Free Sir William by David Stacton Page A

shepherd’s pie, jam tarts, Yorkshire pudding, brown Windsor soup, baked widgeon, jugged hare, blood pudding, venison patty, suet roly-poly, and all those other treats of the commonalty which in Edgware Row could be served only on the sly.
    “She is a wonder,” Romney said to Hayley. “She can sit for hours immovable, and yet her face is never still. In the face she can be anything. In short, she is so vivacious that, tell me, what does Greville see in her?”
    “He reads to her.”
    Which he did. He hoped, by example, to rid her of her native Doric, or failing that, of those tones in it which made the Boston Stump sound like a dance. He instructed her as one would address oneself to the elocution of a parrot, but his voice was a drone, and do what shewould, Emma could not drone. She was too happy. Mr. Romney had asked her to come back again.
    “It is useless,” said Greville. “But her French is not too bad.”
    It was better than his own, since the proper English always speak that tongue as though groping around in a hip tub for the soap they cannot find but on which they have no desire to slip when they get out to dry themselves with their native tongue.
    Serena was disposed of, but Greville had commissioned a three-quarter portrait (that being the cheapest size). Romney proposed to paint her in a poke bonnet, with a toy spaniel in her lap.
    “What are you looking for, dear child?”
    “The spaniel,” said Emma, with a disappointed air.
    “The spaniel is hypothetical,” he assured her gravely. She was the most entrancing personage, the ideal daughter, and he had produced mostly far from ideal, and solemn, if reverend, sons.
    “You mean it isn’t here?”
    “It isn’t here,” said Romney.
    “It never is, is it?” said Emma, and gave him a quizzical look.
    So the next Thursday there was a toy spaniel which yapped and barked and relieved itself against a full-length portrait of Lord North.
    “The dear thing. How I wish I could take it home.”
    “You may if you wish.”
    “Oh no, I mayn’t. Greville has a rooted horror of the animate; he has never explained why. But it is part of his system, I expect.”
    So the spaniel stayed in the studio, to its own vast relief, with a soft-boiled egg in the morning and kitchen scraps, until Emma forgot the pretty thing and he could give it away. Romney did not mind. It was a happy time for him, his only one.
    It was a very happy time.
    I am an old man, he thought, with a few cronies. The only part I play in their lives is the part I play when I am asking to visit them. I sit inside the dungeon of myself,a room as large as this studio and just as empty. I paint portraits the way a prisoner cards jute, and sometimes, if it is not always winter, there is a ray of pallid sunlight for a few minutes in the morning, before I cloud over again; though all the sun does is show the rings and shackles in the opposite wall, and the dust. I have waited in vain for the jailer’s pretty daughter to unbolt the door with a metallic clang, and open it. I was a young man once, but now my only visions are a purely physiological phenomenon occasioned by pressure when I blink in the dark, when the inchoate roils; the only light, the dead cells in the eye, for the inchoate is uncreatable, for I do not know where to begin.
    But now the jailer’s pretty daughter comes regularly on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and would come every day if she or I were free, and so the dark is light enough. I do not mind carding my jute.
    She had become an obsession. He saw her everywhere, most clearly perhaps, because surrounded by a nimbus, where she was not.
    *
    Emma, too, seemed happier, more like her portrait, fresh painted, which had joined Paulus Potter and Thais in the library, with another ordered to balance it—Emma as Spinstress, half cottage ornée, half Graeae. But except for basking in the improved temperature, Greville scarcely noticed. Like Romney, he had been overwhelmed by a ray of hope. His