All this wanton depreciation of goods by one who was not even an interested bargainer galled the picture-dealer, conscious of overflowing good-nature, and prepared for a natural return in breathless adoration. So when Matt suggested that in a celebrated picture of a sea-beach the sea had no fluidity and was falling on the fishermen’s heads, he lost his temper and cried, sarcastically: “I think you had better open a school for R.A.’s, young man!”
Matt flushed, feeling he had been impertinent; then his sense of justice repudiated the rebuke. It was of no use pretending a thing was right when it wasn’t, he protested. He didn’t profess to get things right himself, and he only wished he could do anything half as good as the worst of these pictures. But he did know when he was wrong, even if it wouldn’t come right for all his sweating and fuming.
“A young man oughtn’t to talk till he can paint,” interrupted his uncle, severely.
“But you know what Dr. Johnson says, sir,” Matt remonstrated. “If you can’t make a plum-pudding, it’s no sign you can’t judge one.”
“Plum-puddings and pictures are very different things,” said Matthew Strang, stiffly, as though insulted by an implicit association with a pastry-cook.
“My, that’s ripping!” cried Matt, abandoning the argument at the sudden sight of a fine mellow piece of portrait-painting. “How the Old Masters got the grays! Oh, why don’t people wear wigs nowadays?”
This outburst of enthusiasm made the private exhibition close more auspiciously than had seemed probable, but Matt was never again invited to inspect the sacred treasures. His relations with his relatives came to be limited to morning visits to Herbert, whose stairs he ascended half secretly, to watch the progress of his cousin’s studies for an ambitious picture of “Daniel before Nebuchadnezzar,” the models for which he also used himself. He left his own studies behind at Herbert’s request—though reluctantly, for he was not at all satisfied with them—as a species of payment for the privilege. When, through his interest in this coming masterpiece of Herbert’s, and under the fascination of this delightful and flattering friendship, he forgot his pride and fell into the habit of regular morning work in Herbert’s company, lunch somehow came up regularly for three, though Madame was not supposed to be aware of his presence. Those were joyous lunches, full of laughter and levity, made picturesque by the romantic dress or undress of the third party, and extra palatable for Matt—when his first reluctance wore off—by the fact that they saved dinners.
“Daniel before Nebuchadnezzar” was intended for next year’s Academy, Herbert told him, and he gathered from his cousin’s casual observations that it had also to be submitted beforehand to the professors at the schools, for there were strange cramping conditions as to the size of the canvas and the principal figure. But he was less interested in its destination than in its draughtsmanship. He saw the tableau in his mind’s eye the moment Herbert told him he was engaged upon it, for the scene had often figured itself to his fancy in those far-off days when his mother read the Bible to her helpless children by random prickings. Nebuchadnezzar’s dream was one of the lucky chapters, to which Matt listened without distraction as the narrative unrolled itself pictorially before his inner vision. He rapidly sketched his conception, then found he disliked it, and ultimately remembered he had unconsciously reproduced the grouping of figures in the illustration in his mother’s Bible, one of those he had colored in his childish naughtiness. Herbert protested this was no drawback, but Matt went away brooding over a more artistic arrangement, and dreamed that he was mangled by lions in a den. But in the morning he brought a new grouping for Herbert’s consideration. This Herbert picked to pieces as being against the canons.
“Don’t forget it’s for the Academy,” he said. “We mustn’t make mistakes in grammar. Some of the old buffers are worse than Tarmigan.”
“Damn Tarmigan!” cried Matt, but he had to admit ruefully that his scheme was full of solecisms. He had by this time as full an acquaintance with the rules as his senior, but with Herbert they had become instinctive. It was with a renewed sense of inferiority to his cousin, paradoxically combined with an inward raging against the Lindley Murrays of art, that Matt abandoned point after point under Herbert’s searching criticism. Herbert’s gift of pulling other people’s ideas to pieces amounted to genius. But he abandoned his original sketch also, dismissed his projected models, and devoted himself to arguing out the composition afresh.