BY THE SEA.
Psyche and the Zephyrs waited the last touches of the master's hand;
but William Crawford painted no more. The eminent oculist would not
give him any decided opinion as to the ultimate restoration of his
sight.
"We must wait," he said; "you must give me time."
The painter obeyed his medical adviser implicitly; and after pursuing
a certain course of treatment for a certain time, he went with his
servant Dimond to a little sea-coast village in Dorsetshire,--still
in accordance with the oculist's advice. Change of air,--change to a
better and purer air than the atmosphere of Kensington, could do no
harm, said the oculist, and might possibly effect some good.
William Crawford begged the oculist to select for him the loneliest
and quietest spot he knew of; and to that spot he went, travelling by
a night train, with a green shade over his poor useless eyes, and the
factotum who had served him since the beginning of his prosperity for
his sole companion and attendant.
As yet he had told his dismal secret to no one but the oculist and
the man-servant. Friends and acquaintances called at the Fountains,
and were told that Mr. Crawford was ill. Was it any thing serious? Oh
no,--nothing serious; he had over worked himself,--that was all. The
painter could not bring himself to reveal his sorrow even to his best
friend; he could not bring himself to confess that his career had come
to an end--that a living death had fallen upon him in the zenith of his
fame. All through the long, dark, empty days,--the perpetual night of
his existence,--he brooded upon his trouble; never any more to behold
the beauty of the universe; never again to be the mortal creator of
immortal loveliness. There are no words which can describe his despair
when he thought that his career had ended,--that his hand would never
again wield a brush, his eyes never more be dazzled by the splendour of
his own colour.
He prayed night and day; but he could not bring himself to repeat the
inspired words which had formed his nightly and daily supplication
before the hour of his calamity. He could not say, "Thy will be done."
He cried again and again, "Oh Lord, restore my sight--restore my sight!"
He thought of other men on whom the same calamity had fallen; but on
those men it had fallen so lightly. Milton's grandest thoughts found
their expression after the outer universe had become a blank to him.
Beethoven achieved that which was almost a triumph over the impossible
when his genius survived the loss of his hearing; but oh, what anguish
the musician must have endured when his fingers wove those divine
harmonies which he was never to hear! For the sightless painter what
hope remained? Henceforward there could be no light upon William
Crawford's pathway but the pale radiance of past glories.
While his misfortune was yet new to him, the painter gave way to utter
despair: he complained to no one--he demanded no mortal pity; but hour
after hour, day after day, he sat in the same attitude--dead in life.
He knew that he had many friends who would have been inexpressibly glad
to give him comfort in these bitter days; friends who would have done
their best to cheer his desolation with pleasant talk, grave reading,
music, poetry, the stirring news of the outer world, the airy gossip of
coteries. He could not bring himself to accept such consolation yet.
The very thought of friendly companionship made him shudder.
"I shall never paint any more," he cried; "I shall never paint any
more. The young men would talk and think of me as they talk and think
of the dead. They would be kind, and pity me; but I don't want their
pity. I want to show them that I have not emptied my sack, and that
there is progress for me yet."
One day the painter groped his way to the easel on which the Psyche
still stood, shrouded with dismal drapery. He plucked the veil from his
divinity, and passed his tremulous hands over the canvas. They were
hands as yet unused to groping in the dark, and he had none of the
subtle delicacy of the blind man's touch; but when he came to patches
of solid colour here and there, he fancied he recognised familiar
portions of his work.
"My Psyche's hair," he murmured; "I can feel the undulating touches of
the brush; and here are her shoulders, the rounded pearly shoulders.
Yes, yes, I remember; there was a thought too much of the palette-knife
hereabouts."
He laid his face against the canvas presently, and some of the
bitterest tears that ever fell from manly eyes dropped slowly on the
picture which he could not see.
He was very glad to leave his own house and to escape from the
inquiries of anxious friends and acquaintance. He had a nervous dread
of any revelation of his calamity.
"Would _she_ be sorry for me?" he thought; for even in this dark
hour of his life his fancy took a forbidden flight now and then, and
hovered about the lady of the Hermitage. "Would she be sorry? No; she
would only be interested in me as a new kind of lion. She would come
and beseech me to show myself at her parties. She would pet me, and
exhibit me to her friends as the blind painter--the last new thing in
drawing-room celebrities. No; I will not accept her pity--I will not
sink so low as that. I will go and hide myself in some quiet corner,
and let the world believe that I am dead, if it will."
Not even to his daughter had William Crawford confided his sorrow.
She was far away from him--at Pevenshall--surrounded by gaieties and
splendours; and what need had he to darken her young life with the
knowledge of his affliction? He dictated a letter to the factotum
Dimond, in which he informed Flo that he had hurt his hand, and was
for that reason unable to write himself, but that he was in excellent
health, and was on the point of starting for the seaside for a few
months' rest and quiet.
The sea-coast village chosen by the oculist was one of the
loneliest spots within the limits of civilisation. There was no
fear of any observant stranger recognising William Crawford in the
melancholy-looking gentleman who walked listlessly to and fro on the
sands, leaning on his servant's arm, and never looking to the right
or left. The little hamlet consisted of a cluster of fishermen's
cottages, a general shop, and a rude village inn, where the voices of
the fishermen might be heard sometimes after dark roaring the chorus
of some barbarous ditty. One of those speculative individuals who are
continually roaming the face of the earth, with a view to ruining
themselves and other people in the building-line, had discovered that
the air of Callesly Bay was the balmiest that ever restored healthful
roses to wan and faded cheeks, and had erected an hotel, which might
have had some chance of success at Brighton or Biarritz, but which was
about twenty times too large for the possible requirements of Callesly
Bay. Advertisements had appealed in vain to the British public.
The one sheep that leads the other sheep had not yet been tempted
to jump through this special gap in the hedge; and the Royal Phœnix
Hotel and Boarding-house, with every possible attraction for noblemen
and gentlemen, was a dreary failure. So much the better for William
Crawford. What did he care if the waiters were listless and the cooking
execrable? For the last four or five months of his life he had been in
the habit of eating without knowing what he ate; and just now the most
perfect achievement of culinary art would have been as dust and ashes
in his mouth.
Callesly Bay suited the painter. His servant informed him that, with
the exception of an invalid lady, who went out daily in a Bath-chair,
and a paralytic gentleman, who took the air at his bed-room window, he
was the only occupant of the great barrack-like hotel. This knowledge
brought a sense of tranquillity to the painter's mind. In this quiet
retreat he was safe. Here at least there were no prying eyes keeping
watch at his gate; no journalists, eager for information about
every body and every thing, and ready to dip their pens into their
ink-bottles to spread the tidings of the painter's calamity in less
than five minutes after those tidings reached their greedy ears.
Day after day, day after day, William Crawford paced the sand of the
bay upon his servant's arm, and felt the soft ocean-breezes on his
face. There is no calamity so terrible, no affliction so bitter, that
habit will not temper its anguish to the sufferer. Little by little,
sweet Christian resignation began to take the place of dogged Pagan
despair. The grief which had fallen upon him lost the first sharpness
of its sting. The past, with all its artistic pride and triumph,
drifted away from the present; until it seemed to the painter that his
blindness was an old familiar sorrow, and the days of his work and
ambition strange and remote. Sweet fancies began to visit him as he
walked slowly to and fro amid the scene of tranquil beauty which he
could imagine but not see, and the subtle sense of the painter melted
into the subtler sense of the poet. It is impossible for the mind of
such a man to remain barren. There is in such a soul a divine light
that cannot be extinguished. If the painter did not see that calm
English bay in all its glory of sunrise and sunset, he saw a fairer
bay, and a brighter sun going down behind enchanted waters. All the
splendours of dreamland unfolded themselves before those sightless
eyes. The peerless mistress of Praxiteles arose from a sunlit sea,
beautiful as when Apelles beheld in her the type of his goddess. The
shadows of the past grew into light in the blind painter's fancy. He
forgot himself and his own loss while thinking of fairer creations
than his own. The very breath of the ocean brought divine images to
his mind. It was not the coast of Dorsetshire which he trod: the sands
beneath his feet were the golden sands of fairyland; the sea whose
rolling waves made music in his ears was the sea that carried Æneas to
Dido, the fatal ocean that bore Telemachus to Calypso; the wave that
licked the white feet of Andromeda; the waste of waters on which a
deadly calm came down when Agamemnon launched his Troy-bound fleet, and
offended Diana visited the impious hunter with her wrath.
"If I ever live to paint again, I will do something better than Dido or
Psyche," said William Crawford; for as the deep gloom of his despair
vanished before the divine light of poetry, he felt a wondrous power
in his fettered hands; and brooding hour after hour on the pictures
which yet remained to be painted, it seemed to him as if new lights had
dawned upon him in the day of his darkness--lights that would abide
with him for the rest of his existence, and guide him in his future
work--if God were pleased to give him back his eyesight.
He had been at Callesly Bay for more than a month, and the
ocean-breezes were beginning to lose their balmy summer warmth. He
had grown accustomed to his affliction, perfectly resigned, very
tranquil. Day by day he took the same walks, picturing to himself the
changing beauties of the scene, and sometimes even questioning the
matter-of-fact Dimond as to appearances in the sea and sky. Within
the last two or three weeks he had begun to take some faint interest
in that outer world to which he had once belonged; and the factotum,
who read a little better than the majority of his class, beguiled the
evenings by the perusal of the newspapers, and sometimes even tried his
hand upon a pocket-edition of Shakespeare, borrowed from the landlord
of that splendid failure, the Royal Phœnix.
On one especially beautiful autumn afternoon the painter more keenly
than usual felt the want of some companion a little more refined--a
thought more sympathetic than Dimond the factotum.
He had paced the sands till he was tired, and had seated himself on a
low rock, on which it had been his habit to sit since his first coming
to that quiet shore. Sitting here, with the faithful Dimond by his
side, Mr. Crawford abandoned himself to the influence of the balmy
air. He knew that at such an hour and with such an atmosphere there
must be unspeakable beauty in the western sky--delicious gradations of
colour which he was never more to see; and he would fain have wrung
some translation of that unseen beauty from the prosaic lips of the
factotum.
"Is the sun low, Dimond?" he asked.
"Yes, Sir,--uncommon low. I never did see any thing like the sunsets in
these parts--they've got such a sudden way with them."
"I thought the sun was low. I can feel a light upon my face; there is a
light upon my face,--a red light, isn't there, Dimond?"
"Yes, Sir."
"And the sky? I'm sure the sky is very beautiful--isn't it, Dimond?"
"Well, yes, Sir; it's a very fine afternoon; but, if my corns don't
deceive me--asking your pardon for talking of 'em, Sir--there'll be
some rain before long," added the prosaic Dimond.
"Never mind your corns, Dimond," exclaimed the painter impatiently; "I
want you to tell me about the sky. I have always fancied one might do
something good with an Andromeda standing out in sharp relief against
an evening sky; with nothing but the rock, and the low line of purple
sea, and with one white sea-gull hovering on the edge of the water," he
soliloquised; while Dimond looked doubtfully to windward and pondered
on the prophetic shootings of his corns.
"Tell me about the sky!" cried Mr. Crawford; "a broad band of deep
rose-colour melting into amethyst; and then a pale transparent
opal--eh, Dimond?"
"I don't know about opal, Sir; but there's a bluish and greenish way
with it--something like that bad lumpy glass you see sometimes in
wash-house windows."
"Wash-house windows! Oh Dimond, go home and get me Shakespeare,--the
second volume of the tragedies,--and I'll give you a lesson in reading.
You shall read me the description of Cleopatra before we go back to
dinner."
The factotum obeyed, nothing loth to escape from that trying
cross-examination about the sky; and the painter sat alone by the sea,
listening to the low harmonies of the waves and pondering that possible
picture of Andromeda. He could fancy every curve of the beautiful
rounded form, sharply defined against a sombre background of rock; the
dark streaming hair; the white, lovely face faintly tinged with the
last rays of sunset; the sad despairing eyes looking seaward for the
monster. Andromeda's pale beauty filled the painter's mind. He heard
the dull moaning of the pitiless waves, the sighing of the night winds
amidst the victim's hair; he could almost fancy he heard the swooping
wings of the deliverer's steed; and thus beguiled by sounds that were
not, it is scarcely strange that he did not hear sounds that were,--the
silken rustling of a woman's dress, the soft fluttering of a woman's
shawl.
"I may dream of pictures; but I shall never paint again!" cried William
Crawford hopelessly.
A gentle hand was laid upon his arm as he spoke; and he awoke from that
vision of Andromeda to know that there was a living, breathing woman by
his side.
"Oh yes, you will paint again, Mr. Crawford. The trial is a bitter one;
but please God, it will not be enduring. Why did you leave me to find
out what had happened?"
"Mrs. Champernowne!"
"Yes; the woman whose friendship you rejected so cruelly last April,
and who comes now to offer it once more--on her knees, if you like.
I think one might almost venture to fall upon one's knees in this
delightfully lonely place."
"Mrs. Champernowne!"
"Call me Georgina," said the widow, in her lowest and most harmonious
accents. "I have come to offer you my friendship; and to-day friendship
means any thing you like. I have learnt to hate my own selfishness
since that day at Kensington. I have learnt to know that a woman cannot
live her own life; that the time will come sooner or later when the
presence of one dear companion will be necessary to her existence,
when the loss of one friend will take every charm from her life. I
have missed you so cruelly, William--so cruelly. You don't know what a
dreary season this summer just departed has been to me."
"My darling, can I believe--can I imagine----"
This waking dream,--the tender words sounding in his ears, the tender
hands clinging round his arm, seemed to the painter to constitute a far
wilder vision than any dream of Andromeda. And yet it was all a sweet
reality; the tender hands were warm with life, and sent a magnetic
thrill to the very core of his heart.
"My darling, do you want to make me mad? Oh, Georgina, your presence
here is like nothing but a dream. But if I wake presently to find that
you have been trifling with me, I shall die. The anguish of such a
disappointment would kill me."
"Do you know that you have behaved very badly to me?" said the widow.
"You must have known that I loved you. Remember how humbly I besought
your friendship: and you scorned me and sent me away, just because I
was not ready to renounce my precious liberty at a moment's notice for
your pleasure. I think you might have had patience with me a little
longer, Mr. Crawford. Rubens would never have had three wives, if he
had not shown a little more forbearance to womanly caprice. But I
forgive you that offence. What I cannot forgive is your cruelty in
letting me remain ignorant of this sorrow that has come upon you
lately. You ought to have known that the more uncertain and hard to
please a woman may be in a general way, the more fitted she is to play
the ministering angel on occasions. Yes, Mr. Crawford, it was very
cruel of you. All through the summer I have been thinking of you, and
wondering about you,--wondering what you were doing, wondering why
you did not relent and come to see me. It was only this morning that
I learned what had happened from a little gossiping paragraph in a
newspaper. I ordered my carriage, and drove straight to the Fountains,
where I _made_ the servants tell me your whereabouts."
"My darling, my angel! Are you laughing at me, Georgina; or may I
really call you by these dear names?"
"You may call me any thing you please, if you will call me your wife
by-and-by. Helen Vicary is with me. I only gave her twenty minutes'
notice about the journey. Do you know what I said to her?"
"No, indeed, dearest."
"I am going down to Dorsetshire, Helen, to ask Mr. Crawford to marry
me. Pack your things immediately, and be sure you put a white dress
in your trunk; for in all probability I shall want you to be my
bridesmaid."
"Mrs. Champernowne, this is pity! I will not accept such a sacrifice.
My calamity has fallen upon me by God's will, and I will bear it
bravely. I will not trade upon it in order to win from a woman's
generosity that which I could not obtain from her love."
"Was there ever such a provoking creature?" cried Mrs. Champernowne.
"Must I reiterate the confession of my folly? I did not know what I was
doing that day when I rejected your love. It was only afterwards, when
the days and weeks went by and I was obliged to endure my existence
without you--it was only then that I knew I had lost something without
which life was worthless to me. Am I to tell you again and again how
dearly I love you? I have loved you so long that I cannot tell you when
my love began. But it is possible that my humiliation comes too late.
You have learnt to forget me, or worse, perhaps you have learnt to love
some one else as you once loved me."
"To forget you--to love another woman after having known you--my
idol--my goddess! I love you to distraction. My only fear is that
compassion, generosity, self-abnegation----"
"Self-abnegation! You ought to know that I am the most selfish of
women. But here is your servant. Will you take my arm to go back to the
hotel? I have apartments in the same hotel, and poor Helen is waiting
for her dinner. Will you tell your servant to follow us, and trust
yourself to _me_, William?"
Would he? The sweet magnetic thrill went to the core of his heart
once more as Georgina Champernowne slipped her wrist under his arm.
How gently she guided his footsteps! How easy the walk was to him by
her side! He was no longer blind. He possessed something better than
eyesight, in the protection of the woman he loved.
Before the month was out, there was a quiet wedding in Callesly Bay;
and the letter which gently broke to Florence the tidings of her
father's affliction was no ill-spelt missive from the factotum, but an
affectionate feminine epistle, signed "Georgina Crawford," and written
when the painter and his wife were on the eve of a journey to Italy.