The next morning, after writing her letters and attending to her
household duties, Clytie went into her studio with the praiseworthy
intention of stimulating the artistic impulse that had been flagging for
so long. Kent was right, she thought. Her life could be reconstructed.
She would begin her laborious art life again, resume it seriously as a
profession, put her pictures into the market once more. Amid the many
confusing thoughts and emotions resulting from her conversation with
Kent, one idea had sprung in connection with Jack. She could not adopt
the boy. That was a wild feminine craving, somewhat selfish, springing
out of a bitter hour when fairer hopes were crushed. It cost her a sigh
to resign; but she trusted to Kent's judgment, and her mind was so far
at rest. Yet if it could lie in her power to help Jack materially in
after years, when a little capital would be worth all the world to him,
she felt that she would have wrought some good for one human creature
at least in her somewhat self-centred life. And then Kent's advice as
to her art mingled and combined with these thoughts, and the outcome was
the sudden idea that the proceeds of the sale of her pictures would,
in course of time, form a very considerable fund. She clapped her hands
with delight when this occurred to her. A mountain of weariness seemed
removed. In the spontaneity of new workings she scribbled a hasty line
to Kent and had it posted with the address scarcely dry.
“I am going to paint _seriously_, and _sell_ my pictures, and devote the
proceeds to a fund for Jack. Shall I?”
She was in bright spirits this morning, having discovered an object in
life. The future has generally much more to do with our present moods
than the past. Yet, notwithstanding this broad truth, the immediate past
had a certain influence on Clytie's humour. Whilst she was driving home
the afternoon before, the gravity of the fact of her confession to
Kent had somewhat weighed upon her. She had spent the lonely evening
grappling with a truth that had been taking half-reluctant shape in her
consciousness for the last two months, and now rose clear and sharply
defined. She had even written to Kent the following portion of a letter
which she straightway tore up into the finest of pieces. In fact her
intention of sending it to him was from the first of the very remotest.
“My dear Kent,” ran this singularly feminine effusion. “My words to-day
were true. If you had told me you loved me eighteen months ago, I
should have realised myself and what it was that I felt towards you. The
knowledge of her own heart does not come to a woman with the easy grace
that your sentimentalists make out. It is somewhat of a fierce process,
Kent. There is no royal road to it. Well, I know my own heart now, and I
have bought the knowledge with agonies of suffering. Oh, Kent, my true,
loyal Kent! I am tired, tired of hiding facts from myself, of acting
in a wilful dream, in defiance of the promptings of my reason. I am a
woman, and I ought not to confess things to myself, let alone to you.
So people say--and people are so wise, aren't they? I love you, Kent.
There, I write it down in black and white. It looks odd, grotesque,
horrible, and yet wonderfully comforting. I love you, Kent. Why should
I deceive myself any longer? God knows whether it is for my happiness
in the future or my misery; but now that the beauty of it is upon me it
makes me wonderfully happy. Yes, wonderfully, wonderfully, wonderfully
happy.”
And then she threw down her pen and shredded the paper with frenzied
zeal. But her heart was lighter. The world seemed a clearer, pleasanter
place. Her cheeks burned like fire at the thought of Kent ever knowing
of this feeling. She arranged in her mind the tenderest and most elusive
of relations between Kent and herself. He, a declared lover, should
give her all the comfort and kind counsel of a friend; she, his declared
friend, would find delicate, subtle ways of colouring and softening
his life with her love. A new paradise of exquisite emotion opened its
evanescent portals. For the first time in her life came the romance
of delicate sentiment, tinged with an innocent pink like the buds in
spring. It is true these same buds, to continue the analogy, burst into
gorgeous, riotous bloom under the summer sun; but while the tenderer air
of spring keeps them closed they have a grace peculiarly their own.
Clytie moved about the studio singing, a sign with her of great content.
The window was open and the morning sun streamed in, filling the large
and somewhat heavily tapestried room with gay light. It glorified Clytie
as she passed across the patch of sunlight, falling upon her hair in a
thousand scintillations and revealing the deep sea-blue of her eyes.
She wore a soft cream morning gown, a golden tasselled girdle round her
waist, an edging of old lace round the somewhat open neck. The wide,
drooping sleeves she had caught up a little for convenience in working,
and her arms were bare to the elbow. The skirt clung around her as she
walked quickly about the room, with her old elastic tread, making a soft
frou-frou that pleased her, she did not know why. She was happy again,
filled with a double sense of the meaning of life. At last she sat down
before a small easel, on which was put the board with its fair sheet of
Whatman paper ready for the first sketch. In her rapid, eager way she
commenced to indicate the motive of the picture that had flashed like
an inspiration upon her. In the middle distance on the left a pair of
lovers, the woman looking with upturned face at the man, whose arm was
round her waist. In the foreground, peeping at them from behind a clump
of bushes, a girl of about seventeen, with a letter in her hand. The
contrast between the two female faces was the motive--the fulfilment of
knowledge on the one, the dawning revelation on the other. The title had
come with the conception: “Maiden and Woman.” Clytie worked on steadily
with her _ébauche_, keen, sure of herself, tingling once again with the
excitement of inspiration. She knew she could put that in their faces
which would raise the picture above the narrative prettiness of Sant and
his school. The accessories were to be severe to austerity. No elaborate
detail in tree painting, no subtle effects of light and shade. The
principle of abstraction to be as uncompromisingly carried out as in one
of Seymour Haden's etchings. The whole artistic force of the picture was
to be concentrated in the awakened and awakening souls.
She was absorbed in her work when, after a tap at the door, Jack came
in. Clytie looked up with a smile.
“You here again, Jack! That is good of you. But I can't say a word
to you--positively. I am so busy. Sit down somewhere until I have
finished.”
The boy, used to these fits of absorption in his two artist patronesses,
sat down for a little and let his eyes wander round the studio,
looking at the pictures and nicknacks. Then he got up to make a closer
examination of vases and photographs, and walked about on tiptoe, trying
to still the noise of his iron-shod boots against the hard, polished
floor. At last he discovered on the bookshelves an illustrated History
of England, with which he retired to his favourite place on the
hearthrug. And so they remained for half an hour without saying
a word--Clytie bending over her study, Jack curled up with his
picture-book. It was quite still. A stray bumble-bee looked in now and
then at the window, buzzing querulously, as if he had lost his way in
London, and then darted off again. From the servants' hall came the just
perceptible voice of one of the maids singing a hymn-tune, and from
far, far away came the tinkling treble of a piano-organ. And these few
sounds, so faint yet so clear, accentuated the summer stillness.
When Clytie had put the last few touches on the portion of her work that
demanded all her concentration, she gave a little sigh of relief.
“What do you think of that, Jack?” she said, leaning back with her
head critically aslant. “Don't you think that is going to make a famous
picture?”
Jack jumped up promptly, leaving his book open on the hearthrug,
and came up to her side. He was not a connoisseur, in spite of his
associations with art, so he said nothing, but grinned appreciatively,
rubbing the calf of one leg with the instep of the other.
“Well,” asked Clytie, “why don't you admire?”
“You aint given them no faces,” said Jack.
“Ah! This is to be one face,” she said, pointing to a kind of _remarque_
at the foot of the sheet. “Or something like it. Now just use your
imagination, Jack. This face is to go there--the woman whose whole
nature has been awakened, and is shining out of her eyes, and quivering
on her lips, and is vibrating all through her frame--all of which is
Greek and Chaldee to you, my good Jack; but I may as well explain. And
now I have got to fix a face for this one. What kind of face do you
think I am going to give her?”
“I dunno,” murmured Jack. And then after a slight pause: “And what's the
man going to be like?”
“Ah!” said Clytie with a mock sigh. “What a little Philistine you are!
The man can be any kind of creature on two legs. What does it matter
about the man? He is a nuisance. I have a good mind to make him awfully
ugly with a face like a rhinoceros. See, like this.”
She made a few rapid strokes with her charcoal in the oval left for the
man's face, and the result was a picturesque monster with a long nose,
Mephistophelian eyebrows, and a moustache curling up to his ears. Then
they both burst out laughing.
“Let me draw some funny men for you,” she said in the light-hearted
buoyancy of her mood. “Run and get me that sheet of paper over there.”
She pinned the sheet that Jack brought her on to the board and began to
draw caricatures.
“You shall choose one for me to put in the picture, Jack.”
It was a long, long time since she had indulged this freakish side of
her genius. It ran riot now in grotesque exuberance. Here a head with
wide, leering mouth and pointed ears, like the devil that looks over
Lincoln; there a snouted monster with cat's whiskers, an eyeglass, and
a silk hat; a lean, cadaverous, equine face with a terrible squint; a
masher, indicated by three or four little dots and lines. Jack looked
on in rapture. She had never drawn pictures for him before. He broke out
now and then into breathless exclamations.
“Lord, he's an ugly one! Give him a long nose--longer than that; and, my
eye! that's a wart upon it. One of the teachers at school has a wart on
his nose. That's just like him! And where's this one's 'ed?--he's all
body and legs!”
And then he jumped and clapped his hands when the head was seen to
emerge from between the knees after the fashion of the boneless wonders.
When she had filled up the last space on the sheet she tossed the
charcoal into the tray, and rose from her seat.
“There, Jack! There's nothing like going absolutely mad on occasions.
Now if you'd like to keep these pictures and show them to the boys at
school, you can.”
She rolled up the stiff piece of drawing paper, slipped an elastic band
round it in her hasty way, and gave it to Jack, who could only look his
delighted thanks.
“Now I must go and wash my hands and get decent for lunch. Go downstairs
and tell Mrs. Pawkins to give you something to eat. Stay--you had better
leave that roll up here; come in for it before you go.”
She took it from him, and laid it on a little table near the door. She
did not desire that the inquisitive eyes in the servants' hall should
witness the mistress's frivolity. Jack understood her more or less, but
Mrs. Pawkins and Mary and John would have questioned her sanity.
Jack lingered for a moment on the threshold, and then drew shyly from
his handkerchief pocket a dingy, whitey-brown packet.
“I came to show you this,” he said, putting it into her hand. “I prigged
it from mother's drawer this morning. You'll give it me back, won't
you?”
“I have a good mind not to,” said Clytie severely. “If your mother knew,
she would be very angry, and you would catch it. Still, as you have been
a good boy, I'll look at it and give it you back. Run away, now.”
Jack did as he was bid, and Clytie, after a few turns about the room,
putting things more or less straight, unfolded the dirty wrapper of
Jack's packet, with an amused curiosity as to the features of Jack's
father.
But in another second all her curiosity, amusement, idle interest,
were fled, and her whole emotive force concentrated into a short,
irrepressible gasp of astonishment. It was a photograph of Thornton,
her husband. There was no mistaking it. She had the fellow to it in her
album. One day long ago she had seen it among his odds and ends, and had
begged for it, loving it for all that it was so many years old, taken
when he was still in the army. He looked so stalwart, soldierly,
magnificent in his uniform. It was perhaps the likeness of him that she
had cherished most--only too familiar. For a moment she could hardly
understand--the shock was so sudden and unexpected. Then with the quick
reaction she realised what it meant. Thornton was Jack's father, Mrs.
Burmester was his mother. With a shudder of disgust she threw the
photograph on the table.
The riddle of Jack's parentage was solved in a way she had not looked
for; the mystery that had lain hidden in strange, unknown depths of
passion was now clear to her in all its unlovely nakedness. Her soul
sickened at the truth. She had not come to her husband with the helpless
ignorance of a young girl. The knowledge of good and evil, to employ the
somewhat meaningless euphemism, had come to her through her intelligence
by means of books, through her contact with real life. She had grasped
the fact of the existence of the Loulou Mendès type with whom love is a
trade. That a man should have had a liaison with such a woman she could
have understood. In fact she never at any one moment had fancied that
Thornton had brought to her the pure ardour of a virgin soul. To have
been revolted at the discovery of a mere antenuptial infidelity on the
part of her husband would have been to her impossible. It was not noble,
it is true; but it was intelligible. There was certainly for a lower
nature a charm, witchery, fascination, in the fleshly beauty of the
courtesan. She had heard of many men falling victims to it, and sinking
very little into degradation. If Jack's mother had been such a woman,
she would have felt little more than the shock of coincidence, a sense
of strangeness in her relations with the boy. But Jack's mother was not
of this type. She never had charm, witchery, or fascination. She had
never even passable good looks. A poor, stolid, dull, animal drudge.
The truth had come upon Clytie; the truth that had touched her now
and then with its bat wings, making her shiver; the horrible,
soul-nauseating truth of the eternal _beast_ in man. She knew Thornton
now as he was, and her indifference passed into loathing. In Thornton's
feelings what difference had there been between this boy's mother and
herself?
She walked swiftly up and down the studio, with clenched white hands,
her shoulders rising now and then in an involuntary heave of disgust.
The glory had gone out of the day. A foul shadow overspread it.
Suddenly Thornton himself appeared with eager face, a telegram in his
hand. He had just come in from riding in the Park, and according to the
modern fashion out of the season, was dressed in tweed suit and gaiters.
He carried a silver-headed riding whip jauntily under his arm. He waved
the telegram exultingly.
“They have asked me to put up for Witherby!” he said. “I'll have some
lunch on the strength of it. I suppose there's some going.”
“I believe lunch is at the usual hour,” said Clytie, not looking at him.
He lingered a little, flicking his legs with his whip.
“You might as well congratulate me, if only for the sake of politeness,”
he said in an injured tone.
“Oh, yes; I congratulate you,” she replied.
Her voice sounded strange in her own ears. She felt an almost
irresistible impulse to burst forth into a torrent of speech, to say
out finally all the bitterness and loathing that were in her heart. She
restrained herself, but the effort gave a queer guttural resonance to
her words. She turned and looked out of the window.
“What the devil's the matter?” he asked impatiently. “I came in, 'pon my
soul, thinking you'd be pleased. It's a safe seat. I'm dead certain to
knock the confounded Radical into a cocked hat. Just the moment when
I've got what I've been sweating for the last eighteen months, confound
it all, I did think you'd be civil for once in a way. But it's just like
you; I might have expected it. Well, perhaps it's the truth to say you
don't care a damn one way or the other.”
He walked to and fro for a little, fuming. Then his eyes falling on the
photograph that lay on the table, he picked it up, as an angry man will
do, looked at it absently for a moment, and pitched it sharply to the
other side of the room. Clytie, startled by the slight click of the
cardboard striking against the wall, turned half round and met his eyes
fixed loweringly upon her. Each held the other spellbound for a few
seconds. Then the door opened and Jack came into the studio, checking
his motion forward as he saw Thornton.
“What the deuce is this?” cried the latter.
With a swift, instinctive glance Clytie compared the two faces. They
were astonishingly alike. The same finely moulded features, dark lucent
eyes, brown crisp hair, white evenly set teeth; the same lines of
cruelty at the corners of the lips. Strange that, much as she had
studied Jack's physiognomy, the likeness had never suggested itself. At
Thornton's petulant question the boy looked at him half frightened, and
then at Clytie, and was about to shrink back. But she called him in.
“Don't go away without your drawing, Jack. This,” she said coldly to
Thornton, “is a _protégé_ of mine. He was once my model--for my picture
'Jack.' Here, Jack, take your drawing. Run home. Thank you for coming to
see me.”
“And--and the photograph. You said you'd give it me back.”
Clytie went to the table where she had thrown it. Not seeing it, she
remembered the sound that had startled her, and turning round, perceived
the photograph lying face upwards on the floor. She gave a little start
of dismay. The situation threatened to become dramatic, and she was
unprepared. In her hurry to dismiss the boy she had forgotten the
photograph. Now he had called attention to it, and she felt bound to
restore it to him to save the poor little urchin's honour and most
probably his back. And Thornton was leaning against the mantelpiece,
with his hands in his pockets, frowningly surveying the scene. With
outward calm, but with a beating heart, she picked up the photograph,
wrapped it in the dirty covering, and put it into Jack's hand. Thornton,
who had watched her movements with gathering surprise, strode forward
with an oath.
“What the devil----”
But Clytie quickly interposed herself between him and the boy.
“Run away!” she said in a hasty whisper, and Jack, accustomed from his
childhood to sudden dartings, disappeared like a flash. Clytie put her
back against the door and looked at her husband with strange eyes. It
had been done with the speed of a conjuring trick.
“What on earth is the meaning of all this?” asked Thornton; “and what
are you giving away my photographs for? Upon my soul, I think you are
taking leave of your senses. You'll have to drop this sort of thing. I'm
damned if I am going to have my photographs given away to all the street
urchins in London. Play the fool yourself if you like, but I'll trouble
you to keep me and my things out of it. Have you been giving me away any
more?”
“Oh, God! Thornton, you have given yourself away!” she cried, echoing
his slang phrase half unconsciously in her bitterness. “I'll tell you,
if you like. The photograph belongs to the boy's mother. He is your
child.”
“What!” cried Thornton in a voice of thunder, showing his teeth
savagely.
“Yes, your child,” she went on, striving to be calm. “His mother's name
is Burmester. You gave her the picture yourself years ago. I had just
made the discovery when you came in. Ah--h!” she cried, putting her
hands suddenly before her face, “it is horrible, horrible!”
“Ha!” retorted Thornton fiercely. “You are in one of your damned
high-horse moods. Well, I did give one of my father's kitchen-maids a
photograph, and she did have a child, and I paid her for her trouble,
and, damme! what that's got to do with you now is more than I can see.
Besides, you never were such a fool as to imagine you were marrying an
infernal saint.”
“Oh, stop! stop!” she cried. “Don't say anything more. You will
brutalise me as well as yourself. I never thought you a saint--even when
I cared for you. I know what you are, and, oh, God! this is the end of
it. If you had betrayed a sweet, innocent girl, you would have been
a villain, but not necessarily a brute--someone charming, pretty,
attractive--I could have understood it; but a poor stupid drudge--a
kitchen-maid--little better than an animal----”
Thornton rushed forward and caught her by her shoulder.
“By the Lord God! if you don't hold your tongue, I'll strike you!”
She saw that she had aroused the devil in him. She had meant to be calm,
to tell him plainly the facts of the case and to say that it would be
better that they should live apart. But an irrepressible shudder had
come over her, and then the brutal cynicism of his confession had caused
her the loss of her self-control. As she saw the blazing eyes and white
glittering teeth in front of her and felt the grip on her shoulder, she
regretted that she had been, in a way, to blame; but she was no coward,
and the threat awakened the fierce old Puritan courage in her nature.
She did not flinch, but looked him directly in the face.
“Your striking me would only add to your other brutalities.”
“Damn you!” he cried in blind fury; and swinging her round, he struck
her with the riding whip with all his huge strength, cutting the back
of the thin morning gown, that flew open at the gap, showing her bare
shoulders. Then he hurled her from him and rushed out of the room.
With an almost superhuman effort of will Clytie sprang to her feet,
stood for a moment dazed, stunned, on fire with agony, then staggered
forward and threw herself upon the bearskin rug, with the illustrated
History of England, open as Jack had left it, beneath her face.