Love's Usuries.

by Louis Creswicke.

Love's Usuries.

"The star of love is a flower--a deathless token, That grows beside the gate of unseen things."

Among friends, parting for a lengthy spell has its disadvantages. They age in character and physique, and after the reconnoitre there is a pathetic consciousness of the grudging confessions which time has inscribed on the monumental palimpsest. My meeting with Bentham after a severance of years was bleak with this pathos. But he was gay as ever, and better dressed than he used to be in the old art school days, with a self-respecting adjustment of hat and necktie that had been unknown in Bohemia; for he was no longer a boy, but a man, and a noted one, and fortune had stroked him into sleekness. The gender of success must be feminine: she is so capricious. Hitherto her smiles have been for veterans grown h.o.a.ry in doing; now she opens her arms for youngsters grown great merely by daring. Bentham, it must be owned, had dared uncommonly well, and success had pillowed his head in her lap while she twined the bay with her fingers. But lines round his mouth and fatigued cynicism on the eyelids betrayed the march of years, and, more, the thinker, who, like most thinkers, plumbs to exhaustion in a bottomless pit. For all that he was excellent company. On his walls hung innumerable trophies of foreign travel and unique specimens of his own art-bent and with these, by gesture or by anecdote, he gave an unconscious synopsis of the skipped pages in our friendship's volume.

"This," he said, "is the original of 'Earth's Fair Daughters,' the canvas that brought me to the front; and here"--handing an alb.u.m--"is the presentment of my benefactress."

"Benefactress?" I queried.

"Yes. I don't attempt to pad you with the social tarra-diddle that genius finds nuggets on the surface of the diggings. Fame was due to myself, and fortune to Mrs Brune--a dear old creature who bought my pictures with a persistence worthy a better cause. She died, leaving me her sole heir."

"And hence these travels?"

"Yes. When I lost sight of you in Paris I hewed a new route to notice. I played at being successful, bought my own pictures through dealers--_incog._, of course--at enormous prices. That tickled the ears of the Press."

"But how about commission?"

"Oh, the dealers earned it, and my money was well invested. I became talked about. The public knew nothing of my talent, and people love to talk of what they understand least."

"You belittle yourself, Bentham. You felt your work was sound--that you were bound to become great."

"True; otherwise I could not have stooped to play the charlatan. Without it my work might as well have been rotten for all the public could judge. Charlatanism is the only 'open sesame' to the world's cave, once you get inside you may be as honest as you please. All is fair in love or art or war, and there is a consolation in knowing that one's aim is Jesuitical, and not merely base. Had it not been for Mrs Brune--good soul--and the gambling instinct, I might be still, like you and Grey's 'gem of purest ray serene,' flashing my facets in the desert."

From Mrs Brune's portrait he devolved on one or two others of persons distinguished in the art sphere, whose autographs, with cordial or extravagant expressions of devotion, scrambled octopus-wise over the card.

"And here," he said, handling an alb.u.m bound in chicken skin, adorned with the grace of Watteau's rurality--"here are my Flower Martyrs."

"What does that mean?" asked I, knowing him for an eccentric of eccentrics.

"Don't you remember the quotation, 'Butchered to make a Roman holiday?'

It struck me once I should like to make an index of the flower lives that had been sacrificed on the Altar of Selfishness."

"And this is the index?"

"No, not exactly. I soon tired of the experiment, for there was such wholesale murder it was impossible to keep pace with it. I then confined myself to the martyrs, the veritable martyrs broken on the rack of human emotion. Here are a few--with remarks and dates--they have each a little history of love or heroism or----" he shuffled for a term.

"Lunacy," I offered.

"Yes, that is the best word. They convey little histories of lunacy--my own and others."

"May I inspect them?"

"You may," he conceded, throwing himself into an arm-chair and looking over his elbow at the open page. "First," he said, "some rose leaves."

He coughed slightly, and stirred the fire with caution, as though it shaped some panorama he feared to disarrange. Then he began his story:--

"First some rose leaves shaken into the finger-gla.s.s of a great actress--you know Lalage?--on the night when all Paris was intoxicated by her. It was my supper, and she honoured me. Many men would gladly have been that rose--to lay down its life for a touch of her finger-tips: several have parted with all that life holds dear for less than that."

He struck a match and lit a cigarette, throwing the case to me, and then proceeded:--

"The bowls were fragrant with attar, and those petals like fairy boats skimmed over the scented surface of the water. They seemed very red then, but they are faded enough now."

He again stared at the fire as though to a.s.sist his memory by its pictures.

"Lalage is a great artist, and like all great artists her contact brings completeness and a sense of fulfilment to everything--colour, purpose, expression. I had just heard her in the _role_ of Chimene, in the wonderful scene when, not daring to avow her love for Rodrigue, she should have uttered '_Va-je ne te hais point_,' and where she merely stood with moving lips--powerless to articulate from the suppressed immensity of her pa.s.sion. We, of the audience, by one consent seemed to shiver--to shudder as though a polar breeze had swept over the tropic night--so tragic, so real, so ardent, this unspeakable, this unspoken confession."

"And what of Mons. Redan?" I questioned.

"The Count that turned actor? He played the part of Rodrigue, and he told me afterwards that there were times when a sob would choke him as he listened."

"And Redan loved her?"

"Loved? Oh, pale, anaemic, wan-complexioned word to run in leash with Redan. He loved her so much that he was willing to barter name, possessions, career for the warmth of her lips."

"And she?"

"And she----" he said, suddenly disturbing his fire panorama with a dash of the poker. "Well, she took them."

There was silence for a moment or two as I turned the page--silence that was accentuated by the falling ash, which dropped white and weightless like the thousand lives that sink daily to dust exhausted with hope deferred. Then he eyed the vegetable ma.s.s that faced me.

"A camellia," he explained, "crushed and brown. It was plucked from the dead breast of a woman. It was the solitary witness of the last act of a tragedy. The Prince K. was more than a kind patron--an almost friend to me. He valued my apprehension of art, and shadowed me from the hour I first began to paint little Gretchen carrying her father's cobblings to their owners. He bought the picture, and ceaselessly employed me to make sketches of her in some way or another--as a queen--as a boy--as a _danseuse_. He loved to see her in all disguises, for she had the true model's faculty for lending herself to, and developing every pose. Then came the question of marriage--it is inevitable when a man meets a girl with eyes like altar lights, clear and holy beacons of G.o.d. Marriage, between a prince of the blood and the child of a shoemaker!"

Bentham gave vent to a low laugh, which was quite devoid of merriment.

It is the trick of those who spend their lives in plumbing the unfathomable; it translates the meagreness and vacuity of their lore.

"Of course the family was outraged," he went on; "his mother appealed, grovelled on her knees, so it is said, and in the end he gave way. He agreed to part from his beloved. But he asked that she might sit for me, and would sometimes muse for hours over the latest travail of my brush.

Then he became engaged to the Countess Dahlic--there is no accounting for the moral weakness of men under family pressure--and the wedding day was fixed. All this time he had kept his word. He had never spoken to or seen Gretchen, and she, poor child, was dying--yes, dying slowly--not as we die, but fading like twilight, imperceptibly, fainting like high purpose, blighted by the coa.r.s.e breath of the million."

He knocked the end off his cigarette and stared for a while at the gas-smoked ceiling.

"Then--one day when the marriage was close at hand, when flags hung from the housetops and garlands across the streets, there was a stir in the house of the cobbler. Gretchen had been sitting to me as a Spanish maid in a mantilla, with a camellia in her hair and on her chest. Dressed so, she was found locked in the arms of the Prince. Both were dead--and the camellia was crushed to brown as you see. It came into my possession with the lace which belonged to me--an art property that is now too entangled with the human and with the divine ever to be used lightly again."

"A sad story," I sighed, turning the leaf. "Poor child, so young and pretty and----"

"Good," he added. "It is astonishing to calculate the amount of virtue which lurks about unlabelled by the wedding ring."

"That," he said, turning over a fresh page, "was once a bunch of violets; it should have belonged to Jacquaine."

"Who was Jacquaine?"