“Die schönste Jungfrau sitzetDort oben wunderbar,Ihr gold’nes Geschmeide blitzet,Sie kämmt ihr gold’nes Haar.”
“Die schönste Jungfrau sitzetDort oben wunderbar,Ihr gold’nes Geschmeide blitzet,Sie kämmt ihr gold’nes Haar.”
“Die schönste Jungfrau sitzetDort oben wunderbar,Ihr gold’nes Geschmeide blitzet,Sie kämmt ihr gold’nes Haar.”
“Yes, but you haven’t got golden hair,” the man laughed, joyously.
Farther and farther they swam into the vast shimmering blue, and ecstasy made the pace brisker than they had meditated.
“Shall we start from here?” he asked, at last.
“No, not yet. I want a long race.”
They swam on. The brown trawling boats loomed plainer in the offing.
“Here?” said Matthew.
“No—a little farther, faint-heart!”
He turned on his back and propelled himself gently, gazing up in luxurious content at the great circle of blue sky, cloud-mottled round its rim. Olive, lying on her side, paddled lazily a little ahead.
“This is delicious!” she called back. “Clothes make nodifference. But fancy a clothed Lorelei!” And she began to sing again, with pauses for breath:
“Den Schiffer im kleinen SchiffeErgreift es mit wildem Weh;Er schaut nicht die Felsenriffe,Er schaut nur hinauf in die Höh’.”
“Den Schiffer im kleinen SchiffeErgreift es mit wildem Weh;Er schaut nicht die Felsenriffe,Er schaut nur hinauf in die Höh’.”
“Den Schiffer im kleinen SchiffeErgreift es mit wildem Weh;Er schaut nicht die Felsenriffe,Er schaut nur hinauf in die Höh’.”
He threw the reply over his head: “You shall lure me no farther.” But she mocked him, elated by the glory of motion, and witched him to follow her till the shore was far.
At last they turned, trod water, Olive cried, “One, two, three,” and they were off.
For some minutes they swam side by side, Olive making the pace, and Matthew finding it no trouble to keep up with it; at last she made a spurt and shot past him with a triumphant taunt; he allowed her to enjoy some seconds of victory, then came up hand-over-hand and forged ahead. He eased off and she overtook him; he spurted and she flagged; he let her come up again and she came up with a sneer. Resolved to damp her frolicsome spirits, he put on a powerful stroke and showed her a clean pair of heels. She made a desperate effort and drew level with him again. The instinct of victory was now aroused in the painter; he fixed his eyes on the shore and settled steadily to the task of reaching it. Very soon Olive was hopelessly in the rear. He still heard her vague cries from afar. At last they died away entirely. He turned his head to measure the interval. Olive was nowhere to be seen.
His heart contracted with a cold sick horror. He raced back with great side strokes, shouting, “Miss Regan, Miss Regan, holloa!” The great sparkling water stretched all around in deadly silent bareness, suddenly become an evil enemy. He hoped desperately she was only swimming under water for speed or to frighten him.
And then in a moment her head popped up to the right, and he saw from the exhausted expression of the face and the spasmodic struggles of the limbs that she had really gone under. In a few strokes he was at her side. She still retained sufficient self-possession not to grab at him; he supported her with onehand, then with the rest of his limbs he struck out stoutly for home, she helping him with feeble movements. After an interval of weakness and humility, she recovered somewhat and smiled faintly.
“So you wouldn’t follow the Lorelei,” she spluttered, reproachfully.
“I am sorry I followed her so far,” he said, ruefully regarding the distant shore.
Olive struggled for breath. “Prosaic man! I waited down there for you, but I gave you up and came to the surface again.” She essayed sturdier kicks.
“You only sank once?” he said.
“Yes; didn’t you hear me calling you to come?”
“I heard sounds, but I thought they were epigrams.”
“Brute! To hit a woman when she’s down. But I shall be better soon.... I hope they can’t see us from shore.”
“Don’t talk! You brought Herbert an opera-glass to see we started fair.”
“Nonsense,” Olive gasped, indignantly.
“I distinctly remember it.”
“How dare you set up your memory against a drowning woman’s?”
He was glad to find her like herself, and not alarmed. Her strokes were getting stronger now, but he still feared for the consequences if she should suddenly lose her nerve. “What did you think of when you sank?” he asked, lightly, to make her think the danger of sinking was over.
“Of Her—” she began, and stopped short. “Of her carryings-on at my funeral, poor Nor. I was regretting I hadn’t made my will and left her my nose.”
This sounded pure nonsense to her companion.
“I think I can go by myself now,” she added, after a long silence. “Thank you so much for the use of your arm.”
“You are quite sure?” he said, anxiously.
“Yes. Of course, you have won.”
He removed his arm, but kept watchfully at her side. And his misgivings were justified, for, after a slow twenty yards, her strokes became so spent and irregular that he came to herassistance again, and she accepted his support with a wan smile.
“It’s this soppy, clogging costume,” she said.
“You had better keep your breath in your lungs,” he said, not in rebuke, but in hortation.
“I’ll inflate myself like an air-balloon,” she replied, humbly. “I am so sorry to be such a nuisance.” And she turned upon her back and paddled feebly in silence.
He did not answer, for his own nerve was giving way. The responsibility weighed more than the burden, though that was heavy enough with the double weight of superadded garments. He had a spasm of sickening apprehension. His own strokes were getting jerkier; what if he should fail to reach that strip of beach on which he dimly descried two agitated figures! And in this tense, terrible moment the figures were blotted out, he saw only the cliffs in the background and the white sea-gulls overhead, and he was a boy again in the Bay of Fundy, swimming in his clothes for dear life. The illusion was momentary, but it left the memory. A sense of the tragic contrast between the ardent Nova-Scotian lad, dreaming of pictures, and the popular London painter, occupied his consciousness, while his limbs moved automatically shoreward. Then he remembered that of the two who had struck out for home on that memorable day the sailor had only put off the day of drowning. And at the thought that ancient dead face swam up again in front of him. Oh, it was horrible to die, to be dragged down out of the sunlight, to leave a world which held Eleanor Wyndwood! What would become of her? She would live to forget him; she would marry; another man would hold her in his arms. Another man! Oh, direful thought, bitterer than death! There was no need for his death ere another man could possess her. She was only his friend; he had not wanted more than her friendship. Oh, ghastly self-delusion! Olive’s sneer at the friendship of the sexes rang in his brain, and that strange intoxicating expression in Eleanor’s face—half abashment, half radiance—dispelled the vision of his father’s. In a moment of delirium his lips touched her warm cheek; it was her weight that was on his arm. What did it matter if they had a gleam of happiness, he and Eleanor,both victims of an unsatisfactory world? Was not the great, shining, mocking, remorseless sea waiting to suck him down, indifferent to the aspirations and agonizings of the long years? And then between his lips and hers the dead stony face swam up again, and he turned on his back to escape it, and found unexpected relief in the more reposeful attitude and in the change of arm involved, for the left, which had supported Olive, had grown numb. When, sufficiently rested, he turned again he saw with a thrill of joy that the shore was perceptibly nearer. There were more than two figures now; he made out Primitiva and the old cook. And Herbert’s arm was round Mrs. Wyndwood’s waist, supporting her. A powerful spurt brought him within clear hearing of Herbert’s hail.
“Shall I come out?”
Olive roused herself. “What for?” she sang out, lustily. “The race is decided.”
“All right,” came the joyous reply. “I was sure Matt could manage it. I wouldn’t spoil his chances of a medal.”
As they came nearer in he cheered them on with sportive ejaculations, and confounded the beach because there wasn’t a single boat within half a mile. When the couple scrambled on shore, shaking themselves like spaniels, Mrs. Wyndwood dragged more heavily on Herbert’s sustaining arm, and he saw that she had fainted. Almost at the same instant, by a curious coincidence, the sun, upon which the clouds had gradually been closing in, again disappeared, and the wail of the wind rang wilder round the cliffs.
There was confusion in the household that afternoon. Mrs. Wyndwood soon revived, but had to be put to bed, and Miss Regan, who was secretly grateful for an excitement that kept her from assuming the invalid herself, sat with her. The men hung about the house, anxious, and receiving frequent reassuring bulletins by the lips of Primitiva. Presently those pretty lips brought them an invitation to stay to seven o’clock dinner, when Mrs. Wyndwood would try to come down to present the cup. They need have no delicacy about the larder, for Colonel Chesham had opportunely sent Mrs. Wyndwood a gift of grouse. They galloped over the cliffs to get themselves into their dress-clothes.Meantime Mrs. Wyndwood had fallen asleep, and at her bedside Olive Regan writhed in a black paroxysm, asking herself why, having once gone down, she had wanted to come up again.
The hostesses were a little late, but the reunion was gay beyond all precedent. The last trappings of ceremony were thrown off. A Bohemian merriment reigned, regardless of the liveried menial who alone sustained the dignity of the dinner-table. Mrs. Wyndwood, looking a shade paler and more spiritual, but no whit less beautiful than her wont, appeared in a low white satin gown, with the same jewelled butterfly poised at the bosom as on the night when Matthew had met her at the Academy soirée. He fancied some occult significance in the circumstance. Olive was in soft green that harmonized so suavely with her complexion as to give her a less aggressive air than when she wore blue. There was a fragrant tea-rose with a sprig of maiden-hair fern at her throat; and the table was gay with many choice specimens of aster and hydrangea, presents from Primitiva’s father. Outside the roar of the sea and the wail of the wind emphasized the charm and comfort of the interior and the gladness of being alive.
There was a wavering flush on Mrs. Wyndwood’s cheek and a shining moisture in her eye as, before they sat down, she presented Matthew with the cup, which Olive complained had been dashed from her lips. Interrogated as to her sensations, she said she had a horrible feeling of littleness in the midst of the great churn of waters and under the naked sky. It did not seem the same sea she had been bestriding so recklessly and voluptuously. She seemed to herself absolutely unimportant—a mere atom in the blind wash of the waves, a straw they would engulf, drift, or disgorge with equal indifference. It was this thought that suddenly paralyzed her, and made her give up and go under; when she came up, something not herself made her strain every sinew to keep afloat.
“Something not ourselves that makes for life,” said Herbert.
She smiled.
“My last thought was of you,” she said, audaciously. “I determined to send you a message by submarine cable.”
“I had the greatest ado to prevent Primitiva stripping and going out to fetch you in,” he rejoined, laughing.
The incidents of the regatta continued to afford amusement from thehors d’œuvresto the dessert. At the fish Olive sprang up suddenly and rushed to the window. Her exclamation of “The regatta fireworks!” drew them all after her.
Herbert uttered the long-drawn “Oh!” of the spectators of pyrotechnics. It was, indeed, an extraordinary set-piece, this sunset, in affinity with the fitful tempestuous day—a sky steel-blue again, with great broad sulphur-edged clouds of black smoke; on the upper rim of this smoke, white clouds; towards the horizon, over the inhabited hills, a lovely pale-green light, and on the right of that a monstrous sulphur-cloud, its base hidden below the horizon; the shadow of this brilliant cloud darkening to a purple and crimson beauty on the ever-stirring water, and the cloud itself infiltrating its pores more and more with sulphur and deepening momently to old gold; over the green light, patches of bright gold; the left extremity of the sulphur-cloud coming to meet it in spots of smoky red; every little pool of rain or brine on the beach crimsoning and purpling in responsive radiance.
They returned to their fish, but watched from their seats till the beautiful sulphur-cloud faded into a pale bluish blot. Mrs. Wyndwood, observing it all minutely with her recently acquired artistic vision, said she had never realized before how many editions a sunset went through; she wondered how artists arrested it long enough to paint it. Herbert said sunsets were not fixed but faked. He resumed his badinage of Olive for her failure to see her whole life defile pictorially before her; and she apologized for her forgetfulness on the ground that she hadn’t arrived at drowning point. A discussion on memory ensued. Mrs. Wyndwood acknowledged possessing a good verbal memory—especially for poetry. Herbert said that he could only remember ideas, so that he carried away nothing from contemporary literature. Only the Continentals had ideas; the English were a wooden race, “the wooden heads of Old England,” he said, derisively; he was glad of his infusion of French blood, there was no salt in English life—nothing but putrefying Puritanism.Olive said, although she was a Celt, she could remember neither ideas nor words. Herbert asked what was her earliest recollection. After screwing up her forehead in earnest effort she replied, honestly, “I forget,” and he cried “Bull!” Mrs. Wyndwood proffered her own earliest recollection—of gliding in her mother’s arms in a gondola, with a boatman cryingStali—and was curious to know Matthew’s. He replied mirthfully that he didn’t remember, and covered his discomposure with champagne. He could not expose to strangers that memory of his mother scolding his father, shrieking, vociferating, offering to throw up the position, threatening to shoot herself. Even Mrs. Wyndwood would never know that—no one would ever really see the scars on his soul. The thought of her, now babbling harmlessly, saner in her insanity than in her sanity, came up like the skeleton at the feast. He put her resolutely outside with the night and the wind that wailed like a woman. But he heard them moaning: “Oh, the pain of the world!”
After dinner they walked along the shore towards the neighboring village. It blew half a gale now, but the air was not cold and the ladies took only wraps. The quartette looked upon this deserted beach as a private promenade, an appanage of the house. They walked two and two, Matthew and Miss Regan, Herbert and Mrs. Wyndwood. There was only a rim of orange all along the horizon; the rollers thundered on the stones, smashing themselves in flying spray; a fierce undertow kept the waves sandy for half a mile out; there was just light enough to distinguish where the paler green commenced. The darkness grew rapidly as they walked; the last faint reflection of sunset faded on the gray sea. An unusual silence possessed them after the exuberance of the evening. They stopped now and again to shake the little pebbles out of their shoes. All was black when they reached the village. The beach was full of wickerwork crab-pots, and the headless divided forms of skate and dog-fish loomed uncannily from the poles on which they hung. They were the crab-fishers’ bait. Only a stray mongrel represented the village, which already slept. The sea was mournful and gloomy; its pitchy blackness, over which the sky hinged like a half-raised gray lid, was relieved only by its own broken linesof foam, which sometimes rolled in six deep, looking exactly like streaks of phosphorescence on a dark wall, and adding weirdness to the forlorn desolation of the scene. There was no other line of light either on sea or land; the lonesome sea tossed sleeplessly in its agony, howling and crying.
They turned back, interchanging companions. During the walk Mrs. Wyndwood suddenly asked Matthew if his wife knew where he was: he said, “No”; sometimes his brother Billy did; Billy lived with her: his man forwarded all letters from his studio. After a long pause he added that practically he had been separated from his wife for years. Eleanor murmured again, “Poor woman,” and he was too shame-stricken to look her in the face, and to read that the sympathy was for him. They relapsed into silence, and indeed conversation was difficult.
The night had grown wilder, the wind blew more fiercely, drenching their faces with salt spray, whirling them round and round and almost lifting them off their feet. But the clouds were driven off and the star-sprinkled heaven was revealed, majestic.
Near the house Mrs. Wyndwood and Matthew Strang stopped to admire the sublime spectacle, sheltering themselves from the gale in a niche in the cliff; the other two had already gone round the craggy projection which hid the house.
They watched the mad cavalry charge of creaming billows; watched them break, thundering and throwing their spray heavenwards like a continuous play of white fountains all along the line of march. To the right, beyond the village whence they had come, where the cliff jutted out at its lowest level, a ghostly fountain leaped again and again sheer over the top of the cliff with a crashing and splashing that was succeeded by the long-receding moan of the back-drawn wave soughing through the rattling pebbles.
Her face, flushed with the passion of the storm, showed divinely in the dim starlight; beneath her wrap her bosom, panting from the walk in the teeth of the wind, heaved with excitement; the gale had dishevelled her hair. They scarcely spoke; the organ-roll of the sea crashed majestically like the bass in some savage symphony of the winds.
Now at last the moon leaped out, framed in a weird cloud-rack; the moonlight played on her loveliness and made it wonderful.
She moved slightly forward. “The cliff is too damp to lean upon,” she murmured.
Audaciously he slipped a trembling arm against the rock and let her form rest against that. She scarcely seemed conscious of him; she was watching the rampant, seething waters, volleying their white jets skyward with a crash of cannon that outroared the wind; her scarlet lips were parted eagerly; the dreamy light had gone from her eyes; they flashed fire.
“Oh, I could dare to-night!” she cried.
The wind blew her tresses into his face; the perfume of them stung his blood. Her loveliness was maddening him. So close! so close! Oh, to shower mad kisses upon her lips, her eyes, her hair! What did it matter, there on that wild beach alone with the elements! He had been so near death; who would have recked if he had been dead now, tossed in that welter of waters?
The waves broke with a thousand thunders, the white fountains flew at the stars; they seemed alive, exultant, frenzied with the ecstasy of glorious living. Oh, for life—simple, sublime—the keen, tingling, savage life of Vikings and sea-robbers in the days before civilization, in the full-blooded days when men loved and hated fiercely, strenuously, wrenching through rapine and slaughter the women they coveted. Ah, surely he had some of their blood; it ran in his veins like fire; he was of their race, despite his dreamings. He was his father’s son, loving the storm and the battle.
The wind wailed; it was like the cry of his tortured heart, his yearning for happiness. It rose higher and higher. A bat flew between them and the moon. Eleanor nestled to him involuntarily; her face was very near to his. It gleamed seductively; there was no abashment, only alluring loveliness; the fire in her eyes kindled him now not to the secondary life of Art, but to the primary life of realities. Could she not hear his heart beat? Yes, surely the storm of the elements had passed into her blood, too. Her face was ardent, ecstatic. His arm held her tight. Oh, to stake the world on a kiss!
The moon was hidden again; they were alone in the mad, dim night; the complexities of Society were far away. They looked at each other, and through her eyes he seemed to see heaven.
A star fell overhead. It drew her eyes away a moment to watch its fiery curve. He felt the spell was broken. The wind shrieked with an eldritch cry, like the mocking threnody of his thwarted hope. He had a shuddering remembrance of Mad Peggy. And straightway he saw her weird figure dashing round the crag in the darkness—a shawl over her head, and a lovely face, at once radiant and frenzied, gleaming from between its dusky folds. His heart almost stopped, a superstitious thrill froze his hot blood. Never to be happy! Ah, God! never! never! To thirst and thirst, and nothing ever to quench his thirst!
Mrs. Wyndwood started forward. “Oh, there you are, Olive!”
The figure threw passionate arms round her. “Comfort me, darling; I am engaged.”
For the happier Herbert had spoken. And Olive had listened shyly, humbly, with tears, full of an exquisite uplifting emotion, akin to the exaltation of righteousness, at the thought of giving herself to this man, of living her life with and for the one true soul in the world.
They stood close to the hoary rim of the black welter; dusky figures, wind-rocked and spray-drenched, a little apart from each other, the shining house in the background.
“And when did you begin to think of me—in that way?” she faltered.
“I never thought of you in any other. But that night when Matthew arrived, when you sat nid-nodding in the grandfather’s chair, you maddened me; you were adorable! the contrast was exquisite. To think of you—a wilful little misanthrope—to think of that glorious, wayward creature fading away till she suited the chair. Oh, it was too—”
He broke off. Passion robbed him of words. He moved nearer—she drew back.
“Oh, but will you still”—she hesitated, shy of the word—”love me when I do suit the chair?”
“I shall always see you as you were then.”
She laughed with a half-sob.
“And just then,” she confessed deliciously, fluttering even now like a bird in the net, “I was beginning to get frightened of you. I felt you growing upon me, shadowing the horizon like the roc in theArabian Nights. And the pain of the world was outside—in the great black night—calling to me in my slough of luxury.”
“You witch! Veil those eyes or I shall kiss them.”
She retreated.
“And why were you frightened of me?” he asked, tenderly.
She said, humbly, in little shy jerks: “I felt like in the sea this morning—one little atom, and the whole world against me, and my own weakness most of all.... I had prided myself on my swimming, and here was I being dragged under ... just like other girls ... a victim to the same ridiculous passion.”
“You delightful, candid creature! With me as the object?”
“Don’t be flippant now, Herbert.” How delicious his name sounded; it made amends for the rebuke! “You do understand me. Marriage is a second birth—voluntary, this time. It means accepting the universe, which was thrust upon one unasked.”
“It means making the best of it.”
“Oh, surely it means more. It means passing it on to others. But I surrender. I cannot live without you.”
“Olive!”
He sprang to take her, but she eluded him. “Look! the moon is covered up again.”
“I only want to see your face.”
“Don’t talk like other men, though I have fallen like other girls.”
“No, you are always yourself, Olive—I have dreamed of this moment. I would not have it otherwise—except perhaps with you in the grandfather’s chair and a poke bonnet.”
“Now you areyourself. This is such a conventional endingto a holiday, we must preserve what originality we can.” She was recovering her spirits.
“A conventional ending! Why, it’s a most romantic incongruous match. It beats the comedy. I shall burn it.”
“No, let’s produce it—it wouldn’t cost much.”
“I am not worthy of you, Olive,” he said, with a quiver in his voice. “I have nothing.”
“Oh! When you have my heart!”
“My queen of girls! But what of your relatives?”
A gleam of fun passed across her wet face. She had her droll look of mischief.
“You are all of them. I was of age long ago—I am awfully old, you know—you take me with your eyes open—”
“I can’t; yours dazzle me.”
“That’ll do for the comedy,” she laughed, gleefully. “Still, if you do want me, there are only you and I to consider.”
“Only we two,” he murmured.
“We two,” she repeated, and her eyes were suffused with tender moisture.
There was a delicious silence. He tried to take her hand. This time she abandoned it to him; a wave of moral emotion lifted her to the stars.
The wind wailed, the black sea crashed white at their feet, its whirling brine blinded their eyes as with salt tears.
“Isn’t it curious?” she said, as they moved back a little, hand in hand.
“What, dearest?”
“That you and I should be made happier by our common perception of the unhappiness of life?”
“Queer girl!” he thought. But he only squeezed her hand.
“The Catechism is right,” she went on, thoughtfully, proceeding to misquote it. “The waves are too strong. It’s no use fighting against your sex or your station. Do your duty in that state of life in which it has pleased God to call you. But I would have that text taught to the rich exclusively, not to the poor. The poor should be encouraged to ascend; the rich should be taught contentment. Else their strength for good is wasted fruitlessly.” And the electric current of love generatedby those close-pressed palms flashed to her soul the mission of a life of noble work hand in hand.
Herbert scarcely heard her. The glow of her lovely face, the flashes of feeling that passed over it, the tears that glistened on her eyelashes—these absorbed his senses. Her generalizations were only a vague, exquisite music. He lifted her hand and held it passionately to his lips. She murmured, beseechingly:
“You will never disappoint me, Herbert?”
“My darling!” And he strove to draw her nearer and press his first kiss upon those bewitching lips.
“Oh! there’s a star falling,” she cried, and slipped from his hold, a beautiful Diana, virgin as the white spray and tameless as the night.
She had disappointed Herbert. He was puzzled. But as she disappeared round the cliff in quest of the others, a smile of triumphant content curled round his boyish lips.
“That’s the last touch of piquancy,” he murmured, as he chased her round the crag.
Twodays after Herbert’s engagement, Matthew Strang left Devonshire on the plea of a death in the family.
A letter from Billy had indeed brought the news that Rosina’s father was no more. Matthew had never thought untenderly of old Coble; the mountain of a man had acted generously after his lights, and now that his genial roar had passed into the eternal silence, the pathos of death softened his son-in-law towards his memory and towards the bereaved daughter. Nevertheless, Matthew’s plea was only a pretext. He had no intention of intruding upon Rosina. After her recent reception of him he had no reason to suppose a visit would be welcome. The letter from Billy had included no message from her, except a request, superfluously and irritatingly formal, that she should be allowedto give house-room to her aunt Clara, who had gone to live with old Coble when his daughter married. His reply to Billy contained warmly sympathetic reference to the loss of old Coble, and expressed his joy at the prospect of receiving Miss Coble.
His real reason for fleeing from Devonshire was his discovery of his real feeling towards Mrs. Wyndwood. When the frenzy of the stormy night had merged in the sober reflections of the mild morning, he shuddered to think how near he had gone to forfeiting her respect, to insulting her by the revelation of a dishonorable passion. To continue in her daily society would have been too great a torment, aggravated, as it must have been, by the sight of Herbert’s happiness. Perhaps the rude reminder of his domestic shackles contained in Billy’s letter strengthened his resolve to tear himself away. Courtesy compelled him to leave behind him an invitation to the ladies to take tea one day at his studio, which neither had ever seen. How could he snap abruptly the links he had forged with this delightful twain?
He threw himself with ardor into work, trying to soothe his pain by expressing it in Art, as a woman sheds it away in tears. He toiled at a symbolic picture to illustrate Rossetti’s sonnet, “Love’s Fatality.”
“Love shackled with Vain-longing, hand to hand.”
“Love shackled with Vain-longing, hand to hand.”
“Love shackled with Vain-longing, hand to hand.”
He put the figures in a vague landscape, but did not study his models in the open, for he now had a desire to produce that fatness of effect suggested by a concentrated studio light instead of the dry flatness which the open air always diffused. He no longer pinned himself to technical theories, finding by experience that he only invented them afterwards to justify the procedure his instinct dictated for any particular picture. But his progress with “Love’s Fatality” was slow and unsatisfactory. He was feeling about, as it were, for a new manner worthy of her who inspired it. He wrote her once telling her that it was on the easel, and reminding her and Miss Regan of their promise to visit him on their return from Devonshire, and he had from her an answer—elegantly indited on dainty, crested paper, delicately scented—which he held often to his lips with a rankling, gnawing pain of unsatisfied and unspoken desire.She wrote that she was very anxious to see the picture, and also to be back in town, for she was weary of the country with its monotony, its lack of the complex thrill of civilization. Not that the town held much to enthral her. Fortunately Olive had consented to the Paris project; the girl did not want to marry before next summer, and rather hailed the idea of a farewell quasi-bachelor Bohemian period of art and liberty. What she, Eleanor, would do when she lost Olive Heaven only knew. And then came the wail of world-weariness which his ear had caught already in the first stages of their acquaintanceship. He interpreted it in the light of his own blank unrest, but to imagine her hungering for him as he hungered for her was impossible to his reverent passion. That she admired and liked him he could not doubt; and in one or two instants of mutual electricity he had dared to think that Herbert was right, and that she loved him. But his diffidence could never cherish the hope for more than a few seconds; and even if she indeed loved him, he felt that her delicacy, her finer, more ethereal ethical sense would preserve her from the wistful images that tortured him. It was the memory of her unhappy marriage to which her sadness must be due; no doubt, too, her life lacked love, though she might not be consciously aware of it.
When she at last came to see the picture, he was startled to find her alone, and the bearer of a message of apology from Miss Regan. His studio being, so to speak, a place of business, he was not unused to receive ladies in connection with commissions, but his poor, agonized heart—that had so ached to see her again—pulsed furiously with mad hope as her stately figure, clad in widow-like black that set off her beauty in novel lights, moved slowly about the great studio, admiring pictures which he would have hidden from her in the days when he thought of her more as a spiritual critic than a woman. Now, even though she stood before him making remarks, he was too distraught to catch the purport of her criticisms. He followed her about in a haze, a dream, speaking, replying, and feeling all the while as if it was all part of a game of make-believe, and in a moment the thin pretence would be thrown off and she would be in his arms. But the moments passed, the haze cleared, andhe realized that he was entertaining a fashionable, self-possessed lady, wrapped up in artistic interest, with no apparent relation to the woman who had flushed with the passion of the sea and the winds on that night of stress and storm.
His mind flew back from her bodily presence to picture her leaning against his arm, and the memoried vision seemed incredible. She was unapproachably demure in her black-silk gown. Over the shoulders she wore a short black-velvet cape embroidered in jet, with a beaded fringe, finished off with a filmy black lace reaching just below the waist. When she threw it back, Matt saw the great puff sleeves of her gown and a turned-down collar that combined with them to give an old-world feeling. At her throat was a soft ruche of black chiffon. And from this monotone of black the blond skin of the throat and face rose dazzling, crowned by a small pink bonnet, of shamrock shape, entirely composed of roses, with a lace-and-jet butterfly fluttering over it. Now and then she pointed out something with a long black-gloved forefinger. Her left hand held a dainty little book, that looked—like herself—poetry. How far away she seemed, standing thus at his side! He was in a fever of chills and heats.
She stopped longest before his unfinished picture of “Love’s Fatality.” He heard her approving his conception of
“Love shackled with Vain-longing, hand to hand,”
“Love shackled with Vain-longing, hand to hand,”
“Love shackled with Vain-longing, hand to hand,”
but, even as her ravishing lips spoke golden words of praise, his vain longing to kiss them admonished him how feebly his symbols expressed the heart-sickness he was feeling. The longer he heard the music of her lauding voice, the more those gray eyes kindled below the pink bonnet in adoration of his genius, the more his disgust with the picture grew; and when a chance word of hers reminded him that the subject had already been treated in the last Academy, he determined to destroy his work the moment she was gone, though he had always been aware of the little skied picture which had drawn Miss Regan’s eccentric attention. The last vestiges of his hope of her love died as she discussed “Love’s Fatality,” with apparent unconsciousness that to him, at least, the picture stood for something personal; heraloofness was exacerbating. The heats of his fever died; only the chill was left.
He gave her some tea, and became gradually aware that she was abnormally loquacious and vivacious. He remembered to ask after Miss Regan’s health, and was told that Olive was bright and gay, with only rare reactions of pessimism. Mrs. Wyndwood wondered dolefully again what she would do when Olive was married. His heart, bolder than his lips, beat “Come to me. Come to me.” But she did not seem to catch its appeal, though his eyes spoke, too. In his embarrassment he turned over the pages of the dainty little book she had laid down on the table. He started at finding it a new volume of Harold Lavender’s poems, and when on the fly-leaf he read “To Eleanor” his face twitched noticeably.
“Ah, that was the book Mr. Lavender wrote about in the letter that Primitiva lost,” she said, quickly. “It’s just out to-day.”
“I see he calls you Eleanor,” he observed, tonelessly.
“Yes,” she responded, smiling, “that is a poetic license. Besides, it is a screen. There are so many Eleanors.”
That sounded true to his bitter mood. There were indeed so many Eleanors, all in contradiction. He kept turning over the leaves in silent jealousy.
“Ah, that is a very pretty one you have there,” she said, lightly. “It might suggest a subject to you. Read it aloud, it’s only ten lines.”
Fuming inwardly at the suggestion that the dapper poet of sugar-plums and the hero of the nougat, whom he mentally classed with Roy as an interloper, could afford him any inspiration, and further incensed by the command to read the fellow’s verses, he gabbled through the little poem, which extended over two deckle-edged, rough, creamy pages.
“ROSALIND READING AN OLD ROMANCE
“I watch her dainty rose-bud mouth,That trembles with the exquisiteAnd wondrous tide that steals from itOf song, redolent of the South;While o’er her April countenance,The music of the quaint romance,The sweeter for a sense of pain,Sends sun and shade; and lost in dream,Her sweet eyes softly flash and gleamWith golden smiles and diamond rain.”
“I watch her dainty rose-bud mouth,That trembles with the exquisiteAnd wondrous tide that steals from itOf song, redolent of the South;While o’er her April countenance,The music of the quaint romance,The sweeter for a sense of pain,Sends sun and shade; and lost in dream,Her sweet eyes softly flash and gleamWith golden smiles and diamond rain.”
“I watch her dainty rose-bud mouth,That trembles with the exquisiteAnd wondrous tide that steals from itOf song, redolent of the South;While o’er her April countenance,The music of the quaint romance,The sweeter for a sense of pain,Sends sun and shade; and lost in dream,Her sweet eyes softly flash and gleamWith golden smiles and diamond rain.”
“I hope she read it better than that,” laughed Mrs. Wyndwood, mirthfully.
“Well, she couldn’t make the fourth line scan anyhow,” he said.
“Oh, you mean ‘redolent.’ That’s another poetic license.”
“And Rosalind seems to be another,” he said, surlily.
“Oh no, I’m not Rosalind. I haven’t a dainty rose-bud mouth. Mine is a full-grown rose at least.” And her laugh showed the white teeth gleaming against the red lips.
Her arch laughing face so close to his across the little tea-table tantalized him intolerably.
“It is a red, red rose,” he whispered, hoarsely, half rising and bending over as if to survey it.
“Beware of the thorn!” she laughed, nervously, drawing back involuntarily. “And to think that but for the coast-guard who found Primitiva’s letter,” she rattled on hastily, “some other fair lady would have had the honor of the dedication.”
“One of the other Eleanors, perhaps,” he said, sulkily, sinking back into his chair.
“Poor Primitiva!” she cried, in unabated hilariousness and intensified volubility. “Oh, she’s been such fun. You know Olive has brought her to London. She begged her away from her father, to the excessive joy of Primitiva, who has become her devoted slave. The other night Olive took her to the theatre with us and would have her in the box. She had been wrought up to a wild excitement, and when she got inside the theatre and looked round at the festive company she drew a deep breath of rapture. She said she liked it very much. Long before the orchestra struck up, Olive discovered that Primitiva imagined she was already in complete enjoyment of the play, and that to sit in the theatre was all in all. Only one thing marred Primitiva’s pleasure. She was looking round furtivelyfor your cousin, and at last asked where Mr. Herbert sat; not, it transpired, because of his position as Olive’sfiancé, but because she had heard us talk of Herbert as writing a play, and imagined he was an inseparable adjunct of the theatre. Of course, she doesn’t know even now that there are more theatres than one. When the overture struck up she was surprised and delighted by this unexpected addition to the pleasures of the evening. The rising of the curtain was the climax of her astonishment and her transport. The action of the piece—a melodrama, purposely chosen for her behoof by our sportive friend, experimenting upon her freshness—seized her from the start, and kept her riveted. The fall of the first curtain, and the arrest of the innocent man for the murder, left her weeping bitterly. ‘It isn’t real, you little goose!’ Olive said, to pacify her. ‘Isn’t it?’ Primitiva replied, opening her brimming trustful eyes to their widest. She gave a little sobbing laugh. ‘And I thought they was all alive!’ Then she rose to go, and was astonished to hear that there was more. Alas! it would have been better had she gone. When the hero’s wife, visiting the hero in prison, kissed him, Primitiva inquired if the actor and actress were really married, and learning that they were not, was too disgusted to sympathize any further with their misfortunes. It revolted her,” concluded Mrs. Wyndwood, taking up her teacup with an air of preparing for the resumption of sips, “that a man who was not a woman’s husband should kiss her.” And her face gleamed more tantalizing than ever under the roses of her bonnet.
His fingers dented the teaspoon they fidgeted with; it seemed intolerable that his life should be spoiled by acceptance of the moral stand-point of this simple creature. He with his artistic agonies and his complex sorrows and his high imaginings to be squeezed into the same moral moulds as Primitiva! He refused to see the humor of her. The girl had no more interest for him than that irritating Roy. It was maddening to have Eleanor sitting there in cold blood, the Honorable Mrs. Wyndwood, an irreproachable widow in black, talking abstractly of kisses. Then the tense string of expectation snapped; the apathy that he felt in the presence of Rosina invaded him—he stirred histea listlessly, awaiting the moment of her departure. As she talked on, loquacious to the end, prattling of Erle-Smith and Beethoven, and Swinburne, his apathy quickened into impatience; he longed for her to be gone. His hidden fingers played a tattoo on the side of his chair. She bade him good-bye at last; she would not see him again for many months, unless he came to Paris.
“I always run over to do the Salon,” he answered, indifferently.
When he had seen her, stately and stiff, to her carriage, and his studio-door had shut him in again, he ripped up the canvas with his old sailor’s knife in a paroxysm of fury. His eye caught the silver regatta cup standing proudly upon the piano. He felt like dashing it down; then it occurred to him how fine and bitter a revenge it would be upon her and humanity at large to fill it with poison and drain it to the dregs. But he only threw himself upon a couch in a passion of sobs, such as had not shaken him since childhood. The great picturesque room, which the autumn twilight had draped in dusk, was ineffably dreary without her; his heart seemed full of dust, and tears were a blessed relief in the drought. They probably saved him from ending his empty life there and then.
He rallied, and began other pictures, but he could do nothing with them. He refused commissions for portraits, hating the imposition of subject, and fearful of exposing his restlessness to a stranger’s gaze. The return of the world to town renewed social solicitations, but he felt he was wearing his heart on his sleeve, and declined to parade it through drawing-rooms. Despite this gain of time, the weeks passed without any definite product. He was searching, but he could not find. One day he would sit down and fix in charcoal some rough suggestions for a greater symbolic picture than that which he had destroyed; but the next day he would be working up his recollections of Devonshire night-scenery, trying by a series of tentative touches on a toned canvas to evolve the romantic mystery of those illumined villages niched in the cliffs, or of the moon making a lovely rippling path across the dark lonely sea, as Eleanor had made across his life; while a day or so after he would discardthese thinly painted shadowy night-pieces, and, painting straight from the shoulder, “impasto” his canvas with brutal blobs of paint that at a distance merged into the living flow of red sunlit water.
And always this rankling, gnawing pain of unsatisfied and unspoken desire. No man could work with that at his breast. And her rare letters did not allay it, though they spoke no word of love, but were full of enthusiasm for the free student life in Paris, the gloriouscamaraderie, the fun of dining occasionally for a few centimes in tinycrémeries, and going to the People’s Theatre off the Boulevard Montparnasse, where they gave a bonus ofcerises à l’eau de viebetween the pieces. Oh, if she had only been younger, less staled by life! If she could only begin over again. If she only had the energy of Olive, who started work at the Academy at the preternatural hour of eightA.M.But she had lost the faculty of beginnings, she feared, and she made but poor progress in sculpture. That was the undercurrent of these gay letters, the characteristic note of despondency.
Rosina held out no hand of reconciliation. His only contact with her was through Billy, who paid him one visit to escort “Aunt Clara” over the studio. His wife had, it transpired, held forth so copiously and continuously upon its glories that the poor creature had plucked up courage to ask to see it, and Rosina, who had evidently concealed the breach with her famous husband, had besought Billy to convoy her. And so one day these two routed out the sick lion from the recesses of his den.
The appearance of Miss Clara Coble was as much a shock as a surprise to Matthew Strang. In the nine years or so since she had assisted at his wedding—an unimportant but not disagreeable personage, tall and full-blooded as her brother, she had decayed lamentably. She was now an ungainly old maid, stooping and hollow-eyed, with crows’ feet and sharpened features. She had a nervous twitch of the eyelids, her head drooped oddly, and her conversation was at times inconsecutive to the verge of fatuity. From the day of her birth to the day of his death Coble had thought of her as his little sister, and he never realizedthe tragedy of her spinsterhood, of her starved nature, though under his very eye she had peaked and pined in body and soul.
But it leaped to the painter’s eye at the first sight of her, and her image remained in his brain, infinitely pathetic.
The ugliness that in earlier days would have averted his eyes in artistic disgust, drew him now in human pity. He grew tenderer to Rosina at the thought that she was harboring this wreck of femininity. It rejoiced him to think how much “Aunt Clara” was enjoying this visit to his grandeurs; he listened with pleased tolerance to her artless babble—in her best days she had always had something of her brother’s big simplicity—as she told tale after tale out of school, repeating the colossal things her poor brother had said about his son-in-law’s genius and wealth, recounting how Coble had thus become the indirect hero of the Temperance Bar, and unconsciously revealing—what was more surprising to the painter—the pride with which Rosina had always written home (and still spoke to her aunt) about her husband and his fashionable friends and successes. And poor Miss Coble expanded in the atmosphere of the great man, which she had never hoped to breathe. Her cadaverous cheek took a flush, she held her head straighter on her shoulders. He felt that, after all, it was worth while being famous if he could give such pleasure to simple souls by his mere proximity. The fame he had sold his body and soul for was a joyless possession; happy for him if it could yet give joy to others.
Billy told him that Ruth Hailey was in Paris at the Hotel Windsor with Mrs. Verder, preparatory to the long Antipodean tour, and suggested that he might call upon her when he went over to see the Salon if she was still there. Matthew wrote down the address, but said he didn’t think he should go over that year. Billy looked disappointed; he had been about to suggest accompanying his brother. Life at Camden Town, he intimated fretfully, had resumed its dead-alive routine, and he glanced towards Miss Coble as if to imply that her advent had not brightened the domestic table.
When the visitors left, Matthew put them into a cab and drove with them a little way to purchase presents for the children.There was a doll for Clara and a box of animals for Davie. To Rosina he did not venture to send even a message. At a word from her he would have gone to her, but he had no stomach to cope with her tantrums.
This new reminder of home left him more depressed than before. It was impossible to concentrate himself upon his work, even in the presence of models. They were an unprofitable expense, and he dismissed them and brooded over the ruins of his life. Without Eleanor Art was impossible, he felt. True Art he could not produce without her inspiration, and false Art was falseness to her and a vile slavery.
Insomnia dogged his nights, and when he slept it was but to suffer under harassing dreams fantastically compounded of his early struggles. These dreams never touched his later life; many of them dealt oppressively with the bird-shop, and he had often to clean endless shades with chamois leather, smashing one after the other under the rebuking but agonizingly unintelligible “Pop! Pop! Pop!” of “Ole Hey,” though he felt sure Tommy, the young Micmac errand-boy, had cracked them beforehand. And what added to the sleeper’s agony was that these breakages would have to be made good to the Deacon from his scanty wage, or, worse, he would be discharged and unable to send the monthly subsidy to Cobequid Village. The anguish and anxiety were quite as harassing as though the troubles were real.
He made one desperate excursion into Society—it was the delightful dinner-party of a gifted fellow-artist whose cultured and beautiful wife had always seemed to him the ideal hostess. And a pretty and guileless girl, full of enthusiasm for Art and Nature and the life that was opening out before her, fell to his escorting arm; she was visibly overpowered by her luck and charmingly deferential; at first his responsive smile was bitter, but his mood lightened under her engaging freshness and the champagne he imbibed recklessly.
But the next morning’s reaction, aggravated by the headache of indigestion, plunged him into more tenebrous glooms. But for the unkindly fates he might have sat with such a wife, host and hostess of such a gathering. He pictured Eleanor receivinghis guests, and in his factitious happiness he gathered the poor and the despised to his hearth. The images of suicide resurged. He saw it on the bills:—“Suicide of a Popular Painter.” Why not? The position was hopeless; were it not best to throw it up? How the world would stare! No one would understand the reason. Rosina would still remain unknown, irrelevant to the situation. And his eyes filled with tears, in the bitter luxury of woe.
But he did not commit suicide, and all that the world, or that minute portion of it which talks Art, wondered at, was why Matthew Strang was unrepresented when the Academy opened in May. It leaked out that he had been ill, and there were sympathetic paragraphs which were not altogether misinformed, for these sleepless or dream-tortured nights had brought on nervous prostration and acute headaches. That ancient blood-poisoning, too, had left its traces in his system, and when he was worried and overwrought his body had to pay again the penalty of unforgiven physical error.
Again, as in those far-off days, he thought of a sea-voyage to his native village; it dwindled down to crossing the Channel. As the opening of the Salon drew nearer and nearer, he felt more and more strongly that he must not miss the Exhibition. It was part of a painter’s education. There was no need to see Eleanor Wyndwood; by remaining on the fashionable side of the river the chances were he would not even come across her casually in the few days of his stay. No, there was nothing to apprehend. And besides, it began to be increasingly borne in upon him that it was his duty to look up Ruth Hailey; she had called upon him at Camden Town, and etiquette demanded that he should return the call. What had she and Rosina talked about? he wondered dully. If he did not go soon, she might be off to Australia, and the opportunity of seeing his ancient playmate would probably recur nevermore.
And so a bright May morning saw him arrive in the capital of Art, breakfast hastily at the Grand Hotel, and—drive straight to the Latin Quarter. Other climes, other thoughts, and the gayety of the Boulevards, with their green trees and many-colored kiosks, had begun to steal into his spirit, and his gloomyapprehension of danger to dissipate in the crisp sunny air. Why should he not see Eleanor Wyndwood?
And then he discovered that he did not know her address, that she wrote from the English Ladies’ Art Club; he hunted out the place, but the concierge told him she was not there, and gave him the address of the Academy most of the ladies attended, but this was the hour ofdéjeuner, and monsieur would probably not find them there till the afternoon. He grew downcast again, and, dismissing the cab, he sauntered on foot towards the Academy, trying to kill time. He dropped into a tiny restaurant close by to get a cup of coffee; it was decorated by studies from the nude, evidently accepted in payment for dinners; and the ceiling had a central decoration that reminded him of his own crude workmanship in the sitting-room of that hotel in New Brunswick. He sat down at a little table facing the only lady customer, a dashing Frenchwoman, the warm coloring of whose handsome model’s face showed between a great black-plumed hat and a light-blue bow, and who paused between her spoonfuls of apple-stew to chant joyously, “Coucou, coucou, fal la, la, la, la.” A decadent poet with a leonine name sipped absinthe, a spectacled Dane held forth intermittently on the bad faith of England towards Denmark at the commencement of the century, a Scotch painter discoursed on fly-fishing, and exhibited a box of trout-flies, and one or another paused from time to time to hum, “Coucou, coucou, fal la, la, la, la,” in sympathy with the gay refrain. Hens fluttered and clucked about the two sunlit tables, and a goat wandered around, willing to eat.
Matthew Strang fed the hens and was taken by the humors of the quarter, into which he had scarcely penetrated before, knowing mainly the other side of the water. Perceiving him looking at her pictures, the stout smiling proprietress, whose homely face, minus her characteristic smile, flared in paint on a wall, protruding from a scarlet-striped bodice, asked him in very loud tones if he would like to see her collection, and straightway haled him up-stairs to her salon, which was hung thickly with meritorious pictures, upon whose beauties she held a running comment, astonishing Matthew by the intelligence ofher criticisms. “This represents a hawthorn, monsieur, which blossoms in the spring. This was done by a Dane who is dead. The King of Denmark offered him a commission, but he would not work for him, because he was a revolutionary—in painting only, you understand, an Impressionist. That is a copy of the one in the Luxembourg. I paid two hundred francs to have it made, because I love the original so. Oh yes, it is a very good copy. My landlord offered me four hundred for it, but I prefer to live in a little apartment, surrounded by my pictures. As you say, I am an amateur of pictures. There are more here in my bedroom,” and she ushered him in, apologizing for the bed not being made. Then she told him her history. She was a widow with an only son, who wasbeau garçon. Ah, she was beautiful herself when she had twenty years. Her son was to be an artist. Matthew Strang feelingly hoped the boy would become a great artist; inwardly he wondered wistfully why he himself had not been blessed with an art-loving mother. And then in a curious flash of retrospective insight he recognized for the first time the essential artistic elements in his mother’s character, stifled by a narrow creed—her craving for the life of gay cities, her Pagan anger at Abner Preep’s bow-legs! What a pity she had not been born in this freer artistic atmosphere, which indeed her ancestors must have breathed, though their blood had been crossed with German and Scotch, as if to produce his own contradictory temperament. In London, he thought, artistic connoisseurship was the last thing one would look for in small shopkeepers. In a softer mood he repaired to the Academy, which was entered through a pair of large folding doors that gave upon a stone corridor. He passed through this passage and came out under a sloping porch, with broken trellis-work at one side and an untidy tree. At the top of a flight of stone steps that descended thence, he was stopped by a block of young American fellows in soft felt hats, who motioned him to stand still, and, to his astonishment and somewhat melancholy amusement, he found himself part of a group about to be photographed by a pretty young lady student in the sunny, dusty court-yard below.
The group she had posed stretched all down the steps, andconsisted mainly of models—male and female. There were Italian women, dusky and smiling, some bareheaded, some hooded, and a few pressing infants—literal olive-branches—to their bosoms. There was an Italian girl of fourteen with a mustache, who was a flare of color in her green velvet apron and gorgeous trailing head-dress. There were Frenchwomen with coquettish straw hats, and a child in a Tam o’ Shanter; there was a Corsican in a slouch-hat, with coal-black hair and a velvet jacket to match, and a little Spanish boy in a white hat. Thrown in as by way of artistic contrast with all this efflorescence of youth was a doddering, pathetic old man with a spreading gray beard and flowing gray locks; and there were young lady students of divers nationalities—Polish, Greek, Dutch, and American—curiously interspersed in the motley group which stretched right down the stone steps between the stone balustrades that terminated in stone urns spouting disorderly twigs. Behind the pretty photographer were the terra-cotta walls of the sculpture atelier, which, high beyond her head, were replaced by long, green-glazed windows, into which a pink lilac-bush, tiptoeing, tried to peep; around her were stools, dumb-bells, damaged busts, a headless terra-cotta angel with gaping trunk and iron stump, nursing a squash-faced cherub, and dismantled packing-cases swarming with sportive black kittens; and facing her a great blackened stone head of Medusa stared from a red-brick pedestal, awful with spiders’ webs across the mouth and athwart the hollow orbits and in the snaky hair covered with green moss; and towering over her head and dominating the court-yard stood a colossal classical statue, tarnished and mutilated, representing a huge helmeted hero, broken-nosed and bleared, sustaining a heroine, as armless but not so beautiful as the Venus de Milo, doing a backward fall. But the sun shone on the dusty litter and the mess and the lumber, and the lilac-bush blossomed beautifully, and over all was the joy of youth and Art and the gayety of the spring. Matthew Strang felt an ancient thrill pass through his sluggish veins. To be young and to paint—what happiness! His eyes moistened in sympathy with the scene. The models were redolent of Art—the very children breathed Art, the babes sucked it in. Artwas a republic, and everybody was equal in it—the doughtiest professor and the meanest model, the richest amateur and the penurious youth starving himself to be there. There was nothing in the world but Art—it was the essence of existence. There were people who lived for other things, but they did not count. Oh, the free brave life! He was glad to be photographed as part and parcel of all this fresh aspiration; it revivified him; he had a superstitious sense that it was symbolic.
The group scattered, dismissed by the “Merci” of the pretty photographer; and Matthew, descending the steps, asked her if Mrs. Wyndwood worked in her atelier. She did not know, but she guessed from his description it must be the aristocratic-looking lady who had dropped in once or twice in Miss Regan’s company. Miss Regan came regularly every morning at eight o’clock, but not at all in the afternoon, when she worked at home. Miss Regan’s own studio was in an Impasse about ten minutes away; probably her friend lived with her. Heartily thanking his informant, he betook himself thither. He found the Impasse in a prosaic, grimy street, amid which the charming, if battered bass-relief of Venus with Cupids over its entrance, struck an unexpected note of poetry, which was intensified by the little Ionic portico with classic bronze figures between its pillars that faced him as he passed through the corridor. Leafy trees and trellised plants added rusticity to the poetry of the sunny, silent, deserted court-yard, so curiously sequestered amid the surrounding squalor. The windows of many studios gave upon it, and the backs of canvases showed from the glass annexes forplein airstudy. But as he passed under the pretty, natural porch of embowering foliage that led to the door of the studio he sought, his heart beat as nervously at the thought of again facing the Hon. Mrs. Wyndwood as when, in his young days, he had first saluted the magnificent uncle whose name he bore. He had an inward shrinking: was it wise to expose himself to the perturbation of another interview with this cold, stately creature, the image of whom, passing graciously to her carriage, was still vivid to him? But he could not go back now. He knocked at the door.
Eleanor opened the door—a radiant, adorable apparition in abig white clay-smeared blouse with a huge serviceable pocket. He had never imagined her thus; he was as taken aback by her appearance as she by his presence. He stared at her in silence, as she stood there under the overarching greenery, with gold flecks of sunlight on her hair. But both recovered themselves in a moment; the sight of her in this homely artistic costume knocked her off the pedestal of fashion and propriety on which his mental vision had posed her; she became part of that brave young democracy of Art he had just left; and there was a charmingcamaraderiein the gay laugh with which, withdrawing her long white hands beyond reach of his proffered glove, and exhibiting them piquantly clay-covered, she cried, “Can’t shake.”
The seriousness of the imagined meeting vanished in a twinkling. He looked at her dancing eyes, the sweet, red mouth smiling with a gleam of lustrous teeth: he had an audacious inspiration.
“Well, then there’s nothing for it but—” he said, smiling back, and finished the sentence by kissing her. Instantly her eyelids drooped, half-closing; her lips responded passionately to his.
They were withdrawn in a moment before he could realize what he had done, or the wonderful transformation in their relations.
“In the open air!” she cried, horrified, and ran within. He followed her, closing the door; his heart beat tumultuously now. Nothing could undo that moment. A wilderness of talk could not have advanced matters so far.
Through the tall glass roof of the airy studio the sun streamed in rays of dusty gold, dappling the imaginative clay models in their wet wrappings, the busts, fountains, serpents, rock-work, witches, that variegated the shelves, and lent an air of fantasy and poetry, extruding the tedious commonplace of plebeian existence, and harmonizing with the joyous aloofness of the scene in the court-yard its sense of existence in and for itself, by souls attuned to Art and dedicate to loveliness.
Mrs. Wyndwood stood, saucily beautiful, leaning against a shelf, with one hand in the pocket of her blouse, and rubbingthe clay of the other against the sides of what looked like a tin baking-dish filled with plaster-pie. How harmonious was that tilt to her nose! He had never noticed before how delightfully it turned up. She smiled roguishly.
“Imprudent creature! Suppose Olive had been in!”
The great moment was taken in a livelier key than he had ever dreamed.
“Butyouwere out,” he said, trying to respond to her lightness, though he trembled in every limb. He made a movement towards her. She shrank back against the shelf.
“Don’t!” she cried, gayly, “you’ll spoil your gloves.”
He dabbled them magnificently in a heap of plaster of Paris and advanced nearer.
“Now you’ll spoil my blouse,” she cried, moving hastily away to dip her hands in a bowl of water.
He tore off the gloves and threw them on the floor.
“Is that a challenge?” she laughed, drying her hands, but the laughter died in a gurgle. He had stopped her breath. She did not struggle, but lay in his arms silent like a tired, lovely child—at rest, at last, her happy face pressed to his. “Oh, my dear,” she murmured, cooingly. “And all those months you never kissed me once!”
“I did not dare,” he answered, with a pang of remorse. “You gave me no hint that you—that you cared for me.”
A beautiful blush blossomed and faded on her face. “But you should have understood. I needed the touch.” And her face nestled closer against his.
Even now it seemed dream-like that this marvellous happiness should be his; that this fastidious complex creature of fashionable London whom he had dared to love should be pillowing her perfumed head on the shoulder of the man who in his laborious and wretched youth had wheeled a bird-stuffer’s barrow through Whitechapel. His life lay behind him like a steep, arduous hill rising to this celestial cloudland.
“If I had only known,” he said, brokenly. “Oh, how I loved you that night of the storm!”
“And how I adored you,” she confessed deliciously. “You were so brave, so manly that day. You saved Olive’s life, yousaved her for me and for Herbert. Oh, how noble! We none of us thanked you, it was all laughter and badinage, but you were my hero, my true, great, strong, simple man.”
And her lips sought his humbly, her eyes swimming in tears.
“Let me kiss you now for your brave deed. Ah, how I was afraid when Herbert, looking through his glass, cried out that something had happened to Olive, that you had swum back for her. I felt my life growing dark. Suppose I had lost you both.”
And her mobile face grew tragic at the thought. He held her tighter.
“Eleanor! It is so good to be with you!” he articulated in a hoarse whisper that was half a sob.
Her tragic features lightened to a winsome, reproachful smile.
“And when I came to your studio, Matthew, you gave me ... tea!”
“If I had only known, if I had only dared!”
“You must dare with a woman.”
Her arms had been resting on his shoulders—she threw them around his neck.
“Oh, my Master—now and ever.”
Conscience slipped into paradise. He unwound her arms.
“You forget my—secret.”
She moved her chin bewitchingly upward.
“You have sealed my lips.”
He kissed them again. “And you can love me despite that? I am not worthy of such a sacrifice.”
Her bosom heaved beneath the blouse, her eyes kindled with the old spiritual fire, her voice rang passionately.
“Youareworthy! Life has been too cruel to you—you need a woman’s heart to cherish you, you shall not be starved of the sunshine, you shall work in happiness. Ah! that is what I have learned here in this happy, liberal air. Art is the child of joyful labor—it is the sunshine of life. You are sad, miserable, and it harrows my heart. Oh, if I can bring joy and peace to the soul of a man like you, if I can indeed inspire your Art, my wretched life will not have been wasted. You have told me that I could, tell it me again.”
“You, and you only, can bring me joy and peace.”
She caressed his hair with a tender, protective hand. “My Matthew!” she murmured.
“And you, Eleanor,” he faltered, tremulously; “I shall not make you unhappy?”
“I shall be happier than I have ever been,” and her arms stole round him again in simple trust.
“Ah, I was forgetting. Life owesyouhappiness, too. If I dared to think I could bring you forgetfulness of the past!”
She shuddered. Her arms unlaced themselves of their own accord. She dropped into a chair before the table and laid them across the moulding-dish, and buried her head in her hands. He stood by helpless, torn by emotions, waiting till the flood of bitter memories should have spent itself, watching her shoulders quivering, and the sunlight lying on her hair like a consecration.
“Oh, Douglas!” she was moaning. “Did I do you wrong? Did I do you wrong? But I meant the best; I always meant the best, God knows. And you cannot chide me now you are dead and cold, and it is all so long ago.”
He shivered nervously. Truly women were incomprehensible, he thought. No man could follow the leaps and turns of their emotions. They were a higher, more ethereal order of being. But he reverenced her for her loyalty to the unworthy dead, her punctilious self-torture, even while he envied the man who had been privileged to call her “wife.”
He touched her hair reverently—there where the sunshine rested.
“Don’t cry, dear Eleanor.”
A great burst of sobbing shook her. “Oh, life is so difficult!” He bent down beside her, ineffably pitiful.
“We are going to make it easier for one another,” he said, gently. His hair touched hers. She turned her tear-flecked face, and their lips met. “We are going to begin over again,” he murmured. She stifled her sobs like a soothed child, and sprang up with a smile struggling through rain-clouds.
“Yes, with you I can begin over again, Master,” and she looked into his face with her naïve, beseeching trustfulness.
“This is a new life already,” he said, touching her blouse. She gave a laugh of childish joy.
“Yes! yes! This is a new life—the past is dead—this is my neophyte’s robe. Ah, it changes one, this Paris, does it not? I am an artist, and you are my Master. It is you who have awakened me to Art! Oh, I knew this would happen. That wonderful old woman! She’s a fortune-teller in Bethnal Green—the Duchess of Portsdown gave me her address—and after you were so cold to me when I came to your studio in London, I went to see her. Such a queer, wrinkled hag, and such a dingy, wretched room, up such a dirty flight of stairs—oh, I was afraid! But she was marvellous! She knew I was a widow—that I had been married unhappily—that I was a fashionable lady—though I went in my oldest clothes, and hid my rings in my purse for fear of their being stolen. Oh! by-the-way, where have I put them?” He found them and she slipped them on. “And she said I should love again and be loved. You should have seen her wicked old eyes as she spoke of love—they were like live coals. And then she predicted that I should marry again and lead a long and happy life with a dark man, distinguished and rich, who should inspire me to a new faith. Isn’t it marvellous?” She took his hand and smoothed the wrist caressingly.