Part 6

I comforted her, though furious with the others for their Jesuitical practices on her innocence.

“Wait,” I cried, “and I will pay them both out! What right had they, after what I said, to try and torture a lie out of you? Don’t fear for the convent, child. I pledge my word you shall have a husband and fifty children, nun or no nun.”

“I want no husband,” she answered, blushing and clinging to me, “and no lover but you.”

I have taken pains to record her fond little reply, in view of an odious charge, once concocted to my injury, of my having traded upon my friend’s faith in me to rob her heart of its dearest possession. That, indeed, was, then and always, no less than her loved Diana, of whom none was ever permitted by her to take precedence. Any sacrifice which was designed to maintain those mutual relations she thought too cheap for discussion.

One result, however, of her “questioning” was that madam’s attitude towards me was thenceforth marked by a reserve and jealousy which, inasmuch as I was unconscious of having done anything to merit it, served only to prejudice me against a religion which could be used for a cloak to so much hypocrisy. I grew quickly disenamoured of my supposed vocation, and decided that faith, which seemed largely a matter of digestion, could be better realised through independence. In short, in the world I could reach beatitude through twenty self-indulgences to one in the convent; and, such being the case, and my constitution perfect, it seemed folly to take the short way.

Madam seized an early opportunity after this to inquire into my plans for retiring from the world and taking the veil. I confessed to her, in reply, that her late suspicions had engendered in me thoughts, a sense of grievance, inimical to my right contemplation of so momentous a sacrifice. She was very much shocked and troubled, and recommended me a stricter observance of all those self-obliterating virtues which are such a comfort to those who don’t practise them. She rebuked my pride; she prescribed fasting and discipline and maceration--tortures which would have killed a dray-man--in order to lower and submit my system to its final severance from the world. She would have had me at her mercy before she drove in the knife; only, unluckily for her, my constitution was impregnable. It flourished equally whether on bread and water or _vol au vent_; and, finally, she surrendered to it. I rather liked a little pious game we played, called the Moral Lotto, in which the discs were sins, and those left uncovered at the end entailed an obligation on the losers to maintain a particular guard against the temptations they expressed. Though we all, in the end, must have been warned through the calendar, from simony to powder-puffs, I believe the contest was so sanctified to her by intention that she read a design of Heaven in every missing counter; and the fact that I generally won, did more than many assurances to convince her that I was perhaps after all not so black as she had painted me.

But, between me and Father Pope, after that little _malentendu_, there was no quarter asked or given. He treated me with a persistent coarse rudeness, and I retaliated with all the interest of wit I dared. I dropped blobs of wax on his spectacles; left his Hagiology open under a drip from the ceiling; put crumbs of cheese in his cabinets of moth to tempt the mice in; and confessed his own most obvious sins to him as mine, for which I accepted furious penances as meekly as a lamb. He hated me, and I contrived at least to give him a substantial reason for such an abuse of his cloth.

Now, I will mention one only other little incident before I pass on to the subject of this chapter. I was playing in Wellcot attics on a certain wet afternoon with Patty, when I discovered a locked Bluebeard chamber.

“What is it?” I said; but she did not know. I tried the handle; I peered vainly into the keyhole; finally, I took a pin from my hair, and contrived a little pick of it.

“O, what are you going to do?” whispered the child, quite scared.

“Get in, if I can,” said I.

“Don’t!” she said, horrified. “If we are shut out, ’tis for a reason.”

“Of course,” I answered. “And it’s no good looking for it on this side of the door.”

She clasped her hands in a little paralysis of curiosity while I worked. It was a simple lock, and I was successful. As the door swung open, we saw before us a sky-lit room, wedged under the slope of the roof, and quite empty save for a framed picture, which leaned to the wall back outwards. Patty uttered a tiny cry--

“O, Diana! It’s the portrait!”

In a moment, all excitement, we stole in a-tiptoe. The place was very still and ghostly. Only on the dusty canvas itself lay a melancholy grid of light. Palpitating in our sense of guilt, we turned the frame round, let it drop softly back again; and there, before our eyes, bloomed a smiling, wistful face. The light, which had saddened it in reverse, was quickened now to an illuminating glory. It greeted and dimpled to us--the face of a dead woman risen.

A dead woman. Had she ever lived? I could not believe it, thinking of that unsympathetic _dévote_ downstairs.

“Was she _ever_ like that?” I whispered.

“She was beautiful,” murmured Patty fervently. “I remember him painting this.”

“And going away, and leaving it unfinished?” said I: for, indeed, the portrait was but sketched in, though masterly in its promise.

“Yes,” said the little girl, gulping. “And I never supposed what had become of it till now.”

It seemed incredible, the change that but a few envious years had wrought. Had love done this thing before me? Or could love forsaken so warp the loveliness which Love himself had created? It gave me a new little thrill of respect for the humanised Sophia; because, whatever the truth of her face, a man had been found to see this beauty in it.

“She was St. Cecilia,” whispered Patty. “There is the harp in her lap.”

It was without strings--an unborn music. Perhaps the Christian lady had declined to accept a pagan Muse for midwife, and had temporised with her would-be deliverer, hoping to convert him. If so, she had played her cards badly. I wondered if the man had been a fortune-hunter. But in that event Madame Sophia would certainly be Madame de Crespigny.

Whatever the case, however, the picture made a deep impression on me, and from my first moment of seeing it I was haunted by the desire to become myself the subject of such a master’s devotion. _Ma vue et mes minauderies firent tout-à-coup tourner la girouette._ For the first time I felt myself a woman, encumbered with the heavy responsibilities of her sex.

One day--it was some eighteen months later--returning from a commission to the convent, I walked straight into the presence of the original of the picture and its painter. Yes, that is the truth. He had run faith at last to earth, it seemed, and, armed with it, was returned to add the strings to the abortive harp, and perfect the ancient harmony. I could have thought that, to do so, he had need of faith indeed; until, looking at madam, I started in sheer wonder. She was transfigured--rejuvenated. The happiest light--bashful, coy, defiant, and surrendering its defiance--was in her eyes. She was more like a wife in the first wonder of motherhood than the starved _religieuse_ of yesterday.

And the cause! Ah, my Alcide! The creature rose upon my entrance, and I could have laughed in the face of my own befooled ideal. I had thought of Raphael and the Fornarina; and, behold! a slack, half-drowned-looking figure, with an expression, and conduct of its limbs, as if it were just risen gasping from a pond--there he stood, no sort of natural fowl at all, but a freak of genius like a five-legged calf at a fair.

“He! he!” giggled he, and held himself as if he were waiting to be told what to do next.

He was tall, it is true; and there was a good deal of him, mostly gnarled bone, if that counted to his credit. His forehead, streaked with dark hair turning grey, was strong and ample, and in itself something of a feature; but, mercy! the loose indetermination of his lower lip, and the way it overhung, foolish and disproportionate as an elephant’s, the little folded chin! As I stared, too mortified for manners, he returned my gaze, suddenly startled, it seemed, into a speechlessness so stertorous that little Patty, who had entered with and stood behind me, fell back a step in confusion.

“Ah!” he exclaimed at that, chuckling, “and is hee-ar the little girl I knew?”

He spoke, when he did at last, drawlingly, and ended, as was his way, by wrinkling his thin hooked nose and hee-hawing a little laugh through it.

“She is grown, is she not?” said madam, answering for Patty, to whom he had referred, though indeed his eyes were all the time on me. Her voice was so changed and soft, I hardly recognised it.

“She is grown,” he said. “She is become, it appears, a double cherry.”

“No,” said madam seriously, “the other is a second little foundling of my care, and destined to God’s--_our_ God’s” (she added coyly)--“service, de Crespigny.”

She had no sense of humour, the dear creature. The next moment, noticing the direction of his gaze, with a little frown she bade us begone to our books.

We fled, and, once remote, I turned, with a tragi-hysteric stamp, upon my companion.

“Patience! And is that donkey _him_?”

“It is Mr. Noel de Crespigny,” she said, amazed. “He is not-- O, Diana, do you really think him”--

“Hee-haw!” I broke in, with a little passion of laughter; and then fury overcame me.

“How dared she,” I stormed, “how dared she tell him that lie about me?”

“What lie?” said poor Patty.

“Why, to claim me to her worship of a golden ass,” I cried.

“It was a calf,” said my friend, bewildered.

I screamed with laughter.

“O, don’t!” Patty implored. “It really was, Diana.”

“You dear!” I gasped. “I daresay it was. But he was so badly made, I couldn’t tell.”

She followed me upstairs, utterly bewildered. On the landing above we encountered a strange sight. The picture--_the_ picture--was already on its way down from the attics. A groom and maid bore it, and the oddest creature stood above, superintending its resurrection.

“Gogo!” whispered Patty; “it’s Gogo!”

I could well believe it of such a monster.

He was a man, and a huge one, down to his mid-thighs; and there he ended in a couple of wooden stumps. His face, lapped in a very mask of red bristle, was as savage as sin; and he growled and rumbled like an interdicted volcano.

“Ay,” he thundered, “I’m Gogo, the Dutch tumbler. Who calls me by my name?”

Holding with one hand by the banisters, he struck with the strong stick he carried at the stairs, missed the tread, and was within an inch of falling. The stick rattled down, and he swung and clung with both hands to the rail. In an instant, some whimsical impulse sent me tripping lightly up to help him.

“Take my arm,” I said, “down to the landing.”

The giggling servants paused in their task to stare up; but the monster himself laboured round, with quite a stunned look.

“To help--_me_,” he whispered hoarsely; “the little scented rush to prop the oak!”

I was in love with his changed voice at once. It was something to meet only two-thirds of a man.

“No, no,” he said, touching my arm as if it were a relic. “I’m Gogo, the colour-grinder, the bottle-washer--not worthy to latch your ladyship’s little shoe. I’ll go down--I’ll go down. Ho-ho! it’s easy. I’ve done it all my life.”

While he spoke, the odd creature had descended unaided, and, recovering his stick, struck his wooden limbs fiercely with it.

“Do you see?” he cried. “A stiff-kneed dog as ever limped after Fortune!”

He flounced upon the servants, and roared them into care of their charge; then turned again to me, where I stood with my friend, who had run trembling to my shelter.

“’Tis our market, ladies,” he said in apology. “I must be particular in its custody. We deal in new lamps for old; in”--

He descended a few steps, then turned again.

“Ah!” he groaned, tragic and comical in one. “Pity the poor genii who has to serve; pity him--pity him.”

He heaved a sigh that would have turned a windmill, and followed the picture, and disappeared.

“Patty!” I whispered, when he was gone--“Patty! Lord, Patty! who _is_ the creature?”

“I’m terrified of him,” she gulped. “He’s Mr. de Crespigny’s dog, he calls himself, and follows his master everywhere, loving and growling at him. He used to say there was no such painter in the world, if he could be kept to it; but he always frightened me dreadfully. I do hope they won’t stop long.”

“H’m!” I said. “And is that queer name all he’s got?”

“I never heard of another,” she answered. “But anyhow, it suits him.”

“Yes,” I said--and sighed--“_if_ he only had legs!”

IX. I AM COMMITTED TO THE ----

I learned, as you shall understand, to readjust my first impression of de Crespigny. It is certain one must not judge the quality of the wine by the vessel. He was a great artist, who ran quickly to waste in the passions evoked of his own conceptions. From the mouth downwards he was a sensualist, and not fit to trust himself with a fair model. Shut into a monastery, he would have been a Fra Angelico.

At the first he captured me, when once I was familiarised with the ungainly exterior of the creature. To see him work--ardent, engrossed, unerring in the early enthusiasm of a subject--was a revelation. He stood so slack, he ran so to moral exhaustion when delivered of his inspiration, it was impossible to recognise the master of a moment ago in this invertebrate body with the loose wrists and silly laugh. If he could only have been kept always at the high pressure of his conceptions! Sometimes I wondered if it was in me to make him great and hold him. It would have been splendid to be the Hamilton to this Romney. Yet in the end I found the game not worth the candle. He was soft wax, indeed, for seven-eighths of his length, and the littlest puff from red lips could blow all the flame out of his head.

Still, while it lasted, his influence over me was an education. His portfolios were the very minutes of inspiration--suggestions, impressions of loveliness, caught and recorded and passed by for others. He finished little, and perhaps would have been a lesser artist and a stronger man if he could have laboured to consolidate his dreams. He taught me that not facts, but shadows of facts--the reflections, most moving, most intimate which they cast--are the real appeals to the emotions; that there is no landscape so beautiful as its reflection in a mirror, no chord so pathetic as its silent vibration in one’s heart. Perhaps the heavens are an eternity of echoes, of spectral perfumes, of dreams derived from experience, and we the authors of our own immortality. If so, we should live passionately who would dream well.

What this man lacked in nerve and backbone, his strange servant and comrade supplied, and many times over. He was the oddest monstrosity--savage in criticism, caustic in humour, a Caliban bellowing grief and tenderness through hairy lungs. How he could ever have come to attach himself, and passionately, to so flaccid a bear-leader, was a problem pure for psychology. Now, at least, the two were inseparable as-- Ah, my friend! I was on the point of saying as Valentine and Proteus, but the analogy, I protest, is too poignant; for have not I too been cruelly declared the Sylvia who divided them?

The portrait, on that first afternoon, was carried down to a convenient closet on the ground floor; and there de Crespigny worked on it, always alone, or in the sole company of his henchman. When finished for the day, he would invariably lock the canvas into a press, and none, not even I (there is virtue in that parenthesis), was permitted to see it. The room was held sacred to him; and madam herself refrained so religiously from intruding on its privacy as to evoke, in her guileless trust of the singleness of his conversion, the very hypocrisy which to her faith was inconceivable. For, indeed, he converted this closet--which stood safely remote and approached by a back-stair way--into a sanctuary for deceit. Often, to confess the whole truth, when she supposed me engrossed in books or the construction of celestial samplers, was I closeted with de Crespigny and Gogo, learning to handle a brush, or inspire one, while Patty, with a code of signals, kept panic watch on the stairs.

Madam’s exclusion, no doubt, cost her many a patient sigh. She wondered over the idiosyncrasies of genius, which preferred, or professed to prefer, to labour its mental impressions rather than toil to record the living and mechanical pose. Still, it was true, the Sophia of to-day, however rejuvenated, was scarcely the model of that older time; and that he could finish that beautiful inspiration from her staider personality was what it was folly, perhaps, in her to expect.

Poor woman! Though I had my grudge, and no taste or reason to commiserate such vanity, I suffered some qualms of remorse for the part I was led to play. It is natural, after all, for the sex to see itself never so immortal as through the eyes of love; and, when a man has once praised its complexion, to claim for itself an eternity of roses.

Father Pope, the old spiritual curmudgeon, never quite credited, I think, the genuineness of this late conversion. I daresay, from his experience in the confessional box, he knew his man pretty well, and the value of such emotional abjurations. The sick devil turned monk was not to his taste; and, if he ventured to intimate as much, the coldness which certainly befell between madam and him at this time was easily to be accounted for. It all amused me hugely; and I felt delightfully wicked while the fun lasted. But retribution, my friend, was to overtake your naughty little Diana.

One day, stealing into the studio, I found Gogo alone, grinding colours into a little mortar.

“God ye good e’en, little serpent,” said he. “You can sit and beguile me for practice till my master comes.”

“Gogo,” I said, shocked. “Why do you call me by such a name?”

“Because you are as like Eve as two peas,” growled he.

“Eve was not a serpent, but a beautiful woman,” I answered, pouting.

“And so was Lamia; and yet she was a serpent,” he grunted.

“I don’t know what you mean. You said Eve.”

“Well, why not?” he replied, turning his red, morose-looking eyes on me. “Eve accused the serpent of beguilement, didn’t she? and Adam Eve? But Eve was made out of the man, therefore Adam accused himself. But Eve accused the serpent; therefore Adam accused the serpent. Yet he accused Eve; therefore Eve was the serpent, which is what she would, and will, never understand. O, God bless her! God bless her! Which, if He would do, blessing the serpent, might unriddle this sinful problem of life!”

He set to pounding vigorously with his pestle, and for a minute I watched him in a bewildered silence. There was always something in this shorn Cyclops which oddly attracted me.

“Gogo,” I said quite softly.

He threw down his pestle at once, and faced round, writhing his hands together, and glaring at me.

“Who spoke?” he said, in hoarse, trembling tones. “A voice from the garden making me in love with my own clown name. O, always so, always so, thou spirit of Eve; and, though it lost the world to God, I’d take the apple from thy hand.”

I laughed a little tremulously, as he stumped across the floor and stood close before me. The vision of this great storm of a creature, condemned to play the “comic relief” in the tragedy of his own manhood, came as near my heart as anything.

“Look!” he cried, his rugged chest heaving; “I can’t kneel to you, and I’m your slave. I walk open-eyed, hating and adoring you, into the toils you spread for our feet. Feet!” he groaned, looking down, with a despairing gesture. “Perhaps--who knows?--having them, I might have escaped.”

“How did you lose them, poor Gogo?” I said.

“Hating and adoring,” he groaned, unheeding my question, “hating and adoring. Look, little serpent: I could crush your slender throat for what you do, and hold on, and sob my soul away to see you die. Why have you come between us? United, we were strong, he and I. I drove his genius on, and loved the poor ape for its spark of divinity, and propped the weak spirit while it wrought. You knock the prop away, you knock the prop away, and we both fall; and where is _my_ compensation for the injury?” He clasped his great hands to me: “Give me back my genius,” he cried in pain, “and let us go.”

I rose to my feet, half moved and half resentful.

“It is not I who take him or want him. I will not come here again.”

As I turned, he barred my way.

“No,” he said, near sobbing, “I lied. Do what you will with us: make us angels or swine--I am content, so long as I may serve you.”

As he spoke, the door opened, and de Crespigny entered. He greeted me with a rather shifty look, I thought, and his manner seemed too distraught to affect any particular notice of his servant’s obvious emotion.

“O, well, _ma bella_ Unanina,” said he; “but a little sitting for this afternoon, please.”

I flushed, and was about to refuse to remain at all, when an imploring scowl from Gogo softened me. With plenty of hauteur, I stalked into a little curtained-off alcove which was consecrated to me for tiring-room, and there dressed for model. When I emerged again, my feet and arms were bare, my hair loose in a golden fillet, and, for the rest, I wore a kind of seraph smock, in which _les convenances_ had been constrained to clothe me for the peerless Una.

For as Una I was being painted. Looking one day through de Crespigny’s portfolios, I had come upon some “impressions,” royal, strenuous, of lions in the Tower menagerie, and was admiring the lithe, strong darlings, when his voice breathed behind me, with that little eternal foolish giggle.

“Have you decided, naughty?”

“Yes,” I whispered. “I will be the fairy lady whom the lion came to devour, and remained to serve and protect, because she was so pure and innocent.”

He did not know who I meant; so I found him the book and place.

“Ah, to be sure!” said he, reading eagerly. “She laid her stole aside, did she? Yes, it is an inspiration. It will suit me, if it does you.”

So I was painted wonderfully as Una, making my own “stole” from one of Patty’s bedgowns, and glorying, out of my very shamefacedness, to feed the inspiration, while it lasted, of this impassioned art. Now, for days it had wrought without slackening, so that it was an offence to me to find it suddenly become, it seemed, without apparent cause or reason, out of tune with its subject. He worked fitfully, dully, almost, as it were, disregarding my presence, and drawling commonplaces the while to Gogo, who had returned to his pestle and mortar, and was grinding away sullenly.

“Gogo,” he yawned presently, after an idle, preoccupied silence, “which would you rather marry, a woman of wit or virtue?”

“Neither, you blattering genius!” cried the other, turning round with such an instant roar that I was almost frightened off my perch.

The master, accustomed to his strange fellow’s moods, only laughed, and leaned back indolent.

“Why, you old dear?” said he.

Gogo thundered.

“She’s a rotten fish at best, shining the more the more corrupt she is.”

“But if she don’t shine?” said de Crespigny coolly.

“Then she’s a dull fish,” said Gogo, “but a fish still.”

The other mused, and sniggered.

“--Who’s for ever playing to be caught,” added Gogo, grumbling. “She loves the angle. Play her what you like, man, only throw her back when hooked.”

“Mr. Gogo!” I exclaimed.