“DEAR HAROLD,
“I have been behaving like a cad.
Your picture is an original Bronzino, worth quite enough to free you
from all the difficulties brought about by the bank. Any copyist who
could do such work could expend his time more profitably on a picture
of his own. Besides, it’s a _tour de force_ in colouring that no
sane copyist would dream of imitating. Bronzino, I suppose, fancied
his subject, and, like some other great painters, reproduced it in
duplicate, with just the smallest amount of alteration that would
serve to characterize and identify it.
“And now for my own part in this sorry business. It was a mean
trick, but, thank Heaven, I hadn’t the strength, and, I hope, not the
will to carry it through. You see I wanted her so badly that I
couldn’t give her up even to you. And then the question of the
picture turned up, and, unluckily, I found in it my opportunity.
Till then, believe me, I had kept my honour safe. All of a sudden,
the words she had used of me on Chapel hill, the night of the show,
flashed across my mind, and I thought that, if you were out of the
way for a time, I might win her still. And it _was_ hard for me, you
know, when I had waited for her all these years, and had come home at
last to claim her, to find that you had won her love.
“Believe me, Harold, when I say I am sorry. I have sinned against
the friend of my youth and the woman of my love. But try, old
friend—not now but in the future—to win my pardon from Marion and
yourself. You will have time to do so, for I leave England to-morrow
for the East, and shall not return, if I ever do, till I can face
your happiness without a thought of envy or regret. Don’t tell
Marion more than you can help. Old friend, good-bye.
“ERIC.”
“P.S.—I enclose Christie and Manson’s receipt for your picture, which
will go into their next sale. ‘Bronzino _at his best_’ the critics
pronounce it, which in his case means a big difference. I am forwarding
you my own picture of ‘Val Verde,’ which I always intended for Marion.”
EPILOGUE
ERIC, I fancy, will never marry. At least, he says so, and the words
mean more with him than they would do on the lips of other men.
His was not a character—I recognised at last—to love lightly, or to
change the object easily where once it had given its love. In every
single point he had falsified the career which I had mapped out for him
at starting. Not always, it is clear, does Cicero’s rule hold
good—“_Imago animi vultus_; _indices oculi_.” Eric, for one, had
demonstrated its incompleteness. I had thought him weak and vacillating.
And his weakness, if ever it existed, had become his strength. Strong he
had shown himself (in spite of his own words) both for the friend of his
youth and the woman of his choice; strong to build himself a grand
career; strong above all to conquer a temptation before which the
strongest might have fallen; strong finally to fall and rise again, which
is greater and grander, I take it, than not to fall. True of him, if of
anyone—
“That men may rise on stepping-stones
Of their dead selves to higher things.”
Thank Heaven! there is no shadow of a cloud between us now. And though I
cannot look for him at Fleetwater as yet, where the tantalising proximity
of all he held most dear would make life for a time unbearable; yet
surely, most surely, I know that we shall see him there some time, some
day.
In appearance he is not altered much from the lad I loved at school and
college, and from whom I parted not quite three years ago in his rooms at
Trinity, starting, each of us, so confidently on the journey of a life
for which I had made forecast of such different results. Only a weary
look in his eyes, which time, I think, will surely lighten; only a line
or two on his forehead, which time, I think, will surely smooth away.
And when he left us again for a long round of travel in Italy, Egypt, and
the East, to enlarge his ideas and find fresh subjects for his pencil, it
was with a heart full of hope and thankfulness that I bade him Godspeed.
For surely, most surely, I know that we shall have him once again with
us—the Eric of the past, the dearest friend, save one, I ever knew—to
share in and complete the happiness he had won for us out of the strong
heart that only failed him once, and made out of failure a greater and
far more glorious recovery. For time has been quietly perfecting its
work, and when he comes to us again, we shall meet, I know, the Eric of
the future, too, uprising from the Eric of the past.
* * * * *
THE END.
FOOTNOTE.
{190} The following legend formed the subject of a short story in the
“Cambridge Review,” June 1903.
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