AN EVIL OMEN.
Florimel was beginning to understand that the shield of the portrait
was not large enough to cover many more visits to the studio. Still she
must and would venture; and should anything be said, there at least was
the portrait. For some weeks it had been all but finished, was never
off its easel, and always showed a touch of wet paint somewhere--he
kept the last of it lingering, ready to prove itself almost yet not
altogether finished. What was to follow its absolute completion,
neither of them could tell. The worst of it was that their thoughts
about it differed discordantly. Florimel not unfrequently regarded the
rupture of their intimacy as a thing not undesirable--this chiefly
after such a talk with Lady Bellair as had been illustrated by some
tale of misalliance or scandal between high or low, of which kind of
provision for age the bold-faced countess had a large store: her memory
was little better than an ashpit of scandal. Amongst other biographical
scraps one day she produced the case of a certain earl’s daughter,
who, having disgraced herself by marrying a low fellow--an artist,
she believed--was as a matter of course neglected by the man whom, in
accepting him, she had taught to despise her, and, before a twelvemonth
was over--her family finding it impossible to hold communication with
her--was actually seen by her late maid scrubbing her own floor.
“Why couldn’t she leave it dirty?” said Florimel.
“Why indeed,” returned Lady Bellair, “but that people sink to their
fortunes! Blue blood won’t keep them out of the gutter.”
The remark was true, but of more general application than she intended,
seeing she herself was in the gutter and did not know it. She spoke
only of what followed on marriage beneath one’s natal position, than
which she declared there was nothing worse a woman of rank could do.
“She may get over anything but that,” she would say, believing, but not
saying, that she spoke from experience.
Was it part of the late marquis’s purgatory to see now, as the natural
result of the sins of his youth, the daughter whose innocence was dear
to him exposed to all the undermining influences of this good natured
but low-moralled woman, whose ideas of the most mysterious relations of
humanity were in no respect higher than those of a class which must not
even be mentioned in my pages? At such tales the high-born heart would
flutter in Florimel’s bosom, beat itself against its bars, turn sick at
the sight of its danger, imagine it had been cherishing a crime, and
resolve--soon--before very long--at length--finally--to break so far at
least with the painter as to limit their intercourse to the radiation
of her power across a dinner-table, the rhythmic heaving of their two
hearts at a dance, or the quiet occasional talk in a corner, when the
looks of each would reveal to the other that they knew themselves the
martyrs of a cruel and inexorable law. It must be remembered that she
had had no mother since her childhood, that she was now but a girl,
and that the passion of a girl to that of a woman is “as moonlight
unto sunlight, and as water unto wine.” Of genuine love she had little
more than enough to serve as salt to the passion; and passion, however
bewitching, yea, entrancing a condition, may yet be of more worth
than that induced by opium or hashish, and a capacity for it may be
conjoined with anything or everything contemptible and unmanly or
unwomanly. In Florimel’s case, however, there was chiefly much of the
childish in it. Definitely separated from Lenorme, she would have been
merry again in a fortnight; and yet, though she half knew this herself,
and at the same time was more than half ashamed of the whole affair,
she did not give it up --would not--only intended by and by to let it
go, and meantime gave--occasionally--pretty free flutter to the half
grown wings of her fancy.
Her liking for the painter had therefore, not unnaturally, its fits.
It was subject in a measure to the nature of the engagements she
had--that is, to the degree of pleasure she expected from them; it
was subject, as we have seen, to skilful battery from the guns of
her chaperon’s entrenchment; and more than to either was it subject
to those delicate changes of condition which in the microcosm are as
frequent, and as varied both in kind and degree, as in the macrocosm.
The spirit has its risings and settings of sun and moon, its seasons,
its clouds and stars, its solstices, its tides, its winds, its storms,
its earthquakes--infinite vitality in endless fluctuation. To rule
these changes, Florimel had neither the power that comes of love,
nor the strength that comes of obedience. What of conscience she had
was not yet conscience toward God, which is the guide to freedom,
but conscience toward society, which is the slave of a fool. It was
no wonder then that Lenorme, believing--hoping she loved him, should
find her hard to understand. He said _hard_; but sometimes he meant
_impossible_. He loved as a man loves who has thought seriously,
speculated, tried to understand; whose love therefore is consistent
with itself, harmonious with its nature and history, changing only
in form and growth, never in substance and character. Hence the idea
of Florimel became in his mind the centre of perplexing thought; the
unrest of her being metamorphosed on the way, passed over into his,
and troubled him sorely. Neither was his mind altogether free of the
dread of reproach. For self-reproach he could find little or no ground,
seeing that to pity her much for the loss of consideration her marriage
with him would involve, would be to undervalue the honesty of his love
and the worth of his art; and indeed her position was so independently
based that she could not lose it even by marrying one who had not the
social standing of a brewer or a stockbroker; but his pride was uneasy
under the foreseen criticism that his selfishness had taken advantage
of her youth and inexperience to work on the mind of an ignorant
girl--a criticism not likely to be the less indignant that those who
passed it would, without a shadow of compunction, have handed her over,
body, soul, and goods, to one of their own order, had he belonged to
the very canaille of the race.
The painter was not merely in love with Florimel: he loved her. I
will not say that he was in no degree dazzled by her rank, or that he
felt no triumph, as a social nomad camping on the No-Man’s-Land of
society, at the thought of the justification of the human against the
conventional, in his scaling of the giddy heights of superiority, and,
on one of its topmost peaks, taking from her nest that rare bird in the
earth, a landed and titled marchioness. But such thoughts were only
changing hues on the feathers of his love, which itself was a mighty
bird with great and yet growing wings.
A day or two passed before Florimel went again to the studio
accompanied, notwithstanding Lenorme’s warning and her own doubt, yet
again by her maid, a woman, unhappily, of Lady Bellair’s finding. At
Lossie House, Malcolm had felt a repugnance to her, both moral and
physical. When first he heard her name, one of the servants speaking of
her as Miss Caley, he took it for Scaley, and if that was not her name,
yet scaly was her nature.
This time Florimel rode to Chelsea with Malcolm, having directed Caley
to meet her there; and, the one designing to be a little early, and the
other to be a little late, two results naturally followed --first, that
the lovers had a few minutes alone; and second, that when Caley crept
in, noiseless and unannounced as a cat, she had her desire, and saw
the painter’s arm round Florimel’s waist, and her head on his bosom.
Still more to her contentment, not hearing, they did not see her, and
she crept out again quietly as she had entered: it would of course be
to her advantage to let them know that she had seen, and that they were
in her power, but it might be still more to her advantage to conceal
the fact so long as there was a chance of additional discovery in the
same direction. Through the success of her trick it came about that
Malcolm, chancing to look up from Honour’s back to the room where he
always breakfasted with his new friend, saw in one of the windows, as
in a picture, a face radiant with such an expression as that of the
woman-headed snake might have worn when he saw Adam take the apple from
the hand of Eve.
Caley was of the common class of servants in this, that she considered
service servitude, and took her amends in selfishness; she was unlike
them in this, that while false to her employers, she made no common
cause with her fellows against them--regarded and sought none but
her own ends. Her one thought was to make the most of her position;
for that, to gain influence with, and, if it might be, power over
her mistress; and, thereto, first of all, to find out whether she
had a secret: she had now discovered not merely that she had one,
but the secret itself! She was clever, greedy, cunning; equally
capable, according to the faculty with which she might be matched,
of duping or of being duped. She rather liked her mistress, but
watched her in the interests of Lady Bellair. She had a fancy for the
earl, a natural dislike for Malcolm which she concealed in distant
politeness, and for all the rest of the house, indifference. As to
her person, she had a neat oval face, thin and sallow, in expression
subacid; a lithe, rather graceful figure, and hands too long, with
fingers almost too tapering--of which hands and fingers she was very
careful, contemplating them in secret with a regard amounting almost
to reverence: they were her sole witnesses to a descent in which she
believed, but of which she had no other shadow of proof.
Caley’s face, then, with its unsaintly illumination, gave Malcolm
something to think about as he sat there upon Honour, the new horse.
Clearly she had had a triumph: what could it be? The nature of the
woman was not altogether unknown to him even from the first, and he
could not for months go on meeting her occasionally in passages and on
stairs without learning to understand his own instinctive dislike: it
was plain the triumph was not in good. It was plain too that it was
in something which had that very moment occurred, and could hardly
have to do with anyone but her mistress. Then her being in that room
revealed more. They would never have sent her out of the study, and so
put themselves in her power. She had gone into the house but a moment
before, a minute or two behind her mistress, and he knew with what
a cat-like step she went about: she had surprised them---discovered
how matters stood between her mistress and the painter! He saw
everything--almost as it had taken place. She had seen without being
seen, and had retreated with her prize! Florimel was then in the
woman’s power: what was he to do? He must at least let her gather what
warning she could from the tale of what he had seen.
Once arrived at a resolve, Malcolm never lost time. They had turned but
one corner on their way home, when he rode up to her.
“Please, my lady,” he began.
But the same instant Florimel was pulling up.
“Malcolm,” she said, “I have left my pocket-handkerchief. I must go
back for it.”
As she spoke, she turned her horse’s head. But Malcolm, dreading lest
Caley should yet be lingering, would not allow her to expose herself to
a greater danger than she knew.
“Before you go, my lady, I must tell you something I happened to see
while I waited with the horses,” he said.
The earnestness of his tone struck Florimel. She looked at him with
eyes a little wider, and waited to hear.
“I happened to look up at the drawing-room windows, my lady, and Caley
came to one of them with _such_ a look on her face! I can’t exactly
describe it to you, my lady, but----”
“Why do you tell me?” interrupted his mistress, with absolute
composure, and hard, questioning eyes.
But she had drawn herself up in the saddle. Then, before he could
reply, a flash of thought seemed to cross her face with a quick single
motion of her eyebrows, and it was instantly altered and thoughtful.
She seemed to have suddenly perceived some cause for taking a mild
interest in his communication.
“But it cannot be, Malcolm,” she said, in quite a changed tone. “You
must have taken some one else for her. She never left the studio all
the time I was there.”
“It was immediately after her arrival, my lady. She went in about two
minutes after your ladyship, and could not have had _much_ more than
time to go upstairs when I saw her come to the window. I felt bound to
tell your ladyship.”
“Thank you, Malcolm,” returned Florimel kindly. “You did right to tell
me,--but--it’s of no consequence. Mr Lenorme’s housekeeper and she must
have been talking about something.”
But her eyebrows were now thoughtfully contracted over her eyes.
“There had been no time for that, I think, my lady,” said Malcolm.
Florimel turned again and rode on, saying no more about the
handkerchief. Malcolm saw that he had succeeded in warning her, and was
glad. But had he foreseen to what it would lead, he would hardly have
done it.
Florimel was indeed very uneasy. She could not help strongly suspecting
that she had betrayed herself to one who, if not an intentional spy,
would yet be ready enough to make a spy’s use of anything she might
have picked up. What was to be done? It was now too late to think of
getting rid of her: that would be but her signal to disclose whatever
she had seen, and so not merely enjoy a sweet revenge, but account with
clear satisfactoriness for her dismissal. What would not Florimel now
have given for some one who could sympathise with her and yet counsel
her! She was afraid to venture another meeting with Lenorme, and
besides was not a little shy of the advantage the discovery would give
him in pressing her to marry him. And now first she began to feel as if
her sins were going to find her out.
A day or two passed in alternating psychical flaws and fogs-- with
poor glints of sunshine between. She watched her maid, but her maid
knew it, and discovered no change in her manner or behaviour. Weary of
observation she was gradually settling into her former security, when
Caley began to drop hints that alarmed her. Might it not be altogether
the safest thing to take her into confidence? It would be such a
relief, she thought, to have a woman she could talk to! The result was
that she began to lift a corner of the veil that hid her trouble; the
woman encouraged her, and at length the silly girl threw her arms round
the scaly one’s neck, much to that person’s satisfaction, and told her
that she loved Mr Lenorme. She knew of course, she said, that she could
not marry him. She was only waiting a fit opportunity to free herself
from a connection which, however delightful, she was unable to justify.
How the maid interpreted her confession, I do not care to enquire
very closely, but anyhow it was in a manner that promised much to her
after influence. I hasten over this part of Florimel’s history, for
that confession to Caley was perhaps the one thing in her life she had
most reason to be ashamed of, for she was therein false to the being
she thought she loved best in the world. Could Lenorme have known her
capable of unbosoming herself to such a woman, it would almost have
slain the love he bore her. The notions of that odd-and-end sort of
person, who made his livelihood by spreading paint, would have been too
hideously shocked by the shadow of an intimacy between his love and
such as she.
Caley first comforted the weeping girl, and then began to insinuate
encouragement. She must indeed give him up--there was no help for
that; but neither was there any necessity for doing so all at once. Mr
Lenorme was a beautiful man, and any woman might be proud to be loved
by him. She must take her time to it. She might trust her. And so on
and on--for she was as vulgar-minded as the worst of those whom ladies
endure about their persons, handling their hair, and having access to
more of their lock-fast places than they would willingly imagine.
The first result was that, on the pretext of bidding him farewell, and
convincing him that he and she must meet no more, fate and fortune,
society and duty being all alike against their happiness --I mean on
that pretext to herself, the only one to be deceived by it--Florimel
arranged with her woman one evening to go the next morning to the
studio: she knew the painter to be an early riser, and always at his
work before eight o’clock. But although she tried to imagine she had
persuaded herself to say farewell, certainly she had not yet brought
her mind to any ripeness of resolve in the matter.
At seven o’clock in the morning, the marchioness habited like a
housemaid, they slipped out by the front door, turned the corners of
two streets, found a hackney coach waiting for them, and arrived in due
time at the painter’s abode.