“Mummy did tell me, but I can’t ’derstand.” He sat there wondering. “When does God sleep?”
The sudden blare and boom of a Salvationist procession saved reply. The blatant clangor passed, died. They waited for Rosina.
Presently they heard the returning church party descending into the area, so as not to soil the white upper-steps. He had kissed her before she was aware of his presence, as she stepped across the kitchen threshold, red-edged prayer-book in hand. After that her sullenness was only half-hearted. He said he had come to supper. By the time they had sat down to it a reconciliation had been patched up. Warned by Billy’s reception of his determination, he did not even break it to her yet. Thus tamely passed off the great renunciation scene—the crisis of his life—like everything else in his life, unlike what he had imagined beforehand. Rosina did not even understand what this home-coming meant to him. He pleaded that Davie, who did not want to go to sleep, should be allowed to stay up to supper, but this request was not granted.
“Mummy, when does God go to sleep?” the persistent Davie remembered to ask as she was leading him from the room.
“God never sleeps,” replied Rosina, sternly, and haled him to bed.
Matthew pondered the immense saying, so glibly spoken, as he waited for her to return. “Aunt Clara,” pouch-eyed and wan, her head nodding queerly with excitement at the great man’s presence, was laying the supper in the warm kitchen, where the servant would not resume possession till ten; little Clara was at her task of Bible reading. Billy drowsed on his chair, exhausted. The fire glowed red; the cat was still stretched in the warmth. Something in the scene thrilled him with a sense of restful kinship with it, half sweet, half sad; a sense of being more really at home than in delicate drawing-rooms; the old homely kitchen far away on the borders of the forest sent out subtle links, binding his childhood to the manhood that had come at last.
This half-and-half-ness was typical of the new life which began that night, and which on the morrow was sealed and consecrated by the characteristically self-deceptive message from Eleanor: “You are right. We have chosen the highest.” It was a life full of petty pricks and every-day worries. But if it was not so grandiosely heroic as he had intended, neither was the consequence to his Art as he had foreseen.
He has not given up Art. Neither Rosina nor Billy would permit that folly, and Eleanor’s brief letter had a postscript of inspiring protest. He had meant to sacrifice Art and Happiness, but only the latter sacrifice was accepted. For unhappiness drove him back to his studio—where the “Angelus” hung now like an inspiration. From the glooms and trials of the daily routine in this prosaic home, with its faithful but narrow-souled mistress, who knew not what was passing in her husband’s mind, nor at what cost he had made her happy, and who would not even agree to live in some beautiful country spot which would have softened life for him—from this depressing household, with its unsprightly children, its cheerless pensioner, its querulous cripple resenting the very hand that fed him, he escaped to the little whitewashed studio to find in his Art oblivion of the burden of life.
And now, at last, his true life—work was begun. Removed from the sapping cynicism of the Club conscience, from the drought of drawing-room disbelief, from the miasma of fashionable conversation, from the confusing cackle of critics; saved from the intrigue with Mrs. Wyndwood, that would have distracted his soul and imposed an extra need for money-making; withdrawn from the feverish rush of fashion and the enervating consumption of superfluous food and drink; exempted from keeping up a luxurious position purchased by scamped, soulless pictures; able to work without the whims of sitters or patrons, without regard to prices—for Rosina’s income, augmented by her very considerable hoardings and by his balance, supplemented by the proceeds of the sale of his studio effects and