That sounded true to his bitter mood. There were indeed so many

Eleanors, all in contradiction. He kept turning over the leaves in

silent jealousy.

“Ah, that is a very pretty one you have there,” she said, lightly. “It

might suggest a subject to you. Read it aloud, it’s only ten lines.”

Fuming inwardly at the suggestion that the dapper poet of sugar-plums

and the hero of the nougat, whom he mentally classed with Roy as an

interloper, could afford him any inspiration, and further incensed by

the command to read the fellow’s verses, he gabbled through the little

poem, which extended over two deckle-edged, rough, creamy pages.

“ROSALIND READING AN OLD ROMANCE

“I watch her dainty rose-bud mouth,

That trembles with the exquisite

And wondrous tide that steals from it

Of song, redolent of the South;

While o’er her April countenance,

The music of the quaint romance,

The sweeter for a sense of pain,

Sends sun and shade; and lost in dream,

Her sweet eyes softly flash and gleam

With golden smiles and diamond rain.”

“I hope she read it better than that,” laughed Mrs. Wyndwood,

mirthfully.

“Well, she couldn’t make the fourth line scan anyhow,” he said.

“Oh, you mean ‘redolent.’ That’s another poetic license.”

“And Rosalind seems to be another,” he said, surlily.

“Oh no, I’m not Rosalind. I haven’t a dainty rose-bud mouth. Mine is a

full-grown rose at least.” And her laugh showed the white teeth gleaming

against the red lips.

Her arch laughing face so close to his across the little tea-table

tantalized him intolerably.

“It is a red, red rose,” he whispered, hoarsely, half rising and bending

over as if to survey it.

“Beware of the thorn!” she laughed, nervously, drawing back

involuntarily. “And to think that but for the coast-guard who found

Primitiva’s letter,” she rattled on hastily, “some other fair lady would

have had the honor of the dedication.”

“One of the other Eleanors, perhaps,” he said, sulkily, sinking back

into his chair.

“Poor Primitiva!” she cried, in unabated hilariousness and intensified

volubility. “Oh, she’s been such fun. You know Olive has brought her to

London. She begged her away from her father, to the excessive joy of

Primitiva, who has become her devoted slave. The other night Olive took

her to the theatre with us and would have her in the box. She had been

wrought up to a wild excitement, and when she got inside the theatre and

looked round at the festive company she drew a deep breath of rapture.

She said she liked it very much. Long before the orchestra struck up,

Olive discovered that Primitiva imagined she was already in complete

enjoyment of the play, and that to sit in the theatre was all in all.

Only one thing marred Primitiva’s pleasure. She was looking round

furtively for your cousin, and at last asked where Mr. Herbert sat;

not, it transpired, because of his position as Olive’s _fiancé_, but

because she had heard us talk of Herbert as writing a play, and imagined

he was an inseparable adjunct of the theatre. Of course, she doesn’t

know even now that there are more theatres than one. When the overture

struck up she was surprised and delighted by this unexpected addition to

the pleasures of the evening. The rising of the curtain was the climax

of her astonishment and her transport. The action of the piece--a

melodrama, purposely chosen for her behoof by our sportive friend,

experimenting upon her freshness--seized her from the start, and kept

her riveted. The fall of the first curtain, and the arrest of the

innocent man for the murder, left her weeping bitterly. ‘It isn’t real,

you little goose!’ Olive said, to pacify her. ‘Isn’t it?’ Primitiva

replied, opening her brimming trustful eyes to their widest. She gave a

little sobbing laugh. ‘And I thought they was all alive!’ Then she rose

to go, and was astonished to hear that there was more. Alas! it would

have been better had she gone. When the hero’s wife, visiting the hero

in prison, kissed him, Primitiva inquired if the actor and actress were

really married, and learning that they were not, was too disgusted to

sympathize any further with their misfortunes. It revolted her,”

concluded Mrs. Wyndwood, taking up her teacup with an air of preparing

for the resumption of sips, “that a man who was not a woman’s husband

should kiss her.” And her face gleamed more tantalizing than ever under

the roses of her bonnet.

His fingers dented the teaspoon they fidgeted with; it seemed

intolerable that his life should be spoiled by acceptance of the moral

stand-point of this simple creature. He with his artistic agonies and

his complex sorrows and his high imaginings to be squeezed into the same

moral moulds as Primitiva! He refused to see the humor of her. The girl

had no more interest for him than that irritating Roy. It was maddening

to have Eleanor sitting there in cold blood, the Honorable Mrs.

Wyndwood, an irreproachable widow in black, talking abstractly of

kisses. Then the tense string of expectation snapped; the apathy that he

felt in the presence of Rosina invaded him--he stirred his tea

listlessly, awaiting the moment of her departure. As she talked on,

loquacious to the end, prattling of Erle-Smith and Beethoven, and

Swinburne, his apathy quickened into impatience; he longed for her to be

gone. His hidden fingers played a tattoo on the side of his chair. She

bade him good-bye at last; she would not see him again for many months,

unless he came to Paris.

“I always run over to do the Salon,” he answered, indifferently.

When he had seen her, stately and stiff, to her carriage, and his

studio-door had shut him in again, he ripped up the canvas with his old

sailor’s knife in a paroxysm of fury. His eye caught the silver regatta

cup standing proudly upon the piano. He felt like dashing it down; then

it occurred to him how fine and bitter a revenge it would be upon her

and humanity at large to fill it with poison and drain it to the dregs.

But he only threw himself upon a couch in a passion of sobs, such as had

not shaken him since childhood. The great picturesque room, which the

autumn twilight had draped in dusk, was ineffably dreary without her;

his heart seemed full of dust, and tears were a blessed relief in the

drought. They probably saved him from ending his empty life there and

then.

He rallied, and began other pictures, but he could do nothing with them.

He refused commissions for portraits, hating the imposition of subject,

and fearful of exposing his restlessness to a stranger’s gaze. The

return of the world to town renewed social solicitations, but he felt he

was wearing his heart on his sleeve, and declined to parade it through

drawing-rooms. Despite this gain of time, the weeks passed without any

definite product. He was searching, but he could not find. One day he

would sit down and fix in charcoal some rough suggestions for a greater

symbolic picture than that which he had destroyed; but the next day he

would be working up his recollections of Devonshire night-scenery,

trying by a series of tentative touches on a toned canvas to evolve the

romantic mystery of those illumined villages niched in the cliffs, or of

the moon making a lovely rippling path across the dark lonely sea, as

Eleanor had made across his life; while a day or so after he would

discard these thinly painted shadowy night-pieces, and, painting

straight from the shoulder, “impasto” his canvas with brutal blobs of

paint that at a distance merged into the living flow of red sunlit

water.

And always this rankling, gnawing pain of unsatisfied and unspoken

desire. No man could work with that at his breast. And her rare letters

did not allay it, though they spoke no word of love, but were full of

enthusiasm for the free student life in Paris, the glorious

_camaraderie_, the fun of dining occasionally for a few centimes in tiny

_crémeries_, and going to the People’s Theatre off the Boulevard

Montparnasse, where they gave a bonus of _cerises à l’eau de vie_

between the pieces. Oh, if she had only been younger, less staled by

life! If she could only begin over again. If she only had the energy of

Olive, who started work at the Academy at the preternatural hour of

eight A.M. But she had lost the faculty of beginnings, she feared, and

she made but poor progress in sculpture. That was the undercurrent of

these gay letters, the characteristic note of despondency.

Rosina held out no hand of reconciliation. His only contact with her was

through Billy, who paid him one visit to escort “Aunt Clara” over the

studio. His wife had, it transpired, held forth so copiously and

continuously upon its glories that the poor creature had plucked up

courage to ask to see it, and Rosina, who had evidently concealed the

breach with her famous husband, had besought Billy to convoy her. And so

one day these two routed out the sick lion from the recesses of his den.

The appearance of Miss Clara Coble was as much a shock as a surprise to

Matthew Strang. In the nine years or so since she had assisted at his

wedding--an unimportant but not disagreeable personage, tall and

full-blooded as her brother, she had decayed lamentably. She was now an

ungainly old maid, stooping and hollow-eyed, with crows’ feet and

sharpened features. She had a nervous twitch of the eyelids, her head

drooped oddly, and her conversation was at times inconsecutive to the

verge of fatuity. From the day of her birth to the day of his death

Coble had thought of her as his little sister, and he never realized

the tragedy of her spinsterhood, of her starved nature, though under his

very eye she had peaked and pined in body and soul.

But it leaped to the painter’s eye at the first sight of her, and her

image remained in his brain, infinitely pathetic.

The ugliness that in earlier days would have averted his eyes in

artistic disgust, drew him now in human pity. He grew tenderer to Rosina

at the thought that she was harboring this wreck of femininity. It

rejoiced him to think how much “Aunt Clara” was enjoying this visit to

his grandeurs; he listened with pleased tolerance to her artless

babble--in her best days she had always had something of her brother’s

big simplicity--as she told tale after tale out of school, repeating the

colossal things her poor brother had said about his son-in-law’s genius

and wealth, recounting how Coble had thus become the indirect hero of

the Temperance Bar, and unconsciously revealing--what was more

surprising to the painter--the pride with which Rosina had always

written home (and still spoke to her aunt) about her husband and his

fashionable friends and successes. And poor Miss Coble expanded in the

atmosphere of the great man, which she had never hoped to breathe. Her

cadaverous cheek took a flush, she held her head straighter on her

shoulders. He felt that, after all, it was worth while being famous if

he could give such pleasure to simple souls by his mere proximity. The

fame he had sold his body and soul for was a joyless possession; happy

for him if it could yet give joy to others.

Billy told him that Ruth Hailey was in Paris at the Hotel Windsor with

Mrs. Verder, preparatory to the long Antipodean tour, and suggested that

he might call upon her when he went over to see the Salon if she was

still there. Matthew wrote down the address, but said he didn’t think he

should go over that year. Billy looked disappointed; he had been about

to suggest accompanying his brother. Life at Camden Town, he intimated

fretfully, had resumed its dead-alive routine, and he glanced towards

Miss Coble as if to imply that her advent had not brightened the

domestic table.

When the visitors left, Matthew put them into a cab and drove with them

a little way to purchase presents for the children. There was a doll

for Clara and a box of animals for Davie. To Rosina he did not venture

to send even a message. At a word from her he would have gone to her,

but he had no stomach to cope with her tantrums.

This new reminder of home left him more depressed than before. It was

impossible to concentrate himself upon his work, even in the presence of

models. They were an unprofitable expense, and he dismissed them and

brooded over the ruins of his life. Without Eleanor Art was impossible,

he felt. True Art he could not produce without her inspiration, and

false Art was falseness to her and a vile slavery.

Insomnia dogged his nights, and when he slept it was but to suffer under

harassing dreams fantastically compounded of his early struggles. These

dreams never touched his later life; many of them dealt oppressively

with the bird-shop, and he had often to clean endless shades with

chamois leather, smashing one after the other under the rebuking but

agonizingly unintelligible “Pop! Pop! Pop!” of “Ole Hey,” though he felt

sure Tommy, the young Micmac errand-boy, had cracked them beforehand.

And what added to the sleeper’s agony was that these breakages would

have to be made good to the Deacon from his scanty wage, or, worse, he

would be discharged and unable to send the monthly subsidy to Cobequid

Village. The anguish and anxiety were quite as harassing as though the

troubles were real.

He made one desperate excursion into Society--it was the delightful

dinner-party of a gifted fellow-artist whose cultured and beautiful wife

had always seemed to him the ideal hostess. And a pretty and guileless

girl, full of enthusiasm for Art and Nature and the life that was

opening out before her, fell to his escorting arm; she was visibly

overpowered by her luck and charmingly deferential; at first his

responsive smile was bitter, but his mood lightened under her engaging

freshness and the champagne he imbibed recklessly.

But the next morning’s reaction, aggravated by the headache of

indigestion, plunged him into more tenebrous glooms. But for the

unkindly fates he might have sat with such a wife, host and hostess of

such a gathering. He pictured Eleanor receiving his guests, and in his

factitious happiness he gathered the poor and the despised to his

hearth. The images of suicide resurged. He saw it on the

bills:--“Suicide of a Popular Painter.” Why not? The position was

hopeless; were it not best to throw it up? How the world would stare! No

one would understand the reason. Rosina would still remain unknown,

irrelevant to the situation. And his eyes filled with tears, in the

bitter luxury of woe.

But he did not commit suicide, and all that the world, or that minute

portion of it which talks Art, wondered at, was why Matthew Strang was

unrepresented when the Academy opened in May. It leaked out that he had

been ill, and there were sympathetic paragraphs which were not

altogether misinformed, for these sleepless or dream-tortured nights had

brought on nervous prostration and acute headaches. That ancient

blood-poisoning, too, had left its traces in his system, and when he was

worried and overwrought his body had to pay again the penalty of

unforgiven physical error.

Again, as in those far-off days, he thought of a sea-voyage to his

native village; it dwindled down to crossing the Channel. As the opening

of the Salon drew nearer and nearer, he felt more and more strongly that

he must not miss the Exhibition. It was part of a painter’s education.

There was no need to see Eleanor Wyndwood; by remaining on the

fashionable side of the river the chances were he would not even come

across her casually in the few days of his stay. No, there was nothing

to apprehend. And besides, it began to be increasingly borne in upon him

that it was his duty to look up Ruth Hailey; she had called upon him at

Camden Town, and etiquette demanded that he should return the call. What

had she and Rosina talked about? he wondered dully. If he did not go

soon, she might be off to Australia, and the opportunity of seeing his

ancient playmate would probably recur nevermore.

And so a bright May morning saw him arrive in the capital of Art,

breakfast hastily at the Grand Hotel, and--drive straight to the Latin

Quarter. Other climes, other thoughts, and the gayety of the Boulevards,

with their green trees and many-colored kiosks, had begun to steal into

his spirit, and his gloomy apprehension of danger to dissipate in the

crisp sunny air. Why should he not see Eleanor Wyndwood?

And then he discovered that he did not know her address, that she wrote

from the English Ladies’ Art Club; he hunted out the place, but the

concierge told him she was not there, and gave him the address of the

Academy most of the ladies attended, but this was the hour of

_déjeuner_, and monsieur would probably not find them there till the

afternoon. He grew downcast again, and, dismissing the cab, he sauntered

on foot towards the Academy, trying to kill time. He dropped into a tiny

restaurant close by to get a cup of coffee; it was decorated by studies

from the nude, evidently accepted in payment for dinners; and the

ceiling had a central decoration that reminded him of his own crude

workmanship in the sitting-room of that hotel in New Brunswick. He sat

down at a little table facing the only lady customer, a dashing

Frenchwoman, the warm coloring of whose handsome model’s face showed

between a great black-plumed hat and a light-blue bow, and who paused

between her spoonfuls of apple-stew to chant joyously, “Coucou, coucou,

fal la, la, la, la.” A decadent poet with a leonine name sipped

absinthe, a spectacled Dane held forth intermittently on the bad faith

of England towards Denmark at the commencement of the century, a Scotch

painter discoursed on fly-fishing, and exhibited a box of trout-flies,

and one or another paused from time to time to hum, “Coucou, coucou, fal

la, la, la, la,” in sympathy with the gay refrain. Hens fluttered and

clucked about the two sunlit tables, and a goat wandered around, willing

to eat.

Matthew Strang fed the hens and was taken by the humors of the quarter,

into which he had scarcely penetrated before, knowing mainly the other

side of the water. Perceiving him looking at her pictures, the stout

smiling proprietress, whose homely face, minus her characteristic smile,

flared in paint on a wall, protruding from a scarlet-striped bodice,

asked him in very loud tones if he would like to see her collection, and

straightway haled him up-stairs to her salon, which was hung thickly

with meritorious pictures, upon whose beauties she held a running

comment, astonishing Matthew by the intelligence of her criticisms.

“This represents a hawthorn, monsieur, which blossoms in the spring.

This was done by a Dane who is dead. The King of Denmark offered him a

commission, but he would not work for him, because he was a

revolutionary--in painting only, you understand, an Impressionist. That

is a copy of the one in the Luxembourg. I paid two hundred francs to

have it made, because I love the original so. Oh yes, it is a very good

copy. My landlord offered me four hundred for it, but I prefer to live

in a little apartment, surrounded by my pictures. As you say, I am an

amateur of pictures. There are more here in my bedroom,” and she ushered

him in, apologizing for the bed not being made. Then she told him her

history. She was a widow with an only son, who was _beau garçon_. Ah,

she was beautiful herself when she had twenty years. Her son was to be

an artist. Matthew Strang feelingly hoped the boy would become a great

artist; inwardly he wondered wistfully why he himself had not been

blessed with an art-loving mother. And then in a curious flash of

retrospective insight he recognized for the first time the essential

artistic elements in his mother’s character, stifled by a narrow

creed--her craving for the life of gay cities, her Pagan anger at Abner

Preep’s bow-legs! What a pity she had not been born in this freer

artistic atmosphere, which indeed her ancestors must have breathed,

though their blood had been crossed with German and Scotch, as if to

produce his own contradictory temperament. In London, he thought,

artistic connoisseurship was the last thing one would look for in small

shopkeepers. In a softer mood he repaired to the Academy, which was

entered through a pair of large folding doors that gave upon a stone

corridor. He passed through this passage and came out under a sloping

porch, with broken trellis-work at one side and an untidy tree. At the

top of a flight of stone steps that descended thence, he was stopped by

a block of young American fellows in soft felt hats, who motioned him to

stand still, and, to his astonishment and somewhat melancholy amusement,

he found himself part of a group about to be photographed by a pretty

young lady student in the sunny, dusty court-yard below.

The group she had posed stretched all down the steps, and consisted

mainly of models--male and female. There were Italian women, dusky and

smiling, some bareheaded, some hooded, and a few pressing

infants--literal olive-branches--to their bosoms. There was an Italian

girl of fourteen with a mustache, who was a flare of color in her green

velvet apron and gorgeous trailing head-dress. There were Frenchwomen

with coquettish straw hats, and a child in a Tam o’ Shanter; there was a

Corsican in a slouch-hat, with coal-black hair and a velvet jacket to

match, and a little Spanish boy in a white hat. Thrown in as by way of

artistic contrast with all this efflorescence of youth was a doddering,

pathetic old man with a spreading gray beard and flowing gray locks; and

there were young lady students of divers nationalities--Polish, Greek,

Dutch, and American--curiously interspersed in the motley group which

stretched right down the stone steps between the stone balustrades that

terminated in stone urns spouting disorderly twigs. Behind the pretty

photographer were the terra-cotta walls of the sculpture atelier, which,

high beyond her head, were replaced by long, green-glazed windows, into

which a pink lilac-bush, tiptoeing, tried to peep; around her were

stools, dumb-bells, damaged busts, a headless terra-cotta angel with

gaping trunk and iron stump, nursing a squash-faced cherub, and

dismantled packing-cases swarming with sportive black kittens; and

facing her a great blackened stone head of Medusa stared from a

red-brick pedestal, awful with spiders’ webs across the mouth and

athwart the hollow orbits and in the snaky hair covered with green moss;

and towering over her head and dominating the court-yard stood a

colossal classical statue, tarnished and mutilated, representing a huge

helmeted hero, broken-nosed and bleared, sustaining a heroine, as

armless but not so beautiful as the Venus de Milo, doing a backward

fall. But the sun shone on the dusty litter and the mess and the lumber,

and the lilac-bush blossomed beautifully, and over all was the joy of

youth and Art and the gayety of the spring. Matthew Strang felt an

ancient thrill pass through his sluggish veins. To be young and to

paint--what happiness! His eyes moistened in sympathy with the scene.

The models were redolent of Art--the very children breathed Art, the

babes sucked it in. Art was a republic, and everybody was equal in

it--the doughtiest professor and the meanest model, the richest amateur

and the penurious youth starving himself to be there. There was nothing

in the world but Art--it was the essence of existence. There were people

who lived for other things, but they did not count. Oh, the free brave

life! He was glad to be photographed as part and parcel of all this

fresh aspiration; it revivified him; he had a superstitious sense that

it was symbolic.

The group scattered, dismissed by the “Merci” of the pretty

photographer; and Matthew, descending the steps, asked her if Mrs.

Wyndwood worked in her atelier. She did not know, but she guessed from

his description it must be the aristocratic-looking lady who had dropped

in once or twice in Miss Regan’s company. Miss Regan came regularly

every morning at eight o’clock, but not at all in the afternoon, when

she worked at home. Miss Regan’s own studio was in an Impasse about ten

minutes away; probably her friend lived with her. Heartily thanking his

informant, he betook himself thither. He found the Impasse in a prosaic,

grimy street, amid which the charming, if battered bass-relief of Venus

with Cupids over its entrance, struck an unexpected note of poetry,

which was intensified by the little Ionic portico with classic bronze

figures between its pillars that faced him as he passed through the

corridor. Leafy trees and trellised plants added rusticity to the poetry

of the sunny, silent, deserted court-yard, so curiously sequestered amid

the surrounding squalor. The windows of many studios gave upon it, and

the backs of canvases showed from the glass annexes for _plein air_

study. But as he passed under the pretty, natural porch of embowering

foliage that led to the door of the studio he sought, his heart beat as

nervously at the thought of again facing the Hon. Mrs. Wyndwood as when,

in his young days, he had first saluted the magnificent uncle whose name

he bore. He had an inward shrinking: was it wise to expose himself to

the perturbation of another interview with this cold, stately creature,

the image of whom, passing graciously to her carriage, was still vivid

to him? But he could not go back now. He knocked at the door.

Eleanor opened the door--a radiant, adorable apparition in a big white

clay-smeared blouse with a huge serviceable pocket. He had never

imagined her thus; he was as taken aback by her appearance as she by his

presence. He stared at her in silence, as she stood there under the

overarching greenery, with gold flecks of sunlight on her hair. But both

recovered themselves in a moment; the sight of her in this homely

artistic costume knocked her off the pedestal of fashion and propriety

on which his mental vision had posed her; she became part of that brave

young democracy of Art he had just left; and there was a charming

_camaraderie_ in the gay laugh with which, withdrawing her long white

hands beyond reach of his proffered glove, and exhibiting them piquantly

clay-covered, she cried, “Can’t shake.”

The seriousness of the imagined meeting vanished in a twinkling. He

looked at her dancing eyes, the sweet, red mouth smiling with a gleam of

lustrous teeth: he had an audacious inspiration.

“Well, then there’s nothing for it but--” he said, smiling back, and

finished the sentence by kissing her. Instantly her eyelids drooped,

half-closing; her lips responded passionately to his.

They were withdrawn in a moment before he could realize what he had

done, or the wonderful transformation in their relations.

“In the open air!” she cried, horrified, and ran within. He followed

her, closing the door; his heart beat tumultuously now. Nothing could

undo that moment. A wilderness of talk could not have advanced matters

so far.

Through the tall glass roof of the airy studio the sun streamed in rays

of dusty gold, dappling the imaginative clay models in their wet

wrappings, the busts, fountains, serpents, rock-work, witches, that

variegated the shelves, and lent an air of fantasy and poetry, extruding

the tedious commonplace of plebeian existence, and harmonizing with the

joyous aloofness of the scene in the court-yard its sense of existence

in and for itself, by souls attuned to Art and dedicate to loveliness.

Mrs. Wyndwood stood, saucily beautiful, leaning against a shelf, with

one hand in the pocket of her blouse, and rubbing the clay of the other

against the sides of what looked like a tin baking-dish filled with

plaster-pie. How harmonious was that tilt to her nose! He had never

noticed before how delightfully it turned up. She smiled roguishly.

“Imprudent creature! Suppose Olive had been in!”

The great moment was taken in a livelier key than he had ever dreamed.

“But _you_ were out,” he said, trying to respond to her lightness,

though he trembled in every limb. He made a movement towards her. She

shrank back against the shelf.

“Don’t!” she cried, gayly, “you’ll spoil your gloves.”

He dabbled them magnificently in a heap of plaster of Paris and advanced

nearer.

“Now you’ll spoil my blouse,” she cried, moving hastily away to dip her

hands in a bowl of water.

He tore off the gloves and threw them on the floor.

“Is that a challenge?” she laughed, drying her hands, but the laughter

died in a gurgle. He had stopped her breath. She did not struggle, but

lay in his arms silent like a tired, lovely child--at rest, at last, her

happy face pressed to his. “Oh, my dear,” she murmured, cooingly. “And

all those months you never kissed me once!”

“I did not dare,” he answered, with a pang of remorse. “You gave me no

hint that you--that you cared for me.”

A beautiful blush blossomed and faded on her face. “But you should have

understood. I needed the touch.” And her face nestled closer against

his.

Even now it seemed dream-like that this marvellous happiness should be

his; that this fastidious complex creature of fashionable London whom he

had dared to love should be pillowing her perfumed head on the shoulder

of the man who in his laborious and wretched youth had wheeled a

bird-stuffer’s barrow through Whitechapel. His life lay behind him like

a steep, arduous hill rising to this celestial cloudland.

“If I had only known,” he said, brokenly. “Oh, how I loved you that

night of the storm!”

“And how I adored you,” she confessed deliciously. “You were so brave,

so manly that day. You saved Olive’s life, you saved her for me and for

Herbert. Oh, how noble! We none of us thanked you, it was all laughter

and badinage, but you were my hero, my true, great, strong, simple man.”

And her lips sought his humbly, her eyes swimming in tears.

“Let me kiss you now for your brave deed. Ah, how I was afraid when

Herbert, looking through his glass, cried out that something had

happened to Olive, that you had swum back for her. I felt my life

growing dark. Suppose I had lost you both.”

And her mobile face grew tragic at the thought. He held her tighter.

“Eleanor! It is so good to be with you!” he articulated in a hoarse

whisper that was half a sob.

Her tragic features lightened to a winsome, reproachful smile.

“And when I came to your studio, Matthew, you gave me ... tea!”

“If I had only known, if I had only dared!”

“You must dare with a woman.”

Her arms had been resting on his shoulders--she threw them around his

neck.

“Oh, my Master--now and ever.”

Conscience slipped into paradise. He unwound her arms.

“You forget my--secret.”

She moved her chin bewitchingly upward.

“You have sealed my lips.”

He kissed them again. “And you can love me despite that? I am not worthy

of such a sacrifice.”

Her bosom heaved beneath the blouse, her eyes kindled with the old

spiritual fire, her voice rang passionately.

“You _are_ worthy! Life has been too cruel to you--you need a woman’s

heart to cherish you, you shall not be starved of the sunshine, you

shall work in happiness. Ah! that is what I have learned here in this

happy, liberal air. Art is the child of joyful labor--it is the sunshine

of life. You are sad, miserable, and it harrows my heart. Oh, if I can

bring joy and peace to the soul of a man like you, if I can indeed

inspire your Art, my wretched life will not have been wasted. You have

told me that I could, tell it me again.”

“You, and you only, can bring me joy and peace.”

She caressed his hair with a tender, protective hand. “My Matthew!” she

murmured.

“And you, Eleanor,” he faltered, tremulously; “I shall not make you

unhappy?”

“I shall be happier than I have ever been,” and her arms stole round him

again in simple trust.

“Ah, I was forgetting. Life owes _you_ happiness, too. If I dared to

think I could bring you forgetfulness of the past!”

She shuddered. Her arms unlaced themselves of their own accord. She

dropped into a chair before the table and laid them across the

moulding-dish, and buried her head in her hands. He stood by helpless,

torn by emotions, waiting till the flood of bitter memories should have

spent itself, watching her shoulders quivering, and the sunlight lying

on her hair like a consecration.

“Oh, Douglas!” she was moaning. “Did I do you wrong? Did I do you wrong?

But I meant the best; I always meant the best, God knows. And you cannot

chide me now you are dead and cold, and it is all so long ago.”

He shivered nervously. Truly women were incomprehensible, he thought. No

man could follow the leaps and turns of their emotions. They were a

higher, more ethereal order of being. But he reverenced her for her

loyalty to the unworthy dead, her punctilious self-torture, even while

he envied the man who had been privileged to call her “wife.”

He touched her hair reverently--there where the sunshine rested.

“Don’t cry, dear Eleanor.”

A great burst of sobbing shook her. “Oh, life is so difficult!” He bent

down beside her, ineffably pitiful.

“We are going to make it easier for one another,” he said, gently. His

hair touched hers. She turned her tear-flecked face, and their lips met.

“We are going to begin over again,” he murmured. She stifled her sobs

like a soothed child, and sprang up with a smile struggling through

rain-clouds.

“Yes, with you I can begin over again, Master,” and she looked into his

face with her naïve, beseeching trustfulness.

“This is a new life already,” he said, touching her blouse. She gave a

laugh of childish joy.

“Yes! yes! This is a new life--the past is dead--this is my neophyte’s

robe. Ah, it changes one, this Paris, does it not? I am an artist, and

you are my Master. It is you who have awakened me to Art! Oh, I knew

this would happen. That wonderful old woman! She’s a fortune-teller in

Bethnal Green--the Duchess of Portsdown gave me her address--and after

you were so cold to me when I came to your studio in London, I went to

see her. Such a queer, wrinkled hag, and such a dingy, wretched room, up

such a dirty flight of stairs--oh, I was afraid! But she was marvellous!

She knew I was a widow--that I had been married unhappily--that I was a

fashionable lady--though I went in my oldest clothes, and hid my rings

in my purse for fear of their being stolen. Oh! by-the-way, where have I

put them?” He found them and she slipped them on. “And she said I should

love again and be loved. You should have seen her wicked old eyes as she

spoke of love--they were like live coals. And then she predicted that I

should marry again and lead a long and happy life with a dark man,

distinguished and rich, who should inspire me to a new faith. Isn’t it

marvellous?” She took his hand and smoothed the wrist caressingly.

“It is you who have inspired me to a new faith,” he answered,

tremulously. “It is you who have awakened me to Art. Do you know what

happened to me this morning when I went to seek you out? I, too, was

reborn.”

He told her the auspicious incident--how he had been photographed as

part of the fresh young art-life.

She clapped her jewelled hands.

“It is providential--foreordained. We are to be happy.”

“Happy!” He shivered with sudden foreboding. “Another prophetess

declared I was never to be happy,” he said, sadly. “To thirst, and to

thirst, and never to quench my thirst!”

“Oh, that is all superstitious nonsense!” she cried, vehemently. “You

_must_ be happy; you _shall_ be happy; the world must not lose your Art;

_I_ will save it.”

Her face was glorified.

“But the cost to yourself,” he faltered.

“I will pay the price. You love me. For me to ruin your life--_that_

would be sin.”

She drew his head to her bosom and smoothed back the curly hair from his

forehead.

“My dear, my dear,” she murmured.

He gulped back the lump in his throat. “No, this is not sin. You have

redeemed me; I never felt so at peace with all things,” he said, in low,

religious tones. “Oh, we will shame the world--we will live high and

true. Our happiness shall radiate to all that sorrows and suffers. Our

home shall be the home of Art. It shall stand open to all the young

artists striving faithfully in poverty--it shall be a centre of

blessing. Suffering has made me morose, now I feel at one with my kind,

longing to do my truest work. Oh, God bless you, my dear.”

A startled look of alarm had come into her face. She loosed her embrace

of him.

“But, Matt! We cannot have a home.”

He had a chill of apprehension, which even the sweetness of that first

clipping of his name could not counteract.

“But we love each other!”

She waved her hands agitatedly. “The world would spurn me--”

“We will spurn the world.”

“Oh, but you are not thinking! Who would come to the house? How is it to

be a centre of blessing?”

“We will win the world’s respect. What! You and I! Are we not strong

enough? You, with your noble past--I, who come from nothing and have won

_you_.”

“You talk like a dreamer, a poet, and I love you for it. But you do not

know the world--how it ignores the realities of things.”

“Oh, I know the canting hypocrisy that puts its faith in shows, and

honors loveless marriage. I will teach it to respect a home of love, and

the work that is its fruit. You are right, happiness is the mother of

Art. Oh, how I shall work now, my dear!”

“You may overtop Raphael; you will never be a Royal Academician.”

“What has my private life to do with Art?”

“Nothing with Art, but everything with English Art. You will lose your

R.A.”

“I shall gain you.”

She shook her head.

“Why not gain both?”

“Ah, but you say it is impossible!”

“I do not say so. What need is there to wear our hearts upon our

sleeves?” She touched his sleeve now, insinuating caressing fingers.

“Darling, don’t you see how hard it would be for me to bear--I am not a

man. The worst of the scorn would be for me. Society is very hard upon

those who will not be unconventional in secret. I have not your courage

and strength. You will not shame me.”

He weakened.

“Oh, I am thoughtless,” he said, and stood miserable, unconscious of the

caressing fingers.

Then his brow lightened.

“Nobody knows I’m married. If we came back and set up house together,

people would think we had been married abroad.”

She put her hands to her face with a desperate gesture. “Oh, but I could

not bear Olive to know.”

His heart leaped. “Has Herbert told her I’m married?”

“No, she doesn’t know.”

“He is a fine fellow.”

“But she would be sure to learn it one day--it would leak out.”

“Then she would keep the secret.”

She shook her head. “You don’t know Olive,” she said from between her

palms. “She is hard on women. I would have sat to you ages ago, only I

was afraid of her sneers. I wouldn’t have her know for worlds. I used to

think her sexless.”

“But now that she is to be married--”

“She will be more conventional than ever.”

He tossed back his hair, impatiently. “Then we must dispense with

Olive.”

For a long time she did not reply. He thought his harshness towards her

friend had set her crying again. He gently forced her hands from her

face. It was flushed and pain-stricken.

“Forgive me. I have hurt you,” he said, in contrition.

“No, you do not understand. And Olive has been so good to me. She takes

charge of all my affairs--” She hesitated. “I don’t even know what my

income is, or”--with a pathetic engaging smile--”whether I have an

income at all. And I’m afraid I spend a great deal.”

He straightened his shoulders. “I am very glad of that. I will work for

you. I can wring gold from the world.” Rapid calculations flashed

through his mind--already he regretted his last year’s inactivity, the

destruction of his picture.

She was blushing adorably. “No, I could not take anything from you ...

if we lived apart. No, no.”

“Not from me? Oh, Eleanor. Then we must make our home together.”

“But don’t I tell you that is impossible?” she said, almost pettishly,

on the brink of tears. “The world would get to know the truth. There is

that Ruth Hailey you spoke of, who knows your brother, and who through

her connection with Linda Verder gets brought into contact with all

sorts of people. And your wife would hear of it, too. Unscrupulous

persons would egg her on to move. There would be blackmailing,

everything sordid and horrible.” She shuddered violently.... “Oh, you do

not know the world--you have lived with your eyes shut, fixed on inward

visions.”

He opened them now, startled to find himself lectured for want of

worldliness by this ethereal creature. She dissipated his uneasy

bewilderment by a swift transition, her face dimpled itself with

reassuring smiles. She pulled the little curly lock at his forehead with

a fascinating tug.

“Don’t be such a hot-headed Quixote, dear. There is time enough to plan

out the future. Circumstances may change--” Her face saddened. “The poor

creature may be taken ... and your idea may seem more plausible when I

have got used to it--you come with a rush and a crash--like those waves

that night.” She smiled wistfully. “And I am only a woman, and timid.

Can’t you see I have been frightened to death all this last half-hour?”

“Frightened of me?”

“No,” with a pathetic smile. “Frightened of Olive. Twenty times I

thought I caught her footsteps.”

“What if she does come! She won’t be surprised to see me here.”

“No, but I have a plan. It will be safest if she doesn’t know you’re in

Paris at all. You must leave me at once.”

His heart sank. “But when do I see you?”

“Next Sunday evening.”

“A whole week?” The sunlight seemed gone.

“On Sunday morning Olive goes to Brussels for a few days--she’s only

waiting to finish that statuette of Fate, isn’t it weird? All those

things there are Olive’s handiwork; how clever she is! I only do the

menial work of pouring in the plaster. It saves money, because--”

“Yes, yes,” he interrupted, impatiently. “And on Sunday evening?”

“You will call for me here--say about seven--you will take me to dinner,

somewhere quiet in this great free Paris.” She made a great circle with

her arms, as if enjoying the elbow-room. “And then--” she smiled

intoxicatingly, “then we can talk over the future.” Her eyes looked

heavenly promise. He caught her in his arms. This time she struggled

away.

“No, no! She may be back at any moment. I hear footsteps. You must go.”

She pushed him towards the door.

“Mayn’t I write?”

“No, Olive would see the letter.”

The footsteps passed by.

He looked back in reluctant farewell, as he fumbled at the door-handle.

She was close behind him.

She opened her arms, and his head was on her breast again. “Oh, my dear,

my dear,” she murmured, “it is hard to wait.”

Then she pushed him outside, her face grown spiritual again in its

anxiety, and she slammed the door, and he reeled like a drunken man.

Her last look haunted him--soulful, alluring, intoxicating. He was

almost sobbing with happiness. Heaven had been kind to him at last. The

balmy air of the court-yard fanned his brow. He walked on aimlessly, in

a beatific dream, past the beautiful Ionic portico, through the

corridor, into the street, no longer grimy, and so on to the Boulevards.

How happy the world was! How the sunshine streamed with its dancing

motes! How gay the kiosks with their dainty posters and the piquant

designs of great caricaturists laughing from the front pages of the

illustrated journals! How light-hearted those bourgeois drinking red

wine at the _al fresco_ tables! What a jolly, bulbous-nosed old cabman

that was who hailed him, not knowing he had quicksilver in his veins,

and must needs give his limbs to lively motion. He sauntered on at

random, buoyant, treading on sunbeams, a song at his heart, breathing in

the sense of the spacious, airy city that sparkled in the spring

sunshine, mother of nimble spirits; he crossed the river, glittering in

a long sweep, with Notre Dame rising on its island in picturesque

antiquity; the book-stalls on the quays thrilled him with a remembrance

of the joys of reading; he strode on humming a merry tune, the bustle of

traffic was a musical accompaniment to it; he stopped at a great leafy

square, alive with pedestrians, to watch the limpid water leaping from a

beautiful fountain; around him were the seductive programmes of

theatres, eloquent of artistic acting, of fine comedy, of poetic

tragedy. He strolled along, absorbing noble buildings, and churches, and

splendid public monuments. How fair life was, how marvellously

compacted! Gladness was at the heart of all things.

The city passed into his soul as never before; its radiant message of

elegance, proportion, style, sanity, unity, lucidity, exquisite

sensibility to the material, balanced by an æsthetic delight in ideas,

and the spirit of gayety all over; henceforth, thanks to Eleanor, he

would be of it, following Art for the joy of Art, out of the happiness

of the soul, sun-clear, without stagnant vapors of discontent, those

fits of spleen bred of foggy, uncouth London; he would be fixed at last,

swinging steadily on a pivot of happiness, a lover of life and a

praiser thereof. All its sweetness had been diverted from him--it had

passed to others. Now at last he would be self-centred. He rambled on,

he crossed the Pont Passy, and saw the old city rising quaint and steep

in wooded terraces. Oh, love and life! Oh, life and love! Why had people

besmirched the Creation with soilures of cynicism, plaguing the air with

pessimistic laments, graceless grunts of swine nosing garbage?

What good times he had had himself, he who had won fame and gold while

still young! And how ungraciously he had accepted these gifts of the

gods, mewling and whining like a sulky child. Surely he deserved that

hell allotted in Dante for those who had wilfully lived in sadness. The

gracious romance of life--that was what his Art should henceforth

interpret. He began to dream beautiful masterpieces, and they reminded

him that he had come to see the Salon. He retraced his steps towards the

Champs Elysées, watching the endless procession of elegant equipages

rolling steadily to and from the Bois, with their panorama of luxurious

women. He entered the Salon; the pictures delighted him, the crowd

enraptured him, a young girl’s face stirred him to a mood of paternal

benediction; he met Edward Cornpepper, A.R.A., there, and felt the

little man was his dearest friend. Cornpepper introduced him to his

newly-acquired wife, who said the Exhibition was indecent.

“You are right, my dear, there isn’t a decent picture here,” Cornpepper

chuckled, grimacing to adjust his monocle, and feeling his round beard.

“Ichabod! The glory is departed from Paris. The only chaps who can paint

nowadays are the Neo-Teutonic school. The Frenchmen are played out--they

have even lost their taste. They bought a picture of mine last year, you

remember. I palmed off the rottenest thing I’d ever done on ’em. It’s in

the Luxembourg--you go and see it, old man, and you tell me if I’m not

right. Now, mind you do! Ta, ta, old fellow. Sorry you’re not in the

Academy this year--but it’s a good advertisement for you. I think I

shall be ill myself next year. But we mustn’t talk shop. Good-bye, old

man. Oh, by-the-way, I hear your cousin’s engaged to an heiress. It’s

true, is it? Lucky beggar, that Herbert! Better than painting, eh? Ha!

ha! ha! But I knew he’d never do anything. Didn’t he win the Gold Medal,

eh? Ho! ho! ho! Well, au revoir. Don’t forget the Luxembourg. You don’t

want to wait till I’m dead and in the Louvre, what? Thanks for a

pleasant chat, and wish you better.”

Matthew shook his hand for the third time with unabated affection. What

a clever fellow Cornpepper was, and what a pretty wife he had got!

He went to his hotel to dine. The court-yard was gay with lounging,

lolling visitors, the fountain in the centre leaped and sparkled with

changing colors, like an effervescence of the city. Far into the night

he sat out on the balcony of his gilt-skied, many-mirrored bedroom,

gazing at the beautiful Boulevards stretching serenely away in the

moonlight between their gigantic edifices.

CHAPTER IX

RUTH HAILEY

How he lived through the rest of the week he never definitely

remembered. He would have willingly given the days away, but, as they

had to be filled up somehow, they left confused recollections of

theatres and ballets, of rencontres with random acquaintances, of riding

on tiny tram-cars to see the Zoological Garden in the Bois de Boulogne,

of wandering in a rag-fair, of reading modern French poetry, of visiting

the ateliers of French painters whom he knew, and sympathizing with

their grumbles against the Institute and the distribution of

decorations, while wondering inwardly why these overgrown school-boys

languished and died for lack of a bit of ribbon. What could a man want

in life but to paint and to love? State recognition? Bah! The artist was

always an Anarchist. He stood alone, self-centred.

He hobnobbed with students, too, in his new sympathy with youth and art,

and--a distinguished visitor--was taken through the great ateliers with

their rainbow-colored dados of palette-scrapings and the announcements

in every European language that new-comers must pay for drinks. He

gladly accepted a ticket for a students’ ball on the Saturday night; it

had been postponed for a few weeks through the death of a beloved

professor. He had heard much of these balls, but had never seen one, and

he counted upon it to while away that last intolerable night between him

and his happiness.

Several times during the week he had thought of going to see Ruth Hailey

in accordance with the duty that on the other side of the Channel had

seemed so pressing, but he shrank instinctively from the raking up of

memories of the old unhappy days at this joyous crisis; he was not in

the mood for extraneous emotion. Nevertheless on the Saturday afternoon,

partly for want of anything better to do, partly to keep up to himself

the pretence that she was at least one of the motives that brought him

to Paris, and partly to ascertain if she had spoken to people in England

about his wife, he set out to pay the long-projected visit. He would

feel how the ground lay, discover if she had innocently betrayed him to

anybody who might touch Mrs. Wyndwood’s circle--which might be awkward

if in a possible compromise Eleanor should ever decide to live with him

in ostensible marriage.

He had a dim, unformed idea of appealing to Ruth for silence, but he did

not really meditate invoking her sympathies; she was on the eve of

departing for the Antipodes--was perhaps already gone.

He found her hotel--it was in the Rue de Rivoli. A waiter took up his

name and forthwith brought back word that Mademoiselle would see

Monsieur Strang.

His heart was throbbing curiously as he mounted the stairs and stood

outside her door. The quick, irregular clack, clack of a type-writer

responded like an echo. He was ushered into a large plainly-furnished

sitting-room. His first vision was of a tall comely lady in a grayish

gown, writing at a table opposite the door; but this was effaced by the

slimmer figure of a younger woman approaching from the right, with a

smile of welcome and an extended hand. A moment later her smile had

faded, and her hand was on her heart, soothing its flutter. He was

shaken to his depths; behind all the bodily changes he saw the little

girl-friend of his childhood; and, indeed, the purity of her limpid,

truthful gaze was undimmed.

“Ruth!” he cried in alarm, moving forward as if to sustain her.

She drew herself up, rigid and frozen; then her face relaxed, suffused

by a wan smile and a returning flood of carmine. She held out her hand

with a nervous laugh.

“How are you, Mr. Strang? I thought it was Billy, and to see you instead

startled me.”

As he took the little hand and looked into her face, maturer than its

years, though it had not lost its olden charm, especially in the

complexion, which was marvellously pure and soft, registering every

slightest change of thought and feeling in dainty flickers of rose

across its delicate fairness, his soul was invaded by a rush of tender

memories, incongruously jostling in his brain: the thrills and raptures

of boyhood, the joys of coasting down the slopes, and snaring rabbits

and shooting partridges; the glow of skating; the delicious taste of the

home-made cakes; the songs and hymns of childhood, the firelight casting

shadows on the dusky walls, while his mother read the Bible; the drone

of the fusty-coated preacher in the little wooden meeting-house; the

thwacking of the dancers’ feet in the barn, the odors of hay and the

lowing of cattle; the gleam of the yellow-tipped mullein by the wayside

and the smell of the wild flowers in the woods; the note of the

whippoorwill in the forest at twilight; the long cranes floating over

the summer marshes; the buzz of fresh young voices in McTavit’s

school-room. All these came back--dear and desirable, steeped in tears,

softened by distance to a pensive beauty, like bawling choruses heard

from afar across still water, inextricably interwoven with all the

pieties of childhood, the simple sense of God and truth and honor and

righteousness.

He stood holding her hand, oblivious of the present, in a whirling chaos

of ancient images that melted his soul to childish tenderness, and

brought back to it the child’s clear, unquestioning perception of

spiritual ideas which had grown shadowy in the atmosphere of salons and

studios and fashionable churches, that stereoscopic vision of the saint

and the child which sees the spiritual solid. But Ruth disengaged her

fingers at last, blushing under the kindly smile of the comely lady.

“This is Mr. Matthew Strang, Linda,” she said. “Mr. Strang, let me

introduce you to Mrs. Verder.”

He bowed: “Oh, I have heard of Linda Verder,” he said, smiling.

“And I have heard more of Matthew Strang,” she replied, beamingly.

“That is scarcely possible,” he murmured.

She laughed with a bird-like trill. “Oh, I wasn’t alluding merely to

your public career, though our sweet Ruth has gotten a whole album full

of newspaper-cuttings about that. But it is of you yourself and your

childhood that I have heard so much. So you see I _have_ the advantage

of you. But you will excuse me, I know; I have to go out. You needn’t

bother about those letters, dear. We’re nearly through with them.” And

with an affectionate nod to Ruth and a beneficent smile to Matthew, she

left the room. He was reddening: he was beginning to feel uncomfortable

under Mrs. Verder’s smiles, which in their insinuation of old

sweetheartship made it certain that Ruth had never mentioned his

marriage to her friend even; to hear that the forgotten Ruth had been

following his career all those years gave him an odd pathetic shiver.

She and Billy--and Heaven knew what others--were sunning themselves in

the mere reflected rays of that fame which had left him cold.

She stood away from him, shy and equally embarrassed, the blood ebbing

and flowing in the pure, soft cheek.

“Won’t you sit down?” she said at last.

“Oh, thank you!” he replied, and took a distant chair.

She sat down behind her type-writer, facing him. There was a silence.

She was the first to break it.

“I was so sorry to read you were ill.”

“Oh, it was nothing,” he murmured.

“I am so pleased we hadn’t left--we are sailing next Tuesday. It is so

good of you to come and see me, with the many claims that you must have

on your time.”

“It is a pleasure to be reminded of old times. I was sorry I missed you

the time you called at my house,” he said, awkwardly.

“I was very sorry, too.”

“But you know I work at my studio,” he explained, trying not to flush.

“There is no room at home.”

“Yes, I know. But I didn’t care to call there and interrupt your work.

Billy showed me the little room where you used to work in the olden

days. I thought it real nice of you to turn it into a study for him, and

to take care of him as you are doing. He sent me a story of his. No; it

wasn’t very good, poor fellow!” she added, seeing the question in his

face. “Rather too full of passionate love-making.”

“Not published?”

“No--in manuscript. I returned it to him type-written. He was

enraptured. He said it was like seeing himself in print.”

“Ah! we are not so used to the type-writer as you Americans.”

“It is coming in fast, though; even into your slow, old country, if you

consider it yours,” she added, slyly. “I am delighted to see how many

offices the new-fangled machine has crept into; in two years it will be

in every business office.”

“Why delighted? Have you or Mrs. Verder shares in the patent?”

“No, no,” she said, gently. “Don’t you see it is a new occupation for

women?”

He smiled.

“Ah, I remember. That’s your hobby.”

“Oh, not hobby, Mr. Strang, not hobby. It is my life-work. But I can’t

expect you to sympathize with these sordid, practical things,” she said,

smiling. “Your life is devoted to the gospel of the Beautiful.”

“Oh, but I do sympathize,” he cried, remorsefully. “I think it is very

fine of you.”

She shook her head, her smile fading.

“You don’t--you can’t. You are outside the circle of the material

worries of the poor; or, what is worse, the genteel. And nobody but a

woman can know the tragic pettiness of the life-struggle for single

girls--the stifled aspirations, the abortive longings, the tears in the

night. Christ would have understood. But He was not a man.”

He saw the blur of emotion veil her eyes ere she turned her head hastily

away. He felt his own sight growing dim; an understratum of his

consciousness admired the flow of her language, and divined platform

experiences. He had never before thought of her as clever.

She recovered herself in a moment, and resumed, playfully:

“No, if you were a black-and-white artist you would have sketched Mrs.

Verder with corkscrew ringlets and crying for trousers. We do want the

Franchise and the right to dress as we please, but these are only

incidental aspects of the movement for the independence of women, though

they lend themselves most readily to caricature. The woman of the future

is simply the working woman. All we really want is to make girls

economically independent of marriage; able to choose their mates from

love instead of selling themselves for a home.”

He could not meet her frank eyes; he was suddenly reminded of his own

marriage. What would this stainless soul think of him if she knew he had

sold himself, or--worse--if she knew why he had come to her this

afternoon? He murmured, surveying the carpet, that he knew life was hard

for girls, but that he hoped she at least had not been unhappy.

“I? Oh! I’ve been as happy as the next girl, though I’ve had my trials,”

she said, cheerily, between smiles and tears. “But I am grateful to God

for them, else I should never have learned to sympathize as I do, and I

should not have served the Master. My life might have been wasted in

mere happiness.”

Mere happiness! The phrase went through him like a sword.

“But _you_ had no need to work for a living,” he said, dubiously.

“Indeed I had! I had nothing.”

“You had a father.”

“Of a kind. But I quarrelled with him. You heard that, of course.”

He had heard of it, of course, but her affairs had made trivial dints

upon his consciousness.

“Why did you quarrel with him?” he asked.

Her face became a crimson mask. She lowered her head.

“Oh--I beg your pardon,” he stammered in distress. “Of course I had no

right to ask.”

She was silent, her fingers nervously picking out letters on the

type-writer. Then her eyes met his unflinchingly again.

“No, in a way you have a right to ask,” she said, uneasily. “I don’t see

why I shouldn’t tell you--it’s so long ago. You know I became the

Deacon’s book-keeper?”

He nodded, wondering.

“He made me keep all his accounts. I learned all about his affairs.

Well, one day, looking over the books, I made a discovery.”

“Yes?”

She hesitated. Her face was still fiery. The image of the mumbling,

quid-chewing Deacon, with the roundabout methods of arriving at his

point, rose vivid to his memory. He remembered his childish strain to

understand “Ole Hey’s” good advice. Pop! Pop! Pop! It was like the

clack, clack, clack of the type-writer under Ruth’s nervous, unconscious

fingers. But what was this she was saying to the accompaniment of the

erratic automatic music?

“I discovered that he was cheating you, or rather your sister and Abner

Preep, that he had always bamboozled your father, that the mortgage was

more than paid off long before, aside from the work he had gotten out of

your brothers and sisters.” She paused, then hastened on with a lighter

tone. “So, of course, being a foolish, hot-headed girl, I wouldn’t stay

any longer in his house unless he repaid you, and equally of course he

refused, knowing I wouldn’t make a scandal, and so I went off to the

only relative I had in the world--my mother’s sister in Portland, Maine.

She was too poor to give me more than food and shelter. But my knowledge

of book-keeping soon got me a place in a store. And ever since I have

earned my own bread, Heaven be thanked.”

She was not looking at him now; her fingers were still lightly tapping

the letters into combinations that spelled only embarrassment. “Perhaps

I oughtn’t to have told you--but you won’t take action now, will you?”

“No, seeing that the money has been paid!” he cried, hoarsely, with a

sudden intuition. He sprang up agitatedly. “You sent us all that money

anonymously--from Maine!”

Her head drooped lower. “Oh, I felt I oughtn’t to say anything,” she

cried in vexation.

“But you did, didn’t you?”

“It was such a trifle, anyhow,” she said, deprecatingly.

“It was a fortune then--five hundred dollars!”

“I could do no less. There was no other call for the money I earned in

those first few years, while my aunt still lived. And I thought that

perhaps--” He came towards her. “That perhaps--that perhaps it might

help you in your career--my aunt corresponded with my poor mother’s

friends in Cobequid Village--I knew how you were slaving and sending

money to your folks.”

“God bless you, Ruth.”

“I hope it was a little help to you, Matt.” He thrilled under the name,

spoken for the first time. “I have often liked to think it was--that I

had a wee finger in the making of a great artist.”

Her words cut him to the heart. How could he tell her that her money had

come too late? He was about to murmur something, but she stopped him.

“No, don’t answer me for fear you should dispel my illusion. It has been

such a joy to me when I read about your rapid rise to say to myself:

‘Ah, perhaps _we_ know something.’ But half the joy was in the secrecy;

now you have found me out, don’t take away the relics of my pleasure.”

“But why should you bother to read things about me?” he murmured, only

half sincerely, for another and more agitating suspicion was fast

germinating in his breast.

She flashed a quick glance up at him as he stood over her, then looked

down again indifferently, her sweet mouth quivering. “Oh, why should I

not be proud of knowing, if only in boyhood, the only great man our

township ever produced?”

But he had now been trained in woman’s looks. Rosina and Eleanor had

taught him much, and the thought that was borne in upon him now--the

conviction that Ruth, too, loved him, that she had always cherished her

childish affection, though his own had been swamped by his craving for

Art--was not the complacent conviction of a coxcomb. It was a chilling

agony. It pierced his breast like a jagged icicle. He had an appalling

sense as of responsibility for a ruined life. The image of “Aunt Clara”

flashed suddenly before him--careworn, faded, broken-down, unlovely. Was

that to be the end of Ruth--the sweet playmate, the great soul?

“And you, too, have done something in life,” he said, as if to reassure

himself, trying to curve his trembling lips to a smile.

She looked up frankly at him. “In so far as I have been able to help

Linda to help other girls.”

“And do you meditate--helping Linda all your life?”

“With God’s help.”

“Even,” he essayed to smile again, “even if you marry?”

“Oh, but I won’t marry,” she said, quickly, and kept her face bravely

raised to his, though the tell-tale rose was coming and going on her

transparent skin.

“Not even”--his smile was a ghastly caricature--”to spite the

caricaturists?”

She smiled a faint response. “Not even for that. Has not Linda

sacrificed herself on that altar? It’s true she’s a widow, but still--”

He could not help asking the question: “But why won’t you marry?”

“Because I don’t want to. Is that a woman’s reason?” And she smiled

again.

“Ruth!” he cried, frenziedly, in a strange mixture of emotions. “I am

not worthy to kneel to you!”

She opened her eyes, wondering: “Because I prefer celibacy? Because my

life is happy enough as it is; because, thanks to Mrs. Verder, it is

sufficiently filled with activity and movement?”

“Oh, if it is, if it is!” he cried, almost hysterically.

“Certainly it is. You men are all so mistaken about women. Marriage may

be a necessity for some women, but not for all--oh, thank God! not for

all. It may be harder for Linda, who has known a husband’s love--but for

me? Oh, I am perfectly happy.” She rose and moved away from him, and

began to walk restlessly up and down, talking rapidly. “It is perfectly

absurd, this making marriage and happiness synonyms. Novels end with

marriage, and that is called a happy ending. Good heavens! It is quite

as often an unhappy beginning! If you had seen the things I have seen,

heard the tales women have told me! Even the women you would imagine the

most enviable are full of worries. Why, look at your own wife, Mr.

Strang, who has everything to make her happy.” And her lips parted in a

faint smile.

He turned his face away. “Did she also tell you tales of woe?” he said,

with a forced laugh.

“Well, not precisely woe, but plenty of anxiety about the children, and

about the dishonesty of her helps, and she seemed rather poorly, too. I

hope you left her strong and well.”

“Thank you,” he murmured, flushing.

“How proud she is of you,” Ruth went on. “I was so glad to find that she

really appreciated you. I had often wondered. And it isn’t only on

account of your importance, Matthew Strang! She told me you were

goodness itself, which, of course, I knew, and that you had long wished

her to move to a better neighborhood, only she was afraid to put you to

expense. What a good woman she must be! And so pretty too!”

“Do you think so?” he muttered. His face was still averted.

“Yes, and I seem to remember her in your earliest pictures. She’s the

woman in ‘Motherhood,’ isn’t she?”

“I think she sat for the figure,” he said, hesitatingly. “I couldn’t

afford models then. I wish you weren’t going so soon. I should so like

to do a sketch of you--something to remember you by.”

She shook her head. “We have so much to do this week. I shouldn’t have

time.”

“I am sorry. Perhaps we shall never meet again,” he said in low tones.

“I never even had a photograph of you--I could do a sketch from that.”

“I don’t think I have any. You did a sketch of me once,” she reminded

him, “but I’m not going to give you that. That’s precious--an example

of your first manner.” The gay note in her voice sounded rather

strained. “Don’t you remember? You sent it me when you first went to

Halifax, please don’t remember how many years ago.”

But he did remember. And he remembered, too, how he had sent it her as a

slight return for the _Arabian Nights_. He had lost her gift (through

the carelessness of Jack Floss) very soon after, but she cherished his

still.

He moved to her side, watching her rummage among heaps of papers. He saw

the backs of two photographs, and picked them up. One was a portrait of

Linda Verder, the other of himself.

“Both public celebrities,” she said, with a little confused laugh. “I’ve

never attained to the shop-windows, so naturally I am scarcer.” She

continued her search, and at last turned up something. “Ah, there’s an

old one--or rather a young one. Me at sixteen! Goodness, to think I’ve

still got that!”

His flaccid nerves sent fresh moisture to his eyes as he gazed at the

simple picture of the sweet, delicate, girlish face, with large eyes

luminous with dreams, looking out shyly upon life in a sort of wistful

wonder and expectation, unconscious, unprophetic of the blank years when

eyes grow dim with sudden unsought tears.

His voice was broken as he said: “Thank you. This is the picture I would

most have wished to have. Henceforward I shall think of you, earnest,

truthful, aspiring ... as you have thought of me all these years. And

now I suppose I must not keep you any longer from your duties.”

“Oh, they are nothing. It is your time that is precious, I know. I am

rejoiced to have had this glimpse of you in your fame and happiness. I

shall always remember this afternoon. Good-bye, Mr. Strang.” She held

out her hand.

He put his, with the portrait, behind his back. “No, I won’t,” he said,

petulantly. “Not if you call me that.”

She dropped her hand with a sad smile.

“You see I belong to the rejected, Matt.”

He quivered as at a thrust.

“No, you are of the elect, of the saints of this earth.”

Her smile took on the wistfulness of her early portrait. They stood

looking at each other in a tender embarrassment.

“Oh, by-the-way, Matt, you will not mind my speaking of her ... she

belongs to me a little as well as to you, you know ... I went to see

your poor mother before I left for Europe.”

He shuddered.

“Did she recognize you?” he said, in a half-whisper.

She shook her head. Her face was drawn with the pain of the memory. “But

she is quite gentle, except when she quotes texts. They give her simple

housework to do--it provides a vent for her activity ... marriages are

not always happy, you see.” A wan smile flitted across her features. “I

shall go to see her again. Poor creature! I forgot her when I called you

happy. The thought of her must always sadden you.”

He would not trust his voice to reply. He transferred the photograph to

his left hand, and held out the right in silence. She put her hand into

his.

“Good-bye, Matt; perhaps forever.”

He struggled to speak.

“Good-bye, Ruth.” He bent nearer. “May I not kiss you ... for auld lang

syne?”

She withdrew her hand. Her voice was tremulous and low. “We are not

playmates now, Matt.”

He held up the photograph.

“Then I will kiss the girl I used to know.”

He pressed his lips reverentially to it.

She smiled sadly.

“Good-bye again, dear Matt. God bless you.”

He hurried from the room, overwhelmed with emotion. The door closed upon

him, and he leaned against the balustrade for a moment to recover

himself.

Clack! clack! clack! clack! clack!

It was the steady, business-like clatter of determined work. She had

taken up the burden of Duty again.

CHAPTER X

THE MASTER

He half groped his way down the stairs. In this mist of tears all things

were obscured, even the image of Eleanor Wyndwood.

No, one thing was clear--the figure of the sweet Puritan woman with her

simple righteousness.

He emerged into the Rue de Rivoli with its pretentious architecture, its

glittering shop windows, its bustle of life; across the road the gardens

of the Tuileries stretched away in the sunshine; but the gentle figure

stood between him and Paris. He tried to shake her off, to think of the

transcendent raptures that awaited him on the morrow; he tried to see

Eleanor’s face steadily, but it was all wavering lines like a reflection

in storm-shaken water. He bethought himself of selecting the secluded

restaurant and hiring the private room for the dinner, but the figure of

Ruth resurged, blotting Eleanor’s out. He took out her photograph and

kissed it again. “She’s a little angel,” he cried, aloud. And then, from

that chaos of ancient memories, freshly stirred up, came like an echo

Mad Peggy’s cry, “She’s a little angel....” A girl passing him laughed

in his face, and he put away the portrait, flushing and chilled to the

marrow.

He told himself he must soak himself in Paris and forget her. He walked

towards the Grand Boulevards, trying vainly to absorb and assimilate the

gayety of the streets. He returned to his hotel and dressed, and dined

with dainty dishes and sparkling wines, such as Herbert himself would

have recommended. But the quivering roots of his being had been laid

bare; his soul vibrated with intangible memories, and the image of Ruth

still possessed his imagination--the candid eyes, the pure skin. As ever

his soul was touched through the concrete.

After dinner he wandered about the gay city, adding the red of his

cigar-tip to the feverish dusk athrob with a myriad stars above and a

myriad lights below; the soft spring air was charged with the

pleasurable hum of ceaseless pedestrians; the theatres and music-halls

and dancing places blazoned themselves upon the night; the great

restaurants flared within and without, their pavement tables thronged

with light-hearted men and pretty women, gossiping, laughing, clinking

glasses. Women, everywhere women. They looked out even from the

illustrated papers of the illumined kiosks. The shining city seemed to

waft an incense of pleasure up to the stars; to breathe out an aroma of

sinless voluptuousness that rose like a thank-offering for life. His

heart expanded to all this happiness; he felt himself being caught up by

the great joyous wave, and Eleanor Wyndwood’s face came back, radiant

and seductive. But Ruth Hailey was still at his side, and ever and anon

he saw her as in her later guise--stern, sorrowful, negativing; she

stood out against the whole city.

He seated himself before one of the innumerable little marble

_guéridons_. He was at the cross-roads of the great arteries dominated

by the fulgent façade of the Opera House, where he could watch the

perpetual currents of gladsome life. He observed the countless couples

with emotion, striving to concentrate himself on the thought of his

imminent happiness, when the love that sustained the world and made it

sustainable should be his at last; when he should become as other men,

living the natural life of the race and the sexes in sympathetic fusion.

But the figure of Ruth Hailey stood firm amid the swirling crowds, and

her pure eyes shamed his thought, and filled his breast with an aching

tenderness for the poor human atoms he had deserted--for Rosina, for

Billy, for “Aunt Clara”--for whom there was no happiness and no natural

life. He fought against this obsession of Ruth’s spirit, he struggled to

fix his vision on the glitter and the gayety, but he had to see her

standing like a rock or a tower, four-square against smiling,

treacherous seas.

But if he went back to Rosina in honorable acknowledged union, then

farewell to Society! To take her about with him was out of the

question; she would be more unhappy than he in those high glacial

latitudes of humanity. Well, what was Society to him? He could shake it

off as easily as the Micmac of his childhood shook off the clothes of

Christendom. To be shut out from Society were no privation for him. He

had the advantage of his fellow-artists, who sacrificed at its shrine

and were sacrificed to it. He could couch on fir boughs, he had lived on

bread and water. This constant concern with wines and cookery, with

couches and carriages; this gorging and gormandizing and

self-pampering--did it add dignity to life? Was it worth the hecatomb of

hearts and souls offered up for it--this low luxury of the higher

classes? Was not simplicity the note of greatness--in life as in Art?

And howsoever simple the complex comfort of their lives might seem to

those born to it, was it for artists to imitate this lowest side of the

upper classes, especially if it frittered away their Art? Was it for

Bohemia to ape Philistia, and for Art--the last of the rebels against

the platitudinization of life--to bow the knee and swear allegiance to

the vulgar ideals of fashion? They had drawn him even from boyhood,

these showy ideals; from the days when he had peered wistfully into the

cricket-ground at Halifax. But he was done with boyhood now.

Ah, but if he went back to Rosina--and the new thought struck a chill as

of graveyard damps--it was all over with his Art. That, just beginning

to revive under the inspiration of Eleanor Wyndwood, would be a sheer

impossibility under the daily oppression of Rosina with her kitchen

horizon. His imagination would be clogged with the vapors of cabbage.

And of the old bad work he had had enough. He would retire from Art as

from Society, and the Exhibitions should know him no more. He would go

out of the business; that was all it was, he told himself with a bitter

smile. His fame was a bauble, a bagatelle. For all it mattered to him it

might have been his dead uncle, Matthew Strang, whose name was on the

lips of strangers. There was still work in the world for an honest man

to do; he remembered again that his hands could wield more than the

brush; besides, he had a little capital now, Rosina had still her

income. Perhaps they would go back to Nova Scotia and buy a farm. They

would sow and reap, far from the glare of cities, and the sweet, simple

sun and rain would bless the work of their hands. His life would be

joyless, but perchance his soul would be at peace.

Yes, but to give up Art! Art, which was the meaning of his life!

Rosina’s life stood for nothing. It was out of all proportion to give up

his for hers. Had he not suffered enough? Had he not already expiated

his marriage, the hapless union he had entered into when distracted by

illness and disgrace and hunger, when perhaps his whole future had

hinged--such were the tragi-whimsical turns of life--on his reluctance

to change his last two dollars?

He rose and walked about restlessly through the glistening streets.

Everywhere restaurants, open-air tables, men, women. He wandered to

Montmartre. More restaurants, more couples, cafés, cabarets, queer

entertainments: _Le Chat Noir, Le Rat Mort_, the red sails of the famous

Mill turning tirelessly, lights, gayety, women, always women, of all

shades of prettiness and piquancy, with rosy cheeks and lips not always

painted, and eyes that could shine without bismuth. He walked back

through the Grand Boulevards--they were one flush of life.

But the reasoning was inexorable. He had sacrificed Rosina to his Art;

Art had slipped through his fingers, but Rosina remained none the less

sacrificed. Now his Art must be sacrificed to Rosina--the atonement was

logical. That was not a surrender, he told himself angrily, to Ruth

Hailey’s view of life--a view whose narrowness he and everybody around

him had outgrown. He refused to recognize, in the face of this radiant

Paris, that each human soul came into the world to sacrifice its

happiness to other human souls. That seemed to him a preposterous

paradox rather than a solution; a world of reciprocal whipping-boys was

an absurdity, and, at any rate, if such were the scheme of creation, it

did not work at all with the gross run of mankind, to say nothing of

animals. The only reason for going back to Rosina must be honestly to

fulfil his side of the bargain. She had done her part, he must do his.

That his return to her meant the ruin of his life and his life-work was

not her concern; these larger issues were too wide for her

comprehension; she loved her husband and she desired him. That was

enough. He owed himself to her, and to shirk his obligation was as

dishonorable as to disown a debt. He had paid off the Stasborough

store-keeper, although absolved by bankruptcy; he must be equally

honorable with Rosina, though his life had been bankrupted. Practically

his Art had always been sacrificed to her; it was her pettiness that had

driven him to produce in haste for the market, so as to escape

indebtedness to her; well, let the sacrifice be consummated.

He had come to the Place de la Concorde--it seemed a fairy-land of

romantic lights, a dance of fire-flies; it wooed him towards the calm

and solitude of the river. He leaned on the parapet and saw the sombre,

fire-shot water stretching away in marvellously solemn beauty, hushed

and lonely, its many-twinkling perspective of green and red and yellow

gleams palpitating in the air dim with a yearning poetry. He felt the

presence of Ruth Hailey at his side; she looked like the photograph now;

he held her little hand and gazed into her candid eyes. Good God! This

girl had loved him all those long years, and would be hopelessly

faithful even unto death.

But if he went back to Rosina, what of Eleanor Wyndwood? Would he spoil

her life, too? and more culpably than he had spoiled Ruth Hailey’s? He

sighed wearily; it was impossible to do wrong and have the result

simple. Life was so intercomplicated. But he had been honest with

Eleanor, thank heaven; she knew the truth about his life; he would be

honest with her to the end. He would tell her the truth now. The same

noble, uncalculating simplicity that had accorded him friendship, that

had been ready to give him love, would bear her triumphantly through the

new trial. He remembered her brave words: “If I did not suffer I should

think I had not grown.” Perhaps there would be consolation for both in

the thought that she remained unsullied before the world.

He crossed the river, and his mood changed. He got towards the Latin

Quarter, and wandered into the “Boule Miche” amid the students’

restaurants, where young humanity sat in its couples again, amorous and

gay; every place was full within and without, and there was the gurgle

of liquids with the sounds of singing and laughter; he was back again

amid the blithe, insouciant, easy-going life of the eternal

undergraduate, with the local variation of bocks; rakish young men

danced through the restaurants arm in arm in tipsy merriment; poets with

lack-lustre visages and tumbled hair imbibed vermouth, clinking glasses

with their mistresses; the smoky air vibrated with irresponsible gayety;

it was full of invitations to careless happiness, joyous levity,

forgetfulness of an austere view of life. Puritanism seemed a form of

dementia, asceticism a sunless folly. The atmosphere gained upon him. He

tossed off a bock, then walked recklessly past Mrs. Wyndwood’s studio.

The whole court-yard was in darkness, but he thought of to-morrow night,

and it glowed as with bonfires of joy. He resolved to sup famously. He

jumped into a victoria and drove to a fashionable restaurant. It was

near midnight; the theatres had emptied, but the streets were only the

fuller. He passed through rooms full of dazzling women in gorgeous

evening costumes, sipping champagne; women, always women: the city

blossomed with them like roses. He ordered some oysters and chablis, and

forgot to eat; opposite him a self-conscious celebrity of the

footlights, blazing with diamonds, held her court, surrounded by a bevy

of dandies; behind him a black-eyed _demi-mondaine_ in red playfully

rapped her cavalier’s knuckles; at the next table the exuberant

liveliness of a supper party diverted him; he drank, drank, listening

greedily to the gay repartees. Life should be joy, joy, joy, he thought.

That was what modern life lacked, gray with problems, wrinkled with

thought. These people lived--lived in splendid insolence under the

midnight sun. There was a touch of bigness that appealed to him in their

arrogant vitality. Society was an organized insipidity, afraid of life.

The figure of Ruth Hailey rose rebuking; he paid the bill and went out.

But his heart cried, ached for happiness. Ah, no! He could not give up

so young; go into a living grave. He roved the Boulevards again. The

beautiful city solicited him, rouged and perfumed, clad in shining

garments, with star-gemmed hair. But the virginal figure of Ruth Hailey,

with sweet shy eyes, stood against the city. Paris seemed garish beside

her.

He was fluctuating again. It seemed as if the simple girl would draw him

away from all the joys of life. Was there no means of ridding himself of

her haunting presence? A grotesque mask looked out of a cab. Ah! the

fancy ball! He had forgotten. That would lay the ghost of his disordered

imagination. He felt in his pocket and found the ticket; he hastened to

the scene of revelry. A clatter of cabs and a blaze of lights--he had

arrived.

The first glimpse within was exhilarating, provoking, dazzling,

overwhelming; he had a confused sense of a hall of a thousand lights and

mirrors, reeking with scent and heat, reverberant with music and shrieks

and laughter, white with the whirling gleam of semi-nude women, and

motley with the rainbow hues and multiplied reflections of male

masqueraders; a mad, joyous orgy, the diabolical medley of a glittering,

tinselled pantomime and an opium-eater’s nightmare. Ah, here was

oblivion of Ruth Hailey at last, and he eagerly took up a position on a

raised platform that ran along the side of the gigantic ball-room,

trying to catch the contagion of the scene, and ready to rush into the

heart of the devil-may-care jollity. The gleeful, palpitating pageant--a

twisted, tangled kaleidoscopic rally of riotous color and flesh

tones--tore past him, dancing, leaping, shrieking, wantoning, clowning,

kissing, uncouth as the gargoyles of Notre Dame and brilliant as the

midnight Boulevard: Japanese figures and demons, gladiators in cuirasses

and bathing drawers, Gallic warriors in skins, brawny barbarians in

blankets, Amazons with brass breasts, a savage in a girdle of

fig-leaves, a real Samoan girl with coal-black hair in the convoy of her

Russian lover in a tall white hat, a boy as a German girl, and an

elderly woman as a gendarme with orange blossoms in her hair; one man

with a helmet crowned by a black cat, and another with a mock broken

head, reddened bandages, and a hideous stream of blood on his

shirt-front. And women--always women; a few masked, but most bare-faced,

shining with flowers and flesh; models of all sorts and conditions, some

with artistic dresses designed by their favorite students, some with

tarnished gaudery; blondes, brunettes of every nationality--French,

English, Greek, Italian, Creoles, Negresses, diversely dowered; frail

anæmic women, fervid gypsy-like women, saucily splendid women, soft

sleepy women with languorous black eyes, sweet lily-like women, big

blowzy women, tall febrile women, little demoniac women, all content to

take life as a flash of leaping flame flickering out to an early

darkness. And as they danced and laughed and romped and shouted, the fun

rose to hysterical frenzy; four masked men bore the queen of the models,

sinuous in complete fleshings, niched in an outspread gigantic fan;

before it a Druid and a Bacchante danced backward; behind it seethed a

vast picturesque procession of women mounted on their cavaliers’

shoulders, smoking cigarettes and waving lighted red and green lanterns;

at its sides girls pirouetted frantically, foot in mouth; the brazen

orchestra clanged--the procession defiled, frolicking, round and round

the hall, roaring a students’ marching chorus; a wave of hysteria ran

through the assembly, mighty, magnetic, compulsive; and Matthew Strang

waved his arms and shouted and sang with the best. Joy, joy, joy, this

was your true artistic interpretation of life. Away with this modern

morbidity! He was one in soul with all the great artists, all the

Masters who had had their royal way in life. O royal Eleanor! O rare

Eleanor! fit mate for a mighty artist! Then supper came, and he fought

for some in the balconies, amid the roar of voices, and the rattle of

knives, and the shouts for the maddened waiters, and the indescribable

exhalations of food and wine and smoke and hot air and scented flesh.

The half-deserted dancing floor was littered with champagne capsules,

bits of lanterns, ends of cigarettes, fragments of dresses, spangles,

morsels of fur. After supper the frolic grew more intoxicating, the

gayety more reckless; sweet demure-looking girls gave themselves to

high-kicking and lascivious movement; they obliged with the _danse du

ventre_; in a corner a woman turned somersaults from sheer

light-heeledness, a bashi-bazouk trundled a hoop through the centre of

the room, a band of fifty dancers with joined hands ran amuck among the

yelling crowd. Matthew Strang’s senses ached with the riot of color and

the rollick of figures and the efflorescence of femininity, and the

tohu-bohu of this witches’ sabbath. And then a strange ancient thought

struck him afresh--the same grotesque thought that after his father’s

death had weighed upon his childhood: very soon all these scintillating,

whirling figures would lie still and cold, frozen in death. They

suddenly became nothing but marionettes in a clock-work mechanism

destined to run down. And then the girlish form that had hovered mistily

in his neighborhood throughout all the tumultuous hours grew clear

again, and against this pandemoniac background the inexorable figure of

Ruth Hailey rose, simple and virginal, with sweet shy eyes.

When he came back to consciousness of the revellers, they had formed a

human amphitheatre, an inner circle lying on the ground, and the next

squatting, and the next kneeling, and the next half standing, and the

last but one erect, and the last of all surmounted by shouldered girls,

and in the centre of this human amphitheatre a beautiful young nude

model with ruddy brown hair struck graceful attitudes. The cold blue

light of dawn fell through a semicircular window overhead and mingled

weirdly with the yellowish electric light, lending a strange, wan,

unearthly hue to all these painted, perspiring faces.

The atmosphere seemed unbearably mephitic. He sallied shamefacedly into

the street. It was Sunday morning, stainless and fresh and blue. The

sunrise brooded over the sleeping gray-etched city in sacred splendor.

The sun was like a gigantic bowl of pure gold with a refracted cover

separated from it by a rift of cloud. Around it the sky was dappled with

lines and splashes and a ring or two of pale sulphur, ending to the

south in a narrow gulf of green. And all this loveliness of color was

spread on two amorphous islands of amber-gray in an ocean of pale-blue

sky, across which a few fleecy clouds sailed swan-like.

He had a perception of the divine, speaking through the silence of

beauty. And the world was asleep or at riot.

Ah! this should have been the message of his Art. Each morn the sunrise

spoke its flaming word unheard; it was the artist’s function to stir the

world to the perception of the sublimity and poetry that lay all around

unheeded; to uplift its eyes to the loveliness of realities, realities

solid as rocks, yet beautiful as dreams; visionary and tangible; the

great verities of sun and sea and forest, of righteousness and high

thinking; beautiful and elemental.

Too late! Too late! Art was over now. Not to his hand had the mission

been given; once he had thought to feel the sacred fire in his bosom;

but he knew now that the mission was not for him. He had failed.

The great streets stretched under the blue dawn bathed in sacred

freshness. The stir of night was passing into the stir of morning. The

sleepy yawn of returning revellers was met by the sleepy yawn of

early-risen artisans. Two horrible hags of rag-pickers, first astir of

Parisians, were resting their baskets on a bench; he heard them

rapturously recalling the excellence of the soup they had made from the

bones, picked clean by dogs, that they had gathered from the citizens’

ash-pans.

Ah, not all the world was gay. He had been surveying only the sparkling

bubbles and froth of Paris. Below flowed the sober, orderly, industrious

civic life, with its bottom dregs of misery. All the great cities were

full of dolorous figures, every by-way and alley swarmed with sickly

faces, pale fruits of a congested civilization. He had always kept his

eye on those happier than he; now he was reminded of how much more than

the man in the street he had drawn in the lottery of the fates. He

remembered the saying of a street scavenger he had come across in his

days of destitution. “I’m neither hungry nor dry, so what have I to

grumble about, mate?” What, indeed, had he, Matthew Strang, to grumble

about? There did not seem to be enough happiness to go round. Who was

he, to be selected for a special helping? Who was he more than his mate

the scavenger, more than any other of the human souls he had met in his

diversified career, more than his fellow-lodgers in the slums of Holborn

or Halifax, or his fellow-passengers on board _The Enterprise_, or the

blind woman who caned chairs in the basement of the house of the

Rotherhithe bird-stuffer? Why should he be happy?

It was like a new thought, luminous and arrestive. And then it flashed

upon him that all this glitter of gayety that had dazzled his covetous

eyes, even if it were not half an illusion, was infinitely subdivided;

each person could only have a minute share in the overwhelming total,

and even this quantum of joy must be alloyed with the inevitable

miseries of the human lot. This was the fallacy that in London, too, had

added the sting of envy to his unhappiness; he had lumped together all

the pleasure and splendor and happiness of the capital, forgetting that

though it could all be lacked by one man, it could not be possessed by

one. And to look at life from the outside was childish--it was like

reading paragraphs about people in the newspapers. How happy he himself

loomed in biographical summaries! Poor Rosina! Poor Aunt Clara! Poor

Billy! What happiness for these?

They were foolish, fretful creatures, all of them; in the jargon of the

drawing-rooms, bourgeois, vulgar, impossible, too low even for the

stigma of “suburban”; but their lives were as important to them as his

life to him. Each soul was the centre of its own world. If he could

understand them, and they could not understand him, the gain was to him.

He was strong, therefore he must supplement their weakness; not because

of any ethics or theology, simply because he was stronger. For sheer

pity he must give up his life to theirs; sacrifice his Art to their

happiness. He must adapt himself to their points of view, since they

could not adapt themselves to his; if for Rosina the world turned on the

price of beef, he must teach himself to be interested in the price of

beef. He had found it easy enough on the day when they had gone

a-marketing together at Halifax. He saw her as then, buoyant, youthful,

gay, even pretty; was it not he who had made her shrewish, sorrowful,

unlovely? How nobly reticent she had been about his neglect of her!

Coble had died thinking her ideally happy, boastfully proud of his

son-in-law. And after all, there was an excellent side to her economical

instincts; she did not long for diamonds and dinner-parties like the

wives of other artists; nay, wiser, perhaps, than he, she had known how

to content herself with her own station. Even Tarmigan must have

approved of her as an artist’s wife. Yes, he must go back to her and

his children, not out of any deference to the marriage-tie, but as

individual to individuals.

He arrived at his hotel. To his astonishment it was in full

illumination; he heard the strains of dance-music from within. He peeped

into the magnificent dining-room; it was become a ball-room, and sober

couples were waltzing. Women, always women; irreproachable this time;

elegant in shimmering silks. The world of fashion was dancing

there--dancing on behalf of a charity.

He wavered again; this was the world he was leaving forever, the world

of soft things, the world of thought and pleasant speech, the world of

art and books and music, the caressing world that praised pictures, and

the makers thereof: the world of Eleanor Wyndwood. But the fight was

over; in every sense, he told himself, the fight was over. He must go to

Eleanor and tell her that happiness was not for either; she would be

strong and fine, she would strengthen him in his obedience to the higher

voice. But oh--and her face swam up vivid again--would not the very

sight of her weaken him, shatter his resolve? And perhaps, too, the

sight of him would weaken even her. No, they must never meet again; that

was the simplest, the least painful for both.

He gave instructions that he was to leave by the first morning train; he

mounted to his room and packed up; then he wrote to Eleanor.

DEAREST ELEANOR,--Forgive me that I must cause you pain. I can only

hope it will prove to have saved you greater pain in the future.

But, my dear, I must not pretend it is from any unselfish desire to

save you from sacrificing yourself to my happiness, as you in your

generous nobility have been ready to do, that I have resolved never

to see you again. I am leaving Paris at once. When I tell you the

reason I know that it will ease your pain, and that your noble

nature will approve and forgive. I am going back to my wife. I have

thought it over and see that I have no option. I have been

forgetting that in return for her helping me to Art, I vowed to

love, cherish, and protect her. If I cannot love her--if I can only

love you, if the thought of you will always be like music to me,

though I must never see you again in the flesh--I must at least do

my best to make her happy. This is not only a farewell to you, it

is a farewell to Art. Without you to inspire it, my Art is dead. I

retire from the long contest broken-hearted.

Yours so truly,

MATTHEW STRANG.

P.S.--I dared not trust myself to come and tell you this. It would

have been a useless trial for both of us. You will be happier

without me and all the suffering my selfish passion must have

brought upon you. Forget me. God bless you.

He descended to the court-yard and dropped the letter into the box. Then

he sat outside on his balcony and watched the great gleaming Boulevards

as they woke to the new day.

He was too early at the station, and the train tarried. The porters

leisurely wheeled in the luggage. Sleepy passengers straggled up, armed

with gayly illustrated papers broad with Gallic buffoonery.

Oh, the agony of that last quarter of an hour, when Paris beckoned him

with its finger of morning sunlight, when Art cried to him from a

thousand happy ateliers, calling him to come back and be happy in the

great work he felt he had been about to do at last; when Love shone like

a purple haze veiling the world in poetic dream, and sang to him like an

angel’s voice, and witched him back with the eyes and the hair and the

lips of Eleanor Wyndwood!

But the train was going at last, and he must take his seat in his

first-class compartment. It was his second defeat, his second farewell

to Art, bitterer, crueller by a thousand-fold than the first, when he

had sailed home again penniless, broken in soul and body. Then, at

least, home was a tender recollection. Now--! And he had been so near

the goal of happiness, the cup had been at his very lips. Never to be

happy--never, never! The sudden shriek of the engine sounded sardonic.

The train moved on, bearing Matthew Strang from all the sweetness and

savor of life. In the great ocean of existence wherein men struggle for

happiness he had gone down--like his father.

But, like his father, he had gone down wrapped in his flag.

* * * * *

The stage of the world is not adapted for heroic attitudes, unless the

curtain be dropped on the instant.

To pass, after a tedious day-long journey, from the vivid boulevards to

the gray dreariness of a poor London suburb on a Sunday evening was

already a chill to the artistic mind; to find that the wife into whose

arms he had come to fall in dramatic contrition was not only out, but

gone to church with Aunt Clara and little Clara, was to be further

reminded of the essentially inartistic character of life in general, and

of its especial narrowness in church-going districts.

But he stooped down to kiss little Davie, who, by reason of the

servant’s “Sunday out,” had opened the door and explained these things

to him. He saw that the child had a little wooden mannikin in his hand,

and was sucking it.

“Don’t suck that, Davie,” he said.

“There ain’t no paint to spoil,” Davie urged, gravely. “It’s all gone.”

Matthew carried both the little men down-stairs on his shoulder. In the

kitchen he found Billy moping by the fire--profiting by the absence of

the servant to enjoy the only fire Rosina’s economy permitted at this

season of the year--but sunk so deep in a black reverie that he did not

raise his head at the unwonted footsteps.

A wave of protective love, almost paternal, flooded Matthew’s soul; he

laid his hand on poor Billy’s head as in benediction. Nevermore would

they be parted, nevermore.

“Billy,” he said, softly.

The young man started violently, and looked up.

“I’ve come back, Billy,” he said, tenderly.

“So I see,” replied Billy, ungraciously.

He was stung to the quick, but he controlled his pain; he saw this was

part of his atonement.

“I’ve come to make it up with Rosina. I’m not going away again,” he went

on gently, his hand on Billy’s shoulder.

“And what’s the use of that?” Billy snapped. “Even if she makes it up

with you, she’ll break out again in a few days. I know her.”

He set down the child with a sigh, and drew a chair to his brother’s

side. Davie climbed trustfully on his knee. The kettle was singing, and

a plump gray cat purred in the fender.

“Besides,” Billy went on, “you’ve always said you couldn’t live here--it

was necessary to live at your studio.”

“I know; but I am giving up the studio.”

Billy turned whiter than usual.

“What’s happened?” he cried in alarm.

“Nothing in particular.”

“Then I suppose you are going to turn me out of my workroom?”

“No, no, Billy. I am giving up painting altogether.”

Billy’s eyes dilated in horror, as on the night when his mother had

dragged him out of bed to trudge the frozen fields.

“Are you mad?” he gasped.

Something of his awe sent a shiver through his brother.

“Perhaps I am,” said Matthew.

He fell silent.

Billy regarded him furtively. The minutes dragged on. Matthew looked at

his watch--getting on for seven. Eleanor Wyndwood would have been

dressing for him--he saw her matchless loveliness. Another few minutes,

and his kisses would have been on her lips--those lips that had lain on

his in what was already an enchanted, hazy dream rather than a waking

memory.

“Perhaps I _am_ mad,” he muttered again, as he sat waiting for Rosina

instead. And then he caught sight of the little figure Davie was

sucking, and began to laugh boisterously.

Billy was terrified.

“You can have the studio back if you like,” he said, soothingly; the

cripple’s tones became protective in their turn. “I can write

anywhere--and, after all, what’s the use of my writing?--nobody will

take what I write.”

“I can write kisses,” interposed Davie, looking up proudly.

“What does he mean, Billy?” said Matthew.

“Oh, he used to put crosses at the end of the letter when Rosina wrote

to poor old Coble--kisses to his grandfather, you know.”

“He’s a angel now,” said Davie, gravely.

“What’s that you’re sucking?” Billy responded, sternly. “You know you

mustn’t.”

He took it away, and Davie set up a howl till pacified by a penny.

“It’s an image of a preacher, Matt,” Billy explained. “I forget his

name. He died last year--Rosina used to go and hear him. She said he

gave her great comfort. These images are sold in thousands. What a

ludicrous thing popular religion is!”

Matthew laughed, but there was a tear for Rosina in the laughter.

“By-the-way,” he said, suddenly, “did old Coble leave her any money?”

“Yes--but a few thousand dollars was all there was when his estate was

wound up. He couldn’t have expected to crack up, for he made no

provision whatever for Aunt Clara.”

“Then Rosina is keeping her?”

“Yes, I suppose so.”

“How does she reconcile that with her economy?” he thought, with an

added throb of tenderness. The kettle sang on; the cat purred; he had a

flash of hope--he might grow to love her yet. But he thought of Eleanor

Wyndwood, and the hope died. They would have been on their way now to

their restaurant--sitting close together, driving through the flashing

streets. Oh, was he not mad to be here?

“What are you doing all alone?” he thought. “My love, my first love and

my last, you who believed in me, who were ready to sacrifice yourself to

me?”

“Did you go to see Ruth Hailey?” asked Billy, suddenly.

Eleanor’s face vanished. He put his hand to his breast-pocket, and drew

out the portrait with the sweet, shy eyes.

“Yes,” he said, tremulously, “and she gave me this.”

Billy took the photograph and kissed it.

“God bless you!” he said.

Davie pricked up his ears.

“You’re not in love with her?” Matthew asked, lightly, with a sudden

apprehension.

“I?--I know better than to be in love with any woman,” said Billy,

sadly, as he returned the portrait. “Only in my stories can I love and

be loved.”

“It was she who sent us that mysterious money,” said Matthew, and told

him the story. Billy listened in surprise and emotion.

“God bless you, Ruth!” he said again.

“What is that God?” interrupted Davie.

The brothers looked at each other, embarrassed.

“Ask mummy; she’ll tell you,” said Matthew, at last.

“Mummy did tell me, but I can’t ’derstand.” He sat there wondering.

“When does God sleep?”

The sudden blare and boom of a Salvationist procession saved reply. The

blatant clangor passed, died. They waited for Rosina.

Presently they heard the returning church party descending into the

area, so as not to soil the white upper-steps. He had kissed her before

she was aware of his presence, as she stepped across the kitchen

threshold, red-edged prayer-book in hand. After that her sullenness was

only half-hearted. He said he had come to supper. By the time they had

sat down to it a reconciliation had been patched up. Warned by Billy’s

reception of his determination, he did not even break it to her yet.

Thus tamely passed off the great renunciation scene--the crisis of his

life--like everything else in his life, unlike what he had imagined

beforehand. Rosina did not even understand what this home-coming meant

to him. He pleaded that Davie, who did not want to go to sleep, should

be allowed to stay up to supper, but this request was not granted.

“Mummy, when does God go to sleep?” the persistent Davie remembered to

ask as she was leading him from the room.

“God never sleeps,” replied Rosina, sternly, and haled him to bed.

Matthew pondered the immense saying, so glibly spoken, as he waited for

her to return. “Aunt Clara,” pouch-eyed and wan, her head nodding

queerly with excitement at the great man’s presence, was laying the

supper in the warm kitchen, where the servant would not resume

possession till ten; little Clara was at her task of Bible reading.

Billy drowsed on his chair, exhausted. The fire glowed red; the cat was

still stretched in the warmth. Something in the scene thrilled him with

a sense of restful kinship with it, half sweet, half sad; a sense of

being more really at home than in delicate drawing-rooms; the old homely

kitchen far away on the borders of the forest sent out subtle links,

binding his childhood to the manhood that had come at last.

* * * * *

This half-and-half-ness was typical of the new life which began that

night, and which on the morrow was sealed and consecrated by the

characteristically self-deceptive message from Eleanor: “You are right.

We have chosen the highest.” It was a life full of petty pricks and

every-day worries. But if it was not so grandiosely heroic as he had

intended, neither was the consequence to his Art as he had foreseen.

He has not given up Art. Neither Rosina nor Billy would permit that

folly, and Eleanor’s brief letter had a postscript of inspiring protest.

He had meant to sacrifice Art and Happiness, but only the latter

sacrifice was accepted. For unhappiness drove him back to his

studio--where the “Angelus” hung now like an inspiration. From the

glooms and trials of the daily routine in this prosaic home, with its

faithful but narrow-souled mistress, who knew not what was passing in

her husband’s mind, nor at what cost he had made her happy, and who

would not even agree to live in some beautiful country spot which would

have softened life for him--from this depressing household, with its

unsprightly children, its cheerless pensioner, its querulous cripple

resenting the very hand that fed him, he escaped to the little

whitewashed studio to find in his Art oblivion of the burden of life.

And now, at last, his true life--work was begun. Removed from the

sapping cynicism of the Club conscience, from the drought of

drawing-room disbelief, from the miasma of fashionable conversation,

from the confusing cackle of critics; saved from the intrigue with Mrs.

Wyndwood, that would have distracted his soul and imposed an extra need

for money-making; withdrawn from the feverish rush of fashion and the

enervating consumption of superfluous food and drink; exempted from

keeping up a luxurious position purchased by scamped, soulless pictures;

able to work without the whims of sitters or patrons, without regard to

prices--for Rosina’s income, augmented by her very considerable

hoardings and by his balance, supplemented by the proceeds of the sale

of his studio effects and

[Illustration: “SOMETHING IN THE SCENE THRILLED HIM WITH A SENSE OF

RESTFUL KINSHIP”]

ancient pictures, the whole doubled by Rosina’s economic administration,

was amply sufficient for every rational need--Matthew Strang began at

last, without underthought of anything but Art, in this homely

environment to which his soul was native, to express his own inmost

individuality, to produce faithfully and finely the work it was in him

to do.

Solitary, silent, sorrowful, strong; not chattering about his ideas and

his aims, indifferent to fame or the voice of posterity, striving for

self-approbation and rarely obtaining it, touching and retouching,

breaking the rules of the schools in obedience to his own genius, he

toiled on in his humble studio, seeking the highest, with no man and no

woman to inspire, encourage, or praise. He had been saved from Love and

Happiness, and sent back into sympathy with all that works and suffers.

And thus the note that had trembled faintly and then died out in his

work was struck strong and sure at last--the note of soul. To his

accurate science and his genius for the decorative, which are two of the

factors of great Art, was now added the spiritual poetry which is the

last and rarest. For he was master of his soul at last.

He had absorbed life sufficiently--he had toiled and hungered; he had

feasted and made merry; he had sorrowed and endured; he had sinned and

suffered; he had known the lust of life and the pride of the eye; he had

known Love--the love of the soul and the love of the senses; he had

known the heartache of baffled ambition and the dust and ashes of

achievement. What he had wanted he had not got; by the time he had got

it he had not wanted it; whatever he had set out to do he had not done,

and whatever he had done he had not foreseen. And out of all this

travail of the soul was born his Art--strong, austere, simple.

In the five or six years since he died to the world he has finished as

many big pictures, and has made studies for others, besides a host of

minor things. He has not exhibited any of the larger pictures in the

Academy; three have been presented quietly to provincial and suburban

galleries where the People comes. Only one with some of the smaller

things has been sold for money, and this but to appease Rosina; it was

one more sacrifice of his individuality to hers. It is true there are

expenses for models and materials, and he has now two more children, but

it jars upon him to ask money for work that expresses and conceals the

tragic secrets of his inmost being. Nor does he care to have his

pictures shut away amid the other furniture of luxurious mansions.

Still, he has learned enough to know that life cannot be lived ideally.

And, moreover, the event has taught him again the contrariety of life;

for his eccentricity, leaking out slowly, has enhanced the fame to which

he is indifferent, and, aided by a legend of mysterious saturnine

seclusion, has raised his market value to such a point that he need only

sell an occasional picture. One dealer in particular is anxious to give

him his own price for a picture. Matthew Strang will probably part with

one to him some day, but he does not know that the dealer is acting for

Lady Thornton, the wealthy and celebrated society leader and convert,

though he knows and is glad that Eleanor Wyndwood found both happiness

and spiritual peace when, a few months after her friend Olive Regan’s

marriage to Herbert Strang, that ever-charming and impressionable lady

was led to the altar by the handsome and brilliant Sir Gilbert Thornton,

and went over with him to Roman Catholicism. With the same earnestness

with which she had passed from her native orthodoxy to the Socialism of

Gerard Brode, and thence to the spirituality of Dolkovitch, she had slid

by a natural transition from the sensuous art atmosphere of Matthew

Strang’s world into the sensuous spirituality of Catholicism as soon as

his influence had been replaced by the ascendency of another male mind.

He was not asked to the wedding, and the invitation to Olive’s, reaching

him in the days when the first darkness of isolation was upon him, he

had left unanswered.

And just as he has given his Art freely to the world, so, under the

inspiration of Tarmigan’s memory, he gives his services freely at

Grainger’s and other humble art-schools as encourager of every talent

that aspires under discouragement; teaching it to be itself and nothing

else, for the artist gives to the world and is not asked for, creating

the taste he satisfies, and Art is not Truth nor Beauty, but a

revelation of beautiful truth through the individual vision. It is the

artist’s reaction to the stimulus of his universe, whether his universe

be our common world seen for itself or through antecedent art, or a

private world of inward vision: for while the philosophers are

quarrelling about abstract truth, the artist answers Pilate’s question

through his own personality. The beauty which Matthew Strang’s art

reveals, though he experiments in many styles, with unequal results, is

mainly tragic. For others the gay, the flippant, the bright--let those

from whose temperament these things flow interpret the joyousness and

buoyancy and airy grace of existence. For others the empty

experimentation in line and color. It is all Art--in the house of Art

are many mansions. He has come to the last of the three stages of so

many artists, who pass from the fever to do everything, through a period

of intolerance for all they cannot do, into a genial acceptance of the

good in all schools. But, unassuming as he has always been, he is yet

sometimes shaken by righteous indignation when he sees tawdry art--art

that is the response to the stimulus of no universe but the artificial

studio-universe of models and posings and stage-properties--enthroned

and fêted at the banquet of life; and sometimes an unguarded word

flashes out before his pupils, but he always repents of his railings,

feeling it is his to work, not to judge; to do the one simple thing that

his hand findeth to do.

One of his pictures is of a woman looking out to sea with hopeless eyes;

there is a mocking glory of sunset in the sky. This is called “The Pain

of the World.” The title was due to Olive’s exclamation that night in

Devonshire. The figure is his mother’s, come back to him in his own

solitude--the image of her standing thus in the asylum at Halifax could

not be effaced from his soul; it had to find expression in his Art.

As he worked at it, with the brutal aloofness of the artist, studying

lights and shadows, values and effects, gradations and tones, he

wondered whether the artist were a cold-blooded monster, or a divinely

appointed alchemist sent to transmute the dross of the world’s pain to

the gold of Art for the world’s pleasure; a magician to cover up the

rawness of life, as kindly Nature covers up the naked earth with grass,

or throws the purple light of dream over all that is dead--over the

centuries that are past or our youth that is gone; a Redeemer, whose

beautiful perception of pathos and tragedy robs the grave of its

victory, and plucks Death of its sting, so that no man suffereth or

travaileth without contributing to the raw stuff of life of which Art is

woven by the souls dowered with the pangs and privileges of

Over-Consciousness. Each man, it sometimes seemed to him, dimly, had to

pay so much in sorrow and pain; and in return for that he drew from the

common human fund the comprehension of life and the consolation of Art,

new sympathies and new delights, music and books and pictures, that only

lived through the rich variety of human destinies; mystic atmospheres

and minor scales, meaningless to souls that had not suffered or

inherited the capacity to suffer. Some--generally the stupid--paid

little in pain and sorrow; and some--as in his own case--much. But so

long as the account showed a balance to the general good, it was not for

the soul that was sacrificed to complain. It was, perhaps, even a

privilege to subserve the common good. Life was so arranged that virtue

could not be sure of personal reward, and this uncertainty was just what

made virtue possible. Under no other scheme of things could the soul

enjoy the privilege of virtue. To have suffered, as he himself had done,

by the institution of marriage, both as child and husband; to have been

a victim to the general laws which safeguard human society; to have been

cut in two by the flaming swords of the cherubim, which turn every way

to keep the way of the Tree of Life--all this did not, he thought, give

him the right to blaspheme existence. And the artist at least extracted

a soul of good from all things evil.

Some such reflections--not clear, but all confused and blurred, for he

was no syllogism-building philosopher, but an artist whose profoundest

thought sprang always from the concrete image before him--came to him

again when he was working at his famous picture “The Persecutors,”

inspired by an episode in Billy’s life, though Billy does not know. It

is simply children tormenting an old man. The old man is one of the

world’s wrecks; the children know not what they do. But the pathos of

the picture is overwhelming; it purifies by pity and terror. This is the

profit to the world of Billy’s life.

Matthew Strang knows, with the same secret assurance that sent him out

to fight, and strengthened him in the long struggle, that this picture

will live, that the gods have answered his boyish prayer for

immortality. But at moments when Billy is moping or in pain, or when the

artist foresees the gabble of magazines and drawing-rooms about his

work, the chatter of fashionable parrots, and the analysis of his

“second manner” by glib, comfortable critics, he wonders whether the

picture or the immortality is worth the price.

But, stronger than those driven by their Over-Consciousness to express

in artistic shapes the futility of life, he does not dwell eternally on

the tears of things; and his picture simply entitled “A Woman” is

perhaps his masterpiece. For when he painted it that sunrise in Paris

was still vivid to him, and the light in Ruth Hailey’s eyes, and that

fire of love in Eleanor Wyndwood’s; these things were in the eternal

order, too, as truly as the ugliness and the sordid realities. The

simplest human life was packed with marvels of sensation and emotion,

haloed with dreams and divine illusions. To have been a child, to have

sung and danced, to have eaten and played, to have seen woods and

waters, to have grown to youth and to manhood, to have dreamed and

aspired, to have labored and hoped--all this happiness had been his

while he was looking for happiness, just as Art had been his in Nova

Scotia, while he had been struggling to get to it in England.

And so to-day he yearns to paint the poetry of the Real--not with the

false romantic glamour which had witched his youth, though even his

youth had had a hankering after the Real, just as his maturity retains a

love for the mystic. That gilded unreality to which his Art would have

gravitated, had he found happiness with the sentimental Eleanor in her

atmosphere of fashion, will be replaced by the beauty that even when

mystic is based on Truth. He needed no woman’s inspiration, nor the

stimulus of cultured cliques. Alone he faces the realities of life and

death without intervening veils of charming illusion, no longer craving

to filter the honest sunlight through stained cathedral windows or to

tarnish the simplicity of the grave with monumental angels. Aspiring now

to paint London, he wanders through the gray streets, as in his days of

hunger, but now the grotesque figures no longer seem outside the realm

of serious Art, or mere picturesque arrangements of line and color. To

his purged vision, that still lacks humor, they touch the mysteries and

the infinities, passing and disappearing like ghosts on a planet of

dream: solitude has brought him a sense of the universal life from which

they flow, and he fancies the function of Art should be to show the

whole in every part, the universal through the particular. And so he

longs to paint the beauty that lies unseen of grosser eyes, the poetry

of mean streets and every-day figures, to enrich and hallow life by

revealing some sweep of a great principle that purifies and atones.

In “The Old Maid” he has painted the portrait of “Aunt Clara” with Davie

on her knee, revealing the wistful, imprisoned, maternal instinct he

detected one day in her sunken eyes as she fondled his little Davie.

What makes this presentation of ugliness Art is not merely the breathing

brush-work, but the beauty of his own pity which the artist has added to

the Nature he copied. With the falsely aristocratic in Art or life he

has lost sympathy: to him to be honest and faithful is to belong to the

only aristocracy in the world--and the smallest. Sometimes he dreams of

some great Common Art--for all men, like the sky and the air, which

should somehow soften life for all. And dreaming thus he somewhat frets

against the many limitations of his own Art--as once in his callow

boyhood when he set out to write that dime novel--and against its lapsed

influence in modern life, wishing rather he had been a great poet or a

great musician. Only music and poetry, he feared while toiling at the

“Old Maid,” could express and inspire modern life; the impulse that had

raised the cathedral had been transformed into the impulse that built

the grand hotel, fitted throughout with electrical conveniences; in the

visible arts landscape and portraiture alone seemed to find response

from the modern mind, the one by its revelation of the beauty of the

world, the other by its increasing subtlety of psychological insight.

Painting had begun with religion, religion had led to technique, then

religion had drifted away from painting, and then technique had become a

religion. But technique ought not to be thought of separately except by

the student; to the artist the spiritual and the material came as one

conception, as metre comes with the poet’s thought. The spirit must be

brought back to painting--this modern accuracy of tones and forms was

but the channel for it. But it could no longer be conveyed through the

simple images of a popular creed to which all men vibrated: to-day there

was no such common chord for the artist to touch. Even this picture of

“The Old Maid” might be unintelligible without its title, and risked

denunciation as literary. And the greatest picture could be seen by but

few.

But repining is useless; there is only one thing he can do, and he must

do it--a small thing in the span of the cosmos and the sweep of the

ages, but to be done ere he goes down to the kindred dust. But before

death comes he has doubtless other things to suffer--all these spiritual

agonies have seared the body in which early privations and sickness had

already left the seeds of premature infirmity. His children are growing

up, too, bringing new fears and problems.

And yet his life is not all unhappy--work is his anodyne, and there is

an inner peace in the daily pain, because it is the pain that his soul

has chosen, in willing slavery to its own yoke.

But life is too long for ideals; the unending procession of the days

depresses the finest enthusiasm. Sometimes when the domestic horizon is

dark, or when his body is racked with pain, he rebels against the rôle

thrust upon him in the world’s workshop, and against the fate that

mocked at his free-will, and made of him a voluntary instrument for the

happiness of Rosina and Herbert, turning his every action to

undreamed-of issues; and then he longs for the life that he had found so

hollow, the life of gay talk, and rustling dresses, and wine, and woman,

and song. And in such moments as these--when the natural human instinct

for happiness, yearning sunward, breaks through all the strata of

laborious philosophy and experience--he remembers that men call him “The

Master,” and then he seems to hear the sardonic laughter of Mad Peggy,

as he asks himself what Master he has followed in his sacrifice, or what

Master, working imperturbably, moulds human life at his ironic,

inscrutable will.

* * * * *

Typographical errors corrected by the etext transcriber:

Miss O’Reilly’s hair chamelon-colored=> Miss O’Reilly’s hair

chameleon-colored {pg}

painter always trod giugerly=> painter always trod gingerly {pg 400}