“And then he has always had the benefit of your experience,” he said.
“Oh, I can’t pretend to have done more than encourage him.”
“Now, Matthew,” said Madame, shaking her finger fondly, “you know it was at your knee that he made his first studies.”
Matthew smiled faintly, not displeased. “I’m like Tarmigan: I can teach better than I can paint,” he said, and poured himself out a glass of wine, fascinating Matt’s eye by the play of light in the diamond on his forefinger. “If I listened to my wife, I should give up business and set up an easel again, as in my young and foolish days. Thank God,” he said, pausing to gulp down the claret, “I had sense to stop in time! What could be expected of a young man who’d lived on a farm in a God-forsaken country? Ah, your father was right! He never would allow any merit to my ships or cows.”
Red sands flitted before Matt’s vision, with lambent pools, and overhead a diaphanous rosy vapor, beyond which brooded the vast cloudless circle of the sky. Ah, God! why was the sky so blue and depthless in those days? As from dim, far-away caverns, the acrid voice of the picture-dealer reached his ears in complacent exposition: “It’s all training, and if you don’t get trained young, you might as well attempt to fly.”
Becoming conscious of a silence, Matt answered, “That’s so.”
“It’s the same with music,” went on his uncle, tapping impressively on his wineglass with his glittering forefinger. “You can’t expect a grown-up man to sit down and practise scales like a little girl in a pinafore; and even if he would, his fingers have lost their suppleness, his joints are set. I saw this clearly, and was determined my boy shouldn’t suffer as I’d done. Why, Herbert had a brush put into his hand before he could write!”
Matt’s heart sank lower.
“I should like to see his work,” he said, anxiously.
“Ha!” said Matthew, a complacent smile hovering about his lips.