CHAPTER I.
WALTER HAMLIN did not go to America. On leaving the Villa Arnolfini, he met at Florence some artist friends, who, in his condition of utter absence of plans, easily drew him on with them to Siena and Perugia, thence into the smaller Umbrian cities, and finally into a wholly unexplored region between the Abruzzo and the Adriatic. By the time that their sketching and article‐writing expedition was at an end, the winter had come round, and more than three months had elapsed since Hamlin had parted with the Perrys. Would Hamlin return with his friends to England? He had often said that he had had enough of Italy—that he would go home and shut him‐ page: 116 self himself up in his studio at Hammersmith, among smoke and river‐fogs, seeing not a living creature, learning Persian and studying Sufi poets until next spring, when he would set off for the East, never more to return to Europe, except for the Grosvenor private view. But when the moment for return north approached, Hamlin began to hesitate; and the very day before his friends’ departure, he informed them that he had come to the conclusion that there was still some work for him to do in Italy.
“I shall be in England at the end of two months at latest,” he said.
And on their remonstrating at his fickleness, he merely answered—
“I have a notion for a new picture, and I think I have found my model for it.”
“‘The Queen of Night’ in your portfolio,” suggested one of his friends.
They had noticed and generally admired that strange head, the like of which none of them had ever seen before, and they had given the drawing, which Hamlin described page: 117 merely as “a girl near Lucca,” the nickname of “The Queen of Night.”
“Yes,” answered Hamlin, “that’s the one I’m thinking about.”
So the rest of the party set sail from Civita Vecchia; and one drizzly, foggy morning, Hamlin got into the train to carry him northward to Florence.
During those three months, he could scarcely himself have explained when or how, strange notions had come into Hamlin’s head, and a still stranger plan had finally matured in it. He had been haunted by the remembrance of the Perrys’ nursemaid at the Villa Arnolfini, and gradually taken to brooding and day‐dreaming about her. He had made up his mind that Anne Brown was the most beautiful girl, in the strangest style, whom he had ever met. What was to be her future? Of two possibilities one must be realised. Either this magnificent blossom was to be untimely nipped,—this beautiful and strange girl was to fritter away her life, unnoticed, wasted, to page: 118 little by little lose her beauty, her dignity, her grandeur, her whole imaginative aroma; or the rare plant of beauty was to be cherished, nursed into perfection, till it burst out in maturity of splendour, a thing of delight for the present and of wonder for the future. Either Anne Brown must turn into a sordid nursery‐governess, or into the avowedly most beautiful woman in England—that is to say, in the particular pre‐Raphaelite society which constituted England to him.
Yet not necessarily; there was still a middle course—she might marry some small shopkeeper or teacher of languages at Florence; or, perhaps, some artist might notice her, make her his mistress, perhaps his wife. This last thought of Anne Brown as the possible wife of some other Melton Perry (for they were all Melton Perrys at Florence) filled Hamlin with a vague disgust and irritation. Much better that she should end her life as a nursery‐maid, or a daily governess at a franc the hour. Still, it was dreadful to think that something so page: 119 unique should be lost, wasted for ever. “Such things must be,” said Hamlin to himself; “it is sad, but it can’t be helped.” And he wrote two sonnets, “Lost Loveliness,” and “Stillborn Joy,” which were extremely beautiful, and quite among the finest he ever wrote. But this did not despatch the subject. The sense of having made the most of the fact that this loveliness was to be wasted, this joy of beauty to be stillborn, did not make up for the consciousness that the waste, the abortion, had not actually taken place, might yet be prevented, and were dreadful in themselves. Was he, Hamlin, to marry Anne Brown? He shrank in terror from so Quixotic, and at the same time so commonplace, so school‐girlish a thought. But if he did not marry her no other man could; at least, no other man who was to prevent the act of wastefulness to be consummated. She might marry a clerk, a shopkeeper, even a servant, or even some miserable little Anglo‐Florentine artist; but if she married a man above that, a man to appreciate and page: 120 make the most of her, that man must evidently be himself. It is difficult to follow the logic of this notion; but certain it is that Hamlin never doubted for a second that either Anne Brown must bloom for him and by him, must be his most precious possession and his most precious loan to the world—or that Anne Brown must be simply and deliberately buried under a bushel. Such arguments are matters of character, I suppose; be it as it may, the argument was absolutely cogent.
When Hamlin had got thus far he stopped for a long time, revolving the matter in his mind in a purely abstract way, without attempting to realise how things might be settled. He was not a man of action or of resolves, and would usually let things slip on and look at them slipping; and during this ruminating condition, he did not once seriously ask himself whether he intended marrying the Perrys’ nursemaid. But suddenly, the very day before his friends were to carry him back to England, a new notion came into his head. His life seemed page: 121 suddenly filled with romance. The matter was settled in a minute. Anne Brown was to be filched triumphantly from oblivion: he telegraphed Perry to hire him rooms in Florence. As the meeting of certain chemical substances will sometimes produce a new and undreamt‐of something of wholly unprecedented properties, so ideas had come in collision in Hamlin’s mind, and out of a mere perplexity had arisen a stranger scheme—out of the question what should be the fate of Anne Brown, had originated the decision what was to be the future of Walter Hamlin. The situations seemed changed: instead of his being a mere possible, but by no means probable, instrument of a change in her life, she was the predestined instrument for the consummation of his life. Anne Brown should live for the world and for fame; and Walter Hamlin’s life should be crowned by gradually endowing with vitality, and then wooing, awakening the love of this beautiful Galatea whose soul he had moulded, even as Pygmalion had moulded the limbs of page: 122 the image which he had made to live and to love. The idea, once present to Hamlin’s mind, had been accepted at once; and in another hour he had worked out all the details of the real romance in which he was embarking; he had determined exactly where he would send Anne Brown to school, where he would go during her stay there, what settlements he would make to ensure her complete freedom of choice when she should choose him, in what part of London he would buy a house for her, which of his female relations should have charge of her, by whom she should be introduced into artistic society;—he began to imagine all the details of his long courtship. Beyond the courtship, into their actual married life, his fancy did not carry him; it was that year, or two or three years of gradually growing devotion, upon which he cared to dwell. Whether such a scheme was wise or right it never occurred to him to question. He had determined on educating, wooing, and marrying a woman like what Anne Brown seemed to be, page: 123 as a man might determine to buy a house in a particular fishing or hunting district—the only thing is to make sure whether the particular house is the suitable house. The only further concern of Hamlin was to make sure that Anne Brown was really all that she seemed to him to be; and Hamlin looked forward as to a kind of preliminary romance to the strange inspection, this minute examination of a creature who should never guess the extraordinary metamorphosis which might, or might not, be in store for her.
