It was odd how, as he paced up and down the Embankment late that
evening, musing over the vision vouchsafed him, one detail continued to
detach itself with discordant sharpness from the harmonious blur.
The parlour-maid who had never heard of Mrs. Morland, and who
consequently could not know that the house had ever been hers, had
naturally enough explained it to him in terms of its new owners’ habits.
French’s imagination had so promptly anticipated this that he had,
almost without a shock, heard Mrs. Morland’s library described as “the
gentleman’s study,” and marked how an upstairs sitting-room with faded
Venetian furniture and rows of old books in golden-brown calf had been
turned, by the intrusion of a large pink toilet-table, into “the lady’s
dressing-room, sir.” It did not offend him that the dwelling should be
used as suited the convenience of the persons who lived in it; he was
never for expecting life to stop, and the Historic House which has been
turned into a show had always seemed to him as dead as a blown egg. He
had small patience with the kind of reverence which treats fine things
as if their fineness made them useless. Nothing, he thought, was too
fine for natural uses, nothing in life too good for life; he liked the
absent and unknown Donald Pauls the better for living naturally in this
house which had come to them naturally, and not shrinking into the mere
keepers of a shrine. But he had winced at just one thing: at seeing
there, on the writing-table which had once been Emily Morland’s, and
must still, he quickly noted, be much as she had left it—at seeing
there, among pens and pencils and ink-stained paper-cutters, halfway
between a lacquer cup full of elastic bands and a blotting-book with her
initials on it, one solitary object of irrelevant newness: an immense
expensively framed photograph of Fingall’s picture of his wife.
The portrait—the famous first one, now in the Luxembourg—was so
beautiful, and so expressive of what lovers of Fingall’s art most loved
in it, that Willis French was grieved to see it so indelicately and
almost insolently out of place. If ever a thing of beauty can give
offence, Mrs. Fingall’s portrait on Emily Morland’s writing-table gave
offence. Its presence there shook down all manner of French’s faiths.
There was something shockingly crude in the way it made the woman in
possession triumph over the woman who was gone.
It would have been different, he felt at once, if Mrs. Morland had lived
long enough to marry the man she loved; then the dead and the living
woman would have faced each other on an equality. But Mrs. Morland, to
secure her two brief years of happiness, had had to defy conventions and
endure affronts. When, breaking away from the unhappy conditions of her
married life, she had at last won London and freedom, it was only to
learn that the Reverend Ambrose Morland, informed of her desire to
remarry, and of his indisputable right to divorce her, found himself, on
religious grounds, unable to set her free. From this situation she
sought no sensational escape. Perhaps because the man she loved was
younger than herself, she chose to make no open claim on him, to place
no lien on his future; she simply let it be known to their few nearest
friends that he and she belonged to each other as completely as a man
and woman of active minds and complex interests can ever belong to each
other when such life as they live together must be lived in secret. To a
woman like Mrs. Morland the situation could not be other than difficult
and unsatisfying. If her personal distinction saved her from social
slights it could not save her from social subserviences. Never once, in
the short course of her love-history, had she been able to declare her
happiness openly, or to let it reveal itself in her conduct; and it
seemed, as one considered her case, small solace to remember that some
of her most moving verse was the expression of that very privation.
At last her husband’s death had freed her, and her coming marriage to
Donald Paul been announced; but her own health had already failed, and a
few weeks later she too was dead, and Donald Paul lost in the crowd
about her grave, behind the Morland relations who, rather generously as
people thought, came up from Staffordshire for the funeral of the woman
who had brought scandal and glory to their name.
So, tragically and inarticulately, Emily Morland’s life had gone out;
and now, in the house where she and her lover had spent their short
secret hours, on the very table at which she had sat and imperishably
written down her love, he had put the portrait of the other woman, her
successor; the woman to whom had been given the one great thing she had
lacked....
Well, that was life too, French supposed: the ceaseless ruthless turning
of the wheel! If only—yes, here was where the real pang lay—if only the
supplanting face had not been so different from the face supplanted!
Standing there before Mrs. Fingall’s image, how could he not recall his
first sight of Emily Morland, how not feel again the sudden drop of all
his expectations when the one woman he had not noticed on entering Lady
Brankhurst’s drawing-room, the sallow woman with dull hair and a dowdy
dress, had turned out to be his immortal? Afterward, of course, when she
began to talk, and he was let into the deep world of her eyes, her face
became as satisfying as some grave early sculpture which, the
imagination once touched by it, makes more finished graces trivial. But
there remained the fact that she was what is called plain, and that her
successor was beautiful; and it hurt him to see that perfect face, so
all-expressive and all-satisfying, in the very spot where Emily Morland,
to make her beauty visible, had had to clothe it in poetry. What would
she not have given, French wondered, just once to let her face speak for
her instead?
The sense of injustice was so strong in him that when he returned to his
hotel he went at once to his portmanteau and, pulling out Mrs. Morland’s
last volume, sat down to reread the famous love-sonnets. It was as if he
wanted to make up to her for the slight of which he had been the
unwilling witness....
The next day, when he set out for France, his mood had changed. After
all, Mrs. Morland had had her compensations. She had been inspired,
which, on the whole, is more worth while than to inspire. And then his
own adventure was almost in his grasp; and he was at the age when each
moment seems to stretch out to the horizon.
The day was fine, and as he sat on the deck of the steamer watching the
white cliffs fade, the thought of Mrs. Morland was displaced by the
vision of her successor. He recalled the day when Mrs. Fingall had first
looked out at him from her husband’s famous portrait of her, so frail,
so pale under the gloom and glory of her hair, and he had been told how
the sight of her had suddenly drawn the painter’s genius from its long
eclipse. Fingall had found her among the art students of one of the
Parisian studios which he fitfully inspected, had rescued her from
financial difficulties and married her within a few weeks of their
meeting: French had had the tale from Lady Brankhurst, who was an
encyclopædia of illustrious biographies.
“Poor little Bessy Reck—a little American waif sent out from some
prairie burrow to ‘learn art’—that was literally how she expressed it!
She hadn’t a relation of her own, I believe: the people of the place she
came from had taken pity on her and scraped together enough money for
her passage and for two years of the Latin Quarter. After that she was
to live on the sale of her pictures! And suddenly she met Fingall, and
found out what she was really made for.”
So far Lady Brankhurst had been satisfying, as she always was when she
trod on solid fact. But she never knew anything about her friends except
what had happened to them, and when questioned as to what Mrs. Fingall
was really like she became vague and slightly irritable.
“Oh, well, he transformed her, of course: for one thing he made her do
her hair differently. Imagine; she used to puff it out over her
forehead! And when we went to the studio she was always dressed in the
most marvellous Eastern things. Fingall drank cups and cups of Turkish
coffee, and she learned to make it herself—it _is_ better, of course,
but so messy to make! The studio was full of Siamese cats. It was
somewhere over near the Luxembourg—very picturesque, but one _did_ smell
the drains. I used always to take my salts with me; and the stairs were
pitch-black.” That was all.
But from her very omissions French had constructed the vision of
something too fine and imponderable not to escape Lady Brankhurst, and
had rejoiced in the thought that, of what must have been the most
complete of blisses, hardly anything was exposed to crude comment but
the stairs which led to it.
Of Donald Paul he had been able to learn even less, though Lady
Brankhurst had so many more facts to give. Donald Paul’s life lay open
for everybody in London to read. He had been first a “dear boy,” with a
large and eminently respectable family connection, and then a not
especially rising young barrister, who occupied his briefless leisure by
occasionally writing things for the reviews. He had written an article
about Mrs. Morland, and when, soon afterward, he happened to meet her,
he had suddenly realized that he hadn’t understood her poetry in the
least, and had told her so and written another article—under her
guidance, the malicious whispered, and boundlessly enthusiastic, of
course; people said it was that which had made her fall in love with
him. But Lady Brankhurst thought it was more likely to have been his
looks—with which French, on general principles, was inclined to agree.
“What sort of looks?” he asked. “Oh, like an old picture, you know”; and
at that shadowy stage of development the image of Donald Paul had hung.
French, in spite of an extensive search, had not even been able to find
out where the fateful articles on Mrs. Morland’s verse had been
published; and light on that point was one of the many lesser results he
now hoped for.
Meanwhile, settled in his chair on deck, he was so busy elaborating his
own picture of the couple he was hastening to that he hardly noticed the
slim figure of a traveller with a sallow keen face and small dark beard
who hovered near, as if for recognition.
“André Jolyesse—you don’t remember me?” the gentleman at length reminded
him in beautifully correct English; and French woke to the fact that it
was of course Jolyesse, the eminent international portrait painter,
whose expensively gloved hand he was shaking.
“We crossed together on the _Gothic_ the last time I went to the
States,” Monsieur Jolyesse reminded him, “and you were so amiable as to
introduce me to several charming persons who added greatly to the
enjoyment of my visit.”
“Of course, of course,” French assented; and seeing that the painter was
in need of a listener, the young man reluctantly lifted his rugs from
the next chair.
It was because Jolyesse, on the steamer, had been so shamelessly in
quest of an article that French, to escape his importunities, had passed
him on to the charming persons referred to; and if he again hung about
in this way, and recalled himself, it was doubtless for a similarly
shameless purpose. But French was more than ever steeled against the
celebrating of such art as that of Jolyesse; and, to cut off a possible
renewal of the request, he managed—in answer to a question as to what he
was doing with himself—to mention casually that he had abandoned art
criticism for the writing of books.
The portrait painter was far too polite to let his attention visibly
drop at this announcement; too polite, even, not to ask with a show of
interest if he might know the subject of the work Mr. French was at the
moment engaged on.
“Horace Fingall—_bigre_!” he murmured, as if the aridity of the task
impressed him while it provoked his pity. “Fingall—Fingall—” he
repeated, his incredulous face smilingly turned to French, while he drew
a cigarette from a gold case as flat as an envelope.
French gave back the smile. It delighted him, it gave him a new sense of
the importance of his task, to know that Jolyesse, in spite of Fingall’s
posthumous leap to fame, still took that view of him. And then, with a
start of wonder, the young man remembered that the two men must have
known each other, that they must have had at least casual encounters in
the crowded promiscuous life of the painters’ Paris. The possibility was
so rich in humour that he was moved to question his companion.
“You must have come across Fingall now and then, I suppose?”
Monsieur Jolyesse shrugged his shoulders. “Not for years. He was a
savage—he had no sense of solidarity. And envious—!” The artist waved
the ringed hand that held his cigarette. “Could one help it if one sold
more pictures than he did? But it was gall and worm-wood to him, poor
devil. Of course he sells _now_—tremendously high, I believe. But that’s
what happens: when an unsuccessful man dies, the dealers seize on him
and make him a factitious reputation. Only it doesn’t last. You’d better
make haste to finish your book; that sort of celebrity collapses like a
soap-bubble. Forgive me,” he added, with a touch of studied compunction,
“for speaking in this way of your compatriot. Fingall had
aptitudes—immense, no doubt—but no technique, and no sense of beauty;
none whatever.”
French, rejoicing, let the commentary flow on; he even felt the need to
stimulate its flow.
“But how about his portrait of his wife—you must know it?”
Jolyesse flung away his cigarette to lift his hands in protest. “That
consumptive witch in the Luxembourg? _Ah, mais non!_ She looks like a
vegetarian vampire. _Voyez vous, si l’on a beaucoup aimé les femmes—_”
the painter’s smile was evidently intended to justify his championship
of female loveliness. He puffed away the subject with his cigarette
smoke, and turned to glance down the deck. “There—by Jove, that’s what I
call a handsome woman! Over there, with the sable cloak and the brand
new travelling-bags. A honeymoon outfit, _hein_? If your poor Fingall
had had the luck to do _that_ kind—! I’d like the chance myself.”
French, following his glance, saw that it rested on a tall and extremely
elegant young woman who was just settling herself in a deck-chair with
the assistance of an attentive maid and a hovering steward. A young man,
of equal height and almost superior elegance, strolled up to tuck a rug
over her shining boot-tips before seating himself at her side; and
French had to own that, at least as a moment’s ornament, the lady was
worth all the trouble spent on her. She seemed, in truth, framed by
nature to bloom from one of Monsieur Jolyesse’s canvases, so completely
did she embody the kind of beauty it was his mission to immortalize. It
was annoying that eyes like forest-pools and a mouth like a tropical
flower should so fit into that particular type; but then the object of
Monsieur Jolyesse’s admiration had the air of wearing her features, like
her clothes, simply because they were the latest fashion, and not
because they were a part of her being. Her inner state was probably a
much less complicated affair than her lovely exterior: it was a state,
French guessed, of easy apathetic good-humour, galvanized by the
occasional need of a cigarette, and by a gentle enjoyment of her
companion’s conversation. French had wondered, since his childhood, what
the Olympian lovers in fashion-plates found to say to each other. Now he
knew. They said (he strolled nearer to the couple to catch it): “Did you
wire about reserving a compartment?”; and “I haven’t seen my golf-clubs
since we came on board”: and “I do hope Marshall’s brought enough of
that new stuff for my face,”—and lastly, after a dreamy pause: “I _know_
Gwen gave me a book to read when we started, but I can’t think where on
earth I’ve put it.”
It was odd too that, handsome and young as they still were (both well on
the warm side of forty), this striking couple were curiously undefinably
old-fashioned—in just the same way as Jolyesse’s art. They belonged, for
all their up-to-date attire, to a period before the triumph of the slack
and the slouching: it was as if their elegance had pined too long in the
bud, and its belated flowering had a tinge of staleness.
French mused on these things while he listened to Jolyesse’s guesses as
to the class and nationality of the couple, and finally, in answer to
the insistent question: “But where do you think they come from?” replied
a little impatiently: “Oh, from the rue de la Paix, of course!” He was
tired of the subject, and of his companion, and wanted to get back to
his thoughts of Horace Fingall.
“Ah, I hope so—then I may run across them yet!” Jolyesse, as he gathered
up his bags, shot a last glance at the beauty. “I’ll haunt the
dressmakers till I find her—she looks as if she spent most of her time
with them. And the young man evidently refuses her nothing. You’ll see,
I’ll have her in the next Salon!” He turned back to add: “She might be a
compatriot of yours. Women who look as if they came out of the depths of
history usually turn out to be from your newest Territory. If you run
across her, do say a good word for me. My full lengths are fifty
thousand francs now—to Americans.”