Besides, there was doubt. He who can do many things must needs choose, and, where circumstances are passive, choice may be difficult. Carl inherited his father’s talent, and had more than his father’s force. He sketched and painted exquisitely, and, when he drew the portrait of one he loved, the picture breathed. Many a lady, disappointed with the stiff presentment of her beauty achieved by other artists, had entreated him in vain to become her limner.
“Ransome paints my nose, and hair, and shoulders all right,” one said. “I cannot find fault with a line. But for all the soul he puts into them, my head might as well be a milliner’s block. I suppose it is because he thinks that a fine body does not need any soul. Such a contrast as I saw in his studio, the other day! He had two or three portraits of Mrs. Clare, painted in different positions, and he displayed them to me, going into ecstasies over her beauty. ‘Yes, yes,’ I answered; but I was not enchanted. ‘She is one of the few dangerous women,’ he said, meaning that the power of her loveliness was irresistible; but I could not understand his enthusiasm. Presently, I espied, in a corner of the room, on the floor, half-hidden by other pictures, a face that made me start. I did not think whether or not the features were perfect, the hair profuse, the tint exquisite. I saw only a luring, fascinating creature, who, with head half-drooping and lips half-smiling, gazed at me over her shoulder. There were no red and white. The face looked out from shadows so profound, they might be of a midnight garden at midsummer, when the moon and stars are hid in sultry cloud, or from the shrouding
arras of a lonely chamber in some wicked old palace, or from the overhanging portal of the bottomless pit. I would walk through fire to snatch back one I love from following such a face. ‘It is wonderful!’ I exclaimed. ‘Why do you hide it? It is by far superior too anything else you have here.’ I thought that Mr. Ransome did not seem to be much delighted by my praise. ‘I did not paint it,’ he said. ‘Carl Owen Yorke did.’ Of course, I could not say any more. The situation was embarrassing. ‘Would you think that face the same as these?’ pointing to his portraits of Mrs. Clare. I could see no resemblance. ‘They are the same,’ he said, looking mortified. And then I knew what he meant in saying that she was a dangerous woman.” “Why did you paint that, Mr. Yorke?” the lady asked abruptly, turning upon Carl.
“In order not to be attracted by it,” he replied gravely. “Did it not leave on you the impression of something snakelike? In painting that, I broke the spell. Alice Mills told me to paint it. She said, ‘You are fascinated only by that which you cannot analyze. Catch the trick, and the power is gone.’ She was right. She is always right. Nothing is so shallow as an evil fascination.”
Yet, in spite of every promise of success, Carl turned aside from art. He had found out that the artist, above all, needs happiness. One can study, think, and work, when the heartstrings are strained to breaking; but he who, with his hand upon the pen, the brush, the chorded string, or the chisel, waits till those subtile influences which he is gifted to perceive shall move him, must have every pulse stilled by a perfect content. Pain distorts his work. It untunes his music, blurs his color, deadens his thought, and makes his chisel
swerve. Nor is this in purely natural art alone; for the artist whose struggling soul ignores all else to grasp the supernatural gives only a blunted ray through a turbid medium.
The pencil failing, there was diplomacy, and literature, particularly journalism. Something must be done. His idle and aimless life had become a torture. Therefore he studied, and read, giving much time to languages. “Languages,” he was wont to say, “are as necessary to a man who would always and everywhere have his forces in hand, as a string of keys is to a burglar.”
A conversation which Carl held with Edith, just before she left Boston, may have been instrumental in arousing him. The two stood together, in one of the lance-windows that lighted Hester’s library. Hester and her mother were up-stairs, and there was no one else in the room but Eugene Cleaveland and his little brother, Hester’s child. The little one was gravely and patiently striving to pick up, with dimpled fingers, a beam of pink light that fell on the floor through a pane of colored glass in the window-arch, and Eugene was as gravely explaining to him why he could not.
“And so,” said Carl, after a silence, “Mr. Rowan is your ideal man.”
It was his way of intimating his knowledge of existing circumstances, and he spoke carelessly, watching the children.