The Lesson of the Master

“Does that surprise you?” Paul Overt asked.

“The first day?  No, from you—nothing that’s nice.”  She was interrupted by a lady who bade her good-night, and he seemed to read that it cost her nothing to speak to him in that tone; it was her old liberal lavish way, with a certain added amplitude that time had brought; and if this manner began to operate on the spot, at such a juncture in her history, perhaps in the other days too it had meant just as little or as much—a mere mechanical charity, with the difference now that she was satisfied, ready to give but in want of nothing.  Oh she was satisfied—and why shouldn’t she be?  Why shouldn’t she have been surprised at his coming the first day—for all the good she had ever got from him?  As the lady continued to hold her attention Paul turned from her with a strange irritation in his complicated artistic soul and a sort of disinterested disappointment.  She was so happy that it was almost stupid—a disproof of the extraordinary intelligence he had formerly found in her.  Didn’t she know how bad St. George could be, hadn’t she recognised the awful thinness—?  If she didn’t she was nothing, and if she did why such an insolence of serenity?  This question expired as our young man’s eyes settled at last on the genius who had advised him in a great crisis.  St. George was still before the chimney-piece, but now he was alone—fixed, waiting, as if he meant to stop after every one—and he met the clouded gaze of the young friend so troubled as to the degree of his right (the right his resentment would have enjoyed) to regard himself as a victim.  Somehow the ravage of the question was checked by the Master’s radiance.  It was as fine in its way as Marian Fancourt’s, it denoted the happy human being; but also it represented to Paul Overt that the author of “Shadowmere” had now definitely ceased to count—ceased to count as a writer.  As he smiled a welcome across the place he was almost banal, was almost smug.  Paul fancied that for a moment he hesitated to make a movement, as if for all the world he had his bad conscience; then they had already met in the middle of the room and had shaken hands—expressively, cordially on St. George’s part.  With which they had passed back together to where the elder man had been standing, while St. George said: “I hope you’re never going away again.  I’ve been dining here; the General told me.”  He was handsome, he was young, he looked as if he had still a great fund of life.  He bent the friendliest, most unconfessing eyes on his disciple of a couple of years before; asked him about everything, his health, his plans, his late occupations, the new book.  “When will it be out—soon, soon, I hope?  Splendid, eh?  That’s right; you’re a comfort, you’re a luxury!  I’ve read you all over again these last six months.”  Paul waited to see if he would tell him what the General had told him in the afternoon and what Miss Fancourt, verbally at least, of course hadn’t.  But as it didn’t come out he at last put the question.

“Is it true, the great news I hear—that you’re to be married?”

“Ah you have heard it then?”

“Didn’t the General tell you?” Paul asked.

The Master’s face was wonderful.  “Tell me what?”

“That he mentioned it to me this afternoon?”

“My dear fellow, I don’t remember.  We’ve been in the midst of people.  I’m sorry, in that case, that I lose the pleasure, myself, of announcing to you a fact that touches me so nearly.  It is a fact, strange as it may appear.  It has only just become one.  Isn’t it ridiculous?”  St. George made this speech without confusion, but on the other hand, so far as our friend could judge, without latent impudence.  It struck his interlocutor that, to talk so comfortably and coolly, he must simply have forgotten what had passed between them.  His next words, however, showed he hadn’t, and they produced, as an appeal to Paul’s own memory, an effect which would have been ludicrous if it hadn’t been cruel.  “Do you recall the talk we had at my house that night, into which Miss Fancourt’s name entered?  I’ve often thought of it since.”

“Yes; no wonder you said what you did”—Paul was careful to meet his eyes.

“In the light of the present occasion?  Ah but there was no light then.  How could I have foreseen this hour?”

“Didn’t you think it probable?”

“Upon my honour, no,” said Henry St. George.  “Certainly I owe you that assurance.  Think how my situation has changed.”

“I see—I see,” our young man murmured.

His companion went on as if, now that the subject had been broached, he was, as a person of imagination and tact, quite ready to give every satisfaction—being both by his genius and his method so able to enter into everything another might feel.  “But it’s not only that; for honestly, at my age, I never dreamed—a widower with big boys and with so little else!  It has turned out differently from anything one could have dreamed, and I’m fortunate beyond all measure.  She has been so free, and yet she consents.  Better than any one else perhaps—for I remember how you liked her before you went away, and how she liked you—you can intelligently congratulate me.”

“She has been so free!”  Those words made a great impression on Paul Overt, and he almost writhed under that irony in them as to which it so little mattered whether it was designed or casual.  Of course she had been free, and appreciably perhaps by his own act; for wasn’t the Master’s allusion to her having liked him a part of the irony too?  “I thought that by your theory you disapproved of a writer’s marrying.”

“Surely—surely.  But you don’t call me a writer?”

“You ought to be ashamed,” said Paul.

“Ashamed of marrying again?”

“I won’t say that—but ashamed of your reasons.”

The elder man beautifully smiled.  “You must let me judge of them, my good friend.”

“Yes; why not?  For you judged wonderfully of mine.”

The tone of these words appeared suddenly, for St. George, to suggest the unsuspected.  He stared as if divining a bitterness.  “Don’t you think I’ve been straight?”

“You might have told me at the time perhaps.”

“My dear fellow, when I say I couldn’t pierce futurity—!”

“I mean afterwards.”

The Master wondered.  “After my wife’s death?”

“When this idea came to you.”

“Ah never, never!  I wanted to save you, rare and precious as you are.”

Poor Overt looked hard at him.  “Are you marrying Miss Fancourt to save me?”

“Not absolutely, but it adds to the pleasure.  I shall be the making of you,” St. George smiled.  “I was greatly struck, after our talk, with the brave devoted way you quitted the country, and still more perhaps with your force of character in remaining abroad.  You’re very strong—you’re wonderfully strong.”

Paul tried to sound his shining eyes; the strange thing was that he seemed sincere—not a mocking fiend.  He turned away, and as he did so heard the Master say something about his giving them all the proof, being the joy of his old age.  He faced him again, taking another look.  “Do you mean to say you’ve stopped writing?”

“My dear fellow, of course I have.  It’s too late.  Didn’t I tell you?”

“I can’t believe it!”

“Of course you can’t—with your own talent!  No, no; for the rest of my life I shall only read you.”

“Does she know that—Miss Fancourt?”

“She will—she will.”  Did he mean this, our young man wondered, as a covert intimation that the assistance he should derive from that young lady’s fortune, moderate as it was, would make the difference of putting it in his power to cease to work ungratefully an exhausted vein?  Somehow, standing there in the ripeness of his successful manhood, he didn’t suggest that any of his veins were exhausted.  “Don’t you remember the moral I offered myself to you that night as pointing?” St. George continued.  “Consider at any rate the warning I am at present.”

This was too much—he was the mocking fiend.  Paul turned from him with a mere nod for good-night and the sense in a sore heart that he might come back to him and his easy grace, his fine way of arranging things, some time in the far future, but couldn’t fraternise with him now.  It was necessary to his soreness to believe for the hour in the intensity of his grievance—all the more cruel for its not being a legal one.  It was doubtless in the attitude of hugging this wrong that he descended the stairs without taking leave of Miss Fancourt, who hadn’t been in view at the moment he quitted the room.  He was glad to get out into the honest dusky unsophisticating night, to move fast, to take his way home on foot.  He walked a long time, going astray, paying no attention.  He was thinking of too many other things.  His steps recovered their direction, however, and at the end of an hour he found himself before his door in the small inexpensive empty street.  He lingered, questioning himself still before going in, with nothing around and above him but moonless blackness, a bad lamp or two and a few far-away dim stars.  To these last faint features he raised his eyes; he had been saying to himself that he should have been “sold” indeed, diabolically sold, if now, on his new foundation, at the end of a year, St. George were to put forth something of his prime quality—something of the type of “Shadowmere” and finer than his finest.  Greatly as he admired his talent Paul literally hoped such an incident wouldn’t occur; it seemed to him just then that he shouldn’t be able to bear it.  His late adviser’s words were still in his ears—“You’re very strong, wonderfully strong.”  Was he really?  Certainly he would have to be, and it might a little serve for revenge.  Is he? the reader may ask in turn, if his interest has followed the perplexed young man so far.  The best answer to that perhaps is that he’s doing his best, but that it’s too soon to say.  When the new book came out in the autumn Mr. and Mrs. St. George found it really magnificent.  The former still has published nothing but Paul doesn’t even yet feel safe.  I may say for him, however, that if this event were to occur he would really be the very first to appreciate it: which is perhaps a proof that the Master was essentially right and that Nature had dedicated him to intellectual, not to personal passion.