Will Locke lay dying. One would have thought, from his tranquillity,
confidence, and love of work, even along with spare diet, that he would
have lived long. But dreamland cannot be a healthy region for a man in
the body to inhabit. Will was going where his visions would be as nought
to the realities. He was still one of the most peaceful, the happiest of
fellows, as he had been all his life. He babbled of the pictures he
would paint in another region, as if he were conscious that he had
painted in a former state. It seemed, too, that the poor fellow's
spiritual life, apart from his artist career, took sounder, cheerier
substance and form, as the other life grew dimmer and wilder. Dulcie was
almost reconciled to let Will go; for he would be more at home in the
spirit-world than here, and she had seen sore trouble, which taught her
to acquiesce, when there were a Father and a Friend seen glimmeringly
but hopefully beyond the gulf. Dulcie moved about, with her child
holding by her skirts, resigned and helpful in her sorrow.
The most clouded faces in the old room in St. Martin's Lane--with its
old litter, so grievous to-day, of brushes, and colours, and graving
tools, and wild pictures which the painter would never touch more--were
those of Sam Winnington and Clary. Will had bidden Sam and Clary be sent
for to his deathbed; and, offended as they had been, and widely severed
as they were now, they rose and came trembling to obey the summons.
Clary gave one look, put her handkerchief quickly to her eyes, and then
turned and softly covered the tools, lifted the boiling pot to the side
of the grate, and took Dulcie's fretful, wondering child in her lap. She
was not a fine lady now, but a woman in distress. Sam stood immoveable
and uncertain, with a man's awkwardness, but a face working with
suppressed emotion.
Will felt no restraint; he sat up in his faded coat with his cravat open
to give him air, and turning his wan face with its dark shadow towards
Sam Winnington in his velvet coat, with a diamond ring sparkling on his
splashed hand, and his colour, which had grown rosy of late years,
heightened with emotion, addressed his old friend.
"I wanted to see you, Sam; I had something on my mind, and I could not
depart with full satisfaction without saying it to you; I have done
you wrong."
Sam raised his head, startled, and stared at the sick man: poor Will
Locke; were his wits utterly gone? they had always been somewhat to
seek: though he had been a wonderful fellow, too, in his own
way--wonderful at flowers, and birds, and beasts, if he had but been
content with them.
"I called you a mere portrait-painter, Sam," continued the dying man; "I
refused to acknowledge your inspiration, and I knew better: I saw that
to you was granted the discernment to read the human face and the soul
behind it, as to me it was given to hold converse with nature and the
subtle essence of good and evil. Most painters before you have painted
masks; but yours are the clothings of immortals: and your flesh is
wonderful, Sam--how you have perfected it! And it is not true what they
tell you of your draperies: you are the only man alive who can render
them picturesque and not absurd, refined and not stinted. You were a
genteel fellow, too, from the beginning, and would no more do a dirty
action when you had only silver coins to jingle in your pockets, than
now when they are stuffed with gold moidores."
"Oh, Will, Will!" cried Sam, desperately bowing his head; "I have done
little for you."
"Man!" cried Will, with a kingly incredulity, "what could you do for me?
I wanted nothing. I was withdrawn somewhat from my proper field, to
mould and colour for daily bread; but Dulcie saved me many a wasted
hour, and I could occupy the period of a mechanical job in
conceiving--no, in marshalling my visions. Mine was a different, an
altogether higher line than yours, Sam; you will forgive me if I have
told you too abruptly," and the poverty-stricken painter, at his last
gasp, looked deprecatingly at his old honoured associate.
But he was too far gone for ceremony; he was too near release for pain.
He had even shaken hands with the few family cares he was capable of
experiencing, and had commended Dulcie to Sam Winnington without a
single doubt. He felt, like Gainsborough, that they were all going to
heaven, and Vandyke was in the company. Where was the room for
misunderstanding now! Here was the end of strife, and the conclusion of
the whole matter. Some other sentences Will spoke before his parting
breath; and when his hearers heard him murmuring the word "garment,"
they fancied he still raved of his calling--on to the end. But his mind
had turned and taken refuge in another calling, and it was in reference
to it that he quoted the fragment of a verse, "And besought him that
they might touch if it were but the border of his garment; and as many
as touched him were made whole." "Sam, have you put forth your hand?"
Thus Will Locke departed rejoicing. Dulcie, a thin forlorn widow woman,
talked with a lingering echo of his elevation, of her Will's being
beyond lamentation, and of herself and her boy's being well off with
their faith in the future. Dulcie had a proud, constant presentiment in
the recesses of her woman's heart that the husband and father's good
name and merited reputation would surely find his memory out in this
world yet. She had no material possessions save a few of his gorgeous,
gruesome, hieroglyphical pictures, and what she had borrowed or
inherited of his lower cunning in tinting, a more marketable commodity
in the present mind of society.
Dulcie disposed of Will's paintings, reluctantly, realizing an
astonishing amount; astonishing, unless you take into account the fact
that his companions and contemporaries were not sure that he was a mere
madman now that he had gone from their ranks. They wished to atone for
their dislike to his vagaries by preserving some relics of the curious
handling, the grotesque imagination, the delicate taste, and the finely
accurate knowledge of vegetable and animal forms which had passed away.
Then Dulcie went back in the waggon to her old friends at Fairfax,
and, by so doing, probably saved her sole remaining child. Dulcie did
not know whether to be glad or sorry when she found that Will's boy
had no more of his father's genius than might have been derived from
her own quick talents, and neat, nice fingers. And she was comforted:
not in the sense of marrying again--oh dear, no! she cherished the
memory of her Will as a sacred thing, and through all her returning
plumpness and rosiness--for she was still a young woman--never forgot
the honour she had borne in being a great painter's wife and companion
for half-a-dozen years. Perhaps, good as she was, she grew rather to
brandish this credit in the faces of the cloth-workers and their
wives; to speak a little bigly of the galleries and the Academy, of
chiaroscuro and perspective, of which the poor ignoramuses knew
nothing: to be obstinate on her dignity, and stand out on her
gentility far before that of the attorneys' and the doctors'
wives;--and all this though she had been, as you may remember, the
least assuming of girls, the least exacting of wives. But women have
many sides to their nature, and remain puzzles--puzzles in their
virtues as in their vices; and if Dulcie were ever guilty of
ostentation, you have not to dive deep to discover that it was out of
respect to her Will--to her great, simple, single-hearted painter.
No, Will Locke's was not a life wrecked on the rocks of adversity, any
more than Sam Winnington's was stranded on the sandbanks of prosperity.
The one did a little to mellow the other before the scenes closed, and
Will Locke was less obliged to Sam Winnington than Sam to Will in the
end. Will's nature and career were scarcely within the scope of Sam's
genial material philosophy; but the thought of them did grow to cross
Sam's mind during his long work-hours; and good painters' hours are
mostly stoutly, steadily, indefatigably long. He pondered them even when
he was jesting playfully with the affable aristocrat under his pencil;
he spoke of them often to Clary when he was sketching at her work-table
of an evening; and she, knitting beside him, would stop her work and
respond freely. Then Sam would rise, and, with his hands behind his
back, go and look at that lush, yet delicate picture of the Redwater
Bower which he had got routed out, framed, and hung in Clary's
drawing-room. He would contemplate it for many minutes at a study, and
he would repeat the study scores and scores of times with always the
same result--the conviction of the ease and security resulting from
spiritualizing matter, and the difficulty and hopelessness of
materializing spirit. And after these long looks into the past, Sam
would be more forbearing in pronouncing verdicts on his brethren,
worsted in the effort to express what was inherent in their minds; would
not decide quite so dogmatically, that all a man had to do was to be
sound and diligent, and keep himself far apart from high-flown rubbish,
like a common-sense, sober-minded Englishman. And Sam came to be less
feverishly anxious about his own monopoly of public esteem; less nettled
at art-criticism; perhaps less vivacious in his talents and well-doing,
but more manly and serene in his triumph, as Will Locke had been manly
and serene in his failure.
Will Locke's life and death, so devoid of pomp and renown, might be
beyond lamentation, after all.