CHAPTER VIII
ELEANOR WYNDWOOD
Two days after Herbert’s engagement, Matthew Strang left Devonshire on the plea of a death in the family.
A letter from Billy had indeed brought the news that Rosina’s father was no more. Matthew had never thought untenderly of old Coble; the mountain of a man had acted generously after his lights, and now that his genial roar had passed into the eternal silence, the pathos of death softened his son-in-law towards his memory and towards the bereaved daughter. Nevertheless, Matthew’s plea was only a pretext. He had no intention of intruding upon Rosina. After her recent reception of him he had no reason to suppose a visit would be welcome. The letter from Billy had included no message from her, except a request, superfluously and irritatingly formal, that she should be allowed to give house-room to her aunt Clara, who had gone to live with old Coble when his daughter married. His reply to Billy contained warmly sympathetic reference to the loss of old Coble, and expressed his joy at the prospect of receiving Miss Coble.
His real reason for fleeing from Devonshire was his discovery of his real feeling towards Mrs. Wyndwood. When the frenzy of the stormy night had merged in the sober reflections of the mild morning, he shuddered to think how near he had gone to forfeiting her respect, to insulting her by the revelation of a dishonorable passion. To continue in her daily society would have been too great a torment, aggravated, as it must have been, by the sight of Herbert’s happiness. Perhaps the rude reminder of his domestic shackles contained in Billy’s letter strengthened his resolve to tear himself away. Courtesy compelled him to leave behind him an invitation to the ladies to take tea one day at his studio, which neither had ever seen. How could he snap abruptly the links he had forged with this delightful twain?
He threw himself with ardor into work, trying to soothe his pain by expressing it in Art, as a woman sheds it away in tears. He toiled at a symbolic picture to illustrate Rossetti’s sonnet, “Love’s Fatality.”
“Love shackled with Vain-longing, hand to hand.”
He put the figures in a vague landscape, but did not study his models in the open, for he now had a desire to produce that fatness of effect suggested by a concentrated studio light instead of the dry flatness which the open air always diffused. He no longer pinned himself to technical theories, finding by experience that he only invented them afterwards to justify the procedure his instinct dictated for any particular picture. But his progress with “Love’s Fatality” was slow and unsatisfactory. He was feeling about, as it were, for a new manner worthy of her who inspired it. He wrote her once telling her that it was on the easel, and reminding her and Miss Regan of their promise to visit him on their return from Devonshire, and he had from her an answer—elegantly indited on dainty, crested paper, delicately scented—which he held often to his lips with a rankling, gnawing pain of unsatisfied and unspoken desire. She wrote that she was very anxious to see the picture, and also to be back in town, for she was weary of the country with its monotony, its lack of the complex thrill of civilization. Not that the town held much to enthral her. Fortunately Olive had consented to the Paris project; the girl did not want to marry before next summer, and rather hailed the idea of a farewell quasi-bachelor Bohemian period of art and liberty. What she, Eleanor, would do when she lost Olive Heaven only knew. And then came the wail of world-weariness which his ear had caught already in the first stages of their acquaintanceship. He interpreted it in the light of his own blank unrest, but to imagine her hungering for him as he hungered for her was impossible to his reverent passion. That she admired and liked him he could not doubt; and in one or two instants of mutual electricity he had dared to think that Herbert was right, and that she loved him. But his diffidence could never cherish the hope for more than a few seconds; and even if she indeed loved him, he felt that her delicacy, her finer, more ethereal ethical sense would preserve her from the wistful images that tortured him. It was the memory of her unhappy marriage to which her sadness must be due; no doubt, too, her life lacked love, though she might not be consciously aware of it.
When she at last came to see the picture, he was startled to find her alone, and the bearer of a message of apology from Miss Regan. His studio being, so to speak, a place of business, he was not unused to receive ladies in connection with commissions, but his poor, agonized heart—that had so ached to see her again—pulsed furiously with mad hope as her stately figure, clad in widow-like black that set off her beauty in novel lights, moved slowly about the great studio, admiring pictures which he would have hidden from her in the days when he thought of her more as a spiritual critic than a woman. Now, even though she stood before him making remarks, he was too distraught to catch the purport of her criticisms. He followed her about in a haze, a dream, speaking, replying, and feeling all the while as if it was all part of a game of make-believe, and in a moment the thin pretence would be thrown off and she would be in his arms. But the moments passed, the haze cleared, and he realized that he was entertaining a fashionable, self-possessed lady, wrapped up in artistic interest, with no apparent relation to the woman who had flushed with the passion of the sea and the winds on that night of stress and storm.
His mind flew back from her bodily presence to picture her leaning against his arm, and the memoried vision seemed incredible. She was unapproachably demure in her black-silk gown. Over the shoulders she wore a short black-velvet cape embroidered in jet, with a beaded fringe, finished off with a filmy black lace reaching just below the waist. When she threw it back, Matt saw the great puff sleeves of her gown and a turned-down collar that combined with them to give an old-world feeling. At her throat was a soft ruche of black chiffon. And from this monotone of black the blond skin of the throat and face rose dazzling, crowned by a small pink bonnet, of shamrock shape, entirely composed of roses, with a lace-and-jet butterfly fluttering over it. Now and then she pointed out something with a long black-gloved forefinger. Her left hand held a dainty little book, that looked—like herself—poetry. How far away she seemed, standing thus at his side! He was in a fever of chills and heats.
She stopped longest before his unfinished picture of “Love’s Fatality.” He heard her approving his conception of