While painting he wore a long holland blouse that covered the clerical
coat, concealed the clumsy limbs and feet, and concentrated the eye of
the spectator on the young beauty of the head. When a visitor entered he
would look up for an instant flushed with work and ardour, then plunge
again into what he was doing. Art had reclaimed him; Laura could almost
have said the Jesuit had disappeared. And what an astonishing gift there
was in those clumsy fingers! His daring delicacies of colour; his ways of
using the brush, that seemed to leave no clue behind; the liquid shimmer
and brilliancy of his work--Helbeck could only explain them by saying
that he had once taken him as a lad of nineteen to see a loan exhibition
at Manchester, and then to the gallery at Edinburgh,

"There were three artists that he fastened upon--Watteau!--I have seen
him recoil from the subjects (he was already balancing whether he should
become a religious) and then go back again and again to the pictures,
feeding himself upon them. Then there were two or three Rembrandts, and
two or three Tintorets. One Tintoret Entombment I remember--a small
picture. I never could get him away from it. He told me once that it was
like something painted in powdered gems and then dipped in air. I believe
he got the expression from some book he was reading," said Helbeck, with
the good-humoured smile of one who does not himself indulge in the
fineries of language.... "When we came home I borrowed a couple of
pictures for him from a friend in Lancashire, who has good things. One
was a Rembrandt--'The Casting-out of Hagar'--I have his copy of it in my
room now--the other was a Tintoret sketch. He worked at them for days and
weeks, pondering and copying them, bit by bit, till he was almost ill
with excitement and enthusiasm. But you see the result in what he does."

And Helbeck smiled upon the artist with the affectionate sympathy of an
elder brother. He and Laura were standing together one morning at the