"The body," he went on, "was painted before I learnt what colour the soul was. I will tell you."
"No, no!" I remonstrated, perceiving the tension of his set jaws. "It will pain you, and do no good."
"Pain?" he said. "There is no pain that eats into the heart like silence. The knowledge of guilt hidden corrodes like an acid. It must have been that which taught the Catholic Church the value of confession."
"Possibly," I said, moving from my distant chair to his side, and grasping his hand. "But remember I am not a priest; I am only, and always, a friend."
"I know, I know," he said, hurriedly, staring out across the room at the humming, busy road. "My confession is not to you. All that humanity can do the priests have done. You stare? Yes, I've turned myself inside out for them; but all their altar flowers cannot scent a foul soul, nor can their sanctuary lights illumine its crooked corners. I'm no historian, but I've heard of cases where private penance, remorse, and religious absolution have totally failed to wipe clean the hearts of intellectual men—they of the world, sinners, needing absolution of the world. Such men, who live in the open, and trumpet their triumphs there, need, too, to howl their confessions from the housetop, carve their contrition, like the wisdom of Asoka, on the immemorial rocks as an outcry to the generations."
He started up, and began to stride about the room. His face was full of passionate grief, and his wandering eyes passed beyond me as though watching a sunset.
I thought of the loganstone, and of the frail woman, the stalk of asphodel, who had unhinged it. The great painter, sensitive ever to colour and beauty and flattery and happiness, to pin-pricks and to sneers, had dropped in pieces before a real strain—sin for which he held himself responsible, remorse that found no outlet wide enough for his great transcendent heart.
Presently he stood still before his picture, threw back the curtain, and surveyed it with folded arms.
"She was pure," he muttered, half to himself; "sweet, sweet as new milk from warm udders in cowslip time, and I—I brought her to my cobwebbed life without so much as a preliminary sweep of the broom. She thought me like herself, and I dared not undeceive her; but others—curse them!—they taught her. She was pure as milk, I said—ay, for milk absorbs poison quicker than things less pure. She breathed the taint from the loathly atmosphere of my world—of the world that had been mine.... But I loved her ... would have won her back—cringed to her. She spurned me, spited me through herself, evaded me, till"—a shuddering horror stifled his voice—"till, by chance, I came on that."
I followed him to the easel, and placed an affectionate arm on his shoulder.