The Hermit and the Wild Woman

STANWELL, while seeing Caspar through the attack which had been the cause of his sister’s arrival, had struck up a friendship with the young doctor who climbed the patient’s seven flights with unremitting fidelity.  The two, since then, had continued to exchange confidences regarding the sculptor’s health, and Stanwell, anxious to waylay the doctor after his visit, left the studio door ajar, and went out when he heard a sound of leave-taking across the landing.  But it appeared that the doctor had just come, and that it was Mungold who was making his adieux.

The latter at once assumed that Stanwell had been on the alert for him, and met the supposed advance by affably inviting himself into the studio.

“May I come and take a look around, my dear fellow?  I have been meaning to drop in for an age—­” Mungold always spoke with a girlish emphasis and effusiveness—­“but I have been so busy getting up Mrs. Van Orley’s tableaux—­English eighteenth century portraits, you know—­that really, what with that and my sittings, I’ve hardly had time to think.  And then you know you owe me about a dozen visits!  But you’re a savage—­you don’t pay visits.  You stay here and piocher—­which is wiser, as the results prove.  Ah, you’re very strong—­immensely strong!” He paused in the middle of the studio, glancing about a little apprehensively, as though he thought the stored energy of the pictures might result in an explosion.  “Very original—­very striking—­ah, Miss Arran!  A powerful head; but—­excuse the suggestion—­isn’t there just the least little lack of sweetness?  You don’t think she has the sweet type?  Perhaps not—­but could she be so lovely if she were not intensely feminine?  Just at present, though, she is not looking her best—­she is horribly tired.  I am afraid there is very little money left—­and poor dear Caspar is so impossible:  he won’t hear of a loan.  Otherwise I should be most happy—.  But I came just now to propose a piece of work—­in fact to give him an order.  Mrs. Archer Millington has built a new ball-room, as I daresay you may have seen in the papers, and she has been kind enough to ask me for some hints—­oh, merely as a friend:  I don’t presume to do more than advise.  But her decorator wants to do something with Cupids—­something light and playful, you understand.  And so I ventured to say that I knew a very clever sculptor—­well, I do believe Caspar has talent—­latent talent, you know—­and at any rate a job of that sort would be a big lift for him.  At least I thought he would regard it so; but you should have heard him when I showed him the decorator’s sketch.  He asked me what the Cupids were to be done in—­lard?  And if I thought he had had his training at a confectioner’s?  And I don’t know what more besides—­but he worked himself up to such a degree that he brought on a frightful fit of coughing, and Miss Arran, I’m afraid, was rather annoyed with me when she came in, though I’m sure an order from Mrs. Archer Millington is not a thing that would annoy most people!”

Mr. Mungold paused, breathless with the rehearsal of his wrongs, and Stanwell said with a smile:  “You know poor Caspar is terribly stiff on the purity of the artist’s aim.”

“The artist’s aim?” Mr. Mungold stared.  “What is the artist’s aim but to please—­isn’t that the purpose of all true art?  But his theories are so extravagant.  I really don’t know what I shall say to Mrs. Millington—­she is not used to being refused.  I suppose I had better put it on the ground of ill-health.”  The artist glanced at his handsome repeater.  “Dear me, I promised to be at Mrs. Van Orley’s before twelve o’clock.  We are to settle about the curtain before luncheon.  My dear fellow, it has been a privilege to see your work.  By the way, you have never done any modelling, I suppose?  You’re so extraordinarily versatile—­I didn’t know whether you might care to undertake the Cupids yourself.”

Stanwell had to wait a long time for the doctor; and when the latter came out he looked grave.  Worse?  No, he couldn’t say that Caspar was worse—­but then he wasn’t any better.  There was nothing mortal the matter, but the question was how long he could hold out.  It was the kind of case where there is no use in drugs—­he had just scribbled a prescription to quiet Miss Arran.

“It’s the cold, I suppose,” Stanwell groaned.  “He ought to be shipped off to Florida.”

The doctor made a negative gesture.  “Florida be hanged!  What he wants is to sell his group.  That would set him up quicker than sitting on the equator.”

“Sell his group?” Stanwell echoed.  “But he’s so indifferent to recognition—­he believes in himself so thoroughly.  I thought at first he would be hard hit when the Exhibition Committee refused it, but he seems to regard that as another proof of its superiority.”

His visitor turned on him the penetrating eye of the confessor.  “Indifferent to recognition?  He’s eating his heart out for it.  Can’t you see that all that talk is just so much whistling to keep his courage up?  The name of his disease is failure—­and I can’t write the prescription that will cure that complaint.  But if somebody would come along and take a fancy to those two naked parties who are breaking each other’s heads, we’d have Mr. Caspar putting on a pound a day.”

The truth of this diagnosis became suddenly vivid to Stanwell.  How dull of him not to have seen before that it was not cold or privation which was killing Caspar—­not anxiety for his sister’s future, nor the ache of watching her daily struggle—­but simply the cankering thought that he might die before he had made himself known!  It was his vanity that was starving to death, and all Mungold’s hampers could not appease that hunger.  Stanwell was not shocked by the discovery—­he was only the more sorry for the little man, who was, after all, denied that solace of self-sufficiency which his talk so noisily pro- claimed.  His lot seemed hard enough when Stanwell had pictured him as buoyed up by the scorn of public opinion—­it became tragic if he was denied that support.  The artist wondered if Kate had guessed her brother’s secret, or if she were still the dupe of his stoicism.  Stanwell was sure that the sculptor would take no one into his confidence, and least of all his sister, whose faith in his artistic independence was the chief prop of that tottering pose.  Kate’s penetration was not great, and Stanwell recalled the incredulous smile with which she had heard him defend poor Mungold’s “sincerity” against Caspar’s assaults; but she had the insight of the heart, and where her brother’s happiness was concerned she might have seen deeper than any of them.  It was this last consideration which took the strongest hold on Stanwell—­he felt Caspar’s sufferings chiefly through the thought of his sister’s possible disillusionment.