The Crown of Life Part 48

"Tell me, if you know," threw out the other, looking into her broad, good-natured face. "Is he still interested in Miss Hannaford?"

"Why, of course! He's one of the stupids who keep up that kind of thing for a lifetime. But 'he that will not when he may'! Poor silly fellow!

How I should enjoy boxing his ears!"

They laughed, but Miss Bonnicastle seemed very much in earnest.

"He's tormenting his silly self," she went on, "because he has been unfaithful to her. There was a girl in Paris. Oh, he tells me everything! We're good friends. The girl over there did him enormous good, that's all I know. It was she that set him to work, and supplied him with his model at the same time! What better could have happened.

And now the absurd creature has qualms of conscience!"

"Well," said Piers, smiling uneasily, "it's intelligible."

"Bosh! Don't be silly! A man has his work to do, and he must get what help he can. I shall pack him off back to Paris."

"I'll go and see him, I think. About the Italian, Florio. Has he also an interest?"

"In Olga? Yes, I fancy he has, but I don't know much about him. He comes and goes, on business. There's a chance, I think, of his dropping in for money before long. He isn't a bad sort--what do you think?"

That same afternoon Piers went in search of Kite's garret. It was a garret literally, furnished with a table and a bed, and little else, but a large fire burned cheerfully, and on the table, beside a drawing-board, stood a bottle of wine. When he had welcomed his visitor, Kite pointed to the bottle.

"I got used to it in Paris," he said, "and it helps me to work. I shan't offer you any, or you might be made ill; the cheapest claret on the market, but it reminds me of--of things."

There rose in Otway's mind a suspicion that, to-day at all events, Kite had found his cheap claret rather too seductive. His face had an unwonted warmth of colour, and his speech an unusual fluency. Presently he opened a portfolio and showed some of the work he had done in Paris: drawings in pen-and-ink, and the published reproductions of others; these latter, he declared, were much spoilt in the process work. The motive was always a nude female figure, of great beauty; the same face, with much variety of expression; for background all manner of fantastic scenes, or rather glimpses and suggestions of a poet's dreamland.

"You see what I mean?" said Kite. "It's simply Woman, as a beautiful thing, as a--a--oh, I can't get it into words. An ideal, you know--something to live for. Put her in a room--it becomes a different thing. Do you feel my meaning? English people wouldn't have these, you know. They don't understand. They call it sensuality."

"Sensuality!" cried Piers, after dreaming for a moment. "Great heavens!

then why are human bodies made beautiful?"

The artist gave a strange laugh of gratification.

"There you hit it! Why--why? The work of the Devil, they say."

"The worst of it is," said Piers, "that they're right as regards most men. Beauty, as an inspiration, exists only for the few. Beauty of any and every kind--it's all the same. There's no safety for the world as we know it, except in utilitarian morals."

Later, when he looked back upon these winter months, Piers could distinguish nothing clearly. It was a time of confused and obscure motives, of oscillation, of dreary conflict, of dull suffering. His correspondence with Olga, his meetings with her, had no issue. He made a thousand resolves; a thousand times he lost them. But for the day's work, which kept him in an even tenor for a certain number of hours, he must have drifted far and perilously.

It was a life of solitude. The people with whom he talked were mere ghosts, intangible, not of his world. Sometimes, amid a crowd of human beings, he was stricken voiceless and motionless: he stared about him, and was bewildered, asking himself what it all meant.

His health was not good; he suffered much from headaches; he fell into languors, la.s.situde of body and soul. As a result, imagination seemed to be dead in him. The torments of desire were forgotten. When he heard that Irene Derwent had returned to London, the news affected him only with a sort of weary curiosity. Was it true that she would not marry Arnold Jacks? It seemed so. He puzzled over the story, wondered about it; but only his mind was concerned, never his emotions.

Once he was summoned to Queen's Gate. John Jacks lay on a sofa, in his bedroom; he talked as usual, but in a weaker voice, and had the face of a man doomed. Piers saw no one else in the house, and on going away felt that he had been under that roof for the last time.

His mind was oppressed with the thought of death. As happens, probably, to every imaginative man at one time or another, he had a conviction that his own days were drawing to a premature close. Speculation about the future seemed idle; he had come to the end of hopes and fears.

Night after night his broken sleep suffered the same dream; he saw Mrs.

Hannaford, who stretched her hands to him, and with a face of silent woe seemed to implore his help. Help against Death; and his powerlessness wrung his heart with anguish. Waking, he thought of all the women--beautiful, tender, objects of infinite pa.s.sion and worship--who even at that moment lay smitten by the great destroyer; the gentle, the loving, racked, disfigured, flung into the horror of the grave. And his being rose in revolt; he strove in silent agony against the dark ruling of the world.

One day there was of tranquil self-possession, of blessed calm. A Sunday in January, when, he knew not how, he found himself amid the Suss.e.x lanes, where he had rambled in the time of harvest. The weather, calm and dry and mild, but without sunshine, soothed his spirit. He walked for hours, and towards nightfall stood upon a wooded hill, gazing westward. An overcast, yet not a gloomy sky; still, soft-dappled; with rifts and shimmerings of pearly blue scattered among mult.i.tudinous billows, which here were a dusky yellow, there a deep neutral tint. In the low west, beneath the long dark edge, a soft splendour, figured with airy cloudlets, waited for the invisible descending sun. Moment after moment the rifts grew longer, the tones grew warmer; above began to spread a rosy flush; in front, the glory brightened, touching the cloud-line above it with a tender crimson.

If all days could be like this! One could live so well, he thought, in mere enjoyment of the beauty of earth and sky, all else forgotten.

Under this soft-dusking heaven, death was welcome rest, and pa.s.sion only a tender sadness.

He said to himself that he had grown old in hopeless love--only to doubt in the end whether he had loved at all.

CHAPTER x.x.xI

The lad he employed in his office was run over by a cab one slippery day, and all but killed. Piers visited him in the hospital, thus seeing for the first time the interior of one of those houses of pain, which he always disliked even to pa.s.s. The experience did not help to brighten his mood; he lacked that fortunate temper of the average man, which embraces as a positive good the less of two evils. The long, grey, low-echoing ward, with its atmosphere of antiseptics; the rows of little white camp-beds, an ominous screen hiding this and that; the bloodless faces, the smothered groan, made a memory that went about with him for many a day.

It strengthened his growing hatred of London, a huge battlefield calling itself the home of civilisation and of peace; battlefield on which the wounds were of soul no less than of body. In these gaunt streets along which he pa.s.sed at night, how many a sad heart suffered, by the dim glimmer that showed at upper windows, a hopeless solitude amid the innumerable throng! Human cattle, the herd that feed and breed, with them it was well; but the few born to a desire for ever unattainable, the gentle spirits who from their prisoning circ.u.mstance looked up and afar how the heart ached to think of them! Some girl, of delicate instinct, of purpose sweet and pure, wasting her unloved life in toil and want and indignity; some man, whose youth and courage strove against a mean environment, whose eyes grew haggard in the vain search for a companion promised in his dreams; they lived, these two, parted perchance only by the wall of neighbour houses, yet all huge London was between them, and their hands would never touch. Beside this hunger for love, what was the stomach-famine of a mult.i.tude that knew no other?

The spring drew nigh, and Otway dreaded its coming. It was the time of his burning torment, of imagination traitor to the worthier mind; it was the time of reverie that rapt him above everything ign.o.ble, only to embitter by contrast the destiny he could not break. He rose now with the early sun; walked fast and far before the beginning of his day's work, with an aim he knew to be foolish, yet could not abandon. From Guildford Street, along the byways, he crossed Tottenham Court Road, just rattling with its first traffic, crossed Portland Place, still in its soundest sleep, and so onward till he touched Bryanston Square. The trees were misty with half-unfolded leaf.a.ge birds twittered cheerily among the branches; but Piers heeded not these things. He stood before the high narrow-fronted house, which once he had entered as a guest, where never again would he be suffered to pa.s.s the door. Irene was here, he supposed, but could not be sure, for on the rare occasions when he saw Olga Hannaford they did not speak of her cousin. Of the course her life had taken, he knew nothing whatever. Here, in the chill bright morning, he felt more a stranger to Irene than on the day, six years ago, when with foolish timidity he ventured his useless call. She was merely indifferent to him then; now she shrank from the sound of his name.

On such a morning, a few weeks later, he pursued his walk in the direction of Kensington, and pa.s.sed along Queen's Gate. It was between seven and eight o'clock. Nearing John Jacks house, he saw a carriage at the door; it could of course be only the doctor's, and he became sad in thinking of his kind old friend, for whom the last days of life were made so hard. Just as he was pa.s.sing, the door opened, and a man, evidently a doctor, came quickly forth. With movement as if he were here for this purpose, Otway ran up the steps; the servant saw him, and waited with the door still open.

"Will you tell me how Mr. Jacks is?" he asked.

"I am sorry to say, sir," was the subdued answer, "that Mr. Jacks died at three this morning."

Piers turned away. His eyes dazzled in the sunshine.

The evening papers had the news, with a short memoir--half of which was concerned not with John Jacks, but with his son Arnold.

It seemed to him just possible that he might receive an invitation to attend the funeral; but nothing of the kind came to him. The slight, he took it for granted, was not social, but personal. His name, of course, was offensive to Arnold Jacks, and probably to Mrs. John Jacks; only the genial old man had disregarded the scandal shadowing the Otway name.

On the morrow, it was made known that the deceased Member of Parliament would be buried in Yorkshire, in the village churchyard which was on his own estate. And Otway felt glad of this; the sombre and crowded hideousness of a London cemetery was no place of rest for John Jacks.

A fortnight later, at eleven o'clock on Sunday morning, Piers mounted with a quick stride the stairs leading to Miss Bonnicastle's abode. The door of her workroom stood ajar; his knock brought no response; after hesitating a little, he pushed the door open and went in.

Accustomed to the grotesques and vulgarities which generally met his eye upon these walls, he was startled to behold a life-size figure of great beauty, suggesting a study for a serious work of art rather than a design for a street poster. It was a woman, in cla.s.sic drapery, standing upon the seash.o.r.e, her head thrown back, her magnificent hair flowing unrestrained, and one of her bare arms raised in a gesture of exultation. As he gazed at the drawing with delight, Miss Bonnicastle appeared from the inner room, dressed for walking.

"What do you think of _that_?" she exclaimed.

"Better than anything you ever did!"

"True enough! That's Kite. Don't you recognise his type?"

"One thinks of Ariadne," said Piers, "but the face won't do for her."

"Yes, it's Ariadne--but I doubt if I shall have the brutality to finish out my idea. She is to have lying on the sand by her a case of Higginson's Hair-wash, stranded from a wreck, and a bottle of it in her hand. See the notion? Her despair consoled by discovery of Higginson!"

They laughed, but Piers broke off in half-serious anger.

"That's d.a.m.nable! You won't do it. For one thing, the mob wouldn't understand. And in heaven's name do spare the old stories! I'm amazed that Kite should consent to it."

"Poor old fellow!" said Miss Bonnicastle, with an indulgent smile, "he'll do anything a woman asks of him. But I shan't have the heart to spoil it with Higginson; I know I shan't."

"After all," Piers replied, "I don't know why you shouldn't. What's the use of our scruples? That's the doom of everything beautiful."