But he was for pushing on. As we approached the umbrella, a throaty tenor voice was uplifted to a weird foreign strain:—
‘En passant par Square Montholon,
La digue-digue donc! la digue-digue donc!
Je rencontre une jeune tendron!
La digue-digue—
‘Superb! Su-perb! If only I could excite myself to— Ah! if only that tumultuous thrill, which I know always presages—
‘la digue-digue donc!
J’offre tout de suite ma main—ye
La brigue-donc-dain-ye—’
Or at least so the gibberish sounded. But now it suddenly left off. A palette went rattling to the ground. The short squat figure of the owner of the caravan burst into view.
‘Grewes! I cannot do it, I really cannot! I am not sufficiently inspired to-day! I am not great enough! I— Oh! I beg your pardon! I thought it was my friend’s step. Why! the water-bearer, to be sure! How do you do?’
It was my first glimpse of Spelthorne by light of day, and I owned to myself frankly that the night had been kind to him. A fringe of yellow-grey hair escaped in all directions beyond the brim of his hat. He had a florid, puffy, indeterminate face, eyes at once selfish and sentimental, and a week-old beard still further ostracised a chin already too retiring. Like his companion, he wore a gold watch-chain of heavy calibre, with a bunch of seals and trinkets upon it; but his clothes, that in the darkness had seemed much tattered and torn, now appeared entirely disreputable. They were, moreover, covered with finger-marks of paint, to which he was now adding, as he ceremoniously welcomed us.
‘Art—what is it?’ he cried, removing his hat, and running his fingers through his hair, when presently, at his earnest invitation, the Reverend had sat himself down before the easel, and was making a grave show of inspecting the canvas on it. ‘And the artist—where is he?’ He made a dramatic pause.
‘Where indeed?’ quoth the Reverend, grimly staring before him.
‘You see this picture?’—wagging a chrome-yellow thumb over the canvas—‘nine-tenths of it are the work of one exalted day: the rest the unilluminated toil of a week! Strange that we should be made so! At one moment, like Prometheus, stealing the very fire from heaven, and at the next— Ah! but only an artist can really comprehend!’