Complete Works of F Marion Crawford

by F. Marion Crawford

  ‘Fie!’ cried Madame Bernard. ‘You have no human feeling at all!’

  ‘I am sorry,’ answered the physician, with a smile, ‘but it is my business to have a head instead. You asked my opinion and I have given it, as I would to another doctor. The old-fashioned ones would laugh at me, the younger ones would understand.’

  ‘If you could only make the poor child sleep a little! Is there nothing?’

  ‘She is not neurasthenic,’ the doctor objected. ‘It would be of no use to give her sleeping medicines, for after a few days they would have no effect, except to excite her nerves unnaturally.’

  ‘Or something to give her an appetite,’ suggested Madame Bernard vaguely.

  ‘She has an excellent appetite if she only knew it. The reason why she does not eat is that she does not know she is hungry, though she is half starved. I served in the African campaign when I was a young military surgeon. I have seen healthy men faint for want of food when they had plenty at hand because they could not realise that they were hungry in their intense preoccupation. Great emotions close the entrance to the stomach, often for a considerable time. It is well known, and it is easier than you think to form the habit of living on next to nothing. It is the first step that counts.’

  ‘As they said of Saint Denis when he carried his head three steps after it was cut off,’ said Madame Bernard thoughtfully, and without a smile.

  ‘Precisely,’ the doctor assented. ‘I myself have seen a man sit his horse at a full gallop, without relaxing his hold, for fifty yards after he had been shot through the head. The seat of the nerves that direct automatic motion is not in the brain, but appears to be in the body, near the spine. When it is not injured, what used to be called unconscious cerebration may continue for several seconds after death. Similarly, bodily habits, like feeling hunger or being insensible to it, appear to have their origin in those ganglions and not in any sort of thought. Consequently, thought alone, without a strong exercise of the will, has little effect upon such habits of the body. When a man does a thing he does not mean to do, and says “I cannot help it,” he is admitting this fact. If you were to ask Donna Angela if she means to starve herself to death deliberately, she would deny it with indignation, but would tell you that she really cannot eat, and meanwhile she is starving. Give her a comparatively harmless illness like the measles, severe enough to break up the ordinary automatic habits of the body, and she will eat again, with an excellent appetite. In all probability I could give her the measles by artificial means, but unfortunately that sort of treatment is not yet authorised!’

  The young doctor, who was not by any means a dreamer, seemed much amused at his own conclusion, which looks absurd even on paper, and Madame Bernard did not believe a word he said. In questions of medicine women are divided into two great classes, those who will consult any doctor and try anything, and those who only ask the doctor’s opinion when they are forced to, and who generally do precisely the opposite of what he suggests. This is a more practical view and is probably the safer, if they must go to one of the two extremes. Moreover, doctors are so much inclined to disagree that when three of them give a unanimous opinion it is apt to be worthless.

  The only immediate result of Madame Bernard’s consultation with the doctor was that she disappointed one of her pupils the next day in order to gain an hour, which she devoted to making a very exquisite ‘mousse de volaille’ for Angela. The poor girl was much touched, but could only eat two or three mouthfuls, and the effort she made to overcome her repugnance was so unmistakable that the good little Frenchwoman was more anxious for her than hurt at the failure.

  She had tried two sciences, she said to herself, but the doctor of medicine had talked the nonsense of theories to her, and the combined wisdom of Vatel, Brillat-Savarin, and Carême had proved fruitless. A person who could not eat Madame Bernard’s ‘mousse de volaille’ could only be cured by a miracle. Accordingly, she determined to consult a churchman without delay, and went out early in the afternoon. Angela did not notice that she was dressed with more than usual care, as if for a visit of importance.

  She had been gone about half-an-hour, and the young girl was sitting in her accustomed place, listless and apathetic as usual, when the door-bell rang, and a moment later the woman-servant came in, saying that a foreign gentleman was on the landing who insisted on seeing Angela, even though she was alone. After giving a long and not flattering description of his appearance, the woman held out the card he had given her. Angela glanced at it and read the name of Filmore Durand, and above, in pencil, half-a-dozen words: ‘I have brought you a portrait.’

  Angela did not understand in the least, though she tried hard to concentrate her thoughts.

  ‘Ask the gentleman to come in,’ she answered at last, hardly knowing what she said.

  She turned her face to the window again, and in the course of thirty seconds, when she was roused by Durand’s voice in the room, she had almost forgotten that he was in the house. She had not heard English spoken since she had left his studio on the morning when her father died, and she started at the sound. For weeks, nothing had made such an impression on her.

  She rose to receive the great painter, who was standing near the table in the middle of the room, looking at her in surprise and real anxiety, for she was little more than a shadow of the girl he had painted six weeks or two months earlier. He himself had brought in a good-sized picture, wrapped in new brown paper; it stood beside him on the floor, reaching as high as his waist, and his left hand rested on the upper edge. He held out the other to Angela, who took it apathetically.

  ‘You have been very ill,’ he said in a tone of concern.

  ‘No,’ she answered. ‘I am only a little tired. Will you not sit down?’

  She sank into her seat again, and one thin hand lay on the cushioned arm of the chair. Instead of seating himself, Durand lifted the picture, still wrapped up, and set it upright on the table, so that it faced her.

  ‘I heard,’ he said in a low voice, ‘so I did this for you from memory and a photograph.’

  There was a sudden crackling and tearing of the strong paper as he ripped it off with a single movement, and then there was absolute silence for some time. Angela seemed not even to breathe, as she leaned forward with parted lips and unwinking, wondering eyes.

  Then, without even a warning breath, a cry broke from her heart.

  ‘He is not dead! You have seen him again! He is alive — they have cheated me!’

  Then she choked and leaned back, pressing her handkerchief to her mouth.

  Instead of answering, the painter bent his head and looked down sideways at his own astounding handiwork, and for the second time in that year he was almost satisfied. Presently, as Angela said nothing more, he was going to move the canvas, to show it in a better light, but she thought he meant to take it away.

  ‘No!’ she cried imperatively. ‘Not yet! Let me see it — let me understand — —’

  Her words died away and she was silent again, her eyes fixed on the portrait. At last she rose, came forward, and laid both her thin hands on the narrow black and gold frame.

  ‘I must have it,’ she said. ‘You must let me have it, though I cannot pay for it. But I will some day. I will work till I can earn enough money, or till I die — and if that comes soon, they will give you back the picture. You cannot take it away!’

  Durand saw that she had not understood.

  ‘It is for you,’ he said. ‘I painted it to give to you. You see, after your father died, I kept yours — I never meant them to have it, but it seemed as if I owed you something for it, and this is to pay my debt. Do you see?’

  ‘How kind you are!’ she cried. ‘How very, very kind! I do not quite follow the idea — my head is always so tired now — but I knew you would understand how I should feel — if I accepted it without any return!’

  So far as arithmetic went, the man of genius and the broken-hearted girl were equally far from ordinary reckoning. Durand knew
that by a turn of luck he had been able to keep the only portrait he had ever been sorry to part with when it was finished, and he was intimately convinced that he owed somebody something for such an unexpected pleasure; on her side, Angela was quite sure that unless the portrait of the man she had loved was to be an equivalent for some sort of obligation she could not be satisfied to keep it all her life unpaid for.

  It filled the little sitting-room with light and colour, as a Titian might have done; it was as intensely alive as Giovanni Severi had been — the eyes were full of those quick little coruscations of fire that had made them so unlike those of other men, the impulsive nostrils seemed to quiver, the healthy young blood seemed to come and go in the tanned cheeks, the square shoulders were just ready to make that quick, impatient little movement that had been so characteristic of him, so like the sudden tension of every muscle when a thoroughbred scents sport or danger. No ordinary artist would ever have seen all there was in the man, even in a dozen sittings, but the twin gifts of sight and memory had unconsciously absorbed and held the whole, and a skill that was never outdone in its time had made memory itself visible on the canvas. Something that was neither a ‘harmless illness’ nor a ‘miracle’ had waked Angela from her torpor.

  ‘How can I thank you?’ she asked, after a long pause. ‘You do not know what it is to me to see his living face — you will call it an illusion — it seems as if — —’

  She broke off suddenly and pressed her handkerchief to her lips again.

  ‘Only what you call the unreal can last unchanged for a while,’ the painter said, catching at the word she had used, and thinking more of his art than of her. ‘Only an ideal can be eternal, but every honest attempt to give it shape has a longer life than any living creature. Nature makes only to destroy, but art creates for the very sake of preserving the beautiful.’

  She heard each sentence, but was too absorbed in the portrait to follow his meaning closely. Perhaps it would have escaped her if she had tried.

  ‘Only good and evil are everlasting,’ she said, almost unconsciously repeating words she had heard somewhere when she was a child.

  Durand looked at her quickly, but he saw that she was not really thinking.

  ‘What is “good”?’ he asked, as if he were sure that there was no answer to the question.

  It attracted her attention, and she turned to him; she was coming back to life.

  ‘Whatever helps people is good,’ she said.

  ‘The French proverb says “Help thyself and God will help thee,”’ suggested Durand.

  ‘No, it should be “Help others, and God will help you,”’ Angela answered.

  The artist fixed his eyes on her as he nodded a silent assent; and suddenly, though her face was so changed, he knew it was more like his portrait of her than ever, and that the prophecy of his hand was coming to fulfilment.

  He stayed a moment longer, and asked if he could be of any service to her or Madame Bernard. She thanked him vaguely, and almost smiled. He felt instinctively that she was thinking of what she had last said, and was wishing that some one would tell her how she might do something for others, rather than that another should do anything for her.

  She went with him to the door at the head of the stairs and let him out herself.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said, ‘thank you! You don’t know what you have done for me!’

  He looked at her in thoughtful silence for a few seconds, holding her hand as if they were old friends.

  ‘There is no such thing as death,’ he said gravely.

  And with this odd speech he left her and went slowly down the narrow stone steps; and though she watched him till he disappeared at the next landing, he did not once turn his head.

  When she was in the sitting-room she set the framed picture on a straight chair near the window and sat down before it in her accustomed seat; and Durand’s last words came back to her again and again, as if they were begging to be remembered and understood. Her memory brought with them many exhortations and sayings from the sacred books, but none of them seemed to mean just what she knew that little speech of his must mean if she could quite understand it.

  She had come to life again unexpectedly, and the spell of her dreadful solitude was broken. She did not think it strange that her eyes were dry as she gazed at the well-loved face, while the inner voice told her that there was ‘no such thing as death.’ The dead man had done his duty, and he expected her to do hers until the time came for them to meet for ever.

  In the aimless wandering of her thoughts during the past weeks she had only understood that he was gone. In an uncounted moment, while she had been turning over the leaves of a book, or idly talking with Madame Bernard, or plucking a withered leaf from one of the plants outside the window, he had been fighting for his life and had lost it. Perhaps she had been quietly asleep just then. She had heard people say they were sure that if anything happened to those they dearly loved, some warning would reach them; she had heard tales of persons appearing at the moment of their death to those dearest to them, and even to indifferent people. Such stories were but idle talk, for while she had been reading the news out to Madame Bernard, she had been expecting to hear that the expedition was advancing successfully on its way, she had been wondering what chance there was of getting a letter from the interior, she had been intimately convinced that Giovanni was safe, well, and making good progress, when he had been dead a fortnight.

  Madame Bernard had read the details, so far as they were known, but she had wisely said nothing except that the news was fully confirmed. Angela herself had refused to touch a newspaper since that day; it had been enough that he was gone — to know how, or even to guess, would be a suffering she could not face. What had been found of the poor men who had perished had been brought home; there had been a great military funeral for them; their names were inscribed for ever on the roll of honour. In time, when the political situation changed, an effort would be made to avenge their death, no doubt; for every man who had been murdered a hundred would be slain, or more, if possible, till even a Scythian might feel satisfied that their angry spirits were appeased by blood. Angela knew nothing of all this, for she never left the house except to go to early mass every day, and Madame Bernard never spoke of the dead man nor of the lost expedition.

  When the governess came home, a little after sunset, Angela was still sitting before the picture, her chin resting on her hand and her elbow on her knee as she leaned forward to see better in the failing light. The girl turned her head with a bright smile, and Madame Bernard started in surprise when she saw the portrait.

  ‘It is he!’ she cried. ‘It is he, to the very life!’

  ‘Yes,’ Angela answered softly, ‘it is Giovanni. He has been telling me that I must do my part, as he did his. He is waiting for me, but I cannot go to him till my share is done.’

  She was gazing at the face again, while Madame Bernard looked from it to her in undisguised astonishment.

  ‘I do not understand, my dear,’ she said very gently. ‘Who has brought you this wonderful picture?’

  She hardly expected an explanation, and she guessed that the portrait was Durand’s work, for few living painters could have made such a likeness, and none would have painted it in that way, which was especially his own. To her surprise Angela turned on her chair without rising, and told her just what had happened, since he had come in early in the afternoon bringing the picture with him. When she had finished she turned to it again, as if there were nothing more to be said, and at that moment Coco began to talk in a tone that made further conversation impossible. Madame Bernard took him on her hand and disappeared with him.

  When she came back, Angela was standing on a chair holding up the portrait with both hands and trying to hang it by the inner edge of the frame on an old nail she had found already driven into the wall. Madame Bernard at once began to help her, as if not at all surprised at her sudden energy, though it seemed nothing less than miraculous.

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p; They succeeded at last, and both got down from their chairs and drew back two steps to judge of the effect.

  ‘It is a little too high,’ Angela said thoughtfully. To-morrow I will get a cord and two rings to screw into the frame at the back, and then we will hang it just as it should be.’

  ‘Perhaps we could put it in a better light,’ Madame Bernard suggested. ‘The room is so dark now that one cannot judge of that.’

  ‘He must be where he can see me,’ Angela said.

  Her friend looked puzzled, and the young girl smiled again, quite naturally.

  ‘I am not dreaming,’ she said, as if answering a question not spoken. ‘I do not mean that the picture can really see, any more than I believe that what they call “miraculous images” of saints are the saints themselves! But when I see the eyes of the portrait looking straight at me, I feel that he himself must see me, from where he is; and he will see me do my part, as he has done his. At least, I hope I may.’

  She went to her own room, and Madame Bernard followed her to light the little lamp for her as she had always done of late. But to-day Angela insisted on doing it herself.

  ‘You must not wait on me any more,’ said the girl. ‘I have been very idle for weeks, but I did not understand, and you will forgive me, because you are so good and kind.’

  ‘You are a little angel, my dear!’ cried Madame Bernard, much affected. ‘They did right to name you Angela!’

  But Angela shook her head, as she put the paper shade over the cheap lamp, and then went to the window to close the inner shutters before drawing the chintz curtains.