So Matt threaded his way with her among the busy stores, feeling her a part of the sunny freshness of the day, to which he was now alive again; and walking with head erect, for he felt himself rehabilitated by the companionship of so genteel a member of society. He was amused by the keen bargains she drove, and acquired a new interest in prices. Evidently Coble was right—she would make a provident house-keeper. But she would only let him see her part of the way home, though she told him papa expected him to join their evening meal.
“He’s taken quite a fancy to you,” she said. “I don’t know why, I’m sure.”
“I don’t know why, either,” said Matt, simply.
“Perhaps that’s why,” Miss Coble answered, enigmatically.
Then she lent him her gloved fingers for a moment, and gave him a pleasant smile, and tripped away, and he went back and down to the water-side, and lounged about aimlessly in the sun, sky and sea and shipping and the glimpses of hill and forest across the harbor and the white sea-gulls and the bronzed Scandinavian sailors thrilling him with the old sense of the beauty and romance of life. But the open air gave him an appetite, too, and the appetite brought him back to the sordidness of things, to his nigh-bare pockets and the insistent sphinx of his future. He laid out a few cents to stave off hunger till evening should bring better fare at Coble’s; then, in the stronger mood induced by even this minimum of nutriment, a tiresome inner voice began asking by what right he meditated foisting himself upon strangers. He had no longer the excuse of the Frenchman. He had heard Miss Coble’s ultimatum on that matter. And the tiresome voice persisted in dragging up other troublesome thoughts from the depths of consciousness. As he walked about the lively quays it kept repeating Mr. Coble’s observations, though less loudly. Despite some dubious remarks, despite the à priori improbability and unexpectedness of the whole thing, was it possible for Matt to doubt that the old man would be willing to give him his daughter? With whatever timidity he shrank from facing the possibility, wilfully closing his eyes as before a great glare, he could not but feel that Coble’s idea was both rash and generous. Of course his future would justify the old man’s trust and repay it a hundred-fold, but such confidence was none the less touching. Coble did not know—the sun and sea had made the young man drunk again—that he was entertaining a genius. And Miss Coble, too; how kind of her to be so nice to a penniless young man! Her pleasant smiles had been medicinal sunshine to his despairing apathy. If he had not met the Cobles, what would have become of him? But was the girl quite of her father’s mind towards him? Her attitude was certainly not repellent. He allowed himself to dally undisguisedly with the idea, and it made him giddy. The hope of Art flamed again so fiercely that he wondered how it could have lain smouldering so long in his bosom. He was like a pedestrian toiling foot-sore and heart-broken towards a great light that shone celestially on the verge of the horizon. For years he had followed the sacred gleam, over lonely deserts and waste places, with hunger and thirst and pain; and now as, with bleeding feet that could drag along no longer, he was fain to drop down on the way-side, lo! a sound of wheels and a sudden carriage at his side, and he had but to step in to be driven luxuriously to the long-tantalizing goal.
And in this fairy carriage, moreover, sat a pretty maiden, on whose ripe breast he could pillow his tired head, and in whose arms he could find consolation for the blank years. Oh! it was bewildering, dazzling, intoxicating. But did he love the maiden of this enchanting vision? Well, what was love? It would certainly be sweet to hold her warm hand in his, to see her blue eyes soften with tenderness as they gazed into his own. It was so long since a woman had kissed him—such weary, crawling, barren years! That ancient episode with Priscilla came up, as it had not seldom done before, transfigured by the haze of time and the after-glamour of romance; he had long since forgotten how little the girl had really appealed to him in the flesh, and to remember that he had spurned her caresses did not always give him a glow of moral satisfaction. In the delicious sunshine that danced to-day in a myriad gleams on the green waters, and made the air like wine, lurked a subtle appeal to his mere manhood. Were not all women equally lovable for their sex? In the novels and poems he had read love was glorified and woman was a spirit; in his own soul lay divine conceptions of womanhood that inspired his art and sanctified his dreams: a womanhood whose bodily incarnation—imagined now in this gracious shape, now in that—was the outer symbol of an inner loveliness of thought and emotion. But he had not met this Ideal Womanhood; nor did he even expect to meet it in the crude common day. Once or twice in his London life, as in his boyhood in this very city of Halifax, when he had worshipped the beautiful horsewoman, he had seemed to catch a glimpse of it, but it was always far off—as far as the star from the moth. And so, whether seen or divined, it belonged almost equally to that world of imagination in which his true life had been lived, in which he had always taken refuge from the real. He had scarcely known before a girl so refined as Miss Coble, unless, perhaps, it was the adolescent Ruth Hailey, whose shy stateliness had made her so alien from the little girl he dimly remembered taking for a sweetheart in those days of childish mimicry when one drives broomsticks for horses. Why should he not marry this pleasant, plump young woman, if she would condescend to him? Though her position was so much better than his, he did not feel her too remote from him for comfortable companionship, especially as she would never know that he had been in jail. If he did not love her, in the vague transcendental sense, at least he did not love any other woman, and was never likely to. He was not as other men: his life was not in their world; it was centred on Art, it was occupied with visions, its goal was not happiness or a home. But if these offered themselves to him by the way, even while they made his real goal possible, it were mere insane self-martyrdom to refuse them. A wife would save him from his lower self, and in his moments of artistic despair she would always be there to comfort and console. Nay—and he smiled at the consideration—even in his moments of artistic achievement, she could be there as a model. Models ran away with a great deal of money, and for an artist a wife was really an economy. And if in his artistic aspiration she could have no share, neither could any one else, woman or man. An artist could not really have a mate—at most a mistress or a house-keeper. His Art was a holy of holies, in which he must ever be the sole priest, and in this holy of holies Ideal Womanhood could still have its place as before.
Such are the pitfalls of the artistic temperament, moving amid unrealities, spinning its own cosmos.
Three thousand dollars down! He could pay off the store-keeper and cleanse away the prison stain. He could send Madame Strang her little balance, and, best of all—and the thought moved him almost to tears—his poor brothers and sisters would henceforth be certain of their allowance. For himself the prospects were equally tempting—a honey-moon in Europe, in the cities of romantic dream, amid the masterpieces of Art. And then when, after a couple of years of study and work, his own masterpiece should be completed, a settled income of eight hundred dollars—bread and cheese always sure, putting him for life beyond the vulgar necessity of pandering to the market, rescuing him from that sordid internal conflict which imbittered even when it failed to degrade. Oh, the rapture of a life so consecrated to Art!
But would Miss Coble or her parent consent to this expenditure of the money? Of course it would all have to be distinctly understood ere he could agree to marry the girl. He flushed, finding how mercenary motive predominated in his reverie. Mr. Coble had indeed hinted acquiescence in some such scheme. But an instinct kept the young man from concluding to acquiesce in it himself. A vague shame and repugnance struggled with his sense of the advantages of the match; waxing so strong in the reaction that followed the glow of temptation that he determined not to go to the Cobles’ that evening. This visit, he felt, would be fatal.
He went home to his little room in the central slums, determined not to stir out. He had meant to go to bed, broad day though it was, and sleep away the temptation. But he only threw himself upon the pallet, in his clothes, and was more conscious of hunger than of the heaviness necessary for sleep. Yet he would not break into his last two dollars to-day. He tried to divert his mind from Miss Coble’s dowry by alternative projects for continuing his life, but they only served to show the length of the bleak, arid, solitary road that lay before his bruised feet if he let the carriage go by. Money! Money! Money! What had he not suffered from the struggle for it? Degrading to live on another person’s money? It was life without money that was degrading, humiliating, full of petty considerations, consumed in irrelevant labors. In the novels that made such a fuss about love troubles, the fine-sounding sorrows seemed to him infinitely smaller than the carks and worries of prosaic existence.