The close-shut fist, the mean and measuring eye,
And all the little poisoned ways of wrong.
—The Rubaiyat.
Everett had improvised a studio in a low loft over the bachelors’ quarters, contiguous to the cabin which he and Gregory shared.
It was necessary, he said, for him to get down to hard work now. That hedging and ditching nonsense was great sport for a man’s holidays, but he had no more time to play; he must paint. The work he had produced in Fulham had not been, often, especially salable or popular in its character, a certain mystic quality pervading it not readily understood by casual observers. All that, he declared, was now to be rigidly excluded from his painting; he should paint to sell—cheap, pretty things, picturesque, palpable. With this purpose he had set to work with a will, and by February had a few hundred dollars to turn over to the treasury as the fruit of his industry. His pictures were sold in the North through Keith Burgess as intermediary.
He was hard at work in the studio at nine o’clock on a night in February, laying in the outline for a bit of the valley which he declared he could paint now with his eyes shut, he had done it so often, having found it “a good seller,” when he heard Gregory’s step on the stairs. That the boy had just brought the mail up from Spalding Everett knew, having heard the horse galloping over the bridge, and stopping before the house.
Gregory came in now with several letters in his hand, one open. He did not speak at first, and Everett let him walk up and down the place undisturbed, seeing that he was peculiarly perplexed, probably by the open letter, which Everett noticed was in Keith Burgess’s handwriting. After a few moments he remarked slowly, but with an unusually incisive quality in his tone:—
“Burgess is a singularly prudent little man. Did it ever strike you so?”
“He has some capacity, however, for the opposite quality.” Everett threw out this remark with no manifestation of especial interest, and it seemed to pass unnoticed.
“Having it in his power,” Gregory continued, with the same incisive deliberation, “to extricate us from our whole present difficulty himself, with the utmost ease, he yet jogs about the country after a comfortable fashion, presenting the subject publicly as occasion offers, and sends me back such letters as this.”