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"But what of us?" she said lightly. "Do not you men cease to think of us even before we are middle-aged?"
Suddenly it struck Craddock that no more heaven-sent opportunity for carrying out the second of the purposes that had brought him down here, could possibly be desired. He was in luck to-day, too: the business of the portrait had been carried through so smoothly, so easily. But immediately he became aware that he was not, in vulgar parlance, quite up to it. He needed support, he needed her father's consent, but above all he needed the imperative call, the hunger of the soul. Clearly, too, her words did not refer, however remotely, to herself and him, he felt that they were spoken quite impersonally. And immediately she changed the subject.
"I have to thank you," she said, "for trying to dissuade my father from selling the portrait. He told me you had suggested that he should not. That was kind of you."
He caressed the side of his face with the usual gratifying result.
"I found his mind was made up," he said, "though in accordance with your request I suggested he should not sell it. Always command me, Miss Joyce, and I will always fly on your quests. I am aware that I do not look particularly like a knight-errant, but there are motor-cars and railway-trains nowadays which transport us more swiftly and less hazardously than mettlesome chargers, especially if we can't ride."
He had again made himself an opening, but again he found when he came close that it was barricaded to him. But this time some hint of his intentions, though he could not manage to carry them into effect, was communicated to her, and conscious of them, and uncomfortable at them, she again changed the subject.
"Oh, I am not going to ask you to take the train to-night," she said. "The most I shall ask of you is that you play bézique with my father by and by. I play so badly that it is no fun for him. Hark, the singing is coming closer."
They had come to the landing-stage at the far end of the lawn, and looking up the tranquil lane of the river Joyce saw that the sound came from a Canadian canoe which was drifting downstream towards them. The boat itself was barely visible in the shadow of the trees: it was conjectured rather than seen by the outline of shirt-sleeves that outlined it, and it was on the further side of the stream. By this time the moon had swung clear to the horizon, and though the boat was still shadowed, Joyce and Craddock standing on the lawn were in the full white light. At the moment the musical comedy song came to an end, and the voice of some imprudent person from the canoe, forgetting the distinctness with which sound traverses water, spoke in a voice that was perfectly audible to Joyce, though not to Craddock.
"Charles, there's the girl of the punt and her fat white man," it observed.
Charles was more circumspect. His answer was a murmur quite inaudible, and instantly he thrummed his guitar again. The melody was new to Joyce, and though he might not have great skill in singing, he had a crisp enunciation, and the delicious old words were clearly audible:
"See the chariot at hand here of Love
Wherein my Lady rideth."
Louder and more distinct every moment, as the canoe drifted closer came the beautiful lyric. The singer was not using more than half his voice, but as the distance between canoe and audience diminished, the light boyish tenor was sufficiently resonant to set the windless air a-quiver. Just as the canoe emerged into the blaze of moonlight opposite came the final stave, and the white-shirted singer sang from a full and open throat:
"Or have smelt o' the bud o' the briar?
Or the nard in the fire?
Or have tasted the bag of the bee?
O, so white, O, so soft, O, so sweet is she!"
The silence of the night shut down like the lid of a jewel-box. Then after a little while came the drip of a paddle, and the canoe grew small and dim in the distance down-stream.
"Those jolly boys again," said Joyce.
Arthur Craddock heaved a long sigh, horribly conscious of his years and riches, and Joyce heard the creak of his shirt-front.
"That young man has diplomatic gifts," he said. "It is clear that he intended to serenade you, and he chose the far side of the river, so as to make it seem that he had no intention of any kind. It is a reasonable supposition that if serenading was his object, and it certainly was, he might be supposed not to see you standing here. So he serenaded with the open throat. If I tried to do the same, which sorely tempts me, I should only convince you that I had not an open throat but a sore one. Nobody has ever heard me sing, not even when I was as young as that white shirted youth in the canoe. He will paddle back to his tent before long, unless you stay here visible in the moonlight, and dream steadily about you till morning."
Joyce laughed.
"Oh, what nonsense, Mr. Craddock," she said, knowing in the very secret place of her girl's heart that it was not nonsense at all. "Boats with guitars and singers go by every night, and often half the night. They can't all be serenading me."
"I cannot imagine why not. A Mormonism of serenading young men is not illegal. I would join them myself, Miss Joyce, if I could sing, and if I did not think that any Canadian canoe in which I embarked would instantly sink."
Philip Wroughton, in addition to the glass of champagne he had drunk at dinner permitted himself the further indulgence of sitting up for nearly an hour beyond his usual bedtime to talk to his guest and read more about the delectable climate of the Upper Nile. While Craddock and Joyce were out in the garden, a train of thoughts had been suggested to him by his very shrewd mother before she began her Patience, which he was preparing to indicate ever so lightly to that gentleman after Joyce had gone upstairs. "He's got your picture, Philip," said that observant lady, "and now he's after your daughter. Why don't you send Joyce up to town for a month, and give the girl a chance? You're a selfish fellow you know, like all Wroughtons." But she had not succeeded in provoking him to a retort, nor had she affected the independence of his own conclusions. It required no great perspicacity to see that Craddock was considerably attracted by the girl, and it seemed to her father that she might easily marry less suitably for him. She had led a very solitary and sequestered life with him, and he did not propose to alter his habits in order that she might come more in contact with the world. True, in this projected Egyptian winter she was likely to meet more young men than she had ever come across in her life before, but he could not imagine any one who would suit him (as if it was his own marriage that was in contemplation) better than Craddock. Philip found him quiet and deferential and agreeable, and since it was certainly necessary that Joyce and her husband (if she was permitted to marry) should be with him a good deal, these were favourable points. He detested young men with their high spirits and loud laughs and automatic digestions, and he did not for a moment intend to have such a one about the house. Furthermore Craddock was certainly very well off (Philip would have had a fit if he had known that he and his picture were in the act, so to speak, of enriching him more) and it was clearly desirable to have wealth about the house. Possibly some one more eligible might discover himself, but Philip had little difficulty in convincing himself that he would be failing in his duty towards his daughter if he did not let Craddock know that his attentions to Joyce were favourably regarded by her father. But if his meditations were stripped of the fabric of unrealities, until truth in bare austerity was laid open, it must be confessed that he planned Joyce's possible marriage with a single eye for his own comfort.
A game of bézique succeeded Craddock's stroll with Joyce and a cigarette with a whisky and soda consoled him for the withdrawal of the ladies.
"And you have positively to go up to town again to-morrow," said Philip. "Cannot we by any means persuade you to stay another night? You in your modesty have no idea what a refreshment it is to us in our retirement to get a whiff of air from the busy bustling world. Yes, I may say 'us,' for my dear little Joyce was so pleased at your coming. Would you not be more prudent to close that window? I am sure you are sitting in a draught."
This, of course, meant that Philip was, and Craddock did not misunderstand.
"I was saying that Joyce was so pleased," repeated her father.
"I ask nothing better than to please Miss Joyce," said Craddock.
"You do please her: I am sure of it. Dear Joyce! I know it cannot be long that I shall be able to give her a home. Her future continually occupies my thoughts. I daresay she will meet someone when we winter in Egypt who will attract her. She is not ill-looking, is she? I think there must be many suitable men whom she would be disposed to regard not unfavourably. Yes, yes."
It was all spoken very softly and tunefully: the calm sunset of declining day seemed to brood over it. The effect was that Arthur Craddock got up and paced the room once or twice in silence.
"Will you give me your permission to ask Miss Joyce if she will make me the happiest of men?" he asked.
"My dear friend!" said Philip, with hand outstretched.
CHAPTER II
Dawn was brightening in the sky though the sun was not yet risen when Charles Lathom awoke next morning in the tent by the river-side. Close by him in the narrow limits of their shelter his brother Reggie was lying on his back still fast asleep with mouth a little parted, a plume of tumbled hair falling over his forehead, and a bare brown arm and shoulder outside the sheet in which he was loosely wrapped. Late last night, after they had got back from their moonlit drift down the river, Reggie, who, to do him justice, had done all the paddling so as to leave Charles free to serenade, saw the propriety of one dip in the pool below the weir before bed, and had come back into the boat dripping and refreshed and glistening, and without further formality of drying, had curled himself up and gone to sleep with a mocking reference to the lady of the punt. The picture of him taking a header into the pool, now on the point of completion, leaned against the tent-side, and a couple of bags gaping open and vomiting clothes and brushes, and a box of provisions, the lid of which did duty for a table, completed the furniture of the tent. Charles got up quietly, so as not to disturb the sleeper, and went out into the clean dewy morning. The thickets behind their encampment were a-chirrup with the earliest bird-music of the day, and high up in the zenith a few wisps of cloud that had caught the sun not yet risen on the earth itself, had turned rosy with the dawn. The spouting of the weir made a bass for the staccato treble of the birds, but otherwise the stillness of night was not yet broken. Little ripples lapped at the side of the Canadian canoe drawn half out of the water onto a bank blue with forget-me-not, and a tangle of briar-rose with cataract of pink folded petals hung motionless over the water. Then with a sudden shout of awakened colour the first long level rays of the sun sped across the meadows, and with the sigh of the wind of dawn the world awoke.
The morning light was what Charles needed for his picture, but not less did he need his brother, for the painting of the braced shoulder-muscles of his arms as they pointed above his head for the imminent plunge. Sun and dappled shade from the trees that bounded the meadow just beside the weir fell onto his naked body, making here a splash of brilliant light, here a green stain of sunlight filtering through the translucent leaves, while his face and the side of his body seen almost in profile were brilliantly illuminated by the glint from the shining pool below him. But underneath these surface lights there had to be indicated the building and interlacement of the firm muscles and supple sinews of his body. He had all but finished them, he had all but recorded what he saw, but it was necessary that Reggie should stand for him just a little while more. Meantime, since it was still so early, and his brother still so profoundly dormant, there was a little more work to be done to the ecstatic dance of sunlight on the pool. Just at the edge the shadow of the wall of the weir lay over it, and it was deep brown with a skin of reflected blue from the sky, but a few yards out the sun kindled a galaxy of golden stars, flowers of twinkling and dazzling light.
He got his picture out of the tent, set it on its easel, and put a kettle of water on the spirit-lamp. It was still far too early to have breakfast, but a cup of tea brought presently to Reggie's bedside might tend to make him unresentful of being awakened when Charles found he could get on no further without him. So when this was ready, Charles rattled the sugar in its tin loud enough to wake not one only but seven sleepers, and Reggie sat up with a justifiable start.
"What the deuce – " he began.
"Sorry," said Charles. "I'm afraid I made rather a row. But I've made some tea, too. Have a cup?"
"Of course. Is it late?"
"Well, no, not very. I've been up some little time painting. But I can't get on any more without you!"
Reggie gave a great yawn.
"I suppose that means you want me to turn out, and stand with my arms up on that header-board. It's lucky I have the patience of an angel."
"Archangel," said Charles, fulsomely. "You've been a real brick about it."
"And will you get breakfast ready if I come now?"
"Yes, and I'll make both beds."
Reggie accordingly got up and glanced at the picture as he passed it on his way to the header-board.
"I suppose I am like a dappled frog, if you insist on it," he said, "but a devilish finely-made young fellow."
"Absolute Adonis," said Charles humbly. "Oh, Reggie, stand exactly like that as long as you possibly can. That's exactly right."
The work went on in silence after this, for the modelling of muscle and flesh below this checker of light and shade and reflection was utterly absorbing to the artist. He had tried all ways of solving this subtle and complicated problem: once he had put in the curves and shadows of the tense muscles first, and painted the diaper of sun and shade on the top of it, but that made the skin thick and muddy in texture. Once he had mapped the sunlight and surface shadows first and overlaid them with the indicated muscles, but this seemed to turn the model inside out. Then only yesterday he had seen that the whole thing must be painted in together, laid on in broad brushfuls of thin paint, so that the luminousness and solidity should both be preserved, and this method was proving excitingly satisfactory. Often during this last week he had almost despaired of accomplishing that which he had set himself to do, but stronger than his despair was his absolute determination to record what he saw, not only what he knew to be there. It was impossible for his brother to hold this tiring pose for more than a couple of minutes, and often it was difficult to get its resumption accurately. But this morning Reggie seemed to fall or rather stretch himself into the correct position without effort, and Charles on his side knew that to-day he had the clear-seeing eye and the clever co-ordinating hand. For an hour of pose and rest Reggie stood there, and then Charles stepped a few yards away from his canvas, and stood a moment biting the end of his brush, and frowning as he looked from model to picture and back again. Then the frown cleared.
"Thanks most awfully, Reggie," he said. "It's done: good or bad, it's done."
Reggie gave a great shout, and disappeared altogether in the pool.
Charles made breakfast ready according to agreement, and the two sat for a while afterwards in the stupefaction of out-door content.
"This week has gone on wings," said Reggie, "and it's an awful melancholy thing to think that this is my last day here. But it's been a beauty of a week, I'm no end grateful to you for bringing me."
Reggie had the caressing moods of a very young thing. As he spoke he left his seat and established himself on the ground leaning back against his brother's knees and anchoring himself with a hand passed round his leg.
"I should have had to stew in Sidney Street for my week of holiday," he went on, "if it hadn't been for you. It was ripping of you to let me come."
"It's I who score," said Charles. "You've earned your keep all right. I should have had to hire a model otherwise, or have done without one."
"Oh, well, then, we both score."
Reggie threw away the end of his cigarette and abstracted Charles' case from his pocket.
"I must go up to town this afternoon," he said, "for Thistleton's Gallery opens again to-morrow morning. And there I shall sit, all July, at the receipt of custom and sell catalogues and make the turn-stile click and acknowledge receipts … oh, a dog's life. Jove, what a lot of money some of those fellows have! There was an American who came in last week and went around the gallery with a great fat white man called Craddock who often comes and shows people round. I rather think he is Thistleton, and owns the place. I say, Charles – "
Reggie broke off suddenly.
"Why, I believe it was he who was in the punt last night," he said, "and was standing on the lawn with that girl you sang at – "
"Didn't notice him particularly," said Charles.
"No, you were noticing somebody else particularly. But I feel sure it was he. As I say, he was taking an American round last week, who bought a couple of little Dutch pictures. He stopped at my desk on the way out and borrowed my pen and wrote a cheque for £5000 right straight off, without coughing. I remember he said he was going to post-date it. But he didn't tip me."
"I don't quite know what this is all about," remarked Charles.
"Nor do I. I hoped it was just agreeable conversation. Don't you find it so? But I bet you what you like that the fat white man in the punt was Craddock."
Reggie lay further back against his brother's legs.
"I see a great tragedy ahead," he said, "with inquests and executions. Craddock is about to marry the girl of the punt, and Charles will cut his throat, and – "
"Whose throat?" asked Charles.
"His own or Craddock's; perhaps Craddock's first and his own afterwards. Then there will be a sensational trial, and I can't bother to make up any more. Are you going to paint all the morning, Charles?"
"No, none of it. It's enough for to-day to have finished you. I shall stop down here a day or two more and do another sketch after you have gone. I'm at your disposal this morning."
"Then let us do nothing for a long time, and then bathe for a long time, and then do both all over again. Lord, I wish I was an artist like you, instead of a doorkeeper, to stop about all day in delicious places, and do exactly what you like best in the world, which is to paint."
"It would make it completer if anybody wanted best in the world to buy what I had painted," remarked Charles.
"But you sold two water colours the other day for three pounds each," remarked the consolatory Reggie. "That's as much as I earn in a month."
"It might happen oftener," said Charles. "By the way, I heard from Mother last night."
"A nice woman," said Reggie.
"Quite. She sent me another sovereign in case funds had run low. When you get back you will find she has been living on tea and toast because she didn't feel hungry."
Reggie gave a huge sigh.
"I wish a man might marry his mother," he observed. "I should certainly marry her and we would ask you and the punt-girl to stay with us."
"Very kind," said Charles.
These two young men who were enjoying so open-aired a week of June by the Thames-side were the only children of the widow whom they kindly agreed to regard as a "nice woman." They had been brought up in easy and well-to-do circumstances, and educated at public schools, until the suicide of their father a little more than a year ago had disclosed a state of affairs that was as appalling as it was totally unexpected. He was a jobber on the stock-exchange and partner in a firm of high repute, but he had been privately indulging in a course of the wildest gambling, and he could not face the exposure which he knew could no longer be avoided. The sale of the pleasant country home at Walton Heath, and the disposal of all that could be converted into cash had been barely sufficient to make an honourable settlement of his unimagined debts. Neither his wife nor either of the boys had ever dreamed of the possibility of such a situation: never had it appeared that he had had the slightest anxiety with regard to money. His self-control had been perfect until, as with the breaking of some dam, it had given way altogether in ruin and destruction. Till that very moment he had been the gayest and youngest of that eager little family party, all of whom brought an extraordinary lightness and zest to the conduct of their unclouded lives. Charles had already left school for a three years when the stroke fell, and was studying in a famous atelier in Paris, while Reggie, still at Marlborough, was devoting as much time as he could reasonably be expected to spare from athletic exercises to the acquiring of foreign tongues with a view to the diplomatic service. They had both been instantly sent for by their mother, who met his death with a fortitude that never wavered. It was not long that they had to wait for the explanation of the utterly unlooked-for catastrophe, for a very short examination of his private papers showed the extent of his defaulting and the imminence of the crash. Willingly, had it been possible, would she have kept from her sons the knowledge that he had killed himself, bearing alone the unshared secret, but an explanation of accident was impossible. Equally impossible was it to conceal the miserable cause of it.
It was on the evening of Charles' return from Paris, as they sat in the still house that till to-day had always rung with jollity, while heathery sweetness and the resinous odour of pines came in at the open windows, that she told them everything, quite shortly, and when that was done and they were still half stunned with the sudden horror that had blackened life, she rallied her own courage by awakening theirs.
"You know it all, my darlings," she said, "and now whenever you think of it, and for a long time it will always be in your thoughts, you must think of it all as some dreadful mistake that dear Dad made, something he never meant at all. He got his troubles muddled up in his head till he didn't know what he was doing. He felt he couldn't bear it, just as sometimes he used to call out when we were playing some silly game like Animal Grab 'I can't bear it: I can't bear it.' Oh, Charles, my darling, don't cry so awfully. We've got to go straight ahead again, with all our courage undismayed, and show that we can face anything that God chooses to send us."
She waited a little, comforting now one and now the other.
"It was all a mistake," she went on, "and we must never allow ourselves to think that it was the dear Dad we knew who did it. He wasn't himself: trouble had made him forget himself and all of us just for a moment. We will think about that moment as little as we can, and then only as a mistake, but we will think constantly and lovingly of the dear Dad we have known all these years, who was so loving and tender to all three of us, and whom we knew as so gay and light-hearted. We will have him constantly in our thoughts like that, this and all the loving-kindness of the years in which we laughed and loved together. And if we can't help, as we shan't be able to do, thinking with a sort of wondering despair of that blunder, that mistake, we must remember that, somehow or other, though we can't explain how, it is and was even then in the hands of God."
It had been no vague piety or bloodless resignation that had inspired her then, nor in the year that followed, and it had required a very full measure of the essential spirit of youth, which never sits down with folded hands, but despises resignation as it despises any other sort of inaction, to bring them all to the point where they stood to-day. Whether the boys helped their mother most, or she them, is one of those problems of psychological proportions into which it is unnecessary to enquire, since each had been throughout the year, essential to the others. For if there had been no jolly boys coming home at evening to Mrs. Lathom in their lodgings in the meagre gentility of Sidney Street, she could no more have got through her industrious day with hope never quenched in her heart than could they if there had been no mother waiting to welcome them. She without waiting a day after they moved to London invested a few pounds of their exiguous capital in buying a typewriting machine, and before long, by dint of unremitting work was earning a wage sufficient, with Reggie's office salary, to keep the three of them in independence and adequate comfort, as well as to pay for a slip of a dilapidated studio in a neighbouring street, where Charles toiled with all the fire of his young heart and swiftly-growing skill of hand at his interrupted studies.
It was for him, of all the three, that life was most difficult since he was an expense only to the others and it required all the young man's courage to persevere in work which at present brought in almost nothing. But his mother's courage reinforced his: while it was possible for him to continue working, it would be a cowardly surrender to give up tending the ripening fruit of his years in Paris, and let the tree wither, and turn his brushes, so to speak, into pens, and his palette into an office stool. Besides, he had within him, lying secret and shy but vitally alive, the unalterable conviction of the true artist that his work was ordained to be art, and that where his heart was there would sufficient treasure be found also. But it was hard for him, even with the endorsing sincerity of his mother's encouragement, to continue being the drone of the hive so far as actual earning was concerned, and it had demanded the utmost he had of faith in himself and love for his art to continue working with that ecstasy of toil that art demands at all that which his education needed, and not to grudge days and weeks spent in work as profitless from the earning point of view as he believed it to be profitable in his own artistic equipment. Drawing had always been his weak point, and hour after interminable hour from casts or from the skeleton, properties saved from the lavish Paris days, he would patiently copy the framework of bones and patiently clothe them in their appropriate muscles and sinews. As must always happen, long weeks of work went by without progress as noticed by himself, until once and once again he found himself standing on firm ground instead of floundering through bogs and quick-sands which endlessly engulfed his charcoal and his hours, and knew that certain haltings and uncertainties of line troubled him no longer. But he made no pause for self-congratulation but continued with that mingling of fire and unremitting patience which is characteristic of the true and inspired learner. Colour and the whole complex conception of values, which go to make up the single picture, instead of a collection, however well rendered, of different objects was naturally his: he had by instinct that embracing vision that takes in the subject as a whole.
The heat of the morning disposed to quiescence, and the two boys with the spice of meadow-sweet and loosestrife round them, and the coolness of the running water, drowsily booming, to temper the growing swelter of the day, talked lazily and desultorily, concerned with these things, for a long time after breakfast was over. But they were vividly concerned with them no more: to each the opening pageant of life was more engrossing than the tragedy of the past, being young they looked forward, where the middle-aged would have dwelt with the present, and the old have mumbled and starved with the past. But to them it was but dawn, and the promise of day was the insistent thing, and there was no temptation to dwell in ruins, and conjure back the night. But before long the itch for activity, in spite of their resolve of a lazy morning, possessed each, and Reggie fervidly washed up the used crockery of breakfast, while Charles went up the few yards of path that lay between the tent and the side of the weir, to behold again the picture he had left standing on its easel. In his heart he knew it was finished, but in the eagerness of his youth he almost looked forward to some further brushful of inspiration. He would not touch what he knew was good: he hoped only to find something that could be touched with advantage.
He turned a sharp corner, where willows screened the weir; his picture was planted within a dozen yards of him. But between him and his picture was planted a big white-faced man who was regarding it so intently that he did not hear the swish of the parted willows. It was not till Charles was at his elbow that Craddock turned and saw him.
And he put into his manner the deference which he reserved for duchesses and talent.
"I have come to your private view," he said, "without being asked, and it was very impertinent of me. But really this is my second visit. I had my first private view yesterday, when I looked at your picture from a punt in which I happened to be. I had just a couple of glimpses at your work before this. You have been very fortunate in your inspiration since then. The Muse paid you a good visit this morning."
Charles said nothing, but his eyes questioned this intruder, giving him a tentative welcome. But before the pause was at all prolonged the tentative welcome had been changed into a wondering and tremulous expectancy. Were there fairies still by the Thames-side? Was this fat white man to prove a fairy?
"You have painted an admirable picture," continued the possible fairy, "and the handling of the most difficult part of all – of course you know I mean the lights and shadows on that delightful figure – is masterly. Of course there are faults, plenty of them, but you can see, and you can draw, and you can paint."
Craddock saw Charles' lip quiver, and heard that it cost him an effort to command his voice.
"Not really?" he stammered.
"Unless I am much mistaken, and it has been the business of my life to seek out those who can see and draw and paint. Now I don't know your name, and assuredly I have never seen your work before, and since it is my business also to know the names and the works of all young men who can paint, I imagine that you have your artistic début, so to speak, still in front of you. But I shall be exceedingly grateful to you if you will sell me your picture, straight away, here and now. And if you won't let me have it for fifty pounds, I shall have to offer you sixty."
Charles looked vaguely round, first at Craddock then at his picture, then at the spouting weir, almost expecting to see them melt, as is the manner of dreams, into some other farrago as fantastical as this, or dissolve altogether into a waking reality.
"Do you really mean you will give me fifty pounds for it," he asked.
"No: I will give you sixty. But don't touch it again. Take my word for it that it is finished. Or did you know that already?"
"Oh, yes," said the boy. "I finished it an hour ago. But I came back to make sure."
"Well, then, when you leave your encampment here, will you please send it to me at this address? That is to say, if I am to have the privilege of purchasing it."
