by Grant Allen
“Then he sometimes comes to the Riviera with you, does he?” Elsie asked listlessly. She loved Edie and dear old Mrs. Relf, and she was grateful to Warren for his chivalrous kindness; but she could hardly pretend to feel profoundly interested in him. There had never been more than one man in the world for her, and that man was now Winifred’s husband.
“He always comes,” Edie answered, with a significant stress on the word always. “Indeed, this is the very first year he’s ever missed coming since we first wintered here. He likes to be near us while we’re on the coast. It gives him a chance of varying his subjects. He says himself, he’s always inclined to judge of genius by its power of breaking out in a fresh place not always repeating its own successes. In summer he sketches round the mouth of the Thames and the North Sea, but in winter he always alters the venue to the Mediterranean. Variety’s good for a painter, he thinks: though, to be sure, that doesn’t really matter very much to him, because nobody ever by any chance buys his pictures.”
“Can’t he sell them, then?” Elsie asked more curiously.
“My dear, Warren’s a born artist, not a picture-dealer; therefore, of course, he never sells anything. If he were a mere dauber, now, there might be some chance for him. Being a real painter, he paints, naturally enough, but he makes no money.”
“But the real painter always succeeds in the end, doesn’t he?”
“In the end, yes; I don’t doubt that: within a century or two. But what’s the good of succeeding, pray, a hundred years after you’re dead and buried? The’ bankers won’t discount a posthumous celebrity for you. I should like to succeed while I was alive to enjoy it. I’d rather have a modest competence in the nineteenth century than the principal niche in the Temple of Fame in the middle of the twentieth. Besides, Warren doesn’t want to succeed at all, dear boy at least, not much. I wish to goodness he did. He only wants to paint really great pictures.”
That’s the same thing, isn’t it? or very nearly.”
“Not a bit of it. Quite the contrary in some cases. Warrens one of them. He’ll never succeed while he lives, poor child, unless his amiable sister succeeds in making him. And that’s just what I mean to do in time, too, dear. I mean to make Warren earn enough to keep himself and a wife and family.”
Elsie looked down at the carpet uneasily. It wanted darning. “Why didn’t he come this winter as usual?” she asked in haste, to turn the current of the conversation.
“Why? Well, why. What a question to ask! Just because you were here, Elsie.”
Elsie examined the holes in the Persian pattern on the floor by her side with minuter care and precision than ever. “That was very kind of him,” she said after a pause, defining one of them with the point of her shoe accurately.
“Too kind,” Edie echoed “too kind, and too sensitive.”
“I think not,” Elsie murmured low. She was blushing visibly, and the carpet was engrossing all her attention.
“And I think yes,” Edie answered in a decisive tone. “And when I think yes, other people ought as a matter of course to agree with me. There’s such a thing as being too generous, too delicate, too considerate, too thoughtful for others. You’ve no right to swamp your own individuality. And I say, Warren ought to have brought the yawl round Elsie started. “Do you mean to say,” she cried, “he’s been as near as Nice without coming to see you?”
Edie nodded. “Ever since Christmas.”
“No! Not really?”
“Yes, my child. Really, or I wouldn’t say so. It’s a practice of mine to tell the truth and shame a certain individual. Warren couldn’t stop away from us any longer; so he took the yawl round by Gibraltar after after the I7th of December, you know.” Elsie smiled sadly. “And he’s been knocking about along the coast round here ever since, afraid to come on for fear of hurting your feelings, Elsie.”
Elsie rose and clasped her hands tight. “It was very kind of him,” she said. “He’s a dear good fellow. I think I could bear to meet him now. And in any case, I think he ought at least to come over and see you and your mother. It would be very selfish of me, very wrong of me to keep you all out of so much pleasure. Ask him to come, Edie. Tell him it would not hurt me very much to see him.”
Edie’s eyes flashed mischievous fire. “That’s a pretty sort of message to send any one,” she cried, with some slight amusement. “We usually put it in a politer form. May I vary it a little and tell him, Elsie, it will give you great pleasure to see him?”
“If you like,” Elsie answered, quite simply and candidly. He was a nice fellow, and he was Edie’s brother. She must grow accustomed to meeting him somehow. No man was anything at all to her now. And perhaps by this time he had quite forgotten his foolish fancy.
The celebrated centerboard yawl “Mud-Turtle,” of the port of London, Relf, master, seventeen tons registered burden, was at that moment lying up snugly by a wooden pier in the quaint little French harbor of St. Tropez, just beyond the blue peaks of the frontier mountains. When Potts next morning early brought a letter on board, addressed to the skipper, with an Italian stamp duly stuck in the corner, Warren Relf opened it hastily with doubtful expectations. Its contents made his honest brown cheek burn bright red. “My dear old Warren,” the communication ran shortly, “you may bring the yawl round here to San Remo as soon as you like. She says you may come; and what’s more, she authorizes me to inform you in the politest terms that it will give her very great pleasure indeed to see you. So you can easily imagine the pride and delight with which I am ever, Your affectionate and successful sister, Edie.”
“Edie’s a brick!” Warren said to himself with a bound of his heart; “and it’s really awfully kind of Elsie.”
Before ten o’clock that same morning, the celebrated centerboard yawl “Mud-Turtle,” manned by her owner and his constant companion, was under way with a favoring wind, and scudding like a seabird, with all canvas on, round the spit of Bordighera, on her voyage to the tiny harbor of San Remo.
CHAPTER XXIV.
THE BALANCE QUIVERS.
March, April, May passed away: anemones and asphodels came and went; narcissus and globeflower bloomed and withered; and Warren Relf, cruising about in the “Mud-Turtle” round the peacock-blue bays and indentations of the Genoese Riviera, had spent many cloudless days in quiet happiness at the pretty little villa among the clambering olive terraces on the slopes at San Remo. Elsie had learned at least to tolerate his presence now: she no longer blushed a vivid crimson when she saw him coming up the zigzag roadway; she wasn’t much more awkward before him, in fact, than with other creatures of his sex in general; nay, more, as a mere friend she rather liked and enjoyed his society than otherwise. Not to have liked Warren Relf, indeed, would have been quite unpardonable. The Relfs had all shown her so much kindness, and Warren himself had been so chivalrously courteous, that even a heart of stone might surely have melted somewhat toward the manly young painter. And Elsie’s heart, in spite of Hugh’s unkindness, was by no means stony. She found Warren, in his rough sailor clothes, always gentle, always unobtrusive, always thoughtful, always considerate; and as Edie’s brother, she got on with him quite as comfortably in the long run as could be expected of anybody under such trying circumstances.
At first, to be sure, she couldn’t be induced to board the deck of the busy little “Mud-Turtle.” But as May came round with its warm Italian sunshine, Edie so absolutely insisted on her taking a trip with them along that enchanted coast toward Monaco and Villefranche, beneath the ramping crags of the Tete du Chien, that Elsie at last gave way in silence, and accompanied them round the bays and’ headlands and roadsteads of the Riviera on more than one delightful outing. Edie was beginning, by her simple domestic faith in her brother’s profound artistic powers, to inspire Elsie, too, with a new sort of interest in Warren’s future. It began to dawn upon her slowly, in a dim chaotic fashion, that Warren had really a most unusual love for the byways of nature, and a singular faculty for reading and interpreting with lo
ving skill her hidden hieroglyphics. “My dear,” Edie said to her once, as they sat on deck and watched Warren laboring with ceaseless care at the minute growth of a spreading stain on a bare wall of seaward rock, “he shall succeed he must succeed! I mean to make him. He shall be hung. A man who can turn out work like that must secure in the end his recognition.”
“I don’t want recognition,” Warren answered slowly, putting a few more lingering microscopic touches to the wee curved frondlets of the creeping lichen. “I do it because I like to do it. The w-ork itself is its own reward. If only I could earn enough to save you and the dear old Mater from having to toil and moil like a pair of galleyslaves, Edie, I should be amply satisfied, and more than satisfied. I confess, I should like to do that, of course. In art, as elsewhere, the laborer is worthy of his hire, no doubt: he would prefer to earn his own bread and butter. It’s hard to work and work, and work and work, and get scarcely any sale -after all for one’s pictures.”
“It’ll come in time,” Edie answered, nodding sagaciously. “People will find out they’re compelled at last to recognize your genius. And that’s the best success of all in the long run the success that comes without one’s ever seeking it. The men who aim at succeeding, succeed for a day. The men who work at their art for their art’s sake, and leave success to mind its own business, are the men who finally live for ever.”
“It doesn’t do them much good, though, I’m afraid,” Warren answered, with a sigh, hardly looking up from his fragments of orange-brown vegetation. “They seldom live to see their final triumph.
‘For praise is his who builds for his own age; But he that builds for time, must look to time for wage!’”
As he said it, he glanced aside nervously at Elsie. What a slip of the tongue! Without remembering for a moment whom he was quoting, he had quoted with thoughtless ease a familiar couplet from the “Echoes from Callimachus.”
Elsie’s face showed no passing sign of recognition, however. Perhaps she had never read the lines he was thinking of; perhaps, if not, she had quite forgotten them. At any rate, she only murmured reflectively to Edie: “I think, with you, Mr. Relf must succeed in the end. But how soon, it would be difficult to say. He’ll have to educate his public, to begin with, up to his own level. When I first saw his work, I could see very little myself to praise in it. Now, every day, I see more and more. It’s like all good work; it gains upon you as you study it closely.”
Warren turned round to her with a face like a girl’s. “Thank you,” he said gently, and no more. But she could see that her praise had moved him to the core. For two or three minutes, he left off painting; he only fumbled with a dry brush at the outline of the lichens, and pretended to be making invisible improvements in the petty details of his delicate foreground. She observed that his hand was trembling too much to continue work. After a short pause he laid down his palette and colors. “I shall leave off now,” he said, “till the sun gets lower; it’s too hot just at present to paint properly.”
Elsie pitied the poor young man from the bottom of her soul. She was really afraid he was falling in love with her. And if only he knew how hopeless that would be! She had a heart once; and Hugh had broken it That evening, in the sacred recess of Elsie’s room, Edie and Elsie talked things over together in girlish confidence. The summer was coming on apace now. What was Elsie to do when the Relfs returned, as they must return, to England?
She could never go back. That was a fixed point, round which as pivot the rest of the question revolved vaguely. She could never expose herself to the bare chance of meeting Hugh and and Airs. Massinger. She didn’t say so, of course; no need to say it; she was far too profoundly wounded for that. But Edie and she both took it for granted in perfect silence. They understood one another, and wanted no language to communicate their feelings.
Suddenly, Edie had a bright idea: why not go to St. Martin Lantosque?
“Where’s St. Martin Lantosque?” Elsie asked languidly. Her own future was not a subject that aroused in her mind any profound or enthusiastic interest.
“St. Martin Lantosque, my dear,” Edie answered with her brisker, more matter-of-fact manner, “is a sort of patent safety-valve or overflow cistern for the surplus material of the Xice season. As soon as the summer grows unendurably hot on the Promenade des Anglais, the population of the pensions and hotels on the sea-front manifest a mutually repulsive influence like the particles of a gas, according to that prodigiously learned book you teach the girls elementary physics out of. The heat, in fact, acts expansively; it drives them focibly apart in all directions some to England, some to St. Petersburg, some to America, and some to the Italian lakes or the Bernese Oberland. Well, that’s what becomes of most of them: they melt away into different atmospheres; but a few visitors the people with families who make Xice their real home, not the mere sun-worshipers who want to loll on the chairs on the Quai Massena or in the Jardin Public retire for the summer only just as far as St. Martin Lantosque. It’s a jolly little place, right up among the mountains, thirty miles or so behind Nice, as beautiful as a butterfly, and as cool as a cucumber, and supplied with all the necessaries of life, from afternoon tea to a consular chaplain. It’s surrounded by the eternal snows, if you like them eternal; and well “situated for penny ices, if you prefer your glaciers in that mitigated condition. And if you went there, you might manage to combine business with pleasure, you see, by giving lessons to the miserable remnants of the Nice” season. Lots of the families must have little girls; lots of the little girls must be pining for instruction; lots of the mammas must be eager to find suitable companionship; and a Girton graduate’s the very person to supply them all with just what they want in the finest perfection. We’ll look the matter up, Elsie. I spy an opening.”
“Will your brother come here next winter, Edie?”
“I know no cause or impediment why he shouldn’t, my dear. He usually does one winter with another. It’s a way he has, to follow his family. He takes his pleasure out in the exercise of the domestic affections. But why do you ask me?”
“Because” and Elsie hesitated for a moment “I think if he does I oughtn’t to stay here.”
“Nonsense, my dear,” Edie answered promptly. It was the best way to treat Elsie. “You needn’t be afraid. I know what you mean. But don’t distress yourself: men’s hearts will stand a fearful deal of breaking. It doesn’t hurt them. They’re coarse earthenware to our egg-shell porcelain. He must just pine away with unrequited affection in his own way as long as he likes. Never mind him. It’ll do him good. It’s yourself and ourselves you’ve got to think of. He’s quite happy as long as he’s allowed to paint his own unsalable pictures in peace and quietness.”
“I wish he could sell them,” Elsie went on reflectively. “I really do. It’s a shame a man who can paint so beautifully and so poetically as he does should have to wait so long and patiently for his recognition. He strikes too high a note; that’s what’s the matter. And yet I wouldn’t like to see him try any lower one. I didn’t understand him at first, myself; and I’m sure I find as much in nature as most people. But you want to have looked at things for some time together, through his pair of spectacles, before you can catch them exactly as he does. The eye that sees is half the vision.”
“My dear,” Edie answered in her cheery way, “we’ll make him succeed. We’ll push him and pull him. He’ll never do it if he’s left to his own devices, I’m sure. He’s too utterly wrapped up in his work itself to think much of the reception the mere vulgar picture-buying world accords it. The chink of the guinea never distracts his ear from higher music. But I’m a practical person, thank heaven a woman of affairs and I mean to advertise him. They ought to hang him, and he shall be hung. I’m going to see to it. I shall get Mr. Hatherley to crack him up Mr. Hatherley has such a lot of influence, you know, with the newspapers. Let’s roll the log with cheerful persistence. We shall float him yet; you see if we don’t. He shall be Warren Relf, R. A., with a tail to his name, bef
ore you and I have done launching him.”
“I hope so,” Elsie murmured with a quiet sigh.
If Warren Relf could have heard that conversation, he might have plucked up heart of grace indeed for the future. When a woman begins to feel a living interest in a man’s career, there’s hope for him yet in that woman’s affections. Though, to be sure, Elsie herself would have been shocked to believe it. She cherished her sorrow still in her heart of hearts as her dearest chattel, her most sacred possession. She brought incense and tears to it daily with pious awe. Woman-like, she loved to take it out of its shrine and cry over it each night in her own room alone, as a religious exercise. She was faithful to the Hugh that had never been, though the Hugh that really was had proved so utterly base and unworthy of her. For that first Hugh’s sake, she would never love any other man. She could only feel for Warren Relf the merest sisterly interest and grateful friendship.
However, we must be practical, come what may; we must eat and drink though our hearts ache. So it was arranged at last that Elsie should retire for the summer to the cool shades of St. Martin Lantosque; while the Relfs returned to their tiny house at 128, Bletchingley Road, London, W. A few r pupils were even secured by hook and by crook for the off-season, and a home provided for Elsie with an American family, in search of culture in the cheapest market, who had hired a villa in the patent safety-valve, to avoid the ever unpleasant necessity for returning to the land of their birth, across the stormy millpond, for the hot summer. The day before the Relfs took their departure from San Remo, Elsie had a few words alone with Warren in the pretty garden of the Villa Rossa. There was one thing she wanted to ask him particularly a special favor, yet a very delicate one. “Shall you be down about the coast of Suffolk much this year?” she asked timidly. And Warren gathered at once what she meant. “Yes,” he answered in almost as hesitating a voice as her own, looking down at the pricklypears and green lizards by his feet, and keeping his eyes studiously from meeting hers; “I shall be cruising round, no doubt, at Yarmouth and Whitestrand, and Lowestoft and Aldeburgh.”
