Page:The Strand Magazine (Volume 3).djvu/585

 "Jolly good light on the Thingumbob-berg,' he said, shutting one eye and surveying it critically. "You've caught the colour well. If you go on like that, in the course of a century or so you ought, I should say, to make a painter."

Guy was annoyed at the man for this complacent speech; for in his own opinion, though he was by no means conceited, he was a painter already. So he drew himself up and answered, stiffly, "I'm glad you like the light; I've spent some pains on it."

"Pains!" the stranger echoed. "I should think you just had. It surprises me, the trouble you fellows will take over the corner of a picture. It's the right way, of course; that's how pictures are made; you can't make 'em any other way; but I couldn't do it, bless you—I'm such a jolly lazy beggar—fiddling and faddling for a week at a time over a tree or a trinket. I never did a stroke of work in my life, myself, and I admire you fellows who can; you must have such a precious reserve of energy." And he took out a first-rate cigar from his case as he spoke, and proceeded, with elaborate dawdling, to light it. To Guy, whose poor pipe had been stopped for three weeks, the mere smell of that cigar was positive purgatory.

The stranger, however, was in no hurry to go. He sat down on a rock, and began conversing about Art, of which, indeed, Guy was forced somewhat grudgingly to admit he wasn't wholly ignorant. Little by little, after a while, the talk glided off into other channels. True, Guy's part in it was mainly monosyllabic; but the stranger, who had been put into conversational cue by a bottle of good wine at the restauration hard by, made up for all deficiencies on his neighbour's part by a very frank garrulousness. In the course of conversation, it gradually came out that the stranger was a landed proprietor of means, in the horsey interest. His talk was of races. He wondered fellows could spend such a lot of time doing a really good picture like that for a miserable hundred or so—how it made Guy's mouth water!—when he himself had won twenty ponies last week, over a special tip for the Leger, as easy as look at it. He went on to talk of so many winnings and so few losings, that Guy's newly-kindled democratic fire blazed up fiercer than ever.

That evening, at the Berliner-Hof, Guy watched the stranger from his modest table in the corner, hobnobbing over a couple of bottles of sparkling Moselle, with two German officers, whose acquaintance he had picked up quite casually in the restaurant. He was talking German fluently at the top of his voice, laughing loudly between whiles, and offering to bet everybody a hundred marks even, on whatever turned up, with hilarious inconsequence. A hundred marks would have relieved poor Guy from all his embarrassments. He was almost tempted to take the man on spec. more than once, and pocket it if he won, or