Miss Hedges goes with us, and we mean, she and I, to bring back between us the entire Basque country in our portfolios.
"I'm thankful we're going to a region of picturesque men," says Ronayne, "for I think my lot in life likely to be a little less afflictive than it was last year. I don't much mind leading contrary minded horses up and down by the hour, coaxing suspicious or aggressive goats; I might even put another bull as savage as that fellow at Twickenham through his paces; but as to posing myself, in any possible fashion, even as a snoring shepherd, please to consider, ladies, that it's not down in our summer programme.
"Talk of the miseries of a man with a literary wife! What are they, I should like to be told, beside those of the unlucky mortal who's married a 'fair artist,' and can never so much as yawn in peace again, without being perpetuated in the act?"
"I had an eye to business when I married you, sir!" I retort. "You see you're a fine, tall, well-made animal, and since I own you, why should I go pay away my money for some other model who wouldn't be half so good-looking, and whom I couldn't frighten so well into minding me? Not pose indeed! Perhaps you would even choose to be bow-legged if so you could escape doing your duty? And I think you're maliciously trying to get stout. In our rides lately, I notice you puff a good deal if we have a bit of a race, and you're really getting a quite perceptible little bulge!"
And Ronayne, who knows very well that he's a capital figure, and whom I accuse of keeping the lowest button of his coat fastened in order to display his slender waist, gives an alarmed glance down at himself, and I see, to my great amusement, that no Bass is uncorked at luncheon, my lord consenting himself with a glass of sherry instead—a needless self-denial, I hasten to add, for he's really no more bulging than a greyhound! But he deserves the little scare for his attempt at rebellion. Fancy my husband having any will of his own about stopping in any attitude I choose him to take, and for as long as I choose! I knew such a queer artist in London, a rather coarse, wholly uneducated woman, but with a streak of real genius. She married the commonest, stupidest man, a pink-and-white young idiot of a tailor, grown now to be the "heavy father"—red, fat, lazy, letting his wife earn all the money. Somebody scolded about him to the poor, over-worked wife. "Yes, I know I have to keep the pot boiling," she answered, "but then Dave saves a model, he's the kindest father to the children, and he does all the sewing!" He doesn't object to pose, not he! And how proud he is of his wife! I found him alone in her studio one day. I looked over some engravings after Titian while waiting, and the man said, "Them engravings o' Titian's, now, ma'am, they're out o' drawing! But here's a picture o' my wife's that's more the real thing," putting on the easel, with affectionate pride, a painting in which two or three of their children were grouped—a trashy, tawdry, grinning thing, and yet with unmistakable touches of power. And this is a tale my husband has reason to know by heart, I'm sure! Not pose! I wish he had Miss Hedges for a wife! Anything like that girl's utter devotion to her work I've never seen in a woman. Rain or shine, cold or heat, are all one to her; she never has spiritually gray days when the grasshopper's a burden, and Capua itself wouldn't have unnerved her arm and purpose. Work! work! And everything turned to account.
Last summer when she was with us I fainted at some horrible tale or other. She came into the room where I lay stretched flat upon the floor, too miserable to speak, but conscious again. I must do her the justice to say she had heard there was no serious cause for my condition; but her first exclamation was,
"Oh, Lilian, what a color you are! Blue-white, ghastly, your face all drawn, pinched—magnificent! Let me see your hands and nails. Ah, capital! Capital! Poor little Lilian! But if you must faint, what a chance for me! I couldn't think how I was to get the right tint for my dying soldier. I never saw any one dead or wounded, and I am much too stolid ever to faint myself. Crossing the channel I took my hand-mirror and studied my face when I was desperately sick—but it was all green and pathos—no good! But your color's the very thing—only you get pink so fast! Oh, Lilian, if ever you faint again, have me called the very instant you feel yourself going off!"
This may be called devotion to one's work? But grand work she's going to do. She's full of genius, and has only to get over the niminy-piminy-izing of the South Kensington School, and work abroad a few years, to have a far more justly grounded fame than Rosa Bonheur's.
Already a few first great drops of her shower are falling. She's a picture in the Academy, her first, and on the line—a picture to which the hanging committee themselves took off their hats, and gave a cheer for the artist; and a regular ovation she had on the private view day—nobility and clergy, fellow artists and journalists, army and navy—such a day as she says can never come again for her, let the future have what success in store for her it may.
She has sold the picture for a thousand guineas, and her sketch in the Black and White Exhibition has appeared in one of the illustrated papers, the same paper offering her carte-blanche for illustrations. How I feel like swinging her in triumph before the faces of Mesdames Malise and her friends!—a simple, frank, good girl, who never in her life thought of crying out about a career, and a smoothing of her way, or declared her right to devote herself to art, and to such an unwomanly branch of it as the drawing of horses and soldiers, but set herself obscurely at work, and toiled as faithfully as if she hadn't a spark of genius in her—to win what she has already done, and yet will do!