Complete Works of Thomas Hardy (Illustrated) (215 page)

A second meaning was written in Christopher’s look, though he scarcely uttered it.  A woman so delicately poised upon the social globe could not in honour be asked to wait for a lover who was unable to set bounds to the waiting period.  Yet he had privily dreamed of an approach to that position — an unreserved, ideally perfect declaration from Ethelberta that time and practical issues were nothing to her; that she would stand as fast without material hopes as with them; that love was to be an end with her henceforth, having utterly ceased to be a means.  Therefore this surreptitious hope of his, founded on no reasonable expectation, was like a guilty thing surprised when Ethelberta answered, with a predominance of judgment over passion still greater than before:

‘It is unspeakably generous in you to put it all before me so nicely, Christopher.  I think infinitely more of you for being so unreserved, especially since I too have been thinking much on the indefiniteness of the days to come.  We are not numbered among the blest few who can afford to trifle with the time.  Yet to agree to anything like a positive parting will be quite unnecessary.  You did not mean that, did you? for it is harsh if you did.’  Ethelberta smiled kindly as she said this, as much as to say that she was far from really upbraiding him.  ‘Let it be only that we will see each other less.  We will bear one another in mind as deeply attached friends if not as definite lovers, and keep up friendly remembrances of a sort which, come what may, will never have to be ended by any painful process termed breaking off.  Different persons, different natures; and it may be that marriage would not be the most favourable atmosphere for our old affection to prolong itself in.  When do you leave London?’

The disconnected query seemed to be subjoined to disperse the crude effect of what had gone before.

‘I hardly know,’ murmured Christopher.  ‘I suppose I shall not call here again.’

Whilst they were silent somebody entered the room softly, and they turned to discover Picotee.

‘Come here, Picotee,’ said Ethelberta.

Picotee came with an abashed bearing to where the other two were standing, and looked down steadfastly.

‘Mr. Julian is going away,’ she continued, with determined firmness.  ‘He will not see us again for a long time.’  And Ethelberta added, in a lower tone, though still in the unflinching manner of one who had set herself to say a thing, and would say it — ’He is not to be definitely engaged to me any longer.  We are not thinking of marrying, you know, Picotee.  It is best that we should not.’

‘Perhaps it is,’ said Christopher hurriedly, taking up his hat.  ‘Let me now wish you good-bye; and, of course, you will always know where I am, and how to find me.’

It was a tender time.  He inclined forward that Ethelberta might give him her hand, which she did; whereupon their eyes met.  Mastered by an impelling instinct she had not reckoned with, Ethelberta presented her cheek.  Christopher kissed it faintly.  Tears were in Ethelberta’s eyes now, and she was heartfull of many emotions.  Placing her arm round Picotee’s waist, who had never lifted her eyes from the carpet, she drew the slight girl forward, and whispered quickly to him — ’Kiss her, too.  She is my sister, and I am yours.’

It seemed all right and natural to their respective moods and the tone of the moment that free old Wessex manners should prevail, and Christopher stooped and dropped upon Picotee’s cheek likewise such a farewell kiss as he had imprinted upon Ethelberta’s.

‘Care for us both equally!’ said Ethelberta.

‘I will,’ said Christopher, scarcely knowing what he said.

When he had reached the door of the room, he looked back and saw the two sisters standing as he had left them, and equally tearful.  Ethelberta at once said, in a last futile struggle against letting him go altogether, and with thoughts of her sister’s heart:

‘I think that Picotee might correspond with Faith; don’t you, Mr. Julian?’

‘My sister would much like to do so,’ said he.

‘And you would like it too, would you not, Picotee?’

‘O yes,’ she replied.  ‘And I can tell them all about you.’

‘Then it shall be so, if Miss Julian will.’  She spoke in a settled way, as if something intended had been set in train; and Christopher having promised for his sister, he went out of the house with a parting smile of misgiving.

He could scarcely believe as he walked along that those late words, yet hanging in his ears, had really been spoken, that still visible scene enacted.  He could not even recollect for a minute or two how the final result had been produced.  Did he himself first enter upon the long-looming theme, or did she?  Christopher had been so nervously alive to the urgency of setting before the hard-striving woman a clear outline of himself, his surroundings and his fears, that he fancied the main impulse to this consummation had been his, notwithstanding that a faint initiative had come from Ethelberta.  All had completed itself quickly, unceremoniously, and easily.  Ethelberta had let him go a second time; yet on foregoing mornings and evenings, when contemplating the necessity of some such explanation, it had seemed that nothing less than Atlantean force could overpower their mutual gravitation towards each other.

On his reaching home Faith was not in the house, and, in the restless state which demands something to talk at, the musician went off to find her, well knowing her haunt at this time of the day.  He entered the spiked and gilded gateway of the Museum hard by, turned to the wing devoted to sculptures, and descended to a particular basement room, which was lined with bas-reliefs from Nineveh.  The place was cool, silent, and soothing; it was empty, save of a little figure in black, that was standing with its face to the wall in an innermost nook.  This spot was Faith’s own temple; here, among these deserted antiques, Faith was always happy.  Christopher looked on at her for some time before she noticed him, and dimly perceived how vastly differed her homely suit and unstudied contour — painfully unstudied to fastidious eyes — from Ethelberta’s well-arranged draperies, even from Picotee’s clever bits of ribbon, by which she made herself look pretty out of nothing at all.  Yet this negligence was his sister’s essence; without it she would have been a spoilt product.  She had no outer world, and her rusty black was as appropriate to Faith’s unseen courses as were Ethelberta’s correct lights and shades to her more prominent career.

‘Look, Kit,’ said Faith, as soon as she knew who was approaching.  ‘This is a thing I never learnt before; this person is really Sennacherib, sitting on his throne; and these with fluted beards and hair like plough-furrows, and fingers with no bones in them, are his warriors — really carved at the time, you know.  Only just think that this is not imagined of Assyria, but done in Assyrian times by Assyrian hands.  Don’t you feel as if you were actually in Nineveh; that as we now walk between these slabs, so walked Ninevites between them once?’

‘Yes. . . .  Faith, it is all over.  Ethelberta and I have parted.’

‘Indeed.  And so my plan is to think of verses in the Bible about Sennacherib and his doings, which resemble these; this verse, for instance, I remember: “Now in the fourteenth year of King Hezekiah did Sennacherib, King of Assyria, come up against all the fenced cities of Judah and took them.  And Hezekiah, King of Judah, sent to the King of Assyria to Lachish,” and so on.  Well, there it actually is, you see.  There’s Sennacherib, and there’s Lachish.  Is it not glorious to think that this is a picture done at the time of those very events?’

‘Yes.  We did not quarrel this time, Ethelberta and I.  If I may so put it, it is worse than quarrelling.  We felt it was no use going on any longer, and so — Come, Faith, hear what I say, or else tell me that you won’t hear, and that I may as well save my breath!’

‘Yes, I will really listen,’ she said, fluttering her eyelids in her concern at having been so abstracted, and excluding Sennacherib there and then from Christopher’s affairs by the first settlement of her features to a present-day aspect, and her eyes upon his face.  ‘You said you had seen Ethelberta.  Yes, and what did she say?’

‘Was there ever anybody so provoking!  Why, I have just told you!’

‘Yes, yes; I remember now.  You have parted.  The subject is too large for me to know all at once what I think of it, and you must give me time, Kit.  Speaking of Ethelberta reminds me of what I have done.  I just looked into the Academy this morning — I thought I would surprise you by telling you about it.  And what do you think I saw?  Ethelberta — in the picture painted by Mr. Ladywell.’

‘It is never hung?’ said he, feeling that they were at one as to a topic at last.

‘Yes.  And the subject is an Elizabethan knight parting from a lady of the same period — the words explaining the picture being —

“Farewell! thou art too dear for my possessing,

And like enough thou know’st thy estimate.”

The lady is Ethelberta, to the shade of a hair — her living face; and the knight is — ’

‘Not Ladywell?’

‘I think so; I am not sure.’

‘No wonder I am dismissed!  And yet she hates him.  Well, come along, Faith.  Women allow strange liberties in these days.’

CHAPTER 25.

THE ROYAL ACADEMY — THE FARNFIELD ESTATE

Ethelberta was a firm believer in the kindly effects of artistic education upon the masses.  She held that defilement of mind often arose from ignorance of eye; and her philanthropy being, by the simple force of her situation, of that sort which lingers in the neighbourhood of home, she concentrated her efforts in this kind upon Sol and Dan.  Accordingly, the Academy exhibition having now just opened, she ordered the brothers to appear in their best clothes at the entrance to Burlington House just after noontide on the Saturday of the first week, this being the only day and hour at which they could attend without ‘losing a half’ and therefore it was necessary to put up with the inconvenience of arriving at a crowded and enervating time.

When Ethelberta was set down in the quadrangle she perceived the faithful pair, big as the Zamzummims of old time, standing like sentinels in the particular corner that she had named to them: for Sol and Dan would as soon have attempted petty larceny as broken faith with their admired lady-sister Ethelberta.  They welcomed her with a painfully lavish exhibition of large new gloves, and chests covered with broad triangular areas of padded blue silk, occupying the position that the shirt-front had occupied in earlier days, and supposed to be lineally descended from the tie of a neckerchief.

The dress of their sister for to-day was exactly that of a respectable workman’s relative who had no particular ambition in the matter of fashion — a black stuff gown, a plain bonnet to match.  A veil she wore for obvious reasons: her face was getting well known in London, and it had already appeared at the private view in an uncovered state, when it was scrutinized more than the paintings around.  But now homely and useful labour was her purpose.

Catalogue in hand she took the two brothers through the galleries, teaching them in whispers as they walked, and occasionally correcting them — first, for too reverential a bearing towards the well-dressed crowd, among whom they persisted in walking with their hats in their hands and with the contrite bearing of meek people in church; and, secondly, for a tendency which they too often showed towards straying from the contemplation of the pictures as art to indulge in curious speculations on the intrinsic nature of the delineated subject, the gilding of the frames, the construction of the skylights overhead, or admiration for the bracelets, lockets, and lofty eloquence of persons around them.

‘Now,’ said Ethelberta, in a warning whisper, ‘we are coming near the picture which was partly painted from myself.  And, Dan, when you see it, don’t you exclaim “Hullo!” or “That’s Berta to a T,” or anything at all.  It would not matter were it not dangerous for me to be noticed here to-day.  I see several people who would recognize me on the least provocation.’

‘Not a word,’ said Dan.  ‘Don’t you be afeard about that.  I feel that I baint upon my own ground to-day; and wouldn’t do anything to cause an upset, drown me if I would.  Would you, Sol?’

In this temper they all pressed forward, and Ethelberta could not but be gratified at the reception of Ladywell’s picture, though it was accorded by critics not very profound.  It was an operation of some minutes to get exactly opposite, and when side by side the three stood there they overheard the immediate reason of the pressure.  ‘Farewell, thou art too dear for my possessing’ had been lengthily discoursed upon that morning by the Coryphaeus of popular opinion; and the spirit having once been poured out sons and daughters could prophesy.  But, in truth, Ladywell’s work, if not emphatically original, was happily centred on a middle stratum of taste, and apart from this adventitious help commanded, and deserved to command, a wide area of appreciation.

While they were standing here in the very heart of the throng Ethelberta’s ears were arrested by two male voices behind her, whose words formed a novel contrast to those of the other speakers around.