The Dark Clue Read Online Free PDF Page B

your true opinion?’
    He did not reply at once, but stared gravely at the ground, as if seeking an answer there. Finally, he said:
    â€˜We thought so then. Or, rather, we thought he was a genius who had lost his powers, and degenerated into madness.’
    â€˜How mad?’ I said.
    â€˜Just look at his late pictures,’ he replied. ‘Colours entirely divorced from any object. Great splotches of paint that look like nothing at all, save – splotches of paint.
Pictures of nothing,
as the critic said,
and very like.
’
    â€˜And what do you think now?’ I said.
    He shrugged. ‘Some of the early work. The Dutch sea pieces. The engravings.’
    I waited for him to go on, but he didn’t: he took a watch from his pocket, looked at it, then gathered up the portfolio.
    â€˜Can you suggest anyone else,’ I said, ‘who might have known him better?’
    â€˜Jones?’
    â€˜I’ve written to him.’
    He shrugged again, and shook his head. It was only after we had shaken hands, and said goodbye, and gone a few paces on our separate ways, that he turned and called:
    â€˜Try Davenant. He’s in retirement now, at Hampstead. But still has his memory, and likes to open it to the public sometimes, and display the contents.’
    This slight encounter had given me, in truth, little enough; but for some reason – no more, maybe, than that I had at last taken the initiative – I came away from it filled with a new spirit. Or perhaps it would be truer to say an old spirit: for, like the face in a crowd which suddenly calls to mind a long-forgotten childhood playfellow, I knew it at once for something I had known before. My heart beat faster; my legs ached with a tremulous excitement; I filled my lungs, and found in the smoky air, which only an hour ago had tasted of drudgery and sickness, an intoxicating hint of romance – I felt, in short, like a young man again, newly released from dull routine and about to embark on some great adventure. Had you seen me striding through the Regent’s Park and up Avenue Road (it did not even occur to me to take a cab), you might have fancied you saw the ghost of that other Walter Hartright, who, fifteen years ago, his head full of simple purposes and grand hopes, used to walk from London to Hampstead three times a week, and think nothing of it. I seemed, indeed, to glimpse him myself sometimes, marching companionably at my side; and it was surely at his prompting that I broke my journey at a plain roadside inn, and sat with him over a plain luncheon of bread and cheese and ale – I the grave master of Limmeridge, and he the cheerful young drawing teacher, with neither the burden nor the privilege of fortune, and no prospect save the prospect of life itself.
    Mr. Davenant (I learned at the post office) lived not half a mile from my mother’s old cottage, in one of those quaint red-brick houses in Church Row. Its once-regular facade had started to sag and buckle with age, giving it the unsteady look of a child’s drawing (Florrie, indeed, would have got the lines straighter!), as if it had tired of classical sobriety, and decided to get drunk. A big wood-clad bay window, jutting out pugnaciously from the first floor like the stern of an old man-of-war, added to the air of disorder.
    The door was opened by a young manservant who still seemed pitifully uncertain of his duties. When I inquired if Mr.Davenant was at home he said: ‘I’ll go and ask him’; a moment later he came back, his cheeks flaming, to ask my name; and then, after a few steps, stopped, and turned again – presumably to find out my business. He was interrupted, however, by a man’s voice booming down from upstairs:
    â€˜Who is that, Lawrence?’
    â€˜Mr. Hartright, sir,’ called the boy.
    â€˜Who?’
    â€˜Mr. Hartright!’
    â€˜What does he want?’ shouted the man, as if he were commanding a company of