The Judgment Books

"I – I mean – I mean nothing. I don't know what I am saying. I've been working too hard, and I have got dazed and stupid."

He turned to look at the blaze on the waters to the west.

"Ah, how beautiful it is!" he exclaimed. "I wish I were a landscape-painter. But you are more beautiful, Margery. But it is safer to be a landscape-painter, so much safer!"

Margery stopped and faced him.

"Now, Frank, tell me the truth. Have you been out since I left you yesterday morning?"

"No."

"How long have you been working each day?"

"I don't know. I didn't look at my watch. All day, I suppose; and the days are long – terribly long – and the nights too. The nights are even longer, but one can't work then."

Margery was frightened, and, being frightened, she got angry with herself and him.

"Oh, you really are too annoying," she said, with a stamp of her foot. "You get yourself into bad health by overworking and not taking any exercise – you've got the family liver, you know – and then you tell me the house is full of ghosts, and conjure up all sorts of absurd fancies about losing your personality, frightening yourself and me. Frank, it's too bad!"

Frank looked up suddenly at her.

"You too? Are you frightened too? God help me if you are frightened too!"

"No, I'm not frightened," said Margery, "but I'm angry and ashamed of you. You're no better than a silly child."

"Margery," said he, in his lowest audible tone, "I'll never touch the picture again if you wish. Tell me to destroy it and I will, and we'll go for a holiday together. I – I want a holiday; I've been working too hard. Or it would be better if you went in very quietly and cut it up. I don't want to go near it. It doesn't like me. Tell me to destroy it."

"No, no!" cried Margery, "that's the very thing I will not do. And fancy saying you want a holiday! You've just had two months' holiday. But that's no reason why you should work like a lunatic. Of course any one can go mad if they like – it's only a question of whether you think you are going to."

"Margery, tell me truthfully," said Frank, "do you think I am going mad?"

"Of course I don't. I only think you are very, very silly. But I've known that ever since I knew you at all. It's a great pity."

They strolled up and down for a few moments in silence. The magic of Margery's presence was beginning to work on Frank, and after a little space of silence he laughed to himself almost naturally.

"Margery, you are doing me good," he said. "I've been terribly lonely without you."

"And terribly silly, it appears."

"Perhaps I have. Anyhow, I like to hear you tell me so. I should like to think I had been silly, but I don't know."

"I'm afraid if you've been silly the portrait will be silly too," said she. "Is it silly, Frank?"

"It's wonderful," said he, suddenly stopping short. "It is not only like me, but it's me – at least, if you will stop with me while I work it will be all me. I shall feel safer if you are there."

"Then I won't be there," said Margery. "You are not a child any longer, and you must work alone. You always say you can't work if any one else is there."

"Well, I don't suppose it matters," said Frank, with returning confidence. "The fact that I know you are in the house will be enough. But the portrait – it's wonderful! I can't think why I loathe it so."

"You loathe it because you have been working at it in a ridiculous manner," said Margery. "To-morrow I regulate your day for you. I shall leave you your morning to yourself, and after lunch you shall come out with me for two hours at least. We will go up some of those little creeks where we went two years ago. Come in now. It's nearly dinner-time."

When they were alone and a portrait was in progress they often sat in the studio after dinner; but to-night, when Margery proposed it, Frank started up from where he was sitting.

"No, Margery," he said, "please let us sit here. I don't want to go to the studio at all."

"It's the scene of your crime," said Margery.

Frank turned pale.

"What crime?" he asked. "What do you know of my crimes?"

Margery put down the paper she was reading and burst out laughing.

"You really are too ridiculous," she said. "Are you and I going to play the second act of a melodrama? Your crime of working all day and taking no exercise."

"Oh, I see," said Frank. "Well, don't let us visit the scene of my crimes to-night."

Margery had determined that, whatever Frank did, she would behave quite naturally, and not allow herself to indulge even in disturbing thoughts. So she laughed again, and wiped off Frank's remark from her mind.

Otherwise his behavior that evening was quite reassuring. Often when he was painting he had an aversion to being left alone in the intervals, and though this perhaps was more marked than usual, Margery did not allow it to disquiet her. The painting of a portrait was always rather a trying time, though Frank's explanation of this did not seem to her in the least satisfactory.

"When one paints," he had said to her once, "one is much more exposed to other influences. One's soul, so to speak, is on the surface, and I want some one near me who will keep an eye on it, and I feel safe if I have your eye on me, Margery. You know, when religious people have been to church or to a revivalist meeting, they are much more susceptible to what they see, whether it is sin or sanctity; that is just because their souls have come to the surface. It is very unwise to go to see a lot of strange people when you are in that state. No one knows what influence they may have on you. But I know what influence you have on me."

"I wish my influence would make you a little less silly," she had replied.

Margery went to bed quite happy in her mind, except on one point. She had been gifted by nature with a superb serenity which it took much blustering wind to ruffle, and in the main Frank's behavior was different, not in kind, but only in degree, from what she had seen before when he was painting. He always got nervous and excited over a picture which he really gave himself up to; he always talked ridiculous nonsense about personalities and influences, and though his childlike desire to be with her when he was not working was more accentuated than usual, she drew the very natural conclusion that he was more absorbed than usual in his work.

But there was one point which troubled her: she had quite unaccountably shrunk from him when he ran to meet her across the studio, and she had shrunk from him again when she saw his face. She told herself that this was her own silliness, not his, and that it was ridiculous of her to try to cure Frank of his absurdities while she was so absurd herself. She had shrunk back involuntarily, as if from an evil thing.

"How absurd and ridiculous of me," she said to herself, as she settled herself in bed. "Frank is Frank, and it is his idea that he is ceasing or will cease to be Frank which I have thought all along is so supremely silly, and which I think supremely silly still. Yet I shrank from him as I would from a man who had committed a crime."

Then suddenly another thought came to join this one in her brain: "What crimes? What do you know of my crimes?"

The contact and the electric spark had been instantaneous, for she wrenched the two thoughts apart. But they had come together, and between them they had generated a spark of light.

And so, without knowing it, she knew for a moment what was Frank's secret which he dared not tell her.

CHAPTER VII

Frank got up, as his custom was, very early next morning, and went straight to the studio; and Margery, keeping to the resolve of the night before, left him alone all morning. She had sent his breakfast in to him, but ate hers alone in her morning-room.

The knowledge that she was with him had had a quieting effect on Frank, and he had slept deep and dreamlessly. As he walked along the passage to his studio he felt that he hardly feared what he would find there. How could the ghost of what was dead in him have any chance, so to speak, against the near, living reality of Margery and Margery's love? Was not good more powerful than evil? But when he entered the studio and had wheeled the portrait back into its place, the supremacy of one side of his nature over the other was reversed instantaneously – almost without consciousness of transition. The power which the thing his hands had been working out for the last few days had acquired was becoming overwhelming. When Margery was with him, actually with him, she still held up his better part; but when he was alone with this, all that was good sank like lead in an unplumbed sea. He was like some heathen who makes with his own hands an idol of stone or wood, and then bows down before that which he himself made, believing that it is lord over him.

All morning Margery successfully fought against her inclination to go to Frank, for she was clear in her own mind that he had to work out his salvation alone. He was afraid of being alone, and the only way to teach him not to be afraid was to let him learn in solitude that there was nothing to be afraid of. So she yawned an hour away over a two-volume novel by a popular author, wrote a letter to her mother, ordered dinner, and tried to think she was very busy. But it was with a certain sense of relief that she heard the clock strike one, and, shutting up her book, she went to the studio.

Frank was standing with his back to the door, and did not look up from his work when she entered. She came up behind him and saw what he had wished her not to see the night before, and understood why. He always worked rapidly though never hurriedly, and she knew at once what the finished picture would be like. The "idea" was recorded.

She gave a sudden start and a little cry as sharp and involuntary as the cry of physical pain, for the meaning of the first rough sketch which had puzzled her was now worked out, and she saw before her the face of a guilty man. She shrank and shuddered as she had shrunk when her husband ran to meet her across the studio the night before, and as she had shrunk from him when she saw his face, for the face that looked out from that canvas was the same as her husband's face which had so startled and repelled her. It was the face of a man who has wilfully stifled certain nobler impulses for the sake of something wicked, and who was stifling them still. It was the face of a man who has fallen, and when she turned to look at Frank she saw that he had in the portrait seized on something that stared from every line of his features.