Love's
Usuries

BY

LOUIS CRESWICKE

Author of "Magnetism and Mystery"

London
HENRY J. DRANE
SALISBURY HOUSE
SALISBURY SQUARE, FLEET STREET, E.C.

TO

H. F. PREVOST BATTERSBY,

IN APPRECIATION
OF MUCH GOOD FELLOWSHIP.

CONTENTS

LOVES USURIES.

Love's Usuries.

Among friends, parting for a lengthy spell has its disadvantages. They age in character and physique, and after the reconnoitre there is a pathetic consciousness of the grudging confessions which time has inscribed on the monumental palimpsest. My meeting with Bentham after a severance of years was bleak with this pathos. But he was gay as ever, and better dressed than he used to be in the old art school days, with a self-respecting adjustment of hat and necktie that had been unknown in Bohemia; for he was no longer a boy, but a man, and a noted one, and fortune had stroked him into sleekness. The gender of success must be feminine: she is so capricious. Hitherto her smiles have been for veterans grown hoary in doing; now she opens her arms for youngsters grown great merely by daring. Bentham, it must be owned, had dared uncommonly well, and success had pillowed his head in her lap while she twined the bay with her fingers. But lines round his mouth and fatigued cynicism on the eyelids betrayed the march of years, and, more, the thinker, who, like most thinkers, plumbs to exhaustion in a bottomless pit. For all that he was excellent company. On his walls hung innumerable trophies of foreign travel and unique specimens of his own art-bent and with these, by gesture or by anecdote, he gave an unconscious synopsis of the skipped pages in our friendship's volume.

"This," he said, "is the original of 'Earth's Fair Daughters,' the canvas that brought me to the front; and here"—handing an album—"is the presentment of my benefactress."

"Benefactress?" I queried.

"Yes. I don't attempt to pad you with the social tarra-diddle that genius finds nuggets on the surface of the diggings. Fame was due to myself, and fortune to Mrs Brune—a dear old creature who bought my pictures with a persistence worthy a better cause. She died, leaving me her sole heir."

"And hence these travels?"

"Yes. When I lost sight of you in Paris I hewed a new route to notice. I played at being successful, bought my own pictures through dealers—incog., of course—at enormous prices. That tickled the ears of the Press."

"But how about commission?"

"Oh, the dealers earned it, and my money was well invested. I became talked about. The public knew nothing of my talent, and people love to talk of what they understand least."

"You belittle yourself, Bentham. You felt your work was sound—that you were bound to become great."

"True; otherwise I could not have stooped to play the charlatan. Without it my work might as well have been rotten for all the public could judge. Charlatanism is the only 'open sesame' to the world's cave, once you get inside you may be as honest as you please. All is fair in love or art or war, and there is a consolation in knowing that one's aim is