One day in the course of the following June there was ushered into my
studio a gentleman whom I had not yet seen but with whom I had been very
briefly in correspondence. A letter from him had expressed to me some
days before his regret on learning that my "splendid portrait" of Miss
Flora Louisa Saunt, whose full name figured by her own wish in the
catalogue of the exhibition of the Academy, had found a purchaser before
the close of the private view. He took the liberty of inquiring whether
I might have at his service some other memorial of the same lovely head,
some preliminary sketch, some study for the picture. I had replied that
I had indeed painted Miss Saunt more than once and that if he were
interested in my work I should be happy to show him what I had done. Mr.
Geoffrey Dawling, the person thus introduced to me, stumbled into my room
with awkward movements and equivocal sounds--a long, lean, confused,
confusing young man, with a bad complexion and large protrusive teeth. He
bore in its most indelible pressure the postmark, as it were, of Oxford,
and as soon as he opened his mouth I perceived, in addition to a
remarkable revelation of gums, that the text of the queer communication
matched the registered envelope. He was full of refinements and angles,
of dreary and distinguished knowledge. Of his unconscious drollery his
dress freely partook; it seemed, from the gold ring into which his red
necktie was passed to the square toe-caps of his boots, to conform with a
high sense of modernness to the fashion before the last. There were
moments when his overdone urbanity, all suggestive stammers and
interrogative quavers, made him scarcely intelligible; but I felt him to
be a gentleman and I liked the honesty of his errand and the expression
of his good green eyes.
As a worshipper at the shrine of beauty, however, he needed explaining,
especially when I found he had no acquaintance with my brilliant model;
had on the mere evidence of my picture taken, as he said, a tremendous
fancy to her looks. I ought doubtless to have been humiliated by the
simplicity of his judgment of them, a judgment for which the rendering
was lost in the subject, quite leaving out the element of art. He was
like the innocent reader for whom the story is "really true" and the
author a negligible quantity. He had come to me only because he wanted
to purchase, and I remember being so amused at his attitude, which I had
never seen equally marked in a person of education, that I asked him why,
for the sort of enjoyment he desired, it wouldn't be more to the point to
deal directly with the lady. He stared and blushed at this; the idea
clearly alarmed him. He was an extraordinary case--personally so modest
that I could see it had never occurred to him. He had fallen in love
with a painted sign and seemed content just to dream of what it stood
for. He was the young prince in the legend or the comedy who loses his
heart to the miniature of the princess beyond seas. Until I knew him
better this puzzled me much--the link was so missing between his
sensibility and his type. He was of course bewildered by my sketches,
which implied in the beholder some sense of intention and quality; but
for one of them, a comparative failure, he ended by conceiving a
preference so arbitrary and so lively that, taking no second look at the
others, he expressed his wish to possess it and fell into the extremity
of confusion over the question of price. I helped him over that stile,
and he went off without having asked me a direct question about Miss
Saunt, yet with his acquisition under his arm. His delicacy was such
that he evidently considered his rights to be limited; he had acquired
none at all in regard to the original of the picture. There were
others--for I was curious about him--that I wanted him to feel I
conceded: I should have been glad of his carrying away a sense of ground
acquired for coming back. To ensure this I had probably only to invite
him, and I perfectly recall the impulse that made me forbear. It
operated suddenly from within while he hung about the door and in spite
of the diffident appeal that blinked in his gentle grin. If he was
smitten with Flora's ghost what mightn't be the direct force of the
luminary that could cast such a shadow? This source of radiance,
flooding my poor place, might very well happen to be present the next
time he should turn up. The idea was sharp within me that there were
relations and complications it was no mission of mine to bring about. If
they were to develop they should develop in their very own sense.
Let me say at once that they did develop and that I perhaps after all had
something to do with it. If Mr. Dawling had departed without a fresh
appointment he was to reappear six months later under protection no less
powerful than that of our young lady herself. I had seen her repeatedly
for months: she had grown to regard my studio as the temple of her
beauty. This miracle was recorded and celebrated there as nowhere else;
in other places there was occasional reference to other subjects of
remark. The degree of her presumption continued to be stupefying; there
was nothing so extraordinary save the degree in which she never paid for
it. She was kept innocent, that is she was kept safe, by her egotism,
but she was helped also, though she had now put off her mourning, by the
attitude of the lone orphan who had to be a law unto herself. It was as
a lone orphan that she came and went, as a lone orphan that she was the
centre of a crush. The neglect of the Hammond Synges gave relief to this
character, and she made it worth their while to be, as every one said,
too shocking. Lord Iffield had gone to India to shoot tigers, but he
returned in time for the punctual private view: it was he who had snapped
up, as Flora called it, the gem of the exhibition. My hope for the
girl's future had slipped ignominiously off his back, but after his
purchase of the portrait I tried to cultivate a new faith. The girl's
own faith was wonderful. It couldn't however be contagious: too great
was the limit of her sense of what painters call values. Her colours
were laid on like blankets on a cold night. How indeed could a person
speak the truth who was always posturing and bragging? She was after all
vulgar enough, and by the time I had mastered her profile and could
almost with my eyes shut do it in a single line I was decidedly tired of
its "purity," which affected me at last as inane. One moved with her,
moreover, among phenomena mismated and unrelated; nothing in her talk
ever matched anything out of it. Lord Iffield was dying of love for her,
but his family was leading him a life. His mother, horrid woman, had
told some one that she would rather he should be swallowed by a tiger
than marry a girl not absolutely one of themselves. He had given his
young friend unmistakable signs, but was lying low, gaining time: it was
in his father's power to be, both in personal and in pecuniary ways,
excessively nasty to him. His father wouldn't last for ever--quite the
contrary; and he knew how thoroughly, in spite of her youth, her beauty
and the swarm of her admirers, some of them positively threatening in
their passion, he could trust her to hold out. There were richer,
cleverer men, there were greater personages too, but she liked her
"little viscount" just as he was, and liked to think that, bullied and
persecuted, he had her there so gratefully to rest upon. She came back
to me with tale upon tale, and it all might be or mightn't. I never met
my pretty model in the world--she moved, it appeared, in exalted
circles--and could only admire, in her wealth of illustration, the
grandeur of her life and the freedom of her hand.
I had on the first opportunity spoken to her of Geoffrey Dawling, and she
had listened to my story so far as she had the art of such patience,
asking me indeed more questions about him than I could answer; then she
had capped my anecdote with others much more striking, the disclosure of
effects produced in the most extraordinary quarters: on people who had
followed her into railway carriages; guards and porters even who had
literally stuck there; others who had spoken to her in shops and hung
about her house door; cabmen, upon her honour, in London, who, to gaze
their fill at her, had found excuses to thrust their petrifaction through
the very glasses of four-wheelers. She lost herself in these
reminiscences, the moral of which was that poor Mr. Dawling was only one
of a million. When therefore the next autumn she flourished into my
studio with her odd companion at her heels her first care was to make
clear to me that if he was now in servitude it wasn't because she had run
after him. Dawling explained with a hundred grins that when one wished
very much to get anything one usually ended by doing so--a proposition
which led me wholly to dissent and our young lady to asseverate that she
hadn't in the least wished to get Mr. Dawling. She mightn't have wished
to get him, but she wished to show him, and I seemed to read that if she
could treat him as a trophy her affairs were rather at the ebb. True
there always hung from her belt a promiscuous fringe of scalps. Much at
any rate would have come and gone since our separation in July. She had
spent four months abroad, where, on Swiss and Italian lakes, in German
cities, in the French capital, many accidents might have happened.