Armorel of Lyonesse: A Romance of To-day

'If you really would like a talk about everything,' she said, 'come to my own room.' She led the way. 'Here we shall be quiet and undisturbed. It is the place where I practise every day. But I shall never be able to play like you, dear. Now, take that chair and let us begin. First, why do you come so seldom?'

'Frankly and truly, do you wish me to come often?'

'Frankly and truly, fair cousin, yes. But come alone. Mrs. Elstree and I were at school together, and we were not friends. That is all. I hope you like her for a companion.'

'The first of my difficulties,' said Armorel, 'is that I do not. I imagined when she came that it mattered nothing about her. You see, I have been for five years under masters and teachers, and I never thought anything about them outside the lesson. I thought my companion would be only another master. But she isn't. I have her company at breakfast, lunch, and dinner. And all the evening. I think I am wrong not to like her, because she is always good-tempered. Somehow, she jars upon me. She likes everything I do not care about – comic operas, dance music, French novels. She has no feeling for pictures, and her taste in literature is … not mine. Oh, I am talking scandal. And she is so perfectly inoffensive. Mostly she lies by the fire and either dozes or reads her French novels. All day long, I go about my devices. But there is the evening.'

'This is rather unfortunate, Armorel, is it not?'

'If it were only for a month or two, one would not mind. Tell me, Philippa, how long must I have a companion?'

Philippa laughed. 'I dare say the question may solve itself before long. Women generally achieve independence – with the wedding ring – unless that brings worse slavery.'

'No,' said Armorel, gravely, 'I shall not achieve independence that way.'

'Not that way?'

'Not by marrying!'

'Why not, Armorel?'

'You will not laugh at me, Philippa? I learned a long time ago that I could only marry one kind of man. And now I cannot find him.'

'You did know such a man formerly? My dear, you are not going to let a childish passion ruin your own life.'

'I knew a man who was, in my mind, this kind of man. He came across my life for two or three weeks. When he went away I kept his image in my mind, and it gradually grew as I grew – always larger and more beautiful. The more I learned – the more splendid grew this image. It was an Idol that I set up and worshipped for five long years.'

'And now your Idol is shattered?'

'No; the Idol remains. It is the man, who no longer corresponds to the Idol. The man who might have become this wonderful Image is gone – and I can never love any other man. He must be my Idol in the body.'

'But, Armorel, this is unreal. We are not angels. Men and women must take each other with their imperfections.'

'My Idol may have had his imperfections, too. Well, the man has gone. I am punished, perhaps, for setting up an Idol.'

She was silent for awhile, and Philippa had nothing to say.

'But about my companion?' Armorel went on. 'When can I do without one?'

'There is nothing but opinion to consider. Opinion says that a young lady must not live alone.'

'If one never hears what opinion says, one need not consider opinion perhaps.'

'Well, but you could not go into society alone.'

'That matters nothing, because I never go into society at all.'

'Never go into society at all? What do you mean?'

'I mean that we go nowhere.'

'Well, what are people about? They call upon you, I suppose?'

'No; nobody ever calls.'

'But where are Mrs. Elstree's friends?'

'She has no friends.'

'Oh! She has – or had – an immense circle of friends.'

'That was before her father lost everything and killed himself. They were fair-weather friends.'

'Yes, but one's own people don't run away because of misfortune.' Philippa looked dissatisfied with the explanation. 'My dear cousin, this must be inquired into. Your lawyer told me that Mrs. Elstree's large circle of friends would be of such service to you. Do you really mean that you go nowhere? And your wonderful playing absolutely wasted? And your face seen nowhere? Oh! it is intolerable that such a girl as you should be so neglected.'

'I have other friends. There is Effie Wilmot and her brother who wants to become a dramatist. And I have found an old friend, an artist. I am not at all lonely. But in the evening, I confess, it is dull. I am not afraid of being alone. I have always been alone. But now I am not alone. I have to talk.'

'And uncongenial talk.'

'Now advise me, Philippa. Her talk is always on one subject – always the wonderful virtues of Mr. Feilding.'

'My cousin Alec? Yes' – Philippa changed colour, and shaded her face with a hand-screen. 'I believe she knows him.'

'Your cousin? Oh! I had forgotten. But it is all the better, because you know him. Philippa, I am troubled about him. For not only does Zoe talk about him perpetually, but he is always calling on one pretext or other. If I go to a picture-gallery, he is there: if I walk in the park, I meet him: if I go to church – Zoe does not go – he meets me in the porch: if we go to the theatre, he is there.'

'I did not think that Alec was that kind of man,' said Philippa, still keeping the hand-screen before her face. 'Are you mistaken, perhaps? Has he said anything?'

'No: he has said nothing. But it annoys me to have this man following me about – and – and – Philippa – he is your cousin – I know – but I detest him.'

'Can you not show that you dislike his attentions? If he will not understand that you dislike him – wait – perhaps he will speak – though I hardly think – you may be mistaken, dear. If he speaks, let your answer be quite unmistakable.'

'Then I hope that he will speak to-morrow. Zoe wanted me to find some money in order to help him in some way – out of some worries.'

'My dear child – I implore you – do not be drawn into any money entanglements. What does Zoe mean? What does it all mean? My dear, there is something here that I cannot understand. What can it mean? Zoe to help my cousin out of worries about money? Zoe? What has Zoe to do with him and his worries?'

'He has been very kind to her and to her husband.'

'There is something we do not understand,' Philippa repeated.

'You are not angry with me for not liking your cousin?'

'Angry? No, indeed. He has been so spoiled with his success that I don't wonder at your not liking him. As for me, you know, it is different. I knew Alec before his greatness became visible. No one, in the old days, ever suspected the wonderful powers he has developed. When he was a boy, no one knew that he could even hold a pencil, nobody suspected him of making rhymes – and now see what he has done. Yet, after all, his achievements seem to me only like incongruous additions stuck on to a central house. Alec and painting don't go together, in my mind. Nor Alec and vers de société. Nor Alec and story-telling. In his youth he passed for a practical lad, full of common-sense and without imagination.'

'Was he of a sensitive, highly nervous temperament?'

'Not to my knowledge. He has been always, and is still, I think, a man of a singularly calm and even cold temper – not in the least nervous nor particularly sensitive.'

Armorel compared this estimate with that of her companion. Strange that two persons should disagree so widely in their estimate of a man.

'Then, three or four years ago, he suddenly blossomed out into a painter. He invited his friends to his chambers. He told us that he had a little surprise for us. And then he drew aside a curtain and disclosed the first picture he thought worthy of exhibition. It hangs on the wall above your head, Armorel, with its companion of the following year. My father bought them and gave them to me.'

Armorel got up to look at them.

'Oh!' she cried. 'These are copies!'

'Copies? No. They are Alec's own original pictures. What makes you think they are copies?'

What made her think that they were copies was the very remarkable fact that both pictures represented scenes among the Scilly Isles: that in each of them was represented – herself – as a girl of fifteen or sixteen: that the sketches for both these pictures had been made in her own presence by the artist: that he was none other than Roland Lee: and that the picture she had seen in his studio was done by the same hand and in the same style as the two pictures before her. Of that she had no doubt. She had so trained her eye and hand that there could be no doubt at all of that fact.

She stared, bewildered. Philippa, who was beside her looking at the pictures, went on talking without observing the sheer amazement in Armorel's eyes.

'That was his first picture,' she continued; 'and this was the second. I remember very well the little speech he made while we were all crowding round the picture. "I am going," he said, "to make a new departure. You all thought I was just following the beaten road at the Bar. Well, I am trying a new and a shorter way to success. You see my first effort." It was difficult to believe our eyes. Alec a painter? One might as well have expected to find Alec a poet: and in a few months he was a poet: and then a story-teller. And his poetry is as good as it is made in these days; and his short stories are as good as any of those by the French writers.'

'What is the subject of this picture?' Armorel asked with an effort.

'The place is somewhere on the Cornish coast, I believe. He always paints the same kind of picture – always a rocky coast – a tossing sea – perhaps a boat – spray flying over the rocks – and always a girl, the same girl. There she is in both pictures – a handsome black-haired girl, quite young – it might be almost a portrait of yourself when you were younger, Armorel.'

'Almost,' said Armorel.

'This girl is now as well known to Alec's friends as Wouvermann's white horse. But no one knows the model.'

Armorel's memory went back to the day when Roland made that sketch. She stood – so – just as the painter had drawn her, on a round boulder, the water boiling and surging at her feet and the white foam running up. Behind her the granite rock, grey and black. How could she ever forget that sketch?

'Alec is wonderful in his seas,' Philippa went on. 'Look at the bright colour and the clear transparency of the water. You can feel it rolling at your feet. Upon my word, Armorel, the girl is really like you.'

'A little, perhaps. Yes; they are good pictures, Philippa. The man who painted them is a painter indeed.'

She sat down again, still bewildered.

Presently she heard Philippa's voice. 'What is it?' she asked. 'You have become deaf and dumb. Are you ill?'

'No – I am not ill. The sight of those pictures set me thinking. I will go now, Philippa. If he speaks to me I will reply so that there can be no mistake. But if he persists in following me about, I will ask you to interfere.'

'If necessary,' Philippa promised her. 'I will interfere for you. But there is something in all this which I do not understand. Come again soon, dear, and tell me everything.'

When they began this talk, one girl was a little troubled, but not much. The other was free from any trouble. When they parted, both girls were troubled.

One felt, vaguely, that danger was in the air. Zoe meant something by constantly talking about her cousin Alec. What understanding was there between him and that woman – that detestable woman?

The other walked home in a doubt and perplexity that drove everything else out of her head. What did those pictures mean? Had Roland given away his sketches? Was there another painter who had the very touch of Roland as well as his sketches? No, no; it was impossible.

Suddenly she remembered something on the fragment of paper that Effie picked up. The corner of the torn cheque – even the signature of Alec Feilding. What did that mean? Why had Roland torn up a cheque signed by Mr. Feilding? Why had he called that act the turning of the footstep?

CHAPTER XI

A CRITIC ON TRUTH

One painter may make use of another man's sketches for his own pictures. The thing is conceivable, though one cannot recall, and there is no record of, any such case. It is, perhaps, possible. Portrait-painters have employed other men to paint backgrounds and even hands and drapery. Now, the two pictures hanging in Philippa's room were most certainly painted from Roland's sketches. If there were any room for doubt the figure of Armorel herself in the foreground removed that doubt. Therefore, Roland must have lent his sketches to Mr. Feilding. What else did he lend? Can one man lend another his eye, his hand, his sense of colour, his touch, his style? There was once, I seem to have read, a man who sold his soul to the only Functionary who buys such things, and keeps a stock of them second-hand, on the condition that he should be able to paint as well as the immortal Raffaello. He obtained his wish, because the Devil always keeps his bargain to the letter, with the result that, instead of winning the imperishable wreath for himself that he expected, he was never known at all, and his pictures are now sold as those of the master whose works they so miraculously resemble. Armorel had perhaps heard this story somewhere. Could the cleverest man in all London have made a similar transaction, taking Roland Lee for his model? If so, the Devil had not cheated him at all, and he got out of the bargain all he expected, because he not only painted quite as well as his master, and in exactly the same style, so that it was impossible to distinguish between them, but, which the other unfortunate did not get, all the credit was given to him, while the original model or master languished in obscurity.

It was obvious to a trained eye, at very first sight, that the style of the pictures was that of Roland Lee. He had a style of his own. The first mark of genius in any art is individuality. His style was no more to be imitated in painting than the style of Robert Browning can be followed in poetry. Painters there are who have been imitated and have created a school of imitators: even these can always be distinguished from their copyists. The subtle touch of the master, the personal presence of his hand, cannot be copied or imitated. In these two pictures the hand of Roland was clearly, unmistakably visible. The light thrown over them, the atmosphere with which they were charged – everything was his. He had caught the September sunshine as it lies over and enfolds the Scilly Islands – who should know that soft and golden light better than Armorel? – he had caught the transparencies of the seas, the shining yellows of the sea-weed, the browns and purples of bramble and fern, the greyness and the blackness of the rock: you could hear the rush of the water eddying among the boulders; you could see the rapid movement of the sea-gulls' wings as they swept along with the wind. Could another, even with the original sketches lying before him, even with skill and feeling of his own, reproduce these things in Roland's own individual style?

'No,' she cried, but not aloud; 'I know these pictures. They are not his at all. They are Roland's.'

Every line of thought that she followed – to write these down would be to produce another 'Ring and Book' – in her troubled meditations after the discovery led her to the same conclusion. It was that at which she had arrived in a single moment of time, without argument or reasoning, and at the very first sight of the pictures. The first thought is always right. 'They are Roland's pictures' – that was the first thought. The second thought brings along the doubts, suggests objections, endeavours to be judicial, deprecates haste, and calls for the scales. 'They cannot,' said the second thought, 'be Roland's paintings, because Mr. Feilding says they are his.' The third thought, which is the first strengthened by evidence, declared emphatically that they were Roland's, whatever Mr. Feilding might say, and could be the work of none other.

Therefore, the cleverest man in all London, according to everybody, the best and most generous and most honourable, according to Armorel's companion, was an impostor and a Liar. Never before had she ever heard of such a Liar.

Armorel, it is true, knew but little of the crooked paths by which many men perform this earthly pilgrimage from the world which is to the world which is to come. Children born on Samson – nay, even those also of St. Mary's – have few opportunities of observing these ways. That is why all Scillonians are perfectly honest: they do not know how to cheat – even those who might wish to become dishonest, if they knew. In her five years' apprenticeship the tree of knowledge had dropped some of its baleful fruit at Armorel's feet: that cannot be avoided even in a convent garden. Yet she had not eaten largely of the fruit, nor with the voracity that distinguishes many young people of both sexes when they get hold of these apples. In other words, she only knew of craft and falsehood in general terms, as they are set forth in the Gospels and by the Apostles, and especially in the Book of Revelation, which expressly states the portion of liars. Yet, even with this slight foundation to build upon, Armorel was well aware that here was a fraud of a most monstrous character. Surely, there never was, before this man, any man in the world who dared to present to the world another man's paintings, and to call them his own? Men and women have claimed books which they never wrote – witness the leading case of the false George Eliot and the story told by Anthony Trollope; men have pretended to be well-known writers – did I not myself once meet a man in an hotel pretending to be one of our most genial of story-tellers? Men have written things and pretended that they were the work of famous hands. Literature – alas! – hath many impostors. But in Art the record is clean. There are a few ghosts, to be sure, here and there – sporadic spectres! – but they are obscure and mostly unknown. Armorel had never heard or seen any of them. Surely there never before was any man like unto this man!

And, apart from the colossal impudence of the thing, she began to consider the profound difficulties in carrying it out. Because, you see, no one man, unaided, could carry it through. It requires the consent, the silence, and the active – nay, the zealous – cooperation of another man. And how are you to get that man?

In order to get this other man – this active and zealous fellow-conspirator – you must find means to persuade him to sacrifice every single thing that men care for – honour, reputation, success. He must be satisfied to pursue Art, actually and literally, for Art's own sake. This is, I know, a rule of conduct preached by every art critic, every æsthete, every lecturer or writer on Art. Yet observe what it may lead to. Was there, for instance, an unknown genius who gave his work to Giotto, with permission to call it his own? And was that obscure genius content to sit and watch that work in the crowd, unseen and unsuspected, while he murmured praises and thanksgiving for the skill of hand and eye which had been given to him, but claimed by that other young man, Messer Giotto? Did Turner have his ghost? Sublime sacrifice of self! So to pursue Art for Art's sake as to give your pictures to another man by which he may rise to honour – even, it may be, to the Presidency of the Royal Academy, contented only with the consciousness of good and sincere work, and with the possession of mastery! It is beyond us: we cannot achieve this greatness – we cannot rise to this devotion. Art hath no such votaries. By what persuasions, then – by what bribes – was Roland induced to consent to his own suicide – ignoble, secret, and shameful suicide?

He must have consented; in no other way could the thing be done. He must have agreed to efface himself – but not out of pure devotion to Art. Not so. The Roland of the past survived still. The burning desire for distinction and recognition still flamed in his soul. The bitterness and shame with which he spoke of himself proved that his consent had been wrung from him. He was ashamed. Why? Because another bore the honours that should be his. Because he was a bondman of the impostor. Of this Armorel was certain. Roland Lee – the man whom for five long years she had imagined to be marching from triumph to triumph – conqueror of the world – had sold himself – for what consideration she knew not – hand and eye, genius and brain, heart and soul – had sold himself into slavery. He had consented to a monstrous and most impudent fraud! And the man who stood before the canvas in public, writing his name in the corner, was – the noun appellative, the proper noun – belonging to such an act. And her own friend – her gallant hero of Art – what else was he in this conspiracy of two? You cannot persuade a woman – such is the poverty of the feminine imagination – to call a thing like this by any other name than its plain, simple, and natural one. A man may explain away, find excuses, make suggestions, point out extenuating circumstances, show how the force of events destroys free will, and propose a surplice and a golden crown for the unfortunate victim of fate, instead of bare shoulders and the nine-clawed cat. But a woman – never. If the thing done is a Lie, the man who did it is a —

'Armorel,' said her companion – it was in the afternoon, and she had been dozing after her lunch – 'what is the matter? You have been sitting in the window, which has a detestable view of a dismal street, for two long hours without talking. At lunch you sat as if in a dream. Are you ill? Has anything happened? Has the respectable Mr. Jagenal robbed you of your money? Has Philippa been saying amiable things about me?'

'I have found out something which has disquieted me beyond expression,' said Armorel, gravely.

Zoe changed colour. 'Heavens!' – she laughed curiously. 'What has come out now? Anything about me? One never knows what may come out next. It is very odd what a lot of things may be said about everybody.'

'My discovery has nothing to do with you, at least – no, nothing at all.'

'That is reassuring.' It certainly was, as everybody knows who does not wish the curtain to draw up once again on the earlier and half-forgotten scenes of the play. 'Perhaps it might relieve you, dear, if you were to tell me. But do not think I am curious. Besides, I dare say I could tell you more than you could tell me. Is it about Philippa's hopeless attachment for the man who will never marry her, and her cruelty to the reverend gentleman who will?'

'No – no: it is nothing about Philippa. I know nothing about any attachments.'

'Well, you will tell me when you please.' Zoe relapsed into warmth and silence. But she watched the girl from under her heavy eyelids. Something had happened – something serious. Armorel pursued her meditations, but in a different line. She now remembered that the leader in this Fraud was the man whom Zoe professed to honour above all other living men: could she tell this disciple what she had discovered? One might as well inform Kadysha that her prophet Mohammed was an epileptic impostor. And, again, he was Philippa's first cousin, and she regarded him with pride, if not – as Zoe suggested – with a warmer feeling still. How could she bring this trouble upon Philippa?

And, again, it was Roland's secret. How could she reveal a thing which would cover him with ridicule and discredit for the rest of his life? She must be silent for the sake of everybody.

'Zoe,' she sprang to her feet, 'don't ask me anything more. Forget what I said. It is not my own secret.'

'My dear child,' Zoe murmured, 'if nobody has run away with your money, and if you have found out no mares' nests about me, I don't mind anything. I have already quite forgotten. Why should I remember?'

'Of course,' Armorel repeated impatiently – this companion of hers often made her impatient – 'there is nothing about you. It concerns – '

'Mr. Feilding.'

It was only an innocent maid who opened the door to announce an afternoon caller; but Armorel started, for really it was the right completion to her sentence, though not the completion she meant to make.

He came in – the man of whom her mind was full – tall, handsome, calm, and self-possessed. Authority sat, visible to all, upon his brow. His dress, his manner, his voice, proclaimed the man who had succeeded – who deserved to succeed. Oh! how could it be possible?