Then there was silence once more. Paul took up some of the bits of uncompleted work and fixed them together. He would not open the subject, but he knew Spears well enough to know that it must have been some great agitation which had driven him away from his pot-boiling to the work of designing. That was not a work that would ever “pay.” The frames answered the purpose of daily bread; but the designs into which all the rude artist’s soul was thrown were not profitable. A few of the young men who were his friends had bought some plaques and panels of his finer original work; but such purchasers were few and far between; and to spend a whole morning making a design for one of these delicate unprofitable carvings showed that the workman had certainly for the moment lost command of himself.
After a few minutes, during which he measured the little lathes together and fitted them carelessly, Paul went quietly to the back of the room, and taking an old coat which hung there put it on and sat down to do the work which the other had left undone. This was not a kind of work he had ever attempted before. He had been a student of carving, not because of any natural impulse towards the art, but partly for Spears’s company, partly in order to be able to aid in some small way his struggle for a living. This eventful morning brought him a new impulse. While his master laboured impetuously at his drawing, Paul took the humbler work in hand. After all the distraction that had been in his mind, there was something in this homely effort that soothed him. Cast upon it on all hands, in all ways, it was a sort of relief to him to identify himself altogether with this other sphere, which he had chosen and sought out, yet into which he had never cast himself so completely, so fully, as his own family had cast him. He smiled at this within himself, as he began to work at Spears’s everyday vulgar work. Well! if they would have it so, so be it! He had played with the notion of equality, of democratic simplicity, with the doctrine that it was every man’s duty to earn his own living, and give up to humanity the full enjoyment of the land and accumulations of money, which no individual had a right to retain. All this he had held hotly in theory; but in the meantime had lived in his college rooms, and according to his natural position—an anomaly which only now appeared to him in its full vividness. Yes, now he saw it. He smiled to himself, no longer with bitterness, with a lofty disdain of his own past, of all his traditions, of his family, which by way of opposition and resistance to his purpose and principles had pushed him over the verge on which he had been hesitating. Perhaps but for them he might still have hesitated before he took the final step. It was they who had decided it, who had given him the last impulse. He smiled with a sense of the weakness of efforts which thus naturally balked themselves, feeling superior in his calm certainty of decision to all these agitations. Yes, it was over; there was no longer any question of what might or might not be. His fate was settled; he was a member of Spears’s family, not of Sir William Markham’s. That sense of calm which follows a great decision, and at the same time of proud resignation which succeeds a sacrifice exacted, calmed his mind. Somehow, Paul could not have told how, he felt himself a sort of sacrificial offering to justice and nature, making the most eloquent of protests against wrong, tyranny, injustice, and everything that was evil in society. With the dignity of a noble victim, and with a consciousness of innate, inborn, but most illogical superiority to fate, he drew the glue-pot and the tools towards him, and began to do the workman’s work. Nothing could have been more illogical; for the superiority of labour was one of the first principles of his creed, and to make pictures-frames was a respectable occupation by which a man might live. Yet it was with a smile of unspeakable superiority that he began his first day’s real work, enjoying the sensation of voluntary humility, of doing what it was beneath him to do.
Thus they went on in silence for some time: Paul working clumsily enough, with a sense of the humour implied in his adoption of the trade, which made it amusing in its novelty and inappropriateness, but which was most unlike the steady devotion of a man who felt this work to be his duty; while Spears pursued his with a fury of invention which denoted the perturbation of his mind. He flung the drooping bells of the foxglove upon his paper and erected its splendid stalk with an energy and force which was like a defiance, holding the somewhat coarse blue pencil in his hand like a sword, screwing his mouth and putting his limbs into every contortion possible, as he sat, with his stool pushed as far as might be from the table, and all the upper part of his person overhanging it. If it had been an eagle or a lion he was drawing the force and expression of his whole figure would have been more appropriate. As it was, the foxglove bristled with a kind of scornful defiance, yet drooped with something of melancholy, as an eagle might have done in all its pride of strength, yet with the pathos of all speechless creatures in its eyes. In this particular, though he was an actor, he was speechless as the eagle or the wildly noble flower. He had seen a sight which had taken all speech out of him, as it might have done from Shakespeare. He had seen a something unknown, a small, vulgar, incomprehensible spirit, to him unrecognisable, a thing out of his cognisance, looking at him through the eyes of his child. What could he say to such a revelation? Nothing. It took his voice from him and almost his breath. He had not been able to endure the placid work which left him free for thought. Say that his designing did not reach a very ethereal point of art; but it was the highest exercise of skill to him. He flung himself upon the paper, thrusting away all the painful enlightenments and contradictions of his life as he thrust away the gay-coloured spike of the gladiolus. He would have crushed them under foot if he had been able, but this he could not do. They would not disappear from his memory as the others did from his table. Thus he worked on, with a fervour which was almost savage, while Paul, with a proud smile on his face, handled the glue-pot. After a while the mere sense of companionship mollified the elder man. He was wounded, and wanted just such soothing as the sight of his disciple sitting quietly by gave him. His work grew less firm, his hand less rigid; the great pencil ceased to dig into the paper with its violent lines. Insensibly the softening went on. First, he threw a hasty glance from beneath his bushy eyebrows at the young man tranquilly seated near him. Then his fiery inspiration slackened; he paused to look at his model, to devise the next line, and doing so let his eyes rest upon Paul with a growing softness. At last he got up, threw down his pencil, and coming up to his companion struck him on the shoulder.
“Well!” he said. “Boy! So that was how it was. You listened to the father—old fool! but your thoughts were with the girl. That was how it was.” This was not the thing that gnawed at Spears’s heart, but he put it forward by way perhaps of persuading himself, as we all do sometimes, that it was the lesser matter that hurt him most.
Paul paused in his work, and looked up. His face was very serious, with none of that glow of happiness in it which belongs to an accepted lover—as the man beside him, who had been a true lover himself, was quick to see.
“Who said that? Not I, Spears—not I.”
“Who said it? Well, I cannot tell you. The women among them; they have their own way of looking at things.”
And then the two men paused, looking at each other. This was the moment in which it was natural that Janet’s lover should make his own explanation to the father of the girl whom he loved. The whole life of two people at least, and of many more in a secondary point of view, hung upon Paul’s lips, to be decided by the next impulse that might move him, by the next fantastic words which, out of the mist of unreal fact in which he had got himself enveloped, he might be moved to say.
END OF VOL. I.
LONDON: R. CLAY, SONS, AND TAYLOR, PRINTERS.