He went on filling his pipe, and then, looking suddenly into her eyes, saw there a light that was strange—a light that he would have given his soul to put into paint—a light that Joe's name never had kindled and never could. Joan wiped her hand across her mouth uneasily; then she twisted her hands behind her back, like a schoolgirl standing in class, and made answer with her eyes on the ground.
"Iss, I will, then, Mister Jan; an' maybe I couldn't help it if I would."
He lighted his pipe carefully before answering.
"Then I shall be happy, Joan."
But while she grew rose-red at the boldness of her sudden announcement, he took care neither to look at her nor to let her know that he had realized the earnestness with which she spoke. And when, ten minutes later, she had departed, he mused speculatively on the course of their conversation, asking himself what whim had led him to pretend to so much human feeling and to lament his loneliness. This condition of his life he loved above all others. No man, woman or child had the right to interfere with his selfish, impersonal existence, and he gloried in the fact. But to the scraps of his life's history, which he had spread before Joan in their absolute truth, he had added this fiction of friendless loneliness, and it had worked a wonder. He saw that he was growing to be much to her, and the problem lying in his path rose again, as it had for a moment when Murdoch warned him in jest against falling in love with Joan Tregenza. Dim suspicions crossed his mind with greater frequency, and being now a mere remorseless savage, hunting to its completion a fine picture, he made no effort to shut their shadows from his calculation. Everything which bore even indirectly upon his work received its share of attention; to mood must all sacrifices be made; and now a new mood began to dawn in him. He knew it, he accepted it. He had not sought it, but the thing was there, and Nature had sent it to him. To shun it and fly from it meant a lie to his art; to open his arms to it promised the destruction of a human unit. Barron was not the man to hesitate between two such courses. If any action could heighten his inspiration, add a glimmer of glory to his picture, or get a shadow more soul into the painted blue eyes of the subject, he held such action justified. For the present his mind was chaos on the subject, and he left the future to work itself out as chance might determine.
His painting was all he concerned himself with, and should Nature ultimately indicate that greater perfection might be achieved through worship and even sacrifice at her shrine, neither worship nor sacrifice would be withheld.
CHAPTER NINE A WEDDING
Joan Tregenza went home in a dream that day. She did not know where to begin thinking. "Mister Jan" had told her so many astounding things; and her own heart, too, had made bold utterances—concerning matters which she had crushed out of sight with some shame and many secret blushes until now. But, seen in the light of John Barron's revelations, this emotion which she had thrust so resolutely to the back of her mind could remain there no more. It arose strong, rampant and ridiculous; only from her point of view no humor distinguished it. This man, then, was like herself, made of the same flesh and blood, sprung from the people. That fact, though possessing absolutely no significance whatever in reality, struck Joan with great force. Her highly primitive instincts stretched a wide gulf between the thing called "gentleman" and other men; which was the result of training from parents of the old-fashioned sort, whose world lay outside and behind the modern spirit; who had reached the highest development of their intelligence and formed their opinions before the passing of the Education Act. Gray Michael naturally held the great ones of the earth as objects of pity from an eternal standpoint, but birth weighed with him, and, in temporal concerns, he treated his superiors with all respect and civility when rare chance brought him into contact with them. He viewed uneasily the last outcome of progress and the vastly increased facilities for instruction of the juvenile population. The age was sufficiently godless, in his judgment; and he had found that a Board School education was the first nail in the coffin of every young man's faith.
Joan, therefore, allowing nothing for the value of riches, of education, of intellect, was content to accept Barron's own cynical statement in a spirit widely different from the speaker's. He had sneered at himself, just as he had sneered at his own dead father. But Joan missed all the bitterness of his speech. To her he was simply a wondrously honest man who loved truth for itself, who could never utter anything not true, who held it no offense to speak truth even of the dead. Gentle or simple, he seemed infinitely superior to all men whom she had met with. And yet this beautiful nature walked through the world quite alone. He had asked her to remember him when he was gone; he had said that she was his friend. And he cared little for women—there was perhaps no other woman in the world he had called a friend. Then the girl's heart fluttered at the presumption of her silly, soaring thoughts, and she glanced nervously to the right and to the left of the lonely road, as though fearful that some hidden eavesdropper might peep into her open mind. The magic spell was upon her. This little, pale, clever man, so quiet, so strange, so unlike anything else within her seventeen years of experience, had wrought Nature's vital miracle, and Joan, who, until then, believed herself in love with her sailor sweetheart, now stood aghast before the truth, stood bewildered between the tame and bloodless fantasy of her affection for Joe Noy and this wild, live reality. She looked far back into a past already dim and remembered that she had told Joe many times how she loved him with all her heart. But the words were spoken before she knew that she possessed a heart at all. Yet Joe then formed no inconsiderable figure in life. She had looked forward to marriage with him as a comfortable and sufficient background for present existence; she had viewed Joe as a handsome, solid figure—a man well thought of, one who would give her a home with bigger rooms and better furniture in it than most fishermen's daughters might reasonably hope for. But this new blinding light was more than the memory of Joe could face uninjured. He shriveled and shrank in it. Like St. Michael's Mount, seen afar, through curtains of rain, Joe had once bulked large, towering, even grand, but under noonday sun the great mass dwindles as a whole though every detail becomes more apparent; and so with poor Joe Noy. Removed to a distance of a thousand miles though he was, Joan had never known him better, never realized the height, breadth, depth of him so acutely as now she did. The former ignorance in such a case had been bliss indeed, for whereunto her present acquired wisdom might point even she dared not consider. Any other girl must have remained sufficiently alive to the enormous disparity every way between herself and the artist; and Joan grasped the difference, but from the wrong point of view. The man's delicacy of discernment, his wisdom, his love of the things which she loved, his fine feeling, his humility—all combined in Joan's judgment to place him far above herself, though she had not words to name the qualities; but whereas another lowly woman, reaching this point, must, if she possessed any mother-wit or knowledge of the world, have awakened to the danger and grown guarded, Joan, claiming little wit to speak of, and being an empty vessel so far as knowledge of the world was concerned, saw no danger and allowed her thoughts to run away with her in a wholly insane direction. This she did for two reasons: because she felt absolutely safe, and because she suspected that Nature, who was "Mister Jan's" God, had now come to be her God also. The man was very wise, and he hated everything which lacked truth: therefore he would always do what was right, and he would not be less true to her than he was to the world. Truth was his guiding star, and he had always found Nature true. Therefore, why should not Joan find it true? Nature was talking to her now and teaching her rapidly. She must be content to wait and learn. The two men, Noy and Barren, fairly represented the opposite views of life each entertained, and Joan felt the new music wake a thousand sleeping echoes in her heart while the old grew more harsh and unlovely as she considered it. Joe had so many opinions and so little information; "Mister Jan" knew everything and asserted nothing save what Nature had taught him. Joe was so self-righteous and overbearing, so like her father, so convinced that Luke Gospeldom was the only gate to glory; "Mister Jan" had said there was more of the Everlasting God in a bluebell than in the whole of the Old Testament; he had declared that the smell of the gorse and the sunshine on the deep sea were better things than the incense and banners at St. Peter's; he had asserted that the purring of kittens was sweeter to the Father of all than the thunder of a mighty organ played in the noblest cathedral ever made with hands. All these foolish and inconsequent comparisons, uttered thoughtlessly by Barron's lips while his mind was on his picture, seemed very fine to Joan; and the finer because she did not understand them. Again, Joe rarely listened to her; this man always did, and he liked to hear her talk: he had declared as much.
Her brains almost hurt Joan on her way back to the white cottage that morning. They seemed so loaded; they lifted her up high above the working-day world and made her feel many years older. Such reflections and ideas came to grown women doubtless, she thought. A great unrest arose from the shadows of these varied speculations—a great unrest and disquiet—a feeling of coming change, like the note in the air when the swallows meet together in autumn, like the whisper of the leaves on the high tops of the forest before rain. Her heart was very full. She walked more slowly as the thoughts weighed heavier; she went back to her home round-eyed and solemn, wondering at many things, at the extension of the horizon of life, at the mental picture of Joe standing clearly out of the mists, viewed from a woman's standpoint.