Pagina-afbeeldingen
PDF
ePub

for the sake of Major Falconer's. bride, | to the elder lady as rain comes to the the hardest week's work she had ever thirsty land; yet she made no show of known. gratitude. If now and then her heart

How should she not be glad? More than her heart's desire had been given to her. The measure had been pressed down and was running over. She looked back upon the years of negation and pain, but not.sadly, not bitterly. They had all been needed, and God had sent them. How save for them could she have had any fulness or wideness of capacity for due appreciation of the life that was hers now?

She was almost as happy during that melted within her, and her eyes shone week as any human being has a right to with a sudden mist, the latent emotion expect to be in an ordinary way. She was treated as she would have treated was a person of importance at Duncote; symptoms of faintness, or any other unthe knowledge that such was the case had pleasant ailment. But Jane needed no rapidly spread everywhere; and already encouragement by words. She felt, and she fancied that a new and more respect- understood, and was glad. ful element was becoming perceptible in the neighborhood of Sedgeborough. Yet her happiness had its drawbacks. Lady Ursula was suffering from one of her bad attacks of neuralgia, and was obliged to keep her own room till the very day of the arrival. She had sent kind messages to Mrs. Rushbrooke and her daughters, who were at work at the school from daylight to dark; she had begged that they would not fatigue themselves, that they would go up to the manor for rest and refreshment whenever they felt inclined; but she had not once been able to see them. And Mrs. Rushbrooke would rather have had the opportunity of seeing Lady Ursula for half an hour than have received a hundred notes and messages. There were several important points on which she was still in the dark, and darkness that could not be hidden from others without subterfuge and evasion was not at all a pleasant thing. Neither was it pleasant to foresee that her acquaintance with the major's bride must be made, as it were, in public, when all the world, as represented by the tenants and cottagers at Duncote, would be there for the same purpose. This last was a most annoying prospect, and required to be kept out of sight as much as possible.

It was a very happy Christmas-tide at Duncote Manor. Something less than eighteen months of hope and happiness had transformed our poor little chrysalis of a heroine into a bright, sweet woman, with gentle, thoughtful ways, and a winning self-forgetfulness that charmed everybody. Lady Ursula had her reward-all the more welcome because so little anticipated. Her health had been failing, longer and more certainly than any one knew but herself; and to her, weak health was, like any other weakness, something to be ig nored, hidden away out of sight. She had claimed no pity, no help, no consideration, because of it; but Jane offered her all these things and more, without waiting for any sign that they were expected. There was something in her half-reverent tenderness of word and look and act that came

She had a little dreaded these first days at Duncote; but she forgot that she had so dreaded until the day fixed upon for the festivities at the school. Then, when the programme was explained to her, she shrugged her shoulders a little, but to no purpose. The major would have been quite as glad to escape from the intended honors as Jane would have been, but escape was impossible. Lady Margaret Hughes, who had travelled with them from Paris, and was intending to stay at Duncote for a month or two, declared that she should quite enjoy seeing them under torture. The major had better prepare his speeches; and Jane had better retire a while to practise her most fascinating bows and smiles before a looking-glass. Lady Margaret was a little critical about Jane's manner. It was good in its way, but there was not enough of it for a married woman.

Jane's little doubts and reluctancies vanished for the most part toward evening. She had apparently caught something of the spirit that pervaded both the house and the neighborhood. As twilight drew on she could see the lights in the schoolroom windows twinkling beyond the black masses of trees; the band belonging to the Sedgeborough volunteers passed through the park, playing their loudest; and soon after a shrill drum-and-fife band followed. How good it was of them all! But of course it was for her husband's sake, she said to herself as she went upstairs to dress for dinner. It had been finally arranged that the party from the manor was not to go down to the school until tea was over there. The rector and his sister were superintending the arrange

[ocr errors]

ments. The Miss Rushbrookes had noth- They had not long to wait. There was ing to do but sit still and look as expensive a sound of carriage wheels, a clang of and as pretty as they possibly could. music, a roll of drums, a moment of intense, voiceless excitement, and then the crowd round the door gave way, and an avenue was made all along the room to where the table stood with the gifts upon it, and the chairs where Mrs. Rushbrooke and her daughters had been sitting.

And for once it was conceded that they did look pretty, but then everybody was willing to concede everything that evening. I hardly know how to describe it all. Outside, in the frosty starlight night, there was a tent pitched, and in the tent the music was playing, and lights were swinging, and wreaths of evergreens, with pink paper roses were drooping and hanging in every direction. The men were having something more substantial than tea at the long white tables that were ranged down the middle. There was a smell of roast beef, and the clanking of ale-cups mingled with the music and the laughter. There was a chairman, of course, who proposed the toasts; and the responses might have been heard up at the manor if anybody there had listened.

They were all three standing now; and if ever there was a moment in their lives when the fault of self-consciousness could not be laid to their charge, I think certainly that must have been the moment. Four persons had entered the room three of them tall, imposing, and of commanding presence; the fourth fair, fragile, and slight as a child. Yet this childish figure, with her sweeping lavender silk skirts, her white mantle, her small white gauzy bonnet with drooping flowers, was the only one they saw. She was leaning on And if all within the tent was bright, the major's arm as they came up the and gay, and merry, what shall we say of room, looking up to his face a little timidthe schoolroom? It was in itself a pretty ly; and he was bending down toward room, new and spacious, with a high- her with a reassuring smile. And behind pitched roof, and oaken rafters, and illu- came his aunt and mother in slower and minated texts in bright colors all round more stately fashion, stopping to acknowlthe walls, and over the doors and the fire-edge the curtsies and congratulations that place. And it was here that Mrs. Rush- met them on every side. The rector was brooke and her daughters, with a crowd the first to offer a welcome to Jane, and I of helpers from the hamlet, had spent think, that was the pleasantest moment of their busy days. Wreaths of holly and the evening for her. The quiet gladness ivy were festooned along the walls, and of his face was a relief she had hardly across the room from side to side. Col- hoped for. She was only partly aware of ored lamps were swinging, gay banners the blank amazed looks that were passing were waving. The window-sills were between Mrs. Rushbrooke and her daughcrowded with greenhouse plants, the pots ters. She turned and held out her hand buried in moss. There were inscriptions with sweet diffident smiles and half-shy in crimson letters on white grounds, bor- glances, and perceived with something dered with evergreens Long life and that was almost regret that they did not happiness; ""Lo the twain are joined in seem inclined to respond to her desires one; Happy may ye be;" and others for friendliness. But she had no time to of like nature. Some one had lent a piano, think of their odd manner. Mr. Wooler, and there was a crowd round it, and a the principal tenant, was preparing to couple of violins in the crowd. They make a speech, Lady Ursula was introwere only tuning the violins, to be quite ducing Mrs. and Miss Wooler, there was ready when the signal was given. Tea a mass of silk and satin, and cotton and was hardly over yet. The room was full of gay colors and smiles, and clinking china and steam. Mrs. Rushbrooke and her daughters sat in stately chairs near the fire. The rector was everywhere.

"" 66

[ocr errors]

There were one or two tremulous moments when everything was quite ready. The rector did the best he could to keep up the hum and chatter of voices, the sound of pleasant laughter. Mrs. Rushbrooke was growing quite friendly with a stout old farmer's wife, who stood near her; and Cecilia and Elinor were growing even pinker and prettier than before.

Very

muslin, waiting behind to be introduced;
and all seemed confusion and smiles, and
gay colors, and good wishes, with violin
and pianoforte accompaniment.
few of the people there concerned them-
selves with the fact that Jane Falconer had
been Jane Francis, and had lived for the
greater part of her life over the druggist's
shop in Sedgeborough. Some of them
knew it, and some did not; but to all of
them she was Major Falconer's bride, and
Lady Ursula's daughter.

Doubtless, her position was an important element, and of value as an aid to her

phatic deliberation, and in a voice so
changed as to be almost startling," I sup-
pose Major Falconer has proved himself
a fool, as he will find to his cost.
I sup-
pose he has married Jane Francis. But
I am quite sure of this
that he has mar-
ried her FOR PITY'S SAKE!"

natural powers of attraction; but it is not | "I suppose," she began with an emprobable that her position alone would have won for her such golden opinions as she won from the unfashionable but warmhearted little assemblage in the schoolroom that evening. She made no effort, she seemed half afraid to make any; but her peculiarly gentle yet dignified manner, her eloquent face, her rare and wonderful smile, had an effect beyond the reach of effort.

[ocr errors]

I have read somewhere to the effect that our wishes are prophetic, that we seldom dream in youth of attaining to heights which we are not competent to win. Has the reader forgotten the dreams that Jane Falconer had while she was yet Jane Francis? Her half-childish, and perhaps wholly unphilosophic house-philosophy? Her fitful but eager

I hardly think that anything inherent in Mrs. Falconer herself had much to do with the change in Mrs. Rushbrooke's manner; but there was change, and that of a very decided nature. Perhaps a brief conversation that she had with Lady Ursula had something to do with it. Anyhow, it became patent to everybody before an hour was over that Major FalcoDreams of doing good ner's bride and the rector's sister and To good-for-nothing people? nieces were destined to be the best of Perhaps I need hardly say that these friends. None joined more loudly in the dreams, and many others that seemed but buzz of admiration that filled the room idle, and were but half indulged, have after the departure of the ladies from the". proven true." The old manor-house, manor. And when the major returned with its wide oaken chambers, its heavy alone to open the dance with Miss Rush-stone-mullioned brooke, no one overpowered him so completely with fluent and enthusiastic patronage as her mother.

windows, its echoing stairs and corridors all hung with fading pictures, and tattered banners, and ghostly armor, seems strangely familiar and Major Falconer did not stay long, and congenial to her. There are times when Mrs. Rushbrooke's carriage was ordered she would not find it difficult to believe immediately after his departure. During that she had dwelt in it in some former the drive home the usual order of things state of existence. Mrs. Rushbrooke is was reversed; Mrs. Rushbrooke sat si- perpetually suggesting improvements (?) lent; her daughters chattered ceaselessly. -new damask here, the removal of too This strange thing that had happened had sombre furniture there, and so on; but not happened in the pages of a novel it Jane only smiles, realizing afresh her own had come into their own experience, mak- great content. ing it doubly strange. Yet nothing be- And that other dream, wherein she figyond a stray comment could be elicited ured as Lady Bountiful? That, too, has from Mrs. Rushbrooke. She seemed al- its realization. There is hardly a single most paralyzed as she went back over the house in the hamlet where Jane's face is events of the past two years. She was not as well known as the face of any obliged to believe the thing that she had of its own inmates. The sick, the aged, seen with her own eyes, but she told her- the very poor, long for her and wait for self that nothing would ever enable her to her as one could imagine the impotent understand it. Here, in the present, was folk must have waited by the pool of Major Falconer's bride, a lady of position, Bethesda. And it is her tact, her sympawith a lady's means, manners, and appear- thy, quite as much as her generous gifts ance. There, in the past, was Jane Fran- that have won for her her place in the cis, poor, of no birth, uneducated, and un- hearts of the cottagers. Her great natknown. I believe it was at this point in ural reverence, and her humble opinion of her meditations that an erratic gleam of herself, constrain her generally to confine light flashed across her mind. They had her ministrations to things somewhat lowarrived at the rectory, and were taking offer than the highest. And she remembers their wraps in the hall. They were all si- for her comfort that it was for relieving lent at that moment. Suddenly Mrs. Rush-physical needs and distresses, for meat brooke turned, the lamplight flashing in given to the hungry, drink to the thirsty, her face, betraying her compressed mouth, shelter to the stranger; for clothes given her intense eyes, her perturbed expres- to the naked, and visits paid to the sick sion. and imprisoned, that the wondering sheep

1

were called to inherit the kingdom, to sit | in his supper with them he took his dinner. forever and ever on the right hand of James, his second son, was born on the

God.

From The Fortnightly Review. JAMES NORTHCOTE, R.A. IN his "Life of Reynolds," Northcote tells an interesting story of the great painter. Soon after he came to London he went to a picture-sale. The room was crowded, the business was going on briskly. Suddenly, there was a pause, a flutter at the door, and then the company divided, to make a lane for a great man to approach the auctioneer's rostrum. The great man was Mr. Pope. As he passed up the room he shook hands with the persons nearest him. Reynolds, who was in the second rank, put out his hand, the poet took it, and Sir Joshua used to relate in after-life that this was the only time he saw Mr. Pope, and how much he treasured the memory of that shake of the hand. In the same book, Northcote tells a somewhat similar story of himself. When he was a boy of sixteen, Sir Joshua Reynolds and Dr. Johnson came on a visit to Plymouth. It was in 1762. "It was about this time," he says, "that I first saw Sir Joshua. I had seen several of his works which were in Plymouth (for at that time I had never been out of the county), and these pictures filled me with wonder and delight, although I was then very young; insomuch that I remember when Reynolds was pointed out to me at a public meeting, where a great crowd were assembled, I got as near to him as I could from the pressure of the people, to touch the skirt of his coat, which I did with great satisfaction to my mind." It was a genuine case of hero-worship, which lasted throughout Northcote's life. He begins at sixteen with touching the skirts of Sir Joshua's coat; seventy years afterwards, when he is dying of old age, almost his last words are praises of Sir Joshua.

There was a long interval, however, between this first contact with Reynolds and the close association with him which afterwards marked the lives of the two painters. Northcote had to struggle very hard with adverse fortune, narrow means, and restricted opportunities. His father was a watch and clock maker in Market Street, Plymouth Dock. He was poorso poor indeed, that, as Allan Cunningham relates, it was said by the members of a little club to which he belonged, that

22nd of October, 1746. Even in boyhood he had a liking for painting, but as this taste developed, it was repressed by the elder Northcote, who intended the lad to be his own apprentice. He was a Dissenter, too -a Unitarian and in those days art did not stand well in the estimation of persons of his class or creed. Besides, he had views of life, and made estimates of character. "My father used to say," Northcote tells us, "that there were people of premature ability who soon ran to seed. He had known several who were very clever at seventeen or eighteen, but who turned out nothing afterwards; at that time of life the effervescence and intoxication of youth did a great deal, but we required to wait till the gaiety and dance of the animal spirits subsided, to see what people really were." Whatever his motive, the old man made Northcote wait. He apprenticed him to the watchmaking, and allowed him to paint only in the evening and morning hours of leisure. Northcote submitted, and persevered. He served out his term of apprenticeship, and continued to work at his father's business until he was twenty-four years old - painting, meanwhile, as much as he could; confining himself chiefly to portraits, and studies of animals.

In 1771 his chance came to him. His portraits were talked about in Plymouth; people spoke of him as a prodigy; and then Dr. Mudge, the friend of Reynolds and of Johnson, encouraged him to go to London to see Sir Joshua, giving him a letter of introduction for that purpose. Northcote went at once. It is said that he walked the whole distance from Plymouth to London; and it would seem that at first he made little progress in his great desire. Reynolds shook his head at the crude performances of the young man, and Northcote had to seek employmentthat of coloring prints of flowers at a shilling a sheet - to get bread. He was persevering, and did it, contriving to improve his knowledge of art at the same time, until Reynolds, struck with his determination, took him as a pupil and assistant, not only into his studio, but as a resident in his house.

[ocr errors]

It was in the year 1771 [says Northcote in his "Life of Reynolds"] that I was first placed under the tuition of Sir Joshua Reynolds, to whom I was introduced and strongly recommended by my good and much respected friend, Dr. John Mudge. I feel it next to im possible to express the pleasure I received in

breathing, if it may be so said, in an atmos- practice.
phere of art; and as from the earliest period
of my being able to make any observation, I
had conceived him to be the greatest painter
that ever lived, it may be conjectured what I
felt when I found myself in his house as his
scholar.

It was a good house to be in: a house in which there was the best art and the best company-Johnson, and Goldsmith, and Burke, and Garrick; the wits and the poets, politicians and painters, rank and fashion, and, above all, Sir Joshua himself, sovereign in art, polished in manners, capable of holding his ground alike with

men of fashion and men of letters.

[ocr errors]

"It was very provoking," Northcote writes, "after I had been for hours laboring on the drapery of one of his portraits, from a lay figure, to see him, with a few masterly sweeps of his brush, destroy nearly all my work, and turn it into something much finer," and yet, he adds, with a touch of pride, "but for my work it would not have been what it was.' Copying pictures, though unquestionably useful to him, Northcote detested. "It is," he says, "like plain work among women; it is what anybody can do, and therefore nothing but a bare living is to be got from it." Occasionally he tried to argue with Reynolds, and got put down. Criticising some directions as to color, given by a visitor, Sir Joshua replied, "He is a sensible man, but an indifferent colorist. There is not a man on earth who has the least notion of coloring: we all of us have it equally to seek for and find out, as at present it is totally lost to the art." Notwithstanding this rebuff, Northcote ventured to advise Reynolds himself:

Joshua to abandon those fleeting colors, lake
I once humbly endeavored to persuade Sir
and carmine, which it was his practice to use
in painting the flesh, and to adopt vermilion
in their stead, as infinitely more durable, al-
though perhaps not so exactly true to nature
as the former; I remember he looked on his
hand, and said, "I can see no vermilion in
flesh." I replied, "But did not Sir Godfrey
Kneller always use vermilion in his flesh
color?"
Sir Joshua answered rather sharply,
"What signifies what a man uses, who could
not color? You may use it if you will."

Here Northcote remained for five years, treated, he tells us, quite as one of the family. Sir Joshua appreciated his earnestness and industry, encouraged his studies, both at home and in the schools of the Academy, and relished his sharp outspoken comments and retorts. In his Century of Painters" Mr. Redgrave says that Northcote, in his apprenticeship to Reynolds, "had full opportunity of acquiring the technical knowledge he must have so greatly needed. He stood beside Reynolds before his easel, he enjoyed free converse with him, he saw his works in all stages, he assisted in their progress, laying in draperies, painting backgrounds and accessories, and forwarding the numerous duplicates and copies required of such a master, and he shared the usual means of advancement and study enjoyed by Reynolds's pupils; at the same time he did not neglect the essential study of the figure at the Royal Academy." North- Of Northcote's imitative art, Sir Joshua cote himself, in the "Life of Reynolds "had a high opinion. Northcote painted a and in his "Conversations," gives a somewhat different account. He worked with Reynolds, no doubt, and derived benefit from the association; but he complains that Sir Joshua was a bad master, that he taught him nothing directly, would not allow him to use any but the commonest preparations, and locked up his own colors. "He would not suffer me," Northcote says, "during the whole time I resided in his house, to make use of any other materials than the common preparations of color, just as we have them from the hands of the colorman; and all varnishes, The glaring defects of such works almost and every kind of experiment, were strict- disgusted me with the profession. Is this, I ly prohibited. Likewise, all his own prep-said, what the art is made up of? How do I arations of color were most carefully concealed from my sight and knowledge, and perpetually locked secure in his drawers, thus never to be seen or known by any one but himself." Sometimes, however, Reynolds gave him a sharp lesson in

portrait of one of the maid-servants. The likeness was recognized by a macaw belonging to Sir Joshua; the bird disliked the woman, and flew right at the face of the portrait, and tried to bite it. Failing here, he struck at the hand. The experiment was often repeated for the amusement of visitors. Of his own work at that time, Northcote had not formed a very high estimate. Many years afterwards he told Hazlitt how keenly he noted the failures of other pupils in the Academy:

know that my own productions may not appear in the same light to others? Nothing old battered portraits at the doors of brokers' gave me the horrors so much as passing the shops, with the morning sun shining full upon them. I was generally inclined to prolong my walk, and put off painting for that day;

« VorigeDoorgaan »