stylists who are trying to discount Old Mastership will survive their pictures,” was Cornpepper’s commentary on a phase of the newer art. “They will leave masterpieces of invisibility.”
A good many changes had taken place in the Art world since Matthew Strang had first had the felicity of drinking whiskey in Cornpepper’s studio. The flowing tide was now with the decorative artists, of whom the “Mack” of that evening had proved a pioneer; the Fishtown school of photographic realism had lived long enough to be orthodox; the Azure Art Club itself was half absorbed by the Academy, and a new formula of revolt was momently expected on the horizon; some said it was to be Primitive, others mysteriously whispered “spots”; to-night Herbert, with mock seriousness, announced that he himself was about to lead a movement, the originality of which consisted in seeing Nature through stained glass. What weird magic a landscape gained when observed through a green or pink window! But he found the men not so willing to talk of principles as in the days of Cornpepper’s Bohemian parties, when Carrie with the whiskey bottle stood for the sober club attendant with his tray of liqueur brandies. The conversation was rigidly concrete, except for a moment when Cornpepper nearly came to hot words with the photographic painter who insisted that Nature was always beautiful. The little man, glaring through his monocle and rasping the plush arm-chair with his nails, insisted that this was sheer cant, one had only to look in the glass to see how ugly Nature could sometimes be! Selection was the only excuse for Art. Random transcripts from Nature were as foolish as the excesses of the Neo-Japanese school, into which the Azure Art Gallery had degenerated. But this lapse of Cornpepper’s into his early manner was brief. Recovering himself, he told a malicious anecdote about an artist who was taking to etching because his eyesight was failing, and he explained the domesticity of British Art by the objection of artists’ wives to all models except babies. Everybody knew, he said, why Carruthers had been driven to landscape and Christmas supplements. “Depend upon it,” dogmatized the little man with his most owlish air of wisdom, “the man who marries his model is lost. She will never tolerate a model on the premises again.”
His fellow-Associate told a story of a stock-broker who had got himself invited to the Greenwich dinner last year, and had asked Erle-Smith to give him the sketch of passing barges which the great man had pencilled on his sketch-book after dinner. “Erle-Smith good-naturedly gave it to him. This year he was there again, and said with proud respect to Erle-Smith, ‘I’ve still got that sketch.’ And produced it crumpled up from his waistcoat pocket!”
“Yes, but did you hear Vanbrugh’s mot?” asked Trapp. “He said, ‘Naturally; being a financier he doubled it.’ ”
“Why, I said that!” cried Cornpepper, angrily.
“No doubt,” said Herbert. “It’s a well-known chestnut.”
“Then I pulled it out of the fire,” screamed Cornpepper.
Somebody exhibited another sketch, grotesquely indecorous, by a popular painter of religious masterpieces, and the latest epigram on the divorce case of the hour was repeated and enjoyed. But Matthew Strang’s laughter held no merriment.
“Shall you be at the Academy soirée?” he asked Trapp, to turn the conversation.
“No, I don’t care for crowds,” replied the realistic novelist.
The conversation rambled on. The composer drifted away, and a full-fledged Academician took his place—an elderly, dandified figure with a languid drawl, an aristocratic manner caught from his sitters, and a shoulder-shrugging contempt for Continental Art; in despite of which Matthew Strang protested mildly against the bad hanging at Burlington House of a portrait by an eminent Frenchman. Cornpepper talked of a sale at Christie’s at which most of the pictures had fetched lower prices than was given for them by their last owners.
“It’s all a spec’,” said Herbert; “there’s no such thing as a fixed value in a work of art. Everything depends on the artist’s pose. The more the buyer gives for a picture the more he likes it. It’s a game of brag. Set up a fine establishment—the dealer will pay. My old governor was a good deal taken in by pretentious humbugs with pals in the press.” As the Academician’s own establishment was notoriously finer than his pictures—a fact of which the wandering Herbert was ignorant—Matthew Strang hastened to speak of Tarmigan, who had been recalled to memory by the catalogue of the aforesaid sale. “I’m afraid he’s gone under, poor fellow,” he said. “I’ve tried to come across him, but he was always a mysterious person.”
But Cornpepper continued to talk of the sale, of the fluctuations of prices; of the impoverished condition of the market, so menacing to young artists who had set up fashionable establishments on the strength of their first sales; of the potentialities of America, that yet undiscovered continent, till all the tide of secret bitterness welled up in a flood from the depths of Matthew Strang’s soul. Money! Money! Money! He had never really escaped from it. What a mirage Art was! Even success only brought the same preoccupations with prices, it was all the old sordidness over again on a higher plane. The ring of the gold was the eternal undertone, bringing discord into every harmony. With a public ignorant of what Art meant, conceiving it as something rigid like science, not as the expression of the temperament, technique, and vision of individual genius; with a public craving for pictorial platitudes; Art could not be, and was not, produced, save by a martyr here and there. Everywhere the counting of pieces and the shuffling of bank-notes! The complacent Academician irritated him; he was tired of reading of his marble halls, the vassals and serfs at his side, his garden parties, his Belgravian palace erected on the ruins of a forgotten bankruptcy. The fumes of expensive wines and cigars gave him a momentary vertigo.
“For God’s sake, stop talking shop!” he burst out suddenly.
The astonished Cornpepper let his eye-glass fall.
“Have you gone crazy, Strang?” he asked, witheringly. “What do you join an artists’ club for, if you don’t want to talk shop? Strikes me you’d better get yourself put up for the Commercial Travellers’ Union.”
“That’s what we are,” retorted Matthew Strang.
The Scotch landscape-painter pacified them by proposing a game of “shell-out,” and Herbert eagerly seconding the proposal it was carried nem. con., and the group mounted to the billiard-room, where Matthew Strang won half a crown before he went off to his nocturnal parties, leaving his cousin still renewing with zest his olden experience of the lighter side of British Art.
CHAPTER III
“VAIN-LONGING”
As a matter of habit Mr. Matthew Strang went, some weeks later, to the Academy Soirée to add his handshake to the many suffered by the presidential image of patience at the top of the stairs, and to help appease the insatiable appetite of the crowd of Christians to whom lions are thrown. It was part of his success to move through fluttering drawing-rooms, and it imbittered him to feel that the average admirer conceives the artist as living in a world of beautiful dreams, sweet with the incense of perpetually swung censers, and knows nothing of the artist’s agonies, or the craftsman’s sweatings, that go to the making of beautiful things; sees always the completed design, and never the workman scraping the paint or wetting the back of the canvas or tossing sleeplessly under the weight of a ruined picture.
To-night, in the restless dissatisfaction that had grown upon him since the reappearance of Herbert had undammed a flood of ancient memories, this feeling possessed him more strongly than ever, inspiring a morbid resentment of the chattering crew divided between hero-worship and champagne-cup. There was almost a suspicion of a leonine snarl in the stereotyped answer, “You are very kind to say so,” which he gave to the grimacing persons who buttonholed him to bask in the radiance of his success or to effuse honest admiration. Everybody seemed to him ill-dressed, ill-mannered, and in ill-health. He thought he had never seen so many cadaverous complexions, snag teeth, powder-tipped noses, scraggy shoulders, glazed eyes (with pince-nez, monocle, or spectacles), ungainly figures (squat or slim), queer costumes, bald heads, or top-heavy hair-dressings; how horrible gentlefolk were, more uncouth even than the denizens of the slums! Those one could imagine to be a very different breed, cleaned and properly clothed, but these had had every chance. How poorly humanity compared with cows and horses; what a price man had paid for soul—and without always getting it. Surely, none but custom-blinded eyes could gaze unblinking, unsmiling, at the grotesque show of mankind, the quaint crania, the unsightly bodies; the crowd struck him as the inventions of a comic draughtsman in a malicious mood, the men in black and white, the ladies in color. And, indeed, though he was not thinking of himself, his stalwart, well-proportioned figure and his handsome head stood out notably from a serried batch of degenerate physiques.
“So you are determined to cut me, Mr. Strang?”
The painter started violently as the laughing syllables, sounding far more musical than the faint far-away strains of the band in the Sculpture Room, vibrated above the endless buzz of the crowd that hemmed him in.
He looked up. His moody fit vanished before the radiant apparition of a beautiful woman in a shimmering amber gown from which her shoulders rose dazzling. A jewelled butterfly fluttered at her breast. In the twinkling of an eye—and that eye hers—he recanted his contempt for the Creator’s draughtsmanship.
“I have bowed to you three times,” she said, and the twinkling of her eye—large and gray and lambent—was supplemented by the smile that hovered about the corners of her wide sweet mouth. “But you won’t take any notice of me.”
“I beg your pardon,” he said, in flushed embarrassment, “I must have been lost in thought.”
She shook her head bewitchingly.
“You don’t remember me. Celebrities never do remember people, though people always remember celebrities.”
“I do remember you,” he protested, chords of memory vibrating tremulously and melodiously. “I had the pleasure of meeting you at a garden-party some years ago.”
“But you don’t remember my name?”
“I don’t think I caught it then,” he said, simply. “But I remember you scolded me because my pictures were only beautiful.”
She laughed gayly.
“Ah, then I ought to apologize to you. I have changed my mind.”
“Now you don’t think they’re even that!”
“Far from it! What I mean is that I have come to think less of useful things. You know I was a Socialist then. But let me introduce my friend to you.”
“You have to introduce yourself first, Nor,” said a younger lady whom he then perceived at her side.
He smiled.
“You are irrepressible, Olive,” said her friend. “Mr. Strang, let me introduce myself then—Mrs. Wyndwood.”
He bowed, still smiling.
“Eleanor Wyndwood,” she added, “to explain my friend’s abbreviation, which always puzzles strangers.”
“Everybody knows Nor stands for Eleanor,” remonstrated her friend. “Do they suppose your name is Norval?”
Mrs. Wyndwood’s smile met the painter’s.
“And now, if my punctilious friend is satisfied, let me introduce Miss Regan.”
Miss Regan gave him her hand cordially.
“Where are your pictures to be found, Mr. Strang?” she asked. “We haven’t been to the Academy before, and we should so like to save the shilling.”
“Oh, they’re not worth looking at,” he said, uncomfortably. He suddenly felt ashamed of them. It was thus that he had felt more than two years ago, when, over her strawberries and cream, Mrs. Wyndwood had lectured him for artistic aloofness from the travail of the time, insisting that it was the mission of all forms of Art to express the aspiration of the century towards a higher and juster social life, towards the coming of God’s kingdom on earth, and that it would be honester for him to plough the land than to paint decorative pictures for the dining-rooms of capitalists. He had scarcely taken in her point of view, more persuaded by her presence than by her words, by some intangible radiation of earnestness and goodness from the lovely face and the soulful gray eyes, and less ashamed of the sinfulness of his own artistic standpoint than of the often meretricious quality of his performance. She had been the first woman to speak slightingly of his rôle in the world, and her dispraise, co-operating, as it did, with his own discontent, had impressed him more than all the praise, just as one unfavorable newspaper critique rankled, while a hundred eulogies passed across consciousness, scarcely ruffling its waves.
When the flux of the garden-party had drifted her off in the wake of Gerard Brode, the handsome young Socialist, he had felt that he, too, might have become a Socialist or a ploughboy, or even an honest painter, under the inspiration of her enthusiastic eyes. He had thought of her for several months, almost as a creature of dream, so swift and shadowy had been her flitting across his horizon, and she had easily lent herself to that conception of Ideal Womanhood which the world had not yet destroyed, because the world had not created it. It was under the impulsion of the eloquent play of light across her face that he had conceived and painted that allegory of woman’s inspiration which Herbert, unable to read in it the pathetic expression of the painter’s dissatisfaction at once with real womanhood and his own work, had found so amusing, and he was startled now to see how nearly he had reproduced her traits in his conception of the figure on the mountain-top; not so much, perhaps, in the features, in which the slight upward tilt of the nose was omitted and the size of the ears diminished, as in the clustering chestnut hair, with gold lights in it, and in the poise of the head, the long, thin Botticelli hands, the small feet, and the graceful curves of the rather tall form, and, above all, in the expression that seemed to suffuse her face with spiritual effluence. The first impression renewed itself in all its depth; he asked himself with amazement how he could have let the waves of life wash it away so completely that even Herbert’s inquiry about the picture had not recalled her clearly to his memory.
“Oh, but I want to see your pictures,” she said. “There’s a ‘Triumph of Bacchus,’ I hear. I saw the fresco—by Caracci, wasn’t it?—in the Farnese Palace, in Rome, on our homeward journey. We’ve been in Russia, Miss Regan and I, with Monsieur and Madame Dolkovitch, to see Podnieff in his dairy-farm. Oh! he’s so charming—so simple and saintly. He enables one to construct St. Francis of Assisi.”
“He makes very bad butter,” said Miss Regan.
“He is the greatest spiritual force in Russia,” Mrs. Wyndwood said, sweetly. “And Dolkovitch is doing much to extend his influence in England. I wish you knew Dolkovitch, Mr. Strang.”
“Why, would he make me do better pictures?” he asked, playfully, struggling a little against the obsession of her sweet seriousness.
“I will reserve my opinion till I have seen your latest manner. Though I confess I don’t find the title, ‘The Triumph of Bacchus,’ a hopeful augury of noble work. But do tell me where it is—or must I consult the catalogue? Miss Regan made me bring one.”
“It is in this very room.”
“Really?”
“Yes, it’s rather a compliment. The Academicians generally reserve the big room—or at least the line—for their own works. But it is cruel of you to leave me so soon.”
“How subtle, Nor,” said Miss Regan. “Of course he cannot be seen looking at his own picture.”
“Do let us go where the crowd is thinner,” he pleaded.
“Than round your picture?” queried Miss Regan, naïvely.
“For shame, Olive,” laughed Mrs. Wyndwood. “I shall punish you by not letting you see it. We are at your service, Mr. Strang. Show us what you please.”
“May I not get you any refreshment?” he said, as they passed into the smaller room, and into a perceptibly cooler atmosphere.
“No, thank you; this is refreshing enough,” said Mrs. Wyndwood, with a sigh of relief.
“Mrs. Wyndwood means that she lives on air,” said her friend.
“Oh, Olive, I eat quite as much as you.”
“You used to before you developed this Dolkovitch phase, and began understudying an angel.”
Matthew saw the opportunity for a commonplace compliment, but he did not take it. The plane on which Mrs. Wyndwood existed demanded reverential originality. Every word she said sounded magically musical, and delightfully wise and witty. Olive’s remarks one merely smiled at, though she, too, had a low voice, “that excellent thing in woman,” and was considered handsome by those she did not annoy. She reminded the painter of a Caryatid as she stood there, rather more sturdy than her friend, and shorter, with stronger features and a firmer chin, but to the full as graciously proportioned. She had dark hair and eyes, and a warm coloring that reached its most vivid tint in the intense red of the lips. Her dress was of a soft green-blue, cut high, with yellow roses at the throat, and but for the painter’s preoccupation with her friend, would have challenged his eye by subtle harmonies.
“There goes William Lodge, the poet,” cried Mrs. Wyndwood, suddenly.
“Impossible!” said Olive.
“But it is the poet,” insisted Mrs. Wyndwood.
“Impossible,” repeated Olive. “No man can be a poet with mutton-chop whiskers.”
“What has the man’s appearance to do with his poetry?”
“Everything. Mutton chops and lyrics don’t rhyme—they’re like that woman’s emeralds against her turquoise bodice. A poet’s publisher should keep him out of sight—he damages sales. Look at the hook-nosed creature there with the goggles and the green gown—who would believe that is Mrs. Ashman Watford, who writes those dainty essays, and who, realizing it, could ever help reading her between the lines?”
“Or who,” retorted Mrs. Wyndwood, “reading the essays, could help seeing the beautiful soul behind the goggles?”
A tremor of sympathy traversed the painter’s form.
“I stand unreproved, Nor. You can afford to be magnanimous. But I contend that beautiful souls have no right to get mixed up with hooked noses. We ought to judge a soul by the body it keeps. If this country ever becomes a republic, it will be due, not to democracy, but to photography. You will agree with me, I know, Mr. Strang.”
He started, wondering what he was called upon to agree with.
“Beauty is truth, truth beauty,” he quoted, vaguely.
“But you never put truly ugly persons into pictures,” Miss Regan persisted.
“No,” he admitted, “unless in portraits.”
“And not even then,” the girl retorted. “I’d far rather these portraits came out of their frames and walked about, than promenade among the originals as we are doing now.”
“Why, I don’t suppose there’s one original present,” Mrs. Wyndwood remonstrated.
“Isn’t there?” queried Olive, in innocent accents. “I thought there were a lot, judging by the want of resemblance.”
“You are not up to date,” said Matthew Strang, smilingly. “Likeness is the last thing a portrait-painter goes for. Values, spots, passages, color schemes, all sorts of things take precedence of the likeness in their importance for art. The likeness is irrelevant to art. It concerns only the sitter—art concerns the world. A friend of mine, who edits an illustrated paper, which is the first to publish portraits of everybody who becomes anybody, contends that the number of persons who know any one man’s features is a negligible quantity. ‘All the public demands,’ he says, ‘is portraits.’ So you see your criticism leaves our withers unwrung.”
“Oh, do produce your catalogue, Nor,” said Miss Regan, flying off at a tangent for want of an answer. “I am dying to see the name of that thing, stuck right up there on the ceiling.” Mrs. Wyndwood, after protesting that nobody else was consulting a catalogue, which only made Olive more eager, fished out the booklet from some obscure pocket, and Olive turned the pages impatiently.
“It’s just like Miss Regan to want to look at the skied pictures,” her friend murmured to the painter.
“Oh, the poor man!” cried Miss Regan. “Listen, this is what the picture is called:
Life-thwarted. Linked in gyves I saw them stand,
Love shackled with Vain-Longing, hand to hand:
And one was eyed as the blue vault above:
But hope tempestuous like a fire-cloud hove
I’ the other’s gaze, even as in his whose wand
Vainly all night with spell-wrought power has spann’d
The unyielding caves of some deep treasure-trove.’
“Oh, the poor man! Fancy the indignity of having a long quotation skied!”
“What lovely lines!” exclaimed Mrs. Wyndwood, ignoring the humorous aspect which appealed to her companion. “Do they not express the idea perfectly, Mr. Strang?”
“I am afraid I did not quite catch their significance,” he said, flushing. The confession was not so candid as it sounded, for he had been less intent on the quotation than on studying the sweetness of her face, and watching the emotional heaving of the jewelled butterfly on her beautiful bosom.
Olive Regan politely offered him the catalogue, and his flush grew deeper as he seemed to read his personal tragedy in the poet’s images. What ironical Providence had sent him the words just then?
Life-thwarted.”
Perhaps it was that which made his life so unreal to him, which explained its hollowness. He had never loved.
In a strange flash of imaginative insight, it seemed to him that the room was full of lovers. Love was in the air; delicate rumors and whispers of divine delight, of holy pain, fluttered tremulously. On all sides couples moved, heart-bound, their beauty spiritualized, their very ugliness transfigured. Love redeemed the creation.
He remembered that in the days when he had trodden the lonely London pavements, hungry and heart-sick, jostled by hurrying crowds, he had yet seemed to himself the only solid figure amid a throng of shadows flitting to death and oblivion. In this tense instant he felt it was he that had always been the shadow; the one shadow amid a world of substantialities and solidities, a world that lived while he was recording the forms and colors of life.
And even if he should ever love—and the thought set his heart fluttering as he had imagined it could never flutter again—even if Love should ever make existence real for him, was he not predestined to a doom more terrible even than the apathy of loveless life?
Love shackled with Vain-Longing, hand to hand.”
Mrs. Wyndwood! She, too, was married. And in that thought he knew that Love had begun for him. The unrest into which the first vision of her had plunged him, and which time had stilled, had at last come to understand itself. He loved, and his love was vain. They had come to him, both at once—
He returned the catalogue mechanically to Miss Regan.
“They’re Rossetti’s—fine, are they not?” said Mrs. Wyndwood.
The question dragged him up from abysses of dream. But even though he felt he must be answering it, he lingered in luxurious agony over the music of the question, its vibrations prolonging themselves in his ear.
“They are indeed exquisite,” he said, slowly, at last. “But do you think there would be any ‘hope tempestuous’?”
“There is always hope,” said Mrs. Wyndwood, gently.
There seemed a sweet assurance in the unconscious words: he heard a chime of golden bells floating up from some sea-buried city. Perhaps it was only from the band in the Sculpture Room. But he felt he must not attach himself further to the fascinating twain; his solicitude would be too marked, and he was aware of many eyes drawn by their beauty.
But before he could speak, Mrs. Wyndwood went on, musingly:
“And after all, hope is better than fulfilment. There are blue hills on the horizon which the child longs to go beyond; but happiness always lies on the hither side, with the blue hills still beckoning.” Her eyes filled with dreamy light. “It is as George Herbert so beautifully says:
Foolish night-fires, women’s and children’s wishes,
Chases in arras, gilded emptiness,
Shadows well-mounted, dreams in a career,
Embroider’d lies, nothing between two dishes,
These are the pleasures here.’ ”
How exquisitely she spoke the melancholy lines that seemed fraught with all the pathos of the human destiny, her words rippling through the buzz of platitudinarian trivialities he heard vaguely all around him, like a silver stream through an unlovely country. She had suffered too. She, too, had found life and its pleasures hollow; he saw that in the quiver of the beautiful lip, in the wistful brightness of the eye. Straightway his heart was full of tears for her. He longed to comfort her, to sacrifice himself for her. Why could she not be happy?
He had a sense of jar when Miss Regan said:
“That’s rather a strange quotation for you, Nor.”
“Indeed?”
“ ‘Foolish night-fires, women’s and children’s wishes.’ He had a true notion of our futility, that gentle old poet.”
“I am in no fighting mood to-night, Olive,” replied Mrs. Wyndwood, gently.
“You don’t stand up for your sex?” the painter asked Miss Regan, in surprise. She had that resourceful, self-sufficient air which he associated with pioneers of female movements.
Olive shrugged her shapely shoulders. “Heaven forbid that I should be the advocatus diaboli.”
The tossing of the crowd threw up a long-haired, long-bearded man with a handsome leonine cast of features, who greeted the two ladies with an air of camaraderie.
“Ah, nous voilà encore,” he cried, joyously, adding in good English, though with a Russian accent, “Oh, Mrs. Wyndwood, you must see the little picture of the Christ-child by a young follower of our Nicolovitch. He is exiled three years already, and has established himself on your hospitable shores. Ah, how it makes a spiritual ray among your English platitudes! You will come too, Miss Regan?”
Olive, who had cast a droll glance towards the painter at the Russian’s awkward allusion to British banality, shook her head. “No, thank you. I hate children, and I am tired. You will find me here, Nor,” and she let herself sink into a lounge.
Mrs. Wyndwood hesitated, as if about to introduce the two men, but the leonine Dolkovitch swept her off, and she had only time to leave a bewitching smile behind her.
“Won’t you go and see the child, Mr. Strang?” Olive asked.
He hesitated in his turn. But she would come back if he waited.
“I would rather stay with you if I may,” he replied, gallantly.
Olive looked sideways along the lounge.
“There is room,” she reported.
“Thank you.” He seated himself at her side, and stolidly regarded the crowd and the opposite pictures.
Olive fanned herself silently at great length. The painter, stealing a sudden glance at her, found her observing the human spectacle with an air of infinite sadness.
“Do you like dogs?” she asked, unexpectedly.
“Yes,” he replied, startled, and with a vision of Sprat. “But I haven’t kept one since I was a boy. But why?”
“I don’t know. That woman there made me think of them—that creature they’re crowding round. Don’t you see that pasty-faced hag with the false hair and the real diamonds? That’s Miss Craven St. Clair.”
“Well, what has she to do with dogs?”
“Oh, she’s a leading lady. Plays those erotic parts.”
He looked at her a little surprised by the adjective, and still unenlightened.
“And what then?”
“Don’t you know all leading ladies keep dogs—to get extra paragraphs? I hope you hate leading ladies. I do. They’re so virtuous, and you know virtue is such a feeble vice. Nor has a dog, though she’s not a leading lady. But rather a led lady. L—E—D, you know.”
“Do you mean led by the dog?”
“Yes, whenever she’s blind and the dog is sly,” she said, mysteriously, adding quickly, “Nor’s dog isn’t all hers—it’s mine on alternate days. He’s such a snob, is Roy—he’ll never go out with her if she’s frumpy. He insists on swell dresses, dear old Roy.”
“Can she be frumpy?” he asked.
She flashed a quick look at him.
“No, she is very sweet and amusing,” she answered, gravely. “She is the only woman I have ever been able to live with.”
“Do you live with her?”
“Of course—I chaperon her.”
Matthew smiled.
“What, don’t you think I’m old enough to chaperon a young widow?”
His heart leaped.
“I didn’t know she was a young widow.”
“Yes, she’s quite an old widow.”
“Have you lived together long?”
“Æons; we disagree so much.”
“In what way?”
“Our complexions go well with each other’s.”
“I should call that harmony, not disagreement.”
“Perhaps—in your technical nomenclature. But I call it disagreement. Besides, we haven’t a thought in common. I am a—well, how shall I define myself?” she looked up quizzingly, her fan to her lips. “I belong to that class of women whose sex is a misfit. And she is—”
“And she is”—he repeated, in some suspense.
“She is the sort of woman who won’t renew the velvet edging on her walking-dresses.”
“Now you puzzle me.”
“It is evident you know nothing of women, or have only observed Englishwomen who mostly put up with braid. Velvet edging, which is an American notion, saves frayed skirts, and wears out quicker than the stuff. Look at her gown to-night—it trails; mine fits. She retains the infantile habit of long clothes; I am ‘growd up’ and in short frocks.”
“I didn’t notice her gown.”
“Men never do. That’s why we wear so little of them.”
He was puzzled by a curious bitterness in her tone, as well as by a perplexity as to her exact meaning. Her own frock was certainly prudishly high.
“I don’t quite follow your definition, anyhow,” he said.
“No? I’ll try another. There are only two classes of women—those who ought to have been born men, and those who ought never to have been born at all. I am of the first, Nor’s of the second.”
He shook his head laughingly.
“Oh! but I won’t believe that of either.”
“If I expected to be believed I should have more hesitation in telling the truth,” she replied, gravely. “We are both mistakes, but Nor is an incorrigible one. You heard her say she’s dropped Socialism. She didn’t tell you she’s dropped a power of money, too, in subscriptions to the Cause. She probably thought equality would come about in three months, and that she was merely disgorging in advance.”
“Is that why she looks so sad?”
“Dear me, no; money doesn’t trouble her.”
“What’s the matter, then?”
“She’s been married.”
“You mean she grieves?”
“Quite the contrary. But marriage brands.”
“You speak bitterly—yet you have no personal experience.”
“No, I was never tempted.”
Her frank brusquerie made him feel an old acquaintance.
“I cannot believe it,” he said, with a smile.
“Oh, if you call a proposal a temptation! I call it a bare hook.”
“You’re a man-hater, I see.”
“A woman-hater, if you will. Man I adore.”
“I don’t understand you,” he confessed again.
“Really? I am a very simple person. Omne ignotum pro magnifico. Women I know and detest. Men I don’t know and admire. If I married one, I should know him.”
“But you might find him better than you expected.”
“If I didn’t expect to find him better than I expected, I shouldn’t marry him; so I should still be disappointed. You see I know just enough about men to know that they are better left unknown. I quite agree with Nor about the blue hills. It is better to keep one’s illusions. At present I am happy in the thought that somewhere in the universe there exists a fine man. Even the average man is less petty than the average woman, so that the one fine man must be a Bayard indeed.”
He laughed.
“Then, if he came along and made you an offer of marriage—”
“I should close with it at once.”
“You are a droll girl,” he could not help saying. “You are the first of your sex who has ever admitted to me that men are better than women.”
“Didn’t I tell you how sly we were? A man has one or two big sins, a woman a bundle of little ones.”
“Ah, well,” he said, smiling. “Two of a trade, as a friend of mine says.”
“Now I don’t understand you—or rather, your friend,” she said, flushing a little.
“Oh, he’s rather brutal. He takes the Darwinian view of things, you know. He says all women are in the same trade—man-hunting—so they run one another down.”
“But I’m not running one another down. I’m running us down en bloc. And, besides, that isn’t the Darwinian view at all. It’s the males who always seek the females and develop the lively colors to attract them. Don’t you remember Tennyson?—
“Yes, but that’s only in the lower creation,” argued Matthew Strang.
“Do you make a distinction? But I am ready to agree with your friend—since he isn’t here. We are man-hunters. What a pity, though, that civilization has so reversed the order of natural selection that the human female has to be picked instead of picking the male. See the result!”
“I see what you mean. Man has degenerated physically.”
“And woman morally. We adore the beauties of your purse instead of your person.”
“And so we develop brain to get purses with. Really, the effect is not so bad.”
“Brains are cheap to-day; and they don’t improve the appearance, anyhow. If people wore their brains outside—but who is this brutal friend of yours who gauges my sex so well? Do I know him?”
“I shouldn’t think so. He’s just back from strange places.”
“So am I. What’s his name?”
“Herbert—Herbert Strang.”
“A brother?”
“A cousin.”
“He’s not an artist?”
He hesitated: “Yes—and no,” he said.
“Ah, two of a trade,” she said, slyly.
He smiled. “Oh, he’s gone out of the business. He’s become a critic.”
“Wise man!”
He glanced furtively every now and then to see if Mrs. Wyndwood was returning. He was conducting the conversation with only the untroubled surface of his mind, interested enough in his piquant companion, but feeling her entirely as an interlude. Miss Regan perceived his perturbation at last.
“Oh, don’t let me monopolize you, Mr. Strang. I am quite safe here till Nor returns. There are so many people thirsting for you.”
“Oh, I’d rather stay with you,” he averred, disingenuously.
“Don’t be a mere man,” she returned, raising her dark eyebrows. “Even your admirers think you more than that. It’s not fair for me to keep you from them.”
He was rather in a quandary. He could not tell her he was waiting for her friend.
To his relief, “Ah, I see them coming,” she said. “You’ll be off duty in a moment. I must introduce you to Dolkovitch. He’s great fun. He will invite you to his spiritual Sunday afternoons. Do you judge people by their hat-racks?”
He stared at her.
“I mean when they’ve got company. Dolk’s hat-rack when he’s ‘at home’ is lovely; I’d go miles to see it. Such curious curly, dusty, many-hued, amorphous things on the pegs—a cosmopolitan congress, only the chimney-pot unrepresented. Nor goes to meet the earnest people, but I go to see their hats. Oh, M. Dolkovitch, do let me introduce Mr. Strang. He is dying to know you.”
“De-lighted,” said Dolkovitch. “But I do not like this word ‘dying,’ Miss Regan.”
“Oh, I beg your pardon—I forgot,” said Olive. “Mr. Strang is living to know you. M. Dolkovitch, like the ancient Greeks, Mr. Strang, doesn’t like to think of death.”
“I can’t let you misrepresent him to a stranger, Olive,” said Mrs. Wyndwood. “M. Dolkovitch is wide as the poles asunder from Pagan thought, Mr. Strang. His teaching simply is that, as there is no death, but merely upward evolution, the sooner the word is banished from our vocabulary the better.”
Her voice raised the discussion to celestial heights.
“Never say die!” cried Miss Regan, enthusiastically. “Every dictionary should be without it.”
“Just so,” said M. Dolkovitch, gravely. “Our European customs, Mr. Strang, with regard to death are all in direct contradiction to our creed. The spirit rises into more blessed states, and instead of rejoicing in festive attire, we mourn for it, we put on black, and our looks are black, and our hearses are black, and the horses they are of black also.”
“I think it’s very proper,” said Miss Regan, decisively. “I love black funerals. Colored funerals would make me feel sad.” She rose. “We are going soon, Nor, aren’t we? You look tired.”
“Yes, we are going at once,” Mrs. Wyndwood breathed.
The Russian gave the painter his card, and hoped he would come and hear more of the new gospel. Next Sunday afternoon spiritual people came from four to seven.
Mr. Strang made a movement to accompany the ladies, but Mrs. Wyndwood begged him not to trouble—M. Dolkovitch would see them to the carriage.
“Good-bye, then,” she said with an enchanting smile. “It was so good of you to talk to us.”
Words failed him in reply. Fortunately, a little white-haired gentleman bowed to her at that moment and distracted her attention.
“That was General Dale, Olive,” she said. “What a fine, soldierly walk!”
“Varied by ducking for bullets every moment,” remarked Miss Regan. “He oughtn’t to know so many people. Not that I admire the military bearing. It’s so unnatural and stiff. One sees the drill behind. Even those little wooden soldiers I never liked. Good-bye, Mr. Strang.”
“Au revoir, I hope,” he said. Her, at least, he could answer.
He went to the “Sunday afternoon” at five o’clock, the earliest hour one could decently go to a reception commencing at four. In the meantime he had reread a great deal of Shelley, who seemed to have written a great deal about Eleanor, as she became to her lover’s secret thought, though her full name he learned was the Honorable Mrs. Wyndwood, and she was the daughter-in-law of a Viscount, and connected by blood or marriage with several pages of Debrett. In the hopelessness of his love these ties were no separation; he did not think of anything but the blissful pain of seeing her again. He had ridden every morning in the Row, but neither of the friends had shown herself.
The reception was held in a flat half way up a bleak stone staircase in the West Central district. He was so agitated that he forgot to note the hat-rack, and his first glance at the company appalled him with the sense of a cosmopolitan chaos, without form and void, over which no light of Mrs. Wyndwood brooded. There were mystic oil-paintings on the walls of the narrow room, and on the gray marble mantel-piece stood a glass of water, in which floated vaguely the white of an egg.
The host introduced him to his wife—a tall, haggard, giraffe-necked woman—who gave him a cup of tea, and passed him on to a nervously peering Herr Grundau, who spoke to him of the revival of religion among the University Burschen, and passed him on to Mademoiselle Brinskaïa, a little yellow Polishwoman, with eyes like live coals, who had been speaking every European language in turn with equal fluency, as she knitted colored wools into some occult pattern.
“I have heard your name,” she told him in English that sounded almost native, as he seated himself next to her in the cushioned window-seat.
“It is so good of you to say so,” he murmured, automatically, not without the astonishment which from the first had pervaded him when strangers professed knowledge of him, and which had never quite worn off. He thought his peculiar name accounted for his notoriety.
“You’re not a spiritual artist,” she said, half interrogatively.
“An artist can only be artistic,” he replied, in vague self-defence.
“That’s all my eye and Betty Martin,” said Mademoiselle, knitting indefatigably. Then she smiled. “You see I know your idioms.”
A gradual silence fell among the jabbering, gesticulating crowd. All eyes were directed alternately towards the glass on the mantel-piece and Mademoiselle Brinskaïa.
“It is settled,” Dolkovitch declared.
The Polish old maid rose solemnly, marched towards the fireplace, and inspected the glass curiously, noting the shape which the egg-white had taken.
“It is a porte-cochère,” she announced. “That means riches.”
There was a buzz of satisfaction and a little hand-clapping, the blinking octogenarian who had broken the egg being cheerfully complimented on his prospects.
The sibyl did not return to Matthew Strang’s side, and the vacant niche was taken by a stout, elderly, motherly lady, who was introduced to him as the Countess de Villiers, and who, regardless of the fact that his eyes perpetually wandered towards the door, published her autobiography to him, from her babyhood in Brazil to her maturity in Gibraltar. There could be no close to her story, she volunteered, for she could never die.
This drew Matthew’s attention even from the door.
“Do you mean metaphorically?” he said.
“No, literally. You could not kill me if you tried.”
“What! Not with a knife?”
“Neither with fire nor sword.”
“You know I wouldn’t try,” he said.
“If you are going to treat me facetiously I will not pursue the subject,” she declared, the red blood mantling in her sallow cheek.
“I am quite serious,” he said, deprecatingly.
“A woman who can live without eating cannot die,” pursued the Countess, mollified. “I was an invalid, and in my convalescence gradually worked my way to the Truth, and by means of it I have lived fourteen weeks without food. I worked down from five ounces a day to nothing, dropping an ounce a day. And I didn’t lose a pound of flesh.”
“I have fasted, too,” he said, grimly. “But I never found any Truth through it.” He reflected bitterly on the anxious competition of people to give him food, now that he had plenty of his own. Was this the London which he had tramped for work, famished and rebellious?
“You must be patient,” she answered, earnestly. “You must kill the man in you; then you will have got rid of the mortal part. You will be pure spirit, part of God. Existence is only God’s thoughts; everything good is a God-idea, everything evil a man-idea. Jesus was the first discoverer of the Truth, and only the man-idea in Him was crucified, the mortal part. Only the evil part of us is mortal. I have suppressed the man-idea in myself, therefore I cannot die.”
“But do you mean to say you will always live on?”
“Yes, though not necessarily on earth.”
“But what will happen—will you disappear?”
She frowned. “Oh, I know you are making fun of me; but I assure you many eminent men have sat at my feet. Even Dolkovitch says I have a greater grip of the Truth—the glorious Truth of immortality—than any other woman in Europe, except Mademoiselle Brinskaïa and the clairvoyant Princess Stevanovna. There is nothing miraculous. I don’t keep away from society, I dance and paint, but throughout all I am struggling against the bad-self.”
“What sort of things do you paint?” he asked, feeling for firmer ground.
“My vision!” she said, in rapt tones. “My assurance that the universe is all living spirit.”
And all of a sudden a conviction came to him that she was right, that there was no death, no room for death. Eleanor Wyndwood had arrived, and in the light of her face the noisy, motley throng took meaning and music. He rose eagerly, but she did not see him in his niche, and he sat down again awkwardly. The Countess talked on, but he had forgotten even to feign the listener. He could only see the gleam of a creamy dress in rifts of the crowd, which thickened momently. Presently he was aware of Miss Regan, who gave him an abrupt bow, and then crossing over to him said, in vexed accents:
“I am very angry with you. How are you, Countess? Young as ever, I see.”
“What have I done?” inquired Matthew Strang.
“You’ve spoiled my hat-rack. There’s a chimney-pot on it. Life has so few pleasures one can’t afford to be robbed.”
“Oh, please forgive me,” he said, half seriously.
“I sha’n’t—you’re too respectable.”
“Tell me something Bohemian, and I’ll do it,” he pleaded.
“Well, come to tea with me some five o’clock—with me and Nor, that is.”
“Is that very Bohemian?”
“No, I’m afraid not,” said Olive, glumly. Then, brightening up. “But that’s only a beginning. And you haven’t got time to come, either. That makes it a pleasure.”
“I shall be delighted to find time,” he said, looking his words. While they were discussing dates, the Countess rose and stalked away.
“She looks offended,” he said.
“Poor old Countess!” said Olive, “she’s breaking up fast.”
“But she’s going to live forever.”
“I know. How sad! We came across her at Rome—the eternal lady in the eternal city. She’s much grayer since then. Earthly immortality seems almost as horrible as heavenly. Fancy living for ever and ever and ever. No rest for the righteous! Oh, I do hope religion isn’t true. How’s your friend?”
“Which friend?”
“You’re a queer girl,” he said, laughing in spite of himself.
“That’s tautology. All girls are queer. Did you ever know a woman absolutely sane?”
He winced a little—shadows of his mother and his wife flashed past. She answered herself, triumphantly.
“Of course not. We’ve all got bees in our bonnets. Men haven’t even got bonnets. Except Highlanders. And they don’t wear the breeches. I beg pardon, I should have said ‘unmentionables’ to a member of the chimney-potted classes. But that always seems silly. It’s like spelling ‘damn’ in books with a ‘d’ and a blank. I have a lovely private swear. Would you like to hear it?”
He laughed assent.
“Damakakaparatanasuta! The pink lady, who always forgets her bodice, is looking shocked. She doesn’t know it’s Sanscrit, or something, and means: ‘The foundation of the kingdom of righteousness.’ Don’t laugh, it really does. There is a cousin of the Guicowar of Baroda over there—you can ask him. Why, I have even got Nor to swear to swear it. It’s like temperance champagne.”
“Ah! I’d better go over to her,” he said, snapping at the opportunity. “Or else she’ll accuse me of cutting her again.”
He pushed a whit rudely through the teacup-balancing throng. But to his horror he found Eleanor distributing farewells.
She smiled faintly at him, as her magnetic fingers touched his for a moment.
“What wicked things have you been saying to Mademoiselle Brinskaïa?”
He looked at her in astonishment. “I’ve hardly said a word to her.”
She shook her head and passed towards the door. He spent some wretched days, wondering if he had offended her, and what the little yellow woman had been saying about him. He put the question as soon as he was seated at the tea-table in the dainty drawing-room of the tiny Mayfair house which the oddly assorted couple had taken for the season. Mrs. Wyndwood would not say, but Miss Regan cried out:
“Don’t make such a mystery, Nor; you’ll make the man think he’s accused of murder, or drinking his tea out of a saucer. The Polish priestess says she doesn’t like your auras—voilà tout!”
“What are auras?” he asked, relieved and puzzled.
“The Latin for airs, of course,” laughed Olive. “It’s her mystical way of saying you give yourself airs. Yes, you do. You’re disapproving of our furniture now. But it’s through Nor’s objecting to furniture that suited my complexion and vice versa. We compromised by getting furniture in discord with both our complexions. The beautiful photos you see all about you are mine—I mean my collection. They are actresses. I adore beautiful women. After what you told me about the unimportance of the likeness I shall consider them works of art. I have always thought that actresses’ photographs are intended as a protection against the curiosity of the public. But for them, actresses would be liable to be recognized and mobbed in the streets. Great Heavens! I’ve forgotten the scones.” And with this unexpected exclamation, Olive rushed out of the room.
“She would insist on baking scones herself,” Mrs. Wyndwood explained with an affectionate smile.
“She is deliciously odd,” he replied, laughing.
“Do you find her so? I’ve got used to her. There’s a monotony in the variety. Behind it all I see always this one fact—she’s the noblest creature in the world.”
He was touched by the enthusiastic tribute, so different from Olive’s amused estimate of her friend.
“You must find it very pleasant to live with her,” he said.
“Yes, especially after”—But she shuddered, and did not complete the sentence. He read in her face the tragedy of an unhappy marriage. His eyes grew moist with pity; he felt a mad, fighting passion against the inevitable past.
“Olive is so good,” she said, brokenly, “she was of my husband’s family—an Irish branch—but she quarrelled with them all—her father, her sisters—and came to live with me. Fortunately she is immensely rich in her own right, and independent of them all.”
“Done to a turn!” cried Miss Regan, rushing in with the scones. “And I feared I was King Alfred!”
At tea they talked Art.
It was an exquisite sensation to have these charming ladies treat him as Sir Oracle. He was surprised to learn that in her girlhood Miss Regan had displayed considerable talent for sculpture, but had “washed her hands of the clay” on seeing the torso of Victory in the Louvre. He remonstrated with her, insisting that technical skill came slowly, with infinite labor. There were things he himself wanted to do—all sorts of new things that he had never yet done. One day he would try to do them—when he had time. Mrs. Wyndwood spoke contemptuously of technical skill in comparison with soul, but here Olive mischievously took up the cudgels for craftsmanship, and led the rather reluctant painter into an eloquent exposition of the joys of technical mastery; of doing what you would with your material. Mrs. Wyndwood at last caught the fire of his enthusiasm, and astonished him by expressing his sense of the joy of Art better than himself. Under the passion of her words he wondered that he could ever have wasted his time on portraits for mere money, or on scamped pictures for Exhibitions, when all these interesting problems were waiting to be wrought out. Ah, but Miss Regan was wrong, he felt, in thinking these problems the be-all and end-all of Art; it was soul that was the essence of Art; Art had no raison d’être except as the expression of soul, of the upward aspiration of the Spirit towards the Good and the Beautiful and the True, a trinity that was mysteriously one.
CHAPTER IV
FERMENT
The sands of the season were running out, but Matthew Strang sifted them for every grain of the gold of meetings with Eleanor Wyndwood. He was shy of formal visits to the house, he did not venture on the conventional course of asking her to sit to him, for he would not consciously feed the flame of a passion that must be hopeless. But with that curious illogicality which distinguishes man from the brute, he called in accident to arrange their rendezvous, pursuing possibility with a perseverance that made it probability.
He could not follow Eleanor to all her fashionable fastnesses as easily as to the shrines of spirituality, for to be born well is still a necessity of life in some circles; but they met often enough amid the monotonous glitter which was the woman’s birthright and second nature to the man. His eye perpetually sought her; in chattering drawing-rooms, in cool gardens, on congested staircases, in whirling ballrooms; finding every place dark and empty till she filled and illumined the scene. She gleamed upon him as unreal and insubstantial as the figures he had once noted in one of these ballrooms, completely girdled by electric lights, which, robbing the dancers of shadows, made them fairy-like and phantasmal. But he did not follow out the analogy or suspect it might be his own love which was surrounding her with this spiritualizing electric illumination. Each time he saw her he resolved never to see her again. He could never tell her what was in his heart, never insult her exquisite purity with the avowal of his love, even though that love were clarified to unimagined ethereality by her stainless radiance of soul. And each time the possibility of seeing her drew nigh again, he told himself that he needed her for his Art—that she was drawing him up from the slough of banality, that now for the first time his soul was really opening out to the appeal of the higher beauty. Not that he had as yet begun to express the higher beauty; he had simply abandoned the old. He was too restless to work, to concentrate himself; he flitted between the unfinished and the projected, painting in and painting out; he took long rides in the middle of the day, to the amazement of his faithful body-servant; he read emotional literature. Once an unconscious hostess gave him Eleanor’s company at dinner. Mrs. Wyndwood was in stately black, with a bunch of violets at her bosom. It was an enchanted meal. They talked of poetry, and he seemed to be dining off poetry too. The wines where special brands of nectar, laid down by the gods in the golden age, the meats were ambrosia, the sweets honey-dew. A beauty as of Hebe transfigured the faces of the neat-handed waiting-men. It seemed only natural that the beautiful stately creature at his side should overflow with quotations from religious poetry—was she not herself a religious poem? His recent feverish readings had branded lines on his own heart; he was able to answer her in lyric antiphony. His other neighbor he simply forgot, though she was a bishop’s consort and a patroness of the arts, with printed views on the genuineness of Old Masters. There was an old picture of his own on the opposite wall, and the fear lest Eleanor should raise her eyes to it was all the serpent in his Paradise. His subconsciousness noted with pleasure, however, that the painting had mellowed—a proof that his theory of colors was right.
He watched with furtive fascination the play of Eleanor’s beautiful Botticelli hands, plying her knife and fork, as she explained how under the influence of Dolkovitch she had drifted away from Socialism, whose professors always laid too much stress on the needs of the body. But she apologized for having spoken rudely of his “Triumph of Bacchus” from a mere knowledge of its title; he had made her understand now that the appeal of painting must always be sensuous, and that subject was only an excuse for draughtsmanship and coloring, and she startled him by saying she liked that picture of his on the opposite wall, which he had been hoping had escaped her eye. It became at once glorified to his own.
After the ladies had retired, the gentlemen talked about a newly invented torpedo, the finances of India, and the prospects of the Conservatives; the conversation sounded almost indecent, and he was glad Eleanor was not there to hear it. He took no part in the fatuous discussion, contenting himself with watching Eleanor’s face amid the wreaths of his cigar-smoke; even in the flesh the face had for him something of this vaporous, elusive incorporeality.
In the drawing-room the inevitable Miss Regan claimed his attention. Eleanor was playing Mendelssohn, and he would have liked to listen, but Olive was less original.
“You have never honored our five-o’clocks again,” she said, reproachfully.
He murmured that he was busy.
“That was the charm of your coming,” she reminded him. “One had the sensation of beguiling you to play truant. But I suppose the tea was bad. Nor would make it.”
“The tea was beautiful,” he said, smiling. “But aren’t we disturbing the music?”
“On the contrary. Nor is giving us ‘Lieder ohne Wörte,’ and we have to supply the words. I wonder what makes her play such old-fashioned school-girl things. Then it must have been the scones.”
He shook his head and pursed his lips, and the music flowed on like a lovely moonlit stream. He was drifting on the stream with Eleanor, as, in those far-off days of young romance, he had dreamed of lovers drifting. A mystic silver haze was shed from the moon that sailed softly through the lambent starry sky, the whisper of the wind among the trees and the quiet lapping of the water made a dulcet stillness that was punctuated by the passionate “jug-jug” of the nightingale; mysterious palaces of night glided along the banks behind dim gardens wafting drowsy odors. The thought shook him that the world held such lovers—lovers who were not brought together for a moment and hurled apart in the accidental whirl of society atoms, lovers whose lips were not eternally sundered, but lovers who were each other’s sunshine and moonlight and music, daily, nightly, perennially. He alone was doomed to eternal loneliness—nay, to that aggravated form of loneliness which is shared with a life-long partner.
“I came across your cynical friend the other day.”
He started, becoming conscious that his eyes were full of sweet, hopeless tears.
“Indeed,” he murmured automatically.
“Yes, the cousin you told me of.”
“Did I tell you of him?”
“Don’t you remember you told me he said all women are in the same trade? Well, he is veritably a cynic of cynics, for he candidly informed me, after I had been bantering and mystifying him with my foreknowledge of him, that he had simply quoted Schopenhauer.”
“Where did you meet him?” he asked, a little interested.
“At the Dudley-Heatons’s reception a fortnight ago. I call him the Minister of the Interior, he’s such an epicure—the politician, I mean, not your cousin. There was Lord Fashborough there, the man who’s just been appointed president of the Cruelty to Children Commission, and who glittered with stars and orders like a comic-opera Begum. He it was introduced your cousin—at my request, of course. Your cousin told me the Begum and he had travelled together in Spain, when the Begum’s appetite for bull-fights and cock-fights was insatiable. I have never been in Spain, and two of my favorite illusions were destroyed at one fell blow. It seems that they simply push reluctant, decrepit old horses on to the horns of the bulls. And then the Spanish women! Your cousin describes them as ugly and unwashed.”
He shuddered. Why would Miss Regan perversely obtrude the prose of life upon his consciousness? He would not answer her—he tried to drift again with the magic stream, but the spell was broken. He knew it was Eleanor’s music that made the pictures, and that the odors came from the flowers at Olive’s throat.
“He is painting Nor’s portrait,” she went on, indifferently.
He had to answer her now—in a stifled interrogative, masking a sudden sharp agony and foreboding.
“What, Herbert?”
“Yes; he asked her to give him some sittings. He hasn’t altogether become a critic, you see.”
“Who introduced him to her?”
“I did, of course.”
“But his request was rather hasty, wasn’t it?”
“Oh, it wasn’t the first time. We met him again at the Russian Embassy.”
“And how does Mrs. Wyndwood know he can paint?”
Olive laughed quietly. “Oh, he said so. He usually tells the truth, I fancy. But he is an artist, isn’t he?”
“He was a Gold Medallist of the Royal Academy,” he answered, with unaccustomed bitterness. A mad envy was consuming him. Why had he not asked Mrs. Wyndwood to sit to him, seeing that her consent was so facile? Was he always to stand by while the best of life was seized and carried off by the bolder, the more reckless, nay, by the more unworthy? The remembrance that Herbert had the right, and he had not, did not dilute his bitterness, though it brought a hot flush to his cheek. Who was he to see profanation in the juxtaposition of Eleanor with a man like Herbert? However ignoble Herbert’s conception of womanhood, had not he himself always found him lovable?
“Aren’t you friends?” Olive asked, divining alienation in his tone.
He felt remorseful. “Oh, we are great friends,” he answered, with cordial warmth. “He was very kind to me when I first came to London.”
“He asked me to sit as well,” Olive pursued, satisfied.
Matthew Strang felt the tension in his brain relax.
“And are you going to?”
“No. I hate flattery. So I sacrificed Nor instead. Of course I shall go and sit by her, though not with her. Curious, the subtleties of language.”
“Then you will still chaperon her,” he said, with a joyous smile.
“I never neglect a pleasant duty,” she answered, placidly. “But we can only give him a few sittings.”
“Ah!” he interrupted, with an involuntary exclamation of relief.
“We’re leaving town.”
He looked blank now. “Are you, indeed?”
“Of course. Why are you surprised? Didn’t you think we were proper? Nor wanted the eternal Homburg or Switzerland, but I’m resolved to show her England. Like most travelled cockneys, she thinks England’s the capital of London, and I want to teach her geography, so we’re off to Devonshire.”
“She will enjoy Devonshire scenery.”
“Yes, especially the Creamery. That’s what I’ve christened the little God-forsaken village I discovered. So you know, if you ever want a cup of tea, we shall have five-o’clocks going on there also. Patronize the Creamery.”
“I will,” he said, with an instant resolution to take tea both in Mayfair and in Devonshire.
“That’s right. We’ll send a coach-and-four to meet you. At least, you’ll find it waiting at the station for passengers. Do you know whom I should like to meet most of all men living?”
“Wagner? The Pope? The Czar?”
“Don’t be absurd. The Rev. Septimus Wheercastle. A local guide-book says, ‘The Rev. Septimus Wheercastle speaks in very favorable terms of the Undercliff.’ Isn’t it delicious? Imagine a gentleman in a white tie patronizing an Undercliff! But, then, the clergy are always patronizing the Almighty, so why not His works?”
“Hush,” he said, indicating the proximity of the Bishop.
“Isn’t he beautiful?” she asked, in an awed whisper. “What a privilege never to be mistaken for a waiter! I am so proud of the bishops in my family. We have a pair, with gaiters to match, both High Church atheists; they are the joys of my life, they and the dowager duchess, who wears kiss-curls and raves for blood. ‘Give me blood!’ she cries, as she denounces modern society, stabbing her potato with her fork à la Sarah Siddons.”