“I wasn’t thinking of that,” he stammered.

“Then what were you thinking of?” she asked.

“Oh!  I don’t know!” he said vaguely.

“Because those things they advertise—­homework, envelope addressing, or selling gramophones on commission—­they’re no good, you know!”

He shuddered.

The next morning he bought a 36 x 24 canvas, and more brushes and tubes, and surreptitiously introduced them into the attic.  Happily it was the charwoman’s day and Alice was busy enough to ignore him.  With an old table and the tray out of a travelling-trunk, he arranged a substitute for an easel, and began to try to paint a bad picture from his sketch.  But in a quarter of an hour he discovered that he was exactly as fitted to paint a bad picture as to be a valet.  He could not sentimentalize the tones, nor falsify the values.  He simply could not; the attempt to do so annoyed him.  All men are capable of stooping beneath their highest selves, and in several directions Priam Farll could have stooped.  But not on canvas!  He could only produce his best.  He could only render nature as he saw nature.  And it was instinct, rather than conscience, that prevented him from stooping.

In three days, during which he kept Alice out of the attic partly by lies and partly by locking the door, the picture was finished; and he had forgotten all about everything except his profession.  He had become a different man, a very excited man.

“By Jove,” he exclaimed, surveying the picture, “I can paint!”

Artists do occasionally soliloquize in this way.

The picture was dazzling!  What atmosphere!  What poetry!  And what profound fidelity to nature’s facts!  It was precisely such a picture as he was in the habit of selling for L800 or a L1,000, before his burial in Westminster Abbey!  Indeed, the trouble was that it had ‘Priam Farll’ written all over it, just as the sketch had!

* * * * *

CHAPTER VII

The Confession

That evening he was very excited, and he seemed to take no thought to disguise his excitement.  The fact was, he could not have disguised it, even if he had tried.  The fever of artistic creation was upon him—­all the old desires and the old exhausting joys.  His genius had been lying idle, like a lion in a thicket, and now it had sprung forth ravening.  For months he had not handled a brush; for months his mind had deliberately avoided the question of painting, being content with the observation only of beauty.  A week ago, if he had deliberately asked himself whether he would ever paint again, he might have answered, “Perhaps not.”  Such is man’s ignorance of his own nature!  And now the lion of his genius was standing over him, its paw on his breast, and making a great noise.

He saw that the last few months had been merely an interlude, that he would be forced to paint—­or go mad; and that nothing else mattered.  He saw also that he could only paint in one way—­Priam Farll’s way.  If it was discovered that Priam Farll was not buried in Westminster Abbey; if there was a scandal, and legal unpleasantness—­well, so much the worse!  But he must paint.