The Beldonald Holbein

CHAPTER I

Mrs. Munden had not yet been to my studio on so good a pretext as when she first intimated that it would be quite open to me—should I only care, as she called it, to throw the handkerchief—to paint her beautiful sister-in-law.  I needn’t go here more than is essential into the question of Mrs. Munden, who would really, by the way, be a story in herself.  She has a manner of her own of putting things, and some of those she has put to me—!  Her implication was that Lady Beldonald hadn’t only seen and admired certain examples of my work, but had literally been prepossessed in favour of the painter’s “personality.”  Had I been struck with this sketch I might easily have imagined her ladyship was throwing me the handkerchief.  “She hasn’t done,” my visitor said, “what she ought.”

“Do you mean she has done what she oughtn’t?”

“Nothing horrid—ah dear no.”  And something in Mrs. Munden’s tone, with the way she appeared to muse a moment, even suggested to me that what she “oughtn’t” was perhaps what Lady Beldonald had too much neglected.  “She hasn’t got on.”

“What’s the matter with her?”

“Well, to begin with, she’s American.”

“But I thought that was the way of ways to get on.”

“It’s one of them.  But it’s one of the ways of being awfully out of it too.  There are so many!”

“So many Americans?” I asked.

“Yes, plenty of them,” Mrs. Munden sighed.  “So many ways, I mean, of being one.”

“But if your sister-in-law’s way is to be beautiful—?”

“Oh there are different ways of that too.”

“And she hasn’t taken the right way?”

“Well,” my friend returned as if it were rather difficult to express, “she hasn’t done with it—”

“I see,” I laughed; “what she oughtn’t!”

Mrs. Munden in a manner corrected me, but it was difficult to express.  “My brother at all events was certainly selfish.  Till he died she was almost never in London; they wintered, year after year, for what he supposed to be his health—which it didn’t help, since he was so much too soon to meet his end—in the south of France and in the dullest holes he could pick out, and when they came back to England he always kept her in the country.  I must say for her that she always behaved beautifully.  Since his death she has been more in London, but on a stupidly unsuccessful footing.  I don’t think she quite understands.  She hasn’t what I should call a life.  It may be of course that she doesn’t want one.  That’s just what I can’t exactly find out.  I can’t make out how much she knows.”

“I can easily make out,” I returned with hilarity, “how much you do!”

“Well, you’re very horrid.  Perhaps she’s too old.”

“Too old for what?” I persisted.

“For anything.  Of course she’s no longer even a little young; only preserved—oh but preserved, like bottled fruit, in syrup!  I want to help her if only because she gets on my nerves, and I really think the way of it would be just the right thing of yours at the Academy and on the line.”

“But suppose,” I threw out, “she should give on my nerves?”

“Oh she will.  But isn’t that all in the day’s work, and don’t great beauties always—?”

“You don’t,” I interrupted; but I at any rate saw Lady Beldonald later on—the day came when her kinswoman brought her, and then I saw how her life must have its centre in her own idea of her appearance.  Nothing else about her mattered—one knew her all when one knew that.  She’s indeed in one particular, I think, sole of her kind—a person whom vanity has had the odd effect of keeping positively safe and sound.  This passion is supposed surely, for the most part, to be a principle of perversion and of injury, leading astray those who listen to it and landing them sooner or later in this or that complication; but it has landed her ladyship nowhere whatever—it has kept her from the first moment of full consciousness, one feels, exactly in the same place.  It has protected her from every danger, has made her absolutely proper and prim.  If she’s “preserved,” as Mrs. Munden originally described her to me, it’s her vanity that has beautifully done it—putting her years ago in a plate-glass case and closing up the receptacle against every breath of air.  How shouldn’t she be preserved when you might smash your knuckles on this transparency before you could crack it?  And she is—oh amazingly!  Preservation is scarce the word for the rare condition of her surface.  She looks naturally new, as if she took out every night her large lovely varnished eyes and put them in water.  The thing was to paint her, I perceived, in the glass case—a most tempting attaching feat; render to the full the shining interposing plate and the general show-window effect.

It was agreed, though it wasn’t quite arranged, that she should sit to me.  If it wasn’t quite arranged this was because, as I was made to understand from an early stage, the conditions from our start must be such as should exclude all elements of disturbance, such, in a word, as she herself should judge absolutely favourable.  And it seemed that these conditions were easily imperilled.  Suddenly, for instance, at a moment when I was expecting her to meet an appointment—the first—that I had proposed, I received a hurried visit from Mrs. Munden, who came on her behalf to let me know that the season happened just not to be propitious and that our friend couldn’t be quite sure, to the hour, when it would again become so. She felt nothing would make it so but a total absence of worry.

“Oh a ‘total absence,’” I said, “is a large order!  We live in a worrying world.”

“Yes; and she feels exactly that—more than you’d think.  It’s in fact just why she mustn’t have, as she has now, a particular distress on at the very moment.  She wants of course to look her best, and such things tell on her appearance.”

I shook my head.  “Nothing tells on her appearance.  Nothing reaches it in any way; nothing gets at it.  However, I can understand her anxiety.  But what’s her particular distress?”

“Why the illness of Miss Dadd.”

“And who in the world’s Miss Dadd?”

“Her most intimate friend and constant companion—the lady who was with us here that first day.”

“Oh the little round black woman who gurgled with admiration?”

“None other.  But she was taken ill last week, and it may very well be that she’ll gurgle no more.  She was very bad yesterday and is no better to-day, and Nina’s much upset.  If anything happens to Miss Dadd she’ll have to get another, and, though she has had two or three before, that won’t be so easy.”

“Two or three Miss Dadds? is it possible?  And still wanting another!”  I recalled the poor lady completely now.  “No; I shouldn’t indeed think it would be easy to get another.  But why is a succession of them necessary to Lady Beldonald’s existence?”

“Can’t you guess?”  Mrs. Munden looked deep, yet impatient.  “They help.”

“Help what?  Help whom?”

“Why every one.  You and me for instance.  To do what?  Why to think Nina beautiful.  She has them for that purpose; they serve as foils, as accents serve on syllables, as terms of comparison.  They make her ‘stand out.’  It’s an effect of contrast that must be familiar to you artists; it’s what a woman does when she puts a band of black velvet under a pearl ornament that may, require, as she thinks, a little showing off.”

I wondered.  “Do you mean she always has them black?”

“Dear no; I’ve seen them blue, green, yellow.  They may be what they like, so long as they’re always one other thing.”

“Hideous?”

Mrs. Munden made a mouth for it.  “Hideous is too much to say; she doesn’t really require them as bad as that.  But consistently, cheerfully, loyally plain.  It’s really a most happy relation.  She loves them for it.”

“And for what do they love her?”

“Why just for the amiability that they produce in her.  Then also for their ‘home.’  It’s a career for them.”

“I see.  But if that’s the case,” I asked, “why are they so difficult to find?”

“Oh they must be safe; it’s all in that: her being able to depend on them to keep to the terms of the bargain and never have moments of rising—as even the ugliest woman will now and then (say when she’s in love)—superior to themselves.”

I turned it over.  “Then if they can’t inspire passions the poor things mayn’t even at least feel them?”

“She distinctly deprecates it.  That’s why such a man as you may be after all a complication.”

I continued to brood.  “You’re very sure Miss Dadd’s ailment isn’t an affection that, being smothered, has struck in?”  My joke, however, wasn’t well timed, for I afterwards learned that the unfortunate lady’s state had been, even while I spoke, such as to forbid all hope.  The worst symptoms had appeared; she was destined not to recover; and a week later I heard from Mrs. Munden that she would in fact “gurgle” no more.

CHAPTER II

All this had been for Lady Beldonald an agitation so great that access to her apartment was denied for a time even to her sister-in-law.  It was much more out of the question of course that she should unveil her face to a person of my special business with it; so that the question of the portrait was by common consent left to depend on that of the installation of a successor to her late companion.  Such a successor, I gathered from Mrs. Munden, widowed childless and lonely, as well as inapt for the minor offices, she had absolutely to have; a more or less humble alter ago to deal with the servants, keep the accounts, make the tea and watch the window-blinds.  Nothing seemed more natural than that she should marry again, and obviously that might come; yet the predecessors of Miss Dadd had been contemporaneous with a first husband, so that others formed in her image might be contemporaneous with a second.  I was much occupied in those months at any rate, and these questions and their ramifications losing themselves for a while to my view, I was only brought back to them by Mrs. Munden’s arrival one day with the news that we were all right again—her sister-in-law was once more “suited.”  A certain Mrs. Brash, an American relative whom she hadn’t seen for years, but with whom she had continued to communicate, was to come out to her immediately; and this person, it appeared, could be quite trusted to meet the conditions.  She was ugly—ugly enough, without abuse of it, and was unlimitedly good.  The position offered her by Lady Beldonald was moreover exactly what she needed; widowed also, after many troubles and reverses, with her fortune of the smallest, and her various children either buried or placed about, she had never had time or means to visit England, and would really be grateful in her declining years for the new experience and the pleasant light work involved in her cousin’s hospitality.  They had been much together early in life and Lady Beldonald was immensely fond of her—would in fact have tried to get hold of her before hadn’t Mrs. Brash been always in bondage to family duties, to the variety of her tribulations.  I daresay I laughed at my friend’s use of the term “position”—the position, one might call it, of a candlestick or a sign-post, and I daresay I must have asked if the special service the poor lady was to render had been made clear to her.  Mrs. Munden left me in any case with the rather droll image of her faring forth across the sea quite consciously and resignedly to perform it.

The point of the communication had however been that my sitter was again looking up and would doubtless, on the arrival and due initiation of Mrs. Brash, be in form really to wait on me.  The situation must further, to my knowledge, have developed happily, for I arranged with Mrs. Munden that our friend, now all ready to begin, but wanting first just to see the things I had most recently done, should come once more, as a final preliminary, to my studio.  A good foreign friend of mine, a French painter, Paul Outreau, was at the moment in London, and I had proposed, as he was much interested in types, to get together for his amusement a small afternoon party.  Every one came, my big room was full, there was music and a modest spread; and I’ve not forgotten the light of admiration in Outreau’s expressive face as at the end of half an hour he came up to me in his enthusiasm.  “Bonté divine, mon cher—que cette vieille est donc belle!”

I had tried to collect all the beauty I could, and also all the youth, so that for a moment I was at a loss.  I had talked to many people and provided for the music, and there were figures in the crowd that were still lost to me.  “What old woman do you mean?”

“I don’t know her name—she was over by the door a moment ago.  I asked somebody and was told, I think, that she’s American.”

I looked about and saw one of my guests attach a pair of fine eyes to Outreau very much as if she knew he must be talking of her.  “Oh Lady Beldonald!  Yes, she’s handsome; but the great point about her is that she has been ‘put up’ to keep, and that she wouldn’t be flattered if she knew you spoke of her as old.  A box of sardines is ‘old’ only after it has been opened, Lady Beldonald never has yet been—but I’m going to do it.”  I joked, but I was somewhat disappointed.  It was a type that, with his unerring sense for the banal, I shouldn’t have expected Outreau to pick out.

“You’re going to paint her?  But, my dear man, she is painted—and as neither you nor I can do it.  Où est-elle donc?  He had lost her, and I saw I had made a mistake. She’s the greatest of all the great Holbeins.”

I was relieved.  “Ah then not Lady Beldonald!  But do I possess a Holbein of any price unawares?”

“There she is—there she is!  Dear, dear, dear, what a head!”  And I saw whom he meant—and what: a small old lady in a black dress and a black bonnet, both relieved with a little white, who had evidently just changed, her place to reach a corner from which more of the room and of the scene was presented to her.  She appeared unnoticed and unknown, and I immediately recognised that some other guest must have brought her and, for want of opportunity, had as yet to call my attention to her.  But two things, simultaneously with this and with each other, struck me with force; one of them the truth of Outreau’s description of her, the other the fact that the person bringing her could only have been Lady Beldonald.  She was a Holbein—of the first water; yet she was also Mrs. Brash, the imported “foil,” the indispensable “accent,” the successor to the dreary Miss Dadd!  By the time I had put these things together—Outreau’s “American” having helped me—I was in just such full possession of her face as I had found myself, on the other first occasion, of that of her patroness.  Only with so different a consequence.  I couldn’t look at her enough, and I stared and stared till I became aware she might have fancied me challenging her as a person unpresented.  “All the same,” Outreau went on, equally held, “c’est une tête à faire.  If I were only staying long enough for a crack at her!  But I tell you what”—and he seized my arm—“bring her over!”

“Over?”

“To Paris.  She’d have a succès fou.”

“Ah thanks, my dear fellow,” I was now quite in a position to say; “she’s the handsomest thing in London, and”—for what I might do with her was already before me with intensity—“I propose to keep her to myself.”  It was before me with intensity, in the light of Mrs. Brash’s distant perfection of a little white old face, in which every wrinkle was the touch of a master; but something else, I suddenly felt, was not less so, for Lady Beldonald, in the other quarter, and though she couldn’t have made out the subject of our notice, continued to fix us, and her eyes had the challenge of those of the woman of consequence who has missed something.  A moment later I was close to her, apologising first for not having been more on the spot at her arrival, but saying in the next breath uncontrollably: “Why my dear lady, it’s a Holbein!”

“A Holbein?  What?”

“Why the wonderful sharp old face so extraordinarily, consummately drawn—in the frame of black velvet.  That of Mrs. Brash, I mean—isn’t it her name?—your companion.”

This was the beginning of a most odd matter—the essence of my anecdote; and I think the very first note of the oddity must have sounded for me in the tone in which her ladyship spoke after giving me a silent look.  It seemed to come to me out of a distance immeasurably removed from Holbein.  “Mrs. Brash isn’t my ‘companion’ in the sense you appear to mean.  She’s my rather near relation and a very dear old friend.  I love her—and you must know her.”

“Know her?  Rather!  Why to see her is to want on the spot to ‘go’ for her.  She also must sit for me,”

“She?  Louisa Brash?”  If Lady Beldonald had the theory that her beauty directly showed it when things weren’t well with her, this impression, which the fixed sweetness of her serenity had hitherto struck me by no means as justifying, gave me now my first glimpse of its grounds.  It was as if I had never before seen her face invaded by anything I should have called an expression.  This expression moreover was of the faintest—was like the effect produced on a surface by an agitation both deep within and as yet much confused.  “Have you told her so?” she then quickly asked, as if to soften the sound of her surprise.

“Dear no, I’ve but just noticed her—Outreau, a moment ago put me on her.  But we’re both so taken, and he also wants—”

“To paint her?” Lady Beldonald uncontrollably murmured.

“Don’t be afraid we shall fight for her,” I returned with a laugh for this tone.  Mrs. Brash was still where I could see her without appearing to stare, and she mightn’t have seen I was looking at her, though her protectress, I’m afraid, could scarce have failed of that certainty.  “We must each take our turn, and at any rate she’s a wonderful thing, so that if you’ll let her go to Paris Outreau promises her there—”

“There?” my companion gasped.

“A career bigger still than among us, as he considers we haven’t half their eye.  He guarantees her a succès fou.”

She couldn’t get over it.  “Louisa Brash?  In Paris?”

“They do see,” I went on, “more than we and they live extraordinarily, don’t you know, in that.  But she’ll do something here too.”

“And what will she do?”

If frankly now I couldn’t help giving Mrs. Brash a longer look, so after it I could as little resist sounding my converser.  “You’ll see.  Only give her time.”

She said nothing during the moment in which she met my eyes; but then: “Time, it seems to me, is exactly what you and your friend want.  If you haven’t talked with her—”

“We haven’t seen her?  Oh we see bang off—with a click like a steel spring.  It’s our trade, it’s our life, and we should be donkeys if we made mistakes.  That’s the way I saw you yourself, my lady, if I may say so; that’s the way, with a long pin straight through your body, I’ve got you.  And just so I’ve got her!”

All this, for reasons, had brought my guest to her feet; but her eyes had while we talked never once followed the direction of mine.  “You call her a Holbein?”

“Outreau did, and I of course immediately recognised it.  Don’t you?  She brings the old boy to life!  It’s just as I should call you a Titian.  You bring him to life.”

She couldn’t be said to relax, because she couldn’t be said to have hardened; but something at any rate on this took place in her—something indeed quite disconnected from what I would have called her.  “Don’t you understand that she has always been supposed—?”  It had the ring of impatience; nevertheless it stopped short on a scruple.

I knew what it was, however, well enough to say it for her if she preferred.  “To be nothing whatever to look at?  To be unfortunately plain—or even if you like repulsively ugly?  Oh yes, I understand it perfectly, just as I understand—I have to as a part of my trade—many other forms of stupidity.  It’s nothing new to one that ninety-nine people out of a hundred have no eyes, no sense, no taste.  There are whole communities impenetrably sealed.  I don’t say your friend’s a person to make the men turn round in Regent Street.  But it adds to the joy of the few who do see that they have it so much to themselves.  Where in the world can she have lived?  You must tell me all about that—or rather, if she’ll be so good, she must.”

“You mean then to speak to her—?”

I wondered as she pulled up again.  “Of her beauty?”

“Her beauty!” cried Lady Beldonald so loud that two or three persons looked round.

“Ah with every precaution of respect!” I declared in a much lower tone.  But her back was by this time turned to me, and in the movement, as it were, one of the strangest little dramas I’ve ever known was well launched.

CHAPTER III

It was a drama of small smothered intensely private things, and I knew of but one other person in the secret; yet that person and I found it exquisitely susceptible of notation, followed it with an interest the mutual communication of which did much for our enjoyment, and were present with emotion at its touching catastrophe.  The small case—for so small a case—had made a great stride even before my little party separated, and in fact within the next ten minutes.

In that space of time two things had happened one of which was that I made the acquaintance of Mrs. Brash; and the other that Mrs. Munden reached me, cleaving the crowd, with one of her usual pieces of news.  What she had to impart was that, on her having just before asked Nina if the conditions of our sitting had been arranged with me, Nina had replied, with something like perversity, that she didn’t propose to arrange them, that the whole affair was “off” again and that she preferred not to be further beset for the present.  The question for Mrs. Munden was naturally what had happened and whether I understood.  Oh I understood perfectly, and what I at first most understood was that even when I had brought in the name of Mrs. Brash intelligence wasn’t yet in Mrs. Munden.  She was quite as surprised as Lady Beldonald had been on hearing of the esteem in which I held Mrs. Brash’s appearance.  She was stupefied at learning that I had just in my ardour proposed to its proprietress to sit to me.  Only she came round promptly—which Lady Beldonald really never did.  Mrs. Munden was in fact wonderful; for when I had given her quickly “Why she’s a Holbein, you know, absolutely,” she took it up, after a first fine vacancy, with an immediate abysmal “Oh is she?” that, as a piece of social gymnastics, did her the greatest honour; and she was in fact the first in London to spread the tidings.  For a face—about it was magnificent.  But she was also the first, I must add, to see what would really happen—though this she put before me only a week or two later.  “It will kill her, my dear—that’s what it will do!”

She meant neither more nor less than that it would kill Lady Beldonald if I were to paint Mrs. Brash; for at this lurid light had we arrived in so short a space of time.  It was for me to decide whether my æsthetic need of giving life to my idea was such as to justify me in destroying it in a woman after all in most eyes so beautiful.  The situation was indeed sufficiently queer; for it remained to be seen what I should positively gain by giving up Mrs. Brash.  I appeared to have in any case lost Lady Beldonald, now too “upset”—it was always Mrs. Munden’s word about her and, as I inferred, her own about herself—to meet me again on our previous footing.  The only thing, I of course soon saw, was to temporise to drop the whole question for the present and yet so far as possible keep each of the pair in view.  I may as well say at once that this plan and this process gave their principal interest to the next several months.  Mrs. Brash had turned up, if I remember, early in the new year, and her little wonderful career was in our particular circle one of the features of the following season.  It was at all events for myself the most attaching; it’s not my fault if I am so put together as often to find more life in situations obscure and subject to interpretation than in the gross rattle of the foreground.  And there were all sorts of things, things touching, amusing, mystifying—and above all such an instance as I had never yet met—in this funny little fortune of the useful American cousin.  Mrs. Munden was promptly at one with me as to the rarity and, to a near and human view, the beauty and interest of the position.  We had neither of us ever before seen that degree and that special sort of personal success come to a woman for the first time so late in life.  I found it an example of poetic, of absolutely retributive justice; so that my desire grew great to work it, as we say, on those lines.  I had seen it all from the original moment at my studio; the poor lady had never known an hour’s appreciation—which moreover, in perfect good faith, she had never missed.  The very first thing I did after inducing so unintentionally the resentful retreat of her protectress had been to go straight over to her and say almost without preliminaries that I should hold myself immeasurably obliged for a few patient sittings.  What I thus came face to face with was, on the instant, her whole unenlightened past and the full, if foreshortened, revelation of what among us all was now unfailingly in store for her.  To turn the handle and start that tune came to me on the spot as a temptation.  Here was a poor lady who had waited for the approach of old age to find out what she was worth.  Here was a benighted being to whom it was to be disclosed in her fifty-seventh year—I was to make that out—that she had something that might pass for a face.  She looked much more than her age, and was fairly frightened—as if I had been trying on her some possibly heartless London trick—when she had taken in my appeal.  That showed me in what an air she had lived and—as I should have been tempted to put it had I spoken out—among what children of darkness.  Later on I did them more justice; saw more that her wonderful points must have been points largely the fruit of time, and even that possibly she might never in all her life have looked so well as at this particular moment.  It might have been that if her hour had struck I just happened to be present at the striking.  What had occurred, all the same, was at the worst a notable comedy.