consume a great deal of raw spirit, to take the taste out
of your mouth. And my 'Medusa' is to hang for the future in Mr.
Mosenthal's dining-room! Will he understand her, do you think?"
Rainham was silent, wondering at his friend's departure from his
wonted reticence, which, however, scarcely surprised him. He had
never sought to penetrate the dark background, against which the
painter's solitary figure stood. He was content to accept him as he
was, asking no questions, and hardly forming, even in his own mind,
conjectures as to what his previous history and relations might have
been. He was not ignorant, indeed, that he was a man who had been in
dark places; it had always seemed possible to account for him on the
theory that he lived on the memory of an inextinguishable sorrow.
And now this possibility had received corroboration from his own
words, shedding a new light, in which both his character and his
genius became more intelligible. He had only stood out of the
shadows which obscured him for one instant; but that instant had
been enough.
And Rainham did not find the occasion less valuable, nor the
impression which he had received less pitiful, because he believed
it to be ultimate and unique; his friend would make no vain,
elaborate confidences; he would simply step back into his old
obscurity, leaving Rainham with the memory of that instructive cry
which had been wrung from him by the irony of tardy recognition,
when he had seen him luridly standing over the wreck of his honour
and of his life. And with his pity there came to him a fresh sense
of the greatness of the painter's work. His genius, so full of
suffering, and of the sense of an almost fiendish cruelty in things,
was, simply, his life, his experience, his remorse.
With the hand of a master, with the finest technique, which made his
work admirable even to persons who misinterpreted or were revolted
by its conception, he rendered the things he had known, so that his
art was nothing so much as an expression of his personal pain in
life.
In the light of this vision into the bottom of Oswyn's soul,
Rainham's own pain seemed suddenly shallow and remote; he had gazed
for a moment upon a blacker desolation than any which he could know.
He felt a new, a tolerant sympathy towards his friend, and it struck
him, not for the first time, but with an increased force, as he
reminded himself how his days were bounded, that they had many
things which they ha
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