"All right, my dear chap; I plead guilty. What I want to know, though, is, when are we to have another picture? Are you sinking into an animal pure and simple—a sort of superior hog, that eats and drinks, and fills in the between-times with sleep?"
Griff, by way of answer, took Dereham up to the room he used as a studio. A large canvas stood on an easel in the middle of the floor. Dereham went close to the picture, to which the finishing touches had been put early that morning, and stood regarding it attentively.
"Humph!" he dropped at length. "Same style as the two eccentric daubs that the elderly critics profess to think so much of. Gad, though, there's something in it! Why, bless my soul, the figure in the foreground is your wife!"
Yes, Griff had struck a fine idea, undoubtedly. The background was a rush-fringed tarn, with a sweep of rust-coloured bracken on the right and a clump of heathery knolls on the left; in the foreground, standing on a peat-bed of brownish-black, was the figure of a woman, her eyes looking steadfastly out from the canvas, her body set to a careless strength of pose. One corner of the tarn, and the bracken to the right of it, were lit by the dying sun; the rest of the moorscape lay in brooding darkness. On the face of the woman was just that blending of light and sombre shade in which the moor-features themselves had been picked out. It was impossible to say which was the more alive, the woman or the lonely strip of heath; each seemed able to stand alone, yet each helped the other's strength.
"Anything else?" asked Dereham, after a pause, in his usual nonchalant tone.
"Yes; the companion to this. One I call 'Moor Calm,' the other 'Moor Storm.'"
Griff uncovered a second canvas lying against the wall. This time the background was a swirling sea of heather-tips below; and above, lightning and tempest and wind-driven, scudding night-clouds. The naked figure of a man held the foreground—a man eye to eye with the lightning, shoulder to shoulder with the storm; on his lips sat determination, but grim laughter lay in his eyes. The whole smote one with a sense of fearless, Fate-defying nudity.
Dereham shuddered a little as he looked—then shrugged his shoulders when he saw that Griff was watching him.
"Very fine, my friend, for those who understand it. I don't, for my part; it makes me feel cold and wet through."