The Open Door, and the Portrait. - Margaret O. (Wilson) Oliphant
But it was only at rare intervals that I went home. In the long vacation,
as in my school holidays, my father often went abroad with me, so that we
had gone over a great deal of the Continent together very pleasantly. He
was old in proportion to the age of his son, being a man of sixty when I
was twenty, but that did not disturb the pleasure of the relations
between us. I don't know that they were ever very confidential. On my
side there was but little to communicate, for I did not get into scrapes
nor fall in love, the two predicaments which demand sympathy and
confidences. And as for my father himself, I was never aware what there
could be to communicate on his side. I knew his life exactly,--what he
did almost at every hour of the day; under what circumstances of the
temperature he would ride and when walk; how often and with what guests
he would indulge in the occasional break of a dinner-party, a serious
pleasure,--perhaps, indeed, less a pleasure than a duty. All this I knew
as well as he did, and also his views on public matters, his political
opinions, which naturally were different from mine. What ground, then,
remained for confidence? I did not know any. We were both of us of a
reserved nature, not apt to enter into our religious feelings, for
instance. There are many people who think reticence on such subjects a
sign of the most reverential way of contemplating them. Of this I am far
from being sure; but, at all events, it was the practice most congenial
to my own mind.
And then I was for a long time absent, making my own way in the world. I
did not make it very successfully. I accomplished the natural fate of an
Englishman, and went out to the Colonies; then to India in a
semi-diplomatic position; but returned home after seven or eight years,
invalided, in bad health and not much better spirits, tired and
disappointed with my first trial of life. I had, as people say, "no
occasion" to insist on making my way. My father was rich, and had never
given me the slightest reason to believe that he did not intend me to be
his heir. His allowance to me was not illiberal, and though he did not
oppose the carrying out of my own plans, he by no means urged me to
exertion. When I came home he received me very affectionately, and
expressed his satisfaction in my return. "Of course," he said, "I am not
glad that you are disappointed, Philip, or that your health is broken;
but otherwise it is an ill wind, you know, that blows nobody good; and I
am very glad to have you at home. I am growing an old man--"
"I don't see any difference, sir," said I; "everything here seems exactly
the same as when I went away--"
He smiled, and shook his head. "It is true enough," he said; "after we
have reached a certain age we seem to go on for a long time on a
plane, and feel no great difference from year to year; but it is an
inclined plane, and the longer we go on the more sudden will be the
fall at the end. But at all events it will be a great comfort to me to
have you here."
"If I had known that," I said, "and that you wanted me, I should have
come in any circumstances. As there are only two of us in the world--"
"Yes," he said, "there are only two of us in the world; but still I
should not have sent for you, Phil, to interrupt your career."
"It is as well, then, that it has interrupted itself," I said rather
bitterly; for disappointment is hard to bear.
He patted me on the shoulder, and repeated, "It is an ill wind that blows
nobody good," with a look of real pleasure which gave me a certain
gratification too; for, after all, he was an old man, and the only one in
all the world to whom I owed any duty. I had not been without dreams of
warmer affections, but they had come to nothing--not tragically, but in
the ordinary way. I might perhaps have had love which I did not want but
not that which I did want,--which was not a thing to make any unmanly
moan about, but in the ordinary course of events. Such disappointments
happen every day; indeed, they are more common than anything else, and
sometimes it is apparent afterwards that it is better it was so.
However, here I was at thirty stranded, yet wanting for nothing,--in a
position to call forth rather envy than pity from the greater part of my
contemporaries; for I had an assured and comfortable existence, as much
money as I wanted, and the prospect of an excellent fortune for the
future. On the other hand, my health was still low, and I had no
occupation. The neighborhood of the town was a drawback rather than an
advantage. I felt myself tempted, instead of taking the long walk into
the country which my doctor recommended, to take a much shorter one
through the High Street, across the river, and back again, which was
not a walk but a lounge. The country was silent and full of
thoughts,--thoughts not always very agreeable,--whereas there were always
the humors of the little urban population to glance at, the news to be
heard,--all those petty matters which so often make up life in a very
impoverished version for the idle man. I did not like it, but I felt
myself yielding to it, not having energy enough to make a stand. The
rector and the leading lawyer of the place asked me to dinner. I might
have glided into the society, such as it was, had I been disposed for
that; everything about me began to close over me as if I had been fifty,
and fully contented with my lot.
It was possibly my own want of occupation which made me observe with
surprise, after a while, how much occupied my father was. He had
expressed himself glad of my return; but now that I had returned, I saw
very little of him. Most of his time was spent in his library, as had
always been the case. But on the few visits I paid him there, I could not
but perceive that the aspect of the library was much changed. It had
acquired the look of a business-room, almost an office. There were large
business-like books on the table, which I could not associate with
anything he could naturally have to do; and his correspondence was very
large. I thought he closed one of those books hurriedly as I came in, and
pushed it away, as if he did not wish me to see it. This surprised me at
the moment without arousing any other feeling; but afterwards I
remembered it with a clearer sense of what it meant. He was more absorbed
altogether than I had been used to see him. He was visited by men
sometimes not of very prepossessing appearance. Surprise grew in my mind
without any very distinct idea of the reason of it; and it was not till
after a chance conversation with Morphew that my vague uneasiness began
to take definite shape. It was begun without any special intention on my
part. Morphew had informed me that master was very busy, on some occasion
when I wanted to see him. And I was a little annoyed to be thus put off.
"It appears to me that my father is always busy," I said hastily. Morphew
then began very oracularly to nod his head in assent.
"A deal too busy, sir, if you take my opinion," he said.
This startled me much, and I asked hurriedly, "What do you mean?" without
reflecting that to ask for private information from a servant about my
father's habits was as bad as investigating into a stranger's affairs. It
did not strike me in the same light.
"Mr. Philip," said Morphew, "a thing 'as 'appened as 'appens more often
than it ought to. Master has got awful keen about money in his old age."
"That's a new thing for him," I said.
"No, sir, begging your pardon, it ain't a new thing. He was once
broke of it, and that wasn't easy done; but it's come back, if you'll
excuse me saying so. And I don't know as he'll ever be broke of it
again at his age."
I felt more disposed to be angry than disturbed by this. "You must be
making some ridiculous mistake," I said. "And if you were not so old a
friend as you are, Morphew, I should not have allowed my father to be so
spoken of to me."
The old man gave me a half-astonished, half-contemptuous look. "He's been
my master a deal longer than he's been your father," he said, turning on
his heel. The assumption was so comical that my anger could not stand in
face of it. I went out, having been on my way to the door when this
conversation occurred, and took my usual lounge about, which was not a
satisfactory sort of amusement. Its vanity and emptiness appeared to be
more evident than usual to-day. I met half-a-dozen people I knew, and had
as many pieces of news confided to me. I went up and down the length of
the High Street. I made a small purchase or two. And then I turned
homeward, despising myself, yet finding no alternative within my reach.
Would a long country walk have been more virtuous? It would at least have
been more wholesome; but that was all that could be said. My mind did
not dwell on Morphew's communication. It seemed without sense or meaning
to me; and after the excellent joke about his superior interest in his
master to mine in my father, was dismissed lightly enough from my mind. I
tried to invent some way of telling this to my father without letting him
perceive that Morphew had been finding faults in him, or I listening; for
it seemed a pity to lose so good a joke. However, as I returned home,
something happened which put the joke entirely out of my head. It is
curious when a new subject of trouble or anxiety has been suggested to
the mind in an unexpected way, how often a second advertisement follows
immediately after the first, and gives to that a potency which in itself
it had not possessed.
I was approaching our own door, wondering whether my father had gone, and
whether, on my return, I should find him at leisure,--for I had several
little things to say to him,--when I noticed a poor woman lingering about
the closed gates. She had a baby sleeping in her arms. It was a spring
night, the stars shining in the twilight, and everything soft and dim;
and the woman's figure was like a shadow, flitting about, now here, now
there, on one side or another of the gate. She stopped when she saw me
approaching, and hesitated for a moment, then seemed to take a sudden
resolution. I watched her without knowing, with a prevision that she was
going to address me, though with no sort of idea as to the subject of her
address. She came up to me doubtfully, it seemed, yet certainly, as I
felt, and when she was close to me, dropped a sort of hesitating curtsey,
and said, "It's Mr. Philip?" in a low voice.
"What do you want with me?" I said.
Then she poured forth suddenly, without warning or preparation, her long
speech,--a flood of words which must have been all ready and waiting at
the doors of her lips for utterance. "Oh, sir, I want to speak to you! I
can't believe you'll be so hard, for you're young; and I can't believe
he'll be so hard if so be as his own son, as I've always heard he had but
one, 'll speak up for us. Oh, gentleman, it is easy for the likes of you,
that, if you ain't comfortable in one room, can just walk into another;
but if one room is all you have, and every bit of furniture you have
taken out of it, and nothing but the four walls left,--not so much as the
cradle for the child, or a chair for your man to sit down upon when he
comes from his work, or a saucepan to cook him his supper--"
"My good woman," I said, "who can have taken all that from you? Surely
nobody can be so cruel?"
"You say it's cruel!" she cried with a sort of triumph. "Oh, I knowed you
would, or any true gentleman that don't hold with screwing poor folks.
Just go and say that to him inside there for the love of God. Tell him
to think what he's doing, driving poor creatures to despair. Summer's
coming, the Lord be praised, but yet it's bitter cold at night with your
counterpane gone; and when you've been working hard all day, and nothing
but four bare walls to come home to, and all your poor little sticks of
furniture that you've saved up for, and got together one by one, all
gone, and you no better than when you started, or rather worse, for then
you was young. Oh, sir!" the woman's voice rose into a sort of passionate
wail. And then she added, beseechingly, recovering herself, "Oh, speak
for us; he'll not refuse his own son--"
"To whom am I to speak? Who is it that has done this to you?" I said.
The woman hesitated again, looking keenly in my face, then repeated with
a slight faltering, "It's Mr. Philip?" as if that made everything right.
"Yes; I am Philip Canning," I said; "but what have I to do with this?
and to whom am I to speak?"
She began to whimper, crying and stopping herself. "Oh, please, sir! it's
Mr. Canning as owns all the house property about; it's him that our court
and the lane and everything belongs to. And he's taken the bed from under
us, and the baby's cradle, although it's said in the Bible as you're not
to take poor folks' bed."
"My father!" I cried in spite of myself; "then it must be some agent,
some one else in his name. You may be sure he knows nothing of it. Of
course I shall speak to him at once."
"Oh, God bless you, sir," said the woman. But then she added, in a lower
tone, "It's no agent. It's one as never knows trouble. It's him that
lives in that grand house." But this was said under her breath, evidently
not for me to hear.
Morphew's words flashed through my mind as she spoke. What was this? Did
it afford an explanation of the much-occupied hours, the big books, the
strange visitors? I took the poor woman's name, and gave her something
to procure a few comforts for the night, and went indoors disturbed and
troubled. It was impossible to believe that my father himself would
have acted thus; but he was not a man to brook interference, and I did
not see how to introduce the subject, what to say. I could but hope
that, at the moment of broaching it, words would be put into my mouth,
which often happens in moments of necessity, one knows not how, even
when one's theme is not so all-important as that for which such help has
been promised. As usual, I did not see my father till dinner. I have
said that our dinners were very good, luxurious in a simple way,
everything excellent in its kind, well cooked, well served,--the
perfection of comfort without show,--which is a combination very dear to
the English heart. I said nothing till Morphew, with his solemn
attention to everything that was going, had retired; and then it was
with some strain of courage that I began.
"I was stopped outside the gate to-day by a curious sort of
petitioner,--a poor woman, who seems to be one of your tenants, sir, but
whom your agent must have been rather too hard upon."
"My agent? Who is that?" said my father quietly.
"I don't know his name, and I doubt his competence. The poor creature
seems to have had everything taken from her,--her bed, her child's
cradle."
"No doubt she was behind with her rent."
"Very likely, sir. She seemed very poor," said I.
"You take it coolly," said my father, with an upward glance, half-amused,
not in the least shocked by my statement. "But when a man, or a woman
either, takes a house, I suppose you will allow that they ought to pay
rent for it."
"Certainly, sir," I replied, "when they have got anything to pay."
"I don't allow the reservation," he said. But he was not angry, which I
had feared he would be.
"I think," I continued, "that your agent must be too severe. And this
emboldens me to say something which has been in my mind for some
time"--(these were the words, no doubt, which I had hoped would be put
into my month; they were the suggestion of the moment, and yet as I said
them it was with the most complete conviction of their truth)--"and that
is this: I am doing nothing; my time hangs heavy on my hands. Make me
your agent. I will see for myself, and save you from such mistakes; and
it will be an occupation--"
"Mistakes? What warrant have you for saying these are mistakes?" he said
testily; then after a moment: "This is a strange proposal from you, Phil.
Do you know what it is you are offering?--to be a collector of rents,
going about from door to door, from week to week; to look after wretched
little bits of repairs, drains, etc.; to get paid, which, after all, is
the chief thing, and not to be taken in by tales of poverty."
"Not to let you be taken in by men without pity," I said.
He gave me a strange glance, which I did not very well understand, and
said abruptly, a thing which, so far as I remember, he had never in my
life said before, "You've become a little like your mother, Phil--"
"My mother!" the reference was so unusual--nay, so unprecedented--that I
was greatly startled. It seemed to me like the sudden introduction of a
quite new element in the stagnant atmosphere, as well as a new party to
our conversation. My father looked across the table, as if with some
astonishment at my tone of surprise.
"Is that so very extraordinary?" he said.
"No; of course it is not extraordinary that I should resemble my mother.
Only--I have heard very little of her--almost nothing."
"That is true." He got up and placed himself before the fire, which was
very low, as the night was not cold--had not been cold heretofore at
least; but it seemed to me now that a little chill came into the dim and
faded room. Perhaps it looked more dull from the suggestion of a
something brighter, warmer, that might have been. "Talking of mistakes,"
he said, "perhaps that was one: to sever you entirely from her side of
the house. But I did not care for the connection. You will understand how
it is that I speak of it now when I tell you--" He stopped here, however,
said nothing more for a minute or so, and then rang the bell. Morphew
came, as he always did, very deliberately, so that some time elapsed in
silence, during which my surprise grew. When the old man appeared at the
door--"Have you put the lights in the drawing-room, as I told you?" my
father said.
"Yes, sir; and opened the box, sir; and it's a--it's a speaking
likeness--"
This the old man got out in a great hurry, as if afraid that his master
would stop him. My father did so with a wave of his hand.
"That's enough. I asked no information. You can go now."
The door closed upon us, and there was again a pause. My subject had
floated away altogether like a mist, though I had been so concerned about
it. I tried to resume, but could not. Something seemed to arrest my very
breathing; and yet in this dull, respectable house of ours, where
everything breathed good character and integrity, it was certain that
there could be no shameful mystery to reveal. It was some time before my
father spoke, not from any purpose that I could see, but apparently
because his mind was busy with probably unaccustomed thoughts.
"You scarcely know the drawing-room, Phil," he said at last.
"Very little. I have never seen it used. I have a little awe of it, to
tell the truth."
"That should not be. There is no reason for that. But a man by himself,
as I have been for the greater part of my life, has no occasion for a
drawing-room. I always, as a matter of preference, sat among my books;
however, I ought to have thought of the impression on you."
"Oh, it is not important," I said; "the awe was childish. I have not
thought of it since I came home."
"It never was anything very splendid at the best," said he. He lifted the
lamp from the table with a sort of abstraction, not remarking even my
offer to take it from him, and led the way. He was on the verge of
seventy, and looked his age; but it was a vigorous age, with no symptom
of giving way. The circle of light from the lamp lit up his white hair
and keen blue eyes and clear complexion; his forehead was like old ivory,
his cheek warmly colored; an old man, yet a man in full strength. He was
taller than I was, and still almost as strong. As he stood for a moment
with the lamp in his hand, he looked like a tower in his great height and
bulk. I reflected as I looked at him that I knew him intimately, more
intimately than any other creature in the world,--I was familiar with
every detail of his outward life; could it be that in reality I did not
know him at all?
* * * * *
The drawing-room was already lighted with a flickering array of candles
upon the mantelpiece and along the walls, producing the pretty, starry
effect which candles give without very much light. As I had not the
smallest idea what I was about to see, for Morphew's "speaking likeness"
was very hurriedly said, and only half comprehensible in the bewilderment
of my faculties, my first glance was at this very unusual illumination,
for which I could assign no reason. The next showed me a large
full-length portrait, still in the box in which apparently it had
travelled, placed upright, supported against a table in the centre of the
room. My father walked straight up to it, motioned to me to place a
smaller table close to the picture on the left side, and put his lamp
upon that. Then he waved his hand towards it, and stood aside that I
might see.
It was a full-length portrait of a very young woman--I might say a girl
scarcely twenty--in a white dress, made in a very simple old fashion,
though I was too little accustomed to female costume to be able to fix
the date. It might have been a hundred years old, or twenty, for aught I
knew. The face had an expression of youth, candor, and simplicity more
than any face I had ever seen,--or so, at least in my surprise, I
thought. The eyes were a little wistful, with something which was almost
anxiety which at least was not content--in them; a faint, almost
imperceptible, curve in the lids. The complexion was of a dazzling
fairness, the hair light, but the eyes dark, which gave individuality to
the face. It would have been as lovely had the eyes been blue,--probably
more so,--but their darkness gave a touch of character, a slight discord,
which made the harmony finer. It was not, perhaps, beautiful in the
highest sense of the word. The girl must have been too young, too slight,
too little developed for actual beauty; but a face which so invited love
and confidence I never saw. One smiled at it with instinctive affection.
"What a sweet face!" I said. "What a lovely girl! Who is she? Is this one
of the relations you were speaking of on the other side?"
My father made me no reply. He stood aside, looking at it as if he knew
it too well to require to look,--as if the picture was already in his
eyes. "Yes," he said, after an interval, with a long-drawn breath, "she
was a lovely girl, as you say."
"Was?--then she is dead. What a pity!" I said; "what a pity! so young and
so sweet!"
We stood gazing at her thus, in her beautiful stillness and calm,--two
men, the younger of us full-grown and conscious of many experiences, the
other an old man,--before this impersonation of tender youth. At length
he said, with a slight tremulousness in his voice, "Does nothing suggest
to you who she is, Phil?"
I turned round to look at him with profound astonishment, but he turned
away from my look. A sort of quiver passed over his face. "That is your
mother," he said, and walked suddenly away, leaving me there.
My mother!
I stood for a moment in a kind of consternation before the white-robed
innocent creature, to me no more than a child; then a sudden laugh broke
from me, without any will of mine something ludicrous, as well as
something awful, was in it. When the laugh was over, I found myself with
tears in my eyes, gazing, holding my breath. The soft features seemed to
melt, the lips to move, the anxiety in the eyes to become a personal
inquiry. Ah, no! nothing of the kind; only because of the water in mine.
My mother! oh, fair and gentle creature, scarcely woman, how could any
man's voice call her by that name! I had little idea enough of what it
meant,--had heard it laughed at, scoffed at, reverenced, but never had
learned to place it even among the ideal powers of life. Yet if it meant
anything at all, what it meant was worth thinking of. What did she ask,
looking at me with those eyes? What would she have said if "those lips
had language"? If I had known her only as Cowper did--with a child's
recollection--there might have been some thread, some faint but
comprehensible link, between us; but now all that I felt was the curious
incongruity. Poor child! I said to myself; so sweet a creature: poor
little tender soul! as if she had been a little sister, a child of
mine,--but my mother! I cannot tell how long I stood looking at her,
studying the candid, sweet face, which surely had germs in it of
everything that was good and beautiful; and sorry, with a profound
regret, that she had died and never carried these promises to
fulfillment. Poor girl! poor people who had loved her! These were my
thoughts; with a curious vertigo and giddiness of my whole being in the
sense of a mysterious relationship, which it was beyond my power to
understand.
Presently my father came back, possibly because I had been a long time
unconscious of the passage of the minutes, or perhaps because he was
himself restless in the strange disturbance of his habitual calm. He came
in and put his arm within mine, leaning his weight partially upon me,
with an affectionate suggestion which went deeper than words. I pressed
his arm to my side: it was more between us two grave Englishmen than any
embracing.