by Grant Allen
Psyche’s happiness! Ay, Psyche’s happiness! It was no less than Psyche’s happiness that was at stake. And to Haviland Dumaresq, now that the ‘Encyclopædic Philosophy’ was well off his hands, and launched upon posterity, the universe consisted mainly of Psyche. Talk about the anthropocentric fallacy indeed! Who had done more to dispel that illusion than Haviland Dumaresq? Who had shown more clearly than he that instead of the universe revolving about man as its fixed point and centre, man was but a single unimportant species, on the wrinkled surface of an unimportant satellite, attached by gravity to an unimportant sun — the final product of arrested radiant energy on the outer crust of an insignificant speck in boundless space? And yet, when it came to the actual internal world, was it not also a fact that for Haviland Dumaresq the central point in all the universe was Psyche, Psyche, Psyche, Psyche? and that around her as primary all the suns and constellations circled in their orbits like obedient servants? Was it not for her that the cosmos itself loosed the bands of Orion and shed the sweet influences of the Pleiades through long leagues of space upon her nightly dreams?
He was roused from his reverie by a footstep on the gravel path outside; not the footstep of a labourer slouching by to work on the allotments beyond — Haviland Dumaresq, in his inferential fashion, knew it at once for the firm and even tread of a gentleman. The Loamshire hinds loiter about like the half-emancipated serfs they still are, he said to himself quietly: this is the step of a freeman born, who walks the soil of England as if it belonged to him. And sure enough, raising his eyes across the hedge, he saw before him Reginald Mansel.
‘Ha, Mansel,’ he cried, beckoning his painter neighbour to turn aside into the garden, ‘this is luck indeed! Coincidence seldom comes so pat. You’re the very man I wanted to see. I’ve made my first appearance on this or any other stage as an art-patron to-day, and I’d like you to come and judge of my purchase. What do you say to this, now?’ And he held up the water-colour, which lay beside him still on the rustic seat, for Mansel’s critical and professional opinion.
The artist glanced at it with a smile of recognition.
‘What, Linnell’s?’ he cried. ‘Oh, I saw it earlier. I’ve watched it along through all its stages. It’s a very good sketch — very good indeed. He never did better to my mind, with an English subject. Not over-elaborated with those finikin touches which often spoil Linnell’s best work. It’s a perfect little idyll in green and ultramarine.’ And he eyed it appreciatively.
‘You like it, then?’ Dumaresq asked in a curious tone.
‘Like it? Well, of course. One can’t help liking everything of Linnell’s. He has the true touch of genius in all his work, if only he were a little bit less supremely self-conscious.’
‘What do you think I gave for it?’ the old man suggested, with his head on one side like a critical connoisseur.
‘Gave for it?’ Mansel repeated with an incredulous stare. ‘You don’t mean to say, then, Dumaresq, you’ve actually bought it?’
‘Bought it and paid for it,’ the philosopher answered, with something very like unphilosophic complacency, enjoying his hearer’s obvious surprise. ‘Ah, you didn’t think I went in for pictures! Well, I don’t, as a rule: I leave those things to the great of this world. But, you see, as this was a special subject, of peculiar interest to myself and Psyche, I thought I couldn’t let it fall to a mere stranger. I’d fix it at once: I’d keep it in the family. So I commissioned it beforehand, I think you call it; and when Linnell came round this afternoon I paid him his price and gi’ed it in hond, like the Northern Farmer. How much should you say, now, I ought to have spent upon it?’
Mansel regarded first the picture and then the philosopher in hesitating silence for a few seconds.
‘Well,’ he said irresolutely, after an awkward pause, ‘I don’t know, of course, what Linnell’s likely to have put it at for you; no doubt he let you have it a little cheaper; but the picture as a picture is worth fifty guineas.’
‘Fifty guineas!’ Dumaresq echoed in dismayed astonishment.
‘Yes, fifty guineas,’ Mansel answered quietly. ‘Linnell commands his market, you know. He could get that for it any day in London.’
Haviland Dumaresq’s gray eyes flashed sudden fire. His first thought was that Linnell had been guilty of rank disrespect to his person and position in letting him have a fifty-guinea picture at considerably less than half-price. Poor he might be — he had sat up half last night, indeed, toiling like a galley-slave at a penny-a-lining article on the Conservation of Energy for his hard task-masters’ ‘Popular Instructor’ at eight shillings a page — but what right had a painter fellow whom he’d hardly even seen in his life yet, to lower prices for him, like a beggarly skinflint, or to take it for granted he couldn’t with ease, from the plenitude of his wealth, spare fifty guineas?
His second thought was that a man who could earn fifty guineas ‘any day in London’ for a bit of a water-colour no bigger than a page of the Athenæum, might perhaps after all be able to make Psyche happy.
‘That’s a very large sum,’ he said, drawing a long breath and looking hard at Mansel. ‘Men of letters get nothing like that for their work, I’m afraid. But, then, they don’t have anything to sell which can minister to the selfish monopolist vanity of the rich and idle. No Manchester merchant can hang upon his walls a unique copy of “Paradise Lost” or a solitary exemplar of the “Novum Organum,” and say to his friends after dinner with vulgar pride: “Look here, So-and-so, that’s Milton’s or Bacon’s greatest work. I paid fifty thousand guineas down for that lot.” Still, even so, I’m surprised to hear you painters earn your money so easily. Twenty guineas seemed to me in my ignorance a very big price indeed to pay for it.’
‘Oh, Linnell can get that readily enough,’ Mansel answered with a short uneasy laugh. ‘His oils he sells at good prices at Christie’s. His water colours are snapped up every year at the Institute. But then, you know, they take him a good bit of time. He’s a slow worker, and doesn’t get through many canvases in the course of a twelvemonth.’
‘Now, how much do you suppose a painter of his sort ought to earn on an average per annum?’ Dumaresq asked offhand, with too evident an assumption of easy carelessness. ‘How would his income compare, for example, with an author’s or a journalist’s?’
‘Well, I really can’t say,’ Mansel answered, smiling, and perceiving his questioner’s drift at once. ‘Perhaps some five or six hundred, all told; perhaps a thousand; perhaps more than that. But then,’ he added, his thoughts keeping pace all along with Dumaresq’s, ‘he may have private means of his own as well, you know. He spends freely. I’ve never known him pressed for cash. I don’t think he lives altogether on his pictures.’
‘No?’ — with keen interest.
‘No; I should say not. I’ve always imagined he had means of his own. For one thing, he had plenty, I know, at Christ Church.’
‘He was at Christ Church, was he?’ Dumaresq put in reflectively. ‘An expensive college — the most fashionable at Oxford. A man must have money who goes to Christ Church!’
‘Not necessarily,’ Mansel answered, putting him off the scent once more. ‘I was there myself, you remember, and Heaven knows I was poor enough in those days, in all conscience. But then, I had a studentship of eighty pounds a year, which makes a difference, of course: whereas Linnell came up as an ordinary commoner.’
‘And you think he has money, then?’ Dumaresq asked eagerly.
‘I think so. But, mind, I know nothing about it. Linnell was always the most reticent and mysterious of men, full of small reserves and petty mystifications. He never told anybody a word about himself. He’s always been close, provokingly close. For aught I know, he may be as poor as a church mouse in reality; and for aught I know, again, he may be as rich as Cr[oe]sus. So far as my observation goes, he always acts like a wealthy man, and talks like a poor one. But if anybody ever taxes him with opulence, he resents the imputation as a positive slight, and declares with effusion he’s almo
st on the very verge of beggary.’
‘Many rich men,’ Dumaresq mused dreamily, ‘are pursued with a peculiar form of mania called timor paupertatis, and what you say’s just one of its recognised symptoms — that the sufferer never will admit his wealth, for fear other people should try to swindle him or rob him or beg of him. You may remember that in the fourth volume of the “Encyclopædic Philosophy” — the volume that deals with Heteropathic Affections in the Empirical Individual — I bring the phenomenon of concealment of wealth under the same law with the pseudomorphic corrugation of cooling nebulæ and the facts of mimicry in animal evolution. It’s a most interesting branch of psychological study. I shall watch this young man. I shall watch him — I shall watch him.’
He spoke in a droning, half-sleepy undertone; and Mansel, who had seen the great thinker more than once in this state before, and who always felt creepy at the strange look in his eyes, made haste to concoct some plausible excuse for a hurried departure.
‘When Dumaresq gets into that curious vein,’ he said to himself internally, ‘philosopher or no philosopher, he’s simply unendurable. From a man of singular intellect and genius, he dwindles down at once into a mere bore. All his brilliancy and ability seems to desert him, and he talks platitudes to you three times over in varying language, like the veriest old driveller at the Seniors in London. When these fits come upon him, the wise man will do well to leave him alone. He goes silly for the nonce: hunc tu Romane caveto.’ And he walked off, whistling, to his own studio.
But Haviland Dumaresq, having learned all he wanted from Linnell’s friend, strolled away by himself, regardless of lunch, upon the open Downs, that overlook the sea with their bare green knolls and their deep curved hollows. He strolled along, crushing rich flowers under foot as he went, wrapped up in his own thoughts, and with the poison within him gaining deeper and deeper hold upon his swimming and reeling brain each moment. The sun shone high over the purple sea; the hills rolled boundless and undulating before him; the noise of the bell upon the foremost wether of the ruddled flock that cropped close grass in the combe hard by rang distant in his ear like most delicious music. Birds sang; bees hummed; gorse crackled; grasshoppers chirped; the scent of wild thyme hung thick on the air. The opium was transforming earth into heaven for him. Space swelled, as it always swelled into infinite abysses for Haviland Dumaresq when the intoxicating drug had once taken full possession of his veins and fibres. The horizon spread boundless in vast perspective with its clear blue line against the pale gray sky; the shadows in the hollow combes lengthened and deepened into romantic gloom; the hills rose up in huge expansive throes, and became as high mountains to his dilated vision. A white gull flapped its gleaming wings overhead: to Dumaresq it revealed itself as some monstrous albatross. His own stature even seemed to double itself as he stalked along the dividing line of open ridge, till he loomed in his own eyes larger than human on the bald and rounded crest of the gigantic hog’s back. All nature assumed a more heroic cast: he walked no longer our prosaic world: each step appeared to carry him over illimitable space: he trod with Dante the broad floor of Paradise.
And wonderful vistas opened ahead for Psyche also. She, too, his darling, she, too, should be happy. This man who had come to woo her in disguise, he was rich, he was great, there was mystery about him. In his present ecstatic frame of mind, Haviland Dumaresq hugged and magnified the mystery. The poetic element in his nature, sternly repressed by the philosophic side in his saner moments, found free vent at times in the unnatural exaltation of narcotic excitement, and ran riot in wild day-dreams of impossible splendour. He had passed through the golden gate to-day. He saw his Psyche decked out in all the barbaric splendour of pearl and diamond that his soul despised: he saw her floating in silks and gauzy stuffs and laces: he saw her circling round in the giddy dance, one blaze of glory, in the glittering rooms and slippery halls that he hated and eschewed as surviving relics of savage and barbaric anti-social luxury. High-stepping grays whirled her along in state in a light and graceful carriage through thronged thoroughfares of over-wealthy fashion. Flunkeys, whom Haviland Dumaresq could have kicked with pleasure, bowed, door in servile hand, to see her take her seat on the padded cushions. Massive silver and Venetian glass and hideous marvels of cunning architecture in ice and sugar loaded the table at whose head she sat in dainty brocade or in shimmering satin. Money, money, money, money: the dross he despised, the pleasure he looked down upon, the vulgar aims and ends he himself had cast like dirt behind him — he dreamed them all for the daughter he loved, and was no longer ashamed: for Haviland Dumaresq the philosopher was dead within him now, and there remained for the moment but that shell or husk, Haviland Dumaresq the incipient opium-eater. He had forgotten everything but the joy of his day-dream, and he stalked ever forward, more asleep than awake, yet walking on sturdily, with exalted nerves, towards the edge of the Down, to the broad blue sea, that danced and gleamed with pearl and sapphire in the bright sunshine before him.
CHAPTER XII.
THE BUBBLE BURSTS.
Suddenly, after walking on in a dreamy way for miles and miles over the springy turf, he hardly knew how, the old man found himself beside a clump of gorse, face to face with the mysterious painter fellow. He started at the sight. Linnell had come up to the Downs, too, to walk off his chagrin, and to swallow as best he might his disappointment at not seeing Psyche.
Always sensitive, the young artist was more morbidly sensitive than usual where women were concerned. To say the truth, he had known but little of woman’s society. Rich as he was and cultivated to the finger-ends, the circumstances of his life had thrown Linnell to an exceptionally small degree into contact with families. His world was a world of clubs and studios and men’s lounging-places: so little had he seen of the other sex that he hardly felt himself at home, even now in a lady’s drawing-room.
This was not to be wondered at. His mother had died before he left America; at Oxford he had fallen in with none but college acquaintances; his English cousins refused to acknowledge him: and the Boston-bred lad, shy and ill at ease from his congenital lameness, and the strangeness of the novel surroundings in whose midst he was thrown, found himself cast at nineteen entirely on his own resources in the matter of gaining an introduction into our cold and austere English Society. It wasn’t surprising, therefore, that he knew hardly anyone except his brother-painters; or that he loved to escape from the vast blank of London life to the freedom and the space of the African desert. There at least he felt perfectly at home with the world: there no Bedouin ever trod on his social corns, no distracting matron ever strove to win him from his Bohemian solitude to the irksome respectability of white ties or five o’clock tea-tables.
So Linnell, perhaps, made a little more of a girl’s fancy, as he thought it, than most other men of his age and position would have dreamed of doing. He had retired to the Downs to brood over the supposed slight to his feelings in private; but a brisk walk upon the bracing turf, all alive with orchids and blue viper’s bugloss, had almost succeeded in restoring him to equanimity again, when all at once a sudden turn into a small combe brought him up sharp, with unexpected abruptness, full in front of Haviland Dumaresq.
The old man gazed at him vacantly for a moment. His eyes were glazed and very hazy; they explored space for some seconds with a distant interest. Then, on a sudden, he seemed to wake up into life with a start, and recognising the painter with a burst of intuition, laid his hand with quite a kindly air upon Linnell’s shoulder.
The gesture took the young man completely by surprise, for Dumaresq was one of those self-restrained, self-respecting natures whose strong sense of individuality in others assumes the form of an almost instinctive shrinking from anything that borders upon personal contact. Linnell looked the philosopher back in the face with a melting expression of mingled doubt and pleasure, as he hesitated slightly.
‘I wanted to speak with you, Linnell,’ Haviland Dumaresq began in a dreamy voice, motioning the young
man over to a dry bank in the broad sunshine. ‘I want, in point of fact, to apologize, or at least to explain to you. I’m afraid I was perhaps a trifle brusque with you at my cottage this morning. No, don’t say I wasn’t; I know I spoke sharply. Perhaps I even hurt your feelings. My training in life has not, I fear, been of a sort to encourage sensitiveness in myself, or to make me sympathize with it as much as I ought in others. I’m aware that I often err in that respect. But if I erred it was not through any personal intent, but under the influence of a strong impelling motive. I’ve been exercised in mind a good deal of late. There’s something, in short, I want to speak about to you.’
He went on still in a thick, half-dreamy, wandering tone, and his dilated pupils seemed to fix themselves vaguely on a point in infinity; but he delivered his words with regularity and ease, though somewhat stiffly, and it was evident to Linnell that he was making a very strong effort to master himself for some great object, under the influence of some fierce overpowering emotion. The painter allowed the old man to lead him unresisting to the bank, and took his seat beside him with a beating heart, wondering what of good or evil for himself or Psyche this strange exordium might prove to forebode, and anxiously awaiting its further development.
‘I wasn’t at all annoyed, Mr. Dumaresq,’ he said in a low voice, perhaps not quite truthfully; ‘only a little grieved that a man — well — whom I so much admired and respected as yourself, should refuse to accept so small a present from me.’
‘But it cost you a good deal of time and trouble,’ Dumaresq answered slowly, in the same fixed, mechanical, far-away voice; ‘and time is money, you know, Linnell — time is money. I shouldn’t feel it right to occupy so much of a young man’s time without making him what I thought an adequate repayment. You must forgive me that: it’s a principle of mine: rather a sacrifice to my own ideas as to individuality than an act of unfriendliness toward any particular person.’ Then he added suddenly in a very different tone: ‘I’m an old man, you must remember — a worn-out old man. I’ve wasted my life in a hard service — the service of science, the service of humanity. Bear with me, bear with me, a little while, I beg of you. I’m an old, old man. There’s not much now left of me.’
