RIGHT at the top of the house there was a large, unfurnished room, which
Amaryllis had taken as her own long since. It was her study, her
thinking-room, her private chapel and praying-room, her one place of
solitude, silence, and retirement.
The days had gone on, and it was near the end of April. Coming up the
dark stairs one morning, she found them still darker, because she had
just left the sunshine. They were built very narrow, as usual in old
country-houses, and the landing shut off with a door, so that when you
were in them you seemed to be in a box. There was no carpet--bare
boards; old-fashioned folk did not carpet their stairs; no handrail; the
edges of the steps worm-eaten and ragged, little bits apt to break off
under sudden pressure, so that the board looked as if it had been
nibbled by mice.
Shutting the landing door behind her, Amaryllis was in perfect darkness,
but her feet knew the well-remembered way, and she came quickly to the
top.
There were two great rooms running the whole length of the house: the
first was a lumber-room, the second her own especial cell. Cell-like it
was, in its monastic or conventual bareness. It was vague with bareness:
a huge, square room, gaunt as a barn, the walls and ceiling whitewashed,
the floor plain boards. Yonder, near the one small window, stood a table
and tall-backed oaken chair, afar off, as it were, from the doorway--a
journey to them across the creaking floor. On one side an old four-post
bedstead of dark oak, much damaged, was placed by the wall; the sacking
hung down in a loop, torn and decayed--a bedstead on which no one had
slept these hundred years past. By the table there was, too, an ancient
carved linen-press of black oak, Amaryllis' bookcase.
These bits of rude furniture were lost in the vastness of space, as much
as if you had thrown your hat into the sky.
Amaryllis went straight to the window and knelt down. She brought a
handful of violets, fresh-gathered, to place in the glass which she kept
there for her flowers. The window was cut in the thick wall, and formed
a niche, where she always had a tumbler ready--a common glass tumbler,
she could not afford a vase.
They were the white wild violets, the sweetest of all, gathered while
the nightingale was singing his morning song in the April sunshine--a
song the world never listens to, more delicious than his evening notes,
for the sunlight helps him, and the blue of the heavens, the green
leaf, and the soft wind--all the soul of spring.
White wild violets, a dewdrop as it were of flower, tender and delicate,
growing under the great hawthorn hedge, by the mosses and among the dry,
brown leaves of last year, easily overlooked unless you know exactly
where to go for them. She had a bunch for her neck, and a large bunch
for her niche. They would have sunk and fallen into the glass, but she
hung them by their chins over the edge of the tumbler, with their stalks
in the water. Then she sat down in the old chair at the table, and
rested her head on her hand.
Except where she did this every day, and so brushed it, a thin layer of
dust had covered the surface (there was no cloth) and had collected on
her portfolio, thrust aside and neglected. Dust on the indiarubber, dust
on the cake of Indian ink, dust invisible on the smooth surface of the
pencils, dust in the little box of vine charcoal.
The hoarse baying of the hungry wolves around the house had shaken the
pencil from her fingers--Siberian wolves they were, racing over the arid
deserts of debt, large and sharp-toothed, ever increasing in number and
ferocity, ready to tear the very door down. There are no wolves like
those debt sends against a house.
Every knock at the door, every strange footstep up the approach, every
letter that came, was like the gnawing and gnashing of savage teeth.
Iden could plant the potatoes and gossip at the stile, and put the
letters unopened on the mantelshelf--a pile of bills over his head where
he slept calmly after dinner. Iden could plant potatoes, and cut trusses
of hay, and go through _his_ work to appearance unmoved.
Amaryllis could not draw--she could not do it; her imagination refused
to see the idea; the more she concentrated her mind, the louder she
heard the ceaseless grinding and gnashing of teeth.
Potatoes can be planted and nails can be hammered, bill-hooks can be
wielded and faggots chopped, no matter what the inward care. The
ploughman is deeply in debt, poor fellow, but he can, and does, follow
the plough, and finds, perhaps, some solace in the dull monotony of his
labour. Clods cannot feel. A sensitive mind and vivid imagination--a
delicately-balanced organization, that almost lives on its ideas as
veritable food--cannot do like this. The poet, the artist, the author,
the thinker, cannot follow their plough; their work depends on a serene
mind.
But experience proves that they _do_ do their work under such
circumstances. They do; how greatly then they must be tortured, or for
what a length of time they must have suffered to become benumbed.
Amaryllis was young, and all her feelings unchecked of Time. She could
not sketch--that was a thing of useless paper and pencil; what was
wanted was money. She could not read, that was not real; what was wanted
was solid coin.
So the portfolio was thrust aside, neglected and covered with dust, but
she came every day to her flowers in the window-niche.
She had drawn up there in the bitter cold of February and March, without
a fire, disdainful of ease in the fulness of her generous hope. Her warm
young blood cared nothing for the cold, if only by enduring it she could
assist those whom she loved.
There were artists in the Flamma family in London who made what seemed
to her large incomes, yet whose names had never been seen in a newspaper
criticism, and who had never even sent a work to the Academy--never even
tried to enter. Their work was not of an ambitious order, but it was
well paid.
Amaryllis did not for a moment anticipate success as an artist, nor
think to take the world by storm with her talent. Her one only hope was
to get a few pounds now and then--she would have sold twenty sketches
for ten shillings--to save her father from insult, and to give her
mother the mere necessities of dress she needed.
No thought of possible triumph, nor was she sustained by an
overmastering love of art; she was inspired by her heart, not her
genius.
Had circumstances been different she would not have earnestly practised
drawing; naturally she was a passive rather than an active artist.
She loved beauty for its own sake--she loved the sunlight, the grass and
trees, the gleaming water, the colours of the fields and of the sky. To
listen to the running water was to her a dear delight, to the wind in
the high firs, or caught in the wide-stretching arms of the oak; she
rested among these things, they were to her mind as sleep to the body.
The few good pictures she had seen pleased her, but did not rouse the
emotion the sunlight caused; artificial music was enjoyable, but not
like the running stream. It said nothing--the stream was full of
thought.
No eager desire to paint like that or play like that was awakened by
pictures or music; Amaryllis was a passive and not an active artist by
nature. And I think that is the better part; at least, I know it is a
thousand times more pleasure to me to see a beautiful thing than to
write about it. Could I choose I would go on seeing beautiful things,
and not writing.
Amaryllis had no ambition whatever for name or fame; to be silent in the
sunshine was enough for her. By chance she had inherited the Flamma
talent--she drew at once without effort or consideration; it was not so
much to her as it is to me to write a letter.
The thought to make use of her power did not occur to her until the
preceding Christmas. Roast beef and plum pudding were a bitter mockery
at Coombe Oaks--a sham and cold delusion, cold as snow. A "merry
Christmas"--holly berries, mistletoe--and behind these--debt. Behind the
glowing fire, written in the flames--debt; in the sound of the distant
chimes--debt. Now be merry over the plum-pudding while the wolves gnash
their teeth, wolves that the strongest bars cannot keep out.
Immediately the sacred day was past they fell in all their fury upon
Iden. Pay me that thou owest! The one only saying in the Gospel
thoroughly engrained in the hearts of men. Pay me that thou owest! This
is the message from the manger at Bethlehem of our modern Christmas.
[Illustration]