Part 27 (1/2)

”What's the good of seeing how it's done when-when you've got some one else?”

”But, good Lord! Jennie, this is not the only picture of the kind I shall ever paint! Even if I go on using Emma for this, I shall want you for another one-and I'm not sure that I shall go on using Emma. Do you see?”

She was so perturbed that she launched on a question without knowing what she meant to ask.

”Isn't she-”

”Oh, she's all right as far as the figure goes. Features coa.r.s.e. Not a bit what I'm trying to get. Have to keep toning down and modifying to give her the spiritual look that you've got, Jennie, to throw away. I keep thinking of you all the time I'm doing it. Look here, if you'll come to-morrow, I'll pay Bra.s.shead off and you shall have the job.”

By the time they reached Palisade Walk the business was settled on a business basis. Not once did he depart from the professional side of the affair, and not once did she allude to the scene in her dressing-room.

But what was understood was understood, not less certainly for its being by pa.s.sionate mental vibration, without a word, or a glance, or a pressure of the hand.

But the next day, as Jennie was leaving the house to keep her appointment, Josiah, who had gone out as usual to look for work, had dragged himself home and fainted at the door.

”I'm all in,” he mumbled, on his return to consciousness. ”I don't suppose I shall ever get a chance to do a day's work again.”

Jennie was so much alarmed that she forgot to telephone her inability to go to the studio till after her father had been put to bed and the doctor had come and gone.

”Oh, it's all right,” Hubert had said, listlessly. ”I didn't expect you.

I knew that if it wasn't one excuse, it would be another-”

”But I _will_ come,” Jennie had interrupted, tearfully.

”Do just as you like about that. Emma's here, and, as you're so uncertain, I've decided to go on and finish the picture without making a change.”

He put up the receiver on saying this, so that Jennie was left all in the air with her love and her distress.

When Teddy appeared that evening, it was she who told him of their father's breakdown.

”The doctor says it's worry,” she explained, ”and lack of nutrition. He says he must stay in bed a week, and we've got to feed him up and not let him worry again.”

Teddy's face grew longer and longer.

”Then we'll have to have more money.”

”You poor Ted, yes; but then you're making money on the side, aren't you?”

Reminding himself, as he did a hundred times a day, that Nicholson had had five years in which to get away with it, Teddy pa.s.sed on upstairs to his father's bedside.

”It's all right, dad,” he tried to smile. ”Don't you worry. I'm here.

I'll take care of ma and the girls. You just make your mind easy and give yourself up to getting well.”

Jennie's attendance at the studio was thus put out of the question for many days, and in the meantime she had a letter posted at Havana.

Fearing that it would come and attract attention in the family, she watched the postman, getting it one morning before breakfast. Bob wrote:

There is a love so big and strong and sure that separations mean nothing to it, because it fills the world. That's my kind of love, Jennie darling. You can't get out of it-I can't get out of it-even if we would. At this very minute I'm sailing and sailing; but I'm not being carried farther away from you. The love in which you and I are now leading our lives is wider than the great big circle made by the horizon. Don't forget that, dear. I'm always with you. Love doesn't recognize distance. Love isn't physical or geographical. It's force, power, influence. I love you so much that I know I can keep you safe even though I'm on the other side of the world. I can't fend troubles away from you, worse luck, but I can carry you through them. I know that till I come back you'll be having a hard time; but my love will hang round you like an enchanted cloak, and nothing will really get at you. You're always wearing that cloak, Jennie; you always walk with it about you.

While Jennie was reading this, Edith Collingham, at breakfast at Marillo Park, was springing a question on her father. She sprang it at breakfast because it was the only time she was sure of seeing him alone.