CHAPTER XXXII.
BY THE SEA.
Psyche and the Zephyrs waited the last touches of the master's hand; but William Crawford painted no more. The eminent oculist would not give him any decided opinion as to the ultimate restoration of his sight.
"We must wait," he said; "you must give me time."
The painter obeyed his medical adviser implicitly; and after pursuing a certain course of treatment for a certain time, he went with his servant Dimond to a little sea-coast village in Dorsetshire,—still in accordance with the oculist's advice. Change of air,—change to a better and purer air than the atmosphere of Kensington, could do no harm, said the oculist, and might possibly effect some good.
William Crawford begged the oculist to select for him the loneliest and quietest spot he knew of; and to that spot he went, travelling by a night train, with a green shade over his poor useless eyes, and the factotum who had served him since the beginning of his prosperity for his sole companion and attendant.
As yet he had told his dismal secret to no one but the oculist and the man-servant. Friends and acquaintances called at the Fountains, and were told that Mr. Crawford was ill. Was it any thing serious? Oh no,—nothing serious; he had over worked himself,—that was all. The painter could not bring himself to reveal his sorrow even to his best friend; he could not bring himself to confess that his career had come to an end—that a living death had fallen upon him in the zenith of his fame. All through the long, dark, empty days,—the perpetual night of his existence,—he brooded upon his trouble; never any more to behold the beauty of the universe; never again to be the mortal creator of immortal loveliness. There are no words which can describe his despair when he thought that his career had ended,—that his hand would never again wield a brush, his eyes never more be dazzled by the splendour of his own colour.
He prayed night and day; but he could not bring himself to repeat the inspired words which had formed his nightly and daily supplication before the hour of his calamity. He could not say, "Thy will be done." He cried again and again, "Oh Lord, restore my sight—restore my sight!"
He thought of other men on whom the same calamity had fallen; but on those men it had fallen so lightly. Milton's grandest thoughts found their expression after the outer universe had become a blank to him. Beethoven achieved that which was almost a triumph over the impossible when his genius survived the loss of his hearing; but oh, what anguish the musician must have endured when his fingers wove those divine harmonies which he was never to hear! For the sightless painter what hope remained? Henceforward there could be no light upon William Crawford's pathway but the pale radiance of past glories.
While his misfortune was yet new to him, the painter gave way to utter despair: he complained to no one—he demanded no mortal pity; but hour after hour, day after day, he sat in the same attitude—dead in life. He knew that he had many friends who would have been inexpressibly glad to give him comfort in these bitter days; friends who would have done their best to cheer his desolation with pleasant talk, grave reading, music, poetry, the stirring news of the outer world, the airy gossip of coteries. He could not bring himself to accept such consolation yet. The very thought of friendly companionship made him shudder.
"I shall never paint any more," he cried; "I shall never paint any more. The young men would talk and think of me as they talk and think of the dead. They would be kind, and pity me; but I don't want their pity. I want to show them that I have not emptied my sack, and that there is progress for me yet."
One day the painter groped his way to the easel on which the Psyche still stood, shrouded with dismal drapery. He plucked the veil from his divinity, and passed his tremulous hands over the canvas. They were hands as yet unused to groping in the dark, and he had none of the subtle delicacy of the blind man's touch; but when he came to patches of solid colour here and there, he fancied he recognised familiar portions of his work.
"My Psyche's hair," he murmured; "I can feel the undulating touches of the brush; and here are her shoulders, the rounded pearly shoulders. Yes, yes, I remember; there was a thought too much of the palette-knife hereabouts."
He laid his face against the canvas presently, and some of the bitterest tears that ever fell from manly eyes dropped slowly on the picture which he could not see.
He was very glad to leave his own house and to escape from the inquiries of anxious friends and acquaintance. He had a nervous dread of any revelation of his calamity.
"Would she be sorry for me?" he thought; for even in this dark hour of his life his fancy took a forbidden flight now and then, and hovered about the lady of the Hermitage. "Would she be sorry? No; she would only be interested in me as a new kind of lion. She would come and beseech me to show myself at her parties. She would pet me, and exhibit me to her friends as the blind painter—the last new thing in drawing-room celebrities. No; I will not accept her pity—I will not sink so low as that. I will go and hide myself in some quiet corner, and let the world believe that I am dead, if it will."
Not even to his daughter had William Crawford confided his sorrow. She was far away from him—at Pevenshall—surrounded by gaieties and splendours; and what need had he to darken her young life with the knowledge of his affliction? He dictated a letter to the factotum Dimond, in which he informed Flo that he had hurt his hand, and was for that reason unable to write himself, but that he was in excellent health, and was on the point of starting for the seaside for a few months' rest and quiet.
The sea-coast village chosen by the oculist was one of the loneliest spots within the limits of civilisation. There was no fear of any observant stranger recognising William Crawford in the melancholy-looking gentleman who walked listlessly to and fro on the sands, leaning on his servant's arm, and never looking to the right or left. The little hamlet consisted of a cluster of fishermen's cottages, a general shop, and a rude village inn, where the voices of the fishermen might be heard sometimes after dark roaring the chorus of some barbarous ditty. One of those speculative individuals who are continually roaming the face of the earth, with a view to ruining themselves and other people in the building-line, had discovered that the air of Callesly Bay was the balmiest that ever restored healthful roses to wan and faded cheeks, and had erected an hotel, which might have had some chance of success at Brighton or Biarritz, but which was about twenty times too large for the possible requirements of Callesly Bay. Advertisements had appealed in vain to the British public. The one sheep that leads the other sheep had not yet been tempted to jump through this special gap in the hedge; and the Royal Phœnix Hotel and Boarding-house, with every possible attraction for noblemen and gentlemen, was a dreary failure. So much the better for William Crawford. What did he care if the waiters were listless and the cooking execrable? For the last four or five months of his life he had been in the habit of eating without knowing what he ate; and just now the most perfect achievement of culinary art would have been as dust and ashes in his mouth.
Callesly Bay suited the painter. His servant informed him that, with the exception of an invalid lady, who went out daily in a Bath-chair, and a paralytic gentleman, who took the air at his bed-room window, he was the only occupant of the great barrack-like hotel. This knowledge brought a sense of tranquillity to the painter's mind. In this quiet retreat he was safe. Here at least there were no prying eyes keeping watch at his gate; no journalists, eager for information about every body and every thing, and ready to dip their pens into their ink-bottles to spread the tidings of the painter's calamity in less than five minutes after those tidings reached their greedy ears.
Day after day, day after day, William Crawford paced the sand of the bay upon his servant's arm, and felt the soft ocean-breezes on his face. There is no calamity so terrible, no affliction so bitter, that habit will not temper its anguish to the sufferer. Little by little, sweet Christian resignation began to take the place of dogged Pagan despair. The grief which had fallen upon him lost the first sharpness of its sting. The past, with all its artistic pride and triumph, drifted away from the present; until it seemed to the painter that his blindness was an old familiar sorrow, and the days of his work and ambition strange and remote. Sweet fancies began to visit him as he walked slowly to and fro amid the scene of tranquil beauty which he could imagine but not see, and the subtle sense of the painter melted into the subtler sense of the poet. It is impossible for the mind of such a man to remain barren. There is in such a soul a divine light that cannot be extinguished. If the painter did not see that calm English bay in all its glory of sunrise and sunset, he saw a fairer bay, and a brighter sun going down behind enchanted waters. All the splendours of dreamland unfolded themselves before those sightless eyes. The peerless mistress of Praxiteles arose from a sunlit sea, beautiful as when Apelles beheld in her the type of his goddess. The shadows of the past grew into light in the blind painter's fancy. He forgot himself and his own loss while thinking of fairer creations than his own. The very breath of the ocean brought divine images to his mind. It was not the coast of Dorsetshire which he trod: the sands beneath his feet were the golden sands of fairyland; the sea whose rolling waves made music in his ears was the sea that carried Æneas to Dido, the fatal ocean that bore Telemachus to Calypso; the wave that licked the white feet of Andromeda; the waste of waters on which a deadly calm came down when Agamemnon launched his Troy-bound fleet, and offended Diana visited the impious hunter with her wrath.
"If I ever live to paint again, I will do something better than Dido or Psyche," said William Crawford; for as the deep gloom of his despair vanished before the divine light of poetry, he felt a wondrous power in his fettered hands; and brooding hour after hour on the pictures which yet remained to be painted, it seemed to him as if new lights had dawned upon him in the day of his darkness—lights that would abide with him for the rest of his existence, and guide him in his future work—if God were pleased to give him back his eyesight.
He had been at Callesly Bay for more than a month, and the ocean-breezes were beginning to lose their balmy summer warmth. He had grown accustomed to his affliction, perfectly resigned, very tranquil. Day by day he took the same walks, picturing to himself the changing beauties of the scene, and sometimes even questioning the matter-of-fact Dimond as to appearances in the sea and sky. Within the last two or three weeks he had begun to take some faint interest in that outer world to which he had once belonged; and the factotum, who read a little better than the majority of his class, beguiled the evenings by the perusal of the newspapers, and sometimes even tried his hand upon a pocket-edition of Shakespeare, borrowed from the landlord of that splendid failure, the Royal Phœnix.
On one especially beautiful autumn afternoon the painter more keenly than usual felt the want of some companion a little more refined—a thought more sympathetic than Dimond the factotum.
He had paced the sands till he was tired, and had seated himself on a low rock, on which it had been his habit to sit since his first coming to that quiet shore. Sitting here, with the faithful Dimond by his side, Mr. Crawford abandoned himself to the influence of the balmy air. He knew that at such an hour and with such an atmosphere there must be unspeakable beauty in the western sky—delicious gradations of colour which he was never more to see; and he would fain have wrung some translation of that unseen beauty from the prosaic lips of the factotum.
"Is the sun low, Dimond?" he asked.
"Yes, Sir,—uncommon low. I never did see any thing like the sunsets in these parts—they've got such a sudden way with them."
"I thought the sun was low. I can feel a light upon my face; there is a light upon my face,—a red light, isn't there, Dimond?"
"Yes, Sir."
"And the sky? I'm sure the sky is very beautiful—isn't it, Dimond?"
"Well, yes, Sir; it's a very fine afternoon; but, if my corns don't deceive me—asking your pardon for talking of 'em, Sir—there'll be some rain before long," added the prosaic Dimond.
"Never mind your corns, Dimond," exclaimed the painter impatiently; "I want you to tell me about the sky. I have always fancied one might do something good with an Andromeda standing out in sharp relief against an evening sky; with nothing but the rock, and the low line of purple sea, and with one white sea-gull hovering on the edge of the water," he soliloquised; while Dimond looked doubtfully to windward and pondered on the prophetic shootings of his corns.
"Tell me about the sky!" cried Mr. Crawford; "a broad band of deep rose-colour melting into amethyst; and then a pale transparent opal—eh, Dimond?"
"I don't know about opal, Sir; but there's a bluish and greenish way with it—something like that bad lumpy glass you see sometimes in wash-house windows."
"Wash-house windows! Oh Dimond, go home and get me Shakespeare,—the second volume of the tragedies,—and I'll give you a lesson in reading. You shall read me the description of Cleopatra before we go back to dinner."
The factotum obeyed, nothing loth to escape from that trying cross-examination about the sky; and the painter sat alone by the sea, listening to the low harmonies of the waves and pondering that possible picture of Andromeda. He could fancy every curve of the beautiful rounded form, sharply defined against a sombre background of rock; the dark streaming hair; the white, lovely face faintly tinged with the last rays of sunset; the sad despairing eyes looking seaward for the monster. Andromeda's pale beauty filled the painter's mind. He heard the dull moaning of the pitiless waves, the sighing of the night winds amidst the victim's hair; he could almost fancy he heard the swooping wings of the deliverer's steed; and thus beguiled by sounds that were not, it is scarcely strange that he did not hear sounds that were,—the silken rustling of a woman's dress, the soft fluttering of a woman's shawl.
"I may dream of pictures; but I shall never paint again!" cried William Crawford hopelessly.
A gentle hand was laid upon his arm as he spoke; and he awoke from that vision of Andromeda to know that there was a living, breathing woman by his side.
"Oh yes, you will paint again, Mr. Crawford. The trial is a bitter one; but please God, it will not be enduring. Why did you leave me to find out what had happened?"
"Mrs. Champernowne!"
"Yes; the woman whose friendship you rejected so cruelly last April, and who comes now to offer it once more—on her knees, if you like. I think one might almost venture to fall upon one's knees in this delightfully lonely place."
"Mrs. Champernowne!"
"Call me Georgina," said the widow, in her lowest and most harmonious accents. "I have come to offer you my friendship; and to-day friendship means any thing you like. I have learnt to hate my own selfishness since that day at Kensington. I have learnt to know that a woman cannot live her own life; that the time will come sooner or later when the presence of one dear companion will be necessary to her existence, when the loss of one friend will take every charm from her life. I have missed you so cruelly, William—so cruelly. You don't know what a dreary season this summer just departed has been to me."
"My darling, can I believe—can I imagine——"
This waking dream,—the tender words sounding in his ears, the tender hands clinging round his arm, seemed to the painter to constitute a far wilder vision than any dream of Andromeda. And yet it was all a sweet reality; the tender hands were warm with life, and sent a magnetic thrill to the very core of his heart.
"My darling, do you want to make me mad? Oh, Georgina, your presence here is like nothing but a dream. But if I wake presently to find that you have been trifling with me, I shall die. The anguish of such a disappointment would kill me."
"Do you know that you have behaved very badly to me?" said the widow. "You must have known that I loved you. Remember how humbly I besought your friendship: and you scorned me and sent me away, just because I was not ready to renounce my precious liberty at a moment's notice for your pleasure. I think you might have had patience with me a little longer, Mr. Crawford. Rubens would never have had three wives, if he had not shown a little more forbearance to womanly caprice. But I forgive you that offence. What I cannot forgive is your cruelty in letting me remain ignorant of this sorrow that has come upon you lately. You ought to have known that the more uncertain and hard to please a woman may be in a general way, the more fitted she is to play the ministering angel on occasions. Yes, Mr. Crawford, it was very cruel of you. All through the summer I have been thinking of you, and wondering about you,—wondering what you were doing, wondering why you did not relent and come to see me. It was only this morning that I learned what had happened from a little gossiping paragraph in a newspaper. I ordered my carriage, and drove straight to the Fountains, where I made the servants tell me your whereabouts."
"My darling, my angel! Are you laughing at me, Georgina; or may I really call you by these dear names?"
"You may call me any thing you please, if you will call me your wife by-and-by. Helen Vicary is with me. I only gave her twenty minutes' notice about the journey. Do you know what I said to her?"
"No, indeed, dearest."
"I am going down to Dorsetshire, Helen, to ask Mr. Crawford to marry me. Pack your things immediately, and be sure you put a white dress in your trunk; for in all probability I shall want you to be my bridesmaid."
"Mrs. Champernowne, this is pity! I will not accept such a sacrifice. My calamity has fallen upon me by God's will, and I will bear it bravely. I will not trade upon it in order to win from a woman's generosity that which I could not obtain from her love."
"Was there ever such a provoking creature?" cried Mrs. Champernowne. "Must I reiterate the confession of my folly? I did not know what I was doing that day when I rejected your love. It was only afterwards, when the days and weeks went by and I was obliged to endure my existence without you—it was only then that I knew I had lost something without which life was worthless to me. Am I to tell you again and again how dearly I love you? I have loved you so long that I cannot tell you when my love began. But it is possible that my humiliation comes too late. You have learnt to forget me, or worse, perhaps you have learnt to love some one else as you once loved me."
"To forget you—to love another woman after having known you—my idol—my goddess! I love you to distraction. My only fear is that compassion, generosity, self-abnegation——"
"Self-abnegation! You ought to know that I am the most selfish of women. But here is your servant. Will you take my arm to go back to the hotel? I have apartments in the same hotel, and poor Helen is waiting for her dinner. Will you tell your servant to follow us, and trust yourself to me, William?"
Would he? The sweet magnetic thrill went to the core of his heart once more as Georgina Champernowne slipped her wrist under his arm. How gently she guided his footsteps! How easy the walk was to him by her side! He was no longer blind. He possessed something better than eyesight, in the protection of the woman he loved.
Before the month was out, there was a quiet wedding in Callesly Bay; and the letter which gently broke to Florence the tidings of her father's affliction was no ill-spelt missive from the factotum, but an affectionate feminine epistle, signed "Georgina Crawford," and written when the painter and his wife were on the eve of a journey to Italy.