CHAPTER XI

A HOSTAGE TO FORTUNE

Lying awake next morning after a night of troubled dreams, it flashed

upon him that he ought scarcely to go and see Miss Coble again upon the

mere impulsive invitation given on the door-step without her father’s

knowledge. He was angry with

[Illustration: “‘GOOD-NIGHT,’ SHE SAID, SOFTLY.”]

himself for having so curiously let himself drift away from the very

purpose of his visit. He concluded he had best call on old Coble again

at the store, and walked thither with hangdog mien, unable even now to

shake off the jail. Old Coble was sorting out a bale of sponge into

three baskets--one for bests, one for seconds, and one for thirds.

“Hello, young man!” he roared. Matt felt a momentary trepidation before

he remembered that the old man meant his tones to be inviting. He

crunched his way towards the mountain over the gritty débris, sniffing

in the pungent aroma of the place. The old giant straightened himself,

brushed the sand off each hand with the other, and, running his fingers

through his white beard by way of combing that, held out his hairy paw

to Matt. He gripped the young man’s long fingers heartily, then waved

him to a seat on an empty inverted sponge-box.

“I hope I’m not interrupting you,” said Matt.

“Not at all,” said Coble, in angry accents.

There was a pause.

“I made a fool of myself last night,” Matt commenced, abruptly.

Coble looked down inquiringly at him.

“I didn’t say one word to your daughter about the Frenchman,” he

continued, ruefully.

The mountain shook with explosive laughter.

“Ho, I suppose you were too taken up sayin’ ’em about yourself.”

Matt reddened uncomfortably, but was silent.

“The gal seems to know a powerful deal about you, anyway,” said old

Coble, with a Homeric chuckle.

“We had to talk about something,” Matt explained, apologetically.

“Well, Rosie doesn’t ’pear to want to talk about anything else, that’s a

fact. I reckon she was glad enough not to be reminded of the snivellin’

Frenchy.”

“Oh, but I’ve got to tell her,” the young man urged, uneasily.

“Oh yes, she knows you’ve got to tell her. You’re coming to-night,

aren’t you?”

“I thought of it,” Matt stammered, taken aback, “if I might!”

“Ho, don’t you be afraid of us; we don’t bite. We ain’t sharks.” He spat

out. “This gritty atmosphere makes one powerful dry.”

Matt had an instant of intense mental conflict, impecuniosity contending

with his instinct of what was due to the situation and Coble’s past

hospitalities.

“Will you liquor with me?” he said.

“I was just about to ask you that,” and the mountain stamped his foot

three times.

The moment the two glasses were set on the counter of the little secret

bar Matt threw down a ringing dollar with careless magnificence. Coble

put his paw on it and pushed it back to him, throwing down a rival

dollar. There was a playful scuffle of shoving fingers, accompanied by

expostulatory murmurs. Then Matt, rejoicing in defeat, resignedly

pocketed his vanquished piece.

“What do you make out of that there paintin’ business?” suddenly asked

Coble, as he set down his half-emptied glass and lounged reposefully

against the counter.

Matt took another sip of whiskey. “Oh, there are ups and downs,” he

said.

“Well, what’s the uppiest up?”

“It depends,” said Matt, vaguely. “If I could succeed in London there’s

no end to the money I might make. It isn’t unusual to get three or four

thousand dollars for a picture.”

“Three or four thousand dollars!” roared the Titan. “Where do you think

I was raised?”

“Why, my uncle in London has often paid five thousand dollars for a

picture. Yes, and even ten, though that’s usually after the painter’s

dead.”

“Then why don’t you go to London?”

“I can’t afford it,” said Matt, frankly. “I’ve been there, but it’s a

great job to get on without money, so I had to come back.”

“But couldn’t your uncle buy your pictures?”

“They weren’t good enough yet,” Matt explained, anxious to defend the

family honor. “I want to study a lot more yet.”

“Nonsense! what do you want to study for? Why, that thar shark of yours

licks creation.”

Matt shook his head. “I’ve got to go to Paris,” he said, “and to Italy,

and see all the great pictures. That’s the only way a man can learn

after a certain point.” He added, proudly, “My cousin was sent to Paris

by the Royal Academy of London. He won the Gold Medal.”

“Why doesn’t your uncle send you there, then? He ’pears to have made his

pile.”

Matt had to take another sip of whiskey before he could reply. “He knows

I wouldn’t take anything from anybody.”

“Don’t be a goney. _I_ began life with high notions. Them thar sponges

you saw me sortin’ out just now--they’re Florida cup grasses, but the

fine-shaped ones in the first basket are goin’ to be Levantine sponges

soon as they are bleached with permanganate. Time was when I’d ’a

thought that dishonest; now I see it’s only the outsides o’ things that

the world wants. When you’re a boss painter nobody ’ll ask who bleached

you.”

“I hope I can get on without bleaching,” Matt retorted.

“Ho, don’t get mad! I don’t mean to insinuate you’re not genu_ine_. But

the world ain’t a soft place to get on in. They don’t bath you with

rose-water and Turkey firsts. I kinder fancy,” he added, with a roguish

twinkle, “you must have found that out of late. Now, what you want, Mr.

Strang, is to marry a purty, level-headed, healthy gal, with two or

three thousand dollars to tide over the time till you can make your five

thousand a pictur.”

Matt shot a startled glance at Coble’s beaming face. What he read there

supplemented the sensational suggestion of the Titan’s words. A nervous

thrill ran through all his body. The thought was like a lightning-flash,

at once swift, dazzling, and terrifying. But without waiting to analyze

his state of mind, he felt immediately that there was one thing which at

the outset rendered the idea impossible. Honesty required that he should

instantly put a stop to the parent’s overtures, by informing him that he

was a dishonored man--that he had been in prison. But still he shrank

from self-exposure. The union was so impossible that it seemed

superfluous to humiliate himself.

“Maybe,” he replied; “but five thousand’s only the uppiest up, as you

call it. If I didn’t get there, I might be thought a humbug.”

“Oh! any smart man who saw that shark would take the risk of that; and,

even if you didn’t get to the uppiest up, there ’d be no fear of your

coming down again to the downiest down.”

Matt turned his eyes away, and his fingers tattooed nervously on the

stem of his glass.

“That Frenchy friend of yours now, he had the sense and the sarse to

want my gal, but, of course, no proper parent would trust his darter to

a man like that. So there he lays in the downiest down--good name for

jail, eh? Ho! ho!”

Matt wished his companion could moderate his accents; he did not relish

this thunderous talk of jail.

“Well, I must be going now,” he said.

“I’m with you; I’m with you,” genially thundered Coble, sauntering after

him into the sunny street. “You just think that pointer o’ mine over; it

lets you keep your independence and your high notions, and you ain’t

indebted to anybody. All you’ve got to do is to find a purty gal who’s

got money and who won’t fool it away, a gal who’s been raised simply and

can do her own cookin’ and make her own dresses, and don’t play the

pianner; you find a gal like that, with a sensible father that don’t

think wuss of a young man because he’s been in the downiest down.”

“You know?” Matt faltered. He came to a halt.

“Of course I know. Warn’t it in the paper?”

“But I did paint the portrait of the jailer,” he protested, his cheeks

fiery.

“I knew you’d been in chokey all the same.” Coble clapped his paw on the

last button of his waistcoat. “A stomach that size warn’t born

yesterday. But I’ve kept it from Rosie; she don’t understand business,

nor how credit’s a fair wind to-day, and to-morrow a tornado tearin’

around and layin’ everything low. You find a good father,” pursued

Coble, in accents as impersonal as they were angry, so that Matt fancied

he had mistaken the Titan’s import, “and convince him your folks are

respectable, and there’s no wife foolin’ around in London or New York

City, and,” here he resumed his walk, “if he don’t jump at

you--I’ll--waal, I’m blamed if I don’t give you my own darter. There!”

What he would have replied to this wager Matt never knew, for with a

sudden cry of “Thunderation! The shark’s stolen,” the mountain bounded

forward with incredible alacrity and dashed into the store.

But it was his own child who was the temporary thief. Matt, following

Mr. Coble back into the store to see if his picture had been really paid

the compliment of appropriation, found father and daughter bending

admiringly over it as it stood on the counter, propped up against some

large coarse grass-sponges. His heart beat faster with surprise and

excitement.

“Hullo! You here?” said Rosina, raising a face that seemed radiant amid

the dull browns and grays of the store.

“I didn’t know you would be here,” he answered, awkwardly, not knowing

what to reply.

“Why, didn’t I tell you yesterday I was coming?”

She looked roguishly at him from beneath the broad brim of her

flower-wreathed hat, whose narrow black-velvet strings were tied

coquettishly under her left ear.

“So you did. I forgot,” he said.

“You seem to forget everything,” she responded, pertly.

“Yes, he’s lost his head altogether,” roared old Coble.

“Thank you for reminding me,” said Matt, eagerly. “Now you are here I

can tell you what the Frenchman says.”

“Bother the Frenchman!” said Miss Coble, pouting.

“Yes, but he’s languishing in prison this fine, bright day--”

“Mr. Strang painted the jailer’s portrait. That’s how he met the rogue,”

old Coble interrupted.

“And he often cries,” went on Matt.

Miss Coble laughed.

“Gracious, you make me feel like a princess, keeping men in dungeons.”

“Well, that’s how you ought to feel,” said Matt.

“Then I guess I’ll take the privilege of a princess,” said Miss Coble.

“I’ll let him out on my wedding-morn.”

Coble roared with laughter.

“There, that’s a fair offer for you, my boy.”

Matt felt very embarrassed, but he ventured to hope, “for the poor

devil’s sake,” that Miss Coble would get married soon.

“I hope not,” said Coble, to Matt’s relief. “You’re forgettin’ _this_

poor devil. What am I to do without my Rosie?”

“Oh, you’ll get along all right,” said Miss Coble, with a playful tug at

his drooping white beard. “You can send for Aunt Clara.”

“I wish you’d be serious about the poor man in the prison,” Matt

pleaded.

“I am serious,” Miss Coble insisted, indignantly.

“Oh yes, she’s serious,” interposed the parent. “She’s solid, is Rosie.

You can’t squeeze her like this ’ere sponge. ’Pears to me the only way

to help your man is to hurry on the marriage.”

The advent of a customer here removed him, chuckling, from the

conversation; and while he was talking angrily to the new-comer, Matt,

who had been itching to slip away, found himself compelled to linger on

and entertain the young lady, a task which he ended by finding pleasant

enough. When she at last said she must go about her marketing, he even

asked if there was anything he could carry for her.

“Gracious, no! we get the things sent. But you can walk along, if you

have nothing better to do.”

So Matt threaded his way with her among the busy stores, feeling her a

part of the sunny freshness of the day, to which he was now alive again;

and walking with head erect, for he felt himself rehabilitated by the

companionship of so genteel a member of society. He was amused by the

keen bargains she drove, and acquired a new interest in prices.

Evidently Coble was right--she would make a provident house-keeper. But

she would only let him see her part of the way home, though she told him

papa expected him to join their evening meal.

“He’s taken quite a fancy to you,” she said. “I don’t know why, I’m

sure.”

“I don’t know why, either,” said Matt, simply.

“Perhaps that’s why,” Miss Coble answered, enigmatically.

Then she lent him her gloved fingers for a moment, and gave him a

pleasant smile, and tripped away, and he went back and down to the

water-side, and lounged about aimlessly in the sun, sky and sea and

shipping and the glimpses of hill and forest across the harbor and the

white sea-gulls and the bronzed Scandinavian sailors thrilling him with

the old sense of the beauty and romance of life. But the open air gave

him an appetite, too, and the appetite brought him back to the

sordidness of things, to his nigh-bare pockets and the insistent sphinx

of his future. He laid out a few cents to stave off hunger till evening

should bring better fare at Coble’s; then, in the stronger mood induced

by even this minimum of nutriment, a tiresome inner voice began asking

by what right he meditated foisting himself upon strangers. He had no

longer the excuse of the Frenchman. He had heard Miss Coble’s ultimatum

on that matter. And the tiresome voice persisted in dragging up other

troublesome thoughts from the depths of consciousness. As he walked

about the lively quays it kept repeating Mr. Coble’s observations,

though less loudly. Despite some dubious remarks, despite the _à priori_

improbability and unexpectedness of the whole thing, was it possible for

Matt to doubt that the old man would be willing to give him his

daughter? With whatever timidity he shrank from facing the possibility,

wilfully closing his eyes as before a great glare, he could not but feel

that Coble’s idea was both rash and generous. Of course his future would

justify the old man’s trust and repay it a hundred-fold, but such

confidence was none the less touching. Coble did not know--the sun and

sea had made the young man drunk again--that he was entertaining a

genius. And Miss Coble, too; how kind of her to be so nice to a

penniless young man! Her pleasant smiles had been medicinal sunshine to

his despairing apathy. If he had not met the Cobles, what would have

become of him? But was the girl quite of her father’s mind towards him?

Her attitude was certainly not repellent. He allowed himself to dally

undisguisedly with the idea, and it made him giddy. The hope of Art

flamed again so fiercely that he wondered how it could have lain

smouldering so long in his bosom. He was like a pedestrian toiling

foot-sore and heart-broken towards a great light that shone celestially

on the verge of the horizon. For years he had followed the sacred gleam,

over lonely deserts and waste places, with hunger and thirst and pain;

and now as, with bleeding feet that could drag along no longer, he was

fain to drop down on the way-side, lo! a sound of wheels and a sudden

carriage at his side, and he had but to step in to be driven luxuriously

to the long-tantalizing goal.

And in this fairy carriage, moreover, sat a pretty maiden, on whose ripe

breast he could pillow his tired head, and in whose arms he could find

consolation for the blank years. Oh! it was bewildering, dazzling,

intoxicating. But did he love the maiden of this enchanting vision?

Well, what was love? It would certainly be sweet to hold her warm hand

in his, to see her blue eyes soften with tenderness as they gazed into

his own. It was so long since a woman had kissed him--such weary,

crawling, barren years! That ancient episode with Priscilla came up, as

it had not seldom done before, transfigured by the haze of time and the

after-glamour of romance; he had long since forgotten how little the

girl had really appealed to him in the flesh, and to remember that he

had spurned her caresses did not always give him a glow of moral

satisfaction. In the delicious sunshine that danced to-day in a myriad

gleams on the green waters, and made the air like wine, lurked a subtle

appeal to his mere manhood. Were not all women equally lovable for their

sex? In the novels and poems he had read love was glorified and woman

was a spirit; in his own soul lay divine conceptions of womanhood that

inspired his art and sanctified his dreams: a womanhood whose bodily

incarnation--imagined now in this gracious shape, now in that--was the

outer symbol of an inner loveliness of thought and emotion. But he had

not met this Ideal Womanhood; nor did he even expect to meet it in the

crude common day. Once or twice in his London life, as in his boyhood in

this very city of Halifax, when he had worshipped the beautiful

horsewoman, he had seemed to catch a glimpse of it, but it was always

far off--as far as the star from the moth. And so, whether seen or

divined, it belonged almost equally to that world of imagination in

which his true life had been lived, in which he had always taken refuge

from the real. He had scarcely known before a girl so refined as Miss

Coble, unless, perhaps, it was the adolescent Ruth Hailey, whose shy

stateliness had made her so alien from the little girl he dimly

remembered taking for a sweetheart in those days of childish mimicry

when one drives broomsticks for horses. Why should he not marry this

pleasant, plump young woman, if she would condescend to him? Though her

position was so much better than his, he did not feel her too remote

from him for comfortable companionship, especially as she would never

know that he had been in jail. If he did not love her, in the vague

transcendental sense, at least he did not love any other woman, and was

never likely to. He was not as other men: his life was not in their

world; it was centred on Art, it was occupied with visions, its goal was

not happiness or a home. But if these offered themselves to him by the

way, even while they made his real goal possible, it were mere insane

self-martyrdom to refuse them. A wife would save him from his lower

self, and in his moments of artistic despair she would always be there

to comfort and console. Nay--and he smiled at the consideration--even in

his moments of artistic achievement, she could be there as a model.

Models ran away with a great deal of money, and for an artist a wife was

really an economy. And if in his artistic aspiration she could have no

share, neither could any one else, woman or man. An artist could not

really have a mate--at most a mistress or a house-keeper. His Art was a

holy of holies, in which he must ever be the sole priest, and in this

holy of holies Ideal Womanhood could still have its place as before.

Such are the pitfalls of the artistic temperament, moving amid

unrealities, spinning its own cosmos.

Three thousand dollars down! He could pay off the store-keeper and

cleanse away the prison stain. He could send Madame Strang her little

balance, and, best of all--and the thought moved him almost to

tears--his poor brothers and sisters would henceforth be certain of

their allowance. For himself the prospects were equally tempting--a

honey-moon in Europe, in the cities of romantic dream, amid the

masterpieces of Art. And then when, after a couple of years of study and

work, his own masterpiece should be completed, a settled income of

eight hundred dollars--bread and cheese always sure, putting him for

life beyond the vulgar necessity of pandering to the market, rescuing

him from that sordid internal conflict which imbittered even when it

failed to degrade. Oh, the rapture of a life so consecrated to Art!

But would Miss Coble or her parent consent to this expenditure of the

money? Of course it would all have to be distinctly understood ere he

could agree to marry the girl. He flushed, finding how mercenary motive

predominated in his reverie. Mr. Coble had indeed hinted acquiescence in

some such scheme. But an instinct kept the young man from concluding to

acquiesce in it himself. A vague shame and repugnance struggled with his

sense of the advantages of the match; waxing so strong in the reaction

that followed the glow of temptation that he determined not to go to the

Cobles’ that evening. This visit, he felt, would be fatal.

He went home to his little room in the central slums, determined not to

stir out. He had meant to go to bed, broad day though it was, and sleep

away the temptation. But he only threw himself upon the pallet, in his

clothes, and was more conscious of hunger than of the heaviness

necessary for sleep. Yet he would not break into his last two dollars

to-day. He tried to divert his mind from Miss Coble’s dowry by

alternative projects for continuing his life, but they only served to

show the length of the bleak, arid, solitary road that lay before his

bruised feet if he let the carriage go by. Money! Money! Money! What had

he not suffered from the struggle for it? Degrading to live on another

person’s money? It was life without money that was degrading,

humiliating, full of petty considerations, consumed in irrelevant

labors. In the novels that made such a fuss about love troubles, the

fine-sounding sorrows seemed to him infinitely smaller than the carks

and worries of prosaic existence.

He dozed a little and dreamed of his mother. He was back in childhood,

standing with bare feet in an icy passage, and she was screaming at

Harriet for refusing to marry Mr. Coble. He went through all the old

agony of these frequent domestic tragedies. But he did not feel cold so

much as hungry, and breakfast was being delayed by the squabble. He

heard Daisy, equally aggrieved, lowing in the barn. In the face of the

advantages of the Coble marriage it did seem unreasonable of Harriet to

stick to Bully Preep, who would probably beat her. He awoke with a

sensation of relief, which was instantly exchanged for a new worry.

Ought he to tell the Cobles about his mother, supposing he really

thought of--But no; he did not think of--And, in any case, there was no

use in raking up unpleasant matters. He had not inherited her dementia;

it was not in her blood; it had grown up gradually from the sad, narrow

circumstances of her lot; it was his father that he took after. He was

not mad; he was more likely to go mad if he continued his terrible

solitary struggle. Unless, indeed--and here came a sudden vision of a

scene that had lain forgotten for long years--unless, indeed, Mad Peggy

had been right! Mad Matt! Oh no, it was madness to attach any meaning to

the Water-Drinker’s words. Never had he felt so sane. He got up and

looked into the dusty glass on the wash-stand. That was not the face of

a madman. She had prophesied he would never be happy--never, never! He

would thirst and thirst for happiness, but never would he quench his

thirst. Ah, the crazy creature was right there, anyhow. He watched with

curious interest the tears rolling down the face in the mirror. Well, be

it so! He was strong, he could dispense with happiness. He would not go

to the Cobles’ that evening. To-morrow he would leave Halifax, and join

his folks in Cobequid at last. They would all live out their lives

together--poor victims of a common destiny. He would work on the farm,

he would rent more land, he would make it pay. His uncle had been right

all along. Why had he not taken his advice and stayed on at Cattermole’s

farm? Ah, well, his dream of Art was over now. He was getting on in

years; the energy had been buffeted out of him. One could not always be

young and ambitious. He would never be famous now; he would toil

obscurely like his brothers and sisters, and his bones would lie with

theirs in the little lonesome church-yard among the pines. It did not

matter; nothing mattered. Death would shovel them all away soon enough.

He lay down on the bed again. Near it stood a wash-stand with a piece of

ragged sponge upon it. His eye noted a patch of light on the sponge, and

he wondered how the sunshine had got there. Then he perceived the yellow

patch was only a reflection from the water-bottle, and his thoughts

turned to the problem of painting sunlight by optical illusion. He

thought of Cornpepper and the fellows and all the happy discussions he

had had in London. The afternoon waned into evening; the patch of mock

sunshine faded; the shadows gathered, shrouding the walls with mystery.

He grew faint with hunger; in the dusk there opened out a picture of a

lamp-lit room with a snowy cloth on its round table, and a plump figure

with soft blue eyes presiding over the savory dishes.

The vision drew him. He rose, washed himself carefully, and went out.

* * * * *

A month later, a week before his marriage, Matt Strang journeyed to

Cobequid to see his folks, and bid them farewell before leaving for his

artistic honey-moon in Europe. He had written the news home, but they

could not afford to come to Halifax for the wedding, and so he had

promised to run down before starting on his second voyage in search of

Art. He alighted from the coach at Cobequid Village overwhelmed with

emotion, resolved to walk the rest of the way towards the joyous reunion

with his brothers and sisters; he wished to note each familiar

landmark--the fields, the farms, the stores, the little meeting-house,

all the beloved features of the spacious, scattered wooden metropolis of

his childhood. It was almost noon, and the landscape, seen through the

waves of hot air rising from the soil, quivered in the heat. The white

farmhouses glittered; the paint of the verandas bulged out; the wooden

spire of the meeting-house pointed piously to a heaven of stainless

blue. In the farm-yards the fowls lolled prostrate on their sides with

open mouths and drooping wings, their tongues protruding, their eyes

closed, their legs every now and then uneasily stirring up the dust

under their wings; the cattle and horses stood deep in pools under the

trees. The bumblebees droned sleepily about the wild roses of the

way-side, or buzzed among the white-weed and yellow buttercups and

dandelions that mottled the hay-fields. The red squirrels chattered on

the spruces as they sat shelling cones, their tails curved over their

backs; the woodpeckers tapped on the hollow stubs, the blue-jays

screamed among the branches; a hawk circled tranquilly upward to a

speck, then sailed softly downward with motionless wings outspread. In

the fields men were hoeing potatoes, following the slow oxen that

dragged the ploughs between the furrows, and heaping up the earth with

leisurely, monotonous movements; belated sowers of buckwheat were

scattering the triangular grains with a slow, measured, hypnotic motion.

In the sultry stores there was nothing doing; now and then a

store-keeper in his shirt-sleeves spat solemnly or drawled a lazy

monosyllable. Behind a casement a slumbrous old crone snuffed herself. A

wagon rumbled dustily beneath the overarching trees. The far-stretching

village drowsed in the sun.

High noon. The conches began sounding to call the farm-hands to dinner,

and every sign of labor melted away. The languor crept over the young

pedestrian. A perception of the futility of ambition flooded his soul

like a wave of summer sea, soft and warm and bitter. To pass through

life tranquil and obscure, amid the simplicities and sanctities of

childish custom, with work and rest, with feast-day and Sunday; to walk

in foot-worn ways amid the same fragrant wild-flowers, to the music of

the same birds, hand in hand with a daughter of the same soil, to whom

every hoar usage and green meadow should be similarly dear; to carry on

the chain of the quiet generations, and so pass lingeringly towards a

forgotten grave amid humble kinsfolk--were not this sweeter than the

trump and glare of Fame, and the ache of ambition, and the loneliness of

untrodden footways? He seemed to hear Mad Peggy’s mocking laughter in

the distance.

He moved curiously in the direction of the sounds, skirting a new

barn-like building which blocked his view, and which he saw from a

notice was a Baptist meeting-house, such as his mother had always

yearned for; McTavit’s school-house met his gaze, still standing in its

field, and in the foreground a mob of boys and girls shouting and

laughing with the exuberance of school-children just let out. After a

moment he perceived that they were jeering and hooting somebody; then he

caught a glimpse of the ungainly figure of a young man in the centre of

derision, with a dozen hands playfully pulling and pushing him. The poor

butt fell down, and there was a great outburst of hilarious delight.

Matt’s blood boiled; he ran quickly forward towards the booing juvenile

crowd, which scattered a little at the sight of his flaming countenance.

“You pesky little ----!” he cried. Then his voice failed. With a flash of

horror he recognized his brother Billy.

“Boo!” recommenced one of the bigger louts. “Rot-gut rum!”

Matt seized the crutch which lay at the side of the prostrate drunken

cripple, and described a threatening circle with it; the pack of

children broke up and made off, hooting from a safer distance.

“Billy!” he said, hoarsely, clutching the wretched young fellow by the

coat-collar, half to raise him, half in instinctive anger.

Returning intelligence struggled with the look of maudlin pathos on

Billy’s white face. The shock of the sight of his brother sobered him.

He suffered himself to be lifted to his feet, then he took his crutch

and moved forward, refusing further help.

“I kin walk,” he said, sullenly.

The tone and accent grated on Matt’s ear. But a pang of self-reproach

mixed with his wrath and disgust. It was his part to have looked after

Billy better.

“I didn’t expect we should meet like this, Billy,” he said, softly.

“You should hev come sooner,” Billy retorted, “‘stead of gaddin’ about

all the world over enjoyin’ yourself, and never comin’ nigh us, not even

when you were tourin’ in the Province with your portraits an’ your

photographers.”

“I never was near enough, and I always had to move on,” he explained,

gently, as he flicked the dust of the road off Billy’s coat.

“Never mind my clothes; they won’t spoil, they’re not so fine as yours.

If you’re ’shamed to walk with me--”

“Don’t talk like that, Billy. I’m only glad to see how well you can

walk.”

The brothers passed defiantly through the straggling remnants of the

juvenile crowd.

“I’ve walked to the village,” said Billy. “I’m strong enough to go

anywhere a’most.”

A few hoots recommenced in the rear.

“I wish you hadn’t gone to the village to-day,” sighed Matt.

“And why shouldn’t I?” cried Billy, pricked to savagery again. “What is

there for me but gittin’ drunk? I got drunk when you wrote the news--so

I did. Thet was the first time. We all drank your health an’ your

bride’s, an’ I got drunk, an’ I’m glad I found out the joy of it. Why

shouldn’t I hev some pleasure too? I’ll never hev a bride of my

own--thet’s certain. What girl would take me? Do you deny it? Why, even

when Ruth Hailey was here she on’y pitied me.”

“Hadn’t we better get a lift?” said Matt, gently, for a carriage was

rumbling behind them.

“I’ve been twice to the rum-hole since the money came,” pursued Billy,

in dogged defiance. “It’s the on’y way to forgit everythin’.”

He stumped on sturdily. Beads of perspiration glistened on his white,

bloodless face.

“What money came?” Matt asked, puzzled.

“The two hundred and fifty dollars you sent a couple of days after you

got engaged.”

“I never sent two hundred and fifty dollars,” he cried.

“Didn’t you?” Billy opened his large, pathetic eyes wider. “Well, now,

that’s funny. We wondered why you did it so curiously, and why the

postmark was Maine. We thought you were up to some fun, now you had so

much money, but we allowed we’d wait till you came.”

But Matt could not solve the mystery. The notes had been addressed to

“The Strangs,” and were accompanied by a slip of paper: “The same amount

of the money due to you will be forwarded next year.”

That was all the message. Matt exhausted himself in guesses. His

thoughts even went back to the owners of the _Sally Bell_, imagining

some tardy conscience-money in repayment of arrears due to the dead

captain. At last he concluded the remittance must have come from Madame

Strang, acting through some American agent. She had discovered Herbert

owed him money, and was sending him double and quadruple by way of

remorse for the mistake she and her husband had made. To prevent him

from returning it, she had sent it to his family, and anonymously.

Abner Preep contended that there was no occasion for Matt to help his

brothers and sisters further for the present. The subsidy was ample;

more would only lead to unnecessary extravagance. Matt was not entirely

pleased to find his family had no immediate need to profit by his

marriage. Indeed, he almost wished the money had not come. It was

perturbing to feel in himself a yearning--now that his burdens were

lightened--to make one last desperate effort to take the kingdom of Art

by his own unaided assault; it was even more perturbing to feel himself

solicited by that other self, which had spoken out on that sultry summer

afternoon, to abandon Art altogether for the simple restfulness of a

life in his own village at one with Nature. The life that had cramped

him once seemed curiously soothing now; his old fretful sense of

superiority to this Philistine environment was gone. But most perturbing

of all was the thought of Rosina. In neither of these suggested

alternatives--to have another try alone, or to settle down in

Cobequid--did she play any part, and he always came back with a shock to

the recollection of his relation to her, that made both of these futures

impossible. He would not allow himself to dwell for a moment on the

thought of backing out of his engagement--honor forbade that. And was he

even certain that he did not care for her? How piquant she had looked

now and then when she had accidentally got into one or other of the two

postures that became her best, as on the night when, smiling, she had

thrown back her head a little to the left, with the somewhat plebeian

nose refined by foreshortening, and the warm carmines and ivory of the

face and throat showing in the lamplight against the loosened hair. And

then how simple and unpretentious she was, how charmingly candid her

chafferings with the store-keepers! But it eased his mind somewhat to

find Billy selfishly laying claim to the mysterious money, persisting he

would travel with it--he would see the world. Matt persuaded Harriet to

acquiescence in the idea, relieved to find his immediate

responsibilities to the smaller children restored to him. But, unknown

to Billy, Matt had already decided he must, if possible, take charge of

the poor fellow and keep him from drink. He wrote to ask Rosina’s

permission to let his crippled brother travel with him, as his health

needed a sea voyage. He waited anxiously for the reply.

“I can reffuse my darling nothing,” Rosina responded, with more

promptitude than orthography.

“God bless you,” murmured Matt, kissing the letter. “I believe I shall

love you, after all.”

Book III.--CHAPTER I

CONQUEROR OR CONQUERED?

Foresight is insight. It was due to Matthew Strang’s ignorance of life

and of himself that his marriage in no way turned out as he had

calculated. Oh, the fatal mistake of it, perceived as soon as it was too

late, though he shrank weakly from the perception, afraid to face the

chill, blank truth, hoping against hope that love would be the child of

marriage. Oh, the ghastliness of being chained to a loving woman he did

not love, bound by law and honor to simulate a responsive affection, and

to hide the deadly apathy which her caresses could not overcome. He

tried hard to love her, calling his own attention to her youth, her

freshness, her prettiness, her flashes of expression, making the most of

every hint of charm, seeing her through a wilful glamour, even

attempting to persuade himself that she was the woman of his dreams; all

the while his leaden heart coldly refusing itself to the hollow

pretence. Before the marriage he had almost felt on the point of love;

but it was only, he knew later, the self-disguise of cupidity and

mercenariness, though no doubt a measure of gratitude had helped to

becloud his vision. In his bachelor days he could never have imagined

such indifference to any woman. Sometimes he wondered if this was all

marriage meant to any man, but a wistful incredulity denied him the

consolation of acquiescence in a common lot. The testimony of mankind

was quite other, and his own yearning instinct refused to look upon his

union as typical. If only she had been a little more intellectual, less

limited to gossip about servants and prices! How he had deceived

himself, taking the sprightliness of a young girl in love, the

coquettish gayety, the evanescent brilliancy of a bird in the pairing

season, for the output of perennial intellect and good-humor! He had

lived so much alone with his dreams that he had fallen out of touch with

humanity, and particularly with feminine humanity. He had had no

standard of comparison by which to gauge her, and once united to her,

the habitual recluse could not accommodate himself to her constant

companionship.

What an irony their honey-moon in Paris, in Florence, the ardors of

artistic renascence yoked with the blankness of boredom! Despite

Rosina’s affectionate clinging to him, and her almost pathetic endeavor

to admire old churches and dingy picture-galleries, it was a relief to

both when she at last acquiesced in his happy idea of regarding his

rounds as “work,” and, under the convoy of Billy, beguiled the

expectation of fonder reunion by the more exhilarating spectacle of the

streets and the endless glories of the _Bon Marché_. And very soon she

wearied altogether of foreign places, clamoring to be settled in London,

where the language was not gibberish, and one could go a-marketing

without being bamboozled and cut off from bargaining. For after the

first fervors of the honey-moon she had developed that instinct for

petty economy which had amused and charmed him when he had gone shopping

with her in Halifax, but which now fretted him, seeming like a daily

reproach for all those great sums her acquisition of him had cost her.

He was glad that the due arrival of the second mysterious instalment

promised to the Nova-Scotian household relieved him of the painful

necessity of applying to her on its behalf. Unexpectedly enough this sum

was supplemented by a dividend of a hundred and fifteen dollars paid to

him, after he had forgotten all about the matter, by the trustee in

Halifax in settlement of his claim against the estate of the

Starsborough ship-builder.

In vain he tried to interest his wife in books, in the poems and essays,

in the study of French and German, into which he now threw himself with

a feverish desire for culture. In vain he tried to impart to her his

vision of nature, to get her to observe scenery and sunsets. Colors and

shades were only interesting to her as they occurred in dress materials.

Once when they stood by a sea-beach on a December afternoon under a

cold, gray sky, and Rosina complained of the dreariness of the

seascape, he had attempted to show her how beautiful it really was, how

much more interesting to the artistic eye than a crude sunlight effect;

how nearest the horizon it was grayish steel-blue, and then a still

amber, and then emerald green, and how just before the final fringe of

both there shone a band of sparkling amber, grayed by cloud-reflections.

But Rosina shivered, and refused to see anything but a chill green

waste.

She would not even allow him to arrange her furniture, and a pair of

colossal pink vases, garishly hand-painted with pastoral figures (picked

up “a bargain”), were a permanent pain to him, spoiling for him the

drawing-room of the little North London house with the rude whitewashed

studio, in which they had settled down after the birth of their first

child. The temporary lull that attended their installation in British

domesticity was succeeded by graver frictions when Rosina had finished

furnishing. They had no society; neither of the couple knew anybody in

London, and the husband shrank from making friends, constrained,

moreover, by his art to a solitary way of living. Rosina, who before her

child demanded her care had sat to him out of pure desire to be with

him, began to be jealous of the models who replaced her, declaring that

she had had no conception such goings-on were a part of art or she would

never have married him.

The only alleviation of his numb misery was his ability to paint without

pecuniary under-thought the picture with which he was to storm the

Academy, to throw all his individuality into it. The very seclusion of

his life favored this devotion to his ideals.

And these ideals were only partially those of his celibate. He had been

swaying to and fro under the opposite solicitations of Idealism and

Realism; now in a violent upheaval, his sympathy with modern subjects

and even with modern methods had been submerged.

On the Continent for the first time he came into contact with the Old

World. London had been to him as modern as America, repeating its ideas

and ideals, but in France, and more especially in Italy, the mere

variation of tongues helped to draw him into an earlier world,

co-operated with the appeal of ancient churches and streets and palaces,

and the countless treasure of ancient Art. The modern world grew

hateful to him, and he absorbed by affinity the ancient and the

mediæval. At bottom it was not so much the modern that repelled him as

real life, and it was not so much the past towards which he yearned as

towards that timeless realm wherein ideal beauty dwells. The past was at

least less real than the present. Real life was horrible, and marriage

had put the coping-stone on his dissatisfaction with it. From birth to

death it was embased by a sordid series of physical processes. Even the

much-vaunted love was hideous at root. Beauty itself was never really

perfect, and was transient at best, while the beautiful idea that lurked

in nearly every human face and figure had for the most part been left

embryonic. Only in Art could the imperfections of Nature be

corrected--and this was the Artist’s mission, not to imitate Nature, but

to transcend her; from her faulty individuals, frail and perishable, to

draw types of perfection, flawless, immortal, like that Venus de Milo,

which stood at the end of the Louvre passage, beautiful from every

standpoint, fixing in its pensive sweetness of spiritualized form his

dream of Ideal Womanhood; or like that mighty torso of winged Victory

that had achieved the last victory over its own mutilation. Real life

was Deacon Hailey and his mad mother and Billy and Rosina and his uncle

and the grimy denizens of the London slums and the blackguardly crowd at

the Fleet Street public-house and the lewd workmen in the Starsborough

ship-yard. But Art was Rosalind and Imogen, Hamlet and Ariel, Don

Quixote and Beatrix Esmond, and the love in Shelley’s lyrics, and the

music of Beethoven, and the pictures of Botticelli, and the cold white

statues of the Greeks--that imaginary world which man’s soul had called

into being to redress the balance of the Real. It was Art against Nature

throughout--the immortal shadows against the ephemeral realities.

“She cannot fade though thou hast not thy bliss,

Forever wilt thou love and she be fair.”

And so for the “real atmosphere” of Cornpepper he no longer cared: what

mattered the realities of space more than those of time to the soul,

emperor of its own fantasy? All this scientific precision after which he

had been hankering--was it not irrelevant to Art? The Beautiful was the

Ideal; to create the Ideal, the Real must be passed through the crucible

of the Artist’s soul. The Artist was the true creator. In him Nature’s

yearning to beget the Beautiful became conscious. She herself had

infinite failures--ugly moods, fogs, glooms, skies of iron, seas of tin.

And feeling all this instinctively rather than by a lucid excogitation,

he was now for the ideal, for the romantic, for the religious even, for

anything that was not real, that shut out the unbeautiful necessity, as

those glorious stained windows of cathedrals, blazing with saints, shut

out the crude daylight and the raw air of reality, filtering the garish

sunlight to that dim religious light in which the soul could see best.

Ah, how wisely the poor human soul had fenced itself in against the

bleak realities--even as the body had housed itself against the

inhospitalities of Nature--painting its windows with beautiful dreams,

with an incarnate Love that ruled the world, and an image of immaculate

Motherhood. And in a strange hybrid, hazy blend of Catholicism and

Hellenism, possible only to an artist who sees things by their sensuous

outsides, the Venus de Milo and the Madonna of the Italian masters were

to him more akin by beauty than divorced by dogma. In a sense they were

one--the highest types of Beauty conceivable by the Pagan and Christian

ages, so akin that when Botticelli came to draw Venus, as in his

“Nascita di Venere,” his brush fashioned a meek Miltonic Eve,

prefiguring the Virgin Mother, while Andrea del Sarto, in his

Annunziazone in the “Pitti,” had given the Virgin Mother almost the

brooding serenity of a Greek goddess. Ideal Womanhood, Ideal Womanhood,

this was what poor Matthew Strang seemed to find in either--ay, and even

in Perugino’s “Magdalen,” and the saying of Keats, “Beauty is Truth,

Truth Beauty,” seemed to him to be indeed all that mortals needed to

know.

But that Pagan serenity which had produced Greek art could not be his.

For him as for the ages the first sensuous joy in beauty was over. And

what appealed even more than the Greek marbles to the artist who had set

out from his native village with quick blood, worshipper of a beautiful

world, was that subtler art which expressed rather the inadequacy than

the perfection of life; the wistfulness of a Botticelli Madonna, the

unfathomable smile of a Leonardo portrait, the pensive melancholy of

Lorenzo di Credi’s “Unknown Youth” in the Uffizi, or the mystic

aspiration of the monk in that famous “Concerto di Musica,” and

inversely Raphael’s lovelier line than Nature’s, and Michael Angelo’s

with its more majestic sweep. He longed with that yearning, with which

the boy had looked up to the stars in the midnight forest, for God, for

Christ, for Apollo, for some dream of whiteness and beauty, for

something that persisted beneath all the purposeless generations of

which the Louvre held record in those cumbrous relics of vanished

civilization--Egyptian, Phœnician, Syrian, Babylonian, Persian,

Chaldean--those broken shafts of pillars that had upheld barbaric

temples, those friezes that had adorned the façades of palaces, those

blurred monuments perpetuating the victories of forgotten dust, those

faded bass-reliefs that had pleased the lustful eyes of nameless kings,

enthroned in their gigantic halls, those uncouth torsos of bulls and

sphinxes, emblems of a vaster, crueller life. Amid the flux of the

centuries the visibles of Art, the invisibles of Religion--were not

these the only true Realities?

Such had been Matthew Strang’s thoughts, as in a deep silence he walked

through the Louvre with Rosina, a silence that was at its deepest when

he responded to her chatter. She hated the slippery parquet and the dull

oil-colors under the glazed skylight, preferring the fresh coloring of

the copies, though she made fun of the copyists who sat so patiently on

their stools. What queer men, what funny, frumpy girls, what strange old

ladies! And, look! there was a young woman in widows’ weeds, painting

such a cute picture, and--gracious! there was quite a young girl copying

a naked man--weren’t they horrid, the French? She liked the attendants’

cocked hats with a dash of gilt, and enjoyed the desultory crowd of

perambulating spectators, that ranged from old gentlemen hobbling along

on sticks to artisans in red blouses and clayey boots. And wouldn’t Matt

come back into the jewelry and china departments, which were really

interesting? And wasn’t the heat unbearable? It was her restlessness

that made her husband quit this Paris which fascinated him, this

beautiful city, with whose artistic activity, divined from the mere

architecture of the École des Beaux Arts, he had had no opportunity to

get into intimate touch; for he could not even come across Herbert, whom

he had rather hoped to find still there, a cicerone to initiate him into

the art-coteries of Paris. In Florence, where they went for the winter,

Rosina was even more restless. The towered palaces, the Duomo, and the

gracious Campaniles, the gardens, the enchanting environs, and all the

stock wonders of the place, had none but a superficial interest for her;

they were exhausted at first sight; amid the marble calm of colonnades

she even regretted the liveliness of the Boulevards. And the climate,

too, was worse than that of Paris; her grumblings were perpetual. To

pass from the warm piazza or promenade to the biting wind of the narrow

streets was not only uncomfortable, but made it a problem how to dress.

And, indeed, Matt himself suffered keenly from the cold; though there

was a small brass heating apparatus in the centre of the gallery, it

scarcely did more than keep his colors from congealing. For he was

copying Botticelli’s “Virgin with the Child and Angels.” Yes, Botticelli

had become his master--Botticelli, whom at first sight in the National

Gallery he had rejected for insufficient draughtsmanship, but all of

whose naïve exaggerations, of hands or feet or necks, he now credited to

artistic intention, prepared to maintain from loving study of his

delicately luminous canvases and his blond ethereal frescos that the

Master’s drawing had only repudiated the bonds of the Real in quest of a

higher beauty, a more gracious harmony of curves, even as his coloring

had refined away that oleaginous quality which a Rubens found in human

flesh. To brood over a Madonna of Botticelli or of Filippo Lippi,

Matthew Strang would turn from the women of Rubens or the young men of

Titian or the children of Velasquez or Rembrandt’s old men. Though at

the sight of “Les Glaneurs” of Millet he felt a lurking sympathy in his

submerged self, he preferred that morning landscape of Corot, in which

bodiceless beauties dance round trees as half-dressed women never did in

any period of French history. He found a winter scene of Van Ostade’s

none the less charming because the figures were not enveloped, and the

lights were untruly set off by bituminous shadows. He was in the mood in

which even the gilded rose-nudity of the eighteenth century seemed

precious. Amid the infinitude of Art that surrounded him now,

Cornpepper’s cocksureness seemed to him as futile as it had already

appeared amid the infinity of Nature. And all the Masters were so akin

that evolution by revolution seemed less credible than in the smoky

atmosphere of Azure Art studios. Modern subject? Had they not all done

the contemporary, had the Dutch done anything else? Impressionism? In so

far as it meant a free brush-work, was not Rembrandt an Impressionist?

Was not Velasquez in his later manner?

His first picture, then, need not be revolutionary in technique, but it

must be more imaginative than the bulk of English work in the Academy of

his day, more emotional. Photography had reduced realism to absurdity,

had proved that Art lay in the transfusion of Nature through the

artist’s soul. And the essence of all art was emotion, feeling. The work

of Art was but the medium by which the artist passed on his emotion to

the spectator, his joy in beauty, his feeling for nature, his sadness,

his aspiration, even his view of life. Because emotion could be conveyed

by literature and music, there was no reason why these should have the

preference in cases where painting was equal to conveying it, too.

Without emotion a picture was null and void; technique by itself could

give works of craft, never works of Art. On the other hand, to have the

artistic emotion without the technique necessary to pass it on to the

spectator was to be artistic, but not an artist.

The choice of a subject gave him much harassing hesitation; it brought

delicious peace merely to make his final decision amid all the whirl of

ideas that pressed upon him. He would found his picture on those

beautiful lines in Matthew Arnold’s “Forsaken Merman.”

“Once she sat with you and me

On a red-gold throne in the heart of the sea,

And the youngest sat on her knee.

She combed its bright hair, and she tended it well,

When down swung the sound of a far-off bell.

She sighed, she look’d up through the clear green sea;

She said: ‘I must go, for my kinsfolk pray

In the little gray church on the shore to-day.

’Twill be Easter-time in the world--ah me!

And I lose my poor soul, Merman! here with thee.’”

The subject seemed to him made to his hand. It would enable him to

fulfil his young ambitious dream of reconciling the decorative with the

idea-picture; the composition should weave a beautiful pattern, and the

coloring a scheme of harmony, and yet the picture should make a distinct

emotional appeal. A woman, with a soul, throned amid a lower race, yet

yearning for the higher spiritual fervors--that was an idea which lent

itself beautifully to pictorial expression: a literary idea doubtless,

but yet a visual, too, so that there was no need even to label it with

the poet’s lines which had suggested it; it should be self-explanatory.

And what sensuous glow in the accessories--the clear, green sea-depths,

the red-gold throne, the child’s flowing hair! The thought of them was

like wine in his veins. He set to work eagerly on a large scale,

informed by his contemplation of the Old Masters with big ambitions--to

do, not the little lyrics that satisfied contemporary cocksureness, but

a great sustained poem.

What pleasures and pains the work brought him! The thrill of conception

was deadened by inadequacy of execution, to revive when some charm of

color and line flowered under happy accident. He had great joy in doing

the heart of the sea with its “deep, divine, dark dayshine”--it was his

sympathy with this marine fairy-land that had partly inspired his

readiness to do old Coble’s misleading ensign of the shark and the

sponge-diver. Around the red-gold throne of the Merman’s bride that

stood on the sand-strewn sea-bed the submarine flora bloomed in strange,

fantastic arabesques and subtle shades of amber and gray and white and

crimson, and through the green translucent water, spent sunbeams

quivered and gleamed, and vague tropical fish shot lovely notes of

color, and a sea-snake coiled its glittering mail; and there were

strange pied amorphous creatures and moss-like corallines and

red-branching madrepores and gleaming shells, and mother-o’-pearl

touched with purple and azure, yet all strictly subordinated to the two

central figures of the composition--the throned woman with her youngest

on her knee, which, despite the nudity and the strange accessories, took

on a curious likeness to the Madonna and Child. The canvas indeed showed

the influence upon him of those wistful Madonnas he had pored over so

wistfully; the cold, strange eyes of the golden-haired child were in the

imaginative vein of the poem, the form of the throned woman was inspired

by merely Pagan ideals of beauty; and yet the yearning in her uplifted

eyes for the world of prayer whose sound floated mystically down to her

was the same that showed in the eyes of the Holy Mother. But this

analogy was not consciously in the artist’s design, though it had

doubtless influenced his choice of subject, nor, though he had certainly

had in mind to suggest through her the yearning of humanity for a higher

world, did he connect his work with the school of Symbolists which was

just arising across the Channel, and which was capable of finding in the

dominant green of his sea the color-symbol of Resurrection. Even the

dead face which he had placed in a corner in the foreground, though it

might well seem symbolic of the tragedy lurking amid this sensuous

beauty, was in truth only the dead face of his father, and he had put it

in less for its symbolic significance or its realistic appositeness than

from an uncontrollable desire to have it there, as though thus to

dispossess his mind of that ancient haunting image which the continuous

thought of the sea had inevitably brought up again. He told himself it

was but natural some drowned face should bob ghastly in this submarine

paradise, but in reality he felt a morbid craving to put it there, to

have something in his picture for himself alone, that no one else in the

great wide world could possibly understand to the full.

For the rest the picture cost him infinite trouble, for his genius was

an incapacity for not taking infinite pains. The poetry of paint is

achieved by the prose of work, and as despite his Romanticism his

hankerings for the Real persisted, his ambitious conception entailed

much preliminary study, and the setting up in his studio of a little

sea-water aquarium, in the construction of which his ancient experience

at the Stepney bird-stuffing establishment in making cases of shells

with mosses and sea-weeds and coral came in unexpectedly useful. But he

could not get a satisfactory model for his principal figure, and

curiously enough her left hand gave him more vexation than anything else

in this complex composition. He could not settle its pose, scraped out

finger after finger with an old sailor’s knife, relic of his

mackerel-fishing voyage, specially ground down, painted out the whole

hand fourteen times, and at last in despair weakly solved the problem by

hiding the hand altogether. Two days later, working on the scales of the

sea-snake that basked sinuously at the woman’s feet, he suddenly had a

last furious dash at the refractory hand. This time it came right and

brought rejoicing. Sometimes he seemed at the mercy of these haphazard

inspirations; what came, came, quite irrespective of conscious will and

training. “Als ixh Xan” (as I can), the old Flemish motto which Van Eyck

put to his work, seemed to him apt for any painter.

When he began “The Merman’s Bride” he was already much more exigent

towards himself than in his younger days; self-criticism had checked

that fearless execution; by the time he had finished his picture, those

very months of steady work, rigorously revised, had raised his ideal

higher, so that though the actual picture pretty well corresponded with

his first conception, it was still far removed from his later standard.

The expression of the woman’s face seemed especially inadequate, and as

great actresses do not sit as models, and the artist has to imagine

emotional expression, he felt again, despite his Romanticism, that he

had missed the subtleties of reality. But every genus of art has to

sacrifice something, and sending-in day was drawing swiftly nigh, and he

had to lay down his brushes at last, and through his frame-maker

despatch the canvas to Burlington House, and await with what composure

he could the verdict that should bring him the recognition he had

struggled for during such long tedious years. Now that the absorbing

task was over, he had time to think of its reward, to dwell on the

thought of recognition, of Fame, the one thing on earth that still

loomed before him, enshrouded in vague, misty splendors. In a world of

illusions, this was the solid happiness it might yet be his to grasp.

This last illusion was not destined to be dissipated yet awhile. He was

sitting at the breakfast-table when he received a blue card inviting him

to take back his picture. Burning with revolt and despair, he had to

strive to appear calm, what time Rosina was unfolding a tale of woe

concerning the maid-of-all-work, whom she had detected throwing away

half-burned coals into the dust-hole. That, she reiterated monotonously,

explained the mysteriously rapid disappearance of the coals--over a ton

since quarter-day. An investigation of the dust-hole had revealed a

veritable coal-mine. It was one of the most curious characteristics of

Rosina that, with all her hardness, she flinched mentally before her

servants, pouring out her grievances against them when they were out of

ear-shot, so that her husband suffered vicariously for their sins of

omission or commission. Usually he listened to her silently with the

courteous deference he would have shown a guest, never provoked to an

angry retort save by her absurd objections to his models. He had

abandoned as hopeless the effort to unite their souls. But to-day he had

no option but to cap her tragic narrative by telling her of his

disappointment. The news excited her not to sympathy with his aspersed

art, but to reproachful alarm for his pecuniary future.

This was the last straw. He might have stood out against the Academy,

exhibiting elsewhere, and gradually building up an outside reputation;

but the pecuniary independence to enable him to do this, which had been

the main motive of his marriage, was the very thing that he now saw he

must abandon. In his secret paroxysms of resentment--more against

himself than against her--it became increasingly plain to him that he

could not live on her money; that were intolerable to his reawakened

manhood. He must make a financial success on his own account; he must

become independent of her at any cost to Art. His entire preconception

of his future had broken down, his marriage a failure from the financial

point of view as from every other. Instead of having emancipated himself

from the necessity of a monetary success, he had made life impossible

without it. Well, he would compromise; he would recoil to leap the

better; he would do what the public wanted, and then, having secured its

attention, he would do what _he_ wanted.

He went to the Academy and to the Grosvenor Gallery, he studied the most

popular pictures of his day, and in a couple of large canvases--one

domestic, the other Biblical--set himself to outdo them in anecdotage

and obviousness of technique.

In a passion of irony he half parodied his own picture of “The Merman’s

Bride” in an idyllic interior called “Motherhood,” representing a mother

holding up a little girl, who in her turn nursed a doll. Rosina sat for

this to save expense, her own little girl being now weaned. The other

picture was a “Vashti,” and for the repudiated queen did Rosina pose

likewise, and with unwonted interest in her husband’s work.

Both pictures were cleverly painted, for Matthew Strang strove to atone

for his lack of interest in his subjects by painful impeccability of

technique, and to Rosina’s joy both won acceptance from the Hanging

Committee, though at the eleventh hour--on the Saturday night before

Varnishing Day--husband and wife were alike disappointed to

receive an intimation that, through lack of space, only the

smaller--“Motherhood”--could be hung.

Despite all his contempt for his picture and for the Academy, it was a

tingling sensation to move amid the crowd of artists on Varnishing Day,

and to see some whose serious faces he remembered noting on the platform

on that memorable “Gold Medal Night” pause before his picture in

admiration of the vigorous brush-work. This was a sign of success he was

destined to experience in far greater measure the following year, but

the keenness of the thrill could never be matched again.

And when “Motherhood” was mentioned in the papers, and in the early days

of the Exhibition he watched fashionably clad ladies gather in front of

it to commend the “sweetly pretty” child and its touching foreshadowing

of maternity, Matthew Strang found himself insensibly beginning to

partake in the general admiration; and with that strain of weakness

which London had exposed in him from the first, he was tickled by the

praise of these pretty women with their rustle of silks and their

atmosphere of scent and culture, and his American birth subtly lent

added spice to his sensation, in the thought of conquering with his rude

home-born genius these votaries of an elegant civilization. He was

quite annoyed when he heard of Morrison’s _mot_, that the doll was hit

off to the life, but the other two figures were wooden. But it was not

till “Motherhood” sold for two hundred pounds that the process of

corruption really began to set in.

The buyer--a provincial cotton-spinner in town for his holiday--wished

to sit for his portrait. The painter did not like to ask him to the

whitewashed studio. He told Rosina they must move to a better

neighborhood. The economical Rosina would not consent to quit a quarter

where rates and provisions were low, and where she had by this time

acquired several cronies equally martyred by their maids-of-all-work, so

ultimately he took a larger studio in a more fashionable district, going

to his work every day, like a clerk to his office, relieved from his

wife’s overpowering proximity, and from her personal vision of his

models coming and going, though her morbid suspicion was always ready to

flare up. Thus the estrangement had begun. People sent him cards, not

knowing he was married; after some embarrassed refusals he weakly

accepted, without explanation, an invitation to dinner--unable to

decline it gracefully, and knowing Rosina unsuited to the company--and

his reticence made subsequent explanation more and more difficult. After

a still greater success in the next Academy, with an only less

conventional picture, he was caught in a fashionable whirl of work and

social engagements, finding commission after commission thrust upon him,

driven to hasty production of imposing compositions to preserve his

place in the rapidly recurrent Academy and other Exhibitions, and always

postponing the time when he would start upon the real artistic work of

his life, when he should have accumulated enough money to give him a

couple of years of freedom for independent Art, for that fearless

expression of his own individuality which alone makes Art, which alone

adds aught to the world’s treasure of Beauty by contributing a new

individual vision of the Beautiful, and which, so far from being

demanded by the paying public, must be a revelation of unknown riches.

A plethora of portrait commissions was not conducive to personal Art;

people were much more clamorous for the likeness than in the days of

Sir Joshua before photography had been invented, and every artist’s best

portraits were always those unpaid, unchallenged portraits of his

parents and friends--unflattered, yet touched with the higher beauty of

truth. And portraits stood in the way of more complex work, though they

got one a cheap reputation as a stylist. But there was a great run on

Matthew Strang for portraits; almost as much as on one of his

fellow-sufferers for marbles. The public would scarcely have anything

else, and the voice of the public is the voice of the purse.

By fits and snatches he made attempts to express himself, but he never

had time to find out what “himself” was. Sometimes, in a reversion to

one of his earlier manners, he thought he wanted to express sensation,

to transfer to the spectator of his landscape the sensation the original

had given him, and from his country visits he would come back with

studies of strange blue moonlight effects on cliffs, or weird dark seas,

destined never to be worked up. He began a realistic picture of a winter

view from Primrose Hill, with brownish trees in the foreground and gray

in the background, and a white misty townlet to the left; but,

fluctuating again, he abandoned it for an attempt to do the lyric of the

brush, to express, as in balanced metres, harmonies of tree and sky and

water, and this, again, was thrown aside for the picture of “Ideal

Womanhood,” which, under the influence of a beautiful woman’s rebuke, he

had felt was the real “himself” it behooved him to express. But the

beautiful woman’s passage across his horizon had been momentary, and so

even this piece of imaginative art had been finished hurriedly under the

pressure of other work. And thus the years flew by like months, with

incredible velocity. He could not escape from the net-work of

engagements he had helped to weave, nor did he always desire to. There

was a circumlapping consolation about the applause of the public, though

it did not warm him. He found a bitter satisfaction, as of revenge, in

the smiles of society dames, though he did not court them. He took no

pleasure in the personal paragraphs and the notices of his work, though

he knew they were necessary to his prices, and though he had no more

liking for the severe estimates of the few who would have none of him.

The breach with his wife widened imperceptibly, half involuntarily,

though he was passively glad when she was not with him to complicate his

life with her bourgeois ways, with her vulgar outlook.

He was driven to a more pretentious studio, which had sometimes to be

the scene of responsive hospitalities, and which raised his prices. He

fell into a semi-bachelor life. Late evening parties, early morning

rides in the Park, visits for pleasure or portrait-painting or

decoration to country houses (where his early familiarity with rod and

gun gave him a valuable air of autochthonic aristocracy), excursions to

Goodwood, to Henley, sketching tours, all tended to separate him from

his wife, till at last an almost complete separation had grown up, so

gradually that, except for her spasms of jealousy, Rosina seemed almost

to have become reconciled to it in view of the popular success, the

inflow of money, and the eternal economy of Camden Town, and instead of

resenting his absence, to have come to welcoming his presence. When, on

rare gala occasions, he took her out, the places she loved were those

which no fashionable foot ever trod; and as the couple wandered--an

obscure matrimonial molecule among the holiday masses--he was not sorry

that his juvenile idea of fame as a blazoning _vade mecum_ was only one

of the many illusions of youth. And so none of the scented chattering

crowd that gathered on Show Sunday before his pictures or his

refreshments had any inkling of the more legitimate _ménage_ in the less

fashionable quarter. He absolved his occasional qualms of conscience by

lavishing his earnings on her, which she hoarded--though he knew it

not--partly from instinct, partly from a superstitious dread of a

catastrophe when his hand should fail or her shares fall to zero. Too

late he comprehended the hardness in money matters that had been at the

root of her resentment against the defalcating Frenchman, and it was to

spare her feelings, as well as to preserve peace, that he said never a

word to her about the great sums with which he gladdened the

Nova-Scotian household.

Not that Rosina knew much of his other affairs. In truth, she knew very

little of her husband’s life, nor by how vast a sweep it circumscribed

her own. She knew he had to be away from her a very great deal, that he

had to stay in the country to paint great people; she was vaguely aware

that the necessities of his profession made a wide sociality profitable.

She had been once or twice to peep at his studio, horrified by the

grandeur, and only consoled by the demonstration that its cost was

repaid in the prices, like the luxurious fittings of the shops in the

Holloway Road. But her imagination lacked the materials to construct a

vision of the whirlpool which had sucked him away from her; her reading

was limited to a weekly newspaper in which his name seldom appeared. And

he, in his mental isolation from her, found scant self-reproach for his

silence; reserve seemed more natural than communicativeness. She could

never know the doings of his soul, his thoughts were not her thoughts,

he had given up the attempt at communion, the effort to teach her to

know his real self; why should he be less reticent concerning his

outward movements, his superficial self? He was aloof from her

spiritually; beside this, his material separation from her was

insignificant. The children--a girl of seven and a boy of nearly

four--were no bonds of union. The elder, christened Clara, after

Rosina’s aunt, was sharp and lively enough, but given to passionate

sulking; the younger--called after his grandfather, David--was a

lymphatic, colorless youngster, sickly and rather slow-witted, with

something of Billy’s pathos in his large gray eyes. Their father had

tried hard to love them, as he had tried to love their mother, and had

taken a certain proprietary interest in their infantile graces, and in

the engaging ways of early childhood, but the claims of his Art left

them in the mother’s hands, and the older they grew the less he grew to

feel them his. Neither Clara nor David had as yet displayed any

scintilla of artistic instinct. When he went home he usually had

something for them in his pocket, as he would have had for the children

of an acquaintance, but they gave him no parental thrill.

CHAPTER II

“SUCCESS”

The studio bell had tinkled so often that afternoon that Mr. Matthew

Strang refused to budge from the comfortable arm-chair in which he sat

smoking his cigarette and reading the _Nineteenth Century_ after the

labors of the day. The model had sipped her tea, taken her silver, and

was gone to resume her well-earned place among the clothed classes, and

the hard-working artist was in no mood to open his door to the latest

bell-ringer.

Probably it was only another model to inquire if he had any work, or to

apprise him of a change of address or of wardrobe; or else it was a

_soi-disant_ decayed artist, who had tramped all the way from

Camberwell, ignorant that his old patron had moved from the studio a

year ago; or mayhap it was a child. He had been much worried by children

lately, since he had picked up a couple in the gutter and placed them on

the “throne.” The dingy court where the fortunate twain resided had been

agitated from attic to cellar; the entire juvenile population had pulled

his bell in quest of easy riches; mothers had quarrelled with one

another over the chances of their young ones; the whole court had been

torn with intestine war.

Ting-a-ting--ting-a-ting--ting--ting--ting--

The person had rung again, more ferociously. Ah, it must be that

interminable Mrs. Filbert back again. Well, let her ring on, the old

jade. Rather an hour of tintinnabulation than ten minutes of her tongue.

Had his man been in, he might himself have been “out,” but he could

scarcely appear at the door and deny himself. Her shrill falsetto voice

resurged in the ear of memory, offering nude photos from Paris at

exorbitant prices, or lists of models full of inaccurate addresses, or

rare costumes, most of which could be picked up at any old clo’ shop. He

smiled, recalling one of these costumes--something like a fishing-net

with holes about an inch across. “This is Greek, and shows the figure.”

Certainly it showed the figure, he thought, smiling more broadly. And

now he remembered--she had threatened to bring her younger sister. “And

I have also a little sister. I don’t know if you paint pretty girls,”

here his memory inserted a giggle. “She sits for modern dress or the

head. Not for the figure. Of course she doesn’t mind a light costume,

something diaphanous. Though I’m not quite sure she has any time left.

She is always with Mr. Rapper, who does those pastels for the Goupil Art

Gallery. He is so very sweet to her. She goes to the theatre and dines

with him. I sit myself sometimes, though you mightn’t think so”

(giggle). “So of course she can’t sit in the evening, in case you want

her for black and white.” (“Just like a woman,” he reflected, cynically,

“too careless to take the trouble to discover that I am far too eminent

for black and white.”) “I know I’m dressed carelessly just now, I really

must be more careful” (giggle). “I have an Empire gown to sit in, very

sweet. I will bring it you to look at.”

Ting-a-ting-ting-a-ting-ting-ting-ting-ting-ting.

Yes, it was the sweet Empire gown she was bringing him if it was not her

sweeter sister. His experienced eye foresaw the Empire gown--something

cut by herself out of muslin, with an old yellow silk sash. He let the

last vibration of the bell-wire die away; the creature would know now he

was not in. The smoke curled in a blue-gray cloud about his head, as,

looking up from the page of the magazine, he gazed dreamily at his

half-finished picture, standing on the easel at the other extremity of

the great luxurious room, where the westering sun of June sent down a

flood of light that brightened the gleam of the gold frames of hanging

pictures, touched up rough sketches and preliminary studies standing

about, and lay in a splash of brilliancy among the sheets of music and

the dainty volumes of poetry and _belles-lettres_ on the grand piano.

Suddenly, as his gaze rested with a suspicion of wistfulness on this

doubly artistic interior, in which the pictures were only pleasant spots

of color in a larger harmony, a harmony of rugs and flowers and tapestry

and picturesque properties and bric-à-brac, there shot up in his mind an

image of an ancient episode. He saw himself, a shy, homely figure,

standing in despairing bitterness on the threshold of an elegant

studio--though not so elegant nor so commodious as this--the studio of

the brilliant cousin whose life had intersected his own so many years

ago. His face changed, a sad smile hovered about the corners of his

mouth. Perhaps some unhappy young man was now outside his own less

hospitable door, growing hopeless as the echoes alone answered him. He

started up hastily, and hurrying into the passage drew back the handle

of the door. A slim, fashionably attired gentleman, who was just walking

off down the gravel pathway, turned, hearing the sound of the open door,

his handsome, clean-shaven, bronzed face radiating joyous amusement.

“You duffer!” he exclaimed.

The famous painter turned pale. His cigarette fell from his mouth, so

startled was he. That he should have just been thinking of Herbert

Strang seemed almost supernatural. But the nervous feeling was submerged

in a wave of happiness; to have Herbert again was an incredible bliss.

How lucky he had opened the door!

“Herbert!” he cried, seizing his cousin’s delicately gloved hands with

an affectionate impulsiveness worthy of Herbert’s mother.

Herbert surveyed him roguishly. “You’re a nice old pal to make me ring

three times. What’s going on inside?”

“Nothing at all,” laughed the painter, in effusive happiness. “Only tea,

and that’s cold. But come in.”

“You’re sure I’m not disturbing you,” said Herbert, mischievously.

“No, I’m all by myself.”

“It must be awfully convenient to have a back door,” murmured Herbert.

The painter shook his head. “You haven’t changed one bit,” he said, in

laughing reproach, as they moved within.

“Oh, but you have,” said Herbert, pausing in the doorway to take him by

the shoulders, and looking affectionately into his face. “Why, there’s

quite a dash of gray in your hair. You must have been killing yourself

with work.”

And, indeed, there were lines of premature age on the handsome face,

too, though the rather tall, sturdy figure was still alert and unbent.

The dark eyes had lost something of their old softness, the light of

dream was rarer in them, but the little tangle of locks on his forehead

still co-operated with the dark brown mustache and the smoothness of the

firm chin to suggest the artist behind the practical man of the world.

“You forget I’m getting old,” he replied, only half jocosely.

“What nonsense! Why, I’m several years older than you.”

“No, are you?”

“Of course I am. Don’t you remember I was your senior, instructing you

in the ways of this wicked world?”

“Well, you’re still looking a boy, anyhow,” said Mr. Strang.

“That’s what I want to look,” said Herbert, laughing. “It makes pretty

women pet you and hold your hand. Why, in Italy I was the envy of all

the cavaliers. _Per Dio_, this is a change!” he exclaimed, as he entered

the fashionable studio. “Do you remember the time you came to me and

wanted to borrow tenpence, or something? Ha, ha, ha! Not that I’m

surprised, old boy, not a bit. I’ve heard your name come up quite half a

dozen times in the few days I’ve been back in stony old London. No,

thanks, I’ll sit on the couch. It’s cooler there. And I won’t have any

cold tea in this frightfully hot weather. I’m still faithful to

soda-and-whiskey, if you’ve got any.”

“Lots,” said Mr. Strang. “A cigar?”

“Not before dinner, thanks. I don’t mind a cigarette. But I’m not

interrupting your work?”

“Don’t be ridiculous, old fellow. The idea of my turning you away!”

“Well, considering you nearly did it! But you’re a celebrity now. Your

time’s valuable.”

“Oh, but I’ve struck work for to-day.”

“What, with all this light left? This is indeed a change from the

tenpenny days.”

“Yes, I suppose one gets tired,” the painter sighed. “Do you like

Turkish or Egyptians?”

“In cigarettes Turkish, in women Egyptians,” he answered, laconically.

“But what a joke to find you tired of painting! You’re beginning to feel

like I felt, eh? That it’s one demnition grind. And I’m tired of

travelling, and wouldn’t mind doing a little painting now, ha, ha, ha!

How funnily things do turn out, to be sure. Why, you’ve changed inside

almost as much as outside,” he said, looking up languidly into his

host’s face, as he selected a cigarette from the box. “I wonder if I

should have recognized you if I had met you in the streets instead of

tracking the lion to his own den. I shouldn’t have thought half a dozen

years would have made such a difference.”

“Half a dozen years! It’s nearer ten since we met.”

“Nearer ten? Is it possible? Let me see. It must be quite seven years

since the governor died, poor old chap. We haven’t met since then, have

we?”

“No,” said the painter.

“No, of course; I’ve been careering about the world ever since. You know

he died in Egypt?”

“No, I didn’t know that,” said Mr. Strang. “I only heard of his death

from the dealer who took over the connection.”

“Yes, he had to go there pretty sharp for his lungs, and I was compelled

to leave Paris in my second year to go with him and the mater. But he

died happy. That blessed gold medal of mine made him sure the name of

Strang would be immortal in the history of Art. I always said there was

a certain pathos about the poor old gentleman. But perhaps his assurance

wasn’t so wrong after all, because _you_ are going to make the name

glorious, aren’t you, you lucky beggar! And his own name, too; which

ought to make him happy, even in heaven.”

The great man smiled sadly, but he only said, “And your mother--how is

she? I’ve often wished to see her again.”

“Oh, she’s living now at Lyons with some distant relatives of hers. Of

course, she soon tired of gadding about with me. She sent me a cutting

about you once from a French paper. So you see how your fame has spread!

I’ve often been meaning to write to you, but you know how it is, always

moving about, and I always intended to look you up when I came to

London. I was here two years ago on a flying visit, but some paper said

you were in Rome. Yes, and I saw a colored reproduction of a picture of

yours, ‘Motherhood,’ decorating a miner’s cabin in the Rockies--the

Christmas supplement of the _Illustrated London News_, if I remember

aright. It was a mother nursing a little girl, while the kid herself

nursed a doll.”

The painter turned away and struck a match.

“And then there were a couple of years before your father died,” he

said. “The last time we met was at the Students’ Club in Seven Dials on

Gold Medal Night.”

“Yes, by Jove, you’re right,” said Herbert, thoughtfully. “If I didn’t

wish to avoid a platitude I should say that time flies. It’s been a

jolly good time, though, for me, with nothing to do except spend the

poor old governor’s savings, and a jolly big hole I’ve knocked in them,

too. And _you_ haven’t come out of it so badly, eh? That’s a stunning

thing of yours in the Academy. Aren’t you glad I made you promise to

send a picture to it in those tenpenny times? I’ve just come from there.

Got your address from the catalogue. I congratulate you heartily. It’s

not the sort of thing I expected from you; but it’s well put in, and I

suppose it pays. It is astonishing,” he went on, after pausing to sip

from his glass, “how paltry English art looks to me after all these

years and seeing everything everywhere. The picture of the year is

exactly like the lid of a bon-bon box. There aren’t half a dozen things

in to-day’s show that I’d care to look at again. _You’re_ in the

running, don’t look so glum, ha, ha, ha! Frankly, old man, your ‘Triumph

of Bacchus’ is jolly good work. You know I never cared much for subject,

but the modelling is A 1, and that sunlight effect is ripping! And what

a crowd there was before it! Phew! I nearly got suffocated trying to see

it, and I had to retire to the Architectural Room to cool. I don’t like

Cornpepper’s picture one bit, though he _is_ an A.R.A.”

“You mean _because_ he is,” said Matthew Strang, with melancholy

facetiousness.

“No, nothing of the kind; that rather prejudices me in his favor. You

mustn’t forget I prophesied it. You don’t mean to say you admire his

‘Ariadne in Naxos’? ‘Poached lady on greens,’ I marked it in my

catalogue. Do laugh! You look as dull and faded as an Old Master. I

think I shall have to restore you. Here, have some whiskey yourself.

You’re damned unsociable.”

“I rarely drink,” the host said, feebly.

“You used to drink my whiskey,” Herbert reminded him, and as he poured

himself out a little in deference to his brilliant cousin, he thought

how queerly things had inverted themselves.

“The Triumph of Bacchus,” said Herbert, laughing. “Now I’ve put in the

good spirit, I’ll exorcise the bad, as David did to Saul.” And crossing

over to the piano he played a lively air.

“I picked up that from a Spanish gypsy,” he said. “Not George Eliot’s.

But I’m sinking to puns. It’s the English climate. You’ve got no wit

here, and there isn’t even a word for _esprit_. Let’s examine your

pictures. Ha! Hum! I see you’ve got quite a number on your hands. I

suppose they must be the good ones. Ah! What do you call that thing--the

lady in blue and the harp?”

“‘Ideal Womanhood,’” answered the painter, adding, hastily: “It’s just

been returned from Australia. I lent it to an international exhibition.

They beguiled me with the prospect it would be bought by the

Government.”

“Ideal moonshine, I should call it,” laughed Herbert. “There never was

such moonlight on sea or land. And does the ideal woman play the harp on

snowy mountain-tops at midnight without a chaperon?”

“It’s supposed to be symbolic, you know, of her inspiring man to nobler

heights,” explained the artist, with an embarrassed air.

He wondered vaguely what had become of that beautiful woman--what was

her name?--whose casual words at a garden-party had driven him back for

a time into what he thought was the true path of his Art.

“Dear me. There’s quite a mystic feeling about it. Isn’t that the right

phrase? Do you know, I’m seriously thinking of becoming an art critic.

Yes, really! As I told you, I’ve had my fill of travelling, and now I’m

going to try and settle down here, and I rather like getting a

reputation for something or other. It makes real woman more interested

in one. The only thing I’m afraid of is, I know too much about the

subject, and have actually handled the brush. I’m going to paint, too,

but I’ve neglected to keep my hand in, so I’ve not much hopes of that.

Unless I came out as a stylist, who sees the world as he fails to paint

it. You’ve got several new men like that, I hear. There’s money in

myopia and diseases of the eye generally. And _per Dio_! how photography

has come along since I was one of the pioneers of its use in art!”

Matthew Strang shrugged his shoulders.

“What does it matter?” he said, wearily. “The whole thing’s a farce.”

“Here, I say, must I play another gypsy dance? I came here expecting to

find you a harmony in gold, and lo! you’re a discord in the blues.

What’s the matter with you? You’re jealous of Cornpepper. How is it they

haven’t made you an A.R.A. yet? Don’t you go out enough?”

The painter’s lips essayed a melancholy smile.

“I go out all I want to.”

“There are enough cards stuck over your mantel.”

“Yes, I have to go out a good deal in the season. It doesn’t pay to

offend patrons.”

“Or Ideal Womanhood. I reckon you’ll be making a fine marriage one of

these days when you’re an A.R.A., as you must be. Lady Bettina Modish,

or something of that sort, eh?”

“Won’t you have another cigarette?” said the painter, jerkily.

“Thanks. Oh, by-the-way, ha, ha, ha! What’s become of that woman, you

rogue?”

“What woman?”

“Real womanhood. The woman you were living with in Paris. Ha, ha, ha!

You didn’t think I knew that. But I met Cornpepper there on my return

from Egypt, and he told me he’d seen you going about with her. How we

laughed over our Methodist parson, who wanted art to be moral! What’s

the matter?”

The painter’s face had grown white and agitated.

“I’m sorry if I’ve said anything to annoy you,” Herbert protested.

“Perhaps I oughtn’t to have given Cornpepper away. But the affair is so

ancient. I didn’t know you’d mind a reference to it now.”

“The woman I was living with in Paris,” said Matthew Strang, hoarsely,

“was my wife.”

“Non--sense,” said Herbert, in low, long-drawn incredulity. But his

cousin’s face was only too convincing.

“She’s not alive now?” he asked.

The painter nodded his head hopelessly.

Herbert sprang to his feet.

“Good God!” he said. “You don’t mean to say you were such an ass as to

marry! No wonder you’re in the blues.”

Matthew Strang was silent. There was a painful pause.

“But you’ve kept it pretty dark,” Herbert said, at last. “Everybody

seems to look upon you as a bachelor.”

“I know,” replied the painter. “I’ve always lived a lonely life, and I

don’t speak about my affairs.”

“I’m sorry I touched upon them, then.”

“No. I can talk with _you_.”

“Thanks, old man.” And Herbert took his friend’s hand and pressed it

sympathetically. “You’re not living with her, anyhow, and that’s

something.”

“Oh, but I _am_ living with her--at least, I go home sometimes. It’s not

quite my fault--it’s grown up gradually. She lives in Camden Town.”

“Alone?”

“Oh no! There’s Billy--that’s my young brother--to keep her company. And

then there’s the children.”

“What! kids as well?”

“Only two.”

Herbert looked glum. “I suppose she’s an impossible person,” he said.

“Do you mean to live with?”

“No, to be seen with.”

“We’ve never been out together in London,” replied the painter, simply.

“We drifted apart before I was asked out. Oh, but it’s no use going into

it--it’s all too sordid.”

“Poor chap!” said Herbert. “Well, you may rely on my respecting your

confidence. I suppose it _is_ a secret?”

“It seems to be. I make none of it, except negatively. You will find

Mrs. Strang in the directory as a householder in Camden Town; she took

the house, as it happened. She has a little money of her own.”

Herbert smiled sadly. “That’s what I always say. The safest secret in

the world is the open secret. If you had hidden her away in Patagonia,

or tried to put her into a lunatic asylum, it would have been the talk

of the town. As you simply let her live quietly in the heart of London,

nobody’s provoked into inquisitiveness, and if anybody knows--as no

doubt an odd person does here and there--he doesn’t tell anybody else

because he doesn’t know it’s a secret. I shouldn’t be surprised to hear

the marriage was duly advertised in the first column of the _Times_.”

Mr. Matthew Strang’s smile faintly reflected his cousin’s. “No, we were

married in Nova Scotia,” he replied. “But what are you doing to-night?”

“How improbable life is,” mused Herbert. “Only yesterday I heard that

Jackson, the Cabinet Minister, has been secretly married these last

twenty years. What am I doing to-night? Oh, nothing particular. I

thought of dropping into a music-hall. I can’t stand the English

theatre. It’s so unintellectual.”

“Well, why not dine with me at the Limners’?”

“Sure you haven’t got any other engagement?” And Herbert peered

curiously at the large chalked-over engagement slate hung on the wall.

“Oh, I said I would dine _en famille_ at Lady Conisbrooke’s, but I can

easily send a wire. As it isn’t a formal dinner-party, and as I’m rather

a privileged person with her, I dare say she’ll forgive me.”

“It’s awfully naughty of you,” said Herbert. “But then, there, you’re a

genius! And it _would_ be jolly to dine together as in the days of auld

lang syne. I’ve got an awful lot to yarn about, and so have you. I’ll

rush to my rooms and dress.”

“Oh, why bother to dress? Though _I_ must, if you don’t mind. I’ve got

to go on to one or two places. If you don’t mind waiting a few minutes

while I wash my brushes and put on my war-paint, we can go at once.

Unless you’re too fashionable to dine prematurely.”

“No, but I think I’d rather dress. It’s cooler in this frightful

weather. Shall I come back or meet you at the club?”

“As you like.”

“Well, you go on to the club, and I’ll be there just as quick as I can.

Oh, by-the-way, write out that wire, and I’ll send it for you.”

“Thanks; perhaps you had better, though I expect my man back in a few

minutes. He’s seeing about the delivery of a picture to the London

agents of the Liverpool Autumn Exhibition.”

When Herbert was gone Matthew Strang did not at once mount to his

dressing-room. The advent of this visitor from the past had stirred up

all its muddy depths, and the knowledge that he had a little time to

spare kept him brooding over it all, recalling the episodes of their

_camaraderie_; and blended with them, as faded scents with old letters,

he caught faint, elusive whiffs of that freshness of feeling and

aspiration which had impregnated them in those dear, divine days of

youth, when even his darkest hours were tinged with a rose-light of

dawn. Never again would he feel that glow, that fervor, those strange

stirrings of romance, that delicious sadness sweeter than all mirth,

when a perfect blue day could bring tears to the eyes, and the

melancholy patter of rain at twilight was like a dying fall of music,

and something strange and far away subtly interfused itself with the

loveliness of nature, with flowers and sunsets and summer nights, a

haunting grace, intangible, inexpressible, hinting somehow of divine

archetypes of beauty in some celestial universe.

No; even his spasmodic strivings to escape from the rut of false Art

were becoming fewer and farther between. Perhaps he was not a genius,

after all, he had begun to think. Why should he vex himself? That

sentiment of Constable at which he had winced when he first came across

it, “People may say what they like of my art, what I know is that it is

_my_ art,” was losing its power to sting. The stirrings of his astral

self were subsiding. He felt himself hardening steadily into a mere

unit of the Club world of tired and successful men, who, having blunted

their emotions by heavy feeding of all their appetites, could no longer

feel the primal things, taking even their vices with the joyless

sobriety of virtue. And though he himself was temperate enough and had

not been unfaithful to Rosina, but only to the spirit of the marriage

contract, yet this same drought of feeling, this furred tongue of the

emotional being, was becoming unpleasantly familiar.

As he sat now moodily reviewing the situation he burst into a spasmodic,

bitter laugh. It had struck him for the first time that his life had

come to be not unlike his father’s--a life apart from his wife’s, with a

rare stay under the domestic roof, the wife the more amiable for his

absences. A sudden intuition seemed a flash-light on his father’s past.

He felt drawn to the dead sailor with a new sympathy. He rose in

agitation, extending his arms towards a visionary form.

“Father, father!” he cried aloud. “Did you suffer like me?”

“Did you call, sir?” And Claydon, his man-servant, who had come in

quietly through the back door, descended from the bedroom, where he had

been laying out his master’s things.

“Yes,” said his master. “Is my shaving-water ready? I’m going out a

little earlier than usual.”

“Yes, sir.” And the painter, recalled to reality, hastened to perform

his toilet. But his mind still ran in the grooves of the past, remote

from all the new interests and distractions of a brilliant career.

When he sprang from the hansom and walked through the door of the

Limners’ Club, he remembered that this was the very club he had come to

on his first day in London--nay, that the gray-headed, deferential

door-keeper was the very man whose majesty had chilled him. He wondered

now whether the old fellow ever connected the popular painter with the

homely, diffident youth who had inquired for Mr. Matthew Strang.

“Gentleman waiting for you, sir.”

Curious! Now it was Herbert that was waiting for Mr. Matthew Strang.

But the thought of the whirligig of time gave him no pleasure. In his

early struggles in London, when no one would buy his work, he had

gloated in anticipation over the humility of the dealers when he should

have made his position; now he had long since forgotten and forgiven

their contempt; how could they know he was worth taking up? There was

nothing but the palest shadow of satisfaction in the thought that they

would scour London in search of those despised pictures if they only

knew. He wondered sometimes if those early things of his would ever come

up into the light, whether the daughter of his ancient landlady still

treasured her mother’s wedding-present, and what had become of “The

Paradise of the Birds.”

A bluff graybeard in the hall shook his hand heartily. It was

Erle-Smith. Matthew Strang knew now that Erle-Smith, whom he had

imagined to pass his days encamped before the beatific vision, was a

jolly good fellow with sheaves of amusing anecdotes. But he remembered

the first time Erle-Smith had spoken to him--at a City banquet in the

beginnings of his fame.

“We oldsters will have to be looking to our laurels,” he had said,

placing his hand on the young man’s shoulder. After the banquet

Erle-Smith had given him a lift in his open carriage, and as they rolled

through the busy, flashing London night a voice in Matt’s breast kept

crying out, “This is Erle-Smith! Look! This is the great Erle-Smith I am

driving with. Why don’t you look, you stupid multitudes? Do you not know

this is Erle-Smith--Erle-Smith himself?” Oh, why did not some of the

people who knew Matthew Strang come along and see him driving with

Erle-Smith? Perhaps they did--there must surely be one acquaintance, at

least, among all those crowds, and he would tell the others. He had

scarcely been able to reply rationally to Erle-Smith’s conversation, so

intoxicated was he by the great man’s proximity. And now he himself was

a popular celebrity--shown with the finger--on the eve of Academic

honors; had he not, of all the younger men among the guests, been called

upon (with disconcerting unexpectedness) to respond to a toast at the

Academy Greenwich Dinner only last month? Was he not already on the

Council of minor artistic societies? Yes; doubtless he himself was

already the cause of like foolish flutterings in the breasts of youthful

hero-worshippers--he whose heart could no longer flutter, not even when

the youthful hero-worshipper was a woman and beautiful.

He dined with Herbert at a little table. His burst of communicativeness

had exhausted itself, and he was glad to let the returned traveller do

the bulk of the talking as well as of the dining. He himself ate little,

though the cuisine was excellent, and the cellar took high rank. Over

dinner Herbert bubbled over in endless reminiscences of the rare dishes

and vintages he had consumed, the operas and symphonies he had heard,

the women who had loved him--a veritable rhapsody of wine, woman, and

song. In an access of unmalicious bitterness, like that which had

overcome him on the threshold of Herbert’s studio, Matthew Strang felt

that Herbert was the real Master--the Master of life.

In the smoking-room other men gathered round. There was Grose, whose

colossal canvases were exhibited at a shilling a head with explanatory

pamphlets by high ecclesiastical authorities, and there was Thornbury,

who succeeded him in the same gallery with colossal nudes that needed no

explanation from ecclesiastical authorities.

Matthew introduced Herbert to Trapp, the realistic novelist, and Herbert

introduced Matthew to Sir Frederick Boyd, the composer, who related with

gusto a story of how he had exposed a cheat at Monte Carlo. A Scotch

landscape-painter asked Matthew to recommend him a model. Two Associates

joined the group. One was a vigorous painter who painted everything _à

premier coup_, the other was Cornpepper, externally unchanged, save for

a round beard.

He had long since cut himself adrift from the Azure Art Club, though he

still counted his disciples, whose experimental fumblings in development

of his methods he boasted of observing in sapient passivity. “Try it on

the dog,” he used to chuckle to his familiars. “I’ve done searching--let

my imitators search, and risk the bogs and the blind-alleys. If they do

strike a path, I’m on the spot instantly to lead them along it. That’s

the only way one can learn from one’s followers.” He used to tell with

glee how one of them had ruined a picture by putting it out in the rain

to mellow it. “Some of those modern

[Illustration: “MATT DINED WITH HERBERT AT A LITTLE TABLE”]

stylists who are trying to discount Old Mastership will survive their

pictures,” was Cornpepper’s commentary on a phase of the newer art.

“They will leave masterpieces of invisibility.”

A good many changes had taken place in the Art world since Matthew

Strang had first had the felicity of drinking whiskey in Cornpepper’s

studio. The flowing tide was now with the decorative artists, of whom

the “Mack” of that evening had proved a pioneer; the Fishtown school of

photographic realism had lived long enough to be orthodox; the Azure Art

Club itself was half absorbed by the Academy, and a new formula of

revolt was momently expected on the horizon; some said it was to be

Primitive, others mysteriously whispered “spots”; to-night Herbert, with

mock seriousness, announced that he himself was about to lead a

movement, the originality of which consisted in seeing Nature through

stained glass. What weird magic a landscape gained when observed through

a green or pink window! But he found the men not so willing to talk of

principles as in the days of Cornpepper’s Bohemian parties, when Carrie

with the whiskey bottle stood for the sober club attendant with his tray

of liqueur brandies. The conversation was rigidly concrete, except for a

moment when Cornpepper nearly came to hot words with the photographic

painter who insisted that Nature was always beautiful. The little man,

glaring through his monocle and rasping the plush arm-chair with his

nails, insisted that this was sheer cant, one had only to look in the

glass to see how ugly Nature could sometimes be! Selection was the only

excuse for Art. Random transcripts from Nature were as foolish as the

excesses of the Neo-Japanese school, into which the Azure Art Gallery

had degenerated. But this lapse of Cornpepper’s into his early manner

was brief. Recovering himself, he told a malicious anecdote about an

artist who was taking to etching because his eyesight was failing, and

he explained the domesticity of British Art by the objection of artists’

wives to all models except babies. Everybody knew, he said, why

Carruthers had been driven to landscape and Christmas supplements.

“Depend upon it,” dogmatized the little man with his most owlish air of

wisdom, “the man who marries his model is lost. She will never tolerate

a model on the premises again.”

His fellow-Associate told a story of a stock-broker who had got himself

invited to the Greenwich dinner last year, and had asked Erle-Smith to

give him the sketch of passing barges which the great man had pencilled

on his sketch-book after dinner. “Erle-Smith good-naturedly gave it to

him. This year he was there again, and said with proud respect to

Erle-Smith, ‘I’ve still got that sketch.’ And produced it _crumpled up_

from his waistcoat pocket!”

“Yes, but did you hear Vanbrugh’s _mot_?” asked Trapp. “He said,

‘Naturally; being a financier he doubled it.’”

“Why, I said that!” cried Cornpepper, angrily.

“No doubt,” said Herbert. “It’s a well-known chestnut.”

“Then I pulled it out of the fire,” screamed Cornpepper.

Somebody exhibited another sketch, grotesquely indecorous, by a popular

painter of religious masterpieces, and the latest epigram on the divorce

case of the hour was repeated and enjoyed. But Matthew Strang’s laughter

held no merriment.

“Shall you be at the Academy _soirée_?” he asked Trapp, to turn the

conversation.

“No, I don’t care for crowds,” replied the realistic novelist.

The conversation rambled on. The composer drifted away, and a

full-fledged Academician took his place--an elderly, dandified figure

with a languid drawl, an aristocratic manner caught from his sitters,

and a shoulder-shrugging contempt for Continental Art; in despite of

which Matthew Strang protested mildly against the bad hanging at

Burlington House of a portrait by an eminent Frenchman. Cornpepper

talked of a sale at Christie’s at which most of the pictures had fetched

lower prices than was given for them by their last owners.

“It’s all a spec’,” said Herbert; “there’s no such thing as a fixed

value in a work of art. Everything depends on the artist’s pose. The

more the buyer gives for a picture the more he likes it. It’s a game of

brag. Set up a fine establishment--the dealer will pay. My old governor

was a good deal taken in by pretentious humbugs with pals in the press.”

As the Academician’s own establishment was notoriously finer than his

pictures--a fact of which the wandering Herbert was ignorant--Matthew

Strang hastened to speak of Tarmigan, who had been recalled to memory

by the catalogue of the aforesaid sale. “I’m afraid he’s gone under,

poor fellow,” he said. “I’ve tried to come across him, but he was always

a mysterious person.”

But Cornpepper continued to talk of the sale, of the fluctuations of

prices; of the impoverished condition of the market, so menacing to

young artists who had set up fashionable establishments on the strength

of their first sales; of the potentialities of America, that yet

undiscovered continent, till all the tide of secret bitterness welled up

in a flood from the depths of Matthew Strang’s soul. Money! Money!

Money! He had never really escaped from it. What a mirage Art was! Even

success only brought the same preoccupations with prices, it was all the

old sordidness over again on a higher plane. The ring of the gold was

the eternal undertone, bringing discord into every harmony. With a

public ignorant of what Art meant, conceiving it as something rigid like

science, not as the expression of the temperament, technique, and vision

of individual genius; with a public craving for pictorial platitudes;

Art could not be, and was not, produced, save by a martyr here and

there. Everywhere the counting of pieces and the shuffling of

bank-notes! The complacent Academician irritated him; he was tired of

reading of his marble halls, the vassals and serfs at his side, his

garden parties, his Belgravian palace erected on the ruins of a

forgotten bankruptcy. The fumes of expensive wines and cigars gave him a

momentary vertigo.

“For God’s sake, stop talking shop!” he burst out suddenly.

The astonished Cornpepper let his eye-glass fall.

“Have you gone crazy, Strang?” he asked, witheringly. “What do you join

an artists’ club for, if you don’t want to talk shop? Strikes me you’d

better get yourself put up for the Commercial Travellers’ Union.”

“That’s what we are,” retorted Matthew Strang.

The Scotch landscape-painter pacified them by proposing a game of

“shell-out,” and Herbert eagerly seconding the proposal it was carried

_nem. con._, and the group mounted to the billiard-room, where Matthew

Strang won half a crown before he went off to his nocturnal parties,

leaving his cousin still renewing with zest his olden experience of the

lighter side of British Art.

CHAPTER III

“VAIN-LONGING”

As a matter of habit Mr. Matthew Strang went, some weeks later, to the

Academy Soirée to add his handshake to the many suffered by the

presidential image of patience at the top of the stairs, and to help

appease the insatiable appetite of the crowd of Christians to whom lions

are thrown. It was part of his success to move through fluttering

drawing-rooms, and it imbittered him to feel that the average admirer

conceives the artist as living in a world of beautiful dreams, sweet

with the incense of perpetually swung censers, and knows nothing of the

artist’s agonies, or the craftsman’s sweatings, that go to the making of

beautiful things; sees always the completed design, and never the

workman scraping the paint or wetting the back of the canvas or tossing

sleeplessly under the weight of a ruined picture.

To-night, in the restless dissatisfaction that had grown upon him since

the reappearance of Herbert had undammed a flood of ancient memories,

this feeling possessed him more strongly than ever, inspiring a morbid

resentment of the chattering crew divided between hero-worship and

champagne-cup. There was almost a suspicion of a leonine snarl in the

stereotyped answer, “You are very kind to say so,” which he gave to the

grimacing persons who buttonholed him to bask in the radiance of his

success or to effuse honest admiration. Everybody seemed to him

ill-dressed, ill-mannered, and in ill-health. He thought he had never

seen so many cadaverous complexions, snag teeth, powder-tipped noses,

scraggy shoulders, glazed eyes (with pince-nez, monocle, or spectacles),

ungainly figures (squat or slim), queer costumes, bald heads, or

top-heavy hair-dressings; how horrible gentlefolk were, more uncouth

even than the denizens of the slums! Those one could imagine to be a

very different breed, cleaned and properly clothed, but these had had

every chance. How poorly humanity compared with cows and horses; what a

price man had paid for soul--and without always getting it. Surely, none

but custom-blinded eyes could gaze unblinking, unsmiling, at the

grotesque show of mankind, the quaint crania, the unsightly bodies; the

crowd struck him as the inventions of a comic draughtsman in a malicious

mood, the men in black and white, the ladies in color. And, indeed,

though he was not thinking of himself, his stalwart, well-proportioned

figure and his handsome head stood out notably from a serried batch of

degenerate physiques.

“So you are determined to cut me, Mr. Strang?”

The painter started violently as the laughing syllables, sounding far

more musical than the faint far-away strains of the band in the

Sculpture Room, vibrated above the endless buzz of the crowd that hemmed

him in.

He looked up. His moody fit vanished before the radiant apparition of a

beautiful woman in a shimmering amber gown from which her shoulders rose

dazzling. A jewelled butterfly fluttered at her breast. In the twinkling

of an eye--and that eye hers--he recanted his contempt for the Creator’s

draughtsmanship.

“I have bowed to you three times,” she said, and the twinkling of her

eye--large and gray and lambent--was supplemented by the smile that

hovered about the corners of her wide sweet mouth. “But you won’t take

any notice of me.”

“I beg your pardon,” he said, in flushed embarrassment, “I must have

been lost in thought.”

She shook her head bewitchingly.

“You don’t remember me. Celebrities never do remember people, though

people always remember celebrities.”

“I do remember you,” he protested, chords of memory vibrating

tremulously and melodiously. “I had the pleasure of meeting you at a

garden-party some years ago.”

“But you don’t remember my name?”

“I don’t think I caught it then,” he said, simply. “But I remember you

scolded me because my pictures were only beautiful.”

She laughed gayly.

“Ah, then I ought to apologize to you. I have changed my mind.”

“Now you don’t think they’re even that!”

“Far from it! What I mean is that I have come to think less of useful

things. You know I was a Socialist then. But let me introduce my friend

to you.”

“You have to introduce yourself first, Nor,” said a younger lady whom he

then perceived at her side.

He smiled.

“You are irrepressible, Olive,” said her friend. “Mr. Strang, let me

introduce myself then--Mrs. Wyndwood.”

He bowed, still smiling.

“Eleanor Wyndwood,” she added, “to explain my friend’s abbreviation,

which always puzzles strangers.”

“Everybody knows Nor stands for Eleanor,” remonstrated her friend. “Do

they suppose your name is Norval?”

Mrs. Wyndwood’s smile met the painter’s.

“And now, if my punctilious friend is satisfied, let me introduce Miss

Regan.”

Miss Regan gave him her hand cordially.

“Where are your pictures to be found, Mr. Strang?” she asked. “We

haven’t been to the Academy before, and we should so like to save the

shilling.”

“Oh, they’re not worth looking at,” he said, uncomfortably. He suddenly

felt ashamed of them. It was thus that he had felt more than two years

ago, when, over her strawberries and cream, Mrs. Wyndwood had lectured

him for artistic aloofness from the travail of the time, insisting that

it was the mission of all forms of Art to express the aspiration of the

century towards a higher and juster social life, towards the coming of

God’s kingdom on earth, and that it would be honester for him to plough

the land than to paint decorative pictures for the dining-rooms of

capitalists. He had scarcely taken in her point of view, more persuaded

by her presence than by her words, by some intangible radiation of

earnestness and goodness from the lovely face and the soulful gray

eyes, and less ashamed of the sinfulness of his own artistic standpoint

than of the often meretricious quality of his performance. She had been

the first woman to speak slightingly of his rôle in the world, and her

dispraise, co-operating, as it did, with his own discontent, had

impressed him more than all the praise, just as one unfavorable

newspaper critique rankled, while a hundred eulogies passed across

consciousness, scarcely ruffling its waves.

When the flux of the garden-party had drifted her off in the wake of

Gerard Brode, the handsome young Socialist, he had felt that he, too,

might have become a Socialist or a ploughboy, or even an honest painter,

under the inspiration of her enthusiastic eyes. He had thought of her

for several months, almost as a creature of dream, so swift and shadowy

had been her flitting across his horizon, and she had easily lent

herself to that conception of Ideal Womanhood which the world had not

yet destroyed, because the world had not created it. It was under the

impulsion of the eloquent play of light across her face that he had

conceived and painted that allegory of woman’s inspiration which

Herbert, unable to read in it the pathetic expression of the painter’s

dissatisfaction at once with real womanhood and his own work, had found

so amusing, and he was startled now to see how nearly he had reproduced

her traits in his conception of the figure on the mountain-top; not so

much, perhaps, in the features, in which the slight upward tilt of the

nose was omitted and the size of the ears diminished, as in the

clustering chestnut hair, with gold lights in it, and in the poise of

the head, the long, thin Botticelli hands, the small feet, and the

graceful curves of the rather tall form, and, above all, in the

expression that seemed to suffuse her face with spiritual effluence. The

first impression renewed itself in all its depth; he asked himself with

amazement how he could have let the waves of life wash it away so

completely that even Herbert’s inquiry about the picture had not

recalled her clearly to his memory.

“Oh, but I want to see your pictures,” she said. “There’s a ‘Triumph of

Bacchus,’ I hear. I saw the fresco--by Caracci, wasn’t it?--in the

Farnese Palace, in Rome, on our homeward journey. We’ve been in Russia,

Miss Regan and I, with Monsieur and Madame Dolkovitch, to see Podnieff

in his dairy-farm. Oh! he’s so charming--so simple and saintly. He

enables one to construct St. Francis of Assisi.”

“He makes very bad butter,” said Miss Regan.

“He is the greatest spiritual force in Russia,” Mrs. Wyndwood said,

sweetly. “And Dolkovitch is doing much to extend his influence in

England. I wish you knew Dolkovitch, Mr. Strang.”

“Why, would he make me do better pictures?” he asked, playfully,

struggling a little against the obsession of her sweet seriousness.

“I will reserve my opinion till I have seen your latest manner. Though I

confess I don’t find the title, ‘The Triumph of Bacchus,’ a hopeful

augury of noble work. But do tell me where it is--or must I consult the

catalogue? Miss Regan made me bring one.”

“It is in this very room.”

“Really?”

“Yes, it’s rather a compliment. The Academicians generally reserve the

big room--or at least the line--for their own works. But it is cruel of

you to leave me so soon.”

“How subtle, Nor,” said Miss Regan. “Of course he cannot be seen looking

at his own picture.”

“Do let us go where the crowd is thinner,” he pleaded.

“Than round your picture?” queried Miss Regan, naïvely.

“For shame, Olive,” laughed Mrs. Wyndwood. “I shall punish you by not

letting you see it. We are at your service, Mr. Strang. Show us what you

please.”

“May I not get you any refreshment?” he said, as they passed into the

smaller room, and into a perceptibly cooler atmosphere.

“No, thank you; this is refreshing enough,” said Mrs. Wyndwood, with a

sigh of relief.

“Mrs. Wyndwood means that she lives on air,” said her friend.

“Oh, Olive, I eat quite as much as you.”

“You used to before you developed this Dolkovitch phase, and began

understudying an angel.”

Matthew saw the opportunity for a commonplace compliment, but he did

not take it. The plane on which Mrs. Wyndwood existed demanded

reverential originality. Every word she said sounded magically musical,

and delightfully wise and witty. Olive’s remarks one merely smiled at,

though she, too, had a low voice, “that excellent thing in woman,” and

was considered handsome by those she did not annoy. She reminded the

painter of a Caryatid as she stood there, rather more sturdy than her

friend, and shorter, with stronger features and a firmer chin, but to

the full as graciously proportioned. She had dark hair and eyes, and a

warm coloring that reached its most vivid tint in the intense red of the

lips. Her dress was of a soft green-blue, cut high, with yellow roses at

the throat, and but for the painter’s preoccupation with her friend,

would have challenged his eye by subtle harmonies.

“There goes William Lodge, the poet,” cried Mrs. Wyndwood, suddenly.

“Impossible!” said Olive.

“But it is the poet,” insisted Mrs. Wyndwood.

“Impossible,” repeated Olive. “No man can be a poet with mutton-chop

whiskers.”

“What has the man’s appearance to do with his poetry?”

“Everything. Mutton chops and lyrics don’t rhyme--they’re like that

woman’s emeralds against her turquoise bodice. A poet’s publisher should

keep him out of sight--he damages sales. Look at the hook-nosed creature

there with the goggles and the green gown--who would believe that is

Mrs. Ashman Watford, who writes those dainty essays, and who, realizing

it, could ever help reading her between the lines?”

“Or who,” retorted Mrs. Wyndwood, “reading the essays, could help seeing

the beautiful soul behind the goggles?”

A tremor of sympathy traversed the painter’s form.

“I stand unreproved, Nor. You can afford to be magnanimous. But I

contend that beautiful souls have no right to get mixed up with hooked

noses. We ought to judge a soul by the body it keeps. If this country

ever becomes a republic, it will be due, not to democracy, but to

photography. You will agree with me, I know, Mr. Strang.”

He started, wondering what he was called upon to agree with.

“Beauty is truth, truth beauty,” he quoted, vaguely.

“But you never put truly ugly persons into pictures,” Miss Regan

persisted.

“No,” he admitted, “unless in portraits.”

“And not even then,” the girl retorted. “I’d far rather these portraits

came out of their frames and walked about, than promenade among the

originals as we are doing now.”

“Why, I don’t suppose there’s one original present,” Mrs. Wyndwood

remonstrated.

“Isn’t there?” queried Olive, in innocent accents. “I thought there were

a lot, judging by the want of resemblance.”

“You are not up to date,” said Matthew Strang, smilingly. “Likeness is

the last thing a portrait-painter goes for. Values, spots, passages,

color schemes, all sorts of things take precedence of the likeness in

their importance for art. The likeness is irrelevant to art. It concerns

only the sitter--art concerns the world. A friend of mine, who edits an

illustrated paper, which is the first to publish portraits of everybody

who becomes anybody, contends that the number of persons who know any

one man’s features is a negligible quantity. ‘All the public demands,’

he says, ‘is portraits.’ So you see your criticism leaves our withers

unwrung.”

“Oh, do produce your catalogue, Nor,” said Miss Regan, flying off at a

tangent for want of an answer. “I am dying to see the name of that

thing, stuck right up there on the ceiling.” Mrs. Wyndwood, after

protesting that nobody else was consulting a catalogue, which only made

Olive more eager, fished out the booklet from some obscure pocket, and

Olive turned the pages impatiently.

“It’s just like Miss Regan to want to look at the skied pictures,” her

friend murmured to the painter.

“Oh, the poor man!” cried Miss Regan. “Listen, this is what the picture

is called:

“‘Sweet Love--but oh! most dread desire of Love,

Life-thwarted. Linked in gyves I saw them stand,

Love shackled with Vain-Longing, hand to hand:

And one was eyed as the blue vault above:

But hope tempestuous like a fire-cloud hove

I’ the other’s gaze, even as in his whose wand

Vainly all night with spell-wrought power has spann’d

The unyielding caves of some deep treasure-trove.’

“Oh, the poor man! Fancy the indignity of having a long quotation

skied!”

“What lovely lines!” exclaimed Mrs. Wyndwood, ignoring the humorous

aspect which appealed to her companion. “Do they not express the idea

perfectly, Mr. Strang?”

“I am afraid I did not quite catch their significance,” he said,

flushing. The confession was not so candid as it sounded, for he had

been less intent on the quotation than on studying the sweetness of her

face, and watching the emotional heaving of the jewelled butterfly on

her beautiful bosom.

Olive Regan politely offered him the catalogue, and his flush grew

deeper as he seemed to read his personal tragedy in the poet’s images.

What ironical Providence had sent him the words just then?

“Oh! most dread desire of Love,

Life-thwarted.”

Perhaps it was that which made his life so unreal to him, which

explained its hollowness. He had never loved.

In a strange flash of imaginative insight, it seemed to him that the

room was full of lovers. Love was in the air; delicate rumors and

whispers of divine delight, of holy pain, fluttered tremulously. On all

sides couples moved, heart-bound, their beauty spiritualized, their very

ugliness transfigured. Love redeemed the creation.

He remembered that in the days when he had trodden the lonely London

pavements, hungry and heart-sick, jostled by hurrying crowds, he had yet

seemed to himself the only solid figure amid a throng of shadows

flitting to death and oblivion. In this tense instant he felt it was he

that had always been the shadow; the one shadow amid a world of

substantialities and solidities, a world that lived while he was

recording the forms and colors of life.

And even if he should ever love--and the thought set his heart

fluttering as he had imagined it could never flutter again--even if Love

should ever make existence real for him, was he not predestined to a

doom more terrible even than the apathy of loveless life?

“Linked in gyves I saw them stand,

Love shackled with Vain-Longing, hand to hand.”

_Mrs._ Wyndwood! She, too, was married. And in that thought he knew that

Love had begun for him. The unrest into which the first vision of her

had plunged him, and which time had stilled, had at last come to

understand itself. He loved, and his love was vain. They had come to

him, both at once--

“Love shackled with Vain-Longing, hand to hand.”

He returned the catalogue mechanically to Miss Regan.

“They’re Rossetti’s--fine, are they not?” said Mrs. Wyndwood.

The question dragged him up from abysses of dream. But even though he

felt he must be answering it, he lingered in luxurious agony over the

music of the question, its vibrations prolonging themselves in his ear.

“They are indeed exquisite,” he said, slowly, at last. “But do you think

there would be any ‘hope tempestuous’?”

“There is always hope,” said Mrs. Wyndwood, gently.

There seemed a sweet assurance in the unconscious words: he heard a

chime of golden bells floating up from some sea-buried city. Perhaps it

was only from the band in the Sculpture Room. But he felt he must not

attach himself further to the fascinating twain; his solicitude would be

too marked, and he was aware of many eyes drawn by their beauty.

But before he could speak, Mrs. Wyndwood went on, musingly:

“And after all, hope is better than fulfilment. There are blue hills on

the horizon which the child longs to go beyond; but happiness always

lies on the hither side, with the blue hills still beckoning.” Her eyes

filled with dreamy light. “It is as George Herbert so beautifully says:

“‘False glozing pleasures, casks of happiness,

Foolish night-fires, women’s and children’s wishes,

Chases in arras, gilded emptiness,

Shadows well-mounted, dreams in a career,

Embroider’d lies, nothing between two dishes,

These are the pleasures here.’”

How exquisitely she spoke the melancholy lines that seemed fraught with

all the pathos of the human destiny, her words rippling through the buzz

of platitudinarian trivialities he heard vaguely all around him, like a

silver stream through an unlovely country. She had suffered too. She,

too, had found life and its pleasures hollow; he saw that in the quiver

of the beautiful lip, in the wistful brightness of the eye. Straightway

his heart was full of tears for her. He longed to comfort her, to

sacrifice himself for her. Why could she not be happy?

He had a sense of jar when Miss Regan said:

“That’s rather a strange quotation for you, Nor.”

“Indeed?”

“‘Foolish night-fires, _women’s_ and children’s wishes.’ He had a true

notion of our futility, that gentle old poet.”

“I am in no fighting mood to-night, Olive,” replied Mrs. Wyndwood,

gently.

“You don’t stand up for your sex?” the painter asked Miss Regan, in

surprise. She had that resourceful, self-sufficient air which he

associated with pioneers of female movements.

Olive shrugged her shapely shoulders. “Heaven forbid that I should be

the _advocatus diaboli_.”

The tossing of the crowd threw up a long-haired, long-bearded man with a

handsome leonine cast of features, who greeted the two ladies with an

air of _camaraderie_.

“Ah, _nous voilà encore_,” he cried, joyously, adding in good English,

though with a Russian accent, “Oh, Mrs. Wyndwood, you must see the

little picture of the Christ-child by a young follower of our

Nicolovitch. He is exiled three years already, and has established

himself on your hospitable shores. Ah, how it makes a spiritual ray

among your English platitudes! You will come too, Miss Regan?”

Olive, who had cast a droll glance towards the painter at the Russian’s

awkward allusion to British banality, shook her head. “No, thank you. I

hate children, and I am tired. You will find me here, Nor,” and she let

herself sink into a lounge.