“It’s not quite accurate, you know,” went on Billy. “It says you’re a bachelor, and that you were born in Canada, and so on. But that doesn’t matter. There are always mistakes, and, of course, nobody knows about Rosina. Listen! ‘The eldest child of a prosperous Canadian farmer, he gave early evidence of talent, and was sent to England to study art, and soon became the favorite pupil at Grainger’s well-known Art School in central London, where he studied under Tarmigan, a frigid artist who at one time enjoyed considerable repute. Later, Mr. Strang pursued his studies in Paris and Rome, and, returning to London with ripened art, sought and obtained the suffrages of the Academicians with his picture entitled “Motherhood,” since so familiar to the public in countless reproductions, and the herald of a career of uniform success. Next year his classic picture—’ ”
“My God! Do you want to drive me mad?” roared the sick lion, raising his head. “I know all about it.”
“You needn’t bully my head off,” said Billy, pettishly. “I asked you if you’d seen it.”
“It’s copied from People of the Time,” groaned the painter. He clinched his fists in a blind rage against the universe. This was what the public read and believed about his life—his life, with its slow, sick struggles, its inner and outer discords, its poignant pathos. And this was what he read and believed about other men. Good God! What was behind their lives, the lives of his fellows, whose smooth histories he read in biographical summaries? The possibilities of the human tragedy frightened him. Then the realities of the human farce seized him, and he terrified Billy by a long peal of sardonic laughter.
The laughter ceased suddenly. “Go and see how she is,” he commanded the shuddering Billy, and the poor cripple, now less frightened of Rosina than of his brother, sped away as fast as his crutch could carry him.
Left alone, the painter looked abstractedly at “The Angelus,” and it drifted his thoughts back to the time when he had tried to sell it for bread. How happy were those times of youthful aspiration, when all things were new and all things were true, and hunger itself was but a sauce to eke out the scanty meal! What was starvation to this terrible hunger for happiness, what the want of money to this want of something to live for? Ah, money was nothing; money troubles were mental figments. It was the cark of life that killed—money or no money. Oh, to be young and free again; free to be a slave to Art! How hollow it all was—this fame, this running about, this Society that welcomed him, as he had truly told Billy, like a kind of monstrosity! He had been happier when he had toiled in this little whitewashed studio, even after his mistaken marriage. The lines of the poet in whom he had read most of late fell from his lips like an original personal cry:
“Oh, I could lie down like a tired child,
And weep away this sordid life of care.”
And thus Billy found him, his head on the desk, his shoulders heaving convulsively.
“Matt!” he cried, timidly.
“Well!” in muffled accents.