The History of David Grieve Part 71

Next morning David went across to the village shop to buy some daily necessaries, and found a few newspapers lying on the counter.

He bought a _Debats_, seeing that there was a long critique of the Salon in it, and hurried home with it to Elise. She tore it open and rushed through the article, putting him aside that he might not look over her. Her face blanched as she read, and at the end she flung the paper from her, and tottering to a chair sat there motionless, staring straight before her. David, beside himself with alarm, and finding caresses of no avail, took up the paper from the floor.

'Let it alone!' she said to him with a sudden imperious gesture.

'There is a whole paragraph about Breal--her fortune is made. _La voila lancee--arrivee!_ And of me, not a line, not a mention!

Three or four pupils of Taranne--all beginners--but _my_ name--nowhere! Ah, but no--it is too much!'

Her little foot beat the ground, a hurricane was rising within her.

David tried to laugh the matter off. 'The man who wrote the wretched thing had been hurried--was an idiot, clearly, and what did one man's opinion matter, even if it were paid for at so much a column?'

'_Mais, tais-toi, donc!_' she cried at last, turning upon him in a fury. '_Can't_ you see that everything for an artist--especially a woman--depends on the _protections_ she gets at the beginning?

How can a girl--helpless--without friends--make her way by herself?

Some one must hold out a hand, and for me it seems there is no one--no one!'

The outburst seemed to his common sense to imply the most grotesque oblivion of her success in the Salon, of Taranne's kindness--the most grotesque sensitiveness to a few casual lines of print. But it wrung his heart to see her agitation, her pale face, the handkerchief she was twisting to shreds in her restless hands. He came to plead with her--his pa.s.sion lending him eloquence. Let her but trust herself and her gift. She had the praise of those she revered to go upon. How should the carelessness of a single critic affect her? _Imbeciles!_--they would be all with her, at her feet, some day. Let her despise them then and now! But his extravagances only made her impatient.

'Nonsense!' she said, drawing her hand away from him; 'I am not made of such superfine stuff--I never pretended to be! Do you think I should be content to be an unknown genius? _Never!_--I must have my fame counted out to me in good current coin, that all the world may hear and see. It may be vulgar--I don't care! it is so.

_Ah, mon Dieu!_' and she began to pace the room with wild steps, 'and it is my fault--my fault! If I were there on the spot, I should be remembered--they would have to reckon with me--I could keep my claim in sight. But I have thrown away everything--wasted everything--_everything!_'

He stood with his back to the window, motionless, his hand on the table, stooping a little forward, looking at her with a pa.s.sion of reproach and misery; it only angered her; she lost all self-control, and in one mad moment she avenged on his poor heart all the wounds and vexations of her vanity. _Why_ had he ever persuaded her? _Why_ had he brought her away and hung a fresh burden on her life which she could never bear? Why had he done her this irreparable injury--taken all simplicity and directness of aim from her--weakened her energies at their source? Her only _milieu_ was art, and he had made her desert it; her only power was the painter's power, and it was crippled, the fresh spring of it was gone. It was because she felt on her the weight of a responsibility, and a claim she was not made for. She was not made for love--for love at least as he understood it. And he had her word, and would hold her to it. It was madness for both of them. It was stifling--killing her!

Then she sank on a chair, in a pa.s.sion of desperate tears.

Suddenly, as she sat there, she heard a movement, and looking up she saw David at the door. He turned upon her for an instant, with a dignity so tragic, so true, and yet so young, that she was perforce touched, arrested. She held out a trembling hand, made a little cry. But he closed the door softly, and was gone. She half raised herself, then fell back again.

'If he had beaten me,' she said to herself with a strange smile, 'I could have loved him. _Mais!_'

She was all day alone. When he came back it was already evening; the stars shone in the June sky, but the sunset light was still in the street and on the upper windows of the little house. As he opened the garden gate and shut it behind him, he saw the gleam of a lamp behind the acacia, and a light figure beside it. He stood a moment wrestling with himself, for he was wearied out, and felt as if he could bear no more. Then he moved slowly on.

Elise was sitting beside the lamp, her head bent over something dark upon her lap. She had not heard the gate open, and she did not hear his steps upon the gra.s.s. He came closer, and saw, to his amazement, that she was busy with a coat of his--an old coat, in the sleeve of which he had torn a great rent the day before, while he was dragging her and himself through some underwood in the forest. She--who loathed all womanly arts, who had often boasted to him that she hardly knew how to use a needle!

In moving nearer, he brushed against the shrubs, and she heard him.

She turned her head, smiling. In the mingled light she looked like a little white ghost, she was so pale and her eyes so heavy. When she saw him, she raised her finger with a childish, aggrieved air, and put it to her lips, rubbing it softly against them.

'It does p.r.i.c.k so!' she said plaintively.

He came to sit beside her, his chest heaving.

'Why do you do that--for me?'

She shrugged her shoulders and worked on without speaking.

Presently she laid down her needle and surveyed him.

'Where have you been all day? Have you eaten nothing, poor friend?'

He tried to remember.

'I think not; I have been in the forest.'

A little quiver ran over her face; she pulled at her needle violently and broke the thread.

'Finished!' she said, throwing down the coat and springing up.

'Don't tell your tailor who did it! I am for perfection in all things--_abas l'amateur!_ Come in, it is supper-time past. I will go and hurry Madame Pyat. _Tu dois avoir une faim de loup_.'

He shook his head, smiling sadly.

'I tell you, you are hungry, you shall be hungry!' she cried, suddenly flinging her arm round his neck, and nestling her fair head against his shoulder. Her voice was half a sob.

'Oh, so I am!--so I am!' he said, with a wild emphasis, and would have caught her to him. But she slipped away and ran before him to the house, turning at the window with the sweetest, frankest gesture to bid him follow.

They pa.s.sed the evening close together, she on a stool leaning against his knee, he reading aloud Alfred de Musset's _Nuit de Mai_. At one moment she was all absorbed in the verse, carried away by it; great battle-cry that it is! calling the artist from the miseries of his own petty fate to the lordship of life and nature as a whole; the next she had s.n.a.t.c.hed the book out of his hands and was correcting his accent, bidding him speak after her, put his lips so. Never had she been so charming. It was the coaxing charm of the softened child that cannot show its penitence enough.

Every now and then she fell to pouting because she could not move him to gaiety. But in reality his sad and pa.s.sive gentleness, the mask of feelings which would otherwise have been altogether beyond his control, served him with her better than any gaiety could have done.

_Gaiety!_ it seemed to him his heart was broken.

At night, after a troubled sleep, he suddenly woke, and sprang up in an agony. _Gone!_ was she gone already? For that was what her sweet ways meant. Ah, he had known it all along!

Where was she? His wild eyes for a second or two saw nothing but the landscape of his desolate dream. Then gradually the familiar forms of the room emerged from the gloom, and there--against the further wall--she lay, so still, so white, so gracious! Her childish arm, bare to the elbow, was thrown round her head, her soft waves of hair made a confusion on the pillow. After her long day of emotion she was sleeping profoundly. Whatever cruel secret her heart might hold, she was there still, his yet, for a few hours and days. He was persuaded in his own mind that her penitence had been the mere fruit of a compromise with herself, their month had still eight days to run, then--_adieu!_ Art and liberty should reclaim their own. Meanwhile why torment the poor boy, who must any way take it hardly?

He lay there for long, raised upon his arm, his haggard look fixed on the sleeping form which by-and-by the dawn illuminated. His life was concentrated in that form, that light breath. He thought with repulsion and loathing of all that had befallen him before he saw her--with anguish and terror of those days and nights to come when he should have lost her. For in the deep stillness of the rising day there fell on him the strangest certainty of this loss. That gift of tragic prescience which was in his blood had stirred in him--he knew his fate. Perhaps the gift itself was but the fruit of a rare power of self-vision, self-apprais.e.m.e.nt. He saw and cursed his own timid and ignorant youth. How could he ever have hoped to hold a creature of such complex needs and pa.s.sions? In the pale dawn he sounded the very depths of self-contempt.

But when the day was up and Elise was chattering and flitting about the house as usual without a word of discord or parting, how was it possible to avoid reaction, the re-birth of hope? She talked of painting again, and that alone, after these long days of sullen alienation from her art, was enough to bring the brightness back to their little _menage_ and to dull that strange second sight of David's. He helped her to set her palette, to choose a new canvas; he packed her charcoals, he beguiled some cold meat and bread out of Madame, and then before the heat they set out together for the Bas Breau.

Just as they started he searched his pockets for a knife of hers which was missing, and thrusting his hand into a breast pocket which he seldom used, he brought out some papers at which he stared in bewilderment.

Then a shock went through him; for there was Mr. Gurney's letter, the letter in which the cheque for 600 _pounds_ had been enclosed, and there was also that faded sc.r.a.p of Sandy's writing which contained the father's last injunction to his son. As he held the papers he remembered--what he had forgotten for weeks--that on the morning of his leaving Manchester he had put them carefully into this breast pocket, not liking to leave things so interesting to him behind him, out of his reach. Never had he given a thought to them since! He looked down at them, half ashamed, and his eye caught the words:--'_I lay it on him now I'm dying to look after her. She's not like other children; she'll want it. Let him see her married to a decent man, and give her what's honestly hers. I trust it to him. That little lad_--' and then came the fold of the sheet.

'I have found the knife,' cried Elise from the gate. 'Be quick!'

He pushed the papers back and joined her. The day was already hot, and they hurried along the burning street into the shade of the forest. Once in the Bas Breau Elise was not long in finding a subject, fell upon a promising one indeed almost at once, and was soon at work. This time there were to be no figures, unless indeed it might be a dim pair of woodcutters in the middle distance, and the whole picture was to be an impressionist dream of early summer, finished entirely out of doors, as rapidly and cleanly as possible.

David lay on the ground under the blasted oak and watched her, as she sat on her camp-stool, bending forward, looking now up, now down, using her charcoal in bold energetic strokes, her lip compressed, her brow knit over some point of composition. The little figure in its pink cotton was so daintily pretty, so full of interest and wilful charm, it might well have filled a lover's eye and chained his thoughts. But David was restless and at times absent.

'Tell me what you know of that man Montjoie?' he asked her at last, abruptly. 'I know you disliked him.'

She paused, astonished.

'Why do you ask? Dislike--I _detest and despise_ him. I told you so.'

'But what do you know of him?' he persisted.

'No good!' she said quickly, going back to her work. Then a light broke upon her, and she turned on her stool, her two hands on her knees.

'_Tiens!_--you are thinking of your sister. You have had news of her?'

A conscious half-remorseful look rose into her face.

'No, I have had no news. I ought to have had a letter. I wrote, you remember, that first day here. Perhaps Louie has gone home already,'

he said, with constraint. 'Tell me anyway what you know.'