Innocent : her fancy and his fact Part 51

"No," she answered, quietly--"I have often told you I have no one. I am alone in the world--I can do as I like." Then a smile brightened her face. "Lord Blythe would have me as a daughter if I would go to him."

He started and loosened her from his embrace.

"Lord Blythe! That wealthy old peer! What does he want with you?"

"Nothing, I suppose, but the pleasure of my company!" and she laughed--"Doesn't that seem strange?"

He rose and went back to work at his easel.

"Rather!" he said, slowly--"Are you going to accept his offer?"

Her eyes opened widely.

"I? My Amadis, how can you think it? I would not accept it for all the world! He would load me with benefits--he would surround me with luxuries--but I do not want these. I like to work for myself and be independent." He laid a brush lightly in colour and began to use it with delicate care.

"You are not very wise," he then said--"It's a great thing for a young girl like you who are all alone in the world, to be taken in hand by such a man as Blythe. He's a statesman,--very useful to his country,--he's very rich and has a splendid position. His wife's sudden death has left him very lonely as he has no children,--you could be a daughter to him, and it would be a great leap upwards for you, socially speaking. You would be much better off under his care than scribbling books."

She drew a sharp breath of pain,--all the pretty colour fled from her cheeks.

"You do not care for me to scribble books!" she said, in low, stifled accents.

He laughed.

"Oh, I don't mind!--I never read them,--and in a way it amuses me! You are such an armful of sweetness--such a warm, nestling little bird of love in my arms!--and to think that you actually write books that the world talks about!--the thing is so incongruous--so 'out of drawing'

that it makes me laugh! I don't like writing women as a rule--they give themselves too many airs to please me--but you--"

He paused.

"Well, go on," she said, coldly.

He looked at her, smiling.

"You are cross? Don't be cross,--you lose your enchanting expression!

Well--you don't give yourself any airs, and you seem to play at literature like a child playing at a game: of course you make money by it,--but--you know better than I do that the greatest writers"--he emphasized the word "greatest" slightly--"never make money and are never popular."

"Does failure const.i.tute greatness?" she asked, with a faintly satirical inflection in her sweet voice which he had never heard before.

"Sometimes--in fact pretty often," he replied, dabbing his brush busily on his canvas--"You should read about great authors--"

"I HAVE read about them," she said--"Walter Scott was popular and made money,--Charles d.i.c.kens was popular and made money--Thackeray was popular and made money--Shakespeare himself seemed to have had the one princ.i.p.al aim of making sufficient money enough to live comfortably in his native town, and he was 'popular' in his day--indeed he 'played to the gallery.' But he was not a 'failure'--and the whole world acknowledges his greatness now, though in his life-time he was unconscious of it."

Surprised at her quick eloquence, he paused in his work.

"Very well spoken!" he remarked, condescendingly--"I see you take a high view of your art! But like all women, you wander from the point.

We were talking of Lord Blythe--and I say it would be far better for you to be--well!--his heiress!--for he might leave you all his fortune--than go on writing books."

Her lips quivered: despite her efforts, tears started to her eyes. He saw, and throwing down his brush came and knelt beside her, pa.s.sing his arm round her waist.

"What have I said?" he murmured, coaxingly--"Innocent--sweet little love! Forgive me if I have--what?"--and he laughed softly--"rubbed you up the wrong way!"

She forced a smile, and her delicate white hands wandered caressingly through his hair as he laid his head against her bosom.

"I am sorry!" she said, at last--"I thought--I hoped--you might be proud of my work, Amadis! I was planning it all for that! You see"--she hesitated--"I learned so much from the Sieur Amadis de Jocelin--the brother of your ancestor!--that I have been thinking all the time how I could best show you that I was worthy of his teaching. The world--or the public--you know the things they say of me--but I do not want their praise. I believe I could do something really great if YOU cared!--for now it is only to please you that I live."

A sense of shame stung him at this simple avowal.

"Nonsense!" he said, almost brusquely--"You have a thousand other things to live for--you must not think of pleasing me only. Besides I'm not very--keen on literature,--I'm a painter."

"Surely painting owes something to literature?" she queried--"We should not have had all the wonderful Madonnas and Christs of the old masters if there had been no Bible!"

"True!--but perhaps we could have done without them!" he said, lightly--"I'm not at all sure that painting would not have got on just as well without literature at all. There is always nature to study--sky, sea, landscape and the faces of lovely women and children,--quite enough for any man. Where is Lord Blythe now?"

"In Italy," she replied--"He will be away some months."

She spoke with constraint. Her heart was heavy--the hopes and ambitions she had cherished of adding l.u.s.tre to her fame for the joy and pride of her lover, seemed all crushed at one blow. She was too young and inexperienced to realise the fact that few men are proud of any woman's success, especially in the arts. Their att.i.tude is one of amused tolerance when it is not of actual s.e.x-jealousy or contempt. Least of all can any man endure that the woman for whom he has a short spell of pa.s.sionate fancy should be considered notable, or in an intellectual sense superior to himself. He likes her to be dependent on him alone for her happiness,--for such poor crumbs of comfort he is pleased to give her when the heat of his first pa.s.sion has cooled,--but he is not altogether pleased when she has sufficient intelligent perception to see through his web of subterfuge and break away clear of the entangling threads, standing free as a G.o.ddess on the height of her own independent attainment. Innocent's idea of love was the angelic dream of truth and everlastingness set forth by poets, whose sweet singing deludes themselves and others,--she was ready to devote all the unique powers of her mind and brain to the perfecting of herself for her lover's delight. She wished to be beautiful, brilliant, renowned and admired, simply that he might take joy in knowing that this beautiful, brilliant, renowned and admired creature was HIS, body and soul--existing solely for him and content to live only so long as he lived, to work only so long as he worked,--to be nothing apart from his love, but to be everything he could desire or command while his love environed her. She thought of the eternal union of souls,--while he had no belief in the soul at all, his half French materialism persuading him that there was nothing eternal. And like all men of his type he estimated her tenderness for him, her clinging arms, and the lingering pa.s.sion of her caresses, to be chiefly the outflow of pleased vanity--the kittenish satisfaction of being stroked and fondled--the sense of her own s.e.x-attractiveness,--but of anything deep and closely rooted in the centre of a more than usually sensitive nature he had not the faintest conception, taking it for granted that all women, even clever ones, were more or less alike, easily consoled by new millinery when lovers failed.

Sometimes, during the progress of their secret amour, a thrill of uneasiness and fear ran coldly through her veins--a wondering doubt which she repelled with indignation whenever it suggested itself.

Amadis de Jocelyn was and must be the very embodiment of loyalty and honour to the woman he loved!--it could not be otherwise. His tenderness was ardent,--his pa.s.sion fiery and eager,--yet she wondered--timidly and with deep humiliation in herself for daring to think so far--why, if he loved her so much as he declared, did he not ask her to be his wife? She supposed he would do so,--though she had heard him depreciate marriage as a necessary evil. Evidently he had his own good reasons for deferring the fateful question. Meanwhile she made a little picture-gallery of ideal joys in her brain,--and one of her fancies was that when she married her Amadis she would ask Robin Clifford to let her buy Briar Farm.

"He could paint well there!" she thought, happily, already seeing in her mind's eye the "Great Hall" transformed into an artist's studio--"and I almost think _I_ could carry on the farm--Priscilla would help me,--and we know just how Dad liked things to be done--if--if Robin went away. And the master of the house would again be a true Jocelyn!"

The whole plan seemed perfectly natural and feasible. Only one obstacle presented itself like a dark shadow on the brightness of her dream--and that was her own "base" birth. The brand of illegitimacy was upon her,--and whereas once she alone had known what she judged to be a shameful secret, now two others shared it with her--Miss Leigh and Lord Blythe. They would never betray it--no!--but they could not alter what unkind fate had done for her. This was one reason why she was glad that Amadis de Jocelyn had not as yet spoken of their marriage.

"For I should have to tell him!" she thought, woefully--"I should have to say that I am the illegitimate daughter of Pierce Armitage--and then--perhaps he would not marry me--he might change--ah no!--he could not!--he would not!--he loves me too dearly! He would never let me go--he wants me always! We are all the world to each other!--nothing could part us now!"

And so the time drifted on--and with its drifting her work drifted too, and only one all-absorbing pa.s.sion possessed her life with its close and consuming fire. Amadis de Jocelyn was an expert in the seduction of a soul--little by little he taught her to judge all men as worthless save himself, and all opinions unwarrantable and ill-founded unless he confirmed them. And, leading her away from the contemplation of high visions, he made her the blind wors.h.i.+pper of a very inadequate idol.

She was happy in her faith, and yet not altogether sure of happiness.

For there are two kinds of love--one with strong wings which lift the soul to a dazzling perfection of immortal destiny,--the other with gross and heavy chains which fetter every hope and aspiration and drag the finest intelligence down to dark waste and nothingness.

CHAPTER IX

In affairs of love a woman is perhaps most easily ensnared by a man who can combine pa.s.sion with pleasantry and hot pursuit with social tact and diplomacy. Amadis de Jocelyn was an adept at this kind of thing--he was, if it may be so expressed, a refined libertine, loving women from a purely physical sense of attraction and pleasure conveyed to himself, and obtusely ignorant of the needs or demands of their higher natures.

From a mental or intellectual standpoint all women to him were alike, made to be "managed" alike, used alike, and alike set aside when their use was done with. The leaven of the Jew or the Turk was in the temperament of this descendant of a long line of French n.o.bles, who had gained their chief honours by killing men, ravis.h.i.+ng women and plundering their neighbours' lands--though occasional flashes of bravery and chivalry had glanced over their annals in history like the light from a wandering will o' the wisp flickering over a mora.s.s.

Gifted in his art, but wholly undisciplined in his nature, he had lived a life of selfish aims to selfish ends, and in the course of it had made love to many women,--one especially, on whose devoted affections he had preyed like an insect that ungratefully poisons the flower from which it has sucked the honey. This woman, driven to bay at last by his neglect and effrontery, had roused the scattered forces of her pride and had given him his conge--and he had been looking about for a fresh victim when he met Innocent. She was a complete novelty to him, and stimulated his more or less jaded emotions,--he found her quaint and charming as a poet's dream of some nymph of the woodlands,--her manner of looking at life and the things of life was so deliciously simple--almost mediaeval,--for she believed that a man should die rather than break his word or imperil his honour, which to Jocelyn was such a primitive state of things as to seem prehistoric. Then there was her fixed and absurd "fancy" about the n.o.ble qualities and manifold virtues of the French knight who had served the Duc d'Anjou,--and who had been to her from childhood a kind of lover in the spirit,--a being whom she had instinctively tried to serve and to please; and he had sufficient imagination to understand and take advantage of the feeling aroused in her when she had met one of the same descent, and bearing the same name, in himself. He had run through the gamut of many emotions and sentiments,--he had joined one or two of the new schools of atheism and modernism started by certain self-opinionated young University men, and in the earlier stages of his career had in the c.o.c.k-sure impulse of youth designed schemes for the regeneration of the world, till the usual difficulties presented themselves as opposed to such vast business,--he had a.s.sociated himself with men who followed what is called the "fleshly school" of poetry and art generally, and had evolved from his own mentality a comfortable faith of which the chief tenet was "Self for Self"--a religion which lifts the mind no higher than the purely animal plane;--and in its environment of physical consciousness and agreeable physical sensations, he was content to live.

With such a temperament and disposition as he possessed, which swayed him hither and thither on the caprice or impulse of the moment, his intentions toward Innocent were not very clear even to himself. When he had begun his "amour" with her he had meant it to go just as far as should satisfy his own whim and desire,--but as he came to know her better, he put a check on himself and hesitated as one may hesitate before pulling up a rose-bush from its happy growing place and flinging it out on the dust-heap to die. She was so utterly unsuspicious and unaware of evil, and she had placed him on so high a pedestal of honour, trusting him with such perfect and unquestioning faith, that for very manhood's sake he could not bring himself to tear the veil from her eyes. Moreover he really loved her in a curious, haphazard way of love,--more than he had ever loved any one of her s.e.x,--and, when in her presence and under her influence, he gained a glimmering of consciousness of what love might mean in its best and purest sense.

He laughed at himself however for this very thought. He had always pooh-pooh'd the idea of love as having anything divine or uplifting in its action,--nevertheless in his more sincere moments he was bound to confess that since he had known Innocent his very art had gained a certain breadth and subtlety which it had lacked before. It was a pleasure to him to see her eyes s.h.i.+ne with pride in his work, to hear her voice murmur dulcet praises of his skill, and for a time he took infinite pains with all his subjects, putting the very best of himself into his drawing and colouring with results that were brilliant and convincing enough to ensure success for all his efforts.

Sometimes--lost in a sudden fit of musing--he wondered how his life would shape itself if he married her? He had avoided marriage as a man might avoid hanging,--considering it, not without reason, the possible ruin of an artist's greater career. Among many men he had known, men of undoubted promise, it had proved the fatal step downward from the high to the low. One particular "chum" of his own, a gifted painter, had married a plump rosy young woman with "a bit o' money," as the country folks say,--and from that day had been steadily dragged down to the domestic level of sad and sordid commonplace. Instead of studying form and colour, he was called upon to examine drains and superintend the plumber, mark house linen and take care of the children--his wife believing in "making a husband useful." Of regard for his art or possible fame she had none,--while his children were taught to regard his work in that line as less important than if he had been a bricklayer at so much pence the hour.

"Children!" thought Jocelyn--"Do I want them? ... No--I think not!

They're all very well when they're young--really young!--two to five years old is the enchanting age,--but, most unfortunately, they grow!

Yes!--they grow,--often into hideous men and women--a sort of human vultures sitting on their fathers' pockets and screaming 'Give! Give!'

The prospect does not attract me! And she?--Innocent? I don't think I could bear to watch that little flower-like face gradually enlarging into matronly lines and spreading into a double chin! Those pretty eyes peering into the larder and considering the appearance of uncooked bacon! Perish the thought! One might as well think of Shakespeare's Juliet paying the butcher's bill, or worse still, selecting the butcher's meat! Forbid it, O ye heavens! Of course if ideals could be realised, which they never are, I can see myself wedded for pure love, without a care, painting my pictures at ease, with a sweet woman wors.h.i.+pping me, ever at my beck and call, and s.h.i.+elding me from trouble with all the tender force of her pa.s.sionate little soul!--but commonplace life will net fit itself into these sort of beatific visions! Babies, and the necessary provision of food and clothes and servants--this is what marriage means--love having sobered down to a matter-of-fact conclusion. No--no! I will not marry her! It would be like catching a fairy in the woods, cutting off its sunbeam wings and setting it to scrub the kitchen floor!"