The Marquis of Lossie Part 23

"Have I the impudence? I didn't know it," said Malcolm, with some dismay. "I seemed to myself merely saying the obvious thing, the common sense, about the picture, on the ground of your own statement of your meaning in it. I am annoyed with myself if I have been talking of things I know nothing about."

"On the contrary, MacPhail, you are so entirely right in what you say, that I cannot for the life of me understand where or how you can have got it."

"Mr Graham used to talk to me about everything."

"Well, but he was only a country schoolmaster."

"A good deal more than that, sir," said Malcolm, solemnly. "He is a disciple of him that knows everything. And now I think of it, I do believe that what I've been saying about your picture, I must have got from hearing him talk about the revelation, in which is included Isis herself, with her brother and all their train."

Lenorme held his peace. Malcolm had taken his place again unconsciously, and the painter was working hard, and looking very thoughtful. Malcolm went again to the picture.

"Hillo!" cried Lenorme, looking up and finding no object in the focus of his eyes.

Malcolm returned directly.

"There was just one thing I wanted to see," he said, "--whether the youth worshipping his G.o.ddess, had come into her presence clean."

"And what is your impression of him?" half murmured Lenorme, without lifting his head.

"The one that's painted there," answered Malcolm, "does look as if he might know that the least a G.o.ddess may claim of a worshipper is, that he should come into her presence pure enough to understand her purity. I came upon a fine phrase the other evening in your English prayer book. I never looked into it before, but I found one lying on a book stall, and it happened to open at the marriage service. There, amongst other good things, the bridegroom says: 'With my body I thee worship.'--'That's grand,' I said to myself.

'That's as it should be. The man whose body does not worship the woman he weds, should marry a harlot.' G.o.d bless Mr William Shakspere!--he knew that. I remember Mr Graham telling me once, before I had read the play, that the critics condemn Measure for Measure as failing in poetic justice. I know little about the critics, and care less, for a man who has to earn his bread and feed his soul as well, has enough to do with the books themselves without what people say about them; and Mr Graham would not tell me whether he thought the critics right or wrong; he wanted me to judge for myself. But when I came to read the play, I found, to my mind, a most absolute and splendid justice in it. They think, I suppose, that my lord Angelo should have been put to death. It just reveals the low breed of them; they think death the worst thing, therefore the greatest punishment. But Angelo prays for death, that it may hide him from his shame: it is too good for him, and he shall not have it. He must live to remove the shame from Mariana.

And then see how Lucio is served!"

While Malcolm talked, Lenorme went on painting diligently, listening and saying nothing. When he had thus ended, a pause of some duration followed.

"A G.o.ddess has a right to claim that one thing--has she not, Mr Lenorme?" said Malcolm at length, winding up a silent train of thought aloud.

"What thing?" asked Lenorme, still without lifting his head.

"Purity in the arms a man holds out to her," answered Malcolm.

"Certainly," replied Lenorme, with a sort of mechanical absoluteness.

"And according to your picture, every woman whom a man loves is a G.o.ddess--the G.o.ddess of nature?"

"Certainly;--but what are you driving at? I can't paint for you.

There you stand," he went on, half angrily, "as if you were Socrates himself, driving some poor Athenian buck into the corner of his deserts! I don't deserve any such insinuations, I would have you know."

"I am making none, sir. I dare never insinuate except I were prepared to charge. But I have told you I was bred up a fisher lad, and partly among the fishers, to begin with. I half learned, half discovered things that tended to give me what some would count severe notions: I count them common sense. Then, as you know, I went into service, and in that position it is easy enough to gather that many people hold very loose and very nasty notions about some things; so I just wanted to see how you felt about such. If I had a sister now, and saw a man coming to woo her, all beclotted with puddle filth--or if I knew that he had just left some woman as good as she, crying eyes and heart out over his child--I don't know that I could keep my hands off him--at least if I feared she might take him. What do you think now? Mightn't it be a righteous thing to throttle the sc.u.m and be hanged for it?"

"Well," said Lenorme, "I don't know why I should justify myself, especially where no charge is made, MacPhail; and I don't know why to you any more than another man; but at this moment I am weak, or egotistic, or sympathetic enough to wish you to understand that, so far as the poor matter of one virtue goes, I might without remorse act Sir Galahad in a play."

"Now you are beyond me," said Malcolm. "I don't know what you mean."

So Lenorme had to tell him the old Armoric tale which Tennyson has since rendered so lovelily, for, amongst artists at least, he was one of the earlier borrowers in the British legends. And as he told it, in a half sullen kind of way, the heart of the young marquis glowed within him, and he vowed to himself that Lenorme and no other should marry his sister. But, lest he should reveal more emotion than the obvious occasion justified, he restrained speech, and again silence fell, during which Lenorme was painting furiously.

"Confound it!" he cried at last, and sprang to his feet, but without taking his eyes from his picture, "what have I been doing all this time but making a portrait of you, MacPhail, and forgetting what you were there for! And yet," he went on, hesitating and catching up the miniature, "I have got a certain likeness! Yes, it must be so, for I see in it also a certain look of Lady Lossie. Well! I suppose a man can't altogether help what he paints any more than what he dreams. That will do for this morning, anyhow, I think, MacPhail. Make haste and put on your own clothes, and come into the next room to breakfast. You must be tired with standing so long.

"It is about the hardest work I ever tried," answered Malcolm; "but I doubt if I am as tired as Kelpie. I've been listening for the last half hour to hear the stalls flying."

CHAPTER XXIX: AN EVIL OMEN

Florimel was beginning to understand that the shield of the portrait was not large enough to cover many more visits to the studio. Still she must and would venture; and should anything be said, there at least was the portrait. For some weeks it had been all but finished, was never off its easel, and always showed a touch of wet paint somewhere--he kept the last of it lingering, ready to prove itself almost yet not altogether finished. What was to follow its absolute completion, neither of them could tell. The worst of it was that their thoughts about it differed discordantly. Florimel not unfrequently regarded the rupture of their intimacy as a thing not undesirable--this chiefly after such a talk with Lady Bellair as had been ill.u.s.trated by some tale of misalliance or scandal between high or low, of which kind of provision for age the bold faced countess had a large store: her memory was little better than an ashpit of scandal. Amongst other biographical sc.r.a.ps one day she produced the case of a certain earl's daughter, who, having disgraced herself by marrying a low fellow--an artist, she believed--was as a matter of course neglected by the man whom, in accepting him, she had taught to despise her, and, before a twelvemonth was over--her family finding it impossible to hold communication with her--was actually seen by her late maid scrubbing her own floor.

"Why couldn't she leave it dirty?" said Florimel.

"Why indeed," returned Lady Bellair, "but that people sink to their fortunes! Blue blood won't keep them out of the gutter."

The remark was true, but of more general application than she intended, seeing she herself was in the gutter and did not know it. She spoke only of what followed on marriage beneath one's natal position, than which she declared there was nothing worse a woman of rank could do.

"She may get over anything but that," she would say, believing, but not saying, that she spoke from experience.

Was it part of the late marquis's purgatory to see now, as the natural result of the sins of his youth, the daughter whose innocence was dear to him exposed to all the undermining influences of this good natured but low moralled woman, whose ideas of the most mysterious relations of humanity were in no respect higher than those of a cla.s.s which must not even be mentioned in my pages? At such tales the high born heart would flutter in Florimel's bosom, beat itself against its bars, turn sick at the sight of its danger, imagine it had been cherishing a crime, and resolve--soon--before very long--at length--finally--to break so far at least with the painter as to limit their intercourse to the radiation of her power across a dinner table, the rhythmic heaving of their two hearts at a dance, or the quiet occasional talk in a corner, when the looks of each would reveal to the other that they knew themselves the martyrs of a cruel and inexorable law. It must be remembered that she had had no mother since her childhood, that she was now but a girl, and that the pa.s.sion of a girl to that of a woman is "as moonlight unto sunlight, and as water unto wine." Of genuine love she had little more than enough to serve as salt to the pa.s.sion; and pa.s.sion, however bewitching, yea, entrancing a condition, may yet be of more worth than that induced by opium or hashish, and a capacity for it may be conjoined with anything or everything contemptible and unmanly or unwomanly. In Florimel's case, however, there was chiefly much of the childish in it. Definitely separated from Lenorme, she would have been merry again in a fortnight; and yet, though she half knew this herself, and at the same time was more than half ashamed of the whole affair, she did not give it up --would not--only intended by and by to let it go, and meantime gave--occasionally--pretty free flutter to the half grown wings of her fancy.

Her liking for the painter had therefore, not unnaturally, its fits. It was subject in a measure to the nature of the engagements she had--that is, to the degree of pleasure she expected from them; it was subject, as we have seen, to skilful battery from the guns of her chaperon's entrenchment; and more than to either was it subject to those delicate changes of condition which in the microcosm are as frequent, and as varied both in kind and degree, as in the macrocosm. The spirit has its risings and settings of sun and moon, its seasons, its clouds and stars, its solstices, its tides, its winds, its storms, its earthquakes--infinite vitality in endless fluctuation. To rule these changes, Florimel had neither the power that comes of love, nor the strength that comes of obedience. What of conscience she had was not yet conscience toward G.o.d, which is the guide to freedom, but conscience toward society, which is the slave of a fool. It was no wonder then that Lenorme, believing--hoping she loved him, should find her hard to understand. He said hard; but sometimes he meant impossible. He loved as a man loves who has thought seriously, speculated, tried to understand; whose love therefore is consistent with itself, harmonious with its nature and history, changing only in form and growth, never in substance and character. Hence the idea of Florimel became in his mind the centre of perplexing thought; the unrest of her being metamorphosed on the way, pa.s.sed over into his, and troubled him sorely. Neither was his mind altogether free of the dread of reproach. For self reproach he could find little or no ground, seeing that to pity her much for the loss of consideration her marriage with him would involve, would be to undervalue the honesty of his love and the worth of his art; and indeed her position was so independently based that she could not lose it even by marrying one who had not the social standing of a brewer or a stockbroker; but his pride was uneasy under the foreseen criticism that his selfishness had taken advantage of her youth and inexperience to work on the mind of an ignorant girl--a criticism not likely to be the less indignant that those who pa.s.sed it would, without a shadow of compunction, have handed her over, body, soul, and goods, to one of their own order, had he belonged to the very canaille of the race.

The painter was not merely in love with Florimel: he loved her.

I will not say that he was in no degree dazzled by her rank, or that he felt no triumph, as a social nomad camping on the No Man's Land of society, at the thought of the justification of the human against the conventional, in his scaling of the giddy heights of superiority, and, on one of its topmost peaks, taking from her nest that rare bird in the earth, a landed and t.i.tled marchioness. But such thoughts were only changing hues on the feathers of his love, which itself was a mighty bird with great and yet growing wings.

A day or two pa.s.sed before Florimel went again to the studio accompanied, notwithstanding Lenorme's warning and her own doubt, yet again by her maid, a woman, unhappily, of Lady Bellair's finding.

At Lossie House, Malcolm had felt a repugnance to her, both moral and physical. When first he heard her name, one of the servants speaking of her as Miss Caley, he took it for Scaley, and if that was not her name, yet scaly was her nature.

This time Florimel rode to Chelsea with Malcolm, having directed Caley to meet her there; and, the one designing to be a little early, and the other to be a little late, two results naturally followed --first, that the lovers had a few minutes alone; and second, that when Caley crept in, noiseless and unannounced as a cat, she had her desire, and saw the painter's arm round Florimel's waist, and her head on his bosom. Still more to her contentment, not hearing, they did not see her, and she crept out again quietly as she had entered: it would of course be to her advantage to let them know that she had seen, and that they were in her power, but it might be still more to her advantage to conceal the fact so long as there was a chance of additional discovery in the same direction. Through the success of her trick it came about that Malcolm, chancing to look up from Honour's back to the room where he always breakfasted with his new friend, saw in one of the windows, as in a picture, a face radiant with such an expression as that of the woman headed snake might have worn when he saw Adam take the apple from the hand of Eve.

Caley was of the common cla.s.s of servants in this, that she considered service servitude, and took her amends in selfishness; she was unlike them in this, that while false to her employers, she made no common cause with her fellows against them--regarded and sought none but her own ends. Her one thought was to make the most of her position; for that, to gain influence with, and, if it might be, power over her mistress; and, thereto, first of all, to find out whether she had a secret: she had now discovered not merely that she had one, but the secret itself! She was clever, greedy, cunning; equally capable, according to the faculty with which she might be matched, of duping or of being duped. She rather liked her mistress, but watched her in the interests of Lady Bellair.

She had a fancy for the earl, a natural dislike for Malcolm which she concealed in distant politeness, and for all the rest of the house, indifference. As to her person, she had a neat oval face, thin and sallow, in expression subacid; a lithe, rather graceful figure, and hands too long, with fingers almost too tapering--of which hands and fingers she was very careful, contemplating them in secret with a regard amounting almost to reverence: they were her sole witnesses to a descent in which she believed, but of which she had no other shadow of proof.

Caley's face, then, with its unsaintly illumination, gave Malcolm something to think about as he sat there upon Honour, the new horse.

Clearly she had had a triumph: what could it be? The nature of the woman was not altogether unknown to him even from the first, and he could not for months go on meeting her occasionally in pa.s.sages and on stairs without learning to understand his own instinctive dislike: it was plain the triumph was not in good. It was plain too that it was in something which had that very moment occurred, and could hardly have to do with anyone but her mistress. Then her being in that room revealed more. They would never have sent her out of the study, and so put themselves in her power. She had gone into the house but a moment before, a minute or two behind her mistress, and he knew with what a cat-like step she went about: she had surprised them---discovered how matters stood between her mistress and the painter! He saw everything--almost as it had taken place. She had seen without being seen, and had retreated with her prize! Florimel was then in the woman's power: what was he to do? He must at least let her gather what warning she could from the tale of what he had seen.

Once arrived at a resolve, Malcolm never lost time. They had turned but one corner on their way home, when he rode up to her.

"Please, my lady," he began.

But the same instant Florimel was pulling up.

"Malcolm," she said, "I have left my pocket handkerchief. I must go back for it."

As she spoke, she turned her horse's head. But Malcolm, dreading lest Caley should yet be lingering, would not allow her to expose herself to a greater danger than she knew.

"Before you go, my lady, I must tell you something I happened to see while I waited with the horses," he said.

The earnestness of his tone struck Florimel. She looked at him with eyes a little wider, and waited to hear.

"I happened to look up at the drawing room windows, my lady, and Caley came to one of them with such a look on her face!

I can't exactly describe it to you, my lady, but--"