Bag and Baggage/"Beneath Dark Wings"

by Bernard Capes

 

"BENEATH DARK WINGS"

CHAPTER I
THE FROZEN POND

"THROUGHOUT my early artistic development," once wrote Laurence Derrick to a very intimate friend, "I suffered from a peculiar difficulty—an inability to see things as all others appeared to see them. I had always to force myself into line, as it were, with alien perceptions in order to be understood; to distinguish between the positive and the adventitious in recognised forms; to define for myself the limits of the actual as patent to the common view. This difficulty ceased in me with the cessation of celibacy; but while it lasted it was a very definite one, bewildering and distressing at times, though blessed with some rare compensations. Thus, to my abnormal vision, every human being was possessed of an aura, a luminous emanation, varying in its density, and eloquent somehow of the nature it enshrined; and every beast was likewise adorned, though in a lesser and duller degree. Moreover, I seemed ever conscious of a spiritual environment, now perilous, now sympathetic, but generally emotional, whose invisibility found me entirely without the scepticism common to those who believe in no evidence but such as their senses afford them. And, again, I could hear things inaudible to most.

"Now, the capacity for hearing, as for utterance, does not cease arbitrarily on a given note—that must be patent. Then where need it cease, for those who have, literally, ears to hear? Are there such? I suppose that, for the 'general,' attenuated sound, like attenuated atmosphere, means, beyond a certain point, death. Nevertheless, when I tell you that I could once distinguish the low intercourse of the spirits of the dead, you will most certainly question my sanity.

"But, question it as you will, you must understand in what manner my constitution affected my art, and with what infinite caution I had to realise and prune that art's early exuberances. All that was not to be done in a day, or in a year, or in many years; and no doubt it was the gradual process of elimination which gave my etchings their characteristic quality, since I could not at once learn to see 'sanely' with other men's eyes. I am married now; I have exchanged the vision for the reality; my art, I hope, is sounder and stronger for its loss; yet there come times when I could regret the older faculty, and, for the sake of that seer's atmosphere, could barter much present rationality. And so, what then? Why, the dolefullest void where is now the essential presence."

The change to which the letter refers occurred at an acute crisis of Derrick's life, and physiologists, for their part, found a sufficient explanation for it. It is quite unnecessary to attempt to trace here its anterior evolutions. Up to a certain date the man was a brilliant Fantastic; after that date he was a brilliant Rationalist—no more needs to be said. We all remember how he was called the Meryon of London, and what prices we were willing to give for good examples of his earlier period. He was, indeed, the very genius of etching, to which he brought a soul nearly akin to that of the wild French visionary. Only Derrick's visions found something beyond gloom and terror in his 'City of Dreadful Night.' His Saxon blood saved him.

This is by way of a prelude to a strange episode in the artist's career here recorded.

 

•⁠•⁠•⁠•⁠•⁠•

 

On a certain still afternoon in mid-winter a man loitered along the "Mud-cliffs" of Norfolk, at about the point where the coast-line bends definitely to sweep westwards under the Lynn Deeps and Cross-Keys Wash. Land and sea, it was all a desolate prospect attuned to a desolate soul. During the whole twenty-five years of his young life Laurence Derrick never remembered a time when he had held other than aloof, in all that stood for instinctive comradeship, from his fellow-creatures. He was born to loneliness and self-sufficiency—a virile, potent spirit, nevertheless, and no truckler to Destiny. Already at this early age he was famous, and without a shadow of arrogance. Socially a shy man, in all that pertained to his art he was the embodiment of independence and individuality. You seemed to read it in his large absorbed eyes, which were the fine feature of a face otherwise lean, hollow-chapped, and somewhat breathless in suggestion. In figure he was tall, gaunt, strong-shouldered, and in habit inclined to slouch. His "London Visions" had at this date won him the very first of reputations as an etcher.

He had never as yet worked but in black and white. There had been no reason and little opportunity for his doing so. This wandering tour, in fact, marked the beginning of his departure from a hitherto unbroken rule. For the first time he was essaying to express his visions in water-colour. Something in the aspect of his surroundings had won him to the attempt—the grey tones, the little-defined contrasts, the still predominance of white and shadow in the picture. If a man sought to emerge from the thraldom of ink and paper, he could not do it by more cautious and gradual means. He was feeling his way.

Presently he paused on the edge of the cliff and looked about him. His 'tools' were slung in a case over his shoulder; his hands, a good stick gripped in one of them, were bare; he was not the man to concede a point to the rigours of frost and fog. There was little to cherish in all the view but a sense of stark isolation. Melancholy is the reigning spirit of all that haunted, crumbling coast. Old solitary churches, old ruined memories of an age-long-foundered life possess its league-wide desolations. It is thick with dreary ghosts, whose shrouds come washing inwards on the curl of the tides. One may stroll for miles on the cold sands or the harsh over-cliffs and never meet a soul.

All this was congenial to the solitary man. He liked loneliness, he liked desolation. The mystery of a grey-green sea flowing from under a curtain of mist absorbed his fancy; the scream of sweeping gulls stimulated it; he looked abroad over a dim frost-locked landscape, and marked without a shiver the fleece of snow that carpeted it. Then he turned southwards and went on.

Suddenly, in the growing mist, he came upon a railed-in track which crossed his path. The fence was of the slightest and rudest, but it appeared to betoken a private way from a point above the shore to some place inland. Moved by a perverse impulse, the artist entered and took the track, leaving the coast behind him.

As he proceeded, a sense as of some undefined exclusiveness in the spot increased upon him. The track narrowed, and became a cutting between low banks, became a lane, became a gorge. Stunted bushes appeared on its banks, and presently trees, ever increasing in density. And then in a moment, as he turned a corner, a wooden gate barred his way.

The thing was a mouldering ruin, a mere pretence, its statement of privacy a scarce decipherable legend. Derrick, scorning to construe, pushed by and continued his exploration. This was the back entrance, he convinced himself, to some long-deserted estate, and likely no one would interfere with him.

The trees thickened as he advanced, and massed themselves in a loftier tangle of sprays. The track of melancholy sky between their tops seemed contracted to a width no greater than that of the melancholy path he trod. On all sides reigned a profound sad silence; he seemed to be entering into the dead recesses of something long excommunicate; the biting crunch of his footsteps in the snow smote upon his nerves like a desecration. Still he pressed forward.

Now the very murmur of his spirit environment seemed hushed, as if his progress were being breathlessly watched and followed. Suddenly the lane of thronged trunks distended, opening out into a wide circular gulf among the trees; and in the midst lay a broad pond or mere, hard-frozen and set with withered clumps of rushes.

It was winter manifest—a voiceless unpeopled solitude locked in ice. Derrick walked yet a score paces, and on the instant stopped. He had reached unexpectedly the opening to a second track or avenue, which entered the close amphitheatre at right angles to the other; and, looking up this new approach, he saw a house at its farther end. The building was not so far away but that he could distinguish, or thought he could distinguish, its forlorn and abandoned character. No smoke rose from its chimneys; no sign of life was visible about it anywhere. Decided as to its tenantless condition, yet willing to compromise with appearances, he stepped back out of sight of its windows, and quickly became absorbed in the prospect before him.

It was the pond that held and fascinated him—the 'composition' to be wrought out of that lifeless material, as a sculptor hews form out of marble. If he could realise the dream of fast-locked silence it evoked—the grave, the mausoleum of buried water! The surrounding woods and thickets offered enough contributory colour to suit his new-born purpose. For the foreground a blackened sluice, controlling some subterranean rivulet, stood up in effective position. A convenient log presented itself hard by. Derrick seated himself on it, and was quickly at work, oblivious of everything but his subject.

The short noon closed about him as he painted. He was eager only to forestall the approaching twilight. He may have been engaged for an hour, when a consciousness of some neighbouring presence seized him in a moment. Simultaneously with the thought, a low deep growl sounded in his ears, and he started and turned his head.

A man, holding a great hound in a leash, was standing close behind him—so close, that for the instant Derrick's heart leapt as in the shock of a betrayal. Then he laughed, lowered his block, and slewed round upon his seat.

"Hullo!" he said.

The man backed immediately, dragging the hound with him, and stood staring. He was a sullen-looking, thickset young fellow, in gaiters and corduroys—some sort of a Keeper in suggestion. His face was ruddy by nature, but impressed, so Derrick could have thought, with the yellow patches, like finger-marks, which betoken fear. He relieved his mood, whatever it was, by kicking the mastiff, which still grumbled ominously.

"I'm trespassing, I suppose," said the young man. "Does it matter?"

The Keeper passed the back of his hand across his mouth, and made, it would seem, some obvious effort at self-mastery.

"Aye, it does," he answered low, and immediately cursed the threatening beast, as if to regain control over his own voice. "Who may ye be, by your leave?" he said, looking up.

"An artist."

"And how came ye here?"

"By the lane from the sea."

"The lane?"

The man moved slightly, as if to consult the betraying footprints, and then returned to his former position, from which he looked down stupidly on his own approaching tracks, appearing to compare the two. He was so long, and apparently so dense over the business, that Derrick lost patience.

"There was nothing to mark it private, you know," he said.

"That's a lie. There was the gate."

"Rotten."

"So you seen it, anyhow. Belike you'd been before."

"No."

"That may be true or it mayn't. What's your name?"

Derrick told him, unperturbed. "I'm staying in the village—Wanborough," he added, "at the Dark Horse Inn. You can test my veracity, if you please."

The man shrugged his shoulders. Somehow the scared look had not left his eyes.

"What were ye sitting painting—here, of all places?" he demanded, hoarsely for all his effort.

"The place appealed to me," said Derrick with cool surprise. "You would know why, if you were an artist."

"If I——" the word seemed to stick in the man's throat.

"Come," said Derrick, rising. "The offence is no great one. If I've made a mistake it's soon put right by my going."

"Ah!" The man stirred on the instant, and blocked his way. "No, you don't. You'd best be warned, between me and the dog. Where you come you'll bide, bating Miss Bruna's leave."

Derrick paused, between dudgeon and astonishment. "O! shall I?" he said. "And who is Miss Bruna—your mistress?"

"Aye, she be," said the man doggedly—"and the mistress of 'Coldshot,' though you may come to question it."

"Question it? Why, in the devil's name? Is this 'Coldshot'?"

"Don't you know it is?"

Was the fellow crazed? "Well," said Derrick, with a grunt of resignation, "take me to your mistress, and I'll apologise in person."

The Keeper nodded grimly. "Go you before," he said, "and I'll follow."

"Which way? Towards the house, I suppose. Very well."

He set off, and the other shadowed him. There was no disputing a madman, and so accompanied, he thought. But the situation struck the young man as odd in the extreme. He could only conjecture that this forlorn-looking wilderness was the stronghold of some jealous eccentric, impoverished, or perhaps a miser. Such spirits were wont, traditionally, to be suspiciously resentful of intruders.

He tramped on, provoked yet queerly interested. There was something in the adventure, in the ghostly solitude of the place, in its remoteness and neglect, which touched his phantasmal nerve, and kept it agitated and expectant. As he approached the house, he found reason to qualify his first conviction as to its abandonment—but only to qualify, no more. That it was in some sort inhabited showed in at least one quarter, where there were blinds and curtains to the windows and other signs of occupancy. Yet for the most part the air of sad desertion which characterised the grounds dwelt and brooded hereover.

It was a fair large structure in itself, oblong in form and built of antique red brick. A stone coping with balusters and a shallow parapet ran the length of the roof; a double stairway, stained and green, descended from a doorway on the first floor to the disordered garden. It was with a little jerk of the pulses that Derrick suddenly perceived a couple of figures coming down these steps.

He did not hesitate, nevertheless, but walked straight on until he encountered the advancing pair, who were obviously crossing the garden to meet him. They stopped at the ridge of a low terrace, and he stood a foot or two beneath, looking up at them. One of the two was a woman—she might have been some three or four years older than himself; the other by his garb appeared a Catholic priest—a fat, genial-looking body, with a hint and perfume of snuff about his rounded habit. Derrick, prompt and decisive, raised his hat, and addressed the former:

"I have been caught trespassing—unwittingly, believe me. Pray accept my apologies, and at the same time my congratulations on your possession of a very efficient watchdog."

His voice faltered on its note of hardly concealed irony, as he stood, his face raised. The eyes, suddenly bent down to encounter his, had made an easy and imperious capture of him on the instant. Cold as grey agates, the lashes that rayed from them were nevertheless ink-black—a wonderful contrast. The woman was lithe and tall in figure; her face was of an even pallor, like cut ivory; passion and mere prettiness seemed blended in it—the mingling of the Latin with the Saxon. But there was something more—a sense of indescribable sorrow, of emotion fettered and imprisoned, which affected this man of abnormal sympathies like poignant music. He stood without another word, awaiting her response.

None followed; but, her eyes instantly travelling from him to the block he held exposed in his hand, she gave a quite perceptible start, and glanced, wide-lidded, at the Keeper.

"Aye," said the man, "an artist. He was sitting there, when I come upon him."

She seemed to breathe an inaudible word or two; and then her gaze, intense, haunting, re-sought the intruder. Suddenly she put out a hand. The action releasing the cloak she had clutched about her throat, its hood fell back, revealing a night of winged hair.

"Let me see," she said. "The pond?"

Derrick, thrilling throughout, placed the sketch in her hand. She stared at it, eagerly, hungrily, then made a motion towards the priest. He came and glanced over her shoulder, smiled, shrugged, and said something in a low voice. Then once more she fixed the artist with that strange concentrated look.

"You were sitting there?" she whispered. "Who are you?"

He was less taken aback, perhaps, than most men might have been under the circumstances.

"My name is Laurence Derrick," he said. "I am sorry to have offended; but I took the place to be deserted."

"Do you want to go?"

"Want!" His eyes might have expressed his astonishment. "I am putting up in the neighbourhood," he said, "at the 'Dark Horse.' I should be back there before nightfall."

"Go, then, if you will."

He was too amazed to answer; he bowed and turned.

"No, not that way again," she cried quickly.

The Keeper interposed. "Here, master," he said, "I'll show you out."

He motioned the intruder to follow him by way of a side path which, penetrating the thickets, brought them round to the front of the house, and thence, through darkling shrubberies, to the rusted gates of the estate and so into a lonely by-road.

"Follow that," he said surlily, "and ye'll make Wanborough."

"Good night," said Derrick. The man did not answer; and he went wondering on his way.

 

CHAPTER II
A WEIRD DISAPPEARANCE

Not many visitors favour Wanborough in the best of the season; in winter, but a wandering castaway or two. It is a salt, remote, wind-blown little place, one of the many, remnants of a once-swarming life, that dot at long intervals that stretch of eroded coast. Loneliness, quietude, grey antiquity are its settled features; it is dominated by one old, old church tower, ashen and lofty; and its lanes, its cliffs, its wastes of sand, are sown with ghostly secrets. In the houses there are noises at night, not to be accounted to rats or gusty chinmeys; in twilit rooms presences are felt, and the touch of soft cold fingers; in the deep troughs of the waves outside gleam shadows of ruins and sudden deriding eyes. The dead scream in stormy weather on the buried ramparts of the old towns for miles away. They lie where they fell when the sea caught and overwhelmed them, lapping up a principality in a night.

From the first Derrick had been fascinated by the place. Its haunted solitude had no fears for him. His soul could not, for its own ease, reach too far beyond the pale of the conventional vulgarities and the conventual securities. He felt freest in isolation—he was an unusual man. This atmosphere, barren to others, fruitful to his peculiar art, seemed to him full of strange potentialities, one of which had now been surely realised. In what other place known to his memory could he have alighted on so odd an adventure?

The thought of it dwelt with him continually. He was for ever standing in spirit and looking up into a pair of cold fathomless eyes, and pondering on their secret. What was it? He was to learn in a little. The knowledge was to come to him in the most commonplace way possible.

He was sitting that night in the bar-parlour of the 'Dark Horse,' a very old-time hostelry, whose eastern wall abutted on the churchyard, where the tower was and the dead. Amongst these last was numbered one Jonathan Ball, a wife-poisoner, who lay age-long buried in the shadows, a piece of cake in one hand, a poker in the other, symbolic of his crimes and of the destination they assured him. The frost lay hard and sparkling in the moonlight above his grave and the other stalagmite headstones. It was bitter cold outside, and Derrick, though commonly unsociable, could appreciate the contrastive comfort of an inn snuggery. He smoked, sipped at his glass, and from time to time addressed a word or two to the crinkle-faced landlord, who suggested nothing so much as a dried Norfolk biffin. Once he suddenly asked a question that had long hovered on his lips:

"Is there any story connected with the place called 'Coldshot'?"

The landlord stood at the moment half in and half out of the parlour door, and Derrick had supposed him to be alone, until his question evoked an answer, not from him, but from an unsuspected stranger who, it seemed now, had come briskly into the shadows of the tap beyond. This person put his head suddenly round and into the opening, and replied for the other:

"Yes, there is. Good evening to you, sir."

He looked an educated quidnunc of a fellow, and was in fact the bailiff or steward to some neighbouring estate. He had a sharp face, with restless lips and eyes, and a muffler about his throat; and his lean form was buttoned into a thick tight-waisted overcoat.

"O!" said Derrick. "Good evening. I wonder if I might hear it?"

"No objection in the world," said the stranger. His speech was dry and staccato; he put his hand over the counter, and, unbuttoning the bar door, walked in. "Ah!" he said; "it's like slipping into bed out of the cold. Been sketching, sir?"

Derrick was not aware of having seen the stranger before, but the stranger knew all about him. The young man nodded. "At the place itself," he answered; "but it seemed I was trespassing."

"Caught at it, eh? You got in through Haggart's Lane, I suppose."

"Where?"

"From down by the coast?"

"O, yes! I supposed the place, from its appearance, to be deserted."

"You would—" the stranger peered at him, quick and curious—"and it might as well be, for all the care she takes of it."

"Who's 'she'?"

"Miss Salvetti; Bruna her name is—queer name, isn't it? The place belongs to her, I suppose."

"Why do you suppose?"

"Ah! There's the story. She had a brother once—Lotto—queer name again—a boy of fourteen. He was the heir-at-law; but he disappeared."

"Disappeared? How?"

The stranger shut his lips like a trap. He reopened a corner of them to say, "Wish you could explain," and closed all tight again.

"Well, give me the chance," said Derrick. He glanced significantly from the well-conditioned stranger to his own glass and back again.

"Don't mind if I do," said the bailiff. "Rum, by your leave. Nothing for something's a bad principle."

"Join us, landlord," said Derrick, relieved, and in a minute fragrant harmony prevailed.

The stranger did not smoke; but he took snuff, and he rolled his liquor approvingly round in his mouth while he revolved his subject.

"Where were you caught?" he said at last.

"I was seated on a stump, sketching the pond."

"Ah! the very place!" He cogitated yet a little; then opened out, speaking in quick, abrupt sentences: "It was ten years ago, I should say, pretty well to a day. Those people had only been there a year or two—the girl, her mother and the boy. I don't know where they came from; but 'Coldshot' was the mother's property. She was Anglo-Irish; but the father, deceased, was Italian, as you might guess. The mother died, too, first year of their coming, and the orphans were left in possession. They weren't much liked in the neighbourhood—strange people, and papists at that. There was thought something uncanny about them; and devils of tempers the two had. They were left alone mostly; and there they lived. But I get to know things; and what I learnt of them was nothing to their discredit. Ever studied the wars of Italian independence—the late sixties and thereabouts?"

"Not much, I must confess," said Derrick.

"Ah!" said the stranger. "They happened inside my time, and I have a curiosity about most things. The end for the Pope came in '70, when the national troops entered Rome, and the foreigners and all marched out with the honours of war. But there had been a bit of a scrimmage first, and a few were accounted for on both sides. Grandfather Salvetti was one of them—a papal Zouave; and ever after his memory was revered in the family as that of a martyr. The girl, Bruna, though an after product, held it in the most passionate regard. She was a real fanatic—due to her convent-training, no doubt; and she never ceased to look for the time when Italy should return to its senses and its allegiance, as she considered it, and restore to the chair of Peter its temporal sovereignty. A queer obsession, eh—and in these times? But she stuck to it, and Lotto, her brother, was destined by her to his share in the glorious restitution. She dedicated him to the Vatican and its service—to be a soldier of God; and it was his refusal to be so disposed of that affected their mutual relations—that was responsible for some almighty rows between them, in fact. It was said she got to hate him; but I don't believe that."

The stranger paused, to roll another relished sip round his tongue.

"The boy was a queer uncanny creature," he went on, "rather an unholy gowk to look at, and an artist like yourself. He saw things and painted things, it was said, that no one else this side of reason ever imagined. But, whatever was his capacity, or want of it, the sister held the whole business in furious scorn. She wanted him to be a soldier, like his father and grandfather, and when he wouldn't she just made his life a burden. And at last it came to the final rumpus between them—and then something happened."

"Yes," said Derrick, impatient of the repeated parentheses.

"It was on an evening like this," said the narrator; "only the snow was thicker on the ground. The boy had gone down to that pond to sketch; and he was never seen again."

"Never seen?"

"That warn't all," put in the landlord shrewdly. "There were summut odder."

"You dry up, Coombes," said the bailiff sharply, "and leave me alone to tell my story." He touched Derrick's knee with long impressive fingers. "His footsteps, sir, were traced in the snow from the house to the stump on which he sat, and there they ceased. They neither branched off in any direction, nor did they return the way they had come. But a second track there was—the girl's. And her footsteps were traced from the house to the stump and back again."

He drew up his shoulders, took snuff, and challenged comment with a look.

"It had snowed," began Derrick; but the other stopped him:

"Here, but not there? No, sir, there was no snow after—none. There were the footsteps and there they ended. Bruna never denied her part. She admitted they had quarrelled; that, further maddened by his persistence in going to paint after the row, she had followed him in the twilight; that there had been a second furious scene between them, and that then she had left him and flung back to the house. She said all that to explain how she was no murderess."

"Good God!"

"Why, there had to be some sort of enquiry, of course; and naturally suspicion fell on her. But nothing was discovered, and to this day no trace of the boy has been found. He just went so far, and disappeared. There lay the track of his footsteps and hers as far as the stump, and beyond and around that just virgin snow—not a trace, not a sign of him anywhere. He had melted into the air, it seemed."

Derrick sat frowning awhile.

"She was seen to return to the house alone?" he asked presently.

"That was so," answered the stranger.

"And yet she was believed to have killed him?"

"The thing, you see, had to be accounted for somehow."

"How could she have disposed of the body by the way, and never betrayed a sign? "

"God knows. She didn't dispose of it, of course. There was no body to dispose of. The boy hadn't been murdered. He had vanished inscrutably before her arrival on the spot, and her story of an altercation between them was fiction. Assume all that, if you like. Does it make the mystery less inexplicable?"

"It is monstrous."

"What?"

"That she should have been allowed to suffer on such evidence under such an imputation."

"Well, you asked for a chance to explain; and there are the facts."

"Viewed through the mists and exaggerations of ten years, remember."

The stranger made a dry sound. "I accept the implication," he said, "on behalf of myself and fellow-asses."

"Surely you were not convinced of her guilt at the time?"

"I have stated the case plainly, sir. I am no believer in the supernatural. There was the testimony of the quarrel, of the tell-tale footprints, of the boy's disappearance. I don't pretend to go beyond them."

"And they are sufficient, in your opinion, to justify the social ostracism to which the unhappy woman has been condemned—for I take it that that is the true meaning of the strange household, of the banned and neglected estate."

"The 'unhappy woman,' bear in mind, stood to profit by the lad's decease. She became sole inheritress of the property. Yet one must admit she doesn't seem to have taken much advantage of her opportunity. She's nursing the place belike against her brother's return some day. Think what you please. In any case she had the temper to stand to her guns, and I admire her for it; but it's hardly to be supposed that the mystery tended to an improvement of her already bad relations with her neighbours. She was virtually proscribed, in fact, and she's lived apart and alone ever since."

"Alone?"

"There's Blackadder and his mother—a hard-listed couple who stuck to the girl throughout; and there's Father Appleyard—not much to recommend in any one of them."

"Not in the priest?"

"O! there's no harm in him—a sort of comfortable lay cleric, a family chaplain of the old order. He knows which side his bread's buttered, and he doesn't quarrel with it. They all hive together in a wing of the old house."

The stranger finished his rum, added a fortifying pinch of snuff, and rose.

"There's the story, sir," he said, "and resolve it if you can. We shall be curious hereabouts to have your explanation. In the meantime——"

"In the meantime," said Derrick, "you damn a poor soul by default. Why not start on the other assumption?"

"What assumption? "

"That she's innocent."

"Of course she is. Only, where's the boy?"

"Must a wrongfully accused man produce the real criminal in order to save his own neck? "

"Had to once, you know. Ever seen the 'Lyons Mail'? I don't say it's right; but Society's more conservative than the law, and every bit as irrational. Good night to you."

Derrick went to bed and to sleep, and hunted all night about the margin of a frozen pond, close by whose icy levels the waters of a blackened sluice, remote, deep-sunken, kept up a perpetual low thunder.

 

CHAPTER III
A SURPRISE INVITATION

{'{sc|His}} footsteps were traced from the house to the stump and there ceased '—hers went forth and back. There was the strange problem which was to haunt this strange man for many a day to come.

Why should it haunt him? What concern was it of his? An ancient story now, so put away, so staled under the dust of a whole decade, that anyone seeking to disinter and restore it to its once significance must needs start at a great disadvantage. Perhaps it was a natural predilection for old things, for their mellowness and their mystery, for the tone which past deeds no less than past materials acquire from long keeping, which was in some sort responsible for Laurence Derrick's feeling; his constitutional solitariness would certainly have assumed for itself no more than an abstract interest in the chief person of the drama. If for the moment she possessed his soul, it was because of her prominent place in the picture.

So he supposed; and what was the value of his supposition? Legend and fact have too often declined to distinguish the possession of an artist's soul by his subject from material passion. Pygmalion, no doubt, felt at first no more than an abstract interest in the figure he foresaw embedded in the ivory. It was when he began to shape substance out of the shadow that he began to realise that his model was his own transcendent desire. So Laurence unconsciously entertained the image that was to come to possess his soul with the passion of its loveliness.

Yet, at the outset, its beauty did not so much affect him as its mystery. Was this woman sinned against or sinning? He did not much care. The hot blood already kindled in him could have found equal satisfaction in either conclusion. He did not recognise his own mood, of course; it represented to him no more than the fascination of his imagination by a subject; but he was possessed by an odd determination to claim that subject as his right. The very sympathies of shyness and social ostracism—theirs in common, though for a different reason—appeared to justify him. And for this reason the comparative remoteness of the tragedy only the more thrilled his veins. It invited his intent into an atmosphere of privacy and mystery long secluded from the outer respectabilities.

Now, for some inexplicable reason he was so confident of this moral right of his to penetrate, and again penetrate the forbidden, that not only was he undisturbed by any qualms as to how to effect his purpose, but, the way to it being suddenly offered to him unasked, he accepted the concession with an air that implied that that concession was immaterial, though welcome as a formal courtesy. And yet the offer came to him in a surprising enough manner.

The day after his adventure opened with no abatement in the quiet rigour of the frost. Derrick, having breakfasted, was preparing himself for a day-long tramp over the snowy wastes, when a message was brought in that Father Appleyard begged a word with him at the door. Perhaps his heart was conscious of a momentary jerk and heat. They passed as instantly, and he went out leisurely to answer his visitor.

The priest, looming large in the mist in a great frieze overcoat, and with a round clerical hat of dark felt put back from his head like an extinguished halo, greeted the artist with an ineffable enlargement of the smile that was habitual to his round impassive face. His eyes were half-buried in jocund wrinkles, his nose was small, his little juicy mouth seemed to eject phrases, like cherry-stones, with a delicate relish. He put out a plump gloved hand, and touched Derrick on the arm.

"Pardon me," he said; "an artist? The artist?"

Derrick nodded. "We met yesterday," he said.

"Exactly," answered the stranger. His smile positively shone. "You are coming again?"

"My reception was hardly encouraging," said Derrick; "but, if this is an invitation, thank you, and yes."

"You will find excuses, I know," said the priest, "for the faithful stew-ard. You were interested in the place?"

"Very much so." For some reason the young man was not moved to expansion.

"You are already acquainted with it, perhaps?" suggested the other smoothly.

Derrick glanced at him, and marked with surprise an expression on his face which he would have read as one of sly innuendo.

"If I was," he replied, "it must have been in dreams alone."

Something impelled him to the answer; and, even as he made it, a startled sense of its truth, of his already unconscious recognition of its truth, passed through him. The place, now he came to analyse its impressions, had appeared vaguely, mystically familiar—an instance, no doubt, of that illusion commonly attributed to a lost beat in one of the twin brain hemispheres.

Father Appleyard, his eyes almost closed, tapped him again, and indulgently, on the arm.

"There are dreams, my de-ar," he said cryptically, "that constitute a tru-ar evidence than fact—your own artistic conceptions, for example. You observed the manner of your dismissal yesterday?"

"How could I fail to?"

"But misread it, doubtless. Was it not conditional on your own wishes? The lady would have been proud to have you stay—to come, to go, at your enti-ar convenience. I bring that message from her. Believe me that 'remote, unfriended, melancholy, slow' though we be, we are not, even in 'Coldshot,' so unenlightened as to be ignorant of the reputation of Mr. Laurence Derrick."

The young man bowed curtly. Compliment made him impatient and uncomfortable; for what had searching self-criticism, the only one that he valued, to do with flattering phrases? Yet there seemed to him here some significant relation between the idle blandishment and the message it adorned. For some mysterious reason it was designed to induce him to return; he felt the strong purpose behind the apparent casualness; and to what did he owe the unaccustomed grace?

He could not guess. It was all an unfathomable riddle. And yet the purpose pulled with his own, which was as incomprehensible and as equally compelling. He had intended to return, with or without leave, and he welcomed the invitation merely as a happy solution of a difficulty. A spirit of cool assurance in this matter had unaccountably mastered him.

"Then you know of his moods and eccentricities," he said unceremoniously, "and can comprehend something of the appeal that this sad wilderness of a place, with its haunted atmosphere, must have for them. Yet I must not respond to a permission so liberal, if given, perhaps, under a mistaken assumption. I am a stranger here, sir, but accident has made me acquainted with the story of 'Coldshot.'"

The fat priest quite closed his eyes, and nodded serenely once or twice.

"The admission," he said, "does you infinite credit, but without the least prejudice to our understanding. You are welcome to the run of the grounds."

"Then, in that case," said Derrick, "the sooner I revisit them the more profit to me."

"We will walk back together, by your leave," said Father Appleyard, "if your young impatience can accommodate itself to my slowness."

Derrick laughed slightly, and the pair set forth to cover the two or three waste miles which separated them from Haggart's Lane. They returned in the tracks of the heavy clerical footprints—a fact so suggestive in the light of a recent admission, that the artist could not refrain from an occasional conscious glance at his companion, who for his part would respond with as conscious a smile. Yet no word reminiscent of the tragedy was suffered to pass between them, and they talked, when they did, on indifferent subjects.

Derrick had no reason to suspect a studied subtlety in the good Father's attitude. If it had not been for that suspicion of a deep purpose underlying the courtesy, he would have judged the man frankly on his undisguised candour, would have believed him to be what he seemed, a complaisant, comfortable ecclesiastic, long mellowed in an easy and prosperous sinecure. Father Appleyard was quite open about his position—which he had held, it seemed, for some six years only; a significant fact—and about the Christian sympathies which had maintained him in it through much sorrow and misrepresentation. He went no nearer the tragedy than that; but he expatiated prettily on the errors of heresy, and on the passion of the Good Shepherd to recover strayed sheep to the fold. The subject bored Derrick after a time, and perhaps too palpably, for a silence had fallen between the two as they passed by the ruined gate, and entered into the frozen recesses of the woods beyond. Nor was it broken until they came out into view of the lonely mere and the stump where the artist had erstwhile sat. And there Derrick stopped.

"I have not exhausted the subject," he said. "I will remain here, by your leave."

The priest bowed. A strange look, or so Derrick thought it, had returned to his eyes.

"You are to please yourself, my de-ar," he said. "Orders have been given, and you need fe-ar no interruption."

He commented briefly on the suggestive melancholy of the scene, recommended the artist to peace and felicity, and, with one lingering odd scrutiny of him and of his surroundings, went off through the trees. Derrick sat down to work.

He worked long and absorbedly, losing himself, as was his wont, in his subject. Perhaps something of the mysterious tragedy associated with that white and brooding solitude may have affected his conception of things. He wrought again in colour, and in colour so weird and startling in its unusualness, that many might have convicted him of a deliberate desire to impress by wilful distortion and perversity. But he never conceived like other men. He saw what was unrevealed to most.

The mist, where it shrouded the sheeted ice and obscured the farther banks of trees, thinned after a time, letting through little splinters of gold and emerald. He caught and recorded the fairy change, but in a fashion all his own; and, as a thing of his own, he stood up presently to regard his work, placing the block against a stone. As he stooped and recovered himself, the sensitive mechanism of his nerves announced a neighbouring presence—something utterly motionless and silent. He turned and saw the woman.

She had come upon him unheard over the snow. A grey hood, as before, was clasped by one hand about her throat. Her eyes stared from its shadows like unearthly stones. But she was beautiful—he understood that now. The slender contours, the ivory complexion of her face had been moulded in the creative heat of passion. Derrick, with that strange feeling of mastery and possession still affecting him, walked straight up to the apparition.

"Would you care to examine my work?" he said. "It owes to you, you know."

Her eyes engrossed him. Their gaze still fixed on his, she just stirred, and her lips moved. He understood her to answer "yes."

"Come, then," he said, "and tell me how it affects you."

He moved, and she followed mechanically, walking like one in a dream. She seemed to stumble slightly as he stayed her at the requisite point of view.

"It stands down there," he said, "against the stone."

Then for the first time her gaze passed, with an obvious effort, from the artist to his work. She stared long at the latter, her breast rising and falling. Some strong emotion seemed repressed in her when presently she looked up; some inscrutable appeal seemed shadowed in her eyes.

"It is," she began in a low voice; then hesitated, and went on—"I think I understand: I am sure I understand—at last."

Strange enigmatic words; but meet to this strange adventure. Derrick was conscious of queer little thrills in his veins as he listened. There was a low music in her voice that impressed him like some old haunting. But he felt little faith, nevertheless, in her professed appreciation. He laughed slightly, and moved to recover his block.

"There," he said, "I mustn't tax your courtesy, or risk depriving myself in your eyes of a fair reason for my intrusion. It was rash of me to invite comment."

In the very act of stooping, it gave him a start of surprise to feel her hand upon his arm, quick, impulsive.

"No, no," she said hurriedly. "Leave it a little. It will come to me—I shall understand. How can you expect the teaching of genius to prevail all at once with lesser souls? But I can feel in myself the birth of the larger knowledge—I long for it—it is awake, only—O, have patience, please!"

She had backed from him again. There was distress in her eyes, in her voice. What mystery it all was; and she its most haunting protagonist—the dark angel of these white-locked deeps! But into that impersonal view was already sinking a seed of human emotion, that should presently germinate and absorb the soul of that it possessed.

"Look, then," said Derrick, his whole body suddenly flushing; "devour; absorb; it is part of myself—let it become part of you."

He spoke as if some brain intoxication had seized him on the instant. Her gaze passed to his face again, and dwelt there.

"I have learnt to learn," she said low. "Suffering has been my master. Will you come again?"

"Yes."

"Many times?"

"Yes. Day by day, until you dismiss me."

"I will be very quiet. I will not disturb you. May I come and watch?"

"If you will be true to your word—if you will keep aloof. I shall not know you are there when once I am at work."

He was the master, she the servant. With one low-spoken word of thanks—no more—she turned and left him.

 

CHAPTER IV
DREAMLAND

To the unnamed friend of an earlier chapter Derrick once came to deliver his soul in writing. The section of the narrative which follows is given in his own words. It suffices to say, without enlarging on the reason, that no misuse of confidence is entailed in their publication:

"And so began this strange episode. I was made free of the haunted estate; I became one of its grave and wandering familiars. Day after day I entered upon my silent task there, and for so many in succession that the weather changed and rechanged while I wrought—from frost to thaw, from cloud to sunshine and again to chill—and I was able to realise its solitude under innumerable aspects. The place was of no extravagant extent; but such as it was it was an epitome of all loneliness and isolation. Its voices were the voices of a primeval freedom; no act of man came to alarm their age-long security; the wild-fowl winged, the rabbits loped in unhurrying, half-inquisitive fashion from any chance disturbance. And between myself and this bewildered corner of nature grew such a charm of intimacy that I came to feel as if to withdraw myself from it would be like the tearing of a mandrake up by its roots.

"But it was the pond that most enthralled my imagination, and thereby I oftenest sat to sketch. Perhaps it was the ghostly associations of a particular spot that quickened my best inspirations. Anyhow it was to the familiar stump that I chiefly resorted; and thereon worked and dreamed—yes, dreamed.

"Many thoughts came to me meanwhile; many problems—first of all the problem of my welcome; but that was unanswerable. The riddle of the dead tragedy was most constant to my mind. Much I pondered it, and, unobtrusively, the nature of the ground about. The black sluice, when the thaw unlocked and the spring of swelling waters flushed it, gave no answer. It stood yards away from the spot where the footprints had ceased. In fresh weather a draught of salt air would flow up the valley, by which I had entered, from the sea, and, owing to some disposition of the ground, take a wide curve and blow across the pond. I wondered if such a draught, but of phenomenal proportions, had by chance caught up the boy and whirled him from his place on to the ice, through which he had crashed and sunk. It seemed a preposterous solution; but it was my only one; and the persistent course of the air-current gave it at least a colour.

"It was certainly the oddest situation imaginable, this of mine. I never went, was never invited, into the house; but my attendance without its precincts was regular.

"Now and then, but with a certain air of guilt, as if he were infringing regulations, Father Appleyard would come and stand by me awhile, and discuss theology in that rosy complaisant way of his with the affected intonation. He gave me the impression always of seeking to reclaim a strayed child through the easiest of platitudes; but he was alert all the while, and on the least hint of discovery would vanish with a speed incommensurate with his bulk.

"Once or twice, but at a distance, I saw the Keeper Blackadder and his dog; and, on a single occasion, a hard-featured woman with him whom I took to be his mother. The two were conning me furtively from cover; but they ventured no nearer, and never once was I approached by either. Truly the oddest situation, was it not?

"And now, my friend, like the suitor who discusses commonplaces, circling ever nearer and nearer the poignant essay, I poise and strike.

"She kept to her word—but what profit was that to me! Though my soul were rapt in its creations, though my hand moved mechanically to give them shape, I felt, and always felt, her presence the moment it was there. However light her footfall, however stealing her approach, the instant was recorded in every nerve of my being, and thenceforth I wrought consciously and haltingly. I had utterly misjudged my strength when I gave her leave to watch; the thing could not go on, it was impossible. What predestination, I thought, was in this sympathy; what threat, what demoralisation?

"And one day, moved beyond endurance, almost to despair, I leaped from my seat and turned upon her.

"'You are usurping my rights,' I cried. 'I will be master here or nothing!'

"She stood away a little; her face was quite white; her hand went to her bosom.

"'You are master!' she whispered; 'I know it.'

"Her beauty took me with a sudden shock. I caught my breath like one who realises for the first time the presence of an apparition. Then I laughed and threw down my brushes.

"'Artists,' I cried, 'are unmannerly reptiles—I bite the hand that warmed me. It is my nature; I have no other excuse. But for the future you must not be silent. I would rather hear the words from your mouth than lose my soul in its converse with yours. Do you understand?'

"'I have been very blind,' she said.

"'Then,' I answered, 'come with me, and perhaps I will open your eyes. Let us walk together, and I will teach you all I know by precept rather than example."

"And so began our real intimacy. It was an intimacy of woods and skies, of wildernesses and secret places. This woman, once eased of her shyness, impressed me as a vivid personality, imbued with a strong native force of character which circumstances had humbled and time subdued. Often I fancied that she had to exercise great self-control in the subordinating of her views, especially her religious views, to another's; but the conquest invariably came, and in a manner touching to one who could understand. She deferred against her beliefs; in general I seemed to construe in her a pathetic invitation to confidences I could not fathom, a wistful implication of apology, of entreaty for forgiveness, as if she were indirectly seeking to atone for some earlier misconception as to my personal art and its aims and significances.

"Why need I continue, to you who know the truth? This woman, I called her—love forgive me! What formal phrases, what cold analysis, to disguise the passion which had swept riotously into my soul—it seemed to me all in a moment. O ... there is something indescribably moving in the moral and physical submission of a woman to a man younger than herself. Bruna was my senior by some four years, and my comparative immaturity lusted for that riper fruit.

"I thought I had reason to believe that it need not lust in vain; but ever and ever I postponed the lovely proof. I guarded even against hinting at my own feelings; I was wilful and despotic. How Destiny sought to fool me through my own masquerading, which served no more than, by prolonging my self- confidence, to double-edge the blow when it fell! I told myself, strong in my assurance, that I must learn the truth as to her innocence or guilt, and from her lips, before I spoke. The knowledge of it was not to influence the fact of my passion, but only its character; yet the first overtures for a complete understanding must come from her. She could not in reason—though the subject had never been touched upon between us—suppose me ignorant of the scandal which had made of her locally an outcast.

"And so, like a tyrant, I bided the ecstatic moment, foretasting it a thousand times in thought. Guilty or guiltless, this woman existed body and soul for me. I was already drunk with the transport of her possession. When I put out my hand she would come."

 

CHAPTER V
THE THUNDERBOLT

One day Derrick made a little water-colour sketch of Father Appleyard. It was the oddest thing, full of subtle modelling and strength, but seen by him as no other man would have seen it. In this picture the good Father's roses became tawny petals, and his lips and cheeks pale green. He might have been some jolly Triton of the Mere, and he looked dismayed on his own presentment.

"Is this really how you see me, my de-ar?" he asked.

Derrick laughed. He had been early inured to the mockery of the Philistine, had had to run his full gauntlet of everyday criticism before the irresistible force of his imagination had wholly captured his public, and this essay in a new medium had merely, he concluded, brought the battle upon him again. He would prevail, no doubt, as he had already prevailed in another field, and in the meantime any untutored criticism was instructive.

"Does it look so strange to you?" he said. "Well, I suppose no two men's visions are alike."

The priest, absorbed in contemplation, did not answer him for a little.

"No," he said at last. "No. This vision, at least, must be wholly singu-lar. I have only, in my experience, encountared one other example of it."

"Then it isn't singular," said Derrick. "What other example?"

Father Appleyard looked at him queerly. Once more there was that suggestion in his expression of a sly innuendo.

"If you don't know, I don't," he answered, with an odd chuckle. "Is it finished? "

"As far as I propose to go."

"Then may I show it to Miss Salvetti?"

"Why not?"

"You invited it, did you not? My daughtar cannot accuse me of intruding upon your privacy unasked."

"You can assure her as to that."

The chaplain, securing the sketch delicately, nodded and walked away.

Derrick, left alone, sat down again, but not to work. The air was very still, with a moist exhausted quality in it that seemed enervating. But he was not one to succumb to climatic changes; his listlessness was due to a moral paralysis which appeared to stultify all further artistic effort in him. It had been creeping about his nerves for days; he had proposed the portrait, indeed, as a desperate means of escape from its insidiousness; and now, it seemed, it could no longer be ignored. How was he going to force the crisis? that was the insistent problem that had risen to haunt him.

He had said to himself that she should be the first to speak; and yet she showed no sign. She was sweet, humble, deprecating to him as ever; she treated him as the master and tyrant of her destiny; but still their dear converse remained impersonal. No word of passion had been spoken between them; for all her lovely lowliness she seemed obstinately bent on denying him the invitation his heart so gluttonously craved. She would not let him into her past, however blissful she made the present for him, and he wanted that past for his own, with all its potentialities for emotion. How was he to capture it, to bring it to a voluntary surrender? The days were flying, this life could not go on for ever.

And even as he pondered, between tenacity and irresolution, he saw her form among the trees. She was waiting there, dutifully, on his will, and his will rose and acknowledged its slave, fiercely, exultantly.

Then he noticed for the first time a strange emotion in her face. It was like the dawn of some coming revelation; it affected him like the promise of rain and flowers in springtime; his soul rose in him to meet and answer to it. There was an early bird singing in the still copses. In a hush of rapture he stopped her to listen to it.

"It speaks what I cannot explain to you," he said presently.

"Will you try to?" she answered, hardly above her breath.

"This antiquity," he said, "this meeting in its midst. It has all happened before; but when, when? It cannot have been, I know; and yet it was. I felt it the first day I entered—that it was all somehow known to me and very dear."

She put a sudden hand upon his arm; she was looking at him with wide-opened questioning eyes; her bosom rose and fell in quick-drawn spasms.

"No dream," she whispered. "Believe it, whatever strange shadow may have fallen between your present and its memories. I have seen the portrait you painted to-day—yes, I have seen it. Will you come with me?—I want to show you something—something very particular and secret. It may remind you; it——"

She was agitated all at once. An intense entreaty spoke in her every word and movement. "You will come with me, will you not?" she repeated, with a little half-uttered sob.

"Yes," he muttered, all amazed. "I will come."

He stumbled. His heart was throbbing fire, his brain reeled and danced. She gripped his hand in her hot wet palm and led him on—out of the wood, towards the house. It stood large in the grey mist, a silent shrouded phantom. A feeling of the unreality of all things stole into Derrick's being; he seemed to mount on air. Then came vacancy and shadow.

They were in the house, and alone. No sound or sign of other human being reached them from anywhere.

"We are alone," she whispered. "Not many are needed to take care of this little corner in which I live; and those few are absent. I sent them away that we two might be together. But you shall see. I have kept it all unchanged—shut away but unchanged, and you are the master of it."

There was a thrill of feverish triumph in her voice. "Come with me, come," she said, "and I will show you."

He had no vision for his surroundings; he knew only that he was following her up a dusky stairway, that thick pulse still hammering in his heart and brain, and that suddenly they were in a little white bedroom—her own. There were soft curtains there and flowers and fragrance. The sweet atmosphere stole into his senses and intoxicated them; his blood raced in his veins and half blinded his sight. He saw her dimly—she was down on her knees by an opened drawer—and the madness in him was moving to leap and claim her thus, when she rose to her feet. Her eyes were strangely shining; she held a square of paper in her hand: "Look," she said, in a voice that was scarcely audible.

He took the thing from her: it was a portrait of her younger self in water-colour, very singular, very clever, showing much in common with his own method of work, yet as wholly individual. He looked up from the image to the original.

"Does it not recall," she began—and seemed to stop perforce from the beating of her heart.

"It is an inspiration," he said, "as instinct with life and truth as most portraits, unaccountably to me, miss them."

"But——"

He laid the sketch softly on the table: "But," he echoed her, "what is this to do with the dream that was to find here its fulfilment?"

She was dumb all in a moment. The dawn of some mortal fear, as yet but in its inception, was slowly chilling her gaze as it encountered his. His ardour seemed to be burning hers to ashes, which spread white on her cheeks. A silence like death had fallen between them. Suddenly, and in an instant, she cried out. It was the uncontrollable shriek of the soft thing that brings the crouching beast upon her. She writhed one moment in Derrick's arms, then ceased to struggle.

"No, no," she said hoarsely, "I did not mean it; no more did you. Could any hand but one have painted those two portraits, mine and the priest's? There are things in them—it is impossible not to believe it—you are only pretending—only punishing me. Say it, say it. I have suffered; I have learnt; be merciful with me in your triumph."

He felt the entreaty, enigmatic as it was, like fresh fire. His clasp hardened about her.

"Riddles," he said. "Whoever painted this portrait of you, it was not I. But what does that matter? It is the original I claim for my own—her past, her present, her future. The two last I hold in trust; the first still waits to be mine. I want your past—do you understand? I want your past, Bruna, that we may be wholly one in passion and sympathy."

And, even as he spoke, looking into those horror-stricken eyes, the truth, supreme and amazing, burst upon him like a thunderclap. The uncouth boy, with his odd and uncanny art that no one, his sister least of all, had been able to comprehend; the vanishing; the unbroken silence of the ensuing interval! A hundred little disregarded clues were gathered all at once into his hand; a hundred little cryptic utterances became clear in the flash of that revelation. He felt stunned, as in a lightning shock. Very slowly his grasp relaxed, like that of a drowning man, and he let his pale burden slip from him upon the bed. Then he stood back, his arms crossed, his brow bent in a mocking and dreary frown.

"Tell me," he said, still incredulous, "who painted that portrait of you."

"My brother Lotto," she answered.

He gave a little sighing laugh.

"And you took me—all this time you have taken me—for that portrait's painter?"

She crouched away from him on the little white bed. Her eyes were full of horror and resentment—yes, resentment. That cut him to the soul.

"You must go away," she said. "Cannot you understand? If you are not Lotto, you must go away."

"I shall not go," he answered sternly, "until you have explained—until you have expiated, maybe. You have brought this upon yourself; you have fooled me quite wantonly and unjustifiably. How are you going to atone?"

She was silent, hiding her face from him.

"I know now," he went on, "that you were suspected cruelly and unjustly; but, guilty or innocent, my passion had been prepared to accept you, my whole being to mingle its essence with yours. Do you understand the irredeemable thing you have done—to have diverted the blood of my life into your own veins, and now to have severed us apart and disowned me? What right had you ever to think me other than I called myself?"

She answered, half turning her head. There were tears and rebellion in her voice at once: "Why did you imply you were master here?"

"Because you implied it."

"You spoke of an old-felt familiarity with the place."

"Such fancies often come to us—to me, at least."

"How was I to know? And besides, there were many things—your way of painting——"

"You knew my name, by your own admission."

"Your name—yes—but, ten years ago! and I thought, if he had wanted to conceal himself, the disguise was only natural! It was just so he had worked—like you. My heart seemed to stop when first I saw the similarity. And then the place—there by the pond—and your age—your appearance even! I thought he had come back; that he had forgiven me; that all would be explained at last, and that my long bitter punishment for a pride so soon repented must be near its end. And when you did not seem to understand, I thought perhaps that memory had really died in you, as it will in some, that you had returned to the dreadful spot by a sort of instinct, and that perhaps the portrait would somehow restore to you the broken thread of things. Lotto was always so strange, so unlike other people, and I had never ceased to hope that some day, by his unlikeness, I should be able to trace him and learn the truth. And to me—to all of us—it seemed that you must be he come back at last—the very spot; the strange way of seeing things; and, in the end, the portrait. I never doubted after that."

He stood listening to her gasping, broken utterances. He understood everything now; yet, through all his bitter disillusionment, a wonder over that quality in his own work which seemed to strike others as so markedly singular that even the uninitiated could not mistake it made itself felt. Well, whatever it was, it had served him here to tragic purpose.

"Look at me," he said; but she kept her head averted.

"Look at me," he said again. "What, are you afraid to face your victim?"

Half-blind, shading her eyes with her hand as she crouched, she obeyed trembling.

"What is all this explanation to me!" he said. "I made no pretence; I never masqueraded. Give me back myself." She did not answer. "Does it concern me for you," he said, "that you have stolen my soul under a misapprehension. I want it back. Give it me." Still she did not speak. "It is a dire responsibility," he continued, "that you have incurred. The debt I have owed and constantly paid to my art—will you undertake it for me? Or will you give me yourself in atonement?"

"No, no," she whispered. "You are not Lotto. You must go away."

"I could say, I will not leave you for the very reason that I am not Lotto. He had no rights like mine. Do you dare to rob me of my soul, of my art that is my soul, and refuse me all restitution? You dare because, with the ineffable meanness of your sex, you know that you can trust to my honour as a gentleman not to enforce a return. But no such scruples need stand in the way of my cursing you for what you have done."

She sat upright; she was white to the lips.

"You will not!" she said. "Have mercy. You can have me if you will."

He dwelt one moment on her ashen face.

"No," he said; "I refuse you;" and he turned and left the room and the house.

 

CHAPTER VI
MISS DOLLY PATTERSON

Miss Dolly Patterson was a very pretty, large-eyed, kissable-mouthed slip of a girl—one of the kind of whom the variety stage seems able to produce an endless supply. She was reasonably educated, naturally tasteful and affectionate; she satisfied the smaller aesthetics in a man, and her present distinction lay in her being engaged to be married to the famous but retiring young artist, Mr. Laurence Derrick. She had had other distinctions in her short time; her face had blossomed out of more than one academic canvas, had smiled in the pages of popular weeklies, had figured on postcards. She had only needed a voice, indeed, to make her completely irresistible; but there unfortunately she was wanting—in everything but the tact to conceal her deficiency. So long as she did not uplift her tones she was more than endurable.

Laurence had already known the girl as a professional model, and had now re-alighted on her at a psychologic moment. Her softness, her prettiness, her irreproachable ordinariness in fact, had appealed like balm to his exacerbated emotions, and he had straightway fluttered and flattered her by an impulsive proposal. Offended pride had its part, no doubt, in the impossible contract; but the hunger newly created in his being was principally responsible for it. Passion is a prolific weed when once sown in virgin soil, and, though it may never flower, assumes thenceforth and for ever the biologic cast. The hopeless necessity of the feminine had intruded itself into Laurence's philosophy.

It was a tempered philosophy nevertheless—as yet, at least. It sought to borrow in a normal courtship no more than a sense of rest from recent storms. There was no temptation here to the unconventional or the tragic. He was famous, well-to-do, and quite persuasive of tongue where he chose to be, and he might easily have made of the affair either or both. But it really was not worth the while. The commonplace remains always its own best protector; it becomes so unspeakably vulgar in intrigue. Dolly, indeed, was wholly safe in her gentleman lover's keeping. To cultivate her nymph-like prettiness like a flower was his easy interest. He hardly thought of her but in the abstract, as one thinks in midwinter or the dog-days of the time of daffodils and primroses. He wore her gratefully in his buttonhole, and her small cool fragrance never reached his inner senses. Those he had shut angrily away; he congratulated himself mockingly on his present bondage as a positive relief from the heroic strain; and, as to the future, he ignored it. For the rest, his engagement had excited only a minimum of interest in the outer world. Solitary, uncommunicative, unsocial, he followed no schools and belonged to no cliques. He was always a law unto himself, and he still persisted in ordering his life entirely after his own pleasure and convenience. He had not foreseen, of course, love's novice as he was, the small exactions and tyrannies to which his surrender to the feminine would subject him.

These were perfectly reasonable, nevertheless. Dolly was already something of a popular favourite, she had scored a triumph in her engagement, and she mutinied against the constraint which would have deprived her of the glittering fruits of it. She wanted all the world to know of her selection by so distinguished a lover; the compliment gave her caste, and—though she would never have confessed to or even recognised this sentiment—publicity seemed to assure her a sort of protection against something that was dark and inexplicable in that lover himself. Derrick often puzzled, and sometimes frightened, his little butterfly model. Naturally. The contract was an utterly ludicrous one, and he had no right whatever to propose it.

He had enjoyed the petting, the coquetry, the fragrance at first; he had not tired of them yet; but his subconsciousness already uneasily foreshadowed a time when, a certain labour to which they had won him being accomplished, their appeal might appear to have served its purpose, and those drained and flaccid blossoms might display no longer the power to charm him. In this task—one to which he had been coaxed only after considerable pressure—had consisted, perhaps, his faith's temporary support. Would his faith and the task end together? He was painting Dolly's portrait, in short.

The concession had been made against his own inclination, and with some natural concern for his reputation, to appealing blue eyes and seductive lips. Some Art Society was organising a portrait show of beautiful women on a distinguished scale, and Miss Dolly would give her little boots to figure therein—a vanity quite harmless, since its purpose was to exalt her lover, she told him. And after a while, with a laugh of resignation he had consented; and now in this early autumn of the year the portrait was nearly finished.

Dolly had not been allowed to see it—not once. That had been made an inflexible condition of the agreement. She came and she sat in her professional off-hours, but of what was going on on the positive side of the canvas she was wholly and deliciously ignorant. She dreamed of bewitching things, of course; she had just sufficient imagination to 'visualize' a long room, and a rapt group of visitors concentrated about a particular point on its walls. Love and Genius in combination must surely be producing something to justify such a vision, and she indulged it to its full. She was going to be made famous as she had never been yet—as a lady as well as a beauty, the chosen of an inspired gentleman- artist.

Derrick knew nothing about the girl's relations; never troubled himself with a thought of them; just dreamed and drifted. But, in deference to imaginary respectabilities, he always insisted upon Dolly's being accompanied during the sittings by an adoring professional friend, Miss Vickers. His house and studio were near Queen Anne's Gate—an antique quiet locality, and remote for all its environment—and there he buried himself and was mostly to be found if wanted. And there one afternoon he laid down his brushes and breathed Amen to his task.

Dolly jumped up, and Miss Vickers gave a half-hysteric giggle.

"Finished?" cried the former, "really and truly at last?"

Derrick wheeled the easel, promptly, with its face to the wall.

"Just one more brush over to-morrow morning," he said, "and in the afternoon you shall see it."

Dolly's mouth fell.

"I can't come to-morrow, Laurence," she said.

"Then the next day."

"Won't you show it me now? I have been very good, haven't I?"

"You will have to be gooder. You know that what I say, I say."

He looked at the rebellious pouting face. Had some change really overtaken it with the completion of his labours? Certainly it looked fretful over the disappointment, but was that wholly enough to account for the change?

"You look funny, child," he said, with a little odd laugh. "What has happened to all your artless prettiness and sweetness? I wonder if I have worked the soul of them into my picture, and left only the ugly bones and ribs of temper behind? "

"I wonder," she said, then turned on him—Miss Vickers was helping her on with her jacket—and stamped her little foot. "I wish you wouldn't say such things. If you won't let me see it, you needn't take a pleasure in frightening me."

"I was only trying to account for the alteration. You can easily put me in the wrong by smiling."

But Dolly could not smile. Her plumes were ruffled. She was often doubtful in her small heart of her capacity for understanding, and assimilating her own nature to this strange mysterious spirit whom her young beauty had captivated. And irony, however playful, is always alarming to little minds. She got into her things, and departed with the briefest of adieux.

"Poor little elf," said Derrick to himself, when she was gone. "There will be a note from her to-night, all ill-spelt penitence and supplication."

In the dulling light he wheeled the easel round again from the wall, and looked long and intently into the painted face. Had there been after all some fantastic truth in his mockery? It seemed to him suddenly that all that there was of spiritual beauty and significance in Dolly's aspect he had stolen and adapted here to an ideal impossible of association with the little pretty empty-headed creature. Like the lyrical rhapsodists of past days he had borrowed from Nature rose-petals, and violets, and scraps of coral and crystal, in order to materialise an inexpressible figure of his own imagination. And whence he had ravished were there only flowerless stalks remaining? Poor Dolly, to be so abused!

He wondered if it were really so; if, after all, this were not Dolly Patterson, but something as infinitely remote from her, though dressed in her roses and moulded to her girlish grace, as his own soul. To him the thing was beautiful in a haunting way; he worshipped, impersonally, his own creation, he was proud of his success; but was it Dolly? For the first time he rather wished for an outside opinion, since no other than himself had as yet seen the portrait. It was always his odd way to keep his studio shut to friends and foes alike.

And then his thoughts swerved, as they often would swerve against his will, to a past poignant experience. He had never again, from that day, more than half a year ago, until now, experimented in colour—its use was too directly associated with a grievous memory. It was Dolly, with her little persistent coaxing vanities, who had induced him to break his resolve, and this picture, the first of its kind he had ever attempted, was fair fruit of the concession. Was it destined to prove that his art, as he had once declared in his wrath, had been consigned with his soul to another's keeping? Passion's hyperbole: he was angered to recall it; but the memory necessarily entailed another. Would there still be evident in his painted work those qualities which had before appeared so singularly patent to the initiated and the uninitiated alike? He marvelled what those qualities were. For himself he could form no conception. They must represent something altogether apart from any individuality that his black and white productions might exhibit, since, to the vulgar, those productions were hardly to be differentiated from any other man's. But what were the mysterious qualities? Spiritualised, idealised, though it might be, this face before him was yet, in its material aspects, the face of an ordinary woman, rendered as it would be natural to him to render any other human face.

In a little he abandoned the problem, and lost himself in darker reflections.

But so Destiny ordered things that, happening that same night to chance, when in a very restless and dissatisfied frame of mind, upon a hall where one of a series of popular discourses on science was in the act of being delivered, Laurence Derrick was moved, by some impulse towards self-forgetfulness, to enter the place and take a seat, having done which he was incontinently caught spell-bound by the subject which the lecturer was at that moment in process of introducing. The very first words the newcomer heard uttered riveted his attention.

 

CHAPTER VII
THE LECTURE

"The difficulty," the lecturer was saying, "in identifying cases of colour-blindness consists primarily in the difficulty of convincing its victims that they are mistaken in anything but the accepted classification of terms. They are disposed to imagine that an incomprehensible fuss is made about certain distinctions of tone, which distinctions are to them so nearly imperceptible as to deserve no more than the faintest shadow of a title to the name. Thus, to the colour-blind person many shades of dark blue, dark red, dark green and brown are to be grouped indiscriminately among the blacks. The pure blues and pure yellows they see as we see them; it is the reds, and the combinations of colour into which the reds enter, to which they appear wholly insensible, or insensitive. The reason, though not the explanation, of this shortcoming is readily demonstrable by way of the prism. Let us seek it there.

"Now we know that of the rays proceeding from the sun, some produce heat, some light, and some a peculiar chemical action as demonstrated in photography. Of all, about a fifth part is lost in absorption by the atmosphere—or we believe that it is so lost. It is possible that here and there one of us might, if he could realise his own distinction, tell a different tale. There are always among us examples of what we should call abnormality—natures, that is to say, which in one way or the other do not seem to conform to the prescriptive rule of things. We can refer the strangeness of such, if we like, to their chance unconscious appreciation of, and sensitiveness to, the supposed lost solar rays. They may see things which we cannot see, have a sixth sense which we do not possess—or perhaps be deficient in one which we do possess. It is impossible to test the truth, since, all life being a compromise with terms, we can each of us have no true idea of the value which any other of us attaches to terms. We can only, for general purposes, measure our fellow-beings by our individual standard, and judge their visions and sensations by our own. You and I may use the same term to signify a very differing impression, and to the end of time never suspect, or find it possible to suspect, the fact. Language, it is said, obscures the truth: perhaps we were encouraged in it for that very purpose, that we might of ourselves weave before the jealous face of the unknown that veil whose texture only thickens the more words we make about it. Certainly much talk has not made God clearer to us; certainly some dumb animals see what we cannot see. It is conceivable, at least, that a little supernatural insight might yield some startling results to most of us. Do I see you, for instance, as my neighbour sees you, or again, as you see yourself in the glass? It is impossible to tell, and the speculation is an idle one; but there it is.

"In one direction, however, science, though at a late day, has been able to penetrate the compromise, and to adjust the balance of terms between differing conceptions. We know at length the pathology, so to speak, of colour-blindness, and its bearing upon the solar light rays. It is a very simple matter, and easy of exposition. Here it is:

"A ray or pencil of white light, as transmitted from the sun, is found, on its decomposition through a prism, to have consisted of an admixture of coloured components, themselves only more or less pure in the primitive sense. Now the primitive, or primary, colours, are, according to the accepted formula, red, yellow and blue, which, being mixed in the relative proportions of three, five and eight, represent white or solar light. Pass this ray of light, now, through a crystal prism—that is to say a transparent medium of a greater density than the atmosphere—and it will be seen to fray, like the fringed edge of a woven fabric, into its constituent parts, each of which parts has, however seemingly accidental its position and juxtaposition, its inflexible relation to the common design. Thus, the disintegrated ray, being interrupted, after its passage through the glass, by a screen, will be found to exhibit that invariable order of hues which constitutes the solar spectrum, or rainbow, the sequence of which descends from the red or uppermost edge, by way of orange, yellow, green, blue, and indigo, to the lowest, which is violet.

"So far, so plain. But, now, how are we to account for the fact that this violet, which should consist of an admixture of the blue with the red, figures at a point remotest from the latter? The explanation lies in one of our compromises. There are, in fact, no actually pure or primitive colours in the spectrum, and for this reason. The ray has not been wholly, but only partly decomposed in its passage through the prism, and there remains a residuum of both white and coloured light which affects every part of the spectrum. In that the three primary colours will still most vividly assert themselves; yet it will be understood that at their best they are all faintly diluted; while the secondary and tertiary colours are either combinations of the primary with one another or combinations with combinations.

"Very well. Now, from the three primary colours subtract one, and consider the result so far as human vision is concerned. Its absence must influence all the rest, must it not—and not only in the direct admixtures but in the compound admixtures. Robbed of the very essence of its trinity in unity, the spectrum becomes an indeterminate affair, lacking, so to speak, its hypostatic union. And that is exactly what it does lack to the colour-blind person.

"I have intimated already that it is the red rays to which this person is insensitive; and that is invariably the case. Other undiscovered instances there may possibly be of a blindness to blue or yellow; investigation has so far not revealed any. It is an incapacity for distinguishing the red rays which marks the colour-blind subject as we know him. Their place is taken for him by a neutral tint, which may be described as a visible nothingness. Consider what the lack, in all its bearings, must signify to a person so constituted; and yet he is unconscious of his want. Owing to that aforesaid compromise with terms, he has learnt to adapt his understanding to the accepted classification of tones and colours, while secretly in his heart, perhaps, marvelling over the minute, hardly discernible differentiation; but he does not know that anyone else sees other than himself. Yet what, according to our vision, must the world mean to him, what a melancholy wan affair—of soft cool half-tones at its best, perhaps, but bloodless, and always smeared and stained with brown, like the streaks of decomposed sunset in a Japanese print. Still, his vision may have compensations unknown to the rest of us. Let us fervently hope that such is the case."

The lecturer then went on to discuss notable instances of people afflicted with the blindness, and the means and accidents which had led to an analysis of their cases. The matter was absorbing, and was developed at much greater length than any epitome of it could here satisfy. One particular case out of many impressed itself singularly on Derrick's mind: it was that of a lad who, on being shown a portrait face in which the lips and cheeks had been intentionally painted green and the rest of the flesh brown, had discovered nothing out of the common in the representation beyond the evident heat of its subject, who, he remarked, had obviously walked himself into a rare glow before he sat.

Derrick laughed, with the rest of the audience, over the instance, accepting, as each did, his own sense of its ludicrousness as evidencing his personal normality. But later, on his way home, he stopped suddenly, as if in the shock of some stupendous revelation, and stood a moment staring before him and gnawing his forefinger.

That 'Compromise with terms.' The possible 'compensation' to one so afflicted. 'They may see things which we cannot see.' The strange qualities in his own painted art, so plain to others, so indecipherable by himself!

Did he see visions? He had sometimes wondered over the inexplicable blindness of chance associates to effects manifest enough to him; he had always on such occasions attributed it to a sort of robust Philistinism—an insular shyness of the poetic and the emotional. But supposing they had really failed to see what he saw—had lacked the essential faculty? Did it follow in that case that he was colour-blind?

For an instant he positively staggered; then he pulled himself together and went on his way. It was absurd, impossible! He knew what red was; he knew what a sunset was; he had never found much difficulty in differentiating between tints and tones however delicately anaemic. It was preposterous to suppose that he did not see the world as it was and people as they were to the common view. He had never dreamed of such an amazing condition in himself. Nor could it be there; he must have discovered the truth before now.

He uttered a sigh of incredulous, trembling derision as he opened his door and turned into his own dark house. His footsteps instinctively made for the studio—for the portrait. And then he stopped and set his teeth.

"No," he thought, "I will not look at it again until she does. Dolly shall decide the question for me."

 

CHAPTER VIII
PENDING THE VERDICT

During the whole of the following day Derrick moved and felt like an accused man, who, remanded and released on bail, tries to gather from that concession a sense of hope and reassurance, and is yet, while assuming an air of nonchalance, conscious all the time of a sick underlying apprehension. Perpetually he told himself, as the other might have done, that his sentence, even at the worst, would not be morally a capital one; that he could survive its shock; that his constitution would not even be materially affected by it. Where would it leave him? Why, exactly where he was now, with the sole difference that others would have learned of a defect in him of which he himself would still exist unaware. Was that any great matter? His was always an independent self-sufficient nature; he was wont to go his own way, giving little heed to criticism and comment; such as he was, normal or abnormal, he had made his name, and could continue, on the same lines, to add to it. What difference would it make to him if he were proved colour-blind?

So he would argue, and brighten, and think he had dismissed the subject; so might the bailed one have cocked his hat and strutted. Yet regularly the hot mood would be succeeded by the cold one, and the depression and the apprehensions would all have to be fought with again.

What did it matter to him, then, when the truth was faced? Why, surely this: that, if so convicted of such an affliction, he, an artist to the depths of his being, would know himself for the first time defrauded of his full birthright of beauty; would for ever be straining his soul to attain the light which to all others was a simple condition of their existence. Ignorance is only blissful so long as it is unconscious of its own limitations; but here would be a limitation which, did it exist, must be accepted as final. He had understood so much from the lecturer. The thing was incurable.

And so, all of a sudden, he would recall "Clever Alice," and her lamentations over the axe stuck into the ceiling of the beer-cellar, "O, if I marry Hans, and we have a child, and he grows up, and we send him into the cellar to draw beer, the hatchet may fall upon his head and kill him!" May—may! He had not been proved colour-blind yet. He had allowed himself to imagine a most preposterous bogey out of a turnip and a candle. His fears for the time being were dissolved in gigantic laughter.

Still, he was restless and purposeless. He wished to-morrow and Dolly were come. He could not bring himself to believe in the incredible thing, and yet all day its shadow pursued and worried him. There was some imperial function in process, and the streets were full of soldiers, National and Colonial. The sight, while it lasted, distracted his thoughts and helped him to forget himself. At evening he turned into a theatre, and, burying himself in a dusk corner, watched his little sprightly fiancée disporting herself on the stage. She was very happy, very pretty, very commonplace. It seemed a monstrous tyranny to wed her away from all that gay froth and sparkle, to wean her to a life of purpose. Her cheeks were flushed with triumph. Flushed? Had he not loved and appreciated every shade of that mantling rose? Colour-blind, indeed! For the moment she was the best of the best she had ever been to him. He forgot the portrait—his art—its cruel exactions. And then she looked across and saw him, and her face appeared to change. It yielded him again what was already his, what he had taken from it, and the residue seemed but poor cheap stuff. He lowered his eyes and would not look more.

At the end of the act he left the theatre, and sauntered aimlessly abroad. Chance bore him at a late hour in the direction of Piccadilly, and invited his thoughts to a certain Bohemian sketching club—of which he was a very casual member—which was situated in a street not a hundred yards away from Burlington House. A visit to the place might help him to kill time; there were some lively spirits among its habitués. He entered, and found one of the weekly suppers just tailing to its end in an atmosphere of stale smoke and exhausted ribaldry. Most of the company were gone; a few lingered, red-eyed and inclined to incoherence, amongst the ruins of the feast. These symposiums were famous among a certain set. The majority of the members attracted to them were brilliant resourceful young artists, all more or less connected with journalism. Talent coruscated in their ranks, and was not allowed to hide itself under a bushel. A competition of some sort was organised for each supper, and an inflexible condition of attendance lay in contributing to it. Any refusal entailed appalling penalties; but the general cleverness was such that refusals were unknown. Inability was the only peril; one having full license to say what one liked and drink what one liked, the brain could not always command the hand. But impudence generally prevailed somehow.

Derrick was greeted with cheers on his appearance, in homage to his distinction. He had condescended once or twice to join the jolly uproarious crew, and his contributions to the order were still remembered and reverently cherished. He went round the table now, examining the work of the evening, while one or two of the few gay spirits, left hovered unsteadily in his wake.

"Candle-smoke again?" he said. "I see, I see."

It was one of their humours. Supper finished, each, at a given signal, would smoke the upper or the under surface of his plate over a candle flame, and draw thereon, with any instrument he chose, a time picture on a stated subject. The results were often astonishing. The souls of these young fellows lay in their finger-tips, delicate as antennæ. They would produce exquisite effects with them while their lips above were exchanging, perhaps, quite unsavoury badinage.

"The subject was soldiers, it seems," said Derrick; "suggested, I suppose, by the events of to-day."

"Mod'n—they had to be mod'n, you dow," said one of his satellites nosily.

"O, had they? That's modern enough, anyhow—and that. Wilson, isn't it? One can't mistake his hand. I say, that's pretty strong. Pity to waste such talent on such a subject. This is Vigors, of course. What a touch the fellow has! And this—by Jove, here's the cleverest thing I've seen! It's positively an inspiration."

"It ought to be good. It's Eric Norman's."

"Norman's, is it? He tops the show, then. But where's the modernity in it, anyway?"

"That's all ride."

"O! Is it?"

Laurence knew the man's work, as it was impossible that he should not, though he had never met the man himself. Norman was in the way to be one of the most brilliant black and white young artists of his generation. He had come to the front latterly with a bound, after, it was said, years of struggling obscurity. There was always something rather fantastic and cruel in his work, despite its humour. He had that odd uncanny twist in his brain which, as in the case of Hood, could find fun in a street-accident and nothing unsavoury in the juxtaposition of skulls and roses.

The figure which Derrick regarded appeared to be that of a sort of Jacobean halberdier; it certainly suggested nothing modern; but whatever it was it was sketched in in a masterly manner.

"How's it all right?" he said.

"It's wud of the Swiss guard at the Vatican," answered his informant—"so Norman declared. We had to take the thig on trust. Norman said he ought to dow anyhow, as he'd been destined to join the corps himself at wud time. Probably he was gassing drunk. But it's good, isn't it?"

"Yes, it's good."

Derrick felt suddenly giddy. Some wandering vagary had got into his brain like a whiff of chloroform. He put down the plate and turned abruptly.

"Hullo!" he said: "I didn't know it was so late. I must be off."

He wanted to get out into the air again, and to be by himself. A sensation as if some ghostly 'shadowing,' suspected all day, were about to declare itself in a staggering fashion had seized upon his nerves. He felt as if, were he to miss his chance of escape, he would in a moment be hemmed in and caught powerless. There were strange things going on around him—plots brewing- weird surprises hatching. Outside, he took in draughts of the night as if it were fresh cold water.

"That's better," he whispered; "that's much better."

 

CHAPTER IX
THE VERDICT

It is astonishing how women will succeed, by persistence, in gaining the male suffrage for fashions loathed and ridiculed of masculinity in the first stages of their introduction. Nor are artists always amongst the most irreconcilable of their critics. Glancing back over a generation or two, one can recall some of the extravagances which were greeted on their first appearance by a storm of derision, and yet survived to conquer the most virulent of their lampooners and caricaturists. The truth is, of course, that, in our monstrously developed civilisation, custom can reconcile us to anything but Nature. She was a fashion that went out with Eve, and is the only one that has no more chance of resuscitation than the first innocence. Remoteness from her is, indeed, the keynote of 'style.'

Given, then, his contemporary thesis in the shape of some chaotic enormity, it becomes the business of the artist to extract from it a figure of grace, his more or less success in doing which, through earning him the applause and the sincerest flattery of fashion, induces in him an attachment to his own creations, so that what he began by deriding he ends by admiring.

So it was with the preposterous hats and the scant habiliments of our present era; and I for one confess that, so far as they are concerned, I have learnt to exchange my scorn for respect—qualified, of course, as all good taste should be. Dolly wore them, and wore them, under Laurence's tuition, to a monstrous pretty effect. He thought she never looked so well as when her shapely young figure was dressed for walking. There was an angle to her hat which, in its relation to the slim frock beneath—both designed by himself—reminded him of Kiyonaga. He never desired to kiss her so much as when out-of-doors.

This feeling penetrated him to quite poignant effect on that afternoon chosen for the girl's first view of her own portrait. As she came in, stylish, endimanchée, with her friend, a pang like remorse smote into the man's heart. What were the next few moments to reveal? How was he going to be paid for his use or abuse of this confiding daintiness, which he had toyed and played with for his own purposes, conventionally honourable though those might have been? All the morning he had been wandering restless, unsettled, unhappy—and unhappy because of whom? Why, for himself alone. He dreaded, for all his philosophy, the hovering verdict—not as it might affect his little unsophisticated judge, but solely as it might bear upon his own disillusionment or reassurance. He felt that he had sacrificed this pretty innocent, and perhaps cruelly and vainly, on the altar of his art. He only really valued her as a 'property.' It was a base aestheticism which could so convert living flesh and blood to its own selfish profit.

For an instant he was almost impelled, in a rush of emotion, to leap and grip the little fairy figure in his arms; to lavish upon it the heat of passion which he felt to be its due; to kiss the honest eyes, and breathe into the pink ears the tale of his penitence, of his remorse, and of his assurance that he valued Dolly for herself, and not merely because her youth and beauty were at once a salve to his wounds and an inspiration to his art. But the moment passed, and for ever.

"Well, Laurence," she said; "here we are. Are you going to ring up the curtain at last? I feel just as nervous as if it were a first night."

She looked it, indeed. Her face was quite pale; and she turned away after speaking. Some barrier, shadowy, inexplicable, had risen between them, and she could no more surmount it than he could. Never affinities, they were estranged already without knowing it. His ironical reflection on that last day of the sitting still dwelt like a shadow in her mind.

"Then the sooner the ordeal is over the better," he said.

He led the way to the studio and they followed. The picture stood draped on an easel. He placed himself by it, and just uttered a warning:

"Before you pronounce, think first of the affection that has gone into it, and of the art second. My point of view may seem an odd one to you, Dolly; but, such as it is, believe wholly in the love that guided its choice."

Then he pulled away the cloth, and stood, with eyes, that he dared not lift, looking down. A long silence ensued.

"Well?" he said at length.

"I think——"

The voice was the girl's—but so utterly strange and little. A spasm seemed to grip his heart. There followed a pause, a quick rustle, and then a sound, ominous, devastating. He looked up.

She had turned away from the picture—turned towards Miss Vickers, in whose amazed indignant eyes was reflected the sentence patent in her own. It had come. The incredible thing had actually happened, and he was convicted and condemned.

And the next moment Dolly had thrown herself into the friend's sympathetic arms, and was weeping convulsively.

Laurence took a single step forward, and stopped. Every emotion in him seemed suddenly frozen stark; his voice when he spoke was as cold and hard as a devil's.

"It's all right," he said. "You needn't be so overcome. You don't like it, do you?"

He addressed the honest friend's eyes, the only lively feature he could see over Dolly's shoulder. Miss Vickers shook her head.

"What do you think!" she answered. And then her sympathetic wrath overflowed. "It's a beastly shame. To have kept us on tenterhooks all this time, expecting something that was going to make us the talk and envy of the town, and then to show us this caricature! I didn't think it of you, Mr. Derrick."

Laurence laughed.

"Does it really strike you as so awful?"

Miss Vickers jerked her head in mute scorn of the cruel impertinence of such a question. "Come, darling," she said. "We had better leave Mr. Derrick to the enjoyment of his practical joke. The love that guided his choice, indeed! If that is how his love sees you, the less you have to do with it the better."

She was a loyal Vickers; once opened out she gave her tongue full license. Caressing and comforting the victim, she led her by degrees to the door. And Dolly made no resistance, nor did Derrick move a finger or speak a word to detain her. Once, before she left, she half turned her eyes, blinded with tears, as if, in the kindness of her little heart, to essay some apology or explanation; but the effort was too much for her, and she disappeared with her friend. Laurence, waiting like a figure of stone, presently heard the hall-door boom upon them, slammed by the indignant Vickers. Then he turned, and stood for an hour staring at the portrait.

 

CHAPTER X
DECISION

In strange contrast to that stormy exit, Miss Vickers's face next morning suggested nothing so much as the countenance of the rosy Eos. Risen flushed from its virgin bed, it regarded Derrick with an expression that was at once authoritative and propitiatory—an aspect indicative of the mission that had brought the loyal little lady early and hot-foot to the artist's door. She came as outraged beauty's representative, a sort of ex-official solicitress, to expostulate and finesse, and she obviously strove her very best to be diplomatic. Laurence, whom she encountered, fortunately, in the act of going out, was not, it seemed, surprised at her appearance, nor disposed to quarrel with her on any point whatever. His manner was serenely friendly, accommodating—savouring, even, of the patiently polite, not to say the abstracted and the apathetic.

"Tell me frankly the purpose of your visit," he said by and by. "It will save time."

The little deputy, thus adjured, gathered courage.

"Dolly feels that it can't go on," she said; "at least not on existing terms."

"She wishes to put an end to our engagement—is that it?" said Derrick.

"It is the prospect of the beauty-show—first and foremost," said Miss Vickers, hesitating a little. "The thought of figuring in it—as that, you know——"

she gasped and stopped.

"Come, my dear," said Derrick, smiling; "out with it, plump and square! As what?"

"It reminded me of nothing so much," said the friend, in a burst of desperate candour, "as a decomposed mermaid."

Derrick laughed outright.

"Well," he said, "I'm not going to send it to the show. Will that do?"

"It's something," said Miss Vickers, obviously relieved. "But is it really, Mr. Derrick, as you see Dolly?"

"Yes, really."

"That makes things difficult—I'm afraid. It can't be very pleasant, now can it, to picture oneself as looking like that in one's own lover's eyes."

"Well, I suppose not—as you describe it."

"You wouldn't like, I suppose?"

"I'm ready to accept my dismissal."

"O! But wouldn't you rather the initiative came from you? It would save your face, wouldn't it? And if you were to return by me her letters——"

"I see, I see. Pardon my obtuseness. The risk of my bringing an action—just so. Certainly, my dear, you shall have the letters; and you can tell Miss Patterson, formally, from me, that I release her unconditionally from her engagement?"

He rose, and the little deputy rose.

"You are a real gentleman," she said gratefully. "I dare say it's only our innocence in matters of art, but——"

"Not in the least," said Derrick. "It's my ignorance—I confess it with the utmost humility. Assure Miss Patterson that not only shall the portrait be withheld from the exhibition, but that it shall not be shown, if to anybody, as a portrait of her. No one would ever guess, if I did not tell them; and, more than that, I shall probably destroy the thing before another day is past."

He procured the compromising letters, dropping a kiss on the little odd illiterate bundle before he delivered it, and dismissed the deputy, grateful and elate. And then he sank into a chair and went into a fit of laughter, mirthless, sardonic, which seemed to jar his soul to its depths.

"Well," he said, "thereby ends that pretty, fantastic, moving and utterly impossible little idyll. And now for the real tragedy to which it was a prelude."

He got up, pulled himself together, and went out into the street. He had a purpose—to find and crave an interview with the scientific gentleman who had first opened his eyes to the possibility of their own inclusion among the abnormal visions of mankind.

 

CHAPTER XI
THE SENTENCE

"I am afraid there is little doubt about it, Mr. Derrick. The spectrum lacks for you in a most essential respect. I wish we could believe otherwise."

Cold, courteous, dispassionate, a polished scientific formula from his clear unwinking eyes to his thin deliberate hands, the judge pronounced sentence.

The shutters were so closed as to admit of a single ray of sunlight falling upon a prism placed aptly to receive it, and to bend thence its segregated parts upon the surface of a white screen hung opposite. Half shadowed, half revealed in the twilight thus formed loomed a confusion of books and instruments and vessels of gleaming glass. Upon a table near by was disposed an array of coloured wools. They had been used in the test experiment, and to destructive effect. Broadly speaking Derrick had failed to identify, according to the accepted understanding, any of the hues into which the quality of red entered directly or indirectly. The blues, yellows and greens had been rightly named by him, but classified according to an order strangely differing from the orthodox. Other tests had produced a like result.

He took his sentence standing, and like a man.

"This defect, this lacuna," he said quietly, "bears no relation, you tell me, to the ordinary qualities of human vision?"

"None whatever. It occurs among the longest and the shortest sighted people."

"It is marvellous, is it not, how one can live to the age of twenty-five, and never so much as suspect one's own shortcoming?"

"Hardly, I think, when you consider the compromise we have to make with existence. That alone is the common factor, to which all widely differing intelligences have to adapt themselves. Dalton, the propounder of the atomic theory, was no younger than yourself when he first became aware of his defective colour sense; Pole, a well-known engineer, was nearer thirty when he made a like discovery. Thousands, no doubt, have lived and died in complete ignorance of their misfortune—if so we must regard it. But need we? In such a case as yours, for instance, Mr. Derrick? You have shown us that the condition is not detrimental to the possession and development of the most sensitive and delicate of artistic faculties. You will be unwise if you let a consciousness of that condition affect your work."

"You suggested the other night some imaginary compensation to persons so afflicted—a sort of sixth sense."

"Imaginary—yes."

"I have just finished the head of a girl—in colour, a departure for me. If you can make the time to come and criticise it—from this point of view, that is—you will be doing me a real service."

"I will come certainly. It will interest me immensely in the connexion."

Half an hour later the two stood together in Derrick's studio. The man of science dwelt a long time before the portrait, profoundly abstracted and absorbed. Presently he turned round, a light in his eyes.

"It is curious," he said; "a most striking similarity. This is the work of a colour-blind person, but possessed of a vision beyond the common understanding. No technical knowledge is needed to recognise the fact. It impresses at once, as something quite unusual, yet obviously the actual presentment of a thing penetrated and seen by him, invisible, or at best greatly obscured to us. I have only once before in my experience come across a parallel case—that of an artist, and a very original and inspired artist like yourself; of about your own age, too. He was colour-blind, and being somehow led to suspect the fact, showed me some of his paintings. They exhibited all the qualities and the spiritual insight, if I may so express it, of yours; and all the typical shortcomings—the green complexions, the absence of light, as we regard it. The resemblance is most singular and striking. He abandoned colour from that time—it would have been vain for him, indeed, to persist in seeking to convince through it—and took to black and white work, in which he has since come to excel. You must know his name. He is at this day one of our most famous draughtsmen."

"Of whom do you speak? "

"Of Mr. Eric Norman. He—is anything the matter?"

"No, nothing whatever. Only I think I had already suspected him of being the man. How long ago was that—when he first came to you, I mean?"

"O! a considerable number of years—some eight or nine, perhaps. He was a mere boy at the time, but even then extraordinarily gifted. I have traced his career at intervals since, through the public prints, and only wondered that he did not sooner attain his present position. But the light of certain stars is long in reaching to the earth."

Derrick did not answer; and his visitor turned again to the picture.

 

CHAPTER XII
A VISIT AND A REVELATION

In an upper room of a terrace at Hammersmith overlooking the river a young man sat drawing. It was night, and an incandescent lamp, shrouded by a green shade, burned steadily on the table. A green shade, moreover, was pulled low down over the draughtsman's eyes, and those, and the light of the lamp, were concentrated upon a block of considerable size tilted at a slight angle in front of him. The young man worked on the block with a rapid unfaltering hand. Every line he added to his composition had the force and value of a personal signature; one might have declared that, put to a draft, it could not fail to be honoured across the drawer's own bank counter. He built up his picture like an inspired mason; he never paused to alter or erase. The thing just came out, beneath the heat of his genius, like a design already deposited there in invisible ink. And yet, whenever he lifted his face, it appeared the face of a sawney, large in the nose, shallow in the chin, and with a suggestion of viciousness in its weakness.

The subject at which the artist worked represented a feast in Mediæval Italy. Men, risen from their seats, were portrayed in various attitudes of horror, anger, or obscene curiosity. One, the noble giver of the feast, sat slinking and sweating at table, peering up, with a furtive grin, at the figure of his chief guest, who, standing in the foreground, held aloft in his hand a poisoned cup, which he displayed menacingly to his host. On the same arm of this figure, and chained to its wrist, writhed a pet monkey, convulsed and dying from having dipped a piece of bread in the cup and eaten of it, so timely warning his master. The few partisans of the intended victim were shown pushing forward to rally about their lord.

"It tells its own story," said a voice over the worker's shoulder.

Eric Norman hardly started. His room was free to his associates, and he was habituated to sudden interruptions. He was one of those who can keep their hands and tongues going at the same time.

"Wonderful!" he answered jeeringly, without looking round. "That's just what it's meant to do."

"It is destined for that competition I read about in an illustrated weekly, I suppose?" surmised the voice. "I saw an advertisement of it. Every picture was to be a sort of lied ohne wŏrte, wasn't it, and prizes were to be offered to readers for the best rendering in words of the scene depicted? "

Attracted by something unfamiliar in the tone, the worker glanced round, started, and instantly pushed his chair about so as to command the speaker.

"Hullo!" he said. "Who the devil are you?"

"My name's Laurence Derrick," answered the intruder. "Do you mind my introducing myself? I found your address and looked you up. I was shown in by someone, but I suppose you didn't hear? There was a waggon passing at the time."

The other had thrust the shade up from his forehead to grotesque effect, revealing beneath a couple of colourless eyes in slightly inflamed sockets. He saw before him a man of about his own age, but of very different moral and physical calibre; and the laxity in himself took instinctive umbrage at the sight.

"No, I didn't," he said drawlingly. "Honoured, I'm sure, Mr. Laurence Derrick. But you won't mind my saying I'm infernally busy."

The creature had no savoir-faire, it was evident. He exhibited all the insolence of a favoured freak. He countered, with a stupid boorish laugh, the fixed interest with which the stranger was regarding him.

"I'm sorry," said Derrick; "but I come on business—after a kind."

"O! in that case," said Mr. Norman, throwing down his pencil with a very ill grace, "take a seat, will you?"

Derrick, his eyes never leaving the weak petulant face, acquiesced. He sat by the table, leaning his arms on it, so that he could command the full under-range of the lamplight.

"This," he said—he just signified with his hand the picture on the block—"is a good popular idea—for those who are satisfied to contribute to it. But even genius must live, mustn't it? What made you sketch that Swiss Guard at the Club the other night, now?"

The sudden transition, the sharp irrelevancy of the question, appeared to have an instantly stupefying effect on the man addressed. He sat gaping after his way and breathing nosily, like one under a narcotic. He suggested a person suddenly alive to the fact that he was being stealthily drugged for purposes of robbery, yet unable to rally his nerves or his courage to fight the insidious thing.

"Was it really inspired, as I was told," continued Derrick, in a cool measured voice, "by a one-time dedication of yourself to the Papal service?"

Mr. Norman found his speech in a gasp:

"Upon my word I don't see what that's got to do with you!"

"We'll come to that," said Derrick. "It has its bearing on my 'business,' equally with a sympathy I should like to claim from and extend to a fellow-sufferer. I learned certainly to-day, for the first time, Mr. Norman, that I am colour-blind—as you are."

"How do you know I am?" The man sat all amazed—as, indeed, he well might be.

"I want to propose something to you," said Derrick, ignoring the question, leaning well forward, and speaking in a low impressive tone. "It is suggested by this picture of yours. A good subject would, I think, be weird disappearances. Supposing we worked at it together? What do you say?"

"I don't say anything."

"I dare say you know my name."

"I dare say I do."

"Very well. Here is a situation that occurs to me as apt for illustration—and speculation. An artist (he happens to be a colour-blind artist, by the way, and also, strangely enough, to have been destined for the Papal Guard) is seated sketching by a lonely mere. It is winter; there is snow upon the ground, and, printed in the snow, the track of the artist's footsteps leading from an adjacent house to the stump on which he sits. Presently come other footsteps, those of a woman, which take the same course, stop at the stump, and thence return to the house. But the artist's foot-prints do not return. They cease at the stump; there is no sign of them elsewhere in any direction; but the artist himself, when sought for, cannot be found. He has disappeared—utterly and mysteriously disappeared—and the woman, illogically enough, but since she was the last one known to be with him alive, is suspected of his murder. What is the matter, Mr. Eric Norman?"

The other was on his feet, pale as death, gasping like a man winded.

"Murder?" he whispered hoarsely.

Derrick rose and confronted the agitated figure, his lips set, a stern light in his eyes. The clue which had come to him so strangely, which he had followed so thrillingly, with such a heat of daring hope, had really and actually led him to the truth. He was certain of it at the last.

"Murder," he repeated. "That possibility never occurred to you, I suppose, Mr. Lotto Salvetti, when you elected to disappear from 'Coldshot' and leave no sign."

The creature wreathed and unwreathed his fingers, looking furtively up and down.

"No," he said. "The impulse came to me in a moment. As you seem to have heard of it, I'll tell you the truth. We had been quarrelling—we were always quarrelling. She hated me—she did not understand me—we were leagues apart. I wanted to get away—to end it all—to live my own life. And just then came a strange thing. It came floating in the dusk up the valley from the sea—a huge grey bubble—and in a moment I saw that it was a derelict balloon. It came blown in on the current that always sweeps up that valley—blown in from the sea, where its occupants had been lost. Weeks afterwards its remains were found, miles away, floating in the water; I read all about it in the newspapers. But even when it drove upon me I saw that its car was wrecked, hanging loose; and it came right over my head. There was a rope with a little anchor dangling from it; I was very light and strong, and just then, as it hung in the turn of the air-current, I made a jump at the rope, hardly knowing what I did, and caught it and pulled myself up, resting my feet in the anchor. Then the thing dipped for an instant, but immediately it rose again, and carried me away across the ice. I was horribly frightened, and I clung on. The wind lifted it still more, and we passed over the trees, making for the sea again. I thought I was lost; but right down on the shore it dropped enough for me to let go and fall into the sand. I saw the balloon bound up and vanish away into the darkness. For a long time I lay where I was; then presently a thought came to me. I had disappeared without leaving any clue to my whereabouts. Why not seize the chance to sever myself for once and for all from the life and the vocation I hated? I got up and walked for miles along the shore, always near enough the sea for the tide to wash away any trace of my footprints. All night I walked; and at dawn, coming inland a little, I got a stupid countryman to give me a lift in his cart to Cromer, where I took the first train to London. How do you know about it? How have you traced me? Who told you my real name? I have made my own life since, my own reputation. It has been a long, cruel business; but I have got through with it, I have not complained, and I have nothing to be ashamed of."

"And her life?"

Derrick blazed upon him, so that he shrunk.

"I never dreamt of such a thing. Murder! It's too ridiculous. Why, where was the body?"

"Is there anything too illogical, too extravagant, for calumny to fasten on? I know your sister—never mind how. Never mind at this stage by what fantastic processes I have come into your history, and been conducted to this goal. She has suffered; through ten years she has not ceased to surfer for your act; has not ceased to agonise for your return, some day and somehow—to crave your forgiveness. Your forgiveness, good God! Do you understand? It is you who must end her long martyrdom."

The young man whined: "Her martyrdom? You pitch it pretty strong. It had its compensations, didn't it? I left her everything for herself; I never asked for a penny; only to be left alone to go my own way—and a jolly hard one at that. I think, perhaps, she got the best of the bargain."

"Think what you like—I think of her, and she of you alone. She has touched all these years no more than just her needs. The rest she nurses and hoards against your possible return. Now listen to me. You will go down, and reveal yourself, and confess the truth. What ensues is no affair of mine, but that you shall do."

"O! shall I?"

"Or else—mark me—I will go and bring her to you. You shall be brought to bay, and exposed, for what you are and have done, before all your world."

"Very well. You needn't get so excited. If I must go, I must, I suppose."

 

CHAPTER XIII
AFTER THE RAIN

"My de-ar," said Father Appleyard, "all religion is safe in the hands of a good man. We may trust our souls to the honest heretic, so long as he be no heretic from love."

"I am none at least," said Derrick. "Driven from its substance, I sought its shadow, and even rested in it for a time. I will confess, Father."

"Absolvo te," said the priest. "Thou hast atoned and art forgiven. She is at peace, my son."

"So am I not. He has come?"

"And gone. All is well between them."

"And for me, who was guilty of the crime of innocently appearing what I was not? "

He waited long for an answer, but none came. Before him slept the mere, placid and golden in the noon sunshine. He had reached it by the familiar track, to find the good Father patiently anticipating his arrival in the old place. It was all so still, so glowing, so peaceful, that it seemed as if the grass and sedges of to-day were but the seasonable flowering of the frost of near a year earlier. It was so silence grew and blossomed without a movement in this haunted place. Some emotion, some quick consciousness startled him, and he looked round.

The priest was gone—had vanished in a moment like a shadow. But in his place there stood another shadow ineffably wistful and pathetic. Derrick raised his hand and beckoned, and the shadow came to him.

"What is it?" he said. "You have something to ask of me?"

She lifted her face and hands, praying to him:

"You seemed to me what I had dreamed he might become. O, it was a dream! Let me keep my dream."

He caught her hands in his. "You sent for me: I have come: for what?"

"Take off your curse!"

"I never cursed you."

"Unsay what you said. Is not this shame enough to plead for me, to satisfy you?"

One intense moment he lingered, then took her to his heart.

"What is my vision of you?" he said. "Answer first. Do you realise it?"

"It is the vision of love," she whispered. "What else matters? Take me, forgive me, for that alone."

 

•⁠•⁠•⁠•⁠•⁠•

 

"The change," wrote Derrick, to the friend first mentioned, "was slow, imperceptible in its process, but definite. It began with the first dawn of my honeymoon. There was something in the sky—I had acquired a new sense—but it was long, long in developing, long in maturing. And it seemed not so much a sense, after all, as an enlarged appreciation of beauty. Incurable? Well, so it may be for those, who, unlike me, have never drunk of the deep waters of a woman's love."

And there we leave him.