And now he was going absolutely to withdraw from the partnership, and work for himself. Well—poor devil! He would starve!
He stood in front of the picture and looked at it mournfully. The beautiful thing—far more beautiful than any he had exhibited before. It cut him to the heart to think—not that he had been such a fraud, but—that he could have no more from the same source. His career was cut short at the outset, his ambitions blasted, by this unlucky accident. Yet a year or two and the Academy would have made him an Associate: a few more years and he would have become R.A. Perhaps, in the end, President. And now it was all over. No Royal Academy for him, unless—a thing almost desperate—he could find some other Roland Lee—some genius as poor, as reckless of himself. And it might be years—years—before he could find such a one. Meantime, what was he to show? What was he to say? 'Deception! Criminals!' Confound the fellow! The words banged about his head and boxed his ears.
The second letter was from Effie—the girl to whom he had paid such vast sums of money, whom he had surrounded with luxuries—on whom he had bestowed the precious gift of his personal friendship. This girl also wrote without the least sense of gratitude. She said, in fact, writing straight to the point, 'I beg to inform you that I shall not, in future, be able to continue those contributions to your paper which you have thought fit to publish in two volumes with your own name attached. I have submitted my original manuscript of those verses to a friend, who has compared them with your published volume, and has ascertained that there is not the alteration of a single word. So that your pretence of having altered and improved them, until they became your own, is absurd. My brother begs me to add that your statement made before all the people at the reading was false. You made no suggestions. You offered no advice. You said that the play was worthless. My brother has made no alterations. You offered to give him fifty pounds for the whole rights in the play, with the right of bringing it out under your own name. This offer he refuses absolutely.
'I sincerely wish I could restore the money you have given me. I now understand that it was the price of my silence—the Wages of Sin.
'E. W.'
No more verses from that quarter. Poets, however, there are in plenty, writers of glib and flowing rhymes. To be sure, they are as a race consumed by vanity, and want to have their absurd names stuck to everything they do. Very well, henceforth he would have anonymous verses, and engage a small army of poets. The letter moved him little, except that it came by the same post as the other. It proved, taken with the evening of the play, concerted action. As for comparing the girl's manuscript verses with the volume, how was she to prove that the manuscript verses were not copied out of the volume?
Then there was a third letter, a very angry letter, from Lady Frances, his story-teller.
'I learn,' she said, 'that you have chosen me as the fittest person upon whom to practise your deceptions. You assured me that you were engaged to Miss Armorel Rosevean. I learn from the young lady herself that this is entirely false: you did offer yourself, it is true, a week after you had assured me of the engagement. You were promptly and decidedly refused. And you had no reason whatever for believing that you would be accepted.
'I should like you to consider that you owe your introduction into society to me. You also owe to me whatever name you have acquired as a story-teller. Every one of the society stories told in your paper has been communicated to you by me. And this is the way in which you repay my kindness to you.
'Under the circumstances, I think you cannot complain if I request that in future we cease to meet even as acquaintances. Of course, my contributions to your paper will be discontinued. And if you venture to state anywhere that they are your own work, I will publicly contradict the statement.