Amazing Grace Part 7

"Any woman who has a conscience like that ought to cauterize it--with a curling-iron--and get rid of it," he observed dryly.

CHAPTER IV

THE QUALITY OF MERCY

That night I went to my bedroom and pulled open the top of an old-fashioned desk standing in the corner. Except for this desk there was not another unnecessary piece of furniture in the apartment, for I like a cell-like place to sleep. I consider that fresh air and a clear conscience ought to be the chief adjuncts--for a cluttered-up, luxurious bedroom always reminds me of Camille--and tuberculosis.

"And all this fuss about a few little faded wisps of paper!"

I sat down before the desk, after I had loosed my hair--which is that very, very black, that is the Hibernian accompaniment to blue eyes--and had slipped my slippers on.

"You have put me to considerable trouble to-day, Lady Frances."

Her portrait was hanging there--a small, cabinet-sized picture, in a battered gold frame. Her lover had succeeded in making her face on canvas very beautiful--with the exaggerated beauty of eyes and mouth which all portraits of that period show. Her brow was fine and thoughtful, irradiating the face with intelligence, yet I never looked at her without having a feeling that I was infinitely wiser than she.

Isn't it queer that we have this feeling of superiority over the people in old portraits--just because they are dead and we are living?

We open an ancient book of engravings, and say: "Poor little Mary Sh.e.l.ley! Simple little Jane Austen! Naughty little Nell Gwynne!"--There's only one pictured lady of my acquaintance who smiles down my latter-day wisdom as being a futile upstart thing. I can't pity her! Oh, no! Nor endure her either, for she's Mona Lisa!

I had always had this maternal protectiveness in my att.i.tude toward Lady Frances Webb, and to-night it was so keen that I could have tucked her in bed and told her fairy tales to soothe away the trembling fright she must have endured all that day. Instead of doing this, however, I satisfied myself with reading some of the letters over again. Isn't it a pity that above every writing-desk devoted to inter-s.e.x correspondence there is not a framed warning: "Beyond Platonic Friendship Lies--Alimony!"

Anyway, Lady Frances and James Christie tried the medium ground for a while. Over in a large pigeonhole, far away from the rest, was a packet of letters tied with a strong twine. They were the uninteresting ones, because they were _muzzled_. The handwriting was the same as that of the others--dainty, last-century chirography, as delicate and curling as a baby's pink fingers--but I never read them, for I don't care for muzzled things. Gossip about Lady Jersey--Marlborough House--the cold-blooded ire of William Lamb--all this held but little charm--compared with the other.

"Not you--not to-night," I decided, pushing them aside quickly. "I've got to have good pay for my pains of this day!"

I sought another compartment, where a batch huddled together--a carefully selected batch. They were as many, and as clinging in their contact with one another, as early kisses. I took up the first one.

"Dear Big Man"--it began.

"It has been weeks and weeks now since I have seen you! If it were not that you lived in that terrible London and I in this lonely country, I should be too proud to remind you of the time, for I should expect you to be the one to complain.

"Surely it is because of this that I now hate London so! It keeps this knowledge of separation--this sense of dreary waiting--from burning into your heart, as it does into mine!

"There you are kept too busy to think--but here I can do nothing else!--Or perhaps I am quite wrong, and it is not a matter of London and Lancashire, after all, but the more primal one of your being a man, and my being a woman! _Do_ I love the more? I wonder? And yet, I don't think that I care much! I am willing to love more abjectly than any woman ever loved before--if you care for me just a little in return."

(I always felt _very_ wise and maternal at this point.)

"You were an awful goose, Lady Frances!" I said. "This is a mistake that _I_ have never made!"

"Still, I am tormented by thoughts of you in London," the letter kept on. "I think of you--there--as a lion. It presses down upon me, this recollection that you are James Christie, the great artist, and the only release from the torture is when I go alone into the library and sit down before the fire. The two chairs are there--those two that were there that day--and then I can forget about the lion.

'Jim--Jim!' I whisper--'just my _lover_!'

"Then your face comes--it has to come, or I could never be good! Your rugged face that speaks of great forests which have been your home--the fierce young freedom which has nurtured you--and the glorious uplift you have achieved above all that is small and weak!

"You have asked me a thousand times why I love you, but I have never known what to say--because I love you for so many things--until now, when I have nothing but memories--and the ever-present sight of your absent face. And now I don't know why I love you, but I know what I love best about you. Shall I tell you--though of course you know already! It is not your talent--wonderful as it is--for there have been other artists; nor your terrible charm with its power to lure women away from duty--for England is full of fascinating men; nor your sweetness--and I think the first time I saw you smile I sounded the depths of this--it is not any of these, dear heart! Not any of these!

I love best the strength of you which you use to control the charm--the untamed force of your personality which makes your talent seem just an incident--and the big, _big_ virility of you!

"Do you think for a moment that you look like an artist?

Half-civilized you? Why, you are a woodsman, dear love--but not a hunter! You could never kill living things for the joy of seeing them die!

"You look as if you had spent all your life in the woods, doing hard tasks patiently--a woodcutter, or a charcoal burner! Ah, a charcoal burner! A man who has had to grip life with bared hands and wrest his bread from grudging circ.u.mstances. This is what you are, Jim, to my heart's eyes. You are a primal creature--simple-souled, great-bodied, and your mind is given over to naked truth.

"But all the time you are a famous artist--and London's idol! Your studio in St. James's Street is the lounging-place for curled darlings! The hardest task that your hands perform is over the ugly features of a fat d.u.c.h.ess!--How can you, Jim? Why don't you come away?

You are a man first, an artist afterward--and it is the man that I love!

"And, Jim, _do_ you know how much I love you? Do you know how your face leads me on?--It is your face I must have now, darling. _Portrait of the Artist, by Himself_, is a t.i.tle I have often smiled over, wondering how a man could be induced to paint his own features, but now I know! It is always because some woman has so clamorously demanded it--a woman who loved him! What else can so entirely satisfy--and when will you send it to me?"

When I came to the end I was sorry, for I had such a way of getting en rapport with her sentiments that I eyed the next express wagon I pa.s.sed, eagerly, to see if it could possibly be bringing the _Portrait of the Artist, by Himself_!

And on this occasion I reread a portion of the letter.

"Your face--your rugged face--or I could never be good!"

The picture of a rugged face was haunting me, and after a moment a sudden thought came to me.

"Why, that's what _I_ should like!"

I had the grace to feel ashamed, of course, especially as I recalled how mother and Guilford had tormented me that afternoon to know why I wouldn't marry--and I found the answer in this sudden discovery.

Still, that didn't keep me from pursuing the subject.

"A rugged face--great forests--fierce freedom--glorious uplift!--Oh, Man! Man! Where are you--and where is your great forest?--That's exactly what I want!"

I turned back to the desk, after a while, and still allowing my mind to circle away from the business at hand somewhat, I drew out another letter. It was short--and troubled. The dear, little, lady-like writing ran off at a tangent.

"Yes, I have seen the picture! Next to Murillo's _Betrothal of St.

Catherine_,--the face is the loveliest thing I have ever seen on canvas.

"Of course it is idealized--yet so absurdly _like_ that they tell me all Mayfair is staring! This talk--this stirring-up of what has been sleeping--will make it a thousand times harder for us ever to see each other, yet I am glad you did it!

"They are saying--Mayfair--that your 'making a pageant of a bleeding heart' is as indelicate as Caroline Lamb's _Glenarvon_! If people are going to be in love wickedly at least they ought not to write books about it--nor paint pictures of it!... Oh, beloved, let us pray that we may always keep bitterness out of our portraits of each other!"

The letter burned my fingers, for the pen marks were quick and jagged--like electric sparks--and I felt the pain that had sent them out; so I turned back to others of the batch--others that I knew almost by heart, yet always found something new in.

"I don't know that it's such an enviable state, after all, this being in love," I mused. "It seems to me it consists of--quite a mixture!

But, of course, it will take Heaven itself to solve the problem of a thornless rose!"

I ran my finger over the edges of the improvised envelopes, heavily sealed and bearing complicated foreign stamping. There were dozens of them--many only the common garden variety of love-letters, long-drawn out, confidential, reminiscent or hopeful, as the case might be--and a few which sounded at times almost light-hearted.

"When I say that I think of you all the time I am not so original as my critics give me credit for being, dear heart," she wrote in one.

"Nothing else in the annals of love-making is so trite as this, but when I explain how persistently your image is before me, how intricately woven with every thought of the future--how inseparably linked with every vision of happiness--you will know that mine is no light nor pa.s.sing attachment.

"If I give you one foolish example of this will it bore you? I've written you before, I believe, that this spring I have been outdoors all the time--riding or driving about the country, because the mad restlessness of thinking about you drives me out. In this house, in these gardens, _you_ are so constantly present that I can do nothing but remember--then I go away, hoping to forget--and what happens?--I go into a castle--a place where you have never been, perhaps--and before I can begin talking with any one, or think of any sensible thing to say the thought comes to me: 'How well the figure of my lover would fit in with all this grandeur! How naturally and easily he would swing through these great rooms!'

"Then, early some mornings I ride into the village--past cottages that look so humble and happy that I feel my heart stifling with longing to possess one of them--and _you_! 'How happy I could be living there,' I think, 'but--how tremendously tall and stalwart Jim would look coming in through this low doorway, as I called him to supper!'

"Then I spend hours and hours planning the real home I want us to have, dear love of mine. I don't care much whether it is a castle or a cottage, just so it has you in it--and all around it must be the sight of distant hills! These for _your_ artist's soul!