Part 5

“I was entirely broken-hearted when I heard that you were going to stop at Sere all summer; but even for adversity there are sweet uses; and I wish you would ask my boy down to stay with you. I’m sure you can do him good, unless too many months of country air have made a sober woman of you. Do try to Christianise him, and a father’s heart will reward you with its blessing.

“Yours always,

“A. Weir.”

Then Harold went down to Sere; and a fortnight later Mrs. Winchfield wrote as follows to his parent:—

“Dear Weir,—

“I’m afraid it’s hopeless. I’ve done my utmost, and I’ve failed grotesquely. Yesterday I chanced to say, in your young one’s presence, to Colonel Buttington, who’s staying here, that if my husband were only away, I should so enjoy a desperate flirtation with him. Harold, dear boy, looked scandalised, and by and by, catching me alone, he asked (in the words of Father William’s interlocutor) whether I thought at my age it was right? He is like the Frenchman who took his wife to the play, and chid her when she laughed, saying, ‘Nous ne sommes pas ici pour nous amuser,’ I am sending him back by the morning train to morrow. Keep him with you, and try to cultivate a few domestic virtues. A vous,

“Margaret Winchfield.”

Harold arrived, looking very grave. But his father looked graver still, and he invited the young man into the library, and gave him a piece of his mind. It produced no sensible effect. At last, “Well, I hope at least you tipped the servants liberally?” the poor man questioned.

“No, sir, I don’t believe in tipping servants. What are they paid their wages for?”

“You’re quite irreclaimable,” the father cried. “May I ask how long you mean to remain in England?”

“I think I shall need about two months to do it thoroughly.”

His father left the room, and gave orders to his man to pack for a long journey.

A SLEEVELESS ERRAND.

“J’ai perdu via tourterelle,

Je veux aller apres elle.”

I.

It had been the old familiar story, in its most hackneyed version.

She was nineteen; he was three or four and twenty, with an income just sufficient to keep him in bread and cheese, and for prospects and position those of an art-student in a land of money-grubbers. And her parents, who were wise in their generation, wouldn’t hear of a betrothal; whilst the young people, who were foolish in theirs, hadn’t the courage of their folly. And so—the usual thing happened. They vowed eternal constancy—“If it can’t be you, it sha’n’. be anyone!”—and said good-bye.

He left his native hemisphere, to acquire technique in the schools of Paris; and she, after an interval of a year or two, married another man.

Yet, though in its letter their tale was commonplace enough, the spirit of it, on his side at least, was a little rare. I suppose that most young lovers love with a good deal of immediate energy; but his love proved to be of a fibre that could resist the tooth of time. At any rate, years went their way, and he never quite got over it; he was true to that conventional old vow.

This resulted in part, no doubt, from the secluded, the concentrated, manner of his life, passed aloof from actuality, in a studio au cinquième, alone with his colour-tubes and his ideals; but I think it was due in part also to his temperament. He was the sort of man of whom those who know him will exclaim, when his name comes up, “Ah yes—the dear fellow!” Everybody liked him, and all laughed at him more or less. He was extremely simple-minded and trustful, very quiet, very modest, very gentle and sympathetic; by no means without wit, nor altogether without humour, yet in the main disposed to take things a trifle too seriously in a world where levity tempered by suspicion is the only safe substitute for a wholesome, whole-souled cynicism. Though an uncompromising realist in his theories, I suspect that down at bottom he was inclined to be romantic, if not even sentimental. His friends would generally change the subject when he came into the room, because to the ordinary flavour of men’s talk he showed a womanish repugnance. In the beginning, on this account, they had of course voted him a prig; but they had ended by regarding it as a bothersome little eccentricity, that must be borne with in view of his many authentic virtues.

For the rest, he had a sweet voice, a good figure and carriage, a clean-cut Saxon face, and a pleasing, graceful talent, which, in the course of time, fostered by industry, had brought him an honourable mention, several medals, then the red ribbon, and at last the red rosette.

He was what they call a successful man; and he had succeeded in a career where success carries a certain measure of celebrity: yet it was a habit of his mind to think of himself as a failure. This was partly because he had too just a realising sense of the nature of art, to fancy that success in art—success in giving material form to the visions of the imagination—is ever possible; an artist might be defined as one whose mission it is to fail. At all events, neither medals nor decorations could blind him to the circumstance that there was a terrible gulf between what he had intended and what he had accomplished, between the great pictures of his dreams and the canvasses that bore his signature. But in thinking of himself as a failure, I am sure he was chiefly influenced by the recollection that he had not been able to marry that dark-eyed young American girl twenty years before.

At first it had changed life to a sort of waking nightmare for him. He had come abroad with a heart that felt as if it had been crushed between the upper and the nether millstones. His ambition was dead, and his interest in the world. He could not work, because he could see no colour in the sky, and nothing but futility in art; and he could not play,—he could not throw himself into the dissipations of the Quarter, and so benumb his hurt a little with immediate physical excitements,—because pleasure in all its forms had lost its savour. Then a kindly Providence interposed, and ordained that he should drink a glass of infected water, or breathe a mouthful of poisoned air, and fall ill of typhoid fever, and forget; and when he was convalescent, and remembered again, he remembered this: that she had sworn on her soul to be constant to him. Whereupon he said, “I will work like twenty Trojans, and annihilate time, and earn money, and go home with an assured position; and then her parents can have no further pretext for withholding their consent.” In this resolution he found great comfort.

He had been working like twenty Trojans for about a twelvemonth, when he got the news of her marriage to the other man.

It chanced to reach him (in a letter from a friend, saying it would be celebrated in a fortnight) on the very day of its occurrence; and that, by a pleasant coincidence, was his birthday. In a fit of cynical despair he asked a lot of his schoolfellows, and a few, ladies of the neighbourhood, to dine with him; and they feasted and made merry till well into the following morning, when, for the first and almost the only time in his life, he had to be helped home, drunk. His drunkenness, though, was perhaps not altogether to be regretted. It kept him from thinking; and for that particular night it was conceivably better, on the whole, that he should not think.

His mood of cynical recklessness lasted for a month or two. He celebrated the wedding—faisait la noce, as the local idiom runs—in a double sense, and with feverish diligence. For a moment it seemed a toss-up what would become of him: whether he would sink into the condition of a chronic noceur, or return to the former decent tenor of his way. It happened, however, that he had no appetite for alcohol, and that bad music, bad air, evil communications, gaslight, and late hours failed to afford him any permanent satisfaction: whilst, as for other women,—who that has savoured nectar can care for milk and water?—who that has lost a rose can be consoled with an artificial flower? This was how he put it to himself All the women he knew on the right bank of the Seine were, to his taste, mortally insipid; those whom he knew on the left were stuffed with sawdust.

And the consequence was that one morning he went to work again; and in spite of the dull pain in his heart, he worked steadily, doggedly, from day to day, from year to year, scarcely noting the progress of time, in the absorbed and methodical nature of his life, till presently he had turned forty, and was what they call a successful man. Of course the dull pain in his heart had softened gradually into something that was not entirely painful; into something whose sadness was mixed with sweetness, like plaintive music; but her image remained enshrined as an idol in his memory, and I doubt if ever a day passed without his spending some portion thereof in worship before it. He never walked abroad, either, through the Paris streets, without thinking, “What if I should meet her!” (It would be almost inevitable that she should some time come to Paris.) And at this prospect his heart would leap and his pulses quicken like a boy’s. For art and love between them had kept him young; it had indeed never struck him to count his lustres, or to reflect that in point of them he was middle-aged. Besides, he lived in a country whose amiable custom it is to call every man a lad until he marries. Regularly once a year, in the autumn, he had sent a picture to be exhibited at New York, in the hope that she might see it.

He gave his brushes to be washed rather earlier than usual this afternoon, and went for a stroll in the garden of the Luxembourg. The air was languorous with the warmth and the scent of spring; in the sunshine the marble queens, smiling their still, stony smile, gleamed with a thousand tints of rose and amethyst, as if they had been carved of some iridescent substance, like mother-of-pearl. The face of the old palace glowed with mellow fire; the sleek, dark-green foliage of the chestnut-trees was tipped here and there with pallid gold; and in the deep shade of the allées underneath innumerable children romped vociferously, and innumerable pairs of lovers sentimentalised in silence. Of course they were only mock lovers, students and their étudiantes; but one could forget that for the moment, and all else that is ugly, in the circumambient charm.

He took a penny chair by and by, and sat down at the edge of the terrace, and watched the dance of light and shadow on the waters of the fountain, and thanked Heaven for the keen, untranslatable delight he was able to feel in the beauty of the world. He drank it in with every sense, as if it were an ethereal form of wine; but no wine was so delicious, no wine could have penetrated and thrilled and stimulated him as it did. It was a part of his philosophy,—I might almost say an article of his religion,—to count his faculty for deriving exquisite pleasure from every phase of the beautiful as in some sort a compensation for many of the good things of life that he had missed; and yet, in one way at least, so far from serving as a compensation, it only added to his loss. In the presence of whatever was beautiful, under the spell of it, he always longed with intensified pain for her. And now presently, as he had done in like circumstances countless times before, he sighed for her, inwardly: “Ah, if she were here! If we could enjoy it all together!”—I dare say, poor man, it was a little ridiculous at his age; but he did not see the humour.

He pictured her to himself, her slender figure, her white, eager face, with its penumbra of brown hair, soft as smoke, and its dark eyes, deep and luminous, as if pale fires were burning infinitely far within them. He heard her voice, low and melodious, and her crisp, girlish laughter. And she smiled upon him, a faint, sad smile, that was full of tenderness and yearning and regret. He took her hands, her warm little rosy hands, and marvelled over them, as he caressed them. They were like images in miniature of herself, so sensitive, so fragile, so helpless-seeming, yet possessed of such amazing talents: for when he watched them leaping above the ivory keys of her piano, invariably striking the right note with the right degree of stress and the right interval of time (although to an uninitiated witness their movement must have appeared quite wanton), he wondered at them as a pair of witches.

If he had not reckoned his own years, or marked their action upon himself, it is certain that he had treated her with no less forbearance. She came back to him always the same; always the girl of nineteen whom he had left behind him nearly a quarter of a century ago.

Ah, if she were only with him now, here in the quaint old garden of the Luxembourg! How complete and unutterable his joy would be! He would lead her beside the great basin of the fountain, where the goldfishes flashed like flames; and they would stop before the statues of the queens, and tell over for each other the romantic histories of those dead royal ladies; and how much warmer the sunshine would be, how much greener the earth, how much sweeter the fragrance of the air! By and by they would enter the museum, where he would show her that picture of his which the State had honoured him by buying, and which, he had received a whispered promise, should some day find its way into the Louvre. Afterwards they would saunter down the Boulevard, past the Castle of Cluny, across the bridge, into the open space before Notre Dame. And all the while they would talk, talk, talk, making up for the time that they had lost; and their wounds would be healed, and their hearts would be at rest. It was strange, he thought, that she had never come abroad. All Americans come sooner or later, and one is perpetually running across those one happens to know.

He had never run across her, however, though he had never left off expecting to do so. This very afternoon, for instance, how entirely natural it would seem to meet her. The annual irruption of his country-people had begun; thousands of them were in Paris at this moment: why not she among them? And she would certainly not come to Paris without visiting the Luxembourg; and to-day was a perfect day for such a visit; and—if he should look up now....

He looked up, holding his breath for a second, almost thinking to see her advancing towards him. Surely enough, somebody was advancing towards him, standing before him there in the path, making signals to him. But, as the mists of his day-dream cleared away, he perceived that it was only the old woman come to take his penny for the chair.

He went home, a very lonely man in a very empty world.

It felt cold to him now; the sky had grown gray. He had a fire kindled in his drawing-room, and sat dejectedly before it through the twilight. After a while his servant brought in the lamps, at the same time handing him a parcel that had come from his bookseller’s. The parcel was wrapped in an old copy of the Paris edition of the New York Herald; and he spread it out, and glanced at it listlessly. It always filled him with a vague sort of melancholy to look at an old newspaper; on the day of its appearance the life that it recorded, the joys and pains, had seemed of so great importance, such instant interest; and now they mattered as little, they were as much a part of ancient history, as the lives and the joys and the sorrows of the Cæsars. His eye fell presently upon a column headed Obituary; and there he read of the death of Samuel Merrow. He turned the paper up hurriedly to discover its date; November of last year; quite six months ago. Samuel Merrow had died at New York, six months ago; and Samuel Merrow was her husband. II

There were not many passengers on the steamer; at this season the current of travel ran in the opposite direction. There was a puffy little white-haired, important man, who accosted him on the deck, the second day out, and asked whether it was his first visit abroad that he was returning from. He reflected for a moment, and answered yes; for though he had lived abroad half a lifetime, he had crossed the ocean only once before. He was too shy to enter upon an explanation, so he answered yes. Then the puffy man boasted of the immense numbers of voyages he had made. “Oh, I know Europe!” he declaimed, and told how his business—he described himself as “buyer” for a firm of printing-ink importers—took him to that continent two or three times a year. He had an inquiring mind, and a great facility for questioning people. “Excuse me, Mr. Aigrefield,” he said (he had learned our friend’s name from the passenger-list) “but what does that red button in your buttonhole mean? Some society you belong to?”

Aigrefield, concealing what he suffered, again sought refuge in an ambiguous yes; but he slunk away to his cabin, and put the “red button” in his box: it was absurd to wear the insignia of a French order outside of France.

Then, of course, the ship’s company was completed by a highly intelligent lady in eyeglasses, who lay in a deck-chair all day, and read Mr. Pater’s Mariys (the volume lasted her throughout the voyage); a statistical clergyman, returning from his vacation, a mine of practical misinformation; a couple of Frenchmen, travelling no one could guess why, since they seemed quite cast-down and in despair about it; a half-dozen Hebrews, travelling one couldn’t help knowing wherefore, since they discussed “voollens” and prices and shipments at the tops of their cheerful voices; and the inevitable young Western girl, travelling alone. For the first time in twenty years, almost, he had descended from the cloud he lived in, and was rubbing against the actualities of the earth.

The highly intelligent lady “knew who he was,” as she told him sweetly, and would speak of nothing but art, in her highly intelligent way. If he had had more humour, her perfervid enthusiasms, couched in an extremely rudimental studio-slang (she talked a vast deal of values and keys, of atmosphere and light, of things being badly modelled or a little “out”)—if he had had more humour, all this might have amused him; but he was, as we have said, somewhat too literally inclined; and the cant of it jarred upon him, and made him sick at heart. Her formula for opening up a topic, “Now, Mr. Aigrefield, tell me, what do you think of...” became an obsession, that would descend upon him in the dead of night, making him dread the morrow. All these people, he remarked, Mr. Aigrefielded him unpityingly. He wished the English language had, for the use of his compatriots (in England they seem to get on well enough without forever naming names) a mode of address similar to the French monsieur.

But the solitary young Western girl he liked. She had made her first appeal to his eye, through her form and colour; but when he came to know her a little he liked her for her spirit. She was tall, with a strong, supple figure, a face picturesque in the discreet irregularity of its features, a pair of limpid gray eyes, a fresh complexion, and an overhanging ornament of warm brown hair. She was much given to smiling, also,—a smile that played in lovely curves about lips, if anything, a thought too full, a semitone too scarlet,—whence he inferred that she had an amiable disposition, a light heart, and an easy conscience. Hearing her speak, he observed that her voice was of a depth, smoothness, and rotundity, that atoned in great measure for the occidental quality of her accent. At all events, he was drawn to her: they walked the deck a good deal together, and often had their chairs placed side by side. He philosophised her attraction for him by saying, “She is a force of nature, she is fresh and simple.” The “buyer” for the firm of printing-ink importers had struck him as fresh, indeed, but not as simple; the lady who read Mr. Pater, as simple but not fresh; the Hebrew gentlemen, even the unhappy Frenchmen, if you will, as natural forces: but the Western girl combined these several advantages in her single person, and so she became his favourite amongst his shipmates.

Her name was Lillian Goddard; she lived in Minneapolis, where, as she informed him, her father was a judge. She had been abroad nearly a year, had passed the winter in Rome, could speak a little Italian, a little French, and an immense deal of American. I have described her as young, and I hope it will not be considered an anachronism when I add that her age was twenty-six.

She was tremendously patriotic, and appeared shocked and grieved when she learned that he had remained continuously absent from his country for a score of years.

“Why, the more I saw of Europe, the more I loved dear old America,” she declared, in her deep voice.

She was just as homesick as she could be, she said, and couldn’t get back to Minneapolis fast enough. Did he know the West?—and again she appeared shocked at discovering the profundities of his ignorance concerning it. Oh, he must certainly see the West. No American could begin to appreciate his country till he had seen the West. The people out there were so alive, so go-ahead; and they took such an interest in all forms of culture too, in literature, music, painting, the drama. “Why, look at the big magazines,—they depend for their circulation on the West.” And then, the homes of the West! “Oh, if I lived in Europe, I should lose my faith in human nature. Western people are so warmhearted. I’m afraid you’re awfully unpatriotic, Mr. Aigrefield.”

He reminded her that patriotism was the last refuge of a scoundrel; and anyhow, he pleaded, it was too much to expect of one small man that he should be patriotic for a continent. But she shook her head at his perversity, and guessed he’d be proud enough of his Continent if he had seen it, and insisted that he must come to Minneapolis, and look round.

He liked her amazingly. As their voyage grew older, he found himself taking a greater and greater pleasure in her propinquity; looking forward with something akin to eagerness to meeting her on deck, as he accomplished his morning toilet; and recalling fondly their commerce of the day, as he turned in at night. Besides, the charm of her strong, irregular beauty grew upon him, and he said to her, smiling, “When I come to Minneapolis you must let me try a portrait of you.”

“Ah, then you are really coming?” she demanded, striving to fix him in a pious resolution.

He laughed vaguely, and she protested, “Oh, shame, Mr. Aigrefield, now you are wriggling out!”

He felt that she was sweet and sound and honest: direct, vigorous, bracing: he wondered if indeed she might not owe these qualities, in some part, to her native Western soil; and he admitted that the West was beginning to take a place in his affections. Heretofore, it had been a mere geographical abstraction for him, and one he would have shrunk from realising through experience. He imagined the colouring would be hard, the action violent, the atmosphere raw and rough.

“Well, whether I really come or not, I am sure I should really like to,” he said now.

“That’s such an innocent desire,” she cried, with a touch of mockery. “I don’t think it would be selfish to indulge it.”

“And if I do come, you will sit for me?”

“Oh, I’d do anything in such a cause—to make a patriot of you!”