But when he had rescued Aline from the limbo over the small apothecary's shop, as thoughtlessly and as gallantly as his father before him had rescued the delicate lady from the trials of theatrical vagabondage, he found himself face to face with a perplexing problem. That first night he had risen from an amorphous bed he had arranged for himself on the studio floor, and entered his own bedroom on tiptoe, and looked with pathetic helplessness on the tiny child asleep beneath his bedclothes. If it had been a boy, he would have had no particular puzzle. A boy could have been stowed in a corner of the studio, where he could have learned manners and the fear of God and the way of smiling at adversity. He would have profited enormously, as Jimmie felt assured, by his education. But with a girl it was vastly different. An endless vista of shadowy, dreamy, delicate possibilities perplexed him. He conceived women as beings ethereal, with a range of exquisite emotions denied to masculine coarseness. Even the Rue Bonaparte had not destroyed his illusion, and he still attributed to the fair Maenads of the Bal des Quatre-z' Arts the lingering fragrance of the original Psyche. Of course Jimmie was a fool, as ten years afterwards Norma had decided; but this view of himself not occurring to him, he had to manage according to his lights. Here was this mysterious embryo goddess entirely dependent on him. No corner of the studio and rough-and-tumble discipline for her. She must sleep on down and be covered with silk; the airs of heaven must not visit her cheek too roughly; the clatter of the brazen world must not be allowed to deafen her to her own sweet inner harmonies. Jimmie was sorely perplexed.
His charwoman next morning could throw no light on the riddle. She had seven children of her own, four of them girls, and they had to get along the best way they could. She was of opinion that if let alone and just physicked when she had any complaint, Aline would grow up of her own accord. Jimmie said that this possibility had not struck him, but doubtless the lady was right. Could she tell him how many times a day a little girl ought to be fed and what she was to eat? The charwoman's draft upon her own family experiences enlightened Jimmie so far that he put a sovereign into her hand to provide a dinner for her children. After that he consulted her no more. It was an expensive process.
Meanwhile it was obvious that a studio and one bedroom would not be sufficient accommodation, and Jimmie, greatly daring, took a house. He also engaged a resident housekeeper for himself and a respectable cat for Aline, and when he had settled down, after having spent every penny he could scrape together on furniture, began to wonder how he could pay the rent. A month or two before he would have as soon thought of buying a palace in Park Lane as renting a house in St. John's Wood—a cheap, shabby little house, it is true; but still a house, with drawing-room, dining-room, bedrooms, and a studio built over the space where once the garden tried to smile. He wandered through it with a wonderment quite as childish as that of Aline, who had helped him to buy the furniture. But how was he ever going to pay the rent?
After a time he ceased asking the question. The ravens that fed Elijah provided him with the twenty quarterly pieces of gold. Picture-dealers of every hue and grade supplied him with the wherewithal to live. In those early days he penetrated most of the murky byways of his art—alleys he would have passed by with pinched nose a year before, when an empty pocket and an empty stomach concerned himself alone. Now, when the money for the last picture had gone, and no more was forthcoming by way of advance on royalties on plates, and the black and white market was congested, he did amazing things. He copied old Masters for a red-faced, beery print-seller in Frith Street, who found some mysterious market for them. The price can be gauged by the fact that years afterwards Jimmie recognised one of his own copies in an auction room, and heard it knocked down as a genuine Velasquez for eleven shillings and sixpence. He also painted oil landscapes for a dealer who did an immense trade in this line, selling them to drapers and fancy-warehousemen, who in their turn retailed them to an art-loving public, framed in gold, at one and eleven pence three farthings; and the artist's rate of payment was five shillings a dozen—panels supplied, but not the paint. To see Jimmie attack these was the child Aline's delight. In after years she wept in a foolish way over the memory. He would do half a dozen at a time: first dash in the foregrounds, either meadows or stretches of shore, then wash in bold, stormy skies, then a bit of water, smooth or rugged according as it was meant to represent pool or sea; then a few vigorous strokes would put in a ship and a lighthouse on one panel, a tree and a cow on a second, a woman and a cottage on a third. And all the time, as he worked at lightning speed, he would laugh and joke with the child, who sat fascinated by the magic with which each mysterious mass of daubs and smudges grew into a living picture under his hand. When his invention was at a loss, he would call upon her to suggest accessories; and if she cried out “windmill,” suddenly there would spring from under the darting brush-point a mill with flapping sails against the sky. Now and again in his hurry Jimmie would make a mistake, and Aline would shriek with delight:
“Why, Jimmie, that's a cow!”
And sure enough, horned and uddered, and with casual tail, a cow was wandering over the ocean, mildly speculating on the lighthouse. Then Jimmie would roar with laughter, and he would tether the cow to a buoy and put in a milkmaid in a boat coming to milk the cow, and at Aline's breathless suggestion, a robber with a bow and arrow shooting the unnatural animal from the lighthouse top. Thus he would waste an hour elaborating the absurdity, finishing it off beautifully so that it should be worthy of a place on Aline's bedroom wall.
The months and years passed, and Jimmie found himself, if not on the highroad to fortune, at least relieved of the necessity of frequenting the murky byways aforesaid. He even acquired a little reputation as a portrait painter, much to his conscientious, but comical despair. “I am taking people's money under false pretences,” he would say. “I am an imaginative painter. I can't do portraits. Your real portrait painter can jerk the very soul out of a man and splash it on to his face. I can't. Why do they come to me to be photographed, when Brown, Jones, or Robinson would give them a portrait? Why can't they buy my subject-pictures which are good? In taking their money I am a mercenary, unscrupulous villain!” Indeed, if Aline had not been there to keep him within the bounds of sanity, his Quixotism might have led him to send his clients to Brown or Jones, where they could get better value for their money. But Aline was there, rising gradually from the little child into girlhood, and growing in grace day by day. After all, the charwoman seemed to be right. The tender plant, left to itself, thrived, shot up apparently of its own accord, much to Jimmie's mystification. It never occurred to him that he was the all in all of her training—her mother, father, nurse, teacher, counsellor, example. Everything she was susceptible of being taught by a human being, he taught her—from the common rudiments when she was a little child to the deeper things of literature and history when she was a ripening maiden. Her life was bound up with his. Her mind took the prevailing colour of his mind as inevitably as the grasshopper takes the green of grass or the locust the grey-brown of the sand. But Jimmie in his simple way regarded the girl's sweet development as a miracle of spontaneous growth.
Yet Aline on her part instinctively appreciated the child in Jimmie, and from very early years assumed a quaint attitude of protection in common every-day matters. From the age of twelve she knew the exact state of his financial affairs, and gravely deliberated with him over items of special expenditure; and when she was fourteen she profited by a change in housekeepers to take upon herself the charge of the household. Her unlimited knowledge of domestic science was another thing that astounded Jimmie, who to the end of his days would have cheerfully given two shillings a pound for potatoes. And thus, while adoring Jimmie and conscious that she owed him the quickening of the soul within her, she became undisputed mistress of her small material domain, and regarded him as a kind of godlike baby.
At last there came a memorable day. According to a custom five or six years old, Jimmie and Aline were to spend New Year's Eve with some friends, the Frewen-Smiths.
He was a rising architect who had lately