by Ouida
CHAPTER X.
Her stranger from Rubes' land was a great man in a certain world. He hadbecome great when young, which is perhaps a misfortune. It indisposes mento be great at their maturity. He was famous at twenty, by a picturehectic in color, perfect in drawing, that made Paris at his feet. Hebecame more famous by verses, by plays, by political follies, and bysocial successes. He was faithful, however, to his first love in art. Hewas a great painter, and year by year proved afresh the cunning of hishand. Purists said his pictures had no soul in them. It was not wonderfulif they had none. He always painted soulless vice; indeed, he saw verylittle else.
One year he had some political trouble. He wrote a witty pamphlet thathurt where it was perilous to aim. He laughed and crossed the border,riding into the green Ardennes one sunny evening. He had a name of somepower and sufficient wealth; he did not feel long exile. Meanwhile hetold himself he would go and look at Scheffer's Gretchen.
The King of Thule is better; but people talk most of the Gretchen. He hadnever seen either.
He went in leisurely, travelling up the bright Meuse River, and acrossthe monotony of the plains, then green with wheat a foot high, andmusical with the many bells of the Easter kermesses in the quaintold-world villages.
There was something so novel, so sleepy, so harmless, so mediaeval, inthe Flemish life, that it soothed him. He had been swimming all hislife in salt sea-fed rapids; this sluggish, dull, canal water, mirroringbetween its rushes a life that had scarcely changed for centuries, had acharm for him.
He stayed awhile in Antwerpen. The town is ugly and beautiful; it is likea dull quaint gres de Flandre jug, that has precious stones set insideits rim. It is a burgher ledger of bales and barrels, of sale and barter,of loss and gain; but in the heart of it there are illuminated leaves ofmissal vellum, all gold and color, and monkish story and heroic ballad,that could only have been executed in the days when Art was a religion.
He gazed himself into an homage of Rubens, whom before he had slighted,never having known (for, unless you have seen Antwerp, it is as absurd tosay that you have seen Rubens, as it is to think that you have seenMurillo out of Seville, or Raffaelle out of Rome); and he studied theGretchen carefully, delicately, sympathetically, for he loved Scheffer;but though he tried, he failed to care for her.
"She is only a peasant; she is not a poem," he said to himself; "I willpaint a Gretchen for the Salon of next year."
But it was hard for him to portray a Gretchen. All his pictures werePhryne,--Phryne in triumph, in ruin, in a palace, in a poor-house, on abed of roses, on a hospital mattress; Phryne laughing with a belt ofjewels about her supple waist; Phryne lying with the stones of thedead-house under her naked limbs,--but always Phryne. Phryne, who livinghad death in her smile; Phryne, who lifeless had blank despair on herface; Phryne, a thing that lived furiously every second of her days, butPhryne a thing that once being dead was carrion that never could liveagain.
Phryne has many painters in this school, as many as Catherine and Ceciliahad in the schools of the Renaissance, and he was chief amidst them.
How could he paint Gretchen if the pure Scheffer missed? Not even if,like the artist monks of old, he steeped his brushes all Lent through inholy water.
And in holy water he did not believe.
One evening, having left Antwerpen ringing its innumerable bells over thegrave of its dead Art, he leaned out of the casement of an absentfriend's old palace in the Brabant street that is named after Mary ofBurgundy; an old casement crusted with quaint carvings, and gilded roundin Spanish fashion, with many gargoyles and griffins, and illegiblescutcheons.
Leaning there, wondering with himself whether he would wait awhile andpaint quietly in this dim street, haunted with the shades of Memling andMaes, and Otto Veneris and Philip de Champagne, or whether he would gointo the East and seek new types, and lie under the red Egyptian heavensand create a true Cleopatra, which no man has ever done yet,--youngCleopatra, ankle-deep in roses and fresh from Caesar's kisses,--leaningthere, he saw a little peasant go by below, with two little white feet intwo wooden shoes, and a face that had the pure and simple radiance of aflower.
"There is my Gretchen," he thought to himself, and went down and followedher into the cathedral. If he could get what was in her face, he wouldget what Scheffer could not.
A little later walking by her in the green lanes, he meditated, "It isthe face of Gretchen, but not the soul--the Red Mouse has never passedthis child's lips. Nevertheless--"
"Nevertheless--" he said to himself, and smiled.
For he, the painter all his life long of Phryne living and of Phrynedead, believed that every daughter of Eve either vomits the Red Mouseor swallows it.
It makes so little difference which,--either way the Red Mouse has beenthere the evening towards this little rush-covered hut, he forgot the RedMouse, and began vaguely to see that there are creatures of his mother'ssex from whom the beast of the Brocken slinks away.
But he still said to himself, "Nevertheless." "Nevertheless,"--for heknew well that when the steel cuts the silk, when the hound hunts thefawn, when the snake wooes the bird, when the king covets the vineyard,there is only one end possible at any time. It is the strong against theweak, the fierce against the feeble, the subtle against the simple, themaster against the slave; there is no equality in the contest and nojustice--it is merely inevitable, and the issue of it is written.