Four days elapsed, and then Edmund Murdoch received an answer to his letter. He had written at length upon various affairs and his friend did no less.

"No. 6 Melbury Gardens, S.W.

"June 8, 189—.

"Dear Murdoch—Your long screed gave me some pleasure and killed an hour. You relate the even course of your days since my departure from Cornwall, and I envy the good health and happy contentment of mind which your note indicates. I gained no slight benefit from my visit to the West Country, and it had doubtless carried me bravely through this summer but for an unfortunate event. A sharp cold, which settled on my chest, has laid me low for some length of time, though I am now as well again as I shall ever be. So much for facing the night air in evening dress. Nature has no patience with our idiotic conventions, and hates alike man's shirt-front and woman's bare bosom when displayed, as is our imbecile custom, at the most dangerous hours in the twenty-four. My doctors are for sending me away, and I shall probably follow their advice presently. But the end is not very far off.

"I rejoice that you have sucked in something of my spirit and are trying to get at the heart of rocks and sea before you paint them. Men waste so much time poking about in art galleries, like the blind moles they mostly are, and forget that Nature's art gallery is open every day at sunrise. Dwell much in the air, glean the secrets of dawns, listen when the white rain whispers over woodland, translate the tinkle of summer seas where they kiss your rocky shores; get behind the sunset; think not of what colors you will mix when you try to paint it, but let the pageant sink into your soul like a song. Do not drag your art everywhere. Forget it sometimes and develop your individuality. You have learned to draw tolerably; now learn to think. Believe me, the painting people do not think enough.

"Truly I am content to die in the face of the folly I read and see around me. Know you what certain obscure writers are now about in magazines? They are vindicating the cosmic forces, whitewashing Mother Nature after Huxley's Romanes lecture! He told the truth, and Nature loved him for it; but now come hysterical religious ciphers who squeak boldly forth in print that Nature is the mother of altruism, that self-sacrifice is her first law! One genius observes that 'tis their cruelty and selfishness have arrested the progress of the tiger and the ape! Poor Nature! Never a word of shotguns in all this drivel, of course. Cruelty and selfishness! Qualities purely and solely human—qualities resulting from conscious intelligence alone. You and I are selfish, not the ape; you and I are cruel, not the tiger. He at least learns Nature's lessons and obeys her dictates; we never do and never shall. A plague upon these fools with their theologic rubbish heaps. They would prostitute the very fonts of reason and make Nature's eternal circle fit the little squares of their own faiths. Man! I tell you that the root of human misery might be pulled out and destroyed to-morrow like the fang of a decayed tooth if only reason could kill these weeds of falsehood which choke civilization and strangle religion. But the world's 'doers' have all got 'faith' (or pretend to it); the world's thinkers are mere shadows moving about in the background of active affairs. They only write and talk. Action is the sole way of chaining a nation's mind.

"Your churchman is active enough, hence the spread of that poison which keeps human reason stunted, impotent, anaemic. Take Liberty—the cursed ignis fatuus our dear poets have shrieked for, our preachers have prayed for, our patriots have perished for through all time. In pursuit of this rainbow-gold more blood and brains have been wasted than would have sufficed to make a nation. And yet a breath from Reason blows the thing to tatters, as an uprising wind annihilates a fog. Freedom is an attribute of the Eternal, and creation cannot share it with him, any more than it can share his throne with him. 'The liberty of the subject'! A contradiction in terms. Banish this unutterable folly of freedom, and control the breeding of human flesh as we control the output of beef and of mutton. Then the face of the world will alter. Millions of money is annually spent in order that mindless humanity, congenital lunatics and madmen, may be fed and housed and kept alive. Their existences are to themselves less pleasurable than that of the beasts, they are a source of agony to those who have borne them; but they live to old age and devour tons of good food, while wholesome intellects starve in the gutters of every big city. Banish this cant of freedom then, I tell you. The lightning in heaven is not free; the stars are not free; Nature herself is the created slave of the Great Will—and we prattle about liberty. Let the State look to it and practice these lessons Nature has taught and still preaches patiently to deaf ears. Let it be as penal to bring life into the world without permission from authority as it is to put life out of the world. Let the begetting of paupers be a crime; let the health and happiness of the community rise higher than the satisfaction of individuals; let the self-denial practiced by the reasonable few be made a legal necessity to the unreasonable many. Let the blighted, the malformed, the brainless go back to the earth from which they came. Let the world of humanity be cleansed and sweetened and purified as Nature cleanses and sweetens and purifies her own kingdom. She removes her failures; we put ours under glass and treat them like hothouse flowers. That is called humanity; it is the mad leading the mad…. But why waste your time? Nature will have the last word; Reason must win in the end; a genius, at once thinker and doer, will come along some day and put the world right, at a happy moment when the din of theologists is out of its ears. We want a new practical religion; for Christianity, distorted and twisted through the centuries into its present outworn, effete, ignoble shape, is a mere political force or a money-making machine, according to the genius of the country which professes it. The golden key of the founder, which is lost, may be found again, but I think it never will be."

[Here the man elaborated his opinions. They were like himself: a medley—a farrago—wherein ascerbity, acuteness, and a mind naturally philosophic were stranded in the arid deserts of a pessimism bred partly from his own decaying physical circumstances and partly from recognition of his own wasted time.]

"I do not suppose that I shall paint any more. I had my Cornish picture brought from its packing-case and framed, and supported on a great easel at the foot of my bed while I was stricken down last month. Mistress Joan eyed me curiously from under her hand, and through the night-watches, while my man snored in the next chamber and I tossed with great unrest, the girl seemed to live and move and smile at me under the flicker of the night lamp. Everybody is pleased to say that 'Joe's Ship' seems good to them. I have it now in the studio, and contrasted it yesterday with my bathing negresses from Tobago. I think I like it better. It is difficult to read the soul in black faces, especially when the models are freezing to death as mine were. But there is something near to soul in this painted Joan—more I doubt than the living reality would be found to possess to-day. She was a good girl all the same, and I am gratified to hear she did not quite forget me. I have written to her at the address you mention. They pester me to send the picture somewhere, and to stop their importunities—especially the women—I have promised to let the thing go to the Institute in the autumn. I shall doubtless change my mind before the time comes.

"My life slowly but surely dwindles to that mere battle with Death which your consumptive wages at the finish. I fancy Biskra will see my bones later in the year. The R.A. took not less than six months off my waning days this spring. Thank God they hung Brady as he deserved. Twenty good works I saw—'the rest is silence.'

"Yours, while I remain,

"JOHN BARRON."

It was true that the artist had written another letter addressed to Joan Tregenza at Drift. He had written it first—written it hurriedly, wildly, on the spur of the moment. But, after the completion of his communication to Murdoch, the mood of the man changed. He had coldly read again the former epistle, and altered his mind concerning it. Barron wanted Joan back again sometimes, if life dragged more than usual; but pens and paper generally modified his desire when he got that far toward calling her to him. Her memory tickled him pleasantly and whiled away time. He framed the various sketches he had made of her and suffered thought to occupy itself with her as with no other woman who had entered his life. But the day on which he wrote to Murdoch was a good one with him. He felt stronger and better able to suck pleasure out of living than he had for a month.

"When I whistle she will come," he thought to himself. "Perhaps there would be some pleasure in taking her to Biskra presently. I will wait, at any rate, until nearer the last scene. She would be pretty to look at when I'm dying. Yes, she shall close my eyes some day, if she likes. That's a pleasant thought—for me."

So the letter to Murdoch was sent forth, but the letter to Joan, containing some poetic thoughts on Nature, a pathetic description of Barron's enfeebled state, and an appeal to her to join him that they might part no more on this side the grave, was torn up. He laughed at the trouble he had taken to print it all, and pondered pleasantly on the picture which Murdoch had drawn of Joan ruling the kingdom of the meadowsweets, of her eager question concerning "Mister Jan."

"Strange," he reflected, "that her mediocre intelligence should have clung to a man so outwardly mean as myself. If I thought that she had remembered half I said when I was with her, or had made a single attempt to practice the gospel I preached so finely—damned if I wouldn't have her back again to-morrow and be proud of her too. But it can't be. She was such an absolute fool. No, I much fear she only desires to find out what has become of the goose who laid the big golden egg. Or if she doesn't, perhaps her God-fearing father and mother do."

Which opinion is not uninteresting, for it illustrates the usual failure of materialism to discover or gauge those mental possibilities which lie hidden within the humblest and worst equipped intelligences. John Barron was an able man in some respects, but his knowledge of Joan Tregenza had taught him nothing concerning her character and its latent powers of development.