The next day, when the class assembled, the pupils were ordered to stand up in line.  Then they were catechized individually as to who had replaced the master’s picture with one of his own.

All pleaded ignorance until the master reached the blond-haired Van Dyck.  The boy made a clean breast of it all, save that he refused to reveal the names of his accomplices.

“Then you painted the picture alone?”

“Yes,” came the firm answer that betokened the offender was resolved on standing the consequences.

The master relieved the strained tension by a laugh, and declared that he had only discovered the work was not his own by perceiving that it was a little better than he could do.  Accidents are not always unlucky—­this advanced young Van Dyck at once to the place of first assistant to Peter Paul Rubens.

* * * * *

Commissions were pouring in on Rubens.  With him the tide was at flood.  He had been down to Paris and had returned in high spirits with orders to complete that extensive set of pictures for Marie de Medici; he also had commissions from various churches; and would-be sitters for portraits waited in his parlors, quarreling about which should have first place.

Van Dyck, his trusted first lieutenant, lived in his house.  The younger man had all the dash, energy and ambition of the older one.  He caught the spirit of the master, and so great was his skill that he painted in a way that thoroughly deceived the patrons; they could not tell whether Rubens or Van Dyck had done the work.

This was very pleasing to Rubens.  But when Van Dyck began sending out pictures on his own account, properly signed, and people said they were equal to those of Rubens, if not better, Rubens shrugged his shoulders.

There was as little jealousy in the composition of Peter Paul Rubens as in any artistic man we can name; but to declare that he was incapable of jealousy, as a few of his o’er-zealous defenders did, is to apply the whitewash.  The artistic temperament is essentially feminine, and jealousy is one of its inherent attributes.  Of course there are all degrees of jealousy, but the woman who can sit serenely by and behold her charms ignored for those of another, by one who yesterday sat at her feet making ballad to her eyebrow and sighing like a furnace, does not exist on the planet called Earth.

The artist, in any line, craves praise, and demands applause as his lawful right; and the pupil who in excellence approaches him, pays him a compliment that warms the cockles of his heart.  But let a pupil once equal him and the pupil’s name is anathema.  I can not conceive of any man born of woman who would not detest another man who looked like him, acted like him, and did difficult things just as well.  Such a one robs us of our personality, and personality is all there is of us.

The germ of jealousy in Rubens’ nature had never been developed.  He dallied with no “culture-beds,” and the thought that any one could ever really equal him had never entered his mind.  His conscious sense of power kept his head high above the miasma of fear.