The Bride

by Margaret Irwin

  Sophie had hurried straight from the House in the Wood to Lord Craven’s house, which was always ready for any member of their family – it was like part of their own furniture, but more useful. It was more exciting to tell her adventure to a man, even old Craven, who must be nearly fifty, than to her sisters.

  Unfortunately she found her mother there. Elizabeth thought Charles had shown himself rather charmingly ingenuous, and that Sophie was a little prude. Poor Sophie longed to tell more of her encounter with Charles, to justify herself. (Those remarks of his about her bearing him a child as Lucy had done – what would her mother have to say to that?) But caution won, and it was her caution that her mother now condemned.

  ‘These girls today!’ she exclaimed, ‘they take no chances.’ It was a pity really, for one can only be young once, ‘but these modern girls aren’t young, they know too much, they look at people with bleak critical eyes, they are hard, calculating, deliberate—’

  She forgot how angry she often was with Louey for exactly the opposite qualities – slapdash, reckless, casual – which she also labelled modern. Now she declared that girls today were not more good than those of her generation, only more careful: ‘ “Our Sophie is a careful girl!” What a motto for a great- granddaughter of Queen Mary of Scotland!’

  And she swept out of the room, brandishing a trowel, to dig up some precious bulbs Craven had promised her and which she would trust to no other hand but her own.

  Sophie turned for refuge to the sideboard, where there were always nice things standing ready to eat and drink, sweet wines, pastries, and piled-up dishes of marchpane and sugar-plums. Further consolation came when Lord Craven silently fished out a trinket from his pocket and tossed it over to her; he had an inexhaustible store of such ornaments from the curio-dealers at Amsterdam, who commissioned sailors to bring them from China and India.

  Sophie pinned the spray of blue enamelled flowers in her dress, nodding her thanks to him; these gifts were merely a wise and necessary provision, for he needed such extra attractions since he was elderly, small and plain and not of good family, his enormous fortune, the chief support of them all for the past quarter of a century, having been made by his father, a Lord Mayor of London, in trade. But he was a good friend to her, and she could at once pour out her doubts and fears of Charles and all those courtiers of his who were trying to curry favour with her and even, she had heard, hoping to secure Craven’s money for Charles’ schemes through his kindness for herself.

  ‘Did you know that, my True Towser? You see they have designs on you too. What do you think of it all? Wake up and tell me.’

  He had shut his eyes in that annoying way he sometimes had when she was chattering to him, but now opened them, blinking like an owl, and said, ‘I am not thinking just now.’

  ‘But you must be thinking of something? What is it?’

  ‘Nothing. It is a great art, to think of nothing, I can do it whenever I like.’

  ‘But why should you like?’ she asked indignantly.

  ‘I hope it may help me to shine in such conversation as yours,’ he told her.

  Sophie gave him an uncertain eye; she wondered if he were not practically senile. She was certain of it when he began to trot out a pedantic theory of his about spelling French like Latin.

  ‘But the two languages are utterly unlike,’ she declared, and thought he was quizzing her when he told her the one was derived from the other. And who cared if it were or not?

  ‘Tell me what you think of Charles,’ she demanded.

  ‘I think his best hope for his crown is in your hope of it,’ he replied, taking up his clarionet and picking out a tune on it.

  ‘Then you do think I was right to break with Ernest Augustus? I’d never get the English crown for myself or my heirs if I married a prince of Brunswick or Hanover.’

  ‘Your will is so strong, my dear, there’s no knowing what you might compass even then.’

  That cheered her with a sense of power; she would never spoil her chances by the vagueness and unworldliness, in such different ways, of her two eldest sisters.

  Gay, but poised and sure of herself, she would tread the path of her life exactly as she intended, like the new dance steps she now began to practise to his music on the chequered marble floor, tapping her toes so precisely now on the black square, now on the white.

  But she could not keep it up; a queer mood was falling on her, making her feel lonely and frightened as she had done sometimes when a child, remembering in the dark all the terrible stories she had heard of hell-fire and the eternal wrath of God against those who cared only for this world.

  She remembered them now, though she was not in the dark but dancing to this tiny tripping tune in the morning, dancing in and out of this long sunbeam that sent its whirling golden specks spinning round her in the bright room. Yet it seemed as though a shadow had fallen on the earth that none could see, not even herself, who felt only the inexplicable chill strike at her heart.

  Greedy of life as she was, life itself was not enough; she might grasp all she desired within her hands and find it withered, turned tasteless and foul. Was there nothing beyond it to give it sense and form? But what then could ever satisfy her, if life was not enough?

  ‘How is it I can feel so melancholy when all nature means us to be gay?’ she broke out passionately.

  But her eccentric old friend only removed the clarionet from his lips for an instant, and replied that statistics had proved suicides to be most frequent in the spring.

  Sophie preferred to diagnose her case as one of religion. A violent fit of devotion, that was what it was. She at once made use of it to propitiate herself with God by the offering of a devotional poem.

  Sitting at Craven’s writing-table, wielding a big white quill, she wrote, in the space of half an hour, the same half-hour in which Hyde was writing to Rupert a few streets away:

  ‘Lord, how can I, a child of Thine,

  For ever play the castanet,

  For ever aim to be coquette

  And dance away my time?

  That this alone would please Thee, Lord,

  How happy would I be to know!

  I’d take my pleasure here below,

  And in the next world, my reward.’

  To make the best of both worlds, was that after all the sum of her ‘devotion’? She did not feel quite satisfied about it. In tiresome comparison she remembered a couplet from some verses her mother had once written in a like ‘fit of devotion’, at the much earlier age of twelve, and had shown her daughters in a burst of laughter at her youthful heroics:

  ‘Oh my soul of heavenly birth,

  Do thou scorn this basest earth!’

  That echo from Elizabeth’s proud childhood was now vaguely disturbing. Never, even at twelve years old, could Sophie have managed to ‘scorn this basest earth’.

  While Hyde wrote his letter and Sophie her verse, and Montrose rode by Scheveningen to cool his head in the sea-breeze, Louey sat watching Gerard Honthorst paint in the big studio he used while in her mother’s house. He was at work on the portrait of the Marquis of Montrose that had been commissioned by her mother; he had to work at it mostly in the Marquis’ absence, and complained loudly of the fact.

  ‘Says two sittings are enough for any portrait, since it’s all that Jamesone needed when he painted him as a youth. What’s Jamesone? A beggarly Scots painter that never learned his trade in Italy as far as I can make out. And a boy of seventeen or so is easy work compared with the job I have to do now. Look at it. Do you like it?’

  ‘No,’ said Louey.

  ‘I know,’ echoed her master despondently. ‘That air of greatness, yet unconscious of it – is it there?’

  She did not think so. She answered, ‘The eyes are good; you have got them, though not entirely. That left eyelid lower than the other, and the steady way they watch people.’

  ‘Yes, yes, I’ve got something there.’

  He stepped backwards to where she was sitting
and flumped down beside her, a heavy man whose jovial round face had turned suddenly elderly as it sagged with disappointment. But now those lines of age and weariness tautened in the effort of concentration; he stared frowning at his painting, determined to wrest from it the secret of his failure. Louey, sitting doubled up beside him, leaning forward with her elbow on her knee and her chin propped on her fist, knew, without even glancing round at him, how his face was hardening, remodelling itself. Gerard was working at this portrait as he had not worked for years.

  He was doing more, he was admitting it had gone wrong, and to a pupil. Once or twice lately he had done this to her, and she had been more impressed by so singular a trust than by the most passionate avowal of devotion.

  ‘He is very difficult,’ she said.

  ‘Damnably. If you had ever tried to paint him yourself you would know. And why don’t you?’

  ‘Too difficult. I wouldn’t dare – now I have seen him,’ she added under her breath. Not for worlds would she have told of that imaginary sketch she had drawn before she had ever seen Montrose. Its unconscious guess had caught something nearer the truth than this large deliberate oil-painting, three-quarter length, by the practised Court-painter – though this too was aiming, she could see, at the same effect. Honthorst had painted Montrose in armour such as was now worn for State occasions and portraits rather than on the battlefield – black armour for the death of his master King Charles, as befitted the portrait of a great soldier vowed to vengeance of his murdered King.

  But in this face, as in the rough sketch of Louey’s, shone a strange serenity, not to be expected of such a man in such a mood of grim determination as all now recognized in him.

  ‘Yet I haven’t got it,’ Honthorst was muttering, ‘that look, alert and keen, though the face keeps so still. He’s got the eyes of a hawk and the nose of one; but look what I have done instead: smoothed everything down, taken all that look of rugged power out of the face, made it just another conventional portrait of a soldier, if that. Does he look a soldier?’

  ‘He looks more “a veray parfait gentil knight”,’ said Louey, and translated her quotation into the corresponding old Flemish words before he could swear at her for talking English.

  ‘That is the language of chivalry, hein? Like that armour, obsolete, picturesque, for formal occasions only, fit for a lady’s chamber, like this portrait that’s been ordered for your lady mother’s chamber.’

  He turned his great black curled head and looked full at her, his eyes those of a mischievous schoolboy. She met them with a smile of acknowledgement. It was not worth the trouble to hide her thoughts from Gerard. But he must have seen more even than she intended, for he laid his broad hand on her shoulder and shook it gently and told her in bluff kindly clumsy fashion that she had nothing to fear. ‘A man can’t really love a woman over fifty,’ he said with coarse simplicity.

  ‘I’ve seen them do it often enough,’ remarked Louey.

  ‘Ah, your mother’s a wonderful woman, I’m not saying anything else, but nature counts most in the long run.’

  ‘I doubt it. I’d back reputation against nature any day, especially with our countrymen. When they’ve heard a woman is fascinating for nearly forty years they begin to believe it.’

  He roared with laughter, wagging a strong stubby forefinger at her, and his head in rhythm with it. ‘You and your clever sisters, the eldest and the youngest, you’ve tongues like needles all three of you, and it’s that that stands in your way more than any mother. Are you sure you haven’t frightened the Great Marquis now? That’s what it is, I’ll be bound, you’ve scared the mighty General as stiff as any schoolboy.’

  ‘I wish I had. He’s never heard me speak that I’m aware of.’ (‘But yes, he did at first. Before my mother came into the room.’ But she did not say that.) ‘Even if he ever looks at me, he is listening to my mother.’

  ‘He’ll hear you. Wait. You have all her courage and honesty – no, you’ve more, for you’re an honest worker, you never shirk what you see when you’re painting.’

  ‘And to what man, dear Gerard, would that ever make a penny’s odds?’

  ‘It makes many pounds odds to the price of your pictures,’ he chuckled, and then with one of his sudden changes of expression he said ruefully, ‘And to me.’

  He was looking at her with great tenderness. She was no goddess like her mother, who was indeed a bit too titanic for him, but she was as pretty as a nymph, and an amusing little devil, and the only girl who had ever understood him – it was astonishing the things he didn’t mind saying to her. It was just his luck that she should be a princess. ‘And I’m only an old hack of a job painter, and what I think don’t make any odds.’

  Louey knew her drawing-master. Some sentiment he certainly had for her, but more for himself; it was that that must have been jarred lately. She uncoiled herself from her cramped, curled-up position,” getting taller and taller as she rose, and stretched her arms above her head.

  ‘Let us have a pipe together,’ she said. ‘That is, if you have got a new one for me.’

  ‘I have, but it’s an expensive business if you insist on a fresh pipe every time you try one.’

  ‘Not very. This is only the third, and I’m still not sure I like it.’

  He opened a cupboard, pulled out two long clay pipes, two tall tapering glasses, and a bottle of wine. He filled the pipes, handed her one, and lit it from a burning coal which he took from the fire in a pair of tongs. They settled themselves comfortably on either side of the table that held his paints and palette, looking rather like a couple of convivial Carthusian monks for both wore their white painting-coats, shapeless linen sacks held in by belts at the waist. She waited till he had drunk a glass and drawn two or three times at his pipe, watching the smoke-wreaths that rose from it through the sun-laden air in thin spirals, blue on the one side, faint brown on the other, before she tried to probe his discontent.

  ‘You have seen the art-dealers at Amsterdam?’ she said. ‘They haven’t lowered your prices, have they?’

  ‘No, they’ve raised them. I am getting more for my portraits than any painter in Holland at the moment. The Dutch are all very well for their gross little plebeian scenes, but when it comes to a portrait of a lady or gentleman that can show any grace or distinction they’ve still got to go to a Fleming.’

  ‘That’s why that gross Dutch painter at Amsterdam, Rembrandt van Rijn, has to go on painting his own portrait, I suppose,’ said Louey, not looking at her master, who was twirling his fine upturned moustaches in renewed self-satisfaction. But at her apparently careless remark that satisfaction exploded like a bubble in a long sigh. He tugged instead of twirled at the silky, still brown hairs, then burst out:

  ‘That fellow’s a fool. He’ll never be a success again. He’s had it all and chucked it away. He’s deep in debt, his house is a huggermugger of dirty splendour. He drinks – well, we all do that, but he drinks with the wrong people. He does everything with the wrong people. He quarrels with the dealers, he paints Jews, he sleeps with his housekeeper, he never went to Italy, he worships ugliness, all he cares to paint are vulgar cunning peasants or lousy beggars or greasy Jews bound up in bundles of cloths; he even paints the characters in the Bible as Jews—’

  ‘But the characters in the Bible were Jews.’

  ‘So they were, I never thought of that. But it’s downright blasphemy to paint Our Lord as a Jew.’

  ‘Since it was only on His mother’s side?’ suggested Louey.

  ‘Historical accuracy can be carried too far,’ replied the painter, shocked, not for the first time, by his pupil’s flippancy. ‘And anyway it’s done Rembrandt no good; after all his grand start and success he’s getting nowhere. They’ve refused his designs for a picture of the Peace Treaty of Westphalia and given the job to Gerard Ter Borch. Rembrandt is sick as a dog about it, but lord! I saw his sketches for it at Amsterdam and you never saw such stuff. Classic allegorical figures, he can’t do that sort of thing; h
e’s never been to Italy, never studied the masters of classic form, he’s no sense of beauty, can’t paint a beautiful woman, especially a nude – barrels of wrinkled fat, that’s all he ever sees in ‘em. Mind you, the colour’s lovely, those rose-pink flesh tints, the warm cream of the skin, the lighting above all—’ He broke off, musing; he had lost the thread of his diatribe, he had forgotten Louey, he was staring at nothing, at the pictures he had seen at Amsterdam.

  When he spoke again it was softly, truly, in the voice in which a man speaks to himself. ‘I saw his “Christ before Pilate”,’ he said.

  How odd and sad it was! Here was Rembrandt ‘sick as a dog’ at missing the well-paid jobs, and Gerard at only getting them. One man’s meat was another man’s poison.

  ‘But you painted Christ before Pilate yourself, Gerard, your best picture—’

  ‘Painted thirty years ago.’

  ‘What does it matter when? You did it.’

  They were both sharing for an instant their vision of that night interior he had painted with the single candle-flame illumining those two faces, lords of two different worlds – the eager, argumentative, logical face of Pilate seated at the table, looking up into that ineffable other-worldly calm of his prisoner. Gherardo della Notte he had been nicknamed after that picture, acknowledged master of chiaroscuro even by the Italians, the supreme arbiters of taste.

  ‘You lit a candle in the night,’ she said slowly, ‘and focused two worlds, divine and human wisdom, in the single flare of that painted flame.’

  He burst out, ‘But if I did it then, did it once, look at what Rembrandt has done since, look at his “Christ before Pilate” – that crowded whirra-whirra of all humanity jostling the divine, and a light falling on it such as never fell on earth.’

  He picked up a brush from the table, looked at it in disgust, and flung it at his portrait of Montrose. ‘That’s what I think of that,’ he said. ‘Rembrandt could do him. I can’t.’ He heaved a great sigh out of himself as he got up from his stool.