“Ah, there you are wrong, believe me, and will have to admit it before the world has grown much older. He has in him all the fire of the true artist,—latent it may be for a while. But sooner or later it’s bound to come to the fore. Even now he’s seeing things on the continent that will stimulate it into activity, and then he’ll show what’s in him and surprise us all.”
I had hardly entered upon this policy of masterly inactivity before I was tempted to abandon it. On a hot afternoon towards the end of June I was lazily whipping the Rectory stream on the chance of a trout, when Marion came down to me from the terrace, clad—or so it seemed to my uneducated gaze—in a diaphanous cloud of palest lavender, and holding in her hand an open letter. Then and there I became faithless to my conscience, for never had she appeared to me in prettier guise. Her dress—and I always like those confections of cloud-like tulle or gauze under whatever name they are scientifically known—was in perfect harmony with the cool green tints of the Rectory garden, while excitement, and she was excited now, always showed her at her best. It called up the tawny light that slept in her hazel eyes, and flushed the paleness of her cheeks, while the faintest breath of a summer wind saw its opportunity and played with the tangles of her ruddy hair.
Surely, I thought, I’m hypersensitive, even in respect for a love that has such claims on me as Eric’s. And after all, a man owes a duty to himself no less than to his friend.
“Good news!” she cried, as she floated to me down the steps. “I’m off to the archery fête, and am late already. But I couldn’t go without telling you that I’d heard at last from Eric, and, what’s more, we shall see him soon. He’s been through all the great galleries—Paris, Dresden, Florence, and Madrid. Since then he has been studying hard at Rome in one of the best studios. He says his master thinks a lot of him, and will dismiss him soon as needing only practice and hard work, which he can manage just as well in England as in Rome. Meantime, he’s having a really good time of it, making excursions between whiles to all the old towns, and especially to Aquila and the Abruzzi, where every step an artist takes gives him a fresh subject.
“But I must be off now,” she ran on. “Goodbye; I wish you were coming to the fête. But perhaps you are well out of it—(I thought the reverse)—for I know you don’t like archery. It’s too statuesque and Apollo-like for you—would suit Eric better, wouldn’t it? You would like something a little more real and murderous. By the way, I wonder you didn’t make a soldier of yourself.”
She left me almost bewildered by her beauty. And, like a true lover, I abandoned the Rectory trout to their own devices, while I mused and dreamed over my lady’s perfections. “Of course,” I said to myself, “Shakespeare is right, as he always is. Fancy is engendered in the eye; at least it was in my case; born before I had seen any reasons for its birth, in fact, in spite of many reasons to the contrary, as I recalled the well-remembered shock of Reggie’s love-scene. And it may either die in its cradle, or else turn to love, as mine did. Then how is it that the unattractive women find their husbands? I suppose there must be men to whom plainness, and even ugliness, can appear perfection. The answer is not forthcoming, and I give it up. At any rate, love’s a phase of feeling and an emotion (often untrue and misleading, by the way), not a deduction or an inference.”
And then a trout took my fly, and I left off dreaming dreams and landed it.
But her news had left me in a happier frame of mind, and I was already beginning to look forward to Eric’s arrival with a wistful eagerness, as certain to determine, in one direction or the other, this wearing period of anxiety and doubt. As a matter of fact, the issue was nearer than I anticipated, and events that followed rapidly had practically settled the decision before he came.
CHAPTER VII
I had now been some months with Mr. Richardson, and had gained a closer acquaintance with his methods and means of influence. To all sinners and backsliders who admitted their frailties he was lenity itself; albeit the sworn enemy, by instinct and persuasion, of those prim respectabilities who never do a wrong thing or (worse still in his eyes) never a foolish one.