THE LADY'S MILE
A Novel
BY THE AUTHOR OF
"LADY AUDLEY'S SECRET," "AURORA FLOYD"
ETC. ETC. ETC.
Stereotyped Edition
LONDON
JOHN AND ROBERT MAXWELL
MILTON HOUSE, SHOE LANE, FLEET STREET
[_All rights reserved_]
CONTENTS.
I. "HE IS BUT A LANDSCAPE-PAINTER"
II. LORD ASPENDELL'S DAUGHTER
III. HECTOR
IV. LOVE AND DUTY
V. AT THE FOUNTAINS
VI. WEDDING CARDS
VII. THE GREAT O'BOYNEVILLE
VIII. THE DOWAGER'S LITTLE DINNER
IX. LAURENCE O'BOYNEVILLE'S FIRST HEARING
X. THE RICH MR. LOBYER
XI. AT NASEDALE
XII. MR. O'BOYNEVILLE'S MOTION FOR A NEW TRIAL
XIII. CECIL'S HONEYMOON
XIV. MR. LOBYER'S WOOING
XV. DELILAH
XVI. AT HOME IN BLOOMSBURY
XVII. POOR PHILIP
XVIII. TOO LATE FOR REPENTANCE
XIX. THINGS FROM INDIA
XX. AT PEVENSHALL PLACE
XXI. SIR NUGENT EVERSHED
XXII. MRS. LOBYER'S SKELETON
XXIII. "HOW SHOULD I GREET THEE?"
XXIV. BETWEEN CARTHAGE AND KENSINGTON
XXV. THE EASY DESCENT
XXVI. A MODERN LOVE-CHASE
XXVII. "HE COMES TOO NEAR, WHO COMES TO BE DENIED"
XXVIII. "WERE ALL THY LETTERS SUNS, I COULD NOT SEE"
XXIX. A TIMELY WARNING
XXX. "HE'S SWEETEST FRIEND, OR HARDEST FOE"
XXXI. ON THE BRINK
XXXII. BY THE SEA
XXXIII. A COMMERCIAL EARTHQUAKE
THE EPILOGUE
THE LADY'S MILE.
CHAPTER I.
"HE IS BUT A LANDSCAPE-PAINTER."
It was high tide--spring tide, if you will--at half past-six o'clock
on a warm June evening: not the commonplace ebb and flow of a vulgar
river; but the mighty tide of fashion's wonderful sea, surging
westward, under the dusty elms and lindens of the Lady's Mile. If
you had driven round this very park between four and five on this
very afternoon, you would have been gratified by the sight of some
half-dozen nursemaids with their straggling charges, an occasional girl
and perambulator, a picturesque life guardsman here and there, making a
little spot of crimson amongst the wavering shadows of the trees, a few
hulking idlers in corduroy and bluchers, and a tipsy female sleeping
on the grass. Now the excited policemen have enough to do to keep the
four ranks of carriages in line, and to rescue foot-passengers from
the pawing hoofs of three-hundred-guinea steeds. The walk under the
trees is as crowded as the enclosure at Ascot, and the iron chairs are
as fully occupied as the seats in a fashionable chapel. The pouncing
proprietor, with the leathern pouch at his side, has hard work to
collect his rents, so rapidly do his customers come and go, and is
distracted by vague fears of levanting tenants and bad debts. On all
the length of the rails between Hyde-Park Corner and the Serpentine
there is scarcely room for one lounger more, for the rule of fashion
is so subtile a bondage, that it has compelled millions of people who
never in all their lives have spoken to one another to wear the same
order of garments, and talk the same slang, and ride in the same kind
of carriages, and eat the same class of dinners, and congregate in
the same places, at the same hour, year after year, and century after
century, from the earliest dawn of civilisation until to-day.
The uninitiated lawyer's clerk from Holloway, lounging in the same
attitude, and wearing the same pearl-grey gloves, and the same pattern
of whisker as the initiated young patrician from the crack West-end
clubs, may wonder whether the occupants of the splendid equipages
rolling slowly by him are there by right divine of noble birth and
lofty position, or by virtue of that golden 'open sesame,' that
wonderful _passe partout_, which success bestows so often on the
struggling plebeian. The Uninitiated from Holloway sees that there is
not so much interchange of becks and nods, so friendly greetings, as
might be expected if those elegant barouches and useful landaus, those
dashing mail-phaetons and dainty little broughams, belonged only to
the privileged classes whose highest privilege is the honour of being
known to one another. Perceiving this, the Uninitiated perceives also,
with astonished aspect, certain inhabitants of the Eastern Hemisphere,
known to himself in their form of money-grub, but transformed here
into butterflies of fashion, and driving mail-phaetons. Advertising
agents, money-lending lawyers, professional betting-men, dashing
brewers, popular distillers, pass before him side by side with dukes
and duchesses, and only to be distinguished therefrom by an impalpable
something which has no name. The Uninitiated, growing melancholy,
begins to think that it is a hard thing not to have high-stepping
horses and a mail-phaeton, and turns sadly from so much splendour to
wend his way northwards, while high-born elbows close in upon the
half-yard of railing which he leaves vacant. There are few places more
calculated to inspire discontent that this Lady's Mile. Pale Envy
stalks to and fro under the sheltering trees; Greed of Gain lurks
invisible behind the iron chairs; Disappointed Ambition waits at the
corner, ready to whisper in the poor man's ear, "Time was when you
thought it such an easy thing to win a place amongst those favourites
of fortune. Time was when you thought to see your wife sitting behind
high-stepping horses, and your boy trotting his pony in the Row. Go
home, poor drudge, with your blue-bag on your shoulder, and look at
the slatternly drab leaning over the washtub, and the shabby whelp
gambling for marbles in the gutter. Compare the picture of the present
with the vision you once made for yourself of the future; and then be
an agreeable husband and an indulgent father, and enjoy your domestic
happiness and your penny newspaper, if you can."
We are a wealthy nation, the political economist tells the poor
man, and our superfluous wealth must find employment somehow
or other. Hench the crush of high-stepping horses, the crowd of
three-hundred-guinea barouches; the flutter of costly garments rustling
in the summer air, the glitter and splendour which pervades every
object, until it seems almost as if the superfluous gold were melted
into the atmosphere, and all the female population were so many Miss
Kilmanseggs. The lounger on the rails may for the moment find it almost
difficult to believe that hungry women and gaunt haggard-looking men
can have any place in the world of which this dazzling region is a
part: but he need only look backward, under the shadow of the trees, to
see poverty and crime prowling side by side in their rags. Yet at the
worst, the dazzle and the glitter are good for trade; and it is better
that the tide of wealth should be rolling to and fro along the Lady's
Mile than locked in a miser's coffers or given in alms to professional
beggars at a church-door. Some part of the superfluous gold must pass
through the horny hands of labour before it can be transmuted into
C-springs or patent axles, Honiton lace or Spitalfields silk; and
perhaps the safest of all philosophy is that which accepts the doctrine
that "whatever is, is right."
But amongst the loungers on the rails this summer evening there was
one person stationed with his companion some little distance from
the rest of the idlers, who was very much inclined to quarrel with
this easy-going axiom, or with any other sentiment that involved
contentment. The eyes with which Philip Foley contemplated the world
were young, and rather handsome eyes; but they saw every thing in
a jaundiced light just now. He was a painter, self-contained and
ambitious as a disciple of art should be. But he had not yet learnt
the sublime patience of the faithful disciple; and he was angry with
Fortune because she hid her face; forgetful that if she is a churlish
mother, she can also be an over-indulgent one, and sometimes destroys
her fairest favourites by smiling upon them too soon. Philip Foley
was in love, and the girl he loved was the most capricious little
enchantress who ever studied the prettiest method of breaking her
adorers' hearts. The summer light which should have shone upon the back
of his shabby painting-jacket, as he stood before his easel, dazzled
his eyes as he looked along the Lady's Mile, seeking her carriage among
the crowd.
"I say, Foley, old fellow, when are you coming out of this, eh?"
demanded Sigismund Smythe, the novelist, who had abandoned the penny
public to court the favour of circulating-library subscribers, and had
sublimated the vulgar Smith into the aristocratic Smythe. Mr. Smythe
the author and Mr. Foley the painter were sworn friends; and the placid
Sigismund was recreating himself after a day's hard labour on the
"Testimony" of his latest hero, "Written in the Hulks."
"Out of which?"
"The reflective line. You haven't spoke for the last quarter of an
hour. That's a pretty girl with the strawberry-ice coloured parasol.
I say, though, old fellow, you don't suppose I've written two dozen
three volume, novels without knowing something of the human mind when
contemplated in relation to the tender passion. I know all about it,
you know; and it's not the least use your abandoning yourself to
melancholy meditation on _that_ subject. She's all your fancy painted
her, &c. &c., I allow; but she's the coldest-hearted and most mercenary
little scoundrel in creation, and she never can be yours. Put a clean
sponge over the tablet of your brain, dear boy, and turn your attention
to some body else."
"What new imbecility has afflicted your feeble intellect?" asked the
painter indignantly. "I don't know what you're talking of."
"Oh yes, you do, dear boy, and it's the same thing that you are
thinking of, and its name amongst the vulgar is Florence Crawford; but
it is better known in polite society as 'Flo.'"
The young painter gave a sardonic laugh.
"I should be a fool to trouble my head about _her_," he said
contemptuously.
"So you would be a fool, old fellow; and so you are a fool, for you
do trouble yourself about her. You've been on the watch for her
carriage for the last half-hour, and she has not gone by; for instead
of tormenting creation at large by driving here, I dare say she is
torturing mankind in particular by stopping at home. Don't be an idiot,
Phil, but come to Greenwich and have some dinner."
"No," cried Philip, "I will stop here till she passes me by, with her
insolent little affectation of not seeing me, and all the pretty tricks
that constitute her fascination. You think me a fool, Sigismund; but
you can never think so poorly of me as I think of myself when I find
myself here day after day, while the very light I want is shining into
my wretched painting room at Highbury. Do you remember what Catullus
says?
'Odi et amo; quare id faciam, fortasse requiris:
Nescio, sed fieri sentio, et excrucior.'
Do you know that it is quite possible to love and hate the same person
at the same moment? I love Florence Crawford because she is Florence
Crawford. I hate her for the fatal bondage in which she holds me. I
hate her for her evil influence upon my career. I hate her as the
slave hates his master. Do other men suffer as I do, I wonder? or
has feeling gone out of fashion, and am I behind the time? The most
devoted lover nowadays only calls his betrothed a 'nice little party'
and hopes the 'governor will do the right thing.' The men whom I
meet take pains to advertise their contempt for any thing like real
feeling; and girls of eighteen tell you with a smile that a love-match
is the most preposterous thing in creation. The women of the present
day are as heartless as they are beautiful; as artificial as they are
charming,--the Dead-Sea fruit of civilisation, the----"
"The natural growth of the age of sixty-mile-an-hour locomotives,"
rejoined the placid Sigismund. "Do you forget that man is an imitative
animal, and that the rate at which we travel has become the rate at
which we live? Steam is the ruling principle of our age, and the
pervading influence of our lives. Depend upon it, that ever since
mankind began to exist, every succeeding age has lived faster than its
predecessor. 'Time _was_ that when the brains were out the man would
die,' says Macbeth; 'but _now_,' &c. &c. He isn't a bit surprised
at Banquo's appearance, you see. A ghost more or less is nothing
extraordinary in a fast-going age. And we've been accelerating the
pace ever since Macbeth's day. It used to take a man a week to go
from London to Lyme Regis, and the best part of a lifetime to earn
the few thousands which in his simple notions constituted a fortune.
Nowadays a man goes from London to New York in less than a fortnight;
and he expects to make his half-million or so while the purple bloom
is on his locks, and the light of youth in his eyes. Steam is every
where and in every thing. We educate our children by steam; and our
men and women want to grow rich at the rate of sixty miles an hour.
Every man has the same tastes, the same aspirations. There is no such
person nowadays as the Sir Balaam who thought it a grand thing to have
two puddings for his Sunday dinner. Sir Visto is not the exception,
but the rule; and the poor man ruins himself by blindly following the
rich. Sir Balaam has a man cook, and dines _à la Russe_. Sir Balaam's
cashier has his dinners from the confectioner, and dines _à la Russe_
too. Sir Visto, the Manchester cotton-spinner, is a patron of the arts,
and buys largely at Christie's. His clerks follow in his wake, and
cover the walls of their little suburban dining-rooms with impossible
Cuyps and sham Backhuysens, bought in Wardour Street. Before we die
we may see Sir Balaam and Sir Visto in the _Gazette_, with all their
followers at their heels. Look at the dresses and carriages passing by
us. I know most of the people, more or less; and I can see the wives
and daughters of hard-working professional men vying with the peerage
and the autocracy of the money market. Don't rail against the women, my
dear Philip; the women are--what the men make them. You must have _Lui_
before you can have _Elle_. Aspasia is impossible without Pericles. You
could never have had a Cleopatra unless you had first your Cæsar; or
your Marian de Lorme without Cinq Mars. The lives of the women of the
present day are like this drive which they call the Lady's Mile. They
go as far as they can, and then go back again. See how mechanically the
horses wheel when they reach the prescribed turning-point. If they went
any farther, I suppose they would be lost in some impenetrable forest
depth in Kensington Gardens. In the drive the rule has no exception;
because, you see, the barrier that divides the park from the gardens is
a palpable iron railing, which the stoutest hunter might refuse. But
on the highway of life the boundary line is not so clearly defined.
There are women who lose themselves in some unknown region beyond the
Lady's Mile, and whom we never hear of more. Ah, friend Philip, let us
pity those benighted wanderers whose dismal stories are to be found
amongst the chronicles of the Divorce Court, whose tarnished names
are only whispered by scandal-loving dowagers between the acts of an
opera, or in the pauses of a rubber. On this side, the barrier they
pass seems so slight a one--a hedge of thorns that are half hidden by
the gaudy tropical flowers that hang about them--a few scratches, and
the boundary is passed; but when the desperate wanderer pauses for a
moment on the other side to look backward, behold! the thorny hedgerow
is transformed into a wall of brass that rises to the very skies, and
shuts out earth and heaven."
It was not often that Mr. Smythe indulged in any such rhapsody as this
in ordinary society; but Philip Foley and the novelist were sworn
friends and brothers, united by that pleasant bondage of sympathy which
is a better brotherhood than the commoner bond of kindred. Sigismund
had brothers and sisters in Midlandshire, but there was not one of them
who could be as much to him as Philip the painter.
It is doubtful whether Mr. Foley had heard much of his friend's
oration. He had been leaning on the rails in a moody attitude, watching
the carriages go by. And now, when he spoke, it seemed as if he were
replying to some question that had been brooding in his own mind,
rather than to the observations of his friend.
"Do you think I don't know Florence Crawford?" he said, "and know that
she is no wife for me--if she would have me--and she would as soon
think of marrying me as the carver and gilder who makes her father's
frames. Indeed, I dare say she'd rather marry the frame-maker, for he
earns more money than I do, and could give her finer dresses. She has
told me a hundred times that she will marry for money; that when she
leaves her father's house--a bride, with innocent bridal-flowers upon
her brow--she will bid farewell to her home on the same principle as
that on which her housemaid leaves her--to better herself. Think of her
in my carpetless painting-room at Highbury, looking up from her work to
watch me at my easel, and beguiling me with hopeful speeches when I am
depressed. One reads of that sort of wife in a novel. But can you find
me such a one nowadays, Sigismund? The women of the present day live
only to look beautiful and to be admired. They are pitiless goddesses,
at whose shrines men sacrifice the best gifts of their souls. When I
look at the splendour of these carriages, the glory of the butterfly
creatures who ride in them, I think how many plodding wretches are
toiling in Temple-chambers, or lecturing in the theatres of hospitals,
or pacing to and fro on the dusty floor of the Stock Exchange, racked
by the thought of hazardous time-bargains, in order that these
frivolous divinities may have gorgeous raiment and high-stepping
horses, and plant the arrows of envious rage in one another's tender
bosoms. I think they learn the love of splendour in their cradles. They
are proud of their lace-frocks and gaudy sashes before they can speak:
their dolls are duchesses; or, what is worse, as Hippolyte Rigault has
said, '_poupées aux camélias_.' And then they grow up, and some fine
day a poor man falls in love with one of them, and finds that it would
have been infinitely wiser to have dashed out his brains against a
stone wall than to have been beguiled by the mad hope that a penniless
lover's devotion could have any value in their sight."
"Wait till you have made a name, Phil, and can afford as grand a place
as the Fountains, and then see if Miss Crawford won't be civil to you.
Come, we may as well slope, old fellow; it's nearly seven o'clock. The
enchantress will not appear to-night. Let us go some where and dine, and
forget her."
"Dine by yourself, Sybarite," answered the painter. "A man whose most
laborious picture sells for a ten-pound note has no right to whitebait
and Moselle. I can buy half a pound of damp beef at the cook-shop as I
go home. It will not be the first time that the silk-lining of my coat
has been greased by a parcel from the cook-shop. I dare say I smell of
beef sometimes when I call upon Florence Crawford."
"But, Phil, when you know I'm so glad to stand Sam--" remonstrated Mr.
Smythe.
But he remonstrated in vain. Philip Foley rejoiced in his poverty and
his deprivations as a gladiator might rejoice in the training that
he knew must insure victory. (To suffer and be strong was the young
painter's motto, and he took a boyish pride in his bare rooms and his
scanty dinners, the feat of pedestrianism that saved him a half-crown
in cab-hire, the heroism which enabled him to carry his head loftily
under a hat whose bloom had vanished. He was very young. His faults
were the faults of youth--his graces the graces that perish with
youth. He had all the insolent confidence in his own judgment and
the contempt for other people which seems the peculiar attribute of
five-and-twenty. He would point you out the feeble drawing in a fresco
by Michael Angelo, or the false lights in a Rembrandt, with an utter
unconsciousness that he was making a fool of himself. Hot-headed,
generous-hearted, impulsive, undisciplined, candid, and true, Philip
Foley was the incarnation of ambitious youth before the fiery steel has
been thrice refined in the furnace of disappointment. He had only just
begun the great battle, and as yet he saw in failure the evidence of
the popular error, and not of his own weakness. The vision of his own
future shone before him--only a little distant, and with no hindering
clouds between. He was ready to paraphrase Cæsar's despatch, and cry
aloud to all the world, "I am coming--I shall see--I shall conquer!")
The painter did not turn his head to bid his friend Sigismund adieu;
he was looking along the line of carriages for that one equipage, to
behold which was so thrilling a pleasure that it was worth his while to
waste half a day for the chance of obtaining it.
The fairy chariot came by at last, with the fairy in it, and
all the mortal coaches melted into air. The fairy was a pretty,
coquettish-looking girl, who seemed scarcely eighteen years of age,
and whose dark-grey eyes and black eyelashes were rendered doubly
enchanting by the piquancy of their contrast with her rippling golden
hair. The fair one with the golden locks has become quite a common
young person in these days of cunning hair-washes and Circassian
waters; but Florence Crawford's waving tresses had been tinted only by
the hand of Nature, and she was by no means proud of their sunny hue.
She would have preferred to be a heavy-browed person of the masculine
order, with blue-black hair and an aquiline nose, instead of that dear
little insolent _retroussé_, which seemed perpetually asking questions
of all humanity.
Yes; Miss Crawford's nose was decidedly _retroussé_; but it as little
resembled the vulgar snub, or the lumpy pug, or the uncompromising
turn-up, as a pearl resembles a lump of chalk.
It was the dearest and most delicate little nose that ever inhaled the
odours of a costly bouquet in a box on the grand tier, or buried itself
between the flossy ears of a Maltese terrier. It was an aristocratic
nose, and could be as imperiously disdainful as the stateliest Roman;
but whatever it was, its delicate outline was engraved on Philip
Foley's heart too deeply for his worldly welfare or his bosom's peace.
She was as far away from him as the young June moon that glimmered pale
in the daylight above the Lady's Mile. And yet she was only a painter's
daughter; but then there was all the distance that divides the topmost
pinnacle of Fame's mighty mountain from the lowest depths of obscurity,
between William Crawford, R.A., of the Fountains, Kensington, and
Philip Foley, of Adelgisa Crescent, Highbury.
That he was clever, every body who knew any thing about the art he
loved was ready to acknowledge; that he had something in him that was
of a grander and sterner stuff than cleverness, Philip Foley himself
knew very well. If he had been only clever, success would have been a
much easier thing for him; and he knew this too.
Owen Meredith has very nobly said that "genius does what it must, and
talent does what it can." And Philip Foley obeyed the ungovernable
impulse within him, and flung gloom, and darkness, and meteoric skies,
and raging seas, and all manner of Titanic grandeur upon his canvases,
when he should have been painting inevitable rustic maidens in scarlet
cloaks, trotting meekly across the wooden bridges that span placid
mill-streams, or fishermen's white-sailed craft bobbing up and down
upon bright blue-and-opal seas. If it had not been for the patronage
of two or three north-country magnates, whose boyhood had been spent
on the bleak shores of the German Ocean, and who bought Philip's
rugged cliffs and darksome seas for love of their own vanished youth,
the young painter would have found life's battle a sore and difficult
fight; but with a little income of his own, the grace of these rich
patrons, and the help of considerable employment from Mr. Crawford, for
whom he sometimes painted backgrounds, Philip Foley was rich enough
to have leisure to declaim about his poverty,--and your real poverty
has no time for declamation. He was rich enough to live without care,
to entertain his friends with unlimited bitter-beer from the nearest
tavern, and to keep an unfailing supply of mild tobacco in the French
china jar that adorned his mantelpiece. He could afford to dress like a
gentleman, and to waste a good deal of his life in haunting the places
where Florence Crawford was likely to be met; and, good year or bad
year, he never failed to carry a rich silk dress, or a handsome shawl,
or a wonderfully-inlaid casket, or workbox, or portfolio, or tea-caddy,
to a maiden lady in a sleepy little village deep down in a pastoral
valley some ten or twelve miles from Burkesfield, Bucks,--a valley that
lay out of the track of coach-road or railway, and had made no more
progress within the last forty years than if the inhabitants had been
so many Rip Van Winkles.
The maiden lady was Philip Foley's aunt, and the only near relation he
possessed. That she loved him to distraction was the most natural thing
in the world, for she was a gentle and loving creature, and for the
last five-and-twenty years of her life had concentrated her affection
upon the orphan boy who had come from India a frail nursling to be
committed to her charge by his sickly father, who went back to Bengal
to die, within the year of his return, on a dismal march through a
cholera-haunted district. Whence the child derived his love of art,
no one knew. His father had been an ensign in the Company's service;
his mother, a frivolous young person, with thirteen hundred pounds in
Indian Stock, a tendency to consumption, and not two ideas of her own.
But the divine afflatus that gives life to the nostrils of painters
and poets is no hereditary possession to be handed from father to
son, like so many acres of common earth, or so much money in Consols.
From the hour in which Philip Foley's baby fingers first tightened
round a pencil, he was an artist. He drew houses, and apple-trees, and
straggling reptiles which he meant for horses, before he could speak;
and then when he was old enough to buy his first colour-box, he went
out into the woods and fields, like Constable; and alone, amongst the
beautiful mysteries of nature, his soul and mind expanded, unfettered
and untaught.
The time came, as it almost always does come, sooner or later, in the
lives of gifted creatures, when the appreciative stranger came across
the boy's pathway. An elderly gentleman came suddenly upon young Philip
one day, as he sat on a fallen tree in a clearing, painting the glade
that stretched before him, darkly mysterious in its sombre shadows. The
elderly gentleman asked the boy more questions than he had ever been
asked consecutively in his life before; and as it generally happens
to a lad who is tolerably well connected, it happened in this case.
The elderly gentleman had known a member of Philip's family, and was
inclined to be interested in him on that account.
"But a great deal more so on account of those purple shadows," said the
stranger pleasantly. "One may meet young sprigs of old families any
day in the year; but a lad of fourteen who has such nice ideas about
light and shade is by no means a common person. And your aunt is using
all her interest to get you to Addiscombe, is she? so that you may
follow in your father's footsteps, and die of cholera at sunrise, to be
buried in the sands before sunset. Let your aunt use her interest to
get you into Mr. O'Skuro's academy, and she'll be employing it for some
purpose. Your mother had some money, hadn't she?"
"Fifty pounds a year," answered the boy blushing. He had all the grand
notions which are common to extreme youth, and was almost ashamed to
proclaim the pitiful amount.
"And very nice too," returned the stranger briskly; "I have known men
whom fifty pounds a year--yes, or five-and-twenty--would have saved
from ruin,--clever men who have starved for want of ten shillings
a-week. A man with a pound a-week, secured to him for his lifetime,
need never commit a dishonourable action, or accept an insult. Take me
to see your aunt, Mr. Foley; and if I find her a sensible woman, we'll
have you sitting behind your drawing-board at O'Skuro's Academy before
the year is out."
The elderly gentleman was as good as his word. He turned out to be an
amateur landscape-painter, who united untiring industry to the smallest
amount of ability, and who, with a very limited income, had contrived
to collect a wonderful little gallery of what he called "bits,"
broker's-shop and obscure sale-room acquisitions, which adorned the
walls of a tiny cottage at Dulwich, and which he was wont to exhibit
every Sunday to admiring friends or sceptical connoisseurs.
Before the year was out Miss Foley had consented to a bitter sacrifice,
the sacrifice which she knew must come sooner or later, and had packed
her boy's trunks, and stood on the platform at Burkesfield to watch the
departure of the train that carried him away from her.
Mr. Theophilus Gee, the amateur and connoisseur, had talked her into
the belief that her nephew was an embryo Turner; and she had bidden
the boy go forth upon the first stage on the great highway that leads
to glory, or to disappointment and death. He left the simple elegance
of his aunt's cottage, and the tutorship of the Burkesfield curate, to
plunge into the universal Bohemia of art; and for four years he worked
conscientiously under the fostering care or Mr. O'Skuro. Then came
foreign travel, and then pedestrian wanderings on the wildest shores
of England and Wales, Highland rambles, excursions in Western Ireland,
a long apprenticeship to that grand mistress, Nature, who is a better
teacher than all the masters who ever created academicians. And at last
the young painter established himself in a lodging at Highbury, and
began to paint for his daily bread.
Then it was that his friend Mr. Gee introduced him to William Crawford,
the great painter, who employed the embryo Turner to paint backgrounds
for delicious little sketches that could have been covered half-a-dozen
inches deep by the sovereigns that were given for them.
The young man accepted the employment, but disdained himself for
accepting it, until there came an angel into the painting-room one day
to take the painter's soul captive, and reconcile him to any lot that
brought him near her. The angel was Florence, only child and spoiled
darling of William Crawford, who came to ask her father for a check
for her milliner. She was an angel with a tiny _retroussé_ nose, and
dark-grey eyes, that were generally mistaken for black; an impulsive
angel with a temper that was more capricious than an April day.
For some time after that meeting in the painting-room, Philip believed
that he admired Miss Crawford only as the most beautiful thing he had
ever seen; but he woke one day to the knowledge that he loved her to
distraction, and that the happiness of his life was as utterly at her
mercy as the little golden toys hanging from her chatelaine, which she
had so pretty a trick of trifling with when she talked to him.
Of all men upon earth, perhaps William Crawford was the least tainted
by any odour of snobbishness. No intoxicating sense of triumph
bewildered him on the giddy height to which he had risen. He stood
serene upon the mountain top; for he looked upward to the starry
Valhalla of dead painters--whose glory seemed as high above him as the
stars in which he could fancy them dwelling--and not downward to the
struggling wayfarers he had left behind him.
"If people knew as much about painting as I do, they wouldn't believe
in my pictures," said Mr. Crawford.
He had rivals--rivals whom he envied and adored--against whose giant
hands his own seemed to him so feeble and puny; but their names were
Rembrandt and Velasquez, Rubens and Reynolds, Titian and Correggio,
Guido and Vandyke. To him art seemed a grand republic, a brotherhood
in which success had no power to divide a man from his brethren.
He was rich, and he spent his money royally, for he was as fond of
splendour as Rubens himself; and he had not Peter Paul's affection
for gold. Perhaps no man who was equally successful ever had so few
enemies as William Crawford. Young men adored him, struggling men came
to him for advice, disappointed men poured their wrongs into his ears
and took comfort from his sympathy. He was the ideal painter, and he
ought to have sat in the pillared hall of some old Roman palace, with
a band of faithful followers watching the free sweep of his inspired
hand, and an emperor in attendance to pick up his maulstick. In this
man's house Philip Foley came and went as freely as if he had been a
kinsman of the host; and coming from church on a Sunday evening, the
pious inhabitants of Adelgisa Crescent were apt to be startled by the
apparition of the young painter dressed in evening costume, and bending
his footsteps westward in the dusty summer twilight. Sunday evening at
the "Fountains" was a grand institution. On that evening the painter
was at home to his friends; and as the name of his friends was legion,
very pleasant company was to be met at Kensington between nine and
twelve on every Sabbath in the season. Rank and fashion, literature and
art, war and physic, law and diplomacy, poverty and wealth, jostled one
another in those bright, airy drawing-rooms. The painter's fame was
cosmopolitan, and foreigners from every court and capital brought him
their tribute of admiration; and amidst this elegant crowd Florence
floated hither and thither, radiant in the most dazzling toilettes
that Madame Descou could devise, and inflicting anguish upon the souls
of her adorers by the capricious distribution of her smiles. And
Philip, who could find no phrase too bitter for his denunciation of her
follies, came every Sunday evening to tell her he hated and despised
her, and would henceforth make it his business to forget her existence,
remained to adore her, and went back to Highbury more utterly her slave
than before.
She saw him as he lounged against the rails that bright June
evening, and greeted him with a condescending little gesture of
her head,--adorned with Madame Ode's last madness in the shape of
a bonnet,--and then the barouche rolled by and she was gone. The
carriages were growing thin. It was scarcely likely that she could
return, for it was close upon her father's dinner-hour. Poor Philip
wondered what party she was going to--with whom she would dance. He
fancied her smiling destruction upon the gilded youth of Tyburnia and
Belgravia. He thought of those charmed circles in which she was as
remote from him as if she had gone to parties in the Pleiades; and
then, as he crossed the park on his pilgrimage northwards, he set his
strong white teeth together fiercely, and muttered:
"I _will_ succeed!"
It was not to have his name inscribed upon the mighty roll where blaze
the names of Raffaelle and Correggio that the young man aspired with
such a passionate yearning, but to have an _entrée_ in the West-end
mansions where Florence Crawford was to be met.