I am not an artistic person, but even I was beginning to have doubts about Arthur’s talent. It seemed somehow unnatural that he was always having his work enlarged by a third or a fifth, or both. Every picture he had painted, before his hands trembled too much to hold a brush, was faithfully copied and enlarged by his wife. She reproduced his dreary compositions with amazing exactitude, working for hours together in a corner of his studio, while he lay pallid, with half-closed eyes on the black satin sofa, watching her.
I had always taken for granted they were a devoted couple. Mrs. Robinson was always saying so, and it was obvious that Arthur never willingly allowed his wife out of his sight.
However, one morning I came into the studio when there was trouble between them. I saw at once it was one of his worst days.
He was standing before an enlargement of one of his pictures livid with anger.
“How often am I to to tell you that a copy must be exact,” he stammered in his disjointed staccato speech. “If you quote a line of poetry do you alter one of the words? If I trust you to reproduce a picture surely you know you are not at liberty to change it.”
She was as pale as he was. She looked dully at him, and then at her own canvas on the easel.
“I forgot,” she said, in a suffocated voice.
I looked at the original and the copy, and even my stolid heart beat a little quicker.
The original represented a young girl—his wife had evidently sat for him—playing on a harp, while a man listened, leaning against a table, with a bowl of chrysanthemums upon it.
The copy was much larger than the original, and its wooden smugness was faithfully reproduced. The faulty drawing of the two figures seemed to have been accentuated by doubling its size. It was an amazingly exact reproduction, except in one particular. In Blanche’s copy she had made the shadow of the chrysanthemums fall upon the wall. It was a wonderful, a mysterious shadow, I had seen it before.