The lady's mile

AT THE FOUNTAINS.

Hector Gordon kept his word. He left Fortinbras by the evening train, in despite of his aunt's lamentations, and in despite of something which pierced his heart more cruelly than the lamentations of all the fussy dowagers in Christendom,—the still white look of sorrowful resignation in Cecil Chudleigh's face.

She loved him. He knew the truth and depth of her affection as well as he knew the truth and depth of his own. Love would be a poor divinity indeed, if, as some counterbalance to his physical blindness, he were not gifted with the power of second-sight. Hector needed no word from Cecil to tell him how much he resigned in doing his duty. The hour that had revealed to him the secret of his own heart had laid bare the mystery of hers. That subtile sympathy, which had seemed so sweet a friendship, had been only love in disguise, the wolf in sheep's clothing, the serpent in the semblance of a dove.

Ah, what utter despair possessed those two sad hearts on that chill September afternoon! what a cold, dreary future lay before those two helpless wanderers, doomed to bid each other farewell! The day might come, as it comes so often in the story of a lifetime, when to look back upon all this trouble and anguish would be to look back upon something as flimsy as a dream. But then what is more terrible than the agony of a dream?—ay, even though in the sleeper's breast there lurk a vague consciousness that he is only the fool of a vision. Brooding over his hopeless sorrow, as the express whirled London-wards through the darkness, Hector Gordon thought of the stories of unhappy attachments and wasted devotion which he had heard told by his seniors over the mess-table, when the wine went round silently in the summer dusk, and men, whose faces were in shadow, talked more freely than was their wont in the broad glare of day.

"Shall I ever come to tell the story of my sorrow to my brother officers in the gloaming? Will the memory of to-night ever be a subject for friendly talk after a ponderous dinner, while the sentry's tramp echoes in the stillness, and the odour of cigar-smoke floats in from the balcony where the youngsters are lounging? Will they ever call me a dreary old bore, and try to change the subject when they find the conversation drifting round to my dismal love-story? Ah, how sad to be old and a nuisance, and to have profaned the sanctity of my idol's temple!"

How sad to be old! Hector thought of the dull life of duty, the joyless, sunless, desert waste that lay between him and the time when he might begin to care for comet port, and dilate with an elderly dandy's fatuity on the tender story of his youth. He thought of his future until he began to fancy how blessed a thing it would be if his life could end that night in the chill darkness. The engine had but to swerve a hair's breadth, as it flew along the top of a steep embankment—and lo, the end of all his sorrows! A crash, a sudden agony perhaps—unimaginable in its infinity of pain, but brief as summer lightning,—and the enigma of his existence would be solved, the troublesome thread of his life dissevered.

"My poor Mary would be sorry for me," he thought, remembering the gentle betrothed waiting for him in India; "but she would fancy that I had died adoring her, and in a twelvemonth the memory of me would be a painless sorrow. Shall I make her happy by doing my duty? I have seen ruined men, whose ruin began on the day in which they sacrificed feeling on the shrine of honour. My Cecil, my Cecil, how could you be so cruel as to drive me away from you?"

The image of the pale, sorrowful face that had looked at him with such heroic calmness in the moment of parting arose before him now like a reproach. He knew that she had been right. He knew that her voice had been the voice of truth and honour, the voice of his own conscience. "God help me to be worthy of the love that never can be mine, and of the gentle darling I am bound to shelter!" he thought. And then a spirit of resignation seemed to exorcise the demon despair, and he took from his pocket-book a letter written on foreign paper,—a letter in a pretty womanly hand, not too easy to decipher,—a letter from his betrothed wife, which he had read hurriedly the day before, too cruelly preoccupied to know what he was reading.

The tender, trusting words were the most bitter reproaches that could assail him. His heart melted as he read the long, loving epistle by the uncertain light of the railway lamp. He could hear the voice, as he deciphered those simple girlish sentences. He could see her face—not beautiful, but very sweet and loving.

He was quite alone in the carriage, and when he had replaced the letter in his pocket-book, he detached a little trinket which hung to his watch-chain, and pressed the crystal face of it to his lips. Under the crystal there was a lock of pale flaxen hair, which his own hands had selected for the shears the day he parted from his love at Simlah.

"Poor Mary!" he murmured softly; "poor Mary! it will be something at least to make you happy."

The dowager took her nephew's departure very deeply to heart; or it may be rather that she had set her heart on a suite of spacious apartments in Tyburnia, and was by no means disposed to return to Dorset Square. She questioned Cecil very sharply about Hector's proceedings, and succeeded in driving that young lady into a conversational corner, whence it was impossible to emerge without a revelation of the truth.

"You tell me you think he's engaged," said the dowager, impatiently, after forcing Cecil to admit so much. "And why do you think he's engaged? Did he tell you so?"

"He gave me to understand as much."

"And engaged to whom, pray?"

"A young lady in India."

"A young lady in India. Is that all you know about her?"

"Yes indeed, auntie."

"A nice designing thing, I dare say, and a nobody into the bargain, or of course he'd have told you who she was," cried Mrs. MacClaverhouse indignantly. "A stuck-up creature, who will contrive to keep her husband at a distance from his relations, no doubt, in order that she may surround him with a pack of harpies of her own kith and kin. And to think that my boy should never have so much as asked my advice before he threw himself away! If you knew how I had built upon you and Hector making a match of it, Cecil, you'd sympathise with my disappointment a little, instead of sitting looking at me in that provokingly placid way of yours. I could have ended my days happily under Hector's roof: I hoped he would have been glad to give his poor old aunt a home; and I don't think you'd have refused me a shelter in my old age—eh, Cecil?"

"Oh, auntie! auntie!"

Mrs. MacClaverhouse had no need to complain of want of sympathy this time, for Cecil suddenly fell upon her knees, and buried her face in her aunt's ample silken skirts, sobbing passionately. The thought of what might have been was so very bitter; and every word the dowager uttered sent the arrow deeper into the wounded heart.

"Oh, auntie!" she cried, "never speak to me about him again. Oh, pray, pray, do not speak of him again! I love him so dearly, so dearly, so dearly!"

It was the first and last passionate cry of Cecil Chudleigh's heart, and it quite melted the dowager; but there was a touch of sternness mingled with her emotion.

"I hope that designing minx will live to repent her artfulness," she said, spitefully; for it is the peculiar attribute of a woman to empty the vials of her wrath on the passive and unconscious maiden for whose sake her plans have been frustrated, rather than on the active masculine offender who has frustrated them.

The dowager and her niece went back to Dorset Square very soon after Hector's departure: and then came visits to country houses—a fortnight in Leicestershire, where poor Cecil had to endure the hunting talk of horsey men and fast young ladies, the perpetual discussions about dogs and horses and southerly winds and cloudy skies; a month in an old Yorkshire grange, where there was a cheerful Christmas gathering, and where Lady Cecil had to act in charades and take part in duets—the dear old duets in which his melodious barytone had been so delicious. She looked round sometimes when she was singing, and almost expected to see his ghost standing behind her,—so cruel a profanation did it seem to sing the old familiar words. In all the morning gossip, and billiard-playing and fancy-work, the reading aloud—often from the very books which he had read at Fortinbras—in all the music and dancing, the impromptu charades, and carefully studied tableaux-vivants which enlivened the winter evenings, Cecil had to take her part with a smiling face. She wondered sometimes whether there were any other bright smiles which were only masks assumed for the evening with the evening dress. She wondered whether there was any other woman in all the crowd who saw athwart the lights and exotics of the dinner-table the vision of one dear face whose reality was thousands of miles away.

"He may be lying dead while I sit simpering here," she thought. "Yet that would be too dreadful. Oh! surely, surely I should know it if he were dead!"

Bravely though she bore her burden, it was a very heavy one. No mother, pining in the absence of her only son, could have felt more poignant anxiety about the absent one than Cecil felt for the man who had loved her and left her to marry another woman. How often—ah, how often, amidst the hum of joyous voices, and the brilliant tones of a piano vibrating under masterly hands—how often the lamplight faded, and the faces of the crowd melted away, and the gorgeous drawing-room changed itself into that weedy shore at the foot of grim Fortinbras Castle, while the autumn rain drifted once more into Cecil Chudleigh's face, and his eyes looked down upon her dim with tears. Of all their gay and happy hours, their pleasant rambles, Cecil recalled no picture so vivid as that of her lover, in his sorrow, standing bareheaded in the drifting rain, looking tenderly down upon her with fond despairing eyes. And he was gone from her for ever; never, never, never, so long as she lived, was she to look upon his face again.

But she endured her life, and by-and-by, when cold gleams of February sunshine lighted the grey sky, the dowager carried her niece back to Dorset Square, and all the old sordid wearisome care about forks, spoons, and broken wine-glasses and incorrect butcher's bills, began again.

But even broken wine-glasses may be a distraction, and a young lady who has tradesmen's books and the contents of china closets to employ her mind suffers less than the damsel who has nothing to do but to sit by her casement, watching the slow changes of the heavens, and thinking of the absent one. Industrious Charlotte, cutting bread and butter for the little ones, is not so apt to fall in love with Werter as he is to be inspired by a fatal passion for her, since, paltry and sordid a task as Charlotte's may be, it yet requires some thought, or the lady will cut her fingers. A little wholesome household work would have saved poor Elaine from many of those long hours of brooding, in which the lily maid of Astolat contemplated the dark knight's image. Work, the primeval curse, may have been a blessing in disguise after all.

Lady Cecil bore her life. She went hither and thither to places in which she felt little interest, amongst people whose companionship seemed so poor a substitute for that brief, sweet friendship of the departed autumn. Ah, what could ever bring back to her heart the thrilling joy of that broken dream?

Yet her life was not altogether joyless. It was only the magical, mystical gladness, the delight too deep for words, which had gone out of her existence for ever in the hour of that irrevocable parting on the wet sea-shore. She had friends and companions, a social status, in right of her father's name and race, even amongst the vulgar who knew that she was only a penniless dependant upon the sharp-spoken dowager. Perhaps the friend with whom Cecil Chudleigh's proud reserve was most often wont to melt into tender sympathy was Florence Crawford, the frivolous divinity at whose shrine the young landscape painter had laid his heart and his ambition.

They had met "in society," as Flo said, with a little air, which implied that the only society in the civilised world was the circle wherein Miss Crawford revolved: and they had taken a fancy to each other, according to Florence, though it must be confessed the fancy had been chiefly on her own side, as Cecil was not prone to sudden friendships.

"But there was some one else took a fancy to you before I did," exclaimed Flo. "There's not the least occasion to blush, Lady Cecil, for the some one else was only a middle-aged man, with such a shelf on his dear old back that I sometimes quite long to set a row of Carl-Theodore tea-cups on his coat-collar for ornamentation. It was papa who took a fancy to you. He's the most absurd old thing in the world, and he says yours is the very face he has been waiting for, for his new picture. He is going to paint the prison scene in Faust, and he declares that you have the exact expression he wants for his Gretchen. You have no idea what trouble he will take to get a sitting from any one whose face has fascinated him. Professional models are all very well, but you can't get a professional model to read Goethe, or to imagine that she sees an infant struggling in the water, for a shilling an hour. What papa wants is expression, and he was struck by your face the other night when you were singing at Lady Jacynt's; there was an exalted look about your eyes and forehead, he said, which would be worth a fortune to him; so I am to exert all my fascinations in order to induce you to give him a sitting or two; and I'm sure you will, won't you, Lady Cecil? for he really is a dear good creature."

Cecil assented very readily, flattered and honoured by the painter's request. She was a far more reverent disciple of art than Florence Crawford, who spoke flippantly of the greatest master of his age as a dear old thing, and was wont to frisk hither and thither in her father's painting-room, criticising his pictures as freely as if they had been so many Parisian bonnets.

It would have been very strange if Cecil had not been glad to exchange the sordid atmosphere of Dorset Square for the dreamy splendour of the Fountains. The hour or two which Mr. Crawford had entreated in the first place grew into many hours, and Cecil had spent half-a-dozen pleasant mornings in the great master's painting-room before the vague shadow which was so unintelligible to common eyes grew out of the canvas, and became a woman instinct with life and soul. Flo brought her box of water-colours on these occasions, and perched herself at a little table in a corner of the spacious chamber; for she made a faint show of devotion to art now and then as an excuse for intruding into the painter's sanctum. What place of retreat could be sacred from an only daughter, and such an only daughter as Florence Crawford?

So the young lady came very often to the noble tapestried painting-room, into which half the contents of Mr. Woodgate's shop seemed to have been imported, so rich was the gorgeous chamber in black oak cabinets and stamped-leather-cushioned chairs, coloured marbles and mediæval armour majolica vases and Venetian glass. The painter loved beautiful things, and spent his money as recklessly as Aladdin or Alexandre Dumas. For how was it possible that a man could be careful of vulgar pounds and shillings under whose magic-working hand human grandeur and human beauty developed into being—who knew but two rivals, Rubens and Nature—and who could afford to stand comparison with the first?

William Crawford was a painter in the highest and grandest sense of the word; and he wasted his money and sold his pictures for a song when the whim seized him, and scattered little water-colour bits in the scrap-books of beautiful high-born feminine mendicants, which, collected together, would have realised a small fortune at Christie's. It was only when judicious friends with business habits stepped in and insisted upon negotiating affairs for the great painter, that Mr. Crawford received large prices for his pictures, and found a satisfactory row of pencil figures under the last pen-and-ink entry in his banking book. The story of the painter's youth and manhood was not without a touch of sadness. It was the old, old story of a brilliant career and a broken life. William Crawford had not sprung into Fame's ample lap with one daring bound. His progress had been slow and laborious, and there had been a few silver threads mingled with his auburn hair before the laurel crown descended on his forehead, or the nimbus of glory made a light about his earnest face. He had seen other men pass him by—his companions of the Academy, the students who had sat by his side,—he had seen them go by him to take their places amongst the victors, great men in their way, most of them; but how weak and puny was the greatest compared to him!

He had so much to endure, and he bore it all so meekly! So patient was he in the sublime resignation of conscious genius, which knows that it must triumph, that he grew by-and-by to be set down as a dull plodding fellow, who would never do any thing worth looking at. Year after year—year after year—his pictures came back upon him from the Academy, from the British Institution, rejected! rejected! rejected! Yet he was William Crawford all the time, and knew himself, and the sovereign power of his hand.

Meek and mighty spirit to wait so long, to labour so patiently, hoarding thy strength, and adding to thy power day by day, as a miser swells his pile of vulgar gold!

The day came at last, but not all at once. Pictures were accepted, and "skyed:" critics talked about coldness, and blackness, and chalkiness: friends were compassionate, and shoulders were shrugged with polite despair. The poor man had really no idea of colour!

For a few years things went on like this, and then appeared a gorgeous Rubens-like canvas, whereon Pericles reclined at the feet of Aspasia: and in a day, in an hour, the mighty master of all the secrets of colour revealed himself, and the world knew that William Crawford was a great painter.

After that day the men who had called Crawford a dull, plodding fellow, offered him monstrous bribes for the revelation of his "secret." He smiled at their ignorance. He had no secret except his genius. His mystic cabala lay in the two virtues that had made the law of his life—unremitting industry, undeviating temperance. In the chill early light of morning, in the warm glow or noon, in the deepening shadows of evening, in the artificial light of the night school at the Academy, William Crawford had toiled for twenty years, finding no drudgery too hard, no monotonous repetition of study too wearisome. And now at eight-and-thirty, he found himself a great man, and he knew that his hand was to be trusted, and that his feet were surely planted on the mountain he had climbed so patiently.

Alas, there are so many blessings in this life that come too late! Many a vessel laden with the gold of Ophir only nears the shore when her owner lies dead upon the sands. When William Crawford tasted the first fruits of success, the wife—to have purchased whose happiness he would have sold his heart's blood—had been dead ten years. She had felt the cruel hand of poverty, and had withered under that bitter gripe; but she had never complained. She had borne all meekly for his sake—for his sake.

Now, when people offered him large prices for his pictures, he felt half inclined to refuse their commissions in utter bitterness of heart.

"You should have bought my 'Pyramus and Thisbe' twelve years ago," he would have cried. "A fifty-pound cheque would have done that for me then which all the kings and princes of this earth could not do now. It would have brought a smile to the face of my wife."

The young wife whose death had left such a terrible void in the painter's heart had been of higher rank than himself, and had run away from a luxurious home to inhabit draughty second-floor lodgings in a street running out of the Strand. William Crawford had trusted in the strength of his hand to win a better home for his darling. But the blackest years of his life were those that immediately succeeded his marriage, and the poor loving girl had to suffer deprivations that were unfelt by the Spartan painter, but which fell heavily on the home-bred damsel who had sacrificed so much for him. She would have held the loss of position a very light one; but she found that she had lost all her home-friends as well, for her father shut his door upon her after her marriage, and she had no mother to plead for her at home, or to visit her by stealth in her husband's shabby dwelling. The father was a hard, obstinate man, who plucked his daughter's image out of his heart as coolly as he erased her name from his will. He begged that Mrs. Crawford might never be mentioned in his presence; and he threatened to horsewhip the painter in the rooms of the Royal Academy if ever he met him there.

Whether he relented suddenly when the young wife died, or whether his conscience had given him some uneasiness from the beginning, no one ever knew; but he wrote a civil letter to the widower, declaring his willingness to adopt and educate the little girl his daughter had left behind her.

There was some hesitation, a little parley as to how often the father should be permitted to see his child; a very manly letter from the painter, setting forth the condition on which he was willing to part with the little girl, that condition being neither more nor less than an understanding that she was his child, and his only, committed as a sacred trust to her mother's family, and to be claimed by him at any hour he pleased. And then he let his little Florence go. A year later he would as soon have plucked the heart out of his breast as he would have parted from her; but at this time he was utterly broken down in body and mind—so crushed, so desolate, that it seemed as if nothing could add to his desolation. He was even glad to get rid of the child. The sound of her young voice saddened him. There were tones in it that were like her mother's.

"I sat in my room and painted," he said afterwards, when he was able to talk of this dreadful time, "but I didn't know what I was painting, or whether it was winter or summer. People would come in and sit down and talk to me—they came to cheer me up a little, they said. I talked to them and answered them; and when they went away I didn't know who they were, or what they had been talking about. As for my work, the right colours came on my brush somehow; but when the faces looked out at me from my canvas, I used to wonder who had painted them, and what they meant. I don't know how long that time lasted. I only know that the best and dearest friend I ever had took me across the Channel with him, and on to Italy; and one morning, after landing at some place from a steamer in the darkness, I opened my window and saw the Bay of Naples before me. I burst into tears, for the first time since my wife's death; and after that I learnt to bear my sorrow patiently."

When William Crawford found himself a successful man, he built himself a house at Kensington from a design of his own. After stating which latter fact, it is quite unnecessary to say that the Italian façade was perfection, that the Alhambra-like colonnade at the back was delicious, that there was a great deal of space wasted in unnecessary passages, and that there was neither a housemaid's closet nor a dust-bin in the original plan of the mansion. But then what a charming spot was that on which Mr. Crawford planted his temple! for he was far too wise a man to erect his dwelling on one of those patches of arid waste which are called desirable building-ground. He had discovered an inconvenient old house in a delicious garden between the old court suburb and Tyburnia, and had carted away the rambling, low-roofed dwelling, and set up his dazzling white temple in its stead. The crowning glory of the place was a pair of marble fountains which the painter had brought from Rome—fountains whose silver waters had made harmonious accompaniment to the voices of revellers in Tivoli fifteen hundred years ago.

It was to this pleasant home that William Crawford brought his beautiful daughter from the fashionable boarding school in which she had received her education. Her grandfather had died, leaving her the five thousand pounds that had once been allotted to her mother. Her aunts and uncles were scattered, and not one of them had been able to obtain any lasting hold upon the impulsive little heart which beat in Miss Crawford's breast. She came to the Fountains at her father's bidding, and her pretty caressing ways were very pleasant to him; but she did not fill the void in his heart. He looked in her face very sadly sometimes, for it recalled the vision of another face, with a tender, loving light in the eyes, which was wanting in Flo's flashing glances. She was such a frivolous creature compared with her mother.

The difference between them was as wide as the contrast between a tender cooing dove which nestles in your bosom and a beautiful butterfly that flits and skims hither and thither in the sunshine. Miss Crawford was fond of her father, and proud of him after a fashion; but she had no power to appreciate the sublimity of his art, the grandeur of his triumphs. She admired him, and was pleased with his success because it had given him wealth and fashion. Alone in a desert that other one would have rejoiced with him in the glory of his work, however unprofitable, however remote from the possibility of reward, because it was his, and because he loved it.

There were times when Flo's frivolous criticisms jarred on the painter's ear, for there were tones in her voice which even yet reminded him too painfully of the lost one. He was an over-indulgent father, said people, who estimated a father's indulgence by the amount of a daughter's pocket-money; but it may be that he would have been less indulgent if he had loved his child better, or rather if she had been able to reach that inner sanctuary of his soul where the image of the dead reigned alone.

Lady Cecil felt a thrill of delight when the painter turned his easel and revealed his finished picture.

Ah, wonderful power, given to a man in such fulness as it had been given to William Crawford once in two hundred years, rarest of all earthly gifts, the masterdom of colour, the power which makes the painter's hand second only to the hand of the Creator who bade Eve come forth out of the shadow of night, and revealed to awakening Adam the perfection of womanly loveliness.

In the prison scene the painter had full scope for his wondrous power of colour. The light in the picture was subdued. Only through the open door of poor Gretchen's cell one saw a lurid glimmer of the coming day. In this open doorway lounged Mephistopheles, with a horrible smile upon his face, and his figure darkly defined against that low lurid glimmer. The light of the prison-lamp shone full on the faces of the lovers, and the sickly yellow light made a kind of aureola around Gretchen's golden head.

While Cecil stood before the picture in rapt admiration, Miss Crawford laid down her brushes and came to look at her father's labour. The painter lounged against the wall opposite his easel, gazing dreamily at his completed work.

Oh, butterflies of fashion, driving mail-phaetons or tooling teams of four-in-hand in the Lady's Mile, Sybarites and loiterers in pleasant drawing-rooms, loungers in clubs, and triflers with existence, lotus-eaters of every species, have any of you ever known a joy so deep as this—the joy that drove Pygmalion mad, the intoxicating triumph of the creator who sees his work complete in all its beauty and perfection?

"H'm, yes, it's very pretty," said Flo, after contemplating the picture under the shadow of two pretty jewel-twinkling hands arched over her piquant eyebrows; "but isn't Gretchen's arm a leetle out of drawing? I'm sure I could never get my arm into that position; but I dare say people's arms were more flexible in those days. How awfully blue you've made Mephistopheles; but I'm very glad you haven't allowed him to cross his legs. Why a diabolical person should always cross his legs is a mystery that I have never been able to fathom. It's very nice, papa; but I don't like it so well as 'Pericles and Aspasia.' Your proclivities are classic, you dear old thing, so you had better stick to your Lempriere, and let us have rosy gods and goddesses ad infinitum."

"Ad nauseam, perhaps," said the painter sadly.

The critics had been very hard upon William Crawford, and there had been people besotted enough to utter the shameful word "sensualism" in connection with the purest and simplest creature who ever worshipped the divinity of beauty. And then there were all the host of funny little writers who wrote facetious little criticisms upon the great man's pictures. His Cupid had the mumps, his Psyche was in the last stage of scarlet fever, his Alcibiades was a butcher's boy, his Timandra a scorbutic shrew, his Boadicea a prize-fighter disguised in female raiment. The funny little writers who could not have sketched the outline of a pump-handle correctly, had fine fun out of William Crawford. He was happy in spite of all adverse criticism, and had succeeded in spite of his critics. Of course there were some who knew what they were writing about; and to such adverse opinion as he felt to be just William Crawford bowed his head meekly, not too proud to believe that he could have done better if he had "taken more pains." Who could be more acutely conscious than he was of his shortcomings? Whose eyes were keener than his to perceive the weak spots in his work? There is no finer tonic for the true worker than adverse criticism. The friend's lavish praise may enervate: the foe's hardest usage braces and fortifies. Guy Patin, in a criticism on Sir Thomas Brownie, which in the Christian benevolence of its tone is not altogether unlike some criticism of the nineteenth century—regrets that "the man is alive, because he may grow worse." How completely the slashing critics of the present day seem to forget that so long as the man is alive, it is possible for him to grow better!

William Crawford was very happy in the painting-room where the greater part of his life was spent. What man can be so happy as the triumphant artist?—convinced of the innocence and purity of his triumphs, assured of being remembered when all other labourers are forgotten, knowing that his glory will be revealed to posterity by no musty records written by a stranger, but by his own handiwork, instinct with his own soul, revealing himself in a language that needs no translation, and is almost as familiar to the savage as to the savant, so nearly does it copy nature.

Florence thought it a very hard thing that her father would not take her to perpetual parties, and grumbled sorely at being sent under convoy of any grumpy old chaperone who might be available; but on this matter the painter very rarely gave way.

"Do you know how long art is, as compared to a man's life?" he asked. "Can you guess what Raffaelle might have been if he had lived to be as old as Titian? If there is any special strength in my hand, Flo, it is because in twenty years I have worked as hard as most men work in forty. When I paid fifteen shillings a week for my lodgings my landlord grumbled because I kept my fire in all night, in order that I might be at work before daybreak. I don't make any merit of having worked hard, you know, my dear. I have worked because my work pleased me; and you would never believe how little I ever thought of the fame or money that success would bring me. I don't think your real artist ever sets much value upon the price of his labour; he may want money as much as any other man, and of course he is glad to get it; but it is the triumph of his art that he rejoices in, rather than any personal success. The creation of his work is in itself happiness, and would be though his picture were foredoomed to melt and vanish under his hand at the moment of its completion. I would answer for it that Michael Angelo enjoyed modelling his statue of snow quite as much as if he had been putting the finishing touches of his chisel to the fairest marble that ever grew into life under the craftsman's hand, to receive a soul from the last touch of the master. Don't worry me about parties, Flo. I will pay as many milliner's bills as you like, and I'll paint you in all your prettiest dresses, and your most bewitching attitudes, and give you the price of your beauty for pocket-money; but I won't go to be crushed to death upon staircases, or martyred in the act of fetching an ice. I won't go to people who only want to see what the painter of Aspasia is like, as if I must needs be like something different from my fellow-men, and who will think me an insignificant-looking fellow, with very little to say for myself. What should I have to say to people who don't know the A B C of the language to the study of which I have given my life?"

So Flo was obliged to be satisfied, and was fain to go into society under the wing of benevolent matrons who had no daughters of their own to be crushed by Miss Crawford's beauty. Flo had her maid and her carriage and was quite a little woman of fashion; while the painter lived his own life opening his doors every Sunday evening to all who cared to visit him, and generally hiding himself in some snug little corner of his spacious drawing-rooms amongst the friends of his soul, while fashionable visitors who had been received with perfect aplomb by Florence, prowled about in search of him, and stared at the wrong man through gold-rimmed eyeglasses, or pronounced adverse criticisms upon his own pictures under his very nose. Of course Florence Crawford was perfectly aware that her father's protégé, the landscape painter, was desperately in love with her. We live in a fast-going century, and though Flo was only eighteen, she was fully versed in the diagnostics of a hopeless passion of which she was the object. She knew poor Philip's weakness, and laughed undisguisedly at his folly. She was a very dashing young person, and she declared herself to be an utterly heartless young person whenever she became expansive and confidential. Whether the heartlessness were real or affected was an enigma which no one had yet been able to solve. Whatever were the follies of the age, Flo went with them at full gallop. She talked slang, and affected a masculine contempt for all feminine pursuits, had been heard to ask what bodkins were meant for, and whether shirt-buttons were fastened on their foundations with glue. She had a tiny, tiny morocco volume, lined with satin, and emblazoned with gold, and obnoxious with patchouli—a volume that was called a betting-book, and which had about the same relation to the greasy volumes kept by the bookmen who gather on the waste ground in Victoria Road, or meet one another furtively at the corner of Farringdon Street, as a rosebud has to a red cabbage. Dozens of Jouvin's or Dent's six-and-a-quarter gloves were the principal entries in this mystic volume; but Flo had been known to obtain an actual tip from some aristocratic member of the Jockey Club, by whose friendly agency real money had been wagered and won. She was very fast, and had once been seen under the marble colonnade at the Fountains puffing daintily at a coquettish little cigarette. But it is only fair to add that the daring exploit resulted in deadly pallor and unpleasant faintness, and that the experiment was not repeated. She had her horse, and her own groom,—a steady old fellow who helped in the garden, and of whose boots and costume poor Flo was inclined to be rather ashamed when she met her stylish friends in the Row.

Did she ever pause to think that her life was useless, and extravagant and unwomanly? Well, no, not yet. She was only eighteen, remember, the age when a woman has not quite ceased to be a kind of refinement upon a kitten—beautiful, graceful, capricious, mischievous, treacherous. She was at an age when a woman is apt to take pleasure in treading on masculine hearts, and if remonstrated with upon her cruelty, would be quite inclined to echo the question of the poetess, and cry,—

Flo insisted on making a confidante of Cecil.

"I'm the most mercenary of creatures, you know, dear," she said, "and I made up my mind ever so long ago that I would marry for money, and nothing but money. All the nicest girls marry for money nowadays, and live happy ever afterwards. I dare say there was a time when it was quite nice to be poor, and live in a cottage with the husband of one's choice. What a musty old Minerva Press phrase that is!" cried Flo, with a grimace,—"the husband of one's choice! But that was in the days when women wore cottage-bonnets with a bit of ribbon across the crown, or hideous gipsy hats tied down with handkerchiefs, and white muslin dresses with a breadth and a half in the skirt, and when a woman on horseback was a show to be followed by street boys. I suppose Lady Godiva and Queen Elizabeth were the only women who ever did ride in the Middle Ages. Nous avons change tout cela. A woman in the present day must have three or four hundred a-year for pin-money, if she is not to be a disgrace to her sex in the way of gloves and bonnets; and she must ride a three hundred guinea hack if she wants to escape being trampled upon by her dearest friends; and she will find herself a perfect outcast unless she has a box in a good position at one of the opera-houses; and she must go in for dogs and china,—not vulgar modern Dresden abominations, in the way of simpering shepherdesses, and creatures in hoops drinking chocolate or playing chess; but old Vienna, or Chelsea, with the gold anchor, or deliciously ugly Wedgwood, or soft paste. In short, my dearest Cecil, a woman nowadays is a very expensive creature, and love in a cottage is an impossibility. Why, there are no cottages for the poor lovers! The tiniest, tiniest villa on the banks of the Thames costs about two hundred a-year; and if the poverty-stricken creatures who marry for love want a house, they must go to some horrible place beyond the Seven Sisters' Road, and be happy amongst a wilderness of brickfields and railway arches!"

Lady Cecil had seen Florence and Philip together, and had taken it into her head that they loved each other. Her own sorrowful love-story had made her very tenderly disposed towards youthful lovers, and she had ventured to remonstrate with Florence.

"One reads about cruel parents and heart-broken damsels, but I don't think your papa would set his face against Mr Foley so sternly as you set yours, Flory," she said. "He was talking of the young painter the other day, and he told me that your friend Philip has a great career before him if he works patiently."

"Yes, and when he is as old as papa he will be able to earn two or three thousand a-year, I suppose!" exclaimed Miss Crawford. "Do you think that is a brilliant prospect for a girl who cannot live out of society? People with any thing under five thousand a-year are paupers—in society. Do you know what it is that is bearing down upon us, and crushing us all, Cecil, like an avalanche of gold? It is the wealth of the commercial plutocracy. The triumphant monster, Commerce, is devouring us all. Ask papa who buys his pictures; ask where the gems from Christie's go when the great auctions are over; ask why diamonds are worth twice as much to-day as they were twenty years ago: it is all because the princes of trade have taken possession of our land, Cecil, and nowadays a girl must set her cap in the direction of Manchester, if she wishes to marry well."

"Florence, I can't bear to hear you talk like this."

"I am a woman of the world, dear, and I mean to do the best I can for myself. It is very dreadful, I know, but at least I am candid with you. I went to a fashionable school, and you've no idea how we all worshipped wealth and finery. Papa used to come and see me in horrid old hansom cabs, that jingled and rattled as if they would have fallen to pieces when he stepped out of them; but some girls had fathers and mothers who came in two-hundred-guinea barouches, and oh, what a gulf there was between us! and then, again, poor mamma's people live in Russell Square, and there were girls at that school who made me feel that it was a kind of disgrace to have friends in Russell Square. And when I spent the holidays with my uncles and aunts, I used to have mamma's foolish marriage dinned into my ears; and though I always took her part, and declared that it was better to marry papa than to marry a prince of the blood royal, I did think, in my secret soul, that it was very silly to go and live in shabby lodgings near the noisy dirty Strand. Is it any wonder that I have grown up heartless and mercenary, and that I want to have a fine house and horses and carriages when I marry? I hope you will marry a rich man too, Cecil, and give nice parties. You won't have Thursdays though, will you, dear? I have set my heart on having Thursday for my own, own evening."

To this effect Miss Crawford would discourse in her own vivacious fashion; and it was in vain that Cecil appealed to the unawakened heart.

"Philip Foley is a most estimable creature," said Flo; "and if he were not absurdly self-conscious—all young men are so self-conscious nowadays; in fact, in a general way, I consider young men perfectly hateful,—and if he were a marquis with something under a hundred thousand a year, I should think him quite adorable. But then, you see, he isn't a marquis, and he will never earn any thing like a hundred thousand a year by painting those wild skies and dismal rocks of his. Do you know what the Princess Elizabeth, that dear sweet darling whom every one so admires, said when she saw one of Mr. Foley's red-and-yellow sunsets hung next the ceiling in Trafalgar Square:—'Why, what do the Hanging Committee mean by sticking up pictures of eggs and bacon?' said the princess; and ever since that, the poor young man's skies have been called eggs and bacon."