“I’m awfully glad I escaped it,” said a youth in front of Matt. “I got there five minutes late, and the man wouldn’t let me in. At least he said, ‘I’m not supposed to let you in after nine-fifteen.’ But I didn’t take the tip—or give it.”
In the middle of the address on Art, Gurney, coming up the staircase in the wake of a student friend (to whom he had been descanting on the absurdities of Cornpepperism, from which he had now revolted), perceived Herbert, and pushed him boisterously into the room, which straightway became a pandemonium; the pianist banging “See, the Conquering Hero Comes,” the boys stamping, singing, huzzahing, rattling their glasses, and shouting, “Cigars!” “Drinks!” “Strang!”
Herbert beamingly ordered boxes of Havanas and “soda-and-whiskies,” and soon Matt, still in his overcoat, found himself drinking and smoking and shouting with the rest, exalted by the whiskey into forgetfulness of his clothes and his fortunes, and partaking in all the rollicking humors of the evening, in all the devil-may-care gayety of the eternal undergraduate, roaring with his boon companions over the improper stories of the ascetic-looking young man with the poetic head, bawling street choruses, dancing madly in grotesque congested waltzes, wherein he had the felicity to secure Cornpepper for a partner, and distinguishing himself in the high-kickingpas seul, not departing till the final “Auld Lang Syne” had been sung with joined hands in a wildly whirling ring. Herbert had left some time before.
“Good-night, Matt; I want to get away. I don’t often get such an excuse for being out late. There’s no need for you to go yet, you lucky beggar,” he whispered, confidentially, as he sallied forth, radiantly sober, weaving joyous dreams of his travelling studentship future.
When the party broke up in the small hours, Matt Strang, saturated with whiskey and empty of victual, staggered along the frosty pavements, singing to the stars, that reeled round, blinking and winking like the buttons on Herbert’s boots.
Hisown boots preoccupied Matt’s attention ere the New Year dawned. Had “Four-toes” continued going to Grainger’s, instead of letting his subscription lapse perforce with the Christmas quarter, he might have convinced the class that his toes were normal, for they had begun to peep out despite all his efforts to botch up the seams. The state of his wardrobe prevented him from looking up Herbert at his club, especially as he was doubtful whether the travelling studentship had not already carried his cousin off; and thus that mad night, which was a hot shame to sober memory, grew to seem an unreal nightmare, and Herbert as distant as ever.
A vagrant atom of the scum of the city, he tasted all the bitterness of a million-peopled solitude. His quest for work was the more hopeless the shabbier his appearance grew. In optimistic after-dinner moods he had thought the spectacle of the streets sufficient, and to feast one’s eyes on the pageant of life a cloyless ecstasy; and, indeed, in the first days of his wanderings, the merest artistic touch in the wintry streets could still give him a pleasurable sensation that was a temporary anodyne—the yellow sand scattered on slippery days along the tram lines, and showing like a spilth of summer sunshine; the warm front of a public-house, making the only spot of colorin the long suburban street; strange faces seen for an instant in fog and lost forever; snow-flakes tumbling over one another in their haste, or fluttering lingeringly to earth; red suns, gray-ringed, like school-boys’ taws—but, as the slow days unfolded their sordid unchanging coils, he found himself shrinking more and more into himself. He sought warmth and refuge from reality in the National Gallery or the British Museum, dreaming away the hours before the more imaginative pictures or the Elgin marbles. But even these failed him at last, their beauty an intolerable irony. Sometimes he realized with a miserable start the real tragedy of being “out of work,” how it narrowed the horizon down to the prospect of meals, so that the great movement of the world from which he was shut out left him equally exclusive, and the announcements on the newspaper posters—wars and international football and the opening of parks and new plays and the deaths of great men and the rise of ministries—struck no responsive chord in his imagination, were all shadowy emanations from some unreal mockery of a universe. The real universe had his own navel for centre. Sometimes a faint perception of the humor of the position distorted his lips in a melancholy smile; he wondered how he would come out under Jimmy Raven’s pencil. At other times he lay huddled up in his bed, his fading clothes heaped over the one blanket, passing the day in an apathetic trance, interrupted only by the intermittent working of his imagination, or by observation of optical effects that accidentally arrested his gaze; and the next day, in remorse for lost possibilities, he would rise before dawn, and recommence his search for employment.
From such a long day’s tramp he was shuffling homeward late one dark, dismal night, when, pausing to warm his feet and hands at the cellar-grating of a baker’s shop, he was accosted by William Gregson, striding along with a frown on his forehead and a brown-paper parcel in his hand.
“Hullo, Fourt—Strang!” he cried, pausing. “Don’t see you any more.”
“No,” said Matt, wishing Gregson wouldn’t see him now, and edging a little away from a street-lamp.
“You don’t want any boots?”
“No,” said Matt, sticking his toes downward to hide the gaps as far as possible.
“You won’t forget I am at your service whatever you want,” said the little stooping old man, with shining enthusiastic eyes. “It is a pleasure to work for a man with feet like yours. I was only thinkin’ of you to-night at the studio—a scurvy wretch has been servin’ me a shabby trick, and I was thinkin’ to myself: Ah, Four—ah, Strang, there’s a difference now! Strang’s a man and a brother artist. This bloke’s a ’artless biped.”
“Why, what did he do?”
“There’s no need to go into details,” said William Gregson, pathetically. “Suffice it to say he refuses the boots. And here they are. A beautiful pair! Left on my hands! After I sat up half the night to finish ’em for him, trade’s so brisk just now.”
He unwrapped the package to expose their perfections.
“And what will you do with them?” said Matt.
“I’d like to put ’em on and kick him with ’em,” replied Gregson, gloomily. “Only they’re too small.” Gregson’s own feet were decidedly not beautiful.
“Yes, they seem more my size,” agreed Matt.
“Will you have them?” cried the old man, eagerly. “Name your own price! Don’t be afraid. I sha’n’t ask more than last time.”
But Matt shook his head. “I’m hard up,” he confessed, blushing in the lamplight.
“I’ll trust you,” was the fervid response.
“I’d never pay you,” Matt protested, “unless I could do something for you in return. If you want,” he hesitated, “your shop painted, or any wall-papering, or—or I could build you a counter, or—”
But the shoemaker was shaking his head. “I don’t want my shop painted—but ’ow if you painted me?” he cried, with an inspiration. “I’ve often tried to do it myself, but some’ow an angelic expression gets into it, and the missus don’t recognize it. Have you ever tried doin’ your own portrait, Strang?”
“No—not seriously,” said Matt.
“Well, you try, and see if you don’t find it as I say. It’s a curious thing how that angelic expression will creep in when a man’s paintin’ his own portrait. Besides, you can paint better than me; I don’t say it behind your back, but—”
“Then it’s a bargain?” interrupted Matt, anxiously.
“Yes; I can give you an hour every mornin’. Trade’s so slack, unfortunately.”
“May I take the boots with me?” inquired Matt.
“Yes, the moment the portrait’s done,” said Gregson, in generous accents.
“Are you afraid I’ll walk off in ’em?” Matt cried, angrily. “And suppose they don’t fit?”
“Ah, well; you may try them on,” conceded Gregson. And, with a curious repetition of a former episode, Matt slipped off his boot under a street-lamp. The boots were a little tight, especially after the yawning laxness of the old; but it was heavenly to stamp on the wet pavement and to feel a solid sole under one’s foot, even though an oozy, sloppy stocking intervened.
Gregson perceived the ruin of the vacant boot, and his face grew stern.
“Keep it on, keep it on,” he said, harshly. “You’re an old customer.”
“Oh, thank you!” ejaculated Matt.
“You can give me the old pair,” he rejoined, gruffly.
“Oh, but they’re past mending,” said Matt.
“But they can help to mend other boots. They’re like clergymen,” said the little shoemaker, laughing grimly. “Nothing is ever wasted in this world.”
Matt was thinking so too, though from a different point of view. He was grateful to the economical order of the universe.
The boots reinvigorated the pilgrim on his way to the ever-receding Mecca of employment, and each day he sallied forth further refreshed by the bread and butter and tea which William Gregson’s spouse dispensed after the sittings. All over London he tramped. One day he wandered in hopes of a job among the docks of Rotherhithe, feeling a vague romance in the great gray perspectives of towering wood-stacks with their far-away flavor of exotic forests, and in the sombre canals andlocks along which men with cordwain faces were tugging discolored barges. The desolation of the scene and of the district was akin to his mood—his eyes were full of delicious hopeless tears; he rambled on, forgetting to ask for the job, through the forlorn streets, all ship-chandler shops and one-story cottages, and threading a narrow passage strewn with lounging louts, found himself on a little floating pier on the bank of the river, and lost himself again in contemplating the grimy picturesque traffic, the bleak wharves and warehouses.
“You see that air barge with the brick-dust sails?”
Matt started; an aged gentleman with a rusty silk hat was addressing him.
“Well, t’other day I see one just like that capsize in calm weather under my very eyes. I come here every day after dinner to watch the water, and I do get something worth seein’ sometimes. The pier-master he told me it was loaded with road-slop, and road-slop’s alive—shifts the weight on the lurchin’ side, you see, and that’s ’ow it occurred. There was two men drowned—oh! it’s worth while coming here sometimes, I can tell you. You see that green flag off the buoy?—that’s where she lays, right in the fairway of the river.”
Here the aged gentleman snuffed himself with tremulous fingers that spilled half, and offered Matt the box. The young man took a pinch for exhilaration.
A strayed sparrow hopped dolefully amid the grains of snuff on the floating platform in futile quest of seeds.
“It would be ’appier stuffed,” the aged gentleman declared. “I mean with tow, not toke.” And he laughed wheezingly.
Matt contesting this, the aged gentleman maintained, with an air of deep philosophy, that all birds would be ’appier stuffed—that their life in a state of nature was a harrowing competition for crumbs and worms, while to keep them alive in cages was the climax of cruelty.
It subsequently transpired that he was a retired bird-stuffer, and the conversation ended in Matt’s accompanying him home to learn the process, as the bird-stuffer’s son and heir in far-off Stepney was in need of a trustworthy hand in the shop.
“There isn’t a honest ’art in the trade,” he said, gloomily,“and the boys are wuss than the men. They ought to be stuffed. What I like about you is that you’ve got no character. The better the character the wuss the man. They takes advantage of it.”
Arrived at his house—which was more pretentious than most of its one-story neighbors—for it had a basement sublet to a blind woman whose insignia read, “Chairs neatly cained on reasonable terms,” and its parlor window was gay with wax fruits and stuffed birds—the aged gentleman, who gave the name of Ground, discovered that he had no skin to operate on, and, being spent from the walk, directed Matt to buy a dead canary for sixpence from a bird-fancier “in the Eye Road.”
“There’s the tanner,” he said. “Now if you don’t come back with the bird you may stuff me for a old goose.”
Matt came back with the bird, but the aged gentleman put it to his nose and contorted his aged snuff-colored nostrils.
“I want a bird, not manure,” he said. “A bird fresh from this wale of tears. Why, if I began to skin this the feathers ’ould drop out. You’ve been took in, but you haven’t took me in, so here’s another tanner.”
In great anxiety Matt stood outside the bird-fancier’s shop-window, staring wistfully at the frowsy-looking birds roosting in the cages, and hoping that some kindly canary would drop off to eternal sleep under his very nose so that he might be sure of its freshness. But the poor little creatures all clung to existence and their perches. Suddenly he began to laugh. There was an owl in a cage, and it looked like Cornpepper. On its head was an erectile tuft like Cornpepper’s hair after argument, and, though devoid of an eye-glass, the creature regarded him from its great feather-fringed eyes with the same large, profound gaze.
“Give me style,” he heard it saying, “give me style.”
And then he thought of Cornpepper’s theories, of which he had heard more on that glad mad night when the juvenile celebrity had been his partner in the waltz.
“Erle-Smith is all wrong,” Cornpepper had pronounced, testily. “But I don’t want to talk shop to-night. Imagination is shown in treatment, not in subject. There may be more imaginationin the painting of a dressing-gown than of an allegory. Painters are called poets when they can’t paint. And theSaturday Spectatoris quite at sea when it claims me as the champion of modern subject against ancient, mediæval, or imaginary. Subject, indeed! What I demand is moderntreatment. I do wish O’Brien would leave off interpreting me.”
And Matt Strang fell into a reverie, wondering what he should paint for the Academy, and gazing into the owl’s eyes. What if he were destined to waltz to fame in company with Cornpepper! And then he remembered Gurney’s enthusiastic talk during the pauses of the wild waltz in denunciation of the “real moments” of Cornpepperism, and in acclamation of the simpler harmonies of Outamaro, the great Japanese master, from whose work Cornpepper’s was a rotten retrogression rather than a legitimate evolution. Matt speculatively surrendered his fancy to Japanese images. A gallery of beautiful dream-pictures passed before his eyes like a panorama. A brusque tap on the shoulder roused him from his day-dream, and turning, he saw the animated face of the aged gentleman beneath the rusty silk hat.
“Where’s the bloomin’ bird?” cried Mr. Ground, relieved to find Matt not run off, for during the suspense of waiting it had struck him that even the first bird might have been picked up in the gutter.
“The bird,” Matt murmured, dazedly. “Oh! Ah! I was waiting for one to die. I wanted to be sure it was—new.”
“With my little eye, I sore ’im die,” quoted the aged gentleman, mockingly. “ ‘Ere, give us the cash—you’re a juggins. But I suppose folks can’t be honest and clever too.”
He took the sixpence and went inside, and re-emerged with what he called a “new-laid” linnet, and returning to his parlor, skinned it, and smeared the skin with arsenical soap, which he manufactured on the spot out of common yellow soap beaten up into a batter with water, white arsenic, and some drops of toothache mixture he had in a vial. He stuffed the skin with the cotton-wool in which the vial was embedded, and ran a wire right through from mouth to tail, with half a hair-pin for each leg and each wing.
“I’m out of eyes,” he said, pausing. “But in them sockets you sticks glass eyes—they’re so much a dozen, according to size. See?”
Matt’s aptitude as a pupil regained him the aged gentleman’s esteem, and a day or so after the oddly assorted couple sailed down the Thames on a penny steamboat, and walked from Blackwall to Stepney, where Matt was introduced to the bird-stuffer’s son, a fat, greasy, hilarious man, who told his father that he was “a old innercent,” and facetiously argued out the probabilities of Matt’s honesty in Matt’s presence. Ultimately, Ground Junior took the young man on a week’s trial. The trial going in Matt’s favor, he was installed permanently in the establishment at eighteen shillings a week, fulfilling miscellaneous functions, the most troublesome of which was the superintendence of a snub-nosed errand-boy, who played excruciatingly on a penny whistle. This boy, whose name was Tommy, and who reminded Matt queerly of his ancient Indian chum by his dishonesty as well as by his name, would calmly return with bare pedestals where there had been birds and shades, and assert that he had smashed the glass, and that thieves in the crowd had torn off the birds. He did not flinch from smashing whole nests of glass shades, two dozen inside one another, a veritable Napoleon among errand-boys. Sometimes, when he had been out with the barrow delivering orders, he would wheel it home laden with mysterious coats and boots, which he vainly offered Matt on easy terms. At irregular intervals, too, he fell ill, a note from his mother arriving in his handwriting differently sloped, and then Matt was reduced to trundling the barrow himself, while the fat facetious man, summoned from the workroom over the shop, or from his other establishment in the New Cut, where his wiry vixen of a wife had her headquarters, replaced him behind the counter. Matt had also spells of mechanical occupation in the workshop. He not only stuffed the skins (which came from abroad), but arranged baskets of wax-fruit (which were bought ready-made) and paper flowers and cases of shells with moss and sea-weeds and pyramids of pebbles. And he made mock red coral out of balls of brown paper, dipped into a hot composition of beeswax and rosin,and stuck it on wooden stands with many-hued shells variegating it, and preserved insects creeping prettily over it; likewise he manufactured wax-flowers to replace breakages; hollow frauds, mere wax shells pounced with dry colors, or mixed originally with coloring matter, yellow ochre making apples, and lake lending transparency to cherries, or uniting with Prussian blue to furnish the florid richness of purple grapes.
But though—as ever—his taskwork hovered oddly about the purlieus of Art, or the vaults of its Temple, and though his eighteen shillings a week enabled him to send nine shillings a week home, in monthly instalments, to Abner Preep, still he was not happy. The difficulties with the errand-boy; the fat facetiousness of Ground Junior; the menial trundling of the barrow, with the dread of some day meeting “Bubbles,” or other fellows from Grainger’s, to say nothing of Cornpepper, Gurney, Rapper, or the Old Gentleman; the retail trade over the counter, the biweekly task of cleaning all the shades with a chamois leather—all this, combined with the sense of wasted months, galled and fretted him. He was working at his Academy picture now—in accordance with his promise to Herbert—but his hours being from eight to eight, Sunday was his only leisure time, and he was paradoxically grateful for the ancient Oriental ordinance which made the godless British bird-stuffer close his shop once a week and thus enable him to work. He was able to do some of the preliminary sketching-out in the early morning and at night; but there was no light for the real work, nor was there much light in his back bedroom, even at noon on Sundays.
He had not changed his address, though he had to walk three miles to and from his work; kept to his old lodging by habit and the trust that his landlady—an artist’s mother—would not hastily throw him upon the streets. The subject of his picture had grown upon him from his daily occupation; the simulated bird-life around him moved him at moments to thoughts of the joyous winged creatures butchered to make a parlor ornament. He could not agree with Ground Senior that they were happier stuffed. And then, too, the pathos of prisoned birds would overwhelm him, exiled from their naturalwoodland home, and set to peck endlessly at wires. His own lot and theirs became subtly interlinked, and his imagination, turning from the sordid prose of the actual world in which he found himself, brooded on visions of poetry and idyllic happiness, and so, instead of selecting from reality that which was beautiful in it, instead of following Cornpepper’s theories, or his own theories, or anybody’s theories, he found himself irresistibly and instinctively seized and possessed by a subject and a mode of treatment uncompromisingly imaginative—“The Paradise of the Birds,” a beautiful wood, suffused with a magic sunlight, in which freed birds of many species should flutter blithely around a divine female figure with a wondrous radiance of love and joy upon her welcoming face, and at her feet a beautiful boy playing upon an oaten pipe. There should be an undertone of tender pathos—the pathos of birds—but light and joy were to be the essence of this harmony of lovely forms and colors; all the painter’s semi-unconscious yearning for happiness, all his revolt against his narrow, squalid lot, his secret, resentful sense of the high place denied him at the banquet of life, reflecting themselves, inverted, in the mirror of his art. And though the sunlight and atmosphere should be real enough to satisfy the Cornpepper faction, yet over all he would put something of Erle-Smith’s glamour:—
“The gleam,The light that never was on sea or land,The consecration and the poet’s dream.”
“The gleam,The light that never was on sea or land,The consecration and the poet’s dream.”
“The gleam,The light that never was on sea or land,The consecration and the poet’s dream.”
For the paradise Matt drew on his recollections and old sketches of Acadia, supplemented by a few water-color studies made in Epping Forest, which was within difficult walking distance of the bird-shop, from which, of course, he got his birds; the divine female figure was based upon his first study from the nude at Grainger’s, which he still possessed, though he now gave the woman the normal allowance of toes; while by the aid of coppers he bribed the snub-nosed apprentice with his penny whistle to sit for the cherub with the oaten reed. And thus was Nature transfigured to Art. But as Eden to Epping,so was Matt’s mental conception of the picture to the real picture.
From dawn to sunset Matt painted tirelessly, and with many patient effacements and substitutions of passages, during his one working-day, convinced that the Academy was now his only avenue to recognition; and as sending-in day drew nearer, and the precious light was born earlier, he was able to snatch an hour or two every morning before setting out for Stepney. Towards the end the need of time drove him to the omnibus.
Nor was it only the need of time. Of late a strange languor had grown upon him, against which he was incessantly battling. The image in his strip of glass frightened him; his face was white, his once sturdy frame thin, and so feeble was he become that the three-mile walk, which had been rather a pleasure than an inconvenience, was now a weary, endless drag. He had bilious headaches. But he toiled on at his picture, finding in the fairyland of imagination consolation for existence, and in the anxieties and agonies of artistic travail an antidote to the agonies and anxieties of the daily grind. “The Paradise of the Birds,” though he was conscious it did not equal his conception, still seemed to him far superior to the ordinary Academy picture; it could not fail to redeem him from his own Inferno, reveal him to the world, make him an honored guest in artistic coteries, and give him all the day for Art. Through the sordid life of Stepney and Whitechapel he moved, sustained by an inner vision of beauty and victory, and it was not till he had surreptitiously wheeled his picture to Burlington House in the bird-stuffer’s barrow, at the price of a reprimand for idling about, that his will-power gave way, and he realized that he was but a limp shadow. Hope kept him on his feet a little longer, but the terrifying symptoms developed rapidly, and at last even Ground Junior perceived his condition, and allowed him a morning’s leave to attend a hospital. For two hours and a half he waited on one of the bare benches of a cheerless, dim-lit anteroom amid a grimy crowd of invalids, ranging from decrepit, bandaged old men to wan-faced children, all coughing and groaning and conversing fatuously, and ostentatiously comparing complaints, and finally fading awaytediously two by two into the presence of the physician. At last his own turn came, announced by the sharp ting of a hand-bell; and, preceded by a rheumy-eyed stone-mason, he passed through the polished, awe-inspiring portal, and found himself in the presence of an austere gentleman with frosty side-whiskers.
“What’s the matter with you, my man?” the doctor inquired in low tones of the stone-mason.
“All outer sorts,” replied the stone-mason.
“Ah! Any special pain anywhere?” he went on, in the same dulcet accents.
“Eh?” asked the stone-mason, hearing imperfectly in his fluster.
The doctor shouted in a mighty yell: “Any special pain anywhere?”
The appalled stone-mason admitted to a stitch in the side, and the doctor continued his interrogative thunders. He had only two conversational methods—the piano and the fortissimo.
Matt, trembling, awaited his succession to the criminal dock, and, straining his ears when the trying moment came, was fortunate enough to secure the piano treatment.
“Your blood is poisoned,” was the great man’s verdict. “This is the third case I have had from bird-stuffing establishments. When you clean the glass shades and breathe on the insides you imbibe the arsenical and other foul gases that are given off by the skins and collect inside the air-tight glasses. You will take the medicine three times a day, but it won’t do you any good if you go on living in that atmosphere. You want sea-air. You ought to try and get into the country, and have a little holiday.”
And Matt Strang, dazed, but smiling grimly, crawled down into the dispensary and handed in his prescription, and tottered back to the bird-shop with a big bottle of yellow fluid in his hand. He would not let himself think; there was only one point of light—his Academy picture—and he kept his eyes fixed on that as on a star.
A few days later the notice of rejection arrived, and the thin, sickly faced young man, being out with orders, surreptitiouslywheeled “The Paradise of the Birds” home on his barrow, and discounted the renewed wrath of his employer by giving a week’s notice. He did his work as usual that afternoon, smiling in uneasy defiance at the oddly intrusive thought that the Cobequid folks would have said it was all through his painting on Sundays, yet not without a shred of their superstition. But when he got home he fell helplessly on his little iron bed, and wept like a child.
He was beaten, broken, shattered in body and soul. He had fought and lost.
And as an ailing child turns yearningly to its mother, so his heart yearned to his native land in a great surge of homesickness. Here the narrow labyrinthine streets were muddy with spring rains, but there the snow would still be on the fields and forests, white and pure and beautiful under the dazzling blue sky. Oh, the keen, tingling cold, the large embrace of the salt breezes, the joy of skating over the frozen flats! His poor poisoned blood glowed at the thought. Here he was ill and lonely, there he would be among loving faces. Poor Billy! How the boy must long for him! It would be humiliating to return a failure, but there would be none to reproach him, and his own pride was gone, vanished with his physical strength. But how to get back? He was too ill to go before the mast, too impoverished to command even the steerage. He had unfortunately sent thirty-six shillings home just before the rejection of his picture, and he was again in arrears of rent, through the extra expense of the canvas and the compulsory gilt frame. Mrs. Lipchild was induced by the splendor of the frame to take “The Paradise of the Birds” in payment for the three weeks (lunar), and the “carver and gilder, over-mantel and picture-frame maker” in Red Lion Street, who had made the frame, purchased all his remaining pictures and school-studies for a sovereign down.
There was nothing for it but to borrow. So feeble was his whole being that the first suggestion of this ignominy carried no sting. He thought first of Herbert, and brushing his garments to a threadbare specklessness, inquired of his club door-keeper, who informed him curtly that Mr. Strang was abroad. Thiswas as he expected, but he was disappointed. Tarmigan was his only other friend, but him he had lost sight of since Christmas, and though he had in these hours of weakness abandoned the hope of Art, he had still a vague paradoxical aversion from applying to a man whose artistic ideas he did not share, and who might hereafter have a sort of right to resent his departure from them. Besides, Tarmigan was poor, was unsuccessful. In his desperation he thought of Madame Strang, and though, in the course of their chat that night at the Students’ Club, Herbert had told him the Old Gentleman had given her an awful wigging, and she had renewed her promise to close her door in the culprit’s face, yet Matt nerved himself to risk insult. So, spying the shop from a sheltered doorway across the street, he hung about till the Vandyke beard and the velvet jacket had issued and disappeared round a corner, then he rang the bell of the side door, and to his joy Madame herself opened it.
“My poor boy! What is the matter with you?” she cried.
The unexpected sympathy of her words clouded the lonely young man’s gaze with hot tears; he staggered into the passage, and Madame, growing pale herself, took him by the arm and helped him into the sitting-room, and in her agitation poured him out a whole tumblerful of brandy, which fortunately he only sipped.
A little recovered, he explained—improving his pallid complexion with blushes when he came to the point—that he was returning to Nova Scotia, as the doctor had ordered him a sea-voyage, and he wanted four or five pounds till he got to the other side, when he would easily be able to repay the loan.
“Certainly, my poor boy, certainly,” said Madame. “The idea of clever people having no money, and people like me having plenty.”
She ran up-stairs, and returned with ten of the sovereigns, that she hoarded—literally—in her stocking.
But Matt would not take more than five. He felt it foolish to burden himself with superfluous temptations.
“I knew you weren’t a rogue,” cried Madame, in thoughtless triumph. The sentiment reminding her of the interrogativeeyebrows, she added, hastily, “Of course, you won’t tell my husband. Not that he would mind, of course, for I am helping you to leave the country. But oh, how I wish you had come to me instead of to Herbert! The dear boy has such hard work and so few pleasures, and his allowance is so small that his father was naturally annoyed to think of your making the poor boy stint himself. Of course, I made it up to Herbert unbeknown to his father, who would only return him a little of the money you had borrowed. Promise me you will not apply to Herbert again. You know it is so expensive living in Paris!”
“I promise,” Matt murmured, hardly conscious of what Madame was saying, his soul already in Nova Scotia, and dissolved in tenderness and gratitude. The prospect of leaving London was as delightful as the prospect of coming to it had been not fifteen months ago.
Ere he bade her farewell Madame made him promise to come and see her when he was back in London again, hoped the voyage would do him good, and scolded him for never having shown her his pictures.
“I am sure you will be a great artist,” she said, smiling winsomely. “You have the artistic hand. God bless you.”
The young man listened unmoved; he was hoping the ice would bear till he arrived in Cobequid Village.
And so, with all his worldly goods, including the unsaleable “Angelus,” packed in the smallest of satchels, Matt Strang sailed back across the Atlantic, the blood clogged in his veins, an unregarded unit of the countless myriads that London has allured and scorched.
Butthe prodigal son was not fated to see any of his relatives immediately upon his return to his native land except his mother, and this was scarcely his mother, this pale creature with eyes vacant of all save tears, who babbled to him, with heart-rendingverbal repetitions, of Revelation and the Beast, not even mistaking him for his dead father. She had survived her life.
From Halifax Matt did not proceed forthwith to Cobequid Village, joining, instead, a crew of mackerel-fishers, in the hope of earning enough to repay Madame Strang immediately; for his soul, reinvigorated by the sea-breezes of the voyage and the skies of his childhood, had returned to its healthy repugnance to debt, and was ashamed of its lapse.
It was a mixed company that he sailed away with—the bulk decent Nova Scotians, of old fisher stock, but some rougher and more casual, and a few—though these were harmless enough—despised “Portigees.” The fishing was not devoid of danger. The men had to row out from the schooner in twos or threes to tend the nets spread on the mackerel banks, and sometimes a fog would come on and ingulf the ship, and the fishers with their mocking freight would row for hours and hours, and at times for days and days, on the ghostly sea in search of their floating home. And sometimes they, too, would be swallowed up in the mystery of sea and fog, and wives and mothers, running anxiously to the wharf to meet them, would learn that an older fisher had netted his prey.
To Matt the hard work and the peril were alike welcome; the very mists were poetry after the yellow charnel-house vapors of London, which now lay behind him like a nightmare, and with it his dream of Art. His soul had swung round violently. In the strain of hauling up the nets in the misty moonlight, in the silence of sea and sky and night, he found repose from his morbid craving to reproduce this mighty Nature, which stretched away all around him in large, sane serenity, as indifferent to the puny images of Art as the waste of waters to the little dory rocking on its bosom. And the rugged simplicity of his briny, horny-handed mates was equally restful after the garish brilliance of the young artists about town; after all, his heart was with homely folk, went out to sea-folk; he was his father’s son and the brother of all those who go down to the sea in ships and do business in the great waters. How like a child’s cackle Cornpepper’s epigrams sounded across the silence of the lonely deep! Under the hushed stars, touching the infinite spaces with awfulbeauty, all these feverish figures of the smoking-room showed like fretful midges.
When the cruise was over, and the spoil had been unloaded and sold on the fishy wharf, or steeped in brine and packed in the vats, Matt was able to send ten dollars to England, besides keeping up his usual allowance to Cobequid Village and maintaining himself—a triple task which weighed heavily upon his brain, and gave him frequent moments of corroding, nervous apprehension. For his health was only partially re-established, and his correspondence with Cobequid Village was not reassuring. His brothers and sisters were growing up without finding much to do; Billy moped a great deal, and though he thanked his brother for the engraving of the “Angelus,” which Matt sent him, he intimated that he would have been better pleased had Matt spent his money on books of travel and adventure for him. And Abner wrote, with pathetic facetiousness, that he was “tolerable pleased” that his brother-in-law had not come home, as they would have been “mighty squeezed” to put him up, for, what with the increase of Abner’s own progeny and the growth of the Strangs, even the best room with the cane chairs had long since been turned into a bedroom, though it could still be restored to its pristine magnificence on state occasions.
From the neighboring fishing-ground Matt gravitated back to Halifax. His thoughts, divorced from Art, centred on money. His artistic fibre was coarser now than in those days of almost religious enthusiasm for Art. He had an idea of opening a drawing-school and becoming the local “Grainger,” but the initial funds were to seek. He got a few drawing-lessons, but the stupidity of his pupils was maddening, and his communion with their parents fretted him after the larger mind of London. He feared he would have to take to the road again in search of sitters, and the prospect of weary tramps in quest of patronizing store-keepers and farmers was not alluring, even though that fine squeamish horror at the idea of Art to order had been knocked out of him. He was saved from the tramping by becoming assistant in a photographic caravan, which toured the country, leaving in each village a trail of attitudinizing inhabitants mounted and framed; in the course of which campaign, by apleasanter stroke of fortune, he painted the portraits of a minister of fisheries and of the cook he had married, and so gained enough money to quit the caravan and start a carriage-painting shop in the village where the happy couple had their country home. As the poorest inhabitants were carriage-folk—for horses and oats and hay were cheap, and carriage taxes unknown—Matt Strang, with a commercial instinct sharpened and an artistic interest blunted by miseries, calculated to do well. His sign-board, executed by his own hand, ran:
The shop was a success. Ere the summer waned many of the villagers had their idle sleighs brilliantly illumined, and when winter came their faded carriages were handed over to Matt to be berouged or otherwise beautified. Each man had his equipage decorated after his own taste or whim, though he always began by leaving it entirely to the artist. One would order lemon-yellow underworks, with vermilion stripes and an olive-green body, for another the ideal of beauty lay in lake and russet-and-green, while the fancy of a third would turn lightly to Prussian blue and gold stripes; and Matt, devoid now of artistic interest and thus of artistic irritability, faithfully obeyed the behests of his employers, and filled the leafy streets with a riotous motley of perambulating color. The little village was pranked and rejuvenated. It wore a sempiternally festive air. The sign-boards were spick-and-span, the house fronts fresh and bright, the vehicles gayly a-glitter, the glass windows of the stores black with self-laudatory lettering by day, while at night the buff store-blinds repeated the brag; and over all the village was a sense of “wet paint.” Thus did the artist throw a glamour over life, and touch the sleeping souls of his fellows to livelier issues,though his own interest in Art was numb. But prices were small, and paid mainly in kind, and when once the place was transmogrified there was nothing further to be done, the latter items of his sign-board evoking no response. So Matt shifted his ensign to Starsborough, a ship-building village on the coast, where he found new scope for his versatile craftsmanship, as witness two new items added to his painted prospectus:—
Figure-heads Carved.Ship Decorating.
He got leave to set up in the ship-yard, speculated in a set of carving-tools, and supplied the prows of the ships with those picturesque wooden persons whose uselessness is of the essence of Art. He occupied a corner in the calker’s shop, reeking with tarry odors, and worked hemmed in by the oakum-pickers, who relieved the tedium of toil by smoking and singing lewd songs. One of his works, a Turkish lady eight feet high, to get which done in time cost him much sweat and sacrifice of other work, pleased the ship-builder so vastly that he gave Matt the contract—in preference to all the other candidates who sent in estimates—for painting his next ship within and without. The delighted young man saw his way to speedy competence, the long-torpid thought of Art began to stir drowsily, only it was Paris that now gleamed fitfully in the background of his day-dreams. He talked over the decorations with the ship-builder, and agreed to pay the men from week to week, and to supply the tools, paints, and gold-leaf till the job was completed, when his employer undertook to pay him the sum agreed upon in actual coin. As Matt was able to get the materials from a store on three months’ credit, and to pay his men with orders on the same all-embracing store on the same terms, and the job would be finished in less than three months, the arrangement promised to be very profitable. Alas! it proved the crash and break-down of all his new prosperity. In the middle of the work the ship-builder failed heavily, and Matt found himself on the point of bankruptcy too, for, though he sent in his claim against the estate, there seemed scant chance of his obtaininganything. Even the Turkish woman had not been paid for, Matt having consented to receive her price with the rest of the money, for the sake of getting silver in lieu of goods. His account with the store-keeper had run up to $250. He could not see how to meet his bills; the weeks without other work had exhausted his savings; there was even about a fourth of his debt still to be sent to Madame Strang. He got other little jobs, but the great shipwright’s failure had reduced Starsborough to stagnation. The time of payment drew nigh. After sleepless nights of anguish he went to the store-keeper and told him he could not pay. The man received him sympathetically, said he had been expecting the confession, and consented to give him a little time; so Matt broke up his establishment, and journeyed by train and packet to another village nearer Halifax, and set up his sign-board afresh. A job took him to the capital, and in the streets he ran across his Starsborough creditor, who was come up to order hardware, and who, apparently delighted to see him, invited him to breakfast with him at his hotel next morning. Always glad to save a meal, and rejoiced to find his creditor so genial and debonair, Matt tramped into town the first thing in the morning and repaired to the hotel. But there was no breakfast for him. A sheriff’s officer awaited him instead, and arrested him for debt. He had been the victim of a subterfuge, his creditor fearing from his migratory movements that he was about to run off to the States.
And so Matt was clapped into the prison to await his trial, and became one of the broken-down band that inhabited its spacious ward, promenaded the long whitewashed corridor on which the lavatory gave, and slept on the iron beds ranged against the wall. Every morning the bedclothes were stripped off and piled in the empty cells to give the ward a more habitable air. In this dreary bed and sitting room Matt spent days of mental agony, though physically he fared better than under his own parsimoniousrégime. But the sense of degradation outweighed all else. He felt he could never look his fellow-men in the face again. His character was gone; his ambitions had received their death-blow—nay, his very business career in his native land was at an end. The stigma would always soil hisfuture. All the long travail and aspiration had ended at what a goal! He could not understand the careless merriment of his fellow-prisoners, who fleeted the time with cards, which they played for love. There was a negro among them who was the whetstone of their wit, and a Frenchman who varied his tearful narrative of the misfortune that had brought him low, with ventriloquial performances and anecdotes of self-made Yankee millionaires. In this gesticulating little man Matt recognized with surprise and shamefacedness his ancient fractious subordinate in the Halifax furniture shop, who had taken him to his bosom after due alcohol, but he was glad to find his unconscious fellow made no advances. At moments he forced himself to look for the comic Bohemian side of the situation, to imagine Cornpepper’s superiority to a debtors’ prison, the artist sublime amid the ruins of his credit, snorting disdain for the absurd institutions of the bourgeois; but neither this nor philosophy availed to shake his sense of shame. He summoned the infinite to his aid, saw himself again rocking on the little dory between sea and sky, and asked himself what anything mattered in this vast of space and time. But these excursions of the intellect left instinct unmoved; from childhood the word “jail” had been fraught with shuddering associations; they could not be argued away. Strang’s aloofness from his companions, even when an outside friend had sent in liquor or dainties to one of them, attracted the notice of the jailer, a kindly man in a cutaway coat, with only an official cap to mark his calling. He talked to the sullen, brooding prisoner, conceived a liking for him, and commissioned him to paint his portrait for ten dollars, supplying the materials himself and providing a temporary easel. The darkness that had threatened Matt’s reason, if not his life, fled before this kindness; the days before the trial flew by almost joyously, and the nights were rendered more tolerable by being passed alone on a plank bed in one of the criminal cells, whose stout doors, studded with iron nails and furnished with little gratings, rarely held anybody, so that the painter easily persuaded his patron to allow him to occupy it.
He had scarcely set up his easel when his companions clustered round, and the Frenchman burst into tears of emotion, andprofessed that he, too—he who spoke to you—was an artist. If only some one could see the creditor who had thrown him into prison, and explain to him that his victim was guiltless of all save genius. As Matt had heard all this before, he pursued his work unmoved, affording a new distraction to his mates, so that the negro’s life became endurable, and less love was lost at cards. But ere the second sitting was over the Frenchman, who had studied alternately the artist’s face and his canvas, uttered an exclamation of joyous recollection and fell upon his neck, crying that he had at last found again the comrade of his soul. When Matt had shaken him off, he drew a romantic picture of their early affection and collaboration for the edification of the salon, and henceforth took a proud fraternal interest in the progress of the portrait.
The picture turned out better than Matt had expected; to his own surprise he found himself painting more vigorously than ever; his hand, instead of having lost its cunning, seemed to have gained by the rest. The jailer was well content, and promised two and a half dollars over and above the price; but as Matt had expressed his intention of sending the money to his creditor, his new friend held over the surplus till he should need it for himself. When at the end of the third week the trial came on, and Matt “swore out,” solemnly asserting absolute impecuniosity, his creditor, mollified by the ten dollars, and further assuaged by the sale of Matt’s effects, from his tools to his sign-board, did not press the counter-proof of competency, and so the prisoner was set at liberty. Sundry other bankrupts “swore out” at the same time, one or two, who had boasted privily of their means, perjuring themselves back to freedom and prosperity.
Before Matt Strang bade farewell to the jail, the Frenchman broke off a ventriloquial performance to beseech him with tears in the name of thecamaraderieof Art, and for the sake of their ancient affection, now that he was going forth into the free sunshine, to expostulate with that cruel creditor and plead for unhappy genius. The persecutor—Coble by name—would not listen to his own appeals; but if a brother-artist would speak for him, Coble’s better nature—and every man had a better nature—might be touched, and the skylark might soar freely again towards the blue empyrean. He was quite honest—oh, Heaven, yes! He did not really possess two hundred dollars, as Coble imagined, but he could not account for them before the court—one would see why—though privately he could account for them in a way that would satisfy every honest man. Some emissary of Satan had put a bill into his hand which said, “For a hundred dollars we will give you a thousand dollars of our goods.” He had hankered, as any man might, after those thousand dollars, and sought out the coiners (for all the world knew that was their formula), and paid his hundred dollars. But the bag of coin they had given him was snatched from him on his road back by one of their agents. Determined not to be outwitted, he had gone again and invested another hundred dollars, and posted the parcel to himself at a neighboring post-office, but when it arrived he had found only a brick-bat inside. He had been afraid to “swear out” lest Coble should maintain he had the money, and thus get him indicted for perjury.
If the friend of his youth would lay these facts before the cruel Coble, he would no longer languish in a dungeon. Would not the great artist promise him?
The story seemed too strange to be false, and Matt promised, at the risk of a kiss, to recount it to the cruel Coble, though he failed to see how it proved the Frenchman’s honesty. He was, indeed, not sorry to have something definite to do, for with the completion of the jailer’s portrait had come a reaction, and he had lapsed, if not into his first agony, into a listless apathy that was worse—the nerveless, purposeless inertia of a crushed spirit. He had been in jail! Not even a miracle could erase that blot upon his name. How could he take up the burden of life afresh? Unless, perhaps, temporarily, with the sole object of wiping off the debt which he owed morally, though no longer legally. Anyway, he would see this Mr. Coble; the Frenchman seemed—curiously enough—to attach value to life, and if a little bit of his own life could be of any use to the poor weak creature, it was at his disposal. Mr. Coble, too, must be a strange person to derive any satisfaction from keeping the pygmy in prison in revenge for the loss of a few hundred dollars.
Money! Money! Money! How it had cramped and crippled and defiled his life!
He washed himself in the lavatory before leaving, and brushed his clothes, which were in a very fair condition. He was startled to find how many gray hairs streaked the curly locks he combed. “It won’t be a monochrome much longer,” he thought, surveying his mane with bitter merriment.
Outside it was May, but he was not brightened by the great blue sky that roofed him once more. The bustle of life sounded pleasantly about him, but he slunk through the busy quarters of the town with hanging head, as if every passer-by could read his shame in his face. The horrible thought struck him suddenly that Coble would know whence he came, but on top of it came the happy idea of explaining he had only gone to the jail to paint the portrait of an official.
The journey was not very long, though the road was muddy and steep. Mr. Coble lived beyond Citadel Hill, amid whose grassy expanse a path wound towards the more scattered portions of the town. The ice was quite off the sunny fields, except in the shaded parts under the fences, and men were ploughing with yokes of oxen, though here and there heaped-up piles of snow still bordered the route, which they flooded with slush in their gradual deliquescence. Mr. Coble’s suburban residence was a detached, double-fronted wooden cottage, barred from the road by a neat, white-painted picket-fence. There were attics in the roof, which, like its neighbors, was pitched, with broad eaves, for the sliding down of the snow. The front garden had been newly dug up and laid out to receive seed; there was a dirty line round the house, showing where the winter embanking had recently been removed.
Matt pushed open the white picket garden-gate and walked up the gravel path towards the pillared porch; three wooden steps led to the little platform, and then the door was raised one step higher to prevent snow drifting in from without.
Matt knocked. He heard the inner door open, the patter of light footsteps; then the outer door swung back, and a girl—passably pretty—appeared in the little entry between the doors, which were thus duplicated against the frost.
Matt lifted his hat and inquired for Mr. Coble. He had reverted to the drawling accents of the colony, though not altogether to its locutions.
“Oh, pa’s down at the store,” answered the girl, staring at the visitor.
“When will he be in?” Matt asked, disappointed.
“Oh, not for hours,” said Miss Coble. “Is it anything I can tell him?”
“No, no; I don’t think so,” Matt replied, hesitatingly. “I had better call again this evening.”
The girl lingered silently without closing the door. There was a perceptible pause.
“Yes,” she answered, at last. “I guess you had.”
He raised his hat again and went down the gravel path. At the garden-gate it struck him that he ought to have inquired the address of the store in town, and so saved a second journey. He turned his head, and saw the girl still at the door looking after him. Then it seemed funny to go back.
He shut the gate hastily and pursued his way to town down the muddy road, wondering what he would do next, and how he could cope with life. The thought of the Frenchman brought up the memory of that furniture warehouse in which they had worked together in the days of his boyish dreams. He bent his steps towards it with a vague thought of seeking work there again, but found it had been converted into an emporium for sewing-machines. As he sauntered aimlessly down the street, his eye was caught by a lurid picture in a store window. It represented a shark snapping savagely at a diver upon the bed of the ocean. He smiled at the crude composition, which reminded him of his own early works; then, as he perceived its relation to the stock-in-trade, his smile became broader. Sponge was the staple, and a gigantic delicate sponge, with ornamental spout-holes and fragments of rock adhering realistically to it, was a conspicuous object amid dandy-brushes and spoke-brushes and chamois-leather and glass cases covering rock-work. There were little sponges on a card, and Matt started violently as he read, “Coble’s five-cent sponges.” The mountain had come to Mahomet!
He walked in, crunching over a débris of shells, grit, and sand, and inhaling a pungent saline odor. A veritable mountain of a man towered over him with beetling brows and snowy hair and beard. His paunch protruded imposingly, and his eyes glittered.
“Mr. Coble?” said Matt, inquiringly.
“That’s me,” cried the mountain of flesh, in fierce accents, as if defying contradiction.
Matt felt the business would not be easy.
“I’ve taken the liberty of coming to you—on behalf of—”
“Not that tarnation Frenchman?” shrieked Mr. Coble.
Matt reddened uncomfortably.
“That’s the fifth man he’s sent me. When did you come out of prison?”
“I’ve been painting the jailer’s portrait,” Matt stammered, with burning cheeks. “And I used to know the poor little man years ago, and he says—”
“I can’t listen now. Does he think I’ve no business to attend to?”
“He didn’t send me here, he sent me to your house.”
“Ho, that’s a new dodge. But I reckon he told you the old things, eh?—that I’m a stony-hearted cuss, that I’d sneak the coppers off a corpse’s eyes or squeeze a cent till the eagle squeaked.”
“No, really, he didn’t tell me that,” said Matt.
“Oh, you needn’t spare the old man’s feelings. I know what a man says when he finds you won’t be swindled. He’s the everlastingest old dodger that ever drummed for me. His tricks ’ould puzzle a Philadelphia lawyer. The only honest bit of work he ever did in his life was that thar pictur’ of a shark. That’s stunnin’, I admit, and I’d willingly let the poor devil out of the cage if my darter warn’t so bitter agen him. There, that’s the truth. I never told it to any of the other fellows, they all looked such moulty jail-birds. Say now, you said you were a painter, ain’t that a good pictur’?”
Although Mr. Coble’s words were now more amiable, his accent was still fierce, and it required some courage on Matt’s part to reply that the picture was pretty good in a manner that betokened that it was pretty bad.
“Ho, two of a trade!” quoth the mountain of a man.
“The shark couldn’t be like that,” Matt explained, mildly. “He has to turn on his back before biting. It isn’t true to life.”
“Waal,” said Mr. Coble, in irate tones, “as the shark’s got nothing at all to do with the sponge business, and the divers ain’t in no sort o’ danger whatever from it, I don’t see where truth to life comes in, anyhow.”
“Oh, but the less lies you tell in Art the better,” urged Matt. “I’ll do you another if you like.”
“Ho, that’s your dodge, is it?”
“I’m not asking anything for it,” the young man retorted, indignantly. “It ’ll be a return for your listening to my appeal.”
Mr. Coble was startled.
“Thunderation!” he cried, sharply. “You’re a Christian. Step outside, and we’ll liquor up.”
The invitation was uttered so fiercely that it sounded like a command, especially as the Titan stamped three times with his foot—only his way of signalling to his subordinate, Matt found. In the nearest bar, which happened to be an illicit one, approached through a porch at the back of a temperance hotel for the convenience of avowed teetotalers, the man-mountain imparted to Matt the information that it was the Frenchman’s amorous advances that had imbittered his daughter. “For my part,” he said, “so far from wantin’ to keep him in there in clover, I’d like to lift him out on the point of my toe, and I’d make him vamoose from the town that smart you couldn’t see his heels for the dust. I’ll mention it to Rosina that you’ve been putting in a good word for the skunk, but I don’t think she’ll listen, that’s a fact.”
“Oh, but I’m sure she will,” said Matt. “She looks a kindhearted young lady.”
“You haven’t seen her!” exclaimed Mr. Coble, fiercely.
“Yes; I saw her this afternoon,” said Matt.
“Then you’ve seen the purtiest gal you’ll see this year. Set ’em up again. This old rye’s whopping good. Always rely on a temperance hotel for good whiskey. And as my gal has agoodish bit of money,” pursued the old man, smacking his lips and growing communicative without losing any of the sternness of his accent, “you can understand what made the wretched little froggy roll his eyes and twist his mustache at her. How he found it out will be a mystery to my dyin’ day, for I’m careful never to breathe a whisper of it to a single soul, but he ferreted out somehow or t’other that when she’s twenty-one my Rosie will step into an income of eight hundred dollars.”
He shouted the statement so loudly that the whole bar pricked up its ears. Matt quite believed that Coble was incapable of whispering anything to anybody. He had a vague envy of the fortunate girl.
“Not to mention three thousand dollars I’ve put aside myself to hand her on her wedding-day,” continued Coble. “Young folks are lucky nowadays. When I married I had to lend my father-in-law ten dollars to rig himself up respectable for church.”
Before they parted the mountain of flesh had consented thunderously to Matt’s supplying another picture of the dangers of sponge-fishing, but would not bind himself, although in his third glass, to do more in return than lay the matter before his daughter. Once alone in the streets again, Matt felt he had made a bad bargain. The two and a half dollars the jailer had given him were all his funds, and even the few nickels that would have to be expended on common water-colors and the double-royal card-board were a consideration. But he loyally executed the work in the bedroom he had ventured to take, finding rather a relief in this further postponement of the problem of his future. By the following afternoon he was back at Coble’s with a brilliant sketch far more arrestive than the Frenchman’s. The shark was more formidable, the nude diver more graceful, his netted bag more accurate, and the ocean-bed was a veritable fairy-land of sea-lichens and polyps. Coble glared long at the sketch as Matt held it up, but he said nothing.
“What do you think of it?” asked Matt, apprehensively, at last.
“What do I think of it?” roared old Coble, and rushing to the window he grabbed the old, inaccurate shark, tore itsavagely in two, snatched the new picture from the hands of the astonished Matt, filled up the vacancy with it, dashed outside to survey it from the sidewalk, and reappearing at the door, bellowed, “Step this way, young man,” and stamped three times on the threshold.
Over the old rye he reported to the artist that he had found his Rosie more placable than usual; that she was even willing to listen to the young man’s plea, though she seemed to want to hear it from his own mouth before deciding. Matt gladly consented to sup that evening with the mountain and his daughter. Free drinks never surprised him, but a free square meal was like having larks flying into one’s mouth ready roasted.
It was the happiest evening he had spent for many a long day. There was a spotless cloth on the round table, and the food was good, if solid. Miss Coble made herself agreeable, and if she was not so pretty as her father saw her, her plump cheek was sufficiently rosy and her figure sufficiently comely and her frock sufficiently nice to be grateful to the eye of an artist and a young man just emerged from prison society, and starving for the amenities of life. Her light-blue eyes lit up pleasantly when he addressed her, or when she helped him to more griddle-cakes. Some stuffed birds over a low bookcase that contained a few brightly bound volumes reminded him pleasurably of past miseries. The stentorian voice of old Coble almost monopolized the conversation. He had much to say that was not worth listening to—on the bad crops of the year before last, the scarcity of helps, and the failure of the colony to go ahead, which was apparently connected with the uncleanliness of the inhabitants, as manifest from the small sales of bath-sponges. After dinner the mountain smoked, and after smoking the volcano slept.
“I’m afraid you think pa’s got a bad temper,” said Miss Coble, abruptly. She had hastily cleared away the supper dishes, and had seated herself, half recumbent amid a litter of sewing, upon a couch opposite the easy-chair which Matt now occupied. The young man instinctively glanced towards her trumpeting parent.
“Oh, he’s sound enough; can’t you hear?” she said, laughing gayly. “I only hope he doesn’t disturb you. I’m used to it.”
“I only hope I sha’n’t disturbhim,” answered Matt.
“I guess he’s making more noise than us,” laughed Miss Coble. “He can’t even be quiet when he’s asleep. I was going to explain to you that he can’t help it; there’s something wrong with his throat. It happened when his voice broke in his boyhood, and it always sounds as if he was angry—it always frightens off strangers, but he is really the best-tempered papa in the township.”
Matt smiled. “I did think he was rather a fire-eater at first,” he admitted. “But I’ve found him real jolly, and couldn’t quite make it out all this time.” He continued to smile at the drollness of Coble’s disability, and the girl’s eyes met his in an answering gleam of merriment.
“Pa says you’re a powerful painter, Mr. Strang,” she said after a silence, filled up by ruttling sounds from pa’s larynx.
“Oh, your pa’s only seen a rough thing I did for him,” he protested, diffidently.
“Never mind.” She shook her head sagely. “I’m going down town to see it to-morrow,” and she flashed a sunny smile at him that showed her teeth were white.
Matt murmured, uneasily: “Oh, it’s not worth the trouble.”
“It’ll do me good, anyway. I’m getting fat, pa says. Wouldn’t it be awful if I was to take after him? You know he lives away from town so as to have exercise up and down Citadel Hill, but he might as well have lived over the store.” And she giggled, not unmusically.
“You can’t tell what he would have been,” Matt reminded her with a smile.
“Gracious! you frighten me. He might have come through the walls! Do you think there is really any danger of my growing like him? Do tell!”
“There’s no danger of your losing your good looks,” replied Matt, gallantly.
“You mean I never had any,” she said, with a roguish gleam that made the plump face piquant.
“Oh, you know what I mean,” he protested, lamely.
Miss Coble meditatively picked up a piece of tape from the litter of sewing and put it round her waist. Then she measured her bust.
“Is that the proper proportion?” she said, holding it up. “Artists are supposed to know, aren’t they?”
“The figure couldn’t be better,” said Matt.
The girl shook her head in laughing reproof.
“I guess I’d better measure you and prove it, then,” said Matt, rising.
“My, how that lamp flares!” cried Miss Coble, rushing towards the table, and carefully fumbling with the regulator. Matt resumed his seat, feeling rather foolish; but soon, when the girl turned the talk on himself, the reserved, solitary young man found himself telling her of adventures by sea and land, which he had not told anybody, perhaps because nobody had ever asked him. He gave Halifax prison a wide berth, warding off her casual questions about his position and prospects by general statements about his artistic aspirations. Concerning aspects of London life Miss Coble’s curiosity was at its keenest, her own experience of existence having been limited, she said, to Halifax and its environs, with faint, childish reminiscences of Greencastle, Pennsylvania, where her mother had died thirteen years before, when she was six years old.
“Oh, but I didn’t mean to tell you my age,” she said, pouting. “In ten years’ time you will know I am nearly thirty.”
Matt was about to reassure her by declaring that in ten years’ time he would have forgotten all about her, when the fall of the sleeper’s pipe checked the unchivalrous statement.
He rose to go as soon as the mountain awoke, for he had a goodish tramp before him.
Miss Coble accompanied him to the outer door. His eye was caught by the beauty of the moon, gleaming irregularly from a lurid rack of clouds. He stood in charmed silence gazing upward.
“What are you staring at? Aren’t you going to say good-night?” asked Miss Coble, rather tartly.
His spirit returned to earth.
“Oh, good-night,” he said, holding out his hand.
She put her fingers—rougher, but warmer—into his for the first time.
“Good-night,” she said, softly.
He did not let her hand go immediately. At the last instant he was invaded by an indefinite conviction that something—he knew not what—had still to be done or said. He stood silent on the little platform.
As if echoing his thought, “Haven’t you forgot something?” she asked.
His heart leaped violently with a thrilling suggestion. He looked into her quizzing eyes. They were on a level with his own, her shorter figure having the advantage of the raised threshold.
“I thought you came to speak to me about a Frenchman?” she went on.
He was relieved and disappointed.
“Of course; what a fool I am! I haven’t said a word about him.”
“Well, it’s too late now. I can’t stand talking here; the neighbors might see us.”
“I’m so sorry,” said Matt, in a woe-begone tone.
“Well, you’ll have to come again to-morrow evening, then, if you want to go on with it, that’s certain. Good-night again.”
“Till to-morrow, then,” said Matt, raising his hat.
He walked briskly down the gravel-path, glowing with the pleasure of the evening, and looking forward to another pleasant free meal on the morrow. Then his eye sought the moon again, but the cloud-rack had covered it up entirely.