'I remember very well. You are not changed a bit, Armorel: you have only grown larger and——' 'More beautiful,' he would have added, but refrained. 'You will find that the old joy will return again—la joie de vivre—only to breathe and feel and look around. But it will be then ten times as joyous. If you loved Scilly when you were a child and had seen nothing else, how much more will you love the place now that you have travelled and seen strange lands and other coasts and the islands of the Mediterranean!'
'I fear that I shall find the place small: the house will have shrunk—children's houses always shrink. I hope that Holy Farm will not have become mean.'
'Mean? with the verbena-trees, the fuchsias, the tall pampas-grass, and the palms! Mean? with the old ship's lanthorn and the gilded figure-head? Mean, Armorel? with the old orchard behind and the twisted trees with their fringe of grey moss? You talk rank blasphemy! Something dreadful will happen to you.'
'Perhaps it will be I myself, then, that will have grown mean enough to think the old house mean. But Samson is a very little place, isn't it? One cannot make out Samson to be a big place. I could no longer live there always. We will go there for three or four months every year; just for refreshment of the soul, and then return here among men and women or travel abroad together, Effie. We could be happy for a time there: we could sail and row about the rocks in calm weather: and in stormy weather we should watch the waves breaking over the headlands, and in the evening I would play "The Chirping of the Lark."'
'I am ready to go to-morrow, if you will take me with you,' said Effie.
Then they were silent again. Roland walked backwards and forwards, brush and palette in hand, looking at his model and at his canvas. Effie stood beside the picture, watching it grow. To one who cannot paint, the growth of a portrait on the canvas is a kind of magic. The bare outline and shape of head and face, the colour of the eyes, the curve of the neck, the lines of the lips—anyone might draw these. But to transfer to the canvas the very soul that lies beneath the features—that, if you please, is different. Oh! How does the painter catch the soul of the man and show it in his face? One must be oneself an artist of some kind even to appreciate the greatness of the portrait painter.
'When this picture is finished,' said Armorel, 'there will be nothing to keep me in London; and we will go then.'
'At the very beginning of the season?'
'The season is nothing to me. My companion, Mrs. Elstree, who was to have launched me so beautifully into the very best society, turns out not to have any friends; so that there is no society for me, after all. Perhaps it is as well.'
'Will Mrs. Elstree go to Scilly with you?' asked Roland.