Part 6

"I'm an imbecile, of course, but I f-feel like Romeo. There--it's out."

"So is your cigar. Take a pull on yourself, man, and on that horse, too! You're not an imbecile. Alps lie between you and Miss Kirtling, but the Alps have been scaled before and will be again."

"If I could paint a great picture----"

Pynsent was silent.

Mark continued keenly: "And I feel in all my bones that I shall get there, as you put it--with both feet. I say--you're not very encouraging."

"You must try for this next Salon."

No more was said. But when Mark found himself alone in the room at Pitt Hall which he always used, he lit the candles on each side of the old-fashioned mirror. Then he examined himself, frowning.

"Romeo!" he exclaimed disgustedly. "Good heavens!"

*CHAPTER VIII*

*BARBIZON*

After the Hunt Ball Betty Kirtling was whisked away on a round of visits. Jim Corrance accepted a clerkship in a big firm on the Stock Exchange. Archibald was reading hard for his degree. Mark returned to Paris and work.

Acting under Saphir's advice, he went to Barbizon with the intention of painting a picture for the Salon. In those days every man who went to Barbizon painted one picture at least in accordance with certain well-defined Barbizonian rules. At the top of the canvas was a narrow strip of sky put on boldly with big brushes and a palette-knife. Invariably, the sky was of a tender, pinky-grey complexion, hazy, but atmospheric, hall-marked, so to speak, by Bastien Lepage. Below this strip of opalescent mist, in solid contrast, were painted the roofs of the village. These, too, were handled capitally even by the beginners. The foreground represented a field full of waving grasses, grasses from which the sun had sucked the chlorophyl, leaving them pale and attenuated. In this field grew one tree, looking much the worse for wear. Under the tree sat or stood a woman, a peasant wearing the _coiffe_ of the commune and heavy sabots. This woman always had a complexion of the colour and texture of alligator-skin, and her back was bowed by excessive labour. A pretty maid waiting for her lover would have been deemed rank blasphemy against the traditions of the place where the "Angelus" of Millet had been conceived and painted.

Mark worked hard at just such a picture during half of January and the whole of February. A dozen friends were painting similar masterpieces in a fine frenzy of open-air excitement. Saphir himself was at Gretz, but he came over to Barbizon, breakfasted _chez_ Siron, and examined his pupils' canvases with kindly, twinkling eyes. Then he went back to Gretz.

"He says we are all monkeys," observed a big Canadian.

"So we are," cried Mark. "We're trying to copy what one man has done s-s-superlatively well."

Later, he took the Canadian aside. Saphir had talked alone to him; and Mark had overheard his own name.

"What did he say to you about--m-m-me?"

"Oh, nothing."

"I w-want the facts."

"Well, he did ask me if you had private means, and I told him your father made you a good allowance."

"Go on!"

"And--and he said that was fortunate. Of course he meant that--er--it takes time to arrive--eh?"

"Quite so. A lifetime if you happen to choose the wrong r-road."

About the beginning of March Pynsent arrived from England.

"I've caught on," he told Mark. "I shall certainly take a studio somewhere in Kensington. Lady Randolph has found me a score of patrons. What are you doing?"

Mark produced his big canvas. Pynsent stared at it, pursing up his lower lip and frowning. Mark's hopes oozed from every pore. The picture exhibited pitiful signs of excessive labour. Pynsent obtained his best effects with bits of pure colour laid on with amazing precision. Mark's colour looked like putty.

"Are they all as ugly as that?" said Pynsent, indicating the model.

"I got the ugliest in the v-v-village. There's a lot in her face."

"A lot of dirt."

"I don't allow her to wash it. Can you read her 1-life's history?"

"I'm hanged if I can."

"You see n-nothing in her eyes?"

"Nor in her mouth. She's lost all her teeth."

"Knocked out by a b-brutal husband," said Mark, grinning, but ill at ease beneath Pynsent's chaff.

"What are those stains on the apron--red paint?"

"Sheep's blood. I rubbed it on myself."

Pynsent roared; he was not a Barbizonian.

"Great Scott! You fellows take yourselves seriously."

"Honestly," said Mark. "What d'ye think of it?"

"It's good--in streaks," said Pynsent solemnly. Then his eyes flashed. "Look here, Mark, they won't hang that. But I've told Lady Randolph and Miss Kirtling that you will have a 'machine' in the Salon. Now, have you the pluck to scrape this and paint it out--_to-night_?"

"Yes," said Mark.

Next day Pynsent led the way into the forest of Fontainebleau, Mark following like a faithful spaniel. They walked for miles. Finally, Pynsent discovered a bank of cool-looking sand in the heart of a pine wood; upon the sand were wonderful shadows and reflections.

"_Voila notre affaire!_" exclaimed Pynsent.

"But the m-model----"

"I have wired to Paris. These Barbizon peasants make me tired."

That evening the model arrived--a girl. Within twelve hours Mark was at work. Pynsent posed the girl upon the bank. She sat with her elbows on her knees and her face between her hands, staring helplessly and hopelessly out of an unknown world.

"We'll call it '_Perdue_,'" said Pynsent. "The subject is trite, but the treatment will redeem that. I spotted that girl last year in the Rue du Chat qui Peche. Aren't her eyes immense?"

Mark protested in vain. Pynsent ordered him to begin work. In eight days the picture was painted. Pynsent had not laid a brush upon it, but Mark was miserably conscious that his friend's genius informed almost every stroke. For hours Pynsent stood at his side, exhorting and encouraging.

"It's really good," said Pynsent, after he had forbidden his pupil to add another touch.

"But it's not m-m-mine, Pynsent."

"What?"

"I couldn't have p-painted it without you."

"Pooh!"

At Siron's Mark's friends predicted success, a place on the line, honourable mention, a prize, possibly. Saphir saw it and whistled.

"You painted that--you?"

They were standing in the dining-room, panelled with studies, some of them signed by famous men. Mark's friends were all present, and in the background Madame Siron smiled genially, murmuring that monsieur certainly must add a tiny sketch to her little collection. Mark glanced from face to face. The general expression was not to be misinterpreted. In the eyes of those present he had "arrived."

"_Tiens!_" said Saphir; "it is not signed. You must sign it, _mon garcon_."

A bystander produced a brush and palette.

"It grows upon one," said Saphir, shading his eyes. "He has lots to learn in technique, but the feeling which cannot be imparted is there. _Saperlipopette_! It brings tears to the eyes. And look you," he addressed Pynsent and Mark in broken English, "I am not easily moved--I! When I lose a friend of ze blood--how do you call it?--a relation, yes, ze tears do not come--no! And when I hear Wagner--_zoum, soum, zoum_--ze tears do not come, no! But when I hear Rossini, Bellini--rivers, _mes amis_, rivers!" With a large gesture he indicated a tropical downpour; then he continued: "It is ze melodie. Is it not so, _mes enfants_?"

He appealed to the circle around him. Mark listened, stupefied, to a clamour of congratulation.

"Sign it--sign it!" they cried.

Mark took the brush with a queer smile upon his wide mouth. The others fell back to give him room.

"_Dieu de Dieu!_" ejaculated Saphir.

Mark had copied cleverly Pynsent's bold signature; below it in small script was: "_per_ M. S."

Pynsent bit his lip, frowning. The others stared at Mark, who met the startled interrogation of their raised brows with a nervous laugh.

"The f-f-feeling you speak of," he turned to Saphir, "is his," he indicated Pynsent. "I cannot s-send it to the Salon as my work, but I shall k-keep it and v-value it as long as I live."

Saphir held out his hand.

"My friend," he said in his own tongue, "if you were not an Angliche, I should ask to have the honour of embracing you."

"He's a quixotic fool," Pynsent growled; "I never touched the canvas."

The others vanished, put to flight by an intuition that something was about to happen. Mark addressed Saphir.

"When you were here last you s-said to a friend of mine that it was fortunate for me, that I had private means. You are my master; you have seen everything I have done. This, you understand, does not c-c-count. Pynsent knows my work, too, every line of it. I ask you both: Am I w-w-wasting my time?"

Neither answered.

"No mediocre success will content me," continued Mark. "I ask you again: Am I w-w-wasting my time?"

"Yes," said Saphir gruffly. He put on his hat and went out.

"He's not infallible," Pynsent muttered angrily.

"Then you advise me to g-go on? No; you are too honest to do that. I shall not go on, Pynsent; but I don't regret the last three years. They would have been wasted indeed if they had b-b-blinded me to the truth concerning my powers."

"What will you do, Mark?"

"I don't know--yet," said Mark.

Mark returned to England, where he learned of Betty's conquests. The Duke of Brecon, so Lady Randolph told him, had to marry a million, otherwise he might have offered Miss Kirtling the strawberry leaves. Harry Kirtling, the cousin, very handsome, and a passionate protester, wooed in vain, much to the Admiral's dismay, a dismay tempered by Betty's assurance that she did not wish to leave her uncle for many a long year. A prosperous rector proposed in a letter which began: "My dear Miss Kirtling,--After much earnest thought and fervent prayer, I write to entreat you to become my wife...." This gentleman was a widower on the ripe side of forty. Pynsent, too, confessed that had he not been bond to Art, he might have become Betty's slave.

Mark saw her on the day when she was presented at Court, on the day when she held a small court herself at Randolph House, after she had kissed her sovereign's hand. Like the young man in the parable, Mark went away from Belgrave Square very sorrowful, because Betty seemed so rich and he was so poor.

About this time he met the future Bishop-Suffragan of Poplar, David Ross, then head of the Camford Mission. A man of extraordinary personal magnetism, Ross had begun by challenging public attention as the champion middle-weight boxer of his year. He possessed a small forest in Sutherland and abundant private means; but, to the amazement of his friends, he took Orders and accepted a curacy in the East End. His lodge in Sutherland was turned into a sanatorium, whither were sent at his expense clergymen who had broken down in health. David Ross had the highlander's prophetic faculty and intuition. Where others crawled, he leaped to conclusions respecting his fellow-creatures. When he met Mark, for instance, he divined his mental condition: the suffering denied expression, the disappointment, the humiliation. But he divined far more--something of which Mark himself was unconscious: a religious mind, religious in the sense in which Bishop Butler interpreted the word--submissive to the will of God. This quality in combination with a passionate energy and determination to win his way arrested Ross's attention and captivated his interest. He asked Mark to become a guest at the Mission.

Here the almost invincible odds against which a dozen men were struggling whetted to keen edge Mark's vitality and love of fighting. Listening to David Ross, it seemed incredible that he should have pinned his ambition to the painting of a picture. At the end of a couple of months' hard work in the slums he said abruptly to Ross: "If I can overcome my confounded stammer, I shall take Orders."

Ross held his glance.

"Do nothing rashly," he said gravely.

Time, however, strengthened Mark's resolution. He set to work to overcome his stammer. When he told his family of his intention to take Orders, each member in turn protested.

"You--a parson?" The Squire was scarlet with surprise.

"There is only one living," bleated Mrs. Samphire.

"Oh, I shan't compete with old Archie," said Mark, smiling.

Lady Randolph, however, said to Betty: "He is the right man to lead--_lead_, mind you--forlorn hopes."

"And be killed," Betty answered vehemently.

"I don't think he will be killed, my dear."

For many months after this he worked with Ross, seeing but little of his family and friends.

In the following February the Admiral died after a short sharp attack of pneumonia. Mark attended his funeral, and exchanged a few words with Betty, to whom was left everything the kind, eccentric old man possessed. Betty broke down when she saw Mark's sympathetic face. She had nursed her uncle faithfully; she had loved him very dearly; she realised that she was alone in a world which held pain as well as pleasure. Mark tried to comfort her.

"You have so many friends, Betty."

"Friends?" She smiled through her tears. "Friends are like policemen--always round the corner when most wanted. I might want you, and you--you--would be somewhere in Whitechapel."

Mark opened his mouth, and shut it again resolutely.

During that week he saw her twice. It was settled that The Whim should be let till she came of age; Betty living, meanwhile, with her guardian and trustee, Lady Randolph. Miriam Hazelby helped Betty to pack up the Admiral's china, and, when Mark called, played watchdog. She liked Mark and respected him; but she respected also the late Admiral's wishes. Mark noted that Miss Hazelby's affection and sympathy for Betty did not obscure her powers of observation.

"Betty," she said to Mark, "has a mind which till now has been a sundial: recording only the bright hours. I confess that I am anxious about her. When I left her I told the Admiral that she carried too much sail and not enough ballast. As a seaman he approved my trite little metaphor."

Mark began to praise Betty.

"Oh," said Miss Hazelby drily, "she has been fortunate in knowing good people to whose standard she tries to attain. It has been easy for her to avoid evil in King's Charteris, but in Belgrave Square----"

The excellent lady sniffed.

"Lady Randolph will keep an eye on her," said Mark.

"She'll need both eyes," retorted Miss Hazelby.

*CHAPTER IX*

*AT KING'S CHARTERIS*

Two years later, in April, Mark Samphire preached his first sermon at King's Charteris. He had wrestled with his stammer as Christian did with Apollyon, and he told Archie that he had reason to believe it was mastered when the brothers met at Pitt Hall upon the Saturday preceding Mark's appearance in the village pulpit.

"I passed some severe tests, before they admitted me to deacons' orders," he said.

Archie stared curiously at an unfamiliar Mark. "You don't look very fit."

"I've been like a bird in the hand of a fowler, a fluttering tomtit trying to escape. Ross rescued me. You must get to know Ross: he's a splendid fellow. I've talked to him a lot about you."

Archibald nodded, well pleased to find Mark's eyes lingered upon his handsome face and imposing figure with the same pride and affection as of yore, out he was conscious also of a mental change in his brother, divined rather than apprehended. Mark spoke with enthusiasm of work in congested districts, he gave lamentable details, he indicated colossal difficulties.

"And this sort of thing satisfies you?" said Archie heavily. "Although, as I take it, the results are visible. I like to see results. I keep a diary--of results. You were telling me just now of the difficulties of dealing with a shifting population: the people, for instance, round the London Docks. I couldn't undertake that sort of work."

"You want to count your sheaves," said Mark.

"I am ambitious," Archie admitted. "Aren't you?"

"Oh, yes. If I told you that I felt it in me to become a preacher, you would l-laugh perhaps."

"You've always had plenty to say, Mark."

"And if, one day, I could stand in the pulpit of such a fane as Westchester, if----"

"Why not?" said Archie.

"I try not to think of that. But those spires and pinnacles--I see them as in a vision."

"What will be your text to-morrow?"

"That verse from Isaiah: '_A man shall be as an hiding place from the wind, and a covert from the tempest._' I shall not t-touch upon the prophetical interpretation. I want to show that any man, the humblest and weakest, may prove a shelter to others."

Archie caught his enthusiasm.

"It is in you, Mark."

"In me, yes; but suppose it won't come out."

"Do you know that Betty Kirtling is here?"

"Here?" He turned to hide his flushed cheeks.

"She is with Mrs. Corrance. We are asked to lunch there to-morrow. I accepted for you. Betty ran down from town yesterday on purpose to hear your first sermon."

"Oh!"

"It's a great compliment; for she has become a much-sought-after person. I see her name continually in the papers. Lady Randolph tells me that you refuse all invitations to Randolph House. Is that wise?"

"Wise?" Mark laughed, and thrust out a lean leg. "Is this a leg for a gaiter?"

"That joke is worn threadbare," said Archie, with a slight frown. "I can't see why your work should cut you off from old friends who have your welfare at heart. Lord Randolph got me my present curacy. He would do as much and more for you."

"I shall certainly stick to Ross."

Next morning Mark rose early after an uneasy and almost sleepless night. He had been obsessed by a spirit of Betty. Whenever he closed his eyes she came to him. "She is the creature of my dreams," he told himself impatiently. None the less she dominated his waking hours, she stood behind that ever-increasing hope of becoming a great preacher. He had consumed gallons of midnight oil in the composition of sermons declaimed in unfrequented spots of Victoria Park. Now, the thought of preaching to the woman he loved filled him with bitter-sweet excitement. He dressed and went out into the park. Presently he came to an elm out of which flew some jackdaws chattering volubly. Their harsh notes brought back a morning when Archie and he, small schoolboys, had scaled this very tree in search of jackdaws' eggs. Yes; there was the hole, high up, out of which Archibald by his superior height and strength had secured the spoil.

Mark sat down, despite the protests of the jackdaws, and faced his thoughts. The talk with Archie of the night before came back to him. He had heard Archie preach. Archie's matter, perhaps, to the critical mind left something to be desired; but his manner was admirable and his voice clear, persuasive, melodious, an instrument of incomparable power and delicacy. Did Mark envy his brother? Did he grudge him a success already achieved? Did he grudge him--a subtler point--the greater success which undoubtedly he would achieve? To these questions he answered sincerely--"No."

Leaving Archibald, his thoughts flew straight and swift to Betty. She had come to King's Charteris to hear him preach? Why? His heart flamed; for Archie had preached his first sermon in the village church. Had Betty travelled from town to hear Samphire major? No.

When he returned to Pitt Hall, he had made a sort of compromise with his pride, his conscience, and his God. Time was when he abhorred compromise, but David Ross had said that a life without compromise must prove entirely selfish or so selfless in its aims as to be abnormal. Mark admitted the possibility of breakdown. And if silence were imposed, he must shoulder the burden. Speech, on the other hand, if it were truly his, included speech with Betty. He felt assured that she expected him to speak, that she had travelled to King's Charteris to hear him speak. He could not have said why this conviction thrilled every nerve in his body; it simply was so.

During the first part of the service, Mark found time to study the faces of the congregation. Betty, sitting beside Mrs. Corrance, looked pale and anxious. Mark remembered that she had not entered the church since the Admiral's funeral. Having keen sight, he detected traces of tears, which moved him profoundly. Behind her, with his broad back against one of the pillars, sat the Squire, rigidly upright. He had come prepared to hear his boy--"the best boy in the world, sir"--preach a fine sermon. During the rector's long and somewhat dry discourses, the Squire always assumed an attitude of profound attention, his fine head inclined upon his massive chest, his eyes and lips meditatively closed. If suspicious sounds had not escaped through his nose, none would have dared to accuse him of napping. But everybody, from the rector to the latest breeched urchin, knew that the dear man slept like a humming-top from introduction to peroration. He would not sleep to-day. Expectation, tempered by anxiety, informed his expression, the expression assumed by him at Lord's, when his sons were walking to the wicket. Literally interpreted, it said: "A Samphire may fail, but it is not likely to happen." Mark glanced from his father to Mrs. Samphire. Her prominent eyes, set too far apart, like a sheep's, were slightly congested; her puffy cheeks were flushed. It struck Mark that she would accept failure on his part with Christian resignation. She resented the fact that Mark was the favourite son of the Squire, who may have seen the quality in his youngest born which distinguished the mother, and which Mark alone inherited. Mrs. Samphire was inordinately jealous of the first wife.

Mark's thoughts wandered with his eyes. Just below the pulpit he saw Wadge, the head keeper, a thin, hard-bitten, sharp-featured man, whose brown face was framed in bushy red whiskers. Many a day's sport had Mark enjoyed with Wadge. He recalled a frosty morning when Jim Corrance, indiscreetly thrusting his hand into a burrow, had been nailed by a ferret. Behind Wadge was Bulpett, the butcher, a burly man, one of the churchwardens, and reputed to be worth a snug ten thousand pounds. What a lot of rats there used to be in his old slaughter-house before it was pulled down! Once Bulpett had caught Archie and Mark peeping through a chink in the slaughter-house at a calf he was about to kill. What silly idiots they felt when Bulpett politely invited them to come inside. And then Bulpett had laughed and said that he would send a nice piece of veal to Pitt Hall.

The rector gave out the psalms of the day. Archie's splendid voice filled the church. And who was this singing so shrilly and so abominably flat? Why dear old Ellen, to be sure--his first nurse--who must have walked all the way from Cranberry-Orcas. Ellen lived in a cottage near Cranberry brook, wherein Archie and he used to catch trout by the willow at the foot of her cabbage patch. She had been maid to the first Mrs. Samphire; and when Miss Selina Lamb came to Pitt Hall, Ellen married a porter, who had waited for her fifteen years. Mark knew the porter well. He was not an agreeable person, being rheumatic and asthmatic--and crusty in consequence--but at the time of the marriage the Samphire boys agreed that Ellen was wise in preferring him to the Ewe, their nickname for the stepmother.

How his thoughts were wandering!