Thus he visited the National Gallery, the Old Masters at
the Academy and various dealers' exhibitions where collections of the
pictures of foreign men were at that season being displayed.
The brown sailor created some interest viewed in an environment so
peculiar. His picturesque face might well have graced a frame and looked
down upon the artistic throngs who swept among the pictures, but the living
man, full of almost tragic interest in what he saw, laboring along
catalogue in hand, dead to everything but the art around him, seemed wholly
out of place. He looked what he was: the detached thread of some story from
which the spectator only saw this chapter broken away and standing without
its context. Nine persons out of ten dismissed him with a smile; but
occasionally a thoughtful mind would view the man and occupy itself with
the problem of his affairs. Such built up imaginary histories of him and
his actions, which only resembled each other in the quality of remoteness
from truth.
Once it happened that at a small gallery, off Bond Street, the sudden sight
of precious things brought new emotions to Joe Noy--sentiments and
sensations of a sort more human and more natural than those under which he
was at present pursuing his purpose. Before this spectacle, suddenly
presented in the quietness and loneliness of the little exhibition, that
stern spirit of revenge which had actuated him since the knowledge of his
loss, and which, gripping his mind like a frost from the outset, had
congested the gentler emotions of sorrow for poor Joan and for
himself--before this display of a familiar scene, hallowed beyond all
others in memory, the man's relentless mood rose off his mind for a brief
moment like a cloud, and he stood, with aching heartstrings, gazing at a
great canvas.
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