Complete Works of George Moore

by George Moore

  His gentle manner and sincerity won the old lady’s heart, and long before Mrs. Bentham returned she had begun to look upon him as one of the family, and was quite surprised and pained when he spoke of leaving for Paris as soon as the decorations were finished.

  “But, my dear Mrs. Thorpe, I have much to learn. As soon as I know my craft we’ll be able to judge if I have anything new to say.”

  Mrs. Thorpe, who had already passed on to the conclusion that the decorations would be finished by the end of the week, reminded him that Mrs. Bentham would be very disappointed if she returned to Claremont House and found him gone; at which he laughed, saying that the decorations would not be finished for another three months; moreover, he had never contemplated running away to Paris without seeing her. “It is her money that will take me there,” he said; and she replied that she was sure that Lucy would be very sorry.

  On words very like these they often bade each other good-night, and it seemed to Lewis, as he went up the staircase to his room, that life was coming to him in a very pleasant fashion. “Yes,” he said to himself, “it is pleasant enough now, but as soon as the decorations are finished and Mrs. Bentham returns, I shall go to Paris and invest my money in education. I can’t paint, but I can learn to paint. We shall always be friends, Lucy and I. Perhaps more than friends; of course, if that should happen, it will not be necessary for me to go to Paris.” On this he fell to thinking of the last words she had spoken to him, and wondered if he should write to her “ My dear Lucy,” or if on paper he should still keep to the formality of “Mrs. Bentham.”

  “She might like to hear me call her Lucy, but might not like to see it in black and white.” He was handed a letter next morning, and the news that Lucy’s father was much better, and that she was returning to Claremont House at once, was very welcome news, and, having expressed some satisfaction at Mr. Vicome’s recovery, he retired to the ballroom.

  She would have many things to tell him, and he would have the decorations to show her. On the whole he had a good deal to show, for he had worked hard; and if he were to start working at once he might get in some more Cupids, if not in paint, in charcoal, some garlands and some leaves, before she arrived. But his thoughts were too much absorbed in the pleasure of meeting Lucy for him to make much progress in his work that day; and after luncheon he was walking about the drive, wondering if he should set off on foot and meet her at the station. It occurred to him to take a slow train up and wait for her at the junction. The thought of returning in the train with her enchanted him, but the enchantment quickly wore off. She might look upon it as a liberty, and, perhaps, it would not be well for him even to go to the station to meet her or even to be found walking in the drive. It would, perhaps, be better for him to await her pleasure in the ballroom. The time would pass quickly if he were to apply himself to his work; but he couldn’t bring himself to take up his palette, and the hours wore away tediously; but they wore away, and about five o’clock the wheels of the brougham were heard on the gravel sweep. “Now, will she come into the studio or sit talking to Mrs. Thorpe?” he said to himself. “If she goes to Mrs. Thorpe, I shall not be able to resist the temptation, and shall go to her.”

  She came into the ballroom in great eagerness to see him and the decorations, and it did not seem to him certain which she most admired — him or his work.

  “How you have been working! Is it possible that you have done all this by yourself? You must have worked all alone on that scaffolding, hour after hour. Did you miss me?” But, as if the words seemed to her too intimate, she added: “Did you miss my visits in the morning?”

  “I missed our talk very much; it is so much pleasanter to work with somebody standing by that one can turn to for advice and encouragement.”

  “How prettily you say things, Lewis!”

  “But talk to me about yourself,” he interjected suddenly.

  “After tea we will talk. I must get my things off now, and there are several things I have to see to; so good-bye for the time being.”

  She left him, his thoughts dancing and all his blood tingling in his veins, certain at last that if he were to lay his arm about her she would not shield her lips with her hand, and the final intimacy could not he delayed much longer. He expected that she would make it plain to him that she wished him to kiss when she returned. But nothing happened. She seemed to have drifted a little away from him; and during the night he experienced many misgivings. Next day her manner was not reassuring, and he asked himself if it were possible that she only thought of him as a young man of talent whom she would like to encourage and help for her own pleasure or vanity. He thought of her age; perhaps she had thought of that, too, and had come to think of an older man.

  One day they were standing by the window, and for his desire of her lips he could not talk of the decorations any longer, and began to tell her suddenly that he loved her; and she, fearing that his words would precipitate an act on his part that would oblige her to send him away, so she thought, began to prepare a little sermon; but at the moment of speaking her voice died off her tongue, she swayed a little, and a moment after was in his arms. Her leaned-back head lay upon his shoulder — his lips were upon her lips, and her lips were upon his, and, worst of all, she had no power to close them. He drew her towards him, and she forgot to disengage herself from his arms — forgot to tell him that he must not speak to her of love, and they sat on the sofa side by side.

  “I cannot help myself,” she murmured, and drawing him towards her, she kissed him.

  “We must go away together,” he said.

  “Go away together? What do you mean?”

  “If you kiss me you love me,” he answered; “and if you love me you will marry me.”

  “But I am married; what you ask is impossible. You don’t know my husband. To punish me he would not ask for a divorce. Don’t let us speak on this subject again; otherwise we cannot remain friends.”

  “Friends!” he exclaimed; “there can be no friendship between us. You have made me love you, and if you can give me nothing else but friendship I will leave you and your decorations to-night.”

  His words bewildered her. “Leave here to-night; leave this house and the decorations!” And before she could find other words to answer him he rushed out of the room.

  “Going upstairs,” she said to herself, “to pack his portmanteau. But he cannot go to-night; there is no train. To-morrow he may think differently, so there is hope.”

  CHAP. XV.

  THE ROOM IN which she had spent so many charming hours stared at her: nymphs, Cupids, flowers, and tendrils, some completed, some barely indicated with a few black lines. A group of Cupids quarrelled over some masks and arrows. Each panel contained an episode in the comedy of love, a blurred incomplete dream, and she tried to comprehend it all as an allegory of her own life, attaching special significance to the nymph gathering a wounded bird to her bosom. But all that was over and done with now. Lewis would leave her to-morrow, and her life would sink back into arid circumstance. It did not seem to her that she had ever been alive till she had met him, and now that she had given him up life seemed to her more like a desert than ever and the people in it extraordinarily insignificant. How different to-day from yesterday! By her father’s bedside she had been thinking of Lewis, and of the day when she would be free to return to Claremont House to consult with him how a Cupid, a basket of flowers, a mask, a wreath, would light up a composition. She remembered lying awake at night thinking that perhaps she had made a mistake when she had said that the basket of flowers should be on the right side of the nymph instead of the left. Of course Lewis knew better than she, and her hope had been for many an hour that her mistake had not annoyed him and caused him to think less well of her judgment in matters of art. She remembered, too, how she had, while out driving, thought the drive too long, and looked forward to seeing the progress he had made during the afternoon, asking herself all the while if he had succeeded in painting the satyr — the one blow
ing the reed-pipe. And how pleasant it was to have him at dinner, to hear him talking across the dinner-table, to know that he was in the house, to hear his step, the sadness of the footfall as he left the house, the joy he brought back when she heard it returning, the hope that awakened as he came into the drawingroom, and the hope that died when she heard him going towards the ballroom! All this life that had once been so real was now about to disappear. But to keep it, and how? Was it a reality outside of her, or was it something within herself? “I suppose I’m in love with him,” she said suddenly and aloud. “This fever which possesses me, which I would maintain at any cost, is love.

  Strange, is it not? But strange or simple, there it is, and he must not leave the house,” she said, and thanked God there was no train that night. One more night at least he would have to spend under her roof; of that she was sure. He must stay on — for how long she did not know — even if she had to beg him to stay.

  Could it be that he was packing his portmanteau? And unable to restrain her curiosity she lingered on the staircase. If he was packing his portmanteau she would hear him moving to and fro, but she heard nothing, which was not astonishing, for Lewis had hardly ascended the stairs before his heart began to fail him. If he were to leave Claremont House without finishing the decorations, he would be in the same plight as he was when he came to Claremont House. She would not be obliged to pay him for unfinished work, for work which he had declined to finish; and he sat wondering, asking himself how he could retrieve his mistake. If he might retrieve it by going to Mrs. Thorpe and telling her everything that had happened? For a moment this seemed to him to be a way out of the difficulty, but on thinking it over he remembered that, if he were to take Mrs. Thorpe into his confidence, he would have to tell her that he had kissed Lucy. It would be better to go direct to Lucy and tell her he was sorry.

  It was an agony to wait thinking that every moment the butler might come upstairs to tell him that the brougham was at the door to take him to the station. The footsteps in the passage were the butler’s, but he had come to tell him that dinner would be ready in about twenty minutes. So perhaps after all he was not going to be sent away. Nothing was certain, but — As he left his room he met Lucy coming from her room, and he began the conversation with: “Dinner is a little early to-night, Mrs. Bentham.”

  “Only a few minutes, Lewis.”

  His name on her lips put courage in his heart. And during dinner he remembered having mentioned three months as the probable period it would take to finish the decorations, but he thought he could finish them in two. There was a good two months’ work on the walls still; in two months he would broach his project to Lucy, and during these two months he hoped to persuade her out of her scruples, which amounted to no more than fear of discovery and subsequent divorce.

  And, biding his time, choosing one evening as they were sitting, all three together, by the fireside, he began to speak of Paris and its schools of art, and how necessary it was for him to go there.

  Mrs. Thorpe dropped her knitting. “Going to France when you leave here, Lewis? But I thought you had given up that idea?”

  “But why should I have given up the idea? I have a great deal to learn; I know that. I don’t know how to paint, but I can learn to paint. Could I find a better investment for the money you are kind enough to pay me for the decorations?” he said, turning to Lucy. He watched her face, and his reading of it was that she was thinking of the many temptations Paris presents to a young man, and how easily a young man’s character might be undermined by the Parisian sirens.

  “She doesn’t like the idea that another woman should get me, yet she hangs back,” he said to himself; and then aloud: “But, my dear Mrs. Bentham” — he never used her Christian name before Mrs. Thorpe—” I have to paint pictures.”

  “But you are painting pictures here on the walls.”

  “And beautiful pictures,” Mrs. Thorpe interposed.

  “Decorations, mere decorations,” Lewis answered. “I must learn to paint portraits.”

  “And cannot you do that,” Mrs. Thorpe asked, “ without going to Paris?”

  “But, Mrs. Thorpe, there is no reason why you shouldn’t come to Paris, you and Mrs. Bentham, is there?” And he turned to Mrs. Bentham, and she answered:

  “No, there is no reason. If we go to Paris we shall certainly look forward to the pleasure of seeing you.”

  The bodily possession that he desired so ardently still seemed a long way off, but it seemed certain to him now, “for people do things in Paris that they would not do in London,” he said to himself, and asked Mrs. Thorpe if she would like to play a game of backgammon.

  CHAP. XVI.

  SOON LUCY BEGAN to think how her ballroom might be used as an advertisement of Lewis’s talent, and it occurred to her that a ball would introduce him to a great number of people, some of whom might give him commissions to paint their portraits or to decorate their rooms, and if this happened the Parisian adventure might be indefinitely postponed.

  She mentioned the ball one evening after dinner. Mrs. Thorpe did not remonstrate, and Lewis was delighted at the prospect of making known his decorations to Sussex.

  “But if my decorations are to be seen,” he said, “the room must be properly lighted.”

  Mrs. Thorpe answered that they had many lamps.

  “A lustre will be necessary.”

  And next day he and Lucy went to London to seek for lustres, bringing back two with them, each holding twenty-five candles.

  “With these,” he said, “the room will be lighted from end to end.”

  Lucy was not so sure as Lewis that fifty wax candles would be sufficient lighting for so large a room, and when trial was made her judgment proved to be right; and for the sake of certain wreaths and Cupids, which to lose would be to impinge on the general effect, Lewis hung sconces here and there, and lamps were placed at his direction on the mantelpieces and on pedestals in the corners.

  This was his first exhibition, and the voices of the guests crying, “How charming!”

  “How beautiful!”

  “What a lovely room!” filled his soul with an exquisite music only heard by him — an enchanting music whose spell was now and then harshly broken when a couple advanced straight to Mrs. Bentham, showing no sign that they were in a room they had never been in before. “One would think,” Lewis muttered, “that they were in a billiard-room with a hard green paper with a wriggly pattern on the walls.”

  The sense of enchantment, however, began again when Lucy called the attention of her guests to the decorations. He knew they could not appreciate, for they did not understand; but all he desired was praise, and when a couple, after shaking hands with Lucy, began to question her, looking round the room at the pictures, not at the people, his face and hers too lighted up, and she became again a gracious and animated hostess.

  As long as they were looking at his pictures Lewis was delighted, but his delight increased when they asked to be introduced to him, and Mrs. Bentham brought them over or called him to come to her; and her pleasure was plain at his success.

  “It is quite true,” he said, “I’m successful! There can be no doubt about it,” he added, for he caught sight of a group of people who were certainly talking about him, “saying,” he said to himself, “‘He is the painter’”; and when Mr. Ripple, a young man who wrote for the papers, approached him, saying, “I want to introduce you to” — mentioning several people of title — Lewis heard a voice saying again within him: “You’re successful, you’re successful.” He received the compliments paid him with tact, saying that he was pleased they liked his pictures, and this mixture of modesty and pleasure in their judgments was of advantage to him. He made many conquests that evening, and the most useful of these was Mr. Ripple, who he could see accepted him as a man of genius.

  “Mr. Seymour,” he said, “will you come with me where I can listen to your views on modern painting?” And Lewis answered: “I shall be delighted if I can tell you
anything that will be of use to you in your articles. I believe you write for the newspapers. Come into the study.”

  “At the end of the library there is a room free from hats and cloaks where we can sit for a few minutes,” Mr. Ripple said.... “I’m engaged for a waltz not very far ahead. But just tell me your views on mural painting.”

  Lewis tried to gather up his ideas and Ripple tried to understand, and after a few minutes he said: “I think I must return to the ballroom now, but I hope we shall meet again and have an opportunity of discussing this matter more thoroughly. I think I understand, and you may depend on me to give an artistic expression to your views. I believe you are going to Paris very soon,” he added; and Lewis, seeing an opportunity for advertisement, replied:

  “Not to study decoration specially — I have my own ideas about that — but portrait-painting, which must not be ignored by an artist. If you should ever come to Paris you will not fail to call on me at my hotel, which hotel Mrs. Bentham will give you the name of.”

  A few minutes afterwards Lewis saw Ripple gliding and whirling about the ballroom with a young lady in white muslin in his arms, exhibiting, Lewis was fain to admit; great skill in avoiding collisions; stopping at judicious moments, and taking advantage of every opening, pushing his partner backwards or bringing her forwards to her great delight and to his own; Ripple looking upon himself as pastmaster of the art of Terpsichore.

  “Why are you not dancing?” Ripple said, stopping in front of Lewis.

  “I’m afraid I’m not an expert in dancing,” he answered.