“We were paraded to church every Sunday,” he told her, “to cushion our superior backsides on the plush family pew—though never, at our peril, to squirm on it—while lesser mortals sat on hard wood and gawked in awe. And you, Jane? Were you orphans marched in a neat crocodile, two by two, to sit on backless benches and thank God for the many blessings He had showered on you?” His hands played a flourishing arpeggio.
“I always enjoyed church,” she said quietly. “And there are always blessings for which to be thankful.”
He laughed softly.
Most often during the afternoons he painted. He did not want after all, he decided, to paint just her face. He wanted to painther, as she was. Jane had looked sharply at him when he said that, and he had raised his eyebrows.
“You think I am going to drape you in a lascivious pose on the floor, Jane, dressed only in your hair?” he asked. “I would put you to better use than to paint you if I did that, believe me. As I will show you tonight. Yes, definitely. Tonight we will have candles and nakedness and hair, and I will show you how to pose for me like the Siren you could be if you set your mind to it. I will paint you at your embroidery. That is when you are most yourself.” He gazed narrow-eyed at her. “Quiet, industrious, elegant, engaged in creating a work of art.”
And so he painted as she stitched, both of them silent. He always stripped off his coat and waistcoat before he began and donned a large, loose shirt over his good one. As the days passed it became smudged and streaked with paint.
He would not let her see the painting until it was finished.
“I let you see my embroidery,” she reminded him.
“I asked and you said yes,” he replied. “You asked and I said no.”
To which logic there was no further argument.
She worked at her embroidery, but she watched him too. Covertly, of course. If she looked too directly or stopped work too long, he frowned and looked distracted and grumbled at her. It was hard sometimes to realize that this man who shared her most intimate space with such mutual ease was the same man who had once told her he would make her wonder if starvation would not be better than working for him. The infamous, heartless Duke of Tresham.
He had the soul of an artist. Music had been trapped within him most of his life. She had not yet seen any product of his brush, but she recognized the total absorption in his work of the true artist. Much of the harshness and cynicism disappeared from his face. He looked younger, more conventionally handsome.
And entirely lovable.
But it was not until the fourth evening that he really began to talk, to let out in words the person who had lurked behind the haughty, confident, restless, wicked facade he had shown the world all his adult life.
HE WAS ENJOYING THEnovelty of being in love, though he kept reminding himself that it wasjustnovelty, that soon it would be over and he would be on safe, familiar ground again. But it saddened him, at the same time as it reassured him, that Jane would ever look to him just like any other beautiful woman he had once enjoyed and tired of, that the time would come when the thought of her, ofbeingwith her, both in bed and out, would not fill him with such a welling of gladness that it seemed he must have taken all the sunshine inside himself.
His sexual passion for her grew lustier as the week advanced. He could not be satisfied with the almost chaste encounters of their first two times together, but set out to teach her—and himself—different, more carnal, more prolonged delights. The previous week he might have exulted in the bed sport with his new mistress and proceeded with the rest of his life as usual. But it was not the previous week. It wasthisweek. And this week there was so much more than just bed sport. Indeed, he suspected that bed was good between them just because there was so much else.
He dared do things he had craved as a boy—play the pianoforte, paint, dream, let his mind drift into realms beyond the merely practical. He was frustrated by his painting and exhilarated by it. He could not capture the essence of her, perhaps because he looked too hard for it and thought too much about it, he realized at last. And so he relearned what had once been instinctive with him—to observe not so much with his senses or even his mind but with the mindless, wordless aspect of himself that was itself part of the essence it sought. He learned to stop forcing his art to his will. He learned that to create, he somehow had to allow creation to proceed through him.
He would not have understood the concept if he had ever verbalized it. But he had learned that words were not always adequate to what he yearned to express. He had learned to move beyond words.
Gradually the woman who had become the grand obsession of his life took form on the canvas.
But it was words that finally took him into a new dimension of his relationship with his mistress on the fourth evening. He had been playing the pianoforte; she had been singing. Then she had sent for the tea tray and they had drunk their tea in companionable silence. They were both sitting idle and relaxed, one on each side of the hearth, she gazing into the fire, he gazing at her.
“There were woods in Acton Park,” he said suddenly, apropos of nothing. “Wooded hills all down the eastern border of the park. Wild, uncultivated, inhabited by woodland creatures and birds. I used to escape there for long hours of solitude until I learned better. It was when I came to realize that I could never paint a tree or a flower or even a blade of grass.”
She smiled rather lazily. For once, he noticed, she was leaning back in her chair, her head against the headrest.
“Why?” she asked.
“I used to run my hands over the trunks of trees,” he explained, “and even stand against them, my arms about them. I used to hold wildflowers in the palm of my hand and run grass blades between my fingers. There was too much there, Jane. Too many dimensions. I am talking nonsense, am I not?”
She shook her head, and he knew she understood.
“I could not even begin to grasp all there was to grasp,” he said. “I used to feel—how does one describe the feeling? Breathless? No, totally inadequate. But there was a feeling, as if I were in the presence of some quite unfathomable mystery. And the strange thing was, I never wanted to fathom it. How is that for lack of human curiosity?”
But she would not let him mock himself. “You were a contemplative,” she said.
“A what?”
“Some people—most people, in fact,” she said, “are content with a relationship with God in which they have Him pinned down with words and in which they address Him in words. It is inevitable that all of us do it to a certain extent, of course. Words are what humans work with. But a few people discover that God is far vaster than all the words in every language and religion of the world combined. They discover tantalizing near glimpses of God only in silence—in total nothingness. They communicate with God only by giving up all effort to do so.”
“Damn it, Jane,” he said, “I do not even believe in God.”
