AT THE FOUNTAINS.
Hector Gordon kept his word. He left Fortinbras by the evening train,
in despite of his aunt's lamentations, and in despite of something
which pierced his heart more cruelly than the lamentations of all the
fussy dowagers in Christendom,--the still white look of sorrowful
resignation in Cecil Chudleigh's face.
She loved him. He knew the truth and depth of her affection as well as
he knew the truth and depth of his own. Love would be a poor divinity
indeed, if, as some counterbalance to his physical blindness, he were
not gifted with the power of second-sight. Hector needed no word from
Cecil to tell him how much he resigned in doing his duty. The hour
that had revealed to him the secret of his own heart had laid bare
the mystery of hers. That subtile sympathy, which had seemed so sweet
a friendship, had been only love in disguise, the wolf in sheep's
clothing, the serpent in the semblance of a dove.
Ah, what utter despair possessed those two sad hearts on that chill
September afternoon! what a cold, dreary future lay before those two
helpless wanderers, doomed to bid each other farewell! The day might
come, as it comes so often in the story of a lifetime, when to look
back upon all this trouble and anguish would be to look back upon
something as flimsy as a dream. But then what is more terrible than the
agony of a dream?--ay, even though in the sleeper's breast there lurk a
vague consciousness that he is only the fool of a vision. Brooding over
his hopeless sorrow, as the express whirled London-wards through the
darkness, Hector Gordon thought of the stories of unhappy attachments
and wasted devotion which he had heard told by his seniors over the
mess-table, when the wine went round silently in the summer dusk, and
men, whose faces were in shadow, talked more freely than was their wont
in the broad glare of day.
"Shall I ever come to tell the story of my sorrow to my brother
officers in the gloaming? Will the memory of to-night ever be a subject
for friendly talk after a ponderous dinner, while the sentry's tramp
echoes in the stillness, and the odour of cigar-smoke floats in from
the balcony where the youngsters are lounging? Will they ever call me
a dreary old bore, and try to change the subject when they find the
conversation drifting round to my dismal love-story? Ah, how sad to
be old and a nuisance, and to have profaned the sanctity of my idol's
temple!"
How sad to be old! Hector thought of the dull life of duty, the
joyless, sunless, desert waste that lay between him and the time when
he might begin to care for comet port, and dilate with an elderly
dandy's fatuity on the tender story of his youth. He thought of his
future until he began to fancy how blessed a thing it would be if
his life could end that night in the chill darkness. The engine had
but to swerve a hair's breadth, as it flew along the top of a steep
embankment--and lo, the end of all his sorrows! A crash, a sudden
agony perhaps--unimaginable in its infinity of pain, but brief as
summer lightning,--and the enigma of his existence would be solved, the
troublesome thread of his life dissevered.
"My poor Mary would be sorry for me," he thought, remembering the
gentle betrothed waiting for him in India; "but she would fancy that
I had died adoring her, and in a twelvemonth the memory of me would
be a painless sorrow. Shall I make her happy by doing my duty? I have
seen ruined men, whose ruin began on the day in which they sacrificed
feeling on the shrine of honour. My Cecil, my Cecil, how could you be
so cruel as to drive me away from you?"
The image of the pale, sorrowful face that had looked at him with such
heroic calmness in the moment of parting arose before him now like a
reproach. He knew that she had been right. He knew that her voice had
been the voice of truth and honour, the voice of his own conscience.
"God help me to be worthy of the love that never can be mine, and of
the gentle darling I am bound to shelter!" he thought. And then a
spirit of resignation seemed to exorcise the demon despair, and he took
from his pocket-book a letter written on foreign paper,--a letter in
a pretty womanly hand, not too easy to decipher,--a letter from his
betrothed wife, which he had read hurriedly the day before, too cruelly
preoccupied to know what he was reading.
The tender, trusting words were the most bitter reproaches that could
assail him. His heart melted as he read the long, loving epistle by the
uncertain light of the railway lamp. He could hear the voice, as he
deciphered those simple girlish sentences. He could see her face--not
beautiful, but very sweet and loving.
He was quite alone in the carriage, and when he had replaced the letter
in his pocket-book, he detached a little trinket which hung to his
watch-chain, and pressed the crystal face of it to his lips. Under the
crystal there was a lock of pale flaxen hair, which his own hands had
selected for the shears the day he parted from his love at Simlah.
"Poor Mary!" he murmured softly; "poor Mary! it will be something at
least to make you happy."
The dowager took her nephew's departure very deeply to heart; or it may
be rather that she had set her heart on a suite of spacious apartments
in Tyburnia, and was by no means disposed to return to Dorset Square.
She questioned Cecil very sharply about Hector's proceedings, and
succeeded in driving that young lady into a conversational corner,
whence it was impossible to emerge without a revelation of the truth.
"You tell me you think he's engaged," said the dowager, impatiently,
after forcing Cecil to admit so much. "And why do you think he's
engaged? Did he tell you so?"
"He gave me to understand as much."
"And engaged to whom, pray?"
"A young lady in India."
"A young lady in India. Is that all you know about her?"
"Yes indeed, auntie."
"A nice designing thing, I dare say, and a nobody into the bargain, or
of course he'd have told you who she was," cried Mrs. MacClaverhouse
indignantly. "A stuck-up creature, who will contrive to keep her
husband at a distance from his relations, no doubt, in order that she
may surround him with a pack of harpies of her own kith and kin. And to
think that my boy should never have so much as asked my advice before
he threw himself away! If you knew how I had built upon you and Hector
making a match of it, Cecil, you'd sympathise with my disappointment
a little, instead of sitting looking at me in that provokingly placid
way of yours. I could have ended my days happily under Hector's roof: I
hoped he would have been glad to give his poor old aunt a home; and I
don't think you'd have refused me a shelter in my old age--eh, Cecil?"
"Oh, auntie! auntie!"
Mrs. MacClaverhouse had no need to complain of want of sympathy this
time, for Cecil suddenly fell upon her knees, and buried her face in
her aunt's ample silken skirts, sobbing passionately. The thought of
what might have been was so very bitter; and every word the dowager
uttered sent the arrow deeper into the wounded heart.
"Oh, auntie!" she cried, "never speak to me about him again. Oh, pray,
pray, do not speak of him again! I love him so dearly, so dearly, so
dearly!"
It was the first and last passionate cry of Cecil Chudleigh's heart,
and it quite melted the dowager; but there was a touch of sternness
mingled with her emotion.
"I hope that designing minx will live to repent her artfulness," she
said, spitefully; for it is the peculiar attribute of a woman to empty
the vials of her wrath on the passive and unconscious maiden for
whose sake her plans have been frustrated, rather than on the active
masculine offender who has frustrated them.
The dowager and her niece went back to Dorset Square very soon after
Hector's departure: and then came visits to country houses--a fortnight
in Leicestershire, where poor Cecil had to endure the hunting talk of
horsey men and fast young ladies, the perpetual discussions about dogs
and horses and southerly winds and cloudy skies; a month in an old
Yorkshire grange, where there was a cheerful Christmas gathering, and
where Lady Cecil had to act in charades and take part in duets--the
dear old duets in which his melodious barytone had been so delicious.
She looked round sometimes when she was singing, and almost expected
to see his ghost standing behind her,--so cruel a profanation did it
seem to sing the old familiar words. In all the morning gossip, and
billiard-playing and fancy-work, the reading aloud--often from the very
books which _he_ had read at Fortinbras--in all the music and dancing,
the impromptu charades, and carefully studied _tableaux-vivants_
which enlivened the winter evenings, Cecil had to take her part with
a smiling face. She wondered sometimes whether there were any other
bright smiles which were only masks assumed for the evening with the
evening dress. She wondered whether there was any other woman in all
the crowd who saw athwart the lights and exotics of the dinner-table
the vision of one dear face whose reality was thousands of miles away.
"He may be lying dead while I sit simpering here," she thought. "Yet
that would be too dreadful. Oh! surely, surely I should know it if he
were dead!"
Bravely though she bore her burden, it was a very heavy one. No mother,
pining in the absence of her only son, could have felt more poignant
anxiety about the absent one than Cecil felt for the man who had loved
her and left her to marry another woman. How often--ah, how often,
amidst the hum of joyous voices, and the brilliant tones of a piano
vibrating under masterly hands--how often the lamplight faded, and the
faces of the crowd melted away, and the gorgeous drawing-room changed
itself into that weedy shore at the foot of grim Fortinbras Castle,
while the autumn rain drifted once more into Cecil Chudleigh's face,
and _his_ eyes looked down upon her dim with tears. Of all their gay
and happy hours, their pleasant rambles, Cecil recalled no picture so
vivid as that of her lover, in his sorrow, standing bareheaded in the
drifting rain, looking tenderly down upon her with fond despairing
eyes. And he was gone from her for ever; never, never, never, so long
as she lived, was she to look upon his face again.
But she endured her life, and by-and-by, when cold gleams of February
sunshine lighted the grey sky, the dowager carried her niece back to
Dorset Square, and all the old sordid wearisome care about forks,
spoons, and broken wine-glasses and incorrect butcher's bills, began
again.
But even broken wine-glasses may be a distraction, and a young lady who
has tradesmen's books and the contents of china closets to employ her
mind suffers less than the damsel who has nothing to do but to sit by
her casement, watching the slow changes of the heavens, and thinking
of the absent one. Industrious Charlotte, cutting bread and butter for
the little ones, is not so apt to fall in love with Werter as he is to
be inspired by a fatal passion for her, since, paltry and sordid a task
as Charlotte's may be, it yet requires some thought, or the lady will
cut her fingers. A little wholesome household work would have saved
poor Elaine from many of those long hours of brooding, in which the
lily maid of Astolat contemplated the dark knight's image. Work, the
primeval curse, may have been a blessing in disguise after all.
Lady Cecil bore her life. She went hither and thither to places in
which she felt little interest, amongst people whose companionship
seemed so poor a substitute for that brief, sweet friendship of the
departed autumn. Ah, what could ever bring back to her heart the
thrilling joy of that broken dream?
Yet her life was not altogether joyless. It was only the magical,
mystical gladness, the delight too deep for words, which had gone out
of her existence for ever in the hour of that irrevocable parting on
the wet sea-shore. She had friends and companions, a social status, in
right of her father's name and race, even amongst the vulgar who knew
that she was only a penniless dependant upon the sharp-spoken dowager.
Perhaps the friend with whom Cecil Chudleigh's proud reserve was most
often wont to melt into tender sympathy was Florence Crawford, the
frivolous divinity at whose shrine the young landscape painter had laid
his heart and his ambition.
They had met "in society," as Flo said, with a little air, which
implied that the only society in the civilised world was the circle
wherein Miss Crawford revolved: and they had taken a fancy to each
other, according to Florence, though it must be confessed the fancy
had been chiefly on her own side, as Cecil was not prone to sudden
friendships.
"But there was some one else took a fancy to you before I did,"
exclaimed Flo. "There's not the least occasion to blush, Lady Cecil,
for the some one else was only a middle-aged man, with such a shelf
on his dear old back that I sometimes quite long to set a row of
Carl-Theodore tea-cups on his coat-collar for ornamentation. It was
papa who took a fancy to you. He's the most absurd old thing in the
world, and he says yours is the very face he has been waiting for, for
his new picture. He is going to paint the prison scene in _Faust_,
and he declares that you have the exact expression he wants for his
Gretchen. You have no idea what trouble he will take to get a sitting
from any one whose face has fascinated him. Professional models are all
very well, but you can't get a professional model to read Goethe, or to
imagine that she sees an infant struggling in the water, for a shilling
an hour. What papa wants is expression, and he was struck by your face
the other night when you were singing at Lady Jacynt's; there was an
exalted look about your eyes and forehead, he said, which would be
worth a fortune to him; so I am to exert all my fascinations in order
to induce you to give him a sitting or two; and I'm sure you will,
won't you, Lady Cecil? for he really is a dear good creature."
Cecil assented very readily, flattered and honoured by the painter's
request. She was a far more reverent disciple of art than Florence
Crawford, who spoke flippantly of the greatest master of his age as
a dear old thing, and was wont to frisk hither and thither in her
father's painting-room, criticising his pictures as freely as if they
had been so many Parisian bonnets.
It would have been very strange if Cecil had not been glad to exchange
the sordid atmosphere of Dorset Square for the dreamy splendour of the
Fountains. The hour or two which Mr. Crawford had entreated in the
first place grew into many hours, and Cecil had spent half-a-dozen
pleasant mornings in the great master's painting-room before the vague
shadow which was so unintelligible to common eyes grew out of the
canvas, and became a woman instinct with life and soul. Flo brought
her box of water-colours on these occasions, and perched herself at a
little table in a corner of the spacious chamber; for she made a faint
show of devotion to art now and then as an excuse for intruding into
the painter's sanctum. What place of retreat could be sacred from an
only daughter, and such an only daughter as Florence Crawford?
So the young lady came very often to the noble tapestried
painting-room, into which half the contents of Mr. Woodgate's shop
seemed to have been imported, so rich was the gorgeous chamber in
black oak cabinets and stamped-leather-cushioned chairs, coloured
marbles and mediæval armour majolica vases and Venetian glass. The
painter loved beautiful things, and spent his money as recklessly as
Aladdin or Alexandre Dumas. For how was it possible that a man could be
careful of vulgar pounds and shillings under whose magic-working hand
human grandeur and human beauty developed into being--who knew but two
rivals, Rubens and Nature--and who could afford to stand comparison
with the first?
William Crawford was a painter in the highest and grandest sense of
the word; and he wasted his money and sold his pictures for a song
when the whim seized him, and scattered little water-colour bits in
the scrap-books of beautiful high-born feminine mendicants, which,
collected together, would have realised a small fortune at Christie's.
It was only when judicious friends with business habits stepped in
and insisted upon negotiating affairs for the great painter, that
Mr. Crawford received large prices for his pictures, and found a
satisfactory row of pencil figures under the last pen-and-ink entry
in his banking book. The story of the painter's youth and manhood
was not without a touch of sadness. It was the old, old story of a
brilliant career and a broken life. William Crawford had not sprung
into Fame's ample lap with one daring bound. His progress had been slow
and laborious, and there had been a few silver threads mingled with
his auburn hair before the laurel crown descended on his forehead, or
the nimbus of glory made a light about his earnest face. He had seen
other men pass him by--his companions of the Academy, the students who
had sat by his side,--he had seen them go by him to take their places
amongst the victors, great men in their way, most of them; but how weak
and puny was the greatest compared to him!
He had so much to endure, and he bore it all so meekly! So patient was
he in the sublime resignation of conscious genius, which knows that
it _must_ triumph, that he grew by-and-by to be set down as a dull
plodding fellow, who would never do any thing worth looking at. Year
after year--year after year--his pictures came back upon him from the
Academy, from the British Institution, rejected! rejected! rejected!
Yet he was William Crawford all the time, and knew himself, and the
sovereign power of his hand.
Meek and mighty spirit to wait so long, to labour so patiently,
hoarding thy strength, and adding to thy power day by day, as a miser
swells his pile of vulgar gold!
The day came at last, but not all at once. Pictures were accepted, and
"skyed:" critics talked about coldness, and blackness, and chalkiness:
friends were compassionate, and shoulders were shrugged with polite
despair. The poor man had really no idea of colour!
For a few years things went on like this, and then appeared a gorgeous
Rubens-like canvas, whereon Pericles reclined at the feet of Aspasia:
and in a day, in an hour, the mighty master of all the secrets of
colour revealed himself, and the world knew that William Crawford was a
great painter.
After that day the men who had called Crawford a dull, plodding fellow,
offered him monstrous bribes for the revelation of his "secret." He
smiled at their ignorance. He had no secret except his genius. His
mystic cabala lay in the two virtues that had made the law of his
life--unremitting industry, undeviating temperance. In the chill early
light of morning, in the warm glow or noon, in the deepening shadows of
evening, in the artificial light of the night school at the Academy,
William Crawford had toiled for twenty years, finding no drudgery too
hard, no monotonous repetition of study too wearisome. And now at
eight-and-thirty, he found himself a great man, and he knew that his
hand was to be trusted, and that his feet were surely planted on the
mountain he had climbed so patiently.
Alas, there are so many blessings in this life that come too late! Many
a vessel laden with the gold of Ophir only nears the shore when her
owner lies dead upon the sands. When William Crawford tasted the first
fruits of success, the wife--to have purchased whose happiness he would
have sold his heart's blood--had been dead ten years. She had felt the
cruel hand of poverty, and had withered under that bitter gripe; but
she had never complained. She had borne all meekly for his sake--for
his sake.
Now, when people offered him large prices for his pictures, he felt
half inclined to refuse their commissions in utter bitterness of heart.
"You should have bought my 'Pyramus and Thisbe' twelve years ago," he
would have cried. "A fifty-pound cheque would have done that for me
then which all the kings and princes of this earth could not do now. It
would have brought a smile to the face of my wife."
The young wife whose death had left such a terrible void in the
painter's heart had been of higher rank than himself, and had run away
from a luxurious home to inhabit draughty second-floor lodgings in a
street running out of the Strand. William Crawford had trusted in the
strength of his hand to win a better home for his darling. But the
blackest years of his life were those that immediately succeeded his
marriage, and the poor loving girl had to suffer deprivations that were
unfelt by the Spartan painter, but which fell heavily on the home-bred
damsel who had sacrificed so much for him. She would have held the loss
of position a very light one; but she found that she had lost all her
home-friends as well, for her father shut his door upon her after her
marriage, and she had no mother to plead for her at home, or to visit
her by stealth in her husband's shabby dwelling. The father was a
hard, obstinate man, who plucked his daughter's image out of his heart
as coolly as he erased her name from his will. He begged that Mrs.
Crawford might never be mentioned in his presence; and he threatened to
horsewhip the painter in the rooms of the Royal Academy if ever he met
him there.
Whether he relented suddenly when the young wife died, or whether his
conscience had given him some uneasiness from the beginning, no one
ever knew; but he wrote a civil letter to the widower, declaring his
willingness to adopt and educate the little girl his daughter had left
behind her.
There was some hesitation, a little parley as to how often the father
should be permitted to see his child; a very manly letter from the
painter, setting forth the condition on which he was willing to part
with the little girl, that condition being neither more nor less than
an understanding that she was _his_ child, and his only, committed as
a sacred trust to her mother's family, and to be claimed by him at any
hour he pleased. And then he let his little Florence go. A year later
he would as soon have plucked the heart out of his breast as he would
have parted from her; but at this time he was utterly broken down in
body and mind--so crushed, so desolate, that it seemed as if nothing
could add to his desolation. He was even glad to get rid of the child.
The sound of her young voice saddened him. There were tones in it that
were like her mother's.
"I sat in my room and painted," he said afterwards, when he was able to
talk of this dreadful time, "but I didn't know what I was painting, or
whether it was winter or summer. People would come in and sit down and
talk to me--they came to cheer me up a little, they said. I talked to
them and answered them; and when they went away I didn't know who they
were, or what they had been talking about. As for my work, the right
colours came on my brush somehow; but when the faces looked out at me
from my canvas, I used to wonder who had painted them, and what they
meant. I don't know how long that time lasted. I only know that the
best and dearest friend I ever had took me across the Channel with him,
and on to Italy; and one morning, after landing at some place from a
steamer in the darkness, I opened my window and saw the Bay of Naples
before me. I burst into tears, for the first time since my wife's
death; and after that I learnt to bear my sorrow patiently."
When William Crawford found himself a successful man, he built himself
a house at Kensington from a design of his own. After stating which
latter fact, it is quite unnecessary to say that the Italian façade was
perfection, that the Alhambra-like colonnade at the back was delicious,
that there was a great deal of space wasted in unnecessary passages,
and that there was neither a housemaid's closet nor a dust-bin in the
original plan of the mansion. But then what a charming spot was that on
which Mr. Crawford planted his temple! for he was far too wise a man
to erect his dwelling on one of those patches of arid waste which are
called desirable building-ground. He had discovered an inconvenient old
house in a delicious garden between the old court suburb and Tyburnia,
and had carted away the rambling, low-roofed dwelling, and set up his
dazzling white temple in its stead. The crowning glory of the place
was a pair of marble fountains which the painter had brought from
Rome--fountains whose silver waters had made harmonious accompaniment
to the voices of revellers in Tivoli fifteen hundred years ago.
It was to this pleasant home that William Crawford brought his
beautiful daughter from the fashionable boarding school in which she
had received her education. Her grandfather had died, leaving her the
five thousand pounds that had once been allotted to her mother. Her
aunts and uncles were scattered, and not one of them had been able to
obtain any lasting hold upon the impulsive little heart which beat
in Miss Crawford's breast. She came to the Fountains at her father's
bidding, and her pretty caressing ways were very pleasant to him; but
she did not fill the void in his heart. He looked in her face very
sadly sometimes, for it recalled the vision of another face, with a
tender, loving light in the eyes, which was wanting in Flo's flashing
glances. She was such a frivolous creature compared with her mother.
The difference between them was as wide as the contrast between
a tender cooing dove which nestles in your bosom and a beautiful
butterfly that flits and skims hither and thither in the sunshine. Miss
Crawford was fond of her father, and proud of him after a fashion; but
she had no power to appreciate the sublimity of his art, the grandeur
of his triumphs. She admired him, and was pleased with his success
because it had given him wealth and fashion. Alone in a desert that
_other one_ would have rejoiced with him in the glory of his work,
however unprofitable, however remote from the possibility of reward,
because it was his, and because he loved it.
There were times when Flo's frivolous criticisms jarred on the
painter's ear, for there were tones in her voice which even yet
reminded him too painfully of the lost one. He was an over-indulgent
father, said people, who estimated a father's indulgence by the amount
of a daughter's pocket-money; but it may be that he would have been
less indulgent if he had loved his child better, or rather if she had
been able to reach that inner sanctuary of his soul where the image of
the dead reigned alone.
* * * * *
Lady Cecil felt a thrill of delight when the painter turned his easel
and revealed his finished picture.
Ah, wonderful power, given to a man in such fulness as it had been
given to William Crawford once in two hundred years, rarest of all
earthly gifts, the masterdom of colour, the power which makes the
painter's hand second only to the hand of the Creator who bade Eve come
forth out of the shadow of night, and revealed to awakening Adam the
perfection of womanly loveliness.
In the prison scene the painter had full scope for his wondrous power
of colour. The light in the picture was subdued. Only through the open
door of poor Gretchen's cell one saw a lurid glimmer of the coming day.
In this open doorway lounged Mephistopheles, with a horrible smile upon
his face, and his figure darkly defined against that low lurid glimmer.
The light of the prison-lamp shone full on the faces of the lovers, and
the sickly yellow light made a kind of aureola around Gretchen's golden
head.
While Cecil stood before the picture in rapt admiration, Miss Crawford
laid down her brushes and came to look at her father's labour. The
painter lounged against the wall opposite his easel, gazing dreamily at
his completed work.
Oh, butterflies of fashion, driving mail-phaetons or tooling teams of
four-in-hand in the Lady's Mile, Sybarites and loiterers in pleasant
drawing-rooms, loungers in clubs, and triflers with existence,
lotus-eaters of every species, have any of _you_ ever known a joy
so deep as this--the joy that drove Pygmalion mad, the intoxicating
triumph of the creator who sees his work complete in all its beauty and
perfection?
"H'm, yes, it's very pretty," said Flo, after contemplating the picture
under the shadow of two pretty jewel-twinkling hands arched over her
piquant eyebrows; "but isn't Gretchen's arm a _leetle_ out of drawing?
I'm sure I could never get _my_ arm into that position; but I dare
say people's arms were more flexible in those days. How awfully blue
you've made Mephistopheles; but I'm very glad you haven't allowed him
to cross his legs. _Why_ a diabolical person should always cross his
legs is a mystery that I have never been able to fathom. It's very
nice, papa; but I don't like it so well as 'Pericles and Aspasia.'
Your proclivities are classic, you dear old thing, so you had better
stick to your Lempriere, and let us have rosy gods and goddesses _ad
infinitum_."
"_Ad nauseam_, perhaps," said the painter sadly.
The critics had been very hard upon William Crawford, and there had
been people besotted enough to utter the shameful word "sensualism" in
connection with the purest and simplest creature who ever worshipped
the divinity of beauty. And then there were all the host of funny
little writers who wrote facetious little criticisms upon the great
man's pictures. His Cupid had the mumps, his Psyche was in the last
stage of scarlet fever, his Alcibiades was a butcher's boy, his
Timandra a scorbutic shrew, his Boadicea a prize-fighter disguised in
female raiment. The funny little writers who could not have sketched
the outline of a pump-handle correctly, had fine fun out of William
Crawford. He was happy in spite of all adverse criticism, and had
succeeded in spite of his critics. Of course there were some who knew
what they were writing about; and to such adverse opinion as he felt
to be just William Crawford bowed his head meekly, not too proud to
believe that he could have done better if he had "taken more pains."
Who could be more acutely conscious than he was of his shortcomings?
Whose eyes were keener than his to perceive the weak spots in his work?
There is no finer tonic for the true worker than adverse criticism. The
friend's lavish praise may enervate: the foe's hardest usage braces
and fortifies. Guy Patin, in a criticism on Sir Thomas Brownie, which
in the Christian benevolence of its tone is not altogether unlike some
criticism of the nineteenth century--regrets that "the man is alive,
because he may grow worse." How completely the slashing critics of the
present day seem to forget that so long as the man is alive, it is
possible for him to grow better!
William Crawford was very happy in the painting-room where the greater
part of his life was spent. What man can be so happy as the triumphant
artist?--convinced of the innocence and purity of his triumphs, assured
of being remembered when all other labourers are forgotten, knowing
that his glory will be revealed to posterity by no musty records
written by a stranger, but by his own handiwork, instinct with his own
soul, revealing himself in a language that needs no translation, and is
almost as familiar to the savage as to the _savant_, so nearly does it
copy nature.
Florence thought it a very hard thing that her father would not take
her to perpetual parties, and grumbled sorely at being sent under
convoy of any grumpy old chaperone who might be available; but on this
matter the painter very rarely gave way.
"Do you know how long art is, as compared to a man's life?" he asked.
"Can you guess what Raffaelle might have been if he had lived to be as
old as Titian? If there is any special strength in my hand, Flo, it
is because in twenty years I have worked as hard as most men work in
forty. When I paid fifteen shillings a week for my lodgings my landlord
grumbled because I kept my fire in all night, in order that I might be
at work before daybreak. I don't make any merit of having worked hard,
you know, my dear. I have worked because my work pleased me; and you
would never believe how little I ever thought of the fame or money that
success would bring me. I don't think your real artist ever sets much
value upon the price of his labour; he may want money as much as any
other man, and of course he is glad to get it; but it is the triumph
of his art that he rejoices in, rather than any personal success. The
creation of his work is in itself happiness, and would be though his
picture were foredoomed to melt and vanish under his hand at the moment
of its completion. I would answer for it that Michael Angelo enjoyed
modelling his statue of snow quite as much as if he had been putting
the finishing touches of his chisel to the fairest marble that ever
grew into life under the craftsman's hand, to receive a soul from the
last touch of the master. Don't worry me about parties, Flo. I will
pay as many milliner's bills as you like, and I'll paint you in all
your prettiest dresses, and your most bewitching attitudes, and give
you the price of your beauty for pocket-money; but I won't go to be
crushed to death upon staircases, or martyred in the act of fetching
an ice. I won't go to people who only want to see what the painter of
Aspasia is like, as if I must needs be like something different from my
fellow-men, and who will think me an insignificant-looking fellow, with
very little to say for myself. What should I have to say to people who
don't know the A B C of the language to the study of which I have given
my life?"
So Flo was obliged to be satisfied, and was fain to go into society
under the wing of benevolent matrons who had no daughters of their
own to be crushed by Miss Crawford's beauty. Flo had her maid and her
carriage and was quite a little woman of fashion; while the painter
lived his own life opening his doors every Sunday evening to all who
cared to visit him, and generally hiding himself in some snug little
corner of his spacious drawing-rooms amongst the friends of his soul,
while fashionable visitors who had been received with perfect _aplomb_
by Florence, prowled about in search of him, and stared at the wrong
man through gold-rimmed eyeglasses, or pronounced adverse criticisms
upon his own pictures under his very nose. Of course Florence Crawford
was perfectly aware that her father's _protégé_, the landscape painter,
was desperately in love with her. We live in a fast-going century, and
though Flo was only eighteen, she was fully versed in the diagnostics
of a hopeless passion of which she was the object. She knew poor
Philip's weakness, and laughed undisguisedly at his folly. She was a
very dashing young person, and she declared herself to be an utterly
heartless young person whenever she became expansive and confidential.
Whether the heartlessness were real or affected was an enigma which no
one had yet been able to solve. Whatever were the follies of the age,
Flo went with them at full gallop. She talked slang, and affected a
masculine contempt for all feminine pursuits, had been heard to ask
what bodkins were meant for, and whether shirt-buttons were fastened on
their foundations with glue. She had a tiny, tiny morocco volume, lined
with satin, and emblazoned with gold, and obnoxious with patchouli--a
volume that was called a betting-book, and which had about the same
relation to the greasy volumes kept by the bookmen who gather on the
waste ground in Victoria Road, or meet one another furtively at the
corner of Farringdon Street, as a rosebud has to a red cabbage. Dozens
of Jouvin's or Dent's six-and-a-quarter gloves were the principal
entries in this mystic volume; but Flo had been known to obtain an
actual tip from some aristocratic member of the Jockey Club, by whose
friendly agency real money had been wagered and won. She was very fast,
and had once been seen under the marble colonnade at the Fountains
puffing daintily at a coquettish little cigarette. But it is only fair
to add that the daring exploit resulted in deadly pallor and unpleasant
faintness, and that the experiment was not repeated. She had her horse,
and her own groom,--a steady old fellow who helped in the garden, and
of whose boots and costume poor Flo was inclined to be rather ashamed
when she met her stylish friends in the Row.
Did she ever pause to think that her life was useless, and extravagant
and unwomanly? Well, no, not yet. She was only eighteen, remember, the
age when a woman has not quite ceased to be a kind of refinement upon
a kitten--beautiful, graceful, capricious, mischievous, treacherous.
She was at an age when a woman is apt to take pleasure in treading on
masculine hearts, and if remonstrated with upon her cruelty, would be
quite inclined to echo the question of the poetess, and cry,--
"Why should a heart have been there,
In the way of a fair woman's foot?"
Flo insisted on making a confidante of Cecil.
"I'm the most mercenary of creatures, you know, dear," she said, "and
I made up my mind ever so long ago that I would marry for money, and
nothing but money. All the nicest girls marry for money nowadays, and
live happy ever afterwards. I dare say there was a time when it was
quite nice to be poor, and live in a cottage with the husband of one's
choice. What a musty old Minerva Press phrase that is!" cried Flo,
with a grimace,--"the husband of one's choice! But that was in the
days when women wore cottage-bonnets with a bit of ribbon across the
crown, or hideous gipsy hats tied down with handkerchiefs, and white
muslin dresses with a breadth and a half in the skirt, and when a woman
on horseback was a show to be followed by street boys. I suppose Lady
Godiva and Queen Elizabeth were the only women who ever did ride in
the Middle Ages. _Nous avons change tout cela._ A woman in the present
day must have three or four hundred a-year for pin-money, if she is
not to be a disgrace to her sex in the way of gloves and bonnets;
and she must ride a three hundred guinea hack if she wants to escape
being trampled upon by her dearest friends; and she will find herself
a perfect outcast unless she has a box in a good position at one of
the opera-houses; and she must go in for dogs and china,--not vulgar
modern Dresden abominations, in the way of simpering shepherdesses,
and creatures in hoops drinking chocolate or playing chess; but old
Vienna, or Chelsea, with the gold anchor, or deliciously ugly Wedgwood,
or soft paste. In short, my dearest Cecil, a woman nowadays is a very
expensive creature, and love in a cottage is an impossibility. Why,
there are no cottages for the poor lovers! The tiniest, tiniest villa
on the banks of the Thames costs about two hundred a-year; and if the
poverty-stricken creatures who marry for love want a house, they must
go to some horrible place beyond the Seven Sisters' Road, and be happy
amongst a wilderness of brickfields and railway arches!"
Lady Cecil had seen Florence and Philip together, and had taken it into
her head that they loved each other. Her own sorrowful love-story had
made her very tenderly disposed towards youthful lovers, and she had
ventured to remonstrate with Florence.
"One reads about cruel parents and heart-broken damsels, but I don't
think your papa would set his face against Mr Foley so sternly as you
set yours, Flory," she said. "He was talking of the young painter the
other day, and he told me that your friend Philip has a great career
before him if he works patiently."
"Yes, and when he is as old as papa he will be able to earn two or
three thousand a-year, I suppose!" exclaimed Miss Crawford. "Do you
think that is a brilliant prospect for a girl who cannot live out
of society? People with any thing under five thousand a-year are
paupers--in society. Do you know what it is that is bearing down upon
us, and crushing us all, Cecil, like an avalanche of gold? It is the
wealth of the commercial plutocracy. The triumphant monster, Commerce,
is devouring us all. Ask papa who buys his pictures; ask where the gems
from Christie's go when the great auctions are over; ask why diamonds
are worth twice as much to-day as they were twenty years ago: it is all
because the princes of trade have taken possession of our land, Cecil,
and nowadays a girl must set her cap in the direction of Manchester, if
she wishes to marry well."
"Florence, I can't bear to hear you talk like this."
"I am a woman of the world, dear, and I mean to do the best I can for
myself. It is very dreadful, I know, but at least I am candid with
you. I went to a fashionable school, and you've no idea how we all
worshipped wealth and finery. Papa used to come and see me in horrid
old hansom cabs, that jingled and rattled as if they would have fallen
to pieces when he stepped out of them; but some girls had fathers and
mothers who came in two-hundred-guinea barouches, and oh, what a gulf
there was between us! and then, again, poor mamma's people live in
Russell Square, and there were girls at that school who made me feel
that it was a kind of disgrace to have friends in Russell Square. And
when I spent the holidays with my uncles and aunts, I used to have
mamma's foolish marriage dinned into my ears; and though I always took
her part, and declared that it was better to marry papa than to marry
a prince of the blood royal, I _did_ think, in my secret soul, that it
was very silly to go and live in shabby lodgings near the noisy dirty
Strand. Is it any wonder that I have grown up heartless and mercenary,
and that I want to have a fine house and horses and carriages when
I marry? I hope you will marry a rich man too, Cecil, and give nice
parties. You won't have Thursdays though, will you, dear? I have set my
heart on having Thursday for my own, own evening."
To this effect Miss Crawford would discourse in her own vivacious
fashion; and it was in vain that Cecil appealed to the unawakened heart.
"Philip Foley is a most estimable creature," said Flo; "and if he were
not absurdly self-conscious--all young men are so self-conscious
nowadays; in fact, in a general way, I consider young men perfectly
hateful,--and if he were a marquis with something under a hundred
thousand a year, I should think him quite adorable. But then, you
see, he isn't a marquis, and he will never earn any thing like a
hundred thousand a year by painting those wild skies and dismal rocks
of his. Do you know what the Princess Elizabeth, that dear sweet
darling whom every one so admires, said when she saw one of Mr.
Foley's red-and-yellow sunsets hung next the ceiling in Trafalgar
Square:--'Why, what do the Hanging Committee mean by sticking up
pictures of eggs and bacon?' said the princess; and ever since that,
the poor young man's skies have been called eggs and bacon."