“Feel better now?”
“Much better. Thanks awfully!”
“Well, now suppose you trot in there and wash your face. And then run off home and try not to worry. But don’t say a word to anyone else,” she warned, “or we should both be in the soup.”
“I won’t breathe a word to a soul,” he promised fervently.
She shepherded him down the stairs again into the silent hallway, and out into the darkness, and switching off the last lights after them, locked the door. The boy was beginning to feel his feet again now, and to want to assert his precarious masculinity all the more because she had seen it so sadly shaken. He hurried ahead to open doors for her, and accompanied her punctiliously across the forecourt to the parking ground where the big old Riley waited.
“Can I drop you somewhere now? I could take you to the bus stop, if you’re going home?”
“Thanks a lot, it’s awfully kind of you, but I’ve got my bike here. I put it in the stand near the gate.”
All the same, he came right to the car with her, opened the door with a flourish and closed it upon her carefully when she had settled herself on the driving-seat; and he didn’t move away until she had fished her black kid gloves out of the dashboard compartment, pulled them on and started the car. Then he stepped back to give her room to turn, and lifted a hand to her with a self-conscious smile as she drove away.
When she was gone he awoke suddenly to the chill of the wind and ran like a greyhound for his bike. He rode back into the centre of the town as fast as he could go. Some of the shops were already closing, and the dapple of reflected lights in the wet surface of the pavements blurred into a long, hazy ribbon of orange-yellow, the colour of autumn.
CHAPTER XIV.
IT WAS ON Thursday evening that Professor Brandon Lucas, on his way to a weekend art school which did not particularly interest him but at which he had rashly consented to put in an appearance, made a sudden detour in his most capricious manner and called on Jean and Leslie Armiger. The visit could have been regarded as planned, since he had with him the notes and sketches relating to the sign of The Joyful Woman, but he had not admitted his intention even to himself until the miles between him and his boredom were shortening alarmingly, and his reluctance to arrive had become too marked to be ignored. Why get there in time for dinner? His previous experiences at Ellanswood College had led him to write off the food as both dull and insufficient, whereas there was a very decent little hotel in Comerbourne; and if the slight ground mist didn’t provide a plausible excuse for lateness his errand to the Armigers could be pleaded as important, and even turned into a topic of conversation which might save him the trouble of listening to fatuities about art from others.
Being too short-sighted without his glasses to read the lettering on Leslie’s bell, and too self-confident in any case to bother about such details, he startled the silent evening street with a tattoo on Mrs. Harkness’s knocker, and brought out the lady herself; but he was equal even to Mrs. Harkness, and made so profound an impression upon her that Leslie’s status with her went up several notches on the strength of the call.
The professor climbed the stairs unannounced, to find Leslie in his shirt-sleeves washing up at the little landing sink, and the smell of coffee bubbling merrily from the hot plate, and demonstrated his finesse by exclaiming in delight that he’d come just in time, that the cooking at The Flying Horse was splendid, but their coffee hadn’t come up to the rest. And having thus intimated that they need not attempt to feed him, he sat down comfortably and reassured them with equal dexterity that they were not expected to try to entertain him.
“I’m on my way to a weekend course, as a mater of fact. I mustn’t stay long, but I thought I’d look in on you with a progress report. That’s a very interesting job you’ve found me, my boy, very interesting indeed.”
Leslie came in rolling down his sleeves, and produced liqueur glasses and the carefully nursed end of the half-bottle of cognac Barney Wilson had brought back from his summer holiday in France. Jean had conjured up a glass dish he hadn’t known they possessed, and filled it with extravagant chocolate biscuits which Leslie felt certain would be the wrong thing to offer this unexpectedly Corinthian old buck of a professor, until he saw how deftly and frequently they were being palmed. She had also shed her old blue smock and appeared in a honey-yellow blouse that made her hair look blue-black and her skin as clear and cool as dew. Half an hour ago they had been talking to each other with the cautious forbearance of strangers in order not to quarrel, but whenever events demanded from her a gesture in support of her husband Jean would be there, ready and invincible.
“Is it going to turn out to be anything? I was afraid to touch it myself, but I could hardly keep my hands off it, all the same.”
“You had definite ideas about it?”
“Well, rather indefinite, but very suggestive. Such as its possible date, and the genre it belongs to.”
“Have you shown it to anyone else?”
“A dealer in the town here. He put forward some theory that it was originally a portrait by some local eighteenth-century painter called Cotsworth.”
“Preposterous!” croaked Lucas with a bark of laughter, pointing his imperial at the ceiling like a dart.
“Well, not so much preposterous as crafty, actually, I think. Because he’s offered as high as six hundred for it since.”
“Has he, now! And you turned him down. Good boy! So you must have had an idea you were on to something much more important than a dauber like Cotsworth. As indeed I’m pretty sure you are. Mind you, the actual market value may not be very great, I’m not sure how much commercial interest such a discovery might arouse just at this moment. Ultimately it’s likely to be considerable, when the full implications are realised.”
Leslie was startled to discover that his hands were trembling with pure excitement. He didn’t want to look at Jean, she would only think he was underlining the professor’s vindication of his judgment; she would expect him not to miss an opportunity like that, not out of any meanness of spirit but out of his fundamental insecurity. And yet he was longing to exchange glances with her, and see if she was quivering as he was. There ought to be a spark still ready to pass between them, when they were on the verge of promised discoveries fabulous enough to excite this Olympian old man.
“Its possible date,” said Lucas, harking back. “What did you conceive its possible date to be?”
If he wasn’t actually teasing them he was doing something very like it, offering them marvels and then making them play guessing games for the prize. Well, thought Leslie, if he had to be tested he’d better put a good face on it, and say what he had to say with authority.
“Before fourteen hundred.”
It sounded appallingly presumptuous when he’d said it, he would almost have liked to snatch it back, but now it was too late. He stuck out his chin and elaborated the audacity, refusing to hedge. “It seemed to me that the pose couldn’t be later, or the hands, that want of articulation, the long curved fingers without joints. And then the backward-braced shoulders and head, and even something about the way the blocks of colour are filled in to make the dress. If we get all those layers of repainting off successfully I shall expect to see a kind of folded drapery you don’t get as late as the fifteenth century.”
“And the genre! You said you had ideas about that, too.”
Leslie drew breath hard and risked a glance at Jean. Her eyes, wide and wondering, were on him; he didn’t know whether she was with him or only marvelling at his cheek and expecting to see him shot down the next moment.