“Give us a hand up, you beggar,” a piping girlish voice was saying.
On the rich carpet of the vast, elegant studio, whose glories dazzled Matt’s vision, a slim young man was sprawling on his back. Over him stood a stalwart figure, clad only in boxing-gloves.
The saturnine picture-dealer rushed forward and helped his boy up.
“It’s all right, dad,” said Herbert, in unembarrassed amusement as he was scrambling to his feet. “I just wanted to give the model’s arms a little movement during the rest. The position’s so difficult for him, I haven’t been able to get the thing right all day. Look! there’s nothing at all on the canvas; I’ve had to paint it out.”
The model had somewhat shamefacedly taken off his gloves and struck an attitude upon the throne.
“Ha!” said Matthew Strang, in vague accents. “You ought to be getting on faster with those gold-medal studies, now that you have put aside your picture for this year’s Academy. You will need all your time, you know. I’ve brought you a visitor.”
Herbert turned his face towards the door—the handsome, glowing face of a boy, beardless and clean-shaven, with candid blue eyes and tumbled flaxen hair, and the flash of white teeth accustomed to display themselves in laughter. There was his father’s interrogative mark about the arched eyebrows as he caught sight of Matt, hanging back timidly on the threshold.
The young Nova-Scotian’s heart was leaden, his soul wrapped in a gloom which had been gathering blackness ever since he had set foot in his uncle’s shop, and which the sight of the commodious studio, with its rich properties and luxurious appliances, its crimson lounges and silk drapings and fleecy rugs and gleaming marbles and bronzes, had darkened into despair. The penurious past surged back to him through a suffusion of unshed tears—tears that were salt with the sense of injustice and of sorrows unforgettable, all the creeping, irremediable years contributing their quintessence to the bitterness of this supreme moment: the chances he had missed, the lessons he had not received, the obstacles that had rather sprung up to beat him back, whose infant fingers no loving hand had ever guided, whose boyish yearnings no word of encouragement had ever sweetened, whose youth had been all distasteful labors and mean tragedies and burdens too great to bear, and whose very triumph would find none to sympathize with it, if it came, as it never could come to one so untrained, so alien from the world of art and elegant studios and all the soft things of life; driven to the scum of the streets for models at a few pence an hour, and reduced to studying attitudes from his own contortions before a bleared strip of mirror in a dingy back room; unregarded, uncared-for, unknown, an atom in that vast magic-gleaming London which had so cruelly disillusioned him, and in which even the one heart in which his own blood ran was cold and far away; his poor pre-eminence at Grainger’s, his primacy among a set of duffers, no augury of success in that fierce struggle in which Tarmigan himself had gone to the wall. Was it worth while to vex himself endlessly, swirled to and fro like a bubble on an ocean? Were it not sweeter to break, and to be resolved into the vastness and the silence?
His right hand wandered towards his hip-pocket, where his pistol lay. How good to be done with life! Then he became aware, through a semi-transparent mist, that the gracious blond boy was holding out his hand with a frank smile, and instinct drew out his own right hand in amicable response, and so the temptation was over. The poor children dependent upon him came up to memory, and he wondered at his spasm of selfish despair.
His uncle must have said words to which he had been deaf, for Herbert seemed to know who he was and why he had come.