He swept aside by a gesture the subject of his trials, removed it altogether from the horizon, unwilling really that the interest be shifted from her to him. She was equally determined, now that he had sympathized with her, to sympathize with him.
“I know you have,” she insisted; “I know you’ve had lots to try you, just as you knew that I’d had lots. And you’re so high-strung, so sensitive ... I never knew anybody like you. But there are good times coming for you; I’m sure of it.”
“I don’t in the least expect them.” He laughed a little harshly. He had winced at her description of him as sensitive, 249high-strung. “Dear incurable optimist, I don’t in the least expect them. It’s not because there will be compensation that I hold it the decentest thing to put up with the mechancetés of fate, fate’s ingenious stabs in the tender, as they come, without giving the exhibition of one’s vulnerability, or poisoning one’s system with hate!”
“But there will,” she continued to insist, “there will be compensations. I know it just as well.... You have so much talent, it’s perfectly wonderful, and it’s only a question of time your having the success you deserve. I, of course, am not educated up to your paintings, but even I am beginning to see something more than I did at first. I can see, for instance, that almost any fine painter, with a command of his colors, could have done the picture down-stairs, but that only you in the whole world could have done this one here. But, I say again, my opinion isn’t worth anything. But there’s Leslie, who knows all about art and such things, doesn’t she? Well, she ’s told me how wonderful you are. From what she’s told me I’m perfectly sure you’ll make your mark in the world.”
Again Gerald swept her words aside like noxious obscuring cobwebs. “What is, few know, and what will be, nobody knows whatever,” he said. “But of all things, I beg, I beg you will not think of me as a misunderstood genius! Art is not a passion with me, it is–an interest. And don’t hold out for a lure that will reconcile me, my dear friend, anything so vulgar as success! The single hope I have, when I am the most hopeful, is that simply my metal, my resistance, may never quite fail. I shall not have success, dear lady, though in your kindness you predict it. I shall go on and on seeing with different eyes from other people, carving my cherry-stones in my own 250way, and made unsociable by the failure of others to see how superior my way is. I shall go on growing more eccentric and solitary, and call myself lucky quite beyond my merits if those particular snares which the devil Melancholy sets for the solitary may be escaped, that I may neither drink, nor drug myself, nor shoot myself, nor marry the cook!”
“Don’t talk like that, Gerald!” cried Aurora. “Don’t say anything so awful! Now keep still while I talk, listen while I tell you. You’re going on painting in your own way, but some one–see?–some one is going to arise bright enough to recognize how perfectly wonderful your pictures are. Keep still. You mustn’t despise success, you know, success is what everybody needs and wants. You’re going to succeed. Keep still. Stupid people will want to buy your pictures because the people who know about such things have told the public how wonderful they are. Then you’ll grow rich and famous. You won’t be either eccentric or solitary. You’ll have hosts of admiring friends. I guess you could have them now, if you wanted to. You won’t be melancholy. You’ll be happy. In your home there will be a nice wife. Why are you supposing you’ll never marry? A dear true beautiful girl who thinks the world of you and that you think the world of. And when you’re an old gentleman with your grandchildren playing at your knee, you’ll say to yourself, ‘Aurora told me so!’”
She was all cheering smiles and dimples again.
“Be sure you remember now,” she said, holding up a finger and shaking it to mark her bidding, “to say to yourself, ‘Aurora told me so!’”
251It was a pity almost that Gerald should not have gone home at that point. He would have left with undividedly fond and approving feelings; he would have left tied to Aurora by a thousand sweet humanities in common, as well as impressed afresh by the depth and mysteriousness of woman. But he had either forgotten or was disregarding the hour–the clock on the mantelpiece, like most ornamental clocks, was not going; the bliss of being warm for the first time in days, warm through and through, warm to the middle of his heart, made him careless of correctness; and so he stayed on, to be rudely jarred by and by out of his contentment, and take with him finally into the night a renewed, even sharpened, perception of those exasperating faults which made Mrs. Hawthorne, as he named it, impossible.
Because they seemed to be on such solid terms of friendship after the long evening before the fire, when they had sorrowed together and sympathized; when he had been permitted to hold and press her hands; when with a veritable mutual outgoing of the heart they had vied in prophesying for each other fair and happy days, Gerald found the boldness–and found it without much strain–the boldness to utter a request which had burned on his lips before, but which he had repressed, saying to himself that what Mrs. Hawthorne did was no affair of his.