The Dark Clue (7 page)

‘This was his room,' said Mrs. Booth. ‘Every morning he would rise before dawn, and throw a blanket round him, and go up there' – here she indicated the ladder – ‘on to the roof, and sketch the sunrise.'

‘Ah,' I said. ‘That's why the parapet's railed?'

She nodded. ‘And then he'd come back to bed, and rest till breakfast time. And so he went on, right up until his last illness. He was indefatigable, Miss Halcombe. Even when I was nursing him, I had to make sure he always had pencils and paper to hand.'

‘Was he still able to paint, then?' I asked.

‘Not at the very end,' she said. ‘But not to have the hope of it would have killed him that much sooner. So I always kept up the pretence:
Perhaps tomorrow, my dear.
'

How many housekeepers call their master ‘my dear'?

‘He was very lucky to have you, Mrs. Booth,' I said.

She did not answer, seemingly lost in her own thoughts. At length she said:

‘I'll tell you a strange thing, Miss Halcombe. A few weeks before he died, the police dragged out of the river some poor girl, who had fallen into disgrace, and drowned herself.' She moved towards the window, and pointed down to the embankment steps, where the watermen were still idling the afternoon away. ‘Just there. And Mr. Turner was very troubled by it, and kept waking me in the night, and saying he saw her face, and feared to sleep. “I must draw it,” he said. “I must draw that face, or I shall have no rest.” And so he drew it, and it was almost the last picture he ever made.'

‘And was he still haunted by it?' I asked.

‘He never spoke of it again,' she said. ‘Leastways, not that I recall.'

She was quiet then, and I feared I had lost her to her own memories. I said:

‘How did he come to see her, if he was in bed, and she outside?'

‘It was a terrible winter,' she said. ‘Nothing but fog and smoke for weeks on end. He'd say, “I wish I could see the sun again” – but he could barely more than whisper it by then, it'd break your heart to hear him. So he'd roll on to the floor, and try to crawl to the window to look for it.'

‘I see,' I said. ‘So he was there when the police found her?'

She nodded abstractedly, as if her mind were on something more important. ‘Sometimes', she said, ‘he was too weak even to go that far, and I'd find him here, by the chair, and have to help him back to bed.'

Again she was silent, and, though she faced the window, I thought I saw a tear in the corner of her eye. Finally, she sighed, and said: ‘But he did see it again. One morning, it suddenly broke through; and the doctor and I got him into the wheelchair, and pushed him here to the window, so that it could shine full on his face; and an hour later, as if he was satisfied at last, he died, without a murmur, with his head against my shoulder.'

Her voice did not quaver. And yet something in the way she spoke, bringing the thoughts from the depths of her own being, and then gently replacing them there, as if they were her most cherished possessions, told me, beyond doubt, that this was a woman who had not merely served Turner, but had loved him in every sense. And I knew – however hard it might be to believe – that the man described by Lady Eastlake as the foremost genius of the day had lived and died in this mean little house, under an assumed name, as his housekeeper's husband.

If I am honest, I have to say this realization prompted in me no other feeling for Mrs. Booth than deep pity, mingled with a genuine admiration. But what, I wondered, would Walter make of it? For the old widow, I was sure, he would share my sympathy and compassion; but would he view Turner himself in the same liberal spirit? Might the discovery of his subject's eccentricities (to put it as charitably as I can) make him lose interest in writing the
Life,
even before he has begun it?

It was therefore with some trepidation that I said:

‘You have been very helpful, Mrs. Booth. Would it be possible for me to call again with my brother, who, I know, would like to talk to you himself?'

And it was with relief, as well as disappointment, that I heard her reply:

‘I mean no offence, Miss Halcombe, but Mr. Turner's memory is sacred to me. I do not like to talk about him; and, to speak plain, I have already said more than I meant to. So, while I shall always be pleased to see you, if you pass this way, I must ask that
you do not bring your brother here; for I could tell him nothing more than I have told you today.'

VIII

Letter from Walter Hartright to Laura Hartright,
11th August, 185–

Brompton Grove,
Friday

My dearest love,

Your letter is by me as I write – I glance over, and read ‘I am so proud of you, Walter'; and the words sting me like a slap, for I am sure that had you seen me today you would have been anything but proud. I am just returned from Ruskin, you see, and know not what to make of him, or of what he told me – but I fear
he
has made a fool of me, and I of myself, and the result is that I am cast down, and quite confused.

The start of my perplexity is the man himself. Strange, is it not, how a famous name may produce an image in our minds, composed of who knows what scraps and trifles and odds and ends, yet strong enough, in the absence of personal experience, to
be
that person for us? Before today, without in the least reflecting on it, I saw Ruskin as a wild shaggy creature lurking in the dark somewhere (his natural abode has always seemed a cave, or a dungeon), waiting to rush out without warning and impale some poor unsuspecting painter. Perhaps this idea arises partly from my own dread, whenever I exhibit, that he will single out something of mine for particular scorn; and partly from – do you remember it? – that verse in
Punch:

I paints and paints, and no complaints;

I sells before I'm dry;

Then savage Ruskin sticks his tusk in

And nobody will buy.

And just think – had I had no occasion to meet him, this fancy might, through sheer force of habit, have finally established itself in my mind as the truth; and so been passed on by our grandchildren to their grandchildren as a lifelike portrait of the great man!

At all events, they, and I, will be spared that; for the revolution of the last twelve hours has entirely deposed all my preconceptions, and despatched them to an exile from which they will never return.

My first surprise came even before I had met him, for 163 Dennmark Hill turns out to be a tall, rambling old house which – far from shrinking into the shadows – announces its presence with the beefy self-importance of a provincial lord mayor. It has its own porter's lodge (where I was obliged to state my business to a burly man with suspicious eyes and licorice breath, who said: ‘That's Mr.
John
Ruskin, is it?' and then, before I was able to reply, peered at me through the window of the cab, and answered his own question: ‘Yes, it'll be Mr. John'); and a carriage sweep; and walls furred with ivy; and a front door approached by railed steps, and almost hidden in the recesses of a heavy portico. From its size, in short, and its John Bull posture – feet splayed, elbows out – it looked more like the house of one of our fox-hunting neighbours in Cumberland than the home of the world's most celebrated art critic, on the fringes of the world's greatest city.

The footman who opened the door seemed ordinary enough; but for a fleeting moment I had the odd impression that the dim square hall behind him was filled with pale, elderly faces (it was difficult to be sure, for my eyes had not yet adjusted to the gloom), which promptly scattered, as soon as they saw me, like rabbits startled by a walker.

‘Is Mr. Ruskin at home?' I asked.

‘Mr.
John
Ruskin?' replied the man, in a stiff parody of the lodge-keeper.

‘Yes,' I said, wondering secretly how many others there might be, and whether they all had opinions on Art.

He went upstairs; and, as soon as he had gone, two of the rabbits (as I supposed) reappeared. One was an old woman in a bonnet and a black dress; the other, a stocky man with ragged white hair and thick whiskers, wearing a dark jacket and a speckled twill waistcoat. Neither looked exactly like a servant, and there was something proprietorial in their manner; yet they hovered at the margins of the hall, as if they feared to take full possession of it, smiling uneasily at me, and looking away again
– like prosperous innkeepers, perhaps, whose house is their own, but who must defer to others within its walls.

‘Mr. Hartright,' said a soft, gracious voice; and, looking up, I saw a man descending the stairs towards me. At first glance he seemed immensely tall; but as he reached the hall, and stood level with me, I saw that in fact he was merely extremely thin, with a long, close-fitting blue coat that hugged his slender frame and emphasized all the vertical lines in his appearance. He was about my own age, or a little older, with a bright complexion, thick yellow hair and whiskers, and beetling eyebrows. There was something almost foppish – even feminine – in the way he moved, and in the evident care he had taken in arranging his watch-chain and tying his cravat; but it was entirely contradicted by his sharp nose and deep-set blue eyes, which gave him the wary, petulant look of a beast disturbed in its lair.

‘How very pleasant to meet you,' he said, taking both my hands in his. His lower lip, I noticed, was slightly deformed; but his smile more than atoned for it, transforming his expression, in an instant, from bad temper to sweetness. He turned to the old people and said, with a courtly air:

‘Papa, Mama, this is Mr. Hartright. He's here to talk about Turner.'

I had heard, of course, of the poor man's marital difficulties; but the idea that in his middle years, and at the height of his eminence, he should have abandoned the part of a husband only to resume that of a son was strange indeed. I thought of what Davenant had told me of Turner and his father, and Marian had learnt from Mrs. Booth; and wondered if it was a mark of genius to be incapable of normal domestic arrangements.

‘How d'ye do?' said the old man; and, as he and his wife stepped forward awkwardly to shake my hand, I at last recognized their odd mixture of pride and diffidence and concern for what it was, and felt suddenly – and quite unexpectedly – like a schoolboy invited to the home of a gifted but over-sensitive friend.

‘Will you indulge me, Mr. Hartright,' said Ruskin, ‘and take a walk in the garden? I've been in the thick of it all morning, and can't see for the smoke, or think for the noise of the guns.'

Without waiting for a reply, he ushered me quickly out of the front door again, as if anxious to make good his escape before his parents had time to forbid it.

‘In the thick of what, may I ask?' I said, as we turned on to the carriage sweep. ‘A new piece of criticism?'

‘I
am
struggling to finish the last volume of
Modern Painters,
' he said. ‘But I'm afraid I've come to the wretched conclusion that all my critical and historical work up till now has been almost valueless.'

‘Oh, come .. .!' I said.

‘It
is
a sad thought,' he said. ‘Especially when you've devoted your whole life to a thing, as I have. But when I look about me, and see the burden of dumb misery in the world, and calculate what an infinitesimally small fraction of it I have managed to lift with my ruminations on Turner or Veronese or the Gothic …' He shook his head.

‘But
Modern Painters
' , I said, ‘has given delight – and instruction – to thousands. Millions.' I confess that I was slightly abashed, when I reflected how little of it I had read, and how long ago; but not sufficiently to prevent my adding: ‘Myself included.'

‘You are kind to try to console me, Mr. Hartright,' he said. He stopped, and turned on me a gaze of extraordinary candour. ‘But – forgive me – you do not look miserable – at least, not in the way I mean. When I speak of misery, I am thinking of that great mass of suffering humanity which surrounds us, and which we see – and yet do not see – every day; and which we barely touch with all our ideals and concerns.'

He rounded the end of the house, and ducked his head to enter a dark tunnel, pungent with the scent of damp leaves, formed by a dense old laurel bush pressing against the wall.

‘And that is why', he said, the words – suddenly muffled now – floating back to me in the close air, ‘I have begun to turn my attention to the question of political economy.'

I was, I must admit, surprised that he should be so frank with me, and not a little flattered; yet mingled with my gratification, as I followed his stooping figure through the dimness, was a slight repugnance – although I could not, at the time, have told you the reason for it.

‘You may, of course, feel I have little enough reason to complain myself,' he said with a laugh, as we emerged behind the house. He gestured languidly towards the lawn, dotted with trees and artfully laced with winding paths that stretched away below us; and at the kitchen gardens and orchards and a row of farm buildings beyond. ‘Our own milk and pigs,' he said, ‘and peaches from the hothouses; and a meadow for the horses. Everything a mortal could desire, in fact, save a stream – and mountains.' I glanced towards him, and saw that he was smiling, and that he had the grace to blush.

‘But enough of me, Mr. Hartright,' he said, suddenly setting off again. ‘I have a lecture this evening, and fear I must leave at four o'clock. So, tell me, how fares your tremendous undertaking?'

‘It's scarcely begun,' I said. ‘But I have spoken to a few people who knew Turner.'

‘Ah, yes,' he said. ‘Who?'

I told him. He made no response of any kind; so I went on:

‘And my sister has been to see his housekeeper.'

‘Ah, the good Mrs. Booth,' he murmured. ‘Did she elucidate the mystery, or add to it?'