He felt that he probably didn’t, and went to stand by the window, whence he could see little groups of people bent against the black wind, making their way back from the Midnight Mass. Like pilgrims of the new age he saw them, returning from Bethlehem, walking gravely and without speech. Their dark figures against the snow were like a Lovat Fraser frieze. His heart smote him anew for his little girls.
The house was uneasy with the noises of old houses at night. Doors creaked and shadows seemed full of anonymous life; phantom steps sounded in empty corridors and on the black stairs. Once Miles thought he actually heard ghostly feet hesitate in the passage outside his door, but brusquely he drove the thought away as an absurd imagination. But that, had he known it, was Brand groping past the lighted door to his own room, his shoes in his hand.
6. Brand
Brand had been from the first a thorn in the side of his family. Destined for the Church, in place of the dead Philip, to fill the handsome family living whose incumbent was invariably a Gray, he rebelled at the age of sixteen, demanding instead his opportunity to become an artist. He was singularly unfortunate in his parentage in this connection. Since a certain deplorable incident in his own career some years earlier, Adrian had become each year more intolerant, stupid, and suspicious of the motives of other men, and was convinced that men only wanted to study art because that kind of life allowed a greater licence of morals and behaviour. Artists, he knew, did not marry the women with whom they lived, failed to provide for their children, left their quarters without settling their rent account, borrowed money they never intended to repay—were, tout court, a drunken, licentious, bawdy crowd, who paid nothing into the community sack in return for the board and lodging they exacted as their due.
Brand’s school career had been a chequered one, and this further proof of his instability enraged his father. He treated the boy without tact, and with a complete absence of the deference due to youth by its elders. Brand retaliated by leaving home without a word; nor did anyone ever discover whence he obtained the means for flight. Some months later he was heard of in Paris. Richard travelled over to bring him back, but returned unaccompanied. Brand, he reported, had obtained work of a kind that, he declared, provided his daily bread, his candle, and his rent. His lodging, said Richard fastidiously, was highly unsatisfactory, and his mode of employment unbecoming to his birth and parentage. As to his leisure time, this he spent in the most thriftless and even perilous way. He had seen a number of sketches, of the type that young would-be artists appeared to prefer, decorating Brand’s single room, and he personally considered them shocking. He spoke gravely to his father of the danger of contamination to young innocent sisters. Brand, moreover, had formed a number of quite undesirable friendships, having, it seemed, no sense of what was due to his tradition. Altogether, the whole affair was humiliating and apparently incurable. Three years later Richard made a second journey, on this occasion because Gray was seriously ill and it was thought he was unlikely to recover. By this time he discovered that he and his father and Amy had been perfectly justified in their prognostications. Brand had given up his earlier employment and now made a precarious living as an artist. He was something of an experimentalist, and whenever he felt himself master of a certain technique, would abandon that particular type of work and embark on another—the height of folly, as Richard pointed out to him, as editors and patrons appreciate stability as much as other men and prefer to know what they are buying. But all Brand’s pictures were pigs in pokes, and he appeared not even to consider his brother’s suggestion that he should confine himself to one definite type of work. Jack-of-all-Trades, Richard dubbed him.
But worse was to come. It transpired that, during the previous year or more, Brand had been living (promiscuously, said Richard. “You ought to buy a dictionary,” retorted Brand) with a woman of dubious reputation, known to the quarter as Sophy. None of the family, at all events, ever knew her other name. Taxed with the episode, Brand unconcernedly acknowledged its truth, adding that the association had terminated some months since. After this Richard scarcely tried to persuade his brother to return, and in any case Brand had no intention of doing so.
Richard’s report to his father lacked no tone or hint that might make it effectual. But even he was alarmed at the depths and violence of the older man’s rage. It was several hours before he could be sufficiently quieted to remain seated for a quarter of an hour at a time in one chair.
“Such profligacy,” he panted, “such depravity! And if he is like this when he is young, what are we to expect later?”—taking the rather illogical view that such conduct in an older and more experienced man, who might be expected to have learned more self-control, would be less heinous.
“He is no son of mine,” he cried fiercely, “and he shall never again enter this house.” And proceeded to inveigh, with a pronounced biblical fervour, against these “strange women” and their partners in evil-doing.
Richard pacified him at last, and Brand’s name was dropped. Meanwhile, he himself continued to live in Paris in strange places, and to work, when he could not sell his pictures, at employment not commonly resorted to by men of birth and education. It could not be urged, in defence of his choice of a career, that either fame or money rewarded his rather bizarre genius. He came perilously near to starvation several times during those
