Countess Erika's Apprenticeship Part 41

From a pa.s.sage at the head of the stone staircase there appeared an old Venetian woman, with large earrings in her ears, and thick waving gray hair brushed back from her temples and coiled in a knot at the back of her head, the antique style of which suited admirably her regular cla.s.sic features. She smiled a welcome to the ladies, thereby displaying a double row of dazzling white teeth, while Lozoncyi in fluent Italian ordered her to take the portmanteau to the dressing-room and unpack it.

Along the narrow pa.s.sage leading directly through the house from the water, they walked into the garden, a tangle of luxuriant growth. The bushes were already clothed in tender green, and here and there through the young leaves could be seen a spray of white hawthorn.

"Oh, how charming!" exclaimed Erika.

"Is it not?" said the painter. "I came here for the sake of the garden.

A spot of earth is so precious in this watery Venice."

"Do not forget your Lucrezia: her beauty exceeds that of your garden,"

the old Countess remarked.

"My old factotum? Yes, she has a fine face, magnificent features. I cannot endure anything ugly about me. But did you notice how short and stout she is?" He asked the question with so genuine an air of annoyance that the old Countess could not help laughing.

"What of that? Is it a crime in your eyes?"

"No," he said, thoughtfully, "but it makes her useless for artistic purposes. I tried to pose her the other day,--in vain. She might do for Juliet's nurse, or for a modern fortune-teller, but that is not my line. I find plenty of handsome faces among these Venetians, and fine shoulders, too, but nothing more. Their bodies are too long, their legs too short; there are no sweeping lines, no grace of movement. And when one finds a model whose limbs are long enough, she is like a stork. I have a deal of trouble in this respect. When I was painting 'Spring,'--the picture that Countess Erika does not like,--I was in despair because I could find no model for my female figure. Then one day on the Rialto I found a person, no longer young, rouged, but magnificently formed,--as tall as Countess Erika, only not----"

He broke off and grew very red. A moment afterwards, however, he had forgotten his embarra.s.sment in a new inspiration. At the door of the studio Erika lifted her arm to pluck a spray of wistaria.

"Stay just as you are, for one instant, Countess!" he cried, and, rushing into his studio, he returned instantly with a sketch-book and a basket-chair. The latter he placed in the shade for the old Countess, and then began to sketch rapidly.

"Only look at that curve!" he exclaimed to the grandmother. "It is music! And the line of the hips!"

His manner of unceasingly dwelling upon the beauty or ugliness of the human body, the exact a.n.a.lysis which he was perpetually making of its structure, in connection with his profession, was at times offensive.

But neither of the ladies took exception to it, Erika partly from inexperience and partly from flattered vanity, the old Countess because her sensitiveness in this respect had become dulled of late, and also because Lozoncyi expressed himself in so nave a fashion that he seemed at the worst to be merely guilty of a breach of good taste. One had to know him very intimately to discover what a profound impression upon his inmost nature this perpetual study of the human figure had produced.

"How thoroughly you understand how to dress yourself!" he exclaimed, continuing to look fixedly at the girl, who wore a gown of some white woollen stuff, with a large straw hat trimmed with heavy old Venetian lace.

"I have half a mind to paint you thus, instead of in evening dress," he murmured. "But no; your portrait should be in full dress. Only, be generous; we will begin the portrait to-morrow, give me an hour for myself to-day: I want to make a water-colour sketch of you. Does it tire you too much to stretch your arm out so far?"

"A woman does not grow tired when she is conscious of being admired,"

the old Countess declared; "but the situation is less entertaining for me. Have you not some book to give me?"

Erika grew weary at last, in spite of the admiration lavished upon her by Lozoncyi while he sketched. The painter improvised a lunch for his guests beneath a mulberry-tree, upon a little rickety table. It was excellently prepared and delicately served, and he enjoyed seeing the ladies do ample justice to it. Lucrezia had just served the coffee, and was standing with a smiling face and arms akimbo, listening to the old Countess's praise of her skill in cookery, when there came a knock at the door.

"Confound it!" muttered Lozoncyi, "not a visitor, I trust."

It was no visitor, but a letter brought by Lozoncyi's gondolier, a handsome dark-skinned lad in a sailor dress, with a red scarf about his waist. Involuntarily Erika glanced at the letter. The address was in a feminine hand; the post-mark was Paris.

Lozoncyi gave an impatient shrug at sight of the handwriting; then, crushing the letter in his hand, he slipped it unopened into his pocket. "Will you not look into my workshop?" he asked the ladies.

"I was just about to ask you to show us your studio," replied the old Countess. "I am curious with regard to your 'Bad Dreams.'"

"Yes,"--he shivered,--"'bad dreams,'--that is the word!"

The atelier, which they entered from the garden by a gla.s.s door, was an unusually high and s.p.a.cious apartment, but very plainly furnished, and in dusty confusion,--the workshop of a very nervous artist, who can endure no 'clearing up,' who cannot do without the rubbish of his art.

Erika's gaze was instantly attracted by a remarkable and horrible picture.

A single figure in a close, clinging garment of undecided hue, the head thrust forward, the arms stretched out, the whole form expressing yearning, torturing desire, was groping its way towards a swamp above which hovered a will-o'-the-wisp. Above in the dark heavens gleamed the pure light of the stars. It was all a marvel of tone and expression,--the sad harmony of colour, the star-lit sky, the dreary swamp, and above all the figure, its every feature, every fingertip, every fold even of its garment, expressing desire.

"What did you mean it to represent?" asked the old Countess.

"Can you not guess?"

No, she could not guess; but Erika instantly exclaimed, "Blind Love!"

He looked at her more curiously than he had done hitherto, and then asked, "How did you know?"

"I see how the figure is creeping towards the will-o'-the-wisp, not heeding the stars sparkling above it. Look how it is sinking into the swamp, grandmother. It is horrible!"

"Blind Love," her grandmother repeated, thoughtfully. The subject did not appeal to her.

"Yes," said Lozoncyi, "blind love,--the misery of debasing pa.s.sion."

With a bitter smile he added, "Well, the only comfort is that one can sometimes attain to the will-o'-the-wisp, though he can never reach the stars, however he may gaze up at them."

"No," Erika exclaimed, indignantly, "that is no comfort. Rather--a thousand times rather--reach up in vain for the stars, and expand and grow in longing for the unattainable, than stoop to a happiness to be found only in a swamp!"

He made an inclination towards her, and said, half aloud, "What you say is very beautiful; but you do not understand."

"Well, you certainly have turned that poor fellow's head," Countess Lenzdorff remarked, leaning back comfortably among the cushions of the gondola as she and Erika were being rowed home. "It will do him no harm: on the contrary, it is good for such young artists, too apt to be self-indulgent, to reach after the unattainable; it enlarges their minds." Then after a while she went on: "I wonder whom the letter that so provoked him was from. Perhaps from that blonde who was with him at Bayreuth."

Erika did not reply; she looked down at a spray of wistaria he had plucked for her as she took leave of him. Suddenly she started: a large black caterpillar crept out from among the fragrant blossoms. With a little cry of disgust she flung the spray into the water.

At the same time Lozoncyi was standing in his studio, looking at the water-colour sketch he had made of Erika.

"A glorious creature," he muttered to himself; "glorious! I do not remember ever to have seen anything more beautiful, and, with all her distinction, and that pallor too, thoroughly healthy, fully developed, nothing maimed or deformed about her. She must be at least twenty-four.

How is it that she is not married? Some unhappy love-affair? Hardly.

She seems entirely fancy free, as if she had never in her life cared for a lover. How proudly she carries her head! Her kind is entirely unknown to me. Well, there are always women enough to do the dirty work of life; some there must be to guard the Holy Grail." He turned to the door of the studio that led out into the garden. A light vapour was rising from the earth, enveloping the blossoms in mist. He smiled strangely and not very pleasantly. "The spring cares not a whit for the Holy Grail. It goes on its way; it goes on its way."

At first she had been repelled by him; then he had flattered her vanity; by and by he interested her, but from the very beginning he had excited her imagination as no other man had ever done. And this in spite of the fact that his views of life, which he scarcely concealed, aroused within her painful indignation. She was quite aware that there were dark recesses in his soul which she might not explore, and that, courteous and faultless as was his behaviour towards women like her grandmother and herself, he respected them as curious specimens of the s.e.x, interesting, because not often encountered. Upon all this she pondered, sick at heart, as she turned her head to and fro upon her pillow, so many nights, seeking the refreshment of sleep.

The outcome of it was a strange, pathetic, foolishly ambitious project.

She set herself the task of converting him to n.o.bler views of life.

How many unfortunates have been ruined in their zeal for conversion!

That Erika should unconsciously play with fire was not astonishing, but that her grandmother should look on in smiling indifference while her grand-daughter was thus occupied was amazing.

There are learned fanatics who in their determination to establish some theory of their own lavish all their powers in an effort to elaborate it, shutting their eyes to any light which may steal in upon them, while thus engaged, from an opposite quarter.

At first the portrait progressed with great rapidity; but now weeks had gone by, and it seemed as if Lozoncyi were unable to finish it.

It was life-size, a three-fourths figure, and, in order not to fatigue Erika, she was taken sitting in an antique chair, her lap heaped with pale-lilac wistaria blossoms. There was no straining for effect, not a trace of conventionality.