"That picture always fills me with self-reproach."
Richard looked round with a certain lofty courtesy by no means encouraging. And, as he did so, Julius March was conscious of receiving a further, and not less painful impression. For Richard's face was very still, not with the stillness of repose, but with that of fierce emotion held resolutely in check, while in his eyes was a desolation rivalling that of the eyes portrayed by the great Spanish artist upon the canvas close at hand.
"When I first came to Brockhurst, that picture used to hang in the study," he continued, by way of explanation.
"Ah! I see, and you turned it out!" Richard observed, not without an inflection of irony.
"Yes. In those days I am afraid I did not discriminate very justly between refinement of taste and self-indulgent fastidiousness. While pluming myself upon an exalted standard of sensibility and sentiment, I rather basely spared myself acquaintance with that, both in nature and in art, which might cause me distress or disturbance of thought. I was a mental valetudinarian, in short. I am ashamed of my defect of moral courage and charity in relation to that picture."
Richard shifted his position slightly, looked fixedly at the canvas and then down at his own hands in such disproportionate proximity to the floor.
"Oh! you were not to blame," he said. "It is obviously a thing to laugh at, or run from, unless you happen to have received a peculiar mental and physical training. Anyhow the poor devil has found his way home now and come into port safely enough at last?"
He glanced back at the picture, over his shoulder, as he moved across the room.
"Perhaps he's even found a trifle of genuine sympathy—so don't vex your righteous soul over your repudiation of him, my dear Julius. The lapses of the virtuous may make, indirectly, for good. And your instinct, after all, was both the healthy and the artistic one. Velasquez ought to have been incapable of putting his talent to such vile uses, and the first comer with a spark of true philanthropy in him ought to have knocked that poor little monstrosity on the head."
Richard came to the writing-table, glanced at the papers which encumbered it, made for an armchair drawn up beside the fire.