When Laurie left Mr. Welby’s studio he had not, however, satisfied himself either with No. 375, Fitzroy Square, or with the advice on art subjects which he had come to seek. Old Forrester replied to his inquiry if Mrs. Severn was at home with a benevolent smile:—‘It ain’t often as she’s anywhere else, sir,’ said that authority. ‘I never see such a lady to work,—and a-singing at it, as if it was pleasure. Them’s the sort, Mr. Renton, for my money,’ the old man added with enthusiasm. ‘Master, he’s ready to swear at it sometimes, which ain’t consistent with art.’
‘Don’t you think so?’ said Laurie. ‘But when art becomes a passion, you know——’
‘I don’t hold with passion,’ said Forrester. ‘It stands to reason, Mr. Renton, that a thing as is to hang for ages and ages on a wall, didn’t ought to have no violence about it. I hate to see them poor things a-hurting of themselves for centuries. You look at ’em, sir,’ he added, pointing to an old picture, in{249} which the action was somewhat violent, which hung in the hall; ‘they couldn’t do that nohow, not if they were paid millions for it. Me and Shaw was talking it over the last time he was here. I don’t hold with that sort of passion, not in a picture. And I don’t always hold with master himself, Mr. Renton, between you and me. He’s been swearing hawful, sir, over that poor tibbie there. And what business has any man, sir, to have his tibbie in such a hattitude? It’s hoisted right round, nigh out of its socket. I wouldn’t do it, not for no money, if it was me.’
‘But you have no such fault to find with Mrs. Severn,’ said Laurie, who, in the impatience of youthful criticism, had made a similar observation to himself.
‘Bless you, sir, there’s never nothing out of harmony in them groups,’ said Forrester; ‘and easy, too, to tell why. Not as I’m a-making light of her heye; she’s got a fine heye for a lady, sir,—in composition;—but, seeing it’s her own little things as is the models, would she put ’em in hattitudes to hurt ’em, Mr. Renton? You may take your oath as a lady wouldn’t. Master, he pays his models, and he don’t care. Will you walk up, or will I go and say you’re here?’
‘I think I may go without being announced,’ said Laurie, who was a little proud of the petites entrées, though it was only to a humble house. As he went up the great, dingy staircase he put his{250} fingers lightly through his hair, and looked with some dismay at the limp pinkness of the rose in his button-hole. It was hanging its head, as roses will when they feel the approach of frost in the air. There is a curious dinginess, which is not displeasing, in those old-fashioned houses. The walls were painted in a faint grey-green; the big stairs had a narrow Turkey carpet, very much worn, upon them, and went winding up the whole height of the house to a pale skylight in the roof. A certain size, and subdued sense, of airiness, and quiet, and space was in the house, though London raged all around, like a great battle. The arrangement of the first floor was much like that of Mr. Welby’s apartments. There was a great shadowy, dingy drawing-room, with three vast windows, always filled with a kind of pale twilight,—for it was the shady side of the Square,—and opening from that, by folding-doors, a second room, which did duty as Mrs. Severn’s dining-room; and behind that, again, the studio. The door of the dining-room was open, and Laurie paused, and went half in as he passed. The children were there with their daily governess, who was, poor soul! almost at the end of her labours. She was struggling hard to keep their attention to the last half of the last hour when the intruder’s head thrust in at the door made further control impossible. There were two small boys, under ten, and one little creature with golden locks, seated at the feet of the eldest of the family, who was working at the window.{251} ‘Alice, with her curls,’ was almost too big for Miss Hadley’s teaching. She was seated in that demure, soft dignity of the child-woman, with all the importance of an elder sister, working at little Edith’s frock; a girl who rarely said anything, but thought the more; not beautiful, for her features were not regular, but with lovely, thoughtful brown eyes, and a complexion so sweet in its varying colour that it felt like a quality of the heart, and one loved her for it. Her curls were what most people of the outside world knew her by. In these days of crée locks and elaborate hair-dressing, Alice’s soft, silken, perfect curls, nestling about her pretty neck, softly shed behind her ears, were distinction enough for any girl. They were chestnut,—that chestnut, with the gold in it, which comes next to everybody’s favourite colour in everybody’s estimation;—and there was a silken gloss upon them which was old-fashioned, but very sweet to see, once in a way. She sat,—in the perfectly unobtrusive dress of modern girlhood; simple frock up to the throat, little white frill, tiny gold locket, without even a ribbon on her hair,—against the afternoon light in the window, just raising her eyes with a smile in them to Laurie, and lifting up one slender finger by way of warning. ‘Mamma is in the studio,’ said Alice, under her breath. He thought he had never seen a prettier picture than that little interior he had peeped into. Miss Hadley was not bad-looking, Laurie decided. She had keen black eyes under those deep brows,{252} and not a bad little figure. And little Frank, with such a despairing languor over his soft, round, baby face; and Edith, all crumpled up like a dropped rose by Alice’s feet; and the light slanting in through the big window, trying and failing to penetrate the dimness of the grey-green walls, all covered with pictures. Everything was in the shade, even little Edith, all overshadowed by her sister’s dress and figure;—an afternoon picture, with every tone subdued, and a touch of that weariness upon all things which comes with the waning light;—a weariness which would vanish as soon as it was dark enough to have lights, and when the hour came for the family tea.
When Laurie knocked at the studio door, he could hear, even before he was told to come in, the painter singing softly over her work, as Forrester had said. She was no musician, which, we suppose, may be understood from the fact of this singing at her work. Her voice was not good enough to be saved up for the pleasure of others, and accordingly was left free to hum a little accompaniment to her own not unmelodious life. Mrs. Severn was not a partisan of work for women, carrying out her theory, but a widow, with little children, working with the tools that came handiest to her for daily bread; and she had been accordingly adopted respectfully into a kind of comradeship by all the artists about, who had known her husband, and were ready to stand by her{253} as much as men of the same profession might. Nobody ever dreamt of thinking she was going out of her proper place, or taking illegitimate work upon her, when she took up poor Severn’s palette. There are ways of doing a thing which people do not always consider when they are actuated by strong theoretical principles. The padrona took to her work quite quietly, as if she had been born to it; did not think it any hardship; worked her regular hours like any man, and asked little advice from any one. In short, if she had a fault, it was generally believed that it was her indifference to advice. She rarely asked it, and still more rarely took it. Since the time when poor Severn died, and when she passionately explained to her friends that it was less pain to manage her own affairs than to talk them over with others, she had gone on doing everything for herself. Whether that was a wise way of proceeding it would be hard to tell; but at least it was her way. Poor Severn had not been a great painter, poor fellow; he had done very well up to a certain point, but there he had stopped; and then he had travelled about a great deal with his family, and studied all the great pictures in the world, and made sketches of a great many novel customs and practices, with the view of making a new start,—‘as Phillip did.’ John Phillip, as every one knows, being an ordinary painter, went to Spain, and came home a great one; but poor Severn found no inspiration awaiting him{254} at any wayside. One of the children had been born in Florence, and one in Dresden; they were almost the only evidences that remained of those piteous wanderings and labours.
But wherever the poor fellow went, a pair of bright, observant eyes were always by his side, taking note of things which he only tried to make use of, and by degrees his wife had got possession of the pencil as it dropped out of his failing hands. Of course, her drawing would not bear examination as his would have done. He did the best he could to give her a more masculine touch, but failed. She was feeble in her anatomy, very irregular in respect to everything that was classical; but, somehow, bits of life stole upon the forlorn canvases in Fitzroy Square under her hand. ‘You may trust her for the sentiment,’ he said, poor fellow! almost with his last breath, ‘and her eye for colour; but, Welby, I’d like to see her drawing a little firmer before I leave her.’ This he was never fated to see; and Mrs. Severn’s drawing was not likely to get firmer when her teacher was gone. It was never very firm, we are bound to admit; and we are also obliged to confess, against our will, that the padrona catered a great deal for the British public in the way of pretty babies, and tender little nursery scenes. Her pictures were domestic, in the fullest sense of the word. In her best there would be the little child saying its prayers at its mother’s knee, which never fails to touch the Cockney soul;{255} and in her worse there would be baby at table breaking his mug and thrusting his spoon everywhere but where he ought. They were very pretty, and sometimes, as if by chance, they stumbled into higher ground, and caught a look, a gleam of heaven; an unconscious essay, as it were, at the English Mary and her Blessed Child, which has never yet been produced by an insular painter—only an essay—and it never had time or hope to come to more. But the British public, bless it! liked the pictures, and bought them—not for their gleams of loftier meaning, but for the exquisite painting of baby’s mug, and because the carpet under the mother’s feet was so real that you could count the threads. The painter did not ask herself particularly why her pictures became popular; she was very thankful, very glad, and took the money as a personal favour for some time, feeling that it was too good a joke. But all the freshness of the beginning was over long before the day on which Laurie knocked at the studio door. She painted now with a more swift and practised hand, but still very unequally; sometimes mere mugs and carpets, with little human dolls; and sometimes women with children, more and more like the divine ideal; and out of her sorrow had grown softly happy again without knowing how—happy in her work, and her freedom, and her independence, and her children. Alas! yes; in her independence and freedom. She liked that, though many a reader will think the worse of her for liking{256} it. But it is not as a perfect creature she is here introduced, but as a woman with faults like others. Everybody knew that she had been very fond of poor Severn, and had stood by him faithful and tender till his last breath; and that she was very desolate when he was gone, and cried out even against God and His providence a little in her anguish and solitude—but pondered and was silent, and pondered and was cheerful—and, at last, things being as they were, got to be glad that she was free and could work for herself. And she was comparatively young, and had plenty to do, and there were her children. A woman cannot go on being heart-broken with such props as these. And it pleased her, we avow, since she could not help it, to have her own way.
It was her husband who had called her padrona caressingly to everybody when they came back from Italy—the ‘missis,’ as he would explain—and what had been a joke at first had become the tenderest of titles now. Those only who had been Severn’s friends dared continue to address her by that name, and Laurie was one of them, young though he was. When she said ‘Come in,’ he opened the door softly. She was standing by her easel, hastily finishing something with the little light that remained. ‘Don’t disturb me, please, for five minutes,’ she said, without looking round, ‘whoever you are. I must not lose this last little bit of light.’
‘Don’t hurry,’ said Laurie, sitting down behind{257} her in a Louis Quinze fauteuil, which had figured in many pictures.
‘Ah, it is you!’ said the padrona; but she did not turn round for the moment, or take any further notice of him. This third studio was not like any of the others. It was much barer, and, indeed, poorer. There was in it none of the classic wealth of casts and friezes which adorned Laurie’s sanctuary. There were no pictures in it, as in Mr. Welby’s stately studio. Had the padrona possessed ebony cabinets inlaid with silver, or a rare Angelichino, no doubt she would have sold them for some mean-spirited consideration of Alice’s music-lessons, or a month at the seaside for the bundle of children whose pleasure was more to her, alas! though she was a painter, than all the pictures in the world. There were some prints only on the walls, grey-green here as elsewhere throughout the house—prints of Raphael’s Madonnas—she of San Sisto within reach of the painter’s eye as she worked, and she of Fogligno, in her maturer splendour, on the mantel-piece; but there was a great dearth of the usual ‘materials’ with which an artist’s studio abounds. The padrona’s work was of a kind which did not require much consultation of examples; her draperies were chiefly modern, her subject the ever-varying child-life, which she had under her eye. A little lay-figure, which little Edith called her wooden sister, was in a corner, dressed—alas! for art—in one of Edith’s frocks, considerably torn and{258} ragged, which was about the highest touch of effect Mrs. Severn permitted herself. There was something curious altogether in the commonplace, untechnical air of the room. It is the defect of women in general when they adopt a profession to be rather too technical; but the padrona took her own way. She had given in so far, however, to the use and wont of the craft as to wear a grey garment over her gown, which fitted very nicely, and looked as well as if it had been the gown itself. She was a middle-sized woman, fully developed, and not girlish in any way, though her face had the youthfulness of a gay temperament and elastic disposition. Her eyes were hazel, with a great deal of light in them; her mouth full of laughter and merriment, except when she was thinking, and then it might perhaps be a trifle too firm; her hair brown, and soft, and abundant. Laurie sat in the fauteuil and watched her taking the good of the last remnant of the light with a curious mixture of kindness and admiration, and a kind of envy. ‘If I could but go at it like that!’ he said to himself, knowing that had he been in her place he would so gladly have thrown down his brush on the pleasant excuse of a visitor. There was a certain professional ease in the way he seated himself to wait her leisure, such as perhaps could have been bred in none other but this atmosphere, softly touched with the odour of pigments, and with the lay figure in the corner. Literature has less of this brotherhood of mutual{259} comprehension—at least, in England—being a morose art which demands to a certain extent seclusion and silence; but art is friendly, gregarious, talkative. The padrona began to talk to him immediately, though she did not turn her head.
‘I am so glad to see you,’ she said; ‘at least I shall be glad to see you whenever I have finished this arm. It has worried me all day, and if I don’t do it at once it will slip out of my mind again. I wish one could paint without drawing; it is hard upon an uneducated person; and I am sure if it was not for those horrid critics, the British public does not care if one’s arm is out of drawing or not.’
‘Welby does not think so,’ said Laurie. ‘Have you seen his tibia that he is raving about?’
‘Ah, but then that wounds his own eye,’ said Mrs. Severn, half turning round; ‘just as a false note in music wounds my child, though it does not disturb me much. The dreadful thing is not to know when you’re out of drawing or out of tune. One feels something is wrong, but one is not clever enough to see what it is.’
‘I don’t think you are often out of tune, padrona nostra, or out of drawing either,’ said poor Laurie, with a sigh.
‘Dear, dear!’ said Mrs. Severn, ‘what does this mean I wonder—that our friend is out of tune himself?’
‘Dreadfully out of tune,’ said Laurie, ‘all ajar{260} and not knowing what to do with myself, and come to you to set me right.’
Then there was a pause of a minute or two, and the painter turned from her easel and put down her palette with a sigh of relief. ‘That’s over for to-day at least,’ she said, and came and held out her hand to her visitor. ‘I saw it in the papers,’ she said, ‘but I would not say anything till I could give you my hand and look you in the face. Was it sudden? We have all to bear it one way or other; but it’s very hard all the same, and especially the first blow.’
It was the first time since the reading of the will that anybody had sympathised honestly with one of Mr. Renton’s sons for their father’s death; and, near as that event was, the voice of natural pity startled Laurie back to natural feeling. The twilight, too, which hid the tears that rushed to his eyes, and the soft, kind clasp of the hand which had come into his, and the voice full of all sympathies, united to move him. A sudden ache for his loss, for the father who had been so good to him, struck, with all its first freshness, into the mind where dwelt so many harder thoughts. When Mrs. Severn sat down, and bade him tell her about it, the young man went back to the sudden death-bed, and was softened, touched, and mollified in spite of himself; his voice trembled when he told her those wanderings of the dying man,—as everybody thought them,—and of his affectionate confidence that ‘Laurie would not mind.{261}’
‘I see there is something more coming,’ said the padrona, with that insight in which he had trusted; ‘but whatever it is I am sure he was right, and Laurie will not be the one to mind.’
‘I don’t mind,’ said Laurie, with a sob that did no discredit to his manhood; and if there had been a shadow of resentment in his heart for the injury done him, in these words it passed away; and instead of asking the padrona’s advice as he had intended, as he had asked old Welby’s, he told her, on the contrary, about his father, and his anxieties touching Ben, and all the sinkings of heart, of which he did not himself seem to have been conscious till sympathy called them forth. I do not know whether the softness of the domestic quiet, and the padrona’s face shining upon him across the table, with all the light in the room concentrated in her hazel eyes, and the soft monosyllables of sympathy—the ‘poor Laurie’—that dropped from her lips now and then,—one cannot tell what effect these might have had in making the character of this interview so different from that he had held with Mr. Welby. Had it been her daughter to whom he was talking there could of course have been no doubt about it. But anyhow this was how it happened. Laurie made it apparent to her and to himself that it was the tender anguish of bereavement which had brought him here to be comforted, and was perfectly real and true in thus representing himself; and Mrs. Severn was{262} very sorry for him, and thought more highly of him than ever. It had grown almost dark before she rose from her chair and brought the conversation to an end.
‘You are too young to dwell always on one subject,’ she said, ‘Come in now and have tea with the children. They are all very fond of you, and it will do you good. Of course you have not dined: you can go and dine later at eight or nine: it does not matter to you young men. And, if the talk is too much, Alice will play to you.’
‘The talk will not be too much,’ said Laurie; but as he followed the padrona out of the room he plucked the rose out of his button-hole and crushed it up in his hand and let it drop on the floor. A rose in a man’s coat is perhaps not quite consistent with the deepest phase of recent grief. But he was no deceiver in spite of this little bit of involuntary humbug. Other thoughts had driven his grief away, and diminished its force perhaps; but those were true and natural tears he had been shedding, and he felt ashamed of himself for having been able to think of the rose, and did not want the padrona’s quick eye to light upon that gentlest inconsistency; but on the whole it did not appear to him that he was unequal to their talk. So he went and played with the children while Mrs. Severn withdrew to change her dress for the evening, seating himself in the inner room where the lamp was burning and the table{263} arrayed for tea, while Alice in the dim grey drawing-room, with the folding-doors open, played softest Lieder, such as her soul loved, in the dusk; and Miss Hadley sat and knitted, casting now and then a keen look from under her deep brows at Laurie in his mourning; and the urn bubbled and steamed, and little Edith climbed up into her high seat by the table, waiting till the padrona in her lace collar should come down to tea.