“I wonder whether the fellow is grasping the ‘high seriousness’ of Art, or going to the devil!”

Strange was on his road to see Brydon, from whom that morning he had received a rather enigmatical note.

“I didn’t expect you this hour,” said Brydon, when he arrived, “I thought it was that brute, the fellow over me, who always forgets his key. I came back to the old place, you see, from a sort of habit, and I thought too it would suit Mag and Con. I went to see them. They taught me a lot, those two girls; they had fine flesh tints, better than the French article as a rule.”

“Have they been to see you?”

“Yes, Mag’s married, and her figure!—throw your coat there—It’s a sin to see it; women of that order should die young.”

“And Connie?”

“Connie! she’s grown frowsy, I’m afraid it’s gin! There was a blackguard she ‘walked with’ who levanted with a cook, so it’s censorious to grudge her a drop of comfort. But to think of those pearly tints grown frowsy!” he murmured, “to sell that colouring for a greasy mess of pottage! The folly of man is inscrutable!—Strange, you want desert air, your skin has lost tone!”

“Season, my good boy, what else can you expect?”

“I wonder if it’s all season,” thought the fellow, and an unaccountable coldness ran down his spine. “I wonder if he’s made a mistake too!”

“How are you getting on, as to work?”

“I have to speak of something else first, and for reasons best known to myself, I prefer fresh air for it—will you stroll round?”

“I should like to see the picture first,” said Strange.

One of his old blushes mounted to Brydon’s cheeks.

“Wait till afterwards, if you don’t mind,” he said.

“Look at the light from that gin-palace on the red head of that child!” he went on, as they turned the corner, “it’s funny what glorious effects one gets from the filthiest combinations! There is no light more bewildering and lovely than the phosphoric blue flicker from a grave-yard.

“That effect now, those reeking gin lights on that beastly dirty head, and the corpse lights are like a lot of writers’ work, no one can pass it by, it has a power to grasp and hold you, that cleaner things don’t have, and such power means genius, don’t you think? Power strong enough, I mean, to stoop a fellow’s mind and nose low enough to batten on corruption? If the corruption wasn’t made worth examining, one would only pass on, with a kick at the seething mass. Instead of that, one looks and spits, and looks and spits again, but keeps looking and finally settles down to enjoy oneself and then a fellow gets enervated and unmanned before he knows what he is about. He sees the pitiless truth of things, of course, but he loses everything else—the result is very limiting when one thinks of it. Battening on certain books,” went on Brydon after a pause, “was the beginning of it, I think, then rottenness smells sweet after a time, and a fellow gets curious and wants to exploit on his own account. I did all sorts of things first, I tried trees, sun, shade, moonlight; I walked blisters on my feet, I worked in the sweat of my brow, but nothing would still the brutal throbbing, and I went mad one day in that maddening city. Art wasn’t worth a straw to save me. I made a beast of myself, the cheap sort of beast that I had funds for, and—here is the result!”

“Well, you’re a sorry object, it must be confessed!”

“But that’s not the worst either—do you know I have altogether lost the way to work; I can do nothing. Now some fellows can go down in the gutter one day and mount up amongst the gods the next without turning a hair; it beats me.”

“It’s a good deal a question of nationality,” said Strange, “Englishmen as a rule can’t do complete work while they’re mud-larking; French fellows often can; just as no decent bourgeois John Bull has it in him to write tons of magnificent filth on a sort of principle. The fact is, no fellow of your temperament has any business to wallow in modern French realism, you haven’t tone enough. I felt certain this would happen, but you had to take your chance with your betters, and no doubt the experience hasn’t been all loss. I am sorry for you all the same; you’ll find your repentance a darned sight bitterer than the delirium was sweet. That is my experience anyway, and it will go harder with you; your health, you see, can’t stand it.”

“It can’t, which makes me the bigger fool. To think of my work being knocked on the head, and to so little purpose! Especially,” he added naÏvely, “when one has to do that sort of thing on the cheap.”

“Fellows like you feel that sort of thing always, even if they have a pocket full of coin. You see, you are too fastidious and sensitive to enjoy vice properly; and yet the queer thing is, it debases you sooner than it does men of coarser make, unless it kills you right off the reel, as it mostly does. Stronger men have things to keep them up, you fellows haven’t; they get brutalized if you like, but it is the brutalization of men, not of women.”

Here Brydon winced, possibly Strange saw him—he took no notice, however, but went on coolly:

“They don’t get rotten-soft, and corrupt. Another thing that’s against you; your father’s a parson, and his father before him, and your mother is a parson’s daughter.”

“Yes—what on earth has that to do with it?”

“A lot. With inherited conscience and spiritual feelings, and a sneaking regard for hell fire in every drop of your blood, things were sure to be made pretty hot for you in next to no time. Small wonder your work went to the devil!”

“I suppose it’s all the brutal truth,” said Brydon.

“Did you expect this?” he asked with sudden shyness. “Are you disappointed?”

“I am too old ever to be disappointed in any fellow, probably there’s not a thing you have done I wouldn’t myself have done had I been in your skin. Now the question is, what’s to fit you for work again?”

“I think,” said the boy dolefully, “the best thing I could do would be to cut my throat.”

“If I felt like an ass I should hold my tongue about it, and take a blue pill. By the way, there’s some contradiction, for Blunt saw Legrun the other day, and he’s tremendously pleased with you.”

“Oh, I took to swatting for a time, as a sop to Cerberus, and worked like the very devil at drawing, but somehow I’d rather get a kick any day, than praise, when I know my work’s dishonest, done to cover filth; it’s an insult to Art.”

“My good boy, don’t be morbid! It was a good sight better to bring your lines into order than to do nothing.”

“All the same, I have no satisfaction in any work done then.”

“Ah, parson’s blood again—no need you should, but you needn’t add it to the list of your sins, that would be rather a work of supererogation, wouldn’t it?”

“I would like to go out into the desert alone for forty days or so, and wrestle with anything that came along, God or the devil.”

“A very proper attitude of mind and befitting your breed. In the meantime, when do you intend returning to Paris?”

“I must go to-morrow.”

“Why must you?”

“Because——” he hesitated, blushing furiously.

“Good Heavens, man, speak out! Have we been friends for fifteen years for nothing?”

“Well, beastliness, however cheap you do it, is costly. Even your magnificent commission has gone down the gutter.”

“It wouldn’t pay either of us for you to return there just now, besides, I want you to come over and stay at my house.”

“I cannot stay in the house with Lady Strange,” said Brydon in a low voice, “I couldn’t. If I am not clean enough to work at my Art I am certainly not fit to eat and drink in her presence. I didn’t stay in my father’s house until my mother and sisters had gone away, and—Lady Strange, somehow, is divine to me. She is always the bride in that picture. I think,” he continued, with a strange softness in his voice, “for all her jeering at me, that I have painted the real woman.”

It was Strange’s turn to wince this time.

“Look here, Strange,” the boy went on, still softly and with lowered head, “I finished that picture before I went into the sty. I wouldn’t have touched her with a dirty brush.”

“My dear fellow, I know it! I should have liked you to have stayed with us. At any rate you will stay in London for a few days; I will be your banker, of course; it will be, after all, only a very trifling increase of your debt to me, and there’s plenty of time to pay that in.”

He took hold of the fellow’s arm and swung him round.

“It’s getting late,” he said, “and I want to see the picture to-night.”

They walked on in silence, the boy’s chivalrous adoration of his wife touched Strange sharply. All the same, he felt vastly inclined to turn round and punch his head for it.

“How dared the fellow go speculating on her possibilities!” he thought; “that is my business.

“Yet when one comes to think of it, I’m an ass, I might just as well go for the dozens of others whose admiration is quite as vicarious. It’s not Gwen one of the lot goes mad over, it’s her double. Heigh ho! Bigamy’s an awful embarrassment.”

“I tried to keep exactly to Nature in that last picture of Lady Strange,” said Brydon, as he set to unfastening the packing of his picture.

“You succeeded,” said Strange. Brydon looked round.

“You didn’t like it then—no more did I, I tried too hard to be faithful to the order.”

“Well, and so you were, and that was what was wanted of you. Mrs. Waring, for whom the portrait was intended, liked it tremendously,” said Strange shortly. “Damn the fellow’s impudence!” he thought.

Brydon continued his cutting and unwinding, painfully red in the face.

When it was all undone he waited for a moment before he removed the last covering, then he pulled it off with a quick soft movement, and from a vague feeling of half shy delicacy he turned aside and began to cut up tobacco diligently.

When Strange saw his wife, not the cold living abstraction, but a warm, big-hearted, divinely-natural creature, alive there on the canvas before him, a sudden soft gush of tears flooded his eyes, and he shook and reeled at the queer warm shock of them.

“Brydon,” he said, turning round suddenly, “one makes a fool of oneself over her, it is a tribute to your genius.”

Brydon looked at him and hesitated, then he said in a half-fearful tone, looking away,

“It is no tribute to my genius, it is that face! I never cried, I have roared and howled, you know, scores of times, but I never cried properly till I saw it; it is the strongest and the most touching woman’s face I ever saw.”

“It is, and you have done infinite justice to it.”

“I had to paint her as she was there, I couldn’t help myself, I shall never again do anything like it.”

“What does Legrun say of it?”

He was silent for a minute.

“Did you think,” he asked at last, angrily, “that I did that for Legrun’s praise or blame? Did I paint her to be torn limb from limb by those old steely eyes?”

“As a matter of fact I did not expect anything half so sensible from you, but this—this,” he added slowly, with a spasm of infinite generosity, “this shall hang in the Academy.”

“If it does,” said the boy, “I shall never touch a brush again.”

“Well, we won’t discuss it now.”

“Nor at any other time. I shouldn’t care a tuppenny damn, don’t you know, for any fame for which you had to suffer.”

“There was no word of suffering to me, or to anyone else.”

“Who said there was? But do you see the alterations I made,” he went on hurriedly, “I made you even vaguer than you were and served the parson in the same way, and that carpet in Waring church was too strong altogether, I got a piece of stem green stuff and substituted it.”

“Well, it is a work of genius,” said Strange as he got into his coat.

“I am not such a fool as to deny that, but I didn’t paint it, you know. Here, you’ll break your neck on these stairs, let me light you. Good night, dear old man.”