Aurora the Magnificent Part 23

And he would never know what s.h.i.+ning bubble burst there. She had wanted so much, as she said, to like them, and, as she did not say, to buy some of them, a great many of them, and make him rich with her gold.

He replied to her sigh:

"You are very kind."

After a moment spent gazing at the last painting placed on the easel, as if she hoped tardily to discover some merit in it, she said:

"I don't know a thing about painting, so nothing I could say about your way of doing it could matter one way or the other. But I have eyes to see the way things and people look. Tell me, now, honest Injun, do they look that way to you--the way you paint them?"

He laughed.

"Mrs. Hawthorne, no! Emphatically, no. And emphatically yes. When I look at them as you do, in the street, across the table, they look to me probably just as they do to you; but when I sit down to paint them--yes, they look to me as I have shown them looking in these portraits."

"But they're so sad! So sad it's cruel!" she objected.

"Oh, no," he objected to her objection; "it's not quite as bad as that."

"They make me perfectly miserable."

He whipped the canvas off the easel, saying dryly:

"Don't think of them again!"

It looked like impatience. With hands thrust in his pockets he took a purposeless half-turn in the room, then came back to her side.

"If you totally detest them, I am sorry," he said mildly. "I had wanted to offer you one, a little, un.o.btrusive one to stick in some corner, a token of the artist's regard."

"Oh, do! do!" she grasped at his friendly tender. "Find a little cheerful one, if you can. I shall love to have it."

He selected a small panel of a single tall, palely expanding garden poppy, more gray than violet, against a background of shade. Flower though it was, it still affected one like the portrait of a lady wronged and suffering.

In the drawing-room to which they returned Giovanna had lighted a lamp.

The fire had properly caught and was burning more brightly; the place looked rosy and warm, after the winter twilight filling the other room and the chill that reigned there.

Aurora returned to the tea-table; with a disengaged air she reached for plum-cake. She ascertained with comfort that Mrs. Foss did not look sad or Estelle ill used; that the abbe was as serene as ever and Miss Seymour, after her talk with Mrs. Foss, rather serener than usual.

Gerald was far jollier than any of his portraits. To make sure that she was no depressing object herself, she smiled the warmest, sunniest smile she was capable of.

"Do come and talk a little bit with me, before I have to go home!" she unexpectedly called out to the abbe.

When at the end of the long evening spent together smoking and talking the two friends separated for the night, Gerald went to his room as did Vincent to his. But Gerald had no more than pulled off his necktie when he changed his mind, went back to the drawing-room, crossed the tobacco-scented s.p.a.ce where something seemed to linger of the warmth of goodfellows.h.i.+p, and entered the farther room.

A doubt had risen in his mind. He could not wait till morning to see his work with a fresh eye, an eye as fresh as Mrs. Hawthorne's, and satisfy himself as to whether he, so careful of truth, had unconsciously come to exaggerating, falsifying his impressions, grown guilty of hollow mannerisms.

Whatever he had said, he had been stung by Mrs. Hawthorne's liking his paintings so little. It was easy to console oneself remembering the poor lady's ignorance of art. The truth might be that something was wrong with the pictures, which suspicion had driven the artist to go and have a dispa.s.sionate look at them in the frigid hour between twelve and one of the night. If a person is on the way to becoming a morbid a.s.s he cannot find it out too soon.

Gerald's dogma was that the first duty of a picture is to be beautiful.

His critics did not give sufficient attention to that aspect of his work, he privately thought; they were put off by what they mistakenly called its queerness, its mere difference from the academic, the conventional. This was bitter, because he had always so loved beautiful lines, beautiful tints, had insisted that the very texture, of his painting should have the beauty of fine-grained skin.

He was no conspicuous colorist, of course, he did not by temperament revel in the glow of rich, bold, endlessly varied tints. It was a limitation, which his work naturally reflected. This was marked in fact by modesty and melancholy of color-scheme. But that did not interfere with beauty, he maintained. He had been thrilled by the discovery in the Siena gallery of an old master with the same predilections as he, an antipathy apparently to the vivid, crying, self-a.s.sertive colors, which he accordingly with admirable simplicity left out, and interpreted the world all in blues and greens, grays and violets, whites of many degrees and tones and meanings.

"They're so sad that it's cruel!" Mrs. Hawthorne had voiced the instinctive objection of her earth-loving, life-praising disposition to the view he took of people and things. But what was there to do about it? When he looked at a sitter to render his personality sincerely, that was the way he saw him. If he had been limited to rendering a human being in the single aspect he wore while walking from the drawing-room to the dinner-table with a lady on his arm and a rich meal in prospect, he would have given up painting, it interested him so little. Most of the portrait-painters in vogue did thus paint the surface and nothing besides. Gerald had no envy of their large fees at the price of such boredom as he would have suffered in their place.

He held a canvas to the light of his candle. It was an old one of Amabel. She had not been sitting for him, he had made this sketch from a distance while she worked on her side. It was easy to see that the room was cold, that the woman with the pinched aristocratic nose, the little shawl over her shoulders, was poor, determined and anxious. If Mrs. Foss had said, "But Amabel never was as hollow-cheeked as that, nor ever looked pathetic in the least," Gerald could only have answered, "I swear to you this is how she looked to me on that day."

He studied the portrait of his mother, one of his earliest, bad in a way, but excellent in the matter of likeness. His mother no more than Amabel had been a pathetic person, Mrs. Foss would certainly have said.

To which Gerald might have answered that she was not so during an afternoon call; but that the most characteristic thing about that gentle and delicate woman had been the fact of her living so much in the life of others and being open to endless sorrows through them. The dim affectionate eyes, the deprecating half-smile of his mother, engaged sympathy for the unfair plight.

Last, he took up a portrait of Violet. She had been in the perfection of young beauty; she had had no capacity for deep feeling, really,--why did an aroma of sadness escape from that dainty colored shadow of her? Why, but because of the artist's yearning sense that beauty is transitory, and the loveliest girl subject to destiny, and the future full of pitfalls for the fragility of all fles.h.!.+

"Imagine a barnyard fowl, a common white hen pecking among the gravel,"

Gerald once ill.u.s.trated his view-point, "and imagine hovering over it a hawk, which it hasn't seen. Does it make no difference in your sense of the hen that _you_ see the hawk?"

"It comes to this," Leslie on a certain occasion summed up Gerald's case: "Gerald isn't satisfied to paint the thing that's before him. All he cares to paint is the soul of things, and what you finally see expressed on the canvas is his pity for everything that has the misfortune to be born into an unsatisfactory world. Gerald can't see a thing as being common: the moment he narrows his eyes to look for purposes of art, it becomes to him exceptional, unique. I asked him once, as a joke, to paint me a simple, large, bright orange squash, in a field. And he did. A masterpiece. One can't say that the squash isn't large, orange, and true to life. But what a squas.h.!.+ It has an amount of personal distinction, an air of rarity and remoteness, that would make you think twice, nay, three times, before making such a precious product of the sacred earth into pies!"

When he was chilled through and his hands were numb, Gerald remembered to pick up his candle and go to bed. No change of opinion, it is needless to say, had resulted from his midnight inquiry.

A point of natural spite made him say that he did not ask people to like his pictures. All he asked was permission to go on painting as he pleased, obscure and independent, the sincere apostle of a peculiar creed, working out his problems with conscience and fidelity. If fate might send him critics whose opinion he valued he would be properly grateful. He felt the need of criticism and companions.h.i.+p, in his work, but had no regard for his fellow artists in Florence. His thoughts turned sometimes with envy toward Paris, where modern art had some vitality, and artist life the advantage of stimulating a.s.sociations.

There was a good deal of talk at the time, and some derision, of a new phase called impressionism, whose chief seat was Paris.

As for the opinion of such a person as Mrs. Hawthorne, it obviously had no value. But while the artist could brush her aside in the character of critic, it remained a little galling to the man to know he figured in her mind as a painter who did not know how to paint.

"Can't paint for sour apples!" he seemed to hear her reporting to Estelle, and got in his mouth the taste of the apples.

CHAPTER XI

When Gerald asked Mrs. Hawthorne to sit for him, she stared in his face without a word.

"Don't be afraid," he hastened to rea.s.sure her; "I engage to paint a portrait you will like."

She felt herself blush for the dismay she had not been able to conceal, and to hide this embarra.s.sment she lifted to her face--not the handkerchief or the bouquet with which beauty is wont to cover the telltale signal in the cheek, but a wee dog, as white as a handkerchief and no less sweet than a bouquet. She rubbed her nose fondlingly in the soft silk of his breast, while, tickled, he tried, with baby growls and an exposure of sharp pin teeth, to get a bite at it.

Gerald looked on with simple pleasure. Because he had given Aurora that dog. On the day of making a scene because she was to receive a dog from Hunt he had set to work to find one for her himself, the prior possession of which would make it natural to decline Charlie's, if, as Gerald doubted, Charlie's offer had been anything more than facile compliment. And now, instead of the torment to his nerves of seeing her fondle and kiss a brute of Charlie's, he had the not disagreeable spectacle of her pressing to her warm and rosy face an animal that related her caresses, even if loosely and distantly, to a less unworthy object. Sour and sad, dried up and done with women, a man still has feelings.

It would be unfair not to add that something better than primeval jealousy actuated Gerald, at the same time as, no doubt, some tincture of that. A sort of impersonal delicacy made the idea disagreeable to him of a dear, nice woman cheris.h.i.+ng with the foolish fondness such persons bestow on their pets the gift of a friend whom she, in taking his loyalty for granted, overrated, as he thought.

The dog he had selected to present to her belonged to a breed for which he had respect as well as affection, crediting to Maltese terriers, besides all the sterling dog virtues, a discretion, a fineness of feeling, rare enough among humans. That Gerald kept no dog was due to the fact that he was still under the impression of the illness and death of his last, Lucile's pet and his mother's, who had been his companion until a year or two before, a senile, self-controlled little personage of the Maltese variety.

Having decided to give Mrs. Hawthorne a dog, Gerald had spent some hours watching the several components of one litter as they disported themselves in the flagged court of a peasant house, and had fixed upon one dusty ball of fluff rather than another upon solid indications of character.

Snowy after strenuous purifications at the hands of Giovanna, sweet-smelling from the pinch of orris powder rubbed in his fur, and brave with a cherry ribbon, he was taken from the breast of Gerald's overcoat and deposited in the hands of Aurora, whose delight expressed itself in sounds suggestive of an ogreish craving to eat the little beast, interspersed with endearments of dim import, such as, "Diddums!

Wasums! Tiddledewink.u.ms!" Estelle's did the same. There was no difference in the affection the two instantly bestowed on this dog.

Aurora remarked later on that Busteretto couldn't be blamed for not knowing which was his mother.

Sensitively timid, yet bold in his half dozen inches with curiosity of life and the exuberant gladness of youth, Busteretto could frisk and he could tremble. He was cowed by the sight of fearful things, beetles and big dogs, but next moment, with budding valor, would dash to investigate them. He twinkled when he ran, his bark lifted him off his four feet.