FAME and fortune were coming at last. There was no doubt of it in Jimmie's optimistic mind. For years they had lagged with desperately heavy feet, but now they were in sight, slowly approaching, hand in hand. Jimmie made fantastic preparations to welcome them, and wore his most radiant smile. In vain did Aline, with her practical young woman's view of things, point to the exiguity of the price fixed by Her Serene Highness. If that was the advent of fortune, she came in very humble guise, the girl insinuated. Jimmie, with a magnificent sweep of the hand, dismissed such contemptible considerations as present pounds, shillings, and pence. He was going to paint the portrait of the sister of a reigning monarch. Did not Aline see that this might lead to his painting the portrait of the reigning monarch himself? Would not the counterfeit presentment of one crowned head attract the attention of other crowned heads to the successful artist? Did she not see him then appointed painter in ordinary to all the emperors, kings, queens, princes, and princesses of Europe? He would star the Continent, make a royal progress from court to court, disputed for by potentates and flattered by mighty sovereigns. He grew dithyrambic, a condition in which Aline regarded him as hopelessly impervious to reason. His portraits, he said, would adorn halls of state, and the dreams that he put on canvas, hitherto disregarded by a blind world, would find places of honour in the Treasure Houses of the Nations. It would be fame for him and fortune for Aline. She should go attired in silk and shod with gold. She should have a stall at the theatre whenever she wanted, and a carriage and pair to fetch her home. She should eat vanilla ices every night. And then she might marry a prince and live happy ever after.
“I don't want to marry a prince or any one else, dear,” Aline said once, bringing visions down into the light of common day. “I just want to go on staying with you.”
On another occasion she hinted at his possible espousal of a princess. Again Jimmie dropped from the empyrean, and rubbed his head ruefully. There was only one princess in the world for him, an enthroned personage of radiant beauty who now and then took warm pity on him and admitted him to her friendship, but of whom it were disloyalty worse than all folly to think of. And yet he could not help his heart leaping at the sight of her, or the thrill quivering through him when he saw the rare softness come into her eyes which he and none other had evoked. What he had to give her he could give to no other woman, no other princess. The gift was unoffered: it remained in his own keeping, but consecrated to the divinity. He enshrined it, as many another poor chivalrous wretch has done, in an exquisite sanctuary, making it the symbol of a vague sweet religion whose secret observances brought consolation. But of all this, not a whisper, not a sign to Aline. When she spoke of marriageable princesses, he explained the rueful rubbing of his head by reference to his unattractive old fogeydom, and his unfitness for the life of high society.
But Aline ought to have her prince. The coming fortune would help to give the girl what was due to her. For himself he cared nothing. Cold mutton and heel of cheese would satisfy him to the end of his days. And fame? In quieter moments he shrugged his shoulders. An artist has a message to deliver to his generation, and how can he deliver it if he cannot sell his pictures? Let him give out to the world what was best in him, and he would be content. Let him but be able to say, “I have delivered my message,” and that would be fame enough.
These were things of the depths. The surface of his mood was exuberant, almost childish, delight, tempered with whimsical diffidence in his power of comporting himself correctly towards such high personages. For the duchess, who never did things by halves, and was also determined, as she had said, of not buying a pig in a poke, had conveyed to him the intimation that Her Serene Highness the Princess of Herren-Rothbeck would honour him with a visit to his studio on the following Thursday. Jimmie and Aline held long counsel together. What was the proper way to receive a Serene Highness? Jimmie had a vague idea of an awning outside the door and a strip of red baize down the steps and across the pavement. Tony Merewether, who was called into consultation, suggested, with the flippancy of youth, a brass band and a chorus of maidens to strew flowers; whereat Aline turned her back upon him, and Jimmie, adding pages in fancy dress to hold up the serene train and a major-domo in a court suit with a wand, encouraged the offender. Aline retired from so futile a discussion and went on sewing in dignified silence. At last she condescended to throw out a suggestion.
“If I were you, Jimmie, I should get the princess some portraits to look at.”
“God bless my soul,” cried Jimmie, putting down his pipe, “I never thought of it. Tony, my boy, that child with the innocence of the dove combines the wisdom of the original serpent. My brain reels to think what I should be without her. We'll telegraph to all the people that have sat to me and ask them to send in their portraits by Thursday.”
He crossed the studio and began to rummage among the litter on the long table. Aline asked him what he was looking for.
“Telegram forms. Why have n't we got any? Tony, run round the corner to the post-office, like a good boy, and get some.”
But Aline checked the execution of this maniacal project. Three portraits would be quite sufficient. Jimmie would have to pick out three ladies of whom he could best ask such a favour, and write them polite little notes and offer to send a van in the orthodox way to collect the pictures. Jimmie bowed before such sagacity, and wrote the letters.
In the course of the week the portraits arrived, and the studio for a whole day became the undisputed kingdom of Aline and a charwoman. The long untidy table, so dear to Jimmie, was ruthlessly cleared and set in dismaying order. The frame-maker was summoned, and the unsold pictures that had long slumbered sadly on the ground with their faces to the wall, were dusted and hung in advantageous lights. The square of Persian carpet, which Jimmie during an unprotected walk through Regent Street had once bought for Aline's bedroom, was brought down and spread on the bare boards of the model-platform. A few cushions were scattered about the rusty drawing-room suite, and various odds and ends of artists' properties, bits of drapery, screens, old weapons, were brought to light and used for purposes of decoration. So that when Jimmie, who had been banished the house for the day, returned in the evening, he found a flushed and exhausted damsel awaiting him in a transfigured studio.
“My dear little girl,” he said, touched, “my dear little girl, it's beautiful, it's magical. But you have tired yourself to death. Why did n't you let me do all this?”
“You would never have done it yourself, Jimmie. You know you wouldn't,” said Aline. “You would have gone on talking nonsense about red baize strips and flower-girls and pages—anything to make those about you laugh and be happy—and you would never have thought of showing off what you have to its full advantage.”
“I should never have dreamed of robbing your poor little room of its carpet, dear,” he said.
They went upstairs for their simple evening meal, and returned as usual to the beloved studio. Aline filled Jimmie's pipe.
“Do you think I dare smoke in all this magnificence?”
She laughed and struck a match.
“You did not realise what a lot of beautiful pictures you had, did you?”
“They make a brave show,” he said, looking round. “After all, I'm not entirely sorry they have never been sold. I should not like to part with them. No, I did not realise how many there were.” In spite of his cheeriness the last words sounded a note of pathos that caught the girl's sensitive ear.
“'Let us make a tour of inspection,” she said. They went the round, pausing long before each picture. He said little, contrary to his habit, for he was wont to descant on his work with playful magniloquence. He saw the years unfold behind him and disclose the hopes of long ago yet unfulfilled. What endless months of dreams and thrills and passionate toil hung profitless upon these walls! Things there were, wrought from the depths of his radiant faith in man, plucked from the heart of his suffering, consecrated by the purest visions of his soul. Had Aline been an older woman, a woman who had loved him, lived with him in a wife's intimate communion, instead of being merely the tender-hearted child of his adoption, she would have wept her heart out. For she, alone of mortals, would have got behind such imperfections as there were, and would have seen nothing but a crucifixion of the quivering things torn out of the life of the beloved man. Only vaguely, elusively did the girl feel this. But even her half-comprehending sympathy was of great comfort. She thought no one in the world could paint like Jimmie, and held in angry contempt a public that could pass him by. She was hotly his advocate, furious at his rejection by hanging committees, miserably disappointed when his pictures came back from exhibitions unsold, or when negotiations with dealers for rights of reproduction fell through. But she was too young to pierce to the heart of the tragedy; and Jimmie was too brave and laughter-loving to show his pain. Other forces, too, had been at work in her development. Recently her mind had been grappling with the problem of her unpayable debt to him. This silent pilgrimage round the years brought her thoughts instinctively to herself and the monstrous burden she had been.
“I have been wondering lately, Jimmie dear,” she said at last, “whether you would not have been more successful if you had not had all the worry and expense and responsibility of me.”
“Good Lord!” he cried in simple amazement, “whatever are you talking of?”
She repeated her apologia, though in less coherent terms. She felt foolish, as a girl does when a carefully prepared expression of feeling falls upon ears which, though inexpressibly dear, are nevertheless not quite comprehending.
“You have had to do pot-boilers,” she said, falling into miserable bathos, “and I remember the five-shillings-a-dozen landscapes—and you would have spent all that time on your real work—Oh, don't you see what I mean, Jimmie?”
She looked up at him pathetically—she was a slight slip of a girl, and he was above the medium height. He smiled and took her fresh young face between his hands.
“My dear,” he said, “you're the only successful piece of work I've ever turned out in my life. Please allow me to have some artistic satisfaction—and you have been worth a gold-mine to me.”
Thus each was comforted. Jimmie settled down to his pipe and a book, Aline sat over her sewing—the articles to which she devoted her perennial industry were a never solved mystery to him—and they spent a pleasant evening. The inevitable topic naturally arose in conversation. They discussed the princess's visit, the great question—how was she to be received?
“The best thing you can do,” said the practical Aline, “is to go to Mrs. Deering to-morrow and get properly coached.”
Jimmie looked at her in admiration.
“You are worth your weight in diamonds,” he said. “I will.”
He carried out his project, and not only did he have the pleasure of finding Connie at home undisturbed by strange tea-drinking women, but Norma Hardacre came in soon after his arrival. The two ladies formed themselves into a committee of advice, and sent Jimmie home with most definite notions regarding the correct method of receiving Serene Highnesses. He also brought Aline the news that the committee would honour him with a visit the following morning, accompanied by Mrs. Hardacre, who had been pleased to express a desire to see his pictures.
The appointed hour came, and with it the ladies. Mrs. Hardacre's lips smiled sweetly at the man who was to be taken up by a duchess and to paint the portrait of a princess. She declared herself delighted with the studio and professed admiration for the pictures.
“Are they all really your own, Mr. Padgate?” she asked, turning towards him, her tortoise-shell lorgnon held sceptre-wise.
“I'm afraid so,” answered Jimmie, with a smile. “Sometimes I wish they were not so much my own.”
“But I should feel quite proud of them, if I were you,” said the lady, desirous to please.
Connie broke into a laugh, and explained that Jimmie had implied a regret that they had found no purchasers. Mrs. Hardacre sniffed. She did not like being laughed at, especially as she had gone out of her way to be urbane. This was unfortunate for Jimmie; for though he strove hard to remove the impression that he had consciously dug a pit of ridicule for her entrapment, Mrs. Hardacre listened to his remarks with suspicion and became painfully aware of the shabbiness of his coat. Presently she regarded one of the portraits—that of a pretty, fluffy-haired woman.
“Dear me,” she remarked somewhat frigidly, “that is Mrs. Marmaduke Hewson.”
Jimmie, in the simplicity of his heart, was delighted.
“Yes. A most charming lady. Do you know her?”
“Oh, no; I don't know her, but I know of her.”
Her stress on the preposition signified even deeper and more far-reaching things than the nod of Lord Burleigh in the play.
“What do you know of her?” asked Jimmie, bluntly. Mrs. Hardacre smiled frostily, and her lean shoulders moved in an imperceptible shrug.
“Those matters belong to the realm of unhappy gossip, Mr. Padgate; but I'm afraid the duchess won't find her portrait attractive.”
“It is really rather a good portrait,” said Jimmie, in puzzled modesty.
“That is the pity of it,” replied Mrs. Hardacre, sweetly.
The victim smiled. “Surely the private character of the subject can have nothing to do with a person's judgment of a portrait as a specimen of the painter's art. And besides, Mrs. Hewson is as dear and sweet and true a little woman as I have ever met.”
“You are not the first of your sex that has said so.”
“And I most sincerely hope I shall not be the last,” said Jimmie, with a little flush and a little flash in his eyes and the politest of little bows. Whereupon Mrs. Hardacre bit her lip and hated him. Norma, seizing the opportunity of contributing to the final rout of her mother, unwittingly did Jimmie some damage.
“We women ought not to have given up fancy work,” she said in her hardest and most artificial tones. “As we don't embroider with our fingers, we embroider with our tongues. You can have no idea what an elaborate tissue of lies has been woven about that poor little Mrs. Hewson. I agree with Mr. Padgate. I am sorry you believe them, mother.”
Jimmie's grateful glance smote her undeserving heart. She had gained credit under false pretences and felt hypocritical—an unpleasant feeling, for the assumption of unpossessed virtues was not one of her faults. She succeeded, however, in rendering her mother furious. In a very short time Mrs. Hardacre remembered an engagement and went away in a hansom-cab, refusing the seat in Connie's carriage, which was put at her disposal on the condition of her waiting a few moments longer. She had thanked Jimmie, however, for the pleasure afforded by his delightful pictures with such politeness when he saw her into the cab, that he did not for a moment suspect that the lady who had entered the house with expressions of friendliness had driven away in a rage, with feelings towards him ludicrously hostile. He returned to the studio at peace with all womankind; not sorry that Mrs. Hardacre had departed, but only because courtesy no longer demanded his relegating to the second sphere of his attention the divine personage of whom he felt himself to be the slave. No suspicion of Mrs. Hardacre's spiteful motive in deprecating the display of his most striking piece of portraiture ever entered his head. He ran down the studio stairs with the eagerness of a boy released from the flattering but embarrassing society of his elders and free to enjoy the companionship of his congeners. And he was childishly eager to show his pictures to Norma, to hear her verdict, to secure her approval, so that he should stand in her eyes as a person in some humble way worthy of the regard that Morland said she bestowed on him.
He found his visitors not looking at pictures at all, but talking to Aline, who rushed to him as soon as he entered the studio.
“Oh, Jimmie—just fancy! Mrs. Deering is going to take me to Horlingham on Saturday, and is coming upstairs with me to see what I can do in the way of a frock. You don't mind, do you?”
Jimmie looked down into the happy young face and laughed a happy laugh.
“Mrs. Deering is an angel from the most exclusive part of heaven,” he said. And this was one of the rare occasions on which he was guilty of a double meaning. Had not the angel thus contrived an unlooked-for joy—a few minutes' undisturbed communion with his divinity?
The first words that Norma spoke when they were alone were an apology.
“You must not take what my mother said in ill part. She and I have been bred, I'm afraid, in a hard school.”
“It was very kind of Mrs. Hardacre to warn me of the possibility of the duchess being prejudiced against me by the exhibition of a particular portrait. I can't conceive the possibility myself. But still Mrs. Hardacre's intention was kindly.”
Norma turned her head away for a moment. She could not trust herself to speak, for a stinging sarcasm with just a touch of the hysterical would have been all she could utter, and she had not the heart to undeceive him. She shot into the by-path of the gossip concerning Mrs. Hewson.
“Mother believes the stories about her. So do I in the loose sort of way in which our faith in anything is composed—even in our fellow-creatures' failings.”
“You defended her,” said Jimmie.
“You made me do so.”
“Either you, because you carry about with you an uncomfortable Palace of Truth sort of atmosphere, or else the desire to rub it into my mother.”
“Rub what in?” Jimmie was puzzled.
Norma laughed somewhat bitterly. She saw that he was incapable of understanding the vulgar pettiness of the scheme of motives that had prompted the utterances of her mother and herself. She could not explain.
“I think you are born out of your century,” she said.
It was lucky for Jimmie that he was unaware of the passionate tribute the light words implied. She gave him no time to answer, but carried him straight to the pictures.
“I had no idea you did such beautiful work,” she said, looking around her.
Jimmie followed her glance, and the melancholy of the artist laid its touch for a moment upon him. He sighed.
“They might have been beautiful if I had done what I started out to do. It is the eternal tragedy of the clipped wings.”
She was oddly responsive to a vibration in his voice, and gave out, like a passive violin, the harmonic of the struck note.
“Better to have wings that are clipped than to have no wings at all.”
She had never uttered such a sentiment, never thought such a thought in her life before. Her words sounded unreal in her own ears, and yet she had a profound sense of their sincerity.
“There is no apteryx among human souls,” said Jimmie, released from the melancholy fingers. They argued the point in a lighter vein, discussed individual pictures. Charmed by her sympathy, he spoke freely of his work, his motives, his past dreams. Had Norma not begun to know him, she might have wondered at the lack of bitterness in his talk. To this man of many struggles and many crushing disappointments the world was still young and sweet, and his faith in the ultimate righteousness of things undimmed. The simple courage of his attitude towards life moved her admiration. She felt somewhat humbled in the presence of a spirit stronger, clearer than any into which chance had hitherto afforded her a glimpse. And as he talked in his bright, half-earnest, half-humourous way, it crossed her mind that there was a fair world of thought and emotion in which she and her like had not set their feet; not the world entirely of poetic and artistic imaginings, but one where inner things mattered more than outer circumstance, where it would not be ridiculous or affected to think of the existence of a soul and its needs and their true fulfilment.
Hitherto meeting him as an alien in her world, she had regarded him with a touch of patronising pity. From this she was now free. She saw him for the first time in harmony with his environment, as the artist sensitive and responsive, integral with the beautiful creations that hung around the walls, and still homely and simple, bearing the rubs of time as bravely and frankly as the old drawing-room suite that furnished the unpretentious studio. Now it was she who felt herself somewhat disconcertingly out of her element. The sensation, however, had a curious charm.
There was one picture that had attracted her from the first. She stood in front of it moved by its pity and tenderness.
“Tell me about this one,” she said without looking at him. She divined that it was very near his heart.
In the foreground amid laughing woodland crouched a faun with little furry ears and stumps of horns, and he was staring in piteous terror at a vision; and the vision was that of a shivering, outcast woman on a wet pavement in a sordid street.
“It is the joyous, elemental creature's first conception of pain,” said Jimmie, after a few moments' silence. “You see, life has been to him only the sunshine, and the earth drenched with colour and music—as the earth ought to be—and now he sees a world that is coming grey with rain and misty with tears, and he has the horror of it in his eyes. I am not given to such moralising in paint,” he added with a smile. “This is a very early picture.” He looked at it for some time with eyes growing wistful. “Yes,” he sighed, “I did it many years ago.”
“It has a history then?”
“Yes,” he admitted; and he remembered how the outcast figure in the rain had symbolised that little funeral procession in Paris and how terribly grey the world had been.
Norma's chastened mood had not awed the spirit of mockery within her, but had rendered it less bitter, and had softened her voice. She waved her hand towards the crouching faun.
“And that is you?” she asked.
Jimmie caught a kind raillery in her glance, and laughed. Yes, she had his secret; was the only person who had ever guessed him beneath the travesty of horns and goat's feet.
“I like you for laughing,” she said.
“Why?”
“Other painters have shown me their pictures.”
“Which signifies—?”
“That this is one of the most beautiful pictures I have ever seen,” she replied.
“But why are you glad that I laughed?” asked Jimmie, in happy puzzledom.
“I have told you, Mr. Padgate, all that I am going to tell you.”
“I accept the inscrutable,” said he.
“Do you believe in the old pagan joy of life?” she asked after a pause. “I mean, was there, is there such a thing? One has heard of it; in fact it is a catch phrase that any portentous poseur has on the tip of his tongue. When one comes to examine it, however, it generally means champagne and oysters and an unpresentable lady, and it ends with liver and—and all sorts of things, don't you know. But you are not a poseur—I think you are the honestest man I have ever met—and yet you paint this creature as if you utterly believe in what he typifies.”
“It would go hard with me if I did n't,” said Jimmie. “I can't talk to you in philosophic terms and explain all my reasons, because I have read very little philosophy. When I do try, my head gets addled. I knew a chap once who used to devour Berkeley and Kant and all the rest, and used to write about them, and I used to sit at his feet in a kind of awed wonder at the tremendousness of his brain. A man called Smith. He was colossally clever,” he added after a reflective pause. “But I can only grope after the obvious. Don't you think the beauty of the world is obvious?”
“It all depends upon which world,” said Norma.
“Which world? Why, God's world. It is sweet to draw the breath of life. I love living; don't you?”
“I have never thought of it,” she answered. “I should n't like to die, it is true, but I don't know why. Most people seem to spend two-thirds of their existence in a state of boredom, and the rest in sleep.”
“That is because they reject my poor faun's inheritance.”
“I have been asking you what that is.”
“The joy and laughter of life. They put it from them.”
“How?”
“They draw the soul's curtains and light the gas, instead of letting God's sunshine stream in.”
Norma turned away from the picture with a laugh.
“That reminds me of the first time I met you. You told me to go and ventilate my soul. It gave me quite a shock, I assure you. But I have been trying to follow your precept ever since. Don't you think I am a little bit fresher?”
For the moment the girl still lingering in her five-and-twenty hard years flashed to the surface, adorably warming the cold, finely sculptured face, and bringing rare laughter into her eyes. Jimmie marvelled at the infinite sweetness of her, and fed his poor hungry soul thereon.
“You look like a midsummer morning,” he said unsteadily.
The tone caught her, sobered her; but the colour deepened on her cheek.
“I'll treasure that as a pretty compliment,” she said. There was a little space of silence—quite a perilous little space, with various unsaid things lurking in ambush. Norma broke it first.
“Now I have seen everything, have n't I? No. There are some on the floor against the wall.”
Jimmie explained their lack of value, showed her two or three. They were mostly the wasters from his picture factory, he said. She found in each a subject for admiration, and Jimmie glowed with pleasure at her praise. While he was replacing them she moved across the studio.
“And this one?” she asked, with her finger on the top of a strainer. He looked round and followed swiftly to her side. It was her own portrait with its face to the wall.
“I am not going to show you that,” he said hurriedly.
“Why not?”
“It's a crazy thing.”
“I should love to see it.”
“I tell you it's a crazy thing,” he repeated. “A mad artist's dream.”
Norma arched her eyebrows. “Aha! That is very like a confession!”
“Of what?”
“The ideal woman?”
“Perhaps,” he said.
“I thought everything was so positive in your scheme of life,” she remarked teasingly. “Don't you know?”
“Yes,” said Jimmie, “I know.”
Again the vibration that Jimmie, poorest of actors, could not keep from his voice, stirred her. She felt the indelicacy of having trodden upon sanctified ground. She turned away and sat down. They talked of other matters, somewhat self-consciously. Both welcomed the entrance of Connie Deering and Aline. The former filled the studio at once with laughing chatter. She hoped Norma had not turned Jimmie's hair white with the dreadful things she must have said.
“I don't turn a hair, as I'm a mere worldling, but Jimmie is an unsophisticated child of nature, and is n't accustomed to you, my dear Norma.”
She went on to explain that she was Jimmie's natural protectress, and that they who harmed him would have to reckon with her. Jimmie flew gaily to Norma's defence.
“And this child's garments?” he asked, indicating Aline, whose face was irradiated by a vision of splendid attire.
“Don't meddle with what does n't concern you,” replied Connie, while she and the girl exchanged the glances of conspirators.
A short while afterwards the two visitors drove away. For some time Norma responded somewhat absently to Mrs. Deering's light talk.
“I am so glad you have taken to Jimmie,” said the latter at last. “Is n't he a dear?”
“I remember your saying that before. But is n't it rather an odd word to use with reference to him?” said Norma.
“Odd—? But that's just what he is.”
Norma turned in some resentment on her friend.
“Oh, Connie, how dare we talk patronisingly of a man like that? He's worth a thousand of the empty-souled, bridge-playing people we live among.”
“But that's just why I call him a dear,” said Mrs. Deering, uncomprehendingly.
Norma shrugged her shoulders, fell into a silence which she broke by risking:
“Do you know whom he is in love with?”
“Good gracious, Norma,” cried the little lady, in alarm. “You don't say that Jimmie is in love? Oh, it would spoil him. He can't be!”
“There was one picture—of a woman—which he would not let me see,” said Norma.
“Well?”
Norma paused for some seconds before she replied:
“He called it 'a mad artist's dream.' I have been wondering whether it was not better than a sane politician's reality.”
“What is a sane politician's reality, dear?” Connie asked, mystified.
“I am,” said Norma.
Then, woman-like, she turned the conversation to the turpitudes of her dressmaker.
JIMMIE was trudging along the undulating highroad that leads from Dieppe to the little village of Berneval, very hot, very dusty, very thirsty, and very contented. He carried a stick and a little black bag. His content proceeded from a variety of causes. In the first place it was a glorious August day, drenched with sunshine and with deep blue ether; and the smiling plain of Normandy rolled before him, a land of ripening orchards and lazy pastures. He had been longing for the simple beauty of sun and sky and green trees, and for the homely sights and sounds of country things, and now he had his fill. Secondly, Aline was having a much needed holiday. She had been growing a little pale and languid, he thought, in London, after a year's confined administering to his selfish wants. She was enjoying herself, too, and the few days she had already spent in the sea air had brought the blood to her cheeks again. Thirdly, he was free for the moment from everyday cares. A dealer had fallen from heaven into his studio and paid money down for the copyright of two of his worst pictures. Fourthly, he had definitely received the commission for the portrait of the Princess of Herren-Rothbeck. Her Serene Highness and her tutelary duchess had paid their visit, expressed themselves delighted with his work (the duchess especially commending the portrait of the hapless Mrs. Marmaduke Hewson), and had driven away in a most satisfactory condition of serenity and graciousness.
Jimmie was happy. What could man want more? In addition to all these blessings, Norma had written to him from Lord Monzie's place in Scotland a letterà proposof nothing, merely expressive of good-will and friendliness; and he had received it that morning. He had never seen her handwriting before. Bold, incisive, distinguished, it seemed to complement his conception of the radiant lady, and in a foolish way he tried to harmonise the ink-marks with the curves of her proud lips, the setting of her eyes, and the poise of her queenly head. The dreariness of a rainy afternoon with all the men and half the women away on the grouse-moor had been, she said, her excuse for writing. She sketched various members of the house-party with light, satiric touches; notably one Theodore Weever, an American, whose sister had married an impecunious and embarrassing cousin of the Duchess of Wiltshire. He was building himself a palace in Fifth Avenue, wrote Norma, and had been buying pictures in Europe to decorate it with; now he was anxious to purchase a really decorative wife. Morland was expected in a few days, and she would be glad when he appeared upon the scene. She did not say why; but Jimmie naturally understood that her heart was yearning for the presence of the man she loved. “I have very little to say that can interest you,” she concluded, “but you can say many things to interest me: this letter is purely selfish, a mere minnow, after all, that I use as bait.” So Jimmie walked along the dusty road thinking out an answer that could bring comfort to the Hero pining for her Leander; thinking also of Aline, and revelling in the sunshine.
He delighted, like a child, in all he saw. He stopped before the red, gold, and green paradise of an orchard and feasted upon its colour. He lingered in talk with a tiny girl driving a great brown cow; asked her its age, how many calves it had had, its name, and whether she were not afraid it would mistake her for a blade of grass and bite her. The little girl scoffed at the possibility. She could drive three cows, and, if it came to that, a bull. “Ça me connaît, les bêtes,” she said. Whereupon he put a couple of sous in her hand and went on his way. Presently he sat down on the rough wooden bench in front of a wayside café and drank cider from an earthenware bowl, and played with a mongrel puppy belonging to the establishment. When the latter had darted off to bark amid the cloud of dust and petroleum fumes left by a passing motor-car, Jimmie, sipping his second bowl of sour cider in great content, re-read the precious letter, filled his pipe, and reflected peacefully on the great harmony of things. The hopelessness of his own love for Norma struck no discord. The Stephen so closely connected with the life of Saint Catherine of Siena did not love with less hope or more devotion.
He paid the few coppers for his reckoning, took up his stick and little black bag, and trudged on refreshed, and as he neared Berneval the expectation of Aline's welcome gladdened him. He had rented for the month a cottage with a straggling piece of ground behind, from an artist friend whose possession it was. The friend had fixed the figure absurdly low; the modest living under Aline's experienced management was cheap, and thebonne à tout fairecooked divinely for a few halfpence a day. By a curious coincidence Mr. Anthony Merewether had also pitched upon Berneval as a summer resting-place. He had come on business, he gave out, and every morning saw him issue from the hotel by the beach, armed with easel and camp-stool, and the rest of the landscape-painter's paraphernalia, and every evening saw him smoking cigarettes on Jimmie's veranda. Whether the hours of sunshine saw him consistently hard at work, Jimmie was inclined to doubt. He certainly bathed a great deal and ran about with Aline a great deal, and Jimmie read the pair moral lessons on the evil effects of idleness. But Tony was a fresh-minded boy; his ingenuous conversation provided Jimmie with much entertainment, and his presence on their holiday gave him the satisfaction of feeling that Aline had some one of her own age to play with.
The ramshackle vehicle, half diligence, half omnibus, that plies between Berneval and Dieppe, passed him with great cracking of whip and straining of rusty harness and loudhue's from the driver, just as he entered the village. It was late afternoon, and the trim white and green of the place was bathed in mellow sunshine. The short cut home lay up a lane and through the churchyard, a cluster of grey slabs around a little grey church; and many of the slabs bore the story of the pitiless sea—how Jean-Marie Dulac, many years ago, was drowned at the age of nineteen, and how Jacques Lemerre perished in a storm; for it has been from time immemorial a tiny village of fisher-folk and every family has given of its own to the waves. The pathos of the simple legends on the stones always touched him as he walked by; and now he paused to decipher some moss-grown letters of fifty years ago. He stooped, made out the same sad tale, moralised a little thereon, and rose with a sigh of relief to greet the sunshine and the fair earth. But the sight that suddenly met his eyes banished dead fishermen and hungry sea and sunny tree-tops from his mind. It was a boy and a girl very close together, his arm about her waist, her head upon his shoulder, walking by the little church. Their backs were towards him. He stared open-mouthed.
“God bless my soul!” said he, in amazement.
Then he dropped his stick, which clattered upon a gravestone.
The foolish pair started at the sound, assumed a correct attitude with remarkable swiftness, and turning, recognised Jimmie. Tony Merewether, who was a fair youth, grew very red and looked sheepish; Aline awaited events demurely, with downcast eyes. Jimmie pushed his old Homburg hat to the back of his head, and in two or three strides confronted them. He tried to look fiercely at Tony. The young man drew himself up.
“I have asked Aline to marry me, sir,” he said frankly. “I was going to speak to you about it.”
“Good Lord!” said Jimmie, helplessly.
“We can't marry just yet,” said Tony, “but I hope you will give your consent.”
Jimmie looked from one to the other.
“Why did n't you let me know of this state of things before?”
“I have n't done anything underhand. I thought you guessed,” said Tony.
“And you, Aline?”
She stole a shy glance at him.
“I was n't quite sure of it until just now,” she replied. And then she blushed furiously and ran to Jimmie's arms. “Oh, Jimmie dear, don't be cross!”
“Cross, my child?” he said.
The world of tender reproach in his tone touched her. The ready tears started.
“You are an angel, Jimmie.”
The hand that was on her shoulder patted it comfortingly.
“No, dear, I am a blind elderly idiot. O Lord, Tony, I hope you feel infernally ashamed of yourself.”
“As Tony says, we sha'n't be able to get married for a long, long time,” said Aline, by way of consolation, “so for years and years we'll go on in just the same way.”
“I only ask you to consent to our engagement, sir,” said Tony, diplomatically. “I am quite willing to wait for Aline as long as you like.”
The abandonment of Jimmie by Aline had been the subject of the last half-hour's discussion between the lovers. The thought of Jimmie alone and helpless appalled her. She was a horrid selfish wretch, she had informed Tony, for listening to a word he said. How could Jimmie live by himself? She shuddered at the dismal chaos of the studio, the gaping holes in his socks, the impossible meals, the fleecing of him by every plausible beggar in frock coat or rags, the empty treasury. He needed more care than a baby. She would marry Tony, some day, because her head was full of him, and because she had let him kiss her and had found a peculiar, dreamy happiness during the process, and because she could not conceive the possibility of marrying any one else. But she was more than content to leave the date indefinite. Perhaps, in the stretch of aeons between now and then, something would happen to release her from her responsibilities. She had made the position luminously clear to Mr. Merewether before she had consented to be foolish and walk about with her head on his shoulder.
“No, until Jimmie gets properly suited,” she said, quickly following Tony's last remark.
“My dear foolish children,” said Jimmie, “you had better get married as soon as ever you can keep the wolf from the door. What on earth is the good of waiting till you are old? Get all the happiness you can out of your youth, and God bless you.”
The young man bowed his head.
“I will give my life to her.”
Jimmie touched him on the arm, waved his hand around, indicating the little grey church, the quiet graves.
“This is not the place where a man should say such a thing lightly,” he said.
“I am not the man to say such a thing lightly in any place,” retorted the youth, with spirit.
Jimmie nodded approvingly. “My dear,” he said to Aline, “that is the way I like to hear a man talk.”
He turned and collected the fallen stick and the black bag which he had deposited by the side of the slab. He had gone into Dieppe that morning partly for the sake of the walk and partly to purchase some odds and ends for the house. Aline, not trusting to his memory, had given him a list of items with directions attached as to the places where he was to procure them, so that when he came to “pepper,” he should seek it at a grocery and not at a milliner's establishment. Now, without saying a word, he opened the bag and rummaged among its queer contents, which Aline regarded with some twinges of a tender conscience. She ought to have gone into Dieppe herself, and made her purchases like a notable housewife, instead of sending Jimmie and passing the day in selfish lovemaking. The twinge grew sharper when Jimmie at last fished out a little cardboard box and put it in her hands.
“At any rate, I can give you an engagement present before Tony,” he said with a laugh.
It was only an old filigree silver waist-buckle he had picked up at a curio shop in the town, but it was a gem of infinite value to the girl, for she knew that Jimmie's love went with it. She showed it to Tony Merewether, who admired the workmanship.
“If you can give me anything I shall prize more, you will be a lucky fellow,” she said in a low voice.
The three strolled quietly towards the cottage, and it was Jimmie's arm that Aline clung to, and Mr. Merewether who carried the black bag. That night, after she had dismissed the young man, she sat a long time with Jimmie on the veranda, telling him in one shy breath of the wonder that had suddenly come into her life, and in the next that she would never leave him until he was rich and famous and able to live by himself. Jimmie, unguileful in the nature of men and maidens and the ways of this wicked world, kept on repeating like a refrain his formula of astonishment:
“It never entered my head, dear, that you two children would fall in love with one another.”
“You don't think I ought n't to have done it, do you, Jimmie?” she said at last.
He broke into his happy laugh, and kissed her. “If you want to please me, you'll go on doing it,” he said.
It was some time after he had gone to bed that sleep came. Yes; Nature, the dear mother, had spoken, and who could gainsay her? A clean, bright, healthy English lad, and a clean, bright, healthy English girl had read truth in each other's eyes. It was one of the sweet things in the world, for which we who live in the world should be thankful. The dimly seen white curtains of his bed became gossamer veils that enveloped him with beauty. Now, on either side, his inner life was touched by the magic of romance: the fair dream of these two children, and the love of the other betrothed pair. It was on happy eyelids that sleep settled at last. And Aline, too, lay awake, her young cheeks burning at the delicious yet frightening memory of a kiss in the little churchyard, and her heart swelling at the thought of the infinite goodness of Jimmie.
Meanwhile, unconscious of these idyllic happenings and romantic speculations, Norma was enjoying herself in her worldly way at Lord Monzie's place in Scotland. Lord Monzie, a dissipated young man who had lately come into the title, had married a well-to-do young woman in very smart society. Consequently there was no lack of modern entertainment in the house. So modern was everything that the host had got down Mr. Joseph Ascherberg, the financier, to hold a roulette bank every night against all comers; but he took care that he himself, or his own confidential man, turned the wheel and spun the marble. Most of the people had unimaginative nicknames, the extremes of the Submerged Tenth and the Upper Ten thus curiously meeting. Lord Monzie was called “Muggins;” his bosom friend, and, as some whispered, hisâme damnée, Sir Calthrop Boyle, was alluded to as “The Boiler;” and Ascherberg responded to the appellation of “Freddy.” There were also modern conveniences for the gratification of caprices or predilections that need not be insisted upon. In fact the atmosphere was surcharged with modernity; so much so that Norma, who would have walked about the Suburra of Imperial Rome with cynical indifference, gasped a little when she entered it. One or two things actually shocked her, at which she wondered greatly. She regarded Mr. Ascherberg with extreme disfavour, and winced at the women's conversation when they were cosily free from men. For the first day or two she held herself somewhat apart, preferring solitude on sequestered bits of terrace, where she could read a novel, or look at the grey hills that met the stretch of purple moorland. But gradually the sweeter tone of mind which she had brought with her lost its flavour, and having won sixty pounds from Ascherberg, and having told the feminine coterie what she knew of the Wyniard affair, she began to breathe the atmosphere without much difficulty. Yet occasionally she had spasms of revolt. In a corner of the drawing-room stood a marble copy of the little Laughing Faun in the Louvre, put there by the late baron, and every time her eye fell upon it, the picture of another faun arose before her, and with it the memory of a homely man with bright kind eyes, and she seemed to draw a breath of purer air. But she called the fancy foolishness and hardened her heart.
Still, had it not been for Theodore Weever, the American man of affairs, she would probably have found some pretext for an abrupt departure. He alone was a personality among the characterless, vicious men and women of the house-party. Short, spare, alert, bald-headed, clean-shaven, clear-featured, he was of a type apart. Norma, who had a keen intelligence, divined in him from the first an adversary upon whom she could sharpen her wit and a companion who would not bore her with dreary tales of sport or the unprofitable details of his last night's play. And from the first Theodore Weever was attracted towards Norma. Their lax associates, in spite of her engagement to Morland being perfectly well known and in spite of Morland's expected arrival, recognised their pairing with embarrassing frankness, and said appalling things about them behind their backs. For a few days therefore they found themselves inseparable. At last their friendship reached the confidential stage. Mr. Theodore Weever avowed the object of his present visit to England. He was in search of a decorative wife.
“It ought to be as easy as turning over a book of wallpapers,” said Norma.
“And as difficult to choose,” said he.
“You must know what scheme of colouring and design you want.”
“Precisely. I don't find it in the books of stock patterns, either here or in America. And I've ransacked America.”
“Is n't the line—I believe in commercial circles they call it a line—is n't the line of specially selected duchesses for the English market good enough for you?” she asked with a smile.
He was about to light a cigarette when she began her question. He lit it and blew out the first few puffs of smoke before he replied. They were sitting in Norma's favourite nook on the terrace, where he, solitary male who had not gone forth with a gun that morning, had been gratuitously told by an obliging hostess that he would find her.
“The American woman makes a good decorative duchess,” he said in his incisive tone, “because she has to sweep herself clean of every tradition she was born with and accept bodily the very much bigger and more dazzling tradition of your old aristocracy. She can do it, because she is infinitely sensitive and intelligent. But she is a changed creature. She has to live up to her duke.”
He puffed for a moment or two at his cigarette.
“Do you see what I am coming to?” he continued. “I am not an English duke. I am a plain American citizen. No woman in America would make it her ideal in life to live up to me.”
“I don't mean to be rude,” interrupted Norma, with a laugh, “but do you think any Englishwoman would?”
“I do,” he replied. “Not to this insignificant, baldheaded thing that is I, but to what in the way of position and power I represent. An American woman would bring her traditions along with her—her superior culture, her natural right to be enthroned as queen, her expectation that I would take a back seat in my own house. It is I that would become a sort of grotesque decoration in the place. Now, I may be grotesque, but I will not consent to be decorative. I fully intend to be master. I am not going to be Mrs. Theodore Weever's husband. I want an Englishwoman to bring along her traditions. She will be naturallygrande dame; she will come to my house, my social world, frankly the wife of Theodore Weever, and ready to support the dignity, whatever it may be, of Theodore Weever, just as she would have supported the dignity of Lord So and So, had she been married to him in England.”
“You will find thousands of English girls who can do that,” said Norma. “I don't see your difficulty.”
“She must be decorative,” said Weever.
“And that means?”
“She must be a queenly woman, but one content to be queen consort. Your queenly woman—with brains—is not so easy to find. I have met only one in my life who is beyond all my dreams of the ideal. Of course the inherent malice of things screws her down like one blade of a pair of scissors to another fellow.”
“Who is the paragon?” asked Norma.
“It wouldn't be fair on the other fellow to tell you,” said he.
“Is it sheer honesty, or the fear of being cut in half by the pair of scissors that keeps you from coming between them?”
“I think it's honesty,” he replied. “If I can guess rightly, the scissors have n't so fine an edge on them as to make them dangerous.”
“They may be desperately in love with one another, for all you know.”
“They are delightful worldlings of our own particular world, dear lady,” said Weever, with a smile.
Thus was Norma given to understand that the post of decorative queen consort in Mr. Theodore Weever's Fifth Avenue palace was at her disposal. A year ago she might have considered the offer seriously; now that she felt secure of a brilliant position as Morland's wife, she was amused by its frank impudence. She held other laughing conversations with him on the subject of his search, but too prudent to commit indiscretions, she gave no hint that she had understood his personal allusion, and Weever was too shrewd to proceed any further towards his own undoing. They remained paired, however, to their mutual satisfaction, until Morland's arrival, when Theodore Weever took his departure. In fact, the same carriage that conveyed the American to the station remained for a necessary half-hour to meet Morland's train, and Norma, who dutifully drove down to welcome her affianced, shared the carriage with the departing guest.
She stood on the platform chatting with him as he leaned out of the window.
“When shall we see each other again?” she said idly.
“Next month.”
“Where?” she asked, somewhat taken aback by his decided tone.
“I am putting in some time at Chiltern Towers. I had a letter this morning from the duchess, asking me to come and meet the Princess of Herren-Rothbeck.”
They looked at each other, and Norma laughed.
“Beware of Her Serene Highness.”
“Oh, I've had dealings with her before,” replied Weever. “I reckon I get my money's worth. Don't you fret about me.”
The guard came up and touched his cap.
“We are off now, miss.”
She shook hands with Weever, saying with a laugh, “I hope you will find that bit of decoration.”
“Don't you fret about that, either,” he said with a quick, hard glance. “I'm in no hurry. I can wait.”
The train started, and was soon swallowed by a tunnel a few hundred yards up the line. Norma patrolled the platform of the little wayside station waiting for Morland. The place was very still. The only porter had departed somewhither. The station-master had retired into his office. The coachman outside the station sat like a well-bred image on his box, and the occasional clink of the harness, as the horses threw up their heads, sounded sharp and clear. Nothing around but mountain and moorland; a short distance in front a ravine with a lazily trickling, half-dried-up mountain stream. Here and there a clump of larch and fir, and a rough granite boulder. An overcast sky threw dreariness on the silent waste. Norma shivered, suddenly struck with a sense of isolation. She seemed to stand in the same relation with her soul's horizon as with the physical universe. The man that had gone had left her with a little feeling of fear for the future, a little after-taste of bitterness. The man that was coming would bring her no thrill of joy. As she stood between a drab sky and a bleak earth, so stood she utterly alone in the still pause between a past and a future equally unillumined. She longed for the sun to break out of the heaven, for the sounds of joyous things to come from plain and mountain; and she longed for light and song in her heart.
She had been watching for the past few days the proceedings of a half-recognised, irregular union. The woman was the frivolous, heartless, almost passionless wife of a casual husband at the other end of the earth; the man an underbred fellow on the stock exchange. She ordered him about and called him Tommy. He clothed her in extravagant finery, and openly showed her his sovereign male's contempt. Norma had overheard him tell her to go to the devil and leave him alone, when she hinted one night, in a whisper that was meant for his ears alone, that he was drinking overmuch whisky. It was all so sordid, so vulgar—the bond between them so unsanctified by anything like tenderness, chivalry, devotion. Norma had felt the revulsion of her sex.
What would be the future? By any chance like this woman's life? Would the day come when she would sell herself for a gown and a bracelet, thrown at her with a man's contemptuous word? Was marriage very widely different from such a union? Was not she selling herself? Might not the man she was waiting for go the way of so many others of his type, drink and coarsen and tell her to go to the devil?
She longed for the sun, but not a gleam pierced the leaden sky; she sought in her soul for a ray of light, but none came.
At last with a shriek and a billowing plume of smoke the down train emerged from the tunnel. Norma set her face in its calm ironic mask and waited for the train to draw up. Only two passengers alighted, Morland and his man. Morland came to her with smiling looks and grasped her by the hand.
“You are looking more beautiful than ever,” he whispered, bringing his face close to hers.
She started back as if she had been struck. The fumes of brandy were in his breath. Her hideous forebodings were in process of fulfilment.
“The whole station will hear you,” she said coldly, turning away.
The Imp of Mischance rubbed his hands gleefully at his contrivance. Morland, a temperate man, had merely felt chilly after an all-night's journey, and, more out of idleness than from a desire for alcohol, had foolishly taken a sip out of his brandy flask a moment or two before, when he was putting up his hand-bag.
Norma collected herself, summoned with bitter cynicism her common-sense to her aid, and made smiling amends for her shrewish remark. She suffered him to kiss her on the drive home, and strove not to despise herself.