There was a hectic flush on her cheek; her voice rang false. Matthew was afraid.
“Well, good-bye,” she jerked, after a pause. “What are you waiting for?”
“Don’t go away,” whispered Billy, nervously, shattered by the scenes of the afternoon. “Come to the study; she’ll cool down soon.”
The suggestion commended itself to Matthew. It seemed cowardly to leave this hysteric couple to themselves. He descended the kitchen stairs once more, and passed along the corridor that led to his old studio, now turned into a workroom for Billy, and fitted up with bookshelves, whose contents hid the whitewashed walls. A writing-table, littered with papers, occupied the centre of the floor, and piles of manuscript showed within a little angle cupboard, whose door swung open. There were several reproductions of his brother’s works roughly stuck on the wall—one a valuable engraving signed by the artist; and the “Triumph of Bacchus” was already represented in two shapes—once by the half-page cut out of “The Season’s Pictures,” and again by a full-page photograph of it from the Graphic.
“It’s a shame they don’t make you an A.R.A., Matt,” said Billy. “Your pictures get more advertisement for the Academy than almost anybody else’s.”
“For God’s sake, don’t talk of that now,” said the painter, brokenly. His eye noted curiously that ancient engraving of “The Angelus,” miraculously preserved to be one of Billy’s treasures, by the world’s refusal to give more than eighteenpence for it.
It was a poor representative of the original, but the other ornaments of the study seemed to him tawdry in comparison. His taste had changed: the picture attracted him now. Without analyzing—the turmoil of his mind did not permit that—he had an impression of sincerity, of sympathetic vision, of work done inevitably; not, like his own work, from cleverness. Despair of his life and his Art mingled in one dark paroxysm as he dropped upon a chair and laid his head upon the writing-table.
“Don’t, you may get your hair sticky,” said Billy. “I don’t think it’s quite dry—I was just pasting it in before you came.”
He withdrew the album from under his brother’s head—the pious compilation with which he fed at once his jealousy and his pride. “I suppose you saw that little sketch of your life in ‘Our Celebrities’ this month?”
Matthew did not answer.