Billy told him that Ruth Hailey was in Paris at the Hotel Windsor with Mrs. Verder, preparatory to the long Antipodean tour, and suggested that he might call upon her when he went over to see the Salon if she was still there. Matthew wrote down the address, but said he didn’t think he should go over that year. Billy looked disappointed; he had been about to suggest accompanying his brother. Life at Camden Town, he intimated fretfully, had resumed its dead-alive routine, and he glanced towards Miss Coble as if to imply that her advent had not brightened the domestic table.
When the visitors left, Matthew put them into a cab and drove with them a little way to purchase presents for the children. There was a doll for Clara and a box of animals for Davie. To Rosina he did not venture to send even a message. At a word from her he would have gone to her, but he had no stomach to cope with her tantrums.
This new reminder of home left him more depressed than before. It was impossible to concentrate himself upon his work, even in the presence of models. They were an unprofitable expense, and he dismissed them and brooded over the ruins of his life. Without Eleanor Art was impossible, he felt. True Art he could not produce without her inspiration, and false Art was falseness to her and a vile slavery.
Insomnia dogged his nights, and when he slept it was but to suffer under harassing dreams fantastically compounded of his early struggles. These dreams never touched his later life; many of them dealt oppressively with the bird-shop, and he had often to clean endless shades with chamois leather, smashing one after the other under the rebuking but agonizingly unintelligible “Pop! Pop! Pop!” of “Ole Hey,” though he felt sure Tommy, the young Micmac errand-boy, had cracked them beforehand. And what added to the sleeper’s agony was that these breakages would have to be made good to the Deacon from his scanty wage, or, worse, he would be discharged and unable to send the monthly subsidy to Cobequid Village. The anguish and anxiety were quite as harassing as though the troubles were real.
He made one desperate excursion into Society—it was the delightful dinner-party of a gifted fellow-artist whose cultured and beautiful wife had always seemed to him the ideal hostess. And a pretty and guileless girl, full of enthusiasm for Art and Nature and the life that was opening out before her, fell to his escorting arm; she was visibly overpowered by her luck and charmingly deferential; at first his responsive smile was bitter, but his mood lightened under her engaging freshness and the champagne he imbibed recklessly.
But the next morning’s reaction, aggravated by the headache of indigestion, plunged him into more tenebrous glooms. But for the unkindly fates he might have sat with such a wife, host and hostess of such a gathering. He pictured Eleanor receiving his guests, and in his factitious happiness he gathered the poor and the despised to his hearth. The images of suicide resurged. He saw it on the bills:—“Suicide of a Popular Painter.” Why not? The position was hopeless; were it not best to throw it up? How the world would stare! No one would understand the reason. Rosina would still remain unknown, irrelevant to the situation. And his eyes filled with tears, in the bitter luxury of woe.
But he did not commit suicide, and all that the world, or that minute portion of it which talks Art, wondered at, was why Matthew Strang was unrepresented when the Academy opened in May. It leaked out that he had been ill, and there were sympathetic paragraphs which were not altogether misinformed, for these sleepless or dream-tortured nights had brought on nervous prostration and acute headaches. That ancient blood-poisoning, too, had left its traces in his system, and when he was worried and overwrought his body had to pay again the penalty of unforgiven physical error.
Again, as in those far-off days, he thought of a sea-voyage to his native village; it dwindled down to crossing the Channel. As the opening of the Salon drew nearer and nearer, he felt more and more strongly that he must not miss the Exhibition. It was part of a painter’s education. There was no need to see Eleanor Wyndwood; by remaining on the fashionable side of the river the chances were he would not even come across her casually in the few days of his stay. No, there was nothing to apprehend. And besides, it began to be increasingly borne in upon him that it was his duty to look up Ruth Hailey; she had called upon him at Camden Town, and etiquette demanded that he should return the call. What had she and Rosina talked about? he wondered dully. If he did not go soon, she might be off to Australia, and the opportunity of seeing his ancient playmate would probably recur nevermore.
And so a bright May morning saw him arrive in the capital of Art, breakfast hastily at the Grand Hotel, and—drive straight to the Latin Quarter. Other climes, other thoughts, and the gayety of the Boulevards, with their green trees and many-colored kiosks, had begun to steal into his spirit, and his gloomy apprehension of danger to dissipate in the crisp sunny air. Why should he not see Eleanor Wyndwood?
And then he discovered that he did not know her address, that she wrote from the English Ladies’ Art Club; he hunted out the place, but the concierge told him she was not there, and gave him the address of the Academy most of the ladies attended, but this was the hour of déjeuner, and monsieur would probably not find them there till the afternoon. He grew downcast again, and, dismissing the cab, he sauntered on foot towards the Academy, trying to kill time. He dropped into a tiny restaurant close by to get a cup of coffee; it was decorated by studies from the nude, evidently accepted in payment for dinners; and the ceiling had a central decoration that reminded him of his own crude workmanship in the sitting-room of that hotel in New Brunswick. He sat down at a little table facing the only lady customer, a dashing Frenchwoman, the warm coloring of whose handsome model’s face showed between a great black-plumed hat and a light-blue bow, and who paused between her spoonfuls of apple-stew to chant joyously, “Coucou, coucou, fal la, la, la, la.” A decadent poet with a leonine name sipped absinthe, a spectacled Dane held forth intermittently on the bad faith of England towards Denmark at the commencement of the century, a Scotch painter discoursed on fly-fishing, and exhibited a box of trout-flies, and one or another paused from time to time to hum, “Coucou, coucou, fal la, la, la, la,” in sympathy with the gay refrain. Hens fluttered and clucked about the two sunlit tables, and a goat wandered around, willing to eat.