“What a charming young man!” said Madame Strang.
But Matthew Strang tapped his forehead significantly.
“You always will run yourself down, dear,” murmured Madame.
“Josephine,” replied Matthew Strang, in low, solemn tones, “the fellow is either a fool or a rogue.”
“He’s left sixpence on the desk,” broke in the voice of the shopman.
“Ha! a fool! It is enough for me to live in my son. He has advantages which I was denied.”
The extravagant purchaser of the “Angelus” divided the rest of his week between the National Gallery, where he concluded his uncle had not yet been canonized, and the streets of London, which he explored fearlessly. In a few days of industrious investigation he saw more than many a Londoner sees in a lifetime. He had experience of the features and cook-shops of Peckham, Rotherhithe, Clapton, Westminster, Covent Garden, the East India Docks, the Tower, wandering wherever the shapeless city stretched its lubber limbs, and seeing things and places that made him glad of the protection of the pistol he carried in his hip-pocket. The very formlessness of the city fascinated even while it dazed him. He ceased to wonder that artists found inspiration in this atmosphere, in which the fog itself seemed but the visible symbol of the innumerable mysterious existences swarming in its obscure vastness. The unexpected was everywhere, green closes in the heart of commerce, quiet quadrangles in the byways of Fleet Street, quaint old churches by the river-side, bawling market-places behind stately mansions, great parks set in deserts of arid poverty, bustling docks hidden away in back streets, and elegant villas at the end of drab, dismal, long-trailing East-end thoroughfares, redolent of slush and cabbage-leaves and public-houses and fried fish. Miles were of light account to one who had lived in a land of great spaces, yet Matt was wearied by the lengthy sweep of the great arteries and the multiplicity of their ramifications, by this vastness that was but reiterated narrowness in its lack of the free open horizons to which his eye was used.
But the Titanic city awoke strange responses in his soul; something in him vibrated to the impulse of the endless panorama. Often his fingers itched for the brush, as if to translate into color and line all this huge pageant of life; for the spell of youthful poesy was still on his eyes, and if he could not see London as he had seen his native fields and sky and ocean, all fresh and pure and beautiful, if in the crude day its sordid streets seemed labyrinths in an underworld, unlovely, intolerable, there were atmospheres and lights in which it still loomed upon his vision through the glamour of fantasy, and chiefly at night, when the mighty city brooded in sombre majesty, magnificently transfigured by the darkness, and the solemn river stretched in twinkling splendor between enchanted warehouses, or shadowed itself with the inverted architecture of historic piles, or lapped against the gray old Tower dreaming of ancient battle. But he could only take rough pencil or mental notes of the romance of it all, and it was almost always the fantastic that touched his imagination and found expression in the pictorial short-hand of his sketch-book--lurid splotches of sunset against tall, grimy chimneys; tawny barges gliding over black canal-waters shot with quivering trails of liquid gold from the morning sun; ragged Rembrandtesque figures asleep under glooming railway arches, over which trains flew with shining windows; street perspectives at twilight, with strange, livid skies; filmy evening rain blurring the lights of the town to a tender haze; late omnibuses tearing by glistering, moonlit pavements, and casting the shadows of the outside passengers on the sleeping houses; foggy forenoons, with the eye of day inflamed and swollen in the yellow heaven. With his purchase of the “Angelus,” on the other hand, he was not greatly taken, despite its sentiment. He had seen too much of peasants; he had himself stooped over the furrows when his heart was elsewhere; his soul turned from the mean drudgeries and miseries of the human lot, yearning for the flash of poetry, the glow of romance, the light of dream.