Noiselessly, timidly, she half opened the door. The hinges did not creak. She looked in inquisitively. The blind was drawn down, but the moon, shining through it, filled the room with suffused light.
Mrs. Sidebottom's eyes sought the bed. On it, where had lain the body found in the canal, and much in the same position as that had been placed there, lay the figure of a man, black against the white coverlet, in a great-coat. The face was not visible—the curtain interposed and concealed it.
Mrs. Sidebottom's heart stood still. A sense of sickness and faintness stole over her. She dared not take a step further to obtain a glimpse of the face, and she feared to see it.
With trembling hand she closed the door, and stood on the landing with beating heart, recovering herself. 'What a fool I am to be frightened!' she said, after a minute, and with a sigh of relief. 'Of course—the doctor.'
CHAPTER XXIX.
RECOGNITION.
In one of his essays, Goldsmith relates the anecdote of a painter who set up a picture in the market-place, with a pot of black paint and a brush beside it, and the inscription, 'Please indicate faults.'
When in the evening he revisited his picture, he found it smudged out eventually, as everyone had discovered and marked out a blemish. Next day he set up a replica of the picture, with paint and brush as before, and the inscription, 'Please indicate beauties.'
By evening, the entire canvas was covered with black. Everyone had found a beauty, where previously everyone had detected a fault.
The modern novelist sends his work into the great forum, and without inviting, expects criticism. The printer's ink is always available wherewith to draw attention to his defects. In Goldsmith's apologue the critics found beauties, in the present they see only blemishes, which they dab at venomously, and the sorrowful author sits at evening over his despised and bespattered production, bewildered, and ashamed to find that his earnest work, that has called out his most generous feelings, over which he has fagged and worn himself, is a mass of blunders, a tissue of faults.