“A goddess has a right to claim that one thing—has she not, Mr Lenorme?” said Malcolm at length, winding up a silent train of thought aloud.
“What thing?” asked Lenorme, still without lifting his head.
“Purity in the arms a man holds out to her,” answered Malcolm.
“Certainly,” replied Lenorme, with a sort of mechanical absoluteness.
“And according to your picture, every woman whom a man loves is a goddess—the goddess of nature?”
“Certainly;—but what are you driving at? I can’t paint for you. There you stand,” he went on, half angrily, “as if you were Socrates himself, driving some poor Athenian buck into the corner of his deserts! I don’t deserve any such insinuations, I would have you know.”
“I am making none, sir. I dare never insinuate except I were prepared to charge. But I have told you I was bred up a fisher-lad, and partly among the fishers, to begin with. I half learned, half discovered things that tended to give me what some would count severe notions: I count them common sense. Then, as you know, I went into service, and in that position it is easy enough to gather that many people hold very loose and very nasty notions about some things; so I just wanted to see how you felt about such. If I had a sister now, and saw a man coming to woo her, all beclotted with puddle-filth—or if I knew that he had just left some woman as good as she, crying eyes and heart out over his child—I don’t know that I could keep my hands off him—at least if I feared she might take him. What do you think now? Mightn’t it be a righteous thing to throttle the scum and be hanged for it?”
“Well,” said Lenorme, “I don’t know why I should justify myself, especially where no charge is made, MacPhail; and I don’t know why to you any more than another man; but at this moment I am weak, or egotistic, or sympathetic enough to wish you to understand that, so far as the poor matter of one virtue goes, I might without remorse act Sir Galahad in a play.”
“Now you are beyond me,” said Malcolm. “I don’t know what you mean.”
So Lenorme had to tell him the old Armoric tale which Tennyson has since rendered so lovelily, for, amongst artists at least, he was one of the earlier borrowers in the British legends. And as he told it, in a half sullen kind of way, the heart of the young marquis glowed within him, and he vowed to himself that Lenorme and no other should marry his sister. But, lest he should reveal more emotion than the obvious occasion justified, he restrained speech, and again silence fell, during which Lenorme was painting furiously.