The Farringdons Part 39

"I am sure that I am. Women who are at all romantic, have such exaggerated ideas as to what love really is. Like the leper of old, they ask for some great thing to work the wonderful miracle upon their lives; and so they miss the simple way which would lead them to happiness."

Elisabeth felt troubled and perplexed. "I enjoy your society," she said, "and I adore your genius, and I pity your loneliness, and I long to help your weakness. Is this love, do you think?"

"Yes, yes; I am certain of it."

"I thought it would be different," said Elisabeth sadly; "I thought that when it did come it would transform the whole world, just as religion does, and that all things would become new. I thought it would turn out to be the thing that we are longing for when the beauty of nature makes us feel sad with a longing we know not for what. I thought it would change life's dusty paths into golden pavements, and earth's commonest bramble-bush into a magic briar-rose."

"And it hasn't?"

"No; everything is just the same as it was before I met you. As far as I can see, there is no livelier emerald twinkling in the gra.s.s of the Park than there ever is at the end of July, and no purer sapphire melting into the Serpentine."

Cecil laughed lightly. "You are as absurdly romantic as a school-girl!

Surely people of our age ought to know better than still to believe in fairyland; but, as I have told you before, you are dreadfully young for your age in some things."

"I suppose I am. I still do believe in fairyland--at least I did until ten minutes ago."

"I a.s.sure you there is no such place."

"Not for anybody?"

"Not for anybody over twenty-one."

"I wish there was," said Elisabeth with a sigh. "I should have liked to believe it was there, even if I had never found it."

"Don't be silly, lady mine. You are so great and wise and clever that I can not bear to hear you say foolish things. And I want us to talk about how you are going to help me to be a great painter, and how we will sit together as G.o.ds, and create new worlds. There is nothing that I can not do with you to help me, Elisabeth. You must be good to me and hard upon me at the same time. You must never let me be content with anything short of my best, or willing to do second-rate work for the sake of money; you must keep the sacredness of art ever before my eyes, but you must also be very gentle to me when I am weary, and very tender to me when I am sad; you must encourage me when my spirit fails me, and comfort me when the world is harsh. All these things you can do, and you are the only woman who can. Promise me, Elisabeth, that you will."

"I can not promise anything now. You must let me think it over for a time. I am so puzzled by it all. I thought that when the right man came and told a woman that he loved her, she would know at once that it was for him--and for him only--that she had been waiting all her life; and that she would never have another doubt upon the subject, but would feel convinced that it was settled for all time and eternity. And this is so different!"

Again Cecil laughed his light laugh. "I suppose girls sometimes feel like that when they are very young; but not women of your age, Elisabeth."

"Well, you must let me think about it. I can not make up my mind yet."

And for whole days and nights Elisabeth thought about it, and could come to no definite conclusion.

There was no doubt in her mind that she liked Cecil Farquhar infinitely better than she had liked any of the other men who had asked her to marry them; also that no one could possibly be more companionable to her than he was, or more sympathetic with and interested in her work--and this is no small thing to the man or woman who possesses the creative faculty. Then she was lonely in her greatness, and longed for companionship; and Cecil had touched her in her tenderest point by his constant appeals to her to help and comfort him. Nevertheless the fact remained that, though he interested her, he did not touch her heart; that remained a closed door to him. But supposing that her friends were right, and that she was too cold by nature ever to feel the ecstasies which transfigure life for some women, should she therefore shut herself out from ordinary domestic joys and interests? Because she was incapable of attaining to the ideal, must the commonplace pleasures of the real also be denied her? If the best was not for her, would it not be wise to accept the second-best, and extract as much happiness from it as possible? Moreover, she knew that Cecil was right when he said that she could make of him whatsoever she wished; and this was no slight temptation to a woman who loved power as much as Elisabeth loved it.

There was also another consideration which had some weight with her; and that was the impression, gradually gaining strength in her mind, that Cecil Farquhar was George Farringdon's son. She could take no steps in the way of proving this just then, as Christopher was away for his holiday somewhere in the Black Forest, and nothing could be done without him; but she intended, as soon as he returned, to tell him of her suspicion, and to set him to discover whether or not Cecil was indeed the lost heir. Although it never seriously occurred to Elisabeth to hold her peace upon this matter and so keep her fortune to herself, she was still human enough not altogether to despise a course of action which enabled her to be rich and righteous at the same time, and to go on with her old life at the Willows and her work among the people at the Osierfield, even after George Farringdon's son had come into his own.

Although the balance of Elisabeth's judgment was upon the side of Cecil Farquhar and his suit, she could not altogether stifle--try as she might--her sense of disappointment at finding how grossly poets and such people had exaggerated the truth in their description of the feeling men call love. It was all so much less exalted and so much more commonplace than she had expected. She had long ago come to the conclusion--from comparisons between Christopher and the men who had wanted to marry her--that a man's friendship is a better thing than a man's love; but she had always clung to the belief that a woman's love would prove a better thing than a woman's friendship: yet now she herself was in love with Cecil--at least he said that she was, and she was inclined to agree with him--and she was bound to admit that, as an emotion, this fell far short of her old attachment to Cousin Anne or Christopher or even Felicia. But that was because now she was getting old, she supposed, and her heart had lost its early warmth and freshness; and she experienced a weary ache of regret that Cecil had not come across her path in those dear old days when she was still young enough to make a fairyland for herself, and to abide therein for ever.

"The things that come too late are almost as bad as the things that never come at all," she thought with a sigh; not knowing that there is no such word as "too late" in G.o.d's Vocabulary.

At the end of the week she had made up her mind to marry Cecil Farquhar.

Women, after all, can not pick and choose what lives they shall lead; they can only take such goods as the G.o.ds choose to provide, and make the best of the same; and if they let the possible slip while they are waiting for the impossible, they have only themselves to blame that they extract no good at all out of life. So she wrote to Cecil, asking him to come and see her the following day; and then she sat down and wondered why women are allowed to see visions and to dream dreams, if the actual is to fall so far short of the imaginary. Brick walls and cobbled streets are all very well in their way; but they make but dreary dwelling-places for those who have promised themselves cities where the walls are of jasper and the pavements of gold. "If one is doomed to live always on this side of the hills, it is a waste of time to think too much about the life on the other side," Elisabeth reasoned with herself, "and I have wasted a lot of time in this way; but I can not help wondering why we are allowed to think such lovely thoughts, and to believe in such beautiful things, if our dreams are never to come true, but are only to spoil us for the realities of life. Now I must bury all my dear, silly, childish idols, as Jacob did; and I will not have any stone to mark the place, because I want to forget where it is."

Poor Elisabeth! The grave of what has been, may be kept green with tears; but the grave of what never could have been, is best forgotten.

We may not hide away the dear old gnomes and pixies and fairies in consecrated ground--that is reserved for what has once existed, and so has the right to live again; but for what never existed we can find no sepulchre, for it came out of nothingness, and to nothingness must it return.

After Elisabeth had posted her letter to Cecil, and while she was still musing over the problem as to whether life's fulfilment must always fall short of its promise, the drawing-room door was thrown open and a visitor announced. Elisabeth was tired and depressed, and did not feel in the mood for keeping up her reputation for brilliancy; so it was with a sigh of weariness that she rose to receive Quenelda Carson, a struggling little artist whom she had known slightly for years. But her interest was immediately aroused when she saw that Quenelda's usually rosy face was white with anguish, and the girl's pretty eyes swollen with many tears.

"What is the matter, dear?" asked Elisabeth, with that sound in her voice which made all weak things turn to her. "You are in trouble, and you must let me help you."

Quenelda broke out into bitter weeping. "Oh! give him back to me--give him back to me," she cried; "you can never love him as I do, you are too cold and proud and brilliant."

Elisabeth stood as if transfixed. "Whatever do you mean?"

"You have everything," Quenelda went on, in spite of the sobs which shook her slender frame; "you had money and position to begin with, and everybody thought well of you and admired you and made life easy for you. And then you came out of your world into ours, and carried away the prizes which we had been striving after for years, and beat us on our own ground; but we weren't jealous of you--you know that we weren't; we were glad of your success, and proud of you, and we admired your genius as much as the outside world did, and never minded a bit that it was greater than ours. But even then you were not content--you must have everything, and leave us nothing, just to satisfy your pride. You are like the rich man who had everything, and yet took from the poor man his one ewe lamb; and I am sure that G.o.d--if there is a G.o.d--will punish you as He punished that rich man."

Elisabeth turned rather pale; whatever had she done that any one dared to say such things to her as this? "I still don't understand you," she said.

"I never had anything nice in my life till I met him," the girl continued incoherently--"I had always been poor and pinched and wretched and second-rate; even my pictures were never first-rate, though I worked and worked all I knew to make them so. And then I met Cecil Farquhar, and I loved him, and everything became different, and I didn't mind being second-rate if only he would care for me. And he did; and I thought that I should always be as happy as I was then, and that nothing would ever be able to hurt me any more. Oh! I was so happy--so happy--and I was such a fool, I thought it would last forever! I worked hard and saved every penny that I could, and so did he; and we should have been married next year if you hadn't come and spoiled it all, and taken him away from me. And what is it to you now that you have got him?

You are too proud and cold to love him, or anybody else, and he doesn't care for you a millionth part as much as he cares for me; yet just because you have money and fame he has left me for you. And I love him so--I love him so!" Here Quenelda's sobs choked her utterance, and her torrent of words was stopped by tears.

"Come and sit down beside me and tell me quietly what is the matter,"

said Elisabeth gently; "I can do nothing and understand nothing while you go on like this. But you are wrong in supposing that I took your lover from you purposely; I did not even know that he was a friend of yours. He ought to have told me."

"No, no; he couldn't tell you. Don't you see that the temptation was too strong for him? He cares so much for rank and money, and things like that, my poor Cecil! And all his life he has had to do without them. So when he met you, and realized that if he married you he would have all the things he wanted most in the world, he couldn't resist it. The fault was yours for tempting him, and letting him see that he could have you for the asking; you knew him well enough to see how weak he was, and what a hold worldly things had over him; and you ought to have allowed for this in dealing with him."

A great wave of self-contempt swept over Elisabeth. She, who had prided herself upon the fact that no man was strong enough to win her love, to be accused of openly running after a man who did not care for her but only for her money! It was unendurable, and stung her to the quick! And yet, through all her indignation, she recognised the justice of her punishment. She had not done what Quenelda had reproached her for doing, it was true; but she had deliberately lowered her ideal: she had wearied of striving after the best, and had decided that the second-best should suffice her; and for this she was now being chastised. No men or women who wilfully turn away from the ideal which G.o.d has set before them, and make to themselves graven images of the things which they know to be unworthy, can escape the punishment which is sure, sooner or later, to follow their apostasy; and they do well to recognise this, ere they grow weary of waiting for the revelation from Sinai, and begin to build altars unto false G.o.ds. For now, as of old, the idols which they make are ground into powder, and strawed upon the water, and given them to drink; the cup has to be drained to the dregs, and it is exceeding bitter.

"I still think he ought to have told me there was another woman,"

Elisabeth said.

"Not he. He knew well enough that your pride could not have endured the thought of another woman, and that that would have spoiled his chance with you forever. There always is another woman, you know; and you women, who are too proud to endure the thought of her, have to be deceived and blinded. And you have only yourselves to thank for it; if you were a little more human and a little more tender, there would be no necessity for deceiving you. Why, I should have loved him just the same if there had been a hundred other women, so he always told me the truth; but he lied to you, and it was your fault and not his that he was obliged to lie."

Elisabeth shuddered. It was to help such a man as this that she had been willing to sacrifice her youthful ideals and her girlish dreams. What a fool she had been!

"If you do not believe me, here is his letter," Quenelda went on; "I brought it on purpose for you to read, just to show you how little you are to him. If you had loved him as I love him, I would have let you keep him, because you could have given him so many of the things that he thinks most about. But you don't. You are one of the cold, hard women, who only care for people as long as they are good and do what you think they ought to do; Cecil never could do what anybody thought he ought to do for long, and then you would have despised him and grown tired of him. But I go on loving him just the same, whatever he does; and that's the sort of love that a man wants--at any rate, such a man as Cecil."

Elisabeth held out her hand for the letter; she felt that speech was of no avail at such a crisis as this; and, as she read, every word burned itself into her soul, and hurt her pride to the quick.

"DEAREST QUENELDA" (the letter ran, in the slightly affected handwriting which Elisabeth had learned to know so well, and to welcome with so much interest), "I have something to say to you which it cuts me to the heart to say, but which has to be said at all costs. We must break off our engagement at once; for the terrible truth has at last dawned upon me that we can never afford to marry each other, and that therefore it is only prolonging our agony to go on with it. You know me so well, dear little girl, that you will quite understand how the thought of life-long poverty has proved too much for me. I am not made of such coa.r.s.e fibre as most men--those men who can face squalor and privation, and lack all the little accessories that make life endurable, without being any the worse for it. I am too refined, too highly strung, too sensitive, to enter upon such a weary struggle with circ.u.mstances as my marriage with a woman as poor as myself would entail; therefore, my darling Quenelda, much as I love you I feel it is my duty to renounce you; and as you grow older and wiser you will see that I am right.

"Since I can not marry you whom I love, I have put romance and sentiment forever out of my life; it is a bitter sacrifice for a man of my nature to make, but it must be done; and I have decided to enter upon a _mariage de convenance_ with Miss Farringdon, the Black Country heiress. Of course I do not love her as I love you, my sweet--what man could love a genius as he loves a beauty? And she is as cold as she is clever. But I feel respect for her moral characteristics, and interest in her mental ones; and, when youth and romance are over and done with, that is all one need ask in a wife. As for her fortune, it will keep me forever out of the reach of that poverty which has always so deleterious an effect upon natures such as mine; and, being thus set above those pecuniary anxieties which are the death of true art, I shall be able fully to develop the power that is in me, and to do the work that I feel myself called to do.

"Good-bye, my sweetest. I can not write any more; my heart is breaking.

How cruel it is that poverty should have power to separate forever such true lovers as you and I!

"Your heartbroken "CECIL."

Elisabeth gave back the letter to Quenelda. "Do you mean to tell me that you don't despise the man who sent this?" she asked.

"No; because I love him, you see. You never did."

"You are right there. I never loved him. I tried to love him, but I couldn't."