Again we have the familiar lake and line of hills, this time in the dwindling light of a summer evening. Brooding over the scene, like a spirit of the lake, is an elongated and ethereal Sophia, whose lower body vanishes in the water and whose long upper body winds serpentlike across the lake and back; her flowing hair continues the liquid lines of her body, and is shown winding among the hills. The sweeping lines of the creature, twisting back and forth along the canvas, create a paradoxical feeling of energy and repose, as of a bird in flight; the barely human face is stricken with grief. Elizabeth, who first saw the portrait in company with Sophia, wrote in the Journal (31 August 1845): “As if struck with lightning. E paints the soul directly, unencumbered by outward circumstance. Why does S’s sorrow waken in me such a clash and hubbub of feelings? She looks at me as though I were all princess-white in my coffin. Away! I crave the physic of laughter. Am I grown so cruel?”
Moorash’s vision of a sorrowing Sophia may have been “prophetic,” as Havemeyer puts it, and it may have been a “psychic reversal’ (Altdorfer, p. 216) in which Moorash transposed his own love-sorrow onto the features of the woman who had rejected him, but the facts suggest that Moorash was not making an imaginative leap in the dark. Sophia Pinney may have lacked spiritual greatness, but she was by no means the shallow egotist she has sometimes been made out to be. She did not love Moorash or understand his work, but she behaved admirably in extremely trying circumstances; and in her passionate devotion to Elizabeth she rose above herself to spiritual heights from which she sometimes looked down aghast. Elizabeth was a powerful woman who exercised a kind of spell over Sophia, even more so than Moorash did over William Pinney. Under that spell, Sophia bent her life into a shape that more and more came to resemble the shape of Elizabeth’s life; for although she liked to deny it, Sophia’s decision to live with her brother on Black Lake was clearly influenced by Elizabeth’s decision to live with Edmund. Sophia was as open to Elizabeth as she was closed to Elizabeth’s brother, and we have seen that her acute sensitivity took the disturbing form of empathic suffering. In the early days of Elizabeth’s illness, Sophia liked nothing better than to sit with Elizabeth in her sickroom for whole afternoons, reading aloud to her or remaining absolutely quiet if necessary, tending to her slightest needs, and passing the long hours by knitting a shawl for Elizabeth or rummaging among the supplies in Elizabeth’s sewing table for the thread, thimble, needle, and scissors that she used for mending Elizabeth’s frayed clothes. But as her friend’s illness worsened, Sophia’s own symptoms became more pronounced; and as many letters to Fanny Cornwall and Eunice Hamilton attest, Sophia’s suffering was increased by the knowledge that because of her own prostrating headaches she was not always able to come to Elizabeth’s side. In any case she felt utterly useless in preventing Elizabeth’s decline. She believed passionately that Elizabeth’s life with her brother was harming Elizabeth’s health; and she never forgave Moorash for keeping his sister, as Sophia saw it, from marrying William. Her desire for Elizabeth’s marriage to William appears to have been genuine, although it is difficult to believe she would not have experienced jealousy; it is possible that she desired what she could not permit herself to desire, a life alone with Elizabeth. Certainly, at the very least, she was deeply jealous of Elizabeth’s devotion to Edmund. In the summer of 1845 that devotion took a strange turn, which appears to have shocked Sophia.
On an afternoon in late June when the men had walked to Saccanaw Falls to buy a bag of nails and drink a pint of ale at the Cat and Robin, Elizabeth on her sickbed made to Sophia a remarkable proposal. Staring earnestly at Sophia, she offered to marry William if Sophia would marry Edmund. The proposal threw Sophia into confusion and turmoil, as she reports in a letter (unsent) to Fanny Cornwall. She understood immediately that the wild scheme had been hatched for the sake of Edmund: Elizabeth, whose entire life had in Sophias view been a continual sacrifice to Edmund, was willing to sacrifice herself even further for the sake of giving Edmund what he so desperately wanted: Sophia. Sophia, angry at the proposal’s secret cause, nevertheless felt it as a fearful challenge: was she willing to sacrifice her own happiness for the sake of her brother’s, and even more for the sake of Elizabeth, who would be delivered from her prison and would regain her health? The thought of moving into Stone Hill Cottage, of, as it were, replacing Elizabeth, struck her as strange and dreamlike, and not wholly unpleasing; but to marry Moorash, who made her feel “cold all over,” was out of the question. Sophia spent an anguished night and rose at dawn no longer knowing how she felt. After a dreamlike breakfast she rowed across Black Lake with William in the “fierce light” of a cloudless blue day and walked with him the two miles to Stone Hill Cottage, where William left to look for Edmund in the barn. In the dusk of Elizabeth’s curtained sickroom Sophia felt dazed; she was on the verge of saying yes, as if acceding to a terrible fatality, when Elizabeth, who was feeling better, immediately retracted her proposal of the other day, calling it “a wild idea bred of illness.” Sophia, feeling faint, sat down quickly. The entire episode goes unmentioned in Elizabeth’s Journal.
Later that month there occurred another incident that must be taken into account in any consideration of Moorash’s portrait of Sophia. She had spent the morning confined to her room in the cottage on Black Lake, unable to accompany William to Stone Hill Cottage, where he was to read to Elizabeth for an hour before returning to Sophia. In the course of the morning her mood darkened and she experienced a sharp premonition of Elizabeth’s death. William returned to find her tense and agitated; after assuring her that Elizabeth was well, he took Sophia with him on horseback to Stone Hill Cottage, where he left her to ride into town. He returned to find her lying with her eyes closed on the sofa in the kitchen, being read to by Elizabeth while Moorash paced anxiously. Elizabeth recorded the incident in her Journaclass="underline" she had been asleep, and woke to find Sophia sobbing hysterically and shrieking her name. Edmund, hearing the shouts from the barn, hurried to the house, where he discovered Elizabeth attempting to revive Sophia, who had fainted. When Sophia came to, she said that she had entered the darkened sickroom with a feeling of oppression and had been struck by Elizabeth’s extreme pallor and stillness. She had spoken to Elizabeth, who lay with closed eyes; she had called out her name and shaken her shoulder, but Elizabeth lay motionless; her cheek felt deathly cold. It had been too much for Sophia, and she had burst into tears — after that, all was darkness. Elizabeth, with her usual sharpness, noted two things about her brother in the doorway: that he had “hesitated, with a kind of modesty, from intruding into the room, as if by coming to Sophia’s aid while she was unconscious he would be taking advantage of her — until I summoned him to me,” and that he had a spot of red paint on the side of his nose, which at first she had mistaken for blood.
Elizabeth also recorded the viewing of Sophia’s portrait, an event arranged for the last day in August. William’s absence on this occasion is not explained. It was Elizabeth who persuaded Sophia to walk with her down to the barn, where Edmund had covered the portrait with a white cloth. Was he thinking at that moment of The Unveiling [8], his painting of 1837? He stood for a moment staring at the cloth, then crying “So!” removed it with a flourish. Elizabeth, as we have seen, was violently moved: “As if struck with lightning. E paints the soul directly, unencumbered by outward circumstance.” Sophia’s response, as always, was disappointing. She looked at the portrait with an expression of blank politeness that slowly changed to irritation; and turning to Moorash “with an odd little smile,” asked whether her hair was really so much in need of combing as that.