He
was right too: as soon as he put on the first brush of colour he knew he
was right. It was just those divine and violent colours which would
cause his figure to step out from the picture, it was just that pale
strip of sky above which would focus her again, it was just that strip
of grey-green grass below her feet that would prevent her, so it seemed,
from actually leaving the canvas. And with swift eager sweeps of the
brush which never paused and never hurried, he lost himself in his work. He stopped at length with a sense of breathlessness, feeling too as if
he had been suddenly called back from some immense distance off. He must
have been working some three hours, for his man was already laying the
table for lunch, yet it seemed to him that the morning had gone by in
one flash. The progress he had made was extraordinary, and he looked
long at his picture. Then his eye wandered from the brightness of the
canvas to the brightness of the garden-beds. There, just in front of the
bed of sweet-peas, not two yards from him, stood a very large grey cat,
watching him. Now the presence of a cat was a thing that usually produced in Dick a
feeling of deadly faintness, yet, at this moment, as he looked at the
cat and the cat at him, he was conscious of no such feeling, and put
down the absence of it, in so far as he consciously thought about it, to
the fact that he was in the open air, not in the atmosphere of a closed
room. Yet, last night out here, the cat had made him feel faint. But he
hardly gave a thought to this, for what filled his mind was that he saw
in the rather friendly interested look of the beast that expression in
the eye which had so baffled him in his portrait of Lady Madingley. So,
slowly, and without any sudden movement that might startle the cat, he
reached out his hand for the palette he had just put down, and in a
corner of the canvas not yet painted over, recorded in half a dozen
swift intuitive touches, what he wanted. Even in the broad sunlight
where the animal stood, its eyes looked as if they were internally
smouldering as well as being lit from without: it was just so that Lady
Madingley looked. He would have to lay colour very thinly over white....

For five minutes or so he painted them with quiet eager strokes,
drawing the colour thinly over the background of white, and then looked
long at that sketch of the eye to see if he had got what he wanted. Then
he looked back at the cat which had stood so charmingly for him. But
there was no cat there. That, however, since he detested them, and this
one had served his purpose, was no matter for regret, and he merely
wondered a little at the suddenness of its disappearance. But the legacy
it had left on the canvas could not vanish thus, it was his own, a
possession, an achievement. Truly this was to be a portrait which would
altogether out-distance all he had ever done before. A woman, real,
alive, wearing her soul in her eyes, should stand there, and summer riot
round her. An extraordinary clearness of vision was his all day, and towards sunset
an empty whisky-bottle. But this evening he was conscious for the first
time of two feelings, one physical, one mental, altogether strange to
him: the first an impression that he had drunk as much as was good for
him, the second a sort of echo in his mind of those tortures he had
undergone in the autumn, when he had been tossed aside by the girl, to
whom he had given his soul, like a soiled glove. Neither were at all
acutely felt, but both were present to him. The evening altogether belied the brilliance of the day, and about six
o’clock thick clouds had driven up over the sky, and the clear heat of
summer had given place to a heat no less intense, but full of the
menace of storm. A few big hot drops, too, of rain warned him further,
and he pulled his easel into shelter, and gave orders that he would dine
indoors. As was usual with him when he was at work, he shunned the
distracting influence of any companionship, and he dined alone. Dinner
finished, he went into his sitting-room prepared to enjoy his solitary
evening. His servant had brought him in the tray, and till he went to
bed he would be undisturbed. Outside the storm was moving nearer, the
reverberation of the thunder, though not yet close, kept up a continual
growl: any moment it might move up and burst above in riot of fire and
sound. Dick read a book for a while, but his thoughts wandered. The poignancy
of his trouble last autumn, which he thought had passed away from him
for ever, grew suddenly and strangely more acute, also his head was
heavy, perhaps with the storm, but possibly with what he had drunk. So,
intending to go to bed and sleep off his disquietude, he closed his
book, and went across to the window to close that also. But, half-way
towards it, he stopped. There on the sofa below it sat a large grey cat
with yellow gleaming eyes. In its mouth it held a young thrush, still
alive. Then horror woke in him: his feeling of sick-faintness was there, and he
loathed and was terrified at this dreadful feline glee in the torture of
its prey, a glee so great that it preferred the postponement of its
meal to a shortening of the other. More than all, the resemblance of the
eyes of this cat to those of his portrait suddenly struck him as
something hellish. For one moment this all held him bound, as if with
paralysis, the next his physical shuddering could be withstood no
longer, and he threw the glass he carried at the cat, missing it. For
one second the animal paused there glaring at him with an intense and
dreadful hostility, then it made one spring of it out of the open
window. Dick shut it with a bang that startled himself, and then
searched on the sofa and the floor for the bird which he thought the cat
had dropped. Once or twice he thought he heard it feebly fluttering, but
this must have been an illusion, for he could not find it. All this was rather shaky business, so before going to bed he steadied
himself, as his unspoken phrase ran, with a final drink. Outside the
thunder had ceased, but the rain beat hissing on to the grass. Then
another sound mingled with it, the mewing of a cat, not the long drawn
screeches and cries that are usual, but the plaintive calls of the beast
that wants to be admitted into its own home. The blind was down, but
after a while he could not resist peeping out. There on the window-sill
was seated the large grey cat. Though it was raining heavily its fur
seemed dry, for it was standing stiffly away from its body. But when it
saw him it spat at him, scratching angrily at the glass, and vanished. Lady Madingley ... heavens, how he had loved her! And, infernally as she
had treated him, how passionately he wanted her now. Was all his trouble
then to begin over again? Had that nightmare dawned anew on him? It was
the cat’s fault: the eyes of the cat had done it.