Aylwin Part 29

The peculiarity of this 'chaff' was that it was uttered in a simple and serious tone, in which not the faintest tinge of ironical intent was apparent. The other artist looked across and said: 'Dear me!

Sinfi Lovell! I am pleased to see you, Sinfi. I will ask you for a sitting to-morrow. A study of your head would be very suggestive among the Welsh hills.'

The man who had been 'chaffing' Sinfi then rose and walked towards his Quaker-like companion, and I had an opportunity of observing him fully. I saw that he was a spare man, wearing a brown velvet coat and a dark felt hat. The collar of the coat seemed to have been made carefully larger than usual, in order to increase the apparent width of his chest. His hair was brown and curly, but close cut. His features were regular, perhaps handsome. His complexion was bright,--fair almost,--rosy in hue, and his eyes were brown.

He shook hands with Sinfi as he pa.s.sed us, and gave me a glance of that rapid and all-comprehending kind which seems to take in, at once, a picture in its every detail.

'What do you think of him?' said Sinfi to me, as he pa.s.sed on and we two sat down on the gra.s.s by the side of the stream.

'I am puzzled,' I replied, 'to know whether he is a young man who looks like a middle-aged one, or a middle-aged man who looks like a young one. How's his hair under the hat?'

'Thinnish atop,' said Sinfi laconically. 'And I'm puzzled,' I added, still looking at him as he walked over the gra.s.s, 'as to whether he's a little man who looks middle-sized, or a middle-sized man who looks little.'

'He's a little big 'un,' said Sinfi; 'about the height o' Rhona Bozzell's Tarno Rye.'

'Altogether he puzzles me, Sinfi!'

'He puzzled me same way at fust.'

What was it that made me take an interest so strange, strong, and sudden in this man? Without a hint of hair upon his face, while juvenile curls cl.u.s.tered thick and short beneath his wide-awake, he had at first struck me as being not much more than a lad, till, as he gave me that rapid, searching glance in pa.s.sing, I perceived the little crow's-feet round his eyes, and he then struck me immediately as being probably on the verge of thirty-five. His figure was slim and thin, his waist almost girlish in its fall. I should have considered him small had not the unusually deep, loud, manly, and sonorous voice with which he had accosted Sinfi conveyed an impression of size and weight such as even big men do not often produce. This deep voice, coupled with that gaunt kind of cheek which we a.s.sociate with the most demure people, produced an effect of sedateness such as I should have expected to find (and did not find) in the other man--the man of the shaven cheek and Quaker costume; but, in the one glance I had got from those watchful, sagacious, twinkling eyes, there was an expression quite peculiar to them, quite inscrutable, quite indescribable.

II

'Can you reckon him up, brother?' said Sinfi, taking my meerschaum from my lips to refill it for me, as she was fond of doing.

'No.'

'Nor I nuther,' said Sinfi. 'Nor I can't pen his dukkerin' nuther, though often's the time I've tried it.'

During this time the two friends seemed to have finished their colloquy upon 'composition'; for they both came up to us. Sinfi rose; I sat still on the gra.s.s, smoking my pipe, listening to the chatter of the water as it rushed over the rocks. By this time my curiosity in the younger man had died away. My mind was occupied with the dream-picture of a little blue-eyed girl struggling with a wounded heron. I had noticed, however, that he of the piercing eyes did not look at me again, having entirely exhausted at a glance such interest as I had momentarily afforded him; while his companion seemed quite unconscious of my presence as he stood there, his large, full, deep, brown eyes gazing apparently at something over my head, a long way off. Also I had noticed that 'Visionary' was stamped upon this man's every feature--that he seemed an inspired baby of forty, talking there to his companion and to Sinfi, the sun falling upon his long, brown, curly hair, mixed with grey, which fell from beneath his hat, and floated around his collar like a mane.

When my reverie had pa.s.sed, I found the artists trying to arrange with Sinfi to give an open-air sitting to one of them, the man addressed as Wilderspin. Sinfi seemed willing enough to come to terms; but I saw her look round at me as if saying to herself, 'What am I to do with you?'

'I should like for my brother to sit too,' I heard her say.

'Surely!' said Wilderspin. 'Your brother would be a great gain to my picture.'

Sinfi then came to me, and said that the painter wanted me to sit to him.

'But,' said I in an undertone, 'the Gorgios will certainly find out that I am no Romany.'

'Not they,' said Sinfi, 'the Gorgios is sich fools. Why, bless you, a Gorgio ain't got eves and ears like a Romany. You don't suppose as a Gorgio can hear or see or smell like a Romany can?'

'But you forget, Sinfi, that I am a Gorgio, and there are not many Romanies can boast of better senses than your brother Hal.'

'Dordi!' said Sinfi, 'that's jist like your mock-modesty. Your great-grandmother wur a Romany, and it's my belief that if you only went back fur enough, you'd find you had jist as good Romany blood in your veins as I have, and my daddy is a duke, you know, a real, reg'lar, out-an'-out Romany duke.'

'I'm afraid you flatter me, sister,' I replied. 'However, let's try the Gorgios;' and I got up and walked with her close to the two sketchers.

Wilderspin was on the point of engaging me, when the other man, without troubling to look at me again, said:

'He's no more a Romany than I am.'

'Ain't a Romany?' said Sinfi. 'Who says my brother ain't a Romany?

Where did you ever see a Gorgio with a skin like that?' she said, triumphantly pulling up my sleeve and exposing one of my wrists.

'That ain't sunburn, that's the real Romany brown, an' we's twinses, only I'm the biggest, an' we's the child'n of a duke, a real, reg'lar, out-an'-out Romany duke.'

He gave a glance at the exposed wrist.

'As to the Romany brown,' said he, 'a little soap would often make a change in the best Romany brown--ducal or other.'

'Why, look at his neck,' said Sinfi, turning down my neckerchief; 'is that sunburn, or is it Romany brown, I should like to know?'

'I a.s.sure you,' said the speaker, still addressing her in the same grave, measured voice, 'that the Romanies have no idea what a little soap can do with the Romany brown.'

'Do you mean to say,' cried Sinfi, now entirely losing her temper (for on the subject of Romany cleanliness she, the most cleanly of women, was keenly sensitive)--'do you mean to say as the Romany dials an' the Romany dries don't wash theirselves? I know what you fine Gorgios _do_ say,--you're allus a-tellin' lies about us Romanies.

Brother,' she cried, turning now to me in a great fury, 'I'm a duke's chavi, an' mustn't fight no mumply Gorgios; why don't _you_ take an'

make his bed for him?'

And certainly the man's supercilious impertinence was beginning to irritate me.

'I should advise you to withdraw that about the soap,' I said quietly, looking at him.

'Oh! and if I don't?'

'Why, then I suppose I must do as my sister bids,' said I. 'I must make your bed,' pointing to the gra.s.s beneath his feet. 'But I think it only fair to tell you that I am somewhat of a fighting man, which you probably are not.'

'You mean...?' said he (turning round menacingly, but with no more notion of how to use his fists than a lobster).

'I mean that we should not be fighting on equal terms,' I said.

'In other words,' said he, 'you mean...?' and he came nearer.

'In other words, I mean that, judging from the way in which you are advancing towards me now, the result of such an encounter might not tend to the honour and glory of the British artist in Wales.'

'But,' said he, 'you are no Gypsy. Who are you?'

'My name is Henry Aylwin,' said I; 'and I must ask you to withdraw your words about the virtues of soap, as my sister objects to them.'

'What?' cried he, losing for the first time his matchless _sang-froid_. 'Henry Aylwin?' Then he looked at me in silent amazement, while an expression of the deepest humorous enjoyment overspread his features, making them positively shine as though oiled. Finally, he burst into a loud laugh, that was all the more irritating from the manifest effort he made to restrain it.

'Did I hear His Majesty of Gypsydom aright?' he said, as soon as his hilarity allowed him to speak. 'Is the humble bed of a mere painter to be made for him by the representative of the proud Aylwins, the genteel Aylwins, the heir-presumptive Aylwins--the most respectable branch of a most respectable family, which, alas! has its ungenteel, its bohemian, its vulgar offshoots? Did I hear His Majesty of Gypsydom aright?'

He leant against a tree, and gave utterance to peal after peal of laughter.

I advanced with rapidly rising anger, but his hilarity had so overmastered him that he did not heed it.

'Wilderspin,' cried he, 'come here! Pray come here. Have I not often told you the reason why I threw up my engagement with my theatrical manager, and missed my high vocation in ungenteel comedy? Have I not often told you that it sprang from no disrespect to my friends, the comic actors, but from the feeling that no comedian can hope to be comic enough to compete with the real thing--the true harlequinade of everyday life, roaring and screaming around me wherever I go?'