Works of Grant Allen

by Grant Allen

  ‘So you mean to go there still, my child, in spite of what I say to you?’

  Geraldine hesitated.

  ‘Father dear,’ she cried, putting her graceful arms round the old man’s neck tenderly, ‘I love you very, very much; but I can’t bear not to help poor dear lonely Psyche.’

  The General’s courage, which was all physical, oozed out like Bob Acres’s at the palms of his hands. This was not being firm; but he couldn’t help it. His daughter’s attitude had his sincerest sympathy. The commanding officer might go and be hanged. Still, he temporized.

  ‘Geraldine,’ he said softly, bending her head to his, ‘promise me at least you won’t go to-day. Your mother’ll be so annoyed with me if you go to-day. Promise me to stop at home and — —’

  ‘And protect you, you old dear!’ She reflected a moment. ‘Well, yes; I’ll stop at home just this once, if only to keep you out of trouble. Give Mr. Linnell a chance of speaking if he really wants to. Though what on earth poor Psyche’ll do without me I’m sure I don’t know. She’s expecting me to-day. She counts on my coming. I’ll have to write and tell her I can’t come; and Psyche’s so quick, I’m afraid she’ll guess exactly why I can’t get round this morning to help her.’

  The General breathed more freely once more.

  ‘There’s a dear girl,’ he said, stroking her hair gently. ‘Your mother would have been awfully annoyed if you’d gone. She thinks it’s wrong of you to encourage young Linnell in his flirtation with that girl. Though I quite agree with you, Geraldine, my dear, that if you don’t love a man, you oughtn’t to marry him. Only — it’d be a very great comfort to us both, you know, my dear, if only you could manage ever to love a man who was in a position to keep you as we’ve always kept you.’

  ‘I don’t know how it is,’ Geraldine answered reflectively. ‘I suppose it’s original sin or the natural perversity of human nature coming out in my case; but I never do like men with money, and I always fall in love with men without a ha’penny. But, there; I’ve no time to discuss the abstract question with you now. I must run up at once and write this note to poor Psyche.’

  CHAPTER X.

  AS BETWEEN GENTLEMEN.

  That same morning Linnell sat in his own room at the Red Lion, with a letter of Sir Austen’s lying open before him, and a look of sad perplexity gathering slowly upon his puckered brow. It was natural, perhaps, that Sir Austen should wish to settle the question once for all before leaving England: natural, too, that Sir Austen should look at the whole matter purely from the point of view of Frank Linnell, ‘the parson in Northumberland,’ whom alone he had been sedulously taught from his childhood upward to consider as his cousin, though the law would have nothing to do with countenancing their unacknowledged relationship. And yet Linnell was distinctly annoyed. The tone of the letter was anything but a pleasant one. ‘Sir Austen Linnell presents his compliments’ — what a studiously rude way of addressing his own first-cousin, his next of kin, his nearest relative, the heir to the baronetcy! Linnell took up his pen and, biting his lip, proceeded at once, as was his invariable wont, to answer offhand the unpleasant communication.

  ‘Mr. C. A. Linnell presents his compliments — —’ No, no; as he wrote, he remembered with a blush that verse of Shelley’s, ‘Let scorn be not repaid with scorn;’ and rising superior to the vulgar desire to equal an adversary in rudeness and disrespect, he crumpled up the half-written sheet in his hands, and began again upon a fresh page in more cousinly fashion:

  ‘Dear Sir Austen,

  ‘I can readily understand that your friendship and affection for my half-brother Frank Linnell should prompt you to write to me on the unfortunate question of the succession to the title before leaving England. The subject, I need hardly say, is a painful one to every one of us: to none of us more so, I feel sure, than to myself. But as you are the first to open communications upon it, there can be no reason on earth why I should not answer your queries frankly and straight-forwardly without reserve. In the first place, then, during your lifetime I can promise you that I will not overtly or covertly lay claim in any way to the heirship to the title and estates of the baronetcy. In the second place, during my brother Frank’s lifetime I will not lay claim to the baronetcy itself, should it ever fall to me, thereby implying any slight upon him or upon my father’s memory. But, in the third place, I will not, on the other hand, permit him to put any such slight upon me or upon those whose memory is very dear to me by claiming it for himself without any real legal title. Such a course, I think, would imply a dishonour to one whom I revere more than any other person I have ever met with. I hope this arrangement, by which I practically waive my own rights and my place in the family during my brother’s life and yours, will prove satisfactory and pleasing to both of you. — With my best wishes for your success in your African trip, I am ever

  ‘Your sincere friend and cousin,

  ‘Charles Austen Linnell.’

  He wrote it at one burst. And when he had written it he felt all the lighter for it.

  He had an appointment that morning at eleven with Psyche, and as soon as the letter was off his mind he went round to the Wren’s Nest trembling with suppressed excitement. In his hand he carried the water-colour sketch of the cottage, now completed and framed, for presentation to Psyche. If he saw her alone, he had it half in his mind to ask her that morning whether or not she would be his for ever. Those lines from the Lord of Burleigh kept ringing in his ears —

  ‘If my heart by signs can tell,

  Maiden, I have watched thee daily,

  And I think thou lov’st me well.’

  Surely, surely, Psyche loved him. So timid and sensitive a man as himself could not have been mistaken in his interpretation of her frank confidence and her crimson blushes.

  He was not destined to find Psyche alone, however. As he entered, Haviland Dumaresq met him in the garden, tearing up a note from Geraldine to his daughter. The note had annoyed him, if so placid a man could ever be said to display annoyance. It mentioned merely ‘in great haste’ that Geraldine would not be able to come round and assist at the sitting to-day, as mamma was dreadfully angry about something, and poor papa wanted her to stop and break the brunt of the enemy’s assault for him. Psyche knew in a moment what the letter meant — she had old experience of Mrs. Maitland’s fancies — and handed it without a word of explanation to her father. The great philosopher took it and read it. ‘All women are alike, my child,’ he said philosophically, crumpling the paper up in his hand: ‘they insist upon making mountains out of molehills. And there’s nothing about men that irritates them more than our perverse male habit of seeing the molehill, in spite of all they may say to magnify it, in merely its own proper proportions. A due sense of social perspective is counted to our sex for moral obliquity. Go in and get yourself ready, Psyche. I’ll wait out here and talk to Mr. Linnell for you.’

  When Linnell arrived upon the scene, picture in hand, a few minutes later, Haviland Dumaresq, straight and proud as ever, stepped forward to meet him, tearing up the peccant letter into shreds as he went, and scattering its fragments over his own dearly-loved and neatly-kept flower-beds. He saw what the water-colour was at a glance, and taking the painter’s hand in his own, with some chilliness in his manner — for it was clear this young man was seeing quite too much of Psyche, when even Mrs. Maitland noticed it and animadverted upon it — he said with the air of a patron of art, not magniloquently at all, but simply and naturally: ‘So you’ve brought home the sketch. We shall be glad to have it.’

  Linnell was taken aback by the quiet business assumption implied in his tone, and looking up quickly into the great man’s face — for to him Dumaresq was always great, in whatever surroundings — he stammered out in answer, with a certain shamefaced awkwardness: ‘I hoped Miss Psyche might be good enough to accept it from me.’

  The philosopher glanced back at him with an inquiring gaze. ‘Oh no,’ he said coldly, examining the picture with a critical eye. ‘This
sketch was a commission. I asked you to do it for us. You must let me pay you whatever’s proper for it.’

  Linnell hardly knew whether to feel more amused or annoyed. Dumaresq, he felt sure, must have received his eight hundred guineas already, and he inclined to assume a princely air of patronage to art on the strength of this sudden access of unwonted opulence. Still, even though the money came directly out of his own pocket, he couldn’t bear to sell the sketch of Haviland Dumaresq’s cottage to the great philosopher — and to Psyche’s father.

  ‘It was a labour of love,’ he ventured to say with quiet persistence, in spite of Dumaresq’s chilling austerity. ‘I did it with more than my usual success, I dare to think, because I was inspired by the importance of the subject, and because I thought you would allow me to present it as a memento to Miss Dumaresq. Besides, you know, it’s only right she should accept it from me in return for the trouble I’ve given her about the other painting. Your daughter has put me under great obligations in permitting me to paint her in the foreground of my Academy picture.’

  Dumaresq drew himself up even more stiffly than before.

  ‘My daughter,’ he said with a very cold and clear intonation, ’is not, as you seem to think, a professional model. She doesn’t expect payment in any way for her services. If her face is of use to you for the purposes of art, we are both of us glad that art should be the richer for it. A beautiful face is a gift of nature, intended for the common good of humanity: a beautiful picture makes the world so much the better for its existence and its beauty. I would not grudge to art the power to multiply beautiful faces — and Psyche’s is beautiful — to the utmost of its ability. But you must tell me how much I owe you for this sketch, all the same. It’s unbecoming the dignity both of art and of philosophy that an artist and a philosopher should haggle together in the matter of price over such a subject.’

  Linnell bowed his head in silent acquiescence. After all, he thought to himself, fifty pounds was not worth fighting about; the money in the end came out of his own pocket. And he didn’t wish to offend Psyche’s father. In a very little time, perhaps — and his heart beat high — it would matter very little which of them had the money, himself or Psyche.

  ‘If you insist upon it, Mr. Dumaresq,’ he said at last with a painful effort, ‘though it’s a great disappointment to me not to be permitted to offer the picture as a present to your daughter, we’ll make it, as you prefer, a matter of business. Suppose then, by way of putting a price upon it, we set down the value at twenty guineas.’

  Haviland Dumaresq drew a long breath. This was eleven pounds more than his utmost imagination. But he was far too proud to show his surprise openly. He had Macmurdo and White’s twenty-pound note that moment in his pocket. He drew it forth with calm determination, like a man to whom twenty pounds is less than nothing, and, adding to it a sovereign from his purse, laid it simply in the painter’s palm. The coin burned into Linnell’s hand, for he, too, was proud — proud and sensitive. He had never been paid so brusquely in his life before, and the hard, matter-of-fact mode of the business transaction made him for the very first time feel ashamed of his profession. But he gave no outward sign, any more than Dumaresq himself had done, of his internal feelings. He thrust the money loose with his hand into his trousers pocket, and muttering something inarticulate about the lights being bad to-day for painting, begged to be excused from going on with the portrait. Then he turned around, and walked slowly out of the garden gate, and up on to the Downs, where he wandered long alone reflecting bitterly with himself that great men, when you come to see them at close quarters, fail often in the end to correspond with one’s preconceived opinion of their innate greatness. It must be always so. They give the people of their best, of course; and the people judge the whole by the sample.

  As for poor Psyche, who, waiting in the drawing-room, had heard this brief colloquy through the open window, she went upstairs to her own bedroom, and, flinging herself on the bed in her Arab costume, cried her poor little eyes out to think that papa should behave so harshly to that dear Mr. Linnell, who admired him so much, and would give his life almost to do anything for either of them.

  For Psyche, too, in her clear girlish way, was quite certain that Linnell loved her.

  CHAPTER XI.

  FOOL’S PARADISE.

  Haviland Dumaresq, left to himself in the garden, paced up and down the narrow gravel walk, and turned over in his mind all these things seriously. Could it be that Mrs. Maitland was right, after all? Was the painter man really coming after Psyche?

  Women are lynx-eyed in matters of emotional expression, he reflected to himself in his generalizing way: in that they resemble savages and the lower animals. Yes, and the women of the inferior intellectual grades, like Mrs. Maitland, are more lynx-eyed as a rule even than others: the lower the grade, the more developed the instinctive perceptive faculty. Their intuitions stand them in stead of reason. And such intuitions seldom err. No doubt she was right: no doubt she was right. The young man wanted to marry Psyche.

  But in that case what ought he himself, as a father, to do? The young man had probably neither money nor position.

  In any other relation of life, indeed, Haviland Dumaresq would never have thought for one moment of inquiring about either of those adventitious circumstances. And he would have regarded their possession to a great extent as a positive disadvantage to the man who was cumbered with them. Money, he would have said, was a bar to exertion: position was antagonistic to wide human sympathies. Those men best know the universe in which they live, those men best love their kind and all other kinds, who earn their own bread by the sweat of their brow, and who have felt the keen spur and common bond of hunger. So, as recommendations to a man in the abstract, poverty and insignificance were far more important in Haviland Dumaresq’s mind than money and position.

  But where Psyche was concerned things seemed quite otherwise. The old philosopher had wasted his own life in the way he liked best, in obedience to the imperious demands of his own inmost and highest nature; but he wasn’t going to let that beautiful girl of his waste hers in the same foolish spendthrift manner: she should profit, he whispered to himself fondly, by her father’s hard and dearly-bought experience. For his own part, Haviland Dumaresq would not have taken from Charles Linnell a twenty-guinea picture; but for Psyche he was ready to take from the first comer ten thousand a year, and a title, and a castle, and a place in the peerage, and anything else of vulgar estimation that the world, the mere wealthy commonplace world, could give him. He was prepared to debase himself to Mrs. Maitland’s level.

  A twenty-guinea picture indeed! The young man seemed to ask twenty guineas for it as if money were water. Nay, he seemed actually to be putting his price very low, as a matter of friendship to a special purchaser — and if so, Haviland Dumaresq felt he ought certainly to resent the uncalled-for liberty, for what right had the fellow to presume upon doing him a favour when he didn’t even so much as wish it? But, setting that aside, and thinking only of Psyche, if the young man could really get twenty guineas — or more — for a mere casual water-colour sketch, mightn’t the matter be worth inquiring into, after all? Mightn’t he be a rising and well-to-do artist? Haviland Dumaresq hated himself for the unworthy thought; but for Psyche’s sake he must hunt up something about this twenty-guinea painter fellow.

  After all, painters are often somebodies — even as the world judges, often somebodies. A painter — Heaven forgive him for so low a point of view of an ennobling art — a painter may rise to be P.R.A. at last, and gain a knighthood, and be petted and admired, and earn lots of money, and lose his own soul — whatever was highest and purest and best within him — and make his wife be called My Lady, and give her all that money can buy of place and pleasure, and drive her out in the Park in a carriage with footmen, and take her to Court, like an African savage, bedizened with powder and paint and ostrich-feathers. Pah! the lowness, the meanness, the vulgarity, the barbarism of it! But for Psyche! A pa
inter may often be a really rich man. Why, yes, he was really and truly sinking to the abject level of a Mrs. Maitland.

  Mrs. Maitland! An idea! The note! The note! What made Mrs. Maitland angry about Psyche? Not merely because Psyche had got an admirer. Clearly, she must have thought that Psyche was setting her cap — as she would call it in her own hideous match-making dialect — at this twenty-guinea painter fellow. But if so, that meant, as Haviland Dumaresq instinctively knew, that Mrs. Maitland wanted the painter fellow herself for Geraldine. And surely Mrs. Maitland wouldn’t want the young man unless she was sure he was a good investment. The Maitlands lived up to the very last penny of the General’s pay and the very last farthing of Mrs. Maitland’s small fortune. The boys were expensive: one in the army; two at Sandhurst or Marlborough; and one who, as his mother ingeniously observed, had ‘failed for everything,’ and must now be shipped off to try his fortune in New Zealand or Manitoba. It was positively necessary, as the Maitlands would put it, that Geraldine should marry a man with money. And a man with money enough for Geraldine Maitland would presumably have money enough for his Psyche also.

  Haviland Dumaresq paced up and down the garden-walk, revolving these things long in his own troubled mind, turning them all over this way and that, and unable to arrive at any decision about them. At last, wearied out with his own anxious thought, he sat down on the bench under the gnarled old apple-tree, and taking from his waistcoat pocket that small cardboard box with the silver-coated pellets, raised one of them mechanically to his trembling lips to calm his nerves from the tempest that possessed them.