Part 23 (1/2)
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.