CHAPTER V.
THUS it came about that Walter Hamlin, of Wotton Hall, pre‐Raphaelite poet and painter, made acquaintance with Anne Brown, nurse, or as Mrs Perry defined it, children’s maid at the Villa Arnolfini.
The whole of the two following days, Hamlin neither saw nor particularly remembered the strange girl whose champion he had constituted himself against the little Perrys. An old chaise, with an older pony, was produced from the neighbouring farmhouse, and Mr and Mrs Melton Perry took it by turns to drive their guest along the dusty roads to the old town of Lucca, to various villas, and other sights of the neighbourhood. In the evening Perry led his friend out for a stroll among the vineyards and page: 47 the olives, and across the low hills covered with bright green pines and dark cypresses. At the end of the third day, Hamlin, while smoking after dinner with his host, insinuated to Perry that he really thought he must be pushing on to Florence. A look of blank terror overspread poor Perry’s face.
“Nonsense!” he cried—“don’t say that; don’t leave me in the lurch yet.”
“You see,” said Hamlin, hypocritically, “I intend going to America; and I really think I ought to do a little work before leaving Italy.”
“What sort of work?”
“Why, I suppose—I think—I ought to take this opportunity of working a little at one of my pictures for the next Grosvenor.”
“Which picture?” asked Perry, eagerly.
“I really scarcely know. I suppose I ought to be making some studies for Circe and the child Comus.”
“Child Comus!” exclaimed Perry. “Why, I’ve the very thing you want here at hand. page: 48 Such a Comus for you! There’s not a model in all Florence will suit you so well; it’s the farmer’s son. Such legs, and such a chest!”
“I don’t intend doing him naked,” answered Hamlin, whose strong point was not anatomy.
“Naked or not, he’s what you want. The head, since you don’t care for legs and chest. You shall have him to‐morrow; and you can work much better here than in that swelter at Florence—”
“In short,” burst out poor Perry, “don’t leave me yet, old fellow. You don’t know what it is for me to have you here—I feel quite another man. It seems to me as if I were ten years younger. The fact is, don’t you know, a man’s never the same when once married; it’s a weight round his neck. Don’t go away yet, dear old Watty, for the sake of auld lang syne.”
Hamlin could not help being touched by the way in which his old friend threw himself on his compassion. Poor old Perry! How page: 49 dreadfully dreary and broken‐spirited he must be when all alone with that awful wife of his!
“Well, I’m willing enough to stay, if you’ll keep me,” answered Hamlin.
“That’s right!” cried Perry, squeezing his hand. “Keep me from growing into a turnip for a little longer, for goodness’ sake.”
So the next morning the farmer’s boy was sent for, and Hamlin began, in a desultory way, to make some studies for his picture. The fact was, he was so utterly indifferent as to all his own movements, that it was an absolute relief to be pinned down to one place by his old friend. Accordingly he unpacked his things, and prepared to stay at the Villa Arnolfini until the Perrys should themselves return to Florence in October.
Little by little he got to arrange his day so as to avoid as far as possible the dreaded tête‐à‐tête with Mrs Perry; spending the morning lying on the sear grass or the fallen fir‐needles under Melton Perry’s sketching umbrella; and page: 50 locking himself up during the afternoon with the pretext of his picture. Locking himself up, and sometimes unlocking the door and letting the lank and limp lady come and sit in his improvised studio, entertaining him with her views on life, poetry, art, love; and invariably representing herself as the devoted slave of a kind of fierce and gloomy lover‐husband of the Othello description. During this first week of his stay at the Villa Arnolfini, Hamlin did not lose sight of the Perrys’ strange nursemaid. The girl’s exotic, and, so to speak, tragic style of beauty, had made a great impression upon him, but a sort of impression such as only a temper entirely artistic could receive. He was interested in Anne Brown, but not in the whole of Anne Brown. He wished to see more of her, but to see more only of her superb physical appearance, and of that sullen, silent, almost haughty manner which accompanied it. As to anything there might be, intellectual or moral, behind this beautiful and dramatic creature, he did not page: 51 care in the least, and would much rather have seen nothing of it. So far, she was striking, admirable, picturesque, consistent; further details might merely spoil the effect. Hence it was that, although he made several sketches of her head from memory, and although he rhymed the first half of a sonnet upon the strange fate which had, to put it in plain prose, given the beauty of an Amazon to a nursemaid, he instinctively abstained from seeking in any way to renew the acquaintance which he had made that first morning. The picturesque and imaginative figure was just in the right light and at the right distance,—a single movement, and all the picturesqueness and strangeness might vanish. Walter Hamlin had had but too many instances of the melancholy results of trying to approach and become familiar with creatures who had caught his æsthetic and poetic fancy. He often saw her hurrying (if she might ever be said to hurry, for there was something wonderfully measured about her) to and fro, filling up, page: 52 it would seem, the gaps in Mrs Perry’s rather theoretical housekeeping; and sometimes, passing through the ground‐floor passage, he would also see her ironing, like that first time, or laboriously presiding over the little Perrys’ lessons; for it appeared that Mrs Perry’s intellectual guidance of her children consisted in telling them the plots of novels and repeating choice poetry, leaving such mechanical matters as reading and writing to what she called a menial. And even more frequently Hamlin would meet her taking the children for a walk, or sitting in the vineyard sewing or reading, while they built houses of leaves and sticks, and cooked dinners of maize‐grains and unripe figs. Hamlin scarcely ever spoke to her; and if the children forced him to remain and examine their houses or their dinners, he would watch the girl, but without the slightest desire of entering into conversation. He wished to know only as much as he could see of her. But this much which he saw inspired him with a kind of respect,—a respect not for Anne page: 53 Brown, nursemaid or nursery‐governess of Mrs Melton Perry, but respect for a beautiful and solemn kind of Valkyr or Amazon; for there is no doubt that to certain temperaments not given to respect for social distinctions or religious institutions, or even the kind of moral characteristics held to be worthy of respect by ordinary folk, there is something actually venerable in some kinds of beauty: the man respects the unknown woman as a goddess, and respects himself for having discovered her divinity. So that, habitually and instinctively, Hamlin displayed towards the young woman a degree of courtesy which astonished the little Perrys, who had seen young men flirt with various of their mother’s carefully selected beautiful servants, but never treat them, as Miss Mildred expressed it, as if they were funerals passing. All of which distant respect Anne Brown received coldly, as if it were a matter of course; showing astonishment only on one occasion, when Hamlin answered, being requested to lift little Winnie into the branches page: 54 of an olive‐tree—“You must first ask permission of Miss Brown.”
The girl looked up from her work, and fixed her great greyish‐blue eyes upon him in wonder. No one had ever called her Miss Brown before.
Thus things might have continued, and Hamlin have left the Villa Arnolfini with only a few lines of a sonnet on the fly‐leaf of his ‘Vita Nuova’—a few scratched‐out sketches of a face with strange, curling full lips, and masses of wiry hair, in his sketchbook—and a daily fainter remembrance of Mrs Perry’s nurse; when one day he took it into his head to construct a kind of medieval costume for his peasant‐boy model, and accordingly went to Mrs Perry for assistance in sewing together the various shreds of old brocade and satin which he had bought at Lucca, the various bits of weather‐stained cotton which he had obtained by barter from the peasants. Mrs Perry, lying languidly on a sofa in her dusty boudoir, littered over with page: 55 books and reviews, afforded him a variety of valuable pieces of information upon harmonies of colours and the magic of folds; but when it came to practical tailoring, she smiled with reproachful gentleness, and, clapping her hands, called out for Annie. Annie—that is to say, Anne Brown—emerged from an adjacent room, silent and sullen as usual; but when she understood that the job was for Hamlin, she seemed suddenly to develop a certain interest in it. The pieces of stuff were spread out on the drawing‐room table, and Hamlin proceeded to explain what manner of garment he wanted, Mrs Perry joining in from the next room with various bewildering instructions. The girl immediately understood; but the piece of work was complicated and tiresome. The stuff had several times to be sewn together, tried on to the live model, and then taken down‐stairs to be altered.
“Won’t you sit down and do it here, Miss Brown?” Hamlin at length suggested.
The girl hesitated for a moment, and then page: 56 settled herself to sew at the table of the empty drawing‐room. Hamlin went into the studio next door, and tried to draw a little; but he felt himself attracted to go and watch the girl as she leaned over the table, or sat with her beautiful head bending over her sewing. Every now and then she looked up to ask him some question: a regal, tragic, out‐of‐our‐world, almost weird face, the contrast of which with her prosiac questions about seams and tucks was almost comic.
Hamlin looked at her as he might have looked at a beautiful cathedral front; and he began to feel that kind of anticipated regret at the thought of losing sight of something beautiful and rare, that almost painful desire to keep at least some durable likeness of it, which, in former years, had often tormented him in the midst of the enjoyment of lovely things. He did not see his way to introducing Anne Brown into any picture; nay, he perhaps did not even think of his work; but he determined that he must have a likeness of page: 57 her to take away with him. Accordingly, that same evening, as he was seated with the Perrys in front of the villa, watching the stars gradually lighting themselves in the bright metallic blue sky, Hamlin suddenly turned to his hostess, and asked her whether she thought it would be possible for him to make a sketch of Anne Brown.
“I may want her for a picture some day,” he added, half hypocritically.
Mrs Perry’s enthusiasm was immediately kindled.
“Oh !” she exclaimed, “paint a picture of her as the Witch of Atlas, with a red cloak and red roses all about her, and a background of cactuses and aloes all twisting and writhing, and looking as if they gibbered. Do paint her like that, dear Mr Hamlin—and Mildred and Winnie will do for attendant spirits. Begin to‐morrow—you shall have her to sit to you all day; and she has such lovely arms and shoulders, you must paint her in some kind of dress that will show them.”
page: 58“I think it’s rather cool of you to promise Annie as a sitter in that way,” put in Melton Perry—“especially with so few clothes on, Julia.”
“Why not?” asked Mrs Perry, in astonishment. “If she is beautiful she must be painted. She shall begin sitting to‐morrow morning.”
“She shan’t do anything of the kind!” exclaimed Perry, suddenly. “I don’t see at all what right we have to dispose of her. We pay her wages as a servant for our children, not as a model for our visitors.”
“I never dreamed of Miss Brown being in any way compelled to sit,” remonstrated Hamlin, rather indignantly. “I only wanted your assistance in asking whether she would.”
“Of course she will,” insisted Mrs Perry. “Why, I wonder what great hardship there is in sitting for one’s likeness? Haven’t I done it hundreds of times? When a woman is beautiful, it’s her duty; that’s what I was always told.”
“It may be the duty of a lady, Julia,” an‐ page: 59 swered answered Mr Perry, gloomily, “and it may be yours; but it isn’t the duty of a servant girl—the difference lies in that.”
“Well,” retorted Mrs Perry, angrily, “I think you don’t show much appreciation of the honour of having one of the greatest of living painters in our house, Perry. I do, and I shall see to his having the proper model.”
“Please, I entreat you, dear Mrs Perry,” cried Hamlin,“ do let the matter go—it really is of no consequence; and, indeed, it would be in the last degree distasteful to me to have an unwilling sitter.”
“You shall have a willing one, Mr Hamlin;” and Mrs Perry walked off with dignity.
Melton Perry suddenly shook off his languor, and started after his wife.
“Julia,” he cried, “do leave it to me—I’ll speak to Annie—only do leave it to me.”
“I see no reason for this,” she answered.
“Then I shall speak to Annie at once,” replied Perry.
page: 60“There’s been far too much of this turning of servants into models in this house,” he said, turning to Hamlin. “Mrs Perry can’t be got to see that it isn’t at all the right sort of thing. I don’t mind so much with the others, for I suppose they’re a parcel of sluts; but Annie is another matter. I don’t mind it’s being you, you know, old fellow; but I object to the principle. Annie! Annie! I want to speak to you a moment,” and Mr Perry went into the house.
After a moment he returned.
“I’ve spoken to her, Hamlin,” he said. “I told her that she was just what you wanted for the Lady Guenevere or the Lady of the Lake, or some lady or other—all a lie; but you see I didn’t wish her to know it was merely because she’s handsome. I told her she was like a portrait of one of these persons. Please don’t tell her she’s not. I really expected she’d refuse; and I said to her, ‘Annie, mind you don’t let the mistress force you into sitting; don’t do it to please anybody.’ I’m page: 61 really quite surprised, for she’s such a very reserved girl always; but then she is an obliging creature too, and I think she’ll do more to please me than perhaps my wife, because I always let her understand that this isn’t a good place at all, and that she ought to try for another. Well, she says she’ll sit; but not till after the ironing is done in the morning. I proposed half‐past nine—will that do?”
“Thank you,” answered Hamlin, putting his hand on Perry’s shoulder; “you’re a good old creature, Perry.”
