The Beautiful Child (7 page)

But what distinguished them for Merrow, of a truth, still more than these comparatively commonplace elements of good luck and good humour, was the way they made him think of them as above all exquisitely at one with each other. He was single, he was, behind everything, lonely, and it had been given him so little to taste of any joy of perfect union, that he was, as to many matters, not even at one with himself. The joy of perfect union, nevertheless, had hovered before him as a dream – in consequence of which he was now insidiously moved by this presentation of a case of it. These handsome, tender, bereaved young persons were acting in entire concert. They had plenty of pleasures, but none would be so great for them as for him to attempt what they proposed. The wife, moreover, would care for it in the measure in which it would touch the husband; the husband would care for it in the measure in which it would touch the wife. This it was that made them beautiful, and from this it was that his disturbing thought sprang. Even as Mrs Archdean proceeded, helplessly, with her errand, he said to himself that it was them he should like to paint, and to paint intensely together. He already saw how he should express it in the truth that, in their world where so much had been loosened, they were intensely together. It was an association free from worldly, from vulgar dis-agreements. so at least our friend had judged it till it threw out a surprise for him. He found himself presently with something else to think of; having meanwhile met the enquiry of his visitors as nearly half way as was permitted by his small eagerness to work from photographs and conversations.

‘It's not a little boy we should like – or at least I should,' said Mrs Archdean. ‘It's a little girl.'

Her husband, at this, as Hugh looked vague, laughed out his awkwardness. ‘We don't, we should tell you, feel quite the same about it. My own idea's the boy – all the more after seeing how you do them. But of course it's for you to say.' Our young man was amused, but he tried not to show it. ‘Which would you had rather have?'

‘Which do you think you could do best?' said Mrs Archdean.

He met her eyes, and he was afterwards to remember that what he had then seen in them was the very beginning, the first faint glimmer – yet with a golden light, however dim – of a relation. She intensely appealed to him; she privately approached him; she attempted an understanding with him apart from her husband – and this though her affection for her husband was complete. Of course, moreover, it was open to that personage to attempt another understanding. All this was much for Hugh to see in a few seconds; but he had not painted portraits ten years for nothing. ‘And then, you've both a boy and a girl?'

‘No – unfortunately not,' said Captain Archdean with a queer face.

‘Oh, you've had the grief of losing them?' Merrow considerately suggested.

It produced, oddly, a silence, as if each of his companions waited for the other to speak. It was the wife again who had to clear it up. ‘We have no children. We've never had any.'

‘Oh!' said her host in vagueness.

‘That's our bad case' – and Captain Archdean, for relief, still treated it with a measure of gaiety. ‘We should have liked awfully to. But here we are.'

‘Do you mean – a – ? ‘ But Hugh could scarce imagine what they meant.

‘We shall never have any,' the young wife went on. ‘We've hoped, we've waited. But now we're sure.'

‘Oh!' said Hugh Merrow again.

‘From the moment we came we had to tell you all this, and perhaps you'll only think us ridiculous. But we've talked it over long – it has taken all our courage. We gained a great deal – so you see it's partly your own doing – from the sight of your child.'

She had so sounded her possessive that Merrow was for the moment at a loss. ‘Mine? Ah,' he said cheeringly, ‘if I could only have one as well!'

‘I mean the one at the Academy – the dear little sailor-man. You can have as many as you like – when you can paint them that way!'

‘Ah, I don't paint them for myself,' our young man laughed. ‘I paint them – with a great deal of difficulty, and not always all as I want – for others.'

‘That's just it,' Captain Archdean observed more lucidly than before. ‘We're just such a pair of others – only we shouldn't make you any sort of difficulty. Not any,' he added with a spasm of earnestness that showed Merrow both what he meant and how he felt. His desire was so great that it overcame his reluctance to mention the subject of price. He was ready to pay the highest the artist could be conceived as asking. ‘All we want is that he should be such a one as we might have had.'

‘Oh, better than that,' the young woman interposed. ‘We might have had one with some blot, some defect, some affliction. We want her perfect – without a flaw. Your little boy' – and she again, for her host, uncontrollably intensified the pronoun – ‘is the absolute ideal for everything.'

‘So that to make ours the same,' said her husband. ‘Mr Merrow will have to make him a boy.'

She looked again at the painter. ‘I think you'll have to tell us first that we don't appear to you crazy.'

Merrow, while he, as before, met her look, found himself aware of a drop of his first disappointment. There was something in her that made – and made, in effect, quite insistently – for a relation; that positively forced it on him as, for his own part, a charity or an act of good manners. And it made the difference that he didn't much care if they were crazy or not, or even if he himself were. Their funny errand had begun to appeal to him, but it would be part of the fun that they should fully state their case. Merrow desired this, moreover, in no spirit of derision; he already saw that, pleasant as they were, there was no fun; for anyone concerned in the transaction would be obstreperous. ‘What exactly is it then that you ask of me?'

‘Well, absurd as it may seem, to give us what we're not so happy as to have otherwise, to create for us a sort of imitation of the little source of pleasure of which we're deprived. That – as you know you may do it – will be something.'

Merrow considered. ‘Haven't you thought of adoption?'

Captain Archdean now promptly answered. ‘Very much. We've looked at a hundred children. But they won't do.'

‘They're not it,' said his wife.

‘They're not him,' he explained.

‘They're not her,' she continued. ‘You see, we know what we would like.'

‘Oh, but you don't quite seem to!' Merrow laughed. ‘Is it a boy or a girl?'

‘Which would you rather do?' Mrs Archdean enquired. ‘Which would most naturally come to you, for ease, for reality?'

‘Ah, reality!' Merrow good-humouredly groaned. ‘Reality's hard to arrive at with so little to go upon. You offer me, you see, no data, no documents. It's worse even than if she were dead.'

‘Oh, thank God she's not dead!' Mrs Archdean oddly exclaimed. ‘We give you a free hand, but we trust you.'

Again Merrow paused. ‘Have you tried anyone else?'

She looked about the room, at studies, heads, figures placed, a little at random, on the walls, and at two or three things on easels, started, unfinished, but taking more or less the form of life. One of these last was, as happened, another portrait of a child, precisely of a little girl, pretty and interested, eminently paintable, in whom our young man had found an inspiration. The thing but fore-shadowed his intention, yet the essence of the face seemed the more to look out from it; and Mrs Archdean, who had approached it, turned from it, after a long gaze, to answer. ‘No – it's something we've never imagined till now.'

‘Not,' said her husband, ‘till we had seen your little Reggie. It all comes from that – he put it into our heads. It came to us – to both of us at the same moment – that if you could do him you could do what we want.' The poor gentleman, making every concession for the absurd sound of their story, yet the more assured, or the more indifferent for having broken, as he evidently felt, an inordinate amount of ice, paused again, pressingly, and again struck out. ‘It's the idea, you see, of something that would live with us. He'll be there – he'll be in the house. It won't be as it is now.'

‘With nothing!' the young mother, as she wished to be, strangely sighed.

‘When we look up we shall seem him,' her companion said. ‘And when we talk we shall mention him. He'll have his name.'

‘Oh, he'll have everything!' – Mrs Archdean repeated her murmur. ‘Your little boy,' she went on, ‘has everything. How,' she asked, ‘could you part with him?'

‘Oh,' said Merrow, ‘I've lost so many that I'm used to it.'

She looked at him as if studying in his face the signs – deep and delicate as they would be – of so much experience. ‘And you can have as many more as you like.'

Merrow didn't deny it; he was thinking of something else. ‘Have you seen little Reggie himself?'

‘Oh dear, no!'

‘We don't want to,' Captain Archdean explained. ‘We wouldn't for the world.' He had arrived at stating the facts of their odd attitude very much as a patient consulting a doctor enumerates aches and pains.

And his wife added her touch. ‘We don't like children – that is, other people's. We can't bear them – when they're beautiful. They make us too unhappy. It's only when they're not nice that we can look at them. Yours is the only nice one we've for a long time been able to think of. It's something in the way you've done him.' With which she looked again at the little girl on the easel. ‘You're doing it again – it's something in yourself. That's what we felt.' She had said all, and she wound up with an intimate glance at her husband. ‘There you have us.'

And Merrow felt indeed that he did; he was in possession; he knew, about their charming caprice, all that was to be known, though perhaps not quite whether the drollery or the poetry of it were what most touched him. It was almost puerile, yet it was rather noble. ‘Of course,' he presently said, ‘I feel the beauty and the rarity of your idea. It's highly original – it quite takes hold of me.'

‘It isn't that we don't see it ourselves as wildly fantastic!' one of them hastened to concede; to which he found himself replying, with a sound of attenuation, that this was not necessarily against it. But it was, just then, by a word of the young wife's that he was most arrested. ‘The worse we shall have done will be after all but to make you refuse.'

‘And what will you do if I refuse?'

‘Well, we shan't go to anyone else.'

‘We shall go on as we have done,' said Captain Archdean with a slight dryness of decency.

‘Oh well,' Merrow answered, more and more determined; he was conscious, in the sense of good humour, of an indulgence as whimsical even as their own proposal – ‘oh well, I don't want you to take me as stupidly unaccommodating, as having too little imagination, even if you yourselves have perhaps too much. It's just the intrinsic difficulty that makes me hesitate. It's the question of doing a thing so much in the air. There's such a drawback as having too free a hand. For little Reggie, you see, I had my model. He was exquisite, but he was definite – he lighted my steps. The question is what will light them in such a case as you propose. You know, as you say, what you want, but how exactly am I to know it?'

This enquiry, he could see, was not one that Captain Archdean could easily meet; and it was to be singular for him later on that he had entertained at the moment itself a small but sharp prevision, involving absolutely a slight degree of suspense, that their companion would, after an instant, be less at a loss. He really almost decided to let the matter depend on what she might say; according to which it depended with some intensity. He was not unaware that in spite of the scant response of the painter in him, who could but judge the invitation as to a wild-goose chase, he had been already moved, to rather a lively tune, by curiosity. It was as if something might come to him if he did consent, though what might come indeed might not be a thing that he himself should call a picture. Whatever it was to be, at any rate, it affected him at the end of another minute as having begun to come; for by that time Mrs Archdean had spoken, his suspense was relieved, his prevision was justified as to her not being so simple a person as her husband. ‘Won't your steps really by lighted by your interest?'

He wondered. ‘My interest in what, dear madam? In you and your husband?'

‘Oh dear, no. In the artistic question itself – which we only suggest to you. In forming a conception which shall be, as you say of little Reggie, definite. In making it definite. In inventing, in finding, in doing – won't it be? – what the artist does. I mean when he tries. For we do,' she added with a smile, ‘want you to try hard.'

It was the same light note as her husband's some minutes before, a hint of great remuneration, should remuneration help the matter. But her smile corrected the slight impatience of the previous words and warranted Merrow's responding with the pleasantest pliancy. ‘First catch your hare —! Do you mean I should be at liberty to reproduce some existing little person?'

The young woman, as with kindled hope, looked at him ever so gently. ‘That's your affair. We should ask no questions.'

‘We should only like the little person,' Captain Archdean intervened, ‘to be somebody quite unknown to us and whom we should be likely never to see.'

His wife reassured him with a look. ‘He'd change her, disguise her, improve her.' And she turned again to their host. ‘You'd make her right. It's what we trust you for. We'd take her so, with our eyes closed, from your hands.'

Her face as she said this became somehow, for Hugh Merrow, more beautiful than before; and the impression had to do with his still more lending himself, even while he kept judging technically the vanity of the task. ‘I should naturally have the resource of making her as much as possible like her supposed mother.'