"You like it more than anything else. You do--you can"t deny it," she went on.
"My dear child, what are you talking about?" Nick asked, gently...
"That"s what you like--doing what you were this morning; with women lolling, with their things off, to be painted, and people like that man."
Nick slowly got up, hesitating. "My dear Julia, apart from the surprise this morning, do you object to the living model?"
"Not a bit, for you."
"What"s the inconvenience then, since in my studio they"re only for me?"
"You love it, you revel in it; that"s what you want--the only thing you want!" Julia broke out.
"To have models, lolling undressed women, do you mean?"
"That"s what I felt, what I knew," she went on--"what came over me and haunted me yesterday so that I couldn"t throw it off. It seemed to me that if I could see it with my eyes and have the perfect proof I should feel better, I should be quiet. And now I _am_ quiet--after a struggle of some hours, I confess. I _have_ seen; the whole thing"s before me and I"m satisfied."
"I"m not--to me neither the whole thing nor half of it is before me.
What exactly are you talking about?" Nick demanded.
"About what you were doing this morning. That"s your innermost preference, that"s your secret pa.s.sion."
"A feeble scratch at something serious? Yes, it was almost serious," he said. "But it was an accident, this morning and yesterday: I got on less wretchedly than I intended."
"I"m sure you"ve immense talent," Julia returned with a dreariness that was almost droll.
"No, no, I might have had. I"ve plucked it up: it"s too late for it to flower. My dear Julia, I"m perfectly incompetent and perfectly resigned."
"Yes, you looked so this morning, when you hung over her. Oh she"ll bring back your talent!"
"She"s an obliging and even an intelligent creature, and I"ve no doubt she would if she could," Nick conceded. "But I"ve received from you all the help any woman"s destined to give me. No one can do for me again what you"ve done."
"I shouldn"t try it again; I acted in ignorance. Oh I"ve thought it all out!" Julia declared. And then with a strange face of anguish resting on his own: "Before it"s too late--before it"s too late!"
"Too late for what?"
"For you to be free--for you to be free. And for me--for me to be free too. You hate everything I like!" she flashed out. "Don"t pretend, don"t pretend!" she went on as a sound of protest broke from him.
"I thought you so awfully _wanted_ me to paint," he gasped, flushed and staring.
"I do--I do. That"s why you must be free, why we must part?"
"Why we must part--?"
"Oh I"ve turned it well over. I"ve faced the hard truth. It wouldn"t do at all!" Julia rang out.
"I like the way you talk of it--as if it were a tr.i.m.m.i.n.g for your dress!" Nick retorted with bitterness. "Won"t it do for you to be loved and cherished as well as any woman in England?"
She turned away from him, closing her eyes as not to see something dangerous. "You mustn"t give anything up for me. I should feel it all the while and I should hate it. I"m not afraid of the truth, but you are."
"The truth, dear Julia? I only want to know it," Nick insisted. "It seems to me in fact just what I"ve got hold of. When two persons are united by the tenderest affection and are sane and generous and just, no difficulties that occur in the union their life makes for them are insurmountable, no problems are insoluble."
She appeared for a moment to reflect upon this: it was spoken in a tone that might have touched her. Yet at the end of the moment, lifting her eyes, she brought out: "I hate art, as you call it. I thought I did, I knew I did; but till this morning I didn"t know how much."
"Bless your dear soul, _that_ wasn"t art," Nick pleaded. "The real thing will be a thousand miles away from us; it will never come into the house, _soyez tranquille_. It knows where to look in and where to flee shrieking. Why then should you worry?"
"Because I want to understand, I want to know what I"m doing. You"re an artist: you are, you are!" Julia cried, accusing him pa.s.sionately.
"My poor Julia, it isn"t so easy as that, nor a character one can take on from one day to the other. There are all sorts of things; one must be caught young and put through the mill--one must see things as they are.
There are very few professions that goes with. There would be sacrifices I never can make."
"Well then, there are sacrifices for both of us, and I can"t make them either. I daresay it"s all right for you, but for me it would be a terrible mistake. When I think I"m doing a certain thing I mustn"t do just the opposite," she kept on as for true lucidity. "There are things I"ve thought of, the things I like best; and they"re not what you mean.
It would be a great deception, and it"s not the way I see my life, and it would be misery if we don"t understand."
He looked at her with eyes not lighted by her words. "If we don"t understand what?"
"That we"re utterly different--that you"re doing it all for _me_."
"And is that an objection to me--what I do for you?" he asked.
"You do too much. You"re awfully good, you"re generous, you"re a dear, oh yes--a dear. But that doesn"t make me believe in it. I didn"t at bottom, from the first--that"s why I made you wait, why I gave you your freedom. Oh I"ve suspected you," Julia continued, "I had my ideas. It"s all right for you, but it won"t do for me: I"m different altogether. Why should it always be put upon me when I hate it? What have I done? I was drenched with it before." These last words, as they broke forth, were attended with a quick blush; so that Nick could as quickly discern in them the uncalculated betrayal of an old irritation, an old shame almost--her late husband"s flat, inglorious taste for pretty things, his indifference to every chance to play a public part. This had been the humiliation of her youth, and it was indeed a perversity of fate that a new alliance should contain for her even an oblique demand for the same spirit of accommodation, impose on her the secret bitterness of the same concessions. As Nick stood there before her, struggling sincerely with the force that he now felt to be strong in her, the intense resolution to break with him, a force matured in a few hours, he read a riddle that hitherto had baffled him, saw a great mystery become simple. A personal pa.s.sion for him had all but thrown her into his arms (the sort of thing that even a vain man--and Nick was not especially vain--might hesitate to recognise the strength of); held in check at moments, with a strain of the cord that he could still feel vibrate, by her deep, her rare ambition, and arrested at the last only just in time to save her calculations. His present glimpse of the immense extent of these calculations didn"t make him think her cold or poor; there was in fact a positive strange heat in them and they struck him rather as grand and high. The fact that she could drop him even while she longed for him--drop him because it was now fixed in her mind that he wouldn"t after all serve her resolve to be a.s.sociated, so far as a woman could, with great affairs; that she could postpone, and postpone to an uncertainty, the satisfaction of an aching tenderness and plan for the long run--this exhibition of will and courage, of the larger scheme that possessed her, commanded his admiration on the spot. He paid the heavy price of the man of imagination; he was capable of far excursions of the spirit, disloyalties to habit and even to faith, he was open to rare communications. He ached, on his side, for the moment, to convince her that he would achieve what he wouldn"t, for the vision of his future she had tried to entertain shone before him as a bribe and a challenge. It struck him there was nothing he couldn"t work for enough with her to be so worked with by her. Presently he said:
"You want to be sure the man you marry will be prime minister of England. But how can you be really sure with any one?"
"I can be really sure some men won"t!" Julia returned.
"The only safe thing perhaps would be to-marry Mr. Macgeorge," he suggested.
"Possibly not even him."
"You"re a prime minister yourself," Nick made answer. "To hold fast to you as I hold, to be determined to be of your party--isn"t that political enough, since you"re the incarnation of politics?"
"Ah how you hate them!" she wailed again. "I saw that when I saw you this morning. The whole place reeked of your aversion."
"My dear child, the greatest statesmen have had their distractions. What do you make of my hereditary talent? That"s a tremendous force."
"It wouldn"t carry you far." Then she terribly added, "You must be a great artist." He tossed his head at the involuntary contempt of this, but she went on: "It"s beautiful of you to want to give up anything, and I like you for it. I shall always like you. We shall be friends, and I shall always take an interest--!"
But he stopped her there, made a movement which interrupted her phrase, and she suffered him to hold her hand as if she were not afraid of him now. "It isn"t only for you," he argued gently; "you"re a great deal, but you"re not everything. Innumerable vows and pledges repose upon my head. I"m inextricably committed and dedicated. I was brought up in the temple like an infant Samuel; my father was a high-priest and I"m a child of the Lord. And then the life itself--when _you_ speak of it I feel stirred to my depths; it"s like a herald"s trumpet. Fight _with_ me, Julia--not against me! Be on my side and we shall do everything. It is uplifting to be a great man before the people--to be loved by them, to be followed by them. An artist isn"t--never, never. Why _should_ he be? Don"t forget how clever I am."
"Oh if it wasn"t for that!" she panted, pale with the effort to resist his tone. Then she put it to him: "Do you pretend that if I were to die to-morrow you"d stay in the House?"
"If you were to die? G.o.d knows! But you do singularly little justice to my incentives," he pursued. "My political career"s everything to my mother."
This but made her say after a moment: "Are you afraid of your mother?"
"Yes, immensely; for she represents ever so many possibilities of disappointment and distress. She represents all my father"s as well as all her own, and in them my father tragically lives again. On the other hand I see him in bliss, as I see my mother, over our marriage and our life of common aspirations--though of course that"s not a consideration that I can expect to have power with you."
She shook her head slowly, even smiling with her recovered calmness and lucidity. "You"ll never hold high office."