The Wellfields: A novel. Vol. 2 of 3

CHAPTER IV.

HERR FALKENBERG’S FRIENDSHIP.

When Herr Falkenberg arrived the following afternoon in the Jägerstrasse, he found Miss Ford alone in her atelier. She had sent Avice out with Ellen, she told him, to walk off the excitement of yesterday.

‘I am glad you have come early,’ she added, ‘while it is yet to-day. The evenings darken down so quickly now, don’t they?’

‘Yes, very; but for me, these chilly autumn evenings have a great fascination.’

‘Have they? And for me too. Do you know, there is nothing I like better than to put on my hat and shawl on a fine, sharp October evening, such as this is going to be, before it is quite dark, while the sky is still light; in fact, just at the time the lamplighter goes his rounds. There is a strange, unusual feeling in the air, and people go by like figures in a dream.’

‘I know the feeling. And what is your favourite haunt at such times?’

‘I like to pass through some of the most crowded streets first, then gradually to leave them and walk through the quieter Allee, till I get to the Hofgarten. I never get tired of it, small though it is. That well-worn round space, called the Schöne Aussicht, remains my favourite spot. Very few people go there at this season, and at that time in the evening. I can sit, or stand, or pace about as long as I choose, and watch the Rhine, and the remains of the sunset, and the bridge of boats, and think of all the villages which the distance hides. It is very beautiful, I think, though you may laugh at me for saying so.’

‘I am not all inclined to laugh, for I like the same kind of thing myself. I have a special fondness for the “still, sad music of humanity,” which one comprehends best at such times.’

‘Yes, it is a music worth listening to. But the music of humanity is not always sad, Herr Falkenberg, is it?’

‘No,’ said Rudolf, looking down at her. He was standing, Sara was seated on a low chair, leaning forward, and looking up at him with an earnest, large gaze, and in her eyes was so deep, so triumphant and secure a happiness, that he could not fail to see it—it made her face glorious with its reflection. Falkenberg, looking at her, repressed the words of admiration he would fain have uttered, and sighed before he answered her, in his usual courteous, collected fashion. ‘No,’ he repeated; ‘it is often glad, I think, and when it is so, it is very glad. Pardon me, Miss Ford,’ he went on, with a slight smile, ‘I think it has been glad for you lately; you look as if your life’s music were pitched just now in a major key.’

Her cheek flushed, and her eyes fell, as she answered, in a low tone:

‘Yes, I have had a great happiness lately. I am very happy.’

‘I am very glad to hear it,’ said he, and he was at no loss to guess to what kind of happiness she alluded. If he had been—his eyes fell upon her hands, clasped upon her knee, and upon the solitary sapphire hoop which decked the third finger of the left hand, with the broad tight gold guard above. That was enough. He had observed her hands in days gone by, and then, he knew, when they were at Ems and Nassau, she had worn several rings, old-fashioned, but valuable—a diamond one, and a pearl and emerald one, and others. They were gone. Nothing remained but the sapphire hoop.

‘Let me congratulate you on your happiness,’ he added, ‘and forgive my saying that the ring you wear is a good omen. Those blue stones mean steadfastness and faith.’

‘Yes, I know. Those qualities are about the best things we can have. Don’t you think so?’

‘They are very good things,’ he replied slowly, as he thought within himself, ‘Two can be steadfast: one may steadfastly give up, as well as steadfastly cling to a thing.’

‘Are you not tired with your exertions last night?’ he asked.

‘I—oh no! I am very strong; I do not easily get tired. I should like always to feel as I did feel last night: as if nothing would ever be difficult again, as if one’s powers would easily sweep away every obstacle. Do you know, in the scene from Hermann and Thusnelda, I was wishing, with all my heart, that I was here in my atelier, with an appropriate subject. I felt as if I could have painted then.’

‘Yes, one lives a full life at such moments. That reminds me that at this season daylight rapidly departs. May I not see your pictures now?’

‘With pleasure, such as they are,’ she answered, rising, and pushing an easel round, so as to show the picture in the best light.

‘This is but a sketch,’ said he, standing before it. ‘Have you nothing finished?’

‘N—no,’ said Sara, pausing; and as she forced herself to make the calculation, she found that she had never finished anything since her visit to Ems; since she had known Jerome Wellfield.

‘I have finished nothing lately,’ she exclaimed, struck with the thought, and involuntarily speaking out her reflections. ‘I finish nothing now. I begin things, and then the impulse fades away, and they are neglected.’

‘It is as well not to insist upon working out every crude attempt,’ he said—and she thought his face took an expression of gravity, as he continued to look at the sketch—‘because if you do that, you are not an artist any more, but a machine; but it is also well occasionally to persevere in carrying out some conception, even if you do not find yourself altogether in sympathy with your first idea. That is discipline, which in moderation is good. What is this?’ he added, so drily, and so abruptly, that she started.

‘That?’ she answered, a little hurriedly; ‘oh, it was a verse from a little poem of Sully Prudhomme’s which struck my fancy. Where is it?’

She found a scrap of paper on the edge of the easel, on which paper were scribbled Sully Prudhomme’s exquisite little lines, Si vous saviez. The verse she had tried to illustrate was the one running:

‘It is not very good,’ said Sara, apologetically; ‘it is a stupid, sentimental little thing after all.’

‘As you have sketched it, it is,’ he answered, and said no more.

Sara, with an uneasy thrill of feeling, remembered his words to her at Trockenau: ‘If I thought it atrocious, I am afraid I should say it was so, much though I might dislike having to do it.’

She felt that he had just now said ‘atrocious,’ or something very like it, and her heart sank. Silently she placed another canvas above the first. It was a vague, indistinct scene; what appeared some wild, wind-blown trees on rising ground to the left—clouds riven asunder, and silvered by a moon which did not actually appear; the hint of a deep, rapid, sullen stream, with tall rushes, in the foreground.

‘That is imaginary!’ he said abruptly, ‘You did not go to Nature for this.’

‘No, not altogether. It is—it is only a sketch.’

‘Scarcely that. Is it meant to typify anything?’

‘I believe I was thinking of Shelley’s stanzas: “Away! the moor is dark beneath the moon!” But it is bad. I have failed,’ she added, a sudden sense of being very small and insignificant rushing over her, and also a conviction of how entirely she had failed.

‘Yes, you have failed,’ he answered, somewhat sarcastically. ‘I should not imagine, in the first place, that you knew what the lines meant.’

‘No, I don’t think I do,’ Sara owned, deprecatingly.

‘Let us hope you never may. The meaning, when you come at it, is bitter—as bitter as anything well can be. Well’—he turned to her, and looked her in the face, with eyes which she felt were full of severity and full of concern—‘is that all?’

‘It is all I can show you,’ she replied hastily, ‘when I see how displeased you are.’

‘You are afraid of hearing the truth?’ asked Falkenberg, with a mocking smile.

With compressed lips, and a face which had grown pale, she threw a cover from another canvas, a larger one, on a second easel, and, leaving him to study it, turned away, and stood at the window, looking out, her heart beating so wildly that its throbs deafened her. Yet she heard him say:

‘Ah! at least one knows what this is intended for.’

It was a sketch merely, all except the head of the figure, in neutral first tints; and there was certainly no mistaking the subject. A man’s figure in imperial robes, leaning eagerly forward, stretching out his hands; his eyes fixed, his lips parted towards the sun, which suddenly bursts with a flood of light into the room, and illumines the desk and tablets, on which he had been inscribing his great Hymn. One could just catch this meaning; and the head of Julian the Apostate, which was boldly finished and beautiful, was a likeness of Jerome.

‘H’m!’ observed Falkenberg. ‘The Apostate—a curious idea.’ Then, after a pause, ‘I suppose that is all?’

‘All, except the studies I am doing with Herr Wilhelmi,’ she said, feeling all the pretty conceits with which she had tried to gloss over her work, small in amount, poor in execution, of the last three months, swept away, as cobwebs might be swept from a roof, till not a trace remained.

‘And has the Herr Professor praised your performances of late?’

‘He has not—he has blamed them,’ said she, her cheek burning, but firmly resolved to confess the worst—to conceal nothing.

‘It would have been odd indeed if he had done so. Has he seen this last one that I have just been looking at?’

‘No one has seen it but yourself,’ she replied, almost inaudibly.

‘It is not quite so bad as the other two. The head shows some signs of good workmanship, but the whole thing is poor and meretricious; and you know it is. Those other two studies, or attempts at studies, show a distinct and visible falling off. They are not so good by a long way as the little sketch you showed me at Trockenau. They are careless, sketchy, weak, and horribly amateurish. They are second-rate in every way—fit for magazine woodcuts—but as works of art! They are dreadful, and quite destitute of workmanship, and I am very sorry to see them.’

‘Oh, Herr Falkenberg!’ she exclaimed, aghast. ‘You—but I deserve it. They are all that you say.’

She spoke with a proud humility, but her voice was stifled with suppressed sobs. His relentless words had aroused, as if by magic, the old spirit of eager ambition which, until a few months ago, had animated her. It was as if some one roughly shook her from some pleasant drowsy dream back into reality. In her own mind she had tried—not very successfully, it is true, but still with the effect of lulling herself into contentment—to call those inadequate attempts at pictures ‘vague fancies,’ ‘thoughts too subtle at once to take shape.’ Consummate criticism, neutral, calm and unimpassioned, fixed its piercing eyes upon them, and instantly pronounced them—daubs.

She had come nearer to him as she spoke. Now she turned away again, consumed by a feeling of burning, scorching shame, and walked back to the window, and stood there, feeling utterly miserable. ‘Love is enough,’ she had lately read somewhere; but it was not true, she found—it did not support or comfort her under this just condemnation. It did not enable her to feel callous and indifferent under the disapproval and displeasure of such a man as Rudolf Falkenberg.

She remained standing by the window. He had begun to pace about the studio, his hands clasped behind him. Presently he spoke:

‘I congratulated you just now on your happiness,’ he said. ‘If this is to be the result, I must withdraw those congratulations.’

‘Herr Falkenberg, don’t—please don’t say that!’ she implored, in a voice that was pitiable, though so low.

‘But I must, if you allow it thus to enervate you—to emasculate your power. Pardon my frankness, and what may seem my intrusiveness; but you know my motives. Do you mean to give up your art?’

‘No—oh no! I never thought of such a thing.’

‘Then look to what you are doing. Such things as those you have showed me—such thin, weak, boneless, bloodless things are a mere prostitution of one of the noblest and most glorious of arts. For heaven’s sake, if you do not intend to do better than that, give it up altogether. Surely you are above such amateur dabbling, such sentimental prettinesses—you, who might do well and worthily, even nobly, I believe, if you only would. And, if you intend to persevere, let me tell you that the “happiness,” or the “good fortune,” or whatsoever it may be, which degrades your powers instead of expanding them, is bad. Sorrow rightly borne, and noble joy rightly worn, should elevate, not degrade. There is no evading this law, and no escaping it for those who have souls at all; and I was firmly convinced that you had. What has one of your own countrymen said, one of the most consummate art-critics that ever lived? He has said just the same thing—“accurately, in proportion to the rightness of the cause, and the purity of the emotion, is the possibility of the fine art— ... with absolute precision, from the highest to the lowest, the fineness of the possible art is an index of the moral purity and majesty of the emotion it expresses.” That is one of the hardest things ever written, and one of the truest. Measure yourself by it, with those—and where are you?’

Sara had cast herself into a chair, and with her hands before her face, was controlling her sobs as best she might. Never before had she felt thus humbled and scorched, and burnt up, as it were. It was terrible, yet not one pang of anger or resentment mingled with her emotion. She knew that what he said was just—no more, no less; and being noble, she liked him the better for his having said it. There was no carping, no prejudice or temper in what he said—no scolding for the sake of rousing her to retort or to deprecate; there was the sorrowful, stern condemnation of one who knew she had belied herself, and had sufficient regard for her to tell her so, and she bowed to it.

He did not speak for a little time, and gradually her sobs grew quieter. At last he stopped before her, and said:

‘Miss Ford!’

Sara removed her hands from before her face, picked up her handkerchief, dried her eyes with it, and looked at him. His eyes were full of kindness; they were not hard; his face was not the face of a hard judge, and his voice was soothing as he said:

‘I do not beg you to forgive me for what I have said to you. If you are what I take you to be, that is not necessary. I do not say I am sorry to have wounded you. I honour you so much as to feel sure that you appreciate my reasons for so speaking. But I ask you, do you know yourself the reason of this quick and lamentable falling off?’

‘Yes, I know it,’ she replied, looking at him with a face pale indeed, but with eyes which did not waver. ‘The reason is, that I have dreamed of myself and my own happiness to the exclusion of everything else. I have let my love master me, instead of being myself master of my love. And I am punished for it.’

‘And will you go on dreaming? Will you not rather try to awaken?’

Sara looked at him, and thought of Jerome—of the love she bore him. Subdue that, make it bondslave to her art, second to something else? She knew that if she meant to be what she had all along striven for—a great artist, that she must do so; the question was, could she? Had she not been in reality the slave of her love for Wellfield, since it had arisen, since he had told her he loved her? Not confessedly so, but indeed, and in fact? Yes, it was so. It suddenly dawned upon her mind that such love might be absorbing—might be exquisite at the time; but her nobler self told her that it was not good to be bound hand and foot in the bonds of this passion, that it was unworthy, that she had yielded to the infatuation that paralyses, not the love that inspires.

‘I cannot be free in a moment,’ said she, ‘but I can endeavour to be so. I will try, and I give you my hand upon it.’

With a simple, proud gesture, she placed her hand in his. He knew what she meant. That love of hers was not to be given up; she held it holy, justifiable. But she was no longer to be its bondslave.

‘Well,’ he thought, ‘it is doubtful, but if there is a woman who can do it, she can.’

He grasped her hand firmly.

‘And our friendship?’ he asked.

‘Do you still wish for my friendship, Herr Falkenberg?’

‘Now, more than ever, your friendship appears precious and desirable to me.’

‘It is yours, so long as you care to keep it,’ she answered. ‘At least, do not desert me till I have found the strait and narrow path again.’

‘That is not hard,’ he answered. ‘Go to Nature, and paint the humblest plant you can find—the most rugged visage you may meet in the street, but paint it—you know how, as well as I do. Do not smear into it your own vague fancies. Study it, to find what God has hidden behind its exterior covering. Think of it and its meaning; not of yourself, and what you would like it to be. Reverence, reverence, and for ever reverence, as that same great countryman of yours has said; and I promise you that if it be but a tuft of dandelions, or the head of the most weather-beaten Mütterchen on the marketplace, it shall be more worth hanging up and looking at than a thousand of those things.’

‘Your sayings are hard, but true,’ she answered, with a return of life in her cheek and eye; ‘and I thank you for your lesson, though it has been a stern one. Only tell me—you don’t despair of me?’

‘I never felt such confidence in you as I do now,’ he replied, with a smile, and looking at her as if he wished she would return it. But Sara could not do that yet. She sat still, resting her cheek on her hand, and he paced about the studio talking to her, his heart beating fast too, thinking.

‘Fine-tempered—true and pure gold. Does the man know what sort of a woman he has won? Judging by my own experience of such affairs—not.’

When Avice came in from her walk, she found Sara and Herr Falkenberg in the parlour, looking over engravings. Then Ellen hastened to bring the coffee, and Rudolf disburthened his mind of an invitation committed to his charge by Fräulein Wilhelmi, bidding Sara to a musical party on the following evening. She promised to go; and he, departing, held her hand somewhat long as he asked:

‘You have understood, I hope?’

‘Perfectly, and am grateful.’

‘Then, till to-morrow evening,’ he replied, bowing, and taking his departure.