CHAPTER X.
THOMAS THE CAT--MY GREAT-GRANDFATHER'S SKETCHES--ADOLPHE IS MYFRIEND--MY GREAT-GREAT-GREAT-GRANDFATHER DISTURBS MY REST--I LEAVE THEVINE.
My great-grandfather had, as I said, some skill in painting. He wasgifted with an intense sense of, and love for, colour. I am sure he sawcolours where other people did not. What to common eyes was a mass ofgrey, or green, was to him a pleasant combination of many gay anddelicate hues. He distinguished severally the innumerable bright threadsin Nature's coat of many colours, and in simple truth I think that eachwas a separate joy to him.
He had a white Persian cat of an artistic temperament, which followedhim in his walks, dozed on the back of his arm-chair, and condescendedto share his tea when it reached a certain moderate temperature. Itnever was betrayed into excitement, except when there was fish fordinner. My great-grandfather's fasts were feasts for Thomas the cat.
I can very clearly remember the sight of my great-grandfather pacingslowly up and down the tiny garden at The Vine, his hands behind him,and followed sedately by Thomas. Now and then he would stop to gaze,with infinite contentment in his eyes, at the delicate blue-grey mistbehind the leafless trees (which in that spring sunshine were, no doubt,of much more complex and beautiful colour to him than mere brown), ordrinking in the blue of the scillas in the border with a sigh ofsatisfaction. When he paused, Thomas would pause; as he feasted hiseyes, Thomas would rub his head against his master's legs, and stretchhis own. When Elspeth had cooked the fish, and my great-grandmother hadmade the tea and arranged the flowers on the table, they would come intogether and condescend to their breakfasts, with the same air aboutthem both of having no responsibility in life but to find out sunnyspots and to enjoy themselves.
My great-grandfather's most charming paintings were sketches of flowers.Ordinary stiff flower-paintings are of all paintings the mostuninteresting, I think; but his were of a very different kind. Eachsketch was a sort of idyll. Indeed, he would tell me stories of each ashe showed them.
Long as my great-grandfather had lived, he was never a robust man, andElspeth's chief ideas on the subject of his sketches bore reference tothe colds he had caught, and the illnesses he had induced, by sitting inthe east winds or lying on damp grass to do this or that sketch.
"That'll be the one the master did before he was laid by with therheumatics," Elspeth said, when I described one of my favourites to her.It was a spring sketch. My great-grandfather had lain face downwards onthe lawn to do it. This was to bring his eyes on a level with the subjectof his painting, which was this: a crocus of the exquisite shades oflilac to be seen in some varieties, just full-blown, standing up in itsfirst beauty and freshness from its fringe of narrow silver-stripedleaves. The portrait was not an opaque and polished-looking painting onsmooth cardboard, but a sketch--indefinite at the outer edges of thewhole subject--on water-colour paper of moderate roughness. The throatand part of the cup of the flower stood out from some shadow at the rootsof a plant beyond; a shadow of infinite gradation, and quite without theblackness common to patches of shade as seen by untrained eyes. From thelevel of my great-grandfather's view, as he lay in the grass, the borderlooked a mere strip; close behind it was a hedge dividing the garden froma field. Just by the crocus there was a gap in the hedge, which in thesketch was indicated rather than drawn. And round the corner of the barethorn branches from the hedge-bank in the field there peeped a celandineand a daisy. They were not nearly such finished portraits as that of thecrocus. A few telling strokes of colour made them, and gave them a lifeand pertness that were clever enough. Beneath the sketch was written, "LaDemoiselle. Des enfants du village la regardent."
My great-grandfather translated this for me, and used to show me how the"little peasants," Marguerite and Celandine, were peeping in at thepretty young lady in her mauve dress striped with violet.
But every sketch had its story, and often its moral; not, as a rule, avery original one. In one, a lovely study of ivy crept over a rottenbranch upon the ground. A crimson toadstool relieved the heavy green,and suggested that the year was drawing to a close. Beneath it waswritten, "Charity." "Thus," said my great-grandfather, "one covers upand hides the defects of one he loves."
A study of gaudy summer tulips stood--as may be guessed--for Pride.
"Pride," said my great-grandfather, "is a sin; a mortal sin, dear child.Moreover, it is foolish, and also vulgar--the pride of fine clothes,money, equipages, and the like. What is called pride of birth--thedignity of an ancient name--this, indeed, is another thing. It is notpetty, not personal; it seems to me more like patriotism--the pride ofcountry."
I did my best to describe to Elspeth both the sketch and mygreat-grandfather's commentary.
"A' pride's sinful," said Elspeth decidedly. "Pride o' wealth, and prideo' birth. Not that I'm for objecting to a decent satisfaction in abody's ain gude conduct and respectability. Pride o' character, that'sanither thing a'thegither, and to be respectit."
My great-grandfather gave me a few paints, and under his directions Idaubed away, much to my own content. When I was struggling hopelesslywith the perspective of some pansies of various colours (for inimitation of him I painted flowers), he would say, "Never mind theshape, dear Marguerite, get the colour--the colour, my child!" And hetrained me to a quickness in the perception of colour certainly notcommon at my age.
I spent many pleasant hours, too, in the less intellectual society ofAdolphe. He dug a bed for me in a bit of spare ground, and shaped itlike a heart. He laboured constantly at this heart, making it plump bypiling up the earth, and cramming it with plants of variouskinds--perennials much in want of subdivision, and often in fullbloom--which he brought from cottage gardens of "folk he knew," andwatered copiously to "sattle 'em."
His real name was not Adolphe, but Thomas. As this, however, had createdsome confusion between him and the cat, my great-grandmother had namedhim afresh, after a retainer of the de Vandaleurs in days gone by,whose faithful service was a tradition in the family.
I was very happy at The Vine--by day. I feel ashamed now to recall howmiserable I was at night, and yet I know I could not help it. In oldtimes I had always been accustomed to be watched to sleep by Ayah. AfterI came to Aunt Theresa, I slept in the same room with one or more of theother children. At The Vine, for the first time, I slept alone.
This was not all. It was not merely the being alone in the dark whichfrightened me. Indeed, a curious little wick floating on a cup of oilwas lighted at night for my benefit, but it only illumined the greatsource of the terror which made night hideous to me.
Some French refugee artist, who had been indebted to mygreat-grandparents for kindness, had shown his gratitude by painting apicture of the execution of that Duc de Vandaleur who perished in theRevolution, my great-grandfather having been the model. It was awretched daub, but the subject was none the less horrible for that, andthe caricatured likeness to my great-grandfather did not make it seemless real or more pleasant.
That execution which was never over, this ghastly head which never foundrest in the grave, that awful-looking man who was, and yet was not,Grandpapa--haunted me. They were the cause of certain horrible dreams,which I can remember quite as clearly at this day as if I dreamed themlast night, and which I know I shall never forget. The dreams againassociated themselves with the picture, and my fears grew instead oflessening as the time went by.
Very late one night Elspeth came in and found me awake, and probablylooking far from happy. I had nothing to say for myself, but I burstinto tears. Elspeth was tenderness itself, but she got hold of a wrongidea. I was "just homesick," she thought, and needed to be "away homeagain," with "bairns like myself."
I do not know why I never explained the real reason of mydistress--children are apt to be reticent on such occasions. I think apanic seized upon the members of the household, that they were too oldto make a child happy. I was constantly assured that "it was verynatural," and I "had been very good." But I was sent back to Riflebury.No one knew how loth
I was to leave, still less that it was to a mucholder relative than those at The Vine that I owed my expulsion--to mygreat-great-great-grandfather--Monsieur le Duc de Vandaleur.
Thomas, the cat, purred so loudly as I withdrew, that I think he wasglad to be rid of me.
Adolphe alone was against the verdict of the household, and I thinkbelieved that I would have preferred to remain.
"I'm sure I thought you was quite sattled, miss," he said, as he saw meoff; and he blubbered like a baby. His transplanted perennials were"sattled" by copious floods of water. Perhaps he hoped that tears wouldsettle me!