A Puritan Bohemia/Chapter 13
CHAPTER XIII
"Console-moi ce soir; je me meurs d'esperance."
Anne Bradford could not sleep. There was a concert in the Music Hall, and the wailing of the violins disturbed her. It seemed as if the bows were being drawn across her nerves.
At last she rose and came into the studio, in her gray wrapper. One star was shining through the skylight. Anne lit her hanging lamp and made a fire in the fireplace, then stood over it, shivering, and warming her hands.
She studied anxiously her new picture on the easel. The work was bad. For weeks she had accomplished nothing worth while. And why? she demanded impatiently. This mental disturbance was only superficial. She was perfectly sure of herself. Some day Howard would learn to care about Helen. Even now he did not realize how much he depended upon her.
"I shall be glad," said Anne firmly. But she knew better.
She smiled, remembering the tears she had shed on the day of his first call. They were tears of regret in not finding herself mistaken in the old decision on the wharf. The four years' silence had been eloquent.
"Whoever wants to prevail with me should stay away," thought Anne, walking restlessly up and down. "The winds and the stars will plead his cause more eloquently than he. Only, it will be fatal for him ever to come back!"
She wondered if in every experience the gods had prepared for her disappointment, trying to pit reality against a dream.
Taking up her brushes she began to paint. Then the music became a voice, a cry for all she had wanted and had missed in life. That was a false stroke! She laid down her palette and put out the light, then curled up on the rug before the fire.
Self-expression! To leave a record of her way of looking at things,—that was all she had striven for. Her thoughts drifted back to that summer afternoon in the Cluny Garden, when grass and trees and the queer bits of Gothic architecture lay deep in shade. The consecration of that hour could not have been a mistake. She reached vainly back for the inspiration of the mornings when she had crossed the Pont Royal on her way to the studio, and had seen the sun coming red through the mist behind the Nôtre Dame towers and the spire of the Sainte Chapelle. Her sight had been clear in those days, her purpose single.
She sat with a background of shadow, an unwonted look of self-distrust in her delicately cut face. The leaping flame on the hearth lit up the Winged Victory, and touched the sneering lips of the devil of Nôtre Dame.
"Anyway," she said at last with a laugh, "after wrestling with a Notion for four years, and almost getting the better of it, I am not afraid of a man. Whatever happens, I'll follow the old desire. It is the nearest thing to a soul that I have ever had. But I am not sorry that I have been obliged to think it all out again. Now it is settled forever."
Feeling safe in this new resolve, she set her fancy free. The last strains of music, tender, sweet, floated up to her. They came like the touch of pleading fingers. She rose with a start, a flush of guilt upon her face. There was a sudden gleam from the fire. From the wall certain words that she had painted on the back of an old palette shone out like a reproach,
"Se tu segui tua stella."
*****
At eight o'clock in the morning Miserere woke, and stretched out his gray paws on the soft divan. His mistress was late. He gave one soft, sleepy, injured mew. The old grievance against life came back to him with returning consciousness.
Miserere was unhappy. His was the heritage of the man
"Who vainly pants
For some celestial fruit forbidden to our wants."
A sullen look crept into his eyes. He lashed the couch with his tail.
"Strange pangs would flash across Childe Harold's brow,
As if the memory of some deadly feud,
Or disappointed passion, lurked below."
He wanted to know how to get into the larder. It was this withheld knowledge that made him mew. Life was for him a long fever because of the unequal responses to his demands upon the material world.
Presently his mistress appeared. From the corner she brought a little oak table, and over it threw a white cloth. Then, behind a great brown canvas screen where golden-rod was painted, she made her coffee on a tiny gas stove. The raven, as she called the milkman, put down a jar of cream outside her door. Miserere heard it, and went to sit close by the crack.
Anne smiled when her breakfast was ready. It was all so old-maidish,—the Sèvres china, the diminutive spoons, the rolls, the jar of marmalade. Long shafts of light came into the studio. Anne thought of the way in which the autumn sunlight used to crawl in the early morning up the meadow by her father's parsonage. The grass was always covered with misty cobwebs that glistened in the sun. That was so long ago.
She poured her coffee into the white and gold cup. Miserere jumped mewing to her lap.
"You miserable, carnal-minded beast," she said, touching him affectionately. "You will never be happy, because you want the wrong thing. Somebody said once, 'Man is not a happy animal, because his appetite for sweet victual is so enormous.' You are like man."
There was a knock at the door. The janitor had brought Miss Bradford a letter. It was a typewritten refusal of the two pictures that she had sent to the Botticelli Art Club for the winter exhibition.
"I expected it," she said quietly, but her eyes grew moist. She was a failure. Her ambition had outstripped her gift.
"I needn't have been so supercilious, Miserere," she remarked, stroking the cat's gray head. "I'm like you, after all. I thought that it was work I cared for, the discipline of hand and brain. But I rather think I wanted only 'sweet victual.'"
Then she reddened at the memory of her thoughts of the night before.
"A woman's despair — with complications" — she said, half laughing, "is very dangerous. I can't surrender now, anyway. Whatever love is, it isn't a second choice."
She pushed the table away. She was not hungry.
"'Wer nie sein Brod mit Thränen ass,'"
she quoted sadly. "I have more: bread, and tears,—and jam."
Then she put on her painting-apron.
"I wonder if the gods really want me to give up," she asked herself meekly, as she mixed her colours. She set her lips.
"I don't care if they do, I sha'n't! After all, there's some pleasure in failing in the one thing you really want to do."