THOMAS THE CAT--MY GREAT-GRANDFATHER'S SKETCHES--ADOLPHE IS MY
FRIEND--MY GREAT-GREAT-GREAT-GRANDFATHER DISTURBS MY REST--I LEAVE THE
VINE.
My great-grandfather had, as I said, some skill in painting. He was
gifted with an intense sense of, and love for, colour. I am sure he saw
colours where other people did not. What to common eyes was a mass of
grey, or green, was to him a pleasant combination of many gay and
delicate hues. He distinguished severally the innumerable bright threads
in Nature's coat of many colours, and in simple truth I think that each
was a separate joy to him.
He had a white Persian cat of an artistic temperament, which followed
him in his walks, dozed on the back of his arm-chair, and condescended
to share his tea when it reached a certain moderate temperature. It
never was betrayed into excitement, except when there was fish for
dinner. My great-grandfather's fasts were feasts for Thomas the cat.
I can very clearly remember the sight of my great-grandfather pacing
slowly up and down the tiny garden at The Vine, his hands behind him,
and followed sedately by Thomas. Now and then he would stop to gaze,
with infinite contentment in his eyes, at the delicate blue-grey mist
behind the leafless trees (which in that spring sunshine were, no doubt,
of much more complex and beautiful colour to him than mere brown), or
drinking in the blue of the scillas in the border with a sigh of
satisfaction. When he paused, Thomas would pause; as he feasted his
eyes, Thomas would rub his head against his master's legs, and stretch
his own. When Elspeth had cooked the fish, and my great-grandmother had
made the tea and arranged the flowers on the table, they would come in
together and condescend to their breakfasts, with the same air about
them both of having no responsibility in life but to find out sunny
spots and to enjoy themselves.
My great-grandfather's most charming paintings were sketches of flowers.
Ordinary stiff flower-paintings are of all paintings the most
uninteresting, I think; but his were of a very different kind. Each
sketch was a sort of idyll. Indeed, he would tell me stories of each as
he showed them.
Long as my great-grandfather had lived, he was never a robust man, and
Elspeth's chief ideas on the subject of his sketches bore reference to
the colds he had caught, and the illnesses he had induced, by sitting in
the east winds or lying on damp grass to do this or that sketch.
"That'll be the one the master did before he was laid by with the
rheumatics," Elspeth said, when I described one of my favourites to her.
It was a spring sketch. My great-grandfather had lain face downwards on
the lawn to do it. This was to bring his eyes on a level with the subject
of his painting, which was this: a crocus of the exquisite shades of
lilac to be seen in some varieties, just full-blown, standing up in its
first beauty and freshness from its fringe of narrow silver-striped
leaves. The portrait was not an opaque and polished-looking painting on
smooth cardboard, but a sketch--indefinite at the outer edges of the
whole subject--on water-colour paper of moderate roughness. The throat
and part of the cup of the flower stood out from some shadow at the roots
of a plant beyond; a shadow of infinite gradation, and quite without the
blackness common to patches of shade as seen by untrained eyes. From the
level of my great-grandfather's view, as he lay in the grass, the border
looked a mere strip; close behind it was a hedge dividing the garden from
a field. Just by the crocus there was a gap in the hedge, which in the
sketch was indicated rather than drawn. And round the corner of the bare
thorn branches from the hedge-bank in the field there peeped a celandine
and a daisy. They were not nearly such finished portraits as that of the
crocus. A few telling strokes of colour made them, and gave them a life
and pertness that were clever enough. Beneath the sketch was written, "La
Demoiselle. Des enfants du village la regardent."
My great-grandfather translated this for me, and used to show me how the
"little peasants," Marguerite and Celandine, were peeping in at the
pretty young lady in her mauve dress striped with violet.
But every sketch had its story, and often its moral; not, as a rule, a
very original one. In one, a lovely study of ivy crept over a rotten
branch upon the ground. A crimson toadstool relieved the heavy green,
and suggested that the year was drawing to a close. Beneath it was
written, "Charity." "Thus," said my great-grandfather, "one covers up
and hides the defects of one he loves."
A study of gaudy summer tulips stood--as may be guessed--for Pride.
"Pride," said my great-grandfather, "is a sin; a mortal sin, dear child.
Moreover, it is foolish, and also vulgar--the pride of fine clothes,
money, equipages, and the like. What is called pride of birth--the
dignity of an ancient name--this, indeed, is another thing. It is not
petty, not personal; it seems to me more like patriotism--the pride of
country."
I did my best to describe to Elspeth both the sketch and my
great-grandfather's commentary.
"A' pride's sinful," said Elspeth decidedly. "Pride o' wealth, and pride
o' birth. Not that I'm for objecting to a decent satisfaction in a
body's ain gude conduct and respectability. Pride o' character, that's
anither thing a'thegither, and to be respectit."
My great-grandfather gave me a few paints, and under his directions I
daubed away, much to my own content. When I was struggling hopelessly
with the perspective of some pansies of various colours (for in
imitation of him I painted flowers), he would say, "Never mind the
shape, dear Marguerite, get the colour--the colour, my child!" And he
trained me to a quickness in the perception of colour certainly not
common at my age.
I spent many pleasant hours, too, in the less intellectual society of
Adolphe. He dug a bed for me in a bit of spare ground, and shaped it
like a heart. He laboured constantly at this heart, making it plump by
piling up the earth, and cramming it with plants of various
kinds--perennials much in want of subdivision, and often in full
bloom--which he brought from cottage gardens of "folk he knew," and
watered copiously to "sattle 'em."
His real name was not Adolphe, but Thomas. As this, however, had created
some confusion between him and the cat, my great-grandmother had named
him afresh, after a retainer of the de Vandaleurs in days gone by,
whose faithful service was a tradition in the family.
I was very happy at The Vine--by day. I feel ashamed now to recall how
miserable I was at night, and yet I know I could not help it. In old
times I had always been accustomed to be watched to sleep by Ayah. After
I came to Aunt Theresa, I slept in the same room with one or more of the
other children. At The Vine, for the first time, I slept alone.
This was not all. It was not merely the being alone in the dark which
frightened me. Indeed, a curious little wick floating on a cup of oil
was lighted at night for my benefit, but it only illumined the great
source of the terror which made night hideous to me.
Some French refugee artist, who had been indebted to my
great-grandparents for kindness, had shown his gratitude by painting a
picture of the execution of that Duc de Vandaleur who perished in the
Revolution, my great-grandfather having been the model. It was a
wretched daub, but the subject was none the less horrible for that, and
the caricatured likeness to my great-grandfather did not make it seem
less real or more pleasant.
That execution which was never over, this ghastly head which never found
rest in the grave, that awful-looking man who was, and yet was not,
Grandpapa--haunted me. They were the cause of certain horrible dreams,
which I can remember quite as clearly at this day as if I dreamed them
last night, and which I know I shall never forget. The dreams again
associated themselves with the picture, and my fears grew instead of
lessening as the time went by.
Very late one night Elspeth came in and found me awake, and probably
looking far from happy. I had nothing to say for myself, but I burst
into tears. Elspeth was tenderness itself, but she got hold of a wrong
idea. I was "just homesick," she thought, and needed to be "away home
again," with "bairns like myself."
I do not know why I never explained the real reason of my
distress--children are apt to be reticent on such occasions. I think a
panic seized upon the members of the household, that they were too old
to make a child happy. I was constantly assured that "it was very
natural," and I "had been very good." But I was sent back to Riflebury.
No one knew how loth I was to leave, still less that it was to a much
older relative than those at The Vine that I owed my expulsion--to my
great-great-great-grandfather--Monsieur le Duc de Vandaleur.
Thomas, the cat, purred so loudly as I withdrew, that I think he was
glad to be rid of me.
Adolphe alone was against the verdict of the household, and I think
believed that I would have preferred to remain.
"I'm sure I thought you was quite sattled, miss," he said, as he saw me
off; and he blubbered like a baby. His transplanted perennials were
"sattled" by copious floods of water. Perhaps he hoped that tears would
settle me!