“Yes, especially after”—But she shuddered, and did not complete the sentence. He read in her face the tragedy of an unhappy marriage. His eyes grew moist with pity; he felt a mad, fighting passion against the inevitable past.
“Olive is so good,” she said, brokenly, “she was of my husband’s family—an Irish branch—but she quarrelled with them all—her father, her sisters—and came to live with me. Fortunately she is immensely rich in her own right, and independent of them all.”
“Done to a turn!” cried Miss Regan, rushing in with the scones. “And I feared I was King Alfred!”
At tea they talked Art.
It was an exquisite sensation to have these charming ladies treat him as Sir Oracle. He was surprised to learn that in her girlhood Miss Regan had displayed considerable talent for sculpture, but had “washed her hands of the clay” on seeing the torso of Victory in the Louvre. He remonstrated with her, insisting that technical skill came slowly, with infinite labor. There were things he himself wanted to do—all sorts of new things that he had never yet done. One day he would try to do them—when he had time. Mrs. Wyndwood spoke contemptuously of technical skill in comparison with soul, but here Olive mischievously took up the cudgels for craftsmanship, and led the rather reluctant painter into an eloquent exposition of the joys of technical mastery; of doing what you would with your material. Mrs. Wyndwood at last caught the fire of his enthusiasm, and astonished him by expressing his sense of the joy of Art better than himself. Under the passion of her words he wondered that he could ever have wasted his time on portraits for mere money, or on scamped pictures for Exhibitions, when all these interesting problems were waiting to be wrought out. Ah, but Miss Regan was wrong, he felt, in thinking these problems the be-all and end-all of Art; it was soul that was the essence of Art; Art had no raison d’être except as the expression of soul, of the upward aspiration of the Spirit towards the Good and the Beautiful and the True, a trinity that was mysteriously one.
CHAPTER IV
FERMENT
The sands of the season were running out, but Matthew Strang sifted them for every grain of the gold of meetings with Eleanor Wyndwood. He was shy of formal visits to the house, he did not venture on the conventional course of asking her to sit to him, for he would not consciously feed the flame of a passion that must be hopeless. But with that curious illogicality which distinguishes man from the brute, he called in accident to arrange their rendezvous, pursuing possibility with a perseverance that made it probability.
He could not follow Eleanor to all her fashionable fastnesses as easily as to the shrines of spirituality, for to be born well is still a necessity of life in some circles; but they met often enough amid the monotonous glitter which was the woman’s birthright and second nature to the man. His eye perpetually sought her; in chattering drawing-rooms, in cool gardens, on congested staircases, in whirling ballrooms; finding every place dark and empty till she filled and illumined the scene. She gleamed upon him as unreal and insubstantial as the figures he had once noted in one of these ballrooms, completely girdled by electric lights, which, robbing the dancers of shadows, made them fairy-like and phantasmal. But he did not follow out the analogy or suspect it might be his own love which was surrounding her with this spiritualizing electric illumination. Each time he saw her he resolved never to see her again. He could never tell her what was in his heart, never insult her exquisite purity with the avowal of his love, even though that love were clarified to unimagined ethereality by her stainless radiance of soul. And each time the possibility of seeing her drew nigh again, he told himself that he needed her for his Art—that she was drawing him up from the slough of banality, that now for the first time his soul was really opening out to the appeal of the higher beauty. Not that he had as yet begun to express the higher beauty; he had simply abandoned the old. He was too restless to work, to concentrate himself; he flitted between the unfinished and the projected, painting in and painting out; he took long rides in the middle of the day, to the amazement of his faithful body-servant; he read emotional literature. Once an unconscious hostess gave him Eleanor’s company at dinner. Mrs. Wyndwood was in stately black, with a bunch of violets at her bosom. It was an enchanted meal. They talked of poetry, and he seemed to be dining off poetry too. The wines where special brands of nectar, laid down by the gods in the golden age, the meats were ambrosia, the sweets honey-dew. A beauty as of Hebe transfigured the faces of the neat-handed waiting-men. It seemed only natural that the beautiful stately creature at his side should overflow with quotations from religious poetry—was she not herself a religious poem? His recent feverish readings had branded lines on his own heart; he was able to answer her in lyric antiphony. His other neighbor he simply forgot, though she was a bishop’s consort and a patroness of the arts, with printed views on the genuineness of Old Masters. There was an old picture of his own on the opposite wall, and the fear lest Eleanor should raise her eyes to it was all the serpent in his Paradise. His subconsciousness noted with pleasure, however, that the painting had mellowed—a proof that his theory of colors was right.
He watched with furtive fascination the play of Eleanor’s beautiful Botticelli hands, plying her knife and fork, as she explained how under the influence of Dolkovitch she had drifted away from Socialism, whose professors always laid too much stress on the needs of the body. But she apologized for having spoken rudely of his “Triumph of Bacchus” from a mere knowledge of its title; he had made her understand now that the appeal of painting must always be sensuous, and that subject was only an excuse for draughtsmanship and coloring, and she startled him by saying she liked that picture of his on the opposite wall, which he had been hoping had escaped her eye. It became at once glorified to his own.
After the ladies had retired, the gentlemen talked about a newly invented torpedo, the finances of India, and the prospects of the Conservatives; the conversation sounded almost indecent, and he was glad Eleanor was not there to hear it. He took no part in the fatuous discussion, contenting himself with watching Eleanor’s face amid the wreaths of his cigar-smoke; even in the flesh the face had for him something of this vaporous, elusive incorporeality.