by Grant Allen
Oh, glorious, short-lived, inexpressible delight! Oh, sudden release of tense heart-strings! Oh, instant relief from unutterable suspense! Psyche drove back to Petherton beside herself with joy. Linnell was safe, and she would see him again. She had no fear now that he might have died or been killed during the siege. Some supreme internal faith told her plainly that all was well. England had wasted money like water and sacrificed lives by the thousand in the desert, all to bring Psyche back her painter; and now, in the very hour of the country’s triumph, should any base doubt dare to obtrude itself on her happy mind that all was in vain, and that her painter was missing? No, no, a thousand times over, no! Not thus are the events of the Cosmos ordered. Psyche knew he was safe; she knew he would come back again.
The robins in the hedge chirped merrier than ever as they two drove back in high glee to Petherton. The sun in the sky shone bright and spring-like; the waves on the sea shimmered like diamonds. Everything was gay and blithe and happy. For Linnell was safe, and Psyche was herself again.
And in many an English home that night sad hearts were mourning for their loved ones at Khartoum.
CHAPTER XXV.
AND AFTER.
At the garden-gate Haviland Dumaresq met them, with that strange, far-away look in his wandering eye which, as Psyche knew — though she knew not the cause — surely and certainly foreboded headache. His glance was dim, and his step unsteady. At sight of them, however, he roused himself with an effort; and raising his hat with that stately old-fashioned courtesy of his, which gave something of princeliness to Haviland Dumaresq’s demeanour at all times, he invited Mrs. Mansel to leave the pony standing at the gate, while she came in herself for a cup of tea in their little drawing-room.
‘He won’t stand,’ Ida said; ‘but perhaps I can tie him;’ and with Dumaresq’s help she proceeded to do so.
Psyche could no longer contain her news.
‘Papa, papa,’ she cried, ‘have you heard what’s happened? It’s all right! Khartoum’s relieved, and — Mr. Linnell’s safe again!’
It was the first time since the painter’s departure that she had so much as mentioned his name to her father. Haviland Dumaresq started with surprise at the unexpected sound, and at Psyche’s blushes. The news seemed to rouse him and quicken his dulled sense. The far-away look died out from his eyes, as he answered with a gasp that to Psyche said much:
‘I’m glad to hear it — very glad to hear it. That young man’s danger has weighed upon my soul not a little of late. I’ve thought at times perhaps I might have been in some degree answerable for having sent him out on that fool’s errand; but all’s well that ends well, thank goodness. Military events matter little as a rule to such as me. The silly persons by whose aid kings and statesmen play their deadly game of skill against one another count for not much individually on the stage of history. We reckon them by the head — so many hundreds or so many thousands swept off the board. Well, what’s the next move? Check, Kaiser! check, Sultan! But with this young man it was a different matter. He had burst into our horizon and crossed our orbits. The comet that swims once distinctly into your ken interests you far more than the crowd of meteors that career unseen through the infinity of heaven.’ He rang the bell for the one tidy maid-of-all-work. ‘Maria, tea!’ he said with a lordly gesture, in the voice in which a sovereign might give commands for an imperial banquet to chamberlains and seneschals.
‘The Government must be infinitely relieved at this success,’ Mrs. Mansel remarked, trying to break the current of the subject; for this narrow and somewhat provincial insistence upon the fate of the one young man whom they all happened to know personally vexed her righteous Girtonian soul by its want of expansiveness. Why harp for ever on a single human life, when population tends always to increase in a geometrical ratio beyond the means of subsistence?
‘Yes,’ Dumaresq echoed, away up among the clouds still, but bringing back the pendulum with a rush to Linnell once more. ‘No doubt; no doubt — and I’m relieved myself. I, too, had sent my own private Gordon to the Soudan unawares; and it’s cost me no little in mental expeditions to raise the siege and release him unconditionally. But no matter now, no matter now; it’s all over. He’ll come back before long, and then I’ll be able to pay him at last for the portrait he thrust upon me, uncommissioned, before leaving England.’
Psyche glanced up at it where it hung on the wall — that portrait of her father that she had so loved and watched through these weary long months — that portrait into which, as she often fancied, Linnell had poured the whole strength and energy of his pent-up nature. Ida Mansel’s eyes followed hers to the picture.
‘It’s a most striking piece of work, certainly,’ the Girton-bred lady remarked with condescending grace. ‘Not niggled and over-elaborated, like so many of Mr. Linnell’s performances. As a rule, our friend seems to me to walk backwards and forwards too much while he’s painting a canvas. I often advised him to sit more still. If you watch any of the great masters at work, I always say, you’ll see them seated so close at their easels, and so certain of the value of every particular touch, that they never need to look at the total effect they’re producing at all. That’s art: that’s the master’s way of working. Corot said there were certain pictures of his which he never really saw in any true sense of the word till they’d been signed and framed and sold and paid for. How much better that than this perpetual niggling!’
‘I think Mr. Linnell paints beautifully,’ Psyche cried all aglow, her heart beating hard in righteous indignation at the bare idea that anyone could venture thus coldly to criticise her divine painter at the very moment when he had just escaped from that deadly peril of his life in Africa. ‘And as to niggling,’ she went on, emboldened by love into something that dangerously approached art-criticism, ‘it seemed to me, when I watched him at work, every touch he added to the pictures, and especially to papa’s, brought them one degree nearer to truth and nature.’
Mrs. Mansel looked up with half-contemptuous surprise. This country-bred girl, who had never even seen an academy or a salon, far less the Vatican or the Pitti Palace — this village child give her lessons in æsthetics!
‘You may niggle and niggle away as long as you like,’ she answered coldly, ‘but you can never get the thousands of leaves that quiver on an aspen, or the myriads of tiny lines and curves and shadows that go to make up one human face of ours. Not mechanical accuracy and embarrassed detail make the great artist: a judicious parsimony of touch and wealth of suggestion are what go to produce true pictures.’
Psyche gazed up at the portrait reverently — and was silent. In the matter of mere technique she felt herself wholly unfit to pit her own criticism against Ida Mansel’s; but as a faithful exposition of all that was best and greatest in Haviland Dumaresq’s face and figure — the man himself, and the soul that was in him, not the mere outer body and husk and shell of him — she felt certain in her own heart Linnell’s picture was a triumphant success and a veritable masterpiece. And all the world has since justified her. The philosophic depth, the logical clearness, the epigrammatic power, the proud reserve, the stoical heroism, the grand self-restraint and endurance of the man — all these were faithfully mirrored or delicately suggested in the endless lines of that admirable portrait: not a shade but spoke Haviland Dumaresq’s character; not a tone of expression but helped to swell the general sense of a forceful and self-sufficing individuality. To look upon it one could almost see those proud lips part, and hear that calm and measured voice say in haughty self-consciousness, as once to Linnell: ‘I must go through the world in my own orbit, come what may. I move on my circuit, undeterred and unswerving.’
Ida Mansel, indeed, with her Girton-bred precision and her cultivated narrowness! She to pretend to sit in judgment upon such a soul as Charles Linnell’s! Could she see in either original or portrait those traits that Psyche admired the most? Could she understand the real granite greatness of Dumaresq’s character, or the piercing insight with
which Linnell had read it in his face, and impressed it in imperishable colours upon his canvas? Did she know what the highest side of art was aiming at, at all?
‘The worst of this cut-and-dried modern higher education,’ Psyche thought to herself, falling for the nonce into that hereditary trick of unconscious generalization, ’is that it educates women beyond their natural powers, and tries to raise them into planes of thought for which nature and descent have never equipped them beforehand.’
But what, in her happiness, did she care for such strictures? Her painter was safe, and she could afford to laugh at them.
‘It’s a very good portrait, though,’ her father said, taking up the cudgels half unconsciously for his daughter’s lover. ‘I don’t pretend to understand its technical qualities myself, of course — art, I suppose, can only be adequately judged or understood by those who themselves have essayed and appraised its practical difficulties; but if I know how to read my own character (and I think I do, from an objective standpoint), Linnell, it seems to me, has managed to put it very cleverly on canvas. In considering a portrait — —’
But even as he spoke he was interrupted by Reginald Mansel’s sudden incursion, holding in one hand an evening paper, and all agog with ill-suppressed excitement at the strange and unexpected tidings contained in it. Psyche knew in a moment what their neighbour had come for. He had just learned the news of the relief of Khartoum!
‘Seen to-night’s Pall Mall?’ he asked with emphasis, as he burst in with the eager face of a man who comes as the bearer of important information.
‘No,’ Dumaresq answered; ‘but we’ve heard the news already, for all that. Mrs. Mansel and Psyche brought it from Melbury. I’m glad they’ve succeeded at last in getting there.’
Mansel stared back at him in mute surprise.
‘Glad?’ he exclaimed, bewildered. ‘Glad? Glad of what? I know you’re little interested in military affairs, and push your horror of war to an extreme; but, hang it all, Dumaresq! you’ll admit yourself this is going a little too far for anything. Glad that the Mahdi’s got into Khartoum! Glad that our people have all had their throats cut by those rampant savages!’
Dumaresq clutched the paper with a thrill of astonishment.
‘Had their throats cut?’ he cried, gasping. ‘And by those savages, too? Why, what do you mean, Mansel? They told me all was well at Khartoum.’
Mansel shook his head as he pointed with his finger to the latest telegrams.
‘No, no,’ he answered testily; ‘that’s all wrong, all unfounded. Here’s the genuine news from the seat of war. Wilson’s steamers have got up to Khartoum, only to find the city taken, and Gordon and every Christian soul in the place massacred in cold blood by the Mahdi’s people.’
For a minute or two Dumaresq, Mrs. Mansel, and her husband all gazed together at the fatal telegram. Absorbed in the news, they forgot all else. The philosopher wrung his hands in horror.
‘Poor Linnell!’ he cried, half under his breath. ‘I acted for the best! I acted for the best! But I did wrong, perhaps, in dismissing him so abruptly.’
Mrs. Mansel turned round to look after her friend.
‘Goodness gracious!’ she exclaimed, with a little scream of horror, ‘just look at Psyche!’
They turned and saw. The shock had unnerved her.
Psyche was sitting bolt upright in her chair. Her cheeks were pale and white as death. Her bloodless hands lay motionless on her knees. Her eyes were staring wide open in front of her. But she saw nothing, heard nothing, felt nothing, knew nothing. She was cold as if dead. Had the shock killed her?
That self-same evening, in Chancery Lane, at the office of Messrs. Burchell and Dobbs, family solicitors, the senior partner in that flourishing firm looked up from his perusal of the St. James’s Gazette, and remarked reflectively:
‘I say, Dobbs, that poor client of ours, C. A. Linnell — you remember — must have been one of the fellows murdered in this Khartoum massacre.’
Dobbs glanced aside from his Echo, and murmured in response:
‘By Jove! so he must. He was out there, wasn’t he? I’m sorry for him, poor fellow! A first-rate client! He must have been worth four hundred a year. And I say, Burchell, consols’ll go down to some tune on this news too, won’t they?’
‘Fallen already,’ his partner answered, consulting his tape and pursing his lips up. ‘Stock Exchange feels these pulses so instantaneously. Look here,’ and he rang the electric bell at his side. ‘Brooks, will you bring Mr. Linnell’s box to me?’
The clerk brought it, and Mr. Burchell opened it deliberately, and glanced over the will.
‘Aha!’ he said, laying it down with some obvious unction. ‘Precious lucky young woman, whoever she may be, Miss Psyche Dumaresq! Sounds like an actress: some casual love of his. Jolly glad she’d be this minute if only she knew the good luck in store for her. I thought I remembered it. Miss Psyche Dumaresq! Linnell’s left her every blessed penny!’
‘No!’ Mr. Dobbs replied, screwing up his mouth, and laying down his Echo.
‘Yes, every penny, to “Psyche, daughter of Haviland Dumaresq, Esquire, of Petherton!”’
‘The family’ll dispute it!’ Mr. Dobbs exclaimed, scenting prey upon the breeze and whetting his appetite.
‘They can’t!’ his partner responded with cheerful certainty. ‘There are none of them left. There’s nobody to dispute with her. Sir Austen was the only relative Linnell had living; and Sir Austen was out at Khartoum along with him. Both of them had their throats cut at once, no doubt. Precious lucky young woman, Miss Psyche Dumaresq!’
And all the time, Miss Psyche Dumaresq, unconscious of her luck, and most other circumstances, was sitting white as death in her chair at Petherton, with her open blue eyes staring blankly in front of her, and her dead, numb hands hanging down like a corpse’s.
‘Shall you write and inform her,’ Mr. Dobbs asked, with his fat face screwed up, ‘or wait for details and further confirmation? It’s more business-like, of course, to wait for details; but promptitude often secures a new client. And eight thousand a year’s not to be sneezed at.’
‘No good,’ Mr. Burchell responded, still scanning the will and shaking his head. ‘I have Linnell’s own express instructions not to write to her about it till a year’s elapsed. Dumaresq — Dumaresq — let me see — Dumaresq. There’s a fellow of the name writes sometimes, I think, in the Westminster or the Fortnightly. His daughter, no doubt: perhaps she jilted him. And a precious lucky thing for Miss Psyche Dumaresq.’
CHAPTER XXVI.
DESPAIR.
They carried Psyche up to her own room, and laid her on the bed, and tended her carefully.
‘She’s been affected like this more than once before,’ Haviland Dumaresq said with a pang of remorse, trying to minimize the matter to his own conscience, ‘though never quite so seriously, perhaps, as to-day. Poor child, poor child! It’s strange how sensitive natures respond to a stimulus. She’s been watching this campaign with such singular interest; and the suddenness of the shock, after such hopes aroused, shows how much she’s been over-exciting herself all along about it.’
As for Ida Mansel, she held her peace and guessed the truth, for even Girton had not wholly extinguished her feminine instincts. They poured a little brandy down Psyche’s throat to revive her, and gradually and slowly she came to herself again. She never once uttered Linnell’s name, and nobody about her alluded to him in any way.
‘Tell me what was in the paper!’ she said, with the calm of despair; and they read it aloud to her — every word of it, ungarbled. She listened with her face buried deep in the pillow. ‘Is that all?’ she asked, as Ida Mansel ended. And her father answered in a choking voice:
‘That’s all, my darling.’ After which she lay a long time silent.
At last she turned round, and with a terrible calmness looked up in their faces. Her eyes, though open, were singularly vacant.
‘Why don’t you light the candles?’ she cried
like a peevish child. ‘It’s so very dark. All dark, everywhere!’ And she flung her hands about her with a curious impatience.
Haviland Dumaresq stood up in his horror. The candles were burning on Psyche’s dressing-table, and the little white room was as bright as daylight. With an agonized face he looked down at his daughter.
‘Don’t you see me, Psyche?’ he cried, all aghast. ‘Look up at me, darling. Try hard. Don’t you see me?’
Psyche groped out at him with extended arms.
‘Where are you, papa?’ she asked quite innocently.
Then she fell back in her place and burst at once into a flood of tears. She was glad she had that cloak to cover her sorrow with. Too proud to acknowledge the meaning of her grief, she could at least let it loose under false pretences. She could cry as much as she liked for Linnell now. They would think she was only crying for her own blindness.
That same evening a telegram went up to London, addressed to the greatest oculist of the day, begging him in terms of urgent entreaty to come down at once to a new patient at Petherton.
And Haviland Dumaresq had reason to bless the blindness too, in his own way, for it took him off for awhile from his remorseful conscience, and concentrated his thoughts upon Psyche’s condition.
All the next day Psyche saw nothing; and the day after that, and the day after that again.
But the eminent oculist who had come down post-haste from town to see her, and who came down each evening again by the last train to watch the case — so profound was his admiration of the ‘Encyclopædic Philosophy’ — held out to them the happiest hopes for her recovery, after a short interval. It was a purely nervous affection, he said with confidence: functional, functional: no cataract, no disintegration, no structural disease: the merest passing failure of the optic centres. It was all in the brain, he assured them with great assurance many times over. They had every hope. There was nothing to despair about.