The Beldonald Holbein | Page 9

at one with me as to the
rarity and, to a near and human view, the beauty and interest of the
position. We had neither of us ever before seen that degree and that
special sort of personal success come to a woman for the first time so
late in life. I found it an example of poetic, of absolutely retributive
justice; so that my desire grew great to work it, as we say, on those
lines. I had seen it all from the original moment at my studio; the poor
lady had never known an hour's appreciation--which moreover, in
perfect good faith, she had never missed. The very first thing I did after
inducing so unintentionally the resentful retreat of her protectress had
been to go straight over to her and say almost without preliminaries that
I should hold myself immeasurably obliged for a few patient sittings.
What I thus came face to face with was, on the instant, her whole
unenlightened past and the full, if foreshortened, revelation of what
among us all was now unfailingly in store for her. To turn the handle
and start that tune came to me on the spot as a temptation. Here was a
poor lady who had waited for the approach of old age to find out what
she was worth. Here was a benighted being to whom it was to be
disclosed in her fifty-seventh year--I was to make that out--that she had
something that might pass for a face. She looked much more than her
age, and was fairly frightened--as if I had been trying on her some
possibly heartless London trick--when she had taken in my appeal.
That showed me in what an air she had lived and--as I should have
been tempted to put it had I spoken out-- among what children of
darkness. Later on I did them more justice; saw more that her
wonderful points must have been points largely the fruit of time, and
even that possibly she might never in all her life have looked so well as
at this particular moment. It might have been that if her hour had struck
I just happened to be present at the striking. What had occurred, all the
same, was at the worst a notable comedy.
The famous "irony of fate" takes many forms, but I had never yet seen
it take quite this one. She had been "had over" on an understanding, and
she wasn't playing fair. She had broken the law of her ugliness and had

turned beautiful on the hands of her employer. More interesting even
perhaps than a view of the conscious triumph that this might prepare
for her, and of which, had I doubted of my own judgement, I could still
take Outreau's fine start as the full guarantee--more interesting was the
question of the process by which such a history could get itself enacted.
The curious thing was that all the while the reasons of her having
passed for plain-- the reasons for Lady Beldonald's fond calculation,
which they quite justified--were written large in her face, so large that it
was easy to understand them as the only ones she herself had ever read.
What was it then that actually made the old stale sentence mean
something so different?--into what new combinations, what
extraordinary language, unknown but understood at a glance, had time
and life translated it? The only thing to be said was that time and life
were artists who beat us all, working with recipes and secrets we could
never find out. I really ought to have, like a lecturer or a showman, a
chart or a blackboard to present properly the relation, in the wonderful
old tender battered blanched face, between the original elements and
the exquisite final it style." I could do it with chalks, but I can scarcely
do it with words. However, the thing was, for any artist who respected
himself, to FEEL it--which I abundantly did; and then not to conceal
from HER I felt it--which I neglected as little. But she was really, to do
her complete justice, the last to understand; and I'm not sure that, to the
end--for there was an end--she quite made it all out or knew where she
was. When you've been brought up for fifty years on black it must be
hard to adjust your organism at a day's notice to gold-colour. Her whole
nature had been pitched in the key of her supposed plainness. She had
known how to be ugly--it was the only thing she had learnt save, if
possible, how not to mind it. Being beautiful took in any case a new set
of muscles. It was on the prior conviction, literally, that she had
developed her admirable dress, instinctively felicitous, always either