The White Shield

People said that Joe Hayward's pictures "lacked something." Even the critics, who knoweverything, were at a loss to find where the deficiency might be. Hayward, himself, workedhard studying the masters, patiently correcting faults in colour and perspective, andsucceeding after a fashion. But he felt that art, in its highest and best sense, was utterlybeyond him; there was a haunting elusive something which was continually beyond hisreach.Occasionally, when he sold a picture, he would give "a time" to a dozen artist chums fromstudios near by, as they did, whenever fortune favoured them; after this he would paintagain, on and on, with a really tremendous perseverance.At length, he obtained permission to make an exhibition of his work in a single room at theArt Gallery. The pictures were only ten in number, and some of them were small, but theyrepresented a year's hard work. When he superintended the hanging, on Saturday morning, he was more nearly happy than he had ever been in his life. The placard on the door, "TheHayward Exhibition will open Monday," filled him with pleasure. It was not a conceitedfeeling of importance, but rather a happy consciousness that he had done his best.At last he was suited with the arrangement. The men went out with the ladder and wire, and he stood in the centre of the room, contemplating the result. The landscape in thecorner might be a little out of drawing, he thought, but the general public would not noticethat. And the woman in white, beside it, which he had christened Purity certainly showed togood advantage. He remembered very well the day he had put the finishing touches upon itafter the night of revelry in which he had helped Jennings and a dozen other fellows fromneighbouring studios to celebrate the sale of Jennings' Study of a Head, and how he hadthought, at the time, that he, who spent such nights, had no business to paint a figure likethis of Purity.As he turned to leave the room, he saw a grey gowned young woman, who evidently did notknow that the pictures were not as yet upon public view. She passed him as she came in, with a rustle of silken skirts and a cooling odour of violets. Seeing the key of the room in hishand, she turned to him and said: "Pardon me, but can you tell me whose pictures theseare?""These are Hayward's," he replied."Hayward," she repeated after him, as if the name were wholly new to her."Hayward is a young artist and of purely local reputation," he explained. "This is his firstpublic exhibition."She surveyed the collection without any very strong show of pleasure, until he remarked,"You don't seem to think much of his beginnin