“What do you mean?”
“It has its bore, like the Severn, or the Seine its Mascaret, and comes down occasionally without the slightest warning, like a brown wall, and sweeps everything, including landscape painters, before it.”
“You have seen it?”
“No, I have only heard of it, as yet. And I hope, when it comes, it will not take me unawares—sitting in the bed of the river as I so often do! I should have to run—or rather leap for it!”
“It is a danger!” she said, quite seriously.
“Oh, one of the very few that beset the artistic field of battle,” he said, laughing; “there are not many. It teaches us painters to ‘look alive’ and cultivate some of the qualities of a sailor. I do have to get into such funny places to paint from sometimes—places where I literally must hang on by my eyelids!... Now shall I ring for Dorothy to bring in some other luxuries?”
Dorothy, summoned by a handbell, shambled in, bringing a bleached and tremulous cornflour pudding and three doddering baked apples, and set them down solemnly before Mr. Rivers and Mrs. Elles. The infatuated woman did not mind—
“A jug of wine, a loaf of bread—and thou
Beside me, singing in the Wilderness,
Oh, Wilderness were Paradise enow!”
But when the maid had cleared the table, in her own primitive, knock-me-down fashion, and replaced the white cloth by the hideous tapestry one, covered with its pattern of pink roses, faded and dulled, moreover, by the constant splashing of the painter’s brush in the tumbler full of water which she, as regularly as clockwork, placed on the middle patch of flowers every evening, Mrs. Elles was suddenly overcome by an unusual sense of shyness. This man made her shy as no man before had ever done. He was so polite and yet so distant. His want of self-consciousness seemed a reproof to her imperious and pampered personality.
To cover it, she rose and shyly looked round the room that the artist had occupied year after year, and on which he had presumably impressed himself, his tastes, his prevailing habit of mind.