CHAPTER XI
A HOSTAGE TO FORTUNE
Lying awake next morning after a night of troubled dreams, it flashed upon him that he ought scarcely to go and see Miss Coble again upon the mere impulsive invitation given on the door-step without her father’s knowledge. He was angry with
himself for having so curiously let himself drift away from the very purpose of his visit. He concluded he had best call on old Coble again at the store, and walked thither with hangdog mien, unable even now to shake off the jail. Old Coble was sorting out a bale of sponge into three baskets—one for bests, one for seconds, and one for thirds.
“Hello, young man!” he roared. Matt felt a momentary trepidation before he remembered that the old man meant his tones to be inviting. He crunched his way towards the mountain over the gritty débris, sniffing in the pungent aroma of the place. The old giant straightened himself, brushed the sand off each hand with the other, and, running his fingers through his white beard by way of combing that, held out his hairy paw to Matt. He gripped the young man’s long fingers heartily, then waved him to a seat on an empty inverted sponge-box.
“I hope I’m not interrupting you,” said Matt.
“Not at all,” said Coble, in angry accents.
There was a pause.
“I made a fool of myself last night,” Matt commenced, abruptly.
Coble looked down inquiringly at him.
“I didn’t say one word to your daughter about the Frenchman,” he continued, ruefully.
The mountain shook with explosive laughter.
“Ho, I suppose you were too taken up sayin’ ’em about yourself.”
Matt reddened uncomfortably, but was silent.
“The gal seems to know a powerful deal about you, anyway,” said old Coble, with a Homeric chuckle.
“We had to talk about something,” Matt explained, apologetically.
“Well, Rosie doesn’t ’pear to want to talk about anything else, that’s a fact. I reckon she was glad enough not to be reminded of the snivellin’ Frenchy.”
“Oh, but I’ve got to tell her,” the young man urged, uneasily.
“Oh yes, she knows you’ve got to tell her. You’re coming to-night, aren’t you?”
“I thought of it,” Matt stammered, taken aback, “if I might!”
“Ho, don’t you be afraid of us; we don’t bite. We ain’t sharks.” He spat out. “This gritty atmosphere makes one powerful dry.”
Matt had an instant of intense mental conflict, impecuniosity contending with his instinct of what was due to the situation and Coble’s past hospitalities.
“Will you liquor with me?” he said.
“I was just about to ask you that,” and the mountain stamped his foot three times.
The moment the two glasses were set on the counter of the little secret bar Matt threw down a ringing dollar with careless magnificence. Coble put his paw on it and pushed it back to him, throwing down a rival dollar. There was a playful scuffle of shoving fingers, accompanied by expostulatory murmurs. Then Matt, rejoicing in defeat, resignedly pocketed his vanquished piece.
“What do you make out of that there paintin’ business?” suddenly asked Coble, as he set down his half-emptied glass and lounged reposefully against the counter.
Matt took another sip of whiskey. “Oh, there are ups and downs,” he said.
“Well, what’s the uppiest up?”
“It depends,” said Matt, vaguely. “If I could succeed in London there’s no end to the money I might make. It isn’t unusual to get three or four thousand dollars for a picture.”
“Three or four thousand dollars!” roared the Titan. “Where do you think I was raised?”
“Why, my uncle in London has often paid five thousand dollars for a picture. Yes, and even ten, though that’s usually after the painter’s dead.”
“Then why don’t you go to London?”
“I can’t afford it,” said Matt, frankly. “I’ve been there, but it’s a great job to get on without money, so I had to come back.”
“But couldn’t your uncle buy your pictures?”
“They weren’t good enough yet,” Matt explained, anxious to defend the family honor. “I want to study a lot more yet.”
“Nonsense! what do you want to study for? Why, that thar shark of yours licks creation.”
Matt shook his head. “I’ve got to go to Paris,” he said, “and to Italy, and see all the great pictures. That’s the only way a man can learn after a certain point.” He added, proudly, “My cousin was sent to Paris by the Royal Academy of London. He won the Gold Medal.”
“Why doesn’t your uncle send you there, then? He ’pears to have made his pile.”
Matt had to take another sip of whiskey before he could reply. “He knows I wouldn’t take anything from anybody.”
“Don’t be a goney. I began life with high notions. Them thar sponges you saw me sortin’ out just now—they’re Florida cup grasses, but the fine-shaped ones in the first basket are goin’ to be Levantine sponges soon as they are bleached with permanganate. Time was when I’d ’a thought that dishonest; now I see it’s only the outsides o’ things that the world wants. When you’re a boss painter nobody ’ll ask who bleached you.”
“I hope I can get on without bleaching,” Matt retorted.
“Ho, don’t get mad! I don’t mean to insinuate you’re not genuine. But the world ain’t a soft place to get on in. They don’t bath you with rose-water and Turkey firsts. I kinder fancy,” he added, with a roguish twinkle, “you must have found that out of late. Now, what you want, Mr. Strang, is to marry a purty, level-headed, healthy gal, with two or three thousand dollars to tide over the time till you can make your five thousand a pictur.”
Matt shot a startled glance at Coble’s beaming face. What he read there supplemented the sensational suggestion of the Titan’s words. A nervous thrill ran through all his body. The thought was like a lightning-flash, at once swift, dazzling, and terrifying. But without waiting to analyze his state of mind, he felt immediately that there was one thing which at the outset rendered the idea impossible. Honesty required that he should instantly put a stop to the parent’s overtures, by informing him that he was a dishonored man—that he had been in prison. But still he shrank from self-exposure. The union was so impossible that it seemed superfluous to humiliate himself.
“Maybe,” he replied; “but five thousand’s only the uppiest up, as you call it. If I didn’t get there, I might be thought a humbug.”
“Oh! any smart man who saw that shark would take the risk of that; and, even if you didn’t get to the uppiest up, there ’d be no fear of your coming down again to the downiest down.”
Matt turned his eyes away, and his fingers tattooed nervously on the stem of his glass.
“That Frenchy friend of yours now, he had the sense and the sarse to want my gal, but, of course, no proper parent would trust his darter to a man like that. So there he lays in the downiest down—good name for jail, eh? Ho! ho!”
Matt wished his companion could moderate his accents; he did not relish this thunderous talk of jail.
“Well, I must be going now,” he said.
“I’m with you; I’m with you,” genially thundered Coble, sauntering after him into the sunny street. “You just think that pointer o’ mine over; it lets you keep your independence and your high notions, and you ain’t indebted to anybody. All you’ve got to do is to find a purty gal who’s got money and who won’t fool it away, a gal who’s been raised simply and can do her own cookin’ and make her own dresses, and don’t play the pianner; you find a gal like that, with a sensible father that don’t think wuss of a young man because he’s been in the downiest down.”
“You know?” Matt faltered. He came to a halt.
“Of course I know. Warn’t it in the paper?”
“But I did paint the portrait of the jailer,” he protested, his cheeks fiery.
“I knew you’d been in chokey all the same.” Coble clapped his paw on the last button of his waistcoat. “A stomach that size warn’t born yesterday. But I’ve kept it from Rosie; she don’t understand business, nor how credit’s a fair wind to-day, and to-morrow a tornado tearin’ around and layin’ everything low. You find a good father,” pursued Coble, in accents as impersonal as they were angry, so that Matt fancied he had mistaken the Titan’s import, “and convince him your folks are respectable, and there’s no wife foolin’ around in London or New York City, and,” here he resumed his walk, “if he don’t jump at you—I’ll—waal, I’m blamed if I don’t give you my own darter. There!”
What he would have replied to this wager Matt never knew, for with a sudden cry of “Thunderation! The shark’s stolen,” the mountain bounded forward with incredible alacrity and dashed into the store.
But it was his own child who was the temporary thief. Matt, following Mr. Coble back into the store to see if his picture had been really paid the compliment of appropriation, found father and daughter bending admiringly over it as it stood on the counter, propped up against some large coarse grass-sponges. His heart beat faster with surprise and excitement.
“Hullo! You here?” said Rosina, raising a face that seemed radiant amid the dull browns and grays of the store.
“I didn’t know you would be here,” he answered, awkwardly, not knowing what to reply.
“Why, didn’t I tell you yesterday I was coming?”
She looked roguishly at him from beneath the broad brim of her flower-wreathed hat, whose narrow black-velvet strings were tied coquettishly under her left ear.
“So you did. I forgot,” he said.
“You seem to forget everything,” she responded, pertly.
“Yes, he’s lost his head altogether,” roared old Coble.
“Thank you for reminding me,” said Matt, eagerly. “Now you are here I can tell you what the Frenchman says.”
“Bother the Frenchman!” said Miss Coble, pouting.
“Yes, but he’s languishing in prison this fine, bright day—”
“Mr. Strang painted the jailer’s portrait. That’s how he met the rogue,” old Coble interrupted.
“And he often cries,” went on Matt.
Miss Coble laughed.
“Gracious, you make me feel like a princess, keeping men in dungeons.”
“Well, that’s how you ought to feel,” said Matt.
“Then I guess I’ll take the privilege of a princess,” said Miss Coble. “I’ll let him out on my wedding-morn.”
Coble roared with laughter.
“There, that’s a fair offer for you, my boy.”
Matt felt very embarrassed, but he ventured to hope, “for the poor devil’s sake,” that Miss Coble would get married soon.
“I hope not,” said Coble, to Matt’s relief. “You’re forgettin’ this poor devil. What am I to do without my Rosie?”
“Oh, you’ll get along all right,” said Miss Coble, with a playful tug at his drooping white beard. “You can send for Aunt Clara.”
“I wish you’d be serious about the poor man in the prison,” Matt pleaded.
“I am serious,” Miss Coble insisted, indignantly.
“Oh yes, she’s serious,” interposed the parent. “She’s solid, is Rosie. You can’t squeeze her like this ’ere sponge. ’Pears to me the only way to help your man is to hurry on the marriage.”
The advent of a customer here removed him, chuckling, from the conversation; and while he was talking angrily to the new-comer, Matt, who had been itching to slip away, found himself compelled to linger on and entertain the young lady, a task which he ended by finding pleasant enough. When she at last said she must go about her marketing, he even asked if there was anything he could carry for her.
“Gracious, no! we get the things sent. But you can walk along, if you have nothing better to do.”
So Matt threaded his way with her among the busy stores, feeling her a part of the sunny freshness of the day, to which he was now alive again; and walking with head erect, for he felt himself rehabilitated by the companionship of so genteel a member of society. He was amused by the keen bargains she drove, and acquired a new interest in prices. Evidently Coble was right—she would make a provident house-keeper. But she would only let him see her part of the way home, though she told him papa expected him to join their evening meal.
“He’s taken quite a fancy to you,” she said. “I don’t know why, I’m sure.”
“I don’t know why, either,” said Matt, simply.
“Perhaps that’s why,” Miss Coble answered, enigmatically.
Then she lent him her gloved fingers for a moment, and gave him a pleasant smile, and tripped away, and he went back and down to the water-side, and lounged about aimlessly in the sun, sky and sea and shipping and the glimpses of hill and forest across the harbor and the white sea-gulls and the bronzed Scandinavian sailors thrilling him with the old sense of the beauty and romance of life. But the open air gave him an appetite, too, and the appetite brought him back to the sordidness of things, to his nigh-bare pockets and the insistent sphinx of his future. He laid out a few cents to stave off hunger till evening should bring better fare at Coble’s; then, in the stronger mood induced by even this minimum of nutriment, a tiresome inner voice began asking by what right he meditated foisting himself upon strangers. He had no longer the excuse of the Frenchman. He had heard Miss Coble’s ultimatum on that matter. And the tiresome voice persisted in dragging up other troublesome thoughts from the depths of consciousness. As he walked about the lively quays it kept repeating Mr. Coble’s observations, though less loudly. Despite some dubious remarks, despite the à priori improbability and unexpectedness of the whole thing, was it possible for Matt to doubt that the old man would be willing to give him his daughter? With whatever timidity he shrank from facing the possibility, wilfully closing his eyes as before a great glare, he could not but feel that Coble’s idea was both rash and generous. Of course his future would justify the old man’s trust and repay it a hundred-fold, but such confidence was none the less touching. Coble did not know—the sun and sea had made the young man drunk again—that he was entertaining a genius. And Miss Coble, too; how kind of her to be so nice to a penniless young man! Her pleasant smiles had been medicinal sunshine to his despairing apathy. If he had not met the Cobles, what would have become of him? But was the girl quite of her father’s mind towards him? Her attitude was certainly not repellent. He allowed himself to dally undisguisedly with the idea, and it made him giddy. The hope of Art flamed again so fiercely that he wondered how it could have lain smouldering so long in his bosom. He was like a pedestrian toiling foot-sore and heart-broken towards a great light that shone celestially on the verge of the horizon. For years he had followed the sacred gleam, over lonely deserts and waste places, with hunger and thirst and pain; and now as, with bleeding feet that could drag along no longer, he was fain to drop down on the way-side, lo! a sound of wheels and a sudden carriage at his side, and he had but to step in to be driven luxuriously to the long-tantalizing goal.
And in this fairy carriage, moreover, sat a pretty maiden, on whose ripe breast he could pillow his tired head, and in whose arms he could find consolation for the blank years. Oh! it was bewildering, dazzling, intoxicating. But did he love the maiden of this enchanting vision? Well, what was love? It would certainly be sweet to hold her warm hand in his, to see her blue eyes soften with tenderness as they gazed into his own. It was so long since a woman had kissed him—such weary, crawling, barren years! That ancient episode with Priscilla came up, as it had not seldom done before, transfigured by the haze of time and the after-glamour of romance; he had long since forgotten how little the girl had really appealed to him in the flesh, and to remember that he had spurned her caresses did not always give him a glow of moral satisfaction. In the delicious sunshine that danced to-day in a myriad gleams on the green waters, and made the air like wine, lurked a subtle appeal to his mere manhood. Were not all women equally lovable for their sex? In the novels and poems he had read love was glorified and woman was a spirit; in his own soul lay divine conceptions of womanhood that inspired his art and sanctified his dreams: a womanhood whose bodily incarnation—imagined now in this gracious shape, now in that—was the outer symbol of an inner loveliness of thought and emotion. But he had not met this Ideal Womanhood; nor did he even expect to meet it in the crude common day. Once or twice in his London life, as in his boyhood in this very city of Halifax, when he had worshipped the beautiful horsewoman, he had seemed to catch a glimpse of it, but it was always far off—as far as the star from the moth. And so, whether seen or divined, it belonged almost equally to that world of imagination in which his true life had been lived, in which he had always taken refuge from the real. He had scarcely known before a girl so refined as Miss Coble, unless, perhaps, it was the adolescent Ruth Hailey, whose shy stateliness had made her so alien from the little girl he dimly remembered taking for a sweetheart in those days of childish mimicry when one drives broomsticks for horses. Why should he not marry this pleasant, plump young woman, if she would condescend to him? Though her position was so much better than his, he did not feel her too remote from him for comfortable companionship, especially as she would never know that he had been in jail. If he did not love her, in the vague transcendental sense, at least he did not love any other woman, and was never likely to. He was not as other men: his life was not in their world; it was centred on Art, it was occupied with visions, its goal was not happiness or a home. But if these offered themselves to him by the way, even while they made his real goal possible, it were mere insane self-martyrdom to refuse them. A wife would save him from his lower self, and in his moments of artistic despair she would always be there to comfort and console. Nay—and he smiled at the consideration—even in his moments of artistic achievement, she could be there as a model. Models ran away with a great deal of money, and for an artist a wife was really an economy. And if in his artistic aspiration she could have no share, neither could any one else, woman or man. An artist could not really have a mate—at most a mistress or a house-keeper. His Art was a holy of holies, in which he must ever be the sole priest, and in this holy of holies Ideal Womanhood could still have its place as before.
Such are the pitfalls of the artistic temperament, moving amid unrealities, spinning its own cosmos.
Three thousand dollars down! He could pay off the store-keeper and cleanse away the prison stain. He could send Madame Strang her little balance, and, best of all—and the thought moved him almost to tears—his poor brothers and sisters would henceforth be certain of their allowance. For himself the prospects were equally tempting—a honey-moon in Europe, in the cities of romantic dream, amid the masterpieces of Art. And then when, after a couple of years of study and work, his own masterpiece should be completed, a settled income of eight hundred dollars—bread and cheese always sure, putting him for life beyond the vulgar necessity of pandering to the market, rescuing him from that sordid internal conflict which imbittered even when it failed to degrade. Oh, the rapture of a life so consecrated to Art!
But would Miss Coble or her parent consent to this expenditure of the money? Of course it would all have to be distinctly understood ere he could agree to marry the girl. He flushed, finding how mercenary motive predominated in his reverie. Mr. Coble had indeed hinted acquiescence in some such scheme. But an instinct kept the young man from concluding to acquiesce in it himself. A vague shame and repugnance struggled with his sense of the advantages of the match; waxing so strong in the reaction that followed the glow of temptation that he determined not to go to the Cobles’ that evening. This visit, he felt, would be fatal.
He went home to his little room in the central slums, determined not to stir out. He had meant to go to bed, broad day though it was, and sleep away the temptation. But he only threw himself upon the pallet, in his clothes, and was more conscious of hunger than of the heaviness necessary for sleep. Yet he would not break into his last two dollars to-day. He tried to divert his mind from Miss Coble’s dowry by alternative projects for continuing his life, but they only served to show the length of the bleak, arid, solitary road that lay before his bruised feet if he let the carriage go by. Money! Money! Money! What had he not suffered from the struggle for it? Degrading to live on another person’s money? It was life without money that was degrading, humiliating, full of petty considerations, consumed in irrelevant labors. In the novels that made such a fuss about love troubles, the fine-sounding sorrows seemed to him infinitely smaller than the carks and worries of prosaic existence.
He dozed a little and dreamed of his mother. He was back in childhood, standing with bare feet in an icy passage, and she was screaming at Harriet for refusing to marry Mr. Coble. He went through all the old agony of these frequent domestic tragedies. But he did not feel cold so much as hungry, and breakfast was being delayed by the squabble. He heard Daisy, equally aggrieved, lowing in the barn. In the face of the advantages of the Coble marriage it did seem unreasonable of Harriet to stick to Bully Preep, who would probably beat her. He awoke with a sensation of relief, which was instantly exchanged for a new worry. Ought he to tell the Cobles about his mother, supposing he really thought of—But no; he did not think of—And, in any case, there was no use in raking up unpleasant matters. He had not inherited her dementia; it was not in her blood; it had grown up gradually from the sad, narrow circumstances of her lot; it was his father that he took after. He was not mad; he was more likely to go mad if he continued his terrible solitary struggle. Unless, indeed—and here came a sudden vision of a scene that had lain forgotten for long years—unless, indeed, Mad Peggy had been right! Mad Matt! Oh no, it was madness to attach any meaning to the Water-Drinker’s words. Never had he felt so sane. He got up and looked into the dusty glass on the wash-stand. That was not the face of a madman. She had prophesied he would never be happy—never, never! He would thirst and thirst for happiness, but never would he quench his thirst. Ah, the crazy creature was right there, anyhow. He watched with curious interest the tears rolling down the face in the mirror. Well, be it so! He was strong, he could dispense with happiness. He would not go to the Cobles’ that evening. To-morrow he would leave Halifax, and join his folks in Cobequid at last. They would all live out their lives together—poor victims of a common destiny. He would work on the farm, he would rent more land, he would make it pay. His uncle had been right all along. Why had he not taken his advice and stayed on at Cattermole’s farm? Ah, well, his dream of Art was over now. He was getting on in years; the energy had been buffeted out of him. One could not always be young and ambitious. He would never be famous now; he would toil obscurely like his brothers and sisters, and his bones would lie with theirs in the little lonesome church-yard among the pines. It did not matter; nothing mattered. Death would shovel them all away soon enough.
He lay down on the bed again. Near it stood a wash-stand with a piece of ragged sponge upon it. His eye noted a patch of light on the sponge, and he wondered how the sunshine had got there. Then he perceived the yellow patch was only a reflection from the water-bottle, and his thoughts turned to the problem of painting sunlight by optical illusion. He thought of Cornpepper and the fellows and all the happy discussions he had had in London. The afternoon waned into evening; the patch of mock sunshine faded; the shadows gathered, shrouding the walls with mystery.
He grew faint with hunger; in the dusk there opened out a picture of a lamp-lit room with a snowy cloth on its round table, and a plump figure with soft blue eyes presiding over the savory dishes.
The vision drew him. He rose, washed himself carefully, and went out.
A month later, a week before his marriage, Matt Strang journeyed to Cobequid to see his folks, and bid them farewell before leaving for his artistic honey-moon in Europe. He had written the news home, but they could not afford to come to Halifax for the wedding, and so he had promised to run down before starting on his second voyage in search of Art. He alighted from the coach at Cobequid Village overwhelmed with emotion, resolved to walk the rest of the way towards the joyous reunion with his brothers and sisters; he wished to note each familiar landmark—the fields, the farms, the stores, the little meeting-house, all the beloved features of the spacious, scattered wooden metropolis of his childhood. It was almost noon, and the landscape, seen through the waves of hot air rising from the soil, quivered in the heat. The white farmhouses glittered; the paint of the verandas bulged out; the wooden spire of the meeting-house pointed piously to a heaven of stainless blue. In the farm-yards the fowls lolled prostrate on their sides with open mouths and drooping wings, their tongues protruding, their eyes closed, their legs every now and then uneasily stirring up the dust under their wings; the cattle and horses stood deep in pools under the trees. The bumblebees droned sleepily about the wild roses of the way-side, or buzzed among the white-weed and yellow buttercups and dandelions that mottled the hay-fields. The red squirrels chattered on the spruces as they sat shelling cones, their tails curved over their backs; the woodpeckers tapped on the hollow stubs, the blue-jays screamed among the branches; a hawk circled tranquilly upward to a speck, then sailed softly downward with motionless wings outspread. In the fields men were hoeing potatoes, following the slow oxen that dragged the ploughs between the furrows, and heaping up the earth with leisurely, monotonous movements; belated sowers of buckwheat were scattering the triangular grains with a slow, measured, hypnotic motion. In the sultry stores there was nothing doing; now and then a store-keeper in his shirt-sleeves spat solemnly or drawled a lazy monosyllable. Behind a casement a slumbrous old crone snuffed herself. A wagon rumbled dustily beneath the overarching trees. The far-stretching village drowsed in the sun.
High noon. The conches began sounding to call the farm-hands to dinner, and every sign of labor melted away. The languor crept over the young pedestrian. A perception of the futility of ambition flooded his soul like a wave of summer sea, soft and warm and bitter. To pass through life tranquil and obscure, amid the simplicities and sanctities of childish custom, with work and rest, with feast-day and Sunday; to walk in foot-worn ways amid the same fragrant wild-flowers, to the music of the same birds, hand in hand with a daughter of the same soil, to whom every hoar usage and green meadow should be similarly dear; to carry on the chain of the quiet generations, and so pass lingeringly towards a forgotten grave amid humble kinsfolk—were not this sweeter than the trump and glare of Fame, and the ache of ambition, and the loneliness of untrodden footways? He seemed to hear Mad Peggy’s mocking laughter in the distance.
He moved curiously in the direction of the sounds, skirting a new barn-like building which blocked his view, and which he saw from a notice was a Baptist meeting-house, such as his mother had always yearned for; McTavit’s school-house met his gaze, still standing in its field, and in the foreground a mob of boys and girls shouting and laughing with the exuberance of school-children just let out. After a moment he perceived that they were jeering and hooting somebody; then he caught a glimpse of the ungainly figure of a young man in the centre of derision, with a dozen hands playfully pulling and pushing him. The poor butt fell down, and there was a great outburst of hilarious delight. Matt’s blood boiled; he ran quickly forward towards the booing juvenile crowd, which scattered a little at the sight of his flaming countenance.
“You pesky little ——!” he cried. Then his voice failed. With a flash of horror he recognized his brother Billy.
“Boo!” recommenced one of the bigger louts. “Rot-gut rum!”
Matt seized the crutch which lay at the side of the prostrate drunken cripple, and described a threatening circle with it; the pack of children broke up and made off, hooting from a safer distance.
“Billy!” he said, hoarsely, clutching the wretched young fellow by the coat-collar, half to raise him, half in instinctive anger.
Returning intelligence struggled with the look of maudlin pathos on Billy’s white face. The shock of the sight of his brother sobered him. He suffered himself to be lifted to his feet, then he took his crutch and moved forward, refusing further help.
“I kin walk,” he said, sullenly.
The tone and accent grated on Matt’s ear. But a pang of self-reproach mixed with his wrath and disgust. It was his part to have looked after Billy better.
“I didn’t expect we should meet like this, Billy,” he said, softly.
“You should hev come sooner,” Billy retorted, “ ‘stead of gaddin’ about all the world over enjoyin’ yourself, and never comin’ nigh us, not even when you were tourin’ in the Province with your portraits an’ your photographers.”
“I never was near enough, and I always had to move on,” he explained, gently, as he flicked the dust of the road off Billy’s coat.
“Never mind my clothes; they won’t spoil, they’re not so fine as yours. If you’re ’shamed to walk with me—”
“Don’t talk like that, Billy. I’m only glad to see how well you can walk.”
The brothers passed defiantly through the straggling remnants of the juvenile crowd.
“I’ve walked to the village,” said Billy. “I’m strong enough to go anywhere a’most.”
A few hoots recommenced in the rear.
“I wish you hadn’t gone to the village to-day,” sighed Matt.
“And why shouldn’t I?” cried Billy, pricked to savagery again. “What is there for me but gittin’ drunk? I got drunk when you wrote the news—so I did. Thet was the first time. We all drank your health an’ your bride’s, an’ I got drunk, an’ I’m glad I found out the joy of it. Why shouldn’t I hev some pleasure too? I’ll never hev a bride of my own—thet’s certain. What girl would take me? Do you deny it? Why, even when Ruth Hailey was here she on’y pitied me.”
“Hadn’t we better get a lift?” said Matt, gently, for a carriage was rumbling behind them.
“I’ve been twice to the rum-hole since the money came,” pursued Billy, in dogged defiance. “It’s the on’y way to forgit everythin’.”
He stumped on sturdily. Beads of perspiration glistened on his white, bloodless face.
“What money came?” Matt asked, puzzled.
“The two hundred and fifty dollars you sent a couple of days after you got engaged.”
“I never sent two hundred and fifty dollars,” he cried.
“Didn’t you?” Billy opened his large, pathetic eyes wider. “Well, now, that’s funny. We wondered why you did it so curiously, and why the postmark was Maine. We thought you were up to some fun, now you had so much money, but we allowed we’d wait till you came.”
But Matt could not solve the mystery. The notes had been addressed to “The Strangs,” and were accompanied by a slip of paper: “The same amount of the money due to you will be forwarded next year.”
That was all the message. Matt exhausted himself in guesses. His thoughts even went back to the owners of the Sally Bell, imagining some tardy conscience-money in repayment of arrears due to the dead captain. At last he concluded the remittance must have come from Madame Strang, acting through some American agent. She had discovered Herbert owed him money, and was sending him double and quadruple by way of remorse for the mistake she and her husband had made. To prevent him from returning it, she had sent it to his family, and anonymously.
Abner Preep contended that there was no occasion for Matt to help his brothers and sisters further for the present. The subsidy was ample; more would only lead to unnecessary extravagance. Matt was not entirely pleased to find his family had no immediate need to profit by his marriage. Indeed, he almost wished the money had not come. It was perturbing to feel in himself a yearning—now that his burdens were lightened—to make one last desperate effort to take the kingdom of Art by his own unaided assault; it was even more perturbing to feel himself solicited by that other self, which had spoken out on that sultry summer afternoon, to abandon Art altogether for the simple restfulness of a life in his own village at one with Nature. The life that had cramped him once seemed curiously soothing now; his old fretful sense of superiority to this Philistine environment was gone. But most perturbing of all was the thought of Rosina. In neither of these suggested alternatives—to have another try alone, or to settle down in Cobequid—did she play any part, and he always came back with a shock to the recollection of his relation to her, that made both of these futures impossible. He would not allow himself to dwell for a moment on the thought of backing out of his engagement—honor forbade that. And was he even certain that he did not care for her? How piquant she had looked now and then when she had accidentally got into one or other of the two postures that became her best, as on the night when, smiling, she had thrown back her head a little to the left, with the somewhat plebeian nose refined by foreshortening, and the warm carmines and ivory of the face and throat showing in the lamplight against the loosened hair. And then how simple and unpretentious she was, how charmingly candid her chafferings with the store-keepers! But it eased his mind somewhat to find Billy selfishly laying claim to the mysterious money, persisting he would travel with it—he would see the world. Matt persuaded Harriet to acquiescence in the idea, relieved to find his immediate responsibilities to the smaller children restored to him. But, unknown to Billy, Matt had already decided he must, if possible, take charge of the poor fellow and keep him from drink. He wrote to ask Rosina’s permission to let his crippled brother travel with him, as his health needed a sea voyage. He waited anxiously for the reply.
“I can reffuse my darling nothing,” Rosina responded, with more promptitude than orthography.
“God bless you,” murmured Matt, kissing the letter. “I believe I shall love you, after all.”
Book III.—CHAPTER I
CONQUEROR OR CONQUERED?
Foresight is insight. It was due to Matthew Strang’s ignorance of life and of himself that his marriage in no way turned out as he had calculated. Oh, the fatal mistake of it, perceived as soon as it was too late, though he shrank weakly from the perception, afraid to face the chill, blank truth, hoping against hope that love would be the child of marriage. Oh, the ghastliness of being chained to a loving woman he did not love, bound by law and honor to simulate a responsive affection, and to hide the deadly apathy which her caresses could not overcome. He tried hard to love her, calling his own attention to her youth, her freshness, her prettiness, her flashes of expression, making the most of every hint of charm, seeing her through a wilful glamour, even attempting to persuade himself that she was the woman of his dreams; all the while his leaden heart coldly refusing itself to the hollow pretence. Before the marriage he had almost felt on the point of love; but it was only, he knew later, the self-disguise of cupidity and mercenariness, though no doubt a measure of gratitude had helped to becloud his vision. In his bachelor days he could never have imagined such indifference to any woman. Sometimes he wondered if this was all marriage meant to any man, but a wistful incredulity denied him the consolation of acquiescence in a common lot. The testimony of mankind was quite other, and his own yearning instinct refused to look upon his union as typical. If only she had been a little more intellectual, less limited to gossip about servants and prices! How he had deceived himself, taking the sprightliness of a young girl in love, the coquettish gayety, the evanescent brilliancy of a bird in the pairing season, for the output of perennial intellect and good-humor! He had lived so much alone with his dreams that he had fallen out of touch with humanity, and particularly with feminine humanity. He had had no standard of comparison by which to gauge her, and once united to her, the habitual recluse could not accommodate himself to her constant companionship.
What an irony their honey-moon in Paris, in Florence, the ardors of artistic renascence yoked with the blankness of boredom! Despite Rosina’s affectionate clinging to him, and her almost pathetic endeavor to admire old churches and dingy picture-galleries, it was a relief to both when she at last acquiesced in his happy idea of regarding his rounds as “work,” and, under the convoy of Billy, beguiled the expectation of fonder reunion by the more exhilarating spectacle of the streets and the endless glories of the Bon Marché. And very soon she wearied altogether of foreign places, clamoring to be settled in London, where the language was not gibberish, and one could go a-marketing without being bamboozled and cut off from bargaining. For after the first fervors of the honey-moon she had developed that instinct for petty economy which had amused and charmed him when he had gone shopping with her in Halifax, but which now fretted him, seeming like a daily reproach for all those great sums her acquisition of him had cost her. He was glad that the due arrival of the second mysterious instalment promised to the Nova-Scotian household relieved him of the painful necessity of applying to her on its behalf. Unexpectedly enough this sum was supplemented by a dividend of a hundred and fifteen dollars paid to him, after he had forgotten all about the matter, by the trustee in Halifax in settlement of his claim against the estate of the Starsborough ship-builder.
In vain he tried to interest his wife in books, in the poems and essays, in the study of French and German, into which he now threw himself with a feverish desire for culture. In vain he tried to impart to her his vision of nature, to get her to observe scenery and sunsets. Colors and shades were only interesting to her as they occurred in dress materials. Once when they stood by a sea-beach on a December afternoon under a cold, gray sky, and Rosina complained of the dreariness of the seascape, he had attempted to show her how beautiful it really was, how much more interesting to the artistic eye than a crude sunlight effect; how nearest the horizon it was grayish steel-blue, and then a still amber, and then emerald green, and how just before the final fringe of both there shone a band of sparkling amber, grayed by cloud-reflections. But Rosina shivered, and refused to see anything but a chill green waste.
She would not even allow him to arrange her furniture, and a pair of colossal pink vases, garishly hand-painted with pastoral figures (picked up “a bargain”), were a permanent pain to him, spoiling for him the drawing-room of the little North London house with the rude whitewashed studio, in which they had settled down after the birth of their first child. The temporary lull that attended their installation in British domesticity was succeeded by graver frictions when Rosina had finished furnishing. They had no society; neither of the couple knew anybody in London, and the husband shrank from making friends, constrained, moreover, by his art to a solitary way of living. Rosina, who before her child demanded her care had sat to him out of pure desire to be with him, began to be jealous of the models who replaced her, declaring that she had had no conception such goings-on were a part of art or she would never have married him.
The only alleviation of his numb misery was his ability to paint without pecuniary under-thought the picture with which he was to storm the Academy, to throw all his individuality into it. The very seclusion of his life favored this devotion to his ideals.
And these ideals were only partially those of his celibate. He had been swaying to and fro under the opposite solicitations of Idealism and Realism; now in a violent upheaval, his sympathy with modern subjects and even with modern methods had been submerged.
On the Continent for the first time he came into contact with the Old World. London had been to him as modern as America, repeating its ideas and ideals, but in France, and more especially in Italy, the mere variation of tongues helped to draw him into an earlier world, co-operated with the appeal of ancient churches and streets and palaces, and the countless treasure of ancient Art. The modern world grew hateful to him, and he absorbed by affinity the ancient and the mediæval. At bottom it was not so much the modern that repelled him as real life, and it was not so much the past towards which he yearned as towards that timeless realm wherein ideal beauty dwells. The past was at least less real than the present. Real life was horrible, and marriage had put the coping-stone on his dissatisfaction with it. From birth to death it was embased by a sordid series of physical processes. Even the much-vaunted love was hideous at root. Beauty itself was never really perfect, and was transient at best, while the beautiful idea that lurked in nearly every human face and figure had for the most part been left embryonic. Only in Art could the imperfections of Nature be corrected—and this was the Artist’s mission, not to imitate Nature, but to transcend her; from her faulty individuals, frail and perishable, to draw types of perfection, flawless, immortal, like that Venus de Milo, which stood at the end of the Louvre passage, beautiful from every standpoint, fixing in its pensive sweetness of spiritualized form his dream of Ideal Womanhood; or like that mighty torso of winged Victory that had achieved the last victory over its own mutilation. Real life was Deacon Hailey and his mad mother and Billy and Rosina and his uncle and the grimy denizens of the London slums and the blackguardly crowd at the Fleet Street public-house and the lewd workmen in the Starsborough ship-yard. But Art was Rosalind and Imogen, Hamlet and Ariel, Don Quixote and Beatrix Esmond, and the love in Shelley’s lyrics, and the music of Beethoven, and the pictures of Botticelli, and the cold white statues of the Greeks—that imaginary world which man’s soul had called into being to redress the balance of the Real. It was Art against Nature throughout—the immortal shadows against the ephemeral realities.
Forever wilt thou love and she be fair.”
And so for the “real atmosphere” of Cornpepper he no longer cared: what mattered the realities of space more than those of time to the soul, emperor of its own fantasy? All this scientific precision after which he had been hankering—was it not irrelevant to Art? The Beautiful was the Ideal; to create the Ideal, the Real must be passed through the crucible of the Artist’s soul. The Artist was the true creator. In him Nature’s yearning to beget the Beautiful became conscious. She herself had infinite failures—ugly moods, fogs, glooms, skies of iron, seas of tin. And feeling all this instinctively rather than by a lucid excogitation, he was now for the ideal, for the romantic, for the religious even, for anything that was not real, that shut out the unbeautiful necessity, as those glorious stained windows of cathedrals, blazing with saints, shut out the crude daylight and the raw air of reality, filtering the garish sunlight to that dim religious light in which the soul could see best. Ah, how wisely the poor human soul had fenced itself in against the bleak realities—even as the body had housed itself against the inhospitalities of Nature—painting its windows with beautiful dreams, with an incarnate Love that ruled the world, and an image of immaculate Motherhood. And in a strange hybrid, hazy blend of Catholicism and Hellenism, possible only to an artist who sees things by their sensuous outsides, the Venus de Milo and the Madonna of the Italian masters were to him more akin by beauty than divorced by dogma. In a sense they were one—the highest types of Beauty conceivable by the Pagan and Christian ages, so akin that when Botticelli came to draw Venus, as in his “Nascita di Venere,” his brush fashioned a meek Miltonic Eve, prefiguring the Virgin Mother, while Andrea del Sarto, in his Annunziazone in the “Pitti,” had given the Virgin Mother almost the brooding serenity of a Greek goddess. Ideal Womanhood, Ideal Womanhood, this was what poor Matthew Strang seemed to find in either—ay, and even in Perugino’s “Magdalen,” and the saying of Keats, “Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty,” seemed to him to be indeed all that mortals needed to know.
But that Pagan serenity which had produced Greek art could not be his. For him as for the ages the first sensuous joy in beauty was over. And what appealed even more than the Greek marbles to the artist who had set out from his native village with quick blood, worshipper of a beautiful world, was that subtler art which expressed rather the inadequacy than the perfection of life; the wistfulness of a Botticelli Madonna, the unfathomable smile of a Leonardo portrait, the pensive melancholy of Lorenzo di Credi’s “Unknown Youth” in the Uffizi, or the mystic aspiration of the monk in that famous “Concerto di Musica,” and inversely Raphael’s lovelier line than Nature’s, and Michael Angelo’s with its more majestic sweep. He longed with that yearning, with which the boy had looked up to the stars in the midnight forest, for God, for Christ, for Apollo, for some dream of whiteness and beauty, for something that persisted beneath all the purposeless generations of which the Louvre held record in those cumbrous relics of vanished civilization—Egyptian, Phœnician, Syrian, Babylonian, Persian, Chaldean—those broken shafts of pillars that had upheld barbaric temples, those friezes that had adorned the façades of palaces, those blurred monuments perpetuating the victories of forgotten dust, those faded bass-reliefs that had pleased the lustful eyes of nameless kings, enthroned in their gigantic halls, those uncouth torsos of bulls and sphinxes, emblems of a vaster, crueller life. Amid the flux of the centuries the visibles of Art, the invisibles of Religion—were not these the only true Realities?
Such had been Matthew Strang’s thoughts, as in a deep silence he walked through the Louvre with Rosina, a silence that was at its deepest when he responded to her chatter. She hated the slippery parquet and the dull oil-colors under the glazed skylight, preferring the fresh coloring of the copies, though she made fun of the copyists who sat so patiently on their stools. What queer men, what funny, frumpy girls, what strange old ladies! And, look! there was a young woman in widows’ weeds, painting such a cute picture, and—gracious! there was quite a young girl copying a naked man—weren’t they horrid, the French? She liked the attendants’ cocked hats with a dash of gilt, and enjoyed the desultory crowd of perambulating spectators, that ranged from old gentlemen hobbling along on sticks to artisans in red blouses and clayey boots. And wouldn’t Matt come back into the jewelry and china departments, which were really interesting? And wasn’t the heat unbearable? It was her restlessness that made her husband quit this Paris which fascinated him, this beautiful city, with whose artistic activity, divined from the mere architecture of the École des Beaux Arts, he had had no opportunity to get into intimate touch; for he could not even come across Herbert, whom he had rather hoped to find still there, a cicerone to initiate him into the art-coteries of Paris. In Florence, where they went for the winter, Rosina was even more restless. The towered palaces, the Duomo, and the gracious Campaniles, the gardens, the enchanting environs, and all the stock wonders of the place, had none but a superficial interest for her; they were exhausted at first sight; amid the marble calm of colonnades she even regretted the liveliness of the Boulevards. And the climate, too, was worse than that of Paris; her grumblings were perpetual. To pass from the warm piazza or promenade to the biting wind of the narrow streets was not only uncomfortable, but made it a problem how to dress. And, indeed, Matt himself suffered keenly from the cold; though there was a small brass heating apparatus in the centre of the gallery, it scarcely did more than keep his colors from congealing. For he was copying Botticelli’s “Virgin with the Child and Angels.” Yes, Botticelli had become his master—Botticelli, whom at first sight in the National Gallery he had rejected for insufficient draughtsmanship, but all of whose naïve exaggerations, of hands or feet or necks, he now credited to artistic intention, prepared to maintain from loving study of his delicately luminous canvases and his blond ethereal frescos that the Master’s drawing had only repudiated the bonds of the Real in quest of a higher beauty, a more gracious harmony of curves, even as his coloring had refined away that oleaginous quality which a Rubens found in human flesh. To brood over a Madonna of Botticelli or of Filippo Lippi, Matthew Strang would turn from the women of Rubens or the young men of Titian or the children of Velasquez or Rembrandt’s old men. Though at the sight of “Les Glaneurs” of Millet he felt a lurking sympathy in his submerged self, he preferred that morning landscape of Corot, in which bodiceless beauties dance round trees as half-dressed women never did in any period of French history. He found a winter scene of Van Ostade’s none the less charming because the figures were not enveloped, and the lights were untruly set off by bituminous shadows. He was in the mood in which even the gilded rose-nudity of the eighteenth century seemed precious. Amid the infinitude of Art that surrounded him now, Cornpepper’s cocksureness seemed to him as futile as it had already appeared amid the infinity of Nature. And all the Masters were so akin that evolution by revolution seemed less credible than in the smoky atmosphere of Azure Art studios. Modern subject? Had they not all done the contemporary, had the Dutch done anything else? Impressionism? In so far as it meant a free brush-work, was not Rembrandt an Impressionist? Was not Velasquez in his later manner?
His first picture, then, need not be revolutionary in technique, but it must be more imaginative than the bulk of English work in the Academy of his day, more emotional. Photography had reduced realism to absurdity, had proved that Art lay in the transfusion of Nature through the artist’s soul. And the essence of all art was emotion, feeling. The work of Art was but the medium by which the artist passed on his emotion to the spectator, his joy in beauty, his feeling for nature, his sadness, his aspiration, even his view of life. Because emotion could be conveyed by literature and music, there was no reason why these should have the preference in cases where painting was equal to conveying it, too. Without emotion a picture was null and void; technique by itself could give works of craft, never works of Art. On the other hand, to have the artistic emotion without the technique necessary to pass it on to the spectator was to be artistic, but not an artist.
The choice of a subject gave him much harassing hesitation; it brought delicious peace merely to make his final decision amid all the whirl of ideas that pressed upon him. He would found his picture on those beautiful lines in Matthew Arnold’s “Forsaken Merman.”