“You ever knew? But you just said—”
Gisburn had a curious smile in his eyes.
“Oh, I knew him, and he knew me—only it happened after he was dead.”
I dropped my voice instinctively. “When she sent for you?”
“Yes—quite insensible to the irony. She wanted him vindicated— and by me!”
He laughed again, and threw back his head to look up at the sketch of the donkey. “There were days when I couldn’t look at that thing—couldn’t face it. But I forced myself to put it here; and now it’s cured me—cured me. That’s the reason why I don’t dabble any more, my dear Rickham; or rather Stroud himself is the reason.”
For the first time my idle curiosity about my companion turned into a serious desire to understand him better.
“I wish you’d tell me how it happened,” I said.
He stood looking up at the sketch, and twirling between his fingers a cigarette he had forgotten to light. Suddenly he turned toward me.
“I’d rather like to tell you—because I’ve always suspected you of loathing my work.”
I made a deprecating gesture, which he negatived with a good humoured shrug.
“Oh, I didn’t care a straw when I believed in myself—and now it’s an added tie between us!”
He laughed slightly, without bitterness, and pushed one of the deep arm-chairs forward. “There: make yourself comfortable—and here are the cigars you like.”
He placed them at my elbow and continued to wander up and down the room, stopping now and then beneath the picture.
“How it happened? I can tell you in five minutes—and it didn’t take much longer to happen. . . . I can remember now how surprised and pleased I was when I got Mrs. Stroud’s note. Of course, deep down, I had always felt there was no one like him— only I had gone with the stream, echoed the usual platitudes about him, till I half got to think he was a failure, one of the kind that are left behind. By Jove, and he was left behind— because he had come to stay! The rest of us had to let ourselves be swept along or go under, but he was high above the current—on everlasting foundations, as you say.
“Well, I went off to the house in my most egregious mood—rather moved, Lord forgive me, at the pathos of poor Stroud’s career of failure being crowned by the glory of my painting him! Of course I meant to do the picture for nothing—I told Mrs. Stroud so when she began to stammer something about her poverty. I remember getting off a prodigious phrase about the honour being mine—oh, I was princely, my dear Rickham! I was posing to myself like one of my own sitters.
“Then I was taken up and left alone with him. I had sent all my traps in advance, and I had only to set up the easel and get to work. He had been dead only twenty-four hours, and he died suddenly, of heart disease, so that there had been no preliminary work of destruction—his face was clear and untouched. I had met him once or twice, years before, and thought him insignificant and dingy. Now I saw that he was superb.
“I was glad at first, with a merely aesthetic satisfaction: glad to have my hand on such a ‘subject.’ Then his strange life likeness began to affect me queerly—as I blocked the head in I felt as if he were watching me do it. The sensation was followed by the thought: if he were watching me, what would he say to my way of working? My strokes began to go a little wild—I felt nervous and uncertain.
“Once, when I looked up, I seemed to see a smile behind his close grayish beard—as if he had the secret, and were amusing himself by holding it back from me. That exasperated me still more. The secret? Why, I had a secret worth twenty of his! I dashed at the canvas furiously, and tried some of my bravura tricks. But they failed me, they crumbled. I saw that he wasn’t watching the showy bits—I couldn’t distract his attention; he just kept his eyes on the hard passages between. Those were the ones I had always shirked, or covered up with some lying paint. And how he saw through my lies!