When I say that my friend Matthew lay dying, I want you so far as
possible to dissociate the statement from any conventional, and
certainly from any pictorial, conceptions of death which you may have
acquired. Death sometimes shows himself one of those impersonal artists
who conceal their art, and, unless you had been told, you could hardly
have guessed that Matthew was dying, dying indeed sixty miles an hour,
dying of consumption, dying because some one else had died four years
before, dying too of debt.

Connoisseurs, of course, would have understood; at a glance would have
named the sculptor who was silently chiselling those noble hollows in
the finely modelled face,--that Pygmalion who turns all flesh to
stone,--at a glance would have named the painter who was cunningly
weighting the brows with darkness that the eyes might shine the more
with an unaccustomed light. Matthew and I had long been students of the
strange wandering artist, had begun by hating his art (it is ever so
with an art unfamiliar to us), and had ended by loving it.

'Let us see what the artist has added to the picture since yesterday,'
said Matthew, signing to me to hand him the mirror.

'H'm,' he murmured, 'he's had one of his lazy days, I'm afraid. He's
hardly added a touch--just a little heightened the chiaroscuro,
sharpened the nose a trifle, deepened some little the shadows round the
eyes....

'O why,' he presently sighed, 'does he not work a little overtime and
get it done? He's been paid handsomely enough....