The question stripped the glamour from him at a rush, he flopped limply down on to a seat.
“If only you hadn’t asked that question for three more months, but now, now, it is cruel! Just imagine a fellow, free all his life to ride his own nag, a sorry jade it might be, but anyway fit enough for him, and his own; just fancy him strapped on to a small donkey belonging to another fellow, that it would be more than his life was worth to prod into a gallop, and to have to peg along on this beast week in, week out, along the same old road! Oh Lord, the grind, it’s awful, awful, digging one’s heels into that confounded ass—Oh!—”
He jumped up with a guilty start. “Lady Strange, I beg your pardon, I forget what ladies are like, and Strange is such a comfortable fellow to growl to, bad language slips out before one can catch it, at the very sight of him.”
“Don’t apologize to me, especially if my husband is the cause of your offence,” said Gwen kindly.
She had a fancy to be kind to this boy, if she had confessed it to herself, it was with a distinct view of getting to know a side of her husband, that Brydon knew all about and she nothing. She was making a study of him in spite of herself, and liked to collect evidence.
Meantime Strange had been looking carefully through some of Brydon’s sketches, scattered everywhere.
“You’ll draw as well as you colour, old man, and that is more than I ever expected of you. What does Legrun say?”
“He says he’ll say nothing until I have unlearned every cursed mannerism I have picked up in England, that den of bad taste. Then ‘peut-être—who knows?’
“But the fellow rages just as much against his own rapid methods, as he does against those we’ve been born and bred in. How dare we think to get an effect with a few strokes like he does, he, who has worked, parbleu! who has sweated, who has prayed, who has blasphemed, who has torn the heart out of his body to arrive at this ease, this divine confidence—‘the head of us should be punched!’ he is great in English. We must take twenty strokes to one of his; we must do with pain, with tears, what is but ‘delices’ to him—details—we must know them as the ‘bon Dieu’ knows them, before we venture to omit or even to suggest one! Then he ups and splutters out some delicious blasphemy on some unwary youth’s head.
“Look at me, the ghost of a creature, stalking mournfully on eggs, with furtive fear in all my lineaments. And this is an artist’s training! Good Lord, when I remember how I sat in that garret in Bland Street and thought of fame and myself in a new suit, dancing a war-dance before my masterpiece on the line, with duchesses squabbling for the first shake of my hand!—Lady Strange, I am going to make some tea.”