THE TESTIMONY OF THE SKETCH-BOOK.
It is only natural that one painter should take an interest in the
work of another. Mr. Darrell testified no surprise, therefore, when
Richard Thornton appeared at Hazlewood the morning after his arrival at
Tolldale, under convoy of Mrs. Monckton and Laura.
“I’ve come to say how sorry I was at your not coming to dinner last
night, dear Mrs. Darrell,” Laura said, to the lady who was so soon
to be her mother-in-law; “and I want to ask you whether I ought to
have the sprigged muslin morning dresses trimmed with pink or blue,
or whether I ought to have three of them pink and three blue, for
Launcelot might get tired of seeing me in the same colours, you know,
and I might have two of them trimmed with peach, if it came to that;
and Eleanor has come with me; and Mr. Thornton—Mr. Thornton, Mrs.
Darrell; Mrs. Darrell, Mr. Thornton—has come too, because he is an
artist and wants to see Launcelot’s pictures—especially the beautiful
picture that’s going into the Academy, and that the committee is sure
to hang on the line; and I’m sure Launcelot will let Mr. Thornton see
his studio—won’t you, dear Launcelot?”
Miss Mason pursed up her rosy lips, and put her head on one side like
an insinuating canary, as she addressed her affianced husband. She
looked very pretty in her winter costume, with a good deal of rich
brown fur about her, and a dash of scarlet here and there. She looked
like a fashionably-dressed Red Ridinghood, simple enough to be deluded
by the weakest-minded of wolves. She was so pretty that her lover
glanced down at her with a gratified smile, deriving considerable
pleasure from the idea that she belonged to him, and that she was, on
the whole, something to be rather proud of; something that added to the
young sultan’s dignity, and bore testimony to his supreme merits.
Eleanor looked at the lovers with a contemptuous curve lifting her firm
upper lip. She despised Launcelot Darrell so utterly, that she was
almost cruel enough to despise Laura for loving him.
“Yes,” she thought, “Mr. Monckton is right. Shallow, selfish, and
frivolous! He is all these, and he is false as well. Heaven help you,
Laura, if I cannot save you from a marriage with this man.”
Mr. Darrell was very well pleased to do the honours of his studio
to Richard Thornton. It would be quite a new sort of thing to this
scene-painting fellow, the embryo Academician thought: the poor devil
would pick up fresh ideas, and get a glimpse at the higher regions of
art, for the first time in his life perhaps.
Launcelot Darrell led the way to that pleasant, prettily furnished,
room which he called his studio. The “Rosalind and Celia” still
occupied the post of honour on the easel. Mr. Darrell worked very
hard; but in that spasmodic fashion which is antagonistic to anything
like progress. The enthusiasm which upon one occasion kept him at his
picture long after the fading light had given him notice to leave it,
entirely deserted him upon another; and was perhaps followed by a fit
of disgust with himself and with his art, which kept him idle for weeks
together.
He made a merit of this fitfulness, depreciating a power of steady and
persistent labour as the faculty of a tradesman, rather than an artist.
He took credit to himself for the long pauses of idleness in which he
waited for what he called inspiration; and imposed upon his mother by
his grand talk about earnestness, conscientiousness, reverence for
the sublimity of art, and a great many more fine phrases by which
he contrived to excuse the simple fact of his laziness. So Eleanor
Vane, as sorrowful _Rosalind_, still smiled sadly upon a simpering
_Celia_:—it had been quite impossible to prevent Miss Mason’s assuming
the conventional simper of the weak-minded sitter who can’t forget
that his portrait is being taken, and that he is in the very act of
handing down his smile to posterity, or to the furniture brokers—out
of an unfinished background, and clad in robes of unfinished satin and
velvet. Mr. Thornton wondered as he looked at the young man’s work, and
remembered how many miles of canvas it had been his own fate to cover
since first he had handled his brushes and splashed in sky borders and
cloud pieces for the chief scene-painter at the Phœnix.
Launcelot Darrell, with his mahlstick in his hand, smiled with sublime
patronage upon Eleanor’s humble friend.
“This sort of thing is rather different to what you’ve been used to,
I suppose?” he said; “rather another kind of work than your pantomime
scenes, your grots of everlasting bliss, and caves of constant content,
where the waterfalls are spangles sewn upon white tape, and the
cloudless skies are blue gauze and silver foil?”
“But we’re not always painting transformations, you know,” Mr. Thornton
answered, in nowise offended by the artist’s graceful insolence;
“scene-painting isn’t _all_ done with Dutch metal and the glue-pot:
we’re obliged to know a little about perspective, and to have a slight
knowledge of colour. Some of my brotherhood have turned out tolerable
landscape-painters, Mr. Darrell. By the bye, you don’t do anything in
the way of landscape, do you?”
“Yes,” Launcelot Darrell answered, indifferently, “I used to try my
hand at landscape; but human interest, human interest, Mr. Thornton, is
the strong point of a picture. To my mind a picture should be a story,
a drama, a tragedy, a poem—something that explains itself without any
help from a catalogue.”
“Precisely. An epic upon a Bishop’s half-length,” Richard Thornton
answered, rather absently. He saw Eleanor’s watchful eyes fixed upon
him, and knew that with every moment she was losing faith in him.
Looking round the room he saw, too, that there were a couple of bloated
portfolios leaning against the wall, and running over with sheets of
dirty Bristol board and crumpled drawing paper.
“Yes,” Launcelot Darrell repeated, “I have tried my hand at landscape.
There are a few in one of those portfolios—the upper one, I think—not
the purple one; I keep private memoranda and scraps in that. The green
portfolio, Mr. Thornton; you may find some things there that will
interest you—that might be useful to you, perhaps.”
The artist threw down his mahlstick, and strolled across the room to
talk to Laura Mason and his mother, who were sitting near the fire. In
doing this he left Eleanor and Richard side by side, near the easel and
the corner in which the portfolios leaned against the wall.
There was a large old-fashioned window in this corner of the room, the
casement against which Eleanor had stood when Launcelot Darrell asked
her to be his wife. The window was in a deep recess, shaded by thick
crimson curtains, and in the recess there was a table. Any one sitting
at this table was almost concealed from the other inmates of the room.
Richard Thornton lifted both the portfolios, and placed them on this
table. Eleanor stood beside him, breathless and expectant.
“The purple portfolio contains private memoranda,” whispered the young
man; “it is in that portfolio we must look, Mrs. Monckton. There is no
such thing as honour on the road we have chosen for ourselves.”
The scene-painter untied the strings of the loaded scrap-book, and
flung it open. A chaotic mass of drawings lay before him. Crayon
sketches; pencil scraps; unfinished and finished water-coloured
drawings; rough caricatures in pen-and-ink, and in water-colours;
faint indications of half-obliterated subjects; heads, profiles, chins,
and noses; lithographed costumes; prints; etchings; illustrations
torn out of books and newspapers; all flung together in bewildering
confusion.
Mr. Thornton, seated at the table with his head bent over the papers
before him, and with Eleanor standing at his shoulder, began steadily
and deliberately to examine the contents of this purple portfolio.
He carefully scrutinized each drawing, however slight, however roughly
done, however unpretentious. He looked also at the back of each
drawing, sometimes finding a blank, sometimes a faint pencil indication
of a rubbed-out sketch, or a rough outline in pen-and-ink.
For a long time he found nothing in which the utmost ingenuity could
discover any relation to that period of Launcelot Darrell’s existence
which Eleanor believed to have been spent in Paris.
“Belisarius. Girl with basket of strawberries. Marie Antoinette.
Headsman. Flower-girl. Oliver Cromwell refusing the crown. Oliver
Cromwell denouncing Sir Harry Vane. Oliver Cromwell and his daughters.
Fairfax,” — muttered Richard, as he looked over the sketches. “Didn’t
I tell you, Eleanor, that a man’s sketch-book contains the record of
his life? These Cromwell drawings are all dated in the same year.
Nearly ten years ago; that is to say, when Mr. Darrell had very little
knowledge of anatomy, and a tremendous passion for republicanism.
Further on we come to a pastoral strata, you see. The Watermill: Rosa.
There is a perpetual recurrence of Rosa and the Watermill; Rosa in a
bridal dress; the mill by moonlight; Rosa in a russet cloak; the mill
in a thunderstorm: Rosa sad; the mill at sunset; and the series bears
date two years later, when the artist was desperately in love with a
rustic beauty in this neighbourhood. Now we lose sight of Rosa, and
come upon a Roman period; the artist goes in for the grand and classic.
The Roman period lasts a very short time. Now we are in London; yes, we
are up to our eyes in student life in the metropolis. Here are sketches
of artist existence in Clipstone Street and the purlieus of Fitzroy
Square. Here is the Haymarket by night. An opera-box. Lady Clara Vere
de Vere. Lady Clara at the flower-show—in Hyde Park—at a concert. Aha!
the artist is in love again; and this time the beauty is highborn and
unapproachable. Here are pen-and-ink hints at contemplated suicide; a
young man lying on a pallet bed, an empty bottle on the floor labelled
Prussic Acid; the same young man leaning over the parapet of Waterloo
Bridge on a moonlit night, with St. Paul’s in the background. Yes,
there have been wasted love and despair, and a wild yearning for death,
and that generally morbid and unpleasant state of mind which is the
common result of idleness and strong liquors. Stay!” cried Richard
Thornton, suddenly, “we’re all wrong here.”
“What do you mean?” asked Eleanor. She had watched the young man’s
examination of the drawings with eager interest, with ever-increasing
impatience, in her desire to come to something that should be evidence
against Launcelot Darrell.
“What do you mean?” she said, and then she added, impatiently, “How
slow you are, Dick! What do I want to know of this man except the one
proof that will identify him with that man upon the Boulevard?”
“I’m afraid we’ve been making a mistake all this time,” Richard said,
in rather a despondent tone. “These sketches must have been done by
some companion of Mr. Darrell’s. I’m afraid they’re none of them his.”
“Not his? But why—why not?”
“Because the first lot, the Cromwells and the Rosas, are all signed
with a flourishing autograph—‘Launcelot Darrell, pinxt.,’ in full, as
if the young man was rather proud of his name.”
“Yes, yes; but what then?”
“The London-life sketches, the Lady Claras, and the suicides, which are
much better than the first lot, though I should have thought they had
been by the same man, are all signed with a monogram.”
“A monogram?”
“Yes, of two initials. I’ve been trying to make them out for ever so
long, and I’ve only just succeeded. The two letters are R. L.”
Richard Thornton felt Eleanor’s hand, which had been resting lightly
upon the back of his chair, tighten suddenly upon the rosewood
scroll-work; he heard her breath grow quicker; and when he turned his
head he saw that she was deadly pale.
“It is coming home to him, Richard,” she said. “The man who cheated my
father called himself ‘Robert Lan—’ Part of the name was torn away in
my father’s letter, but the initials of that false name are R. L. Go
on, Dick; go on quickly, for pity’s sake; we shall find something more
presently.”
Eleanor Monckton had spoken in a whisper, but at this moment the
scene-painter laid his hand upon her wrist and reminded her by a
gesture of the need of caution. But Mr. Darrell, and the two ladies
at the other end of the roomy studio, were in no manner observant of
anything that might be going on in the curtained recess of the window.
Laura was talking, and her lover was laughing at her; half pleased,
half amused, by her childish frivolity.
Richard Thornton turned over a heap of sketches without speaking.
But presently he came upon a water-colour drawing of a long lamplit
street, crowded with figures in grotesque costumes, and with masks upon
their faces.
“We have crossed the Channel, Eleanor,” he said. “Here is Paris in
Carnival time, and here is the assumed name, too, in full,—‘Robert
Lance, March 2nd, ’53.’ Be quiet, Eleanor, be calm, for Heaven’s sake.
The man is guilty; I believe that, now, as fully as you do; but we have
to bring his guilt home to him.”
“Keep that sketch, Richard,” whispered the girl, “keep it. It is the
proof of his false name. It is the proof that he was in Paris when he
was believed to be in India. It is the proof that he was in Paris a few
months before my father’s death.”
The scene-painter folded the tumbled sheet of drawing-paper and thrust
it into the breast-pocket of his loose overcoat.
“Go on, Richard; go on,” said Eleanor; “there may be something more
than this.”
The young man obeyed his eager companion; one by one he looked at the
pen-and-ink sketches, the crayon drawings, the unfinished scraps in
Indian ink or water-colour.
They all bore evidence of a life in Paris and its neighbourhood. Now a
_débardeur_ hanging on the arm of a student; now a grisette drinking
lemonade with an artisan beyond the barrier; a funeral train entering
the gates of Père la Chaise; some children, with garlands in their
hands, kneeling by a grave; a showman on the Boulevard; a group of
Zouaves; a bit of landscape in the forest of Saint Germain, with
equestrian figures beneath an arch of foliage; a scene in the Champs
Elysées.
And at last, a rough pencil sketch of a group in a small chamber at a
_café_; an old man seated at a lamplit table playing _écarté_ with a
man whose face was hidden; an aristocratic-looking, shabby-genteel old
man, whose nervous fingers seemed to clutch restlessly at a little pile
of napoleons on the table before him.
There was a third figure; the figure of a smartly-dressed Frenchman
standing behind the old man’s chair; and in this watcher of the game
Eleanor recognized the man who had persuaded her father to leave her on
the Boulevard,—the companion of the sulky Englishman.
The sketch was dated August 12, 1853; the very day on which Richard
Thornton had recognized the dead man in the ghastly chamber of the
Morgue. On the back of the drawing were written these words, “Sketch
for finished picture, to be called ‘The last of the Napoleons’—Robert
Lance.”
The likeness of the principal figure to George Vane was unmistakable.
The man who had been heartless enough to cheat his kinsman’s friend,
had made this record of the scene of his cruelty; but had not been so
callous as to carry out his design after the suicide of his victim.