Mr and Mrs Robert Drummond lived in a pretty house in the Kensington
district; a house, the very external aspect of which informed the
passer-by who they were, or at least what the husband was. The house was
embowered in its little garden; and in spring, with its lilacs and
laburnums, looked like a great bouquet of bloom--as such houses often
do. But built out from the house, and occupying a large slice of the
garden at the side, was a long room, lighted with sky windows, and not
by any means charming to look at outside, though the creepers, which had
not long been planted, were beginning to climb upon the walls. It was
connected with the house by a passage which acted as a conservatory,
and was full of flowers; and everything had been done that could be
done to render the new studio as beautiful in aspect as it was in
meaning. But it was new, and had scarcely yet begun, as its proprietor
said, to 'compose' with its surroundings. Robert Drummond, accordingly,
was a painter, a painter producing, in the mean time, pictures of the
class called _genre_; but intending to be historical, and to take to the
highest school of art as soon as life and fame would permit. He was a
very good painter; his subjects were truly 'felt' and exquisitely
manipulated; but there was no energy of emotion, no originality of
genius about them. A great many people admired them very much; other
painters lingered over them lovingly, with that true professional
admiration of 'good work' which counteracts the jealousy of trade in
every honest mind. They were very saleable articles, indeed, and had
procured a considerable amount of prosperity for the young painter. It
was almost certain that he would be made an Associate at the next
vacancy, and an Academician in time. But with all this, he was well
aware that he was no genius, and so was his wife.
The knowledge of this fact acted upon them in very different ways; but
that its effect may be fully understood, the difference in their
characters and training requires to be known. Robert Drummond had never
been anything but a painter; attempts had been made in his youth to fix
him to business, his father having been the senior clerk, much respected
and utterly respectable, of a great City house; and the attempt might
have been successful but that accident had thrown him among artists, a
kind of society very captivating to a young man, especially when he has
a certain command of a pencil. He threw himself into art, accordingly,
with all his soul. He was the sort of man who would have thrown himself
into anything with all his soul; not for success or reward, but out of
an infinite satisfaction in doing good work, and seeing beautiful things
grow under his hand. He was of a very sanguine mind, a mind which seldom
accepted defeat, but which, with instinctive unconscious wisdom,
hesitated to dare the highest flights, and to put itself in conflict
with those final powers which either vanquish a man or assure his
triumph. Perhaps it was because there was some hidden possibility of
wild despair and downfall in the man's mind, of which only himself was
aware, that he was thus cautious of putting his final fortune to the
touch. But the fact was that he painted his pictures contentedly,
conscientiously, doing everything well, and satisfied with the
perfection of his work as work, though he was not unaware of the absence
from it of any spark of divinity. He did not say it in so many words,
but the sentiment of his mind was this:--'It is good work, work no man
need be ashamed of. I am not a Raphael, alas! and I cannot help it. What
is the good of being unhappy about a thing I cannot mend? I am doing my
best; it is honest work, which I know I don't slight or do carelessly;
and I can give her everything she wants except that. I should be too
happy myself if she were but content.' But she was not content, and thus
his happiness was brought down to the moderate pitch allowed to mortal
bliss.
She was very different from her Robert. She had been a young lady of
very good connections when she first met the rising young artist. I do
not say that her connections were splendid, or that she made an absolute
_mésalliance_, for that would be untrue. Her people, however, had been
rich people for several generations. They had begun in merchandise, and
by merchandise they had kept themselves up; but to have been rich from
the time of your great-grandfather, with never any downfall or even
break in the wealth, has perhaps more effect on the mind than that
pride which springs from family. Well-descended people are aware that
every family now and then gets into trouble, and may even fall into
poverty without sacrificing any of its pretensions. But well-off people
have not that source of enlightenment. When they cease to be very well
off, they lose the great point of eminence on which they have taken
their stand; and, consequently, success is more absolutely necessary to
them than it is to any other class in the community. Helen Burton
besides was very proud, very ambitious, and possessed of that not
unusual form of _amour propre_ which claims distinction as a
right--though she had not anything particular in herself to justify her
claim. She had, or believed she had, an utter contempt for that money
which was the foundation of her family pride; and she was, at the same
time, too well endowed in mind, and too generous in temper, to be able
to give herself up sincerely to worship of that rank, which, as their
only perpetual superior, tantalizes the imagination of the plebeian
rich, and thrusts itself constantly before them. Helen could have
married the son of a poor lord, and become the Honourable Mrs Somebody,
with her mother's blessing, had she so willed. But as her will took a
totally different direction, she had defied and alienated her mother,
who was also a woman of high spirit, and only some seventeen years older
than her only child; the consequence was that when Mrs Burton found
herself abandoned and left alone in the world, she married too, as truly
out of pique as a girl sometimes does when deserted by her lover; and at
her death left everything she had to her husband and the two small
babies, one of them younger than Helen's little Norah, whom she left
behind. So that a little tragedy, of a kind not much noted by the world,
had woven itself around the beginning of her married life. The mother's
second marriage had not been a success, but was Helen to blame for that?
Nobody said she was, no one around her; but sometimes in the silence of
the night, when she alone was awake, and all her household slept so
peacefully--Robert, good Robert, was not a success either, not such a
man as she had hoped. She loved him sincerely, was grateful to him for
his love, and for his constant regard to her wishes. But yet, in the
depths of her heart,--no, not despised him, the expression is too
strong,--but felt a minute shade of indignation mingled in her
disappointment with him for not being a great genius. _Why_ was he not a
Raphael, a Titian? She had married him with the full understanding that
he was such, that he would bring her sweet fame and distinction. And why
had not he done it? Every time she looked at his pictures she found out
the want of inspiration in them. She did not say anything. She was very
kind, praising the pretty bits of detail, the wonderful perfection of
painting; but Robert felt that he would rather have the President and
all the Hanging Committee to pass judgment on his pictures than his
wife. Her sense that he had somehow defrauded her by not mounting at
once to the very height of his profession, seemed to endow her with a
power of judgment a hundred-fold more than was justified by her
knowledge of art. She saw the want of any soul in them at the first
glance, from under her half-closed eyelids--and it seemed to Robert that
in her heart she said: 'Another pretty piece of mediocrity, a thing to
sell, not to live--with no genius, no genius in it.' These were the
words Robert seemed to himself to hear, but they were not the real words
which, in her heart, Helen uttered. These were rather as follows:--'It
is just the same as the last. It is no better, no better. And now
everybody says he is at his best. Oh! when his worst begins to come,
what will become of us?' But she never said an uncivil word. She
praised what she could, and she went her way languidly into the
drawing-room. She had come down out of her sphere to give herself to
him, and he had not repaid her as she expected. He had given her
love--oh, yes; but not fame. She was Mrs Drummond only; she was not
pointed out where she went as the wife of the great painter. 'Her
husband is an artist' was all that anybody ever said.
The effect of this upon poor Robert, however, was much worse even than
it was upon his wife. Some time elapsed, it is true, before he
discovered it. It took him even years to make out what it was that
shadowed his little household over and diminished its brightness. But
gradually a sense of the absence of that sympathetic backing up which a
man expects in his own house, and without which both men and women who
have work to do are so apt to pine and faint, stole over him like a
chill. When anything was said against his pictures outside, a gloom in
his wife's face would show him that worse was thought within. He had no
domestic shield from adverse criticism. It was not kept in the outer
circle of his mind, but was allowed to penetrate down to his heart, and
envelop him in a heavy discouragement. Even applause did not exhilarate
him. '_She_ does not think I deserve it,' was what he would say to
himself; and the sense of this criticism which never uttered a word
weighed upon the poor fellow's soul. It made his hand unsteady many a
day when his work depended on a firm touch--and blurred the colours
before his eyes, and dulled his thoughts. Two or three times he made a
spasmodic effort to break through his mediocrity, and then the critics
(who were very well pleased on the whole with his mediocrity) shook
their heads, and warned him against the sensational. But Helen neither
approved nor condemned the change. To her it was all alike, always
second-rate. She did her very best to applaud, but she could not
brighten up into genuine admiration the blank composure in her eyes.
What could she do? There was something to be said for her, as well as
for him. She could not affect to admire what she felt to be commonplace.
Nature had given her a good eye, and intense feeling had strengthened
and corrected it. She saw all the weakness, the flatness, with fatal
certainty. What, then, could she say? But poor Robert, though he was not
a great artist, was the most tender-hearted, amiable, affectionate of
men; and this mode of criticism stole the very heart out of him. There
is no such want in the world as that want of backing up. It is the
secret of weakness and failure, just as strong moral support and
sympathy is the very secret of strength. He stood steady and robust to
the external eye, painting many pictures every year, getting very
tolerable prices, keeping his household very comfortable, a man still
under forty, healthy, cheerful, and vigorous; but all the time he was
sapped at the foundations. He had lost his confidence in himself, and it
was impossible to predict how he would have borne any sudden blow.
It was about this time that Mr Reginald Burton, a cousin of Helen's, who
had once, it was supposed, desired to be something nearer to her, found
out the house in Kensington, and began to pay them visits. The
circumstances of her marriage had separated her from her own people. The
elder among them had thought Helen unkind to her mother; the younger
ones had felt that nothing had come of it to justify so romantic a
story. So that when Reginald Burton met the pair in society it was the
reopening of an altogether closed chapter of her life. Mr Burton was a
man in the City in very extensive business. He was chairman of ever so
many boards, and his name, at the head of one company or another, was
never out of the newspapers. He had married since his cousin did, and
had a very fine place in the country, and was more well off still than
it was natural for the Burtons to be. Helen, who had never liked him
very much, and had not even been grateful to him for loving her,
received his visits now without enthusiasm; but Drummond, who was
open-hearted like his kind, and who had no sort of jealousy about
'Helen's friends,' received him with a cordiality which seemed to his
wife much too effusive. She would not accept the invitation which Mrs
Burton sent to pay a long visit to Dura, their country place; but she
could not be less than civil to her cousin when he insisted upon
calling, nor could she openly resist when he carried off her husband to
City dinners, or unfolded to him the benefits of this or that new
society. Drummond had done very well in his profession, notwithstanding
Helen's dissatisfaction with his work; and also notwithstanding her
dissatisfaction, she was a good housewife, doing her duty wisely. She
had a hundred a year of her own, which Drummond had taken care to have
settled upon herself; but since they had grown richer he had insisted
upon letting this accumulate as 'a portion for Norah,' and the two had
laid by something besides. For painter-folk it will be readily seen
they were at the very height of comfort--a pretty house, one pretty
child, a little reserve of money, slowly but pleasantly accumulating.
And money, though it is an ignoble thing, has so much to do with
happiness! Drummond, who had been quite content to think that there was
a portion saving up for Norah, and to whom it had not occurred that his
little capital could be made use of, and produce twenty and a
hundred-fold, gradually grew interested, without being aware of it, in
the proceedings of Mr Burton. He began to talk, half laughingly, half
with intention, of the wonderful difference between the slowly-earned
gains of labour and those dazzling results of speculation. 'These
fellows seem simply to coin money,' he said, 'half in jest and whole in
earnest;' 'everything they touch seems to become gold. It looks
incredible----' and he wound up with a nervous laugh, in which there was
some agitation. Helen had all a woman's conservatism on this point.
'It _is_ incredible, you may be sure,' she said. 'How can they invent
money? Some one will have to pay for it somewhere;' which was a sentence
of profound wisdom, much deeper than she thought.
'So one would say,' said Drummond, still laughing; 'but nobody seems to
suffer. By Jove! as much as--not to say I, who am one of the rank and
file--but as Welby or Hartwell Home get for one of their best pictures,
your cousin will clear in five minutes, without taking the slightest
trouble. When one sees it, one feels hugely tempted'--he added, looking
at her. He was one of those men who like to carry their people's
sympathy with them. He wanted not acquiescence simply, but approval; and
notwithstanding that he was very well used to the absence of it, sought
it still. She would not--could not, perhaps--enter warmly into the
subject of his pictures; but here was a new matter. He looked up at her
with a certain longing--ready, poor fellow, to plunge into anything if
she would but approve.
'I hope you won't let yourself be tempted to anything, Robert, that you
don't see the end of,' she said; but so gently that her husband's heart
rose.
'Trust me for that,' he said joyously, 'and you shall have the first
fruits, my darling. I have not as fine a house for you as your cousin
can give to his wife, but for all that----'
'For all that,' she said, laughing, 'I would not change with Mrs
Reginald Burton. I am not tempted by the fine house.'
'I have thought how we can make this one a great deal better,' he said,
as he stooped to kiss her before he went out. He looked back upon her
fondly as he left the room, and said to himself that if he wished for
gain it was for her sake--his beautiful Helen! He had painted her
furtively over and over again, though she never would sit to him. A
certain shadow of her was in all his pictures, showing with more or less
distinctness according as he loved or did not love his temporary
heroine: but he knew that when this was pointed out to her she did not
like it. She was anxious that everybody should know she did not sit to
him. She was very indignant at the idea that a painter's wife might
serve her husband as a model. 'Why should a painter's profession, which
ought to be one of the noblest in the world, be obtruded upon the outer
world at every step?' she said. But yet as he was a painter, every inch
of him, his eye caught the _pose_ of her head as she moved, and made a
mental note of it. And yet she was not, strictly speaking, a beautiful
woman. She was not the large Juno, who is our present type of beauty;
she was not blazing with colour--red, and white, and golden--like the
Rubens-heroines of the studio; nor was she of the low-browed,
sleepy-eyed, sensuous, classic type. She was rather colourless on the
contrary. Her hair was olive brown, which is so harmonious with a pale
complexion; her eyes hazel-grey; her colour evanescent, coming and
going, and rarely at any time more than a rose tint; her very lips,
though beautifully formed, were only rose--not scarlet--and her figure
was slight and deficient in 'grand curves.' Her great characteristic was
what the French call _distinction_; a quality to which in point of truth
she had no claim--for Helen, it must be remembered, was no
long-descended lady. She was the produce of three generations of money,
and a race which could be called nothing but Philistine; and from whence
came her highbred look, her fanciful pride, her unrealisable ambition,
it would be difficult to say.
She went over the house with a little sigh after Robert was gone,
professedly in the ordinary way of a housewife's duty, but really with
reference to his last words. Yes, the house might be made a great deal
better. The drawing-room was a very pretty one--quite enough for all
their wants--but the dining-room was occupied by Drummond as his studio,
according to an arrangement very common among painters. This, it will be
perceived, was before the day of the new studio. The dining-room was
thus occupied, and a smaller room, such as in most suburban houses is
appropriated generally to the often scanty books of the family, was the
eating-room of the Drummonds. It was one of those things which made
Helen's pride wince--a very petty subject for pride, you will say--but,
then, pride is not above petty things; and it wounded her to be obliged
to say apologetically to her cousin--'The real dining-room of the house
is Mr Drummond's studio. We content ourselves with this in the mean
time.' 'Oh, yes; I see; of course he must want space and light,'
Reginald Burton had replied with patronising complacency, and a
recollection of his own banqueting-hall at Dura. How Helen hated him at
that moment, and how much aggravated she felt with poor Robert smiling
opposite to her, and feeling quite comfortable on the subject! 'We
painters are troublesome things,' he even said, as if it was a thing to
smile at. Helen went and looked in at the studio on this particular
morning, and made a rapid calculation how it could be 'made better.' It
would have to be improved off the face of the earth, in the first place,
as a studio; and then carpeted, and tabled, and mirrored, and ornamented
to suit its new destination. It would take a good deal of money to do
it, but that was not the first consideration. The thing was, where was
Robert to go? She, for her part, would have been reconciled to it
easily, could he have made up his mind to have a studio apart from the
house, and come home when his work was done. That would be an advantage
in every way. It would secure that in the evening, at least, his
profession should be banished. He would have to spend the evening as
gentlemen usually do, yawning his head off if he pleased, but not
professional for ever. It would no longer be possible for him to put on
an old coat, and steal away into that atmosphere of paint, and moon over
his effects, as he loved to do now. He liked Helen to go with him, and
she did so often, and was tried almost beyond her strength by his
affectionate lingerings over the canvas, which, in her soul, she felt
would never be any better, and his appeals to her to suggest and to
approve. Nothing would teach him not to appeal to her. Though he divined
what she felt, though it had eaten into his very life, yet still he
would try again. Perhaps this time she might like it better--perhaps----
'If he would only have his studio out of doors,' Helen reflected. She
was too sure of him to be checked by the thought that his heart might
perhaps learn to live out of doors too as well as his pictures, did she
succeed in driving them out. No such doubt ever crossed her mind. He
loved her, and nobody else, she knew. His mind had never admitted
another idea but hers. She was a woman who would have scorned to be
jealous in any circumstances--but she had no temptation to be jealous.
He was only a moderate painter. He would never be as splendid as Titian,
with a prince to pick up his pencil--which is what Helen's
semi-Philistine pride would have prized. But he loved her so as no man
had ever surpassed. She knew that, and was vaguely pleased by it; yet
not as she might have been had there ever been any doubt about the
matter. She was utterly sure of him, and it did not excite her one way
or another. But his words had put a little gentle agitation in her mind.
She put down her calculation on paper when she went back to the
drawing-room after her morning occupations were over, and called Norah
to her music. Sideboard so much, old carved oak, to please him, though
for herself she thought it gloomy; curtains, for these luxuries he had
not admitted to spoil his light; a much larger carpet--she made her list
with some pleasure while Norah played her scales. And that was the day
on which the painter's commercial career began.