by Grant Allen
‘Oh, thank you,’ Linnell answered, gazing round him abstractedly. ‘But I don’t think I’ll come in to lunch to-day, if you please. I’ve too much respect for Mrs. Mansel’s feelings. If you’ll allow me, I’ll drop in upon you this afternoon, and pay my respects first in due form — and respectable clothes — to your wife and family. In England, you know, all things must be done decently and in order.’
‘But not in Bohemia, my dear fellow: not in Bohemia.’
Linnell glanced down nervously upon the deep-blue bay.
‘Your Bohemia and Shakespeare’s are much the same, it seems,’ he answered, smiling. ‘Each is provided with a sea-coast, gratis, by poetical license. But I won’t avail myself of your kindness, for all that. I’ll go back to the inn first and change my suit. These shabby old painting-things aren’t fit company for ladies’ society. This afternoon, if you’ll allow me to call, I shall hope to come up, arrayed like Solomon in all his glory, and leave my card respectfully upon Mrs. Mansel.’
A sudden thought seemed to strike the would-be host.
‘You’re a bachelor, of course?’ he exclaimed interrogatively.
Linnell’s eye wandered down once more, with a timid glance, towards his left foot.
‘Do you suppose a painter whose works don’t sell would be likely to burden any woman on earth with that?’ he asked, somewhat bitterly— ‘least of all, a woman whom he loved and respected?’
‘Come, come, Linnell!’ the other man cried, with genuine kindliness. ‘This is too ridiculous: quite overwrought, you know. You carry your sensitiveness a deal too far. A fine, manly, handsome fellow like you — an upstanding man, who can ride, and swim, and play lawn-tennis — to talk like that — why, it’s simple nonsense. I should think any girl in her senses would be glad enough, if she could, to catch you.’
‘That’s the way you married men always talk,’ Linnell answered shortly. ‘As soon as you’ve secured a wife for yourselves, you seem to lose all the chivalry in your nature. You speak as if every woman were ready to jump at the very first man who happens to ask her. That may be the way, I dare say, with a great many of them. If so, they’re not the sort I’d care to marry. There are women and women, I suppose, as there are fagots and fagots. I prefer, myself, the shrinking variety — the kind that accepts a man for his own sake, not for the sake of getting married merely.’
‘You know what the Scotch girl said when her parents represented to her the various faults of the scapegrace who’d proposed to her?’ Mansel put in, laughing. “Oo, ay,” she said; “but he’s aye a man, ye ken.” And you have there in a nutshell the whole philosophy of the entire matter. Still, setting aside all that, even, I know no man more likely — —’
Linnell brushed him aside with his hand hastily.
‘Well, here our roads part,’ he said, with some decision in his tone, like one who wishes to check an unpleasant argument. ‘I’ll see you again this afternoon, when I’ve made my outer man fit for polite society. Till then, good-bye;’ and with a swinging pace he walked off quickly down the steep hill, erect and tall, his easel and picture slung carelessly by his side, and no trace of lameness perceptible anywhere in his rapid stride and manly carriage.
Mansel gazed after him with a painter’s admiration for a well-built figure. ‘As good-looking a fellow as ever stepped,’ he thought to himself in silent criticism. ‘What a pity he insists on torturing himself all his life long with these meaningless apprehensions and insoluble mysteries!’
He strolled up slowly to his own gate. In the garden, his wife was busy with the geraniums — a pretty young girl, in a light summer dress and a big straw hat that suited her admirably. ‘Ida,’ he cried out, as he swung open the wicket, ‘who do you think is stopping at the Lion? I met him just now, in Middle Mill Fields, doing a water-colour of Dumaresq’s cottage. Why, Linnell of Christ Church. You recollect, I’ve often told you all about him.’
‘What, the lame man, Reggy, who had the dog that ran after the Proctor?’
‘Well, he used to be lame once, but he isn’t now a bit — at least, not to speak of: you’d hardly notice it. Still, though the lameness itself’s gone, it seems to have left him just as sensitive and nervous as ever — or a great deal more so. He’s coming up here this afternoon to call on you, though, and you’ll be able to judge of him then for yourself: but as far as I can see, there’s nothing on earth left for the man to be sensitive about. Make much of him, Ida: he’s as timid as a girl; but he’s a nice fellow for all that, in spite of his little mysteries and mystifications.’
‘He’s a painter, too, isn’t he?’ Mrs. Mansel asked, arranging a flower in her husband’s button-hole. ‘I think you showed me some things of his once at the Grosvenor or the Academy.’
‘Yes; he daubs like the rest of us — does the Nubian Girl trick and the Street in Cairo dodge; not badly either. But he’s taken all that up since I last saw him. He was the merest amateur in black and white when we were at Oxford together. Now he paints like a man who’s learnt his trade, though he rather overdoes things in the matter of elaboration. Works at textures till you can’t see the picture for the painting. But I don’t believe he can live on his art, for all that. He’s rich, I imagine, though for some strange reason he won’t allow it. But that’s his way. He’s full of all sorts of little fads and fancies. He makes it a rule never to admit anything, except by torture. He’s an American born, and he calls himself an Englishman. He spends money right and left, and he calls himself a pauper. He’s straight and good-looking, and he calls himself a cripple. His name Línnell, and he calls himself Linnéll. In fact, he’s all made up of endless little ideas and affectations.’
‘There’s a Sir Austen Linnéll down our way in Rutland,’ his wife said musingly as they turned towards the house, ‘and he calls himself Linnéll too, with the accent the same way on the second syllable. Perhaps your friend and the Rutland man may be some sort of relations.’
‘Can’t, my dear child. Don’t I tell you he’s American? No baronets there: Republican simplicity. Boston born, though he hates to be told so. The star-spangled banner’s a red rag to him. Avoid chaffing him, for heaven’s sake, about the hub of the universe.’
They had entered the drawing-room while they spoke by the open French windows, and Mrs. Mansel, in a careless way, took up from the table by the corner sofa a Grosvenor catalogue. ‘Ah, this must be he,’ she said, turning over the leaves to the alphabetical list: ‘See here—”329, The Gem of the Harem; 342, By the Edge of the Desert: Charles Austen Linnell.” Why, Reggy, just look: his name’s Austen; and he spells it with an e too, exactly like the Rutland people. I don’t care whatever you choose to say — American or no American, he and the Austen Linnells of Thorpe must be related to one another.’
Her husband took the little book from her hands incredulously. ‘Not possible,’ he murmured, gazing hard at the page. ‘I’m not quite sure, but I fancy I’ve heard it said at Christ Church there was something wrong somewhere about the family pedigree. Linnell’s father made his money out of a quack medicine or something of the sort over in America, and sent his son to Oxford, accordingly, to make a gentleman of him, and get rid of the rhubarb and sarsaparilla. They say Linnell would never go back to his native land again after he took his degree, because he hated to see all the rocks on the Hudson River and all the peaks of the White Mountains plastered over in big white letters with the touching inscription, “Use only Linnell’s Instantaneous Lion Liver Pills.” At least, so Gregory of Brasenose told me, and his father, I fancy, was once an attaché or chargé d’affaires at Washington.’
‘But how does he come to be called Austen, then?’ Mrs. Mansel went on with true feminine persistency, sticking to her point like a born woman. ‘And Austen with an e too! That clinches the argument. If it was only an i, now, it might perhaps be accidental: but don’t go telling me Austen with an e comes within the limits of anything less than a miraculous coincidence.’
Her husband glanced over her shou
lder once more at the catalogue she had seized and examined a second time. ‘It’s odd,’ he said after a pause— ‘distinctly odd. I see the finger of design in this, undoubtedly. It can’t be accident, as you justly remark with your usual acumen: mere coincidence, as you observe, always stops short at phonetic spelling. And now you mention it, I remember Sir Austen does not spell his name with an e certainly: I had a cheque from him once for “The Smugglers’ Refuge” — that picture we let go too cheap, Ida. But there are two ways of accounting for it, all the same: there are always at least two good ways of accounting for everything — except the action of a hanging committee. Either Linnell’s descended from a younger branch of the Rutland family, which went out to America in the Mayflower — all good Boston people, I understand, made it a point of honour to go out in the Mayflower, which must have had accommodation for at least as many first-class cabin passengers as the whole fleet that came over with William the Conqueror — or else, failing that, his excellent papa must with rare forethought have christened him Austen in order to produce a delusive impression on the public mind in future years that he belonged to a distinguished and aristocratic county family. Godfathers and godmothers at one’s baptism do often perpetrate these pious frauds. I knew a man once whose real surname was plain Dish; but his parents with great presence of mind christened him Spencer Caven, so he grew up to be Spencer Cavendish, and everybody thought he was a second cousin of the Duke of Devonshire.’
Mrs. Mansel, for her part, had been educated at Girton. So superficial a mode of settling a question by pure guesswork offended her views of logical completeness.
‘It’s no use arguing a priori, Reginald,’ she said seriously, ‘upon a matter of experience. We can ask Mr. Linnell about it when he comes here this afternoon. I’ve invited Mr. Dumaresq and Psyche to drop in for a set of tennis, and your Christ Church friend’ll be just in time for it.’
When Mrs. Mansel got upon a priori and a posteriori, her husband, who was only a painter, after all, knew his place too well to answer her back in the same dialect. He only stared at the catalogue harder than ever, and wondered to himself in a vague way why Linnell should call himself Austen.
But at that very moment, at the Red Lion, the artist himself was sitting down at the little davenport to dash off a hasty and excited note to his agent in London:
‘Dear Matthews,
‘Can you get some fellow who knows all about such things to give you an exhaustive list of all the public libraries or institutions in Great Britain, Ireland, America, or the colonies, to which a man interested in the matter might present a complete set of Haviland Dumaresq’s “Encyclopædic Philosophy”? The bigger the number you can hunt up the better. Perhaps the people at the London Institution would put you in the way of finding it out. In any case, try to draw up a good big catalogue, and forward it here to me at your earliest convenience. But on no account let anyone know why you want the information. I’ve sent a cheque for fifty guineas to that poor fellow you wrote about at Colchester: many thanks for calling my attention to his painful case. Only I could have wished he wasn’t a German. Teutonic distress touches me less nearly. Never mind about buying-in those New Zealands at present. I see another use for the money I meant to put in them. In breathless haste to save post,
‘Yours ever sincerely,
‘Charles Austen Linnell.’
‘There,’ he said to himself as he folded it up and consigned it to its envelope: ‘that’ll do a little good, I hope, for Dumaresq. The only possible use of money to a fellow like me, whose tastes are simple, and whose wants are few, is to shuffle it off as well as he can upon others who stand in greater need of it. The worst of it is, one spends one’s life in that matter, perpetually steering between the Scylla of pride and the Charybdis of pauperism. The fellows who really need help won’t take it, and the fellows who don’t need it are always grabbing at it. There’s a deal too much reserve and sensitiveness in the world — and I’ve got my own share too, as well as the rest of them.’
CHAPTER III.
LOVE — THIRTY.
When Linnell appeared upon the Mansels’ tennis-ground at half-past three that afternoon, it was in quite other garb from the careless painter suit he had worn on the hillside in the incognito of morning. He was arrayed now in the correctest of correct gray tweeds, and the most respectable of round felt hats, in place of the brown velveteens and Rembrandt cap wherewith he had sallied forth, to the joy of all young Petherton, at early morn for his day’s sketching. Yet it was difficult to say in which of the two costumes he looked handsomest — the picturesque artistic suit of the cosmopolitan painter, or the simple rough homespun country dress of the English gentleman. Linnell was tall, and very dark: his deep black eyes were large and expressive; and his rough beard and moustache, trimmed with a certain loose touch of artistic freedom, gave a decided tone of manliness and vigour to what might otherwise have seemed too purely cultivated and refined a face. As it was, nobody could look at Charles Linnell without seeing in him at a glance the best product of our English school and college training — a man first, and afterwards a gentleman.
As he crossed the lawn to where Mrs. Mansel sat on a rustic chair under the shade of the big umbrella-like lime-tree, he saw that two other visitors were already before him, each of whom equally attracted at once the artist’s quick and appreciative eye. The first was indeed a noble presence — a tall and thin old man, gray-haired and gray-moustached, clad in a close-fitting light pea-jacket and slouch hat, which seemed to bring out in singular relief the full height and spareness of his long lithe figure. No one could have passed that figure by unnoticed even in the crowded streets of London. The old man’s face was full of vividness, fire, and innate majesty. Though close on seventy, he was young still in expression and bearing: he held his gray head proudly erect, and the light that flashed from his keen and deep-set eyes was instinct even now with youthful vigour and unquenchable energy. The high arched forehead, the projecting eyebrows, the sharp clear features, the strong and masculine chin, the delicate mouth, instinct with irony, the powerful lines scored deep on the thin cheeks and round the speaking corners of the acute gray eyes, all told alike of profound intellectual strength and subtlety. The very movements of his limbs were free and unrestrained: he stood aside two steps for Linnell to approach with something of the statuesque Greek gracefulness. The artist had no need to wait for an introduction. He felt sure instinctively it was Haviland Dumaresq, the Encyclopædic Philosopher, who stood in the flesh there visibly before him.
The other stranger, no less striking in her way, was a young girl of sixteen or seventeen, in the first flush of a delicate pink-and-white, peach-like beauty. Linnell was so taken by her childish face and graceful form that he had hardly time to bestow a passing glance upon the maturer and more matronly attractiveness of their common hostess. Even so, he was but dimly aware of a pair of soft and full round cheeks, mantled by a dainty suffused bloom, and with a temptingly rosy mouth set full beneath them, too simple as yet to be even coquettish. Linnell was a shy man, and Haviland Dumaresq’s presence at once overawed him. He was so much agitated by the stately courtesy — a courtesy as of the grand old courtly school — with which the great thinker had stridden aside two paces to let him pass, that he could fix his eyes steadily neither on Mrs. Mansel nor on her pretty little visitor. The lawn swam in a vague haze of uncertainty around him, out of all which only the tall spare figure on the one hand, and that pair of rose-petal cheeks on the other, loomed distinctly visible through the mist of his own shyness on his perturbed and unsteady mental vision.
Happily Mansel came forward to his aid in the nick of time.
‘Ida,’ he said to his wife as she rose from her seat to meet and greet the new-comer, ‘this is my friend Linnell of whom you’ve heard me speak often. Linnell, let me introduce you to Mr. Dumaresq, whose work you know and appreciate so deeply already. Psyche, this is a dear old Oxford friend of mine: he paints pictures, so you’re sure to like hi
m.’
Linnell bowed all round at each introduction with mechanical politeness. So many new acquaintances all at once, one of them distinguished, and two pretty, were far too much for his unstable composure. He muttered some inarticulate conventional phrase, and looked about him uncomfortably at the lawn and the garden.
Haviland Dumaresq himself was the first to break the awkward silence.
‘Linnell,’ he repeated in a rich and powerful but very silvery voice: ‘I hope I caught the name correctly — Linnell. Ah, yes; I thought so. One seldom catches a name right at a first introduction, because all hearing is largely inference; and here, where no context exists to guide one’s guesses, inference is impossible. The world is all before one where to choose: any one name is just as likely to occur in an introduction as another. You said Linnéll, with the accent on the last, I notice, Mansel. I’m a student of names — among other things’ — and he looked the artist keenly in the face with a searching glance. ‘I’ve only met the name, so accented, once before. Sir Austen Linnell was with me at Trinity — not the present man, of course — his father, the General. They’re all Sir Austen Linnells in succession in the Rutland family — have been ever since the Restoration, in fact, when the first man was created a Baronet for welcoming King Charles the moment he landed.’
‘Mr. Linnell’s name’s Austen, too,’ Mrs. Mansel put in suavely, as she reseated herself with Girtonian grace on the rustic chair. ‘We happened to look you up in the Grosvenor Catalogue this morning, Mr. Linnell — I couldn’t recollect the name of that sweet picture of yours, “The Gem of the Harem”: Reggy and I admired it immensely this year on varnishing day. And there we found you set down at full length as Charles Austen Linnell, you know; and we wondered whether you mustn’t be related to the Rutland people.’
‘Austen with an e,’ Haviland Dumaresq interposed with great gravity. ‘Names of similar sound but different in spelling are almost always of distinct origin. Phonetic decay assimilates primarily unlike words. Turner, for example, is only plain turner, a man who puts wood in a lathe for chairs and tables; but Turnor with an o, like the Turnors of Norfolk, are really Tour Noirs, of Norman origin. There the assimilation is obviously late and obviously phonetic.’ For it was a peculiarity of Haviland Dumaresq’s mind, as Linnell soon learned, that he saw nothing — not even the merest small-talk — as isolated fact: every detail came to him always as a peg on which to hang some abstract generalization. The man was pure philosopher to the core: he lived in the act of organizing events by squads and battalions into orderly sequence. To Linnell himself, however, the timely diversion came very pleasantly: he hated his own personality, or his own name even, to form the subject of public discussion.
