by Grant Allen
GETTING ON.
It must be frankly confessed that Linnell took an unconscionably long time in painting in the figure of that bewitching Arab girl in the foreground of his graceful Algerian picture. He arranged and rearranged the drapery and the pose till Psyche herself was fairly astonished at the exacting requirements of high art. Perhaps he had reasons of his own for being in no hurry over his self-imposed task: at any rate, he loitered lovingly over every touch and every detail, and filled in the minutest points of the flesh-tints with even more than his customary conscientious minuteness. Psyche, too, for her part, seemed to like very well her novel trade of artist’s model.
‘Are you tired yet?’ Linnell asked her more than once, as they sat in the gloom of the bare little dining-room at the Wren’s Nest together; and Psyche answered always with a smile of half-childish surprise: ‘Oh dear no, Mr. Linnell — not the least in the world. I could sit like this and be painted for ever.’
To say the truth, she had never before known she was so beautiful. Linnell could idealize female heads against any man; and Psyche’s pretty head came out on his canvas so glorified by the halo of first love that she hardly recognised her own counterfeit presentment.
‘Do you always take so much pains with your sitters?’ she asked once, as the painter paused and regarded attentively some shade of expression on her lips and eyebrows.
And Linnell smiled a broad smile as he answered truthfully: ‘Not unless I think my sitter very well worth it.’
‘And in the East, who do you get to sit for you?’ Psyche asked, looking up at him with those big liquid eyes of hers.
‘Nobody so well worth painting as you,’ the artist answered with a faint touch of his brush on the eye in the picture — he had just managed to catch the very light he wanted in it. ‘Dancing-girls mostly, who sit for money, or Nubians sometimes, who don’t veil their features. But in Lower Egypt and in Algiers, of course, you can’t get most of the respectable women to show you their faces at all for love or money.’
Psyche hesitated for a moment; then she said timidly: ‘Nobody has ever painted papa. Don’t you think some day there ought to be a portrait of him?’
Linnell started.
‘Do you mean to say,’ he cried, with a fresh burst of surprise, ‘there’s no portrait of him at all anywhere in existence?’
‘Not even a photograph,’ Psyche answered with a faint shake of her pretty head. ‘He won’t be taken. He doesn’t like it. He says a world that won’t read his books can’t be very anxious to look at his outer features. But I think there ought to be a portrait painted of him somewhere, for all that. I look to the future. In after-ages, surely, people will like to know what so great a man as papa looked like.’
‘Then you have no fear for his fame?’ Linnell asked, half smiling.
‘None at all,’ Psyche answered with quiet dignity. ‘Of course, Mr. Linnell, I don’t pretend to understand his philosophy and all that sort of thing; but I don’t think I should be worthy to be my father’s daughter if I didn’t see that, in spite of the world’s neglect and want of appreciation, a man with so grand a character as papa must let his soul go out in books which can never be forgotten.’
‘I don’t think you would,’ Linnell murmured very low. ‘And one of the things I like best about you, Psyche, is that you appreciate your father so thoroughly. It shows, as you say, you’re not unworthy to be so great a man’s daughter.’
He had never called her Psyche before, but he called her so now quite simply and unaffectedly; and Psyche, though it brought the warm blood tingling into her cheek, took no overt notice of the bold breach of conventional etiquette. She preferred that Linnell should call her so, unasked, rather than formally ask for leave to use the more familiar form in addressing her.
‘Papa would make a splendid portrait, too,’ she said wistfully, after a moment’s pause.
‘He would,’ Linnell assented. ‘I never in my life saw a nobler head. If only somebody could be got somewhere who was good enough to do it.’
‘Wouldn’t you care to try?’ Psyche asked with an outburst.
Linnell hesitated.
‘It isn’t my line,’ he said. ‘I can manage grace and delicate beauty, I know, but not that rugged masculine grandeur. I’m afraid I should fail to do my sitter justice.’
‘Oh, I don’t think so at all,’ Psyche cried with some warmth. ‘You appreciate papa. You admire him. You understand him. You recognise the meaning of the lines in his face. I think, myself, nobody could do it as well as you could.’ And she looked up at him almost pleadingly.
‘You really mean it?’ Linnell exclaimed, brightening up. She was but an inexperienced country girl, yet her opinion of his art gave him more profound self-confidence than Sydney Colvin’s or Comyns Carr’s could possibly have done. He needed encouragement and the frank note of youthful certainty. No art critic so cocksure as a girl in her teens. ‘If you think I could do it,’ he went on after a pause, still working hard at the light in the left eye, ‘I should be proud to try my inexperienced hand at it. I should go down to posterity, in that case, if for nothing else, at least as the painter of the only genuine and authentic portrait of Haviland Dumaresq.’
‘You share my enthusiasm,’ Psyche said with a smile.
‘I do,’ the painter answered, looking over at her intently. ‘And, indeed, I can sympathize with your enthusiasm doubly. In the first place, I admire your father immensely; and in the second place’ — he paused for a moment, then he added reverently— ‘I had a mother myself once. Nothing that anybody could ever have said would have seemed to me too much to say about my dear mother.’
‘Did you ever paint her?’ Psyche asked, with a quietly sympathetic tinge in her voice.
Linnell shook his head.
‘Oh no,’ he said. ‘She died before I was old enough to paint at all. But,’ he added after a pause, in his most hesitating tone, ‘I’ve a little miniature of her here, if you’d like to see it.’
‘I should like it very much,’ Psyche said softly. Nothings! nothings! yet, oh, how full of meaning when sweet seventeen says them, with pursed-up lips and blushing cheeks, to admiring thirty.
The painter put his hand inside the breast of his coat and drew out a miniature in a small gold frame, hung round his neck by a black silk ribbon. He handed it to Psyche. The girl gazed close at it long and hard. It was the portrait of a graceful, gracious, gentle old lady, her smooth white hair surmounted by a dainty lace head-dress, and her soft eyes, so like Linnell’s own, instinct with a kindly care and sweetness. Yet there was power, too, rare intellectual power, in the ample dome of that tall white forehead; and strength of will, most unlike her son’s, stood confessed in the firm chin and the marked contour of the old lady’s cheeks. It must surely have been from ‘Charlie’ — that scapegrace ‘Charlie’ — that Linnell inherited the weaker half of his nature: in the mother’s traits, as set forth by the miniature, there showed no passing line of mental or moral weakness.
‘She must have been a very great lady indeed,’ Psyche cried, looking close at it.
‘Oh no; not at all. She was only a singer — a public singer,’ Linnell answered truthfully. ‘But she sang as I never heard any other woman sing in all my days; and she lived a life of pure unselfishness.’
‘Tell me about her,’ Psyche said simply.
Her pretty sympathy touched the painter’s sensitive nature to the core. His eyes brimmed full, and his hand trembled on the lashes of the face in the picture, but he pretended to go on with it still unabashed.
‘I can’t tell you much,’ he said, trying hard to conceal his emotion from his sitter; ‘but I can tell you a little. She was a grand soul. I owe to her whatever there may be of good, if any, within me.’
‘An American, I suppose?’ Psyche went on musingly, as she read the name and date in the corner, ‘Boston, 1870.’
‘No, not an American; thank heaven! not that — a Devonshire girl: true Briton to the bone. She was prou
d of Devonshire, and she loved it always. But she went away to America with my father of her own accord in her effort to redress a great wrong — a great wrong my father had unwittingly been forced, by the cruelty and treachery of others, into inflicting unawares on an innocent woman — a woman who hated her, and for whom she would willingly have sacrificed everything. I can’t tell you the whole story — at least, not now. Perhaps — —’ And he paused. Then he added more slowly: ‘No, no; no, never. But I can tell you this much in general terms: my father had been deceived by his father — a wicked old man, my mother said, and my mother was a woman to be believed implicitly — my father had been deceived by a terrible lie into inflicting this cruel and irreparable wrong upon that other woman and a helpless child of hers. My mother, who already had suffered bitterly at his hands — for my father was a very weak man, though kind and well-meaning — my mother found it out, and determined to make what reparation was possible to her for that irretrievable evil. She never thought of herself. She never even vindicated her own position. She stole away to America, and was as if she were dead; there she toiled and slaved, and built up a livelihood for us in a strange way, and wished that half of all she had earned should belong in the end to that other woman and her innocent child; the woman that hated her. Through good report and evil report she worked on still; she kept my father straight, as no other woman could ever have kept him; she brought me up tenderly and well; and when she died, she left it to me as a sacred legacy to undo as far as in me lay the evil my grandfather and father had wrought between them: one by his wickedness, the other by his weakness. I don’t suppose you can understand altogether what I mean; but I dare say you can understand enough to know why I loved and revered and adored my mother.’
‘I can understand all, I think,’ Psyche murmured low; ‘and I don’t know why I should be afraid to say so.’ With any other woman, the avowal might have sounded unwomanly; with Psyche, girt round in her perfect innocence, it sounded but the natural and simple voice of human sympathy.
Events take their colour from the mind that sees them. There are no such things as facts; there are only impressions. The story old Admiral Rolt had bluntly blurted out at the Senior United Service to General Maitland was the self-same story that Linnell, in his delicate, obscure half-hints, had faintly shadowed forth that day to Psyche; only the mode of regarding the events differed. Between the two, each mind must make its choice for itself. To the pure all things are pure; and to Admiral Rolt the singer of beautiful songs, and the mother that Linnell so loved and revered, envisaged herself only as a common music-hall ballet-girl. How far the scene at the Deanery and the Irish brogue were embellishments of the Admiral’s own fertile genius, nobody now living could probably say. On the Admiral’s tongue no story lost for want of amplification. Perhaps the truth lay somewhere between the two extremes; but Linnell’s was at least the nobler version, and bespoke the nobler mind at the back of it.
They paused for a moment or two in utter silence. Then Linnell spoke again.
‘Why do I make you the confidante of this little family episode?’ he asked dreamily.
‘I suppose,’ Psyche answered, looking up at him with something of her father’s bold, open look, ‘because you knew you were sure of finding friendly sympathy.’
Their eyes met, and then fell suddenly. A strange tremor ran through Linnell’s nerves. Was this indeed in very truth that woman who could love him for his own soul, apart from filthy lucre and everything else of the earth, earthy?
He looked up again, and, hasting to change the conversation, asked of a sudden:
‘How can I get your father to sit for me, I wonder?’
He was afraid to trust his own heart any further.
Psyche’s eyes came back from infinity with a start.
‘Oh, he’d never sit!’ she cried. ‘You can’t do it that way. We must make up some plan to let you see him while you pretend to be painting something else, and he doesn’t suspect it. You must get your studies for it while he knows nothing about it.’
‘He might come in here while I paint you,’ Linnell suggested with faint indecision, ‘and then I could put one canvas behind another.’
A slight cloud came over Psyche’s brow. It was so much nicer to be painted tête-à-tête with only an occasional discreet irruption from Geraldine Maitland, who sat for the most part reading French novels on the tiny grass plot outside the open window.
‘I think,’ she said, after a slight pause, ‘we might manage to concoct some better plot with Geraldine.’
There’s nothing on earth to bind two young people together at a critical stage like concocting a plot. Before that surreptitious portrait of Haviland Dumaresq was half finished — the old man being engaged in conversation outside by Geraldine, while Linnell within caught his features rapidly — the painter and Psyche felt quite at home with one another, and Psyche herself, though not prone to love affairs, began almost to suspect that Mr. Linnell must really and truly be thinking of proposing to her. And if he did — well, Psyche had her own ideas about her answer.
CHAPTER IX.
FOR STRATEGIC REASONS.
‘George!’ Mrs. Maitland remarked abruptly to her husband one evening, a few weeks later, as they sat by themselves, towards the small-hours, in the High Ash drawing-room, ‘we must put our foot down without delay about Geraldine and this flighty girl of poor crazy old Dumaresq’s.’
The General wavered. He was an old soldier, and he knew that when your commanding officer gives you a definite order, your duty is to obey, and not to ask for reasons or explanations. Where Geraldine was in question, however, discipline tottered, and the General ventured to temporize somewhat. He salved his conscience — his military conscience — by pretending not quite to understand his wife.
‘Put our foot down how?’ he managed to ask, prevaricating.
Mrs. Maitland, however, was not the sort of woman to stand prevarication.
‘You know perfectly well what I mean,’ she answered, bridling up, ‘so don’t make-believe, George, you haven’t observed it yourself. Don’t look down at the carpet, like a fool, like that. You’ve seen as well as I have all this that’s going on every day between them. Geraldine’s behaved disgracefully — simply disgracefully. Knowing very well we had an eye ourselves upon that young man Linnell for her — a most eligible match, as you found out in London — instead of aiding and abetting us in our proper designs for her own happiness, what must she go and do but try her very hardest to fling him straight at the head of that bread-and-butter miss of poor crazy old Dumaresq’s? And not only that, but, what’s worse than all, she’s helped on the affair, against her own hand, by actually going and playing gooseberry for them.’
‘But what can we do?’ the General remarked helplessly. ‘A girl of Geraldine’s spirit — —’
His commanding officer crushed him ruthlessly.
‘A girl of Geraldine’s spirit!’ she repeated with scorn. ‘You call yourself a soldier! Why, George, I’m ashamed of you! Do you mean to tell me you’re afraid of your own daughter? We must put our foot down. That’s the long and the short of it!’
‘How?’ the General repeated once more with a shudder. It went against the grain with him to repress Geraldine.
‘There are no two ways about it,’ Mrs. Maitland went on, waving her closed fan like a marshal’s baton before her. ‘Look the thing plainly in the face, for once in your life, George. She must get married, and we must marry her. Last year she refused that rich young Yankee at Algiers. This year she’s flung away her one chance of this well-to-do painter man. She’s getting on, and wasting opportunities. There’s Gordon’s got into difficulties at Aldershot again: and Hugh, well, Hugh’s failed for everything: and the boys at Winchester are coming on fast: and unless Geraldine marries, I’m sure I don’t know what on earth we’re ever to do for ourselves about her.’
‘Well, what do you want me to do?’ the General asked submissively. A soldier mayn’t like it, but a soldi
er must always obey orders.
‘Do? Why, speak to her plainly to-morrow,’ Mrs. Maitland said with quiet emphasis. ‘Tell her she mustn’t go round any more wasting her time with these half-and-half Dumaresqs.’
‘Dumaresq’s a gentleman,’ the General said stoutly.
‘Was one, I dare say. But he’s allowed himself to sink. And, anyhow, we can’t let Geraldine aid and abet him in angling to catch this poor young Linnell for his daughter Psyche, or whatever else he calls the pink-and-white young woman. It’s a duty we owe to Mr. Linnell himself to protect him from such unblushing and disgraceful fortune-hunting. The girl’s unfitted to be a rich man’s wife. Depend upon it, it’s always unwise to raise such people out of their natural sphere. You must speak to Geraldine yourself to-morrow, George, and speak firmly.’
The General winced. But he knew his place.
‘Very well, Maria,’ he answered without a murmur.
He would have saluted as he spoke had Mrs. Maitland and military duty compelled the performance of that additional courtesy.
So next morning after breakfast, with many misgivings, the General drew his daughter gently into his study, and begged her in set form to abstain in future, for her mother’s sake, from visiting the Dumaresqs.
Geraldine heard him out in perfect composure.
‘Is that all, papa?’ she asked at last, as the General finished with trembling lips.
‘That’s all, Geraldine.’
He said it piteously.
‘Very well, papa,’ Geraldine answered, holding herself very tall and erect, with one hand on the table. ‘I know what it means. Mamma asked you to speak to me about it. Mamma thinks Mr. Linnell might marry me. There mamma’s mistaken. Mr. Linnell doesn’t mean to ask me, and even if he did, I don’t mean to take him.’
‘You don’t?’
‘No, papa; I don’t. So that’s the long and short of it. I don’t love him, and I won’t marry him. He may be as rich as Cr[oe]sus, but I won’t marry him. More than that: he’s in love with Psyche; and Psyche I think’s in love with him. They want my help in the matter very badly; and unless somebody takes their future in hand and makes the running very easy for them, I’m afraid Mr. Linnell will never summon up courage to propose to Psyche. He’s so dreadfully shy and reserved and nervous.’