by Grant Allen
Psyche, too, for her part, was pale and agitated; but she was far too much of a woman already to let her devoted admirer plainly see it. She, too, had lain awake on her bed all night, not in the sleepless ecstasy of love like Linnell, but crying her eyes out in a fierce conflict of counter-emotions. Till yesterday she hardly knew she loved her painter; but we often learn what we love best only at the moment when we are called upon to give it up. Now that she was asked to relinquish all thoughts of loving Linnell, Psyche felt to herself for the first time how her whole future had unconsciously wrapped itself up in him. She had cried and cried till her eyes were sore and red; at least, for the first half of that long lone night. But about three o’clock the woman within her suggested suddenly that if she went on crying any longer like this, Linnell would detect those red eyes in the morning. So she rose up hastily and bathed them with rose-water; and after a long time spent in reducing the swollen lids to proper proportions, went to bed once more with a stern resolve not to cry again to-night, no matter what cruel thought might present itself to her. And she kept the resolve with innate firmness. She was Haviland Dumaresq’s daughter, after all, and she knew how to control her own heart sternly. Let it throb as it would, she would keep it quiet. Her pride itself would never permit her to let her father or her lover see to-morrow she had shed a tear over this her first great sorrow.
So, when Linnell presented himself in the bare little dining-room at ten o’clock, Psyche was there, fresh and smiling as usual, to meet him and greet him with undisturbed calmness. Fresh and smiling as usual, but somehow changed, Linnell felt instinctively: not quite herself: some shadow of a thick impenetrable barrier seemed to have risen up invisible since yesterday between them. Could it be that Psyche too —— But no! impossible! Linnell dashed away the unworthy thought, half ashamed of himself for allowing it to obtrude its horrid face for one moment upon him. Such motives could never weigh with Psyche. Though Haviland Dumaresq had wallowed in mire, his Psyche could never soil the tip of her white little wings in it.
She held out her hand and took his with a smile. But her grasp had none of that gentle pressure he had learnt to expect of late from Psyche; that cordial pressure, unfelt and undesigned, which all of us give to friends and intimates. A man so sensitive and so delicately organized as Linnell felt the difference at once: he felt it, and it chilled him. ‘Good-morning,’ he said in a disappointed voice: ‘we can go on at once, I suppose, with the picture.’
‘Yes,’ Psyche answered in tones she could hardly school herself to utter. ‘It’ll be finished to-day, I suppose, Mr. Linnell? Papa told me you thought you’d only want one more day for it.’
The artist looked at her with a keen and piercing glance. Was even his faith in Psyche, then, to be shaken? Would Psyche herself have nothing more to say to the penniless painter? He wouldn’t believe it — he couldn’t believe it. ‘Yes, one more day,’ he answered, ‘and then we shall be done. It’s been a pleasant task, Miss Dumaresq. I’m sorry it’s finished. We’ve enjoyed it together.’
‘The picture’s beautiful,’ Psyche answered, trembling, but trying to talk as coldly as she could. She had given her word to papa last night, and bitter as it might be, she would do the best she knew to fulfil it. But, oh, how much easier it was to promise last night — though that itself was hard — than to carry the promise into execution this morning!
‘I’m glad you like it,’ Linnell went on, making up his mind not to notice her tone — a man may so readily misinterpret mere tones: ‘I never pleased myself better before; but then, I never had so suitable a sitter.’
‘Thank you,’ Psyche answered with well-assumed calmness: ‘it’s a pleasure to me if I’ve been able to be of any service to you.’
Linnell looked back at her in surprise and alarm. His heart was beating very fast now. There could be no mistaking the frigidity of her tone. Impossible, incredible, inconceivable as it seemed, Psyche must have found out he wasn’t worth catching.
His hand could hardly guide his brush aright, but he went on painting through that whole long morning — the longest and most terrible he had ever known — with the energy of despair increasing and deepening upon him each moment. They talked continually — talked far more than usual; for each of them felt too constrained and unhappy to let the conversation flag for a single moment. Silence in such a case would be worse than unsafe: only by a strenuous stream of platitudinous commonplaces can the overflowing heart be held back at a crisis from unseemly self-revelation. Linnell talked about the picture and its effect: Psyche answered him back bravely with polite phrases. Her courage never failed or flinched for a second: though she broke her heart over it, she would keep her word to the letter to her father.
After all, it was only for three long years: an eternity of time when one’s seventeen; but still an eternity with limits beyond it. Some day, some day, she could explain it all to him. Some day she could tell him with a bursting heart how much she had endured, and for his dear sake. For he loved her, he loved her; of that she was certain. His hand was trembling on the canvas as he worked; till then, poor fluttering heart, lie still. Some day you may burst your self-imposed barriers, and let your pent-up love flow down its natural channel.
Once or twice, however, the pressure was terrible. Once or twice the tears rose almost to the level of her eyes; but each time, with a superhuman effort of will, like her father’s daughter, she thrust them back again. Towards the end especially, when Linnell, now thoroughly wounded in soul, began to hint at his approaching departure, the conflict within her grew painfully intense.
‘I meant to spend all the summer at Petherton,’ he said with a burst, looking across at her despairingly, towards the close of the sitting— ‘particularly once; I almost made my mind up. But circumstances have arisen which make me think it best now to go. Though, indeed, even yet I might stop — if other circumstances intervened to detain me.’ He looked at her hard. She gave no sign. ‘But that seems unlikely, he went on, heart-broken. ‘So I shall probably leave almost at once. Unless, indeed, anything should happen — unexpectedly — to keep me here.’
He gazed at her, despairing. Psyche faltered. The heart within her rose up and did battle. She knew what he meant. One word would suffice — one motion of the hand. Could she keep it down? Could she do her own soul — and his — this gross injustice? And then her father’s pleading face recurred to her. An old, old man — a broken old man! Her father’s pleading face, and her sacred promise! Her promise! her promise! Come what might, she must, she must! It was for three years only! And he — he would wait for her.
Summoning up all her courage, she answered once more in the same set tone, but with agonized eyes:
‘We shall be sorry to lose you. It’s been a very great pleasure to us all to see you here, Mr. Linnell, this summer.’
Linnell noticed the struggle and its result; noticed it, and — as was natural for him — misinterpreted it too. A nature like his could put but one interpretation upon it. That she was really crushing down her own better feelings at the dictates of mere vulgar prudence and avarice! She would have liked to be cordial — to the man, to himself — modest and sensitive as he was in his heart, Linnell yet paid himself mentally the compliment of admitting so much — she liked the man; but she would make no concession to the penniless painter. He turned to his work once more with a stifled sigh of horror. He, too, had had a day-dream at last; he had thought just once, just once in the world, he had found the one true maiden to love him; and now the day-dream had melted again into airy nothingness, and the one true maiden had declared by no uncertain signs that she too preferred the worship of Mammon. Ah me! ah me! the horror of it! the pity of it!
There was a dangerous silence for half a minute. Psyche thought he must surely hear her heart as it beat with loud thuds against her trembling little bosom. At all hazards she must find something to say. She blundered in her haste and trepidation on the worst possible tack.
‘But you will come again?�
�� she murmured, almost persuasively.
Linnell looked up, and hesitated for an instant. Could she mean to relent? Was she leading him on? Never would he ask her if she took him with anything less than her whole heart, for better for worse, for richer for poorer, on his own account alone, without thought or calculation of money and position.
‘A painter’s life is governed by many varying conditions,’ he answered slowly and very deliberately. ‘We can’t come and go where we will, like moneyed people. We must move where we find work cut out to our hands. Ours is a very precarious trade. We work hard, most of us, and earn little. Such people, you know, must be guided by the market. They must govern their motions hither and thither by demand and supply — hard political economy — paint what they find the world will pay them for.’
‘But you’re not like that,’ Psyche cried, more naturally and unconstrainedly than she had yet spoken: ‘you’re well known, and can paint what you will. Besides, you can come and go where you please. You’ve nobody else in the world but yourself to think of. And — it would give us all so much pleasure to see you again at Petherton.’
Her soul misgave her as she spoke. Had she gone too far? Was she breaking the spirit of her promise now? Was she moving half-way, in her eagerness, to meet the penniless painter?
Linnell, too, looked up with a fresh burst of hope, as he heard her words.
‘I might come back,’ he said, eyeing her once more with that piercing glance of his, ‘if only — I thought — I had something to come back for.’
Psyche shook with terror and remorse from head to foot. It was an awful ordeal for so young a girl. Her father should have guarded her heart from this strain. She had gone too far, then. She had said too much. Her feelings had betrayed her. She had broken her word. Oh, what would papa say to this? She must put herself right again; she must justify her promise.
‘We shall all be delighted to see you,’ she said, relapsing into the same cold impersonal voice as before. ‘I hope you’ll come. There must be plenty of things for you still to paint here.’
Linnell turned back, unmanned, to the picture again. Then she had fought it all out with her own heart, and the worst side had won within her! How beautiful she was, and how young, and how innocent! Who could ever have believed that under that sweet and almost childish face — childish in softness, yet full of womanly grace and dignity — there lay so much cold and calculating selfishness! Who could ever have believed that that seemingly simple country girl would stifle her own better inner promptings — deliberately, visibly to the naked eye — for the sake of money, position, worldly prospects! She would sell her own soul, then, for somebody’s gold! And, oh, how futile, how empty was the sale! If she would but have loved him, how he would have loved her! And now, even now, when he saw she loved him far less than the chance of selling herself for hard cash in the matrimonial market — why, he loved her, he loved her, he loved her still! The more unworthy she was, the more he loved her. But he would never tell her so. Oh, never, never! For her own dignity’s sake he would never tell her. He would never degrade himself — and Her — by putting her to the shame of that open renunciation of her better self. He would spare her the disgrace of belying her own heart. He would bear it all in silence. He would spare her — he would spare her.
He glanced across at her as he worked on mechanically still. A red flush stood now in the midst of her pale white cheek. She was ashamed, ashamed, of that he felt sure; but her heart was not strong enough to break through the vile bonds it had woven for itself. The Psyche he had dreamed of had never existed. But the baser Psyche that actually was he would always love. He would love her for the sake of his own sweet fancy. The ideal had made even the reality dear to him.
He painted away for some minutes in silence. Neither spoke. Psyche could not trust herself to say another word. The tears were welling up almost uncontrollably now. Linnell put touch after touch to the completed picture. Strange to say, the very power of his feeling made him paint intensely. He was surpassing himself in the exaltation of the moment. He was putting on the canvas the ideal Psyche — the Psyche that was not and never had been.
At last he drew breath, stood back, looked at it, and sighed. ‘It’s finished,’ he said. ‘One other stroke would spoil it.’
‘Finished!’ Psyche cried. ‘Oh — I’m so sorry.’
Linnell packed up his things to go, in silence. Psyche never moved from her seat, but watched him. He packed them all up with a resolute air. She knew what it meant, but brave and proud still, she kept her compact to the very letter. ‘Are you — going?’ she asked at last, as he stood with the easel stuck under his arm, leaving the picture itself on the dining-room table.
‘Yes, going,’ he said in a very husky voice. ‘It’s all finished. Good-bye, Miss Dumaresq.’
‘For ever!’ Psyche cried, all her strength failing her.
‘For ever,’ Linnell answered, in choking tones. ‘One word from you would have kept me, Psyche. It never came. You didn’t speak it. If you spoke it now, even, it would keep me still. But you won’t — you won’t! You dare not speak it.’
Psyche looked up at him, one appealing glance. Her lips trembled. Her face was white as death now. ‘I love you! Stop!’ faltered unspoken in her parched throat. It almost burst, irrepressible, from her burning tongue. But her promise! her promise! She must keep her promise! The words died away on her bloodless lips. She only looked. She answered nothing.
With one wild impulse, before he went, Linnell seized the two white cheeks between his hands, and, stooping down, kissed the bloodless lips just once — and no more after. He knew it was wrong, but he couldn’t resist it. Then he rose, and, crying in a tremulous voice, ‘Good-bye, Psyche: good-bye, for ever!’ he rushed wildly out into the cottage garden.
Ten minutes later, when Haviland Dumaresq came into the room to see what fruit his counsel had borne, he found Psyche seated in the one armchair with her cold face buried deep in her two hands, and her bosom rising and falling convulsively.
‘He’s gone, papa!’ she said; ‘and I’ve kept my promise.’
CHAPTER XVI.
ON THE SPUR OF THE MOMENT.
To Linnell the blow was a very severe one. At thirty, when a man loves, he loves in earnest. No playing then with light loves in the portal: no time then to wince and relent and refrain: the wounds he gets at that age go deep and rankle. As Linnell returned to the Red Lion that morning he felt the world was indeed a blank to him. Once only in his life had he indulged in the madness of daring to think a woman loved him: he had put that woman to the test, oh, such a tiny test! and found her wanting past all belief. Henceforth he would hold no girl a goddess. The game was played — and lost. Linnell was tired of it.
He had left the Oriental picture behind him at the Wren’s Nest. The portrait of Haviland Dumaresq himself stood fronting him on the easel in his own sitting-room. It wanted several hours’ work yet of its final completion. That fiery energy of despair he had felt at the cottage still possessed his soul. Seizing his palette, all on fire, and working away with a will from vivid memory alone — a memory now quickened by his unnatural exaltation — Linnell proceeded to fill in the remaining details, and to place upon the canvas a breathing, speaking, living portrait of the great philosopher in his happiest aspect. It was not Dumaresq as he appeared to the artist the day before on the west cliffs — not that shattered and disappointed old man of seventy, pleading hard against his own earlier and better self for the lowest and vulgarest estimate of life — but Dumaresq as he appeared on that first glorious evening at the Wren’s Nest, with the heroic air of resignation and simplicity he had worn on his face, while he told in plain unvarnished language the story of his own grand and noble devotion in the morning of his days to an impersonal cause. Linnell remembered every curve of the features, every flash of the eyes, every turn of the expression, as Dumaresq had unfolded before them in full detail that strange history of magnificent self-denial. That was the Dumaresq
that should live for ever upon his earnest canvas: that was the Dumaresq whose lineaments posterity should transcribe from his hand on the title-page of five thousand future editions of the ‘Encyclopædic Philosophy.’ For Linnell was too single-minded in his admiration of Dumaresq to let contempt for one aspect of the man’s nature interfere with appreciation for the greatness of his life-work. Let him be emotionally whatever he might, intellectually, Linnell felt sure in his own soul, Haviland Dumaresq towered like a giant among the lesser and narrower thinkers of his age.
After three hours’ hard work, he desisted at last, and, standing back in the room, gazed close with a critical eye at the portrait. His instincts told him it was a magnificent picture: he had put his very heart’s blood into each stroke of the pencil. The landlady came up while he worked, and announced lunch; but Linnell would not lay aside his brush for a second till his task was done. ‘Give me a glass of claret and a sandwich,’ he cried hastily; and the landlady, lamenting sore that ‘all them nice sweetbreads was cooked for nothing,’ was fain perforce to acquiesce in his Spartan humour. But when the last touch had been put to the picture, and Dumaresq himself gazed forth from the canvas, a thinker confessed in all his greatness, Linnell stood before it with folded hands, astonished at his own unexpected force and originality. Never before in his life had he painted with all the inborn energy of his nature, unrestrained by petty fears and unworthy self-criticisms. Never before had he so trusted to his own true genius; and the result of that proud and justified confidence was apparent at a glance on the easel before him.
Women take refuge from disappointment in tears; men in action, and above all in work. The work had soothed Linnell’s nerves gradually. He sat down to his desk, when the task was complete, and wrote a hasty note with trembling hands to Psyche. It was the first he had ever written to her: it would be the last — his one love-letter. And then no more hereafter, whatever might come with years.
