Chapter V: A Celebrity at Home

Herbert Strang had gone down to Devonshire to finish his portrait of Mrs. Wyndwood, whose dress was still unrecognizable, and who was so agreeably surprised by the face that she graciously consented to continue the sittings at the “Creamery.” Matthew had arranged to join him--on the excellent pretext of keeping his old friend company--but before he left town for his holiday, Conscience began working hard, ominously presageful of the complications that might spring up in the solitudes of hills and waters. The inner voice whispered strenuously to him to profit by Eleanor’s absence to fight down his impossible passion, not intensify it unendurably by following in her train. Thoughts of his wife began to haunt him--thoughts which, while he was only an absentee husband, had been but pale shadows of remorse, dogging his few unoccupied moments, but which, now that another woman had at last enthroned herself in the vacant temple of his soul, assumed shapes more solid and insistent. Home plucked at his heart, subtly transformed to something more than an unpleasant recollection. In a spasm of compunction and foreboding, he resolved to pay a visit to his wife to strengthen himself against temptation. The idea, once conceived, drove him to instant execution. Ere the train had drawn up at Camden Town he had determined to elude temptation altogether by accompanying his own family on its annual jaunt.

The visit began inauspiciously. When he had passed the ivy-clad turreted church, which was the one picturesque object on the road from the station, he was back in the old familiar mesh of gray streets, any one like any other, with rows of shabby semi-genteel stone-fronted houses, exactly alike, broken at corners by baker-shops and green-grocers. The August afternoon was depressed, with misty, sputtering rain. A few tradesmen’s carts rattled forlornly down the drab avenues of apathetic houses. A diminutive barrel-organ wheezed a lively air. Never had his street seemed so hopeless. His ardor grew chill.

He paused before the door of the little studio where he had painted his first success--“Motherhood.” The discolored wood--set in the blankness of a long brick wall--was scrawled over with chalk inscriptions and sketches by the urchins of the neighborhood. The house was round the corner, and, after a melancholy moment, he walked listlessly towards the front gate, swung it on its creaking hinges, and mounted the chipped stone steps, washed ashen-gray by the drippings of rain.

There was a new face, heavy and smudged, under the ill-adjusted cap of the maid-of-all-work who opened the door, and as he entered the narrow hall the sickly smell of boiled cabbage saluted his nostrils, and justified him to himself. But he was grimly embarrassed at having to explain himself to the girl.

“Is your mistress in?” he asked.

“Yes, sir. Will you wait in the drorin’-room, sir? What name, sir?”

He felt mortified and a whit ashamed. The servant’s ignorance was an unconscious rebuke that counterbalanced the boiled cabbage.

“Oh, tell her Matthew,” he said, flushing. “She’ll know.”

“Yes, sir.” And the girl’s cap, stuck on askew for the edification of unexpected company, disappeared down the kitchen stairs.

He would have liked to brush majestically past her, but delicacy prevented so abrupt an intrusion upon his wife in the recesses of domesticity. His coming was already sufficient surprise. A few hours ago he himself had not foreseen that a swamping wave of moral emotion would sweep him homeward. He walked about the room, morbidly fascinated by the flashy vases with the hand-painted shepherds, and wondering what Rosina would say if he made away with them, as decency demanded. To his bitter amusement he heard her voice from the passage remonstrating with Billy--in a very audible whisper--for the servant’s indiscretion in admitting to the drawing-room a stranger who might do havoc among her cherished possessions.

“Goodness knows what he may not pocket,” she grumbled, uneasily, as she approached the door.

“It’s all right, Rosina,” he called out, coming into the passage. “It’s only me.”

“Gracious!” ejaculated Mrs. Matthew Strang, angrily, putting her hand to her heart. “What a turn you gave me! So you’re the Mr. Matthews! I really do wish you wouldn’t come sneaking in and prying and ferreting and frightening a body out of her wits.”

She stood there--no more pleasing than the vases--the features, that had once threatened to be pretty, sharpened shrewishly, though the figure had grown plumper except where the breasts had fallen. She did not look her youth. The face was weary, the pale blue eyes had lost their softness. She had hastily donned a cheap black cashmere dress trimmed with jet. The painter was glad the usual effusion of affection was wanting. Notwithstanding the pitch of reaction to which he was wrought up, all his being shrank from the desecrating embrace of the woman he did not love. Nevertheless he was conscious of an undercurrent of astonishment. Longer intervals than this last had parted them, yet she had never failed to exhibit amorous emotion, even though it took the shape of jealous reproach. This afternoon there was a suggestion of resentment in her greeting--for the first time he felt unwelcome. He was puzzled, albeit relieved. But the secret of her mood did not leak out yet; and in the meantime there was Billy, sulkily awaiting his famous brother’s recognition. The young man looked whiter and thinner than on Matthew’s last visit to the house.

“How glad he’ll be to come for a holiday with me,” thought the painter, with a pang of joyful repentance. “He oughtn’t to live in London at all. We’ll all go down to some pretty little village where I can paint if necessary, and we’ll stay till the winter.” The cripple churlishly took the hand which his brother extended. His palm burned.

“All right, Billy?” questioned Matthew, cheerfully.

“It doesn’t matter how I am,” snapped the younger man. “It’s months since you’ve been nigh us.”

Rosina turned upon Billy. “Don’t you take my part--I can speak for myself. You can’t expect to see your brother in the summer when all the fashionable folks come up to London to be painted.”

Billy murmured something inarticulate, and looked doggedly at Matthew, leaning on his crutch.

“I suppose I must ask you to walk in and take a chair, since you are such a stranger,” said Mrs. Matthew Strang.

Her husband meekly retreated into the drawing-room, and sat down with his back to the vases that adorned the mantel-piece. But now a new horror caught his eye--nothing less than a framed oleograph of “Motherhood,” which had found its way into the house in the days when its wide popularity still gave him a certain interest in it not far removed from pride. On his soul, tensely strung by Eleanor’s hand for the high notes of imagination, this cheap domesticity now jarred abominably. The picture glared at him, it loomed suddenly symbolic. It was representative of Rosina and her influence. This was her height of poetry, the top measure of her soul--the mother carrying the little girl who carried the doll. The work he wanted to do--nay, the work he had always wanted to do--that was what Eleanor stood for--the rare, the fine, the ethereal. Years of insincere work had blunted and torpified him--Eleanor had recreated his soul, had given him freshness of feeling, and something of the early ardor of aspiration.

This passed through his mind before Billy had stumped in and taken a chair opposite him. Rosina remained standing at the open door in an attitude expressive of household duties plucking at her skirts.

The painter shifted nervously on his chair. There was a dead silence. It permitted the tootling of a tin whistle to become audible, and gave the painter the happy thought of asking after the children.

“Clara’s at school,” replied Rosina, ungraciously. “She’s the second girl in her class, and could be top if she wasn’t so sulky.”

“And Davie?”

“Can’t you hear for yourself? He’s only too quiet as a rule, but since you brought him that whistle he’s been unbearable. It’s the only thing that rouses him. It was stopped up for a fortnight, and he went about like a little ghost till Billy put it right. If he only had a notion of music! Billy tried to teach him to play on it, but he’s got no head for anything. There! did you ever hear such a squeal?”

“Oh! he’s such a baby yet,” said her husband, deprecatingly.

Then the conversation languished again, and Davie’s lugubrious whistle held the field.

Billy drew vague designs on the carpet with his crutch. Matthew fidgeted and at last got up. He was meditating how to turn the conversation into a tenderer channel, and broach the holiday in common. Rosina maintained her inconclusive attitude in the doorway.

“You’ve still got those vases,” Matthew said. There being no other thought in the way, this thought escaped.

“Yes,” she rejoined; “but I don’t wonder at your asking; any day may see the end of them, servants are growing that careless. Even as it is, they only dust their outsides. If I didn’t wash them myself with tea-leaves they’d be choked up in a month.”

She walked to the mantel-piece, and ran her forefinger down one of them. The finger grew black as with anger; her brow darkened.

“Why, Amy is worse than Jane!” she cried, harshly. “I won’t stand any more of her nonsense. Do you know what she did last week?” Here she walked back to the door and shut it tightly, lest her words should reach the kitchen. “She washed the colored things in the same water as the whites. And then, after the wash, I missed a pair of Billy’s red socks, and I hunted high and low for them, and made a fuss. The next day Billy found them mysteriously mixed up with his flannels. I am convinced she stole them, not knowing she had a sharp eye to deal with. I know they’ll worry me into the grave, these servants. This morning I particularly said to her, ‘Have you dusted the drawing-room?’ and she said, bold as brass, ‘Yes, mum.’ And this is what she calls dusting.” She held up her gloomy forefinger. Then, lowering her voice as if it might penetrate even through the closed door, she hissed menacingly at the brothers--“I’ll give her a piece of my mind, that I will. If she don’t know when she’s got a good place, the great hulking brute, she shall pack herself off this very afternoon. A charwoman I give her every Monday to help her; two shillings I have to pay and her beer money, to say nothing of the work I do with my own hands. Often and often I make the beds myself, for there isn’t a girl in creation you can trust to shake out the bedding, they leave it all lumpy. And what is the reward for all my kindness? I hate them all; I wish their necks were screwed.”

“I wish they were,” said Billy, impatiently. “I’m sick of hearing about them.”

Rosina turned upon him again. “And who asks you to stay here? I’m sure I’m sick of hearing you grumbling and whining about the house.”

Billy’s eyes blazed. A red spot burned in each white cheek.

“Won’t you give me a cup of tea, Rosina?” interposed Matthew, gently.

“I dare say Amy has let the fire go out,” she snapped. “Ring the bell, you’re nearest it.”

Matthew rang the bell, and Amy appeared.

“Can you make some tea, Amy?” Rosina inquired, in sweet, seductive accents.

“Yes, mum.”

“My husband has just come from abroad,” she explained, deferentially and apologetically, “and we sha’n’t be wanting any more at tea-time. We’ll have tea a little earlier, and you can keep the water hot for Miss Clara.”

“Yes, mum.” Amy disappeared.

“Did you see the smudge on her cheek?” asked Rosina, despairingly. “She can’t even dust her face.”

While Rosina was speaking, her husband fretted under her conversation; the awkward silence that ensued when she ceased made him wish she would go on talking.

“How is business?” she asked, finding him dumb.

He suppressed a grimace. “Pretty fair. You know I’ve always got as much to do as I care for.”

“You know what I’ve been thinking?” Rosina replied, in a softened and more confidential tone. “You ought to make enough to be able to retire one day. Why should you always live away from me?--it’s as bad as marrying a drummer. At No. 49 there’s one--a commercial traveller they call them in England--and his wife tells me--it’s the house with the striped linen blinds--she doesn’t see him half a dozen times a year, and you’re getting almost as scarce, particularly this year.” She dropped into a chair, finally dismissing her tentative attitude.

This seemed a favorable opening at last, so her husband plunged into it.

“You haven’t been out of town yet?” he began.

Rosina bounded wrathfully from her chair.

“There! I knew that that was what you came to spy out. Isn’t it enough that you’ve left your brother here to be a spy on all my comings and goings? It’s rather me that ought to be setting a spy on you, God knows, what with your studios and your models and your fashionable, false-hearted women. Well, there he is to witness, anyhow. We have _had_ our fortnight at the sea-side. Haven’t we, Billy?”

Billy nodded.

“There! There’s your own brother to witness. We went last month, and all to save you money, though I know you think I’m making a stocking. They charged us so much last year for lodgings at Margate in August that I made up my mind I wouldn’t be swindled any more, and so we went in July. And we did save--it’s no use my denying it, with that spy of yours ever at my tail--but I’ve had to spend twice as much in London, with everything gone up in price. They’re asking a shilling a peck for peas--you can go round and ask Delton, the green-grocer, if you don’t believe me--it’s enough to ruin anybody. And then there was the rise in coals in the spring on account of the strike--something frightful, and such a lot of slag. And then poor Clara has been so poorly; I sent for the doctor once, and then he would keep on coming to see her every day--there was no getting rid of him, and that brother of yours hadn’t the spunk to tell him straight out not to come any more. Goodness knows what his bill has run up to. They’re simply blood-squeezers, these doctors. So there! If you think you’ve caught me out, coming down on me like a detective in my sea-side week, you’re nicely mistaken, Mr. Slyboots. What are you glaring at me for? Looking for the brown? I’d have given myself a coat of paint if I had known you were coming, though I don’t pretend to be so clever at it as you, or your fine ladies either, for the matter of that.”

As Rosina stood over him, breathlessly pouring forth her impassioned defence of the position she took up in financial matters, Matthew Strang felt he understood why men sometimes kill women. He had long since given up attempting to make her understand that her thoughts were not his thoughts, that, despite his hard training in the value of money, details of expenditure had ceased to occupy his consciousness the moment the pinch of need was become a thing of the past. He was inured to her financial apologetics, her tedious justifications of what he (in his ignorance that she was indeed hoarding money secretly, and, like all women, saving on her house-keeping) never called into question. He had steeled himself to a simulation of attention when she elaborately accounted for every farthing he had given her, and, habituated to money perpetually passing from his hands, he had never even reflected that her style of living could not possibly exhaust the sums with which he supplemented her own income; to his heedless mind a growing family vaguely explained everything. But to-day the prosaic minutiæ, though painfully familiar, set up an inward fume that, intensified by her misconstruction of his visit and by her digs at Billy, approached insanity. He controlled himself with a great effort.

“It is you that are mistaken, Rosina,” he rejoined, clinching his palms. “I came merely to propose that you should take your holiday now. I thought we might go somewhere together.”

“Well, then, you’re a bit too late,” she replied, with no diminution of ill-temper. “And what’s come over you that you want my company all of a sudden? I thought you couldn’t spare me a week ever. I reckon the truth is that work’s got slack.”

“Nonsense, I told you my hands were full,” he said, losing his self-control.

“That’s no reason why you should waste money on me. I can’t go twice to the sea-side.”

“I didn’t want you to go twice. I didn’t know you had been.”

“I explained to you why I went,” she retorted, hotly. “They wanted three guineas last year for a sitting-room and two poky bedrooms, and there was no key to the chiffonier, and I’m sure the landlady nibbled at our provisions.”

“But I would have gladly let you have a little extra if you wanted to go in August.”

“I’d much rather you spent the money on the children. Clara wears out her shoes frightfully--the expense turns my hair gray.”

“Then you wouldn’t care to go with me?”

“No; it would be sinful extravagance to go twice. Give me the money if you’re so anxious to get rid of it.”

“Do be reasonable, Rosina. I dare say the children will enjoy another week of--”

“The children! Much you care about the children. You haven’t asked to see Davie yet, and as for Clara--” Rosina’s scornful accents dried up suddenly. Her acute ear had caught the gentle clatter of the mounting tray. She opened the door for Amy. “You’re sure the water was boiling?” she inquired, pleasantly.

“Yes, mum.”

The mistress produced a little key from her bosom. “You will find a cake in the cupboard under the dining-room sideboard. And bring up the blue-bordered plates, the little ones, please.”

“Yes, mum.”

When the tea was duly served, Rosina resumed: “And as for Clara, I didn’t even write to you she had been ailing. I knew you took so little interest in the poor child. She might die and be buried for all you’d know.”

“I can’t know if you don’t tell me,” he said, sulkily, stung by the germ of truth in her words. “Why don’t you let Davie come up to me?--you ought to have sent him up as soon as you knew I was here.”

Rosina threw open the door again with a jerk, and leaned over the kitchen stairs. “Davie,” she bawled, “stop that dreadful noise, and come up at once, do you hear? Your father is dying to see you.”

The painter bit his lips. An irrelevant memory rang in his brain with a Russian accent. “I do not like this word, dying.” The face of Eleanor Wyndwood swam up on the cabbage-scented air. The patter of Davie’s feet was heard, toddling up the stairs.

The child stumbled shyly into the room, the tin whistle clasped distrustfully to his breast--a pathetic, anæmic little figure with flaxen curls and big gray eyes that easily brimmed over with tears. He wore serge knickerbockers, and the rest of him aped the sailor, picturesquely enough. The child paused near the door, clutching his mother’s skirt.

“This way, my little man,” said Matthew, smiling encouragingly from the green sofa that sprawled across the centre of the room. “Come to your daddy.”

“Go to the gentleman, dear,” said Rosina, with withering sarcasm.

But the boy hung back, clutching her skirt and his whistle tighter.

“Don’t be afraid, Davie. I won’t take your whistle from you--don’t you remember, I gave it you?” He held up a piece of Rosina’s home-made cake. Thus adjured and enticed, Davie moved cautiously forward, waves of returning recollection agitating the wee wan face.

A lump swelled in the father’s throat as he surveyed the weakling. The poor child suddenly appeared to him the scape-goat for an unholy union. Life had taught him from what fount of sacred love children should spring.

While he was hoisting the child on his knee, responsive to that strong appeal of feeble creatures, but with no specific stirrings of paternity, Davie wistfully held up his disengaged hand for the cake, which he grabbed as soon as it came within range of his little arm. His mouth was too preoccupied with cake to return his father’s kiss, to which he submitted passively.

The painter laid his hand tenderly on the flaxen hair.

“Did you enjoy yourself at Margate, Davie?”

Rosina uttered an exclamation of disgust.

“Well, I never! Who’ll you be cross-examining next? Perhaps you think Billy and me are in a conspiracy; that I’ve gained over your spy. I’d better go down-stairs so as not to influence the child’s evidence.”

And turning on her heel, she marched haughtily kitchenwards.

Matthew sighed wearily.

“What’s the matter with her, Billy?” he asked.

“Don’t ask me. She’s been as cross as two sticks ever since they’ve had new curtains at No. 53 opposite. And the weather has been so muggy. And your coming has upset her.”

“But she seems to have turned against you, too. You used to get on so well together.”

“She’s so difficult to live with,” replied Billy, fretfully. “So quarrelsome and discontented.”

“What is she discontented about?” Matthew asked, uneasily. “She’s got plenty of money.”

“Oh, it isn’t the money,” replied Billy, morosely. “She’s lucky, is Rosina. She has money of her own. Do you know, her little American property has gone up a good deal lately. Her income is nearer nine hundred than eight hundred dollars.”

“Indeed?” murmured his brother, dimly interested.

“Yes, old Coble wrote to her, telling her things were looking up, and he was right. No, it isn’t Rosina that’s got cause of complaint about money matters. She isn’t like me--she isn’t dependent on you for every farthing.” His words rang bitterly, resentfully.

“But surely you don’t mind taking money from me, Billy?” he said, with infinite gentleness.

“And why shouldn’t I mind taking money from a stranger?”

“A stranger!”

“Yes, you’re naught else. Do you think I don’t know of your goings-on, your gaddings about to parties and banquets? Because Rosina don’t read the papers, you mustn’t think I’m ignorant, too. I’ve got a heap of things about you in my study, all cut out and pasted in books. I don’t tell Rosina, because it would only make her discontented, but it riles me, I tell you straight, to be left here, leading this wretched, lonesome life. Why can’t I live with you?”

“You could live with me to-morrow if you liked, Billy. But don’t you see you’d be just as wretched and lonesome? All day I should be at work, and when I went out you couldn’t accompany me. I can’t foist my relatives on the people who invite me out. They only want _me_--and that only as a curiosity,” he added, with a bitter perception of how extrinsic he really was to the charmed circles of Society; of how little affinity there was between him and the bulk of those who gushed over his Art.

“But if you would only help me to get my work published, they’d make a fuss over me, too. But you’ve never moved your little finger to help me.”

“I got Wilson and Butler to read some of your MSS. I couldn’t do any more. It isn’t my fault if they don’t think your work good enough.”

“Nonsense! I don’t believe they ever saw it. You only said they did to pacify me.”

“Oh, Billy!” cried Matthew, in shocked reproach.

“Well, even if they did,” said Billy, tetchily, “they’re not infallible. They’re prejudiced. They think two brothers can’t both be clever. I’m sure my stories are as good as anything that appears in their magazines, and a damned sight better. But there are any amount of other editors that you come across, for I’ve seen your name printed with theirs in the lists of guests at public dinners. But you go your own way, and never spare a thought for me, eating my heart out here. I come in handy to keep your wife company and to prevent her feeling deserted, and you think that’s about all I’m good for.” His white face was worked up to a flush of anger. He had the common delusion of the unsuccessful, that the successful in any department can pull the ropes in every other. Nor could he understand that Matthew disliked approaching people, and people disliked being approached.

“Whatever you’re good for you’ll be,” said Matthew, soothingly. “If your work is really first-class--it will come to the front in the long-run.” He shrank from adding that he did not think it even second-class; it was no use making the boy more miserable.

“Yes, but I can’t run--I’m a cripple!” Billy burst forth, passionately. “Who knows whether I shall live to see the end of the long-run? Perhaps they’ll give me a stone when I’m dead--but what’s the good of _that_ to me? You have everything that makes life worth living: you have love--you have a wife whenever you choose to come; you have money, and heaps of it, all earned by the sweat of your own brow; you have fame--your name is in all the papers; you have fashionable folk courting and caressing you. I dare say some fine-scented lady fixed that rose so beautifully in your button-hole; I can smell her white fingers. It’s all roses and sunshine for you. But you take jolly good care to keep ’em to yourself.”

The imbittered words carried no sting to the painter’s breast. But he was sick at heart as he replied, gently:

“You don’t really mean what you’re saying, Billy. You know I’ve offered to defray the cost of publication of ‘By Field and Flood’ if you’d only let me.”

“Yes, but that’s making me more of a drag on you. Besides, you told me it’s only the rotten houses that publish novels at the author’s expense, and that the critics look askance on them. But if I could earn enough on my short stories to pay for a book, I’d chance that.” His voice took on a maundering, pitiful intonation. “I’m sure I’ve worked hard enough, toiling at my desk and denying myself every pleasure in life; you can’t say I don’t keep sober now. I never go beyond one glass of ale at meal-times.”

“Yes, you’re very good, Billy. You’ve been good for a long time.”

“Good!” echoed Billy, in the same testy, lachrymose accents. “What’s the good of being good? I wish I was dead. Why don’t you let me drink my fits back again?” His breast heaved, he seemed on the point of sobs. The painter sat in mute misery.

A blood-curdling shriek from the whistle destroyed the intolerable situation. Davie, having finished munching his cake, had his mouth free again for musical operations.

“Put your fingers over the holes, Davie,” said his father, “then it ’ll play nicer.”

“It’s no use,” put in Billy, moodily. “I tried to teach him.”

“Look, I’ll move my fingers, Davie, and you shall blow, and we’ll play a pretty tune together. No, don’t be alarmed. I’m not taking the whistle away, only putting my fingers on it. See, you shall hold the end fast in your mouth.”

The child blew spasmodically. His father mechanically played the first tune that came into his fingers. A gleam of excited interest leaped into the child’s eyes as he heard the notes varying mysteriously in a rough jingle. But the painter broke off suddenly. He realized that he was playing “Home, Sweet Home.” It was too ghastly.

“More, more!” panted Davie, imperatively.

Matthew Strang obediently started “Yankee Doodle,” and had to grant two encores before the juvenile tyrant was robbed of breath and desire.

“What’s your name, my little man?” he asked, thoughtlessly, to make conversation.

“Davie.”

“Davie what?”

“Davie Thrang.”

“Ah! and how old are you?”

“I’se nearly four,” replied Davie, adding in a burst of new confidence, “when I come to my fourf birfday, mummy says she’ll gi’ me a penny every week all to mythelf.”

“Really?” said the painter, with a sad smile. “A whole penny?”

Davie shook his head in vehement affirmation: “Yeth, and I am thinkin’ what I shall buy mummy wi’ my firth penny--appleth or a flower.”

A thrill shot down the painter’s spine. The poor, sickly infant appeared suddenly lovable to him; for the first time, too, he realized the child as an independent entity, with thoughts of its own at work in the queer little brain. Whatever the quality of this little brain, Davie’s heart was sound enough. And this heart was evidently entirely given to his mother. The momentary prick of irrational jealousy that the discovery caused the father was forgotten in softer feelings. His conception of the mother rose with his conception of the child. She was the other side of the relation, and there must be something beautiful in her to correspond with the beauty of her child’s sentiment. The oleograph of “Motherhood” caught his eye again; he saw how insincerely he had painted it, from a mere intellectual idea, unfelt, unrealized; but he saw also the secret of its popularity, each observer contributing the emotion the painter had not felt. His eye dwelt upon it more tolerantly.

“Kiss me, Davie,” he said, “and you shall have a penny now to buy mummy a flower.”

Davie readily put up his lips to clinch the bargain, and his father gave him the coin. The boy regarded it wistfully.

“What do you say?” Billy put in, more amiably.

“Fank you,” said Davie.

“Thank you, da--” prompted Billy.

“Daddy,” wound up Davie, triumphantly. “There ain’t no flower-womans now,” he added, dubiously. “They was a lot at Margit.”

“I’ll be a flower-woman, Davie,” said his father, cheerily. “Wouldn’t you like to have this beautiful flower--this rose in my button-hole--for your penny, to give to mummy?”

“Yeth--I wants it,” said Davie, clutching greedily for it.

“Gently, or all the lovely pink leaves will fall out. And you must give me your penny, you know.”

Davie, with a perplexed air, vaguely conscious of commercial transactions too complicated for his intellect, hesitatingly retendered the penny, and, receiving the rose, was set down on the carpet. He ran eagerly to the door, blowing one disconsolate, irrelevant blast on the whistle, and then the brothers heard him tumble down the oilcloth-covered stairs with three thuds, followed by shrill ululations. They ran to the head of the stairs, but Rosina had already rushed forth to pick up her child, and her soothing prattle, varied by scolding for his careless hurry, made a duet with his howls.

“Where did you get that flower from? You’ve crumpled it all to pieces.” She extracted it from the fingers that had closed upon it tenaciously when the fall commenced.

“From the gen’leman. Him what I calls daddy. It’s for you, mummy.”

“Tell him he can keep it!”

Davie’s howls recommenced.

Matthew Strang’s heart contracted. He went half-way down the stairs to where Rosina ministered to her bruised offspring.

“I didn’t send you the flower, Rosina,” he said, gently. “It’s a gift from the child.”

“Oh, is it? Then he’s better-hearted than his father, that’s all I can say. Thank you, my poor darling, thank you. Dry your little eyes, and mummy shall take you out to see all the pretty shops.”

“Won’t you come up-stairs and finish your tea, Rosina?” Matthew pleaded.

“I’m busy,” she said, tartly. “I’m giving Clara her tea. She’s just come home from school.”

“Let her bring her tea up-stairs; then she can talk to me.”

“I’ll tell her you’re here. I dare say she’ll remember you--she generally gets something out of you.”

He bit his lips to keep back angry speech, and remounted to the drawing-room. Clara came close upon his footsteps, and ran to offer her lips. She was a tall child of seven, with a low forehead, dark hair and eyebrows, a heavy jaw, and a high color--handsome after a rather Gallic fashion. The painter always trod gingerly with her, knowing she had her grandmother’s temper. Rosina, lacking the clew, was less delicate with the girl, whose sullen phases irritated her immeasurably. This afternoon Clara was conciliated by sixpence, and chatted amicably with her father about her lessons. Presently her mother came up too, with Davie in her train, and there was the outward spectacle of a happy family group united at tea. The painter was emboldened to strengthen an idea that was gradually forming in his mind by expressing it.

“Billy feels very lonely down in this part of the town,” he began, timidly.

“And what must I feel?” Rosina snapped.

“Then why can’t we all live together, Rosina?” he said, more boldly.

“Are you beginning that again?” she asked, sharply. “You won’t come and live here, will you?”

“You know it is impossible.”

“And you know it is impossible for me to move to your neighborhood. I’ve told you a thousand times you can’t afford one of those big houses--it would be ruinous; you’d have to keep a staff of servants to match, and things would be coming to the house at extravagant prices from aristocratic tradespeople, whereas here I go out and do my bit of marketing, and pick up a bargain here and a bargain there; I’ve found out a place in Holloway where I get the best meat a penny a pound cheaper than anywhere in Camden Town, and it only means a penny tram there and back. You don’t know how much I save you a year when you suspect me of making a stocking for myself out of my sea-side allowance. And even if you can afford such a house, rather give me the money and let me put it by for the children.”

He made a despairing gesture. “We could get a small house,” he said. “I could work harder for a year or two. Perhaps I could get a few more rooms added to my studio. There’s a piece of ground I use at the back for open-air studies.”

“And what would be the use of my living with you?” inquired Rosina, brutally. “You don’t want me any more. I dare say you could come home at night now if you wanted to.”

“Hush!” said her husband, flushing. “Clara, my dear, take Davie out and buy him some candy. This penny is really his.”

“Yes, father.” And the joyous children disappeared.

“Poor orphans!” said Rosina. “Perhaps it’s just as well there won’t be any more of them.”

Matthew Strang was startled, yet not quite surprised by the revelation of his wife’s mood. She had never before so openly resented or dissented from the situation that had gradually grown up--one of those strange, complex, undefined situations of which life is so full, and which are only able to exist by virtue of not being put into words.

He stirred the dregs of his tea with his spoon, painfully embarrassed.

“I shall talk to an architect I know,” he said at last, ignoring her allusion. “The cost mightn’t be much, and it needn’t be all paid off at once. Besides,” he added, with forced playfulness, “that extra hundred dollars a year of yours must be used up somehow.”

Rosina turned eyes of flame upon the unhappy Billy. “I knew it!” she said, cuttingly. “I knew you were here to spy upon me. So you have sneaked about that, have you?”

Matthew lost his temper at last.

“Don’t be a fool, Rosina!” he said, roughly. “Do you think I care a pin whether you spend a wretched hundred dollars more or less?”

“No; I dare say you would rather have a wife that would bring you to the workhouse. They had the bailiffs in at No. 36A only yesterday. There’s a wife there that would just suit you. The husband’s something in your way of business, an author or a poet, and she’s a tall, stuck-up creature who sits at the window in strange long gowns without stays, and reads books to him and never goes to church. My! You should see her out marketing--they swindle her at every turn; she doesn’t know a horse from a ham sandwich. I don’t wonder they’ve come to a bad end--you should see the dust on her Venetian blinds. I prophesied the crash last winter--ask Billy if I didn’t. They took in their coals by the hundred-weight. Don’t you fancy I don’t know that’s the sort of woman you’re hankering after. Ever since my Davie was born, and you got mixed up with those sort of creatures, you’ve been sorry you married me. Oh, it’s no use denying it. You want a fine lady that would scorn to soil her fingers with housework, and expect you to cover ’em with diamonds, a creature that would faint at the sight of a black-beetle. But you were glad enough to marry me once upon a time, when you hadn’t a dollar to your name. They say you’re a fine painter, and who made you a fine painter? Who took you abroad, and supported you while you were studying? They think you’re a fine gentleman, and who made you a fine gentleman? Oh yes, I know I’m not one of your fine ladies--but if I had been, where would you have been now? In the bankruptcy court--perhaps back again in the jail from which I dragged you.”

Matthew crimsoned furiously. Billy leaped in his chair.

“You fish-wife! How dare you say such things to my brother?” he cried, choking with rage. “Matt in jail, indeed!”

“Let her talk,” said Matthew, wearily. “I see it was a mistake to have come here at all.”

Rosina cast a glance of venomous triumph at her drooping husband. The jail was a chance shot. In long, lonely, agonizing watches the resentful suspicion had germinated and grown.

“It’s true,” she said, defiantly. “Let him deny it.”

“Why did you take a husband from jail?” retorted the painter, with a flash of fire.

“I didn’t know it; I was tricked and bamboozled, and I had a heart in my breast then, not a stone. If I had been a fine lady I might have been more particular to examine your pedigree.”

A sense of guilt damped the man’s fire. The jail episode was not the only thing he had concealed.

“If you’re sorry you married me we can separate,” he murmured.

“Separate--aren’t we separated enough? Do you mean you’d like a divorce? Oh no, not for this child. So that you may marry one of your fine ladies. Perhaps make an honest woman of her?”

“Rosina!” He sprang to his feet, thundering. The image of Eleanor Wyndwood swept involuntarily before him, and he felt that this coarse-tongued woman had profaned it.

She flinched before the cry, but parodied it daringly.

“Matthew!”

He flung from the room. Billy prodded frantically after him.

“Don’t go, Matt! Don’t go! You’ll never come back again.”

The piteous appeal sounded like a prophecy. He paused in the hall, irresolute.

Rosina laughed hysterically. “You had better go with him, Billy, if you’re so frightened. And good riddance to the pair of you. I’ve got my bread and butter, thank God. My children sha’n’t starve, if their father _does_ desert them.”

“Let me go, Billy,” he said, hoarsely, shaking off the cripple’s clutch. “I can’t breathe here. Come with me--write to me--do what you like.” He opened the hall-door and closed it behind him, and dashed against his children coming back through the gate, with their mouths full of almond-rock. Clara caught at the skirts of his coat.

“Don’t go away again, father,” she mumbled, peevishly. “Mother cries for you in the night, and I can’t get to sleep.”

He swayed as if struck by a bullet. Then he took the little girl’s sticky hand, and suffered himself to be led back through the area door. As Clara unlatched it he heard her mother sobbing hysterically above. The servant’s foolish face peeped, white and scared, from the kitchen door, and made his own scarlet with shame.

“Your mistress is ill,” he muttered, and ran hastily up-stairs.

Rosina detected his footstep, and the sobs changed back to frenzied laughter. Then she controlled both by sheer pride, all the steel in her springing back unsnapped from its bend, and she opposed a mocking smile to his discomfited concern. The strength that had kept her silent for years was now summoned to undo the effects of speech.

“What have you forgotten?” she asked, tauntingly. “Have you come back for your good-bye kiss or your umbrella or what? Kisses, they’re off; we’re an old married couple now, but I don’t want to stick to your umbrella. It might be a present from somebody nice. _Is_ there an umbrella about, Billy? No? Dear me! Then it must be that rose. Ah, but Davie gave me that.” She called down the stairs. “Wasn’t it you that gave me the rose, Davie? Yes, and I’m not going to give it back. Don’t be afraid, dear. Mummy won’t give away her darling’s present. Did ’um bruise himself to give it to me? Poor Davie!”

There was a hectic flush on her cheek; her voice rang false. Matthew was afraid.

“Well, good-bye,” she jerked, after a pause. “What are you waiting for?”

“Don’t go away,” whispered Billy, nervously, shattered by the scenes of the afternoon. “Come to the study; she’ll cool down soon.”

The suggestion commended itself to Matthew. It seemed cowardly to leave this hysteric couple to themselves. He descended the kitchen stairs once more, and passed along the corridor that led to his old studio, now turned into a workroom for Billy, and fitted up with bookshelves, whose contents hid the whitewashed walls. A writing-table, littered with papers, occupied the centre of the floor, and piles of manuscript showed within a little angle cupboard, whose door swung open. There were several reproductions of his brother’s works roughly stuck on the wall--one a valuable engraving signed by the artist; and the “Triumph of Bacchus” was already represented in two shapes--once by the half-page cut out of “The Season’s Pictures,” and again by a full-page photograph of it from the _Graphic_.

“It’s a shame they don’t make you an A.R.A., Matt,” said Billy. “Your pictures get more advertisement for the Academy than almost anybody else’s.”

“For God’s sake, don’t talk of that now,” said the painter, brokenly. His eye noted curiously that ancient engraving of “The Angelus,” miraculously preserved to be one of Billy’s treasures, by the world’s refusal to give more than eighteenpence for it.

It was a poor representative of the original, but the other ornaments of the study seemed to him tawdry in comparison. His taste had changed: the picture attracted him now. Without analyzing--the turmoil of his mind did not permit that--he had an impression of sincerity, of sympathetic vision, of work done inevitably; not, like his own work, from cleverness. Despair of his life and his Art mingled in one dark paroxysm as he dropped upon a chair and laid his head upon the writing-table.

“Don’t, you may get your hair sticky,” said Billy. “I don’t think it’s quite dry--I was just pasting it in before you came.”

He withdrew the album from under his brother’s head--the pious compilation with which he fed at once his jealousy and his pride. “I suppose you saw that little sketch of your life in ‘Our Celebrities’ this month?”

Matthew did not answer.

“It’s not quite accurate, you know,” went on Billy. “It says you’re a bachelor, and that you were born in Canada, and so on. But that doesn’t matter. There are always mistakes, and, of course, nobody knows about Rosina. Listen! ‘The eldest child of a prosperous Canadian farmer, he gave early evidence of talent, and was sent to England to study art, and soon became the favorite pupil at Grainger’s well-known Art School in central London, where he studied under Tarmigan, a frigid artist who at one time enjoyed considerable repute. Later, Mr. Strang pursued his studies in Paris and Rome, and, returning to London with ripened art, sought and obtained the suffrages of the Academicians with his picture entitled “Motherhood,” since so familiar to the public in countless reproductions, and the herald of a career of uniform success. Next year his classic picture--’”

“My God! Do you want to drive me mad?” roared the sick lion, raising his head. “I know all about it.”

“You needn’t bully my head off,” said Billy, pettishly. “I asked you if you’d seen it.”

“It’s copied from _People of the Time_,” groaned the painter. He clinched his fists in a blind rage against the universe. This was what the public read and believed about his life--his life, with its slow, sick struggles, its inner and outer discords, its poignant pathos. And this was what he read and believed about other men. Good God! What was behind their lives, the lives of his fellows, whose smooth histories he read in biographical summaries? The possibilities of the human tragedy frightened him. Then the realities of the human farce seized him, and he terrified Billy by a long peal of sardonic laughter.

The laughter ceased suddenly. “Go and see how she is,” he commanded the shuddering Billy, and the poor cripple, now less frightened of Rosina than of his brother, sped away as fast as his crutch could carry him.

Left alone, the painter looked abstractedly at “The Angelus,” and it drifted his thoughts back to the time when he had tried to sell it for bread. How happy were those times of youthful aspiration, when all things were new and all things were true, and hunger itself was but a sauce to eke out the scanty meal! What was starvation to this terrible hunger for happiness, what the want of money to this want of something to live for? Ah, money was nothing; money troubles were mental figments. It was the cark of life that killed--money or no money. Oh, to be young and free again; free to be a slave to Art! How hollow it all was--this fame, this running about, this Society that welcomed him, as he had truly told Billy, like a kind of monstrosity! He had been happier when he had toiled in this little whitewashed studio, even after his mistaken marriage. The lines of the poet in whom he had read most of late fell from his lips like an original personal cry:

“Oh, I could lie down like a tired child,
And weep away this sordid life of care.”

And thus Billy found him, his head on the desk, his shoulders heaving convulsively.

“Matt!” he cried, timidly.

“Well!” in muffled accents.

“She’s gone to her room and locked herself in. She says you’re not to come near her any more ever.”

A long silence.

“But I dare say it’ll blow over, Matt. This is not the first time she’s been taken like that, though you’ve not been here to bear it.”

A longer silence.

Billy cudgelled his brain to rouse his brother.

“I saw Ruth Hailey a month ago,” he said at last. This time he succeeded in evoking an indifferent monosyllable.

“Yes?”

“Yes. She called here to see us--she was in London. She had got our address from Abner Preep before leaving America. I gave her the address of your studio, but she said she was uncertain whether she would have time to look you up. She seems to be secretary to Mrs. Verder, the Woman’s Rights woman, goes about with her everywhere. Linda Verder’s lectures--you remember them at the St. James’s Hall in July. She’s in Scotland now, and later on, Ruth writes to me (for I asked her to correspond with me a little) they’re going to Paris for a course, under the patronage of the American Embassy. They’ll stay in Paris some time, as Linda Verder wants a rest badly, and has a lot of American friends there. Then they go to Australia and New Zealand. Curious, isn’t it?”

“How did she look?”

“Ruth? Oh, she’s gone off a good deal, to my thinking. She must be getting pretty old now--about as old as you, which is young for a man, but old for a woman. But her eyes are fine, and there’s a sweetness--I can’t describe it. She says she used to teach Sunday-school in the States, and, though she enjoys travelling about, regrets having had to give up her class. Fancy! She used to be such a smart girl, too, and I should have thought the deacon had disgusted her with religion. You know she won’t have anything to do with him.”

“Is he still alive?”

“Oh, he’s just as spry as ever. His father’s curled up his toes, though. Old Hey had the old man from Digby to live with him, and they used to go at it hammer and tongs.”

Billy could extract no further answer. But he would not let his brother go that night, insisting he must sleep with him as usual in the spare bed in his bedroom.

About nine o’clock Rosina sent a specially nice supper for two down to the study. Matthew roused himself to eat a morsel to keep Billy company, and then, before going to his sleepless couch in Billy’s room, bethought himself of whiling away the time by answering some letters which had been bulking his inner coat-pocket for days. One of these was a reverential request for an autograph, addressed from a fine-sounding country house, and backed by the compulsive seduction of a stamped envelope.

His emotions were exhausted. He wrote apathetically, “Yours truly, Matthew Strang,” writing very near the top of the note-paper for fear of fraud, and cutting off the Camden Town heading.

The celebrity was at home for once.