At His Gates. Volume 1. Oliphant Margaret
sense of this criticism which never uttered a word weighed upon the poor fellow's soul. It made his hand unsteady many a day when his work depended on a firm touch – and blurred the colours before his eyes, and dulled his thoughts. Two or three times he made a spasmodic effort to break through his mediocrity, and then the critics (who were very well pleased on the whole with his mediocrity) shook their heads, and warned him against the sensational. But Helen neither approved nor condemned the change. To her it was all alike, always second-rate. She did her very best to applaud, but she could not brighten up into genuine admiration the blank composure in her eyes. What could she do? There was something to be said for her, as well as for him. She could not affect to admire what she felt to be commonplace. Nature had given her a good eye, and intense feeling had strengthened and corrected it. She saw all the weakness, the flatness, with fatal certainty. What, then, could she say? But poor Robert, though he was not a great artist, was the most tender-hearted, amiable, affectionate of men; and this mode of criticism stole the very heart out of him. There is no such want in the world as that want of backing up. It is the secret of weakness and failure, just as strong moral support and sympathy is the very secret of strength. He stood steady and robust to the external eye, painting many pictures every year, getting very tolerable prices, keeping his household very comfortable, a man still under forty, healthy, cheerful, and vigorous; but all the time he was sapped at the foundations. He had lost his confidence in himself, and it was impossible to predict how he would have borne any sudden blow.
It was about this time that Mr Reginald Burton, a cousin of Helen's, who had once, it was supposed, desired to be something nearer to her, found out the house in Kensington, and began to pay them visits. The circumstances of her marriage had separated her from her own people. The elder among them had thought Helen unkind to her mother; the younger ones had felt that nothing had come of it to justify so romantic a story. So that when Reginald Burton met the pair in society it was the reopening of an altogether closed chapter of her life. Mr Burton was a man in the City in very extensive business. He was chairman of ever so many boards, and his name, at the head of one company or another, was never out of the newspapers. He had married since his cousin did, and had a very fine place in the country, and was more well off still than it was natural for the Burtons to be. Helen, who had never liked him very much, and had not even been grateful to him for loving her, received his visits now without enthusiasm; but Drummond, who was open-hearted like his kind, and who had no sort of jealousy about 'Helen's friends,' received him with a cordiality which seemed to his wife much too effusive. She would not accept the invitation which Mrs Burton sent to pay a long visit to Dura, their country place; but she could not be less than civil to her cousin when he insisted upon calling, nor could she openly resist when he carried off her husband to City dinners, or unfolded to him the benefits of this or that new society. Drummond had done very well in his profession, notwithstanding Helen's dissatisfaction with his work; and also notwithstanding her dissatisfaction, she was a good housewife, doing her duty wisely. She had a hundred a year of her own, which Drummond had taken care to have settled upon herself; but since they had grown richer he had insisted upon letting this accumulate as 'a portion for Norah,' and the two had laid by something besides. For painter-folk it will be readily seen they were at the very height of comfort – a pretty house, one pretty child, a little reserve of money, slowly but pleasantly accumulating. And money, though it is an ignoble thing, has so much to do with happiness! Drummond, who had been quite content to think that there was a portion saving up for Norah, and to whom it had not occurred that his little capital could be made use of, and produce twenty and a hundred-fold, gradually grew interested, without being aware of it, in the proceedings of Mr Burton. He began to talk, half laughingly, half with intention, of the wonderful difference between the slowly-earned gains of labour and those dazzling results of speculation. 'These fellows seem simply to coin money,' he said, 'half in jest and whole in earnest;' 'everything they touch seems to become gold. It looks incredible – ' and he wound up with a nervous laugh, in which there was some agitation. Helen had all a woman's conservatism on this point.
'It is incredible, you may be sure,' she said. 'How can they invent money? Some one will have to pay for it somewhere;' which was a sentence of profound wisdom, much deeper than she thought.
'So one would say,' said Drummond, still laughing; 'but nobody seems to suffer. By Jove! as much as – not to say I, who am one of the rank and file – but as Welby or Hartwell Home get for one of their best pictures, your cousin will clear in five minutes, without taking the slightest trouble. When one sees it, one feels hugely tempted' – he added, looking at her. He was one of those men who like to carry their people's sympathy with them. He wanted not acquiescence simply, but approval; and notwithstanding that he was very well used to the absence of it, sought it still. She would not – could not, perhaps – enter warmly into the subject of his pictures; but here was a new matter. He looked up at her with a certain longing – ready, poor fellow, to plunge into anything if she would but approve.
'I hope you won't let yourself be tempted to anything, Robert, that you don't see the end of,' she said; but so gently that her husband's heart rose.
'Trust me for that,' he said joyously, 'and you shall have the first fruits, my darling. I have not as fine a house for you as your cousin can give to his wife, but for all that – '
'For all that,' she said, laughing, 'I would not change with Mrs Reginald Burton. I am not tempted by the fine house.'
'I have thought how we can make this one a great deal better,' he said, as he stooped to kiss her before he went out. He looked back upon her fondly as he left the room, and said to himself that if he wished for gain it was for her sake – his beautiful Helen! He had painted her furtively over and over again, though she never would sit to him. A certain shadow of her was in all his pictures, showing with more or less distinctness according as he loved or did not love his temporary heroine: but he knew that when this was pointed out to her she did not like it. She was anxious that everybody should know she did not sit to him. She was very indignant at the idea that a painter's wife might serve her husband as a model. 'Why should a painter's profession, which ought to be one of the noblest in the world, be obtruded upon the outer world at every step?' she said. But yet as he was a painter, every inch of him, his eye caught the pose of her head as she moved, and made a mental note of it. And yet she was not, strictly speaking, a beautiful woman. She was not the large Juno, who is our present type of beauty; she was not blazing with colour – red, and white, and golden – like the Rubens-heroines of the studio; nor was she of the low-browed, sleepy-eyed, sensuous, classic type. She was rather colourless on the contrary. Her hair was olive brown, which is so harmonious with a pale complexion; her eyes hazel-grey; her colour evanescent, coming and going, and rarely at any time more than a rose tint; her very lips, though beautifully formed, were only rose – not scarlet – and her figure was slight and deficient in 'grand curves.' Her great characteristic was what the French call distinction; a quality to which in point of truth she had no claim – for Helen, it must be remembered, was no long-descended lady. She was the produce of three generations of money, and a race which could be called nothing but Philistine; and from whence came her highbred look, her fanciful pride, her unrealisable ambition, it would be difficult to say.
She went over the house with a little sigh after Robert was gone, professedly in the ordinary way of a housewife's duty, but really with reference to his last words. Yes, the house might be made a great deal better. The drawing-room was a very pretty one – quite enough for all their wants – but the dining-room was occupied by Drummond as his studio, according to an arrangement very common among painters. This, it will be perceived, was before the day of the new studio. The dining-room was thus occupied, and a smaller room, such as in most suburban houses is appropriated generally to the often scanty books of the family, was the eating-room of the Drummonds. It was one of those things which made Helen's pride wince – a very petty subject for pride, you will say – but, then, pride is not above petty things; and it wounded her to be obliged to say apologetically to her cousin – 'The real dining-room of the house is Mr Drummond's studio. We content ourselves with this in the mean time.' 'Oh, yes; I see; of course he must want space and light,' Reginald Burton had replied with patronising complacency, and a recollection of his own banqueting-hall at Dura. How Helen hated him at that moment, and how much aggravated she felt with poor Robert smiling opposite to her, and feeling quite comfortable on the subject! 'We painters are troublesome things,'