WHAT IT ALL MEANT TO LAURIE.
When Laurie Renton arrived in town, he went with the story of his
family’s fortune and his own, as was natural, to the padrona, who had
now a double interest in the tale. She had already heard of it in a
letter from Alice; but such a narrative is naturally more full and
satisfactory by word of mouth.
It was in the same house, up the same stairs, in the same studio, that
Laurie sought his friend. Everything was seven years older, and the hair
growing thin on the top of Laurie’s head, and Alice the mother of
children; but neither Mrs. Severn nor her studio was much changed. She
had attained, when we saw her first, to that table-land which lies in
the centre of an innocent and healthful life, and on which Time, if he
does not stand still, moves with such equal and steady steps, that it is
difficult to trace his progress; and as many more years were probably
before her ere there would appear in the padrona any such marked signs
of the passage of years as those which had already left their stamp on
Laurie in his youth. There might be a few white threads among her hair,
at least she said there were; but for all that any one could have told,
she might have been wrapped in some enchanted sleep for all those years,
instead of working, and thinking, and sorrowing, and taking such simple
pleasures as came to her. The pleasures had been less and the sorrows
greater since Alice left her; but now Edie had grown, as everybody said,
a great girl, and the mother’s heart was stirring into life in her
development, to prepare for herself another crisis and sacrifice. It was
years now since Laurie had returned from his first self-banishment to
Italy. He had come back and he had been away again from time to time,
but he had always returned here,--‘home’ as he liked to call it,--and
for a long period there had been nothing in the character of his
feelings which made it painful to him to come. How this was he could not
tell. When he went away on that forlorn journey to Rome he had felt as
if he never could look again upon the woman whom he loved with all his
heart, but who, as nature herself indicated, could never be more to him
than a friend. She could not be his,--never,--though everything in
heaven and earth were to plead for him,--and the only thing for him to
do was to rush away from her, and bury himself and his unhappy love out
of sight for ever. These had been his feelings when he went away;--but,
somehow, they did not last. Slowly, by degrees, he and his heart came
back to her without any anguish or despair in them. When he returned,
and went half-tremblingly to see if he could bear the sight of her,
Laurie found, somewhat to his astonishment, that the sight, instead of
driving him wild with disappointed affection, soothed and consoled and
softened him as nothing else could do. Perhaps, had it been possible
that she should become any other man’s wife the sensation would have
been different; but there had long ago ceased to be any strong wish on
the matter in Laurie’s mind. The old custom of hanging about her house
came back upon him. He would come and talk to her of all his own
concerns, and of a great many of hers, by the hour together; and not of
realities only, but of fancies,--everything that came into his head.
There was the strangest transposition of ordinary rules in their
intercourse. While he lounged about, and talked and poured out all his
mind, she would be working on steadily, pausing to note her
effects,--now and then calling him into counsel on some knotty point,
responding to his thoughts, understanding him even when he but
half-uttered his meaning, giving him a certain proof of perfect sympathy
and friendship, more soft and tender than ordinary friendship,--and yet
never stopping in her work. Had they been of the same age, such a thing
of course could not have been possible; but on the vantage-ground of a
dozen additional years the woman stood calm and steadfast, and the man
too, his boyish fit of passion over, was calm. No doubt there was a
whisper at one time in the artists’ quarter that Mrs. Severn was going
to make a fool of herself and marry a man young enough to be her son.
But as time disproved that matter, the world, which after all is not
such a stupid world, but acknowledges, after due probation, the
privileges that can be safely accorded to the blameless, held its
tongue,--or only jeered innocently by times at the friendship. ‘Such
things are impracticable generally, and dangerous, you know, and all
that. It is all very well to talk of friendship; but one knows it always
falls into love on one side or the other. I really do believe an
exception ought to be made for the padrona and Laurie Renton,’ was what
was said in Fitzroy Square. And as the two took matters with perfect
composure, and never looked as if they supposed either the world or the
Square to have anything to do with it, the unusual bond between them
soon came to be considered a matter of course. It was not such a bond
that the man was always at the woman’s apron-strings. He went away,
sometimes for months together, and travelled about in that
half-professional, half-dilettante way that suited Laurie; and then he
wrote to her, and next after Alice’s, Laurie’s letters were looked for
in Mrs. Severn’s house. And I will not say that there was not now and
then just a word in them which the padrona passed over when she read
these epistles to the boys, and which made her half smile, half sigh
with a curious mingled sense of regret, and amusement, and pleasure. He
would say, when he was describing something to her, ‘If you were but
here, padrona mia, I should want no more.’ Foolish fellow! as if she
ever could be with him, as if it would not be the height of folly and
weakness, and overturn of the whole rational world and all the modesties
of nature. But yet, so long as it evaporated in a harmless sigh like
this, it hurt no one,--not Laurie, who perhaps loved his wanderings all
the better for that soft want in them; and not her, as she doubled down
the page at that point with a half-laugh. And when he came home the
first place he went to was the Square. To be sure, such a friendship put
all thoughts of marrying out of Laurie’s head, as Mrs. Suffolk, who
thought everybody should marry, sometimes deplored. ‘Unless you send him
away, padrona, he will always be just as he is. He will never think of
any other kind of life,’ she would say to her friend. ‘My dear, he has
no money to marry on,’ the padrona would say,--and so Laurie’s heart had
always found a home and every kind of support and consolation and
sympathy in Fitzroy Square.
And, to tell the truth, the money had been rather a difficult point with
him now and then. To live upon two hundred a-year when you have been
brought up a Renton of Renton, is a matter which requires a great deal
of consideration. But Laurie, fortunately for himself, had no expensive
tastes, and he painted some pictures, and, what was more remarkable,
sold some; and even found himself on the line at the Academy, thus
carrying out his highest dreams. But it did not give him the
gratification, nor cause the stir he had once anticipated. It was a
small picture, a little bit of Italian air and sunshine, and Slasher
gave it a little paragraph all to itself in the ‘Sword;’ but the people
whom he had once pictured to himself finding out his name in the
catalogue, and calling heaven and earth to witness that Laurie Renton
had done something at last, had by this time forgotten all about Laurie
Renton, or he had forgotten them, which came to the same thing. And
candidly in his soul, Laurie allowed, that had not old Welby been on the
hanging committee, probably it never would have reached ‘the line;’ and
had not Slasher been a friend of his, would never have been noticed in
the ‘Sword.’ But it sold for a hundred pounds, which was always an
advantage. The picture was called ‘Feliciello, on Tiberio,’ and was the
picture of a dark-faced Capriote guide, on one of the highest points of
his island, pointing out to a fair English girl the points in the
wonderful landscape round. It was Edie Severn, who had never been there,
with her golden hair streaming round her, who was the English girl. But
handsome Feliciello had been studied on the spot. And Mr. Rich of
Richmont,--always a great patron of the fine arts,--gave Laurie a
hundred pounds for it, and thought it one of his greatest bargains.
‘This picture has a story,’ he would say to his guests; ‘it was painted
by a gentleman, the son of one of my neighbours in the country, a man
who had never been brought up to make his living by art. It is quite a
romance; but I hear matters are settled, and that he has come into his
share of the money, and will paint no more, and I think I was very lucky
to secure this. My daughter, Lady Horsman, will tell you all about it.’
‘About the picture painted by a gentleman?’ Nelly would say, on being
questioned. ‘Most painters that I know are gentlemen. Papa means to
infer that he is not much of a painter, I suppose.’ For Lady Horsman was
not fond of the Rentons, and had never cared to cultivate their society.
‘If you get my lady on painters she’ll talk till midnight,’ Sir George
said out of his moustache. He did not know the difference between a
sign-post and a Titian, and thought the one quite as pretty as the
other; but he was the head of one of the oldest families in Christendom,
and Master of the Hounds in his county, and a great many other
grandeurs; and, so far as I know, Nelly had the full value for her fifty
thousand pounds.
This, however, is a digression a long way out of Fitzroy Square. Laurie
went to the padrona with his story, and found her still in a state of
excitement over Alice’s letter,--the second since the event,--with
something in it about Dovecote, which was the last new possibility. She
had just been taken to see it, and her letter was full of an
enthusiastic description of its beauties. ‘Think, mamma, of a lovely
little house close to Renton, with a lawn sloping to the river, and a
cow, and a pony-carriage, and I don’t know what,’ the young wife wrote
in her delight. ‘And Frank thinks he may afford himself a hunter, and
there is the sweetest honeysuckle room for Edie and you!’ The padrona,
being mother to the being upon whom this glorious prospect was opening,
was more interested at first in the Dovecote than in anything Laurie had
to say.
‘To think one has only to take the train and be with her in an
hour,--after being so far away for,--a lifetime!’ the padrona said, with
tears in her eyes.
‘Only six years,’ said Laurie; ‘but never mind; after Alice has had her
turn perhaps you will think of me.’
‘When you know I always think of you!’ said Mrs. Severn, ‘it becomes you
to be _exigeant_, Laurie! and you are not going to have a cow, and a
pony-carriage, and everything that is most delightful on the face of the
earth. Think of Alice having a cow! You are so terribly _blasé_, it does
not seem to strike you. And Edie is out, the child, so that there is no
one to be glad but me.’
‘It does not strike me at all,’ said Laurie. ‘If she had a dozen cows, I
think I could bear it. But some day I must take you to see Dovecote,
padrona, since you like it so much.’
‘I wish they had had Feliciello,’ said Mrs. Severn, ‘if one had known
you were all to be so well off,--it would have pleased Frank.’
‘Frank will like some of those vile chromos just as well,’ said Laurie.
‘I’ll buy him a few, I think. And I mean to bring Ben to see you
to-night; then you will know us all. Not that there will be any intense
gratification in that; but you’ll like Ben. He is made of different
stuff from the rest of us. There is more in him. He is not so cheeky as
Frank; and he is another sort of fellow, to be sure, from a
good-for-nothing like me.’
‘Laurie, there is something the matter,’ said the padrona, turning upon
him with her palette in her hand. She knew all his tones like the notes
in music, and heard the far-off quiver of one of his fits of despondency
already vibrating in the quiet. ‘Is not this as good for you as for the
rest?’
‘Oh, yes, quite as good,’ he said abruptly, with his eyes on her work.
‘You are putting too much yellow in that light.’
‘Am I? but that is not the question. Laurie, never mind the light, but
tell me what is wrong.’
‘I must mind the light,’ he said. ‘If I can’t put you right when you get
into a mess, what is the good of me? It’s all wrong and it’s all right,
padrona mia, and I don’t know that it matters much one way or another;
but I don’t quite like your shadows. With that tone of light they should
have more blue in them,’ he went on, gazing at the picture and shading
his eyes with his hand.
‘But it will make a great difference in your life,’ said Mrs. Severn,
putting down her tools and drawing a chair near to where he sat.
‘That is just it,’ he said; ‘it will make no difference to speak of. It
is a great thing for Ben; and for Frank, too, it will be everything. You
can see that clearly. But what difference will it make to me? More money
to spend, perhaps, and better rooms to live in; but no sort of expansion
or widening-out of life. That’s not possible, you know. It was put a
stop to once, and no change that I know of can effect it now.’
‘You cannot mean to reproach me, Laurie?’ said the padrona.
‘No,’ he said, still fixedly gazing at the picture; ‘I don’t reproach
you. Being you, perhaps you could have done nothing else. I am not
complaining of anybody; but this is how it is,--you see it for
yourself.’
‘Laurie, listen to me,’ she said, with eagerness, laying her hand on his
arm. ‘I have wanted to speak to you for long, and never liked to begin
the subject. You must make an effort to break this spell. I did not say
a word as long as you were poor,--for what could you do?--and I thought
I was always some consolation to you; but now that you have money
enough, and can make a new beginning,--Laurie, do you know, I think it
would be better for you to go away from me.’
‘What, go away again?’ he said, with a half-smile, ‘as I did when I went
to Rome? No, there is no such occasion now.’
‘Of course there is no such occasion now,--that dream has passed away,
as all dreams do,--but, Laurie, for that very reason I speak. Even what
you were so foolish as to wish then you don’t wish now.’
She made a momentary pause, but he gave no answer. It was quite true. He
was not in love with her any longer,--though she was the creature
dearest to him in the world. Nor did he any longer want to appropriate
or bind her closer to himself. He would not have admitted this change in
words, but it was true.
‘I don’t think in the least that you have ceased to care for me,’ she
continued; ‘but it is different,--it is not in that way. And you are
getting not to care much what happens. We talk over it, and come to our
conclusions; and after that, good and evil are much the same to you.
That is why I think you should go away,--not to Italy, as you did
before, but out of this neighbourhood, to some place like the one you
used to live in, and go back into the world.’
‘Why, I wonder?’ said Laurie. ‘The world and I had never much to say to
each other. And at least I have some comfort in my life here.’
‘Too much, a great deal,’ said the padrona, with a smile. ‘You know you
can always come to me, whether it is a pin that pricks, or a storm that
overtakes you. I am fond of you; and you can always reckon on my
sympathy.’
‘Always!’ said Laurie, stooping to kiss the hand she had laid on his
arm.
‘Yes; but that is not good for you,’ said Mrs. Severn, hastily
withdrawing her hand. ‘Now is the moment to preach you Helen Suffolk’s
little sermon. She says you will never marry so long as you are
constantly here.’
‘Marry!’ said Laurie, looking at her, and then turning his head away
with a half-contemptuous impatience.
‘Well, marry. Why should not I say so? If I have stood in your way,
unwillingly, unfortunately, once, why should that shut up all your life?
Laurie, if I were to ask you to reconsider all this, and make a
difference,--for my sake?’
‘I could not marry even for your sake,’ he said, turning to her with a
sudden laugh; ‘though there is no other inducement I would do so much
for. Tell me something else to do to show my devotion, and let
everything go on as it was before.’
‘Not as it was before,’ said Mrs. Severn. ‘This atmosphere might be good
enough for you when you were poor. At least, it did you no harm; but now
I want you to go back into the world.’
‘You want me to be wretched, I think,’ said Laurie. ‘I have got used to
this atmosphere, as you call it; and it suits me. But I have forgotten
all about the world. What have I done that I should be sent back among
people who have forgotten me, to mix myself up with things in which I
take no interest? Padrona, in this you do not show your usual wisdom.
Let us return to the question of the light.’
‘Not yet,’ she said. ‘It is because I am anxious about you that I speak.
This is such a point in your life; a new beginning,--anything you please
to make it,--and you feel yourself how hard it is to think that it will
make no difference. Laurie, what I want you to do is to break this
thread of association, and turn your back upon the past.’
He turned and looked at her as she spoke, and their eyes met;--hers
earnest and steady; his with a smile, which was full of tenderness, and
a kind of playful melancholy dawning in them. ‘But that is not what I
want you to do,’ he said, the smile growing as he met her gaze. She
turned away with a little impatient exclamation. It was not the kind of
reply she had looked for.
‘You are provoking, Laurie,’ she said. ‘You have regained the ground you
stood on seven years ago, and why should you refuse to recall the
circumstances too?’
‘And make the seven years as if they had never been?’
‘I think you might, in a great measure,’ said the padrona, with a little
flush on her cheek, ‘though you laugh. Nothing has happened in those
seven years. Yes, I grant you, you have felt some things as you never
did before, and learned a great many things. But nothing has happened,
Laurie. Nothing has occurred either to tie up your freedom in any way,
or to leave rankling recollections in your mind. There has been no fact
which could fetter you. Indeed,--for all that has come and gone,--your
life might be safer to begin anew than that of any man I know.’
‘Well, that is hard!’ said Laurie, with more energy than he had yet
shown; ‘the present is not much, the future I take no particular
interest in, and you ask me to agree that there is nothing in the past!
What has been the good of me altogether, then? Nobody will say that it
has been worth a man’s while to live in order to produce ‘Feliciello.’
Padrona, this is very poor consolation,--the poorest I ever knew you to
give.’
‘I did not mean it so, Laurie.’
‘No, you did not mean it,’ he said; ‘you did not think that the
past,--such as it is,--is all I have. Of course I might now go back to
Kensington Gore, as you tell me, or somewhere else; and go to a few
parties next season, perhaps. Fine fate! Didn’t I tell you how I used
to anticipate people finding my name in the Academy catalogue, and
standing and staring at Laurie Renton’s picture? and now I can’t, for
the life of me, remember who the people were I so thought of! That’s
encouraging for a return to old ways. Let’s say no more about it,’ said
Laurie, getting up and following his friend to her easel. ‘After all,
the boys and Edie shall have some pleasure out of the money, and then it
will not be quite lost.’
‘The boys and Edie must not get into the way of looking to you for
pleasure,’ said the padrona, quickly; ‘neither for you nor them would
that be good.’
‘There it is now!’ cried Laurie, ‘proof upon proof how little I am the
better for what has happened. You cannot work for ever, padrona; but if
I had all the gold-mines that ever were dreamt of you would not take
anything from me; and what is the good of my having it, I should like to
know?’
‘No, I would not take anything from you,’ she said, with a momentary
smile; but it was a suggestion that made her tremble in her fortitude
whenever it was made. ‘Laurie,’ she said, with a little gasp, turning to
him for sympathy, ‘when I cannot work I hope I shall die.’
‘But one cannot die when one pleases, that is the worst of it,’ said
Laurie. ‘I hope you will, padrona mia,--and I too,--and then, perhaps,
one might have a better chance for a new life.’
This was not cheerful talk for a new beginning; but the amusing thing
about Laurie, and, indeed, about the pair thus strangely united, was,
that after all this had been uttered and done with they both became
quite cheerful; and, a quarter of an hour afterwards, were planning an
expedition to Dovecote, taking Renton by the way, with all that
enjoyment of the idea of a country excursion which is so strong in the
laborious dweller in towns. The vision of gliding rivers and autumnal
trees swept over Mrs. Severn’s mind like a refreshing wind, carrying
away all the vapours. For a time, she thought no more either of that
twilight life which Laurie had chosen for himself, and of which she felt
herself partly the cause, nor of her own anxieties, but went on
painting, reducing the yellow tone in her light, and modifying her
shadows, and full of cheerful discussion of the day and the way of
going. To the moment its work or its thought; and to the next, why,
another thought, another piece of work; and so forth, as pleases God.
This blessing of temperament,--special gift of heaven to its
beloved,--belonged more or less to both. The artist-woman had it in its
perfection, which was the reason why she had got through so much hard
labour and so many struggles with eye undimmed and spirit unbroken; and
Laurie had it in a degree which had done much to lead to the
unsatisfactoriness and imperfection of his life, which is a strange
enough paradox, and yet true. For in the padrona, this power of
dismissing care and living in the hour was accompanied, as it often is,
by the strongest vitality and energy of constitution, by a natural
delight and pleasure in exertion, and by the perpetual, never absent
spur of necessity. Whereas in Laurie’s case it was associated with the
meditative, contemplative soul; the mind that is more prone to thinking
than to doing; a slower amount of life in the veins, and an existence
disengaged from necessities and responsibilities. Temperament had more
to do with the matter than had that early blunder in his life for which
the padrona never forgave herself. ‘If I had not stood in his way he
would have made a life for himself, like other men,’ she would say to
herself, with an ache in her heart, yet with that touch of tender
gratitude to the man who had it in him to pour himself out like a
libation on her path, which a woman cannot but feel, however undesired
the sacrifice may be. I am afraid to acknowledge it, but the truth is
that such a libation is very grateful to a woman. There is in it the
most exquisite, tragical, heart-rending pleasure. Not that one would not
regret it with all one’s heart and soul, and do everything that one
could, like Lancelot, to turn aside the rising passion. But even to
Lancelot was not that self-offering of the lily-maid, though he would
have given his life to prevent it, an exquisite sweetness and
sorrowfulness, a combination of the deepest pain and gratification of
which the soul is capable? Such an act raises the doer of it,--be it man
or woman,--out of the level of ordinary humanity, and envelopes the
receiver of the offering in the same maze of tenderest, most melancholy
glory. Something of this feeling the padrona had for her Laurie, who had
given her his life like a flower, without price or hope of price in this
world. And yet, I think, temperament was at the bottom of it, and the
sacrifice, and the sweetness of it, and all the subdued tones of his
existence which had followed, were more to him than the brighter
daylight colours of ordinary existence, even though he might feel the
absence of those fuller tones now and then, once in a way.
But to some extent Laurie acted upon Mrs. Severn’s advice. As luck would
have it, his old rooms at Kensington Gore, having passed through many
hands in the interval, proved to be vacant about this time. And Laurie
secured them, and fitted up all his old fittings, his carved brackets
and velvet hangings, and all the contrivances that had been so pleasant
to him; and had his bow-window once more full of flowers, and looked out
once more upon the gay park and the stream of carriages as from an
opera-box. But the ladies who looked up at his window once had passed
away and given place to others, who knew not Laurie, or had forgotten
him, and asked each other who was the man who stared so from that
window? And from Kensington Gore to Fitzroy Square is a very long walk
to be taken every day. And though, to be sure, there are plenty of
studios about Kensington, into which an amateur may drop, yet these are
grand studios, flanked by drawing-rooms, with ladies to be called upon,
and the flavour of society about. It is true that Suffolk lives in that
refined neighbourhood now, having made very rapid progress since the
days when Mr. Rich bought ‘The Angles,’ and Laurie put the studio in
order for the reception of the patron, and got cobwebs on his coat.
‘They were very nice, those old days, after all!’ Mrs. Suffolk says,
when they talk it over; but they have now a spruce man-servant,--more
spruce, though not so well instructed as old Forrester, Mr. Welby’s
man,--to move a picture that has to be moved, and open the door to the
patrons and patronesses. And Laurie for one, to whom a man-servant is
not the badge of grandeur and success which it is to Mr. Suffolk, rather
preferred, I fear, the state of things in the old days, when they all
clustered about Fitzroy Square.
But the padrona has not removed from No. 375, though she has been
tempted and plagued to do so on all sides. Frank, who would prefer to
have a mother-in-law (since such a thing he must have) in a habitable
part of the town, is very energetic as to the advantage it will be to
Edie when she grows up. And Alice recommends it with wistful eyes, as so
much nicer for the air, not liking to say a word against the home of her
youth. Mrs. Severn thinks it would be unkind to Mr. Welby to withdraw
from him; and it would cost a great deal of money; and then there would
be new carpets wanted for new rooms, and quantities of things; and, last
of all, would not it be a still greater clog upon Laurie and hindrance
to him, in the possibility of his heart disengaging itself from all the
pleasant bonds of the past? I think, however, that the thing which will
finally resolve the point will be Frank’s success in the competition for
a Foreign Office clerkship, for which he is going in. None of his people
have any doubt of his success; and, in that case, the boy may be trusted
to make his mother’s life a burden to her so long as she remains in
Fitzroy Square. But what is to be done with Mr. Welby, and Forrester, to
whom it would now be impossible to live out of sight of Edie and the
boys, and withdraw themselves from the gradually increasing authority of
the padrona, I don’t know.
Laurie’s sketch of the ‘Three Fairy Princes’ turned up out of a
packing-box when he took back his belongings to Kensington Gore; and he
hung it in the placer of honour over his mantelpiece. There anybody may
see young Frank pushing forth towards the Indian towers and minarets,
with a coronet hanging in a haze over the distant prospect; and Laurie
himself, with his goods and chattels hung about him, and his lay-figure
gazing blank over his shoulders, trudging towards the pepper-boxes of
the National Gallery; and Ben scaling the rocks, like Mr. Longfellow’s
Alpine hero, with the nymph on the summit beckoning him,--not to eternal
snows and supernatural excellence, but to Renton and the House of
Commons. Frank has not got the coronet; nor Laurie, except in the very
mildest accidental way, the glories of the Academy. But who is to tell
what is waiting for Ben? At least, there is only another chapter to do
it in, and the story is all but told.