it was odd how, as he paced up and down the embankment late that evening, musing over the vision vouchsafed him, one detail continued to detach itself with discordant sharpness from the harmonious blur.
the parlour-maid who had never heard of mrs. morland, and who consequently could not know that the house had ever been hers, had naturally enough explained it to him in terms of its new owners’ habits. french’s imagination had so promptly anticipated this that he had, almost without a shock, heard mrs. morland’s library described as “the gentleman’s study,” and marked how an upstairs sitting-room with faded venetian furniture and rows of old books in golden-brown calf had been turned, by the intrusion of a large pink toilet-table, into “the lady’s dressing-room, sir.” it did not offend him that the dwelling should he used as suited the convenience of the persons who lived in it; he was never for expecting life to stop, and the historic house which has been turned into a show had always seemed to him as dead as a blown egg. he had small patience with the kind of reverence which treats fine things as if their fineness made them useless. nothing, he thought, was too fine for natural uses, nothing in life too good for life; he liked the absent and unknown donald pauls the better for living naturally in this house which had come to them naturally, and not shrinking into the mere keepers of a shrine. but he had winced at just one thing: at seeing there, on the writing-table which had once been emily morland’s, and must still, he quickly noted, be much as she had left it — at seeing there, among pens and pencils and ink-stained paper-cutters, halfway between a lacquer cup full of elastic bands and a blotting-book with her initials on it, one solitary object of irrelevant newness: an immense expensively framed photograph of fingall’s picture of his wife.
the portrait — the famous first one, now in the luxembourg — was so beautiful, and so expressive of what lovers of fingall’s art most loved in it, that willis french was grieved to see it so indelicately and almost insolently out of place. if ever a thing of beauty can give offence, mrs. fingall’s portrait on emily morland’s writing-table gave offence. its presence there shook down all manner of french’s faiths. there was something shockingly crude in the way it made the woman in possession triumph over the woman who was gone.
it would have been different, he felt at once, if mrs. morland had lived long enough to marry the man she loved; then the dead and the living woman would have faced each other on an equality. but mrs. morland, to secure her two brief years of happiness, had had to defy conventions and endure affronts. when, breaking away from the unhappy conditions of her married life, she had at last won london and freedom, it was only to learn that the reverend ambrose morland, informed of her desire to remarry, and of his indisputable right to divorce her, found himself, on religious grounds, unable to set her free. from this situation she sought no sensational escape. perhaps because the man she loved was younger than herself, she chose to make no open claim on him, to place no lien on his future; she simply let it be known to their few nearest friends that he and she belonged to each other as completely as a man and woman of active minds and complex interests can ever belong to each other when such life as they live together must be lived in secret. to a woman like mrs. morland the situation could not be other than difficult and unsatisfying. if her personal distinction saved her from social slights it could not save her from social subserviences. never once, in the short course of her love-history, had she been able to declare her happiness openly, or to let it reveal itself in her conduct; and it seemed, as one considered her case, small solace to remember that some of her most moving verse was the expression of that very privation.
at last her husband’s death had freed her, and her coming marriage to donald paul been announced; but her own health had already failed, and a few weeks later she too was dead, and donald paul lost in the crowd about her grave, behind the morland relations who, rather generously as people thought, came up from staffordshire for the funeral of the woman who had brought scandal and glory to their name.
so, tragically and inarticulately, emily morland’s life had gone out; and now, in the house where she and her lover had spent their short secret hours, on the very table at which she had sat and imperishably written down her love, he had put the portrait of the other woman, her successor; the woman to whom had been given the one great thing she had lacked . . .
well, that was life too, french supposed: the ceaseless ruthless turning of the wheel! if only — yes, here was where the real pang lay — if only the supplanting face had not been so different from the face supplanted! standing there before mrs. fingall’s image, how could he not recall his first sight of emily morland, how not feel again the sudden drop of all his expectations when the one woman he had not noticed on entering lady brankhurst’s drawing-room, the sallow woman with dull hair and a dowdy dress, had turned out to be his immortal? afterward, of course, when she began to talk, and he was let into the deep world of her eyes, her face became as satisfying as some grave early sculpture which, the imagination once touched by it, makes more finished graces trivial. but there remained the fact that she was what is called plain, and that her successor was beautiful; and it hurt him to see that perfect face, so all-expressive and all-satisfying, in the very spot where emily morland, to make her beauty visible, had had to clothe it in poetry. what would she not have given, french wondered, just once to let her face speak for her instead?
the sense of injustice was so strong in him that when he returned to his hotel he went at once to his portmanteau and, pulling out mrs. morland’s last volume, sat down to reread the famous love-sonnets. it was as if he wanted to make up to her for the slight of which he had been the unwilling witness . . .
the next day, when he set out for france, his mood had changed. after all, mrs. morland had had her compensations. she had been inspired, which, on the whole, is more worth while than to inspire. and then his own adventure was almost in his grasp; and he was at the age when each moment seems to stretch out to the horizon.
the day was fine, and as he sat on the deck of the steamer watching the white cliffs fade, the thought of mrs. morland was displaced by the vision of her successor. he recalled the day when mrs. fingall had first looked out at him from her husband’s famous portrait of her, so frail, so pale under the gloom and glory of her hair, and he had been told how the sight of her had suddenly drawn the painter’s genius from its long eclipse. fingall had found her among the art students of one of the parisian studios which he fitfully inspected, had rescued her from financial difficulties and married her within a few weeks of their meeting: french had had the tale from lady brankhurst, who was an encyclopaedia of illustrious biographies.
“poor little bessy reck — a little american waif sent out from some prairie burrow to ‘learn art’ — that was literally how she expressed it! she hadn’t a relation of her own, i believe: the people of the place she came from had taken pity on her and scraped together enough money for her passage and for two years of the latin quarter. after that she was to live on the sale of her pictures! and suddenly she met fingall, and found out what she was really made for.”
so far lady brankhurst had been satisfying, as she always was when she trod on solid fact. but she never knew anything about her friends except what had happened to them, and when questioned as to what mrs. fingall was really like she became vague and slightly irritable.
“oh, well, he transformed her, of course: for one thing he made her do her hair differently. imagine; she used to puff it out over her forehead! and when we went to the studio she was always dressed in the most marvellous eastern things. fingall drank cups and cups of turkish coffee, and she learned to make it herself — it is better, of course, but so messy to make the studio was full of siamese cats. it was somewhere over near the luxembourg — very picturesque, but one did smell the drains. i used always to take my salts with me; and the stairs were pitch-black.” that was all.
but from her very omissions french had constructed the vision of something too fine and imponderable not to escape lady brankhurst, and had rejoiced in the thought that, of what must have been the most complete of blisses, hardly anything was exposed to crude comment but the stairs which led to it.
of donald paul he had been able to learn even less, though lady brankhurst had so many more facts to give. donald paul’s life lay open for everybody in london to read. he had been first a “dear boy,” with a large and eminently respectable family connection, and then a not especially rising young barrister, who occupied his briefless leisure by occasionally writing things for the reviews. he had written an article about mrs. morland, and when, soon afterward, he happened to meet her, he had suddenly realized that he hadn’t understood her poetry in the least, and had told her so and written another article — under her guidance, the malicious whispered, and boundlessly enthusiastic, of course; people said it was that which had made her fall in love with him. but lady brankhurst thought it was more likely to have been his looks — with which french, on general principles, was inclined to agree. “what sort of looks?” he asked. “oh, like an old picture, you know”; and at that shadowy stage of development the image of donald paul had hung. french, in spite of an extensive search, had not even been able to find out where the fateful articles on mrs. morland’s verse had been published; and light on that point was one of the many lesser results he now hoped for.
meanwhile, settled in his chair on deck, he was so busy elaborating his own picture of the couple he was hastening to that he hardly noticed the slim figure of a traveller with a sallow keen face and small dark beard who hovered near, as if for recognition.
“andre jolyesse — you don’t remember me?” the gentleman at length reminded him in beautifully correct english; and french woke to the fact that it was of course jolyesse, the eminent international portrait painter, whose expensively gloved hand he was shaking.
“we crossed together on the gothic the last time i went to the states,” monsieur jolyesse reminded him, “and you were so amiable as to introduce me to several charming persons who added greatly to the enjoyment of my visit.”
“of course, of course,” french assented; and seeing that the painter was in need of a listener, the young man reluctantly lifted his rugs from the next chair.
it was because jolyesse, on the steamer, had been so shamelessly in quest of an article that french, to escape his importunities, had passed him on to the charming persons referred to; and if he again hung about in this way, and recalled himself, it was doubtless for a similarly shameless purpose. but french was more than ever steeled against the celebrating of such art as that of jolyesse; and, to cut off a possible renewal of the request, he managed — in answer to a question as to what he was doing with himself — to mention casually that he had abandoned art criticism for the writing of books.
the portrait painter was far too polite to let his attention visibly drop at this announcement; too polite, even, not to ask with a show of interest if he might know the subject of the work mr. french was at the moment engaged on.
“horace fingall — bigre!” he murmured, as if the aridity of the task impressed him while it provoked his pity. “fingall — fingall — ” he repeated, his incredulous face smilingly turned to french, while he drew a cigarette from a gold case as flat as an envelope.
french gave back the smile. it delighted him, it gave him a new sense of the importance of his task, to know that jolyesse, in spite of fingall’s posthumous leap to fame, still took that view of him. and then, with a start of wonder, the young man remembered that the two men must have known each other, that they must have had at least casual encounters in the crowded promiscuous life of the painters’ paris. the possibility was so rich in humour that he was moved to question his companion.
“you must have come across fingall now and then, i suppose?”
monsieur jolyesse shrugged his shoulders. “not for years. he was a savage — he had no sense of solidarity. and envious — !” the artist waved the ringed hand that held his cigarette. “could one help it if one sold more pictures than he did? but it was gall and worm-wood to him, poor devil. of course he sells now — tremendously high, i believe. but that’s what happens: when an unsuccessful man dies, the dealers seize on him and make him, a factitious reputation. only it doesn’t last. you’d better make haste to finish your book; that sort of celebrity collapses like a soap-bubble. forgive me,” he added, with a touch of studied compunction, “for speaking in this way of your compatriot. fingall had aptitudes — immense, no doubt — but no technique, and no sense of beauty; none whatever.”
french, rejoicing, let the commentary flow on; he even felt the need to stimulate its flow.
“but how about his portrait of his wife — you must know it?”
jolyesse flung away his cigarette to lift his hands in protest. “that consumptive witch in the luxembourg? ah, mais non! she looks like a vegetarian vampire. voyez vous, si l’on a beaucoup aimé les femmes — ” the painter’s smile was evidently intended to justify his championship of female loveliness. he puffed away the subject with his cigarette smoke, and turned to glance down the deck. “there — by jove, that’s what i call a handsome woman! over there, with the sable cloak and the brand new travelling-bags. a honeymoon outfit, hein? if your poor fin-gall had had the luck to do that kind —! i’d like the chance myself.”
french, following his glance, saw that it rested on a tall and extremely elegant young woman who was just settling herself in a deck-chair with the assistance of an attentive maid and a hovering steward: a young man, of equal height and almost superior elegance, strolled up to tuck a rug over her shining boot-tips before seating himself at her side; and french had to own that, at least as a moment’s ornament, the lady was worth all the trouble spent on her. she seemed, in truth, framed by nature to bloom from one of monsieur jolyesse’s canvases, so completely did she embody the kind of beauty it was his mission to immortalize. it was annoying that eyes like forest-pools and a mouth like a tropical flower should so fit into that particular type; but then the object of monsieur jolyesse’s admiration had the air of wearing her features, like her clothes, simply because they were the latest fashion, and not because they were a part of her being. her inner state was probably a much less complicated affair than her lovely exterior: it was a state, french guessed, of easy apathetic good-humour, galvanized by the occasional need of a cigarette, and by a gentle enjoyment of her companion’s conversation. french had wondered, since his childhood, what the olympian lovers in fashion-plates found to say to each other. now he knew. they said (he strolled nearer to the couple to catch it): “did you wire about reserving a compartment?”; and “i haven’t seen my golf-clubs since we came on board”: and “i do hope marshall’s brought enough of that new stuff for my face,” — and lastly, after a dreamy pause: “i know gwen gave me a book to read when we started, but i can’t think where on earth i’ve put it.”
it was odd too that, handsome and young as they still were (both well on the warm side of forty), this striking couple were curiously undefinably old-fashioned — in just the same way as jolyesse’s art. they belonged, for all their up-to-date attire, to a period before the triumph of the slack and the slouching: it was as if their elegance had pined too long in the bud, and its belated flowering had a tinge of staleness.
french mused on these things while he listened to jolyesse’s guesses as to the class and nationality of the couple, and finally, in answer to the insistent question: “but where do you think they come from?” replied a little impatiently: “oh, from the rue de la paix, of course!” he was tired of the subject, and of his companion, and wanted to get back to his thoughts of horace fingall.
“ah, i hope so — then i may run across them yet!” jolyesse, as he gathered up his bags, shot a last glance at the beauty. “i’ll haunt the dressmakers till i find her — she looks as if she spent most of her time with them. and the young man evidently refuses her nothing. you’ll see, i’ll have her in the next salon!” he turned back to add: “she might be a compatriot of yours. women who look as if they came out of the depths of history usually turn out to be from your newest territory. if you run across her, do say a good word for me. my full lengths are fifty thousand francs now — to americans.”
