“I’m sorry to say,” Baxter began, “that I heard Miss Everett accused last evening of very sad conduct.”
“Ah, for heaven’s sake, Stephen,” returned his kinswoman, “don’t go back to that. I’ve done nothing all Winter but defend and palliate her conduct. It’s hard work. Don’t make me do it for you. You know her as well as I do. She was indiscreet, but I know she is penitent, and for that matter she’s well out of it. He was by no means a desirable young man.”
“The lady whom I heard talking about the matter,” said Stephen, “spoke of him in the highest terms. To be sure, as it turned out, she was his mother.”
“His mother? You’re mistaken. His mother died ten years ago.”
Baxter folded his arms with a feeling that he needed to sit firm. “Allons,” said he, “of whom do you speak?”
“Of young Mr. King.”
“Good heavens,” cried Stephen. “So there are two of them?”
“Pray, of whom do you speak?”
“Of a certain Mr. Young. The mother is a handsome old woman with white curls.”
“You don’t mean to say there has been anything between Marian and Frederic Young?”
“Voilà! I only repeat what I hear. It seems to me, my dear Mrs. Denbigh, that you ought to know.”
Mrs. Denbigh shook her head with a melancholy movement. “I’m sure I don’t,” she said, “I give it up. I don’t pretend to judge. The manners of young people to each other are very different from what they were in my day. One doesn’t know whether they mean nothing or everything.”
“You know, at least, whether Mr. Young has been in your drawing-room?”
“Oh, yes, frequently. I’m very sorry that Marian is talked about. It’s very unpleasant for me. But what can a sick woman do?”
“Well,” said Stephen, “so much for Mr. Young. And now for Mr. King.”
“Mr. King is gone home. It’s a pity he ever came away.”
“In what sense?”
“Oh, he’s a silly fellow. He doesn’t understand young girls.”
“Upon my word,” said Stephen, “with expression,” as the music sheets say, “he might be very wise and not do that.”
“Not but that Marian was injudicious. She meant only to be amiable, but she went too far. She became adorable. The first thing she knew he was holding her to an account.”
“Is he good-looking?”
“Well enough.”
“And rich?”
“Very rich, I believe.”
“And the other?”
“What other—Marian?”
“No, no; your friend Young.”
“Yes, he’s quite handsome.”
“And rich, too?”
“Yes, I believe he’s also rich.”
Baxter was silent a moment. “And there’s no doubt,” he resumed, “that they were both far gone?”
“I can only answer for Mr. King.”
“Well, I’ll answer for Mr. Young. His mother wouldn’t have talked as she did unless she’d seen her son suffer. After all, then, it’s perhaps not so much to Marian’s discredit. Here are two handsome young millionaires, madly smitten. She refuses them both. She doesn’t care for good looks and money.”
“I don’t say that,” said Mrs. Denbigh, sagaciously. “She doesn’t care for those things alone. She wants talent, and all the rest of it. Now, if you were only rich, Stephen—” added the good lady, innocently.
Baxter took up his hat. “When you wish to marry Miss Everett,” he said, “you must take good care not to say too much about Mr. King and Mr. Young.”
Two days after this interview, he had a conversation with the young girl in person. The reader may like him less for his easily-shaken confidence, but it is a fact that he had been unable to make light of these lightly-made revelations. For him his love had been a passion; for her, he was compelled to believe, it had been a vulgar pastime. He was a man of a violent temper; he went straight to the point.
“Marian,” he said, “you’ve been deceiving me.”
Marian knew very well what he meant; she knew very well that she had grown weary of her engagement and that, however little of a fault her conduct had been to Messrs. Young and King, it had been an act of grave disloyalty to Baxter. She felt that the blow was struck and that their engagement was clean broken. She knew that Stephen would be satisfied with no half-excuses or half-denials; and she had none others to give. A hundred such would not make a perfect confession. Making no attempt, therefore, to save her “prospects,” for which she had ceased to care, she merely attempted to save her dignity. Her dignity for the moment was well enough secured by her natural half-cynical coolness of temper. But this same vulgar placidity left in Stephen’s memory an impression of heartlessness and shallowness, which in that particular quarter, at least, was destined to be forever fatal to her claims to real weight and worth. She denied the young man’s right to call her to account and to interfere with her conduct; and she almost anticipated his proposal that they should consider their engagement at an end. She even declined the use of the simple logic of tears. Under these circumstances, of course, the interview was not of long duration.
“I regard you,” said Baxter, as he stood on the threshold, “as the most superficial, most heartless of women.”
He immediately left Paris and went down into Spain, where he remained till the opening of the Summer. In the month of May Mrs. Denbigh and her protégée went to England, where the former, through her husband, possessed a number of connections, and where Marian’s thoroughly un-English beauty was vastly admired. In September they sailed for America. About a year and a half, therefore, had elapsed between Baxter’s separation from Miss Everett and their meeting in New York.
During this interval the young man’s wounds had had time to heal. His sorrow, although violent, had been short-lived, and when he finally recovered his habitual equanimity, he was very glad to have purchased exemption at the price of a simple heart-ache. Reviewing his impressions of Miss Everett in a calmer mood, he made up his mind that she was very far from being the woman of his desire, and that she had not really been the woman of his choice. “Thank God,” he said to himself, “it’s over. She’s irreclaimably light. She’s hollow, trivial, vulgar.” There had been in his addresses something hasty and feverish, something factitious and unreal in his fancied passion. Half of it had been the work of the scenery, of the weather, of mere juxtaposition, and, above all, of the young girl’s picturesque beauty; to say nothing of the almost suggestive tolerance and indolence of poor Mrs. Denbigh. And finding himself very much interested in Velasquez, at Madrid, he dismissed Miss Everett from his thoughts. I do not mean to offer his judgment of Miss Everett as final; but it was at least conscientious. The ample justice, moreover, which, under the illusion of sentiment, he had rendered to her charms and graces, gave him a right, when free from that illusion, to register his estimate of the arid spaces of her nature. Miss Everett might easily have accused him of injustice and brutality; but this fact would still stand to plead in his favor, that he cared with all his strength for truth. Marian, on the contrary, was quite indifferent to it. Stephen’s angry sentence on her conduct had awakened no echo in her contracted soul.
The reader has now an adequate conception of the feelings with which these two old friends found themselves face to face. It is needful to add, however, that the lapse of time had very much diminished the force of those feelings. A woman, it seems to me, ought to desire no easier company, none less embarrassed or embarrassing, than a disenchanted lover; premising, of course, that the process of disenchantment is thoroughly complete, and that some time has elapsed since its completion.
Marian herself was perfectly at her ease. She had not retained her equanimity—her philosophy, one might almost call it—during that painful last interview, to go and lose it now. She had no ill feeling toward her old lover. His last words had been—like all words in Marian’s estimation— a mere façon de parler. Miss Everett was in so perf
ect a good humor during these last days of her maidenhood that there was nothing in the past that she could not have forgiven.
She blushed a little at the emphasis of her companion’s remark; but she was not discountenanced. She summoned up her good humor. “The truth is, Mr. Baxter,” she said, “I feel at the present moment on perfect good terms with the world; I see everything en rose; the past as well as the future.”
“I, too, am on very good terms with the world,” said Mr. Baxter, “and my heart is quite reconciled to what you call the past. But, nevertheless, it’s very disagreeable to me to think about it.”
“Ah then,” said Miss Everett, with great sweetness, “I’m afraid you’re not reconciled.”
Baxter laughed—so loud that Miss Everett looked about at her father. But Mr. Everett still slept the sleep of gentility. “I’ve no doubt,” said the painter, “that I’m far from being so good a Christian as you. But I assure you I’m very glad to see you again.”
“You’ve but to say the word and we’re friends,” said Marian.
“We were very foolish to have attempted to be anything else.”
“ ‘Foolish,’ yes. But it was pretty folly.”
“Ah no, Miss Everett. I’m an artist, and I claim a right of property in the word ‘pretty.’ You musn’t stick it in there. Nothing could be pretty which had such an ugly termination. It was all false.”
“Well—as you will. What have you been doing since we parted?”
“Travelling and working. I’ve made great progress in my trade. Shortly before I came home I became engaged.”
“Engaged?—à la bonne heure. Is she good?—is she pretty?”
“She’s not nearly so pretty as you.”
“In other words, she’s infinitely more good. I’m sure I hope she is. But why did you leave her behind you?”
“She’s with a sister, a sad invalid, who is drinking mineral waters on the Rhine. They wished to remain there to the cold weather. They’re to be home in a couple of weeks, and we are straightway to be married.”
“I congratulate you, with all my heart,” said Marian.
“Allow me to do as much, sir,” said Mr. Everett, waking up; which he did by instinct whenever the conversation took a ceremonious turn.
Miss Everett gave her companion but three more sittings, a large part of his work being executed with the assistance of photographs. At these interviews also, Mr. Everett was present, and still delicately sensitive to the soporific influences of his position. But both parties had the good taste to abstain from further reference to their old relations, and to confine their talk to less personal themes.
II
ONE AFTERNOON, when the picture was nearly finished, John Lennox went into the empty painting-room to ascertain the degree of its progress. Both Baxter and Marian had expressed a wish that he should not see it in its early stages, and this, accordingly, was his first view. Half an hour after he had entered the room, Baxter came in, unannounced, and found him sitting before the canvas, deep in thought. Baxter had been furnished with a house-key, so that he might have immediate and easy access to his work whenever the humor came upon him.
“I was passing,” he said, “and I couldn’t resist the impulse to come in and correct an error which I made this morning, now that a sense of its enormity is fresh in my mind.” He sat down to work, and the other stood watching him.
“Well,” said the painter, finally, “how does it satisfy you?”
“Not altogether.”
“Pray develop your objections. It’s in your power materially to assist me.”
“I hardly know how to formulate my objections. Let me, at all events, in the first place, say that I admire your work immensely. I’m sure it’s the best picture you’ve painted.”
“I honestly believe it is. Some parts of it,” said Baxter, frankly, “are excellent.”
“It’s obvious. But either those very parts or others are singularly disagreeable. That word isn’t criticism, I know; but I pay you for the right to be arbitrary. They are too hard, too strong, of too frank a reality. In a word, your picture frightens me, and if I were Marian I should feel as if you’d done me a certain violence.”
“I’m sorry for what’s disagreeable; but I meant it all to be real. I go in for reality; you must have seen that.”
“I approve you; I can’t too much admire the broad and firm methods you’ve taken for reaching this same reality. But you can be real without being brutal—without attempting, as one may say, to be actual.”
“I deny that I’m brutal. I’m afraid, Mr. Lennox, I haven’t taken quite the right road to please you. I’ve taken the picture too much au sérieux. I’ve striven too much for completeness. But if it doesn’t please you it will please others.”
“I’ve no doubt of it. But that isn’t the question. The picture is good enough to be a thousand times better.”
“That the picture leaves room for infinite improvement, I, of course, don’t deny; and, in several particulars, I see my way to make it better. But, substantially, the portrait is there. I’ll tell you what you miss. My work isn’t ‘classical’; in fine, I’m not a man of genius.”
“No; I rather suspect you are. But, as you say, your work isn’t classical. I adhere to my term brutal. Shall I tell you? It’s too much of a study. You’ve given poor Miss Everett the look of a professional model.”
“If that’s the case, I’ve done very wrong. There never was an easier, a less conscious sitter. It’s delightful to look at her.”
“Confound it, you’ve given all her ease, too. Well, I don’t know what’s the matter. I give up.”
“I think,” said Baxter, “you had better hold your verdict in abeyance until the picture is finished. The classical element is there, I’m sure; but I’ve not brought it out. Wait a few days, and it will rise to the surface.”
Lennox left the artist alone; and the latter took up his brushes and painted hard till nightfall. He laid them down only when it was too dark to see. As he was going out, Lennox met him in the hall.
“Exegi monumentum,” said Baxter; “it’s finished. Go and look at your ease. I’ll come to-morrow and hear your impressions.”
The master of the house, when the other had gone, lit half-a-dozen lights and returned to the study of the picture. It had grown prodigiously under the painter’s recent handling, and whether it was that, as Baxter had said, the classical element had disengaged itself, or that Lennox was in a more sympathetic mood, it now impressed him as an original and powerful work, a genuine portrait, the deliberate image of a human face and figure. It was Marian, in very truth, and Marian most patiently measured and observed. Her beauty was there, her sweetness, and her young loveliness and her aerial grace, imprisoned forever, made inviolable and perpetual. Nothing could be more simple than the conception and composition of the picture. The figure sat peacefully, looking slightly to the right, with the head erect and the hands—the virginal hands, without rings or bracelets—lying idle on its knees. The blonde hair was gathered into a little knot of braids on the top of the head (in the fashion of the moment), and left free the almost childish contour of the ears and cheeks. The eyes were full of color, contentment and light; the lips were faintly parted. Of color in the picture, there was, in strictness, very little; but the dark draperies told of reflected sunshine, and the flesh-spaces of human blushes and pallors, of throbbing life and health. The work was strong and simple, the figure was thoroughly void of affectation and stiffness, and yet supremely elegant.
“That’s what it is to be an artist,” thought Lennox. “All this has been done in the past two hours.”
It was his Marian, assuredly, with all that had charmed him—with all that still charmed him when he saw her: her appealing confidence, her exquisite lightness, her feminine enchantments. And yet, as he looked, an expression of pain came into his eyes, and lingered there, and grew into a mortal heaviness.