Miss Browne made a hysterical noise in her throat.
'It is so sad,' she said; 'what is it you have done to it? It is only a ship and a man, and yet—do you know I can hardly keep the sobs back when I look at it.'
To her amaze her employer turned eagerly round, shook her hand again and again in warmest gratitude, and fell to painting once more with feverish haste.
The canvas showed a livid stretch of coast and ocean, and a spectre ship with a spectre captain at the helm.
The ship had an indescribably sad effect. You saw her straining through the strong, repellent waves, you heard her cordage creaking, you saw her battling stem struggling to push a way. She was a living thing, breaking her heart over the black hopelessness of her task. The captain's face burnt flame-white out from the canvas; his desperate eyes stared straight ahead; his long hand held the helm in a frightful grip. You knew he was aware he would never round his cape; you knew he would fight to do so through all eternity.
The Camerons celebrated the day of the finishing of the picture as a high holiday. The children had ten shillings tossed to them to spend as they liked. They bought a marvellous motley of edible things, and dragged their father and Miss Browne up the Jib to partake of them. It were sheer madness to suppose a whole half-crown's worth of Brazil nuts; to say nothing of chocolates, tarts and other extreme dainties, could be discussed within the cramped walls of a house in a street. The whole width of the heavens was needed, and a thousand gum-trees, and the smell of earth and grass.
Cameron walked about on the heights as if on air. He had not painted that canvas that stood, still wet, down below in the straggling town. He had entertained a spirit, something stronger, fiercer, more triumphantly capable than himself. He could have flung up his arms and run shouting up and down, shouting thanks to the winds, the trees, the sailing skies, that the spirit had taken its dwelling in him. Magnificent fancies came bursting upon him; now and again he held his head, so rich were the conceptions, so strong felt his hand to bring them into instant being.
An urgent craving for his wife took hold of him—he strode away from the children's shouts, away from Miss Browne, who sat wretched because she had forgotten the tin-opener, and the tea, and the sugar.
He found himself down near the creek, with the gums waving eighty feet above his head, gums with snow patches of blossoms on them, stern gums, smiling gums, red, silver, blue. And he called, 'Molly,' and the trees encouraged him.
And again, 'Molly,' 'Molly,' and there burst up to his lips from his heart all the words he had had to stifle away since the sailing of her ship. All that he would have poured out to her these last two years, all that had lain quiet and kept his being stagnant since that last agonised clinging of her arms.