An Engagement of Convenience

s eye took in the familiar vista, but, as it rested on the great bow-windowed house at the corner where the road branched into two, he turned away with a shudder. For years the sig

itary half-crown in his pocket, speculating with bitter humiliation whether his hard-worked sister had yet a little to spare for him, after all the life-blood which, leech-like, he had sucked out of her! Nay, more, he was conscio

udio every day at six o'clock as he came home from business, but also because he invariably bore something in a plaited rush-bag that had a skewer thrust through it, suggesting visits to Leadenhall Market, and purchases of game or salmon for the good wife according to season.

still go out faultlessly clad and shod. Nobody need suspect his poverty, he flattered himself, if he ever chose to dip into his own world again. Only he did not choose; there was always so much questioning to face. "We've seen nothing of yours in the last two or three Academies-when are you going to give us another masterpiece?" "Still on the big picture? How is it getting along?" However genially thrown out, such usual interrogation annoyed him beyond measure. It was so long

happy dream. Was not the flourish of early trumpets still in his ears? The dazzle of admiration still on his retina? The gush of extensive and

es; yet favourably known as an intellect with enthusiasms. Phidias was more of an inspiration to him than Aristotle; Titian more actual than Todhunter. Ruskin, Pater, Turner, had stirred him; left his mind subdued to their colo

hful labour; of bitterest failure on failure to bring the deep, mysterious impulses to bloom and fruition. But there is yet another, if independent, adventuring. The great light that crowns the artist's journey shines only in his own spirit. The world sees and knows nothing of it. He has none the less to find his way into that other light-the lurid, mocking limelight of the world's acceptance; to seek a place beside or beneath the

btle and unseen. There was the danger that facile talent and social prestige might bring

t, the sheer interest of his labours lightening them astonishingly. And, after some preliminary swayings in varying directions, he at last "fo

"Wyndham belongs to very good people. They're swells-tip-top!" And indeed he had obviously the stamp of being

ty or the market. He had chosen the locality deliberately. It was London, and within reach of the world; but not so near the world as to endanger his labours. The little tide of fashion that ro

onnections, he was seriously launched; especially when a couple of his pictures at last attracted buyers, and he moreover found himself earnin

ducational work as an amateur, was soon able to establish herself as a professional, and had taught ever since at a high school in Kensington; picturesquely settling herself in a t

n his pictures; and somehow, to his greater surprise, everything else went against him at the same time. He could not even get "illustrating" to do. Those who had acclaimed him before because he was a "swell" were now turning against him apparently for the same reason. Your aristocrats were never to be taken seriously; they were necessarily amateurs! It was all so unanimous, so settled and persistent, that it had almost the air of a conspiracy. Wyndham saw well enough that everybody had tir

les! He must express his own deeper self. The strict Whistlerian creed was much too narrow. Art was not merely a bare abstract aesthetics: humanity counted for something after all

gigantic, and he strove to depict a mob of strikers straggling out of the Park after their great meeting, with elements of fashion caught in this mêlée of labour. The pictorial i

he portraits in his own dining-room, proved on acquaintance to be singularly bluff and genial, sometimes almost slap-dash. He had made Wyndham welcome and at his ease, bidding him come and go as he pleased, and "never to mind a bit about turning the room into a studio." And this charming nobleman had likewise a charming daughter, who sometimes came for a minute or two to talk to Wyndham and interest herself in the sketches. Lady Betty was

d come home to him that in this terrible picture he had undertaken a task beyond his strength and experience, he found himself too shamefaced to "abuse" further the courtesy that had been extended to him. The consciousness, too, of his growing poverty was becoming acuter and acuter. Already he was drawing back into his shell, and, once he had ceased going to Grosvenor Place for the sake of his work, he had not the heart to continue his visits as an ordinary acquaintance. More than a year afterwards he read of Lady Betty's engagement in the papers-it was t

tion, though he had stinted his own body to lavish his money on it. At last, gulping down the humiliation, he was forced to accept of Mary's little store of savings to pay his rent and his models.

ge of its long creation. But the picture was Wyndham's backbone; it was his stock-in-trade before his world. He was more and more of a recluse now, refusing all invitations, discouraging his friends from coming to interrupt him-as he put it. Certainly Wyndham would rather have died tha

ars of futile striving, that he had the resolution to remove the

he following year. The dealers offered less than the cost of the frames. Meantime he had ceased to count up the five-pound notes Mary had starved herself to keep for him. He knew he was a coward and dared not. He had reached that stage of moral confusion which Nietzsche registers as in the natural history of the

ing his own house-work; of bothering with coals and cinders, preparing his makeshift monotonous meals, pouring oil into lamps, and boiling kettles, and washing plates and teacups, had begun by encroaching on hi

ay tossing on the narrow iron bed up in the gallery at the end of the studio. Why not do some pretty little things-to fetch ten guineas apiece, say-Cupids playing amid wreathed flowers with pale Doric structures in the background? If Mary could manage just another few pounds for him, he would have time to turn out a number of such decorative trifles. Such things were in constant demand a

and no longer lose his days i

stiny. He had blundered in attempting too big a feat too early in his career, but he did not intend that that should wreck his existence