Mrs. Wyndwood hesitated, as if about to introduce the two men, but the

leonine Dolkovitch swept her off, and she had only time to leave a

bewitching smile behind her.

“Won’t you go and see the child, Mr. Strang?” Olive asked.

He hesitated in his turn. But she would come back if he waited.

“I would rather stay with you if I may,” he replied, gallantly.

Olive looked sideways along the lounge.

“There is room,” she reported.

“Thank you.” He seated himself at her side, and stolidly regarded the

crowd and the opposite pictures.

Olive fanned herself silently at great length. The painter, stealing a

sudden glance at her, found her observing the human spectacle with an

air of infinite sadness.

“Do you like dogs?” she asked, unexpectedly.

“Yes,” he replied, startled, and with a vision of Sprat. “But I haven’t

kept one since I was a boy. But why?”

“I don’t know. That woman there made me think of them--that creature

they’re crowding round. Don’t you see that pasty-faced hag with the

false hair and the real diamonds? That’s Miss Craven St. Clair.”

“Well, what has she to do with dogs?”

“Oh, she’s a leading lady. Plays those erotic parts.”

He looked at her a little surprised by the adjective, and still

unenlightened.

“And what then?”

“Don’t you know all leading ladies keep dogs--to get extra paragraphs? I

hope you hate leading ladies. I do. They’re so virtuous, and you know

virtue is such a feeble vice. Nor has a dog, though she’s not a leading

lady. But rather a led lady. L--E--D, you know.”

“Do you mean led by the dog?”

“Yes, whenever she’s blind and the dog is sly,” she said, mysteriously,

adding quickly, “Nor’s dog isn’t all hers--it’s mine on alternate days.

He’s such a snob, is Roy--he’ll never go out with her if she’s frumpy.

He insists on swell dresses, dear old Roy.”

“_Can_ she be frumpy?” he asked.

She flashed a quick look at him.

“No, she is very sweet and amusing,” she answered, gravely. “She is the

only woman I have ever been able to live with.”

“Do you live with her?”

“Of course--I chaperon her.”

Matthew smiled.

“What, don’t you think I’m old enough to chaperon a young widow?”

His heart leaped.

“I didn’t know she was a young widow.”

“Yes, she’s quite an old widow.”

“Have you lived together long?”

“Æons; we disagree so much.”

“In what way?”

“Our complexions go well with each other’s.”

“I should call that harmony, not disagreement.”

“Perhaps--in your technical nomenclature. But I call it disagreement.

Besides, we haven’t a thought in common. I am a--well, how shall I

define myself?” she looked up quizzingly, her fan to her lips. “I belong

to that class of women whose sex is a misfit. And she is--”

“And she is”--he repeated, in some suspense.

“She is the sort of woman who won’t renew the velvet edging on her

walking-dresses.”

“Now you puzzle me.”

“It is evident you know nothing of women, or have only observed

Englishwomen who mostly put up with braid. Velvet edging, which is an

American notion, saves frayed skirts, and wears out quicker than the

stuff. Look at her gown to-night--it trails; mine fits. She retains the

infantile habit of long clothes; I am ‘growd up’ and in short frocks.”

“I didn’t notice her gown.”

“Men never do. That’s why we wear so little of them.”

He was puzzled by a curious bitterness in her tone, as well as by a

perplexity as to her exact meaning. Her own frock was certainly

prudishly high.

“I don’t quite follow your definition, anyhow,” he said.

“No? I’ll try another. There are only two classes of women--those who

ought to have been born men, and those who ought never to have been born

at all. I am of the first, Nor’s of the second.”

He shook his head laughingly.

“Oh! but I won’t believe that of either.”

“If I expected to be believed I should have more hesitation in telling

the truth,” she replied, gravely. “We are both mistakes, but Nor is an

incorrigible one. You heard her say she’s dropped Socialism. She didn’t

tell you she’s dropped a power of money, too, in subscriptions to the

Cause. She probably thought equality would come about in three months,

and that she was merely disgorging in advance.”

“Is that why she looks so sad?”

“Dear me, no; money doesn’t trouble her.”

“What’s the matter, then?”

“She’s been married.”

“You mean she grieves?”

“Quite the contrary. But marriage brands.”

“You speak bitterly--yet you have no personal experience.”

“No, I was never tempted.”

Her frank brusquerie made him feel an old acquaintance.

“I cannot believe it,” he said, with a smile.

“Oh, if you call a proposal a temptation! I call it a bare hook.”

“You’re a man-hater, I see.”

“A woman-hater, if you will. Man I adore.”

“I don’t understand you,” he confessed again.

“Really? I am a very simple person. _Omne ignotum pro magnifico._ Women

I know and detest. Men I don’t know and admire. If I married one, I

should know him.”

“But you might find him better than you expected.”

“If I didn’t expect to find him better than I expected, I shouldn’t

marry him; so I should still be disappointed. You see I know just enough

about men to know that they are better left unknown. I quite agree with

Nor about the blue hills. It is better to keep one’s illusions. At

present I am happy in the thought that somewhere in the universe there

exists a fine man. Even the average man is less petty than the average

woman, so that the one fine man must be a Bayard indeed.”

He laughed.

“Then, if _he_ came along and made you an offer of marriage--”

“I should close with it at once.”

“You are a droll girl,” he could not help saying. “You are the first of

your sex who has ever admitted to me that men are better than women.”

“Didn’t I tell you how sly we were? A man has one or two big sins, a

woman a bundle of little ones.”

“Ah, well,” he said, smiling. “Two of a trade, as a friend of mine

says.”

“Now I don’t understand you--or rather, your friend,” she said, flushing

a little.

“Oh, he’s rather brutal. He takes the Darwinian view of things, you

know. He says all women are in the same trade--man-hunting--so they run

one another down.”

“But I’m not running one another down. I’m running us down _en bloc_.

And, besides, that isn’t the Darwinian view at all. It’s the males who

always seek the females and develop the lively colors to attract them.

Don’t you remember Tennyson?--

“‘In the spring a fuller crimson comes upon the robin’s breast.’”

“Yes, but that’s only in the lower creation,” argued Matthew Strang.

“Do you make a distinction? But I am ready to agree with your

friend--since he isn’t here. We _are_ man-hunters. What a pity, though,

that civilization has so reversed the order of natural selection that

the human female has to be picked instead of picking the male. See the

result!”

“I see what you mean. Man has degenerated physically.”

“And woman morally. We adore the beauties of your purse instead of your

person.”

“And so we develop brain to get purses with. Really, the effect is not

so bad.”

“Brains are cheap to-day; and they don’t improve the appearance, anyhow.

If people wore their brains outside--but who is this brutal friend of

yours who gauges my sex so well? Do I know him?”

“I shouldn’t think so. He’s just back from strange places.”

“So am I. What’s his name?”

“Herbert--Herbert Strang.”

“A brother?”

“A cousin.”

“He’s not an artist?”

He hesitated: “Yes--and no,” he said.

“Ah, two of a trade,” she said, slyly.

He smiled. “Oh, he’s gone out of the business. He’s become a critic.”

“Wise man!”

He glanced furtively every now and then to see if Mrs. Wyndwood was

returning. He was conducting the conversation with only the untroubled

surface of his mind, interested enough in his piquant companion, but

feeling her entirely as an interlude. Miss Regan perceived his

perturbation at last.

“Oh, don’t let me monopolize you, Mr. Strang. I am quite safe here till

Nor returns. There are so many people thirsting for you.”

“Oh, I’d rather stay with you,” he averred, disingenuously.

“Don’t be a mere man,” she returned, raising her dark eyebrows. “Even

your admirers think you more than that. It’s not fair for me to keep you

from them.”

He was rather in a quandary. He could not tell her he was waiting for

her friend.

To his relief, “Ah, I see them coming,” she said. “You’ll be off duty in

a moment. I must introduce you to Dolkovitch. He’s great fun. He will

invite you to his spiritual Sunday afternoons. Do you judge people by

their hat-racks?”

He stared at her.

“I mean when they’ve got company. Dolk’s hat-rack when he’s ‘at home’ is

lovely; I’d go miles to see it. Such curious curly, dusty, many-hued,

amorphous things on the pegs--a cosmopolitan congress, only the

chimney-pot unrepresented. Nor goes to meet the earnest people, but I go

to see their hats. Oh, M. Dolkovitch, do let me introduce Mr. Strang. He

is dying to know you.”

“De-lighted,” said Dolkovitch. “But I do not like this word ‘dying,’

Miss Regan.”

“Oh, I beg your pardon--I forgot,” said Olive. “Mr. Strang is living to

know you. M. Dolkovitch, like the ancient Greeks, Mr. Strang, doesn’t

like to think of death.”

“I can’t let you misrepresent him to a stranger, Olive,” said Mrs.

Wyndwood. “M. Dolkovitch is wide as the poles asunder from Pagan

thought, Mr. Strang. His teaching simply is that, as there is no death,

but merely upward evolution, the sooner the word is banished from our

vocabulary the better.”

Her voice raised the discussion to celestial heights.

“Never say die!” cried Miss Regan, enthusiastically. “Every dictionary

should be without it.”

“Just so,” said M. Dolkovitch, gravely. “Our European customs, Mr.

Strang, with regard to death are all in direct contradiction to our

creed. The spirit rises into more blessed states, and instead of

rejoicing in festive attire, we mourn for it, we put on black, and our

looks are black, and our hearses are black, and the horses they are of

black also.”

“I think it’s very proper,” said Miss Regan, decisively. “I love black

funerals. Colored funerals would make me feel sad.” She rose. “We are

going soon, Nor, aren’t we? You look tired.”

“Yes, we are going at once,” Mrs. Wyndwood breathed.

The Russian gave the painter his card, and hoped he would come and hear

more of the new gospel. Next Sunday afternoon spiritual people came from

four to seven.

Mr. Strang made a movement to accompany the ladies, but Mrs. Wyndwood

begged him not to trouble--M. Dolkovitch would see them to the carriage.

“Good-bye, then,” she said with an enchanting smile. “It was so good of

you to talk to us.”

Words failed him in reply. Fortunately, a little white-haired gentleman

bowed to her at that moment and distracted her attention.

“That was General Dale, Olive,” she said. “What a fine, soldierly walk!”

“Varied by ducking for bullets every moment,” remarked Miss Regan. “He

oughtn’t to know so many people. Not that I admire the military bearing.

It’s so unnatural and stiff. One sees the drill behind. Even those

little wooden soldiers I never liked. Good-bye, Mr. Strang.”

“_Au revoir_, I hope,” he said. Her, at least, he could answer.

He went to the “Sunday afternoon” at five o’clock, the earliest hour one

could decently go to a reception commencing at four. In the meantime he

had reread a great deal of Shelley, who seemed to have written a great

deal about Eleanor, as she became to her lover’s secret thought, though

her full name he learned was the Honorable Mrs. Wyndwood, and she was

the daughter-in-law of a Viscount, and connected by blood or marriage

with several pages of Debrett. In the hopelessness of his love these

ties were no separation; he did not think of anything but the blissful

pain of seeing her again. He had ridden every morning in the Row, but

neither of the friends had shown herself.

The reception was held in a flat half way up a bleak stone staircase in

the West Central district. He was so agitated that he forgot to note the

hat-rack, and his first glance at the company appalled him with the

sense of a cosmopolitan chaos, without form and void, over which no

light of Mrs. Wyndwood brooded. There were mystic oil-paintings on the

walls of the narrow room, and on the gray marble mantel-piece stood a

glass of water, in which floated vaguely the white of an egg.

The host introduced him to his wife--a tall, haggard, giraffe-necked

woman--who gave him a cup of tea, and passed him on to a nervously

peering Herr Grundau, who spoke to him of the revival of religion among

the University _Burschen_, and passed him on to Mademoiselle Brinskaïa,

a little yellow Polishwoman, with eyes like live coals, who had been

speaking every European language in turn with equal fluency, as she

knitted colored wools into some occult pattern.

“I have heard your name,” she told him in English that sounded almost

native, as he seated himself next to her in the cushioned window-seat.

“It is so good of you to say so,” he murmured, automatically, not

without the astonishment which from the first had pervaded him when

strangers professed knowledge of him, and which had never quite worn

off. He thought his peculiar name accounted for his notoriety.

“You’re not a spiritual artist,” she said, half interrogatively.

“An artist can only be artistic,” he replied, in vague self-defence.

“That’s all my eye and Betty Martin,” said Mademoiselle, knitting

indefatigably. Then she smiled. “You see I know your idioms.”

A gradual silence fell among the jabbering, gesticulating crowd. All

eyes were directed alternately towards the glass on the mantel-piece and

Mademoiselle Brinskaïa.

“It is settled,” Dolkovitch declared.

The Polish old maid rose solemnly, marched towards the fireplace, and

inspected the glass curiously, noting the shape which the egg-white had

taken.

“It is a _porte-cochère_,” she announced. “That means riches.”

There was a buzz of satisfaction and a little hand-clapping, the

blinking octogenarian who had broken the egg being cheerfully

complimented on his prospects.

The sibyl did not return to Matthew Strang’s side, and the vacant niche

was taken by a stout, elderly, motherly lady, who was introduced to him

as the Countess de Villiers, and who, regardless of the fact that his

eyes perpetually wandered towards the door, published her autobiography

to him, from her babyhood in Brazil to her maturity in Gibraltar. There

could be no close to her story, she volunteered, for she could never

die.

This drew Matthew’s attention even from the door.

“Do you mean metaphorically?” he said.

“No, literally. You could not kill me if you tried.”

“What! Not with a knife?”

“Neither with fire nor sword.”

“You know I wouldn’t try,” he said.

“If you are going to treat me facetiously I will not pursue the

subject,” she declared, the red blood mantling in her sallow cheek.

“I am quite serious,” he said, deprecatingly.

“A woman who can live without eating cannot die,” pursued the Countess,

mollified. “I was an invalid, and in my convalescence gradually worked

my way to the Truth, and by means of it I have lived fourteen weeks

without food. I worked down from five ounces a day to nothing, dropping

an ounce a day. And I didn’t lose a pound of flesh.”

“I have fasted, too,” he said, grimly. “But I never found any Truth

through it.” He reflected bitterly on the anxious competition of people

to give him food, now that he had plenty of his own. Was this the London

which he had tramped for work, famished and rebellious?

“You must be patient,” she answered, earnestly. “You must kill the man

in you; then you will have got rid of the mortal part. You will be pure

spirit, part of God. Existence is only God’s thoughts; everything good

is a God-idea, everything evil a man-idea. Jesus was the first

discoverer of the Truth, and only the man-idea in Him was crucified, the

mortal part. Only the evil part of us is mortal. I have suppressed the

man-idea in myself, therefore I cannot die.”

“But do you mean to say you will always live on?”

“Yes, though not necessarily on earth.”

“But what will happen--will you disappear?”

She frowned. “Oh, I know you are making fun of me; but I assure you many

eminent men have sat at my feet. Even Dolkovitch says I have a greater

grip of the Truth--the glorious Truth of immortality--than any other

woman in Europe, except Mademoiselle Brinskaïa and the clairvoyant

Princess Stevanovna. There is nothing miraculous. I don’t keep away from

society, I dance and paint, but throughout all I am struggling against

the bad-self.”

“What sort of things do you paint?” he asked, feeling for firmer ground.

“My vision!” she said, in rapt tones. “My assurance that the universe is

all living spirit.”

And all of a sudden a conviction came to him that she was right, that

there was no death, no room for death. Eleanor Wyndwood had arrived, and

in the light of her face the noisy, motley throng took meaning and

music. He rose eagerly, but she did not see him in his niche, and he sat

down again awkwardly. The Countess talked on, but he had forgotten even

to feign the listener. He could only see the gleam of a creamy dress in

rifts of the crowd, which thickened momently. Presently he was aware of

Miss Regan, who gave him an abrupt bow, and then crossing over to him

said, in vexed accents:

“I am very angry with you. How are you, Countess? Young as ever, I see.”

“What have I done?” inquired Matthew Strang.

“You’ve spoiled my hat-rack. There’s a chimney-pot on it. Life has so

few pleasures one can’t afford to be robbed.”

“Oh, please forgive me,” he said, half seriously.

“I sha’n’t--you’re too respectable.”

“Tell me something Bohemian, and I’ll do it,” he pleaded.

“Well, come to tea with me some five o’clock--with me and Nor, that is.”

“Is that very Bohemian?”

“No, I’m afraid not,” said Olive, glumly. Then, brightening up. “But

that’s only a beginning. And you haven’t got time to come, either. That

makes it a pleasure.”

“I shall be delighted to find time,” he said, looking his words. While

they were discussing dates, the Countess rose and stalked away.

“She looks offended,” he said.

“Poor old Countess!” said Olive, “she’s breaking up fast.”

“But she’s going to live forever.”

“I know. How sad! We came across her at Rome--the eternal lady in the

eternal city. She’s much grayer since then. Earthly immortality seems

almost as horrible as heavenly. Fancy living for ever and ever and ever.

No rest for the righteous! Oh, I do hope religion isn’t true. How’s your

friend?”

“Which friend?”

“The brutal friend!”

“You’re a queer girl,” he said, laughing in spite of himself.

“That’s tautology. All girls are queer. Did you ever know a woman

absolutely sane?”

He winced a little--shadows of his mother and his wife flashed past. She

answered herself, triumphantly.

“Of course not. We’ve all got bees in our bonnets. Men haven’t even got

bonnets. Except Highlanders. And they don’t wear the breeches. I beg

pardon, I should have said ‘unmentionables’ to a member of the

chimney-potted classes. But that always seems silly. It’s like spelling

‘damn’ in books with a ‘d’ and a blank. I have a lovely private swear.

Would you like to hear it?”

He laughed assent.

“_Damakakaparatanasuta!_ The pink lady, who always forgets her bodice,

is looking shocked. She doesn’t know it’s Sanscrit, or something, and

means: ‘The foundation of the kingdom of righteousness.’ Don’t laugh, it

really does. There is a cousin of the Guicowar of Baroda over there--you

can ask him. Why, I have even got Nor to swear to swear it. It’s like

temperance champagne.”

“Ah! I’d better go over to her,” he said, snapping at the opportunity.

“Or else she’ll accuse me of cutting her again.”

He pushed a whit rudely through the teacup-balancing throng. But to his

horror he found Eleanor distributing farewells.

She smiled faintly at him, as her magnetic fingers touched his for a

moment.

“What wicked things have you been saying to Mademoiselle Brinskaïa?”

He looked at her in astonishment. “I’ve hardly said a word to her.”

She shook her head and passed towards the door. He spent some wretched

days, wondering if he had offended her, and what the little yellow woman

had been saying about him. He put the question as soon as he was seated

at the tea-table in the dainty drawing-room of the tiny Mayfair house

which the oddly assorted couple had taken for the season. Mrs. Wyndwood

would not say, but Miss Regan cried out:

“Don’t make such a mystery, Nor; you’ll make the man think he’s accused

of murder, or drinking his tea out of a saucer. The Polish priestess

says she doesn’t like your auras--_voilà tout_!”

“What are auras?” he asked, relieved and puzzled.

“The Latin for airs, of course,” laughed Olive. “It’s her mystical way

of saying you give yourself airs. Yes, you do. You’re disapproving of

our furniture now. But it’s through Nor’s objecting to furniture that

suited my complexion and vice versa. We compromised by getting furniture

in discord with both our complexions. The beautiful photos you see all

about you are mine--I mean my collection. They are actresses. I adore

beautiful women. After what you told me about the unimportance of the

likeness I shall consider them works of art. I have always thought that

actresses’ photographs are intended as a protection against the

curiosity of the public. But for them, actresses would be liable to be

recognized and mobbed in the streets. Great Heavens! I’ve forgotten the

scones.” And with this unexpected exclamation, Olive rushed out of the

room.

“She would insist on baking scones herself,” Mrs. Wyndwood explained

with an affectionate smile.

“She is deliciously odd,” he replied, laughing.

“Do you find her so? I’ve got used to her. There’s a monotony in the

variety. Behind it all I see always this one fact--she’s the noblest

creature in the world.”

He was touched by the enthusiastic tribute, so different from Olive’s

amused estimate of her friend.

“You must find it very pleasant to live with her,” he said.

“Yes, especially after”--But she shuddered, and did not complete the

sentence. He read in her face the tragedy of an unhappy marriage. His

eyes grew moist with pity; he felt a mad, fighting passion against the

inevitable past.

“Olive is so good,” she said, brokenly, “she was of my husband’s

family--an Irish branch--but she quarrelled with them all--her father,

her sisters--and came to live with me. Fortunately she is immensely rich

in her own right, and independent of them all.”

“Done to a turn!” cried Miss Regan, rushing in with the scones. “And I

feared I was King Alfred!”

At tea they talked Art.

It was an exquisite sensation to have these charming ladies treat him as

Sir Oracle. He was surprised to learn that in her girlhood Miss Regan

had displayed considerable talent for sculpture, but had “washed her

hands of the clay” on seeing the torso of Victory in the Louvre. He

remonstrated with her, insisting that technical skill came slowly, with

infinite labor. There were things he himself wanted to do--all sorts of

new things that he had never yet done. One day he would try to do

them--when he had time. Mrs. Wyndwood spoke contemptuously of technical

skill in comparison with soul, but here Olive mischievously took up the

cudgels for craftsmanship, and led the rather reluctant painter into an

eloquent exposition of the joys of technical mastery; of doing what you

would with your material. Mrs. Wyndwood at last caught the fire of his

enthusiasm, and astonished him by expressing his sense of the joy of Art

better than himself. Under the passion of her words he wondered that he

could ever have wasted his time on portraits for mere money, or on

scamped pictures for Exhibitions, when all these interesting problems

were waiting to be wrought out. Ah, but Miss Regan was wrong, he felt,

in thinking these problems the be-all and end-all of Art; it was soul

that was the essence of Art; Art had no _raison d’être_ except as the

expression of soul, of the upward aspiration of the Spirit towards the

Good and the Beautiful and the True, a trinity that was mysteriously

one.

CHAPTER IV

FERMENT

The sands of the season were running out, but Matthew Strang sifted them

for every grain of the gold of meetings with Eleanor Wyndwood. He was

shy of formal visits to the house, he did not venture on the

conventional course of asking her to sit to him, for he would not

consciously feed the flame of a passion that must be hopeless. But with

that curious illogicality which distinguishes man from the brute, he

called in accident to arrange their rendezvous, pursuing possibility

with a perseverance that made it probability.

He could not follow Eleanor to all her fashionable fastnesses as easily

as to the shrines of spirituality, for to be born well is still a

necessity of life in some circles; but they met often enough amid the

monotonous glitter which was the woman’s birthright and second nature to

the man. His eye perpetually sought her; in chattering drawing-rooms, in

cool gardens, on congested staircases, in whirling ballrooms; finding

every place dark and empty till she filled and illumined the scene. She

gleamed upon him as unreal and insubstantial as the figures he had once

noted in one of these ballrooms, completely girdled by electric lights,

which, robbing the dancers of shadows, made them fairy-like and

phantasmal. But he did not follow out the analogy or suspect it might be

his own love which was surrounding her with this spiritualizing electric

illumination. Each time he saw her he resolved never to see her again.

He could never tell her what was in his heart, never insult her

exquisite purity with the avowal of his love, even though that love were

clarified to unimagined ethereality by her stainless radiance of soul.

And each time the possibility of seeing her drew nigh again, he told

himself that he needed her for his Art--that she was drawing him up from

the slough of banality, that now for the first time his soul was really

opening out to the appeal of the higher beauty. Not that he had as yet

begun to express the higher beauty; he had simply abandoned the old. He

was too restless to work, to concentrate himself; he flitted between the

unfinished and the projected, painting in and painting out; he took long

rides in the middle of the day, to the amazement of his faithful

body-servant; he read emotional literature. Once an unconscious hostess

gave him Eleanor’s company at dinner. Mrs. Wyndwood was in stately

black, with a bunch of violets at her bosom. It was an enchanted meal.

They talked of poetry, and he seemed to be dining off poetry too. The

wines where special brands of nectar, laid down by the gods in the

golden age, the meats were ambrosia, the sweets honey-dew. A beauty as

of Hebe transfigured the faces of the neat-handed waiting-men. It seemed

only natural that the beautiful stately creature at his side should

overflow with quotations from religious poetry--was she not herself a

religious poem? His recent feverish readings had branded lines on his

own heart; he was able to answer her in lyric antiphony. His other

neighbor he simply forgot, though she was a bishop’s consort and a

patroness of the arts, with printed views on the genuineness of Old

Masters. There was an old picture of his own on the opposite wall, and

the fear lest Eleanor should raise her eyes to it was all the serpent in

his Paradise. His subconsciousness noted with pleasure, however, that

the painting had mellowed--a proof that his theory of colors was right.

He watched with furtive fascination the play of Eleanor’s beautiful

Botticelli hands, plying her knife and fork, as she explained how under

the influence of Dolkovitch she had drifted away from Socialism, whose

professors always laid too much stress on the needs of the body. But she

apologized for having spoken rudely of his “Triumph of Bacchus” from a

mere knowledge of its title; he had made her understand now that the

appeal of painting must always be sensuous, and that subject was only an

excuse for draughtsmanship and coloring, and she startled him by saying

she liked that picture of his on the opposite wall, which he had been

hoping had escaped her eye. It became at once glorified to his own.

After the ladies had retired, the gentlemen talked about a newly

invented torpedo, the finances of India, and the prospects of the

Conservatives; the conversation sounded almost indecent, and he was glad

Eleanor was not there to hear it. He took no part in the fatuous

discussion, contenting himself with watching Eleanor’s face amid the

wreaths of his cigar-smoke; even in the flesh the face had for him

something of this vaporous, elusive incorporeality.

In the drawing-room the inevitable Miss Regan claimed his attention.

Eleanor was playing Mendelssohn, and he would have liked to listen, but

Olive was less original.

“You have never honored our five-o’clocks again,” she said,

reproachfully.

He murmured that he was busy.

“That was the charm of your coming,” she reminded him. “One had the

sensation of beguiling you to play truant. But I suppose the tea was

bad. Nor _would_ make it.”

“The tea was beautiful,” he said, smiling. “But aren’t we disturbing the

music?”

“On the contrary. Nor is giving us ‘Lieder ohne Wörte,’ and we have to

supply the words. I wonder what makes her play such old-fashioned

school-girl things. Then it must have been the scones.”

He shook his head and pursed his lips, and the music flowed on like a

lovely moonlit stream. He was drifting on the stream with Eleanor, as,

in those far-off days of young romance, he had dreamed of lovers

drifting. A mystic silver haze was shed from the moon that sailed softly

through the lambent starry sky, the whisper of the wind among the trees

and the quiet lapping of the water made a dulcet stillness that was

punctuated by the passionate “jug-jug” of the nightingale; mysterious

palaces of night glided along the banks behind dim gardens wafting

drowsy odors. The thought shook him that the world held such

lovers--lovers who were not brought together for a moment and hurled

apart in the accidental whirl of society atoms, lovers whose lips were

not eternally sundered, but lovers who were each other’s sunshine and

moonlight and music, daily, nightly, perennially. He alone was doomed to

eternal loneliness--nay, to that aggravated form of loneliness which is

shared with a life-long partner.

“I came across your cynical friend the other day.”

He started, becoming conscious that his eyes were full of sweet,

hopeless tears.

“Indeed,” he murmured automatically.

“Yes, the cousin you told me of.”

“Did I tell you of him?”

“Don’t you remember you told me he said all women are in the same trade?

Well, he is veritably a cynic of cynics, for he candidly informed me,

after I had been bantering and mystifying him with my foreknowledge of

him, that he had simply quoted Schopenhauer.”

“Where did you meet him?” he asked, a little interested.

“At the Dudley-Heatons’s reception a fortnight ago. I call him the

Minister of the Interior, he’s such an epicure--the politician, I mean,

not your cousin. There was Lord Fashborough there, the man who’s just

been appointed president of the Cruelty to Children Commission, and who

glittered with stars and orders like a comic-opera Begum. He it was

introduced your cousin--at my request, of course. Your cousin told me

the Begum and he had travelled together in Spain, when the Begum’s

appetite for bull-fights and cock-fights was insatiable. I have never

been in Spain, and two of my favorite illusions were destroyed at one

fell blow. It seems that they simply push reluctant, decrepit old horses

on to the horns of the bulls. And then the Spanish women! Your cousin

describes them as ugly and unwashed.”

He shuddered. Why would Miss Regan perversely obtrude the prose of life

upon his consciousness? He would not answer her--he tried to drift again

with the magic stream, but the spell was broken. He knew it was

Eleanor’s music that made the pictures, and that the odors came from the

flowers at Olive’s throat.

“He is painting Nor’s portrait,” she went on, indifferently.

He had to answer her now--in a stifled interrogative, masking a sudden

sharp agony and foreboding.

“What, Herbert?”

“Yes; he asked her to give him some sittings. He hasn’t altogether

become a critic, you see.”

“Who introduced him to her?”

“I did, of course.”

“But his request was rather hasty, wasn’t it?”

“Oh, it wasn’t the first time. We met him again at the Russian Embassy.”

“And how does Mrs. Wyndwood know he can paint?”

Olive laughed quietly. “Oh, he said so. He usually tells the truth, I

fancy. But he _is_ an artist, isn’t he?”

“He was a Gold Medallist of the Royal Academy,” he answered, with

unaccustomed bitterness. A mad envy was consuming him. Why had he not

asked Mrs. Wyndwood to sit to him, seeing that her consent was so

facile? Was he always to stand by while the best of life was seized and

carried off by the bolder, the more reckless, nay, by the more unworthy?

The remembrance that Herbert had the right, and he had not, did not

dilute his bitterness, though it brought a hot flush to his cheek. Who

was he to see profanation in the juxtaposition of Eleanor with a man

like Herbert? However ignoble Herbert’s conception of womanhood, had not

he himself always found him lovable?

“Aren’t you friends?” Olive asked, divining alienation in his tone.

He felt remorseful. “Oh, we are great friends,” he answered, with

cordial warmth. “He was very kind to me when I first came to London.”

“He asked me to sit as well,” Olive pursued, satisfied.

Matthew Strang felt the tension in his brain relax.

“And are you going to?”

“No. I hate flattery. So I sacrificed Nor instead. Of course I shall go

and sit by her, though not with her. Curious, the subtleties of

language.”

“Then you will still chaperon her,” he said, with a joyous smile.

“I never neglect a pleasant duty,” she answered, placidly. “But we can

only give him a few sittings.”

“Ah!” he interrupted, with an involuntary exclamation of relief.

“We’re leaving town.”

He looked blank now. “Are you, indeed?”

“Of course. Why are you surprised? Didn’t you think we were proper? Nor

wanted the eternal Homburg or Switzerland, but I’m resolved to show her

England. Like most travelled cockneys, she thinks England’s the capital

of London, and I want to teach her geography, so we’re off to

Devonshire.”

“She will enjoy Devonshire scenery.”

“Yes, especially the Creamery. That’s what I’ve christened the little

God-forsaken village I discovered. So you know, if you ever want a cup

of tea, we shall have five-o’clocks going on there also. Patronize the

Creamery.”

“I will,” he said, with an instant resolution to take tea both in

Mayfair and in Devonshire.

“That’s right. We’ll send a coach-and-four to meet you. At least, you’ll

find it waiting at the station for passengers. Do you know whom I should

like to meet most of all men living?”

“Wagner? The Pope? The Czar?”

“Don’t be absurd. The Rev. Septimus Wheercastle. A local guide-book

says, ‘The Rev. Septimus Wheercastle speaks in very favorable terms of

the Undercliff.’ Isn’t it delicious? Imagine a gentleman in a white tie

patronizing an Undercliff! But, then, the clergy are always patronizing

the Almighty, so why not His works?”

“Hush,” he said, indicating the proximity of the Bishop.

“Isn’t he beautiful?” she asked, in an awed whisper. “What a privilege

never to be mistaken for a waiter! I am so proud of the bishops in my

family. We have a pair, with gaiters to match, both High Church

atheists; they are the joys of my life, they and the dowager duchess,

who wears kiss-curls and raves for blood. ‘Give me blood!’ she cries, as

she denounces modern society, stabbing her potato with her fork _à la_

Sarah Siddons.”

To Matthew Strang, who still had a vague reverence for duchesses, it was

troubling to see them through the eyes of relatives for whom they were

common clay. But this had always been his disappointment, the further he

penetrated into the arcana of aristocracy and into the ranks of the

distinguished--nobody ever seemed quite so imposing as his or her name

in the paper. Taken in the mass, aristocracy of birth or brain was

dazzling, overwhelming; but the individual was always amiably imperfect,

with the exception, of course, of the one perfect being in the universe,

Eleanor Wyndwood.

“You don’t think much of your family, Miss Regan,” he said, smiling.

“No, and they return the compliment. They don’t realize how near

Doomsday is for us aristocrats. We must disappear. We have played our

part.”

“What part?”

“Oh, I don’t know. I suppose the upper classes, the people of leisure,

existed to evolve culture. That can now be grafted on to the artisan,

and both the upper and the lower classes can disappear. We want the

amalgam now--culture without its vices, and work without its vulgarity.”

“Shall we ever get what we want?”

She smiled with ineffable sadness and weariness. “I sometimes think that

that makes life worth living. That and bishops. This is the only world

in which bishops could happen. There is some consolation, too, in Royal

Drawing-rooms and kangaroos. Do you think there is any other planet in

which ladies walk backward or animals hop? I wonder. When one feels

weary of the burden of existence, one thinks of the humor of Creation

and stays on. It is a delicious world.”

“Do you mean that you enjoy the imperfections of life?”

“I don’t know what I mean. I hate to see ill-fed people, and I hate to

see well-fed people. Unhappy people pain me and happy people irritate

me. What _do_ I mean? Oh, I think I see it at last. It is the

unintelligent people that I hate to see unhappy, and the intelligent

people that I hate to see happy. People who have brains and are happy

can’t have souls. The fools ought to have creature comforts because they

are fools enough to value them before all else. How I envy my maid’s

capacity for envying me! Thank you, Mr. Strang, you have enabled me to

understand myself.”

The music stopped, but the player was at once monopolized by the bishop.

Fragments of their conversation reached the ears of the couple.

“She’s trying to convert him to Christianity,” Olive observed, gravely;

“didn’t I tell you she was the most unpractical creature? She’s always

leading forlorn hopes.”

“How is Herbert--my cousin--painting her?” he asked.

“Oh! he’s only had one sitting. She’s to be done _à l’ordinaire_, but

she had her hair dressed specially--such a waste of time--and was

manicured, and the man took as long manicuring her as if she had been

Briareus.”

“I mean, what will she wear?”

“Oh! a sentimental expression--the sort of look you see in a girl’s

face when she’s sitting on the stairs with her hand in a man’s.”

A shudder traversed her shoulders, crinkling the blue bodice that

covered them. “For the rest, she will be clothed in one of those creamy

low-necked gowns that become her so well.”

Before the evening was over Olive was induced to sing. Matthew Strang

was startled to find her choosing a love-song, and he was as astonished

by the passionate intensity of her vocalization as by the beauty of her

rich contralto voice.

“_Ninon, Ninon_,” she sang. “_Que fais-tu de la vie--toi qui n’as pas

d’amour?_” And the notes melted exquisitely in pity. The tears returned

to his eyes. It was his tragedy, it was Eleanor’s tragedy, it was

everybody’s tragedy. “_Ninon, Ninon, que fais-tu de la vie?_”

Very few days went by before he rang Mrs. Wyndwood’s bell. The mental

image of Eleanor sitting to Herbert was the motor that drove him to

call. He had only seen his volatile cousin once or twice since they had

dined together at the Limners’--Herbert Strang’s curious facility for

taking up and dropping people had persisted unchanged. But the couple

were destined to meet now, for victorias and hansoms hovered outside

Mrs. Wyndwood’s house, and Matthew Strang found that he had stumbled

upon a formal “At Home,” at which Herbert was fetching and carrying

strawberry-ices to perspiring beauty. The popular painter noted with a

novel thrill of alarm the boyish good looks of his friend, whose spruce,

smiling figure was so visibly the cynosure of feminine eyes. Happily for

his peace of mind, Eleanor was too busy welcoming her miscellaneous

visitors to allot much attention to Herbert, who seemed, indeed, amply

content with engaging the interest of half a dozen fair women, not

counting an occasional interlude of Miss Regan. Matthew Strang slowly

ploughed his way to the hostess, a cool-looking angel in white, through

the block of bonneted ladies, amid which an occasional man stood out

unpicturesque.

“You seem surprised to see me,” he said, in low tones, into which he

infused an intimate note.

“Yes, indeed,” said Eleanor, with a little frank laugh. “How did you

know it was my day?”

He smiled mysteriously, wondering the while if she could hear his heart

beat above the feminine babble.

“You ought not to have come,” pursued Eleanor, with a little pout that

made her face adorable. “We pay you the compliment of not asking you to

our tea-fights, and this is how you appreciate it.”

“Forgive me,” he said, intoxicatingly flattered. “I do appreciate it. I

didn’t know. I came for a cup of tea, with no idea of fighting for it.”

“Then let me give it you. Do you take sugar?”

And she handed him the cup, which he took with a hand that trembled.

Then a press of fresh people cut him off from her, and she made no

effort to keep him by her side. Gloom invaded his breast again. He had

to speak to some of the crowd, and he did his duty with ill grace. He

feared it would be too presumptuous to outstay the intrusive crew, so he

resolved to escape as soon as possible. But Herbert captured him with a

hearty hand-shake, and introduced him--with a certain proprietary

pride--to his bevy of dames, and he was perforce added to the applausive

circle in the centre of which Herbert quizzed the rest of the company

and the universe at large.

“Isn’t that Lily O’Reilly talking with Mrs. Wyndwood?” he said, catching

Olive’s passing eye.

“Sure, and it is that,” answered Olive, permitting the eye an unwonted

roguish twinkle. “She is talking about her new novel.”

“Wonderful woman,” soliloquized Herbert for the benefit of his galaxy.

“She is more read by the superfine critics than any other lady novelist

in London.”

“Oh, Mr. Strang,” protested Lady William Dallox, a petite, elegant

creature with an air of having stepped off a decorative panel, “why, the

critics all slate her awfully.”

“I know. But that’s her revenge--to threaten her reviewers with libel

actions, so that they have to read her to see if she deserved their

slatings.”

“You’re a saucy cynic, sir,” said Olive, laughingly.

“What is a cynic?” airily retorted Herbert. “An accurate observer of

life.”

“Beyond that definition cynicism cannot go,” said Olive, ceasing to

smile.

“What a pity!” said Herbert. “At any rate, it is true as far as it goes.

To call Miss O’Reilly’s hair chameleon-colored would be considered

cynical. Yet it is but accurate observation. The inaccurate observer of

life would call it auburn, not seeing that it is only auburn _pro tem._,

and that it goes through as many editions as her books. Similarly, to

call her complexion hand-painted--”

“Would be rudeness,” interrupted Olive, more severely, “especially as I

heard her asking Mrs. Wyndwood to introduce to her the young man who

looked so much like the hero of one of her novels.”

“Ah, that puts another complexion on the matter,” said Herbert, lightly.

Under cover of the confusion of feminine compliment that greeted the

quick sally, Matthew Strang slipped away, leaden-hearted, from the sight

of the smiles and the sound of the laughter. Even had he been free, what

chance would he have had, pitted against his brilliant cousin? He knew

himself a silent man, scarcely speaking, unless abnormally moved, much

less scintillating. He had only one talent--one poor talent for

expressing the Beautiful to one sense--and this one talent he had

prostituted. Everything grew black to his morbid mood. The dying

afternoon, cool, sun-glinted, had no beauty for him; the speckless

grooms outside the door irritated him; the shining carriages dashing

along the great arteries of the West End, bearing their lolling

occupants to dress and dinner, stirred him to something of the same

revolt that he had felt when he had walked the metropolis of wealth and

fashion in broken boots. After all, he had never really entered this

circle of pleasure, it had always been a fairy-ring he could not step

into. Beautiful as his boots were externally, there had always been a

nail, a pebble inside; that adverse atom which, according to the

philosopher, suffices to destroy happiness. His had always been a life

of labor, of misery. He was still of the down-trodden classes, of those

whom fate, if not man, grinds down, whose lives slip by in a vain

yearning for the sun, who see happiness as a phantasm that is only solid

for others, and love as the mocking mirage of a beauty that is far

away. He was angry--so unreasonably angry that the unreason seemed a

reason for fresh anger with himself. And he was angry, not only with

himself, but with Herbert, with the world, aye, with Eleanor Wyndwood

and her idle, hare-brained visitors, reeking of the toilet-table,

chattering of poems, pictures, and symphonies.

The thought of his mother came up from dim recesses of memory--still

babbling in the asylum that was her haven of refuge after a life of

storm and stress and sorrow and weary watchings for a vagrant mate--and

he was jealous of Eleanor for her sake, jealous of her beauty, her

breeding, her wealth, her fine dresses, her carriage, her fashionable

visitors; jealous of all that made her different from his mother, of all

that made her life fuller, freer, higher, richer--of all, in fine, that

made him love her! Ah, God, how he loved her! He could scarcely keep

back the hysteric sobs that swelled at his throat. But they had always

been shut out from the sunshine, his mother and he. Happiness! oh, to

clasp it, to hold it tight! Nothing counted except happiness--ambition,

success, art, money, alike vain gauds, shadows. He walked past his

turning, and far beyond. Lights began to twinkle in the great tired

city; the summer evening brooded, fresh and cool, over the vast

stretches of dusty stone. When at last he reached his studio the sun had

set. He saw the pale rose-glow, mystically tender, at the end of the

long suburban avenue of green trees and yellow street-lamps; it spoke to

him of peace and rest and resignation, and some secret beauty behind

all.

Not many days later his restless feet took him again to the Mayfair

house. He would speak out--at some opportunity which the shrewd, kindly

Olive would not fail to afford him--he would tell Eleanor all she meant

to him, how she was becoming the pivot of his thought, how she and she

alone might inspire his art to higher purpose. He would not ask for

love, only for a noble friendship; he needed an understanding soul to

sympathize with his inmost self, his aspirations, his agonies. He had

always been hedged in by thick barriers of ice, through which no human

soul had ever pierced. No one knew what tinder for divine fires lay

awaiting the spark within, nor how cold and lonely he felt in his

glacial isolation.

But at first his visit threatened to be even more disappointing than the

last. Another man was taking tea--or rather, eating nougat with Mrs.

Wyndwood and Miss Regan--young and fascinating of feature, but with a

fatal air of the minor poet. And a poet, indeed, he proved to be: a poet

of considerable pretensions, who might win the bays if only he could get

over his unfortunate appearance, which seemed to tie him down to sugared

prettiness and elegant concetti. Matthew Strang had read one of his

dainty, gilt-edged volumes, wherein dapper lyrics posed in the centre of

broad-margined pages, and he wondered resentfully why Mrs. Wyndwood did

not lecture him into spirituality instead of feeding him with nougat,

which his poetry already resembled. But though Harold Lavender was

accommodating enough to go soon, Matthew Strang profited little by his

retirement from the field, for Eleanor seemed to be in a freakish mood,

as if the contagion of Olive had infected her, or the nougat had made

her terrestrial, and she played a lively second to her vivacious friend

in recapitulating the charms of their dog, Roy, a slumbrous Scotch

collie, that he had barely noted before, but which now became the climax

of creation.

“We’ve only hired him,” Mrs. Wyndwood explained. “Lady Arthur, to whom

the house belongs, asked us to take charge of him, so he’s in the

inventory. His father was a pedigree dog, and won five hundred guineas.”

“Yes, her ladyship had him catalogued completely, lest we should lose a

bit of him,” said Olive, rolling the animal over, and digging her

fingers affectionately into his fur and pulling his ears and his paws

and his tail to illustrate her recital of his perfections.

“Brown-and-white coat--the brown of an autumn filbert, with a collar and

shirt-front of white fur over skin as pink as rosebuds--look at

it--black gums and palate, with the whitest of teeth, canines, I

believe; a tail of russet and black and white that waves like a

palm-tree. Observe the little black ring; we identified him once by it,

though we had never noticed it before, had we, my beauty?”

Mrs. Wyndwood took up the ball. “He was lost, stolen, or strayed, and

information was lodged at a police-station that a collie with a black

ring round his tail had been found. We told the superintendent ours had

no such ring.”

“The inaccurate observation of life, you see, Mr. Strang,” broke in

Olive, “which, according to your cousin, delivers one from cynicism.”

“But cynicism has something to do with dogs, hasn’t it?” observed Mrs.

Wyndwood, smilingly.

“Yes,” said Olive. “We must get Mr. Strang to define cynicism as the

accurate observation of dogs. Don’t forget to tell him, Nor, when you

sit to him to-morrow.”

Matthew Strang moved uncomfortably on his seat, raging inwardly, and

scarcely knowing whether he was more jealous of Herbert or of Roy.

“Well, that superintendent must have been a cynic,” Mrs. Wyndwood went

on, “for he recommended us to go and look at the dog all the same. It

was a wild expedition--nearly eleven o’clock at night--we routed out a

nest of costers who lived over a stable, and were invaded by means of a

ladder. I felt like a robber Viking, all heart-beat and adventure. It

was glorious!”

“Yes; and Roy came bounding out and nearly toppled you over. And all the

little costers came crowding out of bed in their night-dresses, and you

gave Mrs. Coster a sovereign for them in mistake for a shilling.”

Mrs. Wyndwood went into a fit of mirth over the recollection. For once

her melodious laugh grated upon his ears. What in the world was there to

laugh about? It seemed all the most puerile nonsense. He could have

cried more easily.

“Remark his lively air,” said Olive. “His intuitive sympathy is

wonderful. He is sad when you weep, and merry when you frivol.”

The painter merely heard the dog panting like an impatient steam-engine.

“He wants a run, I think,” he observed, ungraciously.

“Aye, you should see him run!” cried Mrs. Wyndwood. “It makes one feel

young again to see him scampering up hill and down dale. Even a mudhill

delights him; it reminds him of his native moors, doesn’t it, Roy,

dear?”

Roy stared at her with large, unblinking eyes.

“But we are not dressed well enough to go out with him now,” said Olive.

“I told you what a snob he was, Mr. Strang. Shake paws with the

gentleman, dear. He’s smart enough even for your tastes. See how he

likes you, Mr. Strang. If he didn’t, the skin over his dear old nose

would snarl up into gathers and puckers and frills. There! That’s his

favorite attitude--on his hind-legs, with his fore-paws placably on a

beloved lap. Now he is happy. How simple life is for him! Lucky dog!”

“Ah, you forget that he, too, has his ideal, his unachieved aspiration,”

said Mrs. Wyndwood. “The disappointment of his life is that he can’t

catch birds. He snaps at everything that soars in air--even insects; it

exasperates him to find things hovering mockingly overhead in defiance

of gravity. He sits on his haunches and wails over the emptiness of

life.”

Matthew Strang gave Roy a kindlier pat. But the creature was still

stretched on the tapis of conversation, and Olive proceeded to a

whimsical account of the partition of Roy between Eleanor and herself,

as joint house-keepers. Since they could not bisect the collie, he

belonged to each on alternate days, so that if he were lost again, the

onus would rest on the mistress for the day.

By this time the painter could hardly refrain from kicking the dog, and

when Mrs. Wyndwood added that Roy was only eighteen months old, he rose

to go.

Mrs. Wyndwood’s expression changed.

“You’re not running away yet?” she said.

“I must,” he murmured, his ill-humor abating under the sweet seriousness

of her face.

“Why, you haven’t talked to us at all--we want to hear more about

technique.”

“Technique can’t be talked,” he said, still surly.

“We haven’t any materials for practical demonstrations,” said Olive,

“not even a black-board.”

“I should love to be an artist,” cried Mrs. Wyndwood. “To feel beauty

growing under one’s hand--what a sense of creative divinity. I never sit

to an artist without thinking what a privilege is his---- Now what

_are_ you laughing at, Olive?”

“Nothing, except your subtle way of complimenting yourself on your good

looks. Now, if Mr. Strang will be good, and waste a little more valuable

time on two foolish women, I will pay him a compliment.”

He sat down, his curiosity stimulated, and Olive, producing a box of

Turkish cigarettes, asked if he objected to her smoking. Permission

being obtained, she got him to apply a light to her cigarette, and then

bade him smoke one himself. He was relieved to find Mrs. Wyndwood an

abstainer.

“There,” said Olive, puffing out a thin cloud, “that is the highest

compliment I can pay a man--to expose myself in all my horror. I smoke

neither for toothache nor neuralgia, but for sheer viciousness. See the

result of our visit to Podnieff--Nor picked up ideals, and I, smoke.

Perhaps they are the same thing in the long-run.”

Matthew Strang dissented vehemently. “Ideals are the only realities.”

“Nonsense, they are the only things that change,” retorted Miss Regan.

“The ideal woman of to-morrow will smoke shag and birdseye in long clay

pipes.”

Eleanor Wyndwood came to his assistance, and together they did battle

with Olive, who took up the most perverse Philistine positions and

fought as if for life, eluding, shuffling, dodging, equivocating,

turning, twisting, doubling upon herself with the most daring defiance

of consistency, and the most bizarre flashes of wit and argument. She

would snatch a victory by specious logic that could only hold for a

moment, and stand in as serenely mocking triumph upon a crumbling

sand-heap as if she knew herself upon a rock, and was not about to bound

off to the next sand-heap the instant the tide of reason swept this one

hopelessly away. The painter found a celestial knitting of soul in thus

fighting side by side with Eleanor; he did not blench even when she

quoted a quatrain from Harold Lavender to enforce her point. But the

shades of earth returned when she referred to Herbert Strang.

“Here is an example of a man who has absolutely nothing to gain from

Art--who doesn’t need it, who has means--to whose sceptical spirit the

applause of the world is indifferent. And yet the other morning--when

the sunshine called one to the joys of the _dolce far niente_--he sat

for hours toiling painfully at his Art, and fretting because he had

allowed his right hand to lose its cunning. He had neglected the Ideal,

but now his soul thirsts for it again, and the Ideal is avenged.”

Matthew Strang felt a malicious satisfaction in the thought that Herbert

was not getting on very well with the portrait. He had a sudden

curiosity to see it.

“You are really too simple, Nor,” said Olive, plaintively. “Can’t you

see the man’s only trying to spread out the sittings so as to have you

come there? I dare say he can paint as well as the present Mr. Strang.”

Eleanor flushed, hotly. “Oh, there’s no deception about his limitations.

I am almost sorry I consented.”

Matthew Strang’s heart leaped exultant. “He did let his gifts rust,” he

said, magnanimously. “But I dare say his old talent will come back after

a little practice. He had a fine color-sense in the old days.”

His magnanimity seemed to please both ladies, especially Olive, and the

discussion wound up suddenly in a congruity as unexpected as any of her

arguments.

“You were great chums then, weren’t you?” she asked.

“Yes; he was my cicerone in artistic society. I might almost say in

civilized society. I owe him a good deal.” He had no shame in hinting at

his humble origin to these two unconventional gentlewomen.

“Where is his studio?” he asked.

They told him; but Miss Regan seemed to be suddenly uneasy. A little

clock on the mantel-piece struck six silvery notes. He thought his

hostesses might want to dress elaborately for some dinner-party or the

theatre, so he tore himself away, and, jumping into a hansom, drove, on

the impulse of the moment, to Herbert’s studio.

Olive sighed wearily, and leaned her head upon her elbows, which were

planted on the tea-table. Eleanor stooped and kissed her.

“Lie down, dear, till dinner. The heat has been too much for you. You

look tired to death.”

“Heigho! I wish I was really. What’s the use of living, Nor, darling?”

“Oh, life is so beautiful!” exclaimed Eleanor, with shining eyes. “Think

of Art, think of Nature! Cheer up, Olive. The horrid season will soon be

over, and then hey for Devonshire!”

“And the Creamery,” added the girl, in hollow accents. “But let’s get

away at once, dear.”

“We must stay for a few things yet--we promised,” Mrs. Wyndwood reminded

her sweetly. “There’s the dance at Lady Surbiton’s, and the reception

of--”

Olive interrupted her with a burst of laughter that sounded hysterical

to her friend’s anxious ears. “Oh, it’s a mad, bad world! But there are

Lady Surbiton’s tea-gowns!”

“Do lie down, dear.”

“Why aren’t there convents for unbelievers, Nor? It’s an oversight. I’d

get me into a nunnery, but I should be suspected of piety. The hospitals

are overrun. They are as impossible as Ramsgate; and your nurse is

suspected of being a heroine. When will people understand that altruism

is a passion, and that nobody wants to be patted on the back for

gratifying instinct? When I did that month’s hard in the Dublin

Hospital--but that was before I knew you, dear--half my family thought

me mad, and the other half a saint. But I was only incapable, Nor,

dearest. I couldn’t dress ugly wounds as if I wasn’t feeling the pain of

them. No, I’m a failure. There’s nothing for it save suicide.”

“Or marriage,” said Mrs. Wyndwood, softly, laying her cheek to her

friend’s.

Olive moved her head away, shuddering violently. “I’d breed dogs

rather.” She rose to her feet and stretched her arms. “They are happy,

aren’t you, Roy?” She leaned down and pulled the collie’s jaws apart.

“Eating and sleeping, sleeping and eating. Why didn’t Evolution stop

with you, instead of going further and faring worse? But still there are

those birds, Roy. And on our side there’s Art and there’s Nature,

Eleanor Wyndwood says. Which Art is it going to be, by-the-way, Eleanor

Wyndwood--Poetry or Painting? But it’s two to one on Painting.”

“You’re feverish, darling,” said Eleanor, troubled. “Don’t talk at

random.”

“I’m talking straight, dear. Two Strangs to one Lavender. And what has

become of Spirit, dearest? That used to come before Art and Nature!”

“And who said it doesn’t still?” Eleanor answered, deprecatingly. Then,

with a passionate cry that set her beautiful bosom heaving, “My God,

Olive, why do you misjudge me? Can’t you understand earnest seeking?”

Tears came into her eyes and trickled down her face.

Olive kissed them away. “I’m a brute, Eleanor. The heat’s too much for

both of us. Good-night!”

“Going to lie down, dearest?”

“No; going to bed.”

* * * * *

Matthew Strang had rung several times before he could gain admittance to

his cousin’s studio. Herbert appeared in his shirt-sleeves, grinning and

yawning.

“Tit for tat,” he said. “But I’m awfully glad you came, old man. I was

just dreaming of you. By Jove, isn’t it hot?”

When Herbert said “old man,” in his caressing voice, Matthew became as

clay in the hands of the potter. It seemed so good to have the

friendship of this sunny being. He answered affectionately that it _was_

hot.

“You haven’t seen this den before?” said Herbert. “Not so swell as

yours. But then I’m hard up.”

Matthew smiled incredulously, for the studio was charming.

“You’re doing a portrait of Mrs. Wyndwood, I hear.”

“Who told you?”

“I was there this afternoon.”

“Yes? Did you see her friend Miss Regan?”

“She is always there.”

“I know. Isn’t she a jolly little girl?”

“She’s very odd,” said Matthew.

“Odd? You Philistine! She’s the most amusing girl in London. And so

unaffected! You can say anything to her--talk about anything. No beastly

prudishness. That’s what I like in a woman. The other day she was

complaining gravely that a woman couldn’t be a burglar because it would

land her in compromising situations. Therefore there never could be

thorough equality of the sexes, she maintained. Wasn’t it quaint? She

sits here smoking cigarettes while I paint that saintly friend of hers,

and all the while rattles on in the most delightful fashion. What a flow

of spirits! And, by Jove! the clever, biting things she says make your

hair curl. I’m not in it with her, though I try hard. I draw her out to

talk about her relations--it’s better than Thackeray. She’s no end of a

swell, you know.”

“I know.”

“And disgustingly rich. In short, she’d be intolerable if she wasn’t

herself. What an enviable lot! All the B’s--Beauty, Bullion, Blue Blood,

and Brilliancy. No wonder she’s light-hearted! They say she had an

eccentric dad, which accounts for her--a man who wasted one of his

fortunes on socialistic experiments! But she knows better than that.

Eccentricity in the parent is epigram in the child.”

“Which is an epigram,” said Matthew, laughing, and considerably relieved

by this outburst on his cousin’s part. “But _your_ parents were not

eccentric.”

“Indeed? Don’t you see any eccentricity in the poor old governor’s

trying to make an artist out of me?”

“Where _is_ that portrait?” asked Matthew, amused.

“Here it is, you duffer, staring you in the face on the easel all the

time. Don’t say you didn’t recognize it. Please don’t.”

“Now that I know who it is,” began Matthew, laughing.

“It _is_ ghastly, old man, isn’t it? But that girl distracts me with her

talk.”

“What made you attempt it?” asked Matthew, candidly.

“I wanted to hear her talk.”

“Whom?”

“Miss Regan.”

Matthew felt a great wave of affection for his cousin.

“But why don’t you paint _her_?”

“She wouldn’t sit. I had to ask her friend, knowing she’d accompany her.

But I’m half sorry I undertook it now.”

“You’re certainly not doing her justice!”

There was still plenty of light. He took up the brush, and within a

quarter of an hour Mrs. Wyndwood’s sweetly spiritual face gleamed

unmistakably upon the canvas. Herbert watched with admiration those

sure, swift strokes, behind which lay so arduous a training, so

irrepressible an instinct.

“You seem to have her face by heart,” he said at last, with a suspicious

twinkle. “But don’t let me interrupt you.” And lighting a cigarette, he

threw himself on a lounge in an attitude that curiously recalled old

times to the painter.

Matthew Strang painted on lovingly till he could no longer see his

palette, then Herbert took him to his new club--the Epicurean--and gave

him a delightful dinner for his pains, and over the kümmel and the

coffee borrowed a hundred pounds from him so as not to sell out a stock

that was depreciated for the moment.

CHAPTER V

A CELEBRITY AT HOME

Herbert Strang had gone down to Devonshire to finish his portrait of

Mrs. Wyndwood, whose dress was still unrecognizable, and who was so

agreeably surprised by the face that she graciously consented to

continue the sittings at the “Creamery.” Matthew had arranged to join

him--on the excellent pretext of keeping his old friend company--but

before he left town for his holiday, Conscience began working hard,

ominously presageful of the complications that might spring up in the

solitudes of hills and waters. The inner voice whispered strenuously to

him to profit by Eleanor’s absence to fight down his impossible passion,

not intensify it unendurably by following in her train. Thoughts of his

wife began to haunt him--thoughts which, while he was only an absentee

husband, had been but pale shadows of remorse, dogging his few

unoccupied moments, but which, now that another woman had at last

enthroned herself in the vacant temple of his soul, assumed shapes more

solid and insistent. Home plucked at his heart, subtly transformed to

something more than an unpleasant recollection. In a spasm of

compunction and foreboding, he resolved to pay a visit to his wife to

strengthen himself against temptation. The idea, once conceived, drove

him to instant execution. Ere the train had drawn up at Camden Town he

had determined to elude temptation altogether by accompanying his own

family on its annual jaunt.

The visit began inauspiciously. When he had passed the ivy-clad turreted

church, which was the one picturesque object on the road from the

station, he was back in the old familiar mesh of gray streets, any one

like any other, with rows of shabby semi-genteel stone-fronted houses,

exactly alike, broken at corners by baker-shops and green-grocers. The

August afternoon was depressed, with misty, sputtering rain. A few

tradesmen’s carts rattled forlornly down the drab avenues of apathetic

houses. A diminutive barrel-organ wheezed a lively air. Never had his

street seemed so hopeless. His ardor grew chill.

He paused before the door of the little studio where he had painted his

first success--“Motherhood.” The discolored wood--set in the blankness

of a long brick wall--was scrawled over with chalk inscriptions and

sketches by the urchins of the neighborhood. The house was round the

corner, and, after a melancholy moment, he walked listlessly towards the

front gate, swung it on its creaking hinges, and mounted the chipped

stone steps, washed ashen-gray by the drippings of rain.

There was a new face, heavy and smudged, under the ill-adjusted cap of

the maid-of-all-work who opened the door, and as he entered the narrow

hall the sickly smell of boiled cabbage saluted his nostrils, and

justified him to himself. But he was grimly embarrassed at having to

explain himself to the girl.

“Is your mistress in?” he asked.

“Yes, sir. Will you wait in the drorin’-room, sir? What name, sir?”

He felt mortified and a whit ashamed. The servant’s ignorance was an

unconscious rebuke that counterbalanced the boiled cabbage.

“Oh, tell her Matthew,” he said, flushing. “She’ll know.”

“Yes, sir.” And the girl’s cap, stuck on askew for the edification of

unexpected company, disappeared down the kitchen stairs.

He would have liked to brush majestically past her, but delicacy

prevented so abrupt an intrusion upon his wife in the recesses of

domesticity. His coming was already sufficient surprise. A few hours ago

he himself had not foreseen that a swamping wave of moral emotion would

sweep him homeward. He walked about the room, morbidly fascinated by the

flashy vases with the hand-painted shepherds, and wondering what Rosina

would say if he made away with them, as decency demanded. To his bitter

amusement he heard her voice from the passage remonstrating with

Billy--in a very audible whisper--for the servant’s indiscretion in

admitting to the drawing-room a stranger who might do havoc among her

cherished possessions.

“Goodness knows what he may not pocket,” she grumbled, uneasily, as she

approached the door.

“It’s all right, Rosina,” he called out, coming into the passage. “It’s

only me.”

“Gracious!” ejaculated Mrs. Matthew Strang, angrily, putting her hand to

her heart. “What a turn you gave me! So you’re the Mr. Matthews! I

really do wish you wouldn’t come sneaking in and prying and ferreting

and frightening a body out of her wits.”

She stood there--no more pleasing than the vases--the features, that had

once threatened to be pretty, sharpened shrewishly, though the figure

had grown plumper except where the breasts had fallen. She did not look

her youth. The face was weary, the pale blue eyes had lost their

softness. She had hastily donned a cheap black cashmere dress trimmed

with jet. The painter was glad the usual effusion of affection was

wanting. Notwithstanding the pitch of reaction to which he was wrought

up, all his being shrank from the desecrating embrace of the woman he

did not love. Nevertheless he was conscious of an undercurrent of

astonishment. Longer intervals than this last had parted them, yet she

had never failed to exhibit amorous emotion, even though it took the

shape of jealous reproach. This afternoon there was a suggestion of

resentment in her greeting--for the first time he felt unwelcome. He was

puzzled, albeit relieved. But the secret of her mood did not leak out

yet; and in the meantime there was Billy, sulkily awaiting his famous

brother’s recognition. The young man looked whiter and thinner than on

Matthew’s last visit to the house.

“How glad he’ll be to come for a holiday with me,” thought the painter,

with a pang of joyful repentance. “He oughtn’t to live in London at all.

We’ll all go down to some pretty little village where I can paint if

necessary, and we’ll stay till the winter.” The cripple churlishly took

the hand which his brother extended. His palm burned.

“All right, Billy?” questioned Matthew, cheerfully.

“It doesn’t matter how I am,” snapped the younger man. “It’s months

since you’ve been nigh us.”

Rosina turned upon Billy. “Don’t you take my part--I can speak for

myself. You can’t expect to see your brother in the summer when all the

fashionable folks come up to London to be painted.”

Billy murmured something inarticulate, and looked doggedly at Matthew,

leaning on his crutch.

“I suppose I must ask you to walk in and take a chair, since you are

such a stranger,” said Mrs. Matthew Strang.

Her husband meekly retreated into the drawing-room, and sat down with

his back to the vases that adorned the mantel-piece. But now a new

horror caught his eye--nothing less than a framed oleograph of

“Motherhood,” which had found its way into the house in the days when

its wide popularity still gave him a certain interest in it not far

removed from pride. On his soul, tensely strung by Eleanor’s hand for

the high notes of imagination, this cheap domesticity now jarred

abominably. The picture glared at him, it loomed suddenly symbolic. It

was representative of Rosina and her influence. This was her height of

poetry, the top measure of her soul--the mother carrying the little girl

who carried the doll. The work he wanted to do--nay, the work he had

always wanted to do--that was what Eleanor stood for--the rare, the

fine, the ethereal. Years of insincere work had blunted and torpified

him--Eleanor had recreated his soul, had given him freshness of

feeling, and something of the early ardor of aspiration.

This passed through his mind before Billy had stumped in and taken a

chair opposite him. Rosina remained standing at the open door in an

attitude expressive of household duties plucking at her skirts.

The painter shifted nervously on his chair. There was a dead silence. It

permitted the tootling of a tin whistle to become audible, and gave the

painter the happy thought of asking after the children.

“Clara’s at school,” replied Rosina, ungraciously. “She’s the second

girl in her class, and could be top if she wasn’t so sulky.”

“And Davie?”

“Can’t you hear for yourself? He’s only too quiet as a rule, but since

you brought him that whistle he’s been unbearable. It’s the only thing

that rouses him. It was stopped up for a fortnight, and he went about

like a little ghost till Billy put it right. If he only had a notion of

music! Billy tried to teach him to play on it, but he’s got no head for

anything. There! did you ever hear such a squeal?”

“Oh! he’s such a baby yet,” said her husband, deprecatingly.

Then the conversation languished again, and Davie’s lugubrious whistle

held the field.

Billy drew vague designs on the carpet with his crutch. Matthew fidgeted

and at last got up. He was meditating how to turn the conversation into

a tenderer channel, and broach the holiday in common. Rosina maintained

her inconclusive attitude in the doorway.

“You’ve still got those vases,” Matthew said. There being no other

thought in the way, this thought escaped.

“Yes,” she rejoined; “but I don’t wonder at your asking; any day may see

the end of them, servants are growing that careless. Even as it is, they

only dust their outsides. If I didn’t wash them myself with tea-leaves

they’d be choked up in a month.”

She walked to the mantel-piece, and ran her forefinger down one of

them. The finger grew black as with anger; her brow darkened.

“Why, Amy is worse than Jane!” she cried, harshly. “I won’t stand any

more of her nonsense. Do you know what she did last week?” Here she

walked back to the door and shut it tightly, lest her words should reach

the kitchen. “She washed the colored things in the same water as the

whites. And then, after the wash, I missed a pair of Billy’s red socks,

and I hunted high and low for them, and made a fuss. The next day Billy

found them mysteriously mixed up with his flannels. I am convinced she

stole them, not knowing she had a sharp eye to deal with. I know they’ll

worry me into the grave, these servants. This morning I particularly

said to her, ‘Have you dusted the drawing-room?’ and she said, bold as

brass, ‘Yes, mum.’ And this is what she calls dusting.” She held up her

gloomy forefinger. Then, lowering her voice as if it might penetrate

even through the closed door, she hissed menacingly at the

brothers--“I’ll give her a piece of my mind, that I will. If she don’t

know when she’s got a good place, the great hulking brute, she shall

pack herself off this very afternoon. A charwoman I give her every

Monday to help her; two shillings I have to pay and her beer money, to

say nothing of the work I do with my own hands. Often and often I make

the beds myself, for there isn’t a girl in creation you can trust to

shake out the bedding, they leave it all lumpy. And what is the reward

for all my kindness? I hate them all; I wish their necks were screwed.”

“I wish they were,” said Billy, impatiently. “I’m sick of hearing about

them.”

Rosina turned upon him again. “And who asks you to stay here? I’m sure

I’m sick of hearing you grumbling and whining about the house.”

Billy’s eyes blazed. A red spot burned in each white cheek.

“Won’t you give me a cup of tea, Rosina?” interposed Matthew, gently.

“I dare say Amy has let the fire go out,” she snapped. “Ring the bell,

you’re nearest it.”

Matthew rang the bell, and Amy appeared.

“Can you make some tea, Amy?” Rosina inquired, in sweet, seductive

accents.

“Yes, mum.”

“My husband has just come from abroad,” she explained, deferentially and

apologetically, “and we sha’n’t be wanting any more at tea-time. We’ll

have tea a little earlier, and you can keep the water hot for Miss

Clara.”

“Yes, mum.” Amy disappeared.

“Did you see the smudge on her cheek?” asked Rosina, despairingly. “She

can’t even dust her face.”

While Rosina was speaking, her husband fretted under her conversation;

the awkward silence that ensued when she ceased made him wish she would

go on talking.

“How is business?” she asked, finding him dumb.

He suppressed a grimace. “Pretty fair. You know I’ve always got as much

to do as I care for.”

“You know what I’ve been thinking?” Rosina replied, in a softened and

more confidential tone. “You ought to make enough to be able to retire

one day. Why should you always live away from me?--it’s as bad as

marrying a drummer. At No. 49 there’s one--a commercial traveller they

call them in England--and his wife tells me--it’s the house with the

striped linen blinds--she doesn’t see him half a dozen times a year, and

you’re getting almost as scarce, particularly this year.” She dropped

into a chair, finally dismissing her tentative attitude.

This seemed a favorable opening at last, so her husband plunged into it.

“You haven’t been out of town yet?” he began.

Rosina bounded wrathfully from her chair.

“There! I knew that that was what you came to spy out. Isn’t it enough

that you’ve left your brother here to be a spy on all my comings and

goings? It’s rather me that ought to be setting a spy on you, God knows,

what with your studios and your models and your fashionable,

false-hearted women. Well, there he is to witness, anyhow. We have _had_

our fortnight at the sea-side. Haven’t we, Billy?”

Billy nodded.

“There! There’s your own brother to witness. We went last month, and

all to save you money, though I know you think I’m making a stocking.

They charged us so much last year for lodgings at Margate in August that

I made up my mind I wouldn’t be swindled any more, and so we went in

July. And we did save--it’s no use my denying it, with that spy of yours

ever at my tail--but I’ve had to spend twice as much in London, with

everything gone up in price. They’re asking a shilling a peck for

peas--you can go round and ask Delton, the green-grocer, if you don’t

believe me--it’s enough to ruin anybody. And then there was the rise in

coals in the spring on account of the strike--something frightful, and

such a lot of slag. And then poor Clara has been so poorly; I sent for

the doctor once, and then he would keep on coming to see her every

day--there was no getting rid of him, and that brother of yours hadn’t

the spunk to tell him straight out not to come any more. Goodness knows

what his bill has run up to. They’re simply blood-squeezers, these

doctors. So there! If you think you’ve caught me out, coming down on me

like a detective in my sea-side week, you’re nicely mistaken, Mr.

Slyboots. What are you glaring at me for? Looking for the brown? I’d

have given myself a coat of paint if I had known you were coming, though

I don’t pretend to be so clever at it as you, or your fine ladies

either, for the matter of that.”

As Rosina stood over him, breathlessly pouring forth her impassioned

defence of the position she took up in financial matters, Matthew Strang

felt he understood why men sometimes kill women. He had long since given

up attempting to make her understand that her thoughts were not his

thoughts, that, despite his hard training in the value of money, details

of expenditure had ceased to occupy his consciousness the moment the

pinch of need was become a thing of the past. He was inured to her

financial apologetics, her tedious justifications of what he (in his

ignorance that she was indeed hoarding money secretly, and, like all

women, saving on her house-keeping) never called into question. He had

steeled himself to a simulation of attention when she elaborately

accounted for every farthing he had given her, and, habituated to money

perpetually passing from his hands, he had never even reflected that her

style of living could not possibly exhaust the sums with which he

supplemented her own income; to his heedless mind a growing family

vaguely explained everything. But to-day the prosaic minutiæ, though

painfully familiar, set up an inward fume that, intensified by her

misconstruction of his visit and by her digs at Billy, approached

insanity. He controlled himself with a great effort.

“It is you that are mistaken, Rosina,” he rejoined, clinching his palms.

“I came merely to propose that you should take your holiday now. I

thought we might go somewhere together.”

“Well, then, you’re a bit too late,” she replied, with no diminution of

ill-temper. “And what’s come over you that you want my company all of a

sudden? I thought you couldn’t spare me a week ever. I reckon the truth

is that work’s got slack.”

“Nonsense, I told you my hands were full,” he said, losing his

self-control.

“That’s no reason why you should waste money on me. I can’t go twice to

the sea-side.”

“I didn’t want you to go twice. I didn’t know you had been.”

“I explained to you why I went,” she retorted, hotly. “They wanted three

guineas last year for a sitting-room and two poky bedrooms, and there

was no key to the chiffonier, and I’m sure the landlady nibbled at our

provisions.”

“But I would have gladly let you have a little extra if you wanted to go

in August.”

“I’d much rather you spent the money on the children. Clara wears out

her shoes frightfully--the expense turns my hair gray.”

“Then you wouldn’t care to go with me?”

“No; it would be sinful extravagance to go twice. Give me the money if

you’re so anxious to get rid of it.”

“Do be reasonable, Rosina. I dare say the children will enjoy another

week of--”

“The children! Much you care about the children. You haven’t asked to

see Davie yet, and as for Clara--” Rosina’s scornful accents dried up

suddenly. Her acute ear had caught the gentle clatter of the mounting

tray. She opened the door for Amy. “You’re sure the water was boiling?”

she inquired, pleasantly.

“Yes, mum.”

The mistress produced a little key from her bosom. “You will find a cake

in the cupboard under the dining-room sideboard. And bring up the

blue-bordered plates, the little ones, please.”

“Yes, mum.”

When the tea was duly served, Rosina resumed: “And as for Clara, I

didn’t even write to you she had been ailing. I knew you took so little

interest in the poor child. She might die and be buried for all you’d

know.”

“I can’t know if you don’t tell me,” he said, sulkily, stung by the germ

of truth in her words. “Why don’t you let Davie come up to me?--you

ought to have sent him up as soon as you knew I was here.”

Rosina threw open the door again with a jerk, and leaned over the

kitchen stairs. “Davie,” she bawled, “stop that dreadful noise, and come

up at once, do you hear? Your father is dying to see you.”

The painter bit his lips. An irrelevant memory rang in his brain with a

Russian accent. “I do not like this word, dying.” The face of Eleanor

Wyndwood swam up on the cabbage-scented air. The patter of Davie’s feet

was heard, toddling up the stairs.

The child stumbled shyly into the room, the tin whistle clasped

distrustfully to his breast--a pathetic, anæmic little figure with

flaxen curls and big gray eyes that easily brimmed over with tears. He

wore serge knickerbockers, and the rest of him aped the sailor,

picturesquely enough. The child paused near the door, clutching his

mother’s skirt.

“This way, my little man,” said Matthew, smiling encouragingly from the

green sofa that sprawled across the centre of the room. “Come to your

daddy.”

“Go to the gentleman, dear,” said Rosina, with withering sarcasm.

But the boy hung back, clutching her skirt and his whistle tighter.

“Don’t be afraid, Davie. I won’t take your whistle from you--don’t you

remember, I gave it you?” He held up a piece of Rosina’s home-made cake.

Thus adjured and enticed, Davie moved cautiously forward, waves of

returning recollection agitating the wee wan face.

A lump swelled in the father’s throat as he surveyed the weakling. The

poor child suddenly appeared to him the scape-goat for an unholy union.

Life had taught him from what fount of sacred love children should

spring.

While he was hoisting the child on his knee, responsive to that strong

appeal of feeble creatures, but with no specific stirrings of paternity,

Davie wistfully held up his disengaged hand for the cake, which he

grabbed as soon as it came within range of his little arm. His mouth was

too preoccupied with cake to return his father’s kiss, to which he

submitted passively.

The painter laid his hand tenderly on the flaxen hair.

“Did you enjoy yourself at Margate, Davie?”

Rosina uttered an exclamation of disgust.

“Well, I never! Who’ll you be cross-examining next? Perhaps you think

Billy and me are in a conspiracy; that I’ve gained over your spy. I’d

better go down-stairs so as not to influence the child’s evidence.”

And turning on her heel, she marched haughtily kitchenwards.

Matthew sighed wearily.

“What’s the matter with her, Billy?” he asked.

“Don’t ask me. She’s been as cross as two sticks ever since they’ve had

new curtains at No. 53 opposite. And the weather has been so muggy. And

your coming has upset her.”

“But she seems to have turned against you, too. You used to get on so

well together.”

“She’s so difficult to live with,” replied Billy, fretfully. “So

quarrelsome and discontented.”

“What is she discontented about?” Matthew asked, uneasily. “She’s got

plenty of money.”

“Oh, it isn’t the money,” replied Billy, morosely. “She’s lucky, is

Rosina. She has money of her own. Do you know, her little American

property has gone up a good deal lately. Her income is nearer nine

hundred than eight hundred dollars.”

“Indeed?” murmured his brother, dimly interested.

“Yes, old Coble wrote to her, telling her things were looking up, and he

was right. No, it isn’t Rosina that’s got cause of complaint about money

matters. She isn’t like me--she isn’t dependent on you for every

farthing.” His words rang bitterly, resentfully.

“But surely you don’t mind taking money from me, Billy?” he said, with

infinite gentleness.

“And why shouldn’t I mind taking money from a stranger?”

“A stranger!”

“Yes, you’re naught else. Do you think I don’t know of your goings-on,

your gaddings about to parties and banquets? Because Rosina don’t read

the papers, you mustn’t think I’m ignorant, too. I’ve got a heap of

things about you in my study, all cut out and pasted in books. I don’t

tell Rosina, because it would only make her discontented, but it riles

me, I tell you straight, to be left here, leading this wretched,

lonesome life. Why can’t I live with you?”

“You could live with me to-morrow if you liked, Billy. But don’t you see

you’d be just as wretched and lonesome? All day I should be at work, and

when I went out you couldn’t accompany me. I can’t foist my relatives on

the people who invite me out. They only want _me_--and that only as a

curiosity,” he added, with a bitter perception of how extrinsic he

really was to the charmed circles of Society; of how little affinity

there was between him and the bulk of those who gushed over his Art.

“But if you would only help me to get my work published, they’d make a

fuss over me, too. But you’ve never moved your little finger to help

me.”

“I got Wilson and Butler to read some of your MSS. I couldn’t do any

more. It isn’t my fault if they don’t think your work good enough.”

“Nonsense! I don’t believe they ever saw it. You only said they did to

pacify me.”

“Oh, Billy!” cried Matthew, in shocked reproach.

“Well, even if they did,” said Billy, tetchily, “they’re not

infallible. They’re prejudiced. They think two brothers can’t both be

clever. I’m sure my stories are as good as anything that appears in

their magazines, and a damned sight better. But there are any amount of

other editors that you come across, for I’ve seen your name printed with

theirs in the lists of guests at public dinners. But you go your own

way, and never spare a thought for me, eating my heart out here. I come

in handy to keep your wife company and to prevent her feeling deserted,

and you think that’s about all I’m good for.” His white face was worked

up to a flush of anger. He had the common delusion of the unsuccessful,

that the successful in any department can pull the ropes in every other.

Nor could he understand that Matthew disliked approaching people, and

people disliked being approached.

“Whatever you’re good for you’ll be,” said Matthew, soothingly. “If your

work is really first-class--it will come to the front in the long-run.”

He shrank from adding that he did not think it even second-class; it was

no use making the boy more miserable.

“Yes, but I can’t run--I’m a cripple!” Billy burst forth, passionately.

“Who knows whether I shall live to see the end of the long-run? Perhaps

they’ll give me a stone when I’m dead--but what’s the good of _that_ to

me? You have everything that makes life worth living: you have love--you

have a wife whenever you choose to come; you have money, and heaps of

it, all earned by the sweat of your own brow; you have fame--your name

is in all the papers; you have fashionable folk courting and caressing

you. I dare say some fine-scented lady fixed that rose so beautifully in

your button-hole; I can smell her white fingers. It’s all roses and

sunshine for you. But you take jolly good care to keep ’em to yourself.”

The imbittered words carried no sting to the painter’s breast. But he

was sick at heart as he replied, gently:

“You don’t really mean what you’re saying, Billy. You know I’ve offered

to defray the cost of publication of ‘By Field and Flood’ if you’d only

let me.”

“Yes, but that’s making me more of a drag on you. Besides, you told me

it’s only the rotten houses that publish novels at the author’s

expense, and that the critics look askance on them. But if I could earn

enough on my short stories to pay for a book, I’d chance that.” His

voice took on a maundering, pitiful intonation. “I’m sure I’ve worked

hard enough, toiling at my desk and denying myself every pleasure in

life; you can’t say I don’t keep sober now. I never go beyond one glass

of ale at meal-times.”

“Yes, you’re very good, Billy. You’ve been good for a long time.”

“Good!” echoed Billy, in the same testy, lachrymose accents. “What’s the

good of being good? I wish I was dead. Why don’t you let me drink my

fits back again?” His breast heaved, he seemed on the point of sobs. The

painter sat in mute misery.

A blood-curdling shriek from the whistle destroyed the intolerable

situation. Davie, having finished munching his cake, had his mouth free

again for musical operations.

“Put your fingers over the holes, Davie,” said his father, “then it ’ll

play nicer.”

“It’s no use,” put in Billy, moodily. “I tried to teach him.”

“Look, I’ll move my fingers, Davie, and you shall blow, and we’ll play a

pretty tune together. No, don’t be alarmed. I’m not taking the whistle

away, only putting my fingers on it. See, you shall hold the end fast in

your mouth.”

The child blew spasmodically. His father mechanically played the first

tune that came into his fingers. A gleam of excited interest leaped into

the child’s eyes as he heard the notes varying mysteriously in a rough

jingle. But the painter broke off suddenly. He realized that he was

playing “Home, Sweet Home.” It was too ghastly.

“More, more!” panted Davie, imperatively.

Matthew Strang obediently started “Yankee Doodle,” and had to grant two

encores before the juvenile tyrant was robbed of breath and desire.

“What’s your name, my little man?” he asked, thoughtlessly, to make

conversation.

“Davie.”

“Davie what?”

“Davie Thrang.”

“Ah! and how old are you?”

“I’se nearly four,” replied Davie, adding in a burst of new confidence,

“when I come to my fourf birfday, mummy says she’ll gi’ me a penny every

week all to mythelf.”

“Really?” said the painter, with a sad smile. “A whole penny?”

Davie shook his head in vehement affirmation: “Yeth, and I am thinkin’

what I shall buy mummy wi’ my firth penny--appleth or a flower.”

A thrill shot down the painter’s spine. The poor, sickly infant appeared

suddenly lovable to him; for the first time, too, he realized the child

as an independent entity, with thoughts of its own at work in the queer

little brain. Whatever the quality of this little brain, Davie’s heart

was sound enough. And this heart was evidently entirely given to his

mother. The momentary prick of irrational jealousy that the discovery

caused the father was forgotten in softer feelings. His conception of

the mother rose with his conception of the child. She was the other side

of the relation, and there must be something beautiful in her to

correspond with the beauty of her child’s sentiment. The oleograph of

“Motherhood” caught his eye again; he saw how insincerely he had painted

it, from a mere intellectual idea, unfelt, unrealized; but he saw also

the secret of its popularity, each observer contributing the emotion the

painter had not felt. His eye dwelt upon it more tolerantly.

“Kiss me, Davie,” he said, “and you shall have a penny now to buy mummy

a flower.”

Davie readily put up his lips to clinch the bargain, and his father gave

him the coin. The boy regarded it wistfully.

“What do you say?” Billy put in, more amiably.

“Fank you,” said Davie.

“Thank you, da--” prompted Billy.

“Daddy,” wound up Davie, triumphantly. “There ain’t no flower-womans

now,” he added, dubiously. “They was a lot at Margit.”

“I’ll be a flower-woman, Davie,” said his father, cheerily. “Wouldn’t

you like to have this beautiful flower--this rose in my button-hole--for

your penny, to give to mummy?”

“Yeth--I wants it,” said Davie, clutching greedily for it.

“Gently, or all the lovely pink leaves will fall out. And you must give

me your penny, you know.”

Davie, with a perplexed air, vaguely conscious of commercial

transactions too complicated for his intellect, hesitatingly retendered

the penny, and, receiving the rose, was set down on the carpet. He ran

eagerly to the door, blowing one disconsolate, irrelevant blast on the

whistle, and then the brothers heard him tumble down the

oilcloth-covered stairs with three thuds, followed by shrill ululations.

They ran to the head of the stairs, but Rosina had already rushed forth

to pick up her child, and her soothing prattle, varied by scolding for

his careless hurry, made a duet with his howls.

“Where did you get that flower from? You’ve crumpled it all to pieces.”

She extracted it from the fingers that had closed upon it tenaciously

when the fall commenced.

“From the gen’leman. Him what I calls daddy. It’s for you, mummy.”

“Tell him he can keep it!”

Davie’s howls recommenced.

Matthew Strang’s heart contracted. He went half-way down the stairs to

where Rosina ministered to her bruised offspring.

“I didn’t send you the flower, Rosina,” he said, gently. “It’s a gift

from the child.”

“Oh, is it? Then he’s better-hearted than his father, that’s all I can

say. Thank you, my poor darling, thank you. Dry your little eyes, and

mummy shall take you out to see all the pretty shops.”

“Won’t you come up-stairs and finish your tea, Rosina?” Matthew pleaded.

“I’m busy,” she said, tartly. “I’m giving Clara her tea. She’s just come

home from school.”

“Let her bring her tea up-stairs; then she can talk to me.”

“I’ll tell her you’re here. I dare say she’ll remember you--she

generally gets something out of you.”

He bit his lips to keep back angry speech, and remounted to the

drawing-room. Clara came close upon his footsteps, and ran to offer her

lips. She was a tall child of seven, with a low forehead, dark hair and

eyebrows, a heavy jaw, and a high color--handsome after a rather Gallic

fashion. The painter always trod gingerly with her, knowing she had her

grandmother’s temper. Rosina, lacking the clew, was less delicate with

the girl, whose sullen phases irritated her immeasurably. This afternoon

Clara was conciliated by sixpence, and chatted amicably with her father

about her lessons. Presently her mother came up too, with Davie in her

train, and there was the outward spectacle of a happy family group

united at tea. The painter was emboldened to strengthen an idea that was

gradually forming in his mind by expressing it.

“Billy feels very lonely down in this part of the town,” he began,

timidly.

“And what must I feel?” Rosina snapped.

“Then why can’t we all live together, Rosina?” he said, more boldly.

“Are you beginning that again?” she asked, sharply. “You won’t come and

live here, will you?”

“You know it is impossible.”

“And you know it is impossible for me to move to your neighborhood. I’ve

told you a thousand times you can’t afford one of those big houses--it

would be ruinous; you’d have to keep a staff of servants to match, and

things would be coming to the house at extravagant prices from

aristocratic tradespeople, whereas here I go out and do my bit of

marketing, and pick up a bargain here and a bargain there; I’ve found

out a place in Holloway where I get the best meat a penny a pound

cheaper than anywhere in Camden Town, and it only means a penny tram

there and back. You don’t know how much I save you a year when you

suspect me of making a stocking for myself out of my sea-side allowance.

And even if you can afford such a house, rather give me the money and

let me put it by for the children.”

He made a despairing gesture. “We could get a small house,” he said. “I

could work harder for a year or two. Perhaps I could get a few more

rooms added to my studio. There’s a piece of ground I use at the back

for open-air studies.”

“And what would be the use of my living with you?” inquired Rosina,

brutally. “You don’t want me any more. I dare say you could come home at

night now if you wanted to.”

“Hush!” said her husband, flushing. “Clara, my dear, take Davie out and

buy him some candy. This penny is really his.”

“Yes, father.” And the joyous children disappeared.

“Poor orphans!” said Rosina. “Perhaps it’s just as well there won’t be

any more of them.”

Matthew Strang was startled, yet not quite surprised by the revelation

of his wife’s mood. She had never before so openly resented or dissented

from the situation that had gradually grown up--one of those strange,

complex, undefined situations of which life is so full, and which are

only able to exist by virtue of not being put into words.

He stirred the dregs of his tea with his spoon, painfully embarrassed.

“I shall talk to an architect I know,” he said at last, ignoring her

allusion. “The cost mightn’t be much, and it needn’t be all paid off at

once. Besides,” he added, with forced playfulness, “that extra hundred

dollars a year of yours must be used up somehow.”

Rosina turned eyes of flame upon the unhappy Billy. “I knew it!” she

said, cuttingly. “I knew you were here to spy upon me. So you have

sneaked about that, have you?”

Matthew lost his temper at last.

“Don’t be a fool, Rosina!” he said, roughly. “Do you think I care a pin

whether you spend a wretched hundred dollars more or less?”

“No; I dare say you would rather have a wife that would bring you to the

workhouse. They had the bailiffs in at No. 36A only yesterday. There’s a

wife there that would just suit you. The husband’s something in your way

of business, an author or a poet, and she’s a tall, stuck-up creature

who sits at the window in strange long gowns without stays, and reads

books to him and never goes to church. My! You should see her out

marketing--they swindle her at every turn; she doesn’t know a horse from

a ham sandwich. I don’t wonder they’ve come to a bad end--you should see

the dust on her Venetian blinds. I prophesied the crash last

winter--ask Billy if I didn’t. They took in their coals by the

hundred-weight. Don’t you fancy I don’t know that’s the sort of woman

you’re hankering after. Ever since my Davie was born, and you got mixed

up with those sort of creatures, you’ve been sorry you married me. Oh,

it’s no use denying it. You want a fine lady that would scorn to soil

her fingers with housework, and expect you to cover ’em with diamonds, a

creature that would faint at the sight of a black-beetle. But you were

glad enough to marry me once upon a time, when you hadn’t a dollar to

your name. They say you’re a fine painter, and who made you a fine

painter? Who took you abroad, and supported you while you were studying?

They think you’re a fine gentleman, and who made you a fine gentleman?

Oh yes, I know I’m not one of your fine ladies--but if I had been, where

would you have been now? In the bankruptcy court--perhaps back again in

the jail from which I dragged you.”

Matthew crimsoned furiously. Billy leaped in his chair.

“You fish-wife! How dare you say such things to my brother?” he cried,

choking with rage. “Matt in jail, indeed!”

“Let her talk,” said Matthew, wearily. “I see it was a mistake to have

come here at all.”

Rosina cast a glance of venomous triumph at her drooping husband. The

jail was a chance shot. In long, lonely, agonizing watches the resentful

suspicion had germinated and grown.

“It’s true,” she said, defiantly. “Let him deny it.”

“Why did you take a husband from jail?” retorted the painter, with a

flash of fire.

“I didn’t know it; I was tricked and bamboozled, and I had a heart in my

breast then, not a stone. If I had been a fine lady I might have been

more particular to examine your pedigree.”

A sense of guilt damped the man’s fire. The jail episode was not the

only thing he had concealed.

“If you’re sorry you married me we can separate,” he murmured.

“Separate--aren’t we separated enough? Do you mean you’d like a divorce?

Oh no, not for this child. So that you may marry one of your fine

ladies. Perhaps make an honest woman of her?”

“Rosina!” He sprang to his feet, thundering. The image of Eleanor

Wyndwood swept involuntarily before him, and he felt that this

coarse-tongued woman had profaned it.

She flinched before the cry, but parodied it daringly.

“Matthew!”

He flung from the room. Billy prodded frantically after him.

“Don’t go, Matt! Don’t go! You’ll never come back again.”

The piteous appeal sounded like a prophecy. He paused in the hall,

irresolute.

Rosina laughed hysterically. “You had better go with him, Billy, if

you’re so frightened. And good riddance to the pair of you. I’ve got my

bread and butter, thank God. My children sha’n’t starve, if their father

_does_ desert them.”

“Let me go, Billy,” he said, hoarsely, shaking off the cripple’s clutch.

“I can’t breathe here. Come with me--write to me--do what you like.” He

opened the hall-door and closed it behind him, and dashed against his

children coming back through the gate, with their mouths full of

almond-rock. Clara caught at the skirts of his coat.

“Don’t go away again, father,” she mumbled, peevishly. “Mother cries for

you in the night, and I can’t get to sleep.”

He swayed as if struck by a bullet. Then he took the little girl’s

sticky hand, and suffered himself to be led back through the area door.

As Clara unlatched it he heard her mother sobbing hysterically above.

The servant’s foolish face peeped, white and scared, from the kitchen

door, and made his own scarlet with shame.

“Your mistress is ill,” he muttered, and ran hastily up-stairs.

Rosina detected his footstep, and the sobs changed back to frenzied

laughter. Then she controlled both by sheer pride, all the steel in her

springing back unsnapped from its bend, and she opposed a mocking smile

to his discomfited concern. The strength that had kept her silent for

years was now summoned to undo the effects of speech.

“What have you forgotten?” she asked, tauntingly. “Have you come back

for your good-bye kiss or your umbrella or what? Kisses, they’re off;

we’re an old married couple now, but I don’t want to stick to your

umbrella. It might be a present from somebody nice. _Is_ there an

umbrella about, Billy? No? Dear me! Then it must be that rose. Ah, but

Davie gave me that.” She called down the stairs. “Wasn’t it you that

gave me the rose, Davie? Yes, and I’m not going to give it back. Don’t

be afraid, dear. Mummy won’t give away her darling’s present. Did ’um

bruise himself to give it to me? Poor Davie!”

There was a hectic flush on her cheek; her voice rang false. Matthew was

afraid.

“Well, good-bye,” she jerked, after a pause. “What are you waiting for?”

“Don’t go away,” whispered Billy, nervously, shattered by the scenes of

the afternoon. “Come to the study; she’ll cool down soon.”

The suggestion commended itself to Matthew. It seemed cowardly to leave

this hysteric couple to themselves. He descended the kitchen stairs once

more, and passed along the corridor that led to his old studio, now

turned into a workroom for Billy, and fitted up with bookshelves, whose

contents hid the whitewashed walls. A writing-table, littered with

papers, occupied the centre of the floor, and piles of manuscript showed

within a little angle cupboard, whose door swung open. There were

several reproductions of his brother’s works roughly stuck on the

wall--one a valuable engraving signed by the artist; and the “Triumph of

Bacchus” was already represented in two shapes--once by the half-page

cut out of “The Season’s Pictures,” and again by a full-page photograph

of it from the _Graphic_.

“It’s a shame they don’t make you an A.R.A., Matt,” said Billy. “Your

pictures get more advertisement for the Academy than almost anybody

else’s.”

“For God’s sake, don’t talk of that now,” said the painter, brokenly.

His eye noted curiously that ancient engraving of “The Angelus,”

miraculously preserved to be one of Billy’s treasures, by the world’s

refusal to give more than eighteenpence for it.

It was a poor representative of the original, but the other ornaments of

the study seemed to him tawdry in comparison. His taste had changed: the

picture attracted him now. Without analyzing--the turmoil of his mind

did not permit that--he had an impression of sincerity, of sympathetic

vision, of work done inevitably; not, like his own work, from

cleverness. Despair of his life and his Art mingled in one dark paroxysm

as he dropped upon a chair and laid his head upon the writing-table.

“Don’t, you may get your hair sticky,” said Billy. “I don’t think it’s

quite dry--I was just pasting it in before you came.”

He withdrew the album from under his brother’s head--the pious

compilation with which he fed at once his jealousy and his pride. “I

suppose you saw that little sketch of your life in ‘Our Celebrities’

this month?”

Matthew did not answer.

“It’s not quite accurate, you know,” went on Billy. “It says you’re a

bachelor, and that you were born in Canada, and so on. But that doesn’t

matter. There are always mistakes, and, of course, nobody knows about

Rosina. Listen! ‘The eldest child of a prosperous Canadian farmer, he

gave early evidence of talent, and was sent to England to study art, and

soon became the favorite pupil at Grainger’s well-known Art School in

central London, where he studied under Tarmigan, a frigid artist who at

one time enjoyed considerable repute. Later, Mr. Strang pursued his

studies in Paris and Rome, and, returning to London with ripened art,

sought and obtained the suffrages of the Academicians with his picture

entitled “Motherhood,” since so familiar to the public in countless

reproductions, and the herald of a career of uniform success. Next year

his classic picture--’”

“My God! Do you want to drive me mad?” roared the sick lion, raising his

head. “I know all about it.”

“You needn’t bully my head off,” said Billy, pettishly. “I asked you if

you’d seen it.”

“It’s copied from _People of the Time_,” groaned the painter. He

clinched his fists in a blind rage against the universe. This was what

the public read and believed about his life--his life, with its slow,

sick struggles, its inner and outer discords, its poignant pathos. And

this was what he read and believed about other men. Good God! What was

behind their lives, the lives of his fellows, whose smooth histories he

read in biographical summaries? The possibilities of the human tragedy

frightened him. Then the realities of the human farce seized him, and he

terrified Billy by a long peal of sardonic laughter.

The laughter ceased suddenly. “Go and see how she is,” he commanded the

shuddering Billy, and the poor cripple, now less frightened of Rosina

than of his brother, sped away as fast as his crutch could carry him.

Left alone, the painter looked abstractedly at “The Angelus,” and it

drifted his thoughts back to the time when he had tried to sell it for

bread. How happy were those times of youthful aspiration, when all

things were new and all things were true, and hunger itself was but a

sauce to eke out the scanty meal! What was starvation to this terrible

hunger for happiness, what the want of money to this want of something

to live for? Ah, money was nothing; money troubles were mental figments.

It was the cark of life that killed--money or no money. Oh, to be young

and free again; free to be a slave to Art! How hollow it all was--this

fame, this running about, this Society that welcomed him, as he had

truly told Billy, like a kind of monstrosity! He had been happier when

he had toiled in this little whitewashed studio, even after his mistaken

marriage. The lines of the poet in whom he had read most of late fell

from his lips like an original personal cry:

“Oh, I could lie down like a tired child,

And weep away this sordid life of care.”

And thus Billy found him, his head on the desk, his shoulders heaving

convulsively.

“Matt!” he cried, timidly.

“Well!” in muffled accents.

“She’s gone to her room and locked herself in. She says you’re not to

come near her any more ever.”

A long silence.

“But I dare say it’ll blow over, Matt. This is not the first time she’s

been taken like that, though you’ve not been here to bear it.”

A longer silence.

Billy cudgelled his brain to rouse his brother.

“I saw Ruth Hailey a month ago,” he said at last. This time he succeeded

in evoking an indifferent monosyllable.