Twice-Told Tales (21 page)

"If my pencil will but be true to my conception in the few last
touches which I meditate," observed he, "these two pictures will be my
very best performances. Seldom indeed has an artist such subjects."
While speaking he still bent his penetrative eye upon them, nor
withdrew it till they had reached the bottom of the stairs.

Nothing in the whole circle of human vanities takes stronger hold of
the imagination than this affair of having a portrait painted. Yet why
should it be so? The looking-glass, the polished globes of the
andirons, the mirror-like water, and all other reflecting surfaces,
continually present us with portraits—or, rather, ghosts—of
ourselves which we glance at and straightway forget them. But we
forget them only because they vanish. It is the idea of duration—of
earthly immortality—that gives such a mysterious interest to our own
portraits.

Walter and Elinor were not insensible to this feeling, and hastened to
the painter's room punctually at the appointed hour to meet those
pictured shapes which were to be their representatives with posterity.
The sunshine flashed after them into the apartment, but left it
somewhat gloomy as they closed the door. Their eyes were immediately
attracted to their portraits, which rested against the farthest wall
of the room. At the first glance through the dim light and the
distance, seeing themselves in precisely their natural attitudes and
with all the air that they recognized so well, they uttered a
simultaneous exclamation of delight.

"There we stand," cried Walter, enthusiastically, "fixed in sunshine
for ever. No dark passions can gather on our faces."

"No," said Elinor, more calmly; "no dreary change can sadden us."

This was said while they were approaching and had yet gained only an
imperfect view of the pictures. The painter, after saluting them,
busied himself at a table in completing a crayon sketch, leaving his
visitors to form their own judgment as to his perfected labors. At
intervals he sent a glance from beneath his deep eyebrows, watching
their countenances in profile with his pencil suspended over the
sketch. They had now stood some moments, each in front of the other's
picture, contemplating it with entranced attention, but without
uttering a word. At length Walter stepped forward, then back, viewing
Elinor's portrait in various lights, and finally spoke.

"Is there not a change?" said he, in a doubtful and meditative tone.
"Yes; the perception of it grows more vivid the longer I look. It is
certainly the same picture that I saw yesterday; the dress, the
features, all are the same, and yet something is altered."

"Is, then, the picture less like than it was yesterday?" inquired the
painter, now drawing near with irrepressible interest.

"The features are perfect Elinor," answered Walter, "and at the first
glance the expression seemed also hers; but I could fancy that the
portrait has changed countenance while I have been looking at it. The
eyes are fixed on mine with a strangely sad and anxious expression.
Nay, it is grief and terror. Is this like Elinor?"

"Compare the living face with the pictured one," said the painter.

Walter glanced sidelong at his mistress, and started. Motionless and
absorbed, fascinated, as it were, in contemplation of Walter's
portrait, Elinor's face had assumed precisely the expression of which
he had just been complaining. Had she practised for whole hours before
a mirror, she could not have caught the look so successfully. Had the
picture itself been a mirror, it could not have thrown back her
present aspect with stronger and more melancholy truth. She appeared
quite unconscious of the dialogue between the artist and her lover.

"Elinor," exclaimed Walter, in amazement, "what change has come over
you?"

She did not hear him nor desist from her fixed gaze till he seized her
hand, and thus attracted her notice; then with a sudden tremor she
looked from the picture to the face of the original.

"Do you see no change in your portrait?" asked she.

"In mine? None," replied Walter, examining it. "But let me see. Yes;
there is a slight change—an improvement, I think, in the picture,
though none in the likeness. It has a livelier expression than
yesterday, as if some bright thought were flashing from the eyes and
about to be uttered from the lips. Now that I have caught the look, it
becomes very decided."

While he was intent on these observations Elinor turned to the
painter. She regarded him with grief and awe, and felt that he repaid
her with sympathy and commiseration, though wherefore she could but
vaguely guess.

"That look!" whispered she, and shuddered. "How came it there?"

"Madam," said the painter, sadly, taking her hand and leading her
apart, "in both these pictures I have painted what I saw. The
artist—the true artist—must look beneath the exterior. It is his
gift—his proudest, but often a melancholy one—to see the inmost
soul, and by a power indefinable even to himself to make it glow or
darken upon the canvas in glances that express the thought and
sentiment of years. Would that I might convince myself of error in the
present instance!"

They had now approached the table, on which were heads in chalk, hands
almost as expressive as ordinary faces, ivied church-towers, thatched
cottages, old thunder-stricken trees, Oriental and antique costume,
and all such picturesque vagaries of an artist's idle moments. Turning
them over with seeming carelessness, a crayon sketch of two figures
was disclosed.

"If I have failed," continued he—"if your heart does not see itself
reflected in your own portrait, if you have no secret cause to trust
my delineation of the other—it is not yet too late to alter them. I
might change the action of these figures too. But would it influence
the event?" He directed her notice to the sketch.

A thrill ran through Elinor's frame; a shriek was upon her lips, but
she stifled it with the self-command that becomes habitual to all who
hide thoughts of fear and anguish within their bosoms. Turning from
the table, she perceived that Walter had advanced near enough to have
seen the sketch, though she could not determine whether it had caught
his eye.

"We will not have the pictures altered," said she, hastily. "If mine
is sad, I shall but look the gayer for the contrast."

"Be it so," answered the painter, bowing. "May your griefs be such
fanciful ones that only your pictures may mourn for them! For your
joys, may they be true and deep, and paint themselves upon this lovely
face till it quite belie my art!"

After the marriage of Walter and Elinor the pictures formed the two
most splendid ornaments of their abode. They hung side by side,
separated by a narrow panel, appearing to eye each other constantly,
yet always returning the gaze of the spectator. Travelled gentlemen
who professed a knowledge of such subjects reckoned these among the
most admirable specimens of modern portraiture, while common observers
compared them with the originals, feature by feature, and were
rapturous in praise of the likeness. But it was on a third
class—neither travelled connoisseurs nor common observers, but people
of natural sensibility—that the pictures wrought their strongest
effect. Such persons might gaze carelessly at first, but, becoming
interested, would return day after day and study these painted faces
like the pages of a mystic volume. Walter Ludlow's portrait attracted
their earliest notice. In the absence of himself and his bride they
sometimes disputed as to the expression which the painter had intended
to throw upon the features, all agreeing that there was a look of
earnest import, though no two explained it alike. There was less
diversity of opinion in regard to Elinor's picture. They differed,
indeed, in their attempts to estimate the nature and depth of the
gloom that dwelt upon her face, but agreed that it was gloom and alien
from the natural temperament of their youthful friend. A certain
fanciful person announced as the result of much scrutiny that both
these pictures were parts of one design, and that the melancholy
strength of feeling in Elinor's countenance bore reference to the more
vivid emotion—or, as he termed it, the wild passion—in that of
Walter. Though unskilled in the art, he even began a sketch in which
the action of the two figures was to correspond with their mutual
expression.

It was whispered among friends that day by day Elinor's face was
assuming a deeper shade of pensiveness which threatened soon to render
her too true a counterpart of her melancholy picture. Walter, on the
other hand, instead of acquiring the vivid look which the painter had
given him on the canvas, became reserved and downcast, with no outward
flashes of emotion, however it might be smouldering within. In course
of time Elinor hung a gorgeous curtain of purple silk wrought with
flowers and fringed with heavy golden tassels before the pictures,
under pretence that the dust would tarnish their hues or the light dim
them. It was enough. Her visitors felt that the massive folds of the
silk must never be withdrawn nor the portraits mentioned in her
presence.

Time wore on, and the painter came again. He had been far enough to
the north to see the silver cascade of the Crystal Hills, and to look
over the vast round of cloud and forest from the summit of New
England's loftiest mountain. But he did not profane that scene by the
mockery of his art. He had also lain in a canoe on the bosom of Lake
George, making his soul the mirror of its loveliness and grandeur till
not a picture in the Vatican was more vivid than his recollection. He
had gone with the Indian hunters to Niagara, and there, again, had
flung his hopeless pencil down the precipice, feeling that he could as
soon paint the roar as aught else that goes to make up the wondrous
cataract. In truth, it was seldom his impulse to copy natural scenery
except as a framework for the delineations of the human form and face
instinct with thought, passion or suffering. With store of such his
adventurous ramble had enriched him. The stern dignity of Indian
chiefs, the dusky loveliness of Indian girls, the domestic life of
wigwams, the stealthy march, the battle beneath gloomy pine trees, the
frontier fortress with its garrison, the anomaly of the old French
partisan bred in courts, but grown gray in shaggy deserts,—such were
the scenes and portraits that he had sketched. The glow of perilous
moments, flashes of wild feeling, struggles of fierce power, love,
hate, grief, frenzy—in a word, all the worn-out heart of the old
earth—had been revealed to him under a new form. His portfolio was
filled with graphic illustrations of the volume of his memory which
genius would transmute into its own substance and imbue with
immortality. He felt that the deep wisdom in his art which he had
sought so far was found.

But amid stern or lovely nature, in the perils of the forest or its
overwhelming peacefulness, still there had been two phantoms, the
companions of his way. Like all other men around whom an engrossing
purpose wreathes itself, he was insulated from the mass of humankind.
He had no aim, no pleasure, no sympathies, but what were ultimately
connected with his art. Though gentle in manner and upright in intent
and action, he did not possess kindly feelings; his heart was cold: no
living creature could be brought near enough to keep him warm. For
these two beings, however, he had felt in its greatest intensity the
sort of interest which always allied him to the subjects of his
pencil. He had pried into their souls with his keenest insight and
pictured the result upon their features with his utmost skill, so as
barely to fall short of that standard which no genius ever reached,
his own severe conception. He had caught from the duskiness of the
future—at least, so he fancied—a fearful secret, and had obscurely
revealed it on the portraits. So much of himself—of his imagination
and all other powers—had been lavished on the study of Walter and
Elinor that he almost regarded them as creations of his own, like the
thousands with which he had peopled the realms of Picture. Therefore
did they flit through the twilight of the woods, hover on the mist of
waterfalls, look forth from the mirror of the lake, nor melt away in
the noontide sun. They haunted his pictorial fancy, not as mockeries
of life nor pale goblins of the dead, but in the guise of portraits,
each with an unalterable expression which his magic had evoked from
the caverns of the soul. He could not recross the Atlantic till he had
again beheld the originals of those airy pictures.

"O glorious Art!" Thus mused the enthusiastic painter as he trod the
street. "Thou art the image of the Creator's own. The innumerable
forms that wander in nothingness start into being at thy beck. The
dead live again; thou recallest them to their old scenes and givest
their gray shadows the lustre of a better life, at once earthly and
immortal. Thou snatchest back the fleeting moments of history. With
then there is no past, for at thy touch all that is great becomes for
ever present, and illustrious men live through long ages in the
visible performance of the very deeds which made them what they are. O
potent Art! as thou bringest the faintly-revealed past to stand in
that narrow strip of sunlight which we call 'now,' canst thou summon
the shrouded future to meet her there? Have I not achieved it? Am I
not thy prophet?"

Thus with a proud yet melancholy fervor did he almost cry aloud as he
passed through the toilsome street among people that knew not of his
reveries nor could understand nor care for them. It is not good for
man to cherish a solitary ambition. Unless there be those around him
by whose example he may regulate himself, his thoughts, desires and
hopes will become extravagant and he the semblance—perhaps the
reality—of a madman. Reading other bosoms with an acuteness almost
preternatural, the painter failed to see the disorder of his own.