The Angel of Pain

But Lady Ellington felt she would probably be equal to facing the world again after eleven hours of retirement, and said she would come down.

“It is a movable feast, dear,” said Lady Dover, as she went out; “in fact, we do not think punctuality at all a virtue at breakfast.”

And a small but certain suspicion darted into Lady Ellington’s mind that her hostess had said exactly the same thing to her just a year ago, when she came to Glen Callan. She wondered how often she had said it since.

Breakfast was a very bright and cheerful meal at Glen Callan; everyone was refreshed by his long night after the day in the fresh air and ready for another one. Lady Grilse and Lady Salmon were already spoken of by the very clever names that Mr. Osborne had found for them, and he further seemed inclined to christen Lord Ellington as Lord Stag. But the dreary amazement in that gentleman’s face when Mr. Osborne made soundings on this point prevented its total success, though Dennison considered it excellent. He himself, though he had to walk but half a mile along a nearly level road to the particular point where he was painting, had so keen a sense of local colour, that, in deference to the fact that this road was in Scotland, he had put on knickerbockers, a Norfolk jacket, and thick shooting-boots. The Norfolk jacket also had a leather pad on the shoulder, so that the cloth should not be soiled by contact with possible oil on the barrels of his gun. But since he never carried nor had ever used a gun, this precaution was almost unnecessary. Still there is no harm in being prepared for any contingency, however unlikely.

The morning was cloudy but fine, and the clouds were high. In front of the windows of the dining-room the ground fell sharply away into the glen, through which brawled the coffee-coloured water of the river where the two ladies were to fish, and Mr. Dennison, as he walked about eating his porridge, a further recognition to the fact that this was Scotland, drew attention to the beautiful contrasts of green and russet in the glen. He also mislaid the spoon with which he had intended to eat his porridge, and after drawing attention to his loss, apparently drew the spoon out of Mr. Osborne’s breast pocket. He was accustomed to be the life and soul of the party, and had equal command over the flowers of language and the easier feats of sleight of hand. The flowers of language were his next preoccupation, for Lady Dover had hoped that there would be enough sun for him to work at his picture.

“We landscape painters,” he said, “are terribly at the mercy of the elements. We may perhaps half-grasp a conception, a cloudy effect, it may be, and then we are given a fortnight of bright and blazing sunshine. What are we to do? Begin another picture? Ah, that is to let the first conception fade. I spent a month once in Skye watching for an effect I had seen ten years before. Not a stroke of the brush did I make all that month; I waited. Then one morning it came.”

He shrugged his shoulders.

“Quite a small picture,” he said, “and I sold it for a song. But my reward was the fact that I had waited for it. That was my imperishable possession; my character, my artistic character, was at stake. And I won; yes, I won.”

Lady Dover broke in upon the sympathetic pause.

“But a portrait-painter, Mr. Dennison,” she said; “surely he may have to wait also for the same look to appear on the face of his sitter. Is not the sitter as fickle as the clouds or the sun?”

Dennison had finished his porridge, and was seated on Lady Dover’s left. He drew with his long white forefinger a few imagined lines in the air.

“No, I don’t think so,” he said. “There are the features; the light can be adjusted. You have but to awake again the train of thought that was in the sitter’s mind, and the expression, which after all is only a matter of line, becomes the same again. Look at Dundas’s pictures, for instance. I do not deny their merit; but what is there? Five sweeps of the brush is the face, literally no more. A piece of mere scene-painting is the background, a bunch of bananas is the hand, I assure you, a bunch of bananas. That would not be my scheme if I was a portrait painter. I should study my sitter till the very finger-nails were an integral part of the picture, so that the picture would be incomplete without them. Poor Dundas, I think we have heard the last of him. This terrible – ”

The silence that succeeded this unfortunate speech was one that might, like darkness, be felt. Mr. Dennison, intoxicated by his own voice, had “forgotten.” The silence made him remember. But the silence, though pregnant, was of almost infinitesimal duration, for Lord Dover immediately resorted to the grilse caught the day before, which was now kedgeree; his wife from the other end of the table, and without consultation, recommended Mr. Osborne to try it, and Lady Angela looked forward in anticipation to the lovely views that she and Mrs. Dennison were certain to enjoy during their drive. But this instinctive buzz to bury what had gone before died down, and the dead subject seemed like to have a disconcerting and resurging silence. But Lady Dover, whose mind was already made up on this subject, indicated her attitude. She turned to Lady Ellington, who sat three places from her, and in her quiet voice the social oracle thundered prophecy and promise —

“And how is dear Madge, Lady Salmon?” she said. “I wonder if we could induce her and Mr. Dundas to come for a week or two before we go south? It would be such a pleasure. She would enjoy these beautiful walks, I am sure, and Mr. Dundas must be so very hard-worked that I am certain a little holiday would do him good.”

That was the pronunciamento for which Lady Ellington really had come here, weighing light all the discomfort of travel and the dulness of the days that she anticipated. It had been forced, squirted as it were, out of her hostess, but nobody had ever squirted out of Lady Dover anything insincere. She often, in fact, refrained from saying all she meant, but she never said what she did not mean. Her word was as good as the bond of anybody else’s; it was trustworthy coinage, sterling in its own dominions. And Lady Ellington accepted it as such, not ringing it or testing it in any way. That it was given her was quite enough.

“I am sure Madge would love to come,” she said, “if she can only tear” – she could not help hesitating a moment – “tear dear Evelyn away from his work. He is so busy; everybody wants to be painted by him. And I’m sure I don’t wonder. His portrait of Madge! It is too extraordinary! You expect her to get down from the easel and say something characteristic. The hands, too, surely, Mr. Dennison, you don’t think the hands are like bunches of bananas in Mr. Dundas’s picture of my daughter?”

Mr. Dennison had not seen the picture; he hastened also to qualify what he had said before. The qualification did not fare quite so well at his hands as the missing spoon had done. That in itself was not extraordinary, since there was no comparison between the respective difficulties of effecting these two disappearances. But breakfast was practically over, and the need for beating a further retreat was thus reduced to an irreducible minimum.

The shooters and the stalker went their ways immediately, the motor-car was also soon round to convey Lady Angela and Mrs. Dennison to their friends, and it was not extraordinary that the artist did not join the remainder of the party on the terrace. Gladys also had gone to consult with the gillie on the question of flies, and thus in ten minutes Lady Dover and Lady Ellington were alone in their after-breakfast stroll. The latter, as usual, went straight to the point; she did not want to talk about salmon pools and rowan-berries or the prospects of slain stags; she had come here to find out what Lady Dover thought about Madge. For this purpose she called Lady Dover by her Christian name, as one has to begin some time. Her Christian name was Susan, a name inimical for confidences, but it could not be helped now.

“Oh, Susan,” she said, “you don’t mind my calling you that, do you, because I feel such friends with you. You have no idea how relieved I am. I wanted so much to know what you thought about poor Madge, and I should have found it so hard to begin, unless you had said what you did say at breakfast about asking them here. Of course it was all a terrible grief to me, you can well understand that.”

“Yes, dear?” said Lady Dover interrogatively.

“I know you see what I mean. The marriage with Philip Home was so nice, so suitable, and it was all arranged. People stopped in London particularly for it.”

Lady Dover’s calm eyes surveyed the terrace, the glen, and lastly her companion.

“But surely that is rather a conventional view to take,” she said. “What does a little inconvenience matter, if your daughter’s happiness is secured? I am told they are devoted to each other.”

Now Lady Ellington in her most wild and wayward dreams had never conceived it possible that she could be called, or remotely labelled, “conventional” by Susan. She had much to learn, however.

“I hope I am not a slave to convention, or anything of the sort,” continued Lady Dover; “but if Madge really loved Mr. Dundas, why on earth should she not marry him? Suppose she had married Mr. Home, and found out afterwards she was not really fond of him? One does not like to contemplate such things; there is a certain suspicion of coarseness even in the thought. I do not know what the view of the world may be, for the view of the world concerns me very little, but I feel quite sure that a girl is right in obeying the dictates of her own heart.”

Lady Ellington longed to contradict all this; it was not in the least in accord with what she felt, and what she felt she was accustomed to state. Thus the suppression of it was not easy.

“How lovely those lights on the hillside are,” said Lady Dover, in parenthesis. “Mr. Dennison ought to see them before he settles on the subject of his next picture. Yes, about Madge. I don’t know what other people think about it all, I only know what I think, and I am sure Dover agrees with me. It was a love match, was it not? What more do you want? Of course if Mr. Home had been a duke and Madge a girl without any position – ”

“You mean it is just a question of degree?” asked Lady Ellington.

“Ah, my dear – er – Margaret,” said Lady Dover, with a certain intonation of relief, because she was sure that her excellent memory had not played her false, “everything is a question of degree; there is nothing in the world into which circumstances, mitigating or the reverse, do not enter. How beautiful the rowan-berries are, I wish Mr. Dennison could see them. They would work into his foreground so well. I must take him to the end of the terrace to-morrow. Yes; but the mitigating circumstances are here so strong. She threw over Mr. Home, who is charming – I met him twice last year at dinner somewhere, and we asked him to lunch, only he could not come – and has married a man who is charming also, with whom she fell in love. How vivid his portraits are, too; I am going to be painted by him next spring, if he can find time. Almost too vivid, perhaps; they seem to jump out on you. But that is my view about the whole question. Supposing she had married Mr. Home, and had fallen in love afterwards! That sort of tragedy is so dreadful; such extraordinary cleverness is required to avoid all the horror of publicity. I could never survive publicity.”

“But there is publicity as it is,” said Lady Ellington. “Poor Madge! What will people think of her? And of me?”

Lady Dover throughout this conversation had given justification after justification for the importance that Lady Ellington attached to her verdict. She gave more now.

“There is publicity, it is true,” she said; “but no sense of respectability has been offended. Of her, they will think that she fell in love and followed her instincts. Of you, they will think that you tried, like an excellent mother, to secure an excellent match for your daughter, but that your daughter chose for herself.”

Lady Dover’s serene face grew a shade more shrewd.

“You see, she has not married Tom or Dick or James,” she said. “Mr. Dundas, in fact, is a sufficiently important person. Was it that you meant, by the way, by saying it was a question of degree? I don’t know what his income is; it may be precarious. But he has great talent. And talent happens to be rather fashionable. I daresay it is only a phase, but after all one wants, if the sacrifice of no principle is involved, to be abreast with the world.”

Now Lady Ellington could not possibly have been called a conceited woman, and her conviction that she was herself pretty well abreast of the world was founded on sober experience. She was up to most things, in fact; the world, on the whole, did not worst her. Yet when Susan spoke of being abreast of the world, she was conscious that another plane altogether was indicated, a plane to which she had to struggle and aspire, whereas Susan moved quite easily and naturally on it. All the way from Golspie she had been labeling her hostess as conventional, but what if this conventionalism came out on the other side, so to speak, and was really the summit of worldly wisdom, a peak, not a mediocre plateau, where Susan and others walked gently about, as at some place of corrective waters, exchanging commonplaces. For Lady Dover, she was beginning to see, was not in the least conventional because it was the way of the world; she was conventional because she was made like that. It was the world, in fact, which was conventional because it was like Lady Dover, not Lady Dover who was conventional because she was like the world. Indeed she had spoken no more than the truth when she said the opinion of the world did not matter to her – it did not; she never had to take it into consideration, simply because it was quite certain to coincide with her own. And Lady Ellington found herself thinking that when Susan died her portrait ought really to be put in a stained glass window, a figure that should typify for all time the solid, respectable, virtuous aspects of the British aristocracy.

They walked in silence for a few moments, for there was really nothing more to say on the subject. Then Lady Ellington took Susan’s arm and pressed it.

“It is a great, great relief to me to know you feel like that,” she said, “and you have made my line with regard to Madge so clear. Poor Madge, I have been too hard on her, but the disappointment was so great. I could not help feeling for Philip, too.”

“Of course one is always sorry for people in trouble,” said Lady Dover, “particularly if it is not their fault. I will write to Madge this morning. And now, do you know, it is almost time you went off to the river. I insist on your being Lady Salmon by this evening. Mr. Osborne is so quick and clever, is he not?”