Page:A Legend of Camelot, Pictures and Poems, etc. George du Maurier, 1898.djvu/137



T happened one day that Jack Spratt's beautiful lay figure had to go back to its maker's, in order to be cleaned, mended, and restuffed; and the happy thought occurred to Jack Spratt that he might as well take a respite from serious Art-work and paint a portrait of his wife, as she sat there darning one of his socks and reading aloud from a black-letter edition of Jack and the Bean Stalk, whose adventures never seemed to pall on the Spratts and their friends.

Now Mrs. Spratt's form and features had not been cast in an early Italian mould; her maiden name was Maloney, and her papa had kept a leading oil and Italian warehouse in Finsbury; which was, indeed, the only Italian feature in the family. Her mother had been a lovely Lancashire lass; and Mrs. Spratt had raven hair, violet eyes, ruby lips, an ivory brow, and a skin made of the whitest lily and the reddest rose. Her little head was poised on a long thick creamy neck, while her tall supple figure erred if at all on the side of a too super-abundant exuberance; but her waist was very small, and so were her proudly arched feet; and her dimpled little white hands had not been made for sock-darning, or any such house drudgery; but to be tightly-gloved in all that Paris can furnish of the best in perfumed kid, five and three-quarters, gris perle.

It is, perhaps, too much to say that Jack Spratt did the same justice to all these charms as he had always done to those of his lay figure; but he produced something so different from anything he had ever produced before, that the trusty friends, who were scandalised beyond measure, repeatedly exclaimed that if that were Art, then the Old Masters must be wrong!

Jack Spratt, however, in spite of the trusty friends, had it framed, called it Ye Phayre Sockque-darrenère, and forwarded it to the Royal Academy, much as he scorned that institution; and the Royal Academicians, who had persistently rejected, year after year, the pictures Jack Spratt and his friends had as persistently sent there, accepted this one; and owing, perhaps, to a little difference among themselves about one of their own works, hung it on the line, in a place of honour in the large room, No. 3, where it made such a sensation that a plucky Baronet bought it at the private view.

Thus Jack woke up one morning, and found himself famous.

Of the Art critics, some proclaimed in him the advent of the long-yearned-for nineteenth-century genius, whose holy mission it was to redeem the Art of our day from the loathsome degradation into which it had fallen; and with the generous intolerance of youth, branded as snobs and ruffians those who could not quite agree with them; others, with the calm benignity of age, pronounced both Jack and his admirers to be perfectly harmless, but incurably imbecile; so that old friends quarrelled, and united families fell out, and all the world was set by the ears through Jack Spratt's little sock-darner; dealers came down on his studio like the wolf on the fold; and so great was the crowd round this picture, that the Royal Academy stationed a couple of mounted Policemen near it, a thing which had never been done in Burlington House before; and many a shilling they brought to the Royal Academy—those two mounted Policemen; and a very happy thought it was to have them there!

The upshot of all this was, that the plucky Baronet, who had purchased the little sock-darner, called at Jack's studio with his 62