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"Oh, I don't know what kind," snapped the lady. "A common or garden ox, to use the slang expression. It is the garden part of it that I object to. My garden has just been put straight for the winter, and an ox roaming about in it won't improve matters. Besides, there are the chrysanthemums just coming into flower." "How did it get into the garden?" asked Eshley.
Eshley presented Adela Pingsford with a new copy of "Israel Kalisch," and a couple of finely flowering plants of Madame Adnre Blusset, but nothing in the nature of a real reconciliation has taken place between them. It was a hot afternoon, and the railway carriage was correspondingly sultry, and the next stop was at Templecombe, nearly an hour ahead.
Some chrysanthemums and other autumn herbage stood about the room in vases, and the animal resumed its browsing operations; all the same, Eshley fancied that the beginnings of a hunted look had come into its eyes, a look that counselled respect. He discontinued his attempt to interfere with its choice of surroundings. "Mr.
"I quite agree," retorted the lady, "painting pretty pictures of pretty little cows is what you're suited for. Perhaps you'd like to do a nice sketch of that ox making itself at home in my morning-room?" This time it seemed as if the worm had turned; Eshley began striding away. "Where are you going?" screamed Adela. "To fetch implements," was the answer. "Implements? I won't have you use a lasso.
I saw it put in at Victoria, that I'll swear. Why there is my luggage! and the locks have been tampered with!" Jerton heard no more. He fled down to the Turkish bath, and stayed there for hours. Theophil Eshley was an artist by profession, a cattle painter by force of environment.
Adela gazed with equal concentration and more obvious hostility at the same focus. As the beast neither lowered its head nor stamped its feet Eshley ventured on another javelin exercise with another pea-stick. The ox seemed to realise at once that it was to go; it gave a hurried final pluck at the bed where the chrysanthemums had been, and strode swiftly up the garden.
The room will be wrecked if there's a struggle." But the artist marched out of the garden. In a couple of minutes he returned, laden with easel, sketching-stool, and painting materials. "Do you mean to say that you're going to sit quietly down and paint that brute while it's destroying my morning-room?" gasped Adela. "It was your suggestion," said Eshley, setting his canvas in position.
All I could think of was that you were a near neighbour and a cattle painter, presumably more or less familiar with the subjects that you painted, and that you might be of some slight assistance. Possibly I was mistaken." "I paint dairy cows, certainly," admitted Eshley, "but I cannot claim to have had any experience in rounding-up stray oxen.
"I imagine it came in by the gate," said the lady impatiently; "it couldn't have climbed the walls, and I don't suppose anyone dropped it from an aeroplane as a Bovril advertisement. The immediately important question is not how it got in, but how to get it out." "Won't it go?" said Eshley.
On a fine afternoon in late autumn he was putting some finishing touches to a study of meadow weeds when his neighbour, Adela Pingsford, assailed the outer door of his studio with loud peremptory knockings. "There is an ox in my garden," she announced, in explanation of the tempestuous intrusion. "An ox," said Eshley blankly, and rather fatuously; "what kind of ox?"
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