He paused, and his brown face took on a look of rather hard meditation.
“Does he never paint what they call decent people?” he inquired. “One may occasionally spend an hour at the Cafe Royal--especially if one is not English--without belonging to the _bas-fonds_. I do not know whether Mr. Dick Garstin understands that.”
“Of course he does,” she said, instantly grasping the meaning of his hesitation. “But there is one portrait--of a man--which I don’t think you have looked at.”
“On that big easel with its back to us. If you want a decent person”--she spoke with a slightly ironical intonation--“go and see what Garstin can do with decency.”
And he walked over to the side of the room opposite to the grand piano, and went to stand in front of the easel she had indicated. She stood where she was and watched him. For two or three minutes he looked at the picture in silence, and she thought his expression had become slightly hostile. His audacious and rather thick lips were set together firmly, almost too firmly. His splendid figure supple, athletic and harmonious, looked almost rigid. She wondered what he was feeling, whether he disliked the portrait of the judge of the Criminal Court at which he was looking. Finally he said:
“I think Mr. Dick Garstin is a humorist. Do not you?”
“To put this gentleman in the midst of all the law breakers.”
Miss Van Tuyn crossed the room and joined him in front of the picture, which showed the judge seated in his wig and robes.
“And that is not all,” added Arabian. “This man’s business is to judge others, naughty people who do God knows what, and, it seems, have to be punished sometimes. Is it not?”
“But Mr. Dick Garstin when painting him is saying to himself all the time, ‘And he is naughty, too! And who is going to put on wig and red clothes and tell him he, too, deserves a few months of prison?’ Now is not that true, mademoiselle? Is not that man bad underneath the judge’s skin? And has not Mr. Dick Garstin found this out, and does not he use all his cleverness to show it?”
Miss Van Tuyn looked at Arabian with a stronger interest than any she had shown yet. It was quite true. Garstin had a peculiar faculty for getting at the lower parts of a character and for bringing it to the surface in his portraits. Perhaps in the exercise of this faculty he showed his ingrained cynicism, sometimes even his malice. Arabian had, it seemed, immediately discovered the painter’s predominant quality as a psychologist of the brush.