He stopped abruptly and faced the clergyman.
"Why does the second best succeed so often and so closely the best, I wonder," he said. "It is very often so in the art life of a man, even of a great man. And it is so sometimes—perhaps you know this better than I—in the soul life of a nature. Must we always sink again after we have soared? Must we do that? Is it an immutable law?"
"Perhaps for a time. Surely, surely, not forever," said Uniacke.
His guest's conversation and personality began to stir him more and more powerfully. It seemed so new and vital an experience to be helped to think, to have suggestion poured into him now, after his many lonely island evenings.
"Ah, well, who can say?" said the painter. "I had the best for a time—long enough for my immediate purpose; for now I painted, and I felt that I was enabled by little Jack to do fine work. It seems he told his drinking mother in Drury Lane, in his lingo, of the wonders of the sea. This I learnt later. And, in his occasional, and now somewhat fleeting visits to Trafalgar Square, he explained to the emaciated little girls, in the shadow of Nelson, the fact that there was to be found, and seen, somewhere, water of a very different kind from that splashing and churning in the dingy basins guarded by the lions. Meanwhile I painted little Jack, all the time keeping alive in his nature the sea change, which was, in the end, to bring into my pocket £1,000 in hard cash."
Sir Graham said this with an indescribable cold irony and bitterness.
"I can hear that money jingling in the wind, upon my soul, Uniacke," he added, frowning heavily.
The young clergyman was touched by a passing thought of the painter's notorious ill-health.
"Before the picture was finished—quite completed—the impish child began to waken in the wonder-child, and I had to comply with the demands of this new-born youngster. Our conversation—little Jack's and mine—drifted from the sea itself to the men and ships that travel it, to the deeds of men that are done upon it; raidings of Moorish pirates, expeditions to the Spanish Main in old days, to the whaling grounds in new, and so forth. When we got to this sort of thing my work was nearly done and could not be spoiled. So I let myself go, and talked several boys' books in those afternoons. I was satisfied, damnably satisfied—your pardon, Uniacke—with my work, and I was heedless of all else. That is the cursed, selfish instinct of the artist; that is the inadvertence of which we spoke formerly. You remember?"
Uniacke nodded.