75.

She stepped into the magic circle of Gabriel's fame
and influence.

There were three circles, she had clearly reasoned, that
day at Hastings when Gabriel, enraged at Mary writing to him
about Annie Miller, had pronounced sentence on her, "Let there
be no more gossip, I am not engaged to Lizzie."

It was a life-sentence, she then thought, but oddly,
she was not broken by it.

She could trump up an excuse about her illness, a "secret
engagement", now cancelled and Dad would be pleased.

There were things she could do, even if she left off sitting for the painters.

Suddenly, she was almost happy that he had behaved so
badly.

There would be two circles, even as she had visualised
them, Mum and Dad, Lyddy and Lyddy's children, and people who
loved her. She could help Mrs. Howitt in the new centre, she
hoped to model for girls, after The Working Men's College
pattern. Barbara and Bessie Parkes helped in the old Rescue
Home, but Mrs. Howitt wanted something "happier" she said,
bright rooms and talks. "This is not the Battle of Hastings,"

76.

Elizabeth had said to Gabriel, but it was a battle. And she had laughed - he had said - "why are you laughing, Lizzie?" - at the way (better than anything she had ever seen with Miss Herbert) Mary had refused to speak to Gabriel. They would refuse to speak to Gabriel. There was something stronger, even than that charm, that was, someone said, like a spell that Gabriel cast on people.

But the very thing that was standing, as you might say, at her elbow, waiting to rescue her, had betrayed her.

It was like a conspiracy.

*It was Three Birds and the word Honour.*

It was three circles certainly, out of Mr. Rossetti's book on Dante.

And maybe it was *Three Birds*, but one of them was an *Eagle displayed*.

It was a hawk really, like they carried on their wrists, like the picture in *The Triumph of Death*, an old book that John Millais's father had given Gabriel. It was, Gabriel had explained, a collection of engravings from old frescoes from the *campo santo* at Pisa. It was this very book, he had explained, that had started them in their ideas; these painters looked at things differently, they were pre-Raphael, that is before the Renaissance in Italy. The little flowers in the

77.

grass were all painted separately, like Madox Brown did Emma's shawl in *The Last of England*. And she, he said, who Bessie Parkes said Mr. Allingham had remarked on as "strange and affecting but never beautiful", was like those people on the campo santo walls that had peeled off. Mr. Ruskin said the same, she was like the pictures in the Missals that he showed them.

That special picture, *The Triumph of Death*, was what had most impressed them in the Lasinio book, as Gabriel called it. The book was in the hall, with loose papers and prints in folders, all untidy, on the shelves, that joined the bed-room to this-room. If she touched the prints with their curled-up edges or the dusty folders, Gabriel would be sure to say that she had displaced the very thing he was looking for, to copy a door-way or a flight of steps, for the background of a Dante picture. The Lasinio pictures were about the same time as Dante. She had found some sort of comfort in the book, she did not know why; it was all so horrible. There were ladies and gentlemen in costume of the period, all riding across that sort of flower-meadow with every daisy showing separate in the grass. They seemed to be laughing and joking, all except the first pair, who already see what the others will soon see.

78.

The lady has a hood with veils. Her sleeves are wide, the
embroidery is indicated carefully; though this was only a
print, you could imagine what the original was like. The
first lady carried a hawk or falcon on her wrist. There is a
chord fastened on the bird's leg. To her, that chord was the
most important detail of the picture; she called it
**The Golden Chord**. The dress swept almost to the ground;
Elizabeth imagined the embroidered hem; there might be strawberry-leaves right round it, and little strawberry-flowers
and now and again, an embossed, thicker knot of embroidered
berries.

He, out of the same picture, wears an ordinary feather-
cap, like a scene from Shakespeare. His sleeves are waught
in at the wrists, as if for better drawing his bow.

These two see what the others, who are still laughing,
will soon see. There is a ditch or fosse; three kings in
open coffins lie there. It isn't just that they are dead;
there was careful drawing, but this part was not impressive.
The eaten-away faces and hands were only grotesque.

The look of sudden horror on the faces of the first
two, is intended to make you feel some kind of like horror,
seeing a decomposing body.

79.

Perhaps on the walls of the arcaded chapel of the
campo santo at Pisa, the picture, before it began to peel
away, might make you feel things.

Elizabeth Siddall had never been on a horse, and she
did not accept Barbara's offer to take her riding, when she
was at Scalands. Barbara rode astride. "Why won't you
come?" asked Barbara. "I haven't the clothes," Elizabeth
answered, but Barbara said her Aunt Julia's old habit would do
nicely, and Aunt Julia didn't hunt now. But that wasn't
quite what Elizabeth meant. Perhaps it was the saddle-bow
that worried her. She felt it now, the cramp in her right
leg and she twisted her left foot round it, leaning sideways
and loosening her right knee where it clamped in, under the
saddle-hold. She was annoyed and breathless. It was her
bird, but the others had gone on, her own party, ladies for
the most part. Her outrider with the feather-cap out of a
scene from Shakespeare, had left her where the road forked.
Most of the gentlemen followed him into the forest for venison.

She shifted the bird from her right wrist, and drew
her left hand, still holding the reins, forward to receive it.
She had forgotten the chord. It was looped about and wound
in a ball, which carelessly, she had left on her lap, instead

80.

of tucking into the saddle-pocket. The ball rolled to the
ground and she jerked at the reins.

There was sand mixed with the moss and dried leaves
of the clearing. They were not far from the sea.

The others had taken the sea-road.

They would be pounding ahead now, while she with her
clumsy gauntlet, was trying to disentangle the chord from the
reins, and all the time, she had to hold her left arm, fairly
steady, for the bird perched there.

If she dropped the reins altogether, her palfrey would
consider it a signal to race on.

He was curveting in a circle, not knowing what she wanted.

Unless she balanced properly, the saddle would slip.

Elizabeth Siddall straightened and tightened her hold -
but it was the arm of the basket-chair she was clinging to;
Sometimes it was like that, she had been dreaming again, but
awake. She couldn't have been sleeping. There were no
kings in coffins. That was out of the engravings from the
Lasinio book, as Gabriel called it because it was edited by an
Italian called Lasinio. The prints were copied from frescoes,
many of which had now crumbled away. The book was from
Florence, (Firenze, it was written); she had worked out the

81.

date, MDCCCXXXII. She remembered the Roman numerals
because that was the year she was born.

She was thinking of another book, when her right foot
slipped from the stirrup.

It was a book they were reading. Was it something
Gabriel told her? But he swept her hand from the page;
it was illuminated writing.

If her palfrey turned too quickly, he would tread on
her, break an arm or ... there were drawings in the Lasinio
book of devil tortures, entrails, published out of tortures ...

Where was she?

By some miracle of wit, she had righted herself. She
was standing in the moss and siftings of sea-sand. The bird,
her familiar, had fluttered to her shoulder.

It was cutting out the costume for Francesca, that made
her think in costume, as if she were one of the ladies in the
picture. Gabriel had done a number of sketches for Paolo and
Francesca.

And the new dress of hers that made him call her the
Dove and her objecting in herself, to being called the Dove.
There was the same bird that she carried on her wrist, stitched
on the saddle-cloth; it was their coat,

She could imagine it all so clearly; it was their coat,

82.

Per Bend Verd and Gules: an Eagle displayed.

The palfrey was nosing for grass round the edges of the clearing. He dragged the gold skein, it was still tangled in his bridle. It lay in loops and tangles on the sand and moss.

She started winding the skein, she pulled off her left gauntlet, then the other.

She did not care to catch up with them now.

Perhaps he would come round through the forest, knowing somehow, where she was, and meet her in the clearing.

She could not remember what Gabriel had told her and what she made up, sitting there in the midsummer darkness in the basket-chair, with the tide-water lapping round the house-foundation. Paolo and Francesca were in hell, in the Inferno in one of Dante's circles; but she could not follow it and Gabriel made it no easier by saying that his father had the theory that some of it was irony, that Dante put in, for political reasons, some whom he most hated in the heaven-circle and others, in Inferno whom he loved. Beatrice was or was not his own soul, or the soul of a suppressed Church, the Church of Love - but wasn't it all like that? Here, she should be in heaven, engaged to Gabriel and already she was finding a way

83.

out, that is out of her impression that going to Madox Brown
like that was not only to paint the cart and Brown in a
farmer's smock, but to make it an excuse to be with Fanny,
perhaps somewhere else that she didn't know about. What
did it all matter? But for Mum and Lyddy and Dad, she had a
mind to get away from Gabriel ... she knew now she never
could do that. So, in her dream (or maybe it was a sort of
trance that she sometimes took) she got away from
worry. It was something driving you wild with worry, like
Harry first rushing at her with a knife, "the very knife he
did it with", that had driven her beyond being frightened.
So now, the cholera fear took her by the throat, so that
and she had
she could hardly draw breath or fretted herself into a
fever, about what Gabriel might be up to, she got beyond feeling.
Then, there was that shelf of sand and moss and someone else,
not Gabriel, and she was waiting, while all the time her
hands were busy untangling The Golden Chord.

It was a tangle but it need not be the death of her, for
all that (beginning with Harry) they seemed to set Death about
her. There was Ophelia dead or dying with the floating
draperies, there was Mr. Allingham, though she wasn't supposed
to know it, with that poem. This mood of dream or romance maybe,
was like those first ones, when she shared the room with Lyddy.
She thought of Lyddy and her old room at Kent Place.

84.

ATXKENTXPIAGSXY

She remembered how she was stiff then, as she was now,
scarcely breathing and in the dark, like she was now, not
wanting to light the candle because of Lyddy. Once Lyddy
got to sleep, propped, almost sitting upright, she must leave
her sleeping. Lyddy did not have dreams but she had the
same terror and the memory of Mr. Greenacre, a large man in
a farmer's smock, living almost next door with another woman
to keep house for him; but it was Hannah Brown that he was
going to marry. He was reputed well off, landlord of the
row of cottages in Jane Place, but Hannah Brown had put aside
her earnings and was said to have jewels, perhaps stolen
from the lady she had worked for. It was his cutting her
up ... trying to recall the pieces, made her suddenly feel
nothing.

There were gnawed bones and human remnants in some of
the devil pictures in the Lasinio drawings.

85.

III

But her midsummer madness was interrupted or inter-
cepted by Mr. Ruskin.

Ida must get out of England.

His choice for her was Switzerland, but she must stop
off in Paris and see the Brownings.

No, he did not care to discuss alternative suggestions.
Gabriel however, found a travelling companion for Lizzie, one
of the Pierce connection. Well, Ida might go to Nice, Ruskin
finally consented, if she refused his gentians.

But "Ida must go South immediately ... Paris will
kill her," he was soon writing Gabriel.

Elizabeth Siddall stayed six weeks in Paris; she had
crossed early in September.

Gabriel was trying to get Ruskin to "advance" more money
on pictures already sold, so that he could join Lizzy.

For the first time since their meeting six months ago,
John Ruskin was in no way, amenable to Gabriel Rossetti's
suggestions. The crystal did not even reflect the molten
rose of Gabriel's fanned-up embers. The famous, negligent
manner and flattering insinuation caught no prismatic flash
from the impenetrable Scot.

What had happened?

86.

It was only the fare over, that Gabriel wanted. Ruskin himself had said that Lizzy should leave Paris. He was simply going over to see her off to the South. But since the suggestion about the fare had been smubbed, Gabriel nonchalantly redeemed his call, with "I only looked in to get a letter from you, to the Brownings."

John Ruskin reminded Gabriel that he had already met the Brownings, "write them yourself."

As to the fare to Paris, Ruskin said, "it is impossible, I am hard up."

Lizzy in the meantime, had taken it into her head to write Ruskin that she could no longer conscientiously accept his offer for paintings which she had not even begun and was sure she would never finish.

Gabriel had heard of Ruskin writing to someone last summer, from the Vaudois, of an experience he had had, lying in the grass and hearing dead soldiers talking. The letter couldn't have been entirely confidential, in any case, Freddy Stevens had got hold of the story. Gabriel thought that he might safely broach the subject. He suggested Ruskin joining him that evening, with another fellow, at the Academy in Sloane Street. Ruskin said, "on no account, Ressetti," Gabriel

87.

noted the deliberate mispronunciation of his surname, "I
have heard of their so-called psychic investigation. On no
account and at no time, will I go there to a seance."

The other fellow was waiting as pre-arranged, in what
Gabriel called the foyer of the Academy. Gabriel had dined
after a fashion and wined out of proportion. "Ressetti,"
he said, "a fellow called me Ressetti, before dinner. It's
true, the gov'nor's father was a blacksmith - my gov'nor's,
that is. His deals in wines, a better business altogether.
Ruskin something-or-other and Domecq. Adèle Domecq broke
his heart the first time; he kept a glove of hers eighteen
years, even after the fatal Euphemia (Mrs.Millais as is) came
trailing clouds of glory. Ever heard of Domecq?"

His friend said he had.

"Ever heard of Effie?"

"Who hasn't?"

"The sneak called me Ressetti - deliberate. Now why?
It's true my grandfather was a blacksmith - what was his?
Euphemia - I mean eupheism - rosso, a horse? His name
was della Guardia really, the blacksmith's. Who was Ruskin
but a red-skin? My brother in Carmel - carnal - Carmelite -
confession - confusion. What about the seance?"

88.

"Let's have a smoke first," his friend said.

"What I say is, no harm waiting in the foyer. We can go in later. What I say is, do you think Rossetti is horse or rosette? My kingdom for - I mean blacksmith. What was his red-skin?"

His friend laughed.

"Everyone knows the story but Sco-Scotus gave fresh details the other evening, at a party. No, it was - "

His friend stopped him, "Ely," he said.

Gabriel staggered to his feet as Dr. Ely brushed past them on his way to the séance.

"Funny, his fish-eyes," said Gabriel, "do you notice? Even in this half-light, they go phosphorescent."

Gabriel staggered forward like a moth to the flame.

His friend dragged him back. "We can wait here. We'll go in at the break. The second part is always more amusing."

"Of Vasto, the Abruzzi, the counts of Della Guardia - why Rossetti?"

"It's something on your 'scutcheon, I'll wager, a rose or rosette," his friend said.

A late arrival left the street door open. The night air seemed a palpable presence in the dim hall. "Br-rr," said Gabriel, "I never did like fresh air. Let's find a warm pub."

89.

But his friend said, "I've got to wait here."

"For why, Gus?" said Gabriel.

"Well - er - he isn't certain how he'll feel, after his talk. I sometimes help him."

Gabriel Rossetti seemed suddenly sobered. "You mean it's all fake - or do you actually - see things yourself?"

"No," said Gus, "I'm a sort of secretary, and it's by no means all fake. He keeps the afternoons for maiden-ladies, for simple-Simon faith-healing and the mediums from Bayswater. He can't do everything and he can't waste his - his power. Depending who turns up - no, Norton Ely is no fake."

"I didn't know that you were in the business, Gus. You just say that."

"By no means, Gabriel."

Gabriel straightened in his chair. He reached for a cigar, but his hand rested on his breast-pocket and Gabriel Rossetti forgot the cigar. Those voices - those voices from the Abruzzi - the govhor's older brother who started him on Dante - a priest. "You know Italian?"

"No," said Gus.

"Ely know Italian?"

"No," said Gus.

"You say you're not in the business, you're lying to me."

90.

"No," said Gus.

"What do you do, anyway - and why do you tell me all this?"

"We're friends, aren't we?"

"I thought you were a painter - Charles Augustus -"

"Call me Manuel."

"You're a weird card," said Gabriel Rossetti, "but I like you. I'm sick of these damn English - you really are a Spaniard?"

"Portuguese," said Manuel.

"Your English is too good."

"My father was a copyist at the Prado," said Manuel, "half English." ("He is no fool, is Gus," thought Gabriel Rossetti, "he wants something.") Gabriel tried to recapture his vague stare, he felt the lines tauten across his forehead, what his father had been wont to call the bar of Angelo, of Michaelangelo, a sign they said, of genius.

He thought of casa Rossetti and the crowd there. His mother had lived in retirement, since the death of Gabriele. Gabriel had loved his father.

There was Mazzini and Father Gavazzi, always tender with him. It wasn't that Pierce connection of his mother's.

92.

Napoleon.

He remembered Paganini, Michael Costa and again Mazzini.

"But the rest were dancing-teachers and piano-tuners."

"Piano-tuners can be useful."

The cards were on the table - or was this just a joke?
In any case, Gabriel was an old hand at this game. He had
been familiar with codes, secret-signs, pass-words, revolution,
conspiracy ever since he could remember. A fellow like Gus
was sure to be in, on something.

"Better begin at the top," said Gabriel, "if you're
dealing with old masters. I'll take you to see Ruskin."

If there were anything in this, Bill with his Board of
Trade connection, could be trusted to follow a clue.

Gabriel let his chin sink forward. Then he started,
as if suddenly aware of his surroundings. "Can't sleep here -
or can I? Had I better go home and come back later? But
he'll be worn out to-night, after his lecture. Hardly worth
sitting an hour with twenty people and the Bayswater medium,
for a message from great-grand-mamma's pet tabby - or is it?
Better than nothing, you'll say and it's fun watching the
others. But," Gabriel pulled himself, as with difficulty to
his feet, "you said Ely wouldn't see me again, for a private
sitting. Who are you, anyway, Gus?"

93.

"I've just told you. I'm Dr. Ely's secretary. I
make arrangements."

"O, I thought you were the tambourines or Rain-in-the-face
or whatever he calls himself in Bayswater."

"We don't have tambourines here - "

"Come, came Gus, don't put on airs. It's your job, you
just said so - but about those other irons on the fire.
Browning's in Paris - or was - on the way to Florence."
Gabriel pulled his cape about him. "Faut de Browning, will
Ruskin do as understudy? He's a cad and a sneak but he knows
everybody. Called me Ressetti this evening, before dinner.
How about coming out for a sandwich and a drink?"

"I told you I had to wait and see that they don't stay
round too long, after the group's over."

"Good-night, till soon -" said Gabriel. He walked
half-way to the door before he turned round. "O, by the way,
arrange a sitting for me - when old Ely is not too tired."

Norton Ely did not look up from his table. He was
apparently writing letters. He looked more like a clerk in
a counting-house, now that Gabriel saw him seated in his own

94.

room. The shaded lamp cast a half-circle of light on the thin hand that held the pen. Dr. Ely held the pen like a schoolmaster, not like a creative writer. Gabriel noticed these things. He noticed everything. You could see from the way Dr. Ely sat at his desk, that he was a man with a conscience. He would sit up half the night, correcting sums exercise books, Examen or Latin. That reminded Gabriel, he must not forget to bait Ely about languages. He would forget, once Ely turned round.

You can't judge a man only, by his eyes. The man was sitting at a desk, after school-hours, correcting papers, or he was going over the books after office-hours, because someone had been ill in the estimable but second-rate firm he worked for - or there was two farthings missing. He was not forging a cheque.

He might be forty-ish from the back of his head.

The cloth was good, he wasn't a parson; new cloth, cut, old-fashioned. Gabriel forgot, for a moment, that Norton Ely was from America. Must remember to mention his great country. Gabriel had been directed to Mr. Ely's private office. Maybe, this wasn't actually for a sitting.

Scratch - scratch - "his is not the pen of a ready writer," thought Gabriel.

95.

Norton Ely turned round. "Don't look at his eyes," said Gabriel to himself. Gabriel bowed, "do not let me disturb you." Dr. Ely passed his hand over his forehead. He laid down his pen. He said, "pray, be seated. I leave the arrangement of the groups to the desk. But I require a personal interview before I engage a new medium. My secretary sent you?"

Gabriel said, "yes."

"Ours is, you understand, a personal dedication. But already, the movement is growing, perhaps growing too fast. There are new, unforeseen developments. Now, as to that congress in Cleveland; they are already arranging for branch societies and supervision of group-centres. It appears all this is necessary but it is really beyond my power to control the more popular and sensational aspects of our work. I don't know. They say we must have some sort of hold over meetings and demonstrations. They say, how else control but by committees and supervision? I don't know. I say, let control come from within - guidance will best serve and personal devotion. It was at the suggestion of Miss Fox, the elder of the sisters, that I came here to help establish this London centre."

Gabriel saw from the shadow, that Norton Ely now had his back to the light. He looked up.

96.

Norton Ely's eyes were half-closed; "dead tired," thought
Gabriel.

"But I need not interview you," said Dr. Ely, "you are
a seeker. They will tell you, at the desk downstairs, your
duties if you wish to work here."

Dr. Ely coughed. He turned back to his table, a polite
intimation that the interview was over. "Good-night, sir."

"I'm sorry," said Gabriel, "I am not a medium."

"It's Miss Mary," said Dr. Ely, "I do not frankly, ap-
prove of Miss Mary, a sensitive, delicate lady, appearing at
public meetings."

"(Those Fox sisters," thought Gabriel. He had heard
Mrs. Howitt speak of them.)

"But I see you are too tired to-night," said Gabriel,
"for a sitting."

"Mr. Manuel does not send clients to my private office."

"It was a special arrangement."

"You are a friend of Manuel?"

"You do not remember me?" said Gabriel.

Norton Ely turned. The phosphorescence was burnt out.
He had probably been working, earlier in the evening. Gabriel
had especially wanted to see Dr. Ely when he was not tired.

97.

"Manuel, like myself, is not wholly English. My name is
Rossetti."

"I think I remember seeing you. I think I remember
your face."

"I have attended your lectures and sat with your mediums at the séances. But I am grateful to say, you gave me two private sittings."

"I am all gone this evening," said Dr. Ely. "It's
thinking of Miss Mary. Pray - did you receive guidance
from my Guardian?"

"Guidance and consolation," said Rossetti.

"Then I will ask your guidance now," said Dr. Ely. "I
am not in two minds about it. But they argue round me." He
lowered the lamp. "They say if you have a message, you must
give it. We in America, are a divided people. We do not
pretend to see the future, but war is coming. What can we do
to stop war? Nothing. But we can do this. We can leave
the door open."

"Je dis que le tombeau ... Ouvre le firmament,"
said Gabriel.

"I do not understand," said Ely.

"You do not speak French?"

98.

"I know no foreign language."

"It is a line of Hugo."

"Hugo?"

"Victor Hugo, a French poet. I learn he is in Jersey."

"Jersey?"

"One of the Channel islands. I am told that he, too, communicates with the Spirits."

"This is a message from the Spirits?"

"You asked me for my guidance and I thought of this poem." Gabriel remembered how Mary Howitt had brought the poem to him and asked him to translate it for _The People's Journal_. He was back in their good graces at the Hermitage.

"The translation is,

_The tomb, I declare it ..._  
Opens the star-gate,

but star-gate is not literal, _firmament_ he says, firmament or heaven."

"I take it for an answer. We must go on. My personal predeliction is for - secrecy. But secrecy is not quite what I mean. I would have more selection and smaller gatherings. It is not so much persecution from outside that I dread, but actual submergence. I can not interview everyone who enters these doors. It is a tide-wave. I am

99.

told that Italy, Belgium, Holland, Sweden, Spain - the whole
world has been swept into this current. There are undesirable
write-ups and sensations, about the movement. Is it the Lord's
doing?

Gabriel was silent.

"In confidence, Mr. - "

"Rossetti."

"You know languages. You are French?"

"Italian," said Rossetti.

"Mr. Manuel is conversant with foreign languages. In
confidence, I have not yet signed this."

Dr. Ely turned to the table. He handed Gabriel a letter.

Gabriel leaned forward to the half-circle of the light.
It was unquestionably, Manuel's writing, dashing and ornate.
French
Ely said, "it is a /xxx princess."

not
"Well - / a Bourbon," said Rossetti.

"It is difficult for me to follow things in Europe -
the Continent, Manuel calls it."

Gabriel handed back the letter. "What did you tell
Manuel to say?"

"I asked him to explain in a few words, our predicament.
We have funds. Chiefly, how communicate?"

Fontanelle

100.

"I see. This Madame de Villiers does not, I gather, expect you to lecture to her group or circle?"

"No, she specified a favour - one or more private sessions. It got about, I might take a trip to Europe. The International Society, as it now calls itself, sends out a monthly bulletin. I guess this Lady de Villiers talks English."

"It is possible," said Gabriel.

"It is different with lectures and discussions. That is, someone at hand to prompt you or them, or to explain or interpret generally, doesn't put you out. Foreign people call here. Generally, they are diplomatic or connected with the Foreign Office and talk English, but there are times when they bring a distinguished visitor."

Gabriel with no visual effort, saw the visitor. He had seen so many in his time, that is while old Gabriele (as he called his father) was still living.

What was it Ely wanted to know? Didn't he trust Manuel? But Gus was, as Gabriel had already admitted, no fool.

"Manuel simply says what you say," repeated Gabriel, "that for a private sitting, you don't want interpreters. But Manuel says it, of course, as if dictated by you. Perhaps he is a little - well, gushing at the end, but felicitations and all that, is the French way of writing."

101.

Dr. Ely handed him back the letter, "read out what he says."

"Dear Princess - "

"But you just said she was no princess."

Had Gabriel come here to elucidate the mysteries of the French aristocracy? Or had he come for his own (as Ely would say) guidance?

"Well, it's difficult to explain."

Had Ely never heard of Louis and Eugenie?

"The present Emperor is the third Napoleon. There was the French Revolution before Bonaparte. The aristocrats who escaped, still hold to their old titles."

"Some came to America," said Mr. Ely. So he had heard of the French Revolution.

"It's a matter of taste - or etiquette - "

"That," said Dr. Ely surprisingly, "is just what I meant. There's a sort of boudoir air about this letter."

"It's only French, it's only - elegance. In any case, Manuel makes it quite clear; you will know or she will know, immediately on meeting, whether or not a private session is desirable."

"You're keeping something back, Mr. Rossetti."

"No," said Gabriel.

102.

Gabriel had read between the lines; Manuel knew what he knew - Norton Ely did not realize that his trance communications were sometimes delivered in foreign languages of which he himself, knew not one word.

And Gabriel wondered what ordering of fate had caused him casually to ask his neighbour, one evening at one of the lectures, to come out afterwards for a drink.

"Has Manuel always been your secretary?"

"I never had a private secretary till recently. I needed someone for these foreign letters."

There was honour among thieves, whichever way you look at it. Gabriel gathered that whatever else Gus was up to, there was some sort of tacit agreement, that to let Dr. Ely know what happened in his trance-state was to break the charm, or the power, as Ely would have called it.

There was honour among thieves.

"I assure you, Dr. Ely," said Gabriel, "that this is the sort of letter that passes merely for ordinary politeness in France. It is a difficult language, untranslatable.

Je dis que le tombeau ...

Ouvre le firmament;

when I gave you my English words for those lines, it was
stones for bread, or stones for star-dust."

103.

"It's what in a way, I have been saying to myself. But you couldn't call anybody swine, even in the Scriptural sense. It's those pearls."

Dr. Ely was tired certainly, but Gabriel believed there would be no difficulty now. Gabriel felt he could help Ely, without cutting across Manuel. He had only to find out what evening or evenings, Ely put aside for letters. He was a methodical man.

"Miss Mary is only a girl, but her devotion to her father compels her to vow not to marry, though Mr. Foxxters be the best. Miss Cathy won't leave her sister. They are really up-state people, but Mr. Fox had, out of sentiment, kept on their Connecticut farm."

Now Gabriel was listening to a foreign language.
"Connecticut?"

"Pretty with golden-rod up to the door, and asters drifting to the stone-walls. They wouldn't let the hired man mow down the field, that September. It was the first year they were alone there, after Mr. Fox died. I didn't know what took it into Miss Mary's head to leave the golden-rod and asters, growing in their front-yard."

"They lived there?" Gabriel felt that Ely was retreating into his reverie. "But I must not keep you from your letters."

104.

"Pray, Mr. Rossetti, forgive my being absent. I was there in that farm. Not a large place, counting in acres, but containing an edge of wood-land. The spring rose beyond the wood, from a hollow-dip. There was fern there, may-flower and violets. Miss Cathy was child-like in her ways and would always set the violets in one of her grand-mother's old mugs. She had notions. The barns were empty though there had been cattle, in the old days. There were of course, blackberry tangles, the run of the stone walls. The sumac made red splashes there; Indian paint-brush, some call it."

"Paint-brush?"

"The Indians painted themselves."

"Were there many Indians?"

"Mr. Rossetti, you will forgive me, but here, you are singularly ignorant about our country. The Indians but for the Far West, have all gone."

"I am ignorant, I grant you - Con-nect-ti-cut? Is it a town?"

"One of our New England states."

Ruskin was planning to send pictures to some exhibition in America. But America to Gabriel, was chiefly associated with talks at home in the old days, Ida de St. Elme and discussions of a certain Louisianna Purchase.

105.

"I confess to ignorance. There was talk at one time,
at my father's home, about Louisiana."

"French and Spanish," said Dr. Ely, "far away but near
at hand, too. It concerned Miss Cathy when Miss Mary said,
they would move out of New York state altogether and live
there, at the farm, all the year round, not only in the
summer. They were working for the run-aways."

"Run-aways?"

"The slaves, Mr. Rossetti. The Friends in Philadelphia
had the tunnels. The slaves got across from Maryland, even
from the deep-south, and worked their way up. The Abolition-
ists in Boston and the Friends in Philadelphia, it was being
reported being said from Virginia, would land the country in
war."

"War?"

"Secession, they call it - the right to what the
plantation-owners call their own property; some of the states
already plan breaking away. I told you our country was
divided. It is a grave problem, but it is no problem. It
was worry about the slaves got Miss Mary thinking of the
Indians. Hiram the man, was son of old Hiram who was head
of the farm in grand-father Fox's day. He was loyal. But
he stopped my buggy on the road. He stated there was talk

106.

from people driving down that way to the rocks, to watch the
sun-set, summer-evenings. But Thanksgiving Day was near, and
Miss Mary and Miss Cathy had just told Hiram they would stay
the winter. Hiram didn't want to be seen, coming to my office.
I had heard some rumour, a doctor must be pleasant, and you
can't always keep a patient quiet. Hiram suggested I look
in some day, just for an excuse in passing. I made the ex-
cuse that I heard they were staying for Thanksgiving, would
they spend it at our house. We always had what strangers
there were about, for Thanksgiving. Not that Miss Mary and
Miss Cathy were strangers. My wife is a good woman."

"Is Mrs. Ely with you here in London?"

"No. It is partly on her account, that I contemplate
the trip to Europe."

Norton Ely went on, "they wouldn't come for Thanksgiving.
Miss Mary said they were keeping it with the Indians.

"Miss Cathy took me to the door. 'Dr. Ely,' she said,
'it's getting about that Mary is touched. You know our father.
I would consider it charitable of you, if you would contradict
any rumours.' She supposed I had heard what people said
about them. She went with me to the fence. 'Mary keeps
the garden this way, for the Indians.' I confess I wondered
if Miss Cathy was touched, too.

107.

"They were not exclusive and they knew people. They had been to Philadelphia. They read what Mr. Hawthorne wrote on evil that had been done by early settlers. Indian villages were burnt out and Indian mothers and the children smoked out and destroyed, like you smoke out a hornet's nest and with no more feeling, for they were heathen. Miss Mary had been writing to Mr. Hawthorne in Liverpool; he was there on consul or diplomatic business. Perhaps it was Mr. Hawthorne talking of coming to England that first put it into Miss Mary's head that I might come here. But she said it was the voices."

Dr. Ely placed his two hands flat on his knees. He sat upright.

There was a tension in the atmosphere. Gabriel recognised the symptoms. His own hackles, he felt, were rising. Or like a cat, watching a mouse-hole, his whiskers felt the stir beneath the boards, where there was no stir. Gabriel was reputed to be the most selfish man in London. He was the last to defend his reputation. But Gabriel Rossetti had his moments.

"Dr. Ely," he tried to be casual, "I've taken enough of your time. Some evening, when you are disengaged, perhaps you will let me come again to see you."

"You are yourself engaged this evening?"

108.

"If I were, I would gladly cancel any previous arrange-
ment, for the sake of talking with you."

"I will tell you then, what I have told no one," said Norton Ely.

But still he sat there, erect, as he did when the
trance took him.

"I was kept for lying-in cases and the dying sometimes,
half the night, on my circuit. I could not confide in Mrs.
Ely. But I could make occasion to pass the Fox farm, hitch
up the buggy, sometimes even unharness, for Hiram helped me
and kept grain ready in the feed-box. In conscience, I could
say I was helping the Fox sisters, for who was there to help
them? It had begun in the old grand-mother's time and she
had talked about it, but grand-father Fox forbade mention of
irreligious subjects, as he called the tales of hauntings,
ghosts and rappings. It was wind in the pine-trees, the
wood was closer to the house then, even it might be, wind from
the sea, or old boards creaking. Grand-mother was what in the
old days, they called a wise-woman, what in the older days,
they burnt for witches.

"It never had taken Miss Mary until she went to Phila-
delphia. Some said, unmarried women and girls should not know
things, but Mary was with the plain Friends, working for the

109.

cause - the run-aways. Some had marks of chains and marks burnt on them of their masters. Miss Mary attended meeting and though not a Friend, the Spirit moved her to stand up and witness. She was afraid after that, Miss Cathy told me. Mary said she had lost conscience of her surroundings, when she spoke. What did she speak of? Cathy told her. xRmxtx TAKEN THEIR FATHER WAS SICK, THEY WERE BACK, HE DIED. When they got here, it was as it had always been, with pansies by the door-stoop. 'We'll leave them this time,' said Mary, 'then, we'll get pansy-violets from behind the spring-house and put them in, and let what's wild stay.' Cathy said she liked the crow-foot and the pansy-violets, but gran always had the pansies. Mary said, 'gran tells me, let it run wild.'

"It was Cathy I got to be afraid for, Mary was away on her trances but Cathy was there all the time. It is a letter to Miss Catharine Fox there, lying at my elbow."

Gabriel could think of nothing to say. Dr. Ely was waiting for him to speak.

The Fox sisters - he had thought of a music-hall turn, the first time he heard of the Fox sisters.

Now there was Cathy with crow-foot ... "What is crow-foot, Dr. Ely?"

110.

"It's a violet, bigger than field-violets. It's because of the leaf, Cathy told me, that it's called crows-foot. I asked that very question."

"I see ... and a spring-house?"

"It's usually of stone, with slabs over the stream or spring; this was a stream flowing out of the spring in the hollow. The slabs or slates hold the cold, and butter is laid there and raspberries on plates or in leaves. My mother pulled grape-leaves."

"I should think raspberries would look very well on vine — I mean, on grape-leaves," Gabriel spoke at random.

"Nothing tasted the same iced; they got to storing ice in ice-pits, to last all summer."

"The summers are hot there?"

"Very hot and the winters are very cold."

"But Gabriel knew that they were marking time. He must ask a question or Norton Ely would not tell him what he had told no one."

"And the voices?" said Gabriel Rossetti.

"It was Indians speaking. Gran, Cathy said, brought them. Gran at first, talked for them. Afterwards, they came by themselves. Mary talked with Indian voices."

111.

"And you understood her?"

"This is out of St. Paul. There are tongues and the interpretation of tongues. Cathy interpreted."

"She understood the language?"

"This is what we are trying to find out - there is a new word, telepathy. She understood the thought back of the language."

"But Miss Mary understood the language, I gather?"

"Miss Mary was in trance. She did not know she spoke with tongues. Cathy said, gran said that the Indians would not come, if Mary (or any but us) knew. It would go, the gift, if Mary knew about it."

"I see," said Gabriel Rossetti.

"What happened, we thought, was summer people. Cathy said she felt Mary might break up. She would sing or intone, at times. That too, worried us - for I was, as it were, Mary's left hand now, Cathy being her right, like Paul again and the Body Spiritual. We were a whole Body, though only three. But there were moonlight picnics and summer-people loitering in their wood, that second summer, and down by the shore. Cathy remembered her gran's little table. It would be quieter and the three of us would take the power together."

112.

Their gran had made a secret of the three-legged table for them, when they were children. But there was always grand-father Fox who might break in on them, and their own father had been sympathetic but he was taken up with Swedenborg. Cathy got out the little table.

"It might have been Mary and Cathy sitting alone with the table, in the summer with the door open or (Hiram's wife was away with a sick mother) the new girl in, part time from the Bridgefield farm. She was only supposed to be there, mornings, but she would stop in evenings, with the breakfast eggs, or she got curious. Anyway, it was in his wife's absence, that Hiram thought it started. They had the same foreman's cottage beyond the barns, where Hiram had been born. There would be no way to convey how Hiram said, summer people.

"It was the summer people. Some out-of-town journalist got hold of the story, rappings and voices at Haunted Hollow.

"It came to be known in less time than you can think, that Miss Mary and Miss Cathy were in communication. They called them the Fox sisters, and try as I would to avoid them, anybody, at any time, in town or on my rounds, would hand me a newspaper. 'You will be interested, Dr. Ely, in happenings on your circuit.' And head-lines, local re-prints of articles

113.

from New York and Chicago and worst of all, the Hollow beseiged
by visitors, ladies from Albany or even from New York, 'we hear
you tell fortunes here, Miss Fox,' showing them, Mary and
Cathy, pieces from home newspapers, brought along in their
hand-bags.

"It was beyond all reason.

"Mrs. Ely is a loyal woman. She listened to no gossip.

"As a matter of fact, it didn't actually come out."

Gabriel thought it time to put in a word, "your sitting
with them at the table?"

"Well that - that was a recreation, you might say,
a rest from the other."

"From Miss Mary's trances?"

"Yes - and from mine.

"Cathy was the go-between, between us.

"Of course, Cathy gave me to understand that my states
were on a different level, stronger maybe, but Mary was nearer
the Spirit. Mary said we were the same, but Mary didn't know
what Cathy and I knew, that she (Mary) spoke with tongues, in
trance state. It was somehow agreed between us, without too
much talk, that I was to leave town."

"It is fortunate for us, Dr. Ely," said Gabriel, "that
you came here."

114.

"A professor from Harvard, interested in what they call metaphysics, came to our help. We got the thing under some sort of control, after the summer visitors cleared out, and Mrs. Hiram took in a group from Boston, over Christmas. I need not tell you that we would, as I said, have worked together in secret, if it were possible. But it was no longer possible. The table helped us, you might almost say gran's table saved us. Miss Mary and Miss Cathy gave good-will messages from the table, to the Christmas people and the folks from Boston said, they would see that the two were sheltered. Miss Mary and Miss Cathy agreed to spend the summer visiting in Vermont and Massachusetts. That was last summer. There was a distinguished set in Boston, abolitionists and writers. It was your speaking of this French poet and my remembering Mr. Hawthorne, that confirmed me. I did not want to go on with the work. But I will try to do what I can in Europe; there are others already arranged for, to go on with the Academy, here in London. I would rather go home to Connecticut. I am a simple man, a doctor."

"You are not a simple man, Dr. Ely." Gabriel remembered Gus speaking of simple-Simon health-cures. "Do you do health-treatments?"

115.

"I talk to people. Doctors always talk to people."

"But the table - why do you say it saved you?"

"We could talk about the table. We had to cover rumours.

And there had always been talk of mystery at the Hollow. It
was old tales from the past, we could say honestly. But
the table started other tables. There was a mushroom growth
of talking-tables, right across the country and they say the
same of Europe. All this sprang up because of Miss Mary and
Miss Cathy and myself. I feel responsible. And I think of
how we sat together, winter evenings, and I think of the clear
water of the spring from the Hollows, and I fear as I said
earlier, that clear rivulet being lost in these dark waters."

And why had Dr. Ely told him all this? Gabriel knew
the answer. It was the message he had had the second time,
the last time, war and inheritors.

There had always been war, Ely had said earlier, but we
could leave the door open.

"We cannot stop war," Dr. Ely had said, "We can not
stop inheritance," said Gabriel.

Dr. Ely reached forward to adjust the lamp.

"I will finish my letter," he said, "I will tell Miss
Cathy that I will go on."

IV

116.

What is happening to Lizzie in Paris, they asked in London. She wrote to Ruskin, deprecating her talent but Ruskin brushed aside her objections and said this year, at any rate, was settled. "I can not have you going to Paris or near Ida," Ruskin writes Gabriel, ordering him to finish certain drawings, commissioned for one of his art patrons in the North. But seeing a fresh picture of Gabriel's, at Chatham place, Ruskin buys it on the spot for thirty-five pounds, and Gabriel is off to Paris.

Lizzie had already been six weeks in Paris.

She looked stronger, better; Gabriel perceived a certain poise and elegance. "What have you done to yourself, Lizzie?" She rose gracefully, from the faded brocade tabouret where she was sitting, and in the small salon of the modest hotel where she and Mrs. Kincaid were staying, she swayed to the door and stood before the curtain. She might have been Miss Louise Herbert, in the green-room.

"Well, I asked you, what have you done to yourself, Lizzie?" Gabriel repeated. It was perhaps perversity on her part that she stood so still, that she turned her head, so that the chin and throat took the line, "your chin, your

117.

chin - you've spoilt that line, ~~damned~~ you." It seemed that
she would tilt her head back, and laugh. She did laugh.

It was not however, the green-room laughter of Miss Herbert.

It was too tense, "her flighty giggle," William had called her
laughter, and "she is flighty," William Rossetti had said
(it was reported to her) on more than one occasion. Gabriel's
outlandish pranks and ridiculous and not always funny parodies,
were acclaimed as expression (even the most trivial) of genius
should be. It was never put on record that William Rossetti
called his brother flighty.

"What is the matter with you, Liz?"

"What is the matter with you, Gabriel? I hardly ever
remember, except for the first few times I sat for the <u>Damozel</u>,
your asking me to talk."

"You've been here six weeks, Lizzie, something's happened
to you."

"Something's happened to you, Gabriel."

"_Tu quoque_ was always forbidden in our family."

"Ah - your family." (Ah - Miss Herbert!!)

"Something stiffish about you, Lizzie."

"That's what you said of Spenser and Wykeham Deverell."

"My God - what a memory you have."

"That's what you said, when I remembered after three

118.

months (at Red Lion Square) that you hadn't thanked me for
the *Damozel*."

"But I think I said, it wasn't finished."

"And you said, why should you thank me, 'it's you', you
said, 'who should thank me, for making you immortal.'"

She swayed over to the window. Outside, was a walled
garden. She looked down on the wall; above it, there was
placed for her exact requirement, a roof slanting at a probable
angle to meet gables, and above and beyond, uneven planes,
roofs set at impossible angles, broken now and again, by dormer-
windows. Beyond them, was the pinnacle of the lesser *Saint Germain*. There were bells, no sweeter but more personal somehow, than the chimes of Bridewell.

"I thought Scotus would come over with Monro, but only
Monro turned up."

"You have already seen him?"

"We crossed together."

"What are you planning to do first?" From an immense
height, from an immeasurable distance, Elizabeth Siddall, for
the first time in the erratic, surcharged years, spoke with
gentle patronage to Gabriel Rossetti.

"Do? Well, we'll barge into the Louvre, I suppose first."

119.

"You won't like the way they've been cleaning up the
Claudes. There is too much of Rubens but you'll like the
Marriage."

"Marriage?"

"Veronese's Marriage in Cana."

It had been reported in London that the Sid was getting
out of hand. Scotus had remarked to one of them, William,
Boyce or Stevens, that she actually thought herself a genius,
with her "small, quaint, quasi-poetical imitations of his
works." It was Scott who had looked in at Chatham Place last
summer, to retrieve some books he had lent Gabriel and found
the Sid in charge, there, "sleeping there - well - in
Gabriel's absence." William Bell Scott had also run across
her, at the Hermitage. It was during the time that the girl
was sleeping in Gabriel's studio. Where wasn't she? True,
Gabriel was staying at the Queen's Head to be near Brown and
to finish the Bridge. "I was trying to find Gabriel. That
caretaker told me he was out at Highgate, but I just pushed
upstairs. Imagine my feelings. It was damn hot. I
would go out the next evening, to Brown's. No, Emma said,
he wasn't there. No help from Emma. He might be sitting
with them, in the Hermitage garden. No, the maid informed me,

120.

the family was away. I just took a look round. You know
the summer-house? Mary called it the studio - romantic,
rustic and all that. There was Gabriel and - the lady.
She slid off. No, I hadn't seen anything. Gabriel walked
back with me to Brown's."

Romantic but hardly rustic, Miss Siddall continued,
"John Hancock has an *epergne* at the Exhibition." Gabriel
with difficulty, recalled Hancock, a fellow he and Monro had
known in the early days. "Whoever mentioned that I knew John
Hancock?" "Mrs.Kincaid." "Why should Mrs.Kincaid speak of
John Hancock to you?" "She remembered him, she met him at
your mother's, she saw his name written on the card in the
show-case, at the Exhibition." "What's an *epergne*, Lizzy?"
"It's knights chasing each other in a circle, and pages between,
with holders." "Holders - what for?" "For putting flowers
in." "Lizzy - are you dotty?" "I thought it would
interest you."

"Are you coming out to dinner?" "Is it time for dinner?"
Dinner was any time, in London, as she well knew. "Are you
hungry, Gabriel?" "No, we had a snack and the crossing was
rough. I thought you might like to come out." "I thought
we could go out to-morrow." She did not want to spoil this

121.

perfect moment. She wanted to prolong it. She wanted to be alone afterwards, to think about it. She wanted to reassemble her impressions; herself, it seemed for the first time in her life, needed no assembling. She wanted to savour this moment and recalled the moment, less than a half hour ago, when Madame Bonnard had announced Gabriel. She wanted to remember Gabriel's voice, behind the curtain, the voice of a new Gabriel, his French voice. It did not abash and shut her out, as his Italian did, when he and William got excited about something (usually some criticism of their father's Dante) and "disappeared" in a mysterious manner; strangers. They were fluent, vituperative in a new way, not that they weren't talkative and dramatic enough in English. But the French Gabriel was different.

"Funny, your not knowing what an *epergne* was," said Lizzie, "I heard you talking real French with Madame Bonnard in the hall, before you came in." "That *epergne*, as you described it, wasn't real anything. And why a damned Exhibition?" "It's cheap," said Lizzie, "cheaper than the Crystal Palace and easy to get to. I mean, we can't walk around the shops all day, looking, though we did buy, in the beginning." She had turned from the window. Now again, she swayed forward and

122.

seated herself, this time, on the gilded settee. The room was growing darker. Her hands seemed to be resting at her sides, but she was fingering the folds of her skirt, then as if at a sudden "damn — your hands, Lizzie," she drew them forward and they rested on her lap. Still, her fingers felt within them, the sheen of the deep-rose taffeta, she had chosen that first week, with such care and so extravagantly, with Mrs. Kincaid. She had worn the dress to get the "feel" of it, so that she wouldn't be shy in it, when Gabriel saw her. It (or something) had gone to her head.

It was _taffetas de soie_ but it wasn't silk exactly. It had the lustre of shot-silk but it wasn't stiff like taffeta.

"It was the stuffs; they have rooms and show-cases and costumes made up, and you couldn't buy anything, not outright, at the Exhibition, even if you wanted. So you look arouhd, without embarrassment, at what they call the _dentelles_, lace, every kind of stitch-work, Flemish, Spanish and of course, French embroideries - and tapestries." "Old tapestries?" "I - I don't know."

"You mean you wasted six weeks, pottering about the Exhibition?"

"O - no, Gabriel."

123.

"You think the time wasn't wasted? Why the protestation?"

"I wasn't protesting. It was a way of - forgetting."

"Forgetting what, Lizzie?"

Gabriel, strangely contrite, thought of bleak London periods, his neglect, her illness. He wished he had not asked her what she had forgotten.

He saw the face, a shadowed cameo. There was the throat and the hands, in the darkness.

"It was a story I made up while you were out at Highgate, out of what you called the Lasinio book, peeled off from the walls at Pisa."

"It was a story as real as if I'd lived it."

"It was those coffins on the ground and the kings, meant to be portrayed horrible, in the coffins."

"I knew it was a picture (you all talked about it) of a painting from a wall in a grave-yard, what you called the campo santo."

"It was going to Chartres. That's why I wouldn't leave Paris."

The face, the throat, the hands - the rest had faded away.

"Lizzy - "

124.

"What's the matter, Gabriel?"

"O, I suppose the crossing. I felt funny."

"There's matches, Gabriel, always in the saucer."

"Well - damn - where's the saucer?"

He did not believe, even now, that there was more to her
than a face, a throat, and two hands, folded upon darkness.

"It was Mrs. Browning saying it was that way with her -
or it had been - not knowing whether a book or a picture
was more real that the un-real world she lived in."

He did not even know she had met the Brownings. He
heard the rustle of her skirt as she rose from the settee.
It was silk of some kind. She was not clothed in impalpable
darkness. He saw through his eyelids and through his hands,
clasped over the flaming bar of Angelo, that there was light.
She had found the matches.

He did not open his eyes.

"Sitting there in the Cathedral, it was as if one
of the queens had stepped off from the wall and was lying in
a coffin. The Queen it seemed, belonged to one of the Kings
in the picture - but this was just the opposite of that
grave-yard painting. It was mixed up with my being afraid
of cholera."

125.

"You never spoke of cholera."

"One fear joins to another fear - one fear reminds one of another. But in that Cathedral picture - or - dream - it was as if the queen might have come out of a Missal, like the ones Mr. Ruskin showed us at Denmark Hill. And I thought of other Cathedrals - or rather it seemed this might be the very place where Heloise and Abelard might most fittingly have worshipped. It seems from what Mrs. Browning told me, there was mystery about them. I had read about Abelard in one of those pamphlets sent to your father, that William used to bring in. It was Forerunners of Dante by a Professor in America, mostly about Abelard."

He opened his eyes. He saw Lizzie standing by the curtain.

"It was connecting terror of that far past, the wrong they did Abelard (and actually in a French cathedral) that reminded me of others, and Harry lunging at me with a knife and Walter Deverell dying at Mr. Greenacre."

The story had horrified Gabriel, but he should have made Lizzie talk more about Mr. Greenacre.

"Then, I was afraid, remembering the guillotine in Paris."

"How could you remember, Lizzy?"

126.

"I mean (maybe, I didn't tell you) Mr. Tozer (whose name was Toussier) told me how his father's master had been killed and I was afraid of Paris."

"I thought you wanted to come to Paris."

"I was afraid. But Mrs. Kincaid took me to the shops and sights, and Madame Bonnard said we must go to Chartres."

"I went alone sometimes. I even spent the night there with a cousin of Madame Bonnard's." Now Elizabeth Siddall remembered the story, herself and the embroidered falcon on the saddle-cloth, the chord twisted in the reins—and as she fell from the awkward saddle, as if into the abyss ... the gentlemen in the forest, led by her own companion. His sleeves were caught in at the wrist and at first she had wondered why that should be, as apparently he was one of their hawking party. But he turned off into the forest and the gentlemen, for the most part, followed him. Her companion in the picture was not Gabriel. But she had worked that out; her own fever of anxiety lest he and Fanny were together ... had projected this other for her. She could not then think of Gabriel without some compensating hope for herself; but here in Paris, Gabriel was different."

"It was suddenly knowing that the story had its real

127.

side and wasn't what you just now called dotty, that made
everything seem different. It was her telling me she got
'lost' sometimes like that. That is she got 'lost', as she
called it, alone there in her father's house, before she was
married, and she experienced the same terrors, things thought
being true, and the washstand and the dressing-table and
everything on it being - 'hallucination' was her word.
She was happier when she had Flush."

"Who's Flush, Lizzie? And who is this who had hallucinations?" He did not know his own voice, but he recognised unfamiliar smothered sobbing in it. He had never cried, not even when ~~Gabriele~~ left him.

"Flush was the little dog she had, when he first came
to see her."

"Lizzie dear, who came to see who, and whose was the
little dog called Flush?"

Was Lizzy really going dotty?

"Why ~~he~~ came to see ~~her~~, Gabriel."

His hands dropped to his sides. He wanted something to
eat - a drink, badly. But he couldn't leave her in this
mood. "Get on your mantle and come out, Lizzie."

"You see, it doesn't matter, but it was always that way,
when I started talking. You always said, 'come out, Lizzy.'"

128.

"It does matter, Lizzy."

"She went to the circles sometimes, but I never saw her. He called it 'slumming', and she loved him so she stopped going. But she wanted to hear about the circles. There was a doctor who had helped her, talking to her; he didn't call it 'healing'.

"She said Robert didn't understand. She was so happy."

"Damn it - Browning is a rich man."

"I asked her if she still had the fancies, she said, yes, but now everything is different. She is so happy about us, Gabriel."

"What did you tell her about us?"

"Only that we are happy."

"We aren't happy, Lizzie, not as we could be. We could cut everything and get out, go to Florence -"

Florence? Even-old Gabriele had never been to Florence.

"She talked about Florence and Venice."

Venice? "I suppose that's Ruskin."

"Why Ruskin, Gabriel?"

"Who ever heard of Venice, before Ruskin went there?"

He was only marking time. He was thinking of Veronese. He was thinking of Carpaccio. He was thinking of Titian and

29.

of Tintoretto.

"Do you remember that first time you saw me, Gabriel? If I think of Venice, I think of that first time at Walter's studio in the garden at Kew."

Kew? It was bog and fog and water sucking under the wharves, and the gnawing of rats in the old partitions. The Bridge.

"There's a bridge there; she called it the Bridge of Sighs." Lizzie was taking the very thoughts out of his mind.

"Well, Byron really started it," he said, "why did I drag in Ruskin?"

"Yes, Byron and Shelley and Keats and Mr. Landor - all of them, she told me, went away, went out of England."

"You mean, we'll get married at once and never go back to England?"

She moved over to the settee. She spread her skirts about her. "Yes, it was England. It was that Mr. Greenacre - and Lyddy having the same fancies. Lyddy and I knew that if Harry was really touched, it was a family failing. But then, I put it all together, Mr. Greenacre cutting her up and her head caught in the weir (which had a gate that pulled up, like Mr. Toussier described the guillotine) and then Abelard and the wrong they did him, that I read about in the folder

130.

that William had left. I even remembered how I had looked
over the folders and was about to put them back, as they were
mostly Italian and German, and then I found that one in English
and I read it. There was the story of Abelard and Heloise,
for the first time, and the studio and everything in it, less
clear than the stones of that Cathedral in France, and her
being put away as a nun, till I looked up and saw what was
equally real with Abelard, your picture, unfinished on the
easel - "

"They're always unfinished, Lizzy."

"You wrote, you finished one for Mr. Ruskin."

"I wanted to come to Paris. I could finish things -
and anyway, Ruskin more or less, offered to see us through -
that was in the beginning, if we wanted to get married. I
have only to write Ruskin."

"They're so much older than we are. We can wait,
Gabriel."

She thought of Aunt Polidori and the family and the
times the rent was not paid, and her own feelings about taking
Ruskin's money. But nothing, somehow, could spoil her rapture
over her first extravagance.

"Then at Chartres, I fancied the queen in the coffin

131

had a book. And I recalled *her* - she said, I must call
her by my own name, Elizabeth. It was talking to myself,
talking to her. I even told her about the queen from the
wall, and the *book*. She said, yes, it was really a poem."

"When are you going, Lizzie?"

"Mrs.Kincaid arranged to get to Nice for Christmas."

"Christmas is a long way off."

"There will be orange-trees and snow, only on the
high mountains."

"I thought you liked the snow, Lizzie. You were always
leaning out of the window, when it snowed, and watching."

She did not answer him. "Before you go, Gabriel,
you must tell me, why you asked me, 'what have you done to
yourself', when you first came."

She straightened her shoulders. He saw the long
throat rising from the shot-silk. "It's a new dress, Lizzie."

"It's *the* new dress, Gabriel." She stood before the
curtain again, but this time she faced him, forgetting "your
chin, your chin - you've spoiled that line, *darn* you."
It was not a line that she wanted him to notice; it was the
billowing folds of a great rose that fell to her feet.

"And what else did you talk about, with Mrs.Browning?"

132.

"It's what I'm trying to tell you, she likes the new
frame. We discussed all the latest fashions."

Now he saw her.

"I see, I'm hardly fine enough to escort you, Lizzie."

"We'll go out to-morrow, I have the old mantle to go
over it. I kept this till you came, though I wore it in the
house a few times, to get the sway of it. It's like walking
on air - being a sort of cloud - but fashionable."

"O - fashionable - "

"It's the way they walk. It's their seeing me somehow,
different. No one ever seemed to think I was a scarecrow,
even in the beginning."

"Whoever thought you were a scarecrow?"

"The girls at Mrs. Tozer's - not Ellen and Jenny, but
the others - and, O Gabriel, lots of London people."

"We'll never go back to London. We can talk about that
later - why Lizzie, you look like an empress."

"It's what it's called - the bell-flower."

"Bell-flower?" asked Gabriel.

"Bell-flower Imperatrice," said Lizzy.

133.

V

"If we hadn't had that champagne, you could have stayed a day longer." Lizzie had been horrified, reckoning the francs back into shillings. It was almost a week at Mrs. Tozer's. Why did Gabriel run his eye down the list and pick the most expensive? They had had champagne at Madame Bonnard's, now and again. Mrs. Kincaid said it was expected, the day the Emperor opened the new Boulevard, and then, Mrs. Kincaid had her husband's solicitor friend in, and they discussed the prices, and Mr. Barrington knew what he called the "vintage" years and seasons.

Mrs. Kincaid said, the first time, "we won't take the cheapest, it looks mean, but the next." It was the other way round with Gabriel, only he didn't take the "next", he took the most expensive.

Was it necessary?

"No heel-taps, Lizzie."

"But I haven't finished this glass."

"You don't finish, it just keeps on re-filling, like the Holy Grail."

"But that's the old name for the Communion."

"This is the new name," and he read out the French, the date, the place, Château something, from the label on the bottle.

134.

"We better have another."

"O - Gabriel - "

"It simply evaporates, it's like you, there's no body to it."

He called the waiter and though Lizzy could not follow what Gabriel was saying, she understood enough to know that he was scolding the waiter. Gabriel waved his hand toward her and the waiter bowed, "parfaitement."

"What did you say, Gabriel?"

"I said that while I was looking at the lady, half a bottle had evaporated and it was up to the house to bring me a new one."

"I don't understand, Gabriel."

"I said, unless he hurried, the lady might likewise vanish. She was wearing, I told him, under the table, a cloud Imperatrice that would, in a minute, waft her away to heaven."

But "Gad," Gabriel said, "quelle politesse."

A gentleman had risen from the next table and was making his way to the door. There was music playing somewhere.

"Ancien régime," said Gabriel, "wears his broadcloth like brocade, a little like Allingham."

135.

Gabriel had turned round in his chair. Lizzy said,
"why did you say _quelle politesse_, Gabriel?"

"He didn't look at you, Lizzie."

"Is that politeness?"

"The essence. You were in his line of vision. Of
course, he wouldn't turn round, but he never saw you."

"He must have seen me, Gabriel, he was sitting just
opposite."

"So you've been looking at him?"

"Not to notice, not till you said he looked like Mr.
Allingham, and he does, a little."

"He's faithful - but he didn't stare at you. That's
why I'm suspicious. He treated you exactly as he would her,
not a _soupçon_ of recognition."

The waiter had placed a fresh bottle on the table;
Gabriel hadn't even noticed his drawing the cork and re-filling
the glasses."

But Gabriel lifted his glass, not looking at Lizzie.
"Madame, la Princesse."

A lady followed by a gentleman, was standing in the door-
way. As if by accident, their former neighbour paused for
the two to enter; surprised, he lifted the lady's hand to his
lips, bowed stiffly to the gentleman and passed out."

136.

"Good timing," said Gabriel, "that's the husband."

"Well, you're not, according to what you just said, being polite, Gabriel."

"Lizzie, you share her with me."

That was quite true.

Her skirt was not too full to be awkward, Lizzie noticed that, first thing. Her own bell-flower was moderate by the latest standards, but Lizzie had noticed that the most extravagant creations were not seen in public. The lady's creation belonged to eternity. It was what Gabriel was saying, "she's walked out of a Velasquez."

"You shouldn't stare, Gabriel."

"They are curiously tolerant in Paris, to what are known as artists. The lady - and even her husband - would know if they saw me staring, that I am no common pleb, nor even your excellent Mr. Barrington, run across on business. My clothes aren't right but your cavalier opposite, (her immoratelle), would recognize a fellow-spirit. And if not for myself, he, she, or even the husband, would know me for what I am, because of you, Lizzie. In spite of insular opinion to the contrary, the French have far more respect for women than they have in England."

137.

"It's what I felt, Gabriel."

"I have a faint suspicion," said Gabriel, "that your cavalier has not consummated the liaison."

"I thought a liaison was lovers being together."

"There can be liaisons without lovers being together."

This did not sound like Gabriel.

The gentleman was arguing with the head-waiter.

"It's all been a mistake, on purpose," said Gabriel, "commedia della arte. There never was a table à part, upstairs in the balcony. They'll go on somewhere else."

"And pass him in the lobby again?"

"No, it will be something different - but mon mari is indignant. Ah, the manager, in person."

But Gabriel talking, was still looking at the lady.

"Now, who was Madame la Princesse, before she married Fontenelle? de Villiers?" said Gabriel.

The manager was motioning to a waiter to find a table, but the gentleman stepped back and the lady brushed past him. Not acknowledging the head-waiter's profuse apology, the gentleman swept out.

"God save the king," said Gabriel.

"Why do you say that?" said Lizzie.

138.

"His high-and-mightiness may be only a de Villiers, but
he does not, for all of Baron Haussmann, accept our new Paris.
The other fellow is more of a gentleman."

"What do you mean, Gabriel?"

"It's just je ne sais quoi. They both belong to the old
world, but there's that difference in them. This fellow,
mon mari, would have had a good look at you, if he had been
sitting where your cavalier was."

"The other was waiting, you said so, for your Princess.
He just didn't see me."

"Ma foi, Lizzie."

"And in any case, Gabriel, you saw the lady."

"I saw, I have seen ... the lady."

"You know her? You knew her name"

"I like to think that I might have heard her name in
London."

Lizzie remembered discussions of gatherings, before Mr. Rossetti died, and Mrs. Kincaid had talked too, but Mr. Kincaid did not go to the soirees, as she called them. They were mixed, they were foreign, Mrs. Rossetti was a cousin of her mother's, Mrs. Kincaid had explained carefully. Her mother had been a Miss Pierce.

"Do you think we ought to go, Gabriel? It's very
crowded and there seem to be people waiting for our table."

139.

9

"Let them wait. What did I order this champagne for?
Which reminds me -" he re-filled his glass.

"Places like this, that's what they're for, to keep people waiting. Who's waiting? O those, they'll find places in a minute. It's Velasquez and della Guardia. Let me entreat you, Madame, the gondola is waiting. You never were a girl to grudge a fellow exaltation - and you exult, too. It is better to talk about her and to have you talk about him, than for us to dilute our sacred raptures - no, not dilute, Lizzie. What is the word for what I mean?"

"What do you mean, Gabriel?"

"I mean - should fill your - your glass, shouldn't I?"

"I don't think you can, Gabriel."

"No, Lizzie, it's not that makes me tremble; it's the Elixir of Life, the Transmutation of Base Metal. Ever hear of Caliostro?"

"Who's Caliostro?"

"He was a chap in Venice ... in Paris ... or perhaps it was Versailles. It was all the rage of the Trianon. She was one of them. But French, unlike her royal mistress who came, didn't she, from Austria?"

"Who came from Austria, Gabriel?"

140.

"This one had more distinction, much more je ne sais quoi than that one. If she carried a crook, she did not tie ribbons round it, nor even primroses - do they have primroses in France, Lizzie?"

"I don't know what you're talking about, Gabriel."

"I don't know myself, Lizzie. I can't see her pretending to make hay, but she had to do what Marie did, I suppose, noblesse oblige."

"Marie?"

"Antoinette - but it doesn't ring true, somehow. No more than he does. I mean, no more than he would, tricked up like a royal lackey to follow the Grand Soleil. But it isn't my world. Perhaps you were there, Lizzie."

She did not know what Gabriel was talking about, but
"Mr. Allingham would never look like a lackey," she said.

"All right, all right; you were always partial to
that cad, Allingham. But he knew his Paris - this one,
He didn't show his breeding. He didn't look at you, Lizzy.
It's a fancy of mine - what you would call a fancy - that
Fontenelle
Madame de... and her innamorato were no more at home
in Versailles than I myself would have been, had I been
there. But I wasn't."

141.

"All right, all right Gabriel; but how do you know she
Fontenelle
is Madame de Villiers?"

Fontenelle
"I don't know that she is Madame de Villiers, I just
like to think she might be, because I heard a chap in London
Fontenelle
talk about Madame de Villiers. He didn't like Caliostro."

"Caliostro?"

"Well, imagine it yourself, Lizzie; it was a harmless
little outing. And easy to arrange things. We were discuss-
ing the fiesta, always a crowd in the Piazza, and easy to get
lost, and in a dark mantle like she wore - "

"She didn't have a mantle - "

"She left it in the foyer. That's how I knew that de
Fontenelle
Villiers had ordered a table à part."

"It's so mixed, Gabriel."

"It was mixed, certainly, imagine it for yourself. You
know Longhi?"

Lizzie had never heard of Longhi.

"But Caliostro - " Now she remembered. She had heard
of Caliostro.

"Not a bad chap, really; he was making a living by it,
but the gold rubbed off the brass. It would last, however, for
the time it took him to get out of Paris. He had other irons

142.

In the fire, I mean alchemy, retorts ... *retorts* - 'I have affairs in Venice with the Grand Master.' Ah, Venice. They would all go to Venice. So they all went to Venice."

It seemed an anti-climax; the story was evaporating like the champagne.

Lizzie saw mirrors on mirrors and candles reflected in them.

They had found tables for the group that had seemed pressing down upon her, obstructing her vision.

"Music - not, Lizzie, unlike this music."

"It's the new waltz."

"Lizzie, you know everything."

It was at Kew that she had heard of Caliostro; it was Mr. Allingham talking about Dante.

"Did you ever read *Zanoni*?"

"Who ever has?"

"Mrs. Deverell said something once about it, at Kew, There was someone in the book, a Count it was, the same sort of thing as Caliostro, I should imagine."

St. Germain?

"Goholin's book, Dick, kick me when I review *Zanoni*, will you?" I must have heard the story - that's it, this is the same story."

"I don't think so, Gabriel."

143.

"Well, the French Revolution came in, and counter-plots were going on, in the name of talking-spirits - and conjurations - "

"Did she - get back to Paris?"

"How do you know they tried to keep her there in Venice?"

"You said something about Mr. Allingham going to her rescue, from Vienna."

"I said nothing of the kind, Lizzie." But to her, everything was quite clear. There were mirrors that reflected double candles and then reflected them again, going backward and going forward. "They say the new waltz is from Vienna."

"Allingham knows Vienna?"

"You said so."

She had stepped from the marble pavement (it was mosaic pattern) onto the polished dance-floor. Her heels were lifting her, like a ladder, to God, and someone whispered, "ah - Mozart."

"Was it Mozart invented the waltz?"

"You're thinking of the minuet, Lizzie."

"Did we dance in Venice?"

Everything was so clear. You could see where the wall began or the wall ended, and count rows and rows of candles, reflecting each other in the double mirrors.

144.

"This is what you mean, Gabriel when you said, that first time, 'those circles, you know. I never did pretend I understood them, though I have explained them to you often enough in my lucid Bacchic moments.' You were talking to Walter Deverell."

So she swayed to the ground. It was a white rose, this time. But she was not broken. The violins lifted her to her feet and she crossed hands to another partner.

"What do you mean - Allingham?"

"Ere she was born
That vow was sworn;
And we must lose into the ground
Her face we knew."

"Is that Allingham?"

"Well - from a private letter."

"To you, Lizzie?"

"No, Gabriel.

"But Allingham - you know all this about him?"

"It was you started it, you said he didn't show his breeding. What a funny thing to say, Gabriel, but I knew what you meant."

"O - that follow."

145.

"My shroud of white, stuck all with yew
O prepare it!
My part of death, no one so true
Did share it!"

"O - that Swan - "

"You said you didn't like the Elizabethans, Gabriel."

"I always say things like that, Lizzie."

"Yes, it was like that. Pretending. She didn't know
anything about them."

"Who didn't know anything, about who?"

"Versailles. It went on in three circles. When you
came to Hastings and told Mary, 'I am not engaged to Lizzy',
there were still two circles left me, Mum and our family was one,
and Scalands was another and Mary Howitt who wouldn't speak
to you. I was not annoyed. I thought I would see clearly,
two circles and that would be enough for my whole life. They
would be clear circles; I would help Mrs. Howitt with her girls'
foundation, patterned on the Working Men's College in Bloomsbury.
But I had committed myself to Mum and Lyddy, half pretending,
so I said to Mary, 'I will marry Gabriel.'"

"So you married Gabriel?"

"No, I was already promised."

The circles did not interfere with one another. But it

146.

was not a three-ringed circus. They spiralled upward, it
was the violins. One violin repeated what another violin
had whispered, "ah - Mozart."

"But who is Longhi?"

"He is Venice, the crowd in the Piazzetta, the cloaks,
the tricorns, the sword and dagger."

"But they're dancing."

"That's what I mean, Lizzy. It did not affect them.
They just went on dancing."

"What did not affect them, Gabriel?"

"O, the usual things ... Venetians! They were a
plague on God's earth, they were more effete, more decadent
even than Paris. What does decadent mean, Lizzy? "

"I don't know. What does it?"

"It's a thing that's come from Paris, they've begun to
talk about in London, or it would come if we weren't such manly
fellows with Sebastapol and all that."

"First time he kissed me he but only kissed
The fingers of this hand wherewith I write.
But I don't think she writes," said Lizzie.

"She writes letters," said Gabriel, "and signs them adding
~~one~~ her estimable but comparatively bourgeois letter, nee -
but let us be discreet. Suffice, she might have been a
princess ~~if~~ if she hadn't married a Valois - only the
princess was Napoleonic pinchbeck."

147.

"You mean, she isn't a real one?"

"I mean, she is more real than a real one."

"And ever since something grows more bright ... I wish I could remember it."

"Is it bouts rimes?"

And even since the candles throw some light.

Will that do, Lizzie? Well, it's your turn now."

"But I'm not making it up; I'm trying to remember it."

"What is it, Lizzy, that you're trying to remember?"

"One of the <u>Sonnets from the Portuguese.</u>"

"Translations?"

"But you've surely read them?"

"I don't remember; what is it all about?"

"I wish I could tell you, I wish I could tell you.

He kissed her and it was God and she walked."

"That's scriptural, took up her bed and - "

"No, no, this happened and in London. But it was no laughing matter, not knowing where the wall began and the sonnet left off. But I saw just now, where the wall ended and the candles began, I mean, the candles (do you see them?) in the mirror that reflect the candles in the mirror - and reflect the candles in the mirror. And each set of candles lights a

148.

separate room, and you can't prove it but you can see it. We
are in separate rooms, dancing. A minuet you say, one was?

"I couldn't say; it was catch-as-catch-can, after mid-
night on the Piazzetta."

"But the wall doesn't end now, the doors are all open,
Velasquez, Versailles, Venice. The sun through the glass
throws different colours on the pavement, like it might be
violets, but it was the same pavement."

"You're drunk, Lizzie," said Gabriel.

"That's what I've been trying to tell you. You said
to Walter Deverell, that first time at Kew, that you didn't
understand Mr. Rossetti's Dante's circle, but you could ex-
plain them, in 'lucid Bacchic moments.' This is a lucid
Bacchic moment and I'm trying to explain things."

"There's only one cure," said Gabriel, "a hair of the
dog."

"A - hair - of the dog?"

"A hair of the dog that bit you; I mean, another bottle."
He snapped his fingers, but the waiters were all busy.

"No, no Gabriel. Please, Gabriel. I only want to
explain the Dante circles, then we'll go."

"They stay open all night."

"But I only wanted to ask you, why did he cut her up,
Gabriel?"

149.

"They're doing it all the time, that was only an isolated instance. <u>Addition garcon.</u> We'll go immediately. There's a chap splashed blood, I mean paint, all over the walls of <u>Les Invalides</u>. But he didn't paint the pieces. He left all that out, in his glory-of-battle pictures. They always do leave all that out - a beastly little frontier question."

"What are you talking about, Gabriel?"

"I was saying to a chap in London, or he was saying to me, that you couldn't stop war. They'll start soon in America."

"America - about what?"

"About - about the <u>Moor of Venice</u>. Don't let's talk about it, Lizzy."

"That's what you said, 'Madame,' you said, 'it was a night on the Rialto - but it wasn't Shakespeare.'"

"No, it wasn't Shakespeare," said Gabriel.

150.

VI.

Of course, she knew she couldn't stay in Paris. Mrs. Kincaid had it all mapped out. Gabriel wondered why Mrs. K wanted to go to Nice. Probably Mrs. Barfington or one of that set, suggested it. There had been talk of Mentone. They were going by slow stages. Well, they were off. He and Monro tucked their travelling-rugs about them in their first-class carriage and waited till the train pulled out. The next day, they were back in London.

What would Lizzie do? Sit about and play cards with solicitors' wives and army widows? He didn't see her in Nice. Nor did Ruskin. "If she would only get out of Nice," Ruskin grumbled to Gabriel. Well, after Christmas, they left the _Hotel des Princes_, that was something. But the new address conveyed nothing to either Gabriel or Ruskin. "It's lodgings anyway," said Gabriel, "and she says they're outside the town, on a slope above some olive-orchards." He remembered how Lizzie had spoken of orange-trees and snow, only on the high mountains.

"They had trouble with their passports," Gabriel told Ruskin. He read part of the letter to him. "Well, at least she's out of England," said Ruskin, "with this new epidemic about."

151.

Ruskin was actually sitting on the edge of the table,
with his great-coat wrapped about him. "I'll tell Miss
Heaton then, that you'll do a replica of Paolo and Francesca,
in place of Beatrice." Gabriel said, "you were always ragging
me about copying my own pictures and selling them twice over."
"Well," said Ruskin, "you needn't copy it; do a variation
of the same subject." "But she ordered Beatrice," said
Gabriel, "why not copy the Beatrice?"

"Because I do not want you to copy the <u>Beatrice</u>," said Ruskin.

All right. Gabriel wasn't quarrelling with his bread
and butter. He was wilful and usually shouted down Ruskin's
pronouncements, "take out the green there. I don't like your
shadows. You must have some line somewhere." Gabriel was
looking through stained glass. It didn't really matter what
Ruskin said.

"You roughed out some arched windows, one day at Denmark
Hill. Did you do anything about them?"

"I was sketching. A comment on my <u>Lamps</u>, was it?
I don't remember."

"We were talking in Paris. Lizzie got me thinking of
stained glass. She went moping alone around Chartres, having
fancies."

152.

"What sort of fancies?"

"O, queens in coffins, and Abelard."

"Why don't you do an Abelard?"

"I've got no model for him. Anyway, I've started Gus as Hamlet."

"Gus?"

"The fellow I sent out to see you. / Manuel. Is he a fake?"

"He knew something about Turner."

"His father was a copyist, he told me, and there are two more chaps who say they want to meet you. You may have heard of their *Oxford and Cambridge* venture. Inspired by our *Germ*, they told me. They've already mapped out their rag for a whole year - but then, Morris has money. Jones and Morris, they're called. They almost made me feel that England mattered. I was for cutting it all. Lizzie talked about the Brownings - O, no - "

Gabriel felt that Ruskin was about to suggest putting his life on a secure foundation again, so that he could go away.

"It would be nothing to me, Gabriel. You owe it to your art, to all of us, to Ida." He looked round the room. "But it's - inspiring. What shall I say, Gabriel? Not all the fellows could carry off this affected carelessness - "

153.

"It's not affected," said Gabriel. "The Birrells turned the place out, as they called it, in my absence - never again - "

"I was thinking of Cellini, you are like those chaps, Gabriel. You are a great Italian living in the Inferno of England. Must you stay here?"

What did he know of England? He had money. Then Gabriel remembered Effie.

"But about those fellows," said Gabriel. "It was, Morris said, your *Nature of Gothic* and seeing a Cathedral in Beauvais (I think it was) on a summer holiday, that made him chuck up Oxford. Well, he's still there, but in an architect's office, at the moment. But Gad, they were both intended for the cloth. Fancy two budding parsons, hearing High Mass at Beauvais (they were on a walking tour) and swearing, before they left Havre, that they would dedicate themselves to art - in place of, or because of God. But why come to me about it?" asked Gabriel and with no affectation.

"Who else would they go to, Gabriel?"

"You started them. It was the *Nature of Gothic* and your description of the Guilds, artist and craftsman all sub-merged in the Cathedral - so this Morris told me. I never read *The Stones of Venice* and I never thanked you for the

154

copy that you sent me."

"My Venice can teach you nothing."

Gabriel did not know himself. He had always on principle,
quarrelled with "that sneak, Ruskin."

"This Morris thinks if he can get in with the architects,
he might in time, stop some of these restorations."

"Venice," said John Ruskin.

"What about Venice?" asked Gabriel.

"They're talking about taking up the old mosaic and
laying a new floor in St. Mark's Cathedral."

"What can we do about it?"

"I'm starting a petition. Gladstone might help," said
Ruskin.

"Well, Gladstone's some use then. I should have thought
he was too busy with the Powers - France, Austria, Prussia!
But Austria and Prussia got out of the alliance, didn't they?
I don't know. What's it all about, anyway? And Louis
Napoleon got out of it, too. That meant only us - only
England was left. But I suppose Louis has come back or
there wouldn't be talk of a Conference in Paris."

"Is there talk of a Conference in Paris?"

"Well, I heard something - probably confidential -
Gus. He has a finger in every pie. Looks like a

155.

Spanish grandee sometimes, like an organ-grinder with a monkey, others. Which reminds me, did you ever hear of Sonnets from the Portuguese? Lizzy was a bit foggy over dinner, the first night she wore her bell-flower, and quoted something that she called a sonnet, saying she didn't know where the wall left off and the sonnet began."

"Ida - foggy?"

"Your Ida was illuminated and dead-drunk."

Ruskin got off the table. "You're lunching with me, Gabriel."

"I'd like to. But I want first to talk of Lizzy. If you would sit down - O, throw those things on the floor. This isn't equal to Ruskin something-or-other Domecq, and it isn't sherry, but Monro smuggled it back from Paris, under his Inverness. I didn't even know he had it, till he left it on the table. I swore to myself, I wouldn't have a drop without Lizzy - without Lizzy being in it, somehow." Gabriel placed the bottle on the table. "The glasses are clean, too."

"I see you've opened it. You had a drop then?"

"When I came back, trying to remember. I think the damned stuff's Russian."

Ruskin studied the label on the bottle, "curious - maybe Turkish."

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He lifted his glass, "the bouquet is Greek."

"Damn you, John Ruskin, how did you know that? You are a curious fellow. Someone called you a spiteful saint, I don't know who. Gus said you were the best mannered fellow he ever met, and one of the best dressed. I forgive you everything."

"What have you to forgive me, Gabriel?"

"Your damned professorial attitude, your pseudo-superiority, your way of drawing leaves under a microscope; your way of teaching the fellows at the College to draw, 'line is everything, colour will come afterwards.' Was there any line in the firmament when heaven and earth, created He them? There was colour first. Let them have their fun with colour."

"Line's fun, too," said John Ruskin.

"You see everything reflected and you see it all so damn clearly that he makes me sick"

Ruskin went on savouring the bouquet.

"Don't you like it? O, I see, the perfect manners that Gus spoke of... Or are you suspicious? You are waiting for your host to prove the stuff isn't poison. Ah, Lizzie - "
Gabriel raised his glass.

"And when I say Lizzie, John Ruskin, I mean another

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Lizzy than your frousty Ida. I mean Lizzy in a bell-flower
and Lizzy talking about Chartres and Lizzy in a room, stuck
round with mirrors and candles reflected backward and forward
(as she said) in them, and Lizzy with a waltz playing - anyway,
she said it was a waltz and from Vienna."

"And the bell-flower?"

"That's what I mean - why don't you marry Lizzy?"

"Is this what you meant, when you said you wanted to talk
first of Lizzy?" Ruskin places his glass back on the table.

"Yes, you've never seen her."

Ruskin did not say, "I have seen Beatrice."

"You've run across her, here in these digs - she needs
a setting. She was happy there in Paris. She talked about
the Brownings - damn, of course, Elizabeth Barrett must have
written that sonnet, I mean the Portuguese, Lizzy quoted,

First time he kissed me, he but only kissed
The fingers of this hand wherewith I write,

Lizzy said she couldn't remember the rest, she wanted to
remember because 'he kissed her and it was God and she walked.'
I wanted to ask someone what it was all about."

"Why didn't you ask Ida?"

"There are things that go through one like knives. I
have - well, Lizzy and I have been about together but we're

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not lovers. I have kissed Lizzy, but it was not the kiss she
wanted. I knew she wanted something else or someone else when
she said 'he kissed her and it was God and she walked'. We
were making up a story too, over the champagne and the music.
The hero wasn't Gabriel, she was promised to another."

Gabriel refilled the glasses.

"She liked Allingham - you know old Allingham? But
somehow, it wasn't Allingham. It was something rugged, though
polished if you will. It was something with eyes from which
there is no escaping. It was something less suave than
Allingham - I say nothing against his - his charm. It's
just something Lizzy wanted. Does Lizzy love you, Ruskin?"

"No, Gabriel," said John Ruskin.

"You're hypnotic, Ruskin. You could make her love you."

"Women don't love line. They want colour."

"What she wants - she as good as said so - is a rock."

"What is a mere mountain when you have the firmament?
I always told you Gabriel, when I didn't like your pictures."

"Why do you buy the damn things, then - to keep Lizzy?"

"I buy them, as I buy Turner, for the colour. I don't
like the mediaeval."

"What of your *beastly gothic*? Your glass windows, your
seven lamps, your Byzantine mosaic, your Carpaccio? Lizzie

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looks Byzantine; you said yourself at Denmark Hill, she was
like those elongated figures in your Missals - yes, you
did see her once, in a proper setting. She liked your room,
your mother showed her your room - horrible, no curtains,
those beastly windows. But Lizzy liked it. She liked the
shells you showed her and the rose-quartz or whatever it was
in chunks, blasted out of your beastly mountain. You can't
say she doesn't like you."

"I didn't say she didn't like me. You're volcanic,
like the fire in the mountain."

"But she likes snow," said Gabriel.

He saw him now. Gabriel had been trying to "see" John
Ruskin. He was the father-superior of some learned order,
who had served inheritance.

"They even discussed seriously, they told me, at one
time, a plan for a monastic foundation. They are good chaps,
really. Jones is the more sensitive and the less gifted.
I mean, the other fellow whom Jones calls Top, has the verve
or the nerve. And there's another blighter I haven't seen
yet, a sort of golden goblin or dwarf Sebastian, I gather

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from their description. Top writes too, but he says the
other fellow writes better."

"Who is the other fellow?" asked Ruskin.

"They call him Algernon. They promised to bring him
along one day, and later, I'll shepherd them all out to Denmark
Hill for your inspection. That's what you're for. Top went
on about your guilds and the subservience in the Cathedral,
of all to one objective - the loss of self. They're self-
less fellows. I think I said, a moment ago, that you said
(Top said) the artist in the middle ages was submerged in the
Cathedral - drowned in it. It was a word used by another,
a religious fellow, I ran across with Gus. More of a mystic,
less of a fanatic, this other, but he was afraid his work would
be submerged, as he put it, in a tide-wave of dark waters.
He himself was following, he said, a clear rivulet from a
hollow - a hollow-dip, he called it. Fact, he's an American.
Hollow-dip. This place where he had his illumination was near
what he called a spring-house, an old farm called Hollows.
There's no connection."

Gabriel said, "that was before they saw the real thing
at Chartres, I mean Beauvais. They couldn't do anything after
that, about the Church in England; they had, Jones said,
'looked behind the veil'. Well, now their dedication is

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toward saving an old foundation, rather than establishing a
new one. That's where you come in. Superior, yes, I have
said I hated your damned didacticism. But it's your inheri-
tance. This chap I spoke of (of the Hollows' illumination)
was afraid his clear rivulet would be lost in the dark waters -
or these dark waters, as he put it. Here in England, he meant
and on the Continent. Not that he had any illusions about
America and a war that he said was coming. But the idea came
to me just now. They'll never be a foundation, not in the
old sense. It's one here, one there. But somehow, they find
their way through the dark waters."

162.

VII

Gabriel sent Lizzy a story, she said she hadn't read it. It had been printed in the *Germ*, their early Pre-Raphaelite paper. He sent it to her, as the setting was Pisa and she had spoken of the Lasinio reproductions, and told him about the story that she had lived or "seen" last summer. They were sitting on one of the benches in the Louvre. She had been frightened in London, she had told him, by the story of the vision. Probably, she said, when he mentioned his own tale of Pisa, she had heard them discussing it. Anyhow, engrossed in the *campo santo* reproductions, it was natural that they should both choose Pisa. She told him about the falcon and the embroidered saddle-cloth and he laughed and said, "one of the rival families in the Pisa story, bore the falcon." "Then, I really must have heard you talk about it," she said. She was reconciled to his going back to London. She had so much to think about, to work out, she said.

She said she had lived her story. Well, he had lived his too; what was imagination but a heightened perception of life? Gabriel called his story *Hand and Soul*.

"What do you call your story, Lizzy?" he asked.

She hadn't a name for her story, she said. The girl got her bird's chord tangled, she told him; she was carrying

163.

a falcon on her wrist. She was alone. Her companion in the story, had taken most of the gentlemen into the forest for venison. Her party had cantered on ahead down the sea-road. "It was Barbara asking me to ride at Scalands, made me remember the saddle. It was worry about the cholera in London, made me think of those dead bodies."

"I speak too, of cholera or of leprosy," he said, "in Hand and Soul. And there are plenty of dead bodies."

Lizzie read *Hand and Soul*, and she remembered how Gabriel had asked her what she called her story. She did not know why she could not tell him that she called it *The Golden Chord*. But then, it was really not about Gabriel, though Gabriel might have painted or helped paint the frescoes. He was a painter. In her thought, she made no apology. In her thought, she knew that Gabriel would never have headed the company nor have led the gentlemen into the forest to hunt *deer*. In her thought, she no longer contrived to deceive herself; she had loved walking with Annie and Mum and Dad sometime; swinging along - and Gabriel at Scalands had slept late, even in the country. He had accompanied her to the woods, but he was not caught in it, like she was, like being at Chartres in the dim light and violets showing like those rainbow blue and green splashes on the floor of the Cathedral. She was glad

164.

that she had been alone at Chartres, almost she had resented
Gabriel in the forest. It wouldn't be like that with her
outrider, in the feather cap. He would see everything, not
just because he was a hunter. Gabriel had proposed to her
actually, in Svalands forest, and he wrote a poem about it,
but he did not see the curl-over of a fern, he did not notice
the speckled leaves with the new leaves growing on the same
stem of the groundsel, nor feel that certain feeling that a
brech birch tree gives you, whose leaves seem always spring leaves
till they turn in autumn and even so, when they are turning,
they take colour, as of fresh-opening leaves. Gabriel would
stack pot-plants back of her to make a forest of it, for a
picture, but it was an indoor forest. He was indoors, in the
forest. He would throw himself down on the old sofa in the
studio, so he threw himself down there at her feet under the
beech trees.

But it was important that she loved Gabriel. Or that
she had loved Gabriel. It came to her after he proposed, and
Barbara's Aunt Julia was so kind about it,

I can not give to thee the love
I gave so long ago -
The love that turned and struck me down
Amid the blinding snow.

It came to her, that is, that the Gabriel she had first known

165.

had denied her, saying he was not engaged, at Hastings. And
he might deny her again. He would deny her again. But
she had stepped into the circle that almost seemed already
-a broken circle, of Gabriel's inspiration. Without Gabriel,
she would have remained unrecognized - or would she? There
were the others, there was Mr. Allingham; Walter Deverell had
drawn away, only after Gabriel came into the studio. But
the outrider in the feather cap wasn't Mr. Allingham. Perhaps
she remembered too clearly, when she thought of the figure by
the lamp-post, that curious feeling of loyalty to Ellen and
Jeannet; she was one of them, that "girl from the bonnet-
shop." She was just a girl from a shop until Gabriel began
to paint her, for she was still compromising, still delaying
her decision while she was with Walter Deverell; he himself
had agreed to her working part-time. There was no part-time
with Gabriel, he would never have let her go back to the shop and
yet he kept her sitting to him, with the windows closed and
his cigar smoke, and he took her late to little upstairs
restaurants where it was crowded and hot, so that she couldn't
eat anything and only wanted to get away. She only wanted
to get away; she wanted so frightfully to gallop across
the fields with Barbara that she refused even to consider the
offer of Aunt Julia's habit.

She wanted it so terribly,

166.

She wanted to be a sort of younger sister of Aunt Julia, she wanted all the things the people had at Scaiano. She didn't want to quarrel with or about painters. Chiaro dell'Erma was a painter and no matter how often she read the story of his leaving Arezzo and his princely habitation to come and be a poor painter with a famous master, she couldn't associate herself (the girl that is, with the falcon on her wrist) with the painter, shut up in his room, with his dreams, by the Church of San Rocco. In the story, she was riding out toward the forest, and the leader of the cavalcade that met hers, at the turning below the outer fortress, wore her hawk-plume in his cap. And this was like Verona, Romeo and the rival faction, but the gentleman was more like Mercutio than Romeo, Gabriel said the rival faction had the hawk for heraldry. She was one of the falcons and he was the rival faction, and when they fought outside the church, along the arcades that were lined with Gabriel's - with Chiaro's painting, the blood splashed the pictures and they were pictures depicting peace, so it said in this *Hand and Soul* of Gabriel's.

She cared for peace, as much as Gabriel, though she didn't like his calling her the dove; no, she was not the dove. Perhaps a hawk does not belong to peace, nor a falcon.

He wore her falcon-feather stuck in his cap and he met her, as by accident below the outer turrets.

167.

He must have been killed.

But why did she blame Gabriel? He was not in the story really, her story, *The Golden Chord*.

Those Lasinio frescoes were fourteenth century and she had wondered if Dante were the same time. She wrote Gabriel about it. He said, yes, Dante was thirteenth and fourteenth century. The dates did not matter of course, but she was, Gabriel said "fussy" about numbers; perhaps she got that from Dad having praised her for keeping the accounts right. You had to be fussy about numbers and she had done a good deal of explaining to tradespeople that Mr. Rossetti was busy on a painting and couldn't be troubled but she would work out the overdue bills, check up on the last months and promise to get things in order. Yes, Mr. Rossetti was paid considerable sums for his pictures, sometimes. Money just melted away with Gabriel.

Gabriel gave an exact date in *Hand and Soul* to the painting, 1239. Perhaps the modern artist who really tells the story, did see a picture with that date, in Florence.

But Chiaro quoted Dante, or something that sounded like the translation of the Dante, Gabriel read her, and Dante must have been later if he went on into the fourteenth century.

168.

H

It was things like this that made her tiresome, she knew that.

It was her worry about the bills and wanting to see that Gabriel wasn't cheated when he did hand her over a sum to settle things with, that annoyed him. Well, she couldn't help it.

She had to laugh to herself, sitting by her table in the pension, in the half-dark, thinking out how the outrider in the feather-cap would know just how many arrows there were in his own quiver and knowing just how many more arrows, in the company could be relied on, knowing just how many and which were likely to fall short and how many, if any were likely to snap off or how many if any, were independable, provided there were a row.

Now she had come back to Hastings and her wonder about who would and would not stand by her. She did not actually count her friends or number her adversaries, but again she thought, "it's like what Gabriel called Mr. Rossetti's Dante's three-ringed circus."

In the third ring or the middle-ring, there was Gabriel. And because he had already betrayed her and because he would, she knew, betray her again, she conjured up an en chanted forest, an outrider who wore dangerously, her falcon- feather in his cap, a face that was more rugged than Gabriel's,

169.

with hard bones showing, hands perhaps not so beautiful nor
so eloquent in gesture, but reining a horse, notching an arrow,
drawing a bow had a peculiar meaning for her, at the moment,
when she laid down *Hand and Soul*, because the light was going
and she wanted to think about the arrows. No, she did not
(any more than Gabriel) believe in all that ... murder. But
the isolated instance, as Gabriel had called Mr. Greenacre, as
compared with the dead and wounded at Sebastopol, was countered
or was checked or was check-mated by another isolated instance.
Gabriel was not isolated. He drew her into the whirlpool of
his enthusiasms and the plots and counter-plots of Pre-Raphaelite
quarrels and intrigue. She was, Mrs. Gabriele Rossetti was
right about that, "Gabriel's model."

And Gabriel's model might gain immortality as *Beatrice* or
as the more personal presentation of Beatrice, the *Damozel*, but
there is something, thought Elizabeth Siddall, that must not
be washed into the inner sea (she did not call it the Sargosso
sea) of Gabriel's circle. It was all right, there was fire
there and she had been stiff and frozen, that is inwardly
(she thought) frozen and stiff, sitting those hours and staying
those extra hours at Mrs. Tozer's. She did not realize her
state of spiritual and almost at times physical paralysis, until
she got out of Mrs. Tozer's. And sitting there at Kew was

170.

pleasant, and what did an hour mean, in pleasant company and
no one to jeer at you, but the strange opposite, being thought
beautiful.

She went back to Gabriel's story. The story had really
given back the early Gabriel to her. Yes, he was a painter,
he was the painter in the *Hand and Soul* who dedicates himself
"in the ecstacy of prayer to his mystical lady now barely in
her ninth year." But that was numbers, Dante's numbers, the
mystical nine that Gabriel had explained to her. But why did
Gabriel make Chiaro say, "the lady he had won on earth had been
dead an hundred years?" No doubt, it was symbolical like
Dante, as Gabriel explained his father's system to her, but
you had to hold on to something. She was ashamed almost, as
she remembered how she had borrowed Mrs. Kincaid's travel-book
and searched through it for some dates. She had found in
fine print at the back, a list of painters and writers and
famous people, and she found Dante: Dante Alighieri, 1265-1321.
Then the picture in 1239 was painted before Dante was born.
Then the mystical lady and the "band of whom he was one ...
permitted to gather round the blessed maiden, and to worship
with her through all ages", was all before Dante, yet it was
out of Dante. She wondered if Dante came into her story. She

171.

wanted to weave in *The Chord*, to follow on after Gabriel's
*Hand and Soul*, but she would have to think up some way of get-
ting round those dates. Might she say it was Abelard and
another, or the same lady? Was Beatrice, Héloïse really?
Was it the same story? Would Gabriel's "the lady he had won
on earth had been dead an hundred years", refer back to a former
lady? Would a hundred years from the time the picture was
painted, bring the story back to the time of Abelard and Héloïse?
She believed, roughly it would. She had remembered noting
that was born the date of Abelard's death after 1066, but she didn't recall the
exact date. This was important to her. It was important,
in this sense, she did not believe that Gabriel himself was
aware of what he meant there. It was something taking hold
of Gabriel like it did sometimes, that made him another person,
or that made him you might say, the flame burning without the
coal and soot and smoke that seemed sometimes around him.
Or as it happened sometimes that something he said was like
light shining through ruby glass.

*Hand and Soul* was published in January, 1850.

Then Gabriel must have written it before that, say in
1849.

It was just about then, that she met Gabriel.

172.

It seemed to have been written for her, to give her back her faith, so that she could go on.

In the basket-chair in Chatham Place, her thoughts had been a fever. She had suspected Gabriel of making love to Fanny, his *Bridge* model for the girl who had gone on the town. Elizabeth had been almost as unhappy before that, about Annie Miller. But Fanny Hughes and Annie Miller and her agony about unpaid bills and the rent overdue, no longer mattered.

She would write her story, *The Chord* or *The Golden Chord*.

Moreover she would go into Nice, the first thing in the morning and find some drawing-paper suitable for illuminated lettering. She would get out her paints and brushes.

She would sketch in the *small consecrated image of St. Mary Virgin* that Chiaro dell'Erma had in his room, before which stood always in summer-time, a glass containing a lily and a rose.

PART II

I

173.

XXXX

Gabriel did not trouble to shout "come in". They had the run of the place, he had told them, when they came up, week-ends. Jones usually turned up Saturday. This was Saturday. He had said, last time, he would be busy in the afternoon. It was Denmark Hill and the matter of those drawings, but he had expected the fellow to walk in, long before this. They would be getting out of Oxford, Jones said last time, as soon as they could manage. They wanted rooms of their own, somewhere in this neighbourhood or not too far off. Furnished rooms were expensive for what you got out of them. Gabriel wondered if Deverell's old studio at Red Lion Square was vacant. He had never been there since -

Well, let them stay away, then. He realized suddenly, his disappointment. It might be Freddy Stevens or old Boyce, but then he remembered that he had told Boyce and Stevens he was busy - not that that would have made any difference, in the old days. He knew the fellows thought him surly, since he got back from Paris. He had said he was staying with Brown. "It is a cold winter," Mrs. Birrell told him. "We are still at war," he heard frequently.

174.

He didn't pretend to be a gentleman but If Mrs.Birrell
was there with coals, remarking, "it is a cold winter - and
the rats are gnawing something fearful in the basement", he
knew he would not be responsible for ungentlemanly expletive.
But coals? "Well, now you speak of it, Mrs.Birrell, the
place is a bit draughty." Gabriel pushed aside his easel.

"Now you speak of it, Mrs. Birrell -" Gabriel opened
the door.

"Hell - I expected Mrs.B -"

"I'm sorry. I'll push off."

"Gad - no. I thought I told you fellows not to knock
but to come straight in. I told the other fellows I was out
at Highgate."

"But - ah - Mrs. B - "

"Mrs. B is the lady wot does for me. She lives in the
basement. We want coals, or don't we? Come in."

"But you're busy."

"I can go on painting, and anyway, what's that got to
do with it?"

Gabriel realized that this was the first time he had
seen this fellow without the other fellow.

"Where's the other fellow?"

175.

"He went round to the College. He said you had suggested he go round the next evening he was in town."

"I? When did I ever suggest to anybody, teaching the Working Man anything?"

"It was there Ted said he met you. He said the chaps like what you teach."

"What the Hell do I teach? I go round there to take the taste of Ruskin out of their mouths. 'Line, line, line,' says Professor Ruskin. I say, 'don't you chaps like colour?' 'The Professor hid the paints, after your elast lecture,' they said."

Gabriel said, "you've got to bang the door shut or it will blow open." The door was banged shut. "I didn't tell you to knock the house down," said Gabriel. "You better take off your coat - unless it's too cold. I can't tell your length from your breadth. It's got snowed on? I didn't know it was snowing outside."

"It is a cold winter," said William Morris.

"I think I've heard that remark before somewhere," said Gabriel, "but you say it differently. Where have you hailed from? Just down from the bridge?"

"The bridge?" said William Morris.