Louis Creswicke

“ And Yate, as he grew in knowledge of her, could have testified to other moods still—ugly ones—had he not been too neck-deep in emotion, too loyal, too profoundly worshipful of the secrets of Nature to notice anything but beauty in the characteristics of an ungarnished reality like hers. Besides this, though he was but a youth, he had cosmopolitan blood in his veins, and cosmopolitan dilution means poetry at a very early age—poetry which clothes womanhood with mystery, and makes her a ravishing mixture of puny weakness and irresistible strength. ”

“ He was not an apostle—merely a man, an atom in the fortuitous system to be swept where destiny should decide. Need he, an artist, be more chivalrous—he put it baldly—more conventional and self-abnegating than other men? Must he, when the delicious moment of love's ripening had arrived, forbear to pluck, to eat? As he had loved this Breton girl a year ago he loved her, despite their severance, to-day. ”

“ The tussle suited his mood, which had rebelled against the suavity of conveyance to his enchanting goal. A handsome colour glowed through the tan of his cheeks, and the sombre green-grey of his eyes shone gallant and golden with the illuminations of love. At first glimpse of him Carol recognised in his personality that almost godlike quality which welds mere dust into heroes. What devotion he was prepared to give her! A crown of sovereignty to lift the chosen one above princes and peoples, pain and penury, and privation. ”

“ Harry leapt up to join her, and only the acacia leaves above were eavesdroppers to the rest of the conversation. It flowed evenly, sometimes stopping against an impedimental stone of argument—occasionally gushing with iridescent bubbles from the force of energetic collision. Yate was a serious thinker and a confident talker. Carol had by nature that light quality of intellectual exuberance which, ornamental and active as foam, has no kinship with real erudition. ”

“ A sore punishment this for having confessed in her heart's naivete a passion for a hero of the brush, a vagrant in velveteen who painted pictures and—vulgarian!—sold them to any patronising passer-by. It was penalty dire enough for a debutante who had but sipped Paris, it waxed doubly dreadful to inquiring Eve within scent of the apple tree. There were tears at first, sobs of despair, then dumb contumacy, and latterly—when the spring weather returned again—kicks! But the pricks of family pride were sharp to lunge against, and many drops of heart's blood were spilt in the exercise. ”

“ He knew that he swayed on the bridge between life and eternity; that possibly—nay, probably—he should never hear the sweet enchantment of her voice again; that if he should die it must be without so much as a pressure from her hand; and yet the great heart never wavered, but beat evenly like the pulse of some grand cathedral clock, which, spite of marriage chime or funeral knell, pursues its steadfast purpose for ever.
At last the work was over, and its reward, [Pg 222] the free respiration of the little sufferer, was assured. ”

“ Dear little Betty! How her twinkling feet make merry, light as sea-foam frothing on shells; how our pulses throb and dance in pace with hers; how our ears dote on the fragile, cooing tones of her dainty voice as it coquettes with banalities, flirts with the very bars of melody that silly men have tried to make witty and pretty. But the prettiness and wittiness are Betty's; do we not all know that? ”

“ Harry, who had occupied a humble position on the nethermost hem of the Sandhurst list, was conscious that his own anxiety for cavalry was due rather to the "beggars can't be choosers" system of the idle and popular ones than to a direct equestrian penchant.
"And women pet them; they'd prefer a fool who can pot rabbits and do a barn-dance to Homer himself," growled Yate. ”

“ I wonder if the scent of orange blossom, warmed by the breath of the sea, is an intoxicant, if it soaks in at the pores and quickens the veins to madness? Mine never seemed so palpitating with delirium as in those days with her by my side, and the free heavens and ocean for her setting. Yet she was ready to leave me without changing the indefinitude which always accompanied her words and actions, to leave me on the morrow—for I was anchored to a studio and some commissions to which I was pledged. ”

“ The Major had been gathered to his fathers, and Mrs Cameron, with her baby girl, to the great regret of the regiment, had returned to the vicinity, if not to the care, of her parents in Maida Vale.
It was this departure, though it would have surprised him had he been told so, that inspired Ralph Danby with the notion that Army doctoring was a bore. He came to the conclusion that real work was all he wanted. What a field was open in metropolitan life with its suffering and pain for a man's labours—a man who was otherwise good for nothing! ”

“ From the top of the steps Yate caught a [Pg 155] pretty glimpse of Sabbath repose. The lawn and the standard roses were formal enough, but there were acacia trees on the left, and, under them, grouped artistically, an Indian drugget, a tea table, and long basket chairs. In one of these Carol lay curled up like the letter S, with head deep in a frilled cushion. Harry, from his point of vantage, whispered, "She reminds me of a lettuce." The soft green of a shimmering tea gown tipped with transparencies of lemon-tinted gauze was gratifying to parched eyes in over-ripe midsummer. ”

“ Harry's expression widened to a grin; his mouth was one of those expansive ones which are born grinning. It sealed for him the reputation of good nature.
"Sunday in the suburbs is such a dull thing, one feels quite asphyxiated, even to the marrow," she said, addressing herself to Harry, and veering weathercock-wise in the direction of Tyndall.
"I thought ladies saved that day for gossip and scandal?" said Yate, dropping, after the fashion of male monsters, into the smallest of chairs indicated by her. ”

“ He coughed slightly, and stirred the fire with caution, as though it shaped some panorama he feared to disarrange. Then he began his story:—
"First some rose leaves shaken into the finger-glass of a great actress—you know Lalage?—on the night when all Paris was intoxicated by her. It was my supper, and she honoured me. Many men would gladly have been that rose—to lay down its life for a touch of her finger-tips: several have parted with all that life holds dear for less than that." ”

“ Always downright—blunt some people said—he invaded where angels might have feared to tread.
"Mrs Cameron—Phœbe—I love you. Will [Pg 211] you marry me? Will you let me make you happy again?"
Two dove-grey eyes blinked wide with amazement; then, seeing the reality of his emotion, she stepped back a pace, and seemed to freeze as she stood.
The birds sounded discordantly; the sunshine lost all its warmth—it was but a winter gleam after all; the rose-bloom of her cheek changed to deadly pallor. Big man as he was, he grew giddy as he looked. ”

“ In an instant I observed that he was no longer the same Wray, whose presentiment he himself had painted for the Corporation of H——, no longer the harum-scarum painter I had known five years ago; it seemed as though he had thrown all the buoyancy of colour and tissue—the veritable body of him—on the canvas, and had left [Pg 123] merely a shadow of the original to walk the earth. ”

“ Perhaps fate had favoured him in providing on the mother's side some German profundity and on the father's a sturdy vertebral column and proportionate wrappings of British muscle; perhaps it had not, for inside the profundity was a luxuriant growth of romance, and through the British muscle coursed subdued but dangerous fires.
"He's a good-looking chap," explained [Pg 154] Harry—for Rosser was an old friend—"a dashing rider, and a capital shot—everyone likes him."
"Lucky fellow," grunted Yate. "I've often observed that the failures are quite the most popular." ”

“ Social excitement is almost as sustaining as fanatical enthusiasm; it is the intoxicant which inflames half the actors that strut through the world's dramas of marriage, murder, or martyrdom. It sustained and inflamed little Elsie, who, dizzy with congratulations, valedictory gushings, present receiving, dress trying, and orange-blossom choosing, ignored the importance of life's destination in the enjoyment of the surrounding and immediate scenery. ”

“ The Catholic and Breton temperament is so finely interwoven that even this sudden overstepping of family restrictions had to her its pious side. She could there and then, in effervescent thankfulness, have knelt to worship all the infinitesimal saintlings of whom her lover had never heard, but who, with her, were active pioneers to mercy. Besides this, love, which, when real, touches the religious string in every breast, had so long played an accompaniment to prayer and worship, that her first action was almost mechanically devotional. ”

“ On his walls hung innumerable trophies of foreign travel and unique specimens of his own art-bent and with these, by gesture or by anecdote, he gave an unconscious synopsis of the skipped pages in our friendship's volume.
"This," he said, "is the original of 'Earth's Fair Daughters,' the canvas that brought me to the front; and here"—handing an album—"is the presentment of my benefactress."
"Benefactress?" I queried.
"Yes. I don't attempt to pad you with the social tarra-diddle that genius finds nuggets on the surface of the diggings. ”

“ We have needed no words to translate love's language in—no signs to show we were each to each the complement that Heaven has made and laws of men have marred; we shall need no oath to bind us to remembrance. ”

“ I suspected the truth when I made an impressionist sketch of her—milky complexion, dead copper chevelure and pulpy eyelids like some Greuze dreamer—and saw his greedy eyes fixed on the canvas, not daring to name a price, too delicate to crave a charitable dole. I learnt more from the attitude of reverence, almost of awe, wherewith he received the gift from my hands and hurriedly carried it to his own sanctum, hid it [Pg 184] from me, the maker of it, as though to veil its charms from alien eye. I knew Aubrey Yeldham well, had shared many of his escapades, and winked apprehensively at others. ”

“ She stared at the dancing gnats and flicked at them dreamily with her glove. "Ah, perhaps so—in the days when the pinch of penury forced one to be tough and calculating. You could not imagine, Harry, the fret of blue blood in starved veins. To be poor makes one mean, grasping, heartless; once rich, we can become amiable, virtuous, heroic even." ”

“ Beyond these last-quoted virtues Ralph Danby had few. He was rather lethargic and decidedly clumsy. His six-feet-three of flesh and blood was knotty with muscle, but, in the garments of the polite, the muscularity showed like adipose tissue and spoilt him. In feature he was pronounced perfect.
"Perfect as regenerate man can well be," raved a lady artist, who, before he had been in Hampstead a week, had implored him to pose for a painting of early Scandinavian classicism. ”

“ It means the wreck of two lives—Letitia's and mine.
Cynicus. Together?
Ardilaun. Together! Why, the universe would be re-created! It is severment that ruins. There is she, brilliant, beautiful, famous, tied for life to a money-grubber on 'Change: a wretch who cuts the leaves of her books with his thumb, and snores over them like an apoplectic pug. ”

“ I fear I am lacking in the necessary command of language to ensure success. I could sweep a crossing with neatness and precision, and can pick periwinkles with unrivalled velocity. To this end I have been practising daily with a darning-needle and a stop-watch. Have you any objection to entering the lists against me, the winner of course claiming whatever guerdon he or she may desire?
The note was in Lorraine's handwriting, and affixed to it was a copy of Clair's answer:—
Dear Mr Lorraine,—Your poetic gifts will, I fear, militate against advance as a crossing sweeper. ”

“ When they had returned to the potato garden, and were plucking herbs for the poultices he had promised to renew during his midnight vigils, he suddenly remarked:—
"We must leave here for the English coast as soon as we can get a fishing smack to take us along."
"Leave here?" she uttered in dismay. "I would remain for ever."
He gave a short gasp, clutched her hands, and looked straight into the transparent blue depths of her eyes. Then he moved away a step or two and shook his head.
"It is inevitable; we must go to England—give ourselves over to law and parson." ”