I
“Travelling, sir,” a curt parlour-maid announced from Mrs. Donald Paul’s
threshold in Kensington; adding, as young Willis French’s glance slipped
over her shoulder down a narrow and somewhat conventional perspective of
white panelling and black prints: “If there’s any message you’d like to
write”—
He did not know if there were or not; but he instantly saw that his
hesitation would hold the house-door open a minute longer, and thus give
him more time to stamp on his memory the details of the cramped London
hall, beyond which there seemed no present hope of penetrating.
“Could you tell me where?” he asked, in a tone implying that the
question of his having something to write might be determined by the
nature of the answer.
The parlour-maid scrutinized him more carefully. “Not exactly, sir: Mr.
and Mrs. Paul are away motoring, and I believe they’re to cross over to
the continent in a day or two.” She seemed to have gathered confidence
from another look at him, and he was glad he had waited to unpack his
town clothes, instead of rushing, as he had first thought of doing,
straight from the steamer train to the house. “If it’s for something
important, I could give you the address,” she finally condescended,
apparently reassured by her inspection.
“It _is_ important,” said the young man almost solemnly; and she handed
him a sheet of gold-monogrammed note-paper across which was tumbled, in
large loose characters: “Hôtel Nouveau Luxe, Paris.”
The unexpectedness of the address left Willis French staring. There was
nothing to excite surprise in the fact of the Donald Pauls having gone
to Paris; or even in their having gone there in their motor; but that
they should be lodged at the Nouveau Luxe seemed to sap the very base of
probability.
“Are you _sure_ they’re staying there?”
To the parlour-maid, at this point, it evidently began to look as if, in
spite of his reassuring clothes, the caller might have designs on the
umbrellas.
“I couldn’t say, sir. It’s the address, sir,” she returned, adroitly
taking her precautions about the door.
These were not lost on the visitor, who, both to tranquillize her and to
gain time, turned back toward the quiet Kensington street and stood
gazing doubtfully up and down its uneventful length.
All things considered, he had no cause to regret the turn the affair had
taken; the only regret he allowed himself was that of not being able
instantly to cross the threshold hallowed by his young enthusiasm. But
even that privilege might soon be his; and meanwhile he was to have the
unforeseen good luck of following Mrs. Donald Paul to Paris. His
business in coming to Europe had been simply and solely to see the
Donald Pauls; and had they been in London he would have been obliged,
their conference over, to return at once to New York, whence he had been
sent, at his publisher’s expense, to obtain from Mrs. Paul certain
details necessary for the completion of his book: _The Art of Horace
Fingall_. And now, by a turn of what he fondly called his luck—as if no
one else’s had ever been quite as rare—he found his vacation prolonged,
and his prospect of enjoyment increased, by the failure to meet the lady
in London.
Willis French had more than once had occasion to remark that he owed
some of his luckiest moments to his failures. He had tried his hand at
several of the arts, only to find, in each case, the same impassable
gulf between vision and execution; but his ill-success, which he always
promptly recognized, had left him leisure to note and enjoy all the
incidental compensations of the attempt. And how great some of these
compensations were, he had never more keenly felt than on the day when
two of the greatest came back to him merged in one glorious opportunity.
It was probable, for example, that if he had drawn a directer profit
from his months of study in a certain famous Parisian _atelier_, his
labours would have left him less time in which to observe and study
Horace Fingall, on the days when the great painter made his round among
the students; just as, if he had written better poetry, Mrs. Morland,
with whom his old friend Lady Brankhurst had once contrived to have him
spend a Sunday in the country, might have given him, during their long
confidential talk, less of her sweet compassion and her bracing wisdom.
Both Horace Fingall and Emily Morland had, professionally speaking,
discouraged their young disciple; the one had said “don’t write” as
decidedly as the other had said “don’t paint”; but both had let him feel
that interesting failures may be worth more in the end than dull
successes, and that there is range enough for the artistic sensibilities
outside the region of production. The fact of the young man’s taking
their criticism without flinching (as he himself had been thankfully
aware of doing) no doubt increased their liking, and thus let him
farther into their intimacy. The insight into two such natures seemed,
even at the moment, to outweigh any personal success within his reach;
and as time removed him from the experience he had less and less
occasion to question the completeness of the compensation.
Since then, as it happened, his two great initiators had died within a
few months of each other, Emily Morland prematurely, and at the moment
when her exquisite art was gaining new warmth from the personal
happiness at last opening to her, and Horace Fingall in his late golden
prime, when his genius also seemed to be winged for new flights. Except
for the nearness of the two death dates, there was nothing to bring
together in the public mind the figures of the painter and the poet, and
Willis French’s two experiences remained associated in his thoughts only
because they had been the greatest revelations of temperament he had
ever known. No one but Emily Morland had ever renewed in him that sense
of being in the presence of greatness that he had first felt on meeting
Horace Fingall. He had often wondered if the only two beings to whom he
owed this emotion had ever known each other, and he had concluded that,
even in this day of universal meetings, it was unlikely. Fingall, after
leaving the United States for Paris toward his fortieth year, had never
absented himself from France except on short occasional visits to his
native country; and Mrs. Morland, when she at last broke away from her
depressing isolation in a Staffordshire parsonage, and set up her own
house in London, had been drawn from there only by one or two holiday
journeys in Italy. Nothing, moreover, could have been more unlike than
the mental quality and the general attitude of the two artists. The only
point of resemblance between them lay in the effect they produced of the
divine emanation of genius. Willis French’s speculations as to the
result of a meeting between them had always resulted in the belief that
they would not have got on. The two emanations would have neutralized
each other, and he suspected that both natures lacked the complementary
qualities which might have bridged the gulf between them. And now chance
had after all linked their names before posterity, through the fact that
the widow of the one had married the man who had been betrothed to the
other!...
French’s brief glimpses of Fingall and Mrs. Morland had left in him an
intense curiosity to know something more of their personal history, and
when his publisher had suggested his writing a book on the painter his
first thought had been that here was an occasion to obtain the desired
light, and to obtain it, at one stroke, through the woman who had been
the preponderating influence in Fingall’s art, and the man for whom
Emily Morland had written her greatest poems.
That Donald Paul should have met and married the widow of Horace Fingall
was one of the facts on which young French’s imagination had always most
appreciatively dwelt. It was strange indeed that these two custodians of
great memories, for both of whom any other marriage would have been a
derogation, should have found the one way of remaining on the heights;
and it was almost equally strange that their inspiration should turn out
to be Willis French’s opportunity!
At the very outset, the wonder of it was brought home to him by his
having to ask for Mrs. Paul at what had once been Mrs. Morland’s house.
Mrs. Morland had of course bequeathed the house to Donald Paul; and
equally of course it was there that, on his marriage to Mrs. Fingall,
Donald Paul had taken his wife. If that wife had been any other, the
thought would have been one to shrink from; but to French’s mind no
threshold was too sacred for the feet of Horace Fingall’s widow.
Musing on these things as he glanced up and down the quiet street, the
young man, with his sharp professional instinct for missing no chance
that delay might cancel, wondered how, before turning from the door, he
might get a glimpse of the house which was still—which, in spite of
everything, would always be—Emily Morland’s.
“You were not thinking of looking at the house, sir?”
French turned back with a start of joy. “Why, yes—I was!” he said
instantly.
The parlour-maid opened the door a little wider. “Of course, properly
speaking, you should have a card from the agent; but Mrs. Paul _did_
say, if anyone was _very_ anxious—May I ask, sir, if you know Mrs.
Paul?”
The young man lowered his voice reverentially to answer: “No; but I knew
Mrs. Morland.”
The parlour-maid looked as if he had misunderstood her question. After a
moment’s thought she replied: “I don’t think I recall the name.”
They gazed at each other across incalculable distances, and Willis
French found no reply. “What on earth can she suppose I want to see the
house for?” he could only wonder.
Her next question told him. “If it’s very urgent, sir—” another glance
at the cut of his coat seemed to strengthen her, and she moved back far
enough to let him get a foot across the threshold. “Would it be to hire
or to buy?”
Again they stared at each other till French saw his own wonder reflected
in the servant’s doubtful face; then the truth came to him in a rush.
The house was not being shown to him because it had once been Emily
Morland’s and he had been recognized as a pilgrim to the shrine of
genius, but because it was Mrs. Donald Paul’s and he had been taken for
a possible purchaser!
All his disenchantment rose to his lips; but it was checked there by the
leap of prudence. He saw that if he showed his wonder he might lose his
chance.
“Oh, it would be to buy!” he said; for, though the mere thought of
hiring was a desecration, few things would have seemed more possible to
him, had his fortune been on the scale of his enthusiasm, than to become
the permanent custodian of the house.
The feeling threw such conviction into his words that the parlour-maid
yielded another step.
“The drawing-room is this way,” she said as he bared his head.