too--splendid old buck; only when he gave her away he was very near
saying, 'Devil take it!' which might have had a novel, but hardly a
solemn, effect. Little Fay was delightful--for all the world like a bit
of incarnated sunshine. Keane was granite all over, except his eyes, and
they were lava; if we hadn't, for our own preservation, let him put her
in a carriage and started 'em off, he might have become dangerous, after
the manner of Etna, ice outside and red-hot coals within. The
bridesmaids tears must have washed the church for a week, and made it
rather a damp affair. One would scarcely think women were so anxious to
marry, to judge from the amount of grief they get up at a friend's
sacrifice. It looks uncommonly like envy; but it _isn't_, we're sure!
The ball was like most other balls: alternate waltzing and flirtation, a
vast lot of nonsense talked, and a vast lot of champagne drunk--Cupid
running about in every direction, and a tremendous run on all the
amatory poets--Browning and Tennyson being worked as hard as cab-horses,
and used up pretty much as those quadrupeds--dandies suffering
self-inflicted torture from tight boots, and saying, like Cranmer, when
he held his hand in the fire, that it was rather agreeable than
otherwise, considering it drew admiration--spurs getting entangled in
ladies' dresses, and ladies making use thereof for a display of
amiability, which the dragoons are very much mistaken if they fancied
continued into private life--girls believing all the pretty things said
to them--men going home and laughing at them all--wallflowers very
black, women engaged ten deep very sunshiny--the governor very glorious,
and my noble self very fascinating. And now," said Sydie, taking up his
pipe, "pass the punch, old boy, and never say I can't talk!"
THE STORY OF A CRAYON-HEAD;
OR,
A DOUBLED-DOWN LEAF IN A MAN'S LIFE.
I was dining with a friend, in his house on the Lung' Arno (he fills,
never mind what, post in the British Legation), where I was passing an
autumn month. The night was oppressively hot; a still, sultry sky
brooded over the city, and the stars shining out from a purple mist on
to the Campanile near, and the slopes of Bellosguardo in the distance.
It was intensely hot; not all the iced wines on his table could remove
the oppressive warmth of the evening air, which made both him and me
think of evenings we had spent together in the voluptuous lassitude of
the East, in days gone by, when we had travelled there, fresh to life,
to new impressions, to all that gives "greenness to the grass, and glory
to the flower."
The Arno ran on under its bridge, and we leaned out of the balcony where
we were sitting and smoking, while I tossed over, without thinking much
of what I was doing, a portfolio of his sketches. Position has lost for
art many good artists since Sir George Beaumont: my friend is one of
them; his sketches are masterly; and had he been a vagrant Bohemian
instead of an English peer, there might have been pictures on the walls
of the R. A. to console one for the meretricious daubs and pet
vulgarities of nursery episodes, hideous babies, and third-class
carriage interiors, which make one's accustomed annual visit to the
rooms that once saw the beauties of Reynolds, and Wilson, and Lawrence,
a positive martyrdom to anybody of decent refinement and educated taste.
The portfolio stood near me, and I took out a sketch or two now and then
between the pauses of our conversation, looking lazily up the river,
while the moonlight shone on Dante's city, that so long forgot, and has,
so late, remembered him.
"Ah! what a pretty face this is! Who's the original?" I asked him,
drawing out a female head, done with great finish in pastel, under which
was written, in his own hand, "Florelle." It was a face of great beauty,
with a low Greek brow and bronze-dark hair, and those large, soft,
liquid eyes that you only see in a Southern, and that looked at you from
the sketch with an earnest, wistful regard, half childlike, half
impassioned. He looked up, glanced at the sketch, and stretched out his
hand hastily, but I held it away from him. "I want to look at it; it is
a beautiful head; I wish we had the original here now. Who is she?"
As I spoke--holding the sketch up where the light from the room within
fell on what I had no doubt was a likeness of some fair face that had
beguiled his time in days gone by, a souvenir of one of his loves more
lasting than souvenirs of such episodes in one's life often are, if
merely trusted to that inconstant capricieuse, Memory,--I might have hit
him with a bullet rather than asked him about a mere etude a deux
crayons, for he shuddered, and drank off some white Hermitage quickly.
"I had forgotten that was in the portfolio," he said, hurriedly, as he
took it from me and put it behind him, with its face against the wall,
as though it had been the sketch of a Medusa.
"What do you take it away for? I had not half done looking at it. Who is
the original?"
"One I don't care to mention."
"Because?"
"Because the sight of that picture gives me a twinge of what I ought to
be hardened against--regret."
"Regret! Is any woman worth that?"
"She was."
"I don't believe it; and I fancied you and I thought alike on such
points. Of all the women for whom we feel twinges of conscience or
self-reproach in melancholy moments, how many _loved us_? Moralists and
poets sentimentalize over it, and make it a stalking-horse whereby to
magnify our sins and consign us more utterly to perdition, while they do
for themselves a little bit of poetic morality cheaply; but in reality
there are uncommonly few women who can love, to begin with, and in the
second, vanity, avarice, jealousy, desires for pretty toilettes, one or
other, or all combined, have quite as much to do with their 'sacrifice'
for us as anything."
"Quite true; but--there are women and women, perhaps, and it was not of
that sort of regret that I spoke."
"Of what sort, then?"
He made me no reply: he broke the ash off his Manilla, and smoked
silently some moments, leaning over the balcony and watching the
monotonous flow of the Arno, with deeper gloom on his face than I
remembered to have seen there any time before. I was sorry I had chanced
to light upon a sketch that had brought him back such painful
recollections of whatever kind they might be, and I smoked too, sending
the perfumed tobacco out into the still sultry night that was brooding
over Florence.
"Of what sort?" said he, abruptly, after some minutes' pause. "Shall I
tell you? Then you can tell _me_ whether I was a fool who made one grand
mistake, or a sensible man of the world who kept himself from a grand
folly. I have been often in doubt myself."
He leaned back, his face in shadow, so that I could not see it, while
the Arno's ebb and flow was making mournful river-music under our
windows,--while the purple glories of the summer night deepened round
Giotto's Tower, where, in centuries past, the Immortal of Florence had
sat dreaming of the Paradiso, the mortals passing by whispering him as
"the man who had seen hell," and the light within the room shone on the
olives and grapes, the cut-glass and silver claret-jugs, the crimson
Montepulciano and the white Hermitage, on the table, as he told me the
story of the head in crayons.
"Two years ago I went into the south of France. I was charge d'Affaires
at ---- then, you remember, and the climate had told upon me. I was not
over-well, and somebody recommended me the waters of Eaux Bonnes. The
waters I put little faith in, but in the air of the Pyrenees, in the
change from diplomacy to a life _en rase campagne_, I put much, and I
went to Eaux Bonnes accordingly, for July and August, with a vow to
forswear any society I might find at the baths--I had had only too much
of society as it was--and to spend my days in the mountains with my
sketching-block and my gun. But I did not like Eaux Bonnes; it was
intensely warm. There were several people who knew me really; no end of
others who got hold of my name, and wanted me to join their
riding-parties, and balls, and picnics. That was not what I wanted, so I
left the place and went on to Luz, hoping to find solitude there. That
valley of Luz--you know it?--is it not as lovely as any artist's dream
of Arcadia, in the evening, when the sunset light has passed off the
meadows and corn-lands of the lower valley, and just lingers golden and
rosy on the crests of the mountains, while the glow-worms are coming out
among the grasses, and the lights are being lit in the little homesteads
nestling among their orchards one above another on the hill-sides, and
its hundred streams are rushing down the mountains and under the trees,
foaming, and tumbling, and rejoicing on their way! When I have had my
fill of ambition and of pleasure, I shall go and live at Luz, I think.
"_When!_ Well! you are quite right to repeat it ironically; that time
will never come, I dare say, and why should it? I am not the stuff to
cogitate away my years in country solitudes. If prizes are worth
winning, they are worth working for till one's death; a man should never
give up the field while he has life left in him. Well! I went to Luz,
and spent a pleasant week or so there, knocking over a few chamois or
izards, or sketching on the sides of the Pic du Midi, or Tourmalet, but
chiefly lying about under the great beech-trees in the shade, listening
to the tinkle of the sheep-bells, like an idle fellow, as I meant to be
for the time I had allotted myself. One day----"
He stopped and blew some whiffs from his Manilla into the air. He seemed
to linger over the prelude to his story, and shrink from going on with
the story itself, I thought; and he smothered a sigh as he raised
himself.
"How warm the night is; we shall have a tempest. Reach me that wine,
there's a good fellow. No, not the Amontillado, the Chateau Margaux,
please; one can't drink hot dry wines such a night as this. But to
satisfy your curiosity about this crayon study.--One day I thought I
would go to Gavarnie. I had heard a good deal, of course, about the
great marble wall, and the mighty waterfalls, the rocks of Marbore, and
the Breche de Roland, but, as it chanced, I had never been up to the
Cercle, nor, indeed, in that part of the Midi at all, so I went. The
gods favored me, I remember; there were no mists, the sun was brilliant,
and the great amphitheatre was for once unobscured; the white marble
flashing brown and purple, rose and golden, in the light; the cascades
tumbling and leaping down into the gigantic basin; the vast plains of
snow glittering in the sunshine; the twin rocks standing in the clear
air, straight and fluted as any two Corinthian columns hewn and
chiselled by man. Good Heaven! before a scene like Gavarnie, what true
artist must not fling away his colors and his brushes in despair and
disgust with his own puerility and impotence? What can be transferred to
canvas of such a scene as that? What does the best beauty of Claude, the
grandest sublimity of Salvator, the greatest power of Poussin, look
beside Nature when she reigns as she reigns at Gavarnie? I am an art
worshipper, as you know: but there are times in my life, places on
earth, that make me ready to renounce art for ever!
"The day was beautiful, and thinking I knew the country pretty well, I
took no guides. I hate them when I can possibly dispense with them. But
the mist soon swooped down over the Cercle, and I began to wish I had
had one when I turned my horse's head back again. You know the route, of
course? Through the Chaos--Heaven knows it is deserving of its
name;--down the break-neck little bridle-path, along the Gave, and over
the Scia bridge to St. Sauveur. You know it? Then you know that it is
much easier to break your neck down it than to find your way by it,
though by some hazard I did not break my neck, nor the animal's knees
either, but managed to get over the bridge without falling into the
torrent, and to pick my way safely down into more level ground; once
there, I thought I should easily enough find my way to St. Sauveur, but
I was mistaken: the mists had spread over the valley, a heavy storm had
come up, and, somehow or other, I lost the way, and could not tell where
I was, whether St. Sauveur was to the left or the right, behind me or in
front of me. The horse, a miserable little Pyrenean beast, was too
frightened by the lightning to take the matter into his hands as he had
done on the road through the Chaos, and I saw nothing for it but to
surrender and come to grief in any way the elements best pleased;
swearing at myself for not having stayed at the inn at Gavarnie or
Gedre; wishing myself at the vilest mountain auberge that ever sheltered
men and mules pele-mele; and calling myself hard names for not having
listened to my landlady's dissuasions of that morning as I left her
door, from my project of going to Gavarnie without a guide, which seemed
to her the acme of all she had ever known or heard of English strangers'
fooleries. The storm only increased, the great black rocks echoing the
roll of the thunder, and the Gave lashing itself into fury in its narrow
bed; happily I was on decently level ground, and the horse being, I
suppose, tolerably used to storms like it, I pushed him on at last, by
dint of blows and conjurations combined, to where, in the flashes of the
lightning, I saw what looked to me like the outline of a homestead: it
stood in a cleft between two shelving sides of rock, and a narrow
bridle-path led up to it, through high yews and a tangled wilderness of
rhododendrons, boxwood, and birch--one of those green slopes so common
in the Pyrenees, that look in full sunlight doubly bright and
Arcadian-like, from the contrast of the dark, bare, perpendicular rocks
that shut them in. I could see but little of its beauty then in the fog
that shrouded both it and me, but I saw the shape and semblance of a
house, and urging the horse up the ascent, thundered on its gate-panels
with my whip-handle till the rocks round echoed.
"There was no answer, and I knocked a little louder, if possible, than
before. I was wet to the skin with that wretched storm, and swore not
mildly at the inhospitable roof that would not admit me under it. I
knocked again, inclined to pick up a piece of granite and beat the panel
in; and at last a face--an old woman's weather-beaten face, but with
black southern eyes that had lost little of their fire with age--looked
through a grating at me and asked me what I wanted.
"'I want shelter if you can give it me,' I answered her. 'I have lost
my way coming from Gavarnie, and am drenched through. I will pay you
liberally if you will give me an asylum till the weather clears.'
"Her eyes blazed like coals through the little grille.
"'M'sieu, we take no money here--have you mistaken it for an inn? Come
in if you want shelter, in Heaven's name! The Holy Virgin forbid we
should refuse refuge to any!'
"And she crossed herself and uttered some conjurations to Mary to
protect them from all wolves in sheep's clothing, and guard their
dwelling from all harm, by which I suppose she thought I spoke fairly
and looked harmless, but might possibly be a thief or an assassin, or
both in one. She unlocked the gate, and calling to a boy to take my
horse into a shed, admitted me under a covered passageway into the
house, which looked like part, and a very ruined part, too, of what had
probably been, in the times of Henri-Quatre and his grandfather, a
feudal chateau fenced in by natural ramparts from the rocks that
surrounded it, shutting in the green slope on which it stood, with only
one egress, the path through which I had ascended, into the level plain
below. She marshalled me through this covered way into an interior
passage, dark and vaulted, cheerless enough, and opened a low oak door,
ushering me into a chamber, bare, gloomy, yet with something of lost
grandeur and past state lingering about its great hearth, its massive
walls, its stained windows, and its ragged tapestry hangings. The woman
went up to one of the windows and spoke with a gentleness to which I
should have never thought her voice could have been attuned with its
harsh patois.
"'Mon enfant, v'la un m'sieu etranger qui vient chercher un abri pour un
petit peu. Veux-tu lui parler?'
"The young girl she spoke to turned, rose, and, coming forward, bade me
welcome with the grace, simplicity, and the naive freedom from
embarrassment of a child, looking up in my face with her soft clear
eyes. She was like----No matter! you have seen that crayon-head, it is
but a portrayal of a face whose expression Raphael and Sassoferrato
themselves would have failed to render in its earnest, innocent,
elevated regard. She was very young--
Standing with reluctant feet
Where the brook and river meet--
Womanhood and childhood fleet.
Good Heavens, I am quoting poetry! what will you think of me, to have
gone back to the Wertherian and Tennysonian days so far as to repeat a
triplet of Longfellow's? No man quotes _those_ poets after his salad
days, except in a moment of weakness. Caramba! why _has_ one any
weaknesses at all? we ought not to have any; we live in an atmosphere
that would kill them all if they were not as obstinate and
indestructible as all other weeds whose seeds will linger and peer up
and spoil the ground, let one root them out ever so! I owed you an
apology for that lapse into Longfellow, and I have made it. Am I to go
on with this story?"
He laughed as he spoke, and his laugh was by no means heartfelt. I told
him to go on, and he lighted another Manilla and obeyed me, while the
Arno murmured on its way, and the dusky, sultry clouds brooded nearer
the earth, and the lights were lit in the distant windows of the palace
of the Marchese Acqua d'Oro, that fairest of Florentines, who rouges so
indiscriminately and flirts her fan so inimitably, to one of whose balls
we were going that night.
He settled himself back in his chair, with his face darkened again by
the shadow cast on it from the pillar of the balcony; and took his cigar
out of his mouth.
"She looked incongruous in that bare and gloomy room, out of place with
it, and out of keeping with the old woman--a French peasant-woman,
weather-beaten and bronzed, such as you see any day by the score riding
to market or sitting knitting at their cottage-doors. It was impossible
that the girl could be either daughter or grand-daughter, or any
relation at all to her. In that room she looked more as one of these
myrtles might do, set down in the stifling gloomy horrors of a London
street than anything else, save that in certain traces about the
chamber, as I told you, there were relics of a faded grandeur which
harmonized better with her. I can see her now, as she stood there with a
strange foreign grace, an indescribable patrician delicacy mingled with
extreme youthfulness and naivete, like an old picture in costume, like
one of Raphael's child-angels in face--poor little Florelle!
"'You would stay till the storm is over, monsieur? you are welcome to
shelter if you will,' she said, coming forward to me timidly yet
frankly. 'Cazot tells me you are a stranger, and our mountain storms are
dangerous if you have no guide.'
"I did not know who Cazot was, but I presumed her to be the old woman,
who seemed to be portress, mistress, domestic, cameriste, and all else
in her single person, but I thanked her for her permitted shelter, and
accepted her invitation to remain till the weather had cleared, as you
can imagine. When you have lost your way, any asylum is grateful,
however desolate and tumble-down. They made me welcome, she and the old
peasant-woman, with that simple, unstrained, and unostentatious
hospitality which is, after all, the true essence of good breeding, and
of which your parvenu knows nothing, when he keeps you waiting, and
shows you that you are come at an inapropos moment, in his fussy fear
lest everything should not be _comme il faut_ to do due credit to _him_.
Old Cazot set before me some simple refreshment, a _grillade de
chataignes_, some maize and milk, and a dish of trout just caught in the
Gave below, while I looked at my chatelaine, marvelling how that young
and delicate creature could come to be shut up with an old peasant on a
remote hill-side. I did my best to draw her out and learn her history;
she was shy at first of a complete stranger, as was but natural, but I
spoke of Garvarnie, of the beauty of the Pyrenees, or Tourmalet, and the
Lac Bleu, and, warming with enthusiasm for her birthplace, the girl
forgot that I was a foreign tourist, unknown to her, and indebted to her
for an hour's shelter, and before my impromptu supper was over I had
drawn from her, by a few questions which she was too much of a child and
had too little to conceal not to answer with a child's ingenuousness,
the whole of her short history, and the explanation of her anomalous
position. Her name was Florelle de l'Heris, a name once powerful enough
among the nobles of the Midi, and the old woman, Madame Cazot, was her
father's foster-sister. Of her family, beggared in common with the best
aristocracy of France, none were now left; they had dwindled and fallen
away, till of the once great house of L'Heris this child remained alone
its representative: her mother had died in her infancy, and her father,
either too idle or too broken-hearted to care to retrieve his fortunes,
lived the life of a hermit among these ruins where I now found his
daughter, educating her himself till his death, which occurred when she
was only twelve years old, leaving her to poverty and obscurity, and
such protection and companionship as her old nurse Cazot could afford
her. Such was the story Florelle de l'Heris told me as I sat there that
evening waiting till the clouds should clear and the mists roll off
enough to let me go to St. Sauveur--a story told simply and
pathetically, and which Cazot, sitting knitting in a corner, added to by
a hundred gesticulations, expletives, appeals to the Virgin, and prolix
addenda, glad, I dare say, of any new confident, and disposed to regard
me with gratitude for my sincere praises of her fried trout. It was a
story which seemed to me to suit the delicate beauty of the flower I
had found in the wilderness, and read more like a chapter of some
versified novelette, like 'Lucille,' than a _bona fide_ page out of the
book of one's actual life, especially in a life like mine, of
essentially material pleasures and emphatically substantial and palpable
ambitions. But there _are_ odd stories in real life!--strange pathetic
ones, too--stranger, often, than those that found the plot and underplot
of a novel or the basis of a poem; but when such men as I come across
them they startle us, they look bizarre and unlike all the other leaves
of the book that glitter with worldly aphorisms, philosophical maxims,
and pungent egotisms, and we would fain cut them out; they have the ring
of that Arcadia whose golden gates shut on us when we outgrew boyhood,
and in which, _en revanche_, we have sworn ever since to
disbelieve--keeping our word sometimes, perhaps to our own
hindrance--Heaven knows!
"I stayed as long as I could that evening, till the weather had cleared
up so long, and the sun was shining again so indisputably, that I had no
longer any excuse to linger in the dark-tapestried room, with the
chestnuts sputtering among the wood-ashes, and Madame Cazot's needles
clicking one continual refrain, and the soft gazelle eyes of my young
chatelaine glancing from my sketches to me with that mixture of shyness
and fearlessness, innocence and candor, which gave so great a charm to
her manner. She was a new study to me, both for my palette and my
mind--a pretty fresh toy to amuse me while I should stay in the Midi. I
was not going to leave without making sure of a permission to return. I
wanted to have that face among my pastels, and when I had thanked her
for her shelter and her welcome, I told her my name, and asked her leave
to come again where I had been so kindly received.
"'Come again, monsieur? Certainly, if you care to come. But you will
find it a long way from Luz, I fear,' she said, naively, looking up at
me with her large clear fawn-like eyes--eyes so cloudless and untroubled
_then_--as she let me take her hand, and bade me adieu et bonsoir.