Isabel Clarendon, Vol. II (of II)

“What are you going to send to the Academy this year?”

He rose, after a touch or two at the drawing, and took up the lamp, which was the only light in the room. (Though it was very cold he had no fire.) On an easel stood a large picture, nearly finished; he illuminated it. Kingcote started at the astonishing scene that was at once before him. It was a portion of an East End market-street at night; the chief group, a man at a stall selling quack-medicines to a thronging cluster of people. The main light came from a naphtha-lamp on the stall, but there was also the gleam from one of the ordinary lamps of the street. The assembled men, women, and children were of the poorest and vilest, and each face seemed a portrait. That of the medicine vendor was marvellous, with its look of low brag and cunning; on it was the full glare of the naphtha flame.

“Anything else?” Kingcote asked, looking at the painter.

“One or two small things, which they won’t hang. This they will.”

“There can be no doubt of that; it will be the picture of the year. But let me see the others.”

One of these filled Kingcote with delight; he uttered an “Ah!” of pleasure. It was a little girl standing before a shop-window, and looking at an open illustrated paper which was exposed there. The subject was nothing, the pose and character of the child everything. Poor and ragged, she had lost for the moment sense of everything, but the rich and comfortable little maiden displayed in the coloured page; her look was envious, but had more of involuntary admiration. This too was a night-piece; the light came from the front of the shop, above the picture.

“The face is exquisite!” Kingcote said; “you have made great strides this last halfyear.”

The artist uttered a “h’m,” and no more.

“So you got tired of your cottage,” he said, seating himself, and taking up his pencil again.

“You know I was that, long since. But a different reason brought me back to London.”

He explained his situation.

“And what shall you do?” Gabriel asked, simply.

“It is impossible to say. I must find work of some kind.”

“Well, this is good news! At last you’ll do something.”

“My dear fellow, it is the opposite of good news. I shall do something, no doubt; but it will be drudgery of some kind to earn a living. There is nothing more to come out of me than that.”

“Humbug! You are not as old as I am.”

“No, but old enough to have seen the end of my tether.”

“Why don’t you go in for writing?”

“Because I am unable to. I can enjoy other men’s work, but I can produce none of my own.”

“Of course not, if you take it for granted. You could if you made up your mind to.”

“Don’t forget that that making up of the mind is everything; it is the very ability which I lack. But literature is a vain thought. How is it for a moment to be imagined that I could earn a sufficient income by it? I have written verses at times; you don’t advise me to go into the market with those wares? Journalism I am utterly unfit for, as you must recognise. Equally unfit to write for magazines; I have neither knowledge nor versatility. There remains fiction, and for that I am vastly too subjective; I have no ‘shaping spirit of imagination’—at all events not of the commercially valuable kind. If I had lived in days when Undine and Sintram were the approved style, I should probably have been tempted to try my hand; but now–”

“Because,” he continued, “you are blessed with genius and will, you think all men should, can do great things by dint of mere exertion. I shall never do anything; do you understand? And why should I? There are other ways of enjoying life.”

“What other ways?” Gabriel asked, strangely.

“One can receive happiness, as well as be active in bestowing it.”

“Whence is your happiness to come?”

“Who knows? We must wait and see.” Such an attitude as this went near to excite Clement Gabriel’s contempt; he ceased to argue and plied his pencil. The respect which Kingcote entertained for his strenuous friend was now and then mingled with vexation that the latter should fall short in finer sympathies; and Gabriel, though he liked Kingcote’s company, could scarcely be said to respect him. He was conscious that the dreamer saw visions and heard voices of a sphere whence there came no message to himself, but he acknowledged the superiority grudgingly, and would have asked to what end the revelations were made if Kingcote could not translate them into one or other form of human art. With the least strain of self-conceit in Kingcote, their friendship would have been at an end long since.

It seemed as if indeed Kingcote had determined to wait upon Providence. He had said to himself that he would vigorously turn to discovering an occupation in life, as soon as he should have settled his sister in the new home at Highgate; but the settlement was effected, and he did not appear to be exerting himself. He bought newspapers, it is true, and sickened his soul with the reading of advertisements, but it was seldom indeed that anything presented itself which seemed in the least likely to assist him. For it was not a temporary pursuit that he needed, but a fixed station of recognisable activity; work, in fact, which would enable him to stand before Isabel without shame when she was free to fulfil her promise. He was not in immediate need, nor likely to be; the capital which produced him sixty pounds a year would permit him to live and support his sister for some time to come, with economy such as they exercised. But it was idle to take comfort from that; practically he was a beggar.

A more admirable housekeeper than Mary could not have been found. Long experience of grinding poverty had taught her how to make a sovereign go very far indeed; King-cote was astonished at the accounts with which she regularly presented him. He would have had her increase her own comfort in many little ways, but she always refused; self-denial, formerly a harsh necessity, had now become a pleasure; a kind of asceticism was becoming her motive in life. This, a common enough phenomenon, allied itself with increased rigour in religious performances. Her brother’s indifference in such matters was a distress to her, but she would not have ventured to speak. Her gratitude to him was deep and fervent, but Mary felt what a distance there was between him and herself. She could love him as her heart desired, yet she was always hoping that time and use might make them more like brother and sister.

Before long there did happen something which resulted in a drawing nearer. Mary began to notice that her brother received frequent letters addressed in a female hand; she discovered, too, that they bore the Winstoke post-mark. Over this she mused much. It was clear to her that Bernard was anything but at rest in his mind, and that the source of his disquietude was something other than the mere difficulties of his position. His room was directly over that in which she slept, and she could hear him walking up and down sometimes half through the night; he would come down to breakfast looking ill and preoccupied. Now and then, when he had promised to sit with her in the evening and read aloud, which he often did, much to her joy, he would alter his mind at the last moment and leave the house. Then he was always very late in returning, and annoyed that she had sat up for him. She was obliged at length to leave supper on the table, and go to her room, though often she waited till she heard him enter the house before she hastened upstairs.

The morning that he went off to Knights-well, she had not noticed his early departure, and his absence throughout the day alarmed her. He reappeared about four in the afternoon. Looking anxiously at his face, she did not venture to question him. He took up a newspaper and glanced over it for a few moments.

“You wondered what had become of me?” he said at length, opening his lips for the first time, and trying to smile. “I went very early; I had to go out of London to see some one.”

“I began to be very uneasy,” Mary returned.

He sat down—not, to her surprise, going to his own room—and she began to lay the table for tea. He read the paper. In passing him she timidly touched his head with her fingers caressingly. Kingcote looked round; his face had the kindest smile.

“Do you know,” he said, laughing, “what was in my mind at that moment? I was thinking how admirable the relations are between a brother and sister, when she is a good sister like you, Mary. Suppose you had been my wife instead of my sister. When I came in just now you would have overwhelmed me with questions, with complaints, with frettings, and made me angry. As it is, you have no anxiety but to put me at my ease, and your quiet kindness is a blessing to me.”

“But all wives are surely not like that, Bernard?” she returned, with pleased protest. “Most, I’m afraid; but no—not all.”

The strangest speculations began to live in Mary’s brain. Was it possible that her brother–? Oh, that was nonsense.

He was kind with the children when they came in from school, and, after tea, took a book and read to himself. Mary sent the youngsters a little earlier than usual to bed. When he and she sat alone, she saw that he made several beginnings of speaking; her eyes apparently busy over sewing, missed no phase of his countenance. At length he laid the book open on his knees.

“You remember my mentioning to you a large house called Knightswell, not far from my cottage?”

He did not look at her, but his eyes had an absent glimmer, not quite a smile, as they fixed themselves on the work she had on her lap.

“Yes, I do.”

“I have been there to-day.”

“Been all that way, Bernard?”

“Yes.”

Mary did not fail to understand that it was now her turn to question.

“You have friends there?”

“A friend. If you will listen I will tell you a story.”

He related all that he knew of the history of Isabel Clarendon, as if it had been told to him or he had read it somewhere, up to the time of his first meeting with her; he described her exactly, and described Ada Warren also, the latter, as far as his knowledge allowed, with perfect justice.

“One of those, Mary, is my friend; which do you think?”

“You have made it too easy to guess,” his sister answered good-naturedly. She had listened with the utmost attention, leaning forward, her arms crossed upon her sewing. “Not Miss Warren!”

“But I do not dislike her; you mustn’t think that.”