CHAPTER II.
A WEEK later Hamlin was painting Anne Brown in a studio which he had hired for three months. She had manifested some pleasure when, unexpectedly, Mrs Perry had told her of his return, and of his desire to have her once more for a model; but the manifestation thereof was so calm, or rather so mingled with her usual haughty indifference, that her romantic and passionate mistress had forthwith made up her mind that Anne Brown was a mere soulless body, and communicated that fact to her husband.
“I don’t see why Annie should be particularly delighted at the prospect of sitting for two hours, twice a‐week, with her head raised and her throat outstretched, in a beastly cold page: 125 studio,” answered Perry, affecting, as he frequently did, from a curious kind of coyness, not to understand his wife’s underlying meaning.
“She is a mere soulless body,” repeated Mrs Perry—“as indifferent to Hamlin as a handsome cow would be.”
“Do you expect her to throw herself into Hamlin’s arms?” cried Perry, angrily.
“I expect her,” answered Mrs Perry, with a kind of haughty mystery and sadness, “to be a woman.”
“And I expect you to attend to her remaining what she is—an honest girl,” retorted Perry.
“Melton!” said his wife solemnly; and immediately poor Perry’s principles drooped like a furled sail.
Melton Perry had always an uncomfortable feeling of responsibility regarding Anne Brown; a sort of sense that, as poor old Miss Curzon had been grievously mistaken in intrusting a girl like Anne Brown to a lady so mystical page: 126 and romantic as his wife, he, on his part, hardened sinner, social wreck as he doubtless was, was in duty bound to make up for the good old woman’s want of discernment. If it had been any one except Hamlin, he repeated to himself, he would never have permitted a single sitting; but Hamlin was a Sir Galahad—at least with regard to servant girls and suchlike—who had always struck Perry dumb with wonder; and in this instance in particular, Hamlin seemed really to consider Anne Brown much in the light of a picture by an old master. Yet even thus, it had taken him by surprise, and relieved his mind of a heavy weight, when, the day before the first sitting in the studio, Ham]in had asked Mrs Perry to tell him of some elderly woman—some former housekeeper or nurse in an English family—who could come to his studio and keep it in order two or three times a‐week.
“I can recommend you a most delightful young laundress,” exclaimed Mrs Perry with fervour—“quite a Palma Vecchio.”
page: 127“Thank you,” answered Hamlin, drily; “I particularly want an elderly woman who can take charge of my things, and who can be there when—I mean, who can take Miss Brown’s bonnet and shawl when she comes to sit to me.”
Mrs Perry confessed to no knowledge of such a person, but sat down to write to the German deaconesses,—“such real saints,”—in quest of the desired piece of elderly respectability. But when she had gone to her writing‐table, Melton Perry kicked Hamlin’s foot under the table, and said in an undertone—
“You are a damned moral dog, certainly, Wat. Thank you so much, old fellow.”
So the old housekeeper was hired to go three times a‐week to Hamlin’s studio, and twice a‐week she opened the studio door to Anne Brown, and took the girl’s poke‐bonnet and grey shawl in the little anteroom, crammed full of dwarf orange‐trees, which opened into the pillared balcony circling round the topmost floor of the old palace, and from which page: 128 you looked into the lichened court, and saw the steel‐like sheen of the water in the well. Hamlin had determined to embody one of his usual mystical fancies in his new picture. His pictures came to him first as poems, and he had written a sonnet descriptive of his intended work before he had painted a stroke of it. It was called Venus Victrix; and the strangeness, the mysteriousness which gave a charm to his beautiful church‐window‐like pictures, and made one forget for a minute the uncertainty of drawing and the weakness of flesh‐painting—this essential quality of the pictorial riddle depended very much upon the fact that his Venus Victrix was entirely unlike any other Venus Victrix which the mind of man could conceive. Instead of the naked goddess triumphing over the apple of Paris, whom such a name would lead you to expect, Hamlin made a sketch of a lady in a dress of sad‐coloured green and gold brocade, seated in a melancholy landscape of distant barren peaks, suffused with the grey and yellow tints page: 129 of a late sunset; behind her was a bower of sear‐coloured palms, knotting their boughs into a kind of canopy for her head, and in her hand she held, dragged despondingly on the ground, a broken palm‐branch. The expression of the goddess of Love, since such she was, was one of intense melancholy. It was one of those pictures which go to the head with a perfectly unintelligible mystery, and which absolutely preclude all possibility of inquiring into their exact meaning. A picture which might have been one of Hamlin’s best, only that it was never finished.
For, it must be remembered, the picture, or rather the painting of it, was merely an excuse invented by Hamlin for an opportunity of seeing, of examining, the creature whose future was in his hands. He wished to assure himself that Anne Brown was really the Anne Brown of his fancy; and as he stared at that strange and beautiful face, it was not in reality with the object of transferring it on to his canvas, but to make sure whether it was page: 130 really as strange as it seemed to him. It was also to gauge whatever mystery there might be hidden in that singular nature. Whether he ever did gauge it, it is impossible to tell. There was, he felt, something strange there—something which corresponded with the magnificent and mysterious outside,—a possibility of thought and emotion enclosed like the bud in its case of young leaves—a potential passion, good or bad, of some sort. At Anne Brown’s actual character it was difficult to get; or rather, perhaps, there was as yet but little actual character to get at. He became more and more persuaded, as he sat opposite to her, painting and talking—or, interrupting the sitting, playing to her strange songs which he had picked up in his travels, and fragments of forgotten operas which it was his mania to collect—that Anne Brown was in reality much younger than her years; that beneath those solemn features there was a still immature soul wrapped up in mere conventional ideas of right and wrong, page: 131 a few inherited republican formulæ, and a natural pride which had grown, as does any protecting skin, physical or moral, where surroundings are for ever chafing and wearing. A soul, above all, which had never yet sought for an ideal—had never loved; and this knowledge was to Hamlin a source of infinite satisfaction.
It was a satisfaction, also, to notice how, little by little, whatever ideals seemed to bud in Anne Brown’s mind, were connected with him, or at least with the things which he presented to her imagination. Nay, with himself, as a person not at all, but yet with the books, the music, the pictures about which he talked to her. This studio, so unlike the bleak and tobacco‐reeking workshop of Melton Perry, with its curious carved furniture, its Japanese screens, its bits of brocade and tapestry (rubbish which Hamlin would have blushed at in London), its shelves of books and chipped majolica and glass, its quantity of flowers, was evidently a sort of earthly paradise to the page: 132 girl. And the handsome, pale, serious young man, with womanishly regular feature and world‐worn look, who treated her with a sort of protecting deference, who instructed her in what she ought to like and dislike, and at the same time asked with real earnestness for her opinion, was evidently its affable archangel. This Hamlin perceived to his pleasure; but, nevertheless, he perceived also that all feeling, all ideas, were in Anne Brown vague, immature, or merely potential—unless, indeed, this tragic‐looking creature repressed and drowned in the darkness of her consciousness anything more definite and developed.
They did not talk very much, for they were both of them rather taciturn; but what they said acquired therefrom more than doubled importance. And of this talking Hamlin did by far the greater share. Anne Brown had indeed little to say—a nursery‐maid of nineteen has not much to tell a fashionable poet‐painter of thirty‐one: slight descriptions of places she had been to, villas, or bathing‐places, and one or two page: 133 excursions from them; vague reminiscences of old Miss Curzon, of the books which she had made the girl read, the music she had heard, the anecdotes of Landor and Rossini and Malibran which the old lady had narrated; a few allusions, short and passionate, to her father; a few more, sullen and dreary, to her own future life;—that was all that poor Anne Brown could say.
For when he told her the plots of novels, and repeated scraps of poems to her, she scarcely ventured to give him her opinion. She was so earnest that she felt that only something worth saying should be said; and what things worth saying could she say to him?
“By the way,” said Hamlin one day, as she stood, tying her bonnet, and looking out over the sea of shingly roofs, the sudden gaps showing shady gardens far below, open loggias, between whose columns fluttered linen, and irregular rows of windows with herbs in broken ewers on their sills—“by the way, you have never page: 134 told me how you liked the ‘Vita Nuova,’ Miss Brown.” He had talked of so many books, making her wonder and sometimes laugh at his account of them, but never about that, nor about his own.
“It is very beautiful,” she said, still looking out of the window—“but do you think it is true?”
“Why not?” he said.
“I don’t know—I don’t think there are men like that;” then she suddenly added, with a sort of melancholy humorous laugh, which was frequent with her, “I will make my pupils read it when I am a parlatrice. Those ladies will tell me their opinion.”
Hamlin was looking at her, as she still turned her massive head, with its waves of iron‐black hair, away from him, towards the light.
“Good‐bye,” she said, with her hand on the door‐latch.
“Stop a minute,” said Hamlin; and going page: 135 to a book‐shelf, he got down a little green‐bound volume.
“I don’t know why,” he said, “but I should like you to read these. It is idiotic trash after the ‘Vita Nuova’—but it is mine.”
“Thank you,” she said. “I will bring it you back next sitting. I will cover the binding.”
“I want you to keep it. Won’t you do me that favour?”
She reddened all over her pale face.
“Thank you,” she said. “’It is very good of you.”
