The Romance of his Picture

Prologue

It was early in the morning and the rooms were almost empty. Only a few business men on their way to the City had looked in to gather a hasty glimpse of contemporary art as displayed on the walls of Burlington House. The pictures looked at thus, with the attention not distracted as usual by a shifting, chattering human crowd, were impressive if only by force of numbers. As I strolled from room to room, I reflected upon the immense output of human industry and patience which had covered their walls with such a tapestry of painted canvas. What hopes and ambitions must have gone to the making of it, and in the case of so many workers must have gone unrewarded ! I remembered how an artist of my acquaintance had said to me : " If one is not on the line, one is nowhere ! " And I wondered what the feelings of those unhappy ones might be whose habitat was near the ceiling.

As I stood staring upwards, some one touched me on the shoulder, and a voice said : " What are you cricking your neck to look at?" Lowering my eyes* Noel, who is one of of the well-known painters. I saw my friend Jeff the younger members Polkerris school of I glanced at him with some amusement His appearance was in no way suggestive of the present depression among artists. Since he is tall and has an admirable figure, his clothes have a way of looking well on him ; but on this occasion he was certainly extremely well dressed, and I fancy a stranger comparing him with the business men would have guessed him to be a guards man or some such gilded youth, and wondered what attraction could have brought him to the Royal Academy at half-past nine in the morning. " What were you studying ? " he asked again.

" Nothing in particular," I answered. " I was indulging in some general reflections, and thinking with how many people's lives these pictures must be intimately connected, with the lives of the artists and their wives and families, to say nothing of the models." "Yes," Noel said, smiling. "Pictures do hold a large place in the short and simple annals of some poor." "Probably," I said, "many of these have stories, and most of the stories are tragical." " Come and look at this one," he said, pointing to a picture which I had already noticed and admired in my ignorant fashion. " I know the man who painted it," Noel continued, " but not well, for he left Polkerris soon after I went there. He painted this thing four years ago, and the RA.s rejected it. This disappointment (not the first by many) convinced him that life being so very short and art so very long, art was no possible career for him.

So he gave up painting and went to the colonies. This year a friend of his, to whom he had given the picture, sent it up, of course without letting him know, and it was accepted and well hung, as you see. The news of his success was wired out to him, but he died before it could reach him. How's that for a tragedy ? " " Quite sad enough," I answered. " But how about your own pictures ? Take that one now that I admire so much, has it got a romance by any chance ? " To my amusement Jeff Noel blushed. Although he has a fair skin, I had never noticed before that it was easily affected in that way ; yet now it had perceptibly reddened. " Perhaps it has," he answered, laughing. " Anyhow it's a long story." He took leave of me, and went to meet two ladies who had just come into the room. It so happened that last winter I spent some time near Polkerris, and saw a great deal of Jeff Noel. Thus it came about that I learnt the romance of his picture.

Chapter I

Where the path was not stony it was muddy, and it ran between a rain-sodden pasture and a low, rough granite wall. Jeff Noel slackened his pace. He was tired, as much mentally as physically. He had walked for hours under a sky where pale gleams of sunshine were crossed continually by veils of sea mist which swept inland, blotting out the wide landscape, and he felt as if some of the mist was pervading his brain. He had been thinking of his picture — a picture which had to be thought about, since it was scarcely begun on this the second of February, and was due at Burlington House before the end of March. For weeks he had been making studies for it, for weeks he had thought of little else, and now to-day a sudden distaste for it had assailed him, and he wavered continually between a firm determination that he would stick to it, what ever it might cost him, and a determination — equally firm for the time being — that he would paint something totally different.

No one who has not experienced this particular form of indecision can know its torment. In Noel's case it had reached that acute stage when a resolve is made with the hateful fore-knowledge that it will be broken an hour later. "I am getting idiotic! I can't go on like this ! " He made this reflection half aloud. Then he stood still and looked about him with eyes which had become once more sensitive to out ward things. The mist had melted, letting through the pale, unearthly glow of a wintry sunset. A few yards from him a woman stood leaning against a gate which broke the long grey line of wall. She had taken off her hat and was looking westward, so that the wind stirred her hair, and her face was irradiated by the sun set. Beyond the gate stretched waste land, gorse-grown and broken, and beyond that grey, quiet sea.

Jeff Noel stood motionless, holding his breath. The woman was young and good to look at, but it was not that which held him spellbound. What he saw before him was a picture — his picture. He almost prayed that she might not realize his presence, in spite of which she turned her head and saw him. As he came forward she straightened herself, changing her position slightly. He paused uncertainly, guessing that she was about to speak. "Please, sir, are you Mr. Noel, the artis'?" She spoke with great deliberation, looking him gravely in the face. " I am," Noel answered, reddening with in ward excitement. " I've been over to Mrs. Goninan's, and I asked her if you'd be wanting a model." Noel sang an inward hymn of triumph, while his outward man remained stolid. " I do want a model, it so happens, and I think you might suit me."

The young woman nodded slightly. " What time would you want me, sir ? " " As a rule from three till dark, but to morrow you must pose morning and after noon. Please come punctually to-morrow at half-past nine, — and please come in that dress." She was wearing a dull blue blouse, much faded, and a shabby brown skirt "Very well, sir." " You live in Polkerris ? " " No, sir. I'm stayin' with my aunt, Mrs. Trewarvas, over to Promised Land." " Is that the name of a farm ? " " Yes, sir." " Far from here ? " "About a mile." " Have you ever been a model before ? " " Never, sir. Is it sixpence an hour ? " Her manner, which up to now had been noticeably cool and self-possessed, betrayed a certain eagerness. Noel answered in the affirmative. The girl's face fell. She reached out for her hat, which she had left on the gate post.

" And your name is Trewarvas ? " Noel asked. " Lesbia Trewarvas. Good-evenin', sir. Her way lay down the path Noel had come by. The artist's eyes followed her, noting her HIS PICTURE broad shoulders, her firm, harmonious walk, her small, well-set head. His brain felt misty no longer, the dull sense of oppression had vanished. He had found what he had been painfully groping for. His imagination was on fire. In fancy his picture was painted already, hung on the line, torn to pieces by the critics — one of the pictures of the year. B

Chapter II Jeffrey

Noel had spent four years at Pol kerris as a member of the colony of artists who have made their home in that grey-roofed Cornish fishing village. At first he had lodged near his studio, but had moved after a time to Tregominion, a farmhouse two miles away from it, where the upland air was fresh and strong, and fishy smells and screaming children were alike unknown. Comparative solitude was in no way unpleasant to him, and when he had had built for him a small studio or rather painting shed near a little copse in the neighbourhood of the farmhouse, he appreciated solitude at its full value. The friendly criti cism and even the friendly encouragement of brother artists are not found alike helpful by every one, and Noel knew that few things bene fited his work less than the discussion of it.

At the time of which I am writing, he had let his studio in Polkerris. He purposed painting an open-air subject, and he was more than usually hard up. The year before last his Academy picture had been well hung, and had attracted some attention. Last year his picture, the fruit of a winter's work, had been among the rejected. He had employed the early part of the present winter in practically repainting it. He was now eight - and - twenty, and his profession had not brought him so far any very dazzling pecuniary profit. His father, the Rev. Canon Noel, made him an allowance, which, though it had sufficed so far for his ordinary needs during his student life in Paris and the years he had spent at Polkerris, left very little margin for extras. The morning after his meeting with Lesbia Trewarvas found him eating his breakfast in a subdued and sober mood.

His exultation of the evening before had been partly the outcome of a reaction from unwonted depression, and partly that " first fine careless rapture " which accompanies the first flash of artistic conception. He had had time to recover his balance, and he was dissatisfied with the weather, which threatened a spell of sunshine. Sunny after noons would mean idleness in his case. Mrs. Goninan, his landlady, set before him a smoking dish of fried mackerel. Noel was lucky in his landlady, who with her son's help farmed the land which her late husband's family had farmed for generations, and found time, though she kept no servant, to make her lodger very comfortable. She was a short, thick-set woman, whose hair, still black, hung down round her broad head in short corkscrew ringlets. Shaken as she sometimes shook them, those "drop curls," as she called them, were capable of much ex pression.

" Mrs. Goninan," said Noel, looking up at her, " I think you know a young woman called Lesbia Trewarvas?" Mrs. Goninan's round face clouded over. " I've known the Trewarvases this thirty years. Lesbia, she comes from over Truro way ; she's only stayin' up to Promised Land." " That's a queer name ; what does it mean ? " " Abner Trewarvas, what built the farm, he called it so ; but what he meant by it is more than I can tell." " Well, Lesbia Trewarvas is going to sit to me." Mrs. Goninan took up the cream glass, and set it down again in the same spot. " I hope you understand, sir, that she had to come and offer for it, since for sartin you'd never think of askin' her. 'Tis a freak of Lesbia's to earn some pocket money, and I'd take it very kind of you if you won't mention it to none of the other gentlemen."

" Very well," said Noel gravely ; " I'll keep it dark if you wish it. I can do so, for the present." He could easily understand that in Mrs. Goninan's eyes there was a wide difference between a farmer's daughter who posed "for a freak," as she put it, and the Polkerris girls who in winter time kept their parents by posing to the various artists. But her request raised unpleasant doubts in his mind as to whether his new model could be depended on. She might find standing still for hours intolerable, since she was quite unused to it, or she might leave the neighbourhood before his picture was finished. The copse, on the edge of which Noel's studio was built, occupied a wedge of land skirted on one side by a cart road, and on the other by a narrow footpath, both converging towards Tregominion.

It was in this footpath, which once past the copse became a path across fields, that he had met Lesbia Trewarvas the evening before, and he listened for her footsteps to come along it while he smoked a pipe outside the studio after breakfast. From where he paced up and down, growing restless with impatience, he could see through a gateway without a gate the path, the low gorse-crowned wall, and the waste land beyond it ; but any one who approached was hidden from him by the hedge by which the copse was bordered. When at last he heard steps they came slowly. Presently they stopped short, as if hesitating. Noel whistled rather loud, and the figure which was to become so familiar to him appeared in the open gateway. " Good-morning," said the artist ; " you are seven minutes after time." " Good-mornin', sir," said Lesbia Trewarvas.

He was struck afresh by her perfect com posure. It had not a touch of effrontery ; it was serious and a trifle stolid. As he looked at her, he saw that she was far handsomer than he had supposed. " You won't mind posing sometimes bare headed ? " he inquired by way of saying some thing. Lesbia Trewarvas took off her hat (which, judged by Cornish standards, was an extremely shabby one), and hung it on a bush. She had a small, shapely head, and her soft mouse-coloured hair, parted down the middle. was twisted into a thick, close knot, which had a classic suggestion ; it was fine, but not sleek, and crinkled slightly above her ears and on her temples. Her skin was clear and pale, brown in the shadows, though not in the least sallow. Her face had all the beauties which are dis tinctively Cornish : the finely marked dark eyebrows, the long-shaped grey eyes, put in with a smutty finger, the delicate aquiline nose, with out those defects — the weak, irregular mouth and chin — which so often accompany them.

Lesbia's mouth and chin were firmly yet finely cut. "Shes beautiful in her way," thought Noel half regretfully. " Well, I suppose it doesn't matter. The type after all is a type hereabouts — common as blackberries, bar that mouth and chin." Aloud he said : " I want you to stand leaning against that further gatepost as you stood by the other gate yesterday, as if you were waiting for some one." He remembered after he had said it that she must have been waiting for him. With the complete absence of self-consciousness which characterized her, the girl stepped back into the gateway, leant her shoulder against the worn granite post, and let her hands fall before her. It was her attitude of the evening before exactly repeated. "Thank you," said Noel; "that will do." One of his doubts concerning his new model was set at rest that morning.

She was either very patient or very anxious to please him. She posed admirably, and never owned to being tired. Once or twice she complained that her feet were cold, although she had been given a board to stand on. " I don't s'pose they be frost-bitten," she said gravely, as she stamped about on the grass before the painting shed. "You don't look cold," said Noel, watching her and noticing the even tint of her smooth skin. A faint smile shone in Lesbia's eyes. " No more don't you, sir." Noel laughed and pushed back his tam-o' shanter. " I'm rather warm than otherwise. I suppose I look so?" Lesbia's smile had already vanished. " I can stand again now," she said shortly. Noel was a silent worker, and habitually so absorbed in his work that any sudden interrup tion gave him something like a shock.

Only one such interruption troubled him that day. Once his model moved suddenly. " Some one's coming ! " she said as if to herself. " Well, what of it ? " said Noel impatiently. The some one, whose heavy tread was ap proaching along the lane, was a thick-set, black-bearded man, clad roughly, but not like a labourer. He passed the gateway so quickly that Noel hardly saw him. What he did see was the deep red flush which darkened his model's face. Who was that?" he asked. Josiah William Goninan." As he drew, Noel wondered why the sight of Josiah William, so called to distinguish him from his father, the late Josiah Goninan, should make Lesbia Trewarvas blush scarlet. Josiah William looked over forty ; Lesbia might be five-and-twenty at most. Still Josiah William was a good-looking man and a tidy farmer, and the girl might very well fancy him as a husband ; but would Mrs. Goninan, who was her son's law-giver, fancy her as a daughter in-law ?

It would be "pull devil, pull baker," if the irrepressible old lady with the black ringlets was ever pitted against that steady eyed, proud-mouthed girl. The daylight faded into twilight before Noel could bring himself to stop work. He was fairly satisfied with what he had done — a charcoal study on fine canvas. Lesbia stretched herself and shivered visibly. " Good Lord ! You must be half frozen ! " said Noel hastily. " You've not had a rest for an hour and a half. You will have to remind me when you're tired, for I shall never remember it, I give you warning." " I shall be warm presently. Mrs. Goninan will fit me a dish o' tay." She came a few steps nearer to him. " I don't want no one coming here while I'm posing, Mr. Noel. 'Tisn't my work standin' to be painted." " Are you ashamed of it ?

" " Not I ; but some might say I belong to be, since 'tisn't my livelihood." Her straightforward tranquillity impressed him, rather against his will. "Well, Miss Trewarvas, no one is likely to see you here except one friend of mine, and I will ask him not to speak of you to any one. Now are you satisfied ? " "Yes, sir. "Then I have my conditions to make, too. Can you undertake to pose to me every after noon except Sundays until my picture is finished, towards the end of March?" " Will you make it a shilling an hour ? "Very well," Noel said. "It's double the usual pay, but I'll give it this once." " I'll undertake to do as you say, sir. You need not be afeard I shall try and back out of it. I want the money." Thus Noel's second fear was set at rest. It was almost dark when Noel returned to the farm.

As he crossed the town-place he heard Mrs. Goninan say coaxingly, — " Do 'ee, my dear, let Josiah William put 'ee a bit of the way home ! " The answer, made in a low voice, did not reach him ; but turning round at the garden door he saw a woman's figure walk rapidly past the lighted kitchen window. Lesbia had declined an escort.

Chapter III

" Going to see your young woman ? " The speaker was a short, stout, middle-aged man, clad in a Norfolk shirt, knickerbockers, and check stockings, who was slowly ascending the very steep hill against the side of which Polkerris nestles. He addressed Jeff Noel, who was striding down hill at a brisk pace, but stopped short on meeting him. Noel had dis carded his tam-o'-shanter and was wearing a dark blue suit — his Sunday suit to those who knew him. " Going to pay a blessed call first," he said in an aggrieved tone. " I did think one HIS PICTURE might escape old friends of one's family — old girls one's father knew in the forties — down here ! " " You will quite get rid of them when you are my age," said the elder man, grinning. "So it's an old girl you are going to see, instead of a young one ?

" " Sunday afternoon too ! I suppose she knows it's the only day I can go anywhere." " What a programme you have got before you ! First a call, then afternoon tea at Came Brea, then church " " I shall try and get out of that. It's her last Sunday. I'll look you up on my way back." The stout man turned round to look after his friend's retreating figure, with a curious expression on his ugly, humorous face. " A four years' engagement," he said to him self; "and why it shouldn't be a ten years' one no one knows except those two fools themselves. A four years' engagement — and one year gone already — humph ! " Below the hill the high road runs level between rows of cottages, past fields and de tached houses into the town of St. Pirans. Noel turned up a lane to the left of the road, and so made a short cut to the outskirts of the town.

Here stood old-fashioned houses in gardens enclosed by high walls. Curiosity made him forget his grievance as he turned into a gate from which a gravelled drive led up to a small, square, ivy-grown house. The old lady whom he was about to visit had been once the Hon. Miss Hawkswood, very pretty, fas cinating, and brilliant, according to an old aunt of his who had described her to him, and in those remote days, his father, according to the same aunt, had been very much in love with her. The aunt herself had never been in love with her, quite the contrary; yet she considered that for the quarrel which had estranged the two young people, Canon Noel, a curate then, had been in part to blame. " Your father was very proud," she had said, " quite as proud as the Hawkswoods, who considered him a contemptible match for the beauty of the family.

She married Mr. Herries two months aiterwards, and I suppose your father, man-like, got over it, but he remained single many years, and I have never heard him mention her name." This scrap of family history Noel turned over in his mind while he waited alone in a cheerlessly smart and formal drawing-room. He was getting frantically impatient, when the door at last opened to admit an old lady, so unlike the old lady whom he had half unconsciously pictured that she was rather a shock to his feelings. " She wears a wig," he thought ; " it must 33 c be a wig! I believe Aunt Catherine was romancing. Both conclusions were erroneous. Father Time, who had reddened and wrinkled her skin and dulled her eyes, had spared Mrs. Herries' thick brown hair rather spitefully, since by so doing he had only laid her open to an unjust suspicion.

" I am sorry to have kept you waiting," she said, after shaking hands with her visitor. "The fact was that I didn't expect you quite so early." " I thought you would not mind my coming earlier than the time you mentioned. I am engaged elsewhere later on." " You were engaged last Sunday too ; I suppose you artists are very sociable people ? " " I don't fancy we're considered so. I can't do much in that way myself, I live too far off." "This place," said Mrs. Herries, "seems to me an odd mixture of an old country town and a new watering place, both of which I personally detest." " Then I'm afraid you won't like being here," Noel said. " I shall like it if I don't get influenza. I had it twice last winter — but I'm not going to bore you with my ailments. How is your father getting on ? I suppose most people think you very like him ?

" There was something offhand in her tone which rather nettled Noel. " My father is very well, but he's getting an old man now. I'm very flattered if any one thinks me like him, for he's the handsomest man I know." Mrs. Herries looked at him oddly. " I don't think conspicuous good looks in a man — or in a woman either, for that matter — much of an advantage. Your father has not found them so, or he would be Archbishop of Canterbury by this time— certainly Archbishop. I once went to a clerical congress, and I give you my word I saw the three hundred ugliest men I ever saw in my life. Talking of good looks, they are plentiful hereabouts. You can easily find handsome models, and I presume that is partly why you artists come here, though I don't see much sign of it in your pictures. Beauty is not quite the thing nowadays, is it?"

"Well, not the only thing," said Noel, laughing. " There is a girl I met this morning," the old lady went on, " who would make a painter's fortune. She lives in the house over the way, I fancy. She wouldn't have been thought handsome in my time, a profile was a necessity then, and this girl has no profile to speak of. But she has hair like red sunshine, and a divine complexion." Is she tall ? " asked Noel eagerly. "Yes, tall. You know her, then?" " Her name is Cicely Henderson. I am engaged to her." Mrs. Herries' eyebrows gave an abrupt twitch. "It isn't a wig," thought Noel, "and she's not a bad sort after all." It gave him genuine pleasure that this woman, who must have seen many fair women, should appreciate Cicely at her true value. " Indeed ! " said Mrs. Herries. " You will have a very handsome wife.

Is the marriage to come off soon, if it's not an indiscreet question ? " " That depends on circumstances — I'm afraid not for some time yet." " Now I understand why your Sunday after noons are taken up." " They are just now, but only now ; she doesn't live at home. She is a hospital nurse." Mrs. Herries' eyebrows twitched again. " A hospital nurse," she said ; " well, it's a fashionable profession for ladies. Personally, I doubt if Sarah Gamp was not more natu rally suited to that state of life than the pretty young girls who enter upon it nowadays. But that is an old fogey's prejudice. By the way, do you know anything about the doctors in these parts? The old friend from whom I took this house recommended a Dr. Ken yon, but I hear he has gone abroad for his health." Noel knew nothing about the St. Pirans doctors, and presently rose to go, after pro mising, quite readily, that he would soon call on Mrs. Herries again.

" But I'm frightfully busy just now," he said, " and shall be till the end of March." " You must come and have dinner with me," said Mrs. Herries ; " I'm expecting my nephew, Charles Herries, soon, and I want you to meet him." After her visitor had left she sat very still, looking steadily at the fire, until the click of the teacups told her that her maid was bringing in the tea. She looked up and smiled. " Jerrold," she said, " I shan't want a second cup, my visitor could not stay. He is a nice boy, though. You remember Mr. Noel, who used to visit your mother, and bring you sweets, I think you told me — a most disgraceful piece of favouritism ? " The maid's grave face relaxed. " I think I do mind him, ma'am, and mother's told me of it, but I was quite a little maid at the time." " The young fellow who has been here is Mr. Noel's son, and oddly enough he's engaged, so he tells me, to that red-haired girl whom I admire and you don't." " Indeed, ma'am," Jerrold answered.

Her face had grown grave again. Meanwhile Jeff Noel .was having tea in the drawing-room of the house over the way. It was a contrast to Mrs. Herries' drawing-room, since it was comfortable, untidy, and full of people, being the principal sitting-room of a large family. Just now there were at least seven young women in it, some wearing hats and some without them, the latter all possessing hair which their enemies might call red and their friends golden. Noel sat in the window seat of the large window overlooking the garden, and a yellow haired girl sat beside him, in spite of which he glanced rather often towards another girl with hair a shade redder and darker, who stood, teacup in hand, at a little distance. She was talking rather excitedly, and her clear, high voice reached his ear : " Of course wearing uniform so much, I never hardly want a new dress, my other things never will wear out ; but if I did I should have it made with " She stopped short.