Priam did.

“My reputation—­Parfitts’—­is at stake.  If those pictures aren’t by you, I’m a swindler.  Parfitts’ name is gone for ever, and there’ll be the greatest scandal that ever was.  Witt is threatening proceedings.  I offered to take the whole lot back at the price he paid me, without any commission.  But he won’t.  He’s an old man; a bit of a maniac I expect, and he won’t.  He’s angry.  He thinks he’s been swindled, and what he says is that he’s going to see the thing through.  I’ve got to prove to him that the pictures are yours.  I’ve got to show him what grounds I had for giving my guarantee.  Well, to cut a long story short, I’ve found you, I’m glad to say!”

He sighed again.

“Look here,” said Priam.  “How much has Witt paid you altogether for my pictures?”

After a pause, Mr. Oxford said, “I don’t mind giving you the figure.  He’s paid me seventy-two thousand pounds odd.”  He smiled, as if to excuse himself.

When Priam Farll reflected that he had received about four hundred pounds for those pictures—­vastly less than one per cent, of what the shiny and prosperous dealer had ultimately disposed of them for, the traditional fury of the artist against the dealer—­of the producer against the parasitic middleman—­sprang into flame in his heart.  Up till then he had never had any serious cause of complaint against his dealers. (Extremely successful artists seldom have.) Now he saw dealers, as the ordinary painters see them, to be the authors of all evil!  Now he understood by what methods Mr. Oxford had achieved his splendid car, clothes, club, and minions.  These things were earned, not by Mr. Oxford, but for Mr. Oxford in dingy studios, even in attics, by shabby industrious painters!  Mr. Oxford was nothing but an opulent thief, a grinder of the face of genius.  Mr. Oxford was, in a word, the spawn of the devil, and Priam silently but sincerely consigned him to his proper place.

It was excessively unjust of Priam.  Nobody had asked Priam to die.  Nobody had asked him to give up his identity.  If he had latterly been receiving tens instead of thousands for his pictures, the fault was his alone.  Mr. Oxford had only bought and only sold; which was his true function.  But Mr. Oxford’s sin, in Priam’s eyes, was the sin of having been right.

It would have needed less insight than Mr. Oxford had at his disposal to see that Priam Farll was taking the news very badly.

“For both our sakes, cher maitre,” said Mr. Oxford persuasively, “I think it will be advisable for you to put me in a position to prove that my guarantee to Witt was justified.”

“Why for both our sakes?”

“Because, well, I shall be delighted to pay you, say thirty-six thousand pounds in acknowledgment of—­er—­” He stopped.

Probably he had instantly perceived that he was committing a disastrous error of tact.  Either he should have offered nothing, or he should have offered the whole sum he had received less a small commission.  To suggest dividing equally with Priam was the instinctive impulse, the fatal folly, of a born dealer.  And Mr. Oxford was a born dealer.