The days had gone on, and it was near the end of April. Coming up the dark stairs one morning, she found them still darker, because she had just left the sunshine. They were built very narrow, as usual in old country-houses, and the landing shut off with a door, so that when you were in them you seemed to be in a box. There was no carpet—bare boards; old-fashioned folk did not carpet their stairs; no handrail; the edges of the steps worm-eaten and ragged, little bits apt to break off under sudden pressure, so that the board looked as if it had been nibbled by mice.
Shutting the landing door behind her, Amaryllis was in perfect darkness, but her feet knew the well-remembered way, and she came quickly to the top.
There were two great rooms running the whole length of the house: the first was a lumber-room, the second her own especial cell. Cell-like it was, in its monastic or conventual bareness. It was vague with bareness: a huge, square room, gaunt as a barn, the walls and ceiling whitewashed, the floor plain boards. Yonder, near the one small window, stood a table and tall-backed oaken chair, afar off, as it were, from the doorway—a journey to them across the creaking floor. On one side an old four-post bedstead of dark oak, much damaged, was placed by the wall; the sacking hung down in a loop, torn and decayed—a bedstead on which no one had slept these hundred years past. By the table there was, too, an ancient carved linen-press of black oak, Amaryllis’ bookcase.
These bits of rude furniture were lost in the vastness of space, as much as if you had thrown your hat into the sky.
Amaryllis went straight to the window and knelt down. She brought a handful of violets, fresh-gathered, to place in the glass which she kept there for her flowers. The window was cut in the thick wall, and formed a niche, where she always had a tumbler ready—a common glass tumbler, she could not afford a vase.
They were the white wild violets, the sweetest of all, gathered while the nightingale was singing his morning song in the April sunshine—a song the world never listens to, more delicious than his evening notes, for the sunlight helps him, and the blue of the heavens, the green leaf, and the soft wind—all the soul of spring.
White wild violets, a dewdrop as it were of flower, tender and delicate, growing under the great hawthorn hedge, by the mosses and among the dry, brown leaves of last year, easily overlooked unless you know exactly where to go for them. She had a bunch for her neck, and a large bunch for her niche. They would have sunk and fallen into the glass, but she hung them by their chins over the edge of the tumbler, with their stalks in the water. Then she sat down in the old chair at the table, and rested her head on her hand.
Except where she did this every day, and so brushed it, a thin layer of dust had covered the surface (there was no cloth) and had collected on her portfolio, thrust aside and neglected. Dust on the india-rubber, dust on the cake of Indian ink, dust invisible on the smooth surface of the pencils, dust in the little box of vine charcoal.
The hoarse baying of the hungry wolves around the house had shaken the pencil from her fingers—Siberian wolves they were, racing over the arid deserts of debt, large and sharp-toothed, ever increasing in number and ferocity, ready to tear the very door down. There are no wolves like those debt sends against a house.
Every knock at the door, every strange footstep up the approach, every letter that came, was like the gnawing and gnashing of savage teeth.
Iden could plant the potatoes and gossip at the stile, and put the letters unopened on the mantelshelf—a pile of bills over his head where he slept calmly after dinner. Iden could plant potatoes, and cut trusses of hay, and go through his work to appearance unmoved.
Amaryllis could not draw—she could not do it; her imagination refused to see the idea; the more she concentrated her mind, the louder she heard the ceaseless grinding and gnashing of teeth.
Potatoes can be planted and nails can be hammered, billhooks can be wielded and faggots chopped, no matter what the inward care. The ploughman is deeply in debt, poor fellow, but he can, and does, follow the plough, and finds, perhaps, some solace in the dull monotony of his labour. Clods cannot feel. A sensitive mind and vivid imagination—a delicately-balanced organization, that almost lives on its ideas as veritable food—cannot do like this. The poet, the artist, the author, the thinker, cannot follow their plough; their work depends on a serene mind.
But experience proves that they do do their work under such circumstances. They do; how greatly then they must be tortured, or for what a length of time they must have suffered to become benumbed.
Amaryllis was young, and all her feelings unchecked of Time. She could not sketch—that was a thing of useless paper and pencil; what was wanted was money. She could not read, that was not real; what was wanted was solid coin.
So the portfolio was thrust aside, neglected and covered with dust, but she came every day to her flowers in the window-niche.
She had drawn up there in the bitter cold of February and March, without a fire, disdainful of ease in the fullness of her generous hope. Her warm young blood cared nothing for the cold, if only by enduring it she could assist those whom she loved.
There were artists in the Flamma family in London who made what seemed to her large incomes, yet whose names had never been seen in a newspaper criticism, and who had never even sent a work to the Academy—never even tried to
