It went on and on for ever.
"And her uncle gave her away. He was quite distressed that he could not afford a trousseau, for he was Rector Designate of Saint Oressa"s at Liverpool, but I told him not to trouble about that. I gave her everything just as if she had been my own child. I spent hundreds on her trousseau, and she was married in my Brussels lace veil that I wore at my own wedding. I just took to her as my own child from the first. And would you believe it before he went away on his honeymoon, Arthur brought me the goldfish to keep me company. In a bowl it was. Such a quaint idea, wasn"t it, so like Arthur. They are my two pets, Blanche and Goldy."
I am not an artistic person, but even I was beginning to have doubts about Arthur"s talent. It seemed somehow unnatural that he was always having his work enlarged by a third or a fifth, or both. Every picture he had painted, before his hands trembled too much to hold a brush, was faithfully copied and enlarged by his wife. She reproduced his dreary compositions with amazing exact.i.tude, working for hours together in a corner of his studio, while he lay pallid, with half-closed eyes on the black satin sofa, watching her.
I had always taken for granted they were a devoted couple. Mrs. Robinson was always saying so, and it was obvious that Arthur never willingly allowed his wife out of his sight.
However, one morning I came into the studio when there was trouble between them. I saw at once it was one of his worst days.
He was standing before an enlargement of one of his pictures livid with anger.
"How often am I to to tell you that a copy must be exact," he stammered in his disjointed staccato speech. "If you quote a line of poetry do you alter one of the words? If I trust you to reproduce a picture surely you know you are not at liberty to change it."
She was as pale as he was. She looked dully at him, and then at her own canvas on the easel.
"I forgot," she said, in a suffocated voice.
I looked at the original and the copy, and even my stolid heart beat a little quicker.
The original represented a young girl--his wife had evidently sat for him--playing on a harp, while a man listened, leaning against a table, with a bowl of chrysanthemums upon it.
The copy was much larger than the original, and its wooden smugness was faithfully reproduced. The faulty drawing of the two figures seemed to have been accentuated by doubling its size. It was an amazingly exact reproduction, except in one particular. In Blanche"s copy she had made the shadow of the chrysanthemums fall upon the wall. It was a wonderful, a mysterious shadow, _I had seen it before_.
"I hadn"t indicated the slightest shadow," Arthur continued. "There is no sunshine in the room. You have deliberately falsified my composition."
"I did it without thinking," said Blanche shivering. "It is a mistake."
"A mistake," he said sullenly. "Your heart isn"t in your work, that is the truth. You don"t really care to help me to find my true expression."
And he took the canvas from the easel and tore it in two.
Did he half know, did some voice in the back of his twisted brain cry out to him that his part of the picture was hopelessly mediocre and out of drawing, that the only value it possessed was the shadow of the chrysanthemums? Was there jealousy in his rage? Who shall say!
I b.u.t.ted in at this point, and made a pretext for sending Blanche out of the room.
"Now, my dear fellow," I said confidentially, "don"t in future try to a.s.sociate your wife with your art. It is quite beyond her. Women, sir, have no artistic feeling. The home, dress, amus.e.m.e.nt that is their department. "Occupy till I come," might well have been said of feminine talent. It does occupy--till--ahem! _we_ arrive. When a woman is happily married like your wife she doesn"t care a fig for anything else. Let her share your lighter moments, your walks and drives, allow her to solace your leisure. The bow, sir, must not be always at full stretch. But promise me you won"t allow her to copy any more of your pictures."
"Never again," said Arthur sepulchrally, stretched face downwards on the satin sofa.
I picked up the two pieces of torn canvas. A sudden idea seized me.
"And now," I said, "I shall say a few words of reprimand to Mrs.
Robinson. You need not fear that I shall be too severe with her."
Arthur made no movement, and I left him, and after taking the torn picture to my car I climbed to the top of the house where I suspected I should find Blanche.
Her mother-in-law had reluctantly given her leave to use an attic lumber room, and, amid a litter of old trunks and derelict furniture and cardboard boxes, she had made a little clearing near the window, where she worked feverishly at her painting in her rare leisure.
I had seen the room once when I had helped the nurse to carry down a screen put away there, and suddenly needed in one of Arthur"s many illnesses. I had been touched by the evident attempt to make some sort of refuge in that large house, where there were several empty rooms on the lower floors, but--perhaps--no privacy.
I quickly found that Mrs. Robinson tacitly disapproved of Blanche working in the attic. Her kind face became almost hard when she spoke of the hours her daughter-in-law spent there, when her sick husband wanted her downstairs.
I tapped at the door, but there was no answer, and I went in. Blanche was sitting near the window on a leather trunk.
I expected to find her distressed, but her eyes, as they were raised to meet mine, were untroubled. An uncomprehending calm dwelt in them. I saw that she had already forgotten her husband"s anger in her complete absorption in something else.
For the first time it struck me that her mental condition was not quite normal. Had she then no memory; or did she continually revert, as soon as she was left to herself to some world of her own imagination, where her hara.s.sed, bewildered soul was refreshed? I remembered the look I had often seen in her face, the piteous expression of one anxiously endeavouring and failing to fix her attention.
She was giving the whole of it now to a picture on a low easel before her. I drew near and looked at it also.
It was a portrait of the goldfish. It was really exactly like him with his eye turned up on the look out for crumbs. He was outlined against a charming a.s.sortment of foreign sh.e.l.ls, strewn artistically on a zinc floor. The aquarium was encircled by a pretty little grove of cowslips and primroses, which gave the picture a cheerful and pleasing aspect.
"It is lovely," I said.
"He is a lucky goldfish, isn"t he?" she said apathetically.
I pondered long that night over Blanche. I reproached myself that I had not perceived earlier that she was overwrought. When I came to think of it her life was deeply overshadowed by her husband"s illness. Was it possible that she was the more talented of the two, and that it was not congenial to her to spend so much of her time docilely copying Arthur"s pictures? I had never thought of that before. I knew nothing about art myself, but I could find out. I was becoming much more occupied by this time, and one of my patients was the celebrated artist, M., whose slow death I was trying to make as painless as possible.
A day or two later I laid before him the picture Arthur had torn in two.
I can still see M. sitting in his arm-chair in the ragged dressing gown which he wore day and night, unshaved, wrinkled, sixty.
He threw the larger half of the canvas on the floor, and held the piece containing the chrysanthemums and their shadow in his thin shaking talon of a hand, moving it now nearer now further away from his half blind blood-shot eyes.
I began to explain that only the chrysanthemums were by the wife of the painter of the picture, but he brushed me aside.
"She can see," he said at last. "And she"s honest. I was honest once.
She can"t always say all she sees--who can--but she sees _everything_.
Bring me something more of hers."
Reader, after immense cogitation I decided to take him two of Arthur"s compositions, the couple which after hours of agitated vacillation he considered to be his best. They were all spread out in his studio, and I had to a.s.sist in his decision. He had on several occasions--knowing I attended the great man--hinted to me that he should like M. to see his work and advise him upon it, but I had never taken the hint. Mrs.
Robinson was only surprised that he had not pressed to see her son"s pictures earlier. She and Arthur evidently thought I had kept them from the famous painter"s notice until now, as, indeed, I had.
"And I must take something of yours too," I said kindly to Blanche as she put the two selected works of art into a magnificent portfolio.
"Yes, indeed," said Mrs. Robinson. "Blanche paints sweetly too, but mostly copies. She"s a wonderful hand at copying."
"I have nothing," said Blanche, "except the goldfish."
"Then I must take him," I said. This was regarded as a great joke by Arthur and his mother, and they could hardly believe I was in earnest until I sent Blanche for it.
"It"s Goldy to the very life," said Mrs. Robinson fondly, "and the sh.e.l.ls and everything exact. Such a beautiful home for him."
Arthur looked gloomily at the little picture, and for a moment I thought he would forbid my taking it, but I wrapped it up with decision, put it in the portfolio with the others, and departed.
I found M. as usual in his armchair in his studio, leaning back livid and breathless, endeavouring so he whispered "to get forward with his dying."
I a.s.sured him he was getting forward at a great pace.