Now there were, of course, many ways in which Hans excelled his sister—in intelligence, in artistic power; even, if the truth were known, in beauty itself. But these were not aspects of life which were dreamed of in Portia’s philosophy. As she herself expressed it, they were the pursuits of ‘ half-wits’; and the facts that Hans was both a brilliant painter and also a very intelligent young man, simply did not exist for her. What she reckoned was that he could play neither tennis nor polo; he could not ride; he did not dance. Portia wanted Hans to look on while she displayed her skill in these directions—directions too, all of them in which, as a boy, he might have been expected to beat her. To have him there, made her feel more than ever satisfied with herself.
Yet, every time that polo was played, Alethea contrived to have made some other arrangement for Hans. The holidays were a silent duel between mother and daughter, though neither of them would have admitted it even to herself.
Portia liked Hans to be seen by her friends, because she hoped they would be impressed by her superiority to her brother; while Alethea’s aim was to keep him out of sight. But he must never know what she was doing. She had seen how her husband’s life had been poisoned from the outset by the heartless scoffing of schoolboys who derided him because his mother was a dwarf; and she was resolved to save Hans from hearing such mockery directed against himself. At Cairn Gorm he saw no strangers. Everyone in the village had known him since he was a child, and they were all his friends. The artists whom he met in Mr. Crosby’s studio did not measure him by his inches; they considered him as a great artist in the making. So the boy had grown up with none of the morbid self-consciousness which had made his father so unhappy a man. When he was at Brokeyates, Alethea was haunted by the fear that something might open his eyes. She set herself so to control events that Hans should never intercept upon the face of a stranger an expression which might suggest to him that he was tragically unlike other people. That he was different from the rest of the world he must indeed realize; but hitherto he had not learnt that this difference need be a defect. The boy was so accustomed to Nicholas’s gloomy manner when they were together, that he had never connected it with himself. He accepted it as his father’s normal disposition. It was true that Portia never failed to remind him that he was absurdly small for his age, but he measured nothing by her standards, and he simply did not care what she said. It was from a stranger, and even most of all from a kindly one, that Alethea dreaded the possibility of enlightenment for him. She had learnt from Nicholas that pity can scorch a proud and sensitive nature.
So without apparent intention on the part of any one, it always came about that on polo days, or on days when Portia had a tennis party, Hans had something else to do. He and his mother were off on one expedition or another. There was always something in the neighbourhood which Hans wanted to paint, and so he and his mother used to go away to sketch together, and it was Alethea who fixed the dates for these excursions. It was with consummate cleverness that she thus saved her boy from contact with strangers, and on these occasions she always knew that Nicholas would support her. He too did not want Hans to be seen.
Chapter Twenty-Four
HANS had a large room at the top of the house which he made into a studio. It was a great attic, with white-washed walls, oak rafters, and uneven floor; and he amused himself by painting fantastic pictures all over the walls. Here, one Christmas holidays, he painted Alethea’s portrait. No one was allowed to see what he was doing, and he and his mother loved the long secret sittings while Nicholas was out on the farm, or in the park with a gun, and while Portia hunted or played hockey. No one disturbed them, and they laughed and talked gaily together.
This picture was the best thing Hans had ever done. It was a quiet, restrained composition, the figure perhaps a little archaic, for he had put Alethea into a rather stiff uncomfortable-looking chair, with none of the easy lounging character of the chair of to-day. It was, however, the kind of chair she liked, and the pose was very typical of her. She sat with her long thin hands laid upon the arms of the chair, her back very straight, and her head rather rigidly poised above the strangely sloping shoulders. Hans had placed her where the light fell straight upon her—the cold wavering winter light with snow in its chill gold; and much of the beauty of the picture was in the painting of that subdued and distant sunlight as it fell upon her.
While he painted her, she watched his eyes. Their colour was incalculable. It changed every hour. Now it was clear green, and then, a few moments later, it made her think of cowslips drowned in liquid light. And Hans’ expression varied with the colour of his eyes. Sometimes he might have been a pure visionary, his far-away gaze searching for the secrets which lie beyond the unreached horizons of the earth; and the next moment he was entirely absorbed in some detail of his picture—busy, careful, and concentrated. Then, all at once, an enchanting sauciness and fun peeped out of his eyes, and seemed the expression most natural to the odd slant in which they were set in his head.
It was two days before Christmas, and the post came late in the morning, so that Alethea’s letters were brought to her in the studio. She had a pile of Christmas cards, which she saw with a groan were mostly from people whom she had quite forgotten; and Hans had only one letter. It did not look interesting—a long business envelope with a foreign stamp. He did not open it, but he put it down beside him, and while Alethea looked at her letters, he hunted about for a tube of paint which he had lost.
‘Did you get any letters?’ Alethea asked at last.
‘No. O yes I did, but I haven’t opened it. It looks like an advertisement, and it comes from Melbourne.’
‘From Melbourne?’
‘It’s a Melbourne postmark,’ said Hans, picking up the envelope which he had thrown down.
‘Give it to me,’ said Alethea in a queer altered voice. With the name of Melbourne, there had rushed back into her mind all that had been most unhappy in her life. What could be the meaning of this letter to Hans? Who could have written it? Her anxious watchful spirit at once dreaded some move on the part of Mrs. Roxerby. Was she trying to insert herself into her grandson’s life, and to give it that bitter twist which she had long ago put into the life of Nicholas? Alethea determined to keep the letter from Hans if she possibly could.
‘I expect it is really for your father,’ she said. ‘You know he used to live in Melbourne. He had a business there. Let me see what it is.’
She took the letter, possessed by a wild desire to throw it unopened into the fire. She was resolved to keep that evil little woman for ever out of Hans’ life; and who but she in Melbourne could possibly have known his name?
The letter was addressed to ‘ Hans Nicholas Archibald Roxerby’. Its writer must have made a study of the baptismal registers. There could be no doubt as to the identity of its sender; but Alethea wondered that even the malign curiosity of Mrs. Roxerby could have discovered all of Hans’ names.
‘Open it, and see if it is a Christmas present,’ said Hans, busy mixing paints.
‘I am afraid it doesn’t look much like that,’ said Alethea. She got out of her chair and went across to the fire. As she opened the envelope, she stood resting her foot upon the fender, and she held the letter towards the flames. She felt as if a viper might spring from it into the room.
It was a letter from a lawyer, and it told Hans that his grandmother was dead, and that she had left him the whole of her fortune.
Alethea felt dizzy. There swept over her the memory of the scene when that fortune had been renounced, and when that hateful little figure had stood in the library, and had mockingly demanded the child as well.
‘It is a Christmas present after all,’ she said faintly.
Hans looked up quickly, alarmed by the change in her voice. He put down his brushes and came to her.
‘What is the matter darling? Are you ill?’ he asked, his arm round her.
‘You had better read this letter for yourself,’ she said. She gave it to him, and
sat down rather suddenly.
Hans read it, completely mystified.
‘What does it mean?’ he asked. ‘ I didn’t know that I even had a grandmother.’ And then, as his eye fell upon Alethea’s altered face, he continued:
‘Tell me what it means. Do you mind so much that she is dead? Were you very fond of her?’
‘Fond of her? No. No darling. I only saw her once.’
‘Then why are you so unhappy?’ He was dreadfully concerned, and the look in his mother’s eyes drove out of his mind all thought of the fortune he had so unexpectedly inherited.
‘She was not kind to your father. She made him very miserable when he was a boy, and to hear of her again reminds me of very depressing things. But they are all past. I am not unhappy now. In fact, I can’t help feeling glad to know that she is dead at last.’
‘It seems to be a very large fortune,’ said Hans, looking again at the letter. He was beginning to realize that this was going to make a very great difference to them all.
‘Yes. She was very rich.’ Alethea said, ‘A great deal of her money really belonged to your father, but he gave it back to her, for reasons which … I can’t now tell you. Perhaps I had better show him the letter. May I have it? Though he has probably heard too that his mother is dead.’
She could not think how Nicholas would take this new development. She took the letter from Hans, and she went to find her husband.
He had heard nothing from Australia, and she handed him the letter without saying anything.
He read it silently.
After a few moments he said:
‘It is the best thing she could have done. I’m thankful it didn’t come to me, I shouldn’t have known what to do. But it’s fair that Hans should have it; and it will make things easier for the poor little chap.’
‘I expect she wanted to make amends.’
‘More probably she hoped she was punishing me,’ he answered.
Portia took the news with none of the mixture of feelings with which her parents had received the announcement of Hans’ fortune. She was delighted.
‘What luck for you!’ she exclaimed. ‘Now you needn’t paint any more.’
‘Needn’t paint any more? Why?’
‘Can’t you understand, my dear little idiot? You are so rich now that you need never do any more work. You won’t have to have a profession.’
Hans laughed.
‘All the more time for painting,’ he said.
‘Hans, you are potty!’ was Portia’s answer to this. But Hans had grown in her estimation now he had become a rich man. He would henceforth be someone to be reckoned with, and not only to be ridiculed.
‘You had better dash up to London in the motor and buy us all very grand Christmas presents,’ she said.
Nicholas looked at her. He was fond of his daughter, but at that moment he disliked her. Still, how was she to guess at the repulsion he felt for the money which was to come from Australia. He certainly had no wish to benefit by it himself.
Two days later, when he came into the dining-room for breakfast on Christmas morning, there faced him, standing on an easel, the portrait of Alethea. He had not even known that she was sitting to Hans. He stopped short.
‘This is a joint Christmas present from Hans and me,’ said Alethea.
‘We have done it between us,’ Hans added.
The picture was a revelation to Nicholas. There it stood before him, and it seemed that a new living creature had leapt into being before his eyes. It was a fresh presence in his house, suddenly alive, and the unexpected vision gave him a shock of startled pleasure. But the picture conveyed to him something beyond its own individual beauty. It was his first sight of anything painted by Hans, and there was no doubt that it was something of a masterpiece. The picture had not only shown him the beauty of Alethea in a fresh aspect, but it had given him another son. Hans was revealed to him no more as the poor little dwarf of whom he had never ceased to be ashamed, but as a man whose genius could not be doubted. And yet, till now he had been blind to it.
A series of emotions crossed his face, as he stood looking at the picture. Alethea watched him, her arm round Hans’ shoulder, and their two faces were lit with the fun of giving Nicholas such a surprise.
When he looked up, he saw them there, and his face was radiant.
‘What a wonderful present!’ he said. ‘It makes me tremendously proud of you both—the painter and the model; and still more proud that this picture is mine.’
He came across to where they were standing, and he flung his arm simultaneously round them both. Then he kissed first one, and then the other, with an equal tenderness. He had never kissed Hans before.
Chapter Twenty-Five
HANS left Brokeyates a few days after Christmas. He was working very hard that winter, as Mr. Crosby had arranged that an exhibition of his work should be given in London in the spring. Alethea regretted his going, for she saw that, for the first time, Nicholas was ready to make friends with his son. That portrait seemed to have broken down a barrier; and after Hans had left, Alethea several times found Nicholas looking at the picture with a rather touching expression on his face. He seemed to be reaching after something which he knew he had missed, and which was symbolized by the portrait of his wife. One day she asked him what he was thinking.
‘I am enjoying the beauty of that picture,’ he said.
‘Yet you don’t look happy.’
‘Perhaps because it shows me something which you and Hans have found, and which I have always missed.’
‘It is yours now.’
‘I mean it to be.’
He pressed her hand and said no more; but in his wife’s ears he seemed to have said a great deal. She felt that she had waited a lifetime for those few words.
Before Hans went back to Cairn Gorm, he gave Portia the Christmas present for which she had asked. It was a second hunter, so that she could now hunt an extra day in the week. At first she thought that it was because she had more days out, that the winter seemed so particularly enjoyable; but after a while she realized that each hunting day in itself had become unaccountably more pleasant. That feeling of exciting suspense with which she now went out every morning, was more acute than the mere anticipation of a good hunt. It was personal.
Portia liked admiration, and she had always had a good deal of it, for she was certainly a very handsome creature, especially on a horse. Yet there was something lacking in the kind of admiration she received. She knew that people thought her good looking, and yet her looks had never won lovers for her. She could always succeed in becoming the centre of a group, but she had never found herself the most important person in the life of any one individual.
And now she began to feel that she was; and it was a new experience.
For some time, she looked upon it as no more than a series of coincidences that when she wanted to go through a gate, General Fanshawe was so often there to open it for her. But as, time after time, they rode on together, often more engrossed in their own conversation than in the whereabouts of the hounds, Portia began to tell herself that this distinguished soldier was deliberately seeking her out. And as she realized this, she realized too that the young men of her own generation had far less judgment and poise than this new friend of hers, who, although still comparatively young, had achieved a position which gave to his least utterances the character of pronouncements. Portia liked confident assertions. She often made them herself: indeed she had no other idea of conversation.
It was over twenty years since Arthur Fanshawe had proposed marriage to anyone, and his single experience had not given him a relish for the practice. But with the passage of time, he had grown to remember that when he asked Alethea to marry him, he had merely done it to help her out of a scrape, and a scrape moreover in which the silly creature had been bent on entangling herself still further. He had even learnt to smile at the memory of the rebuff she had given him.
‘A chivalrous young fellow I was in thos
e days,’ he would tell himself, ‘although, boylike, I am afraid I did not hide from the girl that my own feelings were not involved. I expect she saw through me.’
He liked to remember that he had made this noble gesture, and he often thought that poor Alethea must regret more than he did that she had not taken the chance he had offered her. The prospect of marrying a millionaire had dazzled the poor girl; but she had discovered only too soon that the boasted Australian fortune had been nothing but a myth—a mere pretence on the part of the newcomer in order to give himself a good start in the neighborhood.
Yes, the Roxerbys had not taken long to run through the fortune which had made such a sensation when Nicholas arrived. In fact, their subsequent poverty had caused just as much gossip later on. When Arthur first of all found himself thinking about marrying Portia, he asked himself whether this was not a recrudescence of the old chivalry. Was he once more the knight errant coming to the aid of the daughter of an impoverished baronet?
He need not have vexed himself. He was, in fact, in love for the first time. Portia’s looks were very exciting to him, and he wanted her as he had never, in the old days, wanted her mother. This new desire gained in urgency from his consciousness that he was nearing fifty years of age: he felt that the season would soon be over when he might hope to gather rosebuds.
But the passage of time had made him cautious. He would not risk another refusal. He was therefore in no hurry to declare himself; although the fact that he was meditating this step made his presence curiously disturbing to the girl. It gave her a new kind of self-consciousness, and one that she found particularly agreeable. She felt Arthur’s eyes upon her, and they affected her as she had never been affected by the open appreciation of her other admirers. There was something secret in his expression—something between him and her alone. The consciousness of it heightened her beauty when she was with him.
Dwarf's Blood Page 18
