There were half-a-dozen yellow chrysanthemums in a dull green jar on a
Buhl chiffonier. The slanting November sunshine fell on them, and threw
against the white wall a shadow of them. It was a shadow transfigured,
intricate yet vague, mysterious, beautiful exceedingly.
I should never have noticed it if she had not looked at it with such
intentness. For a moment I saw it with her eyes. I was touched; I hardly
knew why. All the apathy was gone from her face. There was passion in
it. She looked entirely exhausted, and yet it was the first time I had
seen her really alive.
The sunshine went out suddenly, and she sighed.
"You may get up to-morrow, and go downstairs," I said. "It is dull for
you alone up here."
"I like being here," she said.
Was she, like so many women, "contrary?" Always opposing the suggestions
of others, never willing to fall in with family arrangements.
"Don't you want to see the goldfish?" I hazarded, speaking as if to a
child. "He must be lonely now Mrs. Robinson is laid up. And who will
give him his crumbs?"
"No, I don't want to see him," she said passionately. "I never look at
him if I can help it. Oh Dr. Giles, everyone seems to shut their eyes
who comes into this house--everyone--but don't you see how dreadful it
is to be a prisoner?"
She looked at me with timid despairing eyes, which yet had a flicker of
hope in them. I patted her hand gently, and found she still had a little
fever.
"But he gets plenty of crumbs," I said soothingly, "and it is a nice
aquarium with fresh water running through all the time. I think he is a
very lucky goldfish."
She looked fixedly at me, and the faint colour in her cheeks faded, the
imploring look vanished from her eyes.
She leaned back among her lace pillows.
"That is what Mrs. Robinson says," she said with a quivering lip, and I
perceived that I was relegated to the same category in her mind as her
mother-in-law.
She withdrew her thin hand and retreated once more behind the frail
bastion of silence from which she had looked out at me for all these
months; from which she had for one moment emerged, only to creep back to
its forlorn shelter.
A few days later Mrs. Robinson was convalescent, sitting up in bed in a
garish cap festooned with cherry-coloured ribbons, and a silk wadded
jacket to match. I questioned her about her daughter-in-law, in whom for
the first time I felt interested. It needed no acumen on my part to draw
forth the whole of Blanche's short history. One slight question was all
that was necessary to turn on the cock of Mrs. Robinson's confidences.
The stream gushed forth at once, it overflowed, it could hardly be
turned off again. I was drenched.
"How long has Blanche been married? Two years, Dr. Giles. She's just
nineteen. That's her age--nineteen. Seventeen and three days when she
married. Such a romance. _She_ was seventeen and Arthur was twenty-two.
Five years difference. Just right, and you never saw two young people so
much in love with each other. And such a beautiful couple. It was a love
match. Made in heaven. Just like his father and me over again. That is
what I said to them. I said on their wedding day: 'Well, I hope you
will be as happy as your father and I were.'"
There was not much information to be retrieved from Mrs. Robinson's
gushings, but in the course of the next few days I hooked up out of a
flood of extraneous matter a few facts which had apparently escaped her
notice.
Blanche it seemed was the niece of a former Senior Curate of St.
Botolph's. "A splendid preacher, Dr. Giles, and a real churchman, high
mass and confession, and incense, just the priest for St. Botolph's, a
dedicated celibate and vegetarian--such a saintly example to us all."
It appeared obvious to me, though not to Mrs. Robinson, that the
vegetarian celebate had been embarrassed as to what to do with his
niece, when at the age of seventeen she had been suddenly left on his
hands owing to the inconvenient death of her widowed mother. Evidently
Blanche had not had a farthing.
"But he was such a wide-minded man. Of course he wanted dear Blanche to
lead the highest life, and to dedicate herself as he had done, and to go
into a sisterhood. But she cried all the time when he explained it to
her, and said she could not paint in a sisterhood. And she didn't seem
to fancy illuminating missals, or church embroidery, just what he had
thought she would like. He was always thinking what would make her
happy. And then it turned out there was some question of expense as well
which he had not foreseen, so he gave up the idea. And just at that time
I had a lot of trouble with Arthur--with drink--between you and me. It
was such a hot summer. I am convinced it was the heat that started it;
too much whiskey in the soda water--and other things as well. Arthur was
got hold of and led away. And Dr. Whittington advised me to find a nice
young wife for him. And I told Mr. Copton--that was the priest's name,
all about it--I always told him everything, and he was _most_ kind, and
interested, and so understanding, and he agreed a good wife was just
what Arthur wanted, and marriage was an honourable estate, those were
his very words. And Arthur was fond of painting, and Blanche was fond of
painting too, simply devoted to it, and they had lessons together in a
private studio and--"
It went on and on for ever.
"And her uncle gave her away. He was quite distressed that he could not
afford a trousseau, for he was Rector Designate of Saint Oressa's at
Liverpool, but I told him not to trouble about that. I gave her
everything just as if she had been my own child. I spent hundreds on her
trousseau, and she was married in my Brussels lace veil that I wore at
my own wedding. I just took to her as my own child from the first. And
would you believe it before he went away on his honeymoon, Arthur
brought me the goldfish to keep me company. In a bowl it was. Such a
quaint idea, wasn't it, so like Arthur. They are my two pets, Blanche
and Goldy."
I am not an artistic person, but even I was beginning to have doubts
about Arthur's talent. It seemed somehow unnatural that he was always
having his work enlarged by a third or a fifth, or both. Every picture
he had painted, before his hands trembled too much to hold a brush, was
faithfully copied and enlarged by his wife. She reproduced his dreary
compositions with amazing exactitude, working for hours together in a
corner of his studio, while he lay pallid, with half-closed eyes on the
black satin sofa, watching her.
I had always taken for granted they were a devoted couple. Mrs. Robinson
was always saying so, and it was obvious that Arthur never willingly
allowed his wife out of his sight.
However, one morning I came into the studio when there was trouble
between them. I saw at once it was one of his worst days.
He was standing before an enlargement of one of his pictures livid with
anger.
"How often am I to to tell you that a copy must be exact," he stammered
in his disjointed staccato speech. "If you quote a line of poetry do
you alter one of the words? If I trust you to reproduce a picture surely
you know you are not at liberty to change it."
She was as pale as he was. She looked dully at him, and then at her own
canvas on the easel.
"I forgot," she said, in a suffocated voice.
I looked at the original and the copy, and even my stolid heart beat a
little quicker.
The original represented a young girl--his wife had evidently sat for
him--playing on a harp, while a man listened, leaning against a table,
with a bowl of chrysanthemums upon it.
The copy was much larger than the original, and its wooden smugness was
faithfully reproduced. The faulty drawing of the two figures seemed to
have been accentuated by doubling its size. It was an amazingly exact
reproduction, except in one particular. In Blanche's copy she had made
the shadow of the chrysanthemums fall upon the wall. It was a wonderful,
a mysterious shadow, _I had seen it before_.
"I hadn't indicated the slightest shadow," Arthur continued. "There is
no sunshine in the room. You have deliberately falsified my
composition."
"I did it without thinking," said Blanche shivering. "It is a mistake."
"A mistake," he said sullenly. "Your heart isn't in your work, that is
the truth. You don't really care to help me to find my true
expression."
And he took the canvas from the easel and tore it in two.
Did he half know, did some voice in the back of his twisted brain cry
out to him that his part of the picture was hopelessly mediocre and out
of drawing, that the only value it possessed was the shadow of the
chrysanthemums? Was there jealousy in his rage? Who shall say!
I butted in at this point, and made a pretext for sending Blanche out of
the room.
"Now, my dear fellow," I said confidentially, "don't in future try to
associate your wife with your art. It is quite beyond her. Women, sir,
have no artistic feeling. The home, dress, amusement that is their
department. 'Occupy till I come,' might well have been said of feminine
talent. It does occupy--till--ahem! _we_ arrive. When a woman is happily
married like your wife she doesn't care a fig for anything else. Let her
share your lighter moments, your walks and drives, allow her to solace
your leisure. The bow, sir, must not be always at full stretch. But
promise me you won't allow her to copy any more of your pictures."
"Never again," said Arthur sepulchrally, stretched face downwards on the
satin sofa.