Complete Works of George Moore

by George Moore

  Thompson did not mention Lewis’s name even when looking at the Clytemnæstra, a fact that somewhat disconcerted Harding, but he still congratulated himself that his walk with Lady Helen had passed unperceived, until the Scotchman said to him as they parted in the street:

  “By-the-way, Harding, I nearly forgot to tell you; I think, on the whole, you had better not make an example of Seymour in your article, he isn’t worth it.”

  CHAPTER XXXI.

  LOOKING BACK.

  AFTER THE ACADEMY, like an immense flowering tree, London blossomed into dinner parties, balls, garden fêtes, race meetings. Lady Helen and Lewis went everywhere, for them were all pleasures and delights, until, at the end of July, they watched the season dragging itself to its end, marvellous and commonplace, like a hundred other seasons.

  Mrs. Bentham had guessed from Lewis’s manner that he had not wholly forgotten her; and with an exquisite thrill of pleasure she saw that her place had not been entirely taken; that there was still a spot left for her in his life. This being so, she asked them to come and stay with her on a visit, and in the beginning of August Claremont House united the three women, who had worked so lovingly and successfully for Lewis’s welfare, under one roof. Unconscious of each other’s rights, they continued to love him, with loves as different as were their ages and positions.

  But of these three women Gwynnie Lloyd, who had possessed the least, was the happiest. Lady Helen was devoured with jealousy, and the pleasure that Mrs. Bentham experienced in having Lewis near her, was saddened by the memory of the past. Had it been anywhere but at Claremont House, the pain would not have been so defined; but there the whole place was so filled with memories, that the smallest incident sufficed to raise from their dust the dear, dear days, complete in every detail. Sometimes a chance word, the falling of a leaf, a sunset, a particular entrée at dinner, would bring back to her the exact image of some past happiness. Sometimes she thought of their life in Paris, and of the many pleasant voyages she had made with him; but often of the first six months, when Lewis came down to decorate her ball-room, when her love had been a pure and sweet illusion.

  But to her the sadness of the present was not untinged with pleasure; for although Lady Helen hung upon her husband as if haunted by his hands and lips, Lewis was often anxious to escape from her, and talk to Mrs. Bentham. They understood each other SO perfectly; they had so many interests in common, that they were always glad to be together. They were bound together by the indissoluble chains of five years of love and intimacy. At first they were embarrassed when they found themselves alone, and avoided alluding directly to the past; but gradually their constraint wore away, and involuntarily they sought for opportunities of idly dreaming in the cool shade of bygone joys, and the sweetness of half-forgotten kisses. Mrs. Bentham did not deny herself these sad pleasures; for she regarded the past as all hers, as the present and future were all Lady Helen’s.

  Daily the yearning for the memory of old times grew stronger upon them, and Lewis sought Mrs. Bentham’s society more and more. One afternoon, after lunch, he asked her to go out for a walk. Lady Helen was lying down with a sick headache, and Mrs. Thorpe was laid up with a cold. Without knowing why, he was burning with curiosity to talk to her of the past, and he intended to take her to some of the places they used to love in old times.

  It had been raining, the trees glistened with wet, but it was now fine. Towards the sea the sky was a dull heavy grey; and the clouds were collecting overhead. They walked through the pleasure grounds towards the river, but before they had got far large drops of rain fell on the moist gravel; the sky darkened, and the thunder rattled along the horizon. It was too late to go back to the house, so they took refuge under a clump of beeches, which grew in the hollow below the terrace, and just within view of the bridge.

  “How tiresome this rain is,” said Lewis, wondering how he should lead up to the subject of their dead love. At last he said: “Do you think we should be more in shelter over there!”

  It was a spot they both knew well. The brown water rushed round a flat island overgrown with tall trees. Lewis had painted it several times, with figures and without. Mrs. Bentham did not answer, and, after a pause, he continued:— “Do you not remember the big landscape I did there, and I was so busy that I did not come to lunch, but used to ask you to bring me a sandwich?”

  “Yes,” she replied, “I recollect, but I thought you did not think such things worth remembering.”

  “I, not remember! I have forgotten nothing; I never was so happy as when I was with you.”

  Mrs. Bentham’s heart throbbed as she listened to the words, and a delicious sigh of pleasure passed through her lips.

  “But you,” he said, “why are you not the same as you were ? All things seem so altered.”

  It was a great joy to Mrs. Bentham to see that in some ways he missed her, but at that moment, remembering how cruelly he had acted, she could not help saying:

  “Of course it cannot be the same as it was; how could you expect it?”

  The phrase somewhat disconcerted him, and he did not speak for some moments. He wondered that she dared say such a thing; and she began to regret that she had expressed herself so clearly.

  The rain now pattered heavily on the foliage overhead, and the large drops which fell on the bare brown ground at their feet rustled amid the red leaves that remained from last year. The day grew darker, and the thunder rattled rapidly.

  “I wish we could get away,” said Mrs. Bentham, who was beginning to feel afraid.

  “It is a dreadful day, is it not, and is well suited to the bitter sadness of—”

  “Ah!” cried Mrs. Bentham, nearly blinded by a vivid flash of lightning, and they waited for the answering peal which, in a few seconds, burst forth and seemed to roll quite round them. Then Lewis thought of the past, and seized with a vague and undefinable regret for what had gone from him, he put his arm round Mrs. Bentham and tried to draw her towards him. She looked at him with surprise. In this instance, his tact had failed him. It was a sweet sad pleasure to her to talk of their past life, but his sentimentally sensuous nature prevented him from seeing that any renewal of love-making was impossible.

  “Oh, Lewis! How could you? I thought you loved your wife better than that,” she said, looking at him rather sadly.

  Lewis stammered, equivocated, and entered into a long explanation: he referred to the happiness of days gone by, Mrs. Bentham’s great goodness, and Lady Helen’s irritability. He told her how wretched it made him. Then her desire to protect him overpowered all other thoughts, and she consoled and advised him. They talked for a long half-hour under the beeches, every now and then stopping to listen to the thunder, which they vaguely feared was threatening them. At last, however, the storm ceased; the sun shone brightly out of a large piece of blue sky, and they walked towards the house through the warm, gay rain which sparkled in the luminous air.

  Lewis was in high spirits, and he kissed Lady Helen rapturously when he got up to her room. His vanity had been gratified; he could congratulate himself that there were at least two women in the world who would lay down their lives for him; and, like a cat in the sun, he basked in the warmth of the idea.

  Mrs. Bentham was not so well satisfied. Her faith in her protégé had been shaken, but it was built on too stable foundations to be overthrown at the first shock. Her life had been too intimately bound up with his. She had done too much, sacrificed too much, for him, to allow her belief to be cast down without a struggle. To acknowledge him worthless would be to admit that the work of her life had been wasted; and now, when she heard or read of his successes as an artist, she felt all the joys of a kind of adopted maternity, which has grown since their separation, daily more and more inexpressibly dear to her. He belonged to Lady Helen, yet she often said to herself, and always with exquisite pleasure, that he owed everything to her. But if jealousy could no longer touch her, it was not so with Lady Helen. She could never quite understand Mrs. Bentham’s a
ffection for her husband, and she often, like the rest of the world, suspected her of having been her husband’s mistress. A hundred times she had passionately dismissed the idea, because it pained her, because she felt that she had no right so to accuse her friend; but, struggle as she would, it always came back, and at each return buried its sting deeper in her heart.

  Little things constantly occurred which were irritatingly suspicious, and she grew to hate Claremont House; it seemed filled with ghosts. In one room there was a sketch of Mrs. Bentham, by Lewis; in another a book, a present from Lewis to Mrs. Bentham; on the piano she found old songs they used to sing together; and the ball-room seemed to her little more than an emblematic record of their love. Then her husband and Mrs. Bentham had so many subjects in common that interested them, and of which she knew nothing. They were always talking of past times. Sometimes it was when Lewis was at the “Beaux Arts;” sometimes a summer they passed in Sweden. They laughed over one adventure, grew serious over another, or disputed some minute fact which was at last referred to Mrs. Thorpe, who sat, as usual, knitting by the fire-place.

  Lady Helen bit her lips with vexation; she often complained bitterly to her husband, but he only laughed, and told her she might as well suspect him of being in love with his great-grandaunt. This assurance appeased her wrath for the time, and as these bickerings always took place in the silence of their room, a few kisses ended the matter happily. Nevertheless, the feeling of jealousy remained, and an explanation seemed more and more imminent.

  At last it came, and more naturally and quietly than might have been imagined. One day the ladies left Lewis at home to finish a landscape he had begun; and they drove over to Coleworth to see Lady Marion. As they talked, under their parasols, of different things, the conversation suddenly turned upon friendship. This was the opportunity Lady Helen wanted, and, determined to come to the point, she declared, after a little hesitation, that she did not believe that friendship could exist between a man and a woman.

  Mrs. Bentham looked at her, and Lady Helen returned the look, and then the former said:

  “I should have thought, Helen, that you would have been the last person to think so; for you ought to know better than anyone that such friendships are possible.”

  This was a direct reproof, but Lady Helen was determined to see what Mrs. Bentham would say when taxed with having been Lewis’s mistress.

  “You know, I have heard people say that your liking for Lewis was more than mere friendship.”

  Lady Helen expected either an angry retort, or blushings and tremblings, but, to her surprise, Mrs. Bentham answered her quite quietly.

  “My dear,” she said, “I must forgive you for your accusation; for I must admit that it is not easy for you to understand the friendship which has existed so long between me and your husband. You are too young, and you are too much in love to suppose that any other sentiment but love is worth prizing. Under such circumstances it is difficult to close one’s ears to scandal, even when it is a question of one’s friends.”

  This calm reply at once astonished and discountenanced Lady Helen; but when she reflected that, notwithstanding the fine words, Mrs. Bentham had not answered her question, she grew angry, and put the question in all its brutal simplicity.

  “Yes, but were you, or were you not, ever Lewis’s mistress?” Mrs. Bentham looked at her in silence for a moment, and then said:

  “No, it is not true.”

  “You swear it?”

  “Yes, I swear it; it is not true.”

  The women continued to look at each other fixedly for a moment, and then Lady Helen, unable to contain herself any longer, seized her friend’s hand, and, with tears in her eyes, said:

  “Oh! Lucy, you don’t know how happy you have made me! It would kill me to know that Lewis had ever loved any other woman but me.”

  Mrs. Bentham laughed a little nervously, and said:

  “Of course it isn’t true; Lewis never had a chance of making love to me. I knew him under circumstances which would not have permitted of it.”

  Then she went on to say how she had met him, telling the truth as far as she could, and mixing in the narrative the sorrows of her own matrimonial life, explaining how utterly it had disgusted her with all love, for ever and ever. The tale brought tears into Lady Helen’s eyes, and she asked, with much commiseration, many questions concerning Mr. Bentham. The conversation deeply interested her; she pitied Mrs. Bentham with her whole heart, and she assured her that all men were not like Mr. Bentham. With Lady Marion they passed a charming afternoon, and during the drive home Lady Helen, who was in a confidential humour, initiated Mrs. Bentham into the secrets of her wedded life, dwelling particularly on all the delicacies of Lewis’s character — and she was too much wrapped up in her own happiness to notice the pained expression on her friend’s face.

  CHAPTER XXXII.

  BILLS.

  IN THE LAST week in September the Seymours went back to London; they had been married now nearly two years, and were just beginning to perceive that the money was going out far faster than it came in. Not only did Lewis not get so many portraits to do as he had expected, but Mr. Carver, to whom he had been in the habit of selling seven or eight hundred pounds worth of pictures a year, had lately died, and his business had been broken up. This deprived the Seymours of a large portion of their income, for Mrs. Bentham was unable, for the moment, to find a dealer to whom she could entrust the task of buying Lewis’s pictures. Lady Helen’s questions had frightened her, and she now dreaded every breath of gossip. Besides, Lewis’s brag of what he made deceived her. He talked a great deal of the prices he received, and the social position of his sitters, and complained despairingly of how he was pressed for time. He had received a letter from Lady X., saying that she would be in town in a week, and would then be able to sit to him.

  This was cheering news, and he soon forgot all about Mr. Carver.

  Lady X. was a handsome woman, and it would be both amusing and profitable to paint her picture, and not long after this piece of good luck came two more portraits. This looked promising indeed, but when the bills came in at Christmas, they found that they had not only spent the thousand pounds which had been taken out of his wife’s fortune, but were at least two thousand to the bad. A weekly dinner party, and a small dance or two, and the quarter’s rent, had got through six hundred pounds in four months and a half.

  It was clear that they were going a little too fast, but Lady Helen consoled herself with the assurance that expenses were always very heavy at first: when they had once settled down, things would come right. She wrote to the upholsterer, that it would not be quite convenient to pay him just yet, but that she hoped to settle the matter during the course of the summer.

  “There will be no difficulty about this,” she said to Lewis, as she stamped the letter; “you are sure to get five hundred for your picture of Sappho; and we will give the wretched man three hundred out of it. I thought the critics would like it. Has Harding seen it yet?”

  “No, I have not seen him lately; have you? You know it would be as well to keep up the acquaintance.”

  “No, not for some time; but I shall ask him to dinner one of these days,” and she passed her arm through her husband’s and went down with him to the studio. It was large and sumptuous, and only recalled his former ways of life by a few stray touches, a coquettishly arranged bunch of flowers, a glove, or a solitary fan. A few pictures and a piece of tapestry decorated the walls; a large divan covered with dark green velvet, a few arm chairs to match, and a table covered with paints: the view was everywhere intercepted by portraits of fashionable women.

  “Heavens! how the sun does come in here at ten; but it is gone in half-an-hour,” said Lewis, drawing the blind.

  The picture of Sappho stood on the easel; it was nearly finished, only bits of detail here and there remained to be added. It showed the poetess seated amid her attendants, who were engaged in completing her toilette. One of them had just handed her
a lyre, and, resting it against the porphyry table, strewn with silver boxes and vases containing odours, she had begun to sing. It was decidedly Lewis’s best work.

  “I think I shall score a success this time,” he said, looking affectionately at his work.

  “I am sure you will; but you have made it so like me that everybody will recognise it.”

  “The arms are not quite right yet; take off the body of your dress, Helen, and let me have another go at them.” Nothing Lady Helen liked so much as sitting to her husband. They used to spend the happiest days together, all alone in the big studio. She had not only sat for Sappho, but for the hands and feet of the attendants.

  Now she put herself into the necessary light and position, and as Lewis squeezed the paint out on his palette, he bitterly deplored Carver’s death; he declared he would never find another customer like him.

  Lady Helen grew interested, and eagerly demanded the details. He told her how Carver had been in the habit of buying of him nearly a thousand pounds’ worth of pictures yearly. The story made Lady Helen thoughtful, and she wondered why this man had been such an extensive purchaser of Lewis’s pictures.

  “I never had so bad a year in my life,” said Lewis. “It is a fact that I have made only seven hundred pounds this year, and I used to knock off twelve hundred, and did not work half so hard. Had it not been for the portraits, I don’t know what we should have done. I wish I could get some more orders.”

  The conversation here ceased. Lady Helen continued to think, and from the expression on her face it was clear that she was annoyed. Little things were constantly occurring which kept her suspicion always on the alert. She could specify nothing; indeed, when she tried to examine any particular bit of evidence, it faded from her like mist; but yet, in the distance, the clouds of mistrust maintained their sinister appearance. The uncertainty irritated her, and she now suspected every second woman she spoke to of having been a former admirer of her husband.