“Dear Harold,“I have been behaving like a cad.Your picture is an original Bronzino, worth quite enough to free you from all the difficulties brought about by the bank. Any copyist who could do such work could expend his time more profitably on a picture of his own. Besides, it’s atour de forcein colouring that no sane copyist would dream of imitating. Bronzino, I suppose, fancied his subject, and, like some other great painters, reproduced it in duplicate, with just the smallestamount of alteration that would serve to characterize and identify it.“And now for my own part in this sorry business. It was a mean trick, but, thank Heaven, I hadn’t the strength, and, I hope, not the will to carry it through. You see I wanted her so badly that I couldn’t give her up even to you. And then the question of the picture turned up, and, unluckily, I found in it my opportunity. Till then, believe me, I had kept my honour safe. All of a sudden, the words she had used of me on Chapel hill, the night of the show, flashed across my mind, and I thought that, if you were out of the way for a time, I might win her still. And itwashard for me, you know, when I had waited for her all these years, and had come home at last to claim her, to find that you had won her love.“Believe me, Harold, when I say I am sorry. I have sinned against the friend of my youth andthe woman of my love. But try, old friend—not now but in the future—to win my pardon from Marion and yourself. You will have time to do so, for I leave England to-morrow for the East, and shall not return, if I ever do, till I can face your happiness without a thought of envy or regret. Don’t tell Marion more than you can help. Old friend, good-bye.“Eric.”
“Dear Harold,
“I have been behaving like a cad.
Your picture is an original Bronzino, worth quite enough to free you from all the difficulties brought about by the bank. Any copyist who could do such work could expend his time more profitably on a picture of his own. Besides, it’s atour de forcein colouring that no sane copyist would dream of imitating. Bronzino, I suppose, fancied his subject, and, like some other great painters, reproduced it in duplicate, with just the smallestamount of alteration that would serve to characterize and identify it.
“And now for my own part in this sorry business. It was a mean trick, but, thank Heaven, I hadn’t the strength, and, I hope, not the will to carry it through. You see I wanted her so badly that I couldn’t give her up even to you. And then the question of the picture turned up, and, unluckily, I found in it my opportunity. Till then, believe me, I had kept my honour safe. All of a sudden, the words she had used of me on Chapel hill, the night of the show, flashed across my mind, and I thought that, if you were out of the way for a time, I might win her still. And itwashard for me, you know, when I had waited for her all these years, and had come home at last to claim her, to find that you had won her love.
“Believe me, Harold, when I say I am sorry. I have sinned against the friend of my youth andthe woman of my love. But try, old friend—not now but in the future—to win my pardon from Marion and yourself. You will have time to do so, for I leave England to-morrow for the East, and shall not return, if I ever do, till I can face your happiness without a thought of envy or regret. Don’t tell Marion more than you can help. Old friend, good-bye.
“Eric.”
“P.S.—I enclose Christie and Manson’s receipt for your picture, which will go into their next sale. ‘Bronzinoat his best’ the critics pronounce it, which in his case means a big difference. I am forwarding you my own picture of ‘Val Verde,’ which I always intended for Marion.”
Eric, I fancy, will never marry. At least, he says so, and the words mean more with him than they would do on the lips of other men.
His was not a character—I recognised at last—to love lightly, or to change the object easily where once it had given its love. In every single point he had falsified the career which I had mapped out for him at starting. Not always, it is clear, does Cicero’s rule hold good—“Imago animi vultus;indices oculi.” Eric, for one, had demonstrated its incompleteness. I had thought himweak and vacillating. And his weakness, if ever it existed, had become his strength. Strong he had shown himself (in spite of his own words) both for the friend of his youth and the woman of his choice; strong to build himself a grand career; strong above all to conquer a temptation before which the strongest might have fallen; strong finally to fall and rise again, which is greater and grander, I take it, than not to fall. True of him, if of anyone—
“That men may rise on stepping-stonesOf their dead selves to higher things.”
“That men may rise on stepping-stonesOf their dead selves to higher things.”
Thank Heaven! there is no shadow of a cloud between us now. And though I cannot look for him at Fleetwater as yet, where the tantalising proximity of all he held most dear would make life for a time unbearable; yet surely, most surely, I know that we shall see him there some time, some day.
In appearance he is not altered much from the lad I loved at school and college, and from whom I parted not quite three years ago in his rooms at Trinity, starting, each of us, so confidently on the journey of a life for which I had made forecast of such different results. Only a weary look in his eyes, which time, I think, will surely lighten; only a line or two on his forehead, which time, I think, will surely smooth away.
And when he left us again for a long round of travel in Italy, Egypt, and the East, to enlarge his ideas and find fresh subjects for his pencil, it was with a heart full of hope and thankfulness that I bade him Godspeed.
For surely, most surely, I know that we shall have him once again with us—the Eric of the past, the dearest friend, save one, I ever knew—to share in and complete the happiness he had won for us out of the strong heart that only failed him once, andmade out of failure a greater and far more glorious recovery. For time has been quietly perfecting its work, and when he comes to us again, we shall meet, I know, the Eric of the future, too, uprising from the Eric of the past.
THE END.
[190]The following legend formed the subject of a short story in the “Cambridge Review,” June 1903.
Crown 8vo. Illustrated. 3s. 6d. net.
OPINIONS OF THE PRESS
ST. JAMES’S GAZETTE.—“Stones and Sketches . . . There is not one which is not of its kind perfect.”
BIRKENHEAD NEWS.—“There is literature here, and that of the very best, witness ‘The Cruel Crawling Foam.’”
LITERATURE.—“We had finished Mr. Pretor’s book, and had been refreshed by the knowledge and humour and tenderness underlying his descriptions of ‘Our Rector,’ ‘Our Professor,’ and ‘Bindo.’”
CAMBRIDGE REVIEW.—“Mr. Pretor’s power for delicate delineation is unequalled. His style is alone a charm. We have read the book with genuine delight, and we think it appeals to all cultivated people who care for simple yet well drawn pictures of real life.”
ACADEMY.—“A series of studies, grim, humorous, fanciful and pathetic . . . The pleasant mixture is dedicated to Mrs. Thomas Hardy.”
SPECTATOR.—“A volume of clever sketches. Indeed, there is more than cleverness in them. There is feeling, often expressed with no little subtlety and skill, and plenty of humour. Some of the stories are of the strangest.”
SATURDAY REVIEW.—“Mr. Thomas Hardy did well to encourage.”
LITERARY WORLD.—“Mr. Pretor possesses the panoply of a successful writer unless we are much mistaken.”
Cambridge Deighton Bell & Co.London George Bell & Sons.