Читать книгу The Heart of Penelope - Marie Belloc Lowndes - Страница 16

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Lord Wantley, or rather his wife, had been among the first and most ardent patrons of the group of painters who chose to be known as the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. More than one of these had spent happy days at Monk's Eype, and it had been owing to the advice of the most famous survivor of the early P.R.B. that Penelope had been allowed, and even encouraged, to devote much of her early girlhood to the serious pursuit of art. How far her parents had been right her mother sometimes doubted; but there could be no doubt that the great artist had truly divined in the beautiful girl a touch of exceptional power—some would have called it by a rarer name. It was not his fault if such circumstances as youth, rank, beauty, and ultimately great wealth, had asserted their claims, and turned one who might have been a great woman artist into an amateur.

Therefore it was rather as a lover of beauty and as a woman, fully, if rather disdainfully, conscious of her own feminine supremacy, that Mrs. Robinson had been so far well content to leave the spacious rooms of her own, as it had been her father's, favourite home, in much the same order as when they had been arranged under the eye of her great-uncle Ludovic, known in local story as the Popish Lord Wantley.

There was a side of her nature which made her feel peculiarly at ease among the faded splendours of these Italian-looking rooms. Her tall figure, slenderly stately in its proportions; the small, well-poised head; clear-cut, delicate features; deep, troubled-looking blue eyes; masses of red-brown hair, drawn high above the broad low forehead, in the fashion worn when powdered locks lent charm to the plainest face—in short, her whole presence and individuality made a satisfying harmony with faded brocades, the ivory inlaid chairs and tables, and the massive gilt dower-chests, which had no desecration to fear from their present owner's beautiful hands.

That Penelope could create as well as preserve beauty of surroundings—the one power seems nowadays as rare as the other—was seen in the room, half studio, half library, where, when at Monk's Eype, she chose to spend much of her time.

Situated at the extreme western end of the villa, on which, indeed, it still formed a strange excrescence, the room had been added to the main building at a time when Penelope's parents had been inclined to believe much more than they afterwards came to do in the power of eloquent speech. The substantial brick walls of the hall, as it was still called by some of the older servants, had witnessed curious gatherings, and heard the voices of many a famous lay-preacher dealing with schemes which, whether practical or nebulous, had all the same single purpose—that of leaving the world better than it had been before.

Penelope Wantley, as a little girl, had once been taken, when in Paris, to see a certain old lady, who had in her day played a considerable rôle in the brilliant society of the forties. The room in which the English visitors had been received made a deep impression on the child's imagination. The walls were painted in that soft shade of blue which the turquoise is said to assume when a heart is untrue to its wearer, and which is of all tints that best suited to be a background, whether of human beings or of paintings; and the old lady's furniture had been hidden in what the little Penelope had likened to herself as white dimity overalls. The windows looked out on a fine old garden, along whose shady paths had once walked blind Châteaubriand, led by Madame Récamier.

Many years later, when Mrs. Robinson was arranging and transforming the one room at Monk's Eype which she felt at liberty to alter and to arrange after her own fancy, she followed, perhaps unconsciously, the scheme of colouring which had so much pleased her childish fancy. But whereas in the French lady's salon there had been no books—indeed, no sign that such a thing as literature existed in the world—books were not lacking at Monk's Eype. Had Penelope followed her own natural instinct, perhaps she would have kept even more closely than she had done to the Frenchwoman's example; but, though she prided herself on being one of the most unconventional of human beings, she was naturally influenced by the atmosphere in which she had always moved and lived.

'By Penelope's books you may know, not Penelope, but Penelope's friends,' her cousin, Lord Wantley, had once observed. He had been tempted to substitute the word 'adorers' for 'friends,' but had checked himself in time, recollecting that the man with whom he was speaking was one to whom the warmer term was notoriously applicable.

As to what the books were—for there was no lack of variety—French novels, much old and modern verse, mock-erudite volumes, and pamphlets of the type that are written a hundredfold round whatever happens to be the fad of the moment, warred here and there with a substantial Blue-Book, or, stranger still, with some volume which contained deep and painful probings into the gloomier problems of life. Such were the contents of the book-shelves, which, by a curious conceit of the present owner of Monk's Eype, framed the tall narrow door connecting her studio with the rest of the building.

Lord Wantley would also have told you that his brilliant cousin never read. That, however, would have been unjust and untrue. Mrs. Robinson, however deeply absorbed in other things, always found time to glance through the books certain of her friends were good enough to send her.

Sometimes, indeed, she felt considerable interest in what she had been bidden to read, and almost always she showed an extraordinary, if passing, insight into the author's meaning; but to tell the truth, and I hope that in so doing I shall not prejudice my readers against my heroine, she was one of those women, a greater number than is in these days suspected, who regard literature much as the modern civilized man of the world regards art. Such a man goes to those exhibitions which have been specially mentioned to him as worthy of notice, but even to the best of these it would never occur to him to go, save with a pleasant companion, a second time; and in buying, it is always the expert on whom he leans, not his own taste and judgment. In the same way Penelope was always willing to read any volume which her world was discussing at the moment, but she would have been a happier woman had she been able sometimes to take up, not necessarily a classic, but at any rate a book of yesterday rather than of to-day.

But if literature was in her room only used in a decorative sense, the water-colours and drawings, the casts, and the bas-reliefs, which were so hung as to form a low dado down the whole length of the studio, were one and all of remarkable quality, and here you touched the quick reality of Penelope's life. In these matters she needed no advice, for, while as an artist she was truly humble, she only cared to measure herself with the best.

There was something pathetic in this beautiful woman's desire to discover hidden genius; only certain French painters with whom she herself from time to time still studied could have told how generous and how intelligent was the help she was ever ready to bestow on those of her fellow art-students whose means were more slender than their talent. It was to these, so rich and yet so poor, that her heart really warmed; it was on them that she bestowed what time that she could spare from herself.

And yet the room which was specially her own showed very few signs of artistic occupation. True, on a plain table were set out paint-boxes, palettes, sketch-books; but an unobservant visitor might have come and gone without knowing that the woman he had come to see ever took up a pencil or used a brush.

The broad low dado, composed of comparatively small water-colours, drawings, and bas-reliefs, was twice broken, each time by a glazed oil-painting, each time by the portrait of a woman.

To the left of the book-framed door, hung a painting of Penelope's mother, Lady Wantley.

At every period of her life Lady Wantley had been one of those women whom artists delight to paint, and the great artist whose work this was had often had the privilege. But perhaps owing to certain peculiar circumstances connected with this portrait, it was the one of them that he himself preferred. The painting had been a commission from the sitter herself; she had wished to give this portrait to her husband on his sixtieth birthday, and together she and the painter, her friend, who had once owed to her and to Lord Wantley much in the way of sympathy and encouragement, had desired to suggest in the composition something which would be symbolic of what had been an almost ideal wedded life.

Then, without warning, when the scheme had been scarcely sketched out, had come Lord Wantley's death away from home, and the portrait, scarcely begun, had been hastily put away, counted by the artist as among those half-finished things destined to remain tragic in their incompleteness. But some months later his old friend and patroness, clad in no widow's weeds, but in the curious black-and-white flowing draperies, and close Quakerish bonnet, which had become to her friends and acquaintances almost a portion of her identity, had come to see him, and he learnt that she wished her portrait should be finished.

'He always disliked the unfinished, the incomplete,' she had said rather wistfully; and the artist had carried out her wish, finding little to alter, though, perhaps, in the interval between the first and the second sitting the colourless skin of the sitter had lost something of its clearness, the heavy-lidded grey eyes had gained somewhat in dimness, and the hair from dark brown had become grey.

The painter himself substituted, for the lilies which were to have filled in part of the background, a sheaf of rosemary.

The other picture had a less intimate history; and the only two people who ever ventured to criticise Penelope had both, not in any concert with one another, suggested that another place might be found for the kitcat portrait, by Romney, of Mrs. Robinson's famous namesake, than that where it now hung in juxtaposition with that of Lady Wantley.