CHAPTER XXXII.THE TESTIMONY OF THE SKETCH-BOOK.
Itis only natural that one painter should take an interest in the work of another. Mr. Darrell testified no surprise, therefore, when Richard Thornton appeared at Hazlewood the morning after his arrival at Tolldale, under convoy of Mrs. Monckton and Laura.
“I’ve come to say how sorry I was at your not coming to dinner last night, dear Mrs. Darrell,” Laura said, to the lady who was so soon to be her mother-in-law; “and I want to ask you whether I ought to have the sprigged muslin morning dresses trimmed with pink or blue, or whether I ought to have three of them pink and three blue, for Launcelot might get tired of seeing me in the same colours, you know, and I might have two of them trimmed with peach, if it came to that; and Eleanor has come with me; and Mr. Thornton—Mr. Thornton, Mrs. Darrell; Mrs. Darrell, Mr. Thornton—has come too, because he is an artist and wants to see Launcelot’s pictures—especially the beautiful picture that’s going into the Academy, and that the committee is sure to hang on the line; and I’m sure Launcelot will let Mr. Thornton see his studio—won’t you, dear Launcelot?”
Miss Mason pursed up her rosy lips, and put her head on one side like an insinuating canary, as she addressed her affianced husband. She looked very pretty in her winter costume, with a good deal of rich brown fur about her, and a dash of scarlet here and there. She looked like a fashionably-dressed Red Ridinghood, simple enough to be deluded by the weakest-minded of wolves. She was so pretty that her lover glanced down at her with a gratified smile, deriving considerable pleasure from the idea that she belonged to him, and that she was, on the whole, something to be rather proud of; something that added to the young sultan’s dignity, and bore testimony to his supreme merits.
Eleanor looked at the lovers with a contemptuous curve lifting her firm upper lip. She despised Launcelot Darrell so utterly, that she was almost cruel enough to despise Laura for loving him.
“Yes,” she thought, “Mr. Monckton is right. Shallow, selfish, and frivolous! He is all these, and he is false as well. Heaven help you, Laura, if I cannot save you from a marriage with this man.”
Mr. Darrell was very well pleased to do the honours of his studio to Richard Thornton. It would be quite a new sort of thing to this scene-painting fellow, the embryo Academician thought: the poor devil would pick up fresh ideas, and get a glimpse at the higher regions of art, for the first time in his life perhaps.
Launcelot Darrell led the way to that pleasant, prettily furnished, room which he called his studio. The “Rosalind and Celia” still occupied the post of honour on the easel. Mr. Darrell worked very hard; but in that spasmodic fashion which is antagonistic to anything like progress. The enthusiasm which upon one occasion kept him at his picture long after the fading light had given him notice to leave it, entirely deserted him upon another; and was perhaps followed by a fit of disgust with himself and with his art, which kept him idle for weeks together.
He made a merit of this fitfulness, depreciating a power of steady and persistent labour as the faculty of a tradesman, rather than an artist. He took credit to himself for the long pauses of idleness in which he waited for what he called inspiration; and imposed upon his mother by his grand talk about earnestness, conscientiousness, reverence for the sublimity of art, and a great many more fine phrases by which he contrived to excuse the simple fact of his laziness. So Eleanor Vane, as sorrowfulRosalind, still smiled sadly upon a simperingCelia:—it had been quite impossible to prevent Miss Mason’s assuming the conventional simper of the weak-minded sitter who can’t forget that his portrait is being taken, and that he is in the very act of handing down his smile to posterity, or to the furniture brokers—out of an unfinished background, and clad in robes of unfinished satin and velvet. Mr. Thornton wondered as he looked at the young man’s work, and remembered how many miles of canvas it had been his own fate to cover since first he had handled his brushes and splashed in sky borders and cloud pieces for the chief scene-painter at the Phœnix.
Launcelot Darrell, with his mahlstick in his hand, smiled with sublime patronage upon Eleanor’s humble friend.
“This sort of thing is rather different to what you’ve been used to, I suppose?” he said; “rather another kind of work than your pantomime scenes, your grots of everlasting bliss, and caves of constant content, where the waterfalls are spangles sewn upon white tape, and the cloudless skies are blue gauze and silver foil?”
“But we’re not always painting transformations, you know,” Mr. Thornton answered, in nowise offended by the artist’s graceful insolence; “scene-painting isn’talldone with Dutch metal and the glue-pot: we’re obliged to know a little about perspective, and to have a slight knowledge of colour. Some of my brotherhood have turned out tolerable landscape-painters, Mr. Darrell. By the bye, you don’t do anything in the way of landscape, do you?”
“Yes,” Launcelot Darrell answered, indifferently, “I used to try my hand at landscape; but human interest, human interest, Mr. Thornton, is the strong point of a picture. To my mind a picture should be a story, a drama, a tragedy, a poem—something that explains itself without any help from a catalogue.”
“Precisely. An epic upon a Bishop’s half-length,” Richard Thornton answered, rather absently. He saw Eleanor’s watchful eyes fixed upon him, and knew that with every moment she was losing faith in him. Looking round the room he saw, too, that there were a couple of bloated portfolios leaning against the wall, and running over with sheets of dirty Bristol board and crumpled drawing paper.
“Yes,” Launcelot Darrell repeated, “I have tried my hand at landscape. There are a few in one of those portfolios—the upper one, I think—not the purple one; I keep private memoranda and scraps in that. The green portfolio, Mr. Thornton; you may find some things there that will interest you—that might be useful to you, perhaps.”
The artist threw down his mahlstick, and strolled across the room to talk to Laura Mason and his mother, who were sitting near the fire. In doing this he left Eleanor and Richard side by side, near the easel and the corner in which the portfolios leaned against the wall.
There was a large old-fashioned window in this corner of the room, the casement against which Eleanor had stood when Launcelot Darrell asked her to be his wife. The window was in a deep recess, shaded by thick crimson curtains, and in the recess there was a table. Any one sitting at this table was almost concealed from the other inmates of the room.
Richard Thornton lifted both the portfolios, and placed them on this table. Eleanor stood beside him, breathless and expectant.
“The purple portfolio contains private memoranda,” whispered the young man; “it is in that portfolio we must look, Mrs. Monckton. There is no such thing as honour on the road we have chosen for ourselves.”
The scene-painter untied the strings of the loaded scrap-book, and flung it open. A chaotic mass of drawings lay before him. Crayon sketches; pencil scraps; unfinished and finished water-coloured drawings; rough caricatures in pen-and-ink, and inwater-colours; faint indications of half-obliterated subjects; heads, profiles, chins, and noses; lithographed costumes; prints; etchings; illustrations torn out of books and newspapers; all flung together in bewildering confusion.
Mr. Thornton, seated at the table with his head bent over the papers before him, and with Eleanor standing at his shoulder, began steadily and deliberately to examine the contents of this purple portfolio.
He carefully scrutinized each drawing, however slight, however roughly done, however unpretentious. He looked also at the back of each drawing, sometimes finding a blank, sometimes a faint pencil indication of a rubbed-out sketch, or a rough outline in pen-and-ink.
For a long time he found nothing in which the utmost ingenuity could discover any relation to that period of Launcelot Darrell’s existence which Eleanor believed to have been spent in Paris.
“Belisarius. Girl with basket of strawberries. Marie Antoinette. Headsman. Flower-girl. Oliver Cromwell refusing the crown. Oliver Cromwell denouncing Sir Harry Vane. Oliver Cromwell and his daughters. Fairfax,” — muttered Richard, as he looked over the sketches. “Didn’t I tell you, Eleanor, that a man’s sketch-book contains the record of his life? These Cromwell drawings are all dated in the same year. Nearly ten years ago; that is to say, when Mr. Darrell had very little knowledge of anatomy, and a tremendous passion for republicanism. Further on we come to a pastoral strata, you see. The Watermill: Rosa. There is a perpetual recurrence of Rosa and the Watermill; Rosa in a bridal dress; the mill by moonlight; Rosa in a russet cloak; the mill in a thunderstorm: Rosa sad; the mill at sunset; and the series bears date two years later, when the artist was desperately in love with a rustic beauty in this neighbourhood. Now we lose sight of Rosa, and come upon a Roman period; the artist goes in for the grand and classic. The Roman period lasts a very short time. Now we are in London; yes, we are up to our eyes in student life in the metropolis. Here are sketches of artist existence in Clipstone Street and the purlieus of Fitzroy Square. Here is the Haymarket by night. An opera-box. Lady Clara Vere de Vere. Lady Clara at the flower-show—in Hyde Park—at a concert. Aha! the artist is in love again; and this time the beauty is highborn and unapproachable. Here are pen-and-ink hints at contemplated suicide; a young man lying on a pallet bed, an empty bottle on the floor labelled Prussic Acid; the same young man leaning over the parapet of Waterloo Bridge on a moonlit night, with St. Paul’s in the background. Yes, there have been wasted love and despair, and a wild yearning for death, and thatgenerally morbid and unpleasant state of mind which is the common result of idleness and strong liquors. Stay!” cried Richard Thornton, suddenly, “we’re all wrong here.”
“What do you mean?” asked Eleanor. She had watched the young man’s examination of the drawings with eager interest, with ever-increasing impatience, in her desire to come to something that should be evidence against Launcelot Darrell.
“What do you mean?” she said, and then she added, impatiently, “How slow you are, Dick! What do I want to know of this man except the one proof that will identify him with that man upon the Boulevard?”
“I’m afraid we’ve been making a mistake all this time,” Richard said, in rather a despondent tone. “These sketches must have been done by some companion of Mr. Darrell’s. I’m afraid they’re none of them his.”
“Not his? But why—why not?”
“Because the first lot, the Cromwells and the Rosas, are all signed with a flourishing autograph—‘Launcelot Darrell, pinxt.,’ in full, as if the young man was rather proud of his name.”
“Yes, yes; but what then?”
“The London-life sketches, the Lady Claras, and the suicides, which are much better than the first lot, though I should have thought they had been by the same man, are all signed with a monogram.”
“A monogram?”
“Yes, of two initials. I’ve been trying to make them out for ever so long, and I’ve only just succeeded. The two letters are R. L.”
Richard Thornton felt Eleanor’s hand, which had been resting lightly upon the back of his chair, tighten suddenly upon the rosewood scroll-work; he heard her breath grow quicker; and when he turned his head he saw that she was deadly pale.
“It is coming home to him, Richard,” she said. “The man who cheated my father called himself ‘Robert Lan—’ Part of the name was torn away in my father’s letter, but the initials of that false name are R. L. Go on, Dick; go on quickly, for pity’s sake; we shall find something more presently.”
Eleanor Monckton had spoken in a whisper, but at this moment the scene-painter laid his hand upon her wrist and reminded her by a gesture of the need of caution. But Mr. Darrell, and the two ladies at the other end of the roomy studio, were in no manner observant of anything that might be going on in the curtained recess of the window. Laura was talking, and her lover was laughing at her; half pleased, half amused, by her childish frivolity.
Richard Thornton turned over a heap of sketches without speaking.
But presently he came upon a water-colour drawing of a long lamplit street, crowded with figures in grotesque costumes, and with masks upon their faces.
“We have crossed the Channel, Eleanor,” he said. “Here is Paris in Carnival time, and here is the assumed name, too, in full,—‘Robert Lance, March 2nd, ’53.’ Be quiet, Eleanor, be calm, for Heaven’s sake. The man is guilty; I believe that, now, as fully as you do; but we have to bring his guilt home to him.”
“Keep that sketch, Richard,” whispered the girl, “keep it. It is the proof of his false name. It is the proof that he was in Paris when he was believed to be in India. It is the proof that he was in Paris a few months before my father’s death.”
The scene-painter folded the tumbled sheet of drawing-paper and thrust it into the breast-pocket of his loose overcoat.
“Go on, Richard; go on,” said Eleanor; “there may be something more than this.”
The young man obeyed his eager companion; one by one he looked at the pen-and-ink sketches, the crayon drawings, the unfinished scraps in Indian ink or water-colour.
They all bore evidence of a life in Paris and its neighbourhood. Now adébardeurhanging on the arm of a student; now a grisette drinking lemonade with an artisan beyond the barrier; a funeral train entering the gates of Père la Chaise; some children, with garlands in their hands, kneeling by a grave; a showman on the Boulevard; a group of Zouaves; a bit of landscape in the forest of Saint Germain, with equestrian figures beneath an arch of foliage; a scene in the Champs Elysées.
And at last, a rough pencil sketch of a group in a small chamber at acafé; an old man seated at a lamplit table playingécartéwith a man whose face was hidden; an aristocratic-looking, shabby-genteel old man, whose nervous fingers seemed to clutch restlessly at a little pile of napoleons on the table before him.
There was a third figure; the figure of a smartly-dressed Frenchman standing behind the old man’s chair; and in this watcher of the game Eleanor recognized the man who had persuaded her father to leave her on the Boulevard,—the companion of the sulky Englishman.
The sketch was dated August 12, 1853; the very day on which Richard Thornton had recognized the dead man in the ghastly chamber of the Morgue. On the back of the drawing were written these words, “Sketch for finished picture, to be called ‘The last of the Napoleons’—Robert Lance.”
The likeness of the principal figure to George Vane was unmistakable. The man who had been heartless enough to cheat his kinsman’s friend, had made this record of the scene of hiscruelty; but had not been so callous as to carry out his design after the suicide of his victim.