Eleanor looked at the lovers with a contemptuous curve lifting her firm upper lip. She despised Launcelot Darrell so utterly, that she was almost cruel enough to despise Laura for loving him.
“Yes,” she thought, “Mr. Monckton is right. Shallow, selfish, and frivolous! He is all these, and he is false as well. Heaven help you, Laura, if I cannot save you from a marriage with this man.”
Mr. Darrell was very well pleased to do the honours of his studio to Richard Thornton. It would be quite a new sort of thing to this scene-painting fellow, the embryo Academician thought: the poor devil would pick up fresh ideas, and get a glimpse at the higher regions of art, for the first time in his life perhaps.
Launcelot Darrell led the way to that pleasant, prettily furnished, room which he called his studio. The “Rosalind and Celia” still occupied the post of honour on the easel. Mr. Darrell worked very hard; but in that spasmodic fashion which is antagonistic to anything like progress. The enthusiasm which upon one occasion kept him at his picture long after the fading light had given him notice to leave it, entirely deserted him upon another; and was perhaps followed by a fit of disgust with himself and with his art, which kept him idle for weeks together.
He made a merit of this fitfulness, depreciating a power of steady and persistent labour as the faculty of a tradesman, rather than an artist. He took credit to himself for the long pauses of idleness in which he waited for what he called inspiration; and imposed upon his mother by his grand talk about earnestness, conscientiousness, reverence for the sublimity of art, and a great many more fine phrases by which he contrived to excuse the simple fact of his laziness. So Eleanor Vane, as sorrowful Rosalind, still smiled sadly upon a simpering Celia:—it had been quite impossible to prevent Miss Mason’s assuming the conventional simper of the weak-minded sitter who can’t forget that his portrait is being taken, and that he is in the very act of handing down his smile to posterity, or to the furniture brokers—out of an unfinished background, and clad in robes of unfinished satin and velvet. Mr. Thornton wondered as he looked at the young man’s work, and remembered how many miles of canvas it had been his own fate to cover since first he had handled his brushes and splashed in sky borders and cloud pieces for the chief scene-painter at the Phœnix.
Launcelot Darrell, with his mahlstick in his hand, smiled with sublime patronage upon Eleanor’s humble friend.
“This sort of thing is rather different to what you’ve been used to, I suppose?” he said; “rather another kind of work than your pantomime scenes, your grots of everlasting bliss, and caves of constant content, where the waterfalls are spangles sewn upon white tape, and the cloudless skies are blue gauze and silver foil?”
“But we’re not always painting transformations, you know,” Mr. Thornton answered, in nowise offended by the artist’s graceful insolence; “scene-painting isn’t all done with Dutch metal and the glue-pot: we’re obliged to know a little about perspective, and to have a slight knowledge of colour. Some of my brotherhood have turned out tolerable landscape-painters, Mr. Darrell. By the bye, you don’t do anything in the way of landscape, do you?”
“Yes,” Launcelot Darrell answered, indifferently, “I used to try my hand at landscape; but human interest, human interest, Mr. Thornton, is the strong point of a picture. To my mind a picture should be a story, a drama, a tragedy, a poem—something that explains itself without any help from a catalogue.”
“Precisely. An epic upon a Bishop’s half-length,” Richard Thornton answered, rather absently. He saw Eleanor’s watchful eyes fixed upon him, and knew that with every moment she was losing faith in him. Looking round the room he saw, too, that there were a couple of bloated portfolios leaning against the wall, and running over with sheets of dirty Bristol board and crumpled drawing paper.