Then he turned from it abruptly. He had not come here merely to admire, though he hoped that he should admire. He had come on a business proposal, which should satisfy both himself and the young man to whom it was made, and he began examining the smaller canvases which Charles and his mother had displayed round the room. Here were a couple of studies of Thorley Weir, here half a dozen sketches of Reggie prepared to take his plunge, with details thereof, a raised arm, a bent knee, the toes of a foot pressed heavily in the act of springing. There were copies of casts, there were portraits and numerous transcriptions of leg-bones, arm-bones, ribs, with muscles, without muscles, and all betokened the same indomitable resolve to draw. Then there were the copies or bits of copies from masterpieces in the National Gallery: half a dozen heads of Lady Hamilton as a Bacchante, and in particular Philip IV. of Spain, quantities of Philip IV.—his head sometimes, sometimes a dozen of his left eyebrow with the eye beneath: his right hand, a finger of his right hand, the thumb of his right hand: could they have been put together like the dry bones of Ezekiel's vision, there would be a great army of Philip IV. And in none was there any sign of impatience: the Argus of eyes was drawn for a purpose; and till that purpose was achieved, it was evident that the artist was prepared to go on copying eyes until his own were dim. Admirable also was the determination to achieve the result by the same process as that employed by the master: to get the general effect was clearly not sufficient, else there would not have been so copious a repetition.
An examination of a quarter of these delicate copies was sufficient for Craddock's purpose in looking at them. His only doubt was whether it was not mere waste of time to give this youth more copying work to do. But the study of a picture so admirable as Wroughton's Reynolds could hardly be waste of time for anybody. Also, he was not sure whether his involuntary tribute to the unfinished portrait had not been too strong: he did not wish Charles to think of himself as one with the world at his feet.
"I see you have got a sense of the importance of copying method," he said, "and I feel sure you will be able to produce an adequate copy of the Reynolds I have in mind. Now you will see why I told you to leave your camp at Thorley Weir unbroken, for the picture in question is at the house a little lower down the river, the Mill House. Probably you know it: the lawn comes down to the water's edge."
Certainly Charles knew it. Involuntarily there sounded in his brain a song he knew also, "See the Chariot at Hand." Decidedly he knew it. But an infantine caution possessed him, and he raised and wrinkled his eyebrows.
"I think I do," he said. "Is there a big tree on the lawn? And are there usually some dogs about?"
"Yes, and a charming young lady who looks after them. Now I can't offer you very much for the work, but if £50 tempts you at all, I can go as far as that. I should not recommend you to do it at all, if I did not think it would be good for you. What do you say?"
Charles drew a long breath.
"I—I say 'yes,'" he remarked.
"Let us consider that settled then. I will telegraph for the exact size of the picture, and you can take your canvas down. I should start to-morrow, if I were you. Ah, and talking of £50, here is another specimen of £50 which I already owe you. I advanced you ten, did I not? I will take my picture away with me if I may."
The crisp crinkling notes were counted out, and Charles took them up and stood irresolute. Then by an effort the words came.
"You can't know," he said, "what you've done for me, and I feel I must tell you——"
The notes trembled and rustled in his hand.
"You've given me hope and life," he said. "I—I don't think I could have gone on much longer, with the others working and earning, and me not bringing a penny back. You've done all that. You've put me on my feet."
Craddock felt for his whisker in silence a moment. To do him justice there was a little struggle in his mind, as to whether he should put the proposal he had come here to make, or do what his better self, the self that reverenced the unfinished portrait, prompted him to do. Yet for a year now this boy had been toiling and struggling unaided and undiscovered. None of all those who must have seen him copying in the National Gallery had seen what those eyes of Philip IV., those repeated fingers and thumbs implied: none had ever suspected the fire and indomitable patience of those admirable sketches. It was but just that he, who had recognised at once what Charles already was and might easily become, should reap the fruits of his perspicuous vision. And the offer he was about to make would seem wildly generous too to his beneficiary.
"My dear Lathom," he said. "I hope to put you much more erect on your feet. I haven't said anything of what I came to say. Now let me put my whole proposal before you."
He paused a moment.
"It is quite impossible for you to continue in your studio here," he said. "You are a painter of portraits, and what sitter will come up those stairs? Your admirable portrait of your mother will certainly be seen next year, at some big exhibition, and certainly people will enquire for the artist. But it is mere folly for you to live here: You must be more accessible, more civilised. Some fine lady wants to be painted by you, but will she survive, or will her laces survive these stairs? Will she sit on a chair like this for an hour together, and look at a torn blind? I know what you will say: quite sensibly you will say that you can afford nothing better. But I can afford it for you. I will start you in a proper studio, well furnished and comfortable, and as it should be. Why, even a dentist has a comfortable chair for his sitter, and a waiting-room with papers, and a servant who opens the door."
Again Craddock paused, for he had caught sight of the unfinished portrait again, and felt desperately mean. But the pause was very short.
"I will start you decently and properly," he said, "and I will not charge you a penny. But I want a return, and you can make me that return by your paintings. I propose then that you should promise to let me have a picture of yours every year for the next three years at the price of £100. Do you understand? In a year's time or before, I can say to you, pointing to a picture, 'I will take this for this year.' I can say the same next year: I can say the same the year after. You get your studio and all appurtenances free: you also get a hundred a year for certain, provided you only go on painting as well as you paint now. I shall get three pictures by you at a price which I honestly believe will be cheap in three years' time. I tell you that plainly. I think your pictures will fetch more than that then."
Craddock caressed the side of his face a moment.
"I shall also," he said, "have had the pleasure and the privilege of helping a young fellow like yourself, who I believe has a future in front of him, to get a footing in that arena, where attention is paid to artistic work. I have a certain command of the press. It shall assuredly be exercised on your behalf. You have heard of struggling geniuses. I do not say you have genius, but you have great talent, and I shall have enabled you to work without the cramp and constriction of poverty as you paint. Now, you need not tell me now what you decide. Think it over: talk it over with that beautiful mother, whom I hope I may see some day. It is just a business proposal. On the other hand, if you feel no doubt as to your answer, if you are going to tell me to go to the deuce for certain——"
Charles took two quick steps towards him.
"I accept," he said, "how gladly and thankfully I can't tell you. But you might guess ... I think you understand so well ..."
Craddock, laid his hand on the boy's shoulder.
"Then there's our little private bargain," he said. "Tell your mother and that bathing boy, of course. But we'll not talk about it otherwise. Our little agreement, yours and mine. I don't think we shall either of us repent it."
"It won't be me who starts repenting," said Charles joyously.
Charles was in camp again at the little peninsula fringed with meadow-sweet and loosestrife below Thorley Weir, scarcely hearing, far less listening to its low thunder, diminished by the long continuance of the drought, scarcely seeing, far less looking at the dusky crimson behind the trees which showed where the sun had set. Probably his unconscious self, that never-resting observer and recorder of all the minutest unremembered incidents of life, saw and took note, but though his eyes were open and his ears alert, his conscious brain was busy with what concerned him more vividly than those things. Besides, in a way he had already made them his own; he had painted them half a dozen times in sketches and studies, he had guessed their secret, learned the magic of their romance, and they were his. All that was not his, all the life that was expanding and opening about him, could not but claim and receive this surrender of his brain and his heart.
He had come back here two days ago, and on the morning following, had presented his card at the Mill House to a parlour-maid who had taken it in, leaving him and the canvas easel and paint-box he had brought with him to grill at the door. This rather haughty young person returned after a while and bidding him follow, took him upstairs into what looked like a disused nursery, overlooking the lawn and river, and pointed at a picture propped against the end of a sofa.
"Mr. Wroughton hopes there is everything you require," she said, "and please to ring if you want anything."
She rustled out of the door, which she closed with elaborate precaution, exactly as if Charles had fallen into the sleep which was necessary for his recovery.
Charles' grave grey eyes had been twinkling with amusement, as he was thus led through an empty house, and stowed away like a leper, in this sequestered chamber, and, left alone, a broad grin spread over his face. Then before looking at the picture which stood with its face towards the end of the sofa, his eye made an observant tour of the room. Certainly it had been a nursery, for here stood a doll's house, here a child's crib, here a chair with a confining bar between the arms, so that no child imprisoned there could by any means escape. But there were signs of a later occupancy, a couple of big arm-chairs, and a revolving book-case stood there also, on the top of which evidently in recent use lay a writing-pad with ink-bottle and pen-tray attached. Also there was that indefinable sense in the air, manifest subtly but unmistakably that the room was still in use....
A rap at the door which indicated not "May I come in?" but "I am coming in," interrupted this short survey, and the parlour-maid entered. She cast a vulturine glance round the room: she saw and annexed the writing-pad. But again before leaving she spoke like a Delphic oracle up-to-date.
"If you desire to rest or smoke there is the garden," she observed.
Now Charles had already drawn his conclusions about the room, and he resented the removal of the writing-pad by anybody but its owner. For it required but little constructive imagination to reform the history of this room. Surely it had been the nursery of the girl of the punt, and was still used by her as a sitting room. She ought to have come and got her blotting-pad herself. However, she had done nothing of the sort, and in the meantime it was his business not to dream dreams, but see and reproduce another painter's vision. He took hold of the picture that stood against the end of the sofa, turned it round, then gave a short gasp of amazement. For here was the girl of the punt, inimitably portrayed. Just so and in no other fashion had she turned opposite their tent, and looked at Charles while his brother execrated that which should have been an omelette. There was no question that it was she: there was no question either that it was a superb Reynolds.
Instantly the artistic frenzy awoke: the dream that lay deep down in his young soul, dim and faint and asleep, seemed suddenly to awake and merge and personify itself in the treasure that it was his to copy. Instantly the whole room, too, burst into life, when this prototype of its owner was manifested. Nor, apart from the sweet and exquisite pleasure that it gave him to work here, had the room been badly chosen: there was an excellent north light and by drawing down the blinds of the window opposite, he could secure exactly the illumination he required. In five minutes he had adjusted his easel, and with his canvas already mapped faintly out into squares to guide his drawing, the charcoal began its soft grating journeys.
For a long time he worked on in one absorbed pulsation, and was just beginning to feel that his arm was momentarily unable to continue without some pause for rest, when an interruption unlooked for and for the moment inexplicable occurred. A faint continued scratching, not impatient but entreating, came at the door, and rightly rejecting the first idea that had presented itself to him, that the indomitable parlour-maid, suddenly brought low, besought admittance, Charles opened to the intruder. A big golden collie stood outside, who sniffed at him with doubt and hesitancy, and then deciding that he was harmless, came softly by, and established himself on the sofa. Established there in the haven where it would be, it thumped gently with its tail, as a signal of gratitude.
Charles stood with the open door in his hand a moment, but it seemed impossible to continue drawing into the passage, so to speak, and with a tremor of anticipation in his wicked young heart, he closed it again. A parlour-maid could remove a writing-pad, but it might easily require someone with greater authority to entice away that other possession. Then before going back to his work, he tested the friendliness of his visitor, and finding he was welcome, spent a minute in stroking its ears, and received as thanks a rather dry hot nose thrust into his hand. Clearly the dog was not well, and with that strange canine instinct, was grateful for the expression of even a stranger's sympathy. Then it lay down with muzzle on its outstretched paws, and eyes wide-open and suffering and puzzled. Charles went back to his canvas, but he expected further interruptions now.
In a little while they began. Through the open window on the side towards the river, where he had drawn down the blind, he heard a footstep on the gravel path below, a whistle, and then a voice calling "Buz!" Buz heard too, for he pricked a languid ear, and just moved a languid tail, but did not feel equal to a more active recognition. Again and once again Buz was whistled for and called, and it seemed to Charles that he was in the position of an unwilling accomplice, who had better turn King's evidence. So as quietly as he could, he pulled up the blind and looked out. Below on the grass stood Buz's mistress, and perhaps the whisper of the blind had caught her listening ear, for on the moment she looked up, and saw Charles at the window.
"I beg your pardon," he said, "but I was shown up here, and I think it must be Buz who asked to come in. He is lying on the sofa."
There was a sudden surprise in the girl's face: it might only be due to being thus addressed by a stranger from the upper storey. But as a matter of fact, it was not a stranger quite who addressed her: she perfectly recognised him, though the surprise was there.
"Oh, thank you," she said. "I will come up to fetch him."
Charles stood there waiting, with his blood somehow strangely a-tingle and alert. It seemed to him as if this had all happened before, yet he could not remember what happened next. But it all seemed very natural. Then he heard her quick step on the stairs and she entered.
She smiled at him rather remotely but not without friendliness, and certainly without embarrassment.
"Thank you so much," she said. "I could not find him. Buz, dear, come along."
She stood in the doorway, with head already half-turned to leave the room again, just as in the hundred-year old portrait of her. Buz tattooed languidly with his tail.
"I'm afraid he is not very well," said Charles, with the sense of taking a plunge. "His nose is hot and dry."
"I'm afraid so. The dogs always think of this room as their sick-room if they don't feel what's called The Thing. Buz, come along."
Buz thought not.
"But won't you leave him here?" said Charles.
Joyce came a couple of steps into the room.
"Oh, I hardly like to," she said. "Won't he disturb you?"
"Not an atom. Do leave him if he feels like stopping. He doesn't object to me."
That last sentence won Joyce's heart: it was easy to reach it through her dogs. But she detached herself from Charles again, as it were, and went up to her ailing dog.
"Buz, darling, I'm so sorry," she said. "You can stop here if you like. Not quite well? Oh, I'm afraid not well at all."
She bestowed a kiss on Buz's head, who wrinkled puzzled eyebrows at her. It appeared she could not help him, and he did not understand.... Then she turned to Charles again.
"Please forgive my interrupting you," she said. "And weren't you painting below Thorley Weir a week ago? Yes: I thought it was you."
Before he had time for more than the bare affirmative, she had left the room again. And all the way downstairs she mingled with compassion for Buz, a wonder why she had felt as if she could not help asking that, although she was perfectly certain it was he.
It was characteristic of Charles that he flew to his drawing again, for that expressed his feelings better than any mooning reverie would have helped him to do. He must draw, he must draw, just as an eager young horse must run, to give outlet to the life that rejoices in its limbs. Besides, each moment of industry brought him nearer to the painting of the face and the half turned neck. But before he began again, with Buz's permission, he kissed the top of his flat golden head, and went to his work with a heightened colour, feeling a little ashamed of himself.
Perhaps an hour passed, while from the house came no sound at all nor any from the room where Charles worked, except the scrape of his charcoal, and the rather quick uneasy breathing of the dog. Then came an interruption which did not excite him in the least, for he had not forgotten the manner of access peculiar to the parlour-maid.
"Will you be working here this afternoon, sir, Mr. Wroughton wants to know," she said. "And if so will you take some lunch?"
Charles' foolish heart leaped.
"I should be delighted to," he said.
Again silence descended. Then, with a heart that leaped down again, he heard a subdued clink on the stairs. It was even so—then re-entered the parlour-maid with a neat tray on which was set an adequate and austere refreshment. And as Charles ate his excellent cold mutton and rather stringy French beans, he grinned largely at his mental picture of himself as the prisoner in solitary confinement, who might take exercise in the prison yard when he wanted to smoke. But Buz shared his confinement, and the apparition of Buz's mistress was not unknown. By and by he would take his exercise.... And then again the glory of the Reynolds portrait, the exquisite satisfaction, too, of being able to see, from his studies in the National Gallery, the manner of its doing, and the knowledge that he could, owing to his long and careful practice, put on the paint somewhat in that manner, swallowed up his entire consciousness again.
A gong sounded from below, and Buz from mere force of habit, knowing this was dinner-time, got off his sofa, before he realized that dinner was of no use to him. He went but a few steps towards the door, then turned, and sat down in front of Charles, seeking his eyes with his own, mournful, not understanding, mutely beseeching to know what was the matter, asking him to help. Charles tried to convey comfort, and Buz acknowledged his efforts by a few heavy sighs breathed into his caressing hands. Then walking stiffly and painfully he went back on to his sofa again. But Charles felt as if he had been taken into the poor beast's confidence: Buz had enlisted him to give such aid as was possible.
The room had grown very hot in the last hour with the unflecked outpouring of the sun on its roof, and Charles thought with a touch of not more than secondary rapture of the cool liquid embrace of his weir. But a more primary ecstasy was in the foreground, and putting aside his charcoal, he could not resist getting out his paints and rioting with loaded brushfuls over the expanse of the faded blue of the sky that toned into pale yellow above the low horizon to the right of the picture. On the left rose a thick grove of dark serge-clad trees against which was defined that exquisite head, and to which there pointed that beckoning hand. Who was the unseen to whom she beckoned with that gracious gesture, yet a little imperious? To what did she beckon him? Perhaps only—and that would be the best of all—to a saunter through the twilight woods with her alone, away from such crowds as might be supposed to throng the stone terrace, seen glimmeringly to the front of the picture, to a talk, sitting on the soft moss, or on some felled tree-trunk, in low voices, as befitted the quietness of the evening hour, to an hour's remission from the gabble and gaiety of the world. Or was it he, the unseen onlooker, who had asked her to give him half an hour ... he had something he wanted to tell her—Charles could picture him in his satin coat and knee breeches, stammering a little, a little shy—something for her ear alone....
Then the mere quality of the splendid work struck and stung him afresh. What depth of clear and luminous twilight was tangled among the trees that cast tides of long shadows, clear as running water over the lawn! The grass had been painted first, and the shadow laid over it.... It was impossible not to daub in some of that. No one had everseenquite as Reynolds saw, not quite so simply and comprehensively. And then suddenly despair benumbed his fingers: it would be a profanity, were it not so grotesque to think of copying such a wonder. And at that Charles became aware that both hand and eye were thoroughly and deservedly tired. Also that he had a searching and imperative need for tobacco. It was decidedly time to seek the prison yard.
The sun had ceased pouring in at the window when he had raised the blind to turn King's evidence with regard to Buz, and now a cooler breeze suggestive of the coming of evening sauntered in. It was this perhaps that had refreshed the sick dog, for when Charles opened the door Buz shambled off the sofa and followed him downstairs. There was no difficulty about finding the way into the garden, for it lay straight in front of him at the foot of the stairs, and still seeing no signs of life, he crossed the lawn and walked on a grass path down between two old yew hedges, Buz still at his heels, towards the river. Then turning a corner he stopped suddenly.
On a low chair sat a very old lady. Suitably to this hot day she was dressed in a little print gown, with a linen sunbonnet, and looked exactly like the most charming of Kate Greenaway's gallery. She was employed, without the aid of spectacles, on a piece of fine needlework that looked rather like baby-linen but was probably for her own embellishment; Joyce, full length on the ground, was reading to her.
She instantly dropped her work. Never, in all her life, had she failed to make herself agreeable to a good-looking young man, and she was not going to begin now. Joyce had half-raised herself also and gave Charles a half smile of welcome, which she augmented into a most complete one when she saw Buz.
"Buz, dear!" she said.
Lady Crowborough did not quite say "Charles, dear," but she easily might have if she had known his name.
"Joyce, introduce him to me," she said.
Joyce looked at Charles, raising her eyebrows, and quite taking him into the confidence of her smile and her difficulty.
"It's the——" she nearly said "boy," but corrected herself—"it's the gentleman who is copying the Reynolds, granny," she said. Then to Charles, "May I introduce you to Lady Crowborough."
Lady Crowborough held out her little smooth thin hand.
"Charmed to see you," she said. "Of course, I knew what my silly granddaughter has told me. Such a to-do as we've had settling where you were to paint, and where to stow all Joyce's bits of things, and what not."
Charles had excellent manners, full of deference, and void of embarrassment.
"And my name's Lathom," he said, as he shook hands.
"Well, Mr. Lathom, and so you've come out for a breath of air," continued the vivacious old lady. "Get yourself a chair from the tent there, and sit down and talk to us. Only go quietly, else you'll wake up my son, who's having a nap there, and that'll cause him indigestion or perspiration or a sinking, or I don't know what. Perhaps Joyce had better get it for you: she won't give him a turn, if he happens to wake."
"Oh, but I couldn't possibly——" began Charles.
"Well, you can go as far as the tent with her, while she pops round the corner and carries a chair off, and then you can take it from her. But mind you come back and talk to us. Or if you want to be useful you can go to the house and tell them I'm ready for tea, and I'll have it here. Ring the first bell you see, and keep on ringing till somebody comes. The whole lot of them go to sleep here after lunch. Such a pack of nonsense! What's the night for, I say. And then instead of dropping off at the proper time, they lie awake and say a great buzzing, or a dog barking, or a grasshopper sneezing prevented their going to sleep."
Charles went swiftly on his errand, and accomplished it in time to join Joyce outside the tent and take the chair from her. Already the comradeship which naturally exists between youth and maiden had begun sensibly to weave itself between them: in addition Charles had been kind to Buz and seemed to understand the significance of dogs.
"It was good of you to let my poor Buz stop with you," she said. "He has adopted you, too, for he came out when you came, didn't he?"
"Yes: I hope he feels better. What's the matter?"
"I don't know, and the vet doesn't know, and the poor lamb himself doesn't know. He's old, poor dear, and suffers from age, perhaps like most old people, except darling Grannie. I shall send for the vet again if he doesn't mend."
They had come within earshot of Lady Crowborough, who was profoundly indifferent to the brute creation. She preferred motors to horses, mousetraps to cats, and burglar-alarms to dogs. She was equally insensitive to the beauties of inanimate nature, though her intense love, contempt, and interest for and in her fellow creatures quite made up for these other deficiencies.
"Now you're talking about your dog, Joyce," she said. "I'm sure I wish he was well with all my heart, but if his life's going to be a burden to him and you, I say, put the poor creature out of his pain. A dab of the stuff those murderers use in the East End and the thing's done. I say the same about human beings. Let the doctors do the best they can for them, but if they're going to be miserable and a nuisance to everybody, I should like to put them out of their pain, too. Give 'em time to get better in, if they're going to get better, but if not snuff them out. Much more merciful, isn't it, Mr. Lathom? I hope they'll snuff me out before I'm nothing but a mass of aches and pains, but they haven't got the sense, though I daresay they'll so stuff me up with drugs and doctor's stuff that I shall die of the very things that were meant to cure me."
Joyce giggled.
"Darling Granny!" she said. "You wouldn't like it if I came to you one morning and said, 'Drink it down, and you'll know no more.'"
"Well, I'm not a nuisance yet with rheumatics and bellyache," observed Lady Crowborough. "Lor', the medicine your father takes would be enough to sail a battleship in, if he'd collected it all, instead of swilling it, and much good it's done him, except to give him a craving for more. Why, when I was his age, a good walk, and leave your dinner alone if you didn't want it, was physic enough. But I've no patience with all this talk about people's insides. It's only those who haven't got an inside worth mentioning, who mention it. And did you come all the way back from your tent in the heat, Mr. Lathom, to go on painting this afternoon?"
"Oh, no," said Charles, "they very kindly sent me a tray up with some lunch on it."
"And you sat there all by yourself, mum as a mouse, and ate up your tray?" she asked. "You don't do that again, mind! You come and talk to me at lunch to-morrow. I never heard of such a thing! Joyce, my dear, pour out tea for us. I want my tea and so does Mr. Lathom. I warrant he got nothing for lunch but a slice of cold mutton and a glass of sarsaparilla if your father had the ordering of it. Now I hear you live in a tent, Mr. Lathom? Tell us all about it. Ain't you frightened of burglars?"
"There's nothing to steal except a tin kettle and me," said Charles.
"Well, that makes you more comfortable, no doubt. Joyce, my dear, it's no use giving me this wash. Put some more tea in, and stir it about, and let it stand. I like my tea with a tang to it. And your tent doesn't let the rain in? Not that I should like to sleep in a tent myself. I like my windows closed and my curtains drawn. You can get your air in the daytime. The outside air is poison to me, unless it's well warmed up in the sun. But I should like to come and see your tent."
She regarded Charles with strong approval: he was certainly very good to look upon, strong and lean and clear-skinned, and he had about him that air of manners and attentiveness which she missed in the youth of to-day. He sat straight up in his chair when she talked to him and handed her exactly what she wanted at the moment she wanted it.
"Ah, but do come and see it," he said. "Mayn't I give you and Miss Wroughton tea there some afternoon? I promise you it shall be quite strong."
"To-morrow," said Lady Crowborough with decision. "I'll go in the punt for once, and Joyce shall push me along."
Charles excused himself soon after, in order to get another hour of his work, and he was scarcely out of earshot when Lady Crowborough turned to Joyce.
"Well, my dear," she said. "I don't know what you've done, but I've fallen in love with that young man. And to think of him having his lunch all alone, as if he was your father's corn-cutter or hairdresser. When Philip awakes, he shall know what I think about such rubbish! Where's my cup? I don't want to tread on it as I did yesterday. Why, Mr. Lathom's put it back on the table for me!"
"I think he's a dear," said Joyce. "And he was so nice to poor Buz."
"Don't begin again about your dog now," said Lady Crowborough, "though I daresay Mr. Lathom has been most attentive to him and no wonder."
With which rather Delphic utterance, she picked up her needlework again, while a smile kept breaking out in chinks, as it were, over her face. For though she liked presentable young men to be attentive to her, she liked them also to be attentive to any amount of their contemporaries. Young men did not flirt enough nowadays to please her: they thought about their insides and that silly Scotch golf. But she had noticed the change of expression in Charles' respectful eyes when he looked at Joyce. She liked that look. It was many years since she had seen it directed to her, but she kept the pleasantest recollection of it, and welcomed the sight of it as directed at another. And in her opinion, Joyce well deserved to have a handsome young fellow looking at her like that, she, so strictly dieted on the somewhat acid glances of her father. A little judicious flirtation such as Lady Crowborough was quite disposed to encourage, would certainly brisken the house up a bit. At present, in spite of her own presence there, it seemed to have no more spring in it than unleavened bread.
Next day, according to the indisputable orders of Lady Crowborough, Charles had taken his lunch with the family, and though Philip Wroughton had thought good to emphasize the gulf which must exist between his family and a young man who copied their portraits for them, by constantly using the prefix "Mr." when he spoke to Charles, the meal had gone off not amiss. Irrespective of Lady Crowborough there was the inimitable lightness of youth flickering round it, a lightness which Joyce by herself felt unable to sustain, but which instinctively asserted itself when a little more of the proper mixture was added. Afterwards Charles had paddled back to his encampment in order to prepare for his visitors, and soon after, while Philip slept the sleep of the dyspeptic, his daughter and mother left in the manner of a riverside Juliet and a very old nurse, to go to what Lady Crowborough alluded to as "the party." She had dressed herself appropriately in a white linen frock with little rosebud sprigs printed on it, and an immense straw hat with a wreath of rose to embellish it. She had a horror of the glare off the water, which might cause her to freckle, and wore a thick pink veil, which, being absolutely impenetrable, served the additional purpose of keeping the poisonous air away from her. Her whole evergreen heart rejoiced over this diversion, for not only was she going to have tea with her handsome young man—"my new flirt," as she daringly called him—but, having had a good go of flirtation herself, she was prepared to encourage the two young people to advance their intimacy. Most of all she hoped that they would fall in love with each other, and was then prepared to back them up, for she had guessed in the twinkling of an eye that Craddock had Philip's consent in paying attentions to Joyce, and with her sympathies for youth so keen, and her antipathy for middle-age so pronouncedly contemptuous, she altogether recoiled from the idea of Joyce ever having anything to do "with that great white cream-cheese" as she expressed it to herself. She found the cream-cheese agreeable enough at lunch and dinner to give her the news of the town, and a "bit of tittle-tattle" in this desert of a place, but she had no other use for him, either for herself or her granddaughter.
Charles received them at the edge of his domain, ankle-deep in forget-me-nots, and conducted them a distance of three yards to the shadow of his tent where tea was spread. There were two deck-chairs for the visitors, the box of provisions with a handkerchief on the top for table, and a small piece of board for himself. He had pinned up against the tent side two or three of his sketches, and his sole tumbler stood by the tea things with a bunch of forget-me-nots on it. He made no apologetic speeches of any description about the rudimentary nature of the entertainment, because he was aware that he had nothing else to offer them. Besides the tea was strong, and there was a pot of strawberry jam.
"Joyce'll be saying she must live in a tent, too," remarked Lady Crowborough withdrawing her veil. "Upon my word, Mr. Lathom, I like your dining-room very much. That thicket behind cuts the beastly wind off. That's the colour I like to see tea."
"It's been standing a quarter of an hour, Lady Crowborough," said Charles with his respectful glance. "Are you sure it's not a little—well—a little thick?"
"Not a bit—Joyce and you may add water to yours if you like. And are those sketches yours? They seem very nice, though I don't know a picture from a statue."
She looked at them more closely.
"And has Joyce been sitting to you already?" she asked, in a tremor of delight. (Theyhadbeen sly about it!)
The ingenious Charles looked mightily surprised.
"Oh, that?" he said, following her glance. "That's only a little water-colour sketch I did of the head of the Reynolds picture. But it is like Miss Wroughton, isn't it?"
It was indeed: so for that matter was the Reynolds.
Lady Crowborough was a little disappointed that Joyce hadn't been giving clandestine sittings, but she knew as well as Charles himself that he had executed this admirable little sketch with Joyce, so to speak, at his finger-tip, and not her great-great-grandmother, and her new flirt rose higher than ever in her estimation.
"And when will you have finished your copying?" she asked.
Here again Charles did not fail.
"I can't possibly tell," he said. "When I came down I imagined it would take a week or ten days, if I worked very hard. But I see how utterly impossible it will be to do it in anything like that time. But it's lovely work. I don't care how long it takes."
"Bless me, how sick and tired you'll get of it," said she.
"Not if you'll come and have tea with me, Lady Crowborough," said this plausible young man.
Lady Crowborough grinned all over: she knew just how much this was worth, but she liked it being said.
"Well, anyhow this American, Mr. Ward, is quick enough about his part of the bargain," she said. "My son received his cheque this morning, sent by your friend Mr. Craddock, Joyce, my dear. Five thousand pounds! There's a sum of money!"
Charles paused a moment, some remembrance of an American and a cheque for £5000 stirred in his brain, without his being able to establish the connection.
"What? Has he got it for five thousand pounds?" he asked.
"Yes: plenty, too, I should say, for a bit of canvas and a lick or two of paint on it. I'm sure when you have finished his copy none of us would be able to tell the one from the other. Isn't five thousand pounds a good enough price, Mr. Lathom?"
"Well, it's a very good picture," said Charles.
Joyce was watching him, and saw the surprise in his face.
"Why did Mr. Craddock send father the cheque?" she asked.
"Lord, my dear, I don't know," said Lady Crowborough. "Cheques and Bradshaws are what I shall never understand. I suppose it was what my bankers call drawn to Mr. Craddock. His name was on the back of it anyhow. Whenever I get a cheque, which is once every fifty years, I send it straight to my bank, and ask them what's to be done next, and it always ends in my writing my name somewhere to show it is mine, I suppose. But as for Bradshaw, it's a sealed book to me, and I send my maid to the station always to find out."
Suddenly Charles remembered all about this American and the cheque for five thousand pounds, and the slight film of puzzle, uncertainty, though nothing approaching suspicion, rolled off his mind again. Reggie a week ago had mentioned the drawing of this post-dated cheque at Thistleton's Gallery. It was all quite clear. But undoubtedly this Mr. Ward had obtained his picture at a very reasonable figure. Then, as if to abjure what had never been in his mind, he spoke, not more warmly than his heart felt, about Craddock.
"Mr. Craddock has been tremendously good to me," he said. "It's scarcely a week ago that he first saw me, when I was painting here one afternoon, and you brought him by in the punt, Miss Wroughton. The very next day he bought my picture off my easel——"
"Well, I hope he gave you five thousand for it, too," said Lady Crowborough.
Charles beamed at her: she had finished her second cup of positively oily tea, and was smoking a cigarette with an expression of extreme satisfaction.
"He did more for me than that, Lady Crowborough," he said, "he gave me a chance, a start. Then he came to see my studio, and gave me the commission to paint this copy. And then——"
Charles' simple soul found it hard to be silent, but he remembered Craddock's parting admonition.
"And then, my dear?" asked Lady Crowborough.
"Then he's made me feel he believes in me," he said. "That's a lot, you know, when nobody has ever cared two straws before. By Jove, yes, I owe him everything."
Certainly her new flirt was a charming young fellow, and Lady Crowborough saw that Joyce approved no less than she. She felt he was probably extremely unwise and inexperienced, and would have bet her veil, and gone back veilless, the prey of the freckling sun, that Craddock had made some shrewd bargain of his own. It was now time for her flirt to have an innings with Joyce. She was prepared to cast all the duties of a chaperon to the winds, and inconvenience herself as well in order to secure this.
"Well, I've enjoyed my tea and my cigarette," she said, "and all I've not enjoyed is Joyce's punt. I shouldn't wonder if it leaked, and the gnats on the river were something awful. They get underneath my veil and tickle my nose, and I shall walk home across the fields, and leave you to bring the punt back, my dear. And if you've got a spark of good feeling, Joyce, you'll help Mr. Lathom wash up our tea things first."
And this wicked old lady marched off without another word.
Joyce and Charles were left alone, looking exactly like a young god and goddess meeting without intention or scheme of their own, in some green-herbaged riverside in the morning of the world. They did the obvious instinctive thing and laughed.
"Everyone does what darling Grannie tells them," said Joyce, "so we had better begin. The only suggestion I make is that I wash up, because I'm sure I do it better than you, and you sit down and sketch the while, because I shouldn't wonder if you do it better than me."
"But I wash up beautifully," said Charles.
"I think not. There was egg on my tea-spoon."
"I'm sorry. Was that why you didn't take sugar?"
"Yes."
"Have some now by itself?" said he.
"I think I won't. Where's a tea-cloth?" Charles wrinkled his brows.
"They dry in the sun," he said. "We thread them, tea-cups that is, on to the briar-rose."
"And the plates? Do begin sketching."
"They dry also. They are placed anywhere. But one tries not to forget where anywhere is. Otherwise they get stepped on."
Charles plucked down the Reynolds head from the tent wall.
"I began it from the picture," he said, "but may I finish it from you? If you wash up by the forget-me-nots, and I sit in the punt, at the far end, I can do it. Oh, how is Buz to-day? He didn't come up to the nursery."
She neither gave nor withheld permission to finish the head in the way he suggested, but her eyes grew troubled as she emptied the teapot into the edge of the water. It was choked with tea-leaves, gorged, replete with them. He picked up his water-colour box, and climbed out to the cushions of the punt.
"Buz isn't a bit well," she said. "I've sent for the vet to come again to-morrow. Oh, isn't it dreadful when animals are ill? They don't understand: they can't make out why one doesn't help them. Buz has always come to me for everything, like burrs in his coat and thorns in his feet, and he can't make out why I don't pick his pain out of him."
"Sorry," said Charles, scooping some water out of the river in his water-tin, but looking at her. Their eyes met, with the frankness, you would say, of children who liked one another. But for all the frankness, only a few seconds had passed before, the unwritten law, that a boy may look at a girl a shade longer than a girl may look at a boy, prevailed, and Joyce bent over the tea-cups. She was not the less sorry for Buz, but ... but there were other things in the world, too.
"I know you're sorry," she said, "and so does Buz, and we both think it nice of you. And how long really do you think your copy will take? And what will you do if the weather becomes odious?"
"I shall get a cold in my head," said Charles, drawing his brush to a fine point, by putting it between his lips.
Joyce looked at him with horror.
"Oh, don't put the brush in your mouth!" she said. "They always used to stop my doing it at the drawing-school. Some of the paints are deadly poison."
"Oh, do you paint?" said Charles. "You ought to have painted and I to have washed up—please stop still for a moment, exactly like that. So sorry, but I shan't be a minute. Damn!"
An unfortunate movement of his elbow jerked his straw hat which was lying by him into the Thames: it caught and pirouetted for a moment on am eddy of water, and then hurried gladsomely down-stream.
"But your hat?" said Joyce in a strangled whisper, as if, being forbidden to move, she must not speak.
"I'm afraid I've already said what I had to say about that," said Charles. "Just one second."
He worked eagerly and intensely with concentrated vision and effort of its realization for half a minute. Then again he used that forbidden receptacle for paint-brushes, and dragged off the excessive moisture from his wash.
"Now I'll get it while that dries," he said.
He picked up the punt-pole and ran down the edge of the bank to recapture his hat. But it had floated out into mid-stream and his pursuit was fruitless.
"And it looked quite new," said Joyce reproachfully, on his return. "I'm afraid you are extravagant."
"Just the other way round. It would have been false economy to have saved my hat—price half-a-crown, and have risked losing the—the sight I got of you just for that minute while my hat started voyaging. But now," he said, gleefully washing out his brushes—"now that I've got you, let the great river take it to the main."
He made the quotation simply in the bubble of high spirits, not thinking of the context, nor of the concluding and following line, "No more, dear love, for at a touch I yield." But instantaneously the sequel occurred to him—for the words were set to a tune which he very imperfectly sang with his light tenor, and accompanied on his banjo.
"You talk of too many things in one breath, Mr. Lathom," said Joyce. "You said if the weather broke you would catch cold here, so of course you must go to the inn in the village, if it rains. Men have no sense: I believe you would stick on here, while you get congestion and inflammation and pneumonia. Then you asked me if I painted, and I may tell you I don't. I used to try: if I have any sketches left the sight of them would convince you of the truth of what I say."
Charles' art and heart tugged for his whole attention. For another minute he was silent and absorbed.
"Quite done," he said. "Thank you so much, Miss Wroughton."
Charles looked at her, and all thought of his art passed from him. She was entrancing, and he suddenly woke to the fact that in the last quarter of an hour they had made friends.
He came towards her, stripping the sketch off its block.
"Do let me give it you," he said rather shyly. "You see, I shall enjoy the fruits of your labour, as I shan't have to wash up. It's only fair that you should have the fruits of mine—at least if you would care for them at all."
She could not but take in her hand the sketch not yet dry which he held out to her, and looking at it, she could not but care. Never was there anything more admirably simple, never had an impression been more breezily recorded. There was no attempt at making a picture of it; there were spaces unfilled in, a mere daub of hard edged blue in the middle of the sky was sufficient note to indicate sky: the weir was a brown blob, and a brown blot of reflection and a splash of grey, as if the brush had spluttered like a cross-nibbed pen, showed where the water broke below. Against it came the triumphant painting of a head, her own on the head in the Reynolds picture, but so careful, so delicate—and for the rest of her there was a wash of stained blue for her dress; a patch of body colour, careless apparently, but curiously like a tea-cup against it. At her feet was a scrabble of blue lighter than her dress, but none could doubt that this meant forget-me-nots ... they were like that, though the scrabble of pale blue seemed so fortuitous. Probably Charles never painted more magically than in those ten minutes, even when the magic of his brush had become a phrase in art criticism, acliché. There was all that a man can have to inspire it there, and the inspiration had all the potential energy of the bud of some great rose. It had the power of the full blossom still folded in it, the energy of the coiled spring, the inimitable vigour of a young man's opening blossom of love.
It was no wonder that she paused when he handed it to her. Her own face, her own slim body and gesture, as he saw her, leaped at her from the sketch, and she thrilled to think, "Is that what he sees in me?" No array of compliments, subtly worded, brilliantly spoken, could have told her so much of his mind. It was an exquisite maiden that he saw, and that was she. She could not but see how exquisite he thought her: she could not fail to glow inwardly, secretly, at his view of her. Those few minutes' work, at the cost of the straw hat, came as a revelation to her. He showed her herself, or at least, he showed her how he saw her. The insatiable and heaven-born love of all girls to be admired shot in flame through her. Now that she saw his sketch, she knew that she had longed for that tribute from a man, though till now she had been utterly unconscious of any such longing. Mr. Craddock when he proposed to her lacked all spark of such a flame; had even he but smouldered—She knew she was loved. That in itself seemed almost terrifyingly sufficient. She let herself droop and lie on it, on the thought of it ... it was transcendent in its significance.
Her scrutiny lasted but a moment. Then from the sketch she looked back to Charles again, him who had seen her like that.... And had she possessed his skill of brush, and could have painted him, there would have been something in her sketch, as in his, of the glimmering light that trembles high in the zenith when the day of love is dawning. Back and forth between them ran the preluding tremor, a hint, a warning of the fire that should one day break into full blaze, fed by each; but to the girl, at present, it was but remotely felt, and its origin scarcely guessed at. To him the tremor was more vibrant, and its source less obscure; the waters were already beginning to well out from their secret spring, and he beginning to thirst for them.
The moment had been grave, but immediately her smile broke on to it.
"Oh, that is kind of you," she said. "I shall love to have the sketch. And I retract: it was worth a lot of straw hats to do that. Perhaps you have not even lost one. I may overtake it on its mad career as I go back home. I will rescue it for you, if I come across it, and give it first aid. I must be getting back now. Thank you ever so much for the delicious tea, and the delicious sketch. You will be at work again, I suppose, to-morrow morning?"
Such was the history of the two days, which Charles revolved within him that evening, after he had eaten his supper and sat out by the water-side, unwitting of the dusky crimson in the west, and the outpouring weir. Things fairer and more heart-holding than these absorbed and dominated his consciousness.
Day by day his copy of this wonderful Reynolds wonderfully grew beneath the deftness and certainty of his brush. Though he had said that it would take much longer than he had originally contemplated, he found that he was progressing with amazing speed, and though he would gladly have worked more slowly and less industriously so as to lengthen out the tale of these beautiful days, it seemed to be out of his power to keep back his hand. He was dragged along, as it were, by the gloriously-galloping steeds of his own supreme gift: once in the room opposite the portrait, he could no more keep his fingers off his brush, or his brushes off his canvas, than could a drunkard refrain, alone with his cork-drawn intoxicants. Nor could he, for another and perhaps more potent reason, keep away from the house where the picture was, or after a reasonable morning's work lounge away the afternoon on the river. By cords he was drawn to the Mill House, for there was the chance (of not infrequent fulfilment) of meeting Joyce: and then he had to go to his extemporized studio, and the other frenzy possessed him.
But poor Buz had no pleasures in these days and as they went by the old dog grew steadily worse. He was a constant occupant of the sofa, where he had established himself on the first morning of Charles' occupation, and if he was not, as was generally the case, in his place when Charles arrived of a morning, it was never long before there came at the door the request for admittance, daily feebler and more hesitating. Charles had to help him to his couch now, for he was too weak to climb up by himself, but he always managed a tap or two with his tail in acknowledgment of such assistance, and gave him long despairing glances out of dulled topaz eyes, that expressed his dumb bewilderment at his own suffering, the abandonment of his dismay that nobody could help him. Once, on entering, Charles found Joyce kneeling by the sofa, crying quietly. She got up when he entered, and openly wiped her eyes.
"I'm so glad you don't think me silly," she said, "for I feel sure you don't. Other people would say, as darling Grannie does, 'It's only a dog.' Only! What more do you want?"
Charles laid a comforting hand on Buz's head, and stroked his ears.
"I could easily cry, too," he said, "for helplessness, and because we can't make him understand that we would help if we possibly could. What did the vet say yesterday?"
Joyce shook her head.
"There's no hope," she said. "There would have to be an operation anyhow, and probably he would die under it. He wouldn't get over it altogether in any case. He's too old. Mr. Gray told me I had much better have him killed, but I can't bear it. I know I ought to, but I am such a beastly coward. He sent a bottle and a syringe this morning. There it is on the chimney-piece. I can't bear that the groom or coachman should do it, or the vet. And I can't do it myself, though it's just the only thing that I could do for poor darling Buz."
Charles turned from the dog to her.
"Let me do it, Miss Wroughton," he said. "I know what you mean. You can't bear that a stranger like a coachman should do it. But Buz always liked me, you know, and rather trusted me. You mean that, don't you?"
Joyce gave a great sigh.
"Yes, oh, just that," she said. "How well you understand! But would you really do it for me?"
Charles went across to the chimney-piece, and looked at what the vet had sent.
"Yes, it's perfectly simple," he said. "I see what it is. I did it for a dog of my own once. It's quite instantaneous: he won't feel anything."
"And when?" said Joyce piteously, as if demanding a respite.
"I think now," said Charles. "He's dying: he won't know anything."
Joyce bit her lip, but nodded to him. Then she bent down over the sofa once more, and kissed Buz on his nose, and on the top of his head. Then without looking at Charles again she went out of the room.
This aroused Buz, but before many minutes were past he had dozed off again. Then Charles filled the little syringe, wiped the end of it, so that the bitterness should not startle him, and gently pushing back the loose-skinned corner of his lip he inserted the nozzle, and discharged it. A little shiver went through the dog, and he stretched out his legs, and then moved no more at all.
Charles went to the door, and found Joyce standing outside.
"It's all over," he said. "Buz felt nothing whatever."
Joyce was not up to speaking, but she took his hand between both of hers, pressing it.
A dark October day with slanting flows of peevish rain tattooing on the big north window of Charles' new studio, was drawing to a chill and early close, and the light was rapidly becoming too bad to paint. His mother, at whose picture he had been working all day, was sitting in front of the plain deal table from his old studio, with fingers busily rattling on her typewriter, and Charles had put his easel on the model's-stand and worked from this elevation, since the figure in the picture was looking upwards. It was nearing completion, and the last steps which were costing him so much biting of the ends of his brushes, and so continual a frown that it seemed doubtful if his forehead could ever again lose its corrugations, were being taken, and his progress which up till now had been so triumphantly uninterrupted was beginning to shuffle and mark time. Admirable though the wistful welcoming love in her face was, thrice admirable as Craddock had thought it, Charles knew now it did not completely represent what he saw. All day he had been working at it, making his patient model keep rising and looking at him, and not only was he dissatisfied with the inadequacy of it, but he knew that he was losing the simplicity and brilliance of his earlier work on it. Hence these knottings in his forehead, and the marks of teeth in the handles of his brushes.
"Mother, darling," he said, "stand up once more, will you, and that will be all. Now!"
By incessant repetition she had got the pose with unerring accuracy, and she pushed back her chair and rose facing him. He looked back from her to his canvas, and from it back again to her, and the frown deepened. It was not the best he could do, but he could not better it by patching and poking at it. For one moment he wavered; the next he had taken up his palette knife and with three strokes erased the whole of the head. Then he gave a great sign of relief.
"Thank God, that's done," he said, "and to-morrow I will begin all over again. I was afraid I wasn't going to do that."
"My dear, what have you done?" she asked, leaving her place and coming to look. "Oh, Charles, you've scraped it all out."
"Yes, thank God, as I said before."
"But when Mr. Craddock saw it this afternoon he said it was so wonderful."
"Well, I daresay it wasn't bad. But if Craddock thinks that I'm going to be content with things that aren't bad, he's wrong," said Charles. "It'll be time for me to say 'That will do,' in twenty years from now. For the present I'm not going to be content with anything but the best that I can do, and that wasn't the best, and that is why there's that pat of paint on my palette knife, and no head on your dear shoulders."
Mrs. Lathom still looked troubled.
"But he had ordered it, dear," she said. "He had chosen it as the picture he was going to buy from you this year."
Charles rapidly turned on all the electric light.
"I don't care a straw," he said. "Nobody is going to have pictures of mine that aren't as good as I can make them. I see more than I saw when I painted it first, and I couldn't inlay that into it. Your face isn't a patch-work counter-pane. No, we begin again. Now, mother dear, do be kind and toast muffins for tea, while I give the place where your head was a nice wash-down with turpentine, so that there's no speck of paint left on it. Reggie's coming in, and as soon as we've got greasy all over our faces with muffins we'll go and stand in the queue at the theatre. We shall have to go pretty early. 'Easter Eggs' is a tremendous hit and the pit's always crammed."
Charles scrubbed away at his canvas for a minute or so in silence, beaming with satisfaction at his erasure of the head.
"I'm blowed if we stand in the queue at all," he said. "As a thanks-offering for my own honesty, I shall go and get the three best places that are to be had. Now I won't be thwarted. I shall get fifty pounds this week for the Reynolds copy, and I choose, madam, I choose to go to the stalls. I will be economical again to-morrow for weeks and weeks. Hullo, here's the child. Reggie, come and look at my picture of Ma. Haven't I caught the vacant expression of her face quite beautifully? I think I shall let Craddock have it just as it is, and he can call it 'The guillotine at play.'"
"Charles, you are the most tiresome——" began his mother.
"I know: I touch the limits of endurance. But I am pleased to have wiped your face for you. I shall want you at ten o'clock to-morrow morning. Goodness, how it rains! I am glad I'm not going to stand outside for a couple of hours."
Reggie had subsided into a large chair, and was toasting his feet at the fire.
"Mother's morose," he said, "when I was prepared to enjoy myself. She always was a kill-joy. Mother, darling, you shouldn't indulge in these melancholy fits. Consider what a great girl you are. Consider anything, but put lots of butter on the muffins. Charles, history repeats itself. Mr. Ward—opulent American, you know—came in again to-day with Craddock, and again he drew a cheque at my desk, and again, though I lent him my pen, he didn't tip me. He must be indecently rich, because to-day he gave Craddock a cheque for ten thousand and one hundred pounds."
"What had he bought?"
"Dunno. Some little trifle for the servants' hall I suppose. Ten thousand for the picture, one hundred for the frame, do you think? Oh, another thing: there was a long notice in the 'Whitehall' about the Exhibition at the 'British Painters and Etchers.' I brought it home. It says all kinds of things about the picture of me. Here it is: catch hold."
Charles snatched at the paper with all a boy's natural pride in being for the first time noticed in the press. Nor was the morose Mrs. Lathom less eager, for with muffin on toasting-fork she left the fire and read over his shoulder, and the moroseness vanished.
"Oh, Charles," she cried, "'Brilliant achievement—masterly technique—the gem of a rather mediocre exhibition—figure of a graceful stripling.'—Reggie, my graceful stripling, that's you—'a new note in English painting'—You darlings, what a pair of you! I should like to know who wrote it. I wish the people would sign their names."
But as Charles read his first impulse of pleasure faded altogether. At the end he crumpled the paper up, and threw it into the fender.
"Good Lord, what rot!" he said.
"Lays it on thick, doesn't it?" said Reggie. "But I like the part about the graceful stripling."
"You would," said Charles.
The studio which was part of Craddock's bargain with Charles was admirable in design and appointment. A huge sky-light, set in the slope of the roof, looked towards the north, and an apparatus of blinds made it easy to get as much or as little light as was required. The walls were of that most neutral of all tints, the grey-green of the underside of olive leaves, and the parquet floor had a few sober-hued rugs over it. But colour was there in plenty: a couple of brilliant screens, one of lacquer, one of stamped Spanish leather, intercepted possible draughts, and gave a gorgeous warmth of hue to their neighbourhoods, and a big open fireplace with Dutch tiles, and a little congregation of chairs round about it, added to a mere workroom a delightful focus of rest and comfort. The faithful skeleton and the flayed man kept each other company in a sequestered corner, where they might be supposed to entertain each other with dismal tales of how they came to be what they were, for the room was no longer the study of a student, but the living-place of a practitioner. Beyond these things there was little to attract the attention, or seduce the eye, for the vision that comes from within must feed on what it suggests to itself, and not be tickled with what others have done and thought.
At the time when Craddock had made his offer to Charles, the room, with its little chamber adjoining, was already in his hands, and he had thought of using it as an overflow gallery from Thistleton's, but he had drawn a longer bow in offering it to Charles, for his speculation there he believed to hold a larger financial possibility than an extension of Thistleton's promised. And his furnishing it, in accordance with what he thought to be Charles' psychical requirements, was not less than masterly. Morning by morning, when Charles arrived there, he felt instinctively that he saw clearly here, that his own vision was unharassed by things that were ugly and inconvenient, and yet not distracted by the challenge of beauty that demanded attention. In this temperate, colourless place he grew as plants grow on warm grey days, not soaked or scorched, but realizing themselves, and expanding accordingly to their own irresistible vitality. A month ago, Charles could not have scraped out the face that to-day he so joyfully erased from his canvas. No doubt these utterly congenial conditions did not produce his development, but they presented nothing that hindered. Above all, the constant gnawing at his heart of the thought that he earned nothing, contributed nothing to those who worked for him, was removed. To some natures such conditions are a spur, to him they had only been a drag. They had never retarded his industry, but they had always caused him that inward anxiety which, though he knew it not, shackled the perfect freedom of his service to art. To-day he had no touch of such cramp or stiffness: he felt entirely untrammelled: his soul stood nude and unimpeded, like some beautiful runner or wrestler. There was nothing to hinder its leap and swiftness.
Arthur Craddock had been exceedingly busy this autumn; indeed, since the month that he had spent at Marienbad during August, when he atoned for the plethora of nourishment which he had taken during the year before, and cleared his decks, so to speak, for action again, he had hardly spent a night out of town. The bulk of his work was in connection with the production of "Easter Eggs," for, since he knew that no acting manager would look at it, for not containing a star-part, or if he did, would quite infallibly spoil it by making a star part out of it, he, on rather a magnificent scale of speculation, had taken a theatre himself, and himself engaged the actors whom he desired to see in it. These were without exception ladies and gentlemen who had not hitherto been so fortunate as to attract attention; for this reason their services were more cheaply secured, which was an advantage, but the corresponding disadvantage was that they were not possessed of any great histrionic experience, and thus needed the more drilling and instruction. Craddock had engaged an excellent stage-manager, who fully entered into his conception of the manner in which the play must be presented, but there was scarce a rehearsal at which he was not himself present, and after which he did not confabulate with his stage-manager. Sometimes from the incessant hearing of the scenes, they seemed to him to lack all significance and dramatic force, and be, as their despairing author had openly avowed them, the merest twaddle. But even when hope burned lowest, and Craddock seriously wondered how great would be the loss he would have to face, he still stuck to his opinion that there were marketable elements in this quiet drama.
He had another cause for financial disquietude. During the summer there had been an outrageous exhibition of post-Impressionists at one of the London galleries, and though from an artistic point of view he considered that these nightmare canvases had as little to do with art as the "tasteful" decorations of a saloon-carriage, he had through an agent made very considerable purchases of them, with a view to unloading again on the confiding public. Since his return from Marienbad he had caused them to be hung in Thistleton's gallery, and had written several signed articles in the "Whitehall" which he considered should have proved provocative of purchasers. But up to the present the gallery had been barren of buyers, and even though himself pointed out to Mr. Ward, to whom his recommendation had hitherto been always sufficient, the marvels of this new mode of vision, and masterly defiant absence of all that had hitherto been known as drawing or painting, the latter, though lamenting his artistic blindness, had altogether declined to make breaks in the frieze of nightmare which brooded on the gallery walls. But though for the present his money—a considerable sum of it—was locked up in these monstrous and unmarketable wares he did not (which would have affected him far more poignantly), lose prestige as a critic and appraiser of art, since he had bought under an agent's name, and the secret of his identity with Thistleton's Gallery was at present inviolate. His astute young clerk, as has been seen, had conjectured as much, but it was only a conjecture, and the conjecturer was only Reggie. Had Craddock known of Reggie's brotherhood to his new protégé, he might perhaps have devoted a little thought as to whether he should take any steps to ensure secrecy: as it was he neither knew Reggie's name, nor suspected his conjecture or relationship.
A third disagreeableness had chequered September for Craddock, and added a further burden to his anxieties during the weeks of rehearsal for this play. Four years before he had purchased one of his convenient options on the literary work of a slow-labouring and diabolically-canny Scotchman, who had failed to find a publisher for a story which Craddock had judged to be a very beautiful and delicate piece of work. He had given this execrable Pict the sum of three hundred pounds for it, coupled with the right to purchase any future work by him during the next three years for the same sum. Whereupon the execrable Pict, having made quite sure that he had mastered the terms of his agreement, had sat down in his frugal house in Perthshire and devoted himself to study and porridge and reflection. For those three years he had not set pen to paper, but lived a life of meditation that would have done credit to a student of Râja Yogi attaining Samâdhi, and, the period of his apprenticeship to Craddock being finished and the contract terminated, had written a book over which, when it was published during September, the whole world, it seemed, had laughed and wept. Never was there a more tender and exquisite idyll, reviewers hailed him as Scotland's most transcendent sun, round which all lesser lights must for ever burn dim. Hot and hot the editions poured from the press, and Craddock, impotent and dismayed, saw the little fortune which he felt was justly his pour into the purse of this disgusting Northerner. The execrable Pict was a Danae. He sat with gold showering round him, the gold that he had acquired in those three years when he sordidly lived, thanks to Craddock's bounty, on porridge and meditation. Craddock had not, it will be observed, lost money over this unfortunate transaction, since he had more than gathered back his original outlay, but the thought of what he had missed woke him early in the morning, after the remembrance of the last rehearsal had prevented his going to sleep at night. Legally, he believed he might be judged to have some claim, since the book in question was, if not blackly written with ink on paper, invented and thought over and prepared during those years in which he had a claim on the author's work, but for personal reasons he did not desire that this pathetic history should be exposed to the unsympathetic ventilation of the law-courts. But it confirmed to him the wisdom of doing business, wherever possible, with the young and inexperienced.