The Belovéd Vagabond by William J Locke (lightweight ebook reader .TXT) 📕

to the caprice of the moment, from an irreconcilable nationalism to a fantastic anarchism. Now he was proud to identify himself with the once despised bourgeoisie. He would have taken to his bosom the draper papa of Hedwige of Cassel.

Most of his time he spent in the studio at Menilmontant; there at any rate he was at ease. We were not too disreputable for the umbrella, and though he deprecated the loose speech of Bringard and Bonnet who had returned to Paris, and the queer personal habits of Cazalet, he appeared to find solace in our society. At any rate the visits gave him occupation. He also posed for the body of M. Thiers in an historical picture which Bringard proposed to exhibit at the Salon the following spring.

"L'homme propose et Dieu expose," said Paragot.

"If he is anything of a judge this ought to be hung on the line," said Bonnet.

I regret to say the picture was rejected.

At last the time came for the Melford visit. Paragot consulted Ewing and myself earnestly as to his outfit, and though he clung to his frock-coat suit as a garb of ceremony, we succeeded in sending him away with a semblance of English country-house attire. He took with him my portrait of Joanna, packed in a wooden case and bearing, to my great pride, the legend, "Precious. Work of Art. With great care," in French and English.

When he had gone I moved my belongings from my attic to the Rue des Saladiers, and gave myself up to the ministrations of Blanquette.

A little while later I received from my dear lady an invitation to visit Melford and paint the portrait of her mother, who regarded my portrait of Joanna as a work of genius. If you are a young artist it makes your head spin very pleasantly to hear yourself alluded to as a genius. Later in life you do not quite like it, for you have bitter knowledge of your limitations and are mortally afraid your kind flatterers will find you out. But at twenty you really do not know whether you are a genius or not. Mrs. Rushworth, however, backed her opinion with a hundred guineas. A hundred guineas! When I read the words I uttered a wild shriek which brought Blanquette in a fright from the bedroom. It was a commission, Joanna explained, and I was to accept it just like any other artist, and I was to stay with them, again like any other artist, during the sittings.

"I am to go to England to paint another portrait, Blanquette. How much do you think I shall be paid for it?"

"Much?" queried Blanquette, in her deliberate way.

I indicated with swinging arms a balloon of gold. Blanquette reflected.

"Fifty francs?"

"Two thousand six hundred and twenty five francs," I cried.

Blanquette sat down in order to realise the sum. It was difficult for her to conceive thousands of francs.

"That will make you rich for the rest of your life."

"It is only the beginning," I exclaimed hopefully.

Blanquette shook a reproachful head.

"There are some folks who are never satisfied," she said.

CHAPTER XIX

 

WHEN I arrived at Melford my head was full of painting and self-importance; and for the first week or so, Mrs. Rushworth, my subject, occupied the centre of my stage. She was a placid lady of sixty, whose hair, once golden, had turned a flossy white, and whose apple cheeks, though still retaining their plumpness, had grown waxen and were criss-crossed by innumerable tiny lines. The light blue of her eyes had faded, and the rich redness of her lips had turned to faint coral. One could trace how Time had day by day touched her with light but unfaltering fingers, now abstracting a fleck of brightness, now lowering by an imperceptible shade a tone of colour, until she had become what I saw her, still the pink and white beauty, but with rose all deadened into white, like a sick pink pearl. Her pink and white character had also suffered the effacement of the years. She was as dainty and as negative as a piece of Dresden China. She loved to dress in lilac and old lace: and that is how I painted her, regarding her as a bit of exquisite decoration to be treated flat like a panel of Puvis de Chavannes.

My young head, I say, was full of the masterpiece I was about to execute, and though I found much joy in renewed intercourse with my beloved lady and my master, I took no particular note of their relations. We met at meals, sometimes in the afternoons, and always of evenings, when I played dutiful piquet with Mrs. Rushworth, while Joanna made music on the piano, and Paragot read Jane Austen in an arm-chair by the fire. To me the quietude of the secluded English home had an undefinable charm like the smell of lavender, for which I have always had a cat-like affection. Not having the Bohemian temperament--I am now the most smugly comfortable painter in Europe--I was perfectly happy. I took no thought of Paragot, whose temperament was essentially Bohemian; and how he enjoyed the gentle monotony of the days it did not occur to me to consider. Outwardly he shewed no sign of impatience. A dean might have taken him as a model of decorum, and when he drove of afternoons with Joanna in the dog-cart, no dyspeptic bishop could have assumed his air of grim urbanity. But after a while I realised that the old Paragot still smouldered within him; and now and then it burst into unregenerate flame.

Mrs. Rushworth had inherited from her father an old Georgian Bath-stone house at the end of the High Street of Melford. He had been the Duke of Wiltshire's agent and a person of note in the town. Mrs. Rushworth also was a person of note, and her beautiful daughter, the Countess, a lady of fortune, became a person of greater note still. Now on Tuesday afternoons Mrs. Rushworth was "at home." We saw a vast deal of Society, ladies of county families, parsons' wives, doctors' wives and the female belongings of the gentlemen farmers round about. There were also a stray hunting man, a curate or two and Major Walters. The callers sat about the drawing room in little groups drinking tea and discoursing on unimportant and unintelligible matters, and seemed oddly shy of Paragot and myself, whom Joanna always introduced most graciously. They preferred to talk among themselves. I considered them impolite, which no doubt they were; but I have since reflected that Paragot was an unusual guest at an English country tea-party, and if there is one thing more than another that an English country tea-party resents, it is the unusual. I am sure that a square muffin would be considered an indelicacy. On the second of these Tuesday gatherings which I was privileged to attend, Joanna presented me to two well-favoured young women, the daughters, I gathered, of people who had country places near by.

"Mr. Pradel is the artist from Paris who is painting mamma's portrait," she explained.

I bowed and remarked that I was enchanted to make their acquaintance. They stared. I know now that this Gallic mode of address is not usual in Melford. One young woman, recovering from the shock, said she would like to be an artist. The other asked me whether I had been to the Academy. I said, no. I lived in Paris. Then had I been to the Salon?

"At Janot's," said I, with the idiot egregiousness of youth, "we don't go to the Salon."

"Why?" asked the first, looking across the room, apparently at a curate.

"On principle," I answered. "In the first place it costs a franc which might be spent in food and raiment, and in the second we desire to preserve our ideals from the contaminating spectacle of commercial art."

"Do you play much tennis?" asked Number Two, with no desire to snub me (as I deserved) for fatuity, but through sheer lack of interest in my observation.

"No," said I.

"Shoot?"

"No; there is not much shooting to be got in the Boulevard Saint-Michel."

"Oh," she remarked. "Where's that?"

"Paris," said I.

"Oh yes. You live in Paris." And she regarded me with the expression of bored curiosity exhibited by a superior child before the Yak's enclosure at the Zoological Gardens. An English country-bred maiden's cosmic horizon was sadly limited in those days. Now I believe she has extended it to include the more depressing forms of drama when she pays her annual visit to London. There was a silence after which she enquired whether I fished. As my ideas of fishing were restricted to the patient hosts--pale shades of Acheron--who have angled off the quays of the Seine for centuries and have till now caught nothing, I smiled and shook my head.

"The Browns have taken a fishing in Scotland," observed Number One taking her eyes from the curate, "and I'm to join them next month."

"Myra Brown is going to be married, I hear."

"At Christmas."

"What is he like?"

The hitherto unspeculative eyes of the young woman lit up; an answering gleam awoke in the other's. Myra Brown and her engagement absorbed their attention, and I slunk back in my chair, forgotten. I suffered agonies of shyness. I disliked these foolish virgins and longed to flee from them; but how to rise and make my escape, without rudeness, passed my powers of invention. I looked around me. At the tea-table on the farther side of the room stood Joanna and Major Walters. He was a tall soldierly man with a blond moustache and fair hair thinning on the crown. There are about two thousand like him at the present moment on the active and retired list of the British Army. He seemed to be talking earnestly to her, for her eyes were fixed on the point of her shoe, which she moved slightly, from side to side. Presently she flashed a glance at him somewhat angrily and her lips moved as though she said:--

"What right have you to speak like that?"

He made the Englishman's awkward paraphrase of the shrug, looked swiftly over at Paragot, and turned to her with a remark. Then for the first time since the Comte de Verneuil's death, the glacier blue came into her eyes. She said something. He executed a little stiff bow and walked away. Joanna, bearing herself very haughtily, crossed the room with a cup of tea for a new arrival.

Paragot, gaunt and tight-buttoned in his famous frock coat--he had donned it for the ceremonious afternoon, but Joanna (I think) had suppressed the purple cravat with the yellow spots--was talking to an elderly and bony female owning a great beak of a nose. I wondered how so unprepossessing a person could be admitted into a refined assembly, but I learned later that she was Lady Molyneux, one of the Great Personages of the county. The lady seemed to be emphatic; so did Paragot. She regarded him stonily out of flint-blue eyes. He waved his hands; she raised her eyebrows. She was one of those women whose eyebrows in the normal state are about three inches from the eyelids. I understood then what superciliousness meant. Paragot raised his voice. At that moment one of those strange coincidences occurred in