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By what labor he had reached the seemingly inevitable composition of the picture with its twenty figures, its plenitude of light and air, its restful distances seen through white porticoes countless studies bore witness. From James's attitude toward the picture MacMaster could well conjecture what the painter's had been.
"But, my dear Lady Mary," expostulated MacMaster, "and just repress me if I'm becoming too personal but it must, in the first place, have been a marriage of choice on her part as well as on his." Lady Mary poised her glasses on her large forefinger and assumed an attitude suggestive of the clinical lecture room as she replied. "Ellen, my dear boy, is an essentially romantic person.
He bore himself in a manner strikingly capable, and there was a sort of trimness and alertness about him, despite the too-generous shoulders of his coat. In one hand he held a bulldog pipe, and in the other a copy of Sporting Life. While MacMaster was explaining the purpose of his call he noticed that the man surveyed him critically, though not impertinently.
The room was utterly bare of furniture unless a stepladder, a model throne, and a rack laden with large leather portfolios could be accounted such and was windowless, without other openings than the door and the skylight, under which hung the unfinished picture itself. MacMaster had never seen so many of Treffinger's paintings together.
It's four years since I saw you at Nice, isn't it? I was in Paris last winter, but I heard nothing from you." "I was in New York then." "It occurred to me that you might be. And why are you in London?" "Can you ask?" replied MacMaster gallantly. Lady Mary smiled ironically. "But for what else, incidentally?" "Well, incidentally, I came to see Treffinger's studio and his unfinished picture.
Morrison wrote to say that he was about to be promoted to the command of the new Inman Steamship City of Glasgow at that time, of her class and kind, the finest ship afloat and that having got a few weeks' holiday, he was coming down to visit his friends in Lochaber, bringing Angus MacMaster along with him, for he had proved so good and faithful a servant that he was resolved not to part with him.
You ayn't looked at the Marriage yet, sir?" he asked abruptly, glancing doubtfully at MacMaster, and indicating with his thumb the picture under the north light. "Not very closely. I prefer to begin with something simpler; that's rather appalling, at first glance," replied MacMaster. "Well may you say that, sir," said James warmly.
'E got 'imself put up for a club in Piccadilly; 'e starved 'imself thin, an' worrited 'imself white, an' ironed 'imself out, an' drawed 'imself tight as a bow string. It was a good job 'e come a winner, or I don't know w'at'd 'a been to pay." The next week, in consequence of an invitation from Lady Ellen Treffinger, MacMaster went one afternoon to take tea with her.
Treffinger had been a man who lived after his imagination; and his mind, his ideals and, as MacMaster believed, even his personal ethics, had to the last been colored by the trend of his early training. There was in him alike the freshness and spontaneity, the frank brutality and the religious mysticism, which lay well back of the fifteenth century.
In the Marriage of Phaedra MacMaster found the ultimate expression of this spirit, the final word as to Treffinger's point of view. As in all Treffinger's classical subjects, the conception was wholly medieval. This Phaedra, just turning from her husband and maidens to greet her husband's son, giving him her first fearsome glance from under her half-lifted veil, was no daughter of Minos.
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