While Sam and Clarissa were fighting the battles of vanity and the
affections down in the southern shire in quite a rural district, among
mills and ash-trees, and houses with gardens and garden bowers, William
and Dulcie were combating real flesh-and-blood woes--woes that would not
so much set your teeth on edge, as soften and melt your tough, dry
heart--among the bricks and mortar of London. These several years were
not light sunshiny years to the young couple. It is of no use saying
that a man may prosper if he will, and that he has only to cultivate
potatoes and cabbages in place of jessamine and passion flowers; no use
making examples of Sir Joshua and Vandyke, and telling triumphantly that
they knew their business and did it simply--only pretending to get a
livelihood and satisfy the public to the best of their ability, but
ending in becoming great painters. One man's meat is another man's
poison; one man's duty is not his neighbour's. When shall we apprehend
or apply that little axiom? The Duchess of Portland killed three
thousand snails in order that she might complete the shell-work for
which she received so much credit; Dulcie would not have put her foot
voluntarily on a single snail for a pension.
It was Will Locke's fate to vibrate between drudgery and dreaming;
always tending more inevitably towards the latter, and lapsing into more
distant, absorbing trances, till he became more and more fantastic and
unearthly, with his thin light hair, his half-transparent cheek, and his
strained eyes. To prophesy on cardboard and canvas, in flower and
figure, with monster and star, crescent and triangle, in emerald green
and ruby red and sea blue, in dyes that, like those of the Bassani,
resembled the clear shining of a handful of jewels, to prophesy in high
art, to be half pitied, half derided, and to starve: was that Will
Locke's duty?
Will thought so, in the most artless, unblemished, unswerving style; and
he was a devout fellow as well as a gifted one. He bowed to revelation,
and read nature's secrets well before he forsook her for heaven, or
rather Hades. He devoted himself to the sacrifice; he did not grudge his
lust of the eye, his lust of the flesh, his pride of life. He devoted
Dulcie, not without pangs; and he devoted his little sickly children
pining and dying in St. Martin's Lane. He must follow his calling, he
must fulfil his destiny.
Dulcie was not quite such an enthusiast; she did love, honour, and obey
Will Locke, but she was sometimes almost mad to see him such a wreck. It
had been a sent evil, and she had looked down into the gulf; but she had
missed the depths. She had never seen its gloomy, dark, dreary nooks,
poor lass! in her youthful boldness and lavishness; and our little
feminine Curtius in the scoured silk, with the powdered brown curls, had
not merely to penetrate them in one plunge, but had to descend,
stumbling and groping her way, and starting back at the sense of
confinement, the damp and the darkness. Who will blame her that she
sometimes turned her head and looked back, and stretched up her arms
from the desert to the flesh-pots of Egypt? She would have borne
anything for her husband; and she did work marvels: she learned to
engrave for him, coloured constantly with her light, pliant fingers, and
drew and painted from old fresh memories those articles of stoneware for
the potteries. She clothed herself in the cheapest and most lasting of
printed linen sacques and mob caps, and hoods and aprons, fed herself
and him and the children on morsels wellnigh miraculously. She even
swallowed down the sight of Clary in her cut velvet and her own coach,
whose panel Sam Winnington himself had not thought it beneath him to
touch up for Clary's delectation and glory. If Will would only have
tarried longer about his flowers and bees, and groves and rattlesnakes:
if he had even stopped short at faces like those of Socrates, Cæsar,
Cleopatra, Fair Rosamond--what people could understand with help--and
not slid off faster and more fatally into that dim delirium of good and
evil, angels and archangels, the devil of temptation and the goblin of
the flesh, the red fiend of war, and the pale spirit of peace!
The difference which originated at Will and Dulcie's marriage had
ended in alienation. Dulcie thought that Sam Winnington would have
bridged it over at one time, if Will would have made any sign of
meeting his overtures, or acknowledged Sam's talents and fortune: nay,
even if Will had refrained from betraying his churlish doubts of Sam's
perfect deserts.
But no, this Will would not deign to do. The gentle, patient painter,
contented with his own estimation of his endowments, and resigned to
be misjudged and neglected by the world, had his own indomitable
doggedness. He would never flatter the world's low taste for
commonplace, and its miserable short-sightedness; he would never pay
homage to Sam Winnington which he did not deserve--a man very far from
his equal--a mere clever portrait-painter, little better than a
skilled stonemason. Thus Sam Winnington and Will Locke took to
flushing when each other's names were mentioned--sitting bolt upright
and declining to comment on each other's works, or else dismissing
each other's efforts in a few supremely contemptuous words. Certainly
the poor man rejected the rich not one whit less decidedly than the
rich man rejected the poor, and the Mordecais have always the best of
it. If we and our neighbours will pick out each other's eyes, commend
us to the part of brave little Jack, rather than that of the
belligerent Giant, even when they are only eyeing each other previous
to sitting down to the ominous banquet.
But this was a difficulty to Dulcie, as it is to most women. No one
thinks of men's never showing a malign influence in this world; it is
only good women who are expected to prove angels outright here below.
But it does seem that there is something more touching in their having
to stifle lawful instincts, and in their being forced to oppose and
overcome unlawful passions--covetousness, jealousy, wrath, "hatred,
malice, and all uncharitableness."
Dulcie, with the sharpness of her little face, divested of all its
counterbalancing roundness--a keen, worn little face since the day it
had smiled so confusedly but generously out of the scurvy silk in the
church at Redwater--was a sweet-looking woman under her care-laden air.
Some women retain sweetness under nought but skin and bone; they will
not pinch into meanness and spite; they have still faith and charity.
One would not wonder though Dulcie afforded more vivid glimpses of _il
Beato's_ angels after the contour of her face was completely spoilt.
You can fancy the family room in St. Martin's Lane, some five or six
years after Will Locke and Dulcie were wed, with its strange litter of
acids and aquafortis, graving tools and steel plates. Will and Dulcie
might have been some of the abounding false coiners, had it not been for
the colours, the canvas, and the vessels from the potteries, all huddled
together without attention to effect. Yet these were not without order,
for they were too busy people to be able to afford to be purely
disorderly. They could not have had the curtain less scant, for the
daylight was precious to them; they had not space for more furniture
than might have sufficed a poor tradesman or better sort of mechanic;
only there were traces of gentle birth and breeding in the casts, the
prints and portfolios, the Dutch clock, and the great hulk of a
state-bed hung with the perpetual dusky yellow damask, which served as a
nursery for the poor listless little children.
Presently Dulcie looked after the sops, and surreptitiously awarded Will
the Benjamite's portion, and Will ate it absently with the only appetite
there; though he, too, was a consumptive-looking man--a good deal more
so than when he attracted the pity of the good wife at the "Nine Miles
Inn." Then Dulcie crooned to the children of the milk-porridge she would
give them next night, and sang to them as she lulled them to sleep, her
old breezy, bountiful English songs, "Young Roger came tapping at
Dolly's window," and "I met my lad at the garden gate," and brushed
their faces into laughter with the primroses and hyacinths she had
bought for Will in Covent Garden Market. Will asked to see them in the
spring twilight, and described the banks where they grew, with some
revival of his early lore, and added a tale of the fairies who made them
their round tables and galleries, which caused the eldest child (the
only one who walked with Dulcie in his little coat to the church where
he was christened) to open his heavy eyes, and clap his hot hands, and
cry, "More, father, more." Will and Dulcie looked gladly into each
other's eyes at his animation, and boasted what a stamping, thundering
man he would yet live to be--that midge, that sprite, with Dulcie's
small skeleton bones, and Will's dry, lustreless, fair hair!
Anon while Dulcie was still rocking one of these weary children moaning
in its sleep, Will must needs strike a light to resume his beloved
labours; but first he directed his candle to his canvas, and called on
Dulcie to contemplate and comprehend, while he murmured and raved to her
of the group of fallen men and women crouching in the den--of the wind
of horror raising their hair,--of the dawn of hope bursting in the
eastern sky, and high above them the fiendish crew, and the captains of
the Blessed still swaying to and fro in the burdened air, and striking
deadly blows for supremacy. And Dulcie, open-eyed and open-mouthed as of
old, looked at the captives, as if listening to the strife that was to
come, and wellnigh heard the thunder of the captains and the shouting,
while her eye was always eagerly pointed to that pearly streak which was
to herald the one long, cool, calm, bright day of humanity. No wonder
Dulcie was as demented as Will, and thought it would be a very little
matter though the milk-porridge were sour on the morrow, or if the
carrier did not come with the price in his pocket for these sweet pots,
and bowls, and pipkins: she believed her poor babies were well at rest
from the impending dust, and din, and danger; and smiled deep, quiet
smiles at Clary--poor Clary, with her cut velvet, her coach, and her
black boy. Verily Will and Dulcie could afford to refer not only
pleasantly but mercifully, to Sam Winnington and Clary that night.
"It is contemptible to lose sight of the sublimity of life even to enjoy
perfect ease and happiness." That is a very grand saying; but, oh dear!
we are poor creatures; and though Dulcie is an infinitely nobler being
now than then, the tears are fit to start into our eyes when we remember
the little brown head which "bridled finely," the little feet which
pranced lightly, and the little tongue which wagged, free from care, in
the stage waggon on the country road yon clear September day.