“Is he still alive?”
“Oh, he’s just as spry as ever. His father’s curled up his toes, though. Old Hey had the old man from Digby to live with him, and they used to go at it hammer and tongs.”
Billy could extract no further answer. But he would not let his brother go that night, insisting he must sleep with him as usual in the spare bed in his bedroom.
About nine o’clock Rosina sent a specially nice supper for two down to the study. Matthew roused himself to eat a morsel to keep Billy company, and then, before going to his sleepless couch in Billy’s room, bethought himself of whiling away the time by answering some letters which had been bulking his inner coat-pocket for days. One of these was a reverential request for an autograph, addressed from a fine-sounding country house, and backed by the compulsive seduction of a stamped envelope.
His emotions were exhausted. He wrote apathetically, “Yours truly, Matthew Strang,” writing very near the top of the note-paper for fear of fraud, and cutting off the Camden Town heading.
The celebrity was at home for once.
CHAPTER VI
A DEVONSHIRE IDYL
The old-fashioned yellow coach, top-heavy with pyramidal luggage, rattled along the Devonshire coast, striking its apex against over-arching boughs, and Matthew Strang sat on the box-seat, forgetting London in the prospect of Eleanor Wyndwood and in the view of white and red houses scattered like wild-flowers about a steep green hill overhanging the curve of a lovely bay.
For Rosina had continued obdurate and invisible; she had sent up breakfast from the kitchen without appearing, and with an irritating air of cooking for a gentleman-boarder, and he, fretful and anguished after a wretched wakeful night, had fled, snarling even at Billy, who would have stayed him further. The remembrance of her cantankerousness and of his own ill-humor had accompanied him all the way to Devonshire, but the sight of the sea—rolling vast and green and sun-dimpled—the wrinkled unaging sea, had calmed him. His burdens fell from him. The last vapors of London, the torpid miasma of the packed streets, the cabbage odors of Camden Town, were blown afar; he drew deep breaths of the delicious air.
How lucky it was Rosina had shied at the suggestion which he had thrown out on the reckless impulse of a desperate moment! How could they possibly live together any more? To draw the same atmosphere with her was stifling; and at the thought his deep inspirations took on a new voluptuousness of freedom regained. Decidedly he had not counted the cost when the quixotic proposal sprang to his lips. For that atmosphere meant death to his soul—nothing less; death to all his new stirrings and yearnings—asphyxiation to his Art. Ah! the good salt air, let it blow on his free forehead, let it play among his early-graying locks. Let it whisper the brave dreams of youth till the nimble blood tingles and the eyes are wet with tears. Let him feel the freshness of morning, though the sun is hastening westward, and the best of the day is spent. The coachman blows his horn, and the hills are filled with the echoes of romance. Away with the clogging mists and the moral fogs of the town, away with the moody vision of a narrow-souled virago in a gray house in a drab labyrinth, and ho! for the enchanted cliffs and waters, where loveliness broods like light over earth and sea, and a spirit that is half a woman and half the soul of all beauty waits with swelling bosom and kindling eyes. Oh, the bonny horses, the spanking quartette, how they sweep round the curves and dash down the dales, and how gallantly the ruddy-faced driver holds them in the hollow of his hand! What delightful villages, primitive as the rough stone of which they are built, what quaint old hostels and archaic streets steeped in the mingled scent of the sea and the moors! Here be old-world orchards, here be cosey cottages and sweet homely gardens, gay with nasturtiums and hollyhocks and scarlet-runners, with roses and pansies.