Barbarossa and Other Tales Part 16

"'Meanwhile the tailor's wife had often advised me to make a maintenance by sitting as a model. A relation of hers lived that way, who was no real beauty, but only well-grown. Looks were a gift of G.o.d like everything else, and if a singer hired out her beautiful voice for gold, why should not I let the same face that had brought me into trouble help me out of it again? But to all such propositions I always returned the same answer; I knew that nothing could be so bitter to my lover as to hear that I had let myself be looked at for money like a show at a fair, and had gone to serve as lay figure first to one and then to another. That I knew he would never forgive. "_He_ forgive, indeed," said the woman, "he ought to think himself very happy if you forgive him for having taken himself off, and never making a sign since." However, I remained quite resolute, till at length I was at the last gasp, and did not know how I was to pay my next month's lodgings.

If Herr van Kuylen had not come forward--whom I could trust to have no bad intentions--G.o.d knows I have many a time walked through the English garden, and thought if I took a cold bath there, it would be the best and quickest way of escape!

"'And now forgive me for telling you such a long story from beginning to end. But you have done me a real kindness by listening without laughing or shaking your heads. For most people will not believe that one can be unhappy except through his own fault, and least of all unhappy through what is considered the greatest good fortune. Babette,'

said she to the child, who just then brought in her wreath, 'take up your knitting and put the book back in its place. We must go, it has struck five, and your mother will be waiting.'

"Van Kuylen jumped up as if some one had shaken him out of sleep.

"'Will you come to-morrow at the same time, Miss Kate?' said he, without looking at her.

"'To-morrow my landlady goes to a wedding,' she replied, tying on a little black bonnet that framed her face most exquisitely. 'I must stay at home with the children, but the day after to-morrow if it suits you--'

"He silently bowed, and prepared to help her on with her dark woollen shawl, which, however, she declined. She m.u.f.fled herself up so completely in it that her slender form was hardly apparent, even to an artist's eye; then she tied on an almost impervious black veil, and curtsied to me with a bewitching blush. I smiled and heartily shook hands with her. 'I am much indebted to you, my dear young lady,' said I, 'for having acquainted me with your singular story. I am a married man, and, thank G.o.d! still in love with my wife, so that there can be no fear of jealousy in our case; therefore, if ever you need counsel or help, my house is--so-and-so--and I should be delighted if you had confidence in us and allowed us to render you some slight service. For the rest I cannot look upon the matter so despairingly. Who knows whether you will not have to apologise to your face for all the hard words you have bestowed upon it? He who wins the first prize in a lottery may have indeed some perplexities in consequence, but for all that the first prize is no bad thing, and makes up to us for many a drawback. Everywhere there is light and shade'--and so forth, for I do not suppose that the cheap wisdom with which I sought to console the poor child would be tolerable repeated.

"Indeed I was aware even at the time that it did not produce much effect. On the contrary the beautiful face grew sad and weary, as if she was at confession, and she went away without saying another word; only I heard a sigh under the thick veil, which fell, and produced a total eclipse.

"I was alone with Van Kuylen, and for a short time we each went on silently puffing out thick clouds, for the little Dutchman lit his clay-pipe the moment the beautiful girl disappeared.

"'Well, Mynheer,' said I at last, 'I must congratulate you; you are a lucky dog.'

"'I!' he returned, with a short ironical laugh. 'Through what sort of gla.s.ses do you look upon the world that you can utter such a prophecy?'

"'Through my own unaided eyes,' returned I. 'Are you not indeed enviable enough in this, that you have caught in your net the shy bird after which so many have followed in vain. If you only set about it rightly, the bird will grow so tame that you will be able to cage it at last.'

"He turned away: he did not wish me to see the vivid red that suffused his yellow face.

"'You don't know her,' he muttered, 'she is quite different to all others, and if I were the fool you take me to be--'

"'You would be no fool at all,' I continued, exciting myself as I went on. 'You need not of course repeat it to my wife, but by St. Katharine I swear to you, Master Jan, that were I in your place I should not long play St. Anthony's part. I would do everything on earth to deliver that poor child from her purgatory--'

"'And to lead her into a Paradise where such an Adam--get off with you,' said he, with a very unpolite gesture.

"But I knew how to take him; I drew nearer and placed my hand on his shoulder.

"'If it is disagreeable to you, I will not say another word, but can you suppose that a certain Hans Lutz--'

"He sprang from his low seat and ran distractedly up and down the studio.

"'Don't make me mad,' he cried. 'If you have noticed that I am over head and ears in love with the girl--as far as _that_ goes there is no disgrace in it; but I am not such an insane idiotic ape as to imagine for a moment that my respectable visage will drive the sweet child's first love out of her heart, and that a mere settlement in life will not decoy her you have yourself heard. Why then come and blow upon the coals with the bellows of your common-place philosophy? Am I not already wretched enough, in that I plainly see how hopeless the whole matter is, and yet cannot leave off gazing at her by the hour, just to burn in that cruel face of hers upon my memory? And now, forsooth, you must come and prate of solid possibilities, and congratulate me, and--the devil take it! It is just as if you were to hold the pin on which a living c.o.c.kchafer is impaled in a candle, and make it red-hot.'

"He threw himself down on a low ottoman in the corner with such vehemence, that he broke off the neck of a costly Florentine lute lying there, without even noticing it.

"I would now gladly have recalled my thoughtless words.

"'If the case is really so, Mynheer,' said I, 'I own there is nothing to congratulate you upon. But I do not understand why a man like you should so utterly despair. You have no tannery, but you are a famous artist; you do not smell of scents, but as a man should, of strong Porto Rico; and all the rest is mere matter of taste. Women are women, and it is impossible to reckon upon their fancies. That she is not exactly set upon an Adonis is evident--'

"I might have gone on for some time putting forth these plat.i.tudes, with the best intentions, if he had not suddenly turned upon me with a quite phlegmatic air, and asked me--not without a quiver in his voice--what o'clock it was, and whether the 'Muette de Portici' was not going to be performed that night. I then saw plainly how things stood, swallowed down my annoyance at having so stupidly interfered in so tender a matter, and took leave under the pretext that my wife was waiting for me to pay a visit.

"A visit on Whit Monday afternoon when no one is at home! but so one stumbles on from one discrepancy to another.

"Accordingly the series of my mortifications was not yet over for that particular day; for when I had got home to my good wife, and given her a true and faithful account of where I had been, and what I had seen and heard, and finally (though indeed her silence in listening foreboded no good), added: 'It would be a real comfort to me if I could do something for the pretty child, and might it not be as well to offer her our spare room as it chanced to be empty,'--a small matrimonial tempest burst at once, which I had pa.s.sively to endure. My wife had, indeed, long been upon the point of telling me that this Van Kuylen exercised the worst influence over me, and was the most unfit companion; a frivolous bachelor who had no respect for holy things, and had already infected me with his mocking and blasphemous spirit.

She had supposed, when she married a landscape painter, that her house would at least be free from such a disreputable set as models generally are, lost to all sense of decency and shame, and of whom the most horrible stories were heard. And now I had returned from that trumpery Dutchman, not only with my clothes reeking of the very worst tobacco-smoke, but in such a wholly perverted state of mind, and with such entire forgetfulness of what was due to a virtuous young wife, that I could actually propose to her to receive into our family this suspicious person, who had turned my head with her bit of prettiness and her dubious adventures. Rather than consent to such a step, she would take her innocent children in her arms, and at once leave the field clear; for it was too plain to see from the fervour with which I had proposed this fine plan, what must eventually come of it. And so saying, she caught up our little Christopher who had tripped in, with such a pa.s.sionate burst of tears, and pressed his small fair head so closely to her breast, it seemed as if she would fain save the poor harmless child from the evil eye of a sinful father who had irrevocably made over his soul to him who shall be nameless.

"I had no small difficulty in allaying the excitement of my dear better-half; she was generally patience and self-abnegation itself, but there is one point on which women are not to be trifled with, which makes hyenas of them, as Schiller says, and I inwardly called myself a confounded a.s.s for having displayed my aesthetic enthusiasm for the beautiful girl in so wrong a quarter.

"Of course I took good care not to revert to the dangerous subject, but remained at home the whole of the next day, and devoted myself to painting an old oak-forest, as if the riven and rugged bark of the secular trees was far more bewitching than the smoothest satin-skin of a maiden of twenty, and a gnarled oak-branch more ensnaring than the exquisite little Venus-like nose of our poor persecuted beauty.

"The next day I even accomplished a greater triumph over myself, in that I withstood the temptation of looking in--quite accidentally, of course--at Van Kuylen's studio, there to play the part of comforter to a distressed child of humanity. I was certainly a little absent-minded all the afternoon, and as we walked to Nymphenburg, our children pushed along in the perambulator by the maid, failed to get up any very animated conversation. I apologised somewhat lamely for it, on the plea that I was studying atmospheric effects, though indeed there was nothing very noticeable in the sky. But my wife found it much pleasanter than if I had indulged my bad habit of too earnestly studying the faces of the girls and women we pa.s.sed. There is indisputably about the s.e.x this one weakness, that they have themselves no conception of a purely artistic standpoint, and therefore never allow for it in others.

"At last after four or five days, I found it intolerable to my manly self-respect, thus suddenly to withdraw from my worthy Dutchman, merely because he was in my wife's bad books. Consequently, after was.h.i.+ng my brushes, I set out just about twilight, when I knew that though he could paint no longer, he was sure to be at home; and in this was most perfectly justified in my own eyes, since I could not possibly be expecting to find the fair Kate there, but only my small and unjustly calumniated friend.

"And to be sure I saw from a distance the s.h.i.+ning of his lamp through the window: nevertheless I had to be told by the old servant that her master was gone out. Neither did I fare any better on the following day when I knocked at his studio during his hours of work. I called out my name as loud as I could, but he wouldn't open. When I enquired from the old servant whether he was occupied with a model, she shook her head, and shrugged her shoulders; then tapping her forehead with a very significant gesture, she sighed and said, 'Things had not been right with the good gentleman for some days past; he ate and drank nothing to speak of, walked up and down his bed-room half the night, and spoke to no one.' I asked whether the young lady who was with him on Whit Monday had been there since. The answer was that she had not, but that he still went on painting her, out of his head, and the good woman herself had already thought that love might have something to do with her master's silence and absence of mind.

"The truth flashed in upon me too plainly, and I tacitly reproached myself with having poured oil on the flame by speaking of his attachment to the lovely being as something quite reasonable and by no means hopeless. Truly, if we always reflected the serious mischief our jesting words might make, we should be at least as cautious in uttering them, as we are in ascertaining upon what we are about to throw the burning end of our cigar.

"Meanwhile there was nothing to be done. I knew my eccentric Mynheer Jan too well. If he had taken it into his head to eat a whole Edam cheese for his breakfast, no one could have dissuaded him. I made two other attempts to get at him, but in vain; and one evening when I accidentally met him by the 'Aukirche'--we had almost run up against each other--he was off like a shot, and all my calling, and scolding, and running after him did no good; he _would_ not have anything to do with me.

"By-and-bye I came to take the matter more quietly, and to say to myself, 'If he can do without thee, thou canst get on without him.'

This mood of mine won me approving looks from my dear wife. I willingly allowed her the triumph--of which, by-the-way, she did not boast ungenerously--of believing that her remonstrances had weaned me from that soul-destroyer, Jan, and brought me back to the paths of virtue and landscape-painting. When my oak forest was done, we broke up our tent in the town, to pitch it, as we annually did, in the mountains. I wrote a kindly note to wish my friend good-bye, but got no answer in return. And so most of the summer pa.s.sed away without my knowing whether he were dead or alive. The fair Kate seemed to have been swallowed up by an earthquake. Of all my friends and colleagues, who were generally not long in tracking out anything rare, none had discovered the slightest trace of our poor wonder of the world.

"When, however, the middle of September came, and I had got a little tired of painting studies, and perhaps, also, of the monotonous fare of our country abode, and began to long for a return to the amenities of town life, I became conscious of a lively desire to know what had become of my Dutchman and his beauty. My first walk in Munich was to his studio, where I found the nest empty indeed, but left upon his little slate my name and a hearty greeting. After that I went with my wife to the exhibition, for where one has been so long face to face with nature, it is a pleasure to see how art has been getting on in the meantime. But what was my amazement, when the first picture my eyes fell upon, was nothing else than an unmistakable genuine Van Kuylen, in which his unfortunate studies of Kate were turned to account in his well-known manner, and certainly so questionably, that I at first pretended not to notice it, in order to get my wife safely past. But she with her lynx-eyes instantly made out the whole story.

"'But do look,' she said, in a tolerably calm voice, in which, however, I could detect a satirical tone; 'here is a picture by your Dutch painter of holy subjects, and on a larger scale than any we have seen before. I must say, if the subject were not so objectionable, it would go far to reconcile me to him. It seems to me that he has made great progress: one might almost call this picture beautiful; not only the colouring, but the whole composition has something grandiose, historical as you call it, a style--' (You may see that the little woman had not consorted with artists for the last six years for nothing, and could deliver her art-criticisms as confidently as any newspaper writer, only rather more intelligently.) 'But I believe,' she continued, 'that the Bathsheba who is there undressing to take a bath in a very shallow reservoir, is your marvellous creature from the Rhine. At all events, she does not look like any of the other studies in the room, and the little King David who peeps from an upper window, and naturally shows us the beautiful cheese-coloured face of the painter, looks at the lady with a genuine artist's eye, such as I have seen in other people's heads when staring under the bonnets of pretty girls,' (with that, a side glance at her faithful husband.) 'Well! I must say she is not bad-looking, if he has not idealised his model too much; but was I not right to refuse to take that persecuted innocence into our house? A pretty snake, indeed, I should have warmed in my breast! _She_ helpless! I think one who lets herself be painted thus, knows very well how to help herself. And really I do not know which I ought to wonder at most, at my good unsuspicious husband, who was so easily taken in by an experienced adventuress, or, if indeed he were not so entirely harmless in the matter, at his sanguine hope of humbugging me. At all events I am very glad that things have taken this turn.'

"After this attack and these imputations clothed in the most discreet and proper language, to which I had not so much as a word to answer, my domestic guardian angel drew me hastily away, as if fearing that dangerous person might even in her picture exercise some witchcraft over me. And really there was nothing out of the way in the idea, for all that my eccentric friend possessed of taste and love of beauty, had been expended on the figure of the young woman, who, already undraped to the hips, sat on a low stool in the act of taking off her little shoe. While so doing she turned to the left the well-remembered profile, which was drawn with the tenderest contour, not a single feature altered, and a striking likeness; her hair, which seemed to have been just loosened, fell in bewitching confusion over her l.u.s.trous neck. Her back and arms were so beautifully drawn, that I knew not how to give the good 'genre' painter credit for them. But what specially attracted me was the sad impa.s.sive expression with which the fair being bent her head, and cast her long-lashed eyes on the ground. King David up there in his balcony did not appear to me at that moment to be such a great sinner after all; or at least the extenuating circ.u.mstances under which that abominable letter anent Uriah was written, came before me more impressively than they had ever done in the presence of any painting of the subject before.

"I confess that I spent the rest of the day in a somewhat perturbed mood; my old creed, namely, that women _were_ women, was once more confirmed, and the apparent exception turned out to be an illusion.

Whether it were through vanity, or distress, or mere apathy, the beautiful girl had not maintained her inviolability. But although it is very pleasant to be proved right, and though I ought, besides, to have rejoiced that the poor _innamorato_ should in this not unusual way be healed of his madness, and probably at this moment happily betrothed, if not already a husband, there nevertheless lurked a certain uncomfortable feeling in my mind, and I caught myself involuntarily shaking my head as though there were something not quite right about it. My quick-witted wife seemed to discern what was going on within me, but as though the subject of my musings were too low and common to bear discussion, she never referred to the picture, and treated me with a gentleness and consideration befitting a penitent; in the spirit, in short, of the beautiful axiom, 'If a man have fallen, let love bring him back to duty.'

"On the following morning I was anxious to go to work, with fresh energies, at a new picture which I had already mentally composed; but I discovered that there was something wrong with me--there was still that story to unravel. What I should have liked best would have been to have gone at once to Mynheer Jan, and heard the truth, but he never got up before ten o'clock in the morning; so I lounged off again to the exhibition, that I might study the picture I had too hurriedly looked at the previous day, and was not a little annoyed at being reminded by the closed door that it was Sat.u.r.day, the day when the pictures are hung and the public excluded. The official told me that Herr van Kuylen's picture had been taken back to his studio in the course of the previous evening.

"To while away the hours till ten, I turned off through the arcades, and betook myself to the English garden, where I never found time long.

It is so celebrated that I need not praise it; but I venture to say there are not many, even among our good old Munich inhabitants, who know it at the time of its very greatest beauty, and that is early on an autumn, or late-summer morning, when it is as solemn and deserted as a primeval forest, and you can wander along the lofty avenues of shade without meeting a human creature. The gold-daisied meadows are luxuriant in the sun, the trees have lost none of their gorgeous foliage, the sun-light falls, I might say, in _pasto_ on the mirror-like ponds, and the magical dreamy silence thrills with the quiet rus.h.i.+ng of the Isar, and the light and noiseless hopping of birds and squirrels from branch to branch. There was no one to be seen on the lonely benches, unless, perhaps, a student preparing for his examination, or some poor poet meditating his love-songs. As to my colleagues the landscape painters, I have never met one of them here.

"Accordingly as I said, I was lounging on this particular morning in the well-known paths, but not in a particularly good mood for making studies, for Van Kuylen's picture, and what could have happened to enable him to paint it, was constantly running in my head. When I had dreamingly sauntered on to the vicinity of the famous waterfall, which the grateful inhabitants prepared at so much expense as a surprise for King Ludwig, I saw a lady on the bench upon the little hill overlooking it, sitting motionless, and having nothing about her to excite my interest, till all at once it struck me that she had a black veil down.

I thought, however, 'she has some reason for not wis.h.i.+ng to be recognized except by the one for whom she is waiting, and I will pa.s.s quickly by,' when a strange impulse led me to turn round and give her another look. The veiled figure made a little start, as though it recognized me, but the next moment sat as motionless as before. But there was a something in the turn of the head which seemed to me so familiar, that I involuntarily turned back a step or two, and--'Good Heavens! It is you, Miss Kate,' I cried, 'and what brings you here?'

and I held out my hand in cordial greeting. But she did not take it, and seemed on the point of running off. 'Stop,' said I, 'I have not bargained for this,' and in a friendly way I detained her. 'One is not to fly from an old friend in this manner, but to tell him where one has been for so many months past.' Meanwhile some uncomfortable terror was creeping over me, partly by reason of her strange silence and her looking about her as if for a way of escape, and partly because I had seen her hide a bottle under her shawl. It was, therefore, so plainly my duty not to leave her, that even my wife must have allowed it.

"'I shall not go away, Miss Kate,' I began, 'till you restore me a little of that confidence you showed at our first interview. You know I have only friendly intentions. You have something on your mind; it is vain to deny it; and I believe there is no one who can be so unselfish a confidant and adviser as I. Come, my dear young lady, let us seat ourselves on this bench. And now tell me why you seemed so shocked at seeing me again, and what sort of a cordial you are carrying there, and hiding from me. Fie, fie, Miss Kate, are you going to take to drinking secretly in your early youth?'

"She made no reply, but allowed herself to be led back to the bench, where I seated myself beside her.

"In order to give her time to compose herself, I began to talk of quite indifferent subjects: of the weather, and how beautiful it was here by the waterfall, and of how I had spent my summer, purposely dwelling a good deal upon my wife and children, as it always makes a good impression when doctors and spiritual pastors are affectionate husbands and parents.

"She seemed to be deaf to everything. There was no help for it, then, I must take the bull by the horns.

"'Miss Kate,' I said, 'is it long since you have seen Herr van Kuylen?

My first expedition yesterday was to his house, but as I found no one at home--'