POOR PHILIP.
There were other men besides Laurence O'Boyneville who found it
pleasant to pitch their tents and kindle their household fires within
the limits of Bloomsbury. Sigismund Smythe, the novelist, believed in
the neighbourhood of Russell Square as the most delightful spot on
earth.
"I had an over-dose of the country when I was young, and I'm not
given to babble of green fields and pastures new," said Mr. Smythe,
whose quotations were apt to be more appropriate than correct.
"People may talk as they like about the dulness of Rachel Street, and
Sidney Crescent. I only wish they'd had a taste of the High Street
of my native town on a hot summer's evening between eight and nine
o'clock. That would cure them. Dull, quotha! haven't we the cabs and
the tradesmen's carts, and the great vans from King's Cross Station,
and coals always being delivered at one's next-door neighbour's. In
my native town there wasn't a tradesman kept any conveyance above a
wheelbarrow; and as to cabs, there was only one dilapidated old fly
in the place. Oh, I should like the people who turn up their noses
at Bloomsbury to try Wareham, when the townspeople have gone to a
cricket-match in the Castle-Meads, and when the only thing alive in the
High Street is one solitary cat stalking upon the tops of the houses.
Dull, indeed! why, on such a summer evening as I'm thinking of, I've
heard a man yawn three doors off, and I'm sure a hearty sneeze would
have startled the whole town."
Mr. Smythe had taken to himself a pretty country-bred young wife, the
orphan niece of his old friend Charles Raymond, with whom he lived in
perfect harmony, and who never read a line of his novels. This was a
point upon which the novelist insisted.
"If you read my books you'll make suggestions, and if you make
suggestions I shall hate you, and the better your suggestions are the
more I shall hate you," said Sigismund. "Nor do I care about your
knowing the depths of infamy which the human mind, for an adequate
consideration, can fathom. The critics inform me that my fictions are
demoralising. As a writer and a ratepayer I believe in my fictions;
but as a husband I defer to the critics, and forbid my wife to read my
novels."
Sigismund's house was comfortably furnished; and in no habitation
within sound of the bells of St. Pancras were to be seen so many
nicknacks, such quaint old black oak book-cases and cabinets, such
wonderful morsels of majolica and Palissy, such Liliputian silver
tea-services and watering-pots and coal-scuttles, such marvels in the
art of photography, such delicious book-binding in white vellum and
many-coloured calf, as in the dwelling of the romancer. Mr. Smythe
possessed that love of colour and brightness, that childlike yearning
for prettiness, which seems the attribute of most men who live by the
cultivation of their fancy. To keep these household gods in order was
Mrs. Smythe's chief occupation and delight; and to her mind the little
inner room lined with books and furnished with a wonderful office-table
on which there were inexhaustible bundles of quill-pens and innumerable
reams of smooth shining foreign note-paper, was the most sacred chamber
ever tenanted by mortal man. For in this apartment did the industrious
Sigismund compose his romances, beguiled by the yelping and howling
of his favourite dog, who inhabited an open stone-vault below the
novelist's windows,--a vault which the boldest of house-agents faltered
in designating a back-garden.
Perhaps there was no pleasanter house with a mile radius of Russell
Square than the modest dwelling inhabited by Mr. and Mrs. Smythe.
Here, when the moderator lamp was lighted and the curtains drawn,
some of the brightest luminaries of modern literature assembled round
the hospitable hearth. Here were always to be found dry sherry and
unlimited soda-water, the palest brandy and the most genuine Seltzer
and Vichy. Here little wicker covered bottles of liqueur, and cherry
cordials that had come straight from Copenhagen by convoy of friendly
hands, were found lurking in corners of sideboards. Here better things
were said than ever found their way to the compositor. Here the mighty
chief of the "Bond-Street Blagueur" laid aside the murderous pen of the
critic and expanded in genial friendship--that delicious friendship
of the _coterie_, which is another name for enmity to all the rest of
the world. And here poor Philip Foley came to seek consolation--or at
least friendly listeners into whose ears he could pour the unsuccessful
man's bitter railing--when the British Institution and the Academy had
been unanimous in rejecting his pictures, and when the Sunday evenings
at the Fountains had been particularly dispiriting. Of late Mr. Foley
had abandoned himself to a sullen despair--the outward and visible
tokens whereof were to be observed in the length of his hair and the
carelessness of his attire. He had taken to immoderate tobacco, and
laughed a strident laugh at the caustic witticisms of the "Bond-Street"
chief. He had grown fitful in his habits, and would sometimes drink
himself into an intellectual frenzy with innumerable tumblers of brandy
and Seltzer, while on other occasions he would sit apart glowering
moodily on the company, and refusing to taste any thing stronger than
water.
Sigismund was very good to this stricken deer. Sometimes, when Philip
had taken a homely dinner with Mr. and Mrs. Smythe, and when the
novelist had been working hard all day, the two young men paced the
streets and squares of the Bloomsbury district together in gloaming and
gaslight, and discoursed with brotherly confidence and freedom.
"I tell you she isn't worth the howling you make about her--_le jeu ne
vaut pas_--the what's-its-name," said the practical Sigismund. "What
is she but a little fair-haired chit, with dark eyebrows and big grey
eyes, and the insolent turned-up nose of a Palais-Royal _soubrette_?
What is she but a mercenary little adventuress? Yes, though she lives
under her father's roof, and shelters her innocence under the wing of
a chaperone when she ventures abroad, the woman who angles for a rich
husband is no better than an adventuress, whatever and whoever she may
be. And you let yourself run to seed, and neglect your work, and take
to cynical declamation against things in general, when you have good
reason to be thankful for a blessed escape from misery. Do you think
such a wife as William Crawford's daughter could fail to make you
wretched? Why, she would spend your annual earnings on her gloves; and
the day that brought you back your unhung pictures from the Academy
would in all probability bring you a county-court summons from your
wife's milliner. No, no, Phil; the lovely Florence would have been
no wife for you, and she has shown herself wise in her generation.
You want a dear homely little creature--say an orphan,--there's an
extraordinary advantage in marrying an orphan,--a poor desolate young
thing who has spent her girlhood as half-boarder, or governess-pupil
in a cheap boarding-school, and who will think Islington a paradise,
and esteem herself fortunate if she gets a new gown once a year, and
a clean bonnet-cap at Christmas and Easter. That's the only kind of
wife for a rising man--the dear good uncomplaining helpmate, who will
devote all the strength of her intellect to make both ends meet, and
will, while sitting by your side in the parlour, have an instinctive
consciousness that the maid-of-all-work is burning a tallow-candle to
waste in the back-kitchen,--the model housewife of the Dutch painters,
who goes down to her kitchen with a candle in the dead of night, to
prevent waste and riot. You want a dear little girl with a genius for
mending and contriving, who will sit by your fireside darning your
socks, and singing 'Wapping old stairs' or 'The last rose of summer'
while you work at your easel, and who will believe in you, in spite
of the world, as the greatest genius that ever handled a brush. In
point of fact, you want such a wife as my wife!" exclaimed Sigismund
triumphantly. "And as for Florence Crawford, let her make merry or
go hang herself, as the bard observes. Good gracious me!" cried the
romancer, suddenly bursting into song:
"'Should I, wasting in despai-air,
Die-ie becau-ause a woman's fai-air?'
By which, of course, I mean shall _you_," he added, in explanation.
"Besides, haven't you your art to fall back upon? If life goes wrong
with you, can't you take it out in violent reds and yellows, as I take
it out in murder and villany? When the critics fall foul of me, I buy
an extra ream of paper and a gallon of ink, and go at my work with a
will. All the world lies before you, dear old Phil; and the day may
come when Mrs. Lobyer will be obliged to expend her shilling for a
peep at your great picture reigning in solitary glory in some West-end
gallery; which isn't by any means a new dodge by-the-bye, for didn't
the Athenians pay an entrance-fee for seeing the 'Helen' which Zeuxis
painted for their city?"
Thus consoled by the voice of friendship, Mr. Foley only grew more
bitter. But he took his friend's advice nevertheless. Expended his last
ten-pound note in the purchase of a new easel, and set up a monster
canvas. He was almost like poor Haydon, who, in the piteous record of
his wasted life, declares that without "a new large picture to lean
upon," he felt "as if deserted by the world."
In all the course of his acquaintance with William Crawford's
fascinating daughter, the young painter had made no direct avowal of
his passion. He loved her--he had told her so, indirectly, a thousand
times--and he knew that she was conscious of his devotion.
For some time after hearing Florence Crawford's engagement discussed
as an established fact, Mr. Foley kept aloof from the Sunday-evening
gatherings at the Fountains. Ah, how he hated the dreary Sabbath
twilights after he had forsworn the delight of Flo's society; the wind
and dust upon the Islington highways; the smartly-dressed church-goers
decorously moving homewards; the smarter servant-maids hurrying away
from hot little chapels, where they had been enduring semi-suffocation
in the glare of the gas! Those bright, windy, spring evenings were
terrible to the struggling painter. The decorous Islingtonians stared
at him wonderingly as he passed them by, with his haggard face and
streaming hair, his meerschaum-pipe and paint-stained coat. He lit
his pipe when he was clear of the crowd, and with that faithful
companion walked the suburban highways till midnight. On such evenings
the atmosphere of his painting-room stifled him; the prim little
sitting-room, in which his landlord's family kept their Sabbath state,
was odious to him.
"I feel as if I couldn't breathe on those wretched Sunday nights,"
said Philip to his faithful Sigismund. "It is all very well while I
can see to paint--for I have grown a heathen since--since--_she_ threw
me over--and I stick to my easel on Sundays as well as week days; but
when the light goes my pluck goes with it. I light my pipe, but the
tobacco chokes me. I fold my arms upon the window-sill; and try to
think out some difficulty in the composition of my picture; but it's
no use. I find myself thinking of _her_, and wondering whether she is
arraying herself in one of those gauzy white muslins, with floating
turquoise-coloured ribbons, in which she looks the incarnation of
freshness and innocence. And then I light my lamp and open my box of
water-colours, and make a little sketch of her in the cloudy muslin,
and the sky-blue ribbons, with sunshine upon her hair, and sunshine
upon her dress, and the tenderest shadows hovering about and around
her. Ah, Sigismund, if you are ever desperately in love, thank
Providence that you can't paint. That's a fatal power. To conjure
out of a few paltry pigments the beloved face in all its dangerous
beauty, instinct with looks of love that never will illumine it for
you; to be for ever calling into life and brightness the same lovely
shadow, and to know that it is only a beautiful phantasm; to kiss the
lips that are nothing but a patch of colour wet from your own brush;
to pore upon eyes that owe their sole light to artful touches of the
pencil,--ah, dear friend, _that_ way madness lies! If St. Anthony had
been as good a draughtsman as William Crawford, he wouldn't have been
_Saint_ Anthony; for he could never have rid himself of the sirens.
When I have finished my sketch, and have admired it, and have got into
a passion with it, and have torn it into a hundred fragments, I put on
my hat and go out. But even out of doors the atmosphere seems close and
stifling, and I can scarcely breathe till I get beyond Holloway, to the
crown of Highgate Hill; and then I stand on the bridge and look down
upon London, and think what a vast Babylon it is, and how many girls
there are within its boundaries ready, like Florence Crawford, to sell
themselves to the highest bidder--slaves who only lack the badge of
slavery. I shall go to Switzerland in the autumn, Sigismund, and paint
from nature, and try if I can't walk down my disappointments amongst
the mountains."
As the time when Miss Crawford was likely to become Mrs. Lobyer drew
nearer, poor Philip found his Sabbath evenings more difficult of
endurance.
That passionate yearning to see the adored object once more--for the
last, last time--to which all despairing lovers are liable, took
complete possession of the young painter. For three consecutive Sundays
he fought against the temptation, calling up his pride to assist him
in the struggle. But pride is very weak when bidden to do battle with
love. On the third occasion Mr. Foley snatched up his hat, hurried to
a barber in a poor neighbourhood, in which a barber's business was at
its best on a Sunday, and sacrificed the luxuriance of his hair and
beard to the man's inartistic scissors. Then, after a walk, in which
he fought the tempter for the last time, changing his mind every five
minutes, the painter went back to his lodgings and made a careful
toilet. There was a feverish kind of pleasure in what he was doing--the
desperate sense of delight which a despairing wretch is apt to feel
when his woes have come to a climax, and he is about to snatch the one
chance of a fleeting joy that remains to him amidst his misery.
It was a balmy evening in May, and the stars were shining in a tender
blue sky, when Philip descended from the heights of Islington. He
had sold no picture for the last six months, and had exhausted the
quarterly instalments of his modest income, so he was fain to make
his way on foot along the interminable New Road and across the park
to Kensington. He brushed the dust from his boots with his cambric
handkerchief as he stood before Mr. Crawford's gates, and while doing
so, he had the pleasure of beholding the arrival of a pair of high
stepping cobs, and the smallest of miniature broughams, furnished with
the biggest and most ferociously flaming of lamps, whose demoniac
glare might have been easily dispensed with under the silvery spring
starlight. A contemptuous groom with a tight waist descended from the
box of this vehicle and opened the door with a bang, thereby releasing
Mr. Lobyer, who emerged something after the fashion of a badly-fitting
jack-in-the-box, and who looked a great deal too big and clumsy for
his brougham. The two men looked at each other as they passed through
the gateway together, pretending not to know each other, and with an
unquenchable hatred visible in the faces which they fondly imagined
expressed nothing but a contemptuous indifference.
The rich man was free of the place, and contrived to push his way
to the drawing-room before Philip; and the young painter, following
close upon his heels, had the opportunity of beholding Miss Crawford's
coquettishly disdainful welcome of her affianced suitor.
Poor Philip saw her face grow pale as she looked across her lover's
shoulder and recognised her old admirer; but the colour came back to
the delicate cheeks very quickly, and she gave Philip her hand with her
airiest manner.
"Where have you been hiding yourself all the season, Mr. Foley?" she
exclaimed. "We never see you now. I hope you are devoting yourself to
some great picture that is to astonish us all. Do tell me what you have
been doing in all these ages."
Miss Crawford drew her airy dress away from one side of the capacious
triangular ottoman, which had been almost hidden under her voluminous
draperies, and Philip seated himself in the vacant place. Yes, there
are decidedly some joys left even for the desperate man, and Philip
experienced a keen sense of delight in defying Mr. Lobyer.
That gentleman stood beside his betrothed, looking down upon her with
an expression which might have in some degree justified the dismal
forebodings of the people who foresaw only melancholy results from Miss
Crawford's brilliant match. But Flo was not a person to be alarmed by
the scowls of a jealous swain, scowl he never so savagely. She looked
up at Mr. Lobyer with her sweetest smile, and murmured gently:
"Surely, Thomas, you know Mr. Foley? you must have met him here again
and again."
The two men uttered unintelligible growls without looking at each
other, and Florence continued her conversation with her unhappy admirer.
"I hope you have been working very hard," she said, "and painting from
nature. Papa is always talking about the necessity of painting from
nature. Have you been abroad, or in Scotland, or Wales? Pray let us
hear what you have been doing."
"Very little so far, Miss Crawford," answered the landscape-painter
gravely, "but I am beginning to work in savage earnest. 'Men must work,
and women must weep.' I think that's what Mr. Kingsley says. Heaven
knows the men work hard enough nowadays, but I fancy the race of women
who weep has passed away."
Miss Crawford looked at her victim with the most charming expression of
bewilderment; and then after a brief pause she said sweetly:
"I looked for something of yours at the British Institution and the
Academy, and was so disappointed to find nothing. How did it happen?"
"My pictures were rejected. It is my destiny to be rejected," said
Philip, with tragical intensity.
Mr. Lobyer at this moment gave utterance to a suppressed growl, and
might possibly have testified his indignation by some overt act of
discourtesy towards Philip, if a little deputation had not approached
the ottoman to entreat a song from Miss Crawford. That young lady,
rising promptly to comply with the desire of her friends, left her two
lovers scowling at each other.
A young German, of a musical turn of mind, conducted Flo to the piano,
and made himself busy in arranging the music and placing the candles.
Mr. Lobyer, glaring at this gentleman, and addressing Philip Foley
under cover of this gentleman, gave utterance to his sentiments.
"I should have thought when a fellow was engaged to be married to a
girl, other fellows would have sense enough to know that the girl
doesn't want their attentions," said the amiable Thomas; and then he
stalked to the piano, and stood behind his liege lady, staring moodily
at the parting of her hair as she played and sang. Mr. Lobyer was not
an enthusiast in the musical art, nor indeed in the pictorial, nor in
any art which demands the possession of refined tastes in the man who
loves it.
Philip held himself aloof from the group around the piano. He heard
Flo's clear soprano voice ring out the airiest of ballads, all about
Switzerland and "chamois bounding free," and mountain maids, who sing
tra-la-la-la from morn till dewy eve. He heard her, and fancied that
such silvery notes could only belong to a singer unencumbered with
anything in the way of a heart.
"She could never sing like that if she had a spark of real feeling," he
thought. "How charming she was just now! how sweetly she smiled at me!
how graciously she invited me to sit by her side! And yet she has no
more consciousness of my suffering than if she were a mermaid. She is
going to marry a rich man, and she is so pleased with her good fortune
that she is ready to be amiable to all the world. But for pity, or
compunction, or womanly tenderness--bah! she does not know what such
things mean."
The young painter turned his back upon the crowd--the fashionable
people who came to the Fountains because they wanted to see what
William Crawford was like, and the artists and professional people,
who came because they liked him--poor Philip turned his back upon
society, and went into a little inner room where there were stands of
engravings and photographs, and where flirtations were often carried
on pleasantly under cover of art. The little room happened to be empty
just now, and Philip threw himself into a chair by the open window,
and abandoned himself to melancholy meditation. Mr. Crawford's garden
looked very pretty in the starlight. There were trees that had been
growing there for centuries--a noble old cedar, which had sheltered the
powdered beaux and belles of the Hanoverian dynasty, under which Harley
or Bolingbroke may have paced with meditative steps; a tree that had
flourished in the days of the court suburb's grandest glory, and which
flourished still for the delight of William Crawford the painter, who
had given something like a guinea an inch for his old-fashioned garden.
Philip had been sitting alone for some time; he had been so long
undisturbed that he had forgotten the nature of the place he was in,
and the meaning of that gentle buzzing and humming of voices in the
adjoining apartment. So profound were the young man's meditations that
the sound of footsteps close behind him did not break the spell of his
reverie. It was only when a friendly hand was laid upon his shoulder
that he looked up and saw his host standing by his side.
"Florence told me you were here, but I couldn't find you till this
moment," said the great painter, giving his cordial hand to the moody
struggler. "What have you been doing with yourself all these months? I
wanted your help for the background of my Jupiter; but perhaps you are
growing too big a man to paint backgrounds."
"Not too big a man, Mr. Crawford, but too proud a man. I think the
unsuccessful men are always the proudest. Failure is like poverty, it
sets a man against his fortunate fellow-creatures. I've been painting
seven years; and though I've worked fitfully, I've not been idle. If I
don't do any thing to make my name known amongst painters in the next
three years, I'll make a bonfire of my easel and all the rubbish of my
studio, and take to my father's trade."
"What was that?"
"He was a lieutenant in the 82nd foot, and died of cholera on a forced
march in the hottest month of the East-Indian summer. There was a fuss
made at the Home Office about that march, and it turned out to have
been one of those official blunders by which lives are so often wasted.
I dare say my father had rather a hard time of it altogether in his
brief military career, but his life wasn't _all_ disappointment and
failure. He didn't know what it was to give his heart and soul to the
work he loved--to think of it by day and to dream of it by night, until
he woke from his bright dreams to find it all so much wasted labour. He
never knew that."
"No, Philip," answered William Crawford gravely, "but I have known
that; and you know as well as I do that I have gone through the
struggles, and endured the disappointments, that seem so hard to you
now. Do you remember that mystical story of Bulwer Lytton's, in which
the student, who would fain have made himself master of a mighty
science, was arrested at the outset by a hideous spectre that haunted
the threshold of the shadowy temple? At the portal of every temple you
will meet the same forbidding spirit. I have faced the Dweller on the
Threshold, Philip, and have wrestled with and vanquished him. For me
he has borne the shape of toil and poverty, failure and humiliation.
He has dressed himself in the clothes of the hanging-committee, and
has rejected my pictures; he has made himself an art-critic, and
has demolished me in a malevolent criticism. In every form I have
encountered him, and have mastered him--only because I loved my art
better than I loved myself, and worshipped my art as something apart
from myself. There was some method in poor Haydon's madness when he
said, 'In me the solitary sublimity of high art is not gone.' With
an execution in his house, and a cook dunning him for her wages, the
poor enthusiast was able to rejoice that there was one person left in
the world to paint big classic unsaleable pictures. I believe that
poor fellow was a real artist. There are men who paint great pictures
who are not true artists; and there are true artists who never paint
great pictures. Your ideal artist is above envy and above despair.
Haydon committed suicide because he couldn't pay his butcher and
baker, not because his big canvases were unsuccessful. He would have
gone on painting, and hoping against hope, if he could have afforded
to live; it was the sordid every-day necessity that vanquished him.
You will never be a great painter, Foley, while you think of your
own disappointments, your own failures: you must learn to merge your
identity into the mighty abstraction. If they refuse your picture at
the Academy to-day, go home and begin a better to-morrow; and before
the month is out you will rejoice that your rejected canvas was unhung.
The story of Lot's wife has a moral for painters. Never look back. What
are the failures of the past and the present? A little wasted canvas,
a few tubes of colour more or less; and it is across the failures of
the present that brave men march to the triumphs of the future. What
hot-headed fellows the young men of the present day are! I was five and
thirty before I got a decent price for a picture; and here is a lad of
twenty-seven talking of going out to India to die, because he is not
acknowledged as the new Turner."
William Crawford had been the kindly friend and adviser of many young
painters; but it was not often that he spoke as earnestly as he had
spoken to Philip Foley to-night. The young man grasped his counsellor's
hand with feverish ardour.
"You are right," he said. "I am a weak, egotistical fool; and it is
of myself I am always thinking, and not of my art. A painter ought to
divorce himself from the common weaknesses and to wean himself from
the common pleasures of mankind; and yet Rubens was happy with his
beautiful young wives, and had his home as well as his painting-room.
I gathered some ivy-leaves in his garden last autumn, and, standing
in the little pavilion where he used to sit sketching on summer
mornings, I thought what a blessed existence it must have been, the
sweet home-life in that quaint old city of Antwerp. But it is not in
every man to be Rubens, nor is it in every man to win the woman he
loves; and--you are right, Mr. Crawford. The painter who wants to be
great must forget himself and his own troubles. I dare say there were
family jars even in the Antwerp household, and that glorious Peter Paul
has gone to his work with a sore heart on some of those bright summer
mornings."
There was a pause, during which both men stood looking out at the
starlit garden, thinking of the women they loved. Mrs. Champernowne had
promised to "look in" at the Fountains on that special Sunday evening,
and had not done so.
"It was like her to delude me by a promise, on purpose to disappoint me
by breaking it," thought Mr. Crawford bitterly.
"Come, Foley," he said at last, "let's hear what you have been doing. I
hope you are working honestly."
"I am working honestly just now; but I have wasted more of my life
lately than I can afford to waste, and I have only just awakened to the
sense of my folly."
"Then you are lucky," answered William Crawford. "The man who awakes
to a sense of his folly at twenty-seven is a happy fellow. There are
some of us who are fools for the best part of our lives. But answer my
question plainly: What are you doing now?"
"Mountain-scenery--an evening-storm."
"And you paint your mountain-storm at Islington, with no better light
than you get across London chimney-pots! That is not the way Collins
painted. You must go straight to nature, my dear boy, and paint your
storm amongst the mountains."
"A man whose pictures won't sell, and who has only a hundred a-year to
fall back upon, can't afford to go to nature. I did think of spending
the summer on the Yorkshire coast, roughing it among fishermen and
coast-guardsmen; but I have outrun the constable, and must stop in my
Islington lodging and paint 'pot-boilers.' I can't afford to travel
this year."
"Yes, you can, Philip, if I lend you a couple of hundred pounds."
"You, Mr. Crawford?"
"Who can better afford to do so than I, who know your power to do great
things in the future? However, on reflection, I won't lend you the
money. Borrowed money is supposed to exercise a demoralising influence
on the artistic mind. I'll give you a commission, and pay you in
advance. There's a little bit of scenery on the Danube that I fell in
love with a few years ago. I'll find you the description of the spot
in Murray, and I'll write you a cheque for the two hundred before you
leave the house to-night. Spend your summer and autumn on the Rhine and
Danube, and bring me back my pet spot on a small canvas."
"But--but this is too generous," stammered the landscape painter.
"There's not a spark of generosity involved in the transaction. If I
were a Manchester man you would take my commission without thanks or
parley. But since you insist upon treating the matter as a favour, I
will attach a condition to my offer."
"And that is----"
"That you leave England at once. These long May-days are too good to
waste in lodgings at Islington."
"I think I know why you do me this great kindness," said Philip.
"First and foremost, because I believe in your genius."
"Secondly, because you don't wish me to come to this house just now. I
understand the delicacy of your kindness. I appreciate your goodness,
and----"
"And you accept my commission----"
"As heartily as it is given. I shall start for Rotterdam by the next
steamer; and when I come back----"
"You will bring home a picture which the Academy will not reject. I may
be on the hanging-committee myself next year, in which case I promise
you your landscape shall not be skied. Be sure there's human interest
in your picture, by-the-bye. You paint the figure better than any
landscape-painter I know; and mind you make good use of your power.
That barefooted girl with the pitcher would not have crossed the brook
so often if your crack landscape-painters didn't know the value of
human interest. Let us have something fresher and stronger than the
barefooted girl for Trafalgar Square next May."
There was a walnut-wood davenport in the room, before which the painter
seated himself. He took a cheque-book from one of the drawers, and
wrote his cheque while he talked to Philip.
"If you take that to my bankers they'll give you circular notes," he
said; "and now good-night and good-bye. Start by the next boat, work
your hardest, and look forward to next May. I mean you to be a great
man."
For the second time Philip grasped the great painter's hand, and that
hearty pressure of palm to palm was the only expression which he gave
to his gratitude. Nor did William Crawford give him any opportunity for
grateful protestations. Before the young man had put the cheque into
his pocket, his benefactor had returned to the drawing-room, where his
guests were perpetually being surprised, and delighted, and unspeakably
obliged by instrumental and vocal performances, during the progress of
which they had appeared agreeably occupied by animated conversation.
After putting the painter's cheque into his pocket, Philip went out
into the garden, and paced slowly up and down a broad gravel-walk that
led away from the house, and was over-shadowed by trellis-work and
creeping plants. He wanted to linger just for a few minutes within the
precincts of his paradise before he turned his back upon it for ever.
"When I come back here _she_ will be married to that cub, and the
mistress of some fine bran-new house in South Kensington or Tyburnia.
And I can remember her walking by my side in this shaded alley, looking
up in my face with grave earnest eyes, and pretending to be interested
in my art. As if _she_ cared for art, or for any thing upon this earth
except fine dresses and diamonds, and a three-hundred-guinea barouche
in which to display herself when she drives in the park. If I painted a
good picture, and made a success, would she be sorry then, I wonder?"
After two or three rapid turns up and down this dark alley, where the
sound of voices and music came to him through the open windows of Mr.
Crawford's drawing-room, Philip went back to the house, and made his
way through the crowded apartment. He would have left the Fountains
without seeing Florence, but that young lady happened to be standing in
his way to the door. She looked at him with a bright surprised face.
"Why, Mr. Foley, where have you been hiding yourself for this
last half-hour? You only appear to make yourself invisible. Baron
Meiffenheim has been singing the most enchanting little German ballad,
and I so much wished you to hear it. I know you like that kind of
music."
"I like it so well that I am going up the Danube on purpose to hear
it," answered Philip bravely. "Good-night, Miss Crawford; good-night
and--good-bye."
He laid a solemn emphasis on the last two syllables, and suffered the
little hand he had taken to fall suddenly from his loose grasp. Flo had
been an accomplished coquette from the date of her thirteenth birthday,
and was accustomed to heart-rending farewells; and yet she felt just
one little pang as those solemn syllables fell upon her ear. It would
have been so much more pleasant if the landscape-painter had waited to
witness her triumphs, and to be excruciated by her fascinations, when
she had entered the lists of bewitching matrons as Mrs. Thomas Lobyer.
The steamer left St. Katharine's Dock for Rotterdam at noon on the
following day, and on Monday night Philip Foley sat on the raised
deck of the vessel smoking a cigar, and looking dreamily down at
the phosphoric light upon the waves dashing past him with an eager
palpitating motion, as if--or so it seemed to Philip--each silvery
wavelet had been hurrying madly towards the English shore to kiss the
feet of Florence Crawford.
"There's not a boat goes by us but seems to my mind to be sailing
towards her, while I am going away," thought the despondent lover.
He was sorry that he had accepted the painter's kindness. He was sorry
that he had pledged himself to become an exile from the land in which
he had enjoyed the privilege of making himself supremely miserable for
love of Florence Crawford.