The Story of Louie.

by Oliver Onions.

PROLOGUE

I

In an old number of _Punch_, under the heading "Society's New Pet: The Artist's Model," is to be found a drawing by Du Maurier, of which the descriptive text runs:

"And how did you and Mr. Sopley come to quarrel, dear Miss Dragon?"

"Well, your Grace, it was like this: I was sitting to him in a cestus for 'The Judgment of Paris,' when someone called as wished to see him most particular; so he said: 'Don't move, Miss Dragon, or you'll disturb the cestus.' 'Very good, sir,' I said, and off he went; and when he come back in an hour and a 'alf or so he said: 'You've moved, Miss Dragon!' 'I 'aven't!' I said. 'You '_ave_!' he said. 'I 'AVEN'T!' I said--and no more I 'adn't, your Grace. And with that I off with his cestus an' wished him good-morning, an' I never been near him since!"

Du Maurier may or may not have been wrong about the newness of this craze of "Society's." If he was right, the Honourable Emily Scarisbrick becomes at once a pioneer. Let there be set down, here in the beginning, the plain facts of how, a good ten years before the indignant Miss Dragon "offed with" Mr. Sopley's cestus, the Honourable Emily found a way to bridge the gulf that lies between Bohemia and Mayfair.

Except in the case of one person not yet born into these pages, the report that the lady had engaged herself, early in the year 1869, to "Mr. Buckley, her drawing-master," had only a short currency. It was probably devised by the Honourable Emily herself in order to soften the blow for her brother, Lord Moone. The real name of the man to whom she engaged herself was James Buckley Causton. Under this name he appears on the rolls of the 4th Dragoon Guards as a trooper in the years 1862-1867; and as "Buck" Causton he attained some celebrity when, in the last-named year, he vanquished one Piker Betteridge in the prize ring, in a battle which, beginning with gloves and ending with bare knuckles, lasted for nearly nine hours.

For all we know, it may have been Miss Dragon's Mr. Sopley who, seeing the magnificent Buck in the ring, first put it into the ex-trooper's head to become an artists' model. However it was, an artists' model he did become, and, as such, the rage. No doubt Sopley, if it were he, would gladly have kept his discovery to himself; but a neck like a sycamore and a thorax capable of containing nine-hours-contest lungs cannot be hid when Academy time comes round. Sopley's measure was known. If Sopley painted an heroic picture it was certain he had had a hero as model. The Academy opens in May; before June was out Sopley's find was no longer his own. Sir Frederick Henson, the artist who moved so in the world that in him the tradition of the monarch who picked up the painter's brush for him might almost have been said to live again, saw Buck, marked Buck down as his own, and presently had sole possession of Buck.

The Honourable Emily Scarisbrick already had possession of Sir Frederick. To be sure, it neither needed a Sir Frederick Henson to teach her the stippling of birds' eggs and the copying of castles for the alb.u.ms of her friends, nor was the great Academician accustomed to stooping to the office of salaried drawing-master; but--the Honourable Emily was a Scarisbrick, of Mallard Bois.

In Henson's studio the Honourable Emily first saw Buck Causton.

To say that she fell in love with him would demand a definition of the term. Certainly she fell in something with him. Perhaps that something was the something that at the last thrusts baronies and Mallard Boises aside as hindrances to a design even larger than that in which they play so important a part; but we have nothing to do with large designs here. Call it what you will: something proper enough to legend, but of little enough propriety in a modern lady's life; a feeble echo of Romance, perhaps, but never itself to become Romance unless, of it or present scandal, it should prove the stronger. At any rate, it was a very different thing from anything she felt, or ever had felt, for Captain Cecil Chaffinger, of the White Hussars, her brother's nominee for her hand.

It was a word dropped by the gallant Captain, himself a follower of the fancy, that led her to the discovery that the hero of some feat or other of extraordinary skill and endurance, and the young Ajax, all chest and grey eyes and brown curls, who did odd jobs about the studio in the intervals of posing for Henson's demiG.o.dlike canvases, were one and the same person. Her already throbbing pulse bounded. She herself was twenty-eight, a small, dark, febrile woman, given over to discontents based on nothing save on an irremediably spoiled childhood, and perhaps hankering after an indiscretion in the conviction that indiscretions were of two kinds--indiscretions, and the indiscretions of the Scarisbricks. Naturally she became conscious of a quickened interest in her art.

The first indication that this interest pa.s.sed beyond birds eggs and castles was that she began "Lessons in Drapery." If here for a few moments her story becomes a little technical, it may be none the less interesting on that account.

The study of Drapery _as_ Drapery has not much interest for anybody unless perhaps for a student of mechanics. For all that, it is, or then was, regarded by drawing-masters as a self-contained subject, to be tackled, ticked off, and thenceforward possessed. To the study of Drapery in this unrelated sense the Honourable Emily apparently inclined. Seeing her therefore, in this fundamental error, Sir Frederick, a master of Drapery, took from her the "copies" which had already supplanted the "copies" of castles in her portfolio, and good-humouredly began to tell her what she really wanted. What she really wanted, he said, was to rid her mind of the idea that folds existed for their own sake, and to endeavour to realise that their real significance lay in the thing enfolded. Miss Scarisbrick thanked him.

So, at first from the lay figure, and then from Henson's model, she began to draw Drapery with special reference to the thing draped.

About this time she gave Captain Chaffinger for an answer a "No" which he refused to take. His devotion, he said, forbade him. If by his devotion he meant his devotion to his creditors, his constancy remained at their service. In the meantime he was still able to pay his old debts by contracting new ones.

The Honourable Emily's studies became diligent.

There is little to be said about these things except that they do happen. A word now about Buck's att.i.tude.

Had the Honourable Emily's maid thrown herself at his head he would have known what to do. His sense of the holiness of social degrees would have received no shock. But the Honourable Emily, who could command her maid, could not command what in all probability her maid would not have had to ask twice for. The most she got (when after much that is omitted here, it did at last dawn on the bashful Buck that she had any will in the matter at all) was a blush so sudden and violent that it compelled an embarra.s.sed reddening of her own cheeks also.

Buck was not personally outraged. It was his sense of Order that was outraged. He remembered the lady's station for her, and, stammeringly but reverentially, put her back into it.

Now to be merely reverential to a woman who is in love with you is to provoke impatience, anger and tears. On the other hand, to see a woman in tears because you will not permit her to humiliate herself is to have the other half of an impossible situation. It was one luncheon-time (the Honourable Emily now lunched frequently at the studio) that the tears came.

"Oh, you don't care for me--you don't care for me!" she sobbed.

Buck could not truthfully have said that he did care for her; but there she was before him, in tears.

"If it were that Dragon girl, now----"

Buck, while not failing to see the force of this, could only make imploring movements for the Honourable Emily to calm herself.

Presently she did calm herself, sufficiently to change her tone to one of irony.

"Do you read your Bible?" she shot over her shoulder.

"Yes, miss," said Buck--"that is--I mean----"

The reason for Buck's hesitation was that he had suddenly doubted whether the Honourable Emily would know a Racing Calendar by the name she had just used.

"Do you mean _The_ Bible, miss?" he said, fidgeting.

She snapped: "Yes--the one with the story of Joseph in it----"

She burst into tears anew.

"Oh, that I should have to beg a man to marry me! I hate myself--I hate you!"

Her hatred, however, did not prevent repet.i.tions of the scene. At the last repet.i.tion that need trouble us here her tears conquered. The helpless Buck comforted her after the only fashion he knew anything about--the fashion he would have used towards her maid--on his knee.

He still, however, called her "Miss."

They were privately married in the June of 1869.

"_Don't_ call me 'Miss'!" she broke out petulantly one day in the middle of the honeymoon. "And you are _not_ to have your meals with the servants! I shall lunch in my room to-day, and you are to be ready to take me out at three o'clock."

"Yes, m'm," said Buck.

Probably Lord Moone had less to do than he supposed with the separation that took place in the September of the same year. We may a.s.sume that a much more potent factor was the Honourable Mrs.

Causton's remembrance of her own words, "That I should have to beg a man to marry me! I hate myself--I hate you!" She did very soon hate both herself and him. Poor Buck merely hated the whole subversive anomaly.

He accepted the proposal that they should separate with perfect docility. It seemed to him entirely right. Indeed the only thing he had not accepted with docility had been his introduction to Lord Moone, on the only occasion on which the two men ever met, as "Mr.

Buckley, the drawing-master." Buck hadn't liked that much. He had made himself Buck Causton in nine hours of terrific combat, and as Buck Causton he preferred to be known. But all else he suffered with touching obedience, and at the proposal that they should go their several ways his finger flew to his forehead.

"Yes, miss," he said; and his heart, if not his lips, murmured the prayer that begins: "G.o.d bless the Squire and his relations----"

They parted.

They only met once more. This was in the January of the following year, in the great antlered hall at Mallard Bois, that was as regularly used on all occasions as if there had not been salons and galleries and drawing-rooms in a dozen other parts of the great place.

The Honourable Mrs. Causton lay on a couch drawn up to the fire-dogs; her husband looked submissively down on her, dwarfing the suit of armour of Big Hugo by which he stood.

She made a new proposal. It was that he should put it into her hands to set herself free once for all.