_Wherein Miss Betty Modeyne is introduced to the Study of Nature_
As they stood on the doorstep, waiting for the answer to their ring at
Netherby Gomme’s bell, Betty broke a pensive silence:
“I have never spoken to an author,” she said.
She had not imagined the spring of literature as running in so dingy a
well.
Noll pshawed airily:
“I’ve known a lot,” said he. “They’re just like everybody else, except
when they think they are not--and then they are beastly tedious.”
The door was opened by the grim old lady who was mother to Netherby
Gomme. Her, Noll saluted cheerily. The old lady shook hands with him
and darted a jealous look at the girl.
Noll explained:
“I have brought a friend of mine,” said he--“Miss Betty Modeyne.” The
old lady bowed stiffly to the child.
Noll took off his hat:
“I suppose Netherby is in?” he said, calmly walking into the passage;
and the child followed him.
The old lady shut the outer door:
“Yes,” she said--“he’s about finished work by this, I think.”
“Don’t you trouble to come up, Mrs. Gomme,” said Noll airily, opening
the sitting-room door with elaborate formality for the old lady; “I
know the way up, don’t I?”
She smiled. The light suddenly snapped out of her shrewd eyes
again--she glanced sharply at the girl:
“I suppose,” said she, “the little lady will remain with me?”
Noll laughed:
“Oh no; she wants to see a great writer in his workshop,” he said; and
the jealousy went out of the old lady’s eyes. She nodded and smiled as
she withdrew to her chair by the fire.
The youngsters made a move for the heights.
Noll, when he had shut the old lady’s door, said to Betty in a whisper:
“That’s her bedroom at the back.”
They mounted the stairs.
“She lets the other floors,” added Noll, as they passed shut doors.
“Netherby’s room is right at the top....”
Netherby Gomme made his visitors welcome. The talk was soon rattling at
a pace.
He suddenly missed from her place the dainty little figure, and,
looking up, he found that she was making a round of the attic, his
beloved workshop. The child had slipped off to peer at the prints
which hung tacked on to the walls on squares of stiff brown paper--the
overflow from Noll’s collection. They added a delightful touch of
beauty to the dingy place, and were in splendid sombre harmony with the
books, themselves amongst the most decorative of all ornaments--which
here held possession of every nook and cranny, and overflowed every
shelf.
Netherby Gomme went and lit a candle, holding it for her that she might
see the better.
“What does that say to you?” he asked the solemn child. She was gazing
intently at Timothy Cole’s exquisite wood engraving of Millet’s “Sower.”
“It says--no, it _sings_ to me,” she said, trying with deliberate
searching to find the absolute word, as a young thrush tries its notes;
and the effort of her intellect to express the right hair’s-breadth
value touched Gomme’s instincts and made the art leap within him. He
nodded. The child faced the picture, and went on haltingly:
“It sings to me of---- It is a man walking in a furrow--and all the
earth seems to be whispering--in a sort of hush--as if live things
were coming out of the silence. Twilight is far more full of spirits
than any other time--things that beckon and tell secrets. The dusk is
always filled with whispers, as if sweet young things were being born,
and poor dying things were glad to be going to sleep.... That’s the
sower--he walks along and sows. And he is solemn, because he knows
that all that he flings on the dark earth will spring in the dusk, and
become alive.”
Netherby stroked her head:
“Betty,” said he, “do you think the artist who painted that picture
meant you to feel all that?”
“Didn’t he?” she asked simply. She looked at it again with serious
grey eyes. She shook her head doggedly. “No; that isn’t just a man
in a field. Sometimes pictures look as if they had been painted just
because the painter wanted to show how cleverly he could draw an eye or
an ear or a bootlace; but, look! this sower has not got any of these
things, yet somehow they are there--they seem to come in as one looks.
The sowing in the twilight is the thing. I can hear the big clumsy man
walking with long strides, his heavy footfall all muffled in the brown
earth. I can see it and hear it and smell it----”
The child ceased speaking, at a loss to explain, her little brows knit
as she stood searching for expression.
The boy Noll stood at gaze, wondering.
Netherby Gomme said not a word.
The girl sighed:
“Doesn’t it say that to you?” she asked, looking up at the big awkward
fellow, whose intent face, lit by the candle-light, showed large eyes
fixed on some distant thought.
He came back to earth:
“Yes, Betty,” said he--“something like that. That is one of the world’s
masterpieces.”
“Masterpiece.” The child repeated the word lovingly--“I like that
word--masterpiece.”
She went to the next print. It was the wondrous little wood-engraving
of the vision as seen by the youthful Holman Hunt of The Lady of
Shalott when the mirror cracks from side to side and the web on the
loom flies wide, for her eyes have seen unheeding Lancelot.
The child looked at it for a long while:
“I think I know what that means,” she said--“the lady has been weaving
something, and it has all got tangled about her, and she can’t undo the
knots.”
She sighed:
“It is so hard to undo the knots,” she said.
Netherby Gomme coughed:
“Have you ever heard the ballad of _The Lady of Shalott_, Betty?” he
asked.
The child shook her dainty head.
“Sit down in a cosy chair and I’ll read it to you,” he said. And he set
his armchair for her, seating himself by his lamp.
He took up a battered, dog-eared volume of Tennyson and read the
immortal ballad, and Betty, to the haunting music of the verse, strayed
into the meads by Camelot, and, lingering by the river’s brink, she
listened with the awed reapers amongst the bearded barley, watching
the heavy barges glide by until there came wending past that most
tragic barge of all that floated down to the hushed death-song of the
broken-hearted faery Lady of Shalott.
Netherby Gomme closed the book gently, and watched the child.
Her eyes were full of tears:
“But--but why did she die?” she asked eagerly.
“She loved what could not give her love,” he said.
The child nodded her head:
“I think I understand,” she said.
The child sat silent for a long while. Then she took the lighted candle
and went and peered at the little design. She came back to the table,
and put down the candle upon it:
“I like the way that lady’s head is placed right up against the top of
the picture,” she said--“as if she felt something were crushing her
down....” She put her small hands on her dainty head--“crushing and
crushing her down--and she can’t get away from it, because--it’s all
tangled--tangled--tangled. And it won’t come right.... It always feels
just like that.”
“Good God!” said Netherby Gomme hoarsely--“has this child begun to
suffer already?”
The child went to his knee and gazed at him:
“Your eyes are full of tears,” she said.
He blew his nose noisily:
“You must not take my tears too seriously, Betty,” said he--“I am a
humorist.”
“But Mr.----”
“No, no, Betty--no misters, please, between us here--plain Netherby,”
he corrected her.
“But, Netherby,” she said simply, “I thought everyone had known
suffering.”
“No, thank God,” said he.
“Only women?” she asked.
“No--it isn’t a matter of man or woman. Only God’s aristocracy are
crucified,” he said. “Only a few suffer so.”
She looked into the beyond; a smile ran round the serious little lips:
“I _am_ glad to hear that,” she said.
And she added after a while:
“I shall sleep better now.”
Netherby turned in his chair and looked at the child solemnly:
“Come here, little woman,” he said.
She came to him, with her light walk, a dainty lank child, wrought of
the finest fibre.
Me held out his two hands, and she put a slender little hand in each.
“Betty,” he asked, “who have you heard say these things?”
“No one,” she said simply--“I just feel them so.”
Netherby stroked her head:
“One of these days, Betty, the world will listen to you. But don’t
trouble about things until you are grown up--just enjoy your life now.
Noll, Betty is too much indoors. She must get out into the fresh air of
the world--she must study nature--we must take her to the theatre.”
Betty’s eyes sparkled:
“I’ve never been to a theatre,” she said, her nerves dancing.
“Then we’ll go to a pit to-morrow night, Noll, eh? all three of us.”
When Betty and Noll with Netherby descended the stairs, the door of the
old lady’s sitting-room was open.
Betty turned and walked in--stepped lightly to the side of the old
woman where she sat before the fire in her armchair, her old watchful
eyes fixed on the open door, and the child leaned forward and kissed
her withered old cheek:
“I love you,” she said, “because you love Netherby; and you have his
big kind eyes.”
The old lady put out her old hand and stroked the child’s head:
“But you are leaving Master Noll sadly out in the cold, my little
lady,” she said.
Betty turned and looked at Noll:
“Oh no,” said she--“I love him in quite a different way.”
The old lady laughed.
The next morning being Betty’s birthday, she found at her door a sheet
of stiff brown paper on which was fixed the print of “The Sower,” the
whole set in a battered old picture-frame of Noll’s. It was the first
birthday gift she had ever had--as long as she could remember....
The evening of her twelfth birthday Betty spent in the pit of a theatre.
The sound of the rushing feet of the theatre-goers passing eagerly
into the pit in holiday humour; the rustle of silk and satin and the
leisurely entrance of handsomely dressed women into the more gorgeous
comfort of the stalls as they dawdled to their elaborate seats; the
delicious tunings of violins as the bandsmen took their places in
the orchestra; the burst of music; the echo of the stage carpenter’s
hammer from the screened world hidden by the great curtain beyond
the footlights; the lowering of lights and resulting sudden darkness
in the theatre; the sharp clink of a bell for the ringing up of the
curtain; the hushing into silence of the whispering audience; the slow
uprolling of the great curtain as it was gathered into the flies; and
the footlights disclosed another world, flinging its large picture upon
the vision--the fantastic reality of the drama--a world that comes to
life for a little while and holds the imagination as it were held by a
dream.
So the child sat, between Noll and Netherby, holding a hand of each. It
struck her keen wits as strange that in the large drawing-rooms of her
fashionable relations she had felt no warmth of affection towards the
glittering women who turned their cold critical eyes upon this child
of their ne’er-do-weel soldier kinsman--yet here were two lads, whom
she had not known a couple of days ago, winning her confidence by their
large chivalry, their whole-souled friendship now grown as old as her
life--friendship such as makes of life a splendid adventure.
When the curtain came down on the last act, the child sighed. She
realized with a pang that the play was over.