The Nest, The White Pagoda, The Suicide, A Forsaken Temple, Miss Jones and the Masterpiece Part 25

She emphasized the quotation with solemnity: "We can't trifle with our lives; we can't play through them. We must _live_ them. We must make something of them."

"Each man after his own nature," I suggested, feebly, for I felt sure that "we can't _paint_ through them" was implied, and wished to turn from that issue, with which I felt myself incapable of grappling.

But Miss Jones was not to be balked of her moral.

"We build our own characters," she said, and her look held kind warning.

"We must not act after our own nature if that nature is base or trivial."

"I know," I murmured.

"It is only by holding firmly to an ideal that we rise, step by step, beyond our lower selves."

Beyond "Manon Lescaut" to "Faith Conquers Fear" this might mean.

"And ideals we must have," she pursued. Then rising, her little air of guide and counsellor touched with a smile: "But I must not preach too much, must I?"

It was comforting to dwell on the ludicrous aspects of this mentors.h.i.+p, for, when my thoughts led me to a contemplation of Miss Jones's ideals, I felt my position to be meanly hypocritical, if not "base." Manon was almost finished. Ah! it was superb!--but even my joy in Manon rankled and had lost its savour. Manon was there under false pretences, her presence a subtle insult to Miss Jones. Miss Jones in her flaming gown took on symbolical meanings. An unconscious martyr wearing, did she but know it, the veritable robe of Nessus! A sense of protectors.h.i.+p, tender in its self-reproach, grew upon me--a longing for atonement. I had sacrificed Miss Jones to my masterpiece, and its beauty was baleful, vampire-like.

It was indeed a small thing to take Miss Jones's homilies humbly.

Indeed, for this humility I could claim no element of expiation, for I really liked to hear her; she looked so pretty when she talked. It was all so touching and so amusing.

I am not sure that she had read Dante, but if she had she no doubt saw herself something in the guise of a Beatrice stooping from heights of wisdom to support my straying, faltering footsteps. She brought me one day a feeble little volume of third-rate verse, with a page turned down at a pa.s.sage she requested me to read. The badly constructed lines, their grandiloquent sentimentality, jarred on me; but in them I perceived a complimentary application that might imply much encouragement. Miss Jones evidently thought that I was rising step by step, and put this cordial to my lips. I thanked her very earnestly--feeling positively shrivelled--and then, turning from the subject with a haste I hoped she might impute to modesty--and indeed modesty of a certain humiliating kind did form part of it--I told her that Manon would only require another sitting after that day.

"Ah! is it finished, then?"

She went to look at it.

"_Is_ my left eye as indistinct as that?" she asked, playfully. "Can't you see my eyelashes? That is impressionism, I suppose." I felt my forehead growing hot.

"The left eye is in shadow," I observed.

"I am afraid shadows are convenient sometimes, aren't they? I like just a plain, straight-forward telling of the truth, with no green paint over it! You accept a little well-meant teasing, don't you?"

I accepted it as I had to accept her various revelations of stupefying obtuseness, and smiled over the sandy mouthful.

"Yes," she pursued, carefully looking up and down the canvas--certainly a new sign of interest in me and my work--"you will need quite two days to finish it; the hands especially, they are rather sketchy about the finger-tips." She might have been a genial old professor giving me advice mingled with the good-humored _raillerie_ of superiority. The hands were finished; but I kept a cowardly silence.

"And the dress must be a good bit more distinctly outlined; I can't see _where_ it goes on this side; and then the details of the background--I can hardly tell what those dashes and splashes on the dressing-table are supposed to represent."

"I think you are standing a little too near the canvas," I said, in a voice which I strove to free from a tone of patient long-suffering. "If you go farther away, you will get the effect of the _ensemble_."

"No, no!" she laughed; she evidently thought that her ethical relations.h.i.+p justified an equally frank aesthetic helpfulness, and her air of competence was bewildering. "No, we must not run away from the truth! A smudge is a smudge from whatever standpoint one looks at it, and a smear a smear."

The masterly treatment of porcelains, ivories, and silver on the dressing-table, glimmering and gleaming from the soft shadows, to be qualified in such terms!

"You are rather severe," I said. My discomfort was apparent, but she naturally took it to be on my own behalf, not, as it was, on hers.

"Oh! you mustn't think _that_! I hope I am never unduly severe. You will easily mend matters to-day and to-morrow and polish over that rather careless look. And, as far as that goes, I am at your service as long as you need me."

"As model _and_ critic," I observed, with a touch of bitterness.

"As model _and_ critic," she repeated, brightly. "Do you know," she added, mounting the stand, "I found 'Manon Lescaut' on a bookshelf this morning. I didn't know that it was a French book. I am going to read it this evening."

I was struck dumb. This possibility had never presented itself to me.

"I shall find the scene you have painted," she continued, looking down at her gown and patting a fold into place; "I shall see whether you have ill.u.s.trated it conscientiously."

"The book wouldn't interest you at all! Not at all!" I burst out, conscious of a feverish intensity in the gaze I bent upon her. "It is--it is decidedly _dull_!"

"Is it?" said Miss Jones, indifferently. "Now I can't quite believe that. You evidently didn't think it too dull to ill.u.s.trate. There must be some nice bits in it, and I mean to find the bit where the heroine, in a pink silk gown, looks at herself in a mirror."

"Well, you'll find no such bit. I haven't ill.u.s.trated it!" I strove to keep my voice fairly cool. "I merely took the heroine's name as indicative of a cla.s.s, and chose the epoch as characteristic. The book is dull, old-fas.h.i.+oned."

"Ah, but I might not agree with you there. Is it an historical novel? I like them, even if they are rather slow. One gets all sorts of ideas about people of another age."

"It isn't historical." Despite my efforts my voice was growing sharply anxious, and Miss Jones was beginning to notice my anxiety. "And the characters in it are not people you would care to have ideas about. It is merely one of the first attempts to write a psychological study, in the form of romance, made in France."

"Oh, but that is exceedingly interesting."

"You would only find the rather crude a.n.a.lysis of a--a disagreeable girl."

"You think _I_ am like a disagreeable girl, then!" said Miss Jones, still laughing. "From the first I have had a bit of a grudge against you for finding me so suitable. I am sure I am not vain."

"Manon was more than vain. She was heartless, a liar." I felt myself stumbling from bad to worse. "Not in the least like you in anything, except that she was beautiful." My explanation, with this bald piece of tasteless flattery, had hardly helped matters. Indeed, Miss Jones became rather coldly silent. I painted on, my mind in a disturbing whirl of conjecture. I felt convinced that I had merely whetted her curiosity and that she would go straight home to the perusal of "Manon"; and to expect from her the faintest literary appreciation of the distinction and the delicacy of the book was hopeless. She would fasten with horror on the brazen immorality of a character she had been chosen to embody.

The blood surged up to my head as I painted.

As Miss Jones was preparing to go, I held out my hand.

"Good-bye," I said, feeling very badly.

"Good-bye? Am I not coming to-morrow?" She had paused in the act of neatly folding her umbrella, which had been thoughtfully left open to dry while she posed. It had now stopped raining.

"Yes--yes, of course," I stammered.

She secured the elastic band, and then looked at me.

"Miss Jones," I blurted out, abruptly, "don't read 'Manon Lescaut'; please don't."

Her glance became severely penetrating:

"I really don't understand you," she said, and then added: "I most certainly shall read it."

"Well, if you do"--my urgent tone delayed her going--"try to judge it from an artistic standpoint, you know. A study--a type. Don't apply--ah--_modern_ standards."

"I shall apply _my_ standards. I know no other method of judging a book."

"Well, then,"--my manner was becoming pitiful--"remember that the physical resemblance between you was merely in my imagination."