"There!" he said, drawing back, "it is perfect now."
"Outstretched! theatrical!" she replied ironically.
"Can you mend it?" asked Cornelius, looking piqued.
She did not answer, but by just drawing in a little, and bending more forward, she threw into her face, into her look, attitude, and bearing, a strange intensity of eager watchfulness, that made her fixed gaze seem as if piercing the depths of an invisible horizon. Cornelius looked at her with wonder and admiration.
"That is indeed Medora," he frankly said at length: "Oh! Miriam, never tell me, after this, you do not care for Art! and now be merciful, let me sketch you thus."
"And the stolen child, who is waiting?" she said, glancing at me.
"What, Daisy!" he exclaimed, seeing me for the first time.
Miriam attempted to rise; he eagerly turned back to her, and entreated her so ardently to remain thus, that she yielded. When he had prevailed, he turned to me.
"Daisy," he said gaily, "you are a good little girl, but you may take off your picturesque attire."
Alas! so I might: the sorceress had conquered me in my last stronghold!
At first Miss Russell would not hear of sitting for anything more finished and elaborate than a sketch in crayons, but from the sketch to a water-colour drawing, and from this again to an oil painting, the progression was rapid: at length the Stolen Child was wholly set aside and replaced on the easel by Medora. I had before lost Cornelius in the evening, in his moments of leisure and liberty, I now lost him at his labour; the intruder stepped in between him and me on the very spot where I thought myself most secure, and I had to look on and see it, for Miriam objected, it seems, to sitting to Cornelius alone; Kate had something else to do than to keep them company: the task was left to me.
That Miriam should sit to Cornelius instead of me, was the least part of my grief; I had never expected that he would always paint little girls: the sitting in itself was nothing, but it led to much that it was acute misery for a jealous child like me to witness.
I was not accustomed to be much noticed by Cornelius in the studio, but if he had a look to spare from his picture, a word to utter in a pause of his work, he gave both look and word to the child who sat to him, or silently watched him painting, and now this was taken from me! I was to my face robbed and impoverished, that another might be enriched with all I lost. For two years I had reigned in that studio, of which not even Kate shared the empire; for two years Cornelius had there spoken to me of his art, of his future, of everything that was linked with this proud aim and darling ambition of his life; and now another listened to his aspirations; another heard every passing thought and feeling which, though a child, it had once been mine to hear, and I had to look on and see it all.
But it was not all.
I did not merely see Miriam enjoying whatever I had once enjoyed; I saw her loved as I had never been loved, possessed of a thousand things which had never been mine to lose. Miriam was a woman, an intellectual, educated woman; she could do more than listen to Cornelius, she could converse with him; she did do so, and constantly she showed me the immense superiority which her knowledge and her years gave her over a mere child like me. She had also become converted to Art, and if not so fervent a disciple as I had been, she was certainly a far more discriminating critic. Her sense of the beautiful was keen and peculiar.
She seldom admired it under its daily external aspects, but she could detect it where it seemed invisible to others, and was by them unsought for. She never agreed with Cornelius about what he considered the merits of his pictures; but then, by showing him other real merits of which he had remained unconscious, she charmed more than she ever provoked him.
With his fair mistress to sit to him, to look at and talk to--what could Cornelius want with me? It was natural that involuntary and unconscious carelessness should creep into his kindest words and caresses; that, exclusively absorbed in Miriam, he should often forget my presence; that his look, perpetually fastened on her, should seldom fall on me; that every word he uttered should be directed to her: it was natural; but to see, feel, know this, not once in a time, but daily, not for an hour in the day, but all day long, was a torment that acted on me as a slow fever.
But it was not all.
Though Cornelius had been, was still, very fond of me, he had never of course been in love with me. He was in love with Miriam, and if he had enough self-control and self-respect not to show more of the feeling than it was becoming for a child like me to see, he loved too ardently not to be for ever betraying himself to jealous and watchful eyes like mine. His look rested on her with a tenderness and a passion, his voice addressed her in lingering accents, of which he was himself unconscious. His very tones changed in uttering her name, just as the meaning of his face became different when he looked at her. If I had known the frail and fleeting nature of human feelings, I might not have trusted these first signs of a first passion; but all I knew of love was what the fairy tales had told me, and in them I had never read but of loves that had no ending, and were not less ardent than enduring. That Cornelius might one day be less absorbed in Miriam, less oblivious of me, was a thought I never knew nor cherished. The future, when I could forget the present enough to think of the future, had but one image--Cornelius eternally loving Miriam, eternally forgetting me.
But even this was not all.
Miriam was in all the beauty of womanhood; Cornelius in all the fervour of man's young love. She was with him almost all the day long, not alone, but with the check of a constant presence that irritated the fever liberty and untroubled solitude might have soothed to satiety; and this, or I am much deceived, she knew well. He had to repress himself perpetually, in a way which must have been wearying and painfully irksome. His temper was too generous to wreak itself upon me, but I became conscious of a most galling and yet most inevitable truth: in that studio where I had won my place by so much perseverance; where I had shown to Cornelius a faith so entire and unshaken; where I, a child, and restless as all children are more or less, had been the patient slave of his art; where Cornelius had always welcomed me with a greeting so sincere and so cordial in its very homeliness; yes, there, even there, I was no longer welcome. Daily, hourly, I read in his face, in his eyes, in his voice, that my presence was burdensome, my absence a release. I knew it, and I had to endure it; I had to be ever drinking this last sickening drop of a cup that was never drained. I was jealous: and the word sums up all my miseries. I was also what is called a precocious child, and perhaps I felt more acutely than many; I say _perhaps_, for jealousy is an instinct,--is not the dog jealous of its master?--assuredly it is not a feeling that waits for years or knowledge. It is the very shadow of love; and who yet watched the birth of love in a human heart?
I loved Cornelius as an ardent and jealous daughter loves her father, and I was miserable because he bestowed on another that which I neither could wish for, nor even imagine the wish to claim. As was my love, so was my jealousy, filial and childlike: a jealousy of the heart, in which not the faintest trace of any other feeling blended. It was sinful, but it was pure. I did not suffer because Cornelius was in love with Miriam, but because he loved her. If, at twelve, I could have understood and separated feelings that blend so strangely in the heart, I know that I would not have envied Miriam one spark of the passion, but I know that I would still, as I did bitterly, have grudged her every atom of the tenderness. If I did not feel jealousy in that mysterious intensity which has stung so many hearts to madness. I felt it in its calmer bitterness and more patient sorrow. The peculiar agony of this tormenting passion seems to me to lie in the blending of two most opposite feelings: love, from which it springs, and hatred, which it engenders; it has thus the warmth of one and the fierceness of the other, and there also lies the evil and the danger. I loved Cornelius, I detested Miriam. My only salvation from what might have been the utter ruin of my soul, heart, mind, and whole nature, was that I loved him infinitely more than I hated her; woe to me had it been otherwise!
But even as it was, I suffered--and justly--from my sin as well as from my sorrow; and most unhappily I brooded over both unsuspected. Cornelius had detected my jealousy, treated it as a jest, and forgotten it; Kate had, I believe, vaguely conjectured its existence, but I was little with her and on my guard; the only one who really knew what I suffered and why I suffered, was the one who had first inflicted and who now daily embittered the wound. Yes, Miriam knew it: I saw it in her look, in her speech, in her manner; and, if anything could render me more unhappy, it was the consciousness that my miserable weakness lay bare for her to triumph over.
Thus, and more than thus, I felt. Our true life lies in our heart; from within it, according as we feel with force or weakness, we rule the outward world in which we are cast. Strange and dramatic incidents make not the eventful life: it borrows its charm or tragic power from the ebb and flow of feelings. There never was a child who led a more sheltered existence in a more sheltered home; whose life was less varied by adventure beyond the routine of daily joys and sorrows; and yet to all that I felt then I may trace the whole of my future destiny. When I look back on the past, I feel that but for that which preceded, the plain incidents that are to follow would seem, even to me, tame and trifling; but the stakes make the game, and when happiness has to be lost or won the heart will leap at each throw of the dice, and beat fast or slowly with the faintest alternations of hope and despair.
I remember well one day at the close of winter. They both felt tired, and sat on the low couch where I had so often sat by him or watched him sleeping; he now exerted himself to amuse her as he had once done for me; I sat at a table by the window; a book lay open before me, but I could not read; I seemed all eyes, all ears, all sense for them.
"You must sit to me some day for a Mary Magdalene," said Cornelius.
"You spoke of a Juliet the other day," she replied, with a careless smile; "what am I not to be?"
"Say, what should I not be if Cornelius O'Reilly had the power?"
"And why should not Cornelius O'Reilly have the power?"
Her tone was scarcely above indifference, and yet hard to witness and to know; Cornelius had never looked half so delighted when I boldly assigned him a rank among the princes and masters of his art, as he now seemed with these few ambiguous words of his mistress. He started up to work like one who has received a fresh stimulus to exertion.
"I am still tired," coldly said Miriam.
"I do not want you yet."
"Why work then?"
"Oh! Miriam, must not my beautiful Medora progress?"
"Your beautiful Medora!" she echoed, with something like scorn passing across her face, and as if she thought that Medora interfered with the rights of Miriam.
Cornelius was standing before the easel; I saw him smile at the image it bore.
"She is beautiful," he said in a low tone, "though I say it that should not, and though I know you will never grant me that she is."
She smiled a little ironically as he turned round to her.
"I will grant you anything," she replied; "Medora is not my portrait, but an ideal woman for whom you have borrowed my form and face."
"What will not an artist attempt to idealize?" asked Cornelius with a touch of embarrassment.
"Oh!" she observed very sweetly, "I do not mean to imply it was not required. Only if this were a portrait, I should object to having Daisy's eyes and brow given to me."
Cornelius became crimson, and felt that the artist had made the lover commit a blunder. He tried to pass it off carelessly.
"Ah!" he said, "you think that because I gave too dark a tint to the eyebrows, and in attempting to make the eyes look deep, rendered them rather grey--"
She smiled and rose.
"You are not going?" he asked with surprise.
"Why not, since you do not want me."
"No, do not; pray do not!" he entreated; he looked quite uneasy, and in his earnestness took both her hands in his. She withdrew them with an astonished and displeased air, and a look that fell on me.
"Daisy," impatiently said Cornelius, "have you nothing to do below? no lessons to learn?"
He could not have said "You are in the way" more plainly; I did not answer, but rose and left them.
"What brings you down here?" asked Kate, as I entered the parlour, where she sat alone sewing.
"Cornelius said I was to learn my lessons."