“Poor Primitiva!” she cried, in unabated hilariousness and intensified volubility. “Oh, she’s been such fun. You know Olive has brought her to London. She begged her away from her father, to the excessive joy of Primitiva, who has become her devoted slave. The other night Olive took her to the theatre with us and would have her in the box. She had been wrought up to a wild excitement, and when she got inside the theatre and looked round at the festive company she drew a deep breath of rapture. She said she liked it very much. Long before the orchestra struck up, Olive discovered that Primitiva imagined she was already in complete enjoyment of the play, and that to sit in the theatre was all in all. Only one thing marred Primitiva’s pleasure. She was looking round furtively for your cousin, and at last asked where Mr. Herbert sat; not, it transpired, because of his position as Olive’s fiancé, but because she had heard us talk of Herbert as writing a play, and imagined he was an inseparable adjunct of the theatre. Of course, she doesn’t know even now that there are more theatres than one. When the overture struck up she was surprised and delighted by this unexpected addition to the pleasures of the evening. The rising of the curtain was the climax of her astonishment and her transport. The action of the piece—a melodrama, purposely chosen for her behoof by our sportive friend, experimenting upon her freshness—seized her from the start, and kept her riveted. The fall of the first curtain, and the arrest of the innocent man for the murder, left her weeping bitterly. ‘It isn’t real, you little goose!’ Olive said, to pacify her. ‘Isn’t it?’ Primitiva replied, opening her brimming trustful eyes to their widest. She gave a little sobbing laugh. ‘And I thought they was all alive!’ Then she rose to go, and was astonished to hear that there was more. Alas! it would have been better had she gone. When the hero’s wife, visiting the hero in prison, kissed him, Primitiva inquired if the actor and actress were really married, and learning that they were not, was too disgusted to sympathize any further with their misfortunes. It revolted her,” concluded Mrs. Wyndwood, taking up her teacup with an air of preparing for the resumption of sips, “that a man who was not a woman’s husband should kiss her.” And her face gleamed more tantalizing than ever under the roses of her bonnet.
His fingers dented the teaspoon they fidgeted with; it seemed intolerable that his life should be spoiled by acceptance of the moral stand-point of this simple creature. He with his artistic agonies and his complex sorrows and his high imaginings to be squeezed into the same moral moulds as Primitiva! He refused to see the humor of her. The girl had no more interest for him than that irritating Roy. It was maddening to have Eleanor sitting there in cold blood, the Honorable Mrs. Wyndwood, an irreproachable widow in black, talking abstractly of kisses. Then the tense string of expectation snapped; the apathy that he felt in the presence of Rosina invaded him—he stirred his tea listlessly, awaiting the moment of her departure. As she talked on, loquacious to the end, prattling of Erle-Smith and Beethoven, and Swinburne, his apathy quickened into impatience; he longed for her to be gone. His hidden fingers played a tattoo on the side of his chair. She bade him good-bye at last; she would not see him again for many months, unless he came to Paris.
“I always run over to do the Salon,” he answered, indifferently.
When he had seen her, stately and stiff, to her carriage, and his studio-door had shut him in again, he ripped up the canvas with his old sailor’s knife in a paroxysm of fury. His eye caught the silver regatta cup standing proudly upon the piano. He felt like dashing it down; then it occurred to him how fine and bitter a revenge it would be upon her and humanity at large to fill it with poison and drain it to the dregs. But he only threw himself upon a couch in a passion of sobs, such as had not shaken him since childhood. The great picturesque room, which the autumn twilight had draped in dusk, was ineffably dreary without her; his heart seemed full of dust, and tears were a blessed relief in the drought. They probably saved him from ending his empty life there and then.
He rallied, and began other pictures, but he could do nothing with them. He refused commissions for portraits, hating the imposition of subject, and fearful of exposing his restlessness to a stranger’s gaze. The return of the world to town renewed social solicitations, but he felt he was wearing his heart on his sleeve, and declined to parade it through drawing-rooms. Despite this gain of time, the weeks passed without any definite product. He was searching, but he could not find. One day he would sit down and fix in charcoal some rough suggestions for a greater symbolic picture than that which he had destroyed; but the next day he would be working up his recollections of Devonshire night-scenery, trying by a series of tentative touches on a toned canvas to evolve the romantic mystery of those illumined villages niched in the cliffs, or of the moon making a lovely rippling path across the dark lonely sea, as Eleanor had made across his life; while a day or so after he would discard these thinly painted shadowy night-pieces, and, painting straight from the shoulder, “impasto” his canvas with brutal blobs of paint that at a distance merged into the living flow of red sunlit water.
And always this rankling, gnawing pain of unsatisfied and unspoken desire. No man could work with that at his breast. And her rare letters did not allay it, though they spoke no word of love, but were full of enthusiasm for the free student life in Paris, the glorious camaraderie, the fun of dining occasionally for a few centimes in tiny crémeries, and going to the People’s Theatre off the Boulevard Montparnasse, where they gave a bonus of cerises à l’eau de vie between the pieces. Oh, if she had only been younger, less staled by life! If she could only begin over again. If she only had the energy of Olive, who started work at the Academy at the preternatural hour of eight A.M. But she had lost the faculty of beginnings, she feared, and she made but poor progress in sculpture. That was the undercurrent of these gay letters, the characteristic note of despondency.
Rosina held out no hand of reconciliation. His only contact with her was through Billy, who paid him one visit to escort “Aunt Clara” over the studio. His wife had, it transpired, held forth so copiously and continuously upon its glories that the poor creature had plucked up courage to ask to see it, and Rosina, who had evidently concealed the breach with her famous husband, had besought Billy to convoy her. And so one day these two routed out the sick lion from the recesses of his den.
The appearance of Miss Clara Coble was as much a shock as a surprise to Matthew Strang. In the nine years or so since she had assisted at his wedding—an unimportant but not disagreeable personage, tall and full-blooded as her brother, she had decayed lamentably. She was now an ungainly old maid, stooping and hollow-eyed, with crows’ feet and sharpened features. She had a nervous twitch of the eyelids, her head drooped oddly, and her conversation was at times inconsecutive to the verge of fatuity. From the day of her birth to the day of his death Coble had thought of her as his little sister, and he never realized the tragedy of her spinsterhood, of her starved nature, though under his very eye she had peaked and pined in body and soul.
But it leaped to the painter’s eye at the first sight of her, and her image remained in his brain, infinitely pathetic.
The ugliness that in earlier days would have averted his eyes in artistic disgust, drew him now in human pity. He grew tenderer to Rosina at the thought that she was harboring this wreck of femininity. It rejoiced him to think how much “Aunt Clara” was enjoying this visit to his grandeurs; he listened with pleased tolerance to her artless babble—in her best days she had always had something of her brother’s big simplicity—as she told tale after tale out of school, repeating the colossal things her poor brother had said about his son-in-law’s genius and wealth, recounting how Coble had thus become the indirect hero of the Temperance Bar, and unconsciously revealing—what was more surprising to the painter—the pride with which Rosina had always written home (and still spoke to her aunt) about her husband and his fashionable friends and successes. And poor Miss Coble expanded in the atmosphere of the great man, which she had never hoped to breathe. Her cadaverous cheek took a flush, she held her head straighter on her shoulders. He felt that, after all, it was worth while being famous if he could give such pleasure to simple souls by his mere proximity. The fame he had sold his body and soul for was a joyless possession; happy for him if it could yet give joy to others.