DEFEAT
His own boots preoccupied Matt’s attention ere the New Year dawned. Had
“Four-toes” continued going to Grainger’s, instead of letting his
subscription lapse perforce with the Christmas quarter, he might have
convinced the class that his toes were normal, for they had begun to
peep out despite all his efforts to botch up the seams. The state of his
wardrobe prevented him from looking up Herbert at his club, especially
as he was doubtful whether the travelling studentship had not already
carried his cousin off; and thus that mad night, which was a hot shame
to sober memory, grew to seem an unreal nightmare, and Herbert as
distant as ever.
A vagrant atom of the scum of the city, he tasted all the bitterness of
a million-peopled solitude. His quest for work was the more hopeless the
shabbier his appearance grew. In optimistic after-dinner moods he had
thought the spectacle of the streets sufficient, and to feast one’s eyes
on the pageant of life a cloyless ecstasy; and, indeed, in the first
days of his wanderings, the merest artistic touch in the wintry streets
could still give him a pleasurable sensation that was a temporary
anodyne--the yellow sand scattered on slippery days along the tram
lines, and showing like a spilth of summer sunshine; the warm front of a
public-house, making the only spot of color in the long suburban
street; strange faces seen for an instant in fog and lost forever;
snow-flakes tumbling over one another in their haste, or fluttering
lingeringly to earth; red suns, gray-ringed, like school-boys’
taws--but, as the slow days unfolded their sordid unchanging coils, he
found himself shrinking more and more into himself. He sought warmth and
refuge from reality in the National Gallery or the British Museum,
dreaming away the hours before the more imaginative pictures or the
Elgin marbles. But even these failed him at last, their beauty an
intolerable irony. Sometimes he realized with a miserable start the real
tragedy of being “out of work,” how it narrowed the horizon down to the
prospect of meals, so that the great movement of the world from which he
was shut out left him equally exclusive, and the announcements on the
newspaper posters--wars and international football and the opening of
parks and new plays and the deaths of great men and the rise of
ministries--struck no responsive chord in his imagination, were all
shadowy emanations from some unreal mockery of a universe. The real
universe had his own navel for centre. Sometimes a faint perception of
the humor of the position distorted his lips in a melancholy smile; he
wondered how he would come out under Jimmy Raven’s pencil. At other
times he lay huddled up in his bed, his fading clothes heaped over the
one blanket, passing the day in an apathetic trance, interrupted only by
the intermittent working of his imagination, or by observation of
optical effects that accidentally arrested his gaze; and the next day,
in remorse for lost possibilities, he would rise before dawn, and
recommence his search for employment.
From such a long day’s tramp he was shuffling homeward late one dark,
dismal night, when, pausing to warm his feet and hands at the
cellar-grating of a baker’s shop, he was accosted by William Gregson,
striding along with a frown on his forehead and a brown-paper parcel in
his hand.
“Hullo, Fourt--Strang!” he cried, pausing. “Don’t see you any more.”
“No,” said Matt, wishing Gregson wouldn’t see him now, and edging a
little away from a street-lamp.
“You don’t want any boots?”
“No,” said Matt, sticking his toes downward to hide the gaps as far as
possible.
“You won’t forget I am at your service whatever you want,” said the
little stooping old man, with shining enthusiastic eyes. “It is a
pleasure to work for a man with feet like yours. I was only thinkin’ of
you to-night at the studio--a scurvy wretch has been servin’ me a shabby
trick, and I was thinkin’ to myself: Ah, Four--ah, Strang, there’s a
difference now! Strang’s a man and a brother artist. This bloke’s a
’artless biped.”
“Why, what did he do?”
“There’s no need to go into details,” said William Gregson,
pathetically. “Suffice it to say he refuses the boots. And here they
are. A beautiful pair! Left on my hands! After I sat up half the night
to finish ’em for him, trade’s so brisk just now.”
He unwrapped the package to expose their perfections.
“And what will you do with them?” said Matt.
“I’d like to put ’em on and kick him with ’em,” replied Gregson,
gloomily. “Only they’re too small.” Gregson’s own feet were decidedly
not beautiful.
“Yes, they seem more my size,” agreed Matt.
“Will you have them?” cried the old man, eagerly. “Name your own price!
Don’t be afraid. I sha’n’t ask more than last time.”
But Matt shook his head. “I’m hard up,” he confessed, blushing in the
lamplight.
“I’ll trust you,” was the fervid response.
“I’d never pay you,” Matt protested, “unless I could do something for
you in return. If you want,” he hesitated, “your shop painted, or any
wall-papering, or--or I could build you a counter, or--”
But the shoemaker was shaking his head. “I don’t want my shop
painted--but ’ow if you painted me?” he cried, with an inspiration.
“I’ve often tried to do it myself, but some’ow an angelic expression
gets into it, and the missus don’t recognize it. Have you ever tried
doin’ your own portrait, Strang?”
“No--not seriously,” said Matt.
“Well, you try, and see if you don’t find it as I say. It’s a curious
thing how that angelic expression will creep in when a man’s paintin’
his own portrait. Besides, you can paint better than me; I don’t say it
behind your back, but--”
“Then it’s a bargain?” interrupted Matt, anxiously.
“Yes; I can give you an hour every mornin’. Trade’s so slack,
unfortunately.”
“May I take the boots with me?” inquired Matt.
“Yes, the moment the portrait’s done,” said Gregson, in generous
accents.
“Are you afraid I’ll walk off in ’em?” Matt cried, angrily. “And suppose
they don’t fit?”
“Ah, well; you may try them on,” conceded Gregson. And, with a curious
repetition of a former episode, Matt slipped off his boot under a
street-lamp. The boots were a little tight, especially after the yawning
laxness of the old; but it was heavenly to stamp on the wet pavement and
to feel a solid sole under one’s foot, even though an oozy, sloppy
stocking intervened.
Gregson perceived the ruin of the vacant boot, and his face grew stern.
“Keep it on, keep it on,” he said, harshly. “You’re an old customer.”
“Oh, thank you!” ejaculated Matt.
“You can give me the old pair,” he rejoined, gruffly.
“Oh, but they’re past mending,” said Matt.
“But they can help to mend other boots. They’re like clergymen,” said
the little shoemaker, laughing grimly. “Nothing is ever wasted in this
world.”
Matt was thinking so too, though from a different point of view. He was
grateful to the economical order of the universe.
The boots reinvigorated the pilgrim on his way to the ever-receding
Mecca of employment, and each day he sallied forth further refreshed by
the bread and butter and tea which William Gregson’s spouse dispensed
after the sittings. All over London he tramped. One day he wandered in
hopes of a job among the docks of Rotherhithe, feeling a vague romance
in the great gray perspectives of towering wood-stacks with their
far-away flavor of exotic forests, and in the sombre canals and locks
along which men with cordwain faces were tugging discolored barges. The
desolation of the scene and of the district was akin to his mood--his
eyes were full of delicious hopeless tears; he rambled on, forgetting to
ask for the job, through the forlorn streets, all ship-chandler shops
and one-story cottages, and threading a narrow passage strewn with
lounging louts, found himself on a little floating pier on the bank of
the river, and lost himself again in contemplating the grimy picturesque
traffic, the bleak wharves and warehouses.
“You see that air barge with the brick-dust sails?”
Matt started; an aged gentleman with a rusty silk hat was addressing
him.
“Well, t’other day I see one just like that capsize in calm weather
under my very eyes. I come here every day after dinner to watch the
water, and I do get something worth seein’ sometimes. The pier-master he
told me it was loaded with road-slop, and road-slop’s alive--shifts the
weight on the lurchin’ side, you see, and that’s ’ow it occurred. There
was two men drowned--oh! it’s worth while coming here sometimes, I can
tell you. You see that green flag off the buoy?--that’s where she lays,
right in the fairway of the river.”
Here the aged gentleman snuffed himself with tremulous fingers that
spilled half, and offered Matt the box. The young man took a pinch for
exhilaration.
A strayed sparrow hopped dolefully amid the grains of snuff on the
floating platform in futile quest of seeds.
“It would be ’appier stuffed,” the aged gentleman declared. “I mean with
tow, not toke.” And he laughed wheezingly.
Matt contesting this, the aged gentleman maintained, with an air of deep
philosophy, that all birds would be ’appier stuffed--that their life in
a state of nature was a harrowing competition for crumbs and worms,
while to keep them alive in cages was the climax of cruelty.
It subsequently transpired that he was a retired bird-stuffer, and the
conversation ended in Matt’s accompanying him home to learn the process,
as the bird-stuffer’s son and heir in far-off Stepney was in need of a
trustworthy hand in the shop.
“There isn’t a honest ’art in the trade,” he said, gloomily, “and the
boys are wuss than the men. They ought to be stuffed. What I like about
you is that you’ve got no character. The better the character the wuss
the man. They takes advantage of it.”
Arrived at his house--which was more pretentious than most of its
one-story neighbors--for it had a basement sublet to a blind woman whose
insignia read, “Chairs neatly cained on reasonable terms,” and its
parlor window was gay with wax fruits and stuffed birds--the aged
gentleman, who gave the name of Ground, discovered that he had no skin
to operate on, and, being spent from the walk, directed Matt to buy a
dead canary for sixpence from a bird-fancier “in the Eye Road.”
“There’s the tanner,” he said. “Now if you don’t come back with the bird
you may stuff me for a old goose.”
Matt came back with the bird, but the aged gentleman put it to his nose
and contorted his aged snuff-colored nostrils.
“I want a bird, not manure,” he said. “A bird fresh from this wale of
tears. Why, if I began to skin this the feathers ’ould drop out. You’ve
been took in, but you haven’t took me in, so here’s another tanner.”
In great anxiety Matt stood outside the bird-fancier’s shop-window,
staring wistfully at the frowsy-looking birds roosting in the cages, and
hoping that some kindly canary would drop off to eternal sleep under his
very nose so that he might be sure of its freshness. But the poor little
creatures all clung to existence and their perches. Suddenly he began to
laugh. There was an owl in a cage, and it looked like Cornpepper. On its
head was an erectile tuft like Cornpepper’s hair after argument, and,
though devoid of an eye-glass, the creature regarded him from its great
feather-fringed eyes with the same large, profound gaze.
“Give me style,” he heard it saying, “give me style.”
And then he thought of Cornpepper’s theories, of which he had heard more
on that glad mad night when the juvenile celebrity had been his partner
in the waltz.
“Erle-Smith is all wrong,” Cornpepper had pronounced, testily. “But I
don’t want to talk shop to-night. Imagination is shown in treatment, not
in subject. There may be more imagination in the painting of a
dressing-gown than of an allegory. Painters are called poets when they
can’t paint. And the _Saturday Spectator_ is quite at sea when it claims
me as the champion of modern subject against ancient, mediæval, or
imaginary. Subject, indeed! What I demand is modern _treatment_. I do
wish O’Brien would leave off interpreting me.”
And Matt Strang fell into a reverie, wondering what he should paint for
the Academy, and gazing into the owl’s eyes. What if he were destined to
waltz to fame in company with Cornpepper! And then he remembered
Gurney’s enthusiastic talk during the pauses of the wild waltz in
denunciation of the “real moments” of Cornpepperism, and in acclamation
of the simpler harmonies of Outamaro, the great Japanese master, from
whose work Cornpepper’s was a rotten retrogression rather than a
legitimate evolution. Matt speculatively surrendered his fancy to
Japanese images. A gallery of beautiful dream-pictures passed before his
eyes like a panorama. A brusque tap on the shoulder roused him from his
day-dream, and turning, he saw the animated face of the aged gentleman
beneath the rusty silk hat.
“Where’s the bloomin’ bird?” cried Mr. Ground, relieved to find Matt not
run off, for during the suspense of waiting it had struck him that even
the first bird might have been picked up in the gutter.
“The bird,” Matt murmured, dazedly. “Oh! Ah! I was waiting for one to
die. I wanted to be sure it was--new.”
“With my little eye, I sore ’im die,” quoted the aged gentleman,
mockingly. “‘Ere, give us the cash--you’re a juggins. But I suppose
folks can’t be honest and clever too.”
He took the sixpence and went inside, and re-emerged with what he called
a “new-laid” linnet, and returning to his parlor, skinned it, and
smeared the skin with arsenical soap, which he manufactured on the spot
out of common yellow soap beaten up into a batter with water, white
arsenic, and some drops of toothache mixture he had in a vial. He
stuffed the skin with the cotton-wool in which the vial was embedded,
and ran a wire right through from mouth to tail, with half a hair-pin
for each leg and each wing.
“I’m out of eyes,” he said, pausing. “But in them sockets you sticks
glass eyes--they’re so much a dozen, according to size. See?”
Matt’s aptitude as a pupil regained him the aged gentleman’s esteem, and
a day or so after the oddly assorted couple sailed down the Thames on a
penny steamboat, and walked from Blackwall to Stepney, where Matt was
introduced to the bird-stuffer’s son, a fat, greasy, hilarious man, who
told his father that he was “a old innercent,” and facetiously argued
out the probabilities of Matt’s honesty in Matt’s presence. Ultimately,
Ground Junior took the young man on a week’s trial. The trial going in
Matt’s favor, he was installed permanently in the establishment at
eighteen shillings a week, fulfilling miscellaneous functions, the most
troublesome of which was the superintendence of a snub-nosed errand-boy,
who played excruciatingly on a penny whistle. This boy, whose name was
Tommy, and who reminded Matt queerly of his ancient Indian chum by his
dishonesty as well as by his name, would calmly return with bare
pedestals where there had been birds and shades, and assert that he had
smashed the glass, and that thieves in the crowd had torn off the birds.
He did not flinch from smashing whole nests of glass shades, two dozen
inside one another, a veritable Napoleon among errand-boys. Sometimes,
when he had been out with the barrow delivering orders, he would wheel
it home laden with mysterious coats and boots, which he vainly offered
Matt on easy terms. At irregular intervals, too, he fell ill, a note
from his mother arriving in his handwriting differently sloped, and then
Matt was reduced to trundling the barrow himself, while the fat
facetious man, summoned from the workroom over the shop, or from his
other establishment in the New Cut, where his wiry vixen of a wife had
her headquarters, replaced him behind the counter. Matt had also spells
of mechanical occupation in the workshop. He not only stuffed the skins
(which came from abroad), but arranged baskets of wax-fruit (which were
bought ready-made) and paper flowers and cases of shells with moss and
sea-weeds and pyramids of pebbles. And he made mock red coral out of
balls of brown paper, dipped into a hot composition of beeswax and
rosin, and stuck it on wooden stands with many-hued shells variegating
it, and preserved insects creeping prettily over it; likewise he
manufactured wax-flowers to replace breakages; hollow frauds, mere wax
shells pounced with dry colors, or mixed originally with coloring
matter, yellow ochre making apples, and lake lending transparency to
cherries, or uniting with Prussian blue to furnish the florid richness
of purple grapes.
But though--as ever--his taskwork hovered oddly about the purlieus of
Art, or the vaults of its Temple, and though his eighteen shillings a
week enabled him to send nine shillings a week home, in monthly
instalments, to Abner Preep, still he was not happy. The difficulties
with the errand-boy; the fat facetiousness of Ground Junior; the menial
trundling of the barrow, with the dread of some day meeting “Bubbles,”
or other fellows from Grainger’s, to say nothing of Cornpepper, Gurney,
Rapper, or the Old Gentleman; the retail trade over the counter, the
biweekly task of cleaning all the shades with a chamois leather--all
this, combined with the sense of wasted months, galled and fretted him.
He was working at his Academy picture now--in accordance with his
promise to Herbert--but his hours being from eight to eight, Sunday was
his only leisure time, and he was paradoxically grateful for the ancient
Oriental ordinance which made the godless British bird-stuffer close his
shop once a week and thus enable him to work. He was able to do some of
the preliminary sketching-out in the early morning and at night; but
there was no light for the real work, nor was there much light in his
back bedroom, even at noon on Sundays.
He had not changed his address, though he had to walk three miles to and
from his work; kept to his old lodging by habit and the trust that his
landlady--an artist’s mother--would not hastily throw him upon the
streets. The subject of his picture had grown upon him from his daily
occupation; the simulated bird-life around him moved him at moments to
thoughts of the joyous winged creatures butchered to make a parlor
ornament. He could not agree with Ground Senior that they were happier
stuffed. And then, too, the pathos of prisoned birds would overwhelm
him, exiled from their natural woodland home, and set to peck endlessly
at wires. His own lot and theirs became subtly interlinked, and his
imagination, turning from the sordid prose of the actual world in which
he found himself, brooded on visions of poetry and idyllic happiness,
and so, instead of selecting from reality that which was beautiful in
it, instead of following Cornpepper’s theories, or his own theories, or
anybody’s theories, he found himself irresistibly and instinctively
seized and possessed by a subject and a mode of treatment
uncompromisingly imaginative--“The Paradise of the Birds,” a beautiful
wood, suffused with a magic sunlight, in which freed birds of many
species should flutter blithely around a divine female figure with a
wondrous radiance of love and joy upon her welcoming face, and at her
feet a beautiful boy playing upon an oaten pipe. There should be an
undertone of tender pathos--the pathos of birds--but light and joy were
to be the essence of this harmony of lovely forms and colors; all the
painter’s semi-unconscious yearning for happiness, all his revolt
against his narrow, squalid lot, his secret, resentful sense of the high
place denied him at the banquet of life, reflecting themselves,
inverted, in the mirror of his art. And though the sunlight and
atmosphere should be real enough to satisfy the Cornpepper faction, yet
over all he would put something of Erle-Smith’s glamour:--
“The gleam,
The light that never was on sea or land,
The consecration and the poet’s dream.”
For the paradise Matt drew on his recollections and old sketches of
Acadia, supplemented by a few water-color studies made in Epping Forest,
which was within difficult walking distance of the bird-shop, from
which, of course, he got his birds; the divine female figure was based
upon his first study from the nude at Grainger’s, which he still
possessed, though he now gave the woman the normal allowance of toes;
while by the aid of coppers he bribed the snub-nosed apprentice with his
penny whistle to sit for the cherub with the oaten reed. And thus was
Nature transfigured to Art. But as Eden to Epping, so was Matt’s mental
conception of the picture to the real picture.
From dawn to sunset Matt painted tirelessly, and with many patient
effacements and substitutions of passages, during his one working-day,
convinced that the Academy was now his only avenue to recognition; and
as sending-in day drew nearer, and the precious light was born earlier,
he was able to snatch an hour or two every morning before setting out
for Stepney. Towards the end the need of time drove him to the omnibus.
Nor was it only the need of time. Of late a strange languor had grown
upon him, against which he was incessantly battling. The image in his
strip of glass frightened him; his face was white, his once sturdy frame
thin, and so feeble was he become that the three-mile walk, which had
been rather a pleasure than an inconvenience, was now a weary, endless
drag. He had bilious headaches. But he toiled on at his picture, finding
in the fairyland of imagination consolation for existence, and in the
anxieties and agonies of artistic travail an antidote to the agonies and
anxieties of the daily grind. “The Paradise of the Birds,” though he was
conscious it did not equal his conception, still seemed to him far
superior to the ordinary Academy picture; it could not fail to redeem
him from his own Inferno, reveal him to the world, make him an honored
guest in artistic coteries, and give him all the day for Art. Through
the sordid life of Stepney and Whitechapel he moved, sustained by an
inner vision of beauty and victory, and it was not till he had
surreptitiously wheeled his picture to Burlington House in the
bird-stuffer’s barrow, at the price of a reprimand for idling about,
that his will-power gave way, and he realized that he was but a limp
shadow. Hope kept him on his feet a little longer, but the terrifying
symptoms developed rapidly, and at last even Ground Junior perceived his
condition, and allowed him a morning’s leave to attend a hospital. For
two hours and a half he waited on one of the bare benches of a
cheerless, dim-lit anteroom amid a grimy crowd of invalids, ranging from
decrepit, bandaged old men to wan-faced children, all coughing and
groaning and conversing fatuously, and ostentatiously comparing
complaints, and finally fading away tediously two by two into the
presence of the physician. At last his own turn came, announced by the
sharp ting of a hand-bell; and, preceded by a rheumy-eyed stone-mason,
he passed through the polished, awe-inspiring portal, and found himself
in the presence of an austere gentleman with frosty side-whiskers.
“What’s the matter with you, my man?” the doctor inquired in low tones
of the stone-mason.
“All outer sorts,” replied the stone-mason.
“Ah! Any special pain anywhere?” he went on, in the same dulcet accents.
“Eh?” asked the stone-mason, hearing imperfectly in his fluster.
The doctor shouted in a mighty yell: “Any special pain anywhere?”
The appalled stone-mason admitted to a stitch in the side, and the
doctor continued his interrogative thunders. He had only two
conversational methods--the piano and the fortissimo.
Matt, trembling, awaited his succession to the criminal dock, and,
straining his ears when the trying moment came, was fortunate enough to
secure the piano treatment.
“Your blood is poisoned,” was the great man’s verdict. “This is the
third case I have had from bird-stuffing establishments. When you clean
the glass shades and breathe on the insides you imbibe the arsenical and
other foul gases that are given off by the skins and collect inside the
air-tight glasses. You will take the medicine three times a day, but it
won’t do you any good if you go on living in that atmosphere. You want
sea-air. You ought to try and get into the country, and have a little
holiday.”
And Matt Strang, dazed, but smiling grimly, crawled down into the
dispensary and handed in his prescription, and tottered back to the
bird-shop with a big bottle of yellow fluid in his hand. He would not
let himself think; there was only one point of light--his Academy
picture--and he kept his eyes fixed on that as on a star.
A few days later the notice of rejection arrived, and the thin, sickly
faced young man, being out with orders, surreptitiously wheeled “The
Paradise of the Birds” home on his barrow, and discounted the renewed
wrath of his employer by giving a week’s notice. He did his work as
usual that afternoon, smiling in uneasy defiance at the oddly intrusive
thought that the Cobequid folks would have said it was all through his
painting on Sundays, yet not without a shred of their superstition. But
when he got home he fell helplessly on his little iron bed, and wept
like a child.
He was beaten, broken, shattered in body and soul. He had fought and
lost.
And as an ailing child turns yearningly to its mother, so his heart
yearned to his native land in a great surge of homesickness. Here the
narrow labyrinthine streets were muddy with spring rains, but there the
snow would still be on the fields and forests, white and pure and
beautiful under the dazzling blue sky. Oh, the keen, tingling cold, the
large embrace of the salt breezes, the joy of skating over the frozen
flats! His poor poisoned blood glowed at the thought. Here he was ill
and lonely, there he would be among loving faces. Poor Billy! How the
boy must long for him! It would be humiliating to return a failure, but
there would be none to reproach him, and his own pride was gone,
vanished with his physical strength. But how to get back? He was too ill
to go before the mast, too impoverished to command even the steerage. He
had unfortunately sent thirty-six shillings home just before the
rejection of his picture, and he was again in arrears of rent, through
the extra expense of the canvas and the compulsory gilt frame. Mrs.
Lipchild was induced by the splendor of the frame to take “The Paradise
of the Birds” in payment for the three weeks (lunar), and the “carver
and gilder, over-mantel and picture-frame maker” in Red Lion Street, who
had made the frame, purchased all his remaining pictures and
school-studies for a sovereign down.
There was nothing for it but to borrow. So feeble was his whole being
that the first suggestion of this ignominy carried no sting. He thought
first of Herbert, and brushing his garments to a threadbare
specklessness, inquired of his club door-keeper, who informed him curtly
that Mr. Strang was abroad. This was as he expected, but he was
disappointed. Tarmigan was his only other friend, but him he had lost
sight of since Christmas, and though he had in these hours of weakness
abandoned the hope of Art, he had still a vague paradoxical aversion
from applying to a man whose artistic ideas he did not share, and who
might hereafter have a sort of right to resent his departure from them.
Besides, Tarmigan was poor, was unsuccessful. In his desperation he
thought of Madame Strang, and though, in the course of their chat that
night at the Students’ Club, Herbert had told him the Old Gentleman had
given her an awful wigging, and she had renewed her promise to close her
door in the culprit’s face, yet Matt nerved himself to risk insult. So,
spying the shop from a sheltered doorway across the street, he hung
about till the Vandyke beard and the velvet jacket had issued and
disappeared round a corner, then he rang the bell of the side door, and
to his joy Madame herself opened it.
“My poor boy! What is the matter with you?” she cried.
The unexpected sympathy of her words clouded the lonely young man’s gaze
with hot tears; he staggered into the passage, and Madame, growing pale
herself, took him by the arm and helped him into the sitting-room, and
in her agitation poured him out a whole tumblerful of brandy, which
fortunately he only sipped.
A little recovered, he explained--improving his pallid complexion with
blushes when he came to the point--that he was returning to Nova Scotia,
as the doctor had ordered him a sea-voyage, and he wanted four or five
pounds till he got to the other side, when he would easily be able to
repay the loan.
“Certainly, my poor boy, certainly,” said Madame. “The idea of clever
people having no money, and people like me having plenty.”
She ran up-stairs, and returned with ten of the sovereigns, that she
hoarded--literally--in her stocking.
But Matt would not take more than five. He felt it foolish to burden
himself with superfluous temptations.
“I knew you weren’t a rogue,” cried Madame, in thoughtless triumph. The
sentiment reminding her of the interrogative eyebrows, she added,
hastily, “Of course, you won’t tell my husband. Not that he would mind,
of course, for I am helping you to leave the country. But oh, how I wish
you had come to me instead of to Herbert! The dear boy has such hard
work and so few pleasures, and his allowance is so small that his father
was naturally annoyed to think of your making the poor boy stint
himself. Of course, I made it up to Herbert unbeknown to his father, who
would only return him a little of the money you had borrowed. Promise me
you will not apply to Herbert again. You know it is so expensive living
in Paris!”
“I promise,” Matt murmured, hardly conscious of what Madame was saying,
his soul already in Nova Scotia, and dissolved in tenderness and
gratitude. The prospect of leaving London was as delightful as the
prospect of coming to it had been not fifteen months ago.
Ere he bade her farewell Madame made him promise to come and see her
when he was back in London again, hoped the voyage would do him good,
and scolded him for never having shown her his pictures.
“I am sure you will be a great artist,” she said, smiling winsomely.
“You have the artistic hand. God bless you.”
The young man listened unmoved; he was hoping the ice would bear till he
arrived in Cobequid Village.
And so, with all his worldly goods, including the unsaleable “Angelus,”
packed in the smallest of satchels, Matt Strang sailed back across the
Atlantic, the blood clogged in his veins, an unregarded unit of the
countless myriads that London has allured and scorched.