The Master Craftsman

It was about the middle of October that Frances came up from the country. Considering that her uniform practice was to remain there until the middle of January every year, it was reasonable to suppose that there was some urgent cause why she returned so soon.

Perhaps she would tell me. It was her general custom to tell me everything. For instance, when her marriage, at the age of eighteen, with an elderly Secretary of State, was under consideration, we talked it over together, weighing the arguments for and against it, dispassionately, which we could very well do, because Frances was not in love with the elderly statesman, though she greatly admired him, and we were not in love with each other.

I called upon her on Sunday morning, a time when I should be certain to find her quite alone. She received me in her breakfast-room. I observed that her face showed certain signs of trouble, or, at least, uneasiness of some kind. It was in her eyes chiefly, eyes remarkable for their serenity, that the trouble was shown. There was a dark line under them, and her forehead, the forehead remarkable for its sunshine, looked clouded.

‘You are not well, Frances?’

‘I am always well, George. Sit down and tell me all about yourself.’

‘I have got nothing to tell you about myself; but I will tell you, if you please, about Isabel.’

I proceeded to tell her, at length, a great deal about Isabel. Of course, Frances would not believe that a girl could be refined, and graceful, and well-mannered, who was living at Wapping, the daughter of a skipper.

‘You tell me to believe all this of such a girl, George. It is absurd. Where would the girl find these graces? Believe me, a refined and well-bred girl is a most artificial product. It takes the greatest watchfulness and the most careful companionship to create refinement in a girl—a refined and well-bred girl is not in the least a creature of Nature, nor, I should suppose, of Wapping.’

‘I cannot tell you where she found her refinement, Frances. I suppose, where she found her sweet face and her soft voice and her tender eyes.’

‘George, you are a lover. Oh! it must be beautiful to be a man, if only for the man’s power of imagination. I fear your angel would be to me a Common Object.’

‘No, Frances. Have I not known you all my life? This privilege is an education. Do you think that, after going through such a school of manners, I could be capable of falling in love with a Common Object?’

‘It is prettily said, George. I half believe you on the strength of that pretty little speech. Since she appears to you all these things, I can only hope that she is really all these things. You must take me to see her. Only, you know, men who fall in love do sometimes permit themselves the most crazy fancies. It makes them happy, poor dears, and I suppose it does no harm to the woman. I dare say she doesn’t even understand what the man thinks about her. Well, and you are engaged, and you are going to be married. When?’

‘Here comes the trouble. We are not engaged. And we cannot become engaged.’

‘Why not?’

‘On account of Robert.’

‘Oh!’ She blushed quickly. ‘Then, there is a woman, after all. What about Robert?’

‘Four or five years ago, when she came with her father to live with him and to keep his accounts, he told her that some time or other he should want a wife, and that he should marry her. There was to be no wooing, he said, and there has been no love-making ever since. He has never addressed a word of love-making to her.’

‘Well? And why can’t the girl let him go? She must feel that she is a clog upon him.’

Frances spoke more harshly than was customary with her.

‘Robert says that he has passed his word. Isabel says that she owes everything to Robert, and that she is bound by common gratitude to wait for him until he releases her. She will obey him in all things. If he says “Marry me,” she will marry him. If he says “Wait,” she will wait. If he says “Go,” she will go.’

‘Gratitude of this kind, George, is touching, but it may be embarrassing. What does Robert say?’

‘Robert says that he has passed his word. But he also says that it will be long years before he can think of marrying her. I have tried to make him understand that it is cruel to keep a girl on like this.’

‘Does he love her? Oh, I cannot think he does. I have watched him while he was thinking of her. I knew it was a woman, and I knew he had got into some kind of scrape with a woman. Men who are in love do not glare and glower when they think of the object of their affections.’

‘Does he love her?’ I repeated, rising, and looking out of the window. ‘Nobody can answer that question, Frances, better than you.’

It was a bold thing to say; but one must sometimes say bold things. I remained at the window, looking out upon the Park, but I saw nothing.

Frances made no reply.

I came back and resumed my seat.

‘What do you want to do, George?’

‘I want Robert to release her.’

‘Tell him so, then.’

‘I know what he would say. I have told him so already. He says that his word is given. Isabel has assured him that she will wait for him. Isabel has always been so gentle, even meek, with him, that he would understand with difficulty that she would, in fact, rather not.’

‘Well, what do you propose, then?’

‘I would try to work upon his ambitions. There is no doubt that poor Isabel, who has no social ambitions, would be a clog upon him. Seeing what kind of man he is, and the future that lies before him, would it be provident for him to hamper himself with a wife who can never belong to your world?’

‘It would be madness.’

‘Well, Frances, you have taken a very kind interest in him from the first.’

‘For your sake, George; you know that.’

‘It was for my sake at the outset; now, I hope and believe, you continue your interest in him for his own sake.’

She coloured. Thus doth guilt betray itself. Had she taken no such personal interest in the man, there would have been no cause for the mantling soft suffusion. It really was very pretty. Whatever softened Frances’s regal beauty improved the attraction of it.

‘After all,’ she said, ‘the girl must be an incomparable nymph to have conquered two such men. However, Robert must not marry a girl of humble rank—at least, for a very long time to come. When he stands quite firmly, and has secured his position—but even then it would be madness.’

‘If he were to marry the right kind of woman it would be different. He should have in a wife, first good connections, then social position, then some measure of wealth.’

Frances inclined her head. ‘Those are all things that would help a rising man.’

‘Since he is a young man, and has eyes in his head, beauty would be a great additional advantage.’

‘I suppose it would.’

‘Well, Frances, do you know that woman?’

She answered one question with another: ‘Where should one look to find such a woman?’

‘To be sure, Robert is a man without family; he can’t get over that. One may give him the manners of a gentleman, but nothing can make him a gentleman by birth.’

‘If,’ said Lady Frances, ‘your cousin is a gentleman by manners and by instinct, what matters his birth? People may say behind his back that he has been in some kind of trade; that won’t hurt him a bit. The fact that he has been a boat-builder of Wapping will never prevent his rising in the House. He is bound to rise. He will probably become in a very few years a Cabinet Minister. I suppose there is hardly any woman in the country who would not think herself fortunate in marrying a man sure to become in a few years a Cabinet Minister.’

‘Meantime he is only a candidate for this distinction, and nobody, except yourself, Frances, and one or two others, knows that he is likely to get what he wants. Therefore again I ask, Do you know of any woman—such as we desire for him—who would take him?’

‘How am I to know?’ she replied sharply. ‘I do not look about the town in search of wives for my friends.’

‘But you know everybody. Do you know of any woman who possesses all these acquirements?’

‘You are very strange to-day, George. Your love affairs make you importunate.’

‘You shall be as haughty as you please in five minutes, Frances.’ I took her hand. ‘My dear Frances, you have always been so sisterly with me; and now I am in this terrible trouble, and in order to get out of it, I must speak plainly—very plainly.’

‘Well, George’—she threw herself back in her chair and folded her arms—‘you may speak as plainly—yes, as plainly—as you desire.’

‘Thank you. Well, then, do you remember a certain memorable day—a most disastrous day—when I came to tell you that my misguided parent had played ducks and drakes with the whole of my respectable fortune? I was very low in spirits that day.’

‘Yes, I remember it well.’

‘We had a good deal of talk about ways and means. I disgusted you by the absence of any healthy ambition.’

‘You always have disgusted me that way,’ she said. ‘What has all this to do with your cousin?’

‘I am working round to him. You will see the connection in a moment. Well, you fired up then, and became indignant, and looked splendid. I like to see you when you are indignant. You then uttered words—burning words. You said that all the time you had been watching another George Burnikel growing up besides me. You said that he was ever so much taller, handsomer, more ambitious, more industrious, more resolute, more everything. You said also that you had always hoped that, in the fulness of time, the smaller figure would be absorbed in the greater figure, and there would then be a George Burnikel worth looking at. Do you remember saying this?’

‘Yes, I remember, at least, thinking in that way.’

‘And I have often thought, Frances, that, if I could have become that bigger animal—the ambitious and the resolute—perhaps—I don’t know, but perhaps—you might have consented. Well, I must not ask, because I quite understand that the thing was impossible. You have always been too great for me, Frances. I must be contented with Isabel, who has no ambition, poor child! and asks for nothing but love, which is pretty well all I have to give her.’

‘I do not know what might have happened if things had been different.’

‘I was even tempted, being so very small a creature, to assume that ambition, and to go about tricked with the feathers that pleased you. Being a humble barn-door fowl, I thought of pretending to be an eagle.’

‘I am very glad you did not, George, because I might have believed you.’

‘Oh! You would have found me out very soon. However, that nobler creature, that superior George, that imaginary person whom you figured, he does exist; he is, in fact, my cousin. Look at him, Frances; he is exactly like me, only bigger all over, body and brain. He is as ambitious as Lucifer, which is exactly what you want; also he is nearly as proud as my Lord Lucifer, which ought to please you; he is masterful through and through, which pleases you; he makes everything and everybody subservient to his ambition; he has learned an immense quantity of things, to serve his own ambition; he is eloquent; he is handsome; he has manners, though he will never acquire the conventional manner—why, that is in itself a distinction.’

‘George, you were never so eloquent about yourself.’

‘One cannot be. And then, which is something, he is a true man; when he says a thing he means it; he has no past to cover up, like so many men. He will never have anything to conceal in the future. And he will command the whole world, except one person—that person, Frances, is yourself. You are the only person who can rule him; for he worships you, as yet afar off, with no thought of worshipping nearer.’

‘What do you mean, George? What authority or grounds have you for saying this? What has Rob—your cousin—said to you?’

‘I mean exactly what I say. He has said nothing; but I have eyes in my head.’

‘The man has never spoken one word that I could interpret in such a sense.’

‘He never will, unless you bid him speak, and until he is released from his word; then you will find him eloquent enough.’

‘Well, but even supposing so much, George, it is not in my power to release him. Why cannot he release himself?’

‘No; but if a word of hope is authorized—in case.’

She bent her head. Then she looked up and laughed.

‘George,’ she said, ‘you must indeed be desperately in love to undertake the rôle of match-maker.’

‘That word of hope.’ I took her hand, as if I had been her lover indeed, instead of only a go-between. ‘What will you say that I may repeat to him? How shall I let him understand that your interest in him is personal?’

‘George, you shame me! How can I send a message of hope to a man who is engaged to another woman? The thing is ridiculous. Go away and make him release that girl.’

‘Yet I may say—what may I say?’ I insisted.

‘Say whatever you please, George. Go; you are a meddlesome creature. I hope your Isabel will prove inconstant. There are Stairs at Wapping—Old Stairs, I believe—and sailors convenient for inconstant maids.’

‘You are interested in him. Confess, Frances,’ I persisted.

She covered her face with her hands. ‘Oh, George,’ she murmured, ‘I have always been interested in him from the very first.’ She sprang to her feet. ‘Tell him, George, if you wish, that I like a man to be strong and brave. Yes, I like a man to be capable of sweeping the curs out of his way, as that cousin of yours cleared the stage of those curs at Shadwell.’

‘And this great gulf of family. How can it be bridged over?’

‘He must build the bridge if he wishes to cross over.’

‘My Lady Greatheart,’ I said, and kissed her fingers, ‘there is the poem, you know; the lines run like this:

The metre is a little dickey in the next lines, but the sense quite makes up for that defect. The sense is entirely beautiful: