78. CHAPTER LXXVIII.
FINISHING PICTURES.
Arthur Merlin returned to his studio and carefully locked
the door. Then he opened a huge port-folio, which was full
of sketches—and they were all of the same subject, treated in
a hundred ways—they were all Hope Wayne.
Sometimes it was a lady leaning from an oriel window in a
medieval tower, listening in the moonlight, with love in her
eyes and attitude, to the music of a guitar, touched by a gallant
knight below, who looked as Arthur Merlin would have
looked had Arthur Merlin been a gallant medieval knight.
Then it was Juliet, pale and unconscious in the tomb; superb
in snow-white drapery; pure as an angel, lovely as a woman;
but it was Hope Wayne still—and Romeo stole frightened
in, but Romeo was Arthur.
Or it was Beatrice moving in a radiant heaven; while far
below, kneeling, and with clasped hands, gazing upward, the
melancholy Dante watched the vision.
Or the fair phantom of Goethe's ballad looked out with humid,
passionate glances between the clustering reeds she
pushed aside, and lured the fisherman with love.
There were scores of such sketches, from romance, and history,
and fancy, and in each the beauty was Hope Wayne's;
and it was strange to see that in each, however different from
all the others, there was still a charm characteristic of the woman
he loved; so that it seemed a vivid record of all the impressions
she had made upon him, and as if all heroines of poetry
or history were only ladies in waiting upon her. In all
of them, too, there was a separation between them. She was
remote in sphere or in space; there was the feeling of inaccessibility
between them in all.
As he turned them slowly over, and gazed at them as earnestly
as if his glance could make that beauty live, he suddenly
perceived, what he had never before felt, that the instinct
which had unconsciously given the same character of hopelessness
to the incident of the sketches was the same that had
made him so readily acquiesce in what Lawrence Newt had
hinted. He paused at a drawing of Pygmalion and his statue.
The same instinct had selected the moment before the sculptor's
prayer was granted; when he looks at the immovable
beauty of his statue with the yearning love that made the
marble live. But the statue of Arthur's Pygmalion would
never live. It was a statue only, and forever. He asked himself
why he had not selected the moment when she falls breathing
and blushing into the sculptor's arms.
Alone in his studio the artist blushed, as if the very thought
were wrong; and he felt that he had never really dared to
hope, however he had longed, and wished, and flattered his
fancy.
He looked at each one of the drawings carefully and long,
then kissed it and turned it upon its face. When he had seen
them all he sat for a moment; then quietly tore them into
long strips, then into small pieces; and, lifting the window,
scattered them upon the air. The wind whirled them over the
street.
“Oh, what a pretty snow-storm!” said the little street
children, looking up.
Then Arthur Merlin turned to his great easel, upon which
stood the canvas of the picture of Diana and Endymion.
Through the parted clouds the face of the Queen and huntress
—the face of Hope Wayne—looked tenderly upon the sleeping
[ILLUSTRATION]
The Solitary Grave On The Hill-Top.
[Description: 538EAF. Page 446. In-line Illustration. Image of a man sitting in a chair contemplating a painting on an easel in front of him. There are canvases and sculptural figures in the room around him. The painting shows a hill with some weeds and a cross on top of it.]
figure of the shepherd on the bare top of the grassy hill—
the face and figure of Lawrence Newt.
The painter took his brushes and his pallet, and his maulstick.
He paused for some time again, as he stood before the
easel, then he went quietly to work. He touched it here and
there. He stepped back to mark the effect—rubbed with his
finger — sighed — stepped back — and still worked on. The
hours glided away, and daylight began to fade, but not until
he had finished his work.
Then he scraped his pallet and washed his brushes, and
seated himself upon the sofa opposite the easel. There was
no picture of Diana or of Endymion any longer. In the place
of Diana there was a full summer moon shining calmly in a
cloudless heaven. Its benignant light fell upon a solitary
grave upon a hill-top, which filled the spot where Endymion
had lain.
Arthur Merlin sat in the corner of the sofa with folded arms,
looking at the picture, until the darkness entirely hid it from
view.
