CHAPTER XXVIII.
"WERE ALL THY LETTERS SUNS, I COULD NOT SEE."
While the butterflies of fashion enjoyed the bright summer time, and brazen bands brayed their loudest in horticultural gardens, and foreign glee-singers carolled in every imaginable European language at morning concerts and lawn parties, William Crawford shut himself in his painting-room, and worked as he had never worked since the old days in Buckingham Street, when the world had yet to learn that there was a painter called Crawford.
He had nothing left him now but his art. He reminded himself of that fact very often as he stood before his easel in the balmy summer weather, while suburban butterflies wheeled above his roses, and a suburban bee boomed and bounced against the old stained-glass in his bay-window. Time had been when the painter had found his art more than sufficient for his life, and when his chief regret had been that life was not long enough for art. But the elegant siren of the Hermitage had disturbed the even current of his existence; and it was in vain that he tried to coax the stream back into its old course.
"I begin to think that I shall never paint another picture," he said to himself, after abandoning more than one design in despair. "I make sketch after sketch, but my ideas lose their freshness before I am ready to begin upon my large canvas. Have I lost my love for my art, in loving her? or what is this restless, feverish uncertainty which takes the power out of my hand? I will not be the slave of this folly. I have outlived bitterer sorrows than the loss of Mrs. Champernowne's society. I lived down the trouble of my young wife's death; I survived ten years of perpetual failure and disappointment; and am I to succumb at the very last because a woman is selfish and heartless? No; I will forget Georgina Champernowne; I will paint a better picture than I have ever painted yet."
After arriving at this resolution, Mr. Crawford abandoned his brushes and palette for one entire day, and shut himself in his library. He took down his favourite volumes,—the sweet familiar stories of the Greek fairyland; and all the lovely images which had made the brightest dreams of his inspired boyhood came back to him, and floated around him once more, in spite of Mrs. Champernowne. His Psyche's enchanting face bent over him as he sat dreaming in the drowsy summer noon; his Cupid peered at him in all the godlike beauty of immortal youth; and innumerable nymphs, innumerable sirens filled the room with their aërial loveliness.
He went back to his painting-room the next morning with new enthusiasm, and with all the details of his picture fully developed in his mind.
"Come, my divinity," he cried; "come, my bright incarnation of the immortal soul, and put to flight all earthly follies by your divine presence. As I am a man and a painter, I will forget you, Mrs. Champernowne; and my new picture shall plant me a round higher on the glorious ladder."
From the beginning of May to the end of July William Crawford worked incessantly at the large canvas which he had set up for himself in his despair. No hand but his own had any part in the work; for he was possessed with a feverish delight in his labour which he had never, even in his most industrious days, felt before. He worked all through the long summer days, by good lights and bad lights; entering his painting-room at eight o'clock in the morning, rarely to leave it till seven in the evening. He took his hasty meals in that tapestried chamber, amongst the black oak cabinets and trailing draperies.
The servants at the Fountains remarked the change in their master's habits, and talked gravely of his haggard face and restless impatient manner.
"He used to be the best of tempers," said the painter's man-of-all-work; "but now it's as much as you can do to open your mouth without getting your nose snapped off, which the young person that comes to sit for his Fishky says his tempers about her attitoods is somethink offul, and that he's got no more consideration for her elbow-joints than if she was his wooden dummy; which I'm sure, up to two or three months back, there wasn't a pleasanter gentleman or a better master than Mr. Crawford."
It is good for a mortal to be reminded of his mortality at that moment when his yearnings towards a brighter universe have lifted him away from this dull earth, and are wafting him towards that serener region in which dwell the perfect images of his fancy. There are limits beyond which no man can go; and during the last three months of his life William Crawford had been trying to overstep those limits. In the hope of forgetting the woman he loved, he had thrown himself into his work with a burning eagerness for success that was dangerous to him alike as a man and an artist.
"If other men work six hours a day, I will work twelve," he thought. "I have nothing to live for now but my work."
This was the refrain of his life nowadays. What had he to live for but his art? and if he did not do great things in that, what purpose was there left for his existence?
The subject of his new picture was only another chapter in his favourite fable—the story of Psyche. She lay asleep under a tent, with the young god by her side, sleeping like herself, divinely innocent in the unconsciousness of slumber. A crowd of zephyrs, holding one another by the hand, have come to peep at the sleeping lovers. They float on a wandering ray of moonlight, they hover in aërial circles about the lovely sleepers. Never had William Crawford achieved a greater triumph than in the creation of these ethereal beings, transparent as water-drops against a moonlit sky, with sweet arch faces and gauzy wings. And the slumbering Psyche, with her fair infantine face, and her veil of pale golden hair; and the divine moonlight, and the mysterious depths of cool shadow,—every detail of the picture was a triumph; and as the work neared its completion the painter began to feel that he had at least surpassed himself.
"When Sheridan was slow to write a new comedy, they said he was afraid of the author of the School for Scandal. And people have declared that I should never equal the painter of the 'Aspasia;' but I think I have beaten the Aspasia at last," mused Mr. Crawford as he stood before his easel, and pondered on the aërial charms of his zephyrs.
He had worked by bad lights and good lights—in sunshine and shadow. He had grappled with and mastered the difficulties to which he had been wont to succumb. Not content with doubling the daily hours of his labour, he had worked at his background at night. There had been no reason for his abnormal industry except his own restlessness; but that restlessness was unconquerable. The intoxication of success took possession of him, and he allowed himself neither pause nor respite.
There came a time when under any other phase of circumstances he would have laid down his palette and left his painting-room. There came a time when he felt that his sight was beginning to suffer from unwonted use; but still he went on.
"I can rest as long as I like when my zephyrs are finished," he said to himself. "If I were to leave my picture, I might lose the freshness of my ideas; I might even take a disgust for my lovely Psyche."
So the painter held on steadily, in spite of a curious languor which made his eyelids heavy, and an occasional visitation from a strange throbbing pain above his eyebrows. He went on; promising himself a consultation with some distinguished oculist, and a long rest when his "Psyche and the Zephyrs" was finished. He continued his work with unrelenting industry, indomitable determination: but there were moments in which the beautiful faces upon his canvas disappeared suddenly behind a dazzling mist, until he was fain to lay down his brushes and walk up and down the room for a little while with his hands before his tired eyes.
It was the middle of August, and the picture wanted little more than a week's work for its completion, when the painter yielded for the first time to that languid feeling in the eyelids, and abandoned his work in order to indulge in a brief siesta. All the clocks of Kensington had just struck three, and the vibration of the different chimes came floating across the painter's garden. It was an almost insupportable summer day—sultry and oppressive—the day of all others on which the hardest worker is apt to be seized with a distaste for his labour.
"It's no use," said Mr. Crawford, as he gave a last look at his canvas; "I can scarcely see the colours I am using. I can't stand against this drowsiness any longer."
He threw himself upon a sofa, a noble conch of strictly classic form, upon which had erst reclined Aspasia the wise and beautiful, or at any rate the dark-haired model who had sat for the Grecian beauty; that maligned enchantress who sinned against poetry by descending from a Pericles to a cattle-dealer. The painter fell asleep almost immediately; but for some time after he had lain down he had a dim consciousness of pain above his eyebrows. By-and-by, however, the slumber grew deeper; he no longer heard the bees humming in his roses, the subdued roll of distant wheels. He fell into a long dreamless sleep, from which he awoke at last very suddenly, with a feeling that he had slept for many hours.
He had slept for a very long time as it seemed, for it was quite dark when he awoke.
"No more work to-day," he thought with a sigh. "I counted on getting an hour between five and six. Why hasn't Dimond lighted my lamps?"
The painter groped his way to the bell and rang violently.
"What a night!" he muttered; "there must be a storm brewing. I haven't known it as dark as this all the summer."
He stood by the mantelpiece waiting. The window was opposite him, and he felt the warm summer air floating in upon him where he stood. But he could not even define the broad opening of the window through the profound darkness.
"Lights, Dimond," he said impatiently, as the man opened the door.
"Lights, Sir?"
"Yes; of course. Why have you left the lamps till this time? Why isn't that passage lighted?"
"But it's so early, Sir—not much after five—and such a bright afternoon. I didn't think you'd like me to light the gas yet awhile."
"Not much after five o'clock!" repeated the painter in a tone of utter stupefaction.
"No, Sir; just a quarter-past by your own clock, Sir."
"And a bright afternoon?" he asked in the same tone.
"Well,—of course, Sir, I don't presume to say as regards paintin'; but in a general way a very bright afternoon."
"Oh my God!" cried the painter suddenly.
The servant ran to his master, alarmed by that sudden exclamation, which sounded like a cry of agony.
"Is anything the matter, Sir?"
"No; go—go and get me a cab—immediately—I must go out—and I shall want you to go with me."
"Me, Sir?"
"Yes, you, Sir! Go at once, man, for God's sake—and lose no time about it."
The servant departed in bewilderment of mind, and William Crawford groped his way through the outer darkness to the nearest chair. He sunk into the chair, covered his face with his hands, and burst into tears.
"Blind!" he cried; "blind! blind! I said I had nothing but my art, and now my art is lost to me."
He sat with his head bent forward on his breast, staring hopelessly into the darkness. Strain his eyeballs as he might, they could not pierce that darkness. He saw no Psyche and the Zephyrs, no lovely images created by his hand, no bright glimpse of summer sunshine on the smooth green lawn, no changing light upon the summer flowers, no tender shadows from the grand old cedars,—only darkness, utter darkness; beyond which it might be that his eyes were never again to penetrate.
"Cab, Sir," said the man, presenting himself in the doorway.
"Come here, Dimond," William Crawford said very quietly; "come close to me, and give me your arm, please. I beg your pardon if I was impatient just now, but I have had a great shock. I have been working too hard lately and have injured my sight. God only knows whether the injury is to be a lasting one; but for the moment I am quite blind. I think perhaps I shall manage better if you give me your hand to lead me to the cab. I must go at once to an oculist, and I shall want you to go with me."