“Do you recognise them?” she repeated.

“Yes, madam,” I acknowledged, looking up between reserve and defiance.

“You do?” she murmured, taken aback. “And it is your hand?”

“No, madam,” I answered quietly. “It is Miss Grant’s, but disguised.”

She echoed the word, at once incredulous, and fearful of exciting another outbreak by appearing so.

“Disguised! For what purpose? And to whom addressed?”

“To me,” I answered. “It was part of a game between us; but we will play it no more.”

She echoed in amazement, “A game!” Then asked faintly, “What game?”

“I was the Hermit of the Rocks,” I said, “and Miss Grant the Princess Camilla, who wrote to consult me as to her vocation, whether for the cloister or for marriage with a pious young gentleman.”

It was an inspiration, which I had no sooner uttered than I feared for my rashness. But I need not have. Madam, as her slow perceptives kindled, grew one shine of happy intelligence.

“A game!” she repeated, smiling holy-motherly over the decorous innocence of our inventions. “Well, I will say it was a very proper one, though a little ambiguous in the articles of love to be addressed to a hermit. But how came it in the chaplain’s book, child?”

I confessed that I had had the curiosity to read in the Father’s breviary, and must unwittingly have left the paper there for a marker. She kissed me then, and, while deprecating my inquisitiveness in matters which did not concern me, apologised very handsomely, I will say, for having so traduced me on a shred of evidence.

“It shall be a lesson to me, and a penance,” she said. “But, child, go now and retract your wicked recantation, before perhaps the devil shall claim you to your sin.”

“It was very hard, madam,” I said, still rebellious. “Why, being disguised, should Father Pope have decided as of course that the verses were mine?”

“Ah!” she said, blushing and embarrassed. “That I do not know—I think; but little Patty is no genius.”

The moment I was free, I hurried palpitating to my friend, and confessed all, and implored her, by the love between us, to play her part in the little innocent deception I had practised. She gazed at me with her sweet shocked eyes, as if I were inviting her to murder.

“You really meant them for him, for Father Pope?” she whispered, half choking. “O, Diana! It was blasphemy!”

“It was,” I said, “to waste the Princess Camilla on such a block.”

Then, as my friend still cried out, I knelt, and took her waist prisoner in my arms, and begged to her.

“I am not like you, darling. I pine and pinch in this cold air. If it was not for you, you little warm thing, I should run away with Giles, the handsome stable-boy.”

“Don’t,” she wept. “You don’t mean it. Say you only intended it for a joke!”

“Of course I only meant it for a joke,” I said, urging her; “though it’s true I believed the creature was expecting it of me. But ’tis a joke that will cost me dear if you don’t back me.”

“O!” she cried, despairing, “I do, I will. But how can I ever pretend to have wrote them, when that cat rhymes with lap is the best I know of verse.”

“You little dear,” I said, laughing in sheer love of her artlessness. “Pretend nothing, but hold your tongue.”

That she would have done for me, I think, though they racked her to confess; and all might yet have gone well, had not the Lady Sophia, meddlesome like most self-righteous consciences, sent for her to question if, after all, her simple verses might not have been the instinctive expression of her leaning towards the cloister. My poor transparent angel managed to articulate a panic denial of any such tendency; though, indeed, there was no need to, to any but a blindworm. If ever little maid was built for loving, or to lay her pretty hair in a puddle for some rogue to reach heaven by, it was she. The sense of guilt would confound her, however; and, what between her duty to madam and her loyalty to me, she must have answered her examination so ambiguously as to raise some new doubts and suspicions in the minds of her inquisitors.

She flew back to me with very red eyes, and a fresh horror of the imposition she was forced to practise.

“I will never, never tell,” she sobbed, “though they tear me to pieces. But O, Diana! I don’t want to be a nun.”

I comforted her, though furious with the others for their Jesuitical practices on her innocence.

“Wait,” I cried, “and I will pay them both out! What right had they, after what I said, to try and torture a lie out of you? Don’t fear for the convent, child. I pledge my word you shall have a husband and fifty children, nun or no nun.”

“I want no husband,” she answered, blushing and clinging to me, “and no lover but you.”

I have taken pains to record her fond little reply, in view of an odious charge, once concocted to my injury, of my having traded upon my friend’s faith in me to rob her heart of its dearest possession. That, indeed, was, then and always, no less than her loved Diana, of whom none was ever permitted by her to take precedence. Any sacrifice which was designed to maintain those mutual relations she thought too cheap for discussion.

One result, however, of her “questioning” was that madam’s attitude towards me was thenceforth marked by a reserve and jealousy which, inasmuch as I was unconscious of having done anything to merit it, served only to prejudice me against a religion which could be used for a cloak to so much hypocrisy. I grew quickly disenamoured of my supposed vocation, and decided that faith, which seemed largely a matter of digestion, could be better realised through independence. In short, in the world I could reach beatitude through twenty self-indulgences to one in the convent; and, such being the case, and my constitution perfect, it seemed folly to take the short way.

Madam seized an early opportunity after this to inquire into my plans for retiring from the world and taking the veil. I confessed to her, in reply, that her late suspicions had engendered in me thoughts, a sense of grievance, inimical to my right contemplation of so momentous a sacrifice. She was very much shocked and troubled, and recommended me a stricter observance of all those self-obliterating virtues which are such a comfort to those who don’t practise them. She rebuked my pride; she prescribed fasting and discipline and maceration—tortures which would have killed a dray-man—in order to lower and submit my system to its final severance from the world. She would have had me at her mercy before she drove in the knife; only, unluckily for her, my constitution was impregnable. It flourished equally whether on bread and water or vol au vent; and, finally, she surrendered to it. I rather liked a little pious game we played, called the Moral Lotto, in which the discs were sins, and those left uncovered at the end entailed an obligation on the losers to maintain a particular guard against the temptations they expressed. Though we all, in the end, must have been warned through the calendar, from simony to powder-puffs, I believe the contest was so sanctified to her by intention that she read a design of Heaven in every missing counter; and the fact that I generally won, did more than many assurances to convince her that I was perhaps after all not so black as she had painted me.

But, between me and Father Pope, after that little malentendu, there was no quarter asked or given. He treated me with a persistent coarse rudeness, and I retaliated with all the interest of wit I dared. I dropped blobs of wax on his spectacles; left his Hagiology open under a drip from the ceiling; put crumbs of cheese in his cabinets of moth to tempt the mice in; and confessed his own most obvious sins to him as mine, for which I accepted furious penances as meekly as a lamb. He hated me, and I contrived at least to give him a substantial reason for such an abuse of his cloth.

Now, I will mention one only other little incident before I pass on to the subject of this chapter. I was playing in Wellcot attics on a certain wet afternoon with Patty, when I discovered a locked Bluebeard chamber.

“What is it?” I said; but she did not know. I tried the handle; I peered vainly into the keyhole; finally, I took a pin from my hair, and contrived a little pick of it.

“O, what are you going to do?” whispered the child, quite scared.

“Get in, if I can,” said I.

“Don’t!” she said, horrified. “If we are shut out, ’tis for a reason.”

“Of course,” I answered. “And it’s no good looking for it on this side of the door.”

She clasped her hands in a little paralysis of curiosity while I worked. It was a simple lock, and I was successful. As the door swung open, we saw before us a sky-lit room, wedged under the slope of the roof, and quite empty save for a framed picture, which leaned to the wall back outwards. Patty uttered a tiny cry—

“O, Diana! It’s the portrait!”

In a moment, all excitement, we stole in a-tiptoe. The place was very still and ghostly. Only on the dusty canvas itself lay a melancholy grid of light. Palpitating in our sense of guilt, we turned the frame round, let it drop softly back again; and there, before our eyes, bloomed a smiling, wistful face. The light, which had saddened it in reverse, was quickened now to an illuminating glory. It greeted and dimpled to us—the face of a dead woman risen.

A dead woman. Had she ever lived? I could not believe it, thinking of that unsympathetic dévote downstairs.

“Was she ever like that?” I whispered.

“She was beautiful,” murmured Patty fervently. “I remember him painting this.”

“And going away, and leaving it unfinished?” said I: for, indeed, the portrait was but sketched in, though masterly in its promise.

“Yes,” said the little girl, gulping. “And I never supposed what had become of it till now.”

It seemed incredible, the change that but a few envious years had wrought. Had love done this thing before me? Or could love forsaken so warp the loveliness which Love himself had created? It gave me a new little thrill of respect for the humanised Sophia; because, whatever the truth of her face, a man had been found to see this beauty in it.

“She was St. Cecilia,” whispered Patty. “There is the harp in her lap.”

It was without strings—an unborn music. Perhaps the Christian lady had declined to accept a pagan Muse for midwife, and had temporised with her would-be deliverer, hoping to convert him. If so, she had played her cards badly. I wondered if the man had been a fortune-hunter. But in that event Madame Sophia would certainly be Madame de Crespigny.

Whatever the case, however, the picture made a deep impression on me, and from my first moment of seeing it I was haunted by the desire to become myself the subject of such a master’s devotion. Ma vue et mes minauderies firent tout-à-coup tourner la girouette. For the first time I felt myself a woman, encumbered with the heavy responsibilities of her sex.

One day—it was some eighteen months later—returning from a commission to the convent, I walked straight into the presence of the original of the picture and its painter. Yes, that is the truth. He had run faith at last to earth, it seemed, and, armed with it, was returned to add the strings to the abortive harp, and perfect the ancient harmony. I could have thought that, to do so, he had need of faith indeed; until, looking at madam, I started in sheer wonder. She was transfigured—rejuvenated. The happiest light—bashful, coy, defiant, and surrendering its defiance—was in her eyes. She was more like a wife in the first wonder of motherhood than the starved religieuse of yesterday.

And the cause! Ah, my Alcide! The creature rose upon my entrance, and I could have laughed in the face of my own befooled ideal. I had thought of Raphael and the Fornarina; and, behold! a slack, half-drowned-looking figure, with an expression, and conduct of its limbs, as if it were just risen gasping from a pond—there he stood, no sort of natural fowl at all, but a freak of genius like a five-legged calf at a fair.

“He! he!” giggled he, and held himself as if he were waiting to be told what to do next.

He was tall, it is true; and there was a good deal of him, mostly gnarled bone, if that counted to his credit. His forehead, streaked with dark hair turning grey, was strong and ample, and in itself something of a feature; but, mercy! the loose indetermination of his lower lip, and the way it overhung, foolish and disproportionate as an elephant’s, the little folded chin! As I stared, too mortified for manners, he returned my gaze, suddenly startled, it seemed, into a speechlessness so stertorous that little Patty, who had entered with and stood behind me, fell back a step in confusion.

“Ah!” he exclaimed at that, chuckling, “and is hee-ar the little girl I knew?”

He spoke, when he did at last, drawlingly, and ended, as was his way, by wrinkling his thin hooked nose and hee-hawing a little laugh through it.

“She is grown, is she not?” said madam, answering for Patty, to whom he had referred, though indeed his eyes were all the time on me. Her voice was so changed and soft, I hardly recognised it.

“She is grown,” he said. “She is become, it appears, a double cherry.”

“No,” said madam seriously, “the other is a second little foundling of my care, and destined to God’s—our God’s” (she added coyly)—“service, de Crespigny.”

She had no sense of humour, the dear creature. The next moment, noticing the direction of his gaze, with a little frown she bade us begone to our books.

We fled, and, once remote, I turned, with a tragi-hysteric stamp, upon my companion.

“Patience! And is that donkey him?”

“It is Mr. Noel de Crespigny,” she said, amazed. “He is not— O, Diana, do you really think him”—

“Hee-haw!” I broke in, with a little passion of laughter; and then fury overcame me.

“How dared she,” I stormed, “how dared she tell him that lie about me?”

“What lie?” said poor Patty.

“Why, to claim me to her worship of a golden ass,” I cried.

“It was a calf,” said my friend, bewildered.

I screamed with laughter.

“O, don’t!” Patty implored. “It really was, Diana.”

“You dear!” I gasped. “I daresay it was. But he was so badly made, I couldn’t tell.”

She followed me upstairs, utterly bewildered. On the landing above we encountered a strange sight. The picture—the picture—was already on its way down from the attics. A groom and maid bore it, and the oddest creature stood above, superintending its resurrection.

“Gogo!” whispered Patty; “it’s Gogo!”

I could well believe it of such a monster.

He was a man, and a huge one, down to his mid-thighs; and there he ended in a couple of wooden stumps. His face, lapped in a very mask of red bristle, was as savage as sin; and he growled and rumbled like an interdicted volcano.

“Ay,” he thundered, “I’m Gogo, the Dutch tumbler. Who calls me by my name?”

Holding with one hand by the banisters, he struck with the strong stick he carried at the stairs, missed the tread, and was within an inch of falling. The stick rattled down, and he swung and clung with both hands to the rail. In an instant, some whimsical impulse sent me tripping lightly up to help him.

“Take my arm,” I said, “down to the landing.”

The giggling servants paused in their task to stare up; but the monster himself laboured round, with quite a stunned look.

“To help—me,” he whispered hoarsely; “the little scented rush to prop the oak!”

I was in love with his changed voice at once. It was something to meet only two-thirds of a man.

“No, no,” he said, touching my arm as if it were a relic. “I’m Gogo, the colour-grinder, the bottle-washer—not worthy to latch your ladyship’s little shoe. I’ll go down—I’ll go down. Ho-ho! it’s easy. I’ve done it all my life.”

While he spoke, the odd creature had descended unaided, and, recovering his stick, struck his wooden limbs fiercely with it.

“Do you see?” he cried. “A stiff-kneed dog as ever limped after Fortune!”

He flounced upon the servants, and roared them into care of their charge; then turned again to me, where I stood with my friend, who had run trembling to my shelter.

“’Tis our market, ladies,” he said in apology. “I must be particular in its custody. We deal in new lamps for old; in”—

He descended a few steps, then turned again.

“Ah!” he groaned, tragic and comical in one. “Pity the poor genii who has to serve; pity him—pity him.”

He heaved a sigh that would have turned a windmill, and followed the picture, and disappeared.

“Patty!” I whispered, when he was gone—“Patty! Lord, Patty! who is the creature?”

“I’m terrified of him,” she gulped. “He’s Mr. de Crespigny’s dog, he calls himself, and follows his master everywhere, loving and growling at him. He used to say there was no such painter in the world, if he could be kept to it; but he always frightened me dreadfully. I do hope they won’t stop long.”

“H’m!” I said. “And is that queer name all he’s got?”

“I never heard of another,” she answered. “But anyhow, it suits him.”

“Yes,” I said—and sighed—“if he only had legs!”

IX.
I AM COMMITTED TO THE ——

I learned, as you shall understand, to readjust my first impression of de Crespigny. It is certain one must not judge the quality of the wine by the vessel. He was a great artist, who ran quickly to waste in the passions evoked of his own conceptions. From the mouth downwards he was a sensualist, and not fit to trust himself with a fair model. Shut into a monastery, he would have been a Fra Angelico.

At the first he captured me, when once I was familiarised with the ungainly exterior of the creature. To see him work—ardent, engrossed, unerring in the early enthusiasm of a subject—was a revelation. He stood so slack, he ran so to moral exhaustion when delivered of his inspiration, it was impossible to recognise the master of a moment ago in this invertebrate body with the loose wrists and silly laugh. If he could only have been kept always at the high pressure of his conceptions! Sometimes I wondered if it was in me to make him great and hold him. It would have been splendid to be the Hamilton to this Romney. Yet in the end I found the game not worth the candle. He was soft wax, indeed, for seven-eighths of his length, and the littlest puff from red lips could blow all the flame out of his head.

Still, while it lasted, his influence over me was an education. His portfolios were the very minutes of inspiration—suggestions, impressions of loveliness, caught and recorded and passed by for others. He finished little, and perhaps would have been a lesser artist and a stronger man if he could have laboured to consolidate his dreams. He taught me that not facts, but shadows of facts—the reflections, most moving, most intimate which they cast—are the real appeals to the emotions; that there is no landscape so beautiful as its reflection in a mirror, no chord so pathetic as its silent vibration in one’s heart. Perhaps the heavens are an eternity of echoes, of spectral perfumes, of dreams derived from experience, and we the authors of our own immortality. If so, we should live passionately who would dream well.

What this man lacked in nerve and backbone, his strange servant and comrade supplied, and many times over. He was the oddest monstrosity—savage in criticism, caustic in humour, a Caliban bellowing grief and tenderness through hairy lungs. How he could ever have come to attach himself, and passionately, to so flaccid a bear-leader, was a problem pure for psychology. Now, at least, the two were inseparable as— Ah, my friend! I was on the point of saying as Valentine and Proteus, but the analogy, I protest, is too poignant; for have not I too been cruelly declared the Sylvia who divided them?

The portrait, on that first afternoon, was carried down to a convenient closet on the ground floor; and there de Crespigny worked on it, always alone, or in the sole company of his henchman. When finished for the day, he would invariably lock the canvas into a press, and none, not even I (there is virtue in that parenthesis), was permitted to see it. The room was held sacred to him; and madam herself refrained so religiously from intruding on its privacy as to evoke, in her guileless trust of the singleness of his conversion, the very hypocrisy which to her faith was inconceivable. For, indeed, he converted this closet—which stood safely remote and approached by a back-stair way—into a sanctuary for deceit. Often, to confess the whole truth, when she supposed me engrossed in books or the construction of celestial samplers, was I closeted with de Crespigny and Gogo, learning to handle a brush, or inspire one, while Patty, with a code of signals, kept panic watch on the stairs.

Madam’s exclusion, no doubt, cost her many a patient sigh. She wondered over the idiosyncrasies of genius, which preferred, or professed to prefer, to labour its mental impressions rather than toil to record the living and mechanical pose. Still, it was true, the Sophia of to-day, however rejuvenated, was scarcely the model of that older time; and that he could finish that beautiful inspiration from her staider personality was what it was folly, perhaps, in her to expect.

Poor woman! Though I had my grudge, and no taste or reason to commiserate such vanity, I suffered some qualms of remorse for the part I was led to play. It is natural, after all, for the sex to see itself never so immortal as through the eyes of love; and, when a man has once praised its complexion, to claim for itself an eternity of roses.

Father Pope, the old spiritual curmudgeon, never quite credited, I think, the genuineness of this late conversion. I daresay, from his experience in the confessional box, he knew his man pretty well, and the value of such emotional abjurations. The sick devil turned monk was not to his taste; and, if he ventured to intimate as much, the coldness which certainly befell between madam and him at this time was easily to be accounted for. It all amused me hugely; and I felt delightfully wicked while the fun lasted. But retribution, my friend, was to overtake your naughty little Diana.

One day, stealing into the studio, I found Gogo alone, grinding colours into a little mortar.

“God ye good e’en, little serpent,” said he. “You can sit and beguile me for practice till my master comes.”

“Gogo,” I said, shocked. “Why do you call me by such a name?”

“Because you are as like Eve as two peas,” growled he.

“Eve was not a serpent, but a beautiful woman,” I answered, pouting.

“And so was Lamia; and yet she was a serpent,” he grunted.

“I don’t know what you mean. You said Eve.”

“Well, why not?” he replied, turning his red, morose-looking eyes on me. “Eve accused the serpent of beguilement, didn’t she? and Adam Eve? But Eve was made out of the man, therefore Adam accused himself. But Eve accused the serpent; therefore Adam accused the serpent. Yet he accused Eve; therefore Eve was the serpent, which is what she would, and will, never understand. O, God bless her! God bless her! Which, if He would do, blessing the serpent, might unriddle this sinful problem of life!”

He set to pounding vigorously with his pestle, and for a minute I watched him in a bewildered silence. There was always something in this shorn Cyclops which oddly attracted me.

“Gogo,” I said quite softly.

He threw down his pestle at once, and faced round, writhing his hands together, and glaring at me.

“Who spoke?” he said, in hoarse, trembling tones. “A voice from the garden making me in love with my own clown name. O, always so, always so, thou spirit of Eve; and, though it lost the world to God, I’d take the apple from thy hand.”

I laughed a little tremulously, as he stumped across the floor and stood close before me. The vision of this great storm of a creature, condemned to play the “comic relief” in the tragedy of his own manhood, came as near my heart as anything.

“Look!” he cried, his rugged chest heaving; “I can’t kneel to you, and I’m your slave. I walk open-eyed, hating and adoring you, into the toils you spread for our feet. Feet!” he groaned, looking down, with a despairing gesture. “Perhaps—who knows?—having them, I might have escaped.”

“How did you lose them, poor Gogo?” I said.

“Hating and adoring,” he groaned, unheeding my question, “hating and adoring. Look, little serpent: I could crush your slender throat for what you do, and hold on, and sob my soul away to see you die. Why have you come between us? United, we were strong, he and I. I drove his genius on, and loved the poor ape for its spark of divinity, and propped the weak spirit while it wrought. You knock the prop away, you knock the prop away, and we both fall; and where is my compensation for the injury?” He clasped his great hands to me: “Give me back my genius,” he cried in pain, “and let us go.”

I rose to my feet, half moved and half resentful.

“It is not I who take him or want him. I will not come here again.”

As I turned, he barred my way.

“No,” he said, near sobbing, “I lied. Do what you will with us: make us angels or swine—I am content, so long as I may serve you.”

As he spoke, the door opened, and de Crespigny entered. He greeted me with a rather shifty look, I thought, and his manner seemed too distraught to affect any particular notice of his servant’s obvious emotion.

“O, well, ma bella Unanina,” said he; “but a little sitting for this afternoon, please.”

I flushed, and was about to refuse to remain at all, when an imploring scowl from Gogo softened me. With plenty of hauteur, I stalked into a little curtained-off alcove which was consecrated to me for tiring-room, and there dressed for model. When I emerged again, my feet and arms were bare, my hair loose in a golden fillet, and, for the rest, I wore a kind of seraph smock, in which les convenances had been constrained to clothe me for the peerless Una.

For as Una I was being painted. Looking one day through de Crespigny’s portfolios, I had come upon some “impressions,” royal, strenuous, of lions in the Tower menagerie, and was admiring the lithe, strong darlings, when his voice breathed behind me, with that little eternal foolish giggle.

“Have you decided, naughty?”

“Yes,” I whispered. “I will be the fairy lady whom the lion came to devour, and remained to serve and protect, because she was so pure and innocent.”

He did not know who I meant; so I found him the book and place.

“Ah, to be sure!” said he, reading eagerly. “She laid her stole aside, did she? Yes, it is an inspiration. It will suit me, if it does you.”

So I was painted wonderfully as Una, making my own “stole” from one of Patty’s bedgowns, and glorying, out of my very shamefacedness, to feed the inspiration, while it lasted, of this impassioned art. Now, for days it had wrought without slackening, so that it was an offence to me to find it suddenly become, it seemed, without apparent cause or reason, out of tune with its subject. He worked fitfully, dully, almost, as it were, disregarding my presence, and drawling commonplaces the while to Gogo, who had returned to his pestle and mortar, and was grinding away sullenly.

“Gogo,” he yawned presently, after an idle, preoccupied silence, “which would you rather marry, a woman of wit or virtue?”

“Neither, you blattering genius!” cried the other, turning round with such an instant roar that I was almost frightened off my perch.

The master, accustomed to his strange fellow’s moods, only laughed, and leaned back indolent.

“Why, you old dear?” said he.

Gogo thundered.

“She’s a rotten fish at best, shining the more the more corrupt she is.”

“But if she don’t shine?” said de Crespigny coolly.

“Then she’s a dull fish,” said Gogo, “but a fish still.”

The other mused, and sniggered.

“—Who’s for ever playing to be caught,” added Gogo, grumbling. “She loves the angle. Play her what you like, man, only throw her back when hooked.”

“Mr. Gogo!” I exclaimed.

“Ay, Mistress Una,” said he, “you’re all pretty players, from miss to my lady dowager. Don’t tell me. You all love to excite the emotions you don’t understand, and then off with you from the stage, sweet ethereals, to the suppers of steak and porter which you do, while Jack and my lord are wetting their pillows with tears over your sensibility.”

“Thank you,” I said, rising, highly offended. “As I, for one, am not playing to be hooked, I’ll take your warning in time.”

I had expected de Crespigny to strike in, in angry protest over his servant’s insolence; but, to my astonishment, he did not move or interfere. A little pregnant silence ensued, and the tears were already rising to my eyes, when, to my horror, I heard madam’s voice at the door.

“De Crespigny,” she said, “may I come in for once?”

He stumbled to his feet, and stood paralysed a moment, before he answered—

“A minute. You know the conditions: I must hide it away, and then”—

When she entered a little later, there was he standing to receive her with a spasmodic grin; his easel was empty, Gogo pounded at his mortar, and I—I was shrunk behind the curtain, peeping in a very shiver of terror.

She looked at him with a little shaky propitiating smile. Her eyes were red, as if she had been crying. She tried to speak, and could not. He understood so far, the poor clown, and bade his servant withdraw. When they were alone, she turned upon him with a little appealing motion of her hands.

“Am I never to be allowed to see it?” she asked.

He frowned, and bit his trembling lip.

“No, no,” she said, “I know the sensitiveness of your beautiful art. Only, O, Noel! I cannot rest where we ended just now. Believe me, it was so far from my wish to offend or alarm you. But time goes on, and the pledge this finished picture was to redeem is withheld, until I am at a loss how to explain.”

“To whom?” he muttered sullenly, “to that priest? O, I know. What right has he, a grudging Churchman, and you a saint?”

“O, indeed, I am but a weak woman!” she said, with a faint smile, “and he an anointed Father. He does right—dear, he does—to be jealous for his daughter. It is only that he would ask you, that I would ask you, what period”—

“Art is not to be forced,” he interrupted her peevishly. “I made the finishing of this picture, as it was begun—as it was begun, mind—the condition of my being received into your Church. Didn’t I, now?”

“Yes,” she sighed; “but there are some vows better broken.”

“A bad recommendation to what you call the truth,” he sneered.

“But, Noel, it is the truth,” she cried. “O, say you are convinced that it is!”

“Well, I don’t know,” he answered, “since you bid me to a lie.”

“I will take the burden,” she cried, her eyes streaming, “to save the soul I love.”

She hardly breathed the final word. For a wonder, the poor creature she entreated found enough in it to move him.

“There,” he said, “don’t distress yourself, Sophia. I’ll work hot-handed on the picture to-morrow. There, I promise I will.”

“Thank you, Noel,” she whispered, so kindling, so grateful, that de Crespigny shrunk before her. “I—I won’t interrupt you any longer. It was like you, kind and considerate, not to blame me for breaking your rule.”

The room remained so still after her going that I thought he too had followed, until, stealing out presently in a panic, I found him seated in a corner, biting his nails.

“I had better go now, hadn’t I?” I whispered, half choking.

“Yes,” he growled, “to the devil!”

X.
I BEWITCH A MONSTER

On the following morning, going indifferently by the studio, where was a back way into the grounds, I encountered Gogo.

“He’s at work on the portrait,” he said, standing moodily against the room door. “He’ll be at it all day. It’s no good your coming.”

I tossed my head, vouchsafing no reply, and, singing to myself, passed on and out.

The day after, descending the stairs, I observed that the studio door was left ajar. I laughed, taking no other notice, and went my way into the garden.

On the third day, seeing de Crespigny walk out with his Sophia, I borrowed the opportunity to slip down and investigate. The truth was, I was devoured with curiosity to learn how madam’s little explosion had stimulated the artistic verve, and to obtain a glimpse of the portrait, even, if necessary, by bending myself to the corruption of my poor infatuated Gogo. But I was to be disappointed, for the room was empty, and the canvas locked into its press.

Peering here and there, considerably chagrined, in the hope of discovering the key, I came, in the alcove, upon the full-sleeved waistcoat in which the artist usually worked, and, diving eagerly into the pockets thereof, found, not the key indeed, but some scraps of paper, much scribbled over, which instantly aroused my curiosity, and, presently, my amusement.

“Ho-ho!” thought I, “you are inspired in other than the pictured arts, are you, my gentleman? A poet, and fainting in the perfume of some little naughty Mignonette!”

So he had fancy-named the subject of his agonised Muse; and, indeed, why should I prevaricate to myself about the application? I blushed a little, making myself merry over these suffering scrawls and scratches, of which, I was sure, my own poor little person must be the victim. I had a face, it seemed, the calendar of innocence; une bonne poitrine; a sweetest little double chin, like a robin’s throat swelled with song. I put my hand to my neck. I could not but admit that the poor man had taken a poetic licence; but, in truth, it was a very example of the licence that was wont to drug his art. The flesh held his fine imagination in thrall, and laboured his first spiritual conceptions into Parisian models. He was divine only in his sketches—impressions. When he wrought to improve upon them, he became transubstantiated.

So this was his repentance! He had spent the brief period of it in painting me in verse, since he was debarred my presence in actuality. I smiled, reading—

and “Indeed!” thought I, tossing my head; “but not yours as yet, sir!”

While I studied to disentangle the scribble, I heard breathing near me, and started to find Gogo regarding me with a cynical, half-diverted scowl. The creature walked like a cat on carpet. He had no creaking leather to betray him.

“So-ho!” growled he; “you can yet blush to be found out by your dog?”

I laughed, vexed, and a little embarrassed.

“O,” said he, “never mind! I am honoured in even that little rose of shame. You won’t grow it long.”

“Gogo,” I said, “how dare you?”

“Why,” said he, “as dogs dare, who love without respect, and see no more harm to serve a thief than a prince.”

I looked at him a moment, between tears and defiance.

“You are very unkind,” I said. “What is the good of my confessing anything to you, if you so distrust me?”

“Confessing?” said he, “the good? Why, because I have no legs to run away, and a man’s better judgment is always in his legs. My foolish heart is nearer the ground than most. Tread on it, thou Circe; and prove me less than half Ulysses. Confess to me—confess; and I will stay, and smile—and believe.”

“No,” I said, recovering my confidence. “I swear not to, unless you confess first. I asked you the other day how—how you came to lose them; and you put my question by, sir, and were dreadfully rude into the bargain. Very well, I am waiting to have you atone by answering it.”

I dropped into a chair, and he followed me, and squatted himself on the floor, a very abortion of passion, yet moving somehow in his grotesqueness. I kicked off my slippers, and put my feet into his hands—

“There,” I said, “they are tired, Gogo. Soothe them while you talk.”

He caressed the weariness from them, as gentle as a woman.

“I am at odds,” he said, in a low great voice, full of emotion, “I am at odds with what remains of myself. How can I reconcile this with my loyalty to the poor inspired ape I serve, and love through serving?”

“How did you come to serve him?” I whispered, half drugged by the creature’s touch. “You are cleverer than he, better educated, and all that.”

“I love,” he groaned, “I have always loved, to find romantic excuses for the material uglinesses of life; to get a little salt out of its offences. Who are those who say the visible form is but an expression of the individual spirit—an internal autocracy shaping itself on the surface? Poor atomists who cannot feel the pressure of all eternity moulding them from without! Amidst sordid functions they go groping for the essence, turning blank faces to the sweet air, the sun in the trees, the far-drawn winds, the song of birds and scent of flowers, all the spirit influences which really shape us. The soul ceases at the portals of the senses. The dross it carries with it alone goes on and in. We are but so many obstructions in the vast harmony—foreign bodies which it is for ever striving to penetrate and decompose. It focuses its burning light upon us; it takes the swimming heavens for its lens; and we die and are dissolved into it. Only in rare instances does the process wring from us a fine frenzy, or melt us into song; and then we see genius—genius, which fools call self-issuing, but which is really spirit reflected, like heat cast back from a wall.”

“You odd creature,” I murmured. “You may go on, though I don’t understand you a bit. Has Mr. de Crespigny been half melted into song? I shouldn’t be surprised, by his appearance.”

“Nor do I understand,” he said. “I can find romance in everything external to man, but I can’t pursue it into his organic tissues. Can you be so penetrated by it, and yet not perish, or even show one scar? I think you are immortal, woman; unless it is the genius of human beauty which you reflect, and which will presently destroy and annihilate you. Why, then, I would give my own soul to keep you soulless, you wretched, adorable child.”

“Gogo!” I protested, too languid to be resentful.

“Ay!” he said, his voice hoarse with miserable passion. “Let me speak. It is all the licence I ask. I know my place, if I have grown confused about my service. What I don’t know is why I, a free spirit, who have never before truckled to the flesh, should suddenly find myself bound to it, soul and honour.”

He bent and kissed the foot he was caressing; then quickly sat up, and set his strong teeth.

“You ask me how I came by my hurts,” he said. “Well, listen to the story of this most laughable butt of Fortune. It is soon told.”

He passed his hand across his forehead.

“It has been my doom to serve Nature; to worship her through those visible concentrations of her light upon individuals whom we call geniuses. How I discovered too late that her preferences were arbitrary, fanciful, often unworthy; that her signal gifts could be used to stultify her own creed of natural faith, natural justice, natural order, let these witness and call me fool.”

He jerked up his poor stumps so comically that I could not help laughing.

“Ay,” he said, “a tragic prolegomena to the history of a Dutch tumbler, isn’t it? Well, for the text. It was at Oxford that I met and worshipped my first genius. He was a man of great family, an inspired naturalist, an unerring shot and rare sportsman. In those early days we had already planned an expedition together to the unexplored North Western ‘Rockies,’ for the purpose of making such a collection of their flora and fauna as should bring us wealth and reputation. Though the world of Nature seemed even too cramped a stage for my boundless lust of life, the prospect of those unspeakable teeming solitudes, inviting all that was most strenuous in me to conquer, was a certain solace in itself. My soul sought territory; it seeks it still; and, though I be what I am, the stars, this poor earth once subdued, still enter into my plan of campaign.

“I was not rich. When the time came, I had to realise all my capital to sail with my friend. We reached, after considerable hardships, the Athabasca territory, and thence started on our exploration westwards. I soon found that my comrade, though a genius in comparative analysis and definition, lacked the physique necessary to the task we had set ourselves. He was often ailing and querulous, and the gathering of the specimens practically devolved upon me. Still, we had garnered and classified a considerable harvest in one of the little settlements of the Fur Company, before the accident befell which was to deprive me for ever of the fruits of my devotion. We were one day duck-shooting over a lake, when the ice broke and my friend was plunged in frozen water to the knees. His frantic cries brought me hurriedly to his assistance. By the greatest good fortune a little gravelly shallow had received us; but, inasmuch as this shelved away acutely on every side, our desperate scrambles to escape only let us into deeper water. There was nothing for it but to stay where we were till rescue could reach us from the shore, and so we set ourselves to endure. Not long, on my companion’s part. He soon complained that he must die unless relieved. He was frail and spare, and I only something less than a giant. I took him first into my arms, then upon my shoulders, designing to hold him so until succour came. It reached us in the shape of some Indians from the shore, who pushed a canoe towards us over the ice. But by then I was stark frozen, and my legs to the knees insensible. By chance there was an ex-medical student in the settlement, who turned what rough knowledge of surgery was his to the best account he was able. One of my legs was mortified beyond recovery; and this he amputated. The other, after incredible suffering, was saved to me. For weeks, however, I was kept knocking at death’s door; and, when at length I could creep from under the shadow, it was to the knowledge of an anguish more cruel than the other. This man, this genius, whom I had given so much to save, had deserted me while I lay stricken, and, carrying with him all the rare accumulations of our enterprise, had gone south to Vancouver. There was no message left, no consideration for me in all his vile philosophy of self-interest. It was just a case of treacherous abandonment.

“When I was sufficiently recovered, I pursued him by tedious heart-breaking stages, long months in their accomplishment. I will not weary you, you thing of thoughtless life, with their particulars. I was sustained, and only sustained, through all by the thought of wresting from this scientific egoist an acknowledgment of my share in the practical success of our expedition. At last, poor, friendless, crippled, I ran him to earth in London. I found him there, his name writ famous in the annals of the Royal Society; himself the honoured recipient of its gold medal; his collection—our collection—already on view in the hallowed precincts of Crane Street.

“I faced, and upbraided him with his treachery. He retorted coldly that he had never considered me but as the servant of his enterprise, useless to it when once, through my own folly, disabled. I found a friend, and the affair made a little stir. To my accusations he answered that he had employed, but had been forced to discard me, through the irregularity of my habits. Outraged beyond words, I challenged him; he accepted, and we met at Richmond. His first shot, aimed with diabolical ingenuity, shattered the bones of my sound knee; and, in the result, the limb had to be amputated above. When I was discharged from the hospital, it was to find the exhibition closed, the town empty, and myself thrust upon it, a helpless, destitute hulk.

“The friend I have mentioned, humorous and good-natured, came to my assistance. He commanded some pale interest at Court. By means of it, he procured me, as an expert naturalist, the post of Royal Ratcatcher, in succession to a Mr. Gower, who had lately filled the office at a yearly salary of one hundred pounds. The royal economy, however, docked me, as only two-thirds of a man, of a third of the sum. I wore a uniform of scarlet and yellow worsted, with emblematic figures of rats destroying wheat-sheaves embroidered on it; and in this I stood, the laughing-stock of the maids of honour, for three years.

“At the end of that time, having had the misfortune to overlook a rat which had made its nest in a pair of the Duke of Cumberland’s state breeches, I was dismissed without a character. Again I applied to my friend, and was recommended by him, for my scientific attainments, to a French nobleman, who was troubled by the croaking of frogs in his ponds, and employed me to whip the water all night with a long wand of willow that his rest might be undisturbed. But the constant immersion rotting my stumps, and he refusing to supply me with others, I was obliged to resign my post, and returned to England.

“In the meantime, my friend had died of a humour, and I was stranded entirely without resources. For some time I earned a precarious livelihood, in my naturalist character, by worming dogs; and again, one still more precarious, by cleansing ladies’ toupées of the vermin which long usage engendered in them. It was here, while serving my master, a wig-maker, that chance brought me acquainted with my present manner of service.

“During all this time, I will say, I had never ceased to regard soul as external to form, or to scout that introspection which is the real unhappiness. What did it concern me, if I was destroying rats, or picking fleas out of a poodle? In any case, I was helping Nature to its freer manifestations on matter, and, in my constant communion with it, prepared to welcome such rare accidents of genius as might come my way. My master’s business brought him into frequent relations with the theatre; and it was thus that I first encountered de Crespigny, who was at the time acting scene-painter to the new house at Sadler’s Wells. I had no sooner had the chance to see his work than I recognised genius, glaring and manifest. He did wonders in a few touches, that he might idle for an hour. My opportunity was come, and I entreated him to employ me, in however menial a capacity. He was touched by my enthusiasm; flattered, perhaps, by my admiration; persuaded by my strength. He engaged me, first as his assistant; soon as his nurse and mentor. For years I have helped to direct his career, have goaded his inspirations, cossetted his weaknesses. Ah, child! He is my child, made glorious by my faith in him. Do not seduce me from my allegiance to my child, and for the first time make me out of love with Nature!”

He ended with a groan, and flung himself prostrate on the floor, beating, I think, his forehead against it.

“Poor Gogo!” I said. “You have confessed; and so will I now. He is my child too. I adore him, and am so ravished by his art that I could not rest with thinking what he had made of the portrait. Do you know, Gogo? I will tell you the truth. I was hunting for the key of the press when you came in and caught me.”

He lay, without answering.

“Won’t you lend it me, Gogo?” I coaxed softly.

“Thank God,” he muttered, raising his head, “I am tied from the temptress. It is not in my power, thou Circe. He always carries it with him.”

XI.
I ADD THE LAST TOUCH TO A PORTRAIT

That same night, while undressing, with my room door open for the heat, I suddenly thought I distinguished an unwonted footstep on the landing below me, from which Patty’s little chamber led. I listened, quite still, for some moments; then, the stealthy sounds seeming to recede into the hall and thence die away, descended cat-footed to the landing, and, after hearkening an instant, opened her door swiftly and noiselessly upon my friend. Instantly I knew that the amazed suspicion which had sprung upon my heart was justified. The child stood before me, terror in her startled eyes, her dark hair falling upon her shoulders, a brush in one hand, a paper in the other.

“Diana!” she gasped, in a whisper. “What do you want?”

“Has he been with you?” I asked instantly, leaving her no time to prevaricate.

“With me!” she exclaimed, so scandalised and incredulous that the worst of my qualm was laid on the spot.

Without another word I held out my hand. Without a word she put the paper into it. I took it, and read—