Girlhood and Womanhood Part 11

Clarissa had never danced so many dances with one evening's partner as with the smitten member, at the a.s.sembly given on the spur of the moment in his honour, whereat Sam Winnington, standing with his hat under his arm, and leaning against the carved door, was an observant spectator. He was not sullen as when Will Locke and Dulcie tumbled headlong into the pit of matrimony! he was smiling and civil; but his lips were white and his eyes sunken, as if the energetic young painter did not sleep of nights.

Clary was not sincere; she gave that infatuated, tolerably heavy, red-faced, fox-hunting member, own cousin to the Justice, every reason to suppose that she would lend him the most favourable ear, when he chose to pay her his addresses, and then afforded him the amplest provocation to cry, "Caprice--thy name is woman." She had just sung "Tantivy" to him after supper, when she sailed up to Sam Winnington, and addressed him demurely:--

"I have come to wish you good-night, sir."

"And I to wish you farewell, madam."

"Farewell is a hard word, Master Winnington," returned Clary, with a great tide of colour rus.h.i.+ng into her face, and a gasp as for breath, and tracing figures nervously on the floor with her little shoe and its brave paste-buckle.

"It shall be said though, and that without further delay, unless three very different words be put in its place."

"Sir, you are tyrannous," protested Clary, in a tremulous voice.

"No, Mistress Clarissa, I have had too good cause to know who has been the tyrant in this business," declared Sam Winnington, speaking out roundly, as a woman loves to hear a man, though it be to her own condemnation, "You have used me cruelly, Clarissa Gage; you have abused my faith, wasted the best years of my life, and deceived my affections."

"What were the three words," asked Clary, faint and low.

"'Yours, Sam Winnington;' or else, 'Farewell, Clarissa Gage?'"

"Yours, Sam Winnington."

He caught her so sharp up by the arm at that sentence, that some persons said Mistress Clarissa had staggered and was about to swoon; others, that the vulgar fellow of a painter had behaved like a brute, pulled her to his side as she was marching past him, and accused her of perjury before the whole ball-room. Bold men were apt at that time to seize aggravating women (especially if they were the wives of their bosoms) by the hairs of their heads, so that a trifling rudeness was little thought of. The county member, however, p.r.i.c.ked up his long ears, flushed, fiercely stamped to the particular corner, and had a constable in his eye to arrest the beggarly offender; but before he could get at the disputants, he had the mortification to see them retreat amicably into a side room, and the next thing announced to him was, that Mistress Clarissa had evanished home, before anybody could get rightly at the bottom of the mystery.

Very fortunately, the county member ascertained the following day, before he had compromised his pride another hair's-breadth, that the fickle damsel had accepted the painter's escort the previous evening, and had admitted the painter at an incredibly early hour the subsequent morning. After such indiscretion, the great man would have nothing more to say to Mistress Clarissa, but departed in great dudgeon, and would never so much as set his foot within Redwater again; not even at the following election.

Uncle Barnet was forced to come round and acknowledge, with a very bad grace, that legislation in heiresses' marriages--in any marriage--is out of the question. No man knew how a marriage would turn out; you might as well pledge yourself for the weather next morning; certainly there were signs for the wise; but were weather almanacs deceptive inst.i.tutions or were they not? The innocent old theory of marriages being made in heaven was the best. Clary was not such a mighty catch after all: a six thousand pounds' fortune was not inexhaustible, and the county member might never have come the length of asking its owner's price. People did talk of a foolish engagement in his youth to one of his yeomen's daughters, and of a wealthy old aunt who ruled the roast; though her well-grown nephew, not being returned for a rotten borough, voted with dignity for so many thousands of his fellow-subjects in the Commons.

Uncle Barnet, with a peculiarly wry face, did reluctantly what he did not often advise his clients to do, unless in desperate circ.u.mstances--he compromised.

Clary was made a wife in the height of summer, with all the rites and ceremonies of the Church, with all the damasks, and laces, and leadings by the tips of the fingers, and lavis.h.i.+ngs of larkspurs, lupins, and tiger-lilies proper for the occasion, which Dulcie had lost. Nay, the supper came off at the very "Rod and Fly," with the tap open to the roaring, jubilant public; a score of healths were drunk upstairs with all the honours, the bride and bridegroom being king and queen of the company: even Uncle Barnet owned that Sam Winnington was very complaisant--rather exceed in his complaisance, he supplemented scornfully; but surely Sam might mend that fault with others in the bright days to come. It is only the modern English who act Hamlet _minus_ the Prince of Denmark; sitting at the bridal feast without bride or bridegroom. They say hearts are often caught on the rebound, and if all ill-treated suitors spoke out warmly yet sternly like Sam Winnington, and did not merely fence about and either sneer or whine, more young fools might be saved, even when at touch-and-go with their folly, after the merciful fate of Clary and to the benefit of themselves and of society.

V.--DULCIE AND WILL, AT HOME IN ST. MARTIN'S LANE.

While Sam and Clarissa were fighting the battles of vanity and the affections down in the southern s.h.i.+re in quite a rural district, among mills and ash-trees, and houses with gardens and garden bowers, William and Dulcie were combating real flesh-and-blood woes--woes that would not so much set your teeth on edge, as soften and melt your tough, dry heart--among the bricks and mortar of London. These several years were not light suns.h.i.+ny years to the young couple. It is of no use saying that a man may prosper if he will, and that he has only to cultivate potatoes and cabbages in place of jessamine and pa.s.sion flowers; no use making examples of Sir Joshua and Vand.y.k.e, and telling triumphantly that they knew their business and did it simply--only pretending to get a livelihood and satisfy the public to the best of their ability, but ending in becoming great painters. One man's meat is another man's poison; one man's duty is not his neighbour's. When shall we apprehend or apply that little axiom? The d.u.c.h.ess of Portland killed three thousand snails in order that she might complete the sh.e.l.l-work for which she received so much credit; Dulcie would not have put her foot voluntarily on a single snail for a pension.

It was Will Locke's fate to vibrate between drudgery and dreaming; always tending more inevitably towards the latter, and lapsing into more distant, absorbing trances, till he became more and more fantastic and unearthly, with his thin light hair, his half-transparent cheek, and his strained eyes. To prophesy on cardboard and canvas, in flower and figure, with monster and star, crescent and triangle, in emerald green and ruby red and sea blue, in dyes that, like those of the Ba.s.sani, resembled the clear s.h.i.+ning of a handful of jewels, to prophesy in high art, to be half pitied, half derided, and to starve: was that Will Locke's duty?

Will thought so, in the most artless, unblemished, unswerving style; and he was a devout fellow as well as a gifted one. He bowed to revelation, and read nature's secrets well before he forsook her for heaven, or rather Hades. He devoted himself to the sacrifice; he did not grudge his l.u.s.t of the eye, his l.u.s.t of the flesh, his pride of life. He devoted Dulcie, not without pangs; and he devoted his little sickly children pining and dying in St. Martin's Lane. He must follow his calling, he must fulfil his destiny.

Dulcie was not quite such an enthusiast; she did love, honour, and obey Will Locke, but she was sometimes almost mad to see him such a wreck. It had been a sent evil, and she had looked down into the gulf; but she had missed the depths. She had never seen its gloomy, dark, dreary nooks, poor la.s.s! in her youthful boldness and lavishness; and our little feminine Curtius in the scoured silk, with the powdered brown curls, had not merely to penetrate them in one plunge, but had to descend, stumbling and groping her way, and starting back at the sense of confinement, the damp and the darkness. Who will blame her that she sometimes turned her head and looked back, and stretched up her arms from the desert to the flesh-pots of Egypt? She would have borne anything for her husband; and she did work marvels: she learned to engrave for him, coloured constantly with her light, pliant fingers, and drew and painted from old fresh memories those articles of stoneware for the potteries. She clothed herself in the cheapest and most lasting of printed linen sacques and mob caps, and hoods and ap.r.o.ns, fed herself and him and the children on morsels wellnigh miraculously. She even swallowed down the sight of Clary in her cut velvet and her own coach, whose panel Sam Winnington himself had not thought it beneath him to touch up for Clary's delectation and glory. If Will would only have tarried longer about his flowers and bees, and groves and rattlesnakes: if he had even stopped short at faces like those of Socrates, Caesar, Cleopatra, Fair Rosamond--what people could understand with help--and not slid off faster and more fatally into that dim delirium of good and evil, angels and archangels, the devil of temptation and the goblin of the flesh, the red fiend of war, and the pale spirit of peace!

The difference which originated at Will and Dulcie's marriage had ended in alienation. Dulcie thought that Sam Winnington would have bridged it over at one time, if Will would have made any sign of meeting his overtures, or acknowledged Sam's talents and fortune: nay, even if Will had refrained from betraying his churlish doubts of Sam's perfect deserts.

But no, this Will would not deign to do. The gentle, patient painter, contented with his own estimation of his endowments, and resigned to be misjudged and neglected by the world, had his own indomitable doggedness. He would never flatter the world's low taste for commonplace, and its miserable short-sightedness; he would never pay homage to Sam Winnington which he did not deserve--a man very far from his equal--a mere clever portrait-painter, little better than a skilled stonemason. Thus Sam Winnington and Will Locke took to flus.h.i.+ng when each other's names were mentioned--sitting bolt upright and declining to comment on each other's works, or else dismissing each other's efforts in a few supremely contemptuous words. Certainly the poor man rejected the rich not one whit less decidedly than the rich man rejected the poor, and the Mordecais have always the best of it. If we and our neighbours will pick out each other's eyes, commend us to the part of brave little Jack, rather than that of the belligerent Giant, even when they are only eyeing each other previous to sitting down to the ominous banquet.

But this was a difficulty to Dulcie, as it is to most women. No one thinks of men's never showing a malign influence in this world; it is only good women who are expected to prove angels outright here below.

But it does seem that there is something more touching in their having to stifle lawful instincts, and in their being forced to oppose and overcome unlawful pa.s.sions--covetousness, jealousy, wrath, "hatred, malice, and all uncharitableness."

Dulcie, with the sharpness of her little face, divested of all its counterbalancing roundness--a keen, worn little face since the day it had smiled so confusedly but generously out of the scurvy silk in the church at Redwater--was a sweet-looking woman under her care-laden air.

Some women retain sweetness under nought but skin and bone; they will not pinch into meanness and spite; they have still faith and charity.

One would not wonder though Dulcie afforded more vivid glimpses of _il Beato's_ angels after the contour of her face was completely spoilt.

You can fancy the family room in St. Martin's Lane, some five or six years after Will Locke and Dulcie were wed, with its strange litter of acids and aquafortis, graving tools and steel plates. Will and Dulcie might have been some of the abounding false coiners, had it not been for the colours, the canvas, and the vessels from the potteries, all huddled together without attention to effect. Yet these were not without order, for they were too busy people to be able to afford to be purely disorderly. They could not have had the curtain less scant, for the daylight was precious to them; they had not s.p.a.ce for more furniture than might have sufficed a poor tradesman or better sort of mechanic; only there were traces of gentle birth and breeding in the casts, the prints and portfolios, the Dutch clock, and the great hulk of a state-bed hung with the perpetual dusky yellow damask, which served as a nursery for the poor listless little children.

Presently Dulcie looked after the sops, and surrept.i.tiously awarded Will the Benjamite's portion, and Will ate it absently with the only appet.i.te there; though he, too, was a consumptive-looking man--a good deal more so than when he attracted the pity of the good wife at the "Nine Miles Inn." Then Dulcie crooned to the children of the milk-porridge she would give them next night, and sang to them as she lulled them to sleep, her old breezy, bountiful English songs, "Young Roger came tapping at Dolly's window," and "I met my lad at the garden gate," and brushed their faces into laughter with the primroses and hyacinths she had bought for Will in Covent Garden Market. Will asked to see them in the spring twilight, and described the banks where they grew, with some revival of his early lore, and added a tale of the fairies who made them their round tables and galleries, which caused the eldest child (the only one who walked with Dulcie in his little coat to the church where he was christened) to open his heavy eyes, and clap his hot hands, and cry, "More, father, more." Will and Dulcie looked gladly into each other's eyes at his animation, and boasted what a stamping, thundering man he would yet live to be--that midge, that sprite, with Dulcie's small skeleton bones, and Will's dry, l.u.s.treless, fair hair!

Anon while Dulcie was still rocking one of these weary children moaning in its sleep, Will must needs strike a light to resume his beloved labours; but first he directed his candle to his canvas, and called on Dulcie to contemplate and comprehend, while he murmured and raved to her of the group of fallen men and women crouching in the den--of the wind of horror raising their hair,--of the dawn of hope bursting in the eastern sky, and high above them the fiendish crew, and the captains of the Blessed still swaying to and fro in the burdened air, and striking deadly blows for supremacy. And Dulcie, open-eyed and open-mouthed as of old, looked at the captives, as if listening to the strife that was to come, and wellnigh heard the thunder of the captains and the shouting, while her eye was always eagerly pointed to that pearly streak which was to herald the one long, cool, calm, bright day of humanity. No wonder Dulcie was as demented as Will, and thought it would be a very little matter though the milk-porridge were sour on the morrow, or if the carrier did not come with the price in his pocket for these sweet pots, and bowls, and pipkins: she believed her poor babies were well at rest from the impending dust, and din, and danger; and smiled deep, quiet smiles at Clary--poor Clary, with her cut velvet, her coach, and her black boy. Verily Will and Dulcie could afford to refer not only pleasantly but mercifully, to Sam Winnington and Clary that night.

"It is contemptible to lose sight of the sublimity of life even to enjoy perfect ease and happiness." That is a very grand saying; but, oh dear!

we are poor creatures; and though Dulcie is an infinitely n.o.bler being now than then, the tears are fit to start into our eyes when we remember the little brown head which "bridled finely," the little feet which pranced lightly, and the little tongue which wagged, free from care, in the stage waggon on the country road yon clear September day.

VI.--SAM AND CLARISSA IN COMPANY IN LEICESTER SQUARE.

Sam and Clarissa were wors.h.i.+pful people now. Uncle Barnet no longer invited them to his second-rate parties; Uncle Barnet was really proud to visit them in their own home. Sam Winnington was a discerning mortal; he had a faculty for discovering genius, especially that work-a-day genius which is in rising men; and he certainly had bird-lime wherewith he could fix their feet under his hospitable table. The best of the sages and wits of the day were to be met in Sam Winnington's house; the best of the sages and wits of the day thought Clary a fine woman, though a little lofty, and Sam a good fellow, an honest chum, a delightful companion, and at the same time the prince of portrait-painters. What an eye he had! what a touch! How much perception of individual character, and at the same time, what sober judgment and elegant taste to preserve his sitters, ladies and gentlemen, as well as men and women! Cavaliers would have it, the ladies and gentlemen, like Sam's condescension at his wedding-feast, overtopped the mark; but it was erring on the safe side. Who would not sink the man in the gentleman? After all, perhaps the sages and wits were not altogether disinterested: almost every one of them filled Sam Winnington's famous sitter's chair, and depended on Sam's tasteful pencil handing down their precious noses and chins to posterity.

Sam and Clary were going abroad, in that coach, which had made Dulcie Locke look longingly after it, and ponder what it would be for one of her frail children to have "a ride" on the box as far as Kensington.

They were bound for the house of one of the lordly patrons of arts and letters. They were bound for my Lord Burlington's, or the Earl of Mulgrave's, or Sir William Beechey's--for a destination where they were a couple of mark and distinction, to be received with the utmost consideration. Sam reared smartly his round but not ill-proportioned person in his rich brocade coat, and Clary towered in the corner with her white throat, and her filmy ivory-coloured laces.

We won't see many more distinguished men and women than the members of the set who frequented the old London tea-parties; and Sam Winnington and Clary were in it and of it, while Will Locke and Dulcie were poverty-stricken and alone with their bantlings in the garret in St.

Martin's Lane. What becomes of the doctrine of happiness being equally divided in this world, as so many comfortable persons love to opine?

Possibly we don't stand up for it; or we may have our loophole, by which we may let ourselves out and drag it in. Was that ill.u.s.trious voyage all plain sailing? Sam Winnington used to draw a long sigh, and lay back his head and close his eyes in his coach, after the rout was over. He was not conscious of acting; he was not acting, and one might dare another, if that other were not a cynic, to say that the motive was unworthy. He wanted to put his sitters on a good footing with themselves; he wanted to put the world on a good footing with itself; it was the man's nature.

He did not go very far down; he was not without his piques, and like other good-natured men--like Will Locke, for that matter--when he was once offended he was apt to be vindictive; but he was buoyant, and that little man must have had a great fund of charity about him somewhere to be drawn upon at first sight. Still this popularity was no joke. There were other rubs. The keen love of approbation in the little man, which was at the bottom of his suavity, was galled by the least condemnation of his work and credit; he was too manly to enact the old man and the a.s.s, but successful Sam Winnington was about as soon p.r.i.c.ked as a man who wears a fold of silk on his breast instead of the old plate armour.

Clary had her own aggravations: with all her airs Clary was not a match for the indomitable, unhesitating, brazen (with a golden brazenness) women of fas.h.i.+on. Poor Clary had been the beauty at Redwater, the most modish, the best informed woman there; and here, in this world of London, to which Sam had got her an introduction, she was a n.o.body; scarcely to be detected among the host of ordinary fine women, except by Sam's reflected glory. This was a doubtful boon, an unsatisfactory rise in the social scale. Then Clary had n.o.body beyond Sam to look to, and hope and pray for: she had not even sickly children to nurse, like Dulcie. Sam would only live to future generations in his paintings. Ah, well! it was fortunate that Sam was a man of genius.

You may believe, for all the grand company, the coach, the cut velvet, the laces, and the black boy, that this world was but a mighty sorry, uneasy place to Sam and Clarissa as they rolled home over the pavement, while Will and Dulcie slept with little betwixt them and the stars.

VII.--STRIPS SOME OF THE THORNS FROM THE HEDGE AND THE GARDEN ROSES.

Will Locke lay dying. One would have thought, from his tranquillity, confidence, and love of work, even along with spare diet, that he would have lived long. But dreamland cannot be a healthy region for a man in the body to inhabit. Will was going where his visions would be as nought to the realities. He was still one of the most peaceful, the happiest of fellows, as he had been all his life. He babbled of the pictures he would paint in another region, as if he were conscious that he had painted in a former state. It seemed, too, that the poor fellow's spiritual life, apart from his artist career, took sounder, cheerier substance and form, as the other life grew dimmer and wilder. Dulcie was almost reconciled to let Will go; for he would be more at home in the spirit-world than here, and she had seen sore trouble, which taught her to acquiesce, when there were a Father and a Friend seen glimmeringly but hopefully beyond the gulf. Dulcie moved about, with her child holding by her skirts, resigned and helpful in her sorrow.

The most clouded faces in the old room in St. Martin's Lane--with its old litter, so grievous to-day, of brushes, and colours, and graving tools, and wild pictures which the painter would never touch more--were those of Sam Winnington and Clary. Will had bidden Sam and Clary be sent for to his deathbed; and, offended as they had been, and widely severed as they were now, they rose and came trembling to obey the summons.

Clary gave one look, put her handkerchief quickly to her eyes, and then turned and softly covered the tools, lifted the boiling pot to the side of the grate, and took Dulcie's fretful, wondering child in her lap. She was not a fine lady now, but a woman in distress. Sam stood immoveable and uncertain, with a man's awkwardness, but a face working with suppressed emotion.

Will felt no restraint; he sat up in his faded coat with his cravat open to give him air, and turning his wan face with its dark shadow towards Sam Winnington in his velvet coat, with a diamond ring sparkling on his splashed hand, and his colour, which had grown rosy of late years, heightened with emotion, addressed his old friend.

"I wanted to see you, Sam; I had something on my mind, and I could not depart with full satisfaction without saying it to you; I have done you wrong."

Sam raised his head, startled, and stared at the sick man: poor Will Locke; were his wits utterly gone? they had always been somewhat to seek: though he had been a wonderful fellow, too, in his own way--wonderful at flowers, and birds, and beasts, if he had but been content with them.

"I called you a mere portrait-painter, Sam," continued the dying man; "I refused to acknowledge your inspiration, and I knew better: I saw that to you was granted the discernment to read the human face and the soul behind it, as to me it was given to hold converse with nature and the subtle essence of good and evil. Most painters before you have painted masks; but yours are the clothings of immortals: and your flesh is wonderful, Sam--how you have perfected it! And it is not true what they tell you of your draperies: you are the only man alive who can render them picturesque and not absurd, refined and not stinted. You were a genteel fellow, too, from the beginning, and would no more do a dirty action when you had only silver coins to jingle in your pockets, than now when they are stuffed with gold moidores."

"Oh, Will, Will!" cried Sam, desperately bowing his head; "I have done little for you."

"Man!" cried Will, with a kingly incredulity, "what could you do for me?

I wanted nothing. I was withdrawn somewhat from my proper field, to mould and colour for daily bread; but Dulcie saved me many a wasted hour, and I could occupy the period of a mechanical job in conceiving--no, in marshalling my visions. Mine was a different, an altogether higher line than yours, Sam; you will forgive me if I have told you too abruptly," and the poverty-stricken painter, at his last gasp, looked deprecatingly at his old honoured a.s.sociate.