CHAPTER XVI.
WHAT IT ALL MEANT TO LAURIE.
WHEN Laurie Renton arrived in town, he went with the story of his family’s fortune and his own, as was natural, to the padrona, who had now a double interest in the tale. She had already heard of it in a letter from Alice; but such a narrative is naturally more full and satisfactory by word of mouth.
It was in the same house, up the same stairs, in the same studio, that Laurie sought his friend. Everything was seven years older, and the hair growing thin on the top of Laurie’s head, and Alice the mother of children; but neither Mrs. Severn nor her studio was much changed. She had attained, when we saw her first, to that table-land which lies in the centre of an innocent and healthful life, and on which Time, if he does not stand still, moves with such equal and steady steps, that it is difficult to trace his progress; and as many more years were probably before her ere there would appear in the padrona any such marked signs of the passage of years as those which had already left their stamp on Laurie in his youth. There might be a few white threads among her hair, at least she said there were; but for all that any one could have told, she might have been wrapped in some enchanted sleep for all those years, instead of working, and thinking, and sorrowing, and taking such simple pleasures as came to her. The pleasures had been less and the sorrows greater since Alice left her; but now Edie had grown, as everybody said, a great girl, and the mother’s heart was stirring into life in her development, to prepare for herself another crisis and sacrifice. It was years now since Laurie had returned from his first self-banishment to Italy. He had come back and he had been away again from time to time, but he had always returned here,—‘home’ as he liked to call it,—and for a long period there had been nothing in the character of his feelings which made it painful to him to come. How this was he could not tell. When he went away on that forlorn journey to Rome he had felt as if he never could look again upon the woman whom he loved with all his heart, but who, as nature herself indicated, could never be more to him than a friend. She could not be his,—never,—though everything in heaven and earth were to plead for him,—and the only thing for him to do was to rush away from her, and bury himself and his unhappy love out of sight for ever. These had been his feelings when he went away;—but, somehow, they did not last. Slowly, by degrees, he and his heart came back to her without any anguish or despair in them. When he returned, and went half-tremblingly to see if he could bear the sight of her, Laurie found, somewhat to his astonishment, that the sight, instead of driving him wild with disappointed affection, soothed and consoled and softened him as nothing else could do. Perhaps, had it been possible that she should become any other man’s wife the sensation would have been different; but there had long ago ceased to be any strong wish on the matter in Laurie’s mind. The old custom of hanging about her house came back upon him. He would come and talk to her of all his own concerns, and of a great many of hers, by the hour together; and not of realities only, but of fancies,—everything that came into his head. There was the strangest transposition of ordinary rules in their intercourse. While he lounged about, and talked and poured out all his mind, she would be working on steadily, pausing to note her effects,—now and then calling him into counsel on some knotty point, responding to his thoughts, understanding him even when he but half-uttered his meaning, giving him a certain proof of perfect sympathy and friendship, more soft and tender than ordinary friendship,—and yet never stopping in her work. Had they been of the same age, such a thing of course could not have been possible; but on the vantage-ground of a dozen additional years the woman stood calm and steadfast, and the man too, his boyish fit of passion over, was calm. No doubt there was a whisper at one time in the artists’ quarter that Mrs. Severn was going to make a fool of herself and marry a man young enough to be her son. But as time disproved that matter, the world, which after all is not such a stupid world, but acknowledges, after due probation, the privileges that can be safely accorded to the blameless, held its tongue,—or only jeered innocently by times at the friendship. ‘Such things are impracticable generally, and dangerous, you know, and all that. It is all very well to talk of friendship; but one knows it always falls into love on one side or the other. I really do believe an exception ought to be made for the padrona and Laurie Renton,’ was what was said in Fitzroy Square. And as the two took matters with perfect composure, and never looked as if they supposed either the world or the Square to have anything to do with it, the unusual bond between them soon came to be considered a matter of course. It was not such a bond that the man was always at the woman’s apron-strings. He went away, sometimes for months together, and travelled about in that half-professional, half-dilettante way that suited Laurie; and then he wrote to her, and next after Alice’s, Laurie’s letters were looked for in Mrs. Severn’s house. And I will not say that there was not now and then just a word in them which the padrona passed over when she read these epistles to the boys, and which made her half smile, half sigh with a curious mingled sense of regret, and amusement, and pleasure. He would say, when he was describing something to her, ‘If you were but here, padrona mia, I should want no more.’ Foolish fellow! as if she ever could be with him, as if it would not be the height of folly and weakness, and overturn of the whole rational world and all the modesties of nature. But yet, so long as it evaporated in a harmless sigh like this, it hurt no one,—not Laurie, who perhaps loved his wanderings all the better for that soft want in them; and not her, as she doubled down the page at that point with a half-laugh. And when he came home the first place he went to was the Square. To be sure, such a friendship put all thoughts of marrying out of Laurie’s head, as Mrs. Suffolk, who thought everybody should marry, sometimes deplored. ‘Unless you send him away, padrona, he will always be just as he is. He will never think of any other kind of life,’ she would say to her friend. ‘My dear, he has no money to marry on,’ the padrona would say,—and so Laurie’s heart had always found a home and every kind of support and consolation and sympathy in Fitzroy Square.
And, to tell the truth, the money had been rather a difficult point with him now and then. To live upon two hundred a-year when you have been brought up a Renton of Renton, is a matter which requires a great deal of consideration. But Laurie, fortunately for himself, had no expensive tastes, and he painted some pictures, and, what was more remarkable, sold some; and even found himself on the line at the Academy, thus carrying out his highest dreams. But it did not give him the gratification, nor cause the stir he had once anticipated. It was a small picture, a little bit of Italian air and sunshine, and Slasher gave it a little paragraph all to itself in the ‘Sword;’ but the people whom he had once pictured to himself finding out his name in the catalogue, and calling heaven and earth to witness that Laurie Renton had done something at last, had by this time forgotten all about Laurie Renton, or he had forgotten them, which came to the same thing. And candidly in his soul, Laurie allowed, that had not old Welby been on the hanging committee, probably it never would have reached ‘the line;’ and had not Slasher been a friend of his, would never have been noticed in the ‘Sword.’ But it sold for a hundred pounds, which was always an advantage. The picture was called ‘Feliciello, on Tiberio,’ and was the picture of a dark-faced Capriote guide, on one of the highest points of his island, pointing out to a fair English girl the points in the wonderful landscape round. It was Edie Severn, who had never been there, with her golden hair streaming round her, who was the English girl. But handsome Feliciello had been studied on the spot. And Mr. Rich of Richmont,—always a great patron of the fine arts,—gave Laurie a hundred pounds for it, and thought it one of his greatest bargains. ‘This picture has a story,’ he would say to his guests; ‘it was painted by a gentleman, the son of one of my neighbours in the country, a man who had never been brought up to make his living by art. It is quite a romance; but I hear matters are settled, and that he has come into his share of the money, and will paint no more, and I think I was very lucky to secure this. My daughter, Lady Horsman, will tell you all about it.’ ‘About the picture painted by a gentleman?’ Nelly would say, on being questioned. ‘Most painters that I know are gentlemen. Papa means to infer that he is not much of a painter, I suppose.’ For Lady Horsman was not fond of the Rentons, and had never cared to cultivate their society. ‘If you get my lady on painters she’ll talk till midnight,’ Sir George said out of his moustache. He did not know the difference between a sign-post and a Titian, and thought the one quite as pretty as the other; but he was the head of one of the oldest families in Christendom, and Master of the Hounds in his county, and a great many other grandeurs; and, so far as I know, Nelly had the full value for her fifty thousand pounds.
This, however, is a digression a long way out of Fitzroy Square. Laurie went to the padrona with his story, and found her still in a state of excitement over Alice’s letter,—the second since the event,—with something in it about Dovecote, which was the last new possibility. She had just been taken to see it, and her letter was full of an enthusiastic description of its beauties. ‘Think, mamma, of a lovely little house close to Renton, with a lawn sloping to the river, and a cow, and a pony-carriage, and I don’t know what,’ the young wife wrote in her delight. ‘And Frank thinks he may afford himself a hunter, and there is the sweetest honeysuckle room for Edie and you!’ The padrona, being mother to the being upon whom this glorious prospect was opening, was more interested at first in the Dovecote than in anything Laurie had to say.
‘To think one has only to take the train and be with her in an hour,—after being so far away for,—a lifetime!’ the padrona said, with tears in her eyes.
‘Only six years,’ said Laurie; ‘but never mind; after Alice has had her turn perhaps you will think of me.’
‘When you know I always think of you!’ said Mrs. Severn, ‘it becomes you to be exigeant, Laurie! and you are not going to have a cow, and a pony-carriage, and everything that is most delightful on the face of the earth. Think of Alice having a cow! You are so terribly blasé, it does not seem to strike you. And Edie is out, the child, so that there is no one to be glad but me.’
‘It does not strike me at all,’ said Laurie. ‘If she had a dozen cows, I think I could bear it. But some day I must take you to see Dovecote, padrona, since you like it so much.’
‘I wish they had had Feliciello,’ said Mrs. Severn, ‘if one had known you were all to be so well off,—it would have pleased Frank.’
‘Frank will like some of those vile chromos just as well,’ said Laurie. ‘I’ll buy him a few, I think. And I mean to bring Ben to see you to-night; then you will know us all. Not that there will be any intense gratification in that; but you’ll like Ben. He is made of different stuff from the rest of us. There is more in him. He is not so cheeky as Frank; and he is another sort of fellow, to be sure, from a good-for-nothing like me.’
‘Laurie, there is something the matter,’ said the padrona, turning upon him with her palette in her hand. She knew all his tones like the notes in music, and heard the far-off quiver of one of his fits of despondency already vibrating in the quiet. ‘Is not this as good for you as for the rest?’
‘Oh, yes, quite as good,’ he said abruptly, with his eyes on her work. ‘You are putting too much yellow in that light.’
‘Am I? but that is not the question. Laurie, never mind the light, but tell me what is wrong.’
‘I must mind the light,’ he said. ‘If I can’t put you right when you get into a mess, what is the good of me? It’s all wrong and it’s all right, padrona mia, and I don’t know that it matters much one way or another; but I don’t quite like your shadows. With that tone of light they should have more blue in them,’ he went on, gazing at the picture and shading his eyes with his hand.
‘But it will make a great difference in your life,’ said Mrs. Severn, putting down her tools and drawing a chair near to where he sat.
‘That is just it,’ he said; ‘it will make no difference to speak of. It is a great thing for Ben; and for Frank, too, it will be everything. You can see that clearly. But what difference will it make to me? More money to spend, perhaps, and better rooms to live in; but no sort of expansion or widening-out of life. That’s not possible, you know. It was put a stop to once, and no change that I know of can effect it now.’
‘You cannot mean to reproach me, Laurie?’ said the padrona.
‘No,’ he said, still fixedly gazing at the picture; ‘I don’t reproach you. Being you, perhaps you could have done nothing else. I am not complaining of anybody; but this is how it is,—you see it for yourself.’
‘Laurie, listen to me,’ she said, with eagerness, laying her hand on his arm. ‘I have wanted to speak to you for long, and never liked to begin the subject. You must make an effort to break this spell. I did not say a word as long as you were poor,—for what could you do?—and I thought I was always some consolation to you; but now that you have money enough, and can make a new beginning,—Laurie, do you know, I think it would be better for you to go away from me.’
‘What, go away again?’ he said, with a half-smile, ‘as I did when I went to Rome? No, there is no such occasion now.’
‘Of course there is no such occasion now,—that dream has passed away, as all dreams do,—but, Laurie, for that very reason I speak. Even what you were so foolish as to wish then you don’t wish now.’
She made a momentary pause, but he gave no answer. It was quite true. He was not in love with her any longer,—though she was the creature dearest to him in the world. Nor did he any longer want to appropriate or bind her closer to himself. He would not have admitted this change in words, but it was true.
‘I don’t think in the least that you have ceased to care for me,’ she continued; ‘but it is different,—it is not in that way. And you are getting not to care much what happens. We talk over it, and come to our conclusions; and after that, good and evil are much the same to you. That is why I think you should go away,—not to Italy, as you did before, but out of this neighbourhood, to some place like the one you used to live in, and go back into the world.’
‘Why, I wonder?’ said Laurie. ‘The world and I had never much to say to each other. And at least I have some comfort in my life here.’
‘Too much, a great deal,’ said the padrona, with a smile. ‘You know you can always come to me, whether it is a pin that pricks, or a storm that overtakes you. I am fond of you; and you can always reckon on my sympathy.’
‘Always!’ said Laurie, stooping to kiss the hand she had laid on his arm.
‘Yes; but that is not good for you,’ said Mrs. Severn, hastily withdrawing her hand. ‘Now is the moment to preach you Helen Suffolk’s little sermon. She says you will never marry so long as you are constantly here.’
‘Marry!’ said Laurie, looking at her, and then turning his head away with a half-contemptuous impatience.
‘Well, marry. Why should not I say so? If I have stood in your way, unwillingly, unfortunately, once, why should that shut up all your life? Laurie, if I were to ask you to reconsider all this, and make a difference,—for my sake?’
‘I could not marry even for your sake,’ he said, turning to her with a sudden laugh; ‘though there is no other inducement I would do so much for. Tell me something else to do to show my devotion, and let everything go on as it was before.’
‘Not as it was before,’ said Mrs. Severn. ‘This atmosphere might be good enough for you when you were poor. At least, it did you no harm; but now I want you to go back into the world.’
‘You want me to be wretched, I think,’ said Laurie. ‘I have got used to this atmosphere, as you call it; and it suits me. But I have forgotten all about the world. What have I done that I should be sent back among people who have forgotten me, to mix myself up with things in which I take no interest? Padrona, in this you do not show your usual wisdom. Let us return to the question of the light.’
‘Not yet,’ she said. ‘It is because I am anxious about you that I speak. This is such a point in your life; a new beginning,—anything you please to make it,—and you feel yourself how hard it is to think that it will make no difference. Laurie, what I want you to do is to break this thread of association, and turn your back upon the past.’
He turned and looked at her as she spoke, and their eyes met;—hers earnest and steady; his with a smile, which was full of tenderness, and a kind of playful melancholy dawning in them. ‘But that is not what I want you to do,’ he said, the smile growing as he met her gaze. She turned away with a little impatient exclamation. It was not the kind of reply she had looked for.
‘You are provoking, Laurie,’ she said. ‘You have regained the ground you stood on seven years ago, and why should you refuse to recall the circumstances too?’
‘And make the seven years as if they had never been?’
‘I think you might, in a great measure,’ said the padrona, with a little flush on her cheek, ‘though you laugh. Nothing has happened in those seven years. Yes, I grant you, you have felt some things as you never did before, and learned a great many things. But nothing has happened, Laurie. Nothing has occurred either to tie up your freedom in any way, or to leave rankling recollections in your mind. There has been no fact which could fetter you. Indeed,—for all that has come and gone,—your life might be safer to begin anew than that of any man I know.’
‘Well, that is hard!’ said Laurie, with more energy than he had yet shown; ‘the present is not much, the future I take no particular interest in, and you ask me to agree that there is nothing in the past! What has been the good of me altogether, then? Nobody will say that it has been worth a man’s while to live in order to produce ‘Feliciello.’ Padrona, this is very poor consolation,—the poorest I ever knew you to give.’
‘I did not mean it so, Laurie.’
‘No, you did not mean it,’ he said; ‘you did not think that the past,—such as it is,—is all I have. Of course I might now go back to Kensington Gore, as you tell me, or somewhere else; and go to a few parties next season, perhaps. Fine fate! Didn’t I tell you how I used to anticipate people finding my name in the Academy catalogue, and standing and staring at Laurie Renton’s picture? and now I can’t, for the life of me, remember who the people were I so thought of! That’s encouraging for a return to old ways. Let’s say no more about it,’ said Laurie, getting up and following his friend to her easel. ‘After all, the boys and Edie shall have some pleasure out of the money, and then it will not be quite lost.’
‘The boys and Edie must not get into the way of looking to you for pleasure,’ said the padrona, quickly; ‘neither for you nor them would that be good.’
‘There it is now!’ cried Laurie, ‘proof upon proof how little I am the better for what has happened. You cannot work for ever, padrona; but if I had all the gold-mines that ever were dreamt of you would not take anything from me; and what is the good of my having it, I should like to know?’
‘No, I would not take anything from you,’ she said, with a momentary smile; but it was a suggestion that made her tremble in her fortitude whenever it was made. ‘Laurie,’ she said, with a little gasp, turning to him for sympathy, ‘when I cannot work I hope I shall die.’
‘But one cannot die when one pleases, that is the worst of it,’ said Laurie. ‘I hope you will, padrona mia,—and I too,—and then, perhaps, one might have a better chance for a new life.’
This was not cheerful talk for a new beginning; but the amusing thing about Laurie, and, indeed, about the pair thus strangely united, was, that after all this had been uttered and done with they both became quite cheerful; and, a quarter of an hour afterwards, were planning an expedition to Dovecote, taking Renton by the way, with all that enjoyment of the idea of a country excursion which is so strong in the laborious dweller in towns. The vision of gliding rivers and autumnal trees swept over Mrs. Severn’s mind like a refreshing wind, carrying away all the vapours. For a time, she thought no more either of that twilight life which Laurie had chosen for himself, and of which she felt herself partly the cause, nor of her own anxieties, but went on painting, reducing the yellow tone in her light, and modifying her shadows, and full of cheerful discussion of the day and the way of going. To the moment its work or its thought; and to the next, why, another thought, another piece of work; and so forth, as pleases God. This blessing of temperament,—special gift of heaven to its beloved,—belonged more or less to both. The artist-woman had it in its perfection, which was the reason why she had got through so much hard labour and so many struggles with eye undimmed and spirit unbroken; and Laurie had it in a degree which had done much to lead to the unsatisfactoriness and imperfection of his life, which is a strange enough paradox, and yet true. For in the padrona, this power of dismissing care and living in the hour was accompanied, as it often is, by the strongest vitality and energy of constitution, by a natural delight and pleasure in exertion, and by the perpetual, never absent spur of necessity. Whereas in Laurie’s case it was associated with the meditative, contemplative soul; the mind that is more prone to thinking than to doing; a slower amount of life in the veins, and an existence disengaged from necessities and responsibilities. Temperament had more to do with the matter than had that early blunder in his life for which the padrona never forgave herself. ‘If I had not stood in his way he would have made a life for himself, like other men,’ she would say to herself, with an ache in her heart, yet with that touch of tender gratitude to the man who had it in him to pour himself out like a libation on her path, which a woman cannot but feel, however undesired the sacrifice may be. I am afraid to acknowledge it, but the truth is that such a libation is very grateful to a woman. There is in it the most exquisite, tragical, heart-rending pleasure. Not that one would not regret it with all one’s heart and soul, and do everything that one could, like Lancelot, to turn aside the rising passion. But even to Lancelot was not that self-offering of the lily-maid, though he would have given his life to prevent it, an exquisite sweetness and sorrowfulness, a combination of the deepest pain and gratification of which the soul is capable? Such an act raises the doer of it,—be it man or woman,—out of the level of ordinary humanity, and envelopes the receiver of the offering in the same maze of tenderest, most melancholy glory. Something of this feeling the padrona had for her Laurie, who had given her his life like a flower, without price or hope of price in this world. And yet, I think, temperament was at the bottom of it, and the sacrifice, and the sweetness of it, and all the subdued tones of his existence which had followed, were more to him than the brighter daylight colours of ordinary existence, even though he might feel the absence of those fuller tones now and then, once in a way.
But to some extent Laurie acted upon Mrs. Severn’s advice. As luck would have it, his old rooms at Kensington Gore, having passed through many hands in the interval, proved to be vacant about this time. And Laurie secured them, and fitted up all his old fittings, his carved brackets and velvet hangings, and all the contrivances that had been so pleasant to him; and had his bow-window once more full of flowers, and looked out once more upon the gay park and the stream of carriages as from an opera-box. But the ladies who looked up at his window once had passed away and given place to others, who knew not Laurie, or had forgotten him, and asked each other who was the man who stared so from that window? And from Kensington Gore to Fitzroy Square is a very long walk to be taken every day. And though, to be sure, there are plenty of studios about Kensington, into which an amateur may drop, yet these are grand studios, flanked by drawing-rooms, with ladies to be called upon, and the flavour of society about. It is true that Suffolk lives in that refined neighbourhood now, having made very rapid progress since the days when Mr. Rich bought ‘The Angles,’ and Laurie put the studio in order for the reception of the patron, and got cobwebs on his coat. ‘They were very nice, those old days, after all!’ Mrs. Suffolk says, when they talk it over; but they have now a spruce man-servant,—more spruce, though not so well instructed as old Forrester, Mr. Welby’s man,—to move a picture that has to be moved, and open the door to the patrons and patronesses. And Laurie for one, to whom a man-servant is not the badge of grandeur and success which it is to Mr. Suffolk, rather preferred, I fear, the state of things in the old days, when they all clustered about Fitzroy Square.
But the padrona has not removed from No. 375, though she has been tempted and plagued to do so on all sides. Frank, who would prefer to have a mother-in-law (since such a thing he must have) in a habitable part of the town, is very energetic as to the advantage it will be to Edie when she grows up. And Alice recommends it with wistful eyes, as so much nicer for the air, not liking to say a word against the home of her youth. Mrs. Severn thinks it would be unkind to Mr. Welby to withdraw from him; and it would cost a great deal of money; and then there would be new carpets wanted for new rooms, and quantities of things; and, last of all, would not it be a still greater clog upon Laurie and hindrance to him, in the possibility of his heart disengaging itself from all the pleasant bonds of the past? I think, however, that the thing which will finally resolve the point will be Frank’s success in the competition for a Foreign Office clerkship, for which he is going in. None of his people have any doubt of his success; and, in that case, the boy may be trusted to make his mother’s life a burden to her so long as she remains in Fitzroy Square. But what is to be done with Mr. Welby, and Forrester, to whom it would now be impossible to live out of sight of Edie and the boys, and withdraw themselves from the gradually increasing authority of the padrona, I don’t know.
Laurie’s sketch of the ‘Three Fairy Princes’ turned up out of a packing-box when he took back his belongings to Kensington Gore; and he hung it in the placer of honour over his mantelpiece. There anybody may see young Frank pushing forth towards the Indian towers and minarets, with a coronet hanging in a haze over the distant prospect; and Laurie himself, with his goods and chattels hung about him, and his lay-figure gazing blank over his shoulders, trudging towards the pepper-boxes of the National Gallery; and Ben scaling the rocks, like Mr. Longfellow’s Alpine hero, with the nymph on the summit beckoning him,—not to eternal snows and supernatural excellence, but to Renton and the House of Commons. Frank has not got the coronet; nor Laurie, except in the very mildest accidental way, the glories of the Academy. But who is to tell what is waiting for Ben? At least, there is only another chapter to do it in, and the story is all but told.