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CHAPTER XIX
“YOUTH AT THE PROW AND PLEASURE AT THE HELM”
MEANWHILE, Tristan’s picture of Adelheid Stern was begun and grew prosperously. It was Miss Brabazon’s whim, delightedly adopted by the young artist himself, that her beautiful protégée should be painted in the character of Hypatia. Not Hypatia the agonising victim, but Hypatia the ardent, successful orator, in the full pride and triumph of her noble career. Tristan’s conception of the subject was splendid, and his outlines full of masterful power, but his colouring, which was curiously unconventional, gave the picture a weird, startling effect, not unlike that which he himself was everywhere wont to produce by the peculiarity of his appearance and conversation. The woman philosopher, with gleaming, unbound hair and flowing robes stood erect as before an audience, in the act of delivering some impassioned discourse, her eyes dilated with a rapture of intense appeal, and upon her exquisite face, the confidence and enthusiasm of an inspired Pythoness; but the eerie-like light upon the lifted head, and the fervid shadow introduced by way of contrast, gave an unreality to the subject and impressed the beholder with the idea that the picture was an allegory in colour; forcible and didactic certainly, but no faithful rendering of actual flesh and blood. It was such a composition as one may imagine the famous somnambulist-painter to have wrought in his extatic sleep, – the picture of a vision – the work of a dreaming, fantastic brain.
Now it came to pass, of course, that during the progress of this very dramatic portrait, painter and model lived much in each other’s society. Every morning in fact, the hours intervening between breakfast and luncheon were devoted to the pursuit of Art in Tristan’s atelier, on
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which occasions Lady Cairnsmuir or Miss Diana always “assisted” (in the French sense of the word) and not infrequently, both chaperones were present together. So it naturally resulted that my Lady and the communicative Amazon became, before long, a pair of tolerably sociable gossips, united in cordial agreement upon at least one important subject – the absolute peerlessness of Tristan and Adelheid.
And with these two – our hero and heroine – how fared it? Does the reader expect to be told that they fell in vulgar, lawful love with each other, as many a couple of tame pigeons would have done under similar tempting circumstances? Ah, but this boy and girl were not tame pigeons, but wild rock-loving birds of a very strange plumage, nowise related to the milky-silky doves which drew the car of Aphrodite; and the fellowship which arose between them suited in kind with the rarity of their natures. Tristan was not unlike Shelley’s Prince Athanase. Like that eccentric rover, he lived in fantasy, with “a cloud and a burden upon his eyes,” yet, “unenslaved of aught in heaven or earth;” but the likeness was still with a difference, for it was the fate of Athanase to be betrayed by Pandemos, the earthly and unworthy Venus, and the true Lady of his soul only came to him hand-in-hand with Death. But Fortune, kindlier to Le Rodeur than to the vagabond Prince, gave him his twin-spirit earlier, and as though to amuse herself by fostering the hectic illusions with which he had overlaid Life and its absurdities granted him the realization of his Ideal, and enriched him in the very morning of youth, with the gift of a sympathy as actual and perfect as that which endeared the first woman to her yearning spouse in the original Garden of Hesperides.
Between Tristan and Adelheid therefore, arose no ordinary shame-faced attachment with blushes for sweetening, and marriage as its goal; no, nor did they fall victims to that more hysteric passion celebrated by the author of “Poems and Ballads,” for the muse of Mr. A. C. Swinburne never tuned her voluptuous notes to the heart-strings of Adelheid Stern,
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and would have had as little fellowship with her as with the Virgin Mary. Love is not the same emotion to the children of genius and to the children of day. This is a thing which has been so often said, and in so many various ways, that it is now regarded as a sheer truism, but yet I doubt whether it be really admitted or comprehended on all hands. It has often occurred to me, that a very telling and agreeable essay might he written upon the different causes and sources of the master-passion, and that it might he interesting as well as amusing to compute the statistics of the heart, and inquire what intellectual or emotional agent is most active and effective in arousing human love. There are, for example, the loves that have their birth in pity, such as Beauty’s for the unfortunate Beast; the loves which are the offspring of admiration, such as Medea’s for the hero Jason; the loves which are due to respect and esteem, such as that of Annie Strong for the old Doctor; the sudden loves of fascination, the dutiful loves of gratitude, the unruly loves of desire, the love which begins in positive aversion and repugnance to its object; and the love – perhaps commonest of all – which is based on the gratification of personal Vanity and delight in conquest.
But better and rarer far than any of these, is the love which is born of sympathy, the only passion which really deserves to be called magnetic: a passion, which wherever it exists in its integrity, needs no explicit declaration and yet knows neither reserve nor bashfulness. This “perfect love,” indeed, is the ideal marriage, into which the question of “first and foremost” does not enter. It is absolute union, and therefore absolute equality. But as it exists only between rare and poetic souls, and sometimes under circumstances which, the “brute world” condemns, it is very seldom appreciated, and many deny even the possibility of its existence, at least on this side of Styx.
Of all the poets, I fancy that the two Brownings have described it the most delicately.
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And this is the love which Tristan and Adelheid bore to each other.
They were pleasant days that Lady Dolores and Diana spent in the pretty little studio allotted to the boy-artist; days which floated by like rare music or sweet colours, peaceful serene elysian days that to one storm-beaten heart at least, were like the shadow of a great rock in a weary Iand.
In Tristan’s atelier the effect of refined feminine supervision and adjustment were preeminent. The deft artistic fingers of Adelheid and the two elder ladies speedily converted the painting-room and its adjoining antechamber into a pair of the daintiest boudoirs imaginable; and those potent charms of taste and fitness which belong exclusively to the womanly element, never signalized themselves more conspicuously and enchantingly than in this little Parisian haunt of the Arts and Graces. A piano had been imported into the larger apartment allotted to the important business of the day, in order that when Tristan was tired of handling the brush, and Adelheid of enacting her solitary tableau vivant, the pleasures of the easel might he exchanged for those of song, and leisure be afforded our young Raffael for the enjoyment of his matutinal cigarette. And, sooth to say, he was often joined in that pleasant oriental recreation by the lively Diana, always ready to promote any infringement, however small, of masculine prerogatives; and even by the serene peeress herself, with whom Tristan was all-powerful; one word from his lips or one glance of his eyes would have sufficed indeed to beguile her into the commission of far more preposterous and outlandish extravagancies. It must not be supposed by the intelligent peruser of these authentic pages that either her Ladyship or her sage coadjutor were so lost in their Sybarite-like bliss as to be wholly unmindful or careless of the consequences which might, possibly at least, result from this familiar intercourse between their respective charges; but the matter presented itself to Miss Brabazon in a very different light from that in which my
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Lady regarded it. Diana readily entertained a few uneasy qualms on behalf of her brother, for the ultimate success of whose yet unproffered suit she had not ceased to hope; and although she endeavoured to dismiss her fears when she perceived the perfect ease of speech and manner which speedily began to characterise the friendship of these two eccentric and unacknowledged waifs and strays, she could not altogether rid herself of a lurking suspicion that if they were to make love to one another, this was just the free and unembarrassed way in which they would do it. Our Amazonian friend was a shrewd observer – most ladies of her calibre are – and she knew well that if the fair Adelheid were not as other women are in disposition and behaviour respecting ordinary topics, she was likely to be doubly peculiar in any affair immediately concerning her own heart. Diana was painfully aware too, that the strong contrast existing between the mysterious young visionary with his poetic temperament and romantic idealism, and the diplomatic Sir Vivian, who notwithstanding his generous nature was yet thoroughly a man of society – was a contrast not likely in Adelheid’s estimation to tell much in the baronet’s favour; reflections which from time to time considerably troubled his impetuous sister, and even caused her once or twice to feel something like regret for the part she had taken in promoting this new intimacy between her sister-in-law elect and Lady Cairnsmuir’s favourite. But the Countess, whose senses were quite as acute as Miss Brabazon’s upon any subject which affected Tristan, treated this important matter very differently. Though she had a vague intention of acknowledging the son of Jean Le Rodeur at some indefinite future time under some indefinite future circumstance, it was quite impossible, she knew, that he could ever become her heir or her husband’s, and his marriage therefore, was a subject about which it was unnecessary to interfere. If this brilliant songstress were willing to become her son’s wife, my Lady could see no objection to the match. Tristan was exceptionally
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handsome, the girl was remarkably beautiful; he was dark, she fair, both were artists, their opinions and views of life seemed similar; and money was not likely to be wanting upon either side. Dolores, who bad already conceived an ardent admiration and tenderness towards this sweet German girl, felt that she should be nowise ill-disposed to enfold her in the embrace of a mother, nor even loth to accord her a just share of her darling’s affection. But neither the Countess nor Di Brabazon dreamed in what sort of a tragedy this pretty domestic melodrama was destined to find its dénouement.
On a certain singularly warm and pleasant afternoon, somewhere towards the beginning of December, a little before the early sunset-time, while the soft sleep-pervading air of Paris was yet full of the day’s glow, and the dim phantom-light of the dead summer seemed for a brief space to have returned as in a dream to the slumbering world, – the high unearthlike notes of a voice which might have been indeed the voice of Israfel (1), the sweetest singer among the seraphs, floated through the reposeful delicious quietude of Tristan’s firelit studio. With her far gleaming fingers upon the keys of the piano and her electric eyes steadfastly addressed towards the fading daylight, Adelheid Stern, habited in white classic drapery, and aureoled with the long streaming masses of her moony hair, seemed less a heathen Hypatia than a Saint Cecilia leading the divine minstrelsy of a heavenly choir.
At her feet in a half-reclining attitude upon a low tabouret, the motionless figure of Tristan Le Rodeur in his usual fantastic attire, his dark weird face uplifted to hers, and his hands clasped upon his knee, completed a wonderful picture, which my pen lacks cunning to depict. For indeed, to render faithfully such scenes as this, one has need, not of one solitary art, but of the whole circle, and nothing can fairly develop
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the vivid passages of imagination except the resources of the stage. I suppose all writers, however powerful and highly dowered with the gift of language, must at times be keenly sensible of the impotency of their particular craft, and of its inadequacy to suffice for the conveyance of their glowing fancies and redundant visions. Does the painter also at times wish that it were possible to fix with his brush the sound of some passing melody, or thirst to endow his mimicked streams with the silvern swirl and babble of their living originals, or to fill the copious foliage of his voiceless forests with the quiver of that incessant motion, which is as much a part of the Nature he seeks to imitate as its less subtle attributes of form and colour? Whether or not these Promethean yearnings do really occur to masters of the pen and pencil I have never heard; the fancy that such experiences are probable, originates simply in the dissatisfaction which is forced upon me by the consciousness of my own incapability to describe certain scenic effects which my mind conceives with perfect vigour, and especially such scenes as this one now before me, which owes its principal enchantment to the influence of sweet and lingering sounds. The mere picture of the silent room is beautiful enough, with its curious contrasts and rare blended hues; Tristan’s tall easel by the window, just tipped and touched about its corners by a mellow smirch of sunshine, close beside it a chair of the renaissance date, with a faded satin cushion in it, and, thrown carelessly across one of its carved elbow supports, my Lady’s velvet mantle deeply bordered with sable – wonderful in its capacious folds, and smooth rich shadows. In the little antechamber beyond, my Lady herself seated cosily in a chaise longue, and discussing at leisure the contents of a pretty Japanese tea cup, is dimly visible through the fragrant slow circling cloud of Miss Diana’s cigarette, the absence of which magic vapour indeed would leave something lacking in this charming picture to at least one of the senses. The little coterie have lunched en quartette in Tristan’s apartments, and this is the approved
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and established hour of Kettledrum, a domestic rite which few ladies care to neglect under any circumstances; and especially when the prospect of a long and fatiguing evening lies before them, the grateful repose of the sunset hour, and the refreshing aroma of the ante-prandial Pekoe are trebly precious and enjoyable.
And this afternoon is one of Lady Cairnsmuir’s happiest. Through the soft rolling folds of delicate smoke-wreaths she sees as once Lord Surrey saw in the enchanter’s mirror, a vision not indeed of the present, but of the past, a picture from the romance of her old dead love, revived in the gracious youth and beauty of her only son. She sees him with his father’s face raised towards the fair woman beside him, the rapture of his father’s smile upon his lips, and in his eyes the old ineffable light of tenderness that was wont to illumine the eyes of Jean Le Rodeur when they looked on her – on her, just two and twenty years ago!
What a charm there is in beautiful music! How it floats and falls and swells through the hazy air of the studio; how it thrills my Lady’s heart and mingles itself and its rich solemn sweetness with the dim haunting shadows of things gone by that people her reverie as she sits here in the faint light of sundown, drinking in the balmy melody and gazing her fill at the face that is so like the face of the Dead!
But the witchcraft of Adelheid’s minstrelsy, like the matchless song which the fatal sirens sang in old times, and the aromatic breath of that yet more seductive goddess Nicotine, have together woven so potent a spell about the impressible senses of Miss Diana, that she not only forgets for the nonce to shake her bangles and contort her eyebrows, but absolutely abandons herself, bangles and eyebrows inclusive, to the placidity and torpor of an afternoon siesta. And if the somnolent divinities aforesaid permit any illusive visions to visit her comfortable dormeuse, they are probably not of the past but of the
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Future, that gracious liberal future – with a large F – anticipated by Tennyson’s sapient Princess, when everywhere –
“. . . . . with equal husbandry,
The Woman shall he equal to the Man.”
But while Adelheid sings on in the rolling German language she best loves to use, and my Lady always listening, unconsciously anglicises the verses as they float from the singer’s lips, a certain word often repeated with plaintive iteration, and the dawning of a peculiar smile upon Tristan’s lifted face fix her attention with sudden and awful intensity, and with a convulsive gesture she starts forward as though the thrilling touch of a spectre-hand had awakened her from some feverish mesmeric slumber. For thus it was that the lovely German sang:
“Cool silence broods where yonder last
Pale rose of twilight dies;
Drop down on me the vanished Past
O Night of stars and sighs –
Calm fateful stars that fire the vast
Dim meadows of the skies!
"One tender dream of deep delight
The Day’s rude passion mars,
Its veil of sunshine from my sight,
One blessed presence bars;
More sweet to me the stilly Night
Of floating Winds and Stars!
“Ah, sweet lost Love! my sorrow’s Queen!
Return, – this hour is thine!
Stoop from the starry heaven and lean
To touch this soul of mine,
With eyes imperial and serene
As yonder spheres divine!”
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With a hasty glance at the oblivious Miss Brabazon, her ladyship rises, and passing into the larger apartment, seats herself gently beside the piano.
“Child,” she says, in a low voice, as she lays her hand upon Adelheid’s, and meets the crystalline eyes tenderly with her own, “I want you to tell me your story.”
The request is certainly abrupt, the manner of it is infinitely earnest and caressive.
“My story, Countess? What - my story as a child in Germany, before I met – “
“Yes! Yes! Before you met Miss Brabazon!”
My Lady’s words are urgent, and she scans the beautiful features, with eager scrutiny, in which there is blent a strange expression of earning.
With a little soft sigh, Adelheid withdraws her own gaze, and yielding one white hand to Tristan’s, while the other strays and flits, swallow-wise over the keys of the piano, dipping now and then upon some dreamy, wave-like chord, she gives, in the sweet, broken accents of her uncertain English, the long-desired sequel of Frau Engel’s romance – the missing record which the broken-hearted mother of Dorothea strove so unweariedly and so vainly to discover for more than thirteen hopeless years. In murmured child-like tones she tells how she crept out from the wharf-inn by the river-side in London, and wandered, a homeless, lonely little fugitive from town to town, sometimes begging and sometimes dancing for a dole of bread or money, but always making her way towards the sea, and always steadfast in one intent – to reach Antwerp somehow, and find her grandmother. Softly and pathetically she tells how at last it chanced she met with some strolling minstrels going abroad, German adventurers on their return to “Fatherland,” who took a fancy to the little ragged, fair-haired child, and for the sake of her story and of the tie of common nationality that bound them
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to her, carried her along with them to Hamburg. And there the party divided, some went one way and some another, but Adelheid, always stedfast in her own intent, would go with none, but broke away from them one day in the early dawn, and went on her travels alone, dancing and singing her way through the German villages with that one un-changing purpose in her baby heart – to reach Antwerp at last and find her grandmother. But that was not to be, for at Helmstedt the little singer attracted the notice of Di Brabazon, who had accompanied her brother on one of his political errands to Germany, and was amusing herself by wandering about some of the most picturesque hamlets she could find, and picking up rarities of “sorts” as it chanced, with coin or with pencil. And Di, greatly smitten by the beauty and the voice of this strolling fairy who belonged to nobody, determined upon carrying her off and ”making something of her,” which design she contrived to execute under the colourable pretext of helping Adelheid to look for the lost grandmother.
So they went on together, Diana and the child, to Madeburg, where Vivian joined them, and little by little, by dint of a thousand tricks and devices, Miss Brabazon weaned the thoughts of her adopted charge from the object of her pursuit, and brought her again to England.
While this recital lasted, Lady Cairnsmuir had never moved her eyes from the beautiful face of the speaker, whose right hand Tristan still retained in his, while its fellow rambled to and fro over the piano keys and bird-like warbled among them. And now that the story is ended, the Countess bends forward eagerly, with that same strange deathly pallor upon her lips which Ella noticed at Rome on the night of my Lady’s first visit to Tristan: and in low, hurried tones that seem like audible heart-beats, she asks a question.
“Your name, – your name? It is not Adelheid Stern!”
The answer is hurried too, for Di Brabazon’s protégée is plainly surprised and disturbed.
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“No. They Germanized the surname abroad to make it sound more natural and easy, I suppose. I was christened Gretel Adelheid – the first after my grandmother, the second because my mother fancied it and by the second she always called me. But my father was an Englishman and his name was Laurence Starr.”
My Lady, still in the same watchful attitude, speaks again in a swift whisper.
“You told Miss Brabazon all this?”
“Yes; she said it was a chimera, a child’s hallucination, and at last I almost thought so myself. She made me very happy and loved me and I forgot the grandmother I had never seen. Was it not natural, – how do I know there ever was really such a person?”
As she slowly utters the last words she fixes her marvellous eyes penetratingly upon her interlocutor, divining that something at least of this buried romance is known to the Countess. Who rises from her seat by the piano, and passionately clasps the beautiful actress in her arms – once, twice, in silence; then holding her out at arms length gazes delightedly into the lovely face and cries, with falling tears of joy that well-nigh blind her sight.
“It is true! It is all true! You are the grandchild of the dearest friend I ever had, – of Tristan’s nurse and mine! Thank God! thank God! O Frau Gretel, if from Paradise you see us now and bear witness that I have indeed found the child of your darling, hear me promise that for the sake of the dead past and of the bond between us the daughter of Dorothea shall be to me as my very own; and as my child long ago was dear to your loving heart, so dear henceforth shall Adelheid be to mine!”
With a tender significant gesture she replaces in Tristan’s the hand which in her agitation Fräulein Stern had withdrawn, and lays her own expressively upon them both. It is an action not hard to interpret, and the eyes of the brother and sister artists meet in silence. My Lady
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has given them to one another for ever, and they need no spoken words of betrothal to cement their happy union.
But this charming little scene has not been enacted without some inevitable stir, and dozing Miss Di becomes presently aware that the Countess has vacated her chaise-longue in the tea-room, and that something of an agitating nature has been going on in the studio. The music, too, has ceased, and Diana thinks she hears somebody crying softly. Can these three be concocting some scheme of marrying Tristan and Adelheid? The poor Amazon grows positively cold as the idea thrills her awakened senses. At any rate no time is to be lost; she will tell Vivian to speak his wishes at Once. The dear child will surely not refuse him when she hears him ask her with his own lips! Oh, surely not!
NOTES
(173:1) “And the Angel Israfel, whose heart-strings are a lute, and who hath the sweetest voice of all God’s creatures.” – Koran.
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