CHAPTER XXIV.
The next morning, after writing her letters and attending to her household duties, Clytie went into her studio with the praiseworthy intention of stimulating the artistic impulse that had been flagging for so long. Kent was right, she thought. Her life could be reconstructed. She would begin her laborious art life again, resume it seriously as a profession, put her pictures into the market once more. Amid the many confusing thoughts and emotions resulting from her conversation with Kent, one idea had sprung in connection with Jack. She could not adopt the boy. That was a wild feminine craving, somewhat selfish, springing out of a bitter hour when fairer hopes were crushed. It cost her a sigh to resign; but she trusted to Kent's judgment, and her mind was so far at rest. Yet if it could lie in her power to help Jack materially in after years, when a little capital would be worth all the world to him, she felt that she would have wrought some good for one human creature at least in her somewhat self-centred life. And then Kent's advice as to her art mingled and combined with these thoughts, and the outcome was the sudden idea that the proceeds of the sale of her pictures would, in course of time, form a very considerable fund. She clapped her hands with delight when this occurred to her. A mountain of weariness seemed removed. In the spontaneity of new workings she scribbled a hasty line to Kent and had it posted with the address scarcely dry.
“I am going to paint seriously, and sell my pictures, and devote the proceeds to a fund for Jack. Shall I?”
She was in bright spirits this morning, having discovered an object in life. The future has generally much more to do with our present moods than the past. Yet, notwithstanding this broad truth, the immediate past had a certain influence on Clytie's humour. Whilst she was driving home the afternoon before, the gravity of the fact of her confession to Kent had somewhat weighed upon her. She had spent the lonely evening grappling with a truth that had been taking half-reluctant shape in her consciousness for the last two months, and now rose clear and sharply defined. She had even written to Kent the following portion of a letter which she straightway tore up into the finest of pieces. In fact her intention of sending it to him was from the first of the very remotest. “My dear Kent,” ran this singularly feminine effusion. “My words to-day were true. If you had told me you loved me eighteen months ago, I should have realised myself and what it was that I felt towards you. The knowledge of her own heart does not come to a woman with the easy grace that your sentimentalists make out. It is somewhat of a fierce process, Kent. There is no royal road to it. Well, I know my own heart now, and I have bought the knowledge with agonies of suffering. Oh, Kent, my true, loyal Kent! I am tired, tired of hiding facts from myself, of acting in a wilful dream, in defiance of the promptings of my reason. I am a woman, and I ought not to confess things to myself, let alone to you. So people say—and people are so wise, aren't they? I love you, Kent. There, I write it down in black and white. It looks odd, grotesque, horrible, and yet wonderfully comforting. I love you, Kent. Why should I deceive myself any longer? God knows whether it is for my happiness in the future or my misery; but now that the beauty of it is upon me it makes me wonderfully happy. Yes, wonderfully, wonderfully, wonderfully happy.”
And then she threw down her pen and shredded the paper with frenzied zeal. But her heart was lighter. The world seemed a clearer, pleasanter place. Her cheeks burned like fire at the thought of Kent ever knowing of this feeling. She arranged in her mind the tenderest and most elusive of relations between Kent and herself. He, a declared lover, should give her all the comfort and kind counsel of a friend; she, his declared friend, would find delicate, subtle ways of colouring and softening his life with her love. A new paradise of exquisite emotion opened its evanescent portals. For the first time in her life came the romance of delicate sentiment, tinged with an innocent pink like the buds in spring. It is true these same buds, to continue the analogy, burst into gorgeous, riotous bloom under the summer sun; but while the tenderer air of spring keeps them closed they have a grace peculiarly their own.
Clytie moved about the studio singing, a sign with her of great content. The window was open and the morning sun streamed in, filling the large and somewhat heavily tapestried room with gay light. It glorified Clytie as she passed across the patch of sunlight, falling upon her hair in a thousand scintillations and revealing the deep sea-blue of her eyes. She wore a soft cream morning gown, a golden tasselled girdle round her waist, an edging of old lace round the somewhat open neck. The wide, drooping sleeves she had caught up a little for convenience in working, and her arms were bare to the elbow. The skirt clung around her as she walked quickly about the room, with her old elastic tread, making a soft frou-frou that pleased her, she did not know why. She was happy again, filled with a double sense of the meaning of life. At last she sat down before a small easel, on which was put the board with its fair sheet of Whatman paper ready for the first sketch. In her rapid, eager way she commenced to indicate the motive of the picture that had flashed like an inspiration upon her. In the middle distance on the left a pair of lovers, the woman looking with upturned face at the man, whose arm was round her waist. In the foreground, peeping at them from behind a clump of bushes, a girl of about seventeen, with a letter in her hand. The contrast between the two female faces was the motive—the fulfilment of knowledge on the one, the dawning revelation on the other. The title had come with the conception: “Maiden and Woman.” Clytie worked on steadily with her ébauche, keen, sure of herself, tingling once again with the excitement of inspiration. She knew she could put that in their faces which would raise the picture above the narrative prettiness of Sant and his school. The accessories were to be severe to austerity. No elaborate detail in tree painting, no subtle effects of light and shade. The principle of abstraction to be as uncompromisingly carried out as in one of Seymour Haden's etchings. The whole artistic force of the picture was to be concentrated in the awakened and awakening souls.
She was absorbed in her work when, after a tap at the door, Jack came in. Clytie looked up with a smile.
“You here again, Jack! That is good of you. But I can't say a word to you—positively. I am so busy. Sit down somewhere until I have finished.”
The boy, used to these fits of absorption in his two artist patronesses, sat down for a little and let his eyes wander round the studio, looking at the pictures and nicknacks. Then he got up to make a closer examination of vases and photographs, and walked about on tiptoe, trying to still the noise of his iron-shod boots against the hard, polished floor. At last he discovered on the bookshelves an illustrated History of England, with which he retired to his favourite place on the hearthrug. And so they remained for half an hour without saying a word—Clytie bending over her study, Jack curled up with his picture-book. It was quite still. A stray bumble-bee looked in now and then at the window, buzzing querulously, as if he had lost his way in London, and then darted off again. From the servants' hall came the just perceptible voice of one of the maids singing a hymn-tune, and from far, far away came the tinkling treble of a piano-organ. And these few sounds, so faint yet so clear, accentuated the summer stillness.
When Clytie had put the last few touches on the portion of her work that demanded all her concentration, she gave a little sigh of relief.