Lord Markham roused himself from a brief reverie.
“I’m sure you would!” he said. “You are very much in love!”
‘ A pretty blush coloured her cheeks.
“I certainly am!” she admitted. “I thought you were, too!”
He started.
“I?”
“Yes! With me!”
He looked so utterly confounded, that she smiled and pointed a little white finger at him admonishingly.
“There! Now you begin to know yourself! I don’t really mean that I thought you were in love with me — I mean that I thought that you thought you were in love with me! That makes such a difference, you know! I knew all the time that you were not — you don’t know what love means! You’ve just been looking out for a suitable wife — a woman likely to be an agreeable companion and household manager, educated enough to do the honours of your fine old place in England. But love! You haven’t given it a chance in your heart or soul! Forgive me! — I know I’m speaking pretty plainly — but you’re rather a pleasant sort of Englishman — though you’re a bit too satisfied with yourself — and I’d like to see you making the best of life.”
He smiled somewhat cynically.
“And the best — is?”
“Well, it isn’t what half of your ‘smart set’ over in Europe take it to be,” she replied, quietly, and with deep earnestness. “It isn’t planning all day for one’s own selfish pleasure or secret intrigue. It’s just hard work, love, and loyalty! Anyhow, that’s what it is to me. Some of you Englishmen marry us American women for our dollars when we have them — and some of us American women marry you Englishmen because you have titles. That’s all wrong. Dollars are no good unless you’ve got someone you love to spend them for — and titles are just ‘bunkum’ that can be bought for a few thousand pounds. They used to mean something in the very very old days, at the beginning of things, but they mean nothing now, being just ‘bought honours,’ and honour that’s paid for is no honour at all. So you see titles don’t appeal to me, though yours is all right and comes direct to you from a groom of the chambers who no doubt helped that villainous old Henry VIII in his love-affairs!
What I call the ‘best of life’ is to work hard so that you have sufficient to make yourself happy and others, too — and to Une as hard as you work! Then ‘God’s in His heaven, all’s right with the world!’”
He looked at her animated face rather wistfully. “I’m sorry I’m too late!” he said. “For perhaps I might have learned from you — how to love!”
She smiled.
“No one can teach you that!” she answered. “It just comes!” She paused a moment, then added, playfully: “But you’ve got so many old-fashioned notions that I rather wonder love isn’t among them!”
“Old-fashioned notions!” he echoed. “I really think you are mistaken in me—”
“Oh, no, I’m not!” she interposed, laughingly. “You are of course ‘up-to-date’ in the way society amuses itself — but your ideas of the relations of man and woman in the economy of progress and government are as fixed as a very rusty nail embedded in concrete! For instance, you don’t like the idea of a woman dealing in stock and shares. Now, do you?”
“Well, no! — not much!” he confessed. “It seems so unusual—”
“Yet you don’t mind a woman going out charing?” pursued Claudia. “It doesn’t hurt you any to see her poor hands blistered with soda suds, and her face red and swollen and spoilt with ugly effort, such as stooping over other folks’ dirty floors and doorsteps? You think that’s quite a suitable and ‘womanly’ occupation?”
He was silent, but his glance involuntarily strayed to Claudia’s own pretty hands, small, well-shaped, white as milk, and adorned with one or two choice and sparkling rings.
“And you don’t mind it if a woman entrusts a male broker to buy shares for her,” she went on. “As long as one of your sex has a finger in the pie it’s all right! And if the male broker gives her a stupid lead and persuades her to make a stupid speculation, or cheats her out of some of her money, you say at once it’s her fault— ‘women shouldn’t speculate!’ But when a woman takes the trouble to study and to learn the ins and outs of the world’s money-markets, and uses all the foresight and instinct nature has bestowed upon her to win success for herself as well as for others without making herself physically hideous in the process — that’s unwomanly!”
He fidgeted uneasily in his chair.
“You put it very bluntly,” he said.
“Yes — I am blunt!” she admitted. “I like straight ways and straight argument. See!” and she suddenly took up the rose which Markham had noticed lying on a heap of account books. “There’s a sweet, dainty flower — that’s like an innocent woman when she first begins life in the land of dreams! Some of you men like to gather such a flower, wear it and crush it in the wearing, and then — when it fades — throw it away! Ah, I know! That’s the master-and-slave notion, but it doesn’t suit me! I’d — I’d rather be the half of an old hickory nutshell!” and she laughed happily. “It’s a hard, plain thing — but it lasts!”
She put the rose aside, got up from her chair, and held out her hand.
“Time flies! Good-bye!” said she.
He got up also, a little slowly and reluctantly.
“Is it good-bye?” he asked.
“Yes, I think so!” she smiled. “Of course! I’ll settle accounts of your little gamble with me! and then — then—”
“Then — what?”
“Why, then, I hope you’ll go straight home to beautiful England and forget all about me! You’ll have had an experience of a ‘new’ woman, and you’ll be all the better for it! Look at a dear, sweet, fresh English country girl’s pretty face and try to fall in love! Don’t think of yourself at all — think only of her! And when you really do fall in love, stay deep in it! — you’ll never find a warmer corner to be safe and cosy and sheltered from all the worries of the world! Try, won’t you? It’ll do you so much good!”
He took her hand and pressed it gently.
“Very well! I’ll try! But I shall never forget you!”
“Won’t you? Well! Perhaps not!” and she looked frankly up into his eyes. “Some folks say I’m not an easy person to forget! Besides, you’ve had quite a time of it, hunting me round, and trying to find out my ‘business.’ And now you know! You know it’s just what every real woman would like to do — to earn enough money of her own to help make beautiful the home she is going to live in with the man she loves. That’s all! And as long as she does it honourably and intelligently it doesn’t matter how she does it. The pre-Victorian idea was that the man should do it all while the woman sat uselessly simpering, clothed in white muslin and affecting a general helplessness, and then when he had slaved enough and got a home together, that she should fling herself on his shoulders like a ‘burgeon’ as the inimitable Mrs. Gamp says. I don’t want to be a ‘burgeon’ — I’m trying to carry part of the luggage! I want to be the imagined lever of Archimedes and lift the world for my man! I want to be wings, light, power, brightness, joy, everything to him! See!”
He held her hand a little longer — a little more tenderly.
“Yes,” he answered, quietly. “I see! Good-bye!”
Her smile flashed up in his face like sunshine.
“Don’t take it badly!” she said. “Good-bye!”
He glanced at the rose she had set aside.
“May I have it?” he asked, softly.
“Why, certainly!”
She gave it to him, coquettishly touching it with her lips as she did so. He was conscious of a quickened heart-beat.
“Too bad!” he said, smiling.
“Yes! So it is! But it’s just a fancy! To bring you luck — and love! Good-bye!”
Another two or three minutes, and the sharp-featured office boy had shown him out into the surging roar and rush of Wall Street. He stood for a moment, half deafened by the noise and bewildered by the mo
vement, holding the rose in his hand with the abstracted air of a child who has plucked a flower without knowing what it is. Then he saw his automobile approaching, and entering it was driven back to the Astor House.
He saw Claudia no more. Within the week he received, as she had promised, his five hundred pounds doubled into a thousand — but no word came from her, personally, to accompany the formal note of settlement. And, having nothing further to expect or to hope for, he made his preparations for returning to England. Just before leaving New York, however, he chanced to visit an art gallery where there were some very fine examples of sculpture by a young Roman artist, who, discarding the criminal perversions of modern taste, had evidently founded his methods of work on the unrivalled Greek models. One statue in particular struck his fancy called “The Rancher” — the life-size figure of a man in the act of throwing a lasso. The alert, proud, eager form in the rough “down west” attire was superb — the face exceptionally fine in feature and bold in expression. The more he looked at it the more he fancied it, and finally he decided to purchase it for the gallery at Markham Hall. But when he came to ask the price, he was told it was not for sale.
“It’s a very fine piece of work,” said the art dealer. “One of the finest this new man has yet done. But it’s a commission, and we’re only allowed to exhibit it as a favour. It belongs to Claudia Strange.”
Lord Markham winced ever so slightly.
“The lady stock-broker?” he queried, with a forced smile.
“That’s it! I think — I’m not quite sure! — that it’s the statue of an intimate friend of hers — done from the life.”
Markham nodded.
“I see! Her future husband, perhaps?”
“I couldn’t say! Maybe. But I don’t know. All my business is to see that it goes down safely to her place in the country when we’ve done showing. Nothing else you’d like?”
“No, thanks!” and Markham looked long and with a curious sense of resentment at the fine, lithe white marble figure towering above him on its pedestal, the very embodiment of splendid manhood. Claudia’s words rang thrillingly in his ears— “I want to be the imagined lever of Archimedes and lift the world for my man! I want to be wings, light, power, brightness, joy, everything to him! See!”
Yes, he saw! And for the first time a glimmering guess of the true nature of a great love dawned upon him — for the first time his own ways of life seemed unutterably poor and mean, and the vague, chronic boredom of his “set” in England depressed him like the shadow of an approaching cloud. There was joy to be found in life — more joy than he had ever known, if one could only attune oneself to meet it!
Yet, somehow he never found the keynote of the melody! The light of a visionary Paradise which had momentarily flashed across his mind with Claudia’s words soon vanished on his return to England. Convention, and the terrible vagueness of thought and speech, which, like a blight, characterizes English social life, gradually enveloped him in its mental mist and rain once more, and he sank easily back into the old familiar ruts of habit such as every nobly born Britisher makes for himself and wherein he loves to remain. Starched, stiff, and severely accurate in outward conduct and speech, with only occasional lapses from the path of moral rectitude, of which his world knew nothing, he passed his days languidly and uselessly enough, in sublime indifference to most happenings, and never married, because, firstly, it was too much trouble, and secondly, because he was convinced no woman would exactly suit him.
Only once again did he hear of Claudia, and that was when she sent him her wedding cards. Then she passed out of his life, though not entirely out of his memory, and when a friend just over from the States talked to him one day, years later, of a successful speculation he had lately made and mentioned the “famous” stock-broking firm of “Strange and Co.” he was not surprised.
“A woman manages the concern,” said his informant— “and manages it well, too! She married the other day, and they say her husband is a millionaire twice over! No wonder, if his wife works his business for him!”
“No wonder!” murmured Markham, lazily. “Some women are very clever.”
“They are!” assented his friend. “No doubt about it! And, by Jove, Markham, they’ve got their chance of an inning now!”
Lord Markham looked at him quizzically across the top of the newspaper he was reading.
“Think so?” he queried. “Well! What then?”
“Why, we shall have a changed world — that’s all! And the Book of Genesis will have to be revised!” Markham laughed.
“It’s time!” he said. “It’s had rather too long a run of public favour!”
“You believe we should accept women as our equals? Mentally and intellectually?”
“For our own comfort and convenience I don’t believe we should,” answered Markham. “But, whether we like it or not, I’m afraid we must. ‘The race is to the swift and the battle to the strong’ — and just now women are proving themselves both swift and strong. Their goal is in sight.”
“I thought you entirely condemned the idea of female equality with man,” said the other.
“So I do!” declared Markham, emphatically. “If I had my own natural way I would have a woman obey me to the letter or I’d know the reason why! I have all the love of tyranny in me common to our sex. But — it won’t do! Father Abraham has had his day, and we can’t turn our Hagars into the wilderness with impunity. So I resign myself to the inevitable.”
“That’s why you don’t marry?”
“Exactly. That’s why I don’t marry.”
His friend laughed.
“Lucky escape for some woman, if those are your sentiments!”
Lord Markham’s eyes lifted themselves slightly under his heavy eyelids.
“Quite right! A lucky escape for some woman.”
The conversation ended. And Markham partook of his usual grilled cutlet in his usual corner of the club at his usual table, in lonely state, and tried not to think of the wings, light, power, brightness, and joy “some woman” was to — another man!
REJECTED!
THE STORY OF A PICTURE
A BARE, comfortless room with a top-light — a room large enough to be called by courtesy a “studio” — and a worn, haggard-faced man, gifted enough to be called without courtesy an “artist,” these are among the daily commonplaces of London, and the writer of this tale makes apology for intruding them afresh upon the wearied public, already over-familiar with the sordid aspect they present. Yet sometimes, despite the sordidness, a wonder of art breaks forth from these unlovely surroundings, even as a gloriously winged butterfly breaks from a chill worm-like chrysalis. For years upon suffering years Wilfrid Turner had hoped against hope to produce something — anything — that might command not only the attention and admiration of so-called “connoisseurs” in art, but purchasers as well. For he was desperately poor; he had lived a half-starved life for the sake of the dreams within his brain — and he had painted pictures so unlike the pictures of “popular” painters that ordinary people who wanted “things to hang up” on their walls were afraid to buy them lest they should be accused by some pompous critic of “false taste in art.” False taste or otherwise, many private art lovers had a sneaking admiration for Wilfrid Turner’s work — they liked his bold conceptions — his noble and splendid breadth of colour — and they would say kindly yet hesitatingly that it was “very fine! — but — well! perhaps — was it a little too much colour?” — ought it not to be “more subdued in tone and treatment?” and so on. Meanwhile, the man himself hungered and thirsted — his visions fed his soul, but his body was a lean and unsatisfied creature — almost wolfish in its craving for an all-round satisfying meal. The few small studies he was able to dispose of to rapacious dealers for some casual pounds here and there just barely kept a roof over his head and supplied his necessary painting materials — but for all creature comforts he had to grind himself down to the smallest possible limit. He had relati
ves, and one or two good friends, but he would have scorned to ask any of them for assistance. He had made his own bed and was prepared to lie upon it, even though it were all thorns.
Just now he stood before his easel, his attention divided between the large, finished canvas upon it and a square, flat packing-case which, heavily insured, had arrived from the north of Scotland that morning. The packing-case stood up on its narrow end, its addressed label turned toward him, and every now and then he found himself reading his own name upon it with a curious fascination. Then, removing his gaze from it, he would look at his picture — a fine rendering of a sudden squall at sea. The waves, riding over each other’s backs, were powerfully and truthfully drawn — boldly depicted both in form and colour, so that they almost appeared to break out of the canvas in living, rushing foam — and he knew that he had done well. Without any poor pride, he felt that he had realized his best self in his work, and his artistic conscience was as satisfied as ever any artistic conscience can be.
“But it’s all of no use!” he said, with a sigh which he quickly checked and turned into a yawn. “Even if it were the greatest thing done this year, David would keep it out.”
The man he thought of, Ambrose David, was an R.A., and a member of the Academy Council — he had, by dint of sheer push, impudence, and “touting for notice” and patronage, succeeded in trampling his way to the front. His painting was bad — meretricious and “glazy,” with the weak kind of “finish” one sees on a cheap oleograph, but it was, as the suburban young lady would say, “soft” and for “soft” folks effective. He was a jealous little man; having come of a common stock he had not escaped the heritage of a common mind, full of small spites and enviousness. From the first he had realized that if once a work of Wilfrid Turner’s was “passed” by the council, it might possibly be the making of a new and great name in the art world. This he determined to prevent by every means in his power — such means as are employed every day. He had a voice — a rough one and a coarse one — and he could make it heard. He also had a whisper — a sibilant, suggestive whisper, and he could make that heard also. He had used both voice and whisper against Wilfrid Turner to suit his own purposes — in the art dubs and out of them — at studios and beyond them — and not a member of the Academy Council but had heard his playful pleasantries concerning “poor Turner” whom he called “an inspired ass.”
Delphi Collected Works of Marie Corelli Page 954
