And it is perhaps safe to say, though a great pity to have to say it, that Jasper’s mood of the last six months had been one of utter depression.
At first, when he had walked away from the ugly little house in Chiswick, he had felt—in spite of the shock he had received at Bridget’s unexpected attitude towards him—a certain exultation in the thought that duty would never compel him to take that route again. He told himself that he rejoiced in his freedom, but after a day or so he had found it necessary to emphasize that point to himself with a certain degree of insistence. Phrases she had used began to return to his mind at odd moments. In the midst of painting an angel’s wing, or trying to concentrate on the beatific expression of some saint’s face, he would suddenly hear her voice:
“I wanted to ask your help, to tell you what I had suffered. I could not.”
And again, when painting some piece of flame-coloured drapery, he would hear the words:
“How did you try to help me? By talking calm platitudes through a kind of moral disinfectant sheet which you held between us——”
And yet again, as he tried for the strength of courage in the face of the warrior angel, he would hear her saying:
“You have not had the manhood to help me.”
It angered him that she should come between him and his work. He had loved it. He had felt a kind of mystical joy in it, in the knowledge that his work would adorn the houses of God, and that the saints he painted would look down upon the altar where the priest commemorated the Great Sacrifice. Sometimes in his more intense moments he had fancied himself an incarnation of one of the old painters who portrayed for sheer love of God dancing saints garlanded with flowers. He did not know that his own work lacked that child-like joy, and that its asceticism was hard and cold.
But now the memory of the house in Chiswick, which he used to banish easily from his thoughts, came again and again before his mind to prevent him working. He began to leave his studio and go for long walks, only returning when it was too dark to paint. And his fellow-artists wondered what possessed him, and would have welcomed one of his priggish speeches rather than this moody silence.
And Alan Farley, the other artist who fancied himself a mystic, painted a few pictures when the inspiration was upon him, pictures which remained to adorn his own studio walls, as they were incomprehensible to any one but himself and to one other—a girl, Aurora Castleton, in whom Alan found a kindred soul. They frequented each other’s studios, and talked of “the true spirit,” and “the deeper meaning,” and “the virtue of symbolism,” and lamented that the public were too blind to realize the inner beauty which they were kindly interpreting for them on canvas. They found, however, a great deal of consolation and pleasure in each other’s society. And a Small Boy with drooping wings sat mournfully in a corner and heard them talk, knowing that he alone could give them the true key to the meaning of Beauty—a key that the most ignorant could understand. But they refused to look at him. Even his arrows were useless, for the cloak of High Art with which the two had surrounded themselves seems to be the one thing that is impervious to them.