Chapter IX: I Am Committed to the

I learned, as you shall understand, to readjust my first impression of de Crespigny. It is certain one must not judge the quality of the wine by the vessel. He was a great artist, who ran quickly to waste in the passions evoked of his own conceptions. From the mouth downwards he was a sensualist, and not fit to trust himself with a fair model. Shut into a monastery, he would have been a Fra Angelico.

At the first he captured me, when once I was familiarised with the ungainly exterior of the creature. To see him work--ardent, engrossed, unerring in the early enthusiasm of a subject--was a revelation. He stood so slack, he ran so to moral exhaustion when delivered of his inspiration, it was impossible to recognise the master of a moment ago in this invertebrate body with the loose wrists and silly laugh. If he could only have been kept always at the high pressure of his conceptions! Sometimes I wondered if it was in me to make him great and hold him. It would have been splendid to be the Hamilton to this Romney. Yet in the end I found the game not worth the candle. He was soft wax, indeed, for seven-eighths of his length, and the littlest puff from red lips could blow all the flame out of his head.

Still, while it lasted, his influence over me was an education. His portfolios were the very minutes of inspiration--suggestions, impressions of loveliness, caught and recorded and passed by for others. He finished little, and perhaps would have been a lesser artist and a stronger man if he could have laboured to consolidate his dreams. He taught me that not facts, but shadows of facts--the reflections, most moving, most intimate which they cast--are the real appeals to the emotions; that there is no landscape so beautiful as its reflection in a mirror, no chord so pathetic as its silent vibration in one’s heart. Perhaps the heavens are an eternity of echoes, of spectral perfumes, of dreams derived from experience, and we the authors of our own immortality. If so, we should live passionately who would dream well.

What this man lacked in nerve and backbone, his strange servant and comrade supplied, and many times over. He was the oddest monstrosity--savage in criticism, caustic in humour, a Caliban bellowing grief and tenderness through hairy lungs. How he could ever have come to attach himself, and passionately, to so flaccid a bear-leader, was a problem pure for psychology. Now, at least, the two were inseparable as-- Ah, my friend! I was on the point of saying as Valentine and Proteus, but the analogy, I protest, is too poignant; for have not I too been cruelly declared the Sylvia who divided them?

The portrait, on that first afternoon, was carried down to a convenient closet on the ground floor; and there de Crespigny worked on it, always alone, or in the sole company of his henchman. When finished for the day, he would invariably lock the canvas into a press, and none, not even I (there is virtue in that parenthesis), was permitted to see it. The room was held sacred to him; and madam herself refrained so religiously from intruding on its privacy as to evoke, in her guileless trust of the singleness of his conversion, the very hypocrisy which to her faith was inconceivable. For, indeed, he converted this closet--which stood safely remote and approached by a back-stair way--into a sanctuary for deceit. Often, to confess the whole truth, when she supposed me engrossed in books or the construction of celestial samplers, was I closeted with de Crespigny and Gogo, learning to handle a brush, or inspire one, while Patty, with a code of signals, kept panic watch on the stairs.

Madam’s exclusion, no doubt, cost her many a patient sigh. She wondered over the idiosyncrasies of genius, which preferred, or professed to prefer, to labour its mental impressions rather than toil to record the living and mechanical pose. Still, it was true, the Sophia of to-day, however rejuvenated, was scarcely the model of that older time; and that he could finish that beautiful inspiration from her staider personality was what it was folly, perhaps, in her to expect.

Poor woman! Though I had my grudge, and no taste or reason to commiserate such vanity, I suffered some qualms of remorse for the part I was led to play. It is natural, after all, for the sex to see itself never so immortal as through the eyes of love; and, when a man has once praised its complexion, to claim for itself an eternity of roses.

Father Pope, the old spiritual curmudgeon, never quite credited, I think, the genuineness of this late conversion. I daresay, from his experience in the confessional box, he knew his man pretty well, and the value of such emotional abjurations. The sick devil turned monk was not to his taste; and, if he ventured to intimate as much, the coldness which certainly befell between madam and him at this time was easily to be accounted for. It all amused me hugely; and I felt delightfully wicked while the fun lasted. But retribution, my friend, was to overtake your naughty little Diana.

One day, stealing into the studio, I found Gogo alone, grinding colours into a little mortar.

“God ye good e’en, little serpent,” said he. “You can sit and beguile me for practice till my master comes.”

“Gogo,” I said, shocked. “Why do you call me by such a name?”

“Because you are as like Eve as two peas,” growled he.

“Eve was not a serpent, but a beautiful woman,” I answered, pouting.

“And so was Lamia; and yet she was a serpent,” he grunted.

“I don’t know what you mean. You said Eve.”

“Well, why not?” he replied, turning his red, morose-looking eyes on me. “Eve accused the serpent of beguilement, didn’t she? and Adam Eve? But Eve was made out of the man, therefore Adam accused himself. But Eve accused the serpent; therefore Adam accused the serpent. Yet he accused Eve; therefore Eve was the serpent, which is what she would, and will, never understand. O, God bless her! God bless her! Which, if He would do, blessing the serpent, might unriddle this sinful problem of life!”

He set to pounding vigorously with his pestle, and for a minute I watched him in a bewildered silence. There was always something in this shorn Cyclops which oddly attracted me.

“Gogo,” I said quite softly.

He threw down his pestle at once, and faced round, writhing his hands together, and glaring at me.

“Who spoke?” he said, in hoarse, trembling tones. “A voice from the garden making me in love with my own clown name. O, always so, always so, thou spirit of Eve; and, though it lost the world to God, I’d take the apple from thy hand.”

I laughed a little tremulously, as he stumped across the floor and stood close before me. The vision of this great storm of a creature, condemned to play the “comic relief” in the tragedy of his own manhood, came as near my heart as anything.

“Look!” he cried, his rugged chest heaving; “I can’t kneel to you, and I’m your slave. I walk open-eyed, hating and adoring you, into the toils you spread for our feet. Feet!” he groaned, looking down, with a despairing gesture. “Perhaps--who knows?--having them, I might have escaped.”

“How did you lose them, poor Gogo?” I said.

“Hating and adoring,” he groaned, unheeding my question, “hating and adoring. Look, little serpent: I could crush your slender throat for what you do, and hold on, and sob my soul away to see you die. Why have you come between us? United, we were strong, he and I. I drove his genius on, and loved the poor ape for its spark of divinity, and propped the weak spirit while it wrought. You knock the prop away, you knock the prop away, and we both fall; and where is _my_ compensation for the injury?” He clasped his great hands to me: “Give me back my genius,” he cried in pain, “and let us go.”

I rose to my feet, half moved and half resentful.

“It is not I who take him or want him. I will not come here again.”

As I turned, he barred my way.

“No,” he said, near sobbing, “I lied. Do what you will with us: make us angels or swine--I am content, so long as I may serve you.”

As he spoke, the door opened, and de Crespigny entered. He greeted me with a rather shifty look, I thought, and his manner seemed too distraught to affect any particular notice of his servant’s obvious emotion.

“O, well, _ma bella_ Unanina,” said he; “but a little sitting for this afternoon, please.”

I flushed, and was about to refuse to remain at all, when an imploring scowl from Gogo softened me. With plenty of hauteur, I stalked into a little curtained-off alcove which was consecrated to me for tiring-room, and there dressed for model. When I emerged again, my feet and arms were bare, my hair loose in a golden fillet, and, for the rest, I wore a kind of seraph smock, in which _les convenances_ had been constrained to clothe me for the peerless Una.

For as Una I was being painted. Looking one day through de Crespigny’s portfolios, I had come upon some “impressions,” royal, strenuous, of lions in the Tower menagerie, and was admiring the lithe, strong darlings, when his voice breathed behind me, with that little eternal foolish giggle.

“Have you decided, naughty?”

“Yes,” I whispered. “I will be the fairy lady whom the lion came to devour, and remained to serve and protect, because she was so pure and innocent.”

He did not know who I meant; so I found him the book and place.

“Ah, to be sure!” said he, reading eagerly. “She laid her stole aside, did she? Yes, it is an inspiration. It will suit me, if it does you.”

So I was painted wonderfully as Una, making my own “stole” from one of Patty’s bedgowns, and glorying, out of my very shamefacedness, to feed the inspiration, while it lasted, of this impassioned art. Now, for days it had wrought without slackening, so that it was an offence to me to find it suddenly become, it seemed, without apparent cause or reason, out of tune with its subject. He worked fitfully, dully, almost, as it were, disregarding my presence, and drawling commonplaces the while to Gogo, who had returned to his pestle and mortar, and was grinding away sullenly.

“Gogo,” he yawned presently, after an idle, preoccupied silence, “which would you rather marry, a woman of wit or virtue?”

“Neither, you blattering genius!” cried the other, turning round with such an instant roar that I was almost frightened off my perch.

The master, accustomed to his strange fellow’s moods, only laughed, and leaned back indolent.

“Why, you old dear?” said he.

Gogo thundered.

“She’s a rotten fish at best, shining the more the more corrupt she is.”

“But if she don’t shine?” said de Crespigny coolly.

“Then she’s a dull fish,” said Gogo, “but a fish still.”

The other mused, and sniggered.

“--Who’s for ever playing to be caught,” added Gogo, grumbling. “She loves the angle. Play her what you like, man, only throw her back when hooked.”

“Mr. Gogo!” I exclaimed.

“Ay, Mistress Una,” said he, “you’re all pretty players, from miss to my lady dowager. Don’t tell me. You all love to excite the emotions you don’t understand, and then off with you from the stage, sweet ethereals, to the suppers of steak and porter which you do, while Jack and my lord are wetting their pillows with tears over your sensibility.”

“Thank you,” I said, rising, highly offended. “As I, for one, am not playing to be hooked, I’ll take your warning in time.”

I had expected de Crespigny to strike in, in angry protest over his servant’s insolence; but, to my astonishment, he did not move or interfere. A little pregnant silence ensued, and the tears were already rising to my eyes, when, to my horror, I heard madam’s voice at the door.

“De Crespigny,” she said, “may I come in for once?”

He stumbled to his feet, and stood paralysed a moment, before he answered--

“A minute. You know the conditions: I must hide it away, and then”--

When she entered a little later, there was he standing to receive her with a spasmodic grin; his easel was empty, Gogo pounded at his mortar, and I--I was shrunk behind the curtain, peeping in a very shiver of terror.

She looked at him with a little shaky propitiating smile. Her eyes were red, as if she had been crying. She tried to speak, and could not. He understood so far, the poor clown, and bade his servant withdraw. When they were alone, she turned upon him with a little appealing motion of her hands.

“Am I never to be allowed to see it?” she asked.

He frowned, and bit his trembling lip.

“No, no,” she said, “I know the sensitiveness of your beautiful art. Only, O, Noel! I cannot rest where we ended just now. Believe me, it was so far from my wish to offend or alarm you. But time goes on, and the pledge this finished picture was to redeem is withheld, until I am at a loss how to explain.”

“To whom?” he muttered sullenly, “to that priest? O, I know. What right has he, a grudging Churchman, and you a saint?”

“O, indeed, I am but a weak woman!” she said, with a faint smile, “and he an anointed Father. He does right--dear, he does--to be jealous for his daughter. It is only that he would ask you, that I would ask you, what period”--

“Art is not to be forced,” he interrupted her peevishly. “I made the finishing of this picture, as it was begun--as it was begun, mind--the condition of my being received into your Church. Didn’t I, now?”

“Yes,” she sighed; “but there are some vows better broken.”

“A bad recommendation to what you call the truth,” he sneered.

“But, Noel, it _is_ the truth,” she cried. “O, say you are convinced that it is!”

“Well, I don’t know,” he answered, “since you bid me to a lie.”

“I will take the burden,” she cried, her eyes streaming, “to save the soul I love.”

She hardly breathed the final word. For a wonder, the poor creature she entreated found enough in it to move him.

“There,” he said, “don’t distress yourself, Sophia. I’ll work hot-handed on the picture to-morrow. There, I promise I will.”

“Thank you, Noel,” she whispered, so kindling, so grateful, that de Crespigny shrunk before her. “I--I won’t interrupt you any longer. It was like you, kind and considerate, not to blame me for breaking your rule.”

The room remained so still after her going that I thought he too had followed, until, stealing out presently in a panic, I found him seated in a corner, biting his nails.

“I had better go now, hadn’t I?” I whispered, half choking.

“Yes,” he growled, “to the devil!”