CHAPTER XV.
DELILAH.
After driving about half-a-mile Mr. Crawford halted in a little lane leading out of the high road, and within five minutes' walk of Hyde Park,—an obscure corner, in which one would scarcely expect to find a decent house, but which was, nevertheless, one of the choicest spots at the West-end. It was close to the park; and the maximum of earthly bliss seems to be involved in that fact. The painter alighted before a stout wooden door, set deep in a wall, above which appeared the branches of leafless sycamores. The garden within that circling wall was rather less than half-an-acre in extent: the house that nestled amid those leafless trees was only a cottage; but the rent which Mrs. Champernowne paid for this retreat was something like seven hundred a-year.
It was a retreat—a little hermitage half hidden amidst a dreary wilderness of stucco—a pearl of price amongst the meretricious splendours of Birmingham jewellers' ware—a place, whose parallel was not to be found within the charmed circle in which alone Mrs. Champernowne could exist—and Mrs. Champernowne's landlord knew the value of his treasure. Such a cottage and such a garden at Highgate, or Kew, or Ealing, or Isleworth, might have been worth a hundred and fifty pounds a-year: but such a cottage, within ear-shot of the sparrows of Hyde Park, was worth almost any thing its owner chose to ask for it.
Mrs. Champernowne was elegant, Mrs. Champernowne was fashionable. She was a widow—the widow of an elderly man, who had left her what was supposed to be an inexhaustible fortune. But it may be that this idea had arisen in the public mind rather from the reckless expenditure of the widow than from any exact knowledge of the late Mr. Champernowne's resources. With this gentleman had expired one unutterably ancient lineage, and in the person of his widow was represented another. Backward, through the misty regions of the past, Mrs. Champernowne traced the currents of her own and her husband's blood, winding, by separate ways, into the remote darkness of a legendary age. The history of modern Europe had a personal interest for the elegant widow, and Froissart was a family record. But she rarely spoke of these past glories. Only now and then, when the name of some aristocratic conspirator or court-poet, some distinguished politician, or general, or admiral of a mediæval age arose in a discussion, Mrs. Champernowne might be heard to murmur softly, as to herself, "His great grandson married my mother's great aunt;" or, "Poor fellow, how fond my ancestor Ralph Hyde's youngest daughter was of him! I have the ring he gave her the night before his execution,—a posy ring with the motto, Memoria in æterna."
If Georgina Champernowne had secured for herself a certain position in the fashionable world, she had secured it entirely without effort. She had pleased others by pleasing herself. During her husband's lifetime she had been buried alive in a gloomy old Northumbrian castle that rose black and bare above a great expanse of hill and dale, sparsely wooded here and there, and dignified with the name of park. Those who knew most about her—and even they seemed to know very little—declared that the elegant Georgina had known the bitter gripe of poverty's stern hand before she married Mohun Champernowne, of Champernowne Castle. Her father, Ambrose Arscott Pomeroy, was the last representative of a grand old Cornish family, and had carried his three sons and five daughters to a sleepy Belgian town, where the grass grew in the deserted highways, and where the halls in which mediæval commerce had displayed her richest treasures amidst clamorous crowds of buyers and sellers, served for the storehouses of petty manufacturers or the habitations of lonely old women. Georgina had been educated in a convent within a few miles of Brussels, at a cost of about forty pounds a year, and had emerged therefrom more accomplished than one out of twenty of the damsels who leave a fashionable finishing-school, where the annual stipend is something over three hundred. An accidental meeting between Ambrose Pomeroy and his old friend Mohun Champernowne had brought about the marriage of Georgina; and after performing the duties of a devoted wife, and enduring the humours of an invalid husband and the unspeakable dulness of a Northumbrian mansion for ten years, Mr. Pomeroy's daughter found herself mistress alike of her own destiny and of every shilling that her husband had to leave. Her father had died within the last few years; her brothers and sisters had scattered far and wide, some doing badly, some doing well, but none of them holding their own in the sphere to which Mohun Champernowne's widow belonged. She was quite alone in the world. There was no one who had any right to question her actions or interfere with her caprices. She was thirty-two years of age, and in the dull period of her seclusion her taste had refined itself, and her intellect had ripened.
Then it was that Mrs. Champernowne came to London, and began to live her own life. For her, who had been so long an exile from society, the laws of society had little weight. She took a house in a fashionable neighbourhood because the neighbourhood was pleasant, rather than because it was fashionable. She sent for one of her nieces, and made the girl a permanent inmate of her house, not because she feared to face society without the protection of a female companion, but because she wished to benefit her sister's child. She rarely went into society. She was never seen at horticultural fêtes, or fancy-fairs, races, or lawn-parties; but at the private view of every exhibition of pictures, at the opera, on the first night of a new piece at a fashionable theatre, at a few of the choicer morning concerts in Hanover Square, the initiated recognised Mrs. Champernowne, and pointed her out to uninitiated friends as one of the most elegant women in fashionable London. She was not a dashing woman; no flutter of lace or rustle of silk, no musical tingling of bracelets or bangles, or perfume of jockey club attended her entrance into any public resort. Country cousins, staring at the patrician beauty of West-end belles and the splendour of West-end millinery, were apt to overlook Mrs. Champernowne; but if a connoisseur in the trifles of life had been told to look for the woman whose toilette most successfully combined the extremity of rigid simplicity with the perfection of elegance, he would inevitably have selected the widow.
This was the woman who had been one of the first to recognise the genius of William Crawford, who had given him a high price for one of his earliest successes, and who had been pleased to set him down upon the list of her intimates. And this last boon was no small privilege, for Mrs. Champernowne did not crowd her drawing-room with acquaintances of a season's standing. She lived her own life, and she chose her own friends.
The chosen few who had at first constituted her circle grew into many; but there was none amongst the many who had not some claim to distinction. If the door of the Hermitage had been freely opened to every comer, Mrs. Champernowne might have found it difficult to sustain the tone of distinction which she had so unconsciously acquired. But in shutting her door upon people whose acquaintance another woman in her position might have courted, the widow invested her receptions with a piquancy which fascinated the privileged ones who were free to come and go as they pleased. To be free of the Hermitage was d'être de Marly over again; for, once admitted within those walls, all ceremony was done with. No invitation-cards ever issued from Georgina's fair hands. She was an inveterate tea-drinker; and to linger by her side as she dispensed fragile cups of egg-shell china that held about a table-spoonful, was to be carried back to the days of patch and hoop, and to be subjugated by the charms of a new Belinda—a Belinda of five-and-thirty years, well sounded, but the most bewildering of enchantresses nevertheless.
In the evening Mrs. Champernowne was at home to her intimates, and from ten until twelve the little lane leading out of the Kensington Road was luminous with the lamps of broughams.
"I reserve no particular evening for my intimates, for I know so few people," said the widow—she always made a strong point of her limited circle—"and I so rarely go out. People know they can find me whenever they choose to come, and that I like to see them come in and out of my rooms as they please."
Placed on this easy footing, Mrs. Champernowne's friends found the Hermitage one of the most agreeable houses in London. The best music to be heard at the West-end was to be heard at Mrs. Champernowne's; the freshest photographs of new pictures, that had been the gems of the season in continental exhibitions; the last political pamphlet that had aroused the indignation of the Parisian police; the last comedy by Sardou or Augier, that had succeeded at the Française or Gymnase,—were to be found scattered on her table; and all the lions and lionesses of London roared their mildest roar for the pleasure of their accomplished hostess. Some delicate instinct of her own enabled her to discover nice people. She developed talents that had never been brought to light before. The ice of a reserved nature melted under her genial influence; the most afflicted of bashful men found courage in her presence. People who were utterly subjugated by her fascination sought in vain to define its nature, and were content at last to declare her the most charming of women. Her intimates were pestered by the supplications of outsiders, who wanted to penetrate the magic circle: but that circle was not to be entered easily.
People pleaded hard to be allowed to introduce such and such a friend who was dying to make Mrs. Champernowne's acquaintance, but she was seldom charitable enough to say with Rogers, "Let him live." "Come to see me whenever you like," she said; "but don't bring me any strangers; I detest strangers. The only people I care to know are people I can know before I see them. I read a book or see a picture, or hear a sonata on the violin; and I know in a moment whether I shall like the man or woman who writes, or paints, or plays. I knew by the turn of his Iphigenia's head that I should like Mr. Glendower the sculptor, and now he is one of my best friends. And there is Mr. Crawford," added the widow, smiling sweetly as she turned to the painter; "I knew him intimately from the moment in which I stood riveted before that wonderful Aspasia."
It was at the call of this enchantress that Mr. Crawford had left his painting-room in the bleak February afternoon. He rang the bell, which tinkled with a subdued sound in the distance, for the genius of noise was banished from the Hermitage. Once within those sheltering walls, the visitor recognised an atmosphere which had nothing in common with the vulgar air without. A solemn hush reigned as in a cathedral. No shrieking birds, no yelping lapdogs broke the serene stillness. A man admitted Mr. Crawford into a long glazed corridor, where there were hothouse flowers, the frailest of exotics, whose waxen petals glimmered whitely amidst foliage of dark shining green; and at the extreme end two marble figures seemed to keep guard over a pair of dark-green-velvet doors; which divided the corridor from the inner sanctuary. One of the statues was the Genius of Night, with starry veil and extinguished torch; the other, a Silence, with lifted finger pressed upon closed lips. The subdued tone of the vestibule, the dark foliage and colourless petals of the exotics, the chill whiteness of marble against a background of sombre green, possessed a harmony of their own; and the visitor who entered the Hermitage for the first time felt, before he reached the end of the vestibule, that he was in no common abode. For the painter, acutely alive to the sense of external beauty, the surroundings of Mrs. Champernowne had an irresistible intoxication.
"Why do I come here?" he asked himself, as he followed the servant to the end of the vestibule. "There is an odour in the very atmosphere that stupifies and bewilders me. Take away a wall here and there, and open barbaric colonnades to the glare of an Eastern sun, and I can fancy Samson coming to visit Delilah in this house. I have half a mind to leave my card, and go away without seeing her."
The servant looked back at this moment, as wondering why the visitor did not follow him; and after a little movement of hesitation, Mr. Crawford passed into the hall. Need it be said that Mrs. Champernowne's man-servant was not a common man-servant? He was a most gentlemanly creature, upon whom a livery would have been as much out of place as upon a bishop. A little powder in his hair was the sole badge of his servitude, and became him admirably. For the rest, his costume was such as might have been worn by the ideal curate or the poetic doctor of a young lady's novel. The grave dignity of his manner was more impressive than the concentrated insolence of twenty over-fed Jeameses. As you looked at him you were overpowered by a sense of your own inferiority. You felt instinctively that he had been intended for a higher sphere; that he, too, could number conspirators and court-poets amongst his ancestors; that his tastes were as refined as his manners and appearance; that he devoted his Sabbath leisure to the perusal of the Saturday Review, and would have fainted at the sight of a Daily Telegraph.
The entrance-hall of the Hermitage was by no means spacious. A Persian carpet of moderate dimensions covered the centre of the floor, and protected the unwary stranger from the slipperiness of a tesselated pavement. The same subdued colour which pervaded the vestibule reigned in the hall, where there were yet more pale exotics and antique bronzes looming duskily through the shade. Curtains of soft grey silk shrouded a doorway, through which Mr. Crawford passed into the drawing-room, where there were again dark foliage and starry-white blossoms in the dim shade of grey-silk curtains lined with a pale rose colour, that faintly tinted the subdued light, and where two white Angora cats were sleeping peacefully amidst the fleecy fur of a huge polar-bearskin spread upon the hearth. It might have been the chamber of the Sleeping Beauty which Mr. Crawford had penetrated; and to support the delusion, a lady with closed eyes sat half-buried in the softest and deepest of easy-chairs. But she lifted her eyelids as the gentlemanly servant announced Mr. Crawford, and rose to receive him. She was tall and slender—a stern critic would have called her thin. She was dark and pale, with thick bands of black hair carried behind her ears, and gathered in a compact knot at the back of her head. If she had not been Mrs. Champernowne she would scarcely have been called handsome; but a plainer woman than she might have appeared beautiful amidst her surroundings. Whatever charm there was in her face was not to be traced to any perfection of feature; but in the shape of her small head, the perfect grace of her throat, the varying expression of her countenance, the refinement of her appearance, there lurked a charm rarely to be found in the splendour of perfect loveliness.
This was the woman who had enslaved many men, but for whom independence was too dear a treasure to be bartered lightly. She had been the slave of an old man's caprices, and had endured her slavery with all womanly patience and gentleness; but having won her freedom, she was not inclined to accept any new bondage. Her friends declared that she had refused more than one brilliant proposal within the few years of her widowhood, and she had already acquired the reputation of a widow who would never choose a second husband. This was the woman whose fascinations were acknowledged by all who came within her influence, but amongst whose victims there were very few so utterly helpless, so entirely hopeless, as William Crawford.
He had begun by being grateful to her for that early recognition of his genius which had borne witness to her taste. He had allowed himself to be beguiled into a friendship for her, which speedily became the chief delight of his life. He had wondered at her; he had admired her; he had ended by adoring her. Whether she was fully aware of his weakness, or utterly ignorant of it, was one of the great perplexities of his existence. No word of his had ever declared his passion. He was content to be her friend and guest on sufferance. A word, and he might have been expelled from her presence for ever. There were times when he grew desperate, and was inclined to make the declaration which, as he thought, must inevitably banish him from the smiles of his enchantress, and thus make an end of his love and his despair. There were times when he made a solemn vow that he would abstain from her society, as a drunkard vows that he will abstain from the fiery spirit that destroys him, and, like the drunkard, broke his pledge, before it was many days old.
The idea that any other result than disgrace and banishment could follow the declaration of his love for Mrs. Champernowne never entered the painter's mind. Her grace, her fashion, her wealth, constituted a kind of royalty, which separated her from William Crawford as completely as if she had been a queen. Sometimes, as he worked alone in his painting-room, he thought of all the men who had been bewitched by the light of royal beauty's glances, and had suffered the penalty of their presumption. He thought of the legendary knight who loved Queen Guinevere, of Rizzio and Chastelard, wild Buckingham and fated Konigsmark, foolish Rohan and devoted Fersen.
Fanciful, as the man who lives by the cultivation of his fancy must naturally be, the painter tried in vain to shut the image of his enchantress from his thoughts. The simplicity of his life, the singleness of his ambition, had preserved the freshness of his youth. He was as romantic as a lad fresh from college, and his worship of his divinity was pure and unselfish as the love of sentimental youth.
Mrs. Champernowne smiled her sweetest smile as she gave her hand to William Crawford. She was not a vivacious enchantress. Her feminine detractors had been heard to wonder what gentlemen could see in Mrs. Champernowne, who had really no animation, and gave herself the languid airs and graces of a person who was in the last stage of consumption. But the devotees who worshipped at the Hermitage found a charm in the widow's repose of manner which infinitely surpassed the frisky fascinations of livelier belles. The touch of her soft cool hand had a kind of mesmeric influence. The harmonious tones of her low voice were like the dropping of water in some sylvan fountain. She excelled rather as a sympathetic listener than as a brilliant talker; but as she talked little, and never talked at random, she had a reputation for sound judgment and refined taste rarely accorded to a brilliant talker. For her adorers she was always charming; and though she was alike to all, there was so subtle a fascination in her manner, that there was scarcely one among her band of worshippers who did not fondly cherish the delusion that he was the most favoured, and that there were specially melodious accents and particularly delicious smiles reserved for him alone.
Accustomed, in the ten years of her wifehood, to study the whims and gratify the peevish fancies of an elderly invalid, Mrs. Champernowne had acquired the power of pleasing people who were hard to please. Never since she had reigned in her little world had she wounded the self-love of one of her subjects. People left her presence delighted with themselves, as well as charmed with her, and eagerly returned to renew the impressions that were only to be experienced in her society.
"I thought you were never coming to see me again," she said, as the painter seated himself opposite to her; "and yet you must know how anxious I always am to hear about your new pictures, and to see you," she added, in a softer voice; and then there was a pause, during which one of the Angora cats had crept to her knee to be caressed. There were disappointed worshippers at the Hermitage, who, in the peevishness of despair, declared that Mrs. Champernowne cherished her Angora cats with a view to the aggravation of mankind; and that she knew she never looked prettier than when one of her favourites was perched upon her shoulder, making itself into a fleecy-white background for the jet blackness of her shining hair and the pale olive of her complexion.
"I believe in the transmigration of souls, and that Mrs. Champernowne is Cleopatra," said a young poet whom the widow had admitted into the innermost circle of her intimates. "It's not to be supposed that such a woman as that is only meant to last half a century. There must be a principle of economy in nature by which the souls of the mighty are utilised. I know where to put my hand upon all the great men of the past. I have dined at the Garrick with Shakespeare, and I can show you Snyders's house in St. John's Wood; and I have smoked a pipe with Murillo at Kensington, and have seen John van Eyck putting the last touches to his draperies on the Sunday before he sent his picture to the Academy. I used to lift my hat to poor Harry Fielding, who now lies buried at Kensal Green; and I have bought a cigar-case of genial-hearted Peg Woffington at a fancy fair. Mrs. Champernowne is Cleopatra. You can see the Egyptian tint in her complexion after eighteen centuries; and her cats are lineal descendants from the sacred animal of Memphis. She sits in her easy-chair in the very attitude in which she sat in her galley when she went to meet Antony; and sometimes, when she is distrait, I fancy she is thinking of Actium."
In the presence of his divinity for the first time after some months, William Crawford strove in vain to suppress all semblance of emotion. She was dearer to him than he had ever dared to confess to himself. He tried to beguile himself with the belief that he was only fascinated by her, that the admiration which he felt for her arose only from his artistic sense of her grace. But in her presence all reasoning was vain, and he knew that he loved her. To be near her was so deep a joy that he feared to speak, lest in some wild impulse of rapture he should reveal his secret. He sat opposite to her in silence, with the faint glow of the fire upon his face.
"I hope you have not been working too hard," she said presently, when the cat had clambered upon her shoulder, and she had leant her head against the soft white fur.
It was very little to say, and it was an expression of sympathy that William Crawford was in the habit of hearing from all manner of people; but from this woman it seemed so much.
"No, indeed," he answered, almost sadly; "the error of my life is that I don't work enough. Do you know, Mrs. Champernowne, that since my good fortune I have sometimes wished myself back in my second-floor lodging in Buckingham Street, in the blankest and dreariest interval of my life, only because then at least my mind was free for my work? I fancy that a painter ought to live on the top of a column, like St. Simon Stylites; or if he is a sybarite, and must have shelter from the sun and rain, let him beg a lodging in the octagon tower in Windsor Forest, and spend his life there, with the keeper's children and the deer for his only society. I think the old painters must surely have lived lonely lives, and that the secret of their superiority to us must lie in the fact of their seclusion. We live too much in the world, and have too many distractions. The gleam of sunshine in a landscape, or the smile upon a face which we have been trying vainly to produce for weeks, is just beginning to beam upon our canvas, when a servant opens the door of our painting-room and tells us that Mr. Smith has called, and wants to see us most particularly, and will not detain us a moment. We groan, and go to Mr. Smith, who detains us a quarter of an hour; and when we return to our easel the power is gone out of our brush, the divine light has vanished from our canvas."
In speaking of his art the painter had for the moment forgotten his enchantress, but all the old weakness came back to him as Mrs. Champernowne responded, with the low voice that seemed made to express sympathy:
"I can fancy how annoyed you must be when commonplace people intrude upon you. I hope you are going to do something great this year. You have brought me a sketch to look at: that is indeed kind. I feel such a privileged person when I see the germ of the masterpiece that is to delight the world."
The painter looked at the speaker half incredulously; but the gentle gravity of her manner gave evidence that she had no consciousness of uttering an exaggerated compliment.
"My masterpieces are very poor achievements, Mrs. Champernowne," he said; "and I shall begin to doubt the infallibility of your judgment if you show too much indulgence for my shortcomings."
"I believe implicitly in the genius of my friends, and I will cherish my faith as long as I live," answered the widow; and then she extended her hand with an impatient gesture. "Let me see your sketch, if you please, Mr. Crawford; and when you have told me all about it, I will make you some tea."
There was considerable discussion about the future picture. The subject was Cybele and the infant Jupiter, and the idea was taken from an old play of Thomas Heywood's. Relentless Saturn had commanded the destruction of the child, but the bright smile of the young god disarmed the hand that would have slain him.
Mrs. Champernowne was not a "gushing" person. She gave utterance to no rapturous praises of the sketch; but every word she said went to prove how deeply she was interested in the painter's workmanship. An inner door was opened while she was still bending over the canvas, and a bright-looking, blooming young lady appeared, and greeted the painter with frank cordiality. Some women might have feared the rivalry of such a blooming niece as Miss Helen Vicary, but Mrs. Champernowne had no mere terror of her niece's fresh young beauty than Mary Queen of Scots felt when she contemplated the charms of her four fair namesakes. She liked to have a pretty niece about her, just as she liked the sleek beauty of her Angora cats, the delicate tints of her grey-silk draperies, the turquoise blue of her Sèvres china.
"Tell them to send us some tea, Helen," she said; "I am going to give Mr. Crawford an old woman's entertainment;—and you know this is not the fashionable tea before dinner," she added, turning to the painter. "The rest of the world may eat supper at eight and call it dinner, if they like; but Helen and I dine at four, and doze by the fire till six, and then we drink tea for the rest of the evening. I know that a modern Brummel would be unutterably shocked if he heard our degraded mode of life; but my tea keeps me awake, and I am always ready to enjoy the society of my friends. I have no doubt that modern hours are very wisely chosen; for of course every thing we do in the present is incontestably right, and every thing that was done in the past was supremely wrong; but I don't think the Hôtel de Rambouillet would have been quite so celebrated as it was, if people in those days had dined at half-past eight."
The Belinda tea-service was brought: a clumsy guest had once contrived to break one of the Belinda saucers, but not by the faintest contraction of Mrs. Champernowne's brow could the delinquent have divined the value of the fragile soft paste which he had shattered. The widow was never more charming than when presiding over her tiny tea-table. There was no hissing urn, no glittering kettle simmering noisily above a spirit-lamp; for urns and kettles are by nature fussy, and fuss and bustle were unspeakably obnoxious to Mrs. Champernowne. The gentlemanly man-servant brought a fresh teapot every ten minutes when his mistress had many visitors, and Helen, seated by her aunt, dispensed the cups to the tea-drinkers. Every one of the teapots was a gem in its way, and had an individuality of its own. Mrs. Champernowne had a mania for teapots, and had christened her favourites by the names of illustrious tea-drinkers. There were Pope and Addison, Elizabeth Steele and Lady Mary Montague, Molly Lepel and Horace Walpole. No muscle of the gentlemanly servant's countenance relaxed when he was told that there was to be gunpowder in Lady Mary, and orange-pekoe in Mr. Pope.
The gentlemanly creature lighted a cluster of wax-candles and a moderator-lamp, and stirred the fire as softly as if the poker had been sheathed in velvet. No vulgar glare of gas ever illuminated the Hermitage. Moderator-lamps, burning beneath Parian shades, cast their chastened light upon the sombre green of the velvet pile, and waxen tapers twinkled dimly as in a chapel.
Mrs. Champernowne glanced at the clock on the chimney-piece.
"What time do you dine, Mr. Crawford?" she asked. "I mustn't detain you here while Florence is waiting for you at the Fountains."
"Florence dines in Bloomsbury this evening, and I—I dined between three and four," said the painter, who had eaten three biscuits and drunk a glass of pale sherry at that hour. Was there any such thing as dinner for privileged creatures who were permitted to enter the sacred chambers of the Hermitage?
"I wonder whether she thinks I would leave her for the sake of the best dinner the united chefs of all the London clubs could devise?" he thought.
He stayed at the Hermitage, and drank innumerable cups of tea, and forgot that he had ever sworn to abjure the society of Georgina Champernowne. After tea there were new photographs to be looked at, and pleasant talk about the celebrities of the Parisian salons, and then the widow played the softest little bits of Mozart for the painter's edification. Peculiar in every thing, she had her peculiarity with regard to music, and played Mozart, and Mozart only.
"Other composers are very grand," she said, "but Mozart is grand enough and good enough for me. I find every thing that I care for in his music, and don't care to go further. You know I am wicked enough to hate strangers."
Rossini and Auber, Beethoven and Mendelssohn, were amongst Mrs. Champernowne's strangers. The room filled in the course of the evening, and the painter stayed till eleven o'clock. He went very little into society, and Mrs. Champernowne was pleased to exhibit him to her friends. He knew that he was a slave amongst other slaves, who smiled as they contemplated one another's fetters. But in the siren's presence he gave himself up to the sweet intoxication of her influence. To-night she was especially gracious to him, though even when most gracious she contrived to avoid any thing like exclusiveness.
"You are my prodigal son," she said. "I began to think that I was never to see you again."
Throughout all the evening she said nothing worth recording. She sat in the midst of handsomer women than herself, and gave place while cleverer women talked their best; but those who left her presence remembered her and her only; and there were many who would have sympathised with William Crawford as he walked slowly homeward through the highways and byways of Kensington, pondering upon his enchantress.
"Why should I avoid her if it is such happiness to me to be near her?" he thought. "I have no foolish hope that she will ever be more to me than she is now. It ought to be enough for me to see her now and then, to spend such an evening as I have spent to-night, and to go back to my work all the better for so bright an interval of happiness. What can I want more than that, or what could be more delightful—while it lasts? But when I am old and grey and purblind, and have painted half-a-dozen bad pictures, and the public are tired of me, and the critics call my colour flimsy, and insolent young painters begin to talk of poor old William Crawford, who was once such a great card, will Mrs. Champernowne let me spend my evenings at the Hermitage then?"