Here his worst fears were realised. The archway had acted as a funnel, and focussed the wind coming down the glen. The canvas was not to be seen; the easel had been flung halfway through the bridge and smashed. The colour-box, with all the colours out, had been blown out of the vault, and lay in the foreground below.
He swore at the wind and at himself for his folly in leaving the canvas there. Then he started in pursuit of the fugitive picture.
He found it, face down, in a shallow pool, just under the church. He pulled it out of the water, and placed it flat upon the ground. He then stood back from it a few feet, saw it was all cut and torn; jumped on it half-a-dozen times; rolled it up carefully; carried it back to the bridge; and, having emptied the bottle of turpentine over it, succeeded, after many efforts, in lighting a match and setting it on fire.
Then he sat down on his camp-stool--the storm had spared that--and watched the unlucky canvas blaze in the sheltered place he had thrown it.
"If I had only a fiddle now, and could play it, I'd be a kind of Modern Nero. But I haven't a fiddle, and if I had I couldn't play it; so, upon the whole, I think I had better get out of this place."
He rose and went back to the inn. All that day nothing was thought of or talked of but the storm. By night the wind died away. Next morning arose bright and serene. He had made up his mind to stay at Anerly no longer. He would not paint that landscape. He would not try to recover the wreck of that easel. He would not gather up the scattered contents of his colour-box. The place had served him a scurvy trick, and he would leave it without any other recognition of its existence than that of paying what he owed at The Beagle. He would get back to Town at once. Be it ever so humble, there was no place like Town.
At breakfast he called for his bill and paid it.
The London morning papers did not reach Anerly until ten o'clock. Breakfast had softened Graham's mind towards the village. He no longer called down fire and brimstone from heaven on the unlucky place. After all, the wind, which had only been, like himself, a visitor, was more to blame than the place. It was a horrid thing to get to London in the early afternoon--the odious, practical, dinner-eating, business-rushing afternoon. No. He would wait until the shades of eve were falling fast, and then he'd through a Devon village pass, bearing a banner, with the sensible device, "Nearest railway-station where I can book for London?" In the meantime he would sit under the porch, have some cider and a pipe, and look at the London paper, which had just come.