CHAPTER IV
There is a by-street which opens out of the King's Road, Chelsea, and for a short distance pursues a course as respectable as the early career of Mr. Walkingshaw. Then, not unlike that gentleman, it diverges at right angles; and having once begun, goes on doubling for the remainder of its existence, shedding, as it gets round each corner, the more orthodox houses that once bore it company, till at last it becomes a mere devious lane, the haunt of low eccentric buildings; in places, owing to a casual tree or two, positively shady. The eccentric buildings, one is not greatly surprised to hear, are nothing more decorous than the studios of Bohemian painters. Such are the dangers of deviating from a straight and adequately lamp-lit route.
In one of these studios a young man fiercely painted. His powerful, loosely clad figure stepped nervously back and forward, his brush now poised trembling in the air, now dabbing and swishing on the long-suffering canvas. His mop of brown hair had started the day brushed back and comparatively sleek; it was now a mere tousel. His butterfly tie had been a thing of some esthetic pretensions; it was become a tangle of silk. His smile had been bland and his manner courteous; he now resembled a buffalo with a bullet in it.
"The beastly thing won't come right!" he roared.
Another young man reclined upon a deck-chair in company with three cushions. His appearance was equally artistic, but he seemed less strenuous. He was pale, slim, rather pretty than handsome, and engagingly polite.
"Cheer up, dear old fellow," he suggested.
"Damn!" muttered Lucas.
He toiled in agitated silence for some minutes, and then burst out again.
"No one will ever exhibit the thing; no one will ever look twice at it; there's not a fool big enough in England to buy it! And it's all but the best bit of work I've ever done."
"That 'all but' lets you down, I suppose," observed the other gently.
"One could fill a lunatic asylum with you alone," replied the painter. "Why don't you go off and do some work instead of exhibiting your incompetence here?"
"I told you I'd a headache," said the young man in the chair languidly.
"What the devil's in your head to ache beats me," declared Lucas, accompanying this unkind speech by a brutal onslaught on the canvas.
"Dear Lucas!" smiled his friend. "You seem to have come under some softening influence lately. Can you be in love?"
The painter turned and confronted him with a less furious air.
"You know I am," he replied, and strode to the end of the studio and back, while the other contemplated him in pitying silence.
"I feel a fraud, Hillary," he resumed.
"So long as you aren't found out—" began Hillary.
"I have found myself out," retorted Lucas. "I boasted I could make an income for her—and look at this daub!"
"The public likes daubs."
"If they know the signature; yes, by all means. But who knows mine?"
"Some Jews are great picture-buyers," suggested Hillary.
An answering gleam lit Lucas's eye for an instant, and then burned out.
"For the artist there are three ways of making a living," he pronounced. "One is painting for the million—children with rosy cheeks and large wheelbarrows; beds with angels hovering over them and kind doctors with stethoscopes sitting beside them—that sort of thing—the obvious road to the heart. The second is hitting the superior kind of idiot in the eye—inventing a cheap new formula—putting a goblin upside down in one corner, an immoral-looking woman in another, and passing the arrangement off as an allegory. Then up jumps an interpreter and booms you. The third is slowly making your name by the sweat of your brow, and selling your pictures when you are fifty-five to people who never recognized their merit till they had been told you were famous."
"Well," said Hillary, "that gives you a biggish target."
"Does it? I have no popular knack; I lack the conjurer's instincts; and I don't mean to wait for Jean Walkingshaw till I am fifty-five."
"Must it be she?" asked Hillary.
"It must!"
"Her father won't help?"
"If he wasn't so infernally respectable he'd shoot me at sight."
"Run away with her. Once you've got her, he won't be heathen enough to let her starve."
"In the first place," replied Lucas, "she wouldn't run away with me. That's the infernal, charming, irritating, splendid thing about her—she is true to us both."
"Won't chuck you and won't chuck the old boy either?"
Lucas nodded.
"The thing can be done," said Hillary languidly; "it only wants a little energy and enterprise. Great achievements are never accomplished by slackness. Woman was created to yield to the energetic advances of man. Remember that, Luc—"
"Besides," interrupted the painter, who had paid singularly little attention to this stirring speech, "I happen to be handicapped by a little pride. Can you imagine me helping her to compose begging letters to her father? 'We are in great distress this winter, and a check for twenty pounds will be gratefully, etc. etc. etc.!' Can you see me stooping to that sort of thing? What?"
"I merely threw out the idea as it were tentatively," said Hillary mildly.
Lucas gave his mustaches a fierce twist and planted himself firmly with his back to the despised picture.
"It must have been a practical joke of the Devil's that gave Jean that father and then threw me in her way. Old Heriot Walkingshaw is one of those men who were created as an antidote to human affection. He stands between his children's hearts and the sunshine outside like the brick wall of a prison. His virtues are those of a paperweight. Neither his daughter nor his fortune are likely to blow away while he is planted on them; and there his merits end."
"What a dreadful fellow," murmured Hillary.
"And the worst of such fellows is that they are infectious. One can catch grimness and hardness of soul just as one can catch high spirits and courage. Bah! I won't think of him any more. I'll have another shot at this thing."
He took his brush again and faced the canvas. For a few minutes he labored painfully, and then turned with an exclamation.
"The memory of the old devil has got into my brush—" he began, and then stopped.
There was a knock upon the studio door.
"Hullo! A patron?" said Hillary.
"A dun more probably," muttered Lucas.
He opened the door and found himself confronting the rubicund countenance and imposing form of Heriot Walkingshaw. Over the shoulder of this apparition he looked into the clear eyes of Frank. They were trying to convey a caution to use whatever tact he possessed; but the artist was too dumbfounded to heed them.
"Well?" he demanded.