Claude and Claudia: a tale ... Illustrated, etc

Front matter

CLAUDE AND CLAUDIA BY THE SAME AUTHOR. MEMORIES OF SEVENTY YEARS. Crown Svo. ■js. td. A COUNTRY MOUSE. With Eight Illustrations. Crown 8vo, cloth elegant, bevelled boards, gilt edges. 3$. ird. BONNIE LESLEY. With Frontispiece by Miss C. PATERbON. Crown Svo, cloth elegant, bevelled boards, gilt edges. 3^-. 6J. GUIDE, PHILOSOPHER AND FRIEND. With Four Illustrations. Crown 8vo, cloth elegant, bevelled boards, gilt edges. 3s. 6d. FOR A DREAM'S SAKE. With Frontispiece. Crown Svo, cloth elegant, bevelled boards, gilt edges. 3s. 6d. CAST ADRIFT. With Eight Illustrations b-> Miss C. Paterson. Crown 8vo, cloth elegant, bevelled boards, gilt edges. 7..1. 6ci, GRIFFITH FARRAN OKEDEN & WELSH, London and Sydney. " This is ihe time of the Claude, dad. Listen ! ' FrorUisfieceZ\ y, 23j CLAUDE AND CLAUDIA A TALE BY Mrs. HERBERT MARTIN AUTHOR OF " BONNIE LESLEY."

" AMOR VIHC1T,*' "COMMON CLAY," ETC, BTC. ILLUSTRATED BY CAROLINE PATERSON LONDON GRIFFITH FARRAN OKEDEN & WELSH NEWBERY HOUSE CHARING CROSS ROAD, AND SYDNEY. {The rights of Translation and Reproduction are reserved.} LIST OF FULL-PAGE ILLUSTRATIONS. PA3iE " This is the tune us the Claude, dad. Listen ! :' . Frontispiece Clement, in white drapery, was performing Lady Macbeth . . 71 Lifting the light pointed cane, he thrust it violently at the Claude . 147 She made a rush and fell on her knees beside the chair . . 219

Chapter I

' A city clerk, but gently born and bred, His wife, an unknown painter's orphan child." Tennyson. A dull and sullen November day had drawn to its surly close with unabated dreariness ; smoke, fog and chilly damp had done their worst to make our hideous and gigantic old city horrible to its shivering inhabitants. The long, unlovely streets looked their unloveliest, the darkness was dimly — I cannot say illuminated— rather made a little less intense by yellow gasdights few and far between. Why are London streets so abo minably lighted ? Let the County Council meet this question speedily, or prepare to incur our maledictions ! The Bloomsbury district is not a beautiful or festive one, it certainly would not have impressed a foreigner this dull November evening as an inviting abode, but one gets used or hardened to everything, even to the dullest, grimiest and shabbiest square of the Bloomsbury B quarter.

There are inhabitants of it even who maintain its essential superiority over other parts of London. It may be in some respects a convenient and, as house-agents say, "desirable " part to live in, but a visitor dropped suddenly down there would declare it to be a prosaic and ugly world that Louis Dumaresq was leaving outside his home, as he opened the door of one large dingy old house with the latch key and shut it on the fog, the mud and the general dreariness of the wintry streets. The house had once been a grand one, in the days when Bloomsbury was a fashionable region ; dingy and dilapidated as it was inside, there was still some thing of grandeur in the size of the rooms, and the wide, handsome staircase, with carved bannisters, could not be altogether disfigured even by dirt and bareness.

Louis Dumaresq did not own the whole of the great old house, the dining-room flat was taken by a painter and designer on glass. He was much too poor to rent a place like this, even if he had wanted the room, for he was only cashier at a bank, working hard at his monotonous drudgery day after day, week after week, year after year, for a salary that just paid for rent, food, clothes, and the education of his only son, with a small margin over for the few luxuries in which he cared to indulge. Mr. Dumaresq was no longer young, he had turned fifty-five at the time these every-day chronicles begin, but he looked ten years above this age ; he was a grey, silent, thin, reserved man ; neither tall nor short, neither handsome nor ugly, only essentially and decidedly a gentleman in look, bearing and voice.

He had every reason to be one, was he not of the ancient family of Dumaresq, one in whose veins only gentle blood had flowed through a hundred generations ? had he not been educated at Winchester and Oxford ? his father being of the great banking firm of Dumaresq and Dumaresq, a man highly thought of, rich, haughty, given to stately and luxurious ways. How, then, had Louis Dumaresq come down to part of a house in Bloomsbury, and the humble post of cashier at a bank ? The story of this descent belongs to the past which will have to be further elucidated. Dumaresq was a man living in the past. Compared with it, the present was colourless and dreamy, the promises of the future were to him vague, despondent, faltering things. He had lived here now for fourteen years. Two years before the birth of his only living child, his boy Clement ; there had been a little girl born in his early married life, who only just lived long enough to learn her first smiles.

Eight years out of these fourteen, in spite of poverty and drudgery, had been happy ones. Evening after evening Louis Dumaresq had put his latch-key in the great heavy door with cheerful eagerness, with a sense of expectancy, had run up the broad shallow stairs gaily, and opened his own door with a certain hope of finding comfort, happiness and sympathy within. He went upstairs now slowly enough ; he had lost, as one does B lose one's most poignant sensations as time goes by, the despair which used to accompany him step by step ; the sickening returning pang of each day's coming home when home had grown miserable ; he was quiescent now, though he did not call himself resigned ; slowly some thing of pleasure in life had come again, though never more a delight in it. There were some consolations cropping up one by one like the timid flowers through the snow, the pleasure of books, those dear, faithful companions that have always comfort for their true lovers ; there was the sense of repose after the day's work, the leisure for musing and living over again the sweet dead past, his prints and pic tures ; there was the boy.

Sometimes, it is true, the boy was a very doubtful joy, but at others he was able to give his father the nearest approach to an active sensation of happiness which he was now capable of knowing. The room which Louis Dumaresq entered this November evening as he had done spring, summer, autumn, winter for more than twelve years, was a large and handsomely propor tioned one with three long windows with deep cushioned window-seats. Though dimly lighted and a little sombre-looking, it was by no means a sordid or unpleasing room. It had not the brightness or feminine trimness that a woman's taste can give, there was a good deal of litter about, men's litter of papers, books, pipes, writ ing materials, portfolios, but it bore marks of a cultured and refined taste throughout, and it had one or two distinctly noticeable features.

There were relicsofamoreluxurious past, salvage from the extravagant days of college and early manhood ; a little cabinet of curiosities, one or two fine old engravings, framed, plenty more loose about the room, many books, some few of them sumptuous in calf, vellum and morocco ; a collection of coins, a few bits of black old carved oak. The mantlepiece was an Adams, a graceful piece of work, with festoons of roses and Cupids' heads ; on the high shelf in careless disarray stood some specimens of good china ; but the centre of the collection, the gem, the heart of the room, as it were, was to be seen above these in the place of honour over the fireplace. Louis Dumaresq never entered his room without glancing at it, the picture was so closely associated with histenderest memories, with just the best and sweetest of a life obscured and grown dull while but yet at afternoon.

It was an exquisite Claude, a really perfect specimen of the master, an exceedingly valuable piece of property, as a broker might put it, a priceless one to the self-contained, constant, persistently faithful man with whom memory was an extraordinary factor of life. It was a sunshiny Italian landscape, a valley of delights, out of the golden age, it seemed only enriched and mellowed by time, still glowing with light and colour. Dumaresq liked to sit in his deep arm-chair doing nothing, steeped in the past with his large, dreamy, grey eyes fixed on the picture. As he looked he saw scene after scene unfold from his sunny days, he saw Italy again, he was in Signor Crispi's studio painting, he was laughing and joking in bad Italian with the eager, impulsive, impassioned little man ; ah ! in those days he actually laughed and joked !

The Claude, Crispi's one treasure, hung on the bare wall opposite where his easel stood. Crispi's one treasure, did I say ? No, he had two, and the second was worth a thousand Claudes ! Crispi could talk by the hour, could dilate on the beauties of his picture, but when he wanted to talk about Gemma, he generally broke down, and, in his foolish Italian way, got incoherent and tearful in praise of his darling, the little slight, brown-eyed, merry girl of eighteen who came and went as she pleased, slipping in and out like the sunbeam her father called her. And all this had been sixteen years ago. Years of London lay between that golden time in Rome and his present ; nothing was the same, nothing remained of it all but Louis Dumaresq in his arm-chair, silent, quiet, lost in his memories, a grey, passive, undemonstrative, cold-mannered man, and the Claude above the mantlepiece.

Crispi was gone, that fiery eager life of his stamped out in a moment, ten years ago he had dropped down dead at his easel with his palette on his thumb. Gemma was gone, Dumaresq's Gemma, who had come from the land of sun shine to dull London streets for love of him, and who had brought the sun with her, her husband thought. Whenever his eyes rested on the Claude, and they did so often enough, he saw other pictures too that came and melted as dreams do, yet were the real things of his life to him all the same. These are some of the visions that came into Louis Dumaresq's mind's eye as his bodily eyes were fixed on the Claude above the fireplace in the dim old Bloomsbury room. He was a young man again, under thirty, a young man of artistic talent and many tastes, so well off and so handsomely endowed by his rich, careless, lavish father that he had no need to do serious work.

He had travelled nearly all over the world, had been seeing life in a thousand aspects since he left Oxford, and though he seemed a rather grave, thoughtful young fellow, he had enjoyed everything in his reserved, retentive way, taking in impressions and sensations, and as it were assimilating them at his leisure. Fate or chance — or, if you choose to put it so, Providence — had landed his drifting bark at last at Rome, and a freak seized the traveller here to stay and "go in steadily for art. He knew well enough he had no real genius, for he was by no means given to illusions or idealising himself or others, but then he had talent enough to please his own taste and to make it worth while to give up some time and energy to improving it. So he put up at Signor Crispi's house, living in it as an inmate and working in the Italian painter's studio.

Dumaresq remembered, he thought, almost every day he spent there — enchanted days, full to the brim of satisfying content — but one or two stood out in peculiar vividness. Such, for instance, as his first day there. After the morning's work Crispi was beginning to say he, for one, wanted his lunch. Dumaresq himself was conscious of a certain sensation of emptiness, when the curtain that hung over the doorway was pushed aside by a little thin brown hand, a voice — a young, sweet, almost a child's voice — called in that liquid Roman language, "Papa, are you not ready for your lunch yet ? How many shall I get it for?" Signor Crispi's vi vacious face bright ened into more posi tive sunshine at the sound. " Come in, Gemma, come in, my little mouse !" he cried in reply, "come and be introduced to the English gentleman, my new pupil, who is to stay with us.

Be not shy, then, little one, let us see the whole of you ! " And Louis, turning from his easel, a little in terested, and curious to see the owner of the sweet child's voice, saw for the first time the girl who was, when a year was gone, to be his wife. She was not beautiful, there was nothing wonderful in the slim, brown girl, with the thick, short, curling dark hair and the great deep eyes where, pupil and iris seemed all one . 9 shadowy dark together ; she was not beautiful, though these eyes and eye-lashes were, she had not another feature of distinction ; most people thought her a thin, insignificant, frail-looking little creature, hardly worth a second glance ; at first Louis almost thought so too, but he did not take long to find out the soft tenderness, at once profound and accessible, that lived in the depths of her eyes, — the innocent, sunny, merry, sensitive charm that made up her whole personality to one who had once found it out.

There was nothing but what was sunshiny and happy about the girl, so he could never tell why she always impressed him somehow with a sense of vague pathos, why he always felt as if a new world swept and garnished of all bad and dismal things, ought to have been made specially for Gemma Crispi, that she was too fragile and tender a growth to thrive over-well on the stony tracts of every day. There was something of this about her, veiled and unreal as it seemed, which always made Louis speak to her in a different tone from his ordinary one, that led him to contrive little pleasures and surprises for her, and to keep from her any possibly jarring or painful feeling. The same sentiment, which no one ever put into words, made her father's eyes apt to moisten, even while he laughed and teased her, while he looked at her.

But he had some reason for this, she was like her mother who died when she was born. Louis Dumaresq had none, for no girl anywhere could have seemed brighter or more full of life and joy than Gemma always did. He loved now to recall every change, every subtle gradation in her manner to him, as they grew intimate ; how her shyness first melted away, the half-reserve, that was not natural to her, followed ; how she came to confide in him, to gossip about the little interests and occupations of her life, to tell him stories about her friends, to complain of, while she laughed at, old Teresa's short temper and obstinate refusals to try "English " cookery ; to show him her pretty things, her trinkets, books and trifles as freely and confidingly as if he had been one of her girl companions. Then the next change, most ominous of all, when he had startled and half frightened her by a look too warm, a word too much, and the sensitive, impressionable, timid girl had drawn away from him like a mimosa, had persisted in sticking close to " Papa," in answering coldly and briefly, in looking everywhere but where he tried to make her; had, in short, half tormented, half delighted the man who had just awakened to the certainty of passionate love.

She used before to walk with him alone, she was too innocent to think it meant anything — having been brought up by her unworldly, simple minded father outside the stupid convention alities of society — but now she would never come, she was always " busy." He grew wild with impatience at never catching her alone for a moment. At last the chance came that lovers must get sooner or later, the day of days of which he oftenest and most fondly dreamed, now that it was only a memory of the past with the seal of the tomb put on it, the evening when Signor Crispi was called away as they sat together in the. balcony drinking coffee, and Gemma was not ready enough with her excuses, when Dumaresq was determined and bore down upon her fears and confusion with a sudden, strong, manly word that had to be listened to and answered somehow — not with words — no, Gemma was past words, she could only sob and tremble, and let him hold and kiss her little cold hands till the wave of her own suddenly rising heart swept fears and doubts away, and the slender arms were thrown round his neck, and the passionate, loving, childish girl felt herself to be a woman for that moment and for ever after.

Oh, dear, dear dead days ! Not one memory of them would the lonely, silent man of the present have sold for a thousand living gifts, not one but was as much to him as life itself. In the beginning of his loneliness the memory of that one supreme love passage had been the only one that had broken down the outward cold composure of the man's resolute reserve, and forced tears that were at once relief and agony ; now the same remembrance had the power of bringing a faint smile, it was his possession, the secret pearl of his existence that no one could rob him of. Louis Dumaresq passed universally for a mere dry, sensible, trustworthy man of busi ness, all intercourse he had with his fellows was limited to the merest externals, to talks more or less pleasant ; he was a well-read gentlemanly and cultivated companion, every one allowed ; it would have astonished the associates of his business hours if they could have had the faintest idea of the real man, of the obstinate romance and idealism in which he indulged his thoughts, of the extreme tenderness for which he had acapacity.

No one could have a more extra ordinarily retentive memory, no one could lead a more retrospective life ; he had a theory of his own that as long as he chose thus to keep fresh and vivid the remembrance of his wife, as long as he kept his heart absolutely pure and single in its devotion to her, he was laying up a claim that would not, could not be denied him to re gain her elsewhere ; it was the fault of people's own infidelity, he thought, that made separations more than temporary. Gemma was his own still, part of himself, just so long as no other image for a moment pushed her out of his heart. So he had his truest and most real life in these silent, indolent, musing hours when a looker-on would probably have supposed him less than half alive. Every day he turned over his hoarded memories, as a miser handles and counts his gold ; pausing to weigh one specially that had had its greatest significance and charm on his life, such as that blissful, tremulous moment when Gemma forgot to be frightened, forgot everything but that she had found out what love meant, and had thrown those eager arms round his neck in an innocent self-abandonment which was the most sacred trust she could have given him.

Then had followed calmer but scarcely more delicious hours. Crispi had been half dismayed to find any one thought his little girl woman enough to be in love with ; half jealous that she could care for any one but him, yet proud too and happy for her, not forgetful of his own young days. There had seemed no real drawback, no rough ness to spoil the even flow of their first bliss. Mr. Dumaresq, Senior, was certainly rather cool in his congratulations, but he had not refused to countenance what he thought a bit of romantic nonsense, he and his son were on politely indifferent terms, the chief thing between them was liberality on one side, an easy gratitude on the other. Louis meant to set up his tent in Rome, only paying visits to England, and just letting Gemma know his people. She was such a child of the South, he could not fancy her quite comfortably transplanted either in London or in Lockwood Park, his father's country place, she looked much more natural in the bare, sunshiny studio.

So he settled everything, as he thought, for life, in an easy, satis factory fashion ; they were married, and Crispi's wedding present to them was his one greatest possession — the Claude. It was an heirloom, he valued and admired it immensely and justly, as one of the finest specimens of the master and of undoubted authenticity, for he knew its whole history ; for this very reason he was delighted to give it as a dowry with his daughter, and when Dumaresq remonstrated, he declared he had nothing else to give her, and would not have his daughter go to her rich husband without any dot. So the Claude was tenderly moved to Dumaresq's new rooms, and became one of his household gods. For more than half a year the Dumaresqs were as absolutely, perfectly and romantically happy as a young husband and wife can be.

There never was a pair better suited to each other. Gemma's happy nature, sunny in spite of its extreme sensitiveness, and the acute emotions of which it was capable, her pitifulness, and that sympathy, which was always ready to spread itself to every demand upon it, the extraordinary interest she took in the smallest details of life, her hopefulness and the whole indefinite but sensible charm of her nature, was just what Dumaresq's slightly pessimistic, reticent, narrowly strong disposition needed. He was only capable of caring for very few. Gemma, who loved him as entirely as even he could desire, had an open heart for every one who laid the smallest claim upon it. He was apt to take suspicious and melancholy views of his fellow-creatures and had a vein of cynicism in his aspect of the world ; she was perpetually ready to trust, and, if deceived to-day, would be apt to think every one true to-morrow.

Her happy optimism coloured his rather sombre outlook with a rose of dawn ; she was practical too and clever in trifles, while he was careless and somewhat indifferent, imaginative without being intellectual, endowed with that gift of sympathy which is perhaps the very best thing a woman can bring to bear on the lives of those about her. So when the catastrophe came, the sudden downfall of Dumaresq's prosperity for life, Gemma was neither crushed nor inefficient, and made happiness just as possible in poverty as in riches. The great banking firm of Dumaresq and Dumaresq collapsed suddenly, and fell into ruins that carried with them many another life. If any one knew precisely the cause of the crash, Louis Dumaresq at any rate never did ; he did not care to enquire too particularly, for he knew enough to be sure that his father was largely to blame.

The cautious old uncle, head of the house, had died some years before ; if he had been alive, the disaster would never have happened. Mark Dumaresq, Louis' father, was neither cautious nor high principled, he had grown more and more reckless as he grew older, and many a man and woman had cause to curse him ; but at any rate, he had his reward, he died a month after the smash of heart disease, the doctors said, of heart-break in reality. Louis behaved as honourably as he could do, he handed over the fortune he had inherited from his mother, stripping himself to the last farthing, though it was only a drop in the ocean ; he came to London and accepted a post in a bank which was offered him by a firm who had known his father's, and who were impressed by the behaviour of the son. It was not a grand salary or position they gave him, but he was glad and grateful for it.

He moved his house hold gods, his books, collections of prints and pictures and the Claude itself to London, to the very rooms he now occupied in Bloomsbury, and his Italian wife had to learn to keep house in dirty, foggy old London under very different outward and inward conditions, but with a blithe spirit equal to any crisis, so long as she could serve those she loved. Their first child, a little girl, was born very soon after the fall of the house of Dumaresq, and before the fatigue and bustle of moving was well over. It was a fragile little thing, and "only lived a couple of months. Gemma herself was frightfully ill, much nearer death than her husband ever knew, she struggled back to life partly because she would not die and leave him to so dreary and troublesome a world quite alone ; she forced herself back even to seeming cheerfulness, and the tears she shed for her baby were kept for her solitary hours.

Louis never found her anything but merry when he got home to a sort of little festive meal and an evening of charming companionship. Ah ! how long, yet how brief those enchanted years seemed now to look back on ! A lifetime yet an hour, his Paradise, his fairyland set in the midst of grinding routine and prosaic money-getting in the roar and stress of the huge, world of London. He noticed at times, then forced himself not to notice, that Gemma grew thinner and thinner, till she seemed really all spirit with the merest shadow of a body, that her eyes looked too large and brilliant, her eyelashes too long and shady, while her cheeks grew hollow with less and less colour in them. There was always a cause ; her second child was born nearly two years after the first. She was naturally ailing before and some months after ; she got little rest at nights, for the boy was a terrible fidget, never still day or night, always wanting something or other, and perpetually en Evidence.

Louis almost hated the little plague of a dark-eyed monkey when he watched its incessant claims on the tired, patient, adoring young mother ; but after ail, the child made her happy, when it learnt to laugh and talk as well as cry. The father, was delighted with Gemma's delight in her little Clement, her pretty, girlish ways with him, and her firm belief in his extraordinary talents. Well, even the boy's critical, sarcastic father had to acknowledge that there was some justification in this faith of the mother's, the boy was not quite like the common run — Hark ! there's a rush on the stairs, memories and dreams must be put on one side now, Dumaresq must come back to every day. That is the boy's step and whistle. Clement, no longer the curly-haired, precocious darling of his mother, but Clement the schoolboy of twelve years old, whose mother has left him six years, has come to storm the dreamy citadel of his father's musings, and to put in his usual urgent claim for immediate notice and attention. c

Chapter II

Shades of the prison-house begin to close Upon the growing boy. But he beholds the light, and -whence it flows, He sees it in his joy. Wordsworth. Clement always burst into a room ; if it were very cold, he always left the door open ; if not, he was sure to bang it with a noise that even use and custom never could steel his father's sensitive ear to encounter without pain. He generally dropped his bag of books before he reached a chair on which to fling them, while his cap went anywhere. In short, a wandering hurricane best describes his progress generally. A resolute patience, doggedly gentle, charac terised the attitude of his father's mind when he had to endure the shocks that generally accompanied Clement's presence. He was a slim lad, with thick curls and dark eyes, so like his mother's that they half delighted, half pained his father, who had never yet absolutely settled in his own mind if it were worst or best to be so reminded of her.

Except, however, for these features, and for his olive complexion and a certain cleft in his chin, Clement was not much like her, he had some Dumaresq features, some resemblance to his grandfather Crispi, a mixture of dead and gone English and Italian ancestors. The whole result was not exactly a pretty or handsome boy, but one not like the majority, interesting, with an air of distinction, of individuality, not the boy that a schoolmaster would pass over indifferently or a lady neglect to notice. He was invari ably untidy, generally more or less ragged and inky ; it gave the fastidious, gentlemanly instincts of his father a daily shock to see the dilapidated, wild, untended look for which no one really but Clement himself was to blame, for Dumaresq spent a considerable sum on good, even particularly good, clothes for the boy, and the worthy old servant mended incessantly but in vain after him, with groanings not to be uttered.