“Not another petal must be plucked!” he whispered, kissing her soft warm neck— “I will not have you say ‘Pas du tout!’”
She laughed delightedly, nestling against him.
“Very well!” she said— “But suppose—”
“Suppose what?”
“Suppose it ever came to that?” — and she sighed as she spoke— “Then the last petal must fall!”
“Do you think it ever will or can come to that?” he asked, pressing a kiss on the sweet upturned lips— “Does it seem like it?”
She was too happy to answer him, and he was too amorous just then to think of anything but her soft eyes, dewy with tenderness — her white, ivory-smooth skin — her small caressing hands, and the fine bright tendrils of her waving hair — all these were his to play with as a child plays with beautiful toys unconscious of or indifferent to their value.
Many such passages of love occupied their time — though he managed to make a good show of progressive work after the first rough outline drawing of the picture was completed. He was undeniably a genius in his way, uncertain and erratic of impulse, but his art was strong because its effects were broad and simple. He had begun Innocent’s portrait out of the mere desire to have her with him constantly, — but as day after day went on and the subject developed under his skilled hand and brush he realised that it would probably be “the” picture of the Salon in the following year. As this conviction dawned upon him, he took greater pains, and worked more carefully and conscientiously with the happiest results, feeling a thrill of true artistic satisfaction as the picture began to live and smile in response to his masterly touch and treatment. Its composition was simple — he had drawn the girl as though she were slowly advancing towards the spectator, giving her figure all the aerial grace habitual to it by nature, — one little daintily shaped hand held a dove lightly against her breast, as though the bird had just flown there for protection from its own alarm, — her face was slightly uplifted, — the lips smiled, and the eyes looked straight out at the world with a beautiful, clear candour which was all their own. Yet despite the charm and sweetness of the likeness there was a strange pathos about it, — a sadness which Jocelyn had never set there by his own will or intention.
“You are a puzzling subject,” he said to her one day— “I wanted to give you a happy expression — and yet your portrait is actually growing sad! — almost reproachful! … do you look at me like that?”
She opened her pretty eyes wonderingly.
“Amadis! Surely not! I could not look sad when I am with you! — that is impossible!”
He paused, palette in hand.
“Nor reproachful?”
“How? When I have nothing to reproach you for?” she answered.
He put his palette aside and came and sat at her feet on the step of the dais where he had posed her.
“You may rest,” he said, smiling up at her— “And so may I.” She sat down beside him and he folded her in his arms. “How often we rest in this way, don’t we!” he murmured— “And so you think you have nothing to reproach me for! Well, — I’m not so sure of that — Innocent!”
She looked at him questioningly.
“Are you talking nonsense, my ‘Sieur Amadis’? — or are you serious?” she asked.
“I am quite serious — much more serious than is common with me,” he replied, taking one of her hands and studying it as the perfect model it was— “I believe I am involving you in all sorts of trouble — and you, you absurd little child, don’t see it! Suppose Miss Leigh were to find out that we make the maddest love to each other in here — you all alone with me — what would she say?”
“What COULD she say?” Innocent demanded, simply— “There is no harm! — and I should not mind telling her we are lovers.”
“I should, though!” was his quick thought, while he marvelled at her unworldliness.
“Besides” — she continued— “she has no right over me.”
“Who HAS any right over you?” he asked, curiously.
She laughed, softly.
“No one! — except you!”
“Oh, hang me!” he exclaimed, impatiently— “Leave me out of the question. Have you no father or mother?”
She was a little hurt at his sudden irritability.
“No,” she answered, quietly— “I have often told you I have no one. I am alone in the world — I can do as I like.” Then a smile brightened her face. “Lord Blythe would have me as a daughter if I would go to him.”
He started and loosened her from his embrace.
“Lord Blythe! That wealthy old peer! What does he want with you?”
“Nothing, I suppose, but the pleasure of my company!” and she laughed— “Doesn’t that seem strange?”
He rose and went back to work at his easel.
“Rather!” he said, slowly— “Are you going to accept his offer?”
Her eyes opened widely.
“I? My Amadis, how can you think it? I would not accept it for all the world! He would load me with benefits — he would surround me with luxuries — but I do not want these. I like to work for myself and be independent.” He laid a brush lightly in colour and began to use it with delicate care.
“You are not very wise,” he then said— “It’s a great thing for a young girl like you who are all alone in the world, to be taken in hand by such a man as Blythe. He’s a statesman, — very useful to his country, — he’s very rich and has a splendid position. His wife’s sudden death has left him very lonely as he has no children, — you could be a daughter to him, and it would be a great leap upwards for you, socially speaking. You would be much better off under his care than scribbling books.”
She drew a sharp breath of pain, — all the pretty colour fled from her cheeks.
“You do not care for me to scribble books!” she said, in low, stifled accents.
He laughed.
“Oh, I don’t mind! — I never read them, — and in a way it amuses me! You are such an armful of sweetness — such a warm, nestling little bird of love in my arms! — and to think that you actually write books that the world talks about! — the thing is so incongruous — so ‘out of drawing’ that it makes me laugh! I don’t like writing women as a rule — they give themselves too many airs to please me — but you—”
He paused.
“Well, go on,” she said, coldly.
He looked at her, smiling.
“You are cross? Don’t be cross, — you lose your enchanting expression! Well — you don’t give yourself any airs, and you seem to play at literature like a child playing at a game: of course you make money by it, — but — you know better than I do that the greatest writers” — he emphasized the word “greatest” slightly— “never make money and are never popular.”
“Does failure constitute greatness?” she asked, with a faintly satirical inflection in her sweet voice which he had never heard before.
“Sometimes — in fact pretty often,” he replied, dabbing his brush busily on his canvas— “You should read about great authors—”
“I HAVE read about them,” she said— “Walter Scott was popular and made money, — Charles Dickens was popular and made money — Thackeray was popular and made money — Shakespeare himself seemed to have had the one principal aim of making sufficient money enough to live comfortably in his native town, and he was ‘popular’ in his day — indeed he ‘played to the gallery.’ But he was not a ‘failure’ — and the whole world acknowledges his greatness now, though in his life-time he was unconscious of it.”
Surprised at her quick eloquence, he paused in his work.
“Very well spoken!” he remarked, condescendingly— “I see you take a high view of your art! But like all women, you wander from the point. We were talking of Lord Blythe — and I say it would be far better for you to be — well! — his heiress! — for he might leave you all his fortune — than go on writing books.”
Her lips quivered: despite her effor
ts, tears started to her eyes. He saw, and throwing down his brush came and knelt beside her, passing his arm round her waist.
“What have I said?” he murmured, coaxingly— “Innocent — sweet little love! Forgive me if I have — what?” — and he laughed softly— “rubbed you up the wrong way!”
She forced a smile, and her delicate white hands wandered caressingly through his hair as he laid his head against her bosom.
“I am sorry!” she said, at last— “I thought — I hoped — you might be proud of my work, Amadis! I was planning it all for that! You see” — she hesitated— “I learned so much from the Sieur Amadis de Jocelin — the brother of your ancestor! — that I have been thinking all the time how I could best show you that I was worthy of his teaching. The world — or the public — you know the things they say of me — but I do not want their praise. I believe I could do something really great if YOU cared! — for now it is only to please you that I live.”
A sense of shame stung him at this simple avowal.
“Nonsense!” he said, almost brusquely— “You have a thousand other things to live for — you must not think of pleasing me only. Besides I’m not very — keen on literature, — I’m a painter.”
“Surely painting owes something to literature?” she queried— “We should not have had all the wonderful Madonnas and Christs of the old masters if there had been no Bible!”
“True! — but perhaps we could have done without them!” he said, lightly— “I’m not at all sure that painting would not have got on just as well without literature at all. There is always nature to study — sky, sea, landscape and the faces of lovely women and children, — quite enough for any man. Where is Lord Blythe now?”
“In Italy,” she replied— “He will be away some months.”
She spoke with constraint. Her heart was heavy — the hopes and ambitions she had cherished of adding lustre to her fame for the joy and pride of her lover, seemed all crushed at one blow. She was too young and inexperienced to realise the fact that few men are proud of any woman’s success, especially in the arts. Their attitude is one of amused tolerance when it is not of actual sex-jealousy or contempt. Least of all can any man endure that the woman for whom he has a short spell of passionate fancy should be considered notable, or in an intellectual sense superior to himself. He likes her to be dependent on him alone for her happiness, — for such poor crumbs of comfort he is pleased to give her when the heat of his first passion has cooled, — but he is not altogether pleased when she has sufficient intelligent perception to see through his web of subterfuge and break away clear of the entangling threads, standing free as a goddess on the height of her own independent attainment. Innocent’s idea of love was the angelic dream of truth and everlastingness set forth by poets, whose sweet singing deludes themselves and others, — she was ready to devote all the unique powers of her mind and brain to the perfecting of herself for her lover’s delight. She wished to be beautiful, brilliant, renowned and admired, simply that he might take joy in knowing that this beautiful, brilliant, renowned and admired creature was HIS, body and soul — existing solely for him and content to live only so long as he lived, to work only so long as he worked, — to be nothing apart from his love, but to be everything he could desire or command while his love environed her. She thought of the eternal union of souls, — while he had no belief in the soul at all, his half French materialism persuading him that there was nothing eternal. And like all men of his type he estimated her tenderness for him, her clinging arms, and the lingering passion of her caresses, to be chiefly the outflow of pleased vanity — the kittenish satisfaction of being stroked and fondled — the sense of her own sex-attractiveness, — but of anything deep and closely rooted in the centre of a more than usually sensitive nature he had not the faintest conception, taking it for granted that all women, even clever ones, were more or less alike, easily consoled by new millinery when lovers failed.
Sometimes, during the progress of their secret amour, a thrill of uneasiness and fear ran coldly through her veins — a wondering doubt which she repelled with indignation whenever it suggested itself. Amadis de Jocelyn was and must be the very embodiment of loyalty and honour to the woman he loved! — it could not be otherwise. His tenderness was ardent, — his passion fiery and eager, — yet she wondered — timidly and with deep humiliation in herself for daring to think so far — why, if he loved her so much as he declared, did he not ask her to be his wife? She supposed he would do so, — though she had heard him depreciate marriage as a necessary evil. Evidently he had his own good reasons for deferring the fateful question. Meanwhile she made a little picture-gallery of ideal joys in her brain, — and one of her fancies was that when she married her Amadis she would ask Robin Clifford to let her buy Briar Farm.
“He could paint well there!” she thought, happily, already seeing in her mind’s eye the “Great Hall” transformed into an artist’s studio— “and I almost think I could carry on the farm — Priscilla would help me, — and we know just how Dad liked things to be done — if — if Robin went away. And the master of the house would again be a true Jocelyn!”
The whole plan seemed perfectly natural and feasible. Only one obstacle presented itself like a dark shadow on the brightness of her dream — and that was her own “base” birth. The brand of illegitimacy was upon her, — and whereas once she alone had known what she judged to be a shameful secret, now two others shared it with her — Miss Leigh and Lord Blythe. They would never betray it — no! — but they could not alter what unkind fate had done for her. This was one reason why she was glad that Amadis de Jocelyn had not as yet spoken of their marriage.
“For I should have to tell him!” she thought, woefully— “I should have to say that I am the illegitimate daughter of Pierce Armitage — and then — perhaps he would not marry me — he might change — ah no! — he could not! — he would not! — he loves me too dearly! He would never let me go — he wants me always! We are all the world to each other! — nothing could part us now!”
And so the time drifted on — and with its drifting her work drifted too, and only one all-absorbing passion possessed her life with its close and consuming fire. Amadis de Jocelyn was an expert in the seduction of a soul — little by little he taught her to judge all men as worthless save himself, and all opinions unwarrantable and ill-founded unless he confirmed them. And, leading her away from the contemplation of high visions, he made her the blind worshipper of a very inadequate idol. She was happy in her faith, and yet not altogether sure of happiness. For there are two kinds of love — one with strong wings which lift the soul to a dazzling perfection of immortal destiny, — the other with gross and heavy chains which fetter every hope and aspiration and drag the finest intelligence down to dark waste and nothingness.
Delphi Collected Works of Marie Corelli Page 825