The Vicar's Daughter, George MacDonald [important books to read .txt] 📗

“Don’t be dismayed, my darling,” said my husband.

“Look here,”—showing me a bunch of notes,—“we shall go out to-morrow and buy all we want,—as far as this will go,—and then wait for the rest. It will be such a pleasure to buy the things with you, and see them come home, and have you appoint their places. You and Sarah will make the carpets; won’t you? And I will put them down, and we shall be like birds building their nest.”

“We have only to line it; the nest is built already.”

“Well, neither do the birds build the tree. I wonder if they ever sit in their old summer nests in the winter nights.”

“I am afraid not,” I answered; “but I’m ashamed to say I can’t tell.”

“It is the only pretty house I know in all London,” he went on, “with a studio at the back of it. I have had my eye on it for a long time, but there seemed no sign of a migratory disposition in the bird who had occupied it for three years past. All at once he spread his wings and flew. I count myself very fortunate.”

“So do I. But now you must let me see your study,” I said. “I hope I may sit in it when you’ve got nobody there.”

“As much as ever you like, my love,” he answered. “Only I don’t want to make all my women like you, as I’ve been doing for the last two years. You must get me out of that somehow.”

“Easily. I shall be so cross and disagreeable that you will get tired of me, and find no more difficulty in keeping me out of your pictures.”

But he got me out of his pictures without that; for when he had me always before him he didn’t want to be always producing me.

He led me into the little hall,—made lovely by a cast of an unfinished Madonna of Michael Angelo’s let into the wall,—and then to the back of it, where he opened a small cloth-covered door, when there yawned before me, below me, and above me, a great wide lofty room. Down into it led an almost perpendicular stair.

“So you keep a little private precipice here,” I said.

“No, my dear,” he returned; “you mistake. It is a Jacob’s ladder,—or will be in one moment more.”

He gave me his hand, and led me down.

“This is quite a banqueting-hall, Percivale!” I cried, looking round me.

“It shall be, the first time I get a thousand pounds for a picture,” he returned.

“How grand you talk!” I said, looking up at him with some wonder; for big words rarely came out of his mouth.

“Well,” he answered merrily, “I had two hundred and seventy-five for the last.”

“That’s a long way off a thousand,” I returned, with a silly sigh.

“Quite right; and, therefore, this study is a long way off a banqueting-hall.”

There was literally nothing inside the seventeen feet cube except one chair, one easel, a horrible thing like a huge doll, with no end of joints, called a lay figure, but Percivale called it his bishop; a number of pictures leaning their faces against the walls in attitudes of grief that their beauty was despised and no man would buy them; a few casts of legs and arms and faces, half a dozen murderous-looking weapons, and a couple of yards square of the most exquisite tapestry I ever saw.

“Do you like being read to when you are at work?” I asked him.

“Sometimes,—at certain kinds of work, but not by any means always,” he answered. “Will you shut your eyes for one minute,” he went on, “and, whatever I do, not open them till I tell you?”

“You mustn’t hurt me, then, or I may open them without being able to help it, you know,” I said, closing my eyes tight.

“Hurt you!” he repeated, with a tone I would not put on paper if I could, and the same moment I found myself in his arms, carried like a baby, for Percivale is one of the strongest of men.

It was only for a few yards, however. He laid me down somewhere, and told me to open my eyes.

I could scarcely believe them when I did. I was lying on a couch in a room,—small, indeed, but beyond exception the loveliest I had ever seen. At first I was only aware of an exquisite harmony of color, and could not have told of what it was composed. The place was lighted by a soft lamp that hung in the middle; and when my eyes went up to see where it was fastened, I found the ceiling marvellous in deep blue, with a suspicion of green, just like some of the shades of a peacock’s feathers, with a multitude of gold and red stars upon it. What the walls were I could not for some time tell, they were so covered with pictures and sketches; against one was a lovely little set of book-shelves filled with books, and on a little carved table stood a vase of white hot-house flowers, with one red camellia. One picture had a curtain of green silk before it, and by its side hung the wounded knight whom his friends were carrying home to die.

“O my Percivale!” I cried, and could say no more.

“Do you like it?” he asked quietly, but with shining eyes.

“Like it?” I repeated. “Shall I like Paradise when I get there? But what a lot of money it must have cost you!”

“Not much,” he answered; “not more than thirty pounds or so. Every spot of paint there is from my own brush.”

“O Percivale!”

I must make a conversation of it to tell it at all; but what I really did say I know no more than the man in the moon.

“The carpet was the only expensive thing. That must be as thick as I could get it; for the floor is of stone, and must not come near your pretty feet. Guess what the place was before.”

“I should say, the flower of a prickly-pear cactus, full of sunlight from behind, which a fairy took the fancy to swell into a room.”

“It was a shed, in which the sculptor who occupied the place before me used to keep his wet clay and blocks of marble.”

“Seeing is hardly believing,” I said. “Is it to be my room? I know you mean it for my room, where I can ask you to come when I please, and where I can hide when any one comes you don’t want me to see.”

“That is just what I meant it for, my Ethelwyn,—and to let you know what I would do for you if I could.”

“I hate the place, Percivale,” I said. “What right has it to come poking in between you and me, telling me what I know and have known—for, well, I won’t say how long—far better than even you can tell me?”

He looked a little troubled.

“Ah, my dear!” I said, “let my foolish words breathe and die.”

I wonder sometimes to think how seldom I am in that room now. But there it is; and somehow I seem to know it all the time I am busy elsewhere.

He made me shut my eyes again, and carried me into the study.

“Now,” he said, “find your way to your own room.”

I looked about me, but could see no sign of door. He took up a tall stretcher with a canvas on it, and revealed the door, at the same time showing a likeness of myself,—at the top of the Jacob’s ladder, as he called it, with me foot on the first step, and the other half way to the second. The light came from the window on my left, which he had turned into a western window, in order to get certain effects from a supposed sunset. I was represented in a white dress, tinged with the rose of the west; and he had managed, attributing the phenomenon to the inequalities of the glass in the window, to suggest one rosy wing behind me, with just the shoulder-roof of another visible.

“There!” he said. “It is not finished yet, but that is how I saw you one evening as I was sitting here all alone in the twilight.”

“But you didn’t really see me like that!” I said.

“I hardly know,” he answered. “I had been forgetting every thing else in dreaming about you, and—how it was I cannot tell, but either in the body or out of the body there I saw you, standing just so at the top of the stair, smiling to me as much as to say, ‘Have patience. My foot is on the first step. I’m coming.’ I turned at once to my easel, and before the twilight was gone had sketched the vision. To-morrow, you must sit to me for an hour or so; for I will do nothing else till I have finished it, and sent it off to your father and mother.”

I may just add that I hear it is considered a very fine painting. It hangs in the great dining-room at home. I wish I were as good as he has made it look.

The next morning, after I had given him the sitting he wanted, we set out on our furniture hunt; when, having keen enough eyes, I caught sight of this and of that and of twenty different things in the brokers’ shops. We did not agree about the merits of everything by which one or the other was attracted; but an objection by the one always turned the other, a little at least, and we bought nothing we were not agreed about. Yet that evening the hall was piled with things sent home to line our nest. Percivale, as I have said, had saved up some money for the purpose, and I had a hundred pounds my father had given me before we started, which, never having had more than ten of my own at a time, I was eager enough to spend. So we found plenty to do for the fortnight during which time my mother had promised to say nothing to her friends in London of our arrival. Percivale also keeping out of the way of his friends, everybody thought we were on the Continent, or somewhere else, and left us to ourselves. And as he had sent in his pictures to the Academy, he was able to take a rest, which rest consisted in working hard at all sorts of upholstery, not to mention painters’ and carpenters’ work; so that we soon got the little house made into a very warm and very pretty nest. I may mention that Percivale was particularly pleased with a cabinet I bought for him on the sly, to stand in his study, and hold his paints and brushes and sketches; for there were all sorts of drawers in it, and some that it took us a good deal of trouble to find out, though he was clever enough to suspect them from the first, when I hadn’t a thought of such a thing; and I have often fancied since that that cabinet was just like himself, for I have been going on finding out things in him that I had no idea were there when I married him. I had no idea that he was a poet, for instance. I wonder to this day why he never showed me any of his verses before we were married. He writes better poetry than my father,—at least my father says so. Indeed, I soon came to feel very ignorant and stupid beside him; he could tell me so many things, and especially in art (for he had thought about