in ordinary conversation.
Even with his betrothed he had not yet outworn the reserve which every year of his life had strengthened, and Celia, despite her betrothal, was not wholly free from the common error of supposing that, because he did not easily express his sentiment, he lacked warmth of feeling. She had been his pupil in Boston, and it was for the sake of being near her that he had established himself at Salem for the summer, making a pretext of the fact that he had promised to paint the portrait of her cousin, Ralph Thatcher.
Tom Claymore could not have told at what stage of his work upon this portrait he became possessed of the idea that he had been unconsciously painting rather the possibilities than the realities of his sitter’s face. At first he smiled at the thought as a mere fanciful notion; then he strove against it; but he ended by giving his inspiration, or his whim, free rein, and deliberately endeavoring to portray the noblest manhood of which Ralph Thatcher’s face seemed to him to contain the germs. He felt a secret impatience with the young man, who, with wealth, health, and all the opportunities of life, seemed still too much a boy properly to appreciate or to use them; and as the portrait advanced, the belief grew in Claymore’s mind that, when it was completed, some effect might be produced upon Thatcher by its showing him thus vividly the possibilities of character he was wasting. The artist did not, it is true, attach much importance to this notion, but when once he had given himself up to it, he at least found much interest in following out his endeavor. The idea of a sitter’s being influenced by a portrait is by no means a novel one among painters, and Claymore took pains to have Thatcher see the picture as soon as it got beyond its early stages. He wanted it to have to the full whatever influence was possible, and he was eager to discover how soon its departure from an exact likeness would become apparent to the original.
A curious complication followed. It was not long before it began to seem to Tom that Ralph was growing up to the ideal the portrait showed. At first he rejected the idea as utterly fanciful. Then he recalled an experience a brother artist had related to him in Paris, where a girl who had been painted in the dress of a nun worn at a fancy ball, came, by brooding over the picture, to be so possessed with a belief in her vocation that she ended by actually taking the veil. The cases were not exactly parallel, but Claymore saw in them a certain similarity, in that both seemed to show how a possibility might be so strongly expressed on canvas as to become an important influence in making itself an actuality. He became intensely interested in the problem which presented itself. He had before this time remarked to Celia that Ralph only needed arousing to develop into a noble man, and he began to speculate whether it could be within his power to furnish the impulse needed – the filament about which crystallization would take place all at once. He worked slowly and with the utmost care, taking pains to have Thatcher at the studio as much as possible even on days when he was not posing, so that the picture might be constantly before his eyes; and of one thing at least he was sure beyond the possibility of a doubt – Ralph was certainly developing.
“Post hoc sed non ergo propter hoc,” he said to himself, in the Latin of his school debating-society days; but secretly he believed that in this case the effect was no less “because” than “after.”
On the morning after Celia had talked with her betrothed about the picture, Ralph gave the artist a sitting. The young man seemed so preoccupied that Tom rallied him a little on his absence of mind, inquiring if Thatcher wished his portrait to have an air of deep abstraction.
“I was not thinking of that confounded old picture at all,” the young man responded, smiling. “I was merely – well, I do not know exactly how to tell you what I was doing. Do you ever feel as if the reflective part of you, whatever that may be, had gone into its office for private meditation and shut your consciousness outside?”
“Yes,” Tom answered; “and I always comfort myself for being excluded by supposing that at least something of real importance must be under consideration or it would n’t be worth the trouble to shut the doors so carefully.”
“Do you?” returned the sitter. “I had a jolly old clerical uncle who used to lock the door of his study and pretend to be writing the most awe-inspiring sermons, when he really was only having a well-fed nap. I am afraid,” he went on, with a sigh and a change of manner, “that there is little of real importance has ever gone on in my mind. Do you know, I am half inclined to hate you.”
The artist looked up in surprise.
“Hate me?” he echoed. “Why should you hate me?”
“Because you are everything that I am not; because you succeed in everything and I never did anything in my life; because at this poker-table of life you win and I lose.”
A strange tinge of bitterness showed itself in Ralph’s voice, and puzzled Claymore. It was not like Thatcher to be introspective, or to lament lost possibilities. The artist rubbed his brush on his palette with a thoughtful air.
“Even if that were so,” he said, “I don’t see exactly why you should vent your disappointment on me. I’m hardly to blame, am I? But of course what you say is nonsense anyway.”
“Nonsense? It is n’t nonsense. I’ve done nothing. I know nothing. I’m good for nothing; and the worst of it is that the girl I’ve wanted all my life realizes it just as well as I do. She is n’t a fool; and of course she does n’t care a rap about me.”
The confession was so frankly boyish that Claymore had a half-impulse to smile, but the feeling in it was too evidently genuine to be ignored. One thing at least was clear: Ralph was at last beginning to be dissatisfied with his idle, purposeless life. He had come to the enlightenment of seeing himself as he might look to the eyes of the woman he cared for. The reflection crossed Claymore’s mind that some disappointment in love might have brought about whatever change he had observed in his sitter, and that any influence which he had ascribed to the portrait had in reality come from this. The thought struck him with a ludicrous sense of having befooled himself. It was as if some gorgeous palace of fancy, carefully built up and elaborated, had come tumbling in ruins about his head. He made a gesture, half comic, half deprecatory, and laid down his palette.
“The light has changed,” he said. “I can’t paint any more to-day.”
Claymore was intensely imaginative, and he possessed all the sanguine disposition of the artistic temperament, the power of giving himself up to a dream so that it for the time being became real. Matters which the reason will without hesitation allow to be the lightest bubbles of fancy are to such a disposition almost as veracious fact; and often the life of an imaginative man is shaped by what to cold judgment is an untenable hypothesis. The artist had not in the least been conscious how strong a hold the idea of awakening Ralph Thatcher had taken upon his mind, until the doubt presented itself whether the portrait had in reality possessed any influence whatever. He was not without a sense of humor, and he smiled inwardly at the seriousness with which he regarded the matter. He reasoned with himself, half petulantly, half humorously; sometimes taking the ground that his theory had been merely a fantastic absurdity, and again holding doggedly to the belief that it was founded upon some fragment at least of vital truth. He recalled vaguely a good many scraps of modern beliefs in the power of suggestion; then he came back to the reflection that if Ralph was in love, no suggestion was needed to cause a mental revolution.
Wholly to disbelieve in its own inspirations is, however, hardly within the power of the genuinely imaginative nature. Whatever his understanding might argue, Tom, in the end, would have been false to his temperament had he not remained convinced that he was right in believing that to some degree, at least, the picture he was painting had influenced his sitter. Without any consciously defined plan, he got out a fresh canvas, and occupied himself, when alone in the studio, by copying Ralph’s head, but with a difference. As in the other picture he had endeavored to express all the noblest possibilities of the young man’s face, in this he labored to portray whatever potentiality of evil
