And in a few weeks, Miss Russell, we shall all be scattered to the four winds of heaven! You'll be gone to England, the Wilmers to Aix, I to America, and except Winthrop and Churchill, our whole little Anglo-American colony will have deserted Rome altogether for summer quarters! I'm sorry for it, in some ways, for our winter has really been a most enjoyable one.'
'And so am I, Mr. Audouin, very sorry. But we must all meet here again some day or other. Papa's promised that in four years he'll bring me back for another trip. His next three winters will be taken up with his new duties at York, of course; but as soon as he's free again, he's going to bring me to Rome for a second visit. Perhaps by that time you'll be over once more, on a journey of inspection to look up your clever young protégé, Mr. Winthrop.'
Audouin hesitated. Should he propose to her then and there, or should he wait for four more long solitary American winters? he would lead up to it tentatively, first of all, and see whether fortune favoured his present adventure. 'Well,' he answered, dubiously, 'I hardly know whether to say yes or no to that invitation, Miss Russell. I'm not fond of cities, and I've longed many, many times this winter for the expansive breadth of our American woodlands. I wasn't born to be in populous city pent; I pine for the resinous smell of the primæval forest. Only one thing, indeed, has kept me here so long this journey; your presence at Rome, Miss Russell.'
He looked at her as he spoke those words to see whether there was any response in her eyes or not; but Gwen only answered carelessly, 'What pretty things you always say to one, Mr. Audouin! Our English young men have quite lost the fine old-fashioned art of paying compliments, I imagine; but you and Mr. Winthrop seem to have kept it up beyond the Atlantic in a state of the highest original perfection. You almost remind one of Sir Charles Grandison.'
Audouin's eyes dropped. Clearly there was no chance of pressing the question with the beautiful Englishwoman just at present. Well, well, she was very young yet; better wait a year or two for her ideas to expand and ripen. Very young people always think anyone above thirty so extremely ancient; as they grow older themselves, their seniors by a decade or so seem to grow progressively younger, as if to meet them. 'Well, I'll close with your suggestion and make it an engagement, Miss Russell,' he said, half sighing.
'If you'll come back to Rome in four years' time, I'll come back the same winter to see how friend Hiram progresses with his artistic studies. Four years is a short space of time in a human life, after all; and if you contemplate being here at the end of that space, why, Rome will at least have one more attraction for me then than ever.'
Gwen laughed, and turned off the conversation to the latest nothing of Roman society.
A week later, Audouin went away to sail for America. But he carried back with him a little memento which strangely surprised the servants at Lakeside, when he set it up in a velvet-covered frame, among the Greek vases and tiny Egyptian sardonyx mummies, on his study mantelpiece. It was the photograph of a young lady in an English riding costume, by Montabone of the Piazza di Spagna; and when the housemaid slipped it out, 'jest to see who on airth could hev give it to him,' she found on the back the little inscription, 'For Mr. Audouin, with Gwen Howard-Russells best remembrances.'
Gwen herself, too, went before long; but before she went, she mentioned casually to Colin Churchill that she expected to be back at Rome in about four winters.
'We shall all be delighted to see you in Italy again, Miss Howard-Russell,' Colin answered, with hardly more than mere formal politeness. 'Won't we, Winthrop? Miss Russell is such a sincere admirer of painting and sculpture.'
Was that man's heart as cold and hard as the marble from which he cut his weeping nymphs and Calabrian peasants? Did he want a woman to go down upon her knees before him, or didn't he see when she was making as easy running for him as any man can expect from civilised society? He was really too provoking.
The night before Gwen left Rome, however, a little oblong parcel arrived at the hotel for her, containing a picture or something of the sort, left at the door by an English signor, the porter said. Was it one of Colin Churchill's designs for his unexecuted statues, Gwen wondered? She cut the string hastily, and opened the packet with a little internal flutter. No—wrong—evidently not from Mr. Churchill. It was a watercolour sketch of the Emissario at the Lago d'Albano, carefully finished in the minutest detail; and at the back was written in pencil, somewhat shakily, 'With Hiram Winthrop's compliments.'
'How very polite of Mr. Winthrop,' Gwen said in a careless voice that hardly hid her disappointment. 'He saw I was taken with the picture, and he's finished it off beautifully, and sent it to me for a parting present. It's a beautiful sketch, papa, isn't it? Come and see what Mr. Winthrop has sent me, Mrs. Wilmer.'
'A very well-behaved young man indeed,' the colonel put in, looking at the sketch casually, as if it were an object unworthy of a British field-officer's serious attention. 'A very well-behaved young man, although an American, and much less forward than that sculptor fellow, who's always thrusting himself upon us on every conceivable occasion.'
Hiram Winthrop had no photographs, but he had a great many little pencil sketches of a certain beautiful, proud-faced Englishwoman, which he didn't display upon the mantelpiece of his attic bedroom down the narrow Roman alley, because he preferred to keep them securely locked up in a small box, whence he took them out religiously every night and morning during the four years he spent in exile in that terrible, grimy, unnatural city. It was a very clear-cut, sculpturesque face indeed, but in spite of all Hiram's efforts at softening, it somehow managed to look most terribly inexorable. If Gwen found Colin Churchill blind, Hiram Winthrop found Gwen herself absolutely adamantine.
In his bright little study at Lakeside, Lothrop Audouin had just laid down a parchment-bound volume of Carlyle's 'French Revolution' and turned to look out of the pretty bay-window, embowered in clematis and Virginia creeper, that opened on to the placid tawny creek and the blue expanse of more distant Ontario. 'How unawares the summer has crept upon us,' he murmured to himself, half-audibly, as was his fashion. 'When I first got back from Rome in early May, the trees were all but leafless; and now July is far gone, and before many weeks we shall be beginning to think of the melting tints of our golden autumn. That's the difference, really, between revolution and evolution. The most truly important events make no stir on their first taking place; they grow, surely but silently. The changes to which all things conspire, and for which they have prepared the way beforehand, produce no explosion, because they are gradual, and the universe consents to them. A birth takes place in silence, and sums up the result of endless generations; but a murder, which is at war with the constitution of things, creates a tumult immediately. What a fracas over Camille at the Café Foy! and yet, with a whiff of grapeshot, the whole fabric of liberty disappears bodily. What a slow growth the democratic constitution of Massachusetts! and yet, when a convulsion seizes on the entire continent, and north and south tear one another to pieces for a grand idea, the democratic constitutions float unhurt upon the sea of commotion, and come out intact in the fulness of time with redoubled splendour! A good idea! I'll enter it in my diary, elaborated a little into better English.' For Audouin was a writer by instinct, and though he had never yet perpetrated a printed book, he kept a dainty little journal in his desk, in which he jotted down side by side his pretty thoughts, as they occurred to him, and his observations, half-scientific, half-fanciful, on the progress of nature all around him. This diary he regarded as his chief literary testament; and he meant to leave it in his will to Hiram Winthrop, with strict injunctions that it should be published after his death, for private circulation only, among the select few who were competent to understand it. Surely a good man and true may be permitted, in the byways and background of his inner nature, to indulge in his harmless little foibles and affectations.
He had risen to take out the diary, full of his little poetical conceit, when the maid (Audouin wasn't such a recluse that he didn't like to keep his hermitage well-appointed) brought in a note for him on a quaintly chased Japanese salver. He took the note and glanced at it casually. It hadn't come by post, but by hand—a rare event in the isolation of Lakeside, where neighbours were none, and visitors few and distant. He broke open the envelope, and read the few pencilled lines within hastily:—
'Deacon Winthrop would be obliged if you would come over at once to see him, as I am seriously ill, and the Lord is calling me. For Deacon Winthrop, faithfully, Keziah H. Hoptree.'
Audouin put on his hat at once, and went to the porch, with its clambering roses, to see the bearer, who sat in a high buggy, flipping the flies off his horse's ear with his long whipcord.
'Wal,' the man said, 'I guess, Mr. Audouin, you'd better look alive if you want to see the deacon comfortably afore the Lord's taken him.'
'All right,' Audouin answered, with Yankee irreverence, jumping up hastily into the tall buggy. 'Drive right away, sir, and we'll run a race to see which gets there first, ourselves, or Death, the Great Deliverer.'
The man drove along the rough unmade roads as only an American farmer can drive in a life-and-death hurry.
Geauga County hadn't altered greatly to the naked eye since the days long, long ago, when Hiram Winthrop used to sulk and hide in the blackberry bottom. The long straight road still stretched as of yore evenly between its two limits, in a manner calculated to satisfy all the strictest requirements of a definition in Euclid; and the parallel lines of snake fence on either hand still ran along at equal distances till they seemed to meet on the vanishing point of the horizon, somewhere a good deal on the hither side of mathematical infinity. The farms were still all bare, gaunt, dusty, and unlovable; the trees were somewhat fewer even than of old (for this was now acknowledged to be an unusually fine agricultural section), and the charred and blackened stumps that once diversified the weedy meadows had long for the most part been pulled up and demolished by the strenuous labours of men and horses. But otherwise Audouin could notice little difference between the Muddy Creek of fifteen years ago, and the Muddy Creek of that present moment. Fifteen more crops of fall and spring wheat had been reaped and garnered off the flat expanses; fifteen more generations of pigs (no, hogs) had been duly converted into prime American pork, and thence by proper rotation into human fat, bone, and muscle; fifteen winters had buried with their innocent sheet of white the blank desolation of fifteen ugly and utilitarian summers; but the farmers and farmhouses, though richer and easier than before, had not yet wakened one whit the more than of old to a rudimentary perception of the fact that the life of man may possibly consist of some other elements than corn, and pork, and the rigorous Calvinistic theology of Franklin P. Hopkins. Beauty was still crying in the streets of Muddy Creek, and no man regarded her.
At last the long dreary drive was over—a drive, Audouin thought to himself with a sigh, which couldn't be equalled anywhere in the world for naked ugliness, outside this great, free, enlightened, and absolutely materialised republic—and the buggy drew up at the gate of Deacon Zephaniah Winthrop's homestead, in the exact central spot of that wide and barren desert of utter fruitfulness. Audouin leaped from the buggy hastily, and went on through the weedy front yard to the door of the bare white farmhouse.
'Wal, I'm glad you've kem, anyhow,' the hired help (presumably Keziah H. Hoptree) exclaimed in her shrill loud voice as she opened the door to him; 'for deacon's jest tearin' mad tew see you afore the Lord takes him; he says he wants tew give you a message fur Hiram, an' he can't die in peace until he's given it.'
'Is he very ill?' Audouin asked.
'Not so sick tew talk to,' the girl answered, harshly; 'but Dr. Eselman, he says he ain't goin' to live a week longer. He's bin doctoring himself, that's whar it is, with Chief Tecumseh's Paregoric Elixir; an' now he's gone so fur that Dr. Eselman reckons he can't never git that thar Elixir out of his con-stitooshun nohow. Jest you step right in here, judge, an' see him.'
Audouin followed her into the sick room, where the old deacon, thinner, bonier, and more sallow than ever, lay vacantly on his propped-up pillows.
'You set you down thar, mister,' he began feebly, as soon as he was aware of Audouin's presence, 'an' make yourself right comfortable. I wanted to see you, you may calkilate, to give you a message for Hiram.' He paused a little between each sentence, as if he spoke with difficulty; and Audouin waited patiently to hear what it might be, with some misgiving.
'You tell him,' the deacon went on in his slow jerky manner, 'when you see him or correspond to him, that I forgive him.'
It was with some effort that Audouin managed to answer seriously, 'I will, Mr. Winthrop, you may rely upon it.'
'Yes,' the deacon continued with as much Christian magnanimity as his enfeebled condition would permit him to express; 'I forgive him. Freely and on-reservedly, I forgive him. Hiram ain't bin a son to me as I might hev anticipated. Thar was too much of his mother's family in him altogether, I reckon. The Winthrops was never a wild lot, an' wouldn't hev gone off paintin' pictures and goin' to Italy as that thar boy's done, anyhow. I might hev expected that Hiram would hev stopped to home to help me with the farm, and git things comfortable some; but thar, he was allus one o' the idlest, sulkiest, onaccountablest boys I ever met with, nowhar. He's gone off, foolin' around with them thar pictures, an' I don't suppose he'll never come to any good, nohow. But I forgive him, mister; I freely forgive him.'Tain't what one might hev looked fur from a young man who was raised in the Hopkinsite confession, an' whose parents were both of 'em believers; but these things do come out most onaccountably, that they might all be damned who believed not the truth but had pleasure in on-righteousness.'
Audouin merely bowed his head in solemn silence. The picture of the gaunt, hard-faced old man, sitting up in bed upon his pillows in his loneliness, and speaking thus, after his kind, of the son whom he had alienated from him by his unsympathetic harshness, was one too dreary for him to look at without an almost visible shudder.
'It's a mercy,' the deacon meandered on, after a short pause, gasping for breath, 'that his poor mother didn't never live to see the worst of it. Hiram might hev kem home, and helped me look after the farm and the cattle; instead of which, I've had to git in hired helps, since Mis' Winthrop died, while he was off somewhere or other painting pictures. He's in Italy now, learnin' still, he says, when he wrote to me last; I should hev expected he'd hev learnt the trade completely afore this, an' be practisin' it for a livin', as anybody might expect at his age, nat'rally. But he'll hev to come home, now, anyhow, and take to the farm; fur of course it goes to him, mister, an' I hope now he'll give up them thar racketty ways he's got into, and begin to settle down a bit at last, into a decent farmer. He's no boy now, Hiram ain't, an' he ought to be gettin' steady. I don't say I hev any complaint against you personally, mister, on that score,' the deacon went on, shaking his head magnanimously. 'You've led him into it, I know; but I understand you meant it for the best, though it's turned out oncommon bad; an' I'm a Christian man, I hope, an' I bear you no grudge for it. But what I want you to write an' tell him's jest this. You write an' say that his father, afore he died, freely forgave him, an' left him the farm and fixins. In time to come, mister, I dessay that thar boy'll often regret an' think to himself, “While my father was here, I might have made more of him.” But it'll be a comfort to him anyhow to know that I forgave him; an' you jest take an' write it to him, an' I'll be obliged to you.' Audouin sat a long time by the old man's bed, wondering whether any word of regret or penitence would come from him for his own grievous error in making his son's young life a burden and a misery to him (for Hiram, with all his reticence, had let his friend see by stray side hints how sad his days had been in Geauga County); but no word came, nor was the possibility of it within the deacon's narrow self-righteous self-satisfied soul. The hours wore away, and Audouin watched and waited, but still the deacon went on at intervals, all about his own goodness to Hiram, and Hiram's natural unregenerate liking for painting pictures. At last, Keziah came in, and warned Audouin that the deacon mustn't be allowed any longer to excite himself. So Audouin went away, sad and disheartened. 'Great heavens!' he said to himself, as he jumped up again into the buggy, which was waiting to take him back to Lakeside; 'in spite of our common schools, and our ten thousand newspapers, and all our glib American buncombe about enlightenment, and education, and our noble privileges, is there any country in the world, I wonder, where the gap between those who think and feel and know, and those who wallow in their own conceited ignorance and narrowness and brutality, yawns wider and deeper than in these United States of ours, at the latter end of this emancipated nineteenth century? Look at the great gulf fixed between Boston, or even Chicago, and Geauga County! Why, the Florentines of the middle ages, the old Etruscans, the naked Egyptian, the Chinaman, the Hindoo coolie, are all of them a whole spiritual world ahead of Deacon Winthrop! They at least know, or knew, that the human heart has in it some higher need than corn, or pork, or rice, or millet; that man shall not live by bread alone; that of all the gifts God gave to man, He gave none better than the knowledge of beauty! Ay, even the monkey that plays among the mango trees considers the feathers in the parrot's tail as worthy of his passing attention as the biggest cocoanut.
'And yet, not higher, after all, those Chinamen, when one comes to think of it; for is there not mysteriously inherent somehow, in the loins of that utterly sensual materialised clod, the potentiality of begetting Hiram Winthrop?
'I wonder what sort of people my own eight great-grandparents would be, if I could only get them into the little sitting-room at Lakeside, and compare notes with them about heaven and earth, and Herbert Spencer, and the Apollo Belvedere!'
A week later, Audouin had to write to Hiram, and tell him that the deacon had passed away, and had forgiven him. 'How, my dear Hiram,' Audouin wrote, towards the end of his letter, 'your father leaves the farm at Muddy Creek to you; and if you take my advice, you will sell it at once, for what it'll fetch (not much, I doubt me) and apply the principal to paying your expenses for a year or two more at Seguin's studio. You hold your pictorial talents in trust for the American nation, which even now sadly needs them; and you mustn't throw away your chances of the highest self-improvement for the sake of a little filthy lucre, which, even if invested, would really bring you in next to nothing. Nay, rather, to use it in studying at Rome is really to invest it in the best possible manner; for, merely judging the result as a Wall Street speculator would judge it, by the actual return in dollars and cents, United States currency, your pictures will bring you in tenfold in the end of what you spend in preparing to paint them. Though not for money, I hope, Hiram, not for money, but for art's sake, and for the highest final development of this our poor groping humanity, which is still so base, take it for all in all, that I sometimes almost wonder whether it can be really worth our while to try to do anything to improve it.'
Yet so strangely compounded is this human nature of ours for all that, that when Hiram Winthrop read that letter to himself in his own small room beneath the roof of the Roman attic, he lay down upon his bed, and cried passionately in the dusk for the poor narrow-minded old deacon; and thought with a sort of regretful tenderness of the dim old days in the blackberry bottom; and murmured to himself that when he was a boy he was no doubt terribly obstinate and perverse and provoking. And now that he was a man, must he not strive to do as Audouin told him? the one true friend he had yet met with. And then he undressed and lay awake a long time, with the sense of utter loneliness pressing upon his poor solitary head more drearily than ever.
The four years that passed before Gwen Howard-Russell and Lothrop Audouin returned to Rome, were years of bright promise and quick performance for Cohn Churchill. He hadn't been eighteen months with Maradiano, when the master took him aside one day and said to him kindly, 'My friend, you will only waste your time by studying with me any longer. You must take a studio on your own account, and begin earning a little money.'
'But where can I get one?' Colin asked.
'There is one vacant five doors off,' Maragliano answered. 'I have been to see it, and you can have it for very little. It's so near, that I can drop in from time to time and assist you with my advice and experience. But indeed, Churchill, you need either very little; for I fear the time is soon coming when the pupil is to excel the master.'
'If I thought that, master,' Cohn replied smilingly, 'I should stop here for ever. But as I know I can never hope to rival you, I shall take the studio, and tempt fortune.'
It was one morning during the next winter that Cohn was hard at work upon his clay group of Autumn borne by the Breezes, then nearly completed, when the door of the new studio opened suddenly, and a plain, farmer-looking old man in a tweed suit, entered unannounced.
'Good morning, Mr. Churchill,' he said, in a voice of infinite condescension. 'My niece sent me here to look at your statues, you know. You've got some very pretty things here, really. Some very pretty things indeed, as Gwen told me.'
'Oh, I see,' Colin answered, with a smile of recognition. 'It was Miss Howard-Russell, then, who told you where to find me.'
'Well, not exactly,' the visitor went on, peering at the Autumn with a look of the intensest critical interest; 'she told me I should find you at the studio of a man of the name of Miaragliano—or something—I think she called him. Well, I went there, ferreted out the place, and found a fuzzy-headed foreigner Italian fellow, all plastered over with mud and rubbish, who spoke the most ridiculous broken English; andhetold me you'd moved to these new quarters. So I came on here to look you up and give you a commission, you know—I think you call it. My niece—she's really a first cousin once removed, or something equally abstruse, I fancy—but I always speak of her as my niece for short, because she's a good deal younger than I am, and I stand to herin loco avunculi; in loco avunculi, Mr. Churchill. Well, she positively insisted upon it that I must come and give you a commission.'
'It was very good of her, I'm sure,' Colin answered, his heart fluttering somewhat; for this was positively his first nibble. 'May I ask if you are also a Mr. Howard-Russell?'
The visitor drew himself up to his utmost height with much dignity, as though he felt surprised to think that Colin could for a single moment have imagined him to be nothing more on earth than a plain Mister. 'No,' he said, in a chilly voice; 'I fancied my niece had mentioned my name to you. I am Lord Beaminster.'
Colin bowed his head slightly. He wasn't much used to earls and viscounts in those days, though he grew afterwards to understand the habits and manners of the species with great accuracy; but he felt that after all the Earl of Beaminster, mighty magnate and land-owner as he was, didn't really differ very conspicuously in outer appearance from any other respectable fox-hunting country gentleman. Except that, perhaps, he looked, if anything, a trifle stupider than the average.
The earl considerately left Colin a minute or so to accustom himself to the shock of suddenly mixing in such exalted society, and then he said again, narrowly observing the Autumn, 'Some very pretty things, indeed, I must admit. Now, what do you call this one? A capital group. I've half a mind to commission it.'
'That's Autumn borne by the Breezes,' Colin answered, gazing up at it for the thousandth time with a loving attention. 'My idea was to represent Autumn as a beautiful youth, scattering leaves with his two hands, and upheld by the wild west wind—“the breath of autumn's being,” as Shelley calls it.'
'Quite so,' the earl said, assuming once more a studied critical attitude; 'but I don't see the leaves, you know—I don't see the leaves, Mr. Churchill.'
'It would be impossible, of course,' Colin replied, 'to represent any of the leaves as falling through the air unsupported; and so I didn't care to put any in Autumn's hands, even, preferring to trust so much to the imagination of the spectator. In art it's a well-known canon that one ought, in fact, always to leave something to the imagination.'
'But might I suggest,' Lord Beaminster said, putting his head a little on one side, and surveying the figure with profound gravity, 'that you might easily support the falling leaves by an imperceptible wire passing neatly through a small drilled eye into the legs of the Breezes.'
Colin smiled. 'I don't think,' he said, 'that that would be a very artistic mode of treatment.'
'Indeed,' the earl answered with some hesitation 'Well, I'm surprised to hear you say that, now; for my father, who was always considered a man of very remarkable taste, and a great patron of art and artists, had a Triton constructed for our carp-pond at Netherton, blowing a spout of water, in marble, from his trumpet, and the falling drops, where the spout broke into spray, were all secured by wires in the way I mention. Still, of course,' this with a deferential air of mock-modesty, 'I couldn'tdreamof pitting my opinion—a mere outsider's opinion—against yours in such a matter. But couldn't you at least make the leaves tumble in a sort of spire, you know, reaching to the ground; touching one another, of course, so as to form a connected column, which would give support to the right arm, now so very extended and aerial-looking.'
'Why,' Colin answered, beginning to fancy that perhaps even admission to the British peerage didn't naturally constitute a man a great art-critic, 'I don't think marble's a good medium in any case for representing anything so thin and delicate as falling leaves; and though of course a clever sculptor might choose to make the attempt, by way of showing his skill in overcoming a technical difficulty, for my part I look upon such mere mechanicaltours de forceas really unworthy of a true artist. Obedience to one's material rather than defiance of it is the thing to be aimed at. And, to tell you the truth, the pose of that right arm that you so much object to is the very point in the whole group that I most pride myself upon. Maragliano says it's a very fine and original conception.'
The earl stared at him intently for two seconds, in blank astonishment. What a very-extraordinary and conceited young fellow, really! The idea of his thus contradicting him, the Earl of Beaminster, in every particular! Still, Gwen had specially desired him to buy something from this man Churchill, and had said that he was going to become a very great and distinguished sculptor. For Gwen's sake, he would try to befriend the young man, and take no notice of his extraordinary rudeness.
'Well,' he said slowly, after a long pause,
'I won't quarrel with you over the details. I should like to have that group in marble, and if you'll allow me, I'll commission it. Only, as we don't agree about the pose of the Autumn, I'll tell you what we'll do, Mr. Churchill; we'll compromise the matter. Suppose you remove the figure altogether, and put a clock-dial in its place. Then it'd do splendidly, you see, for the top of the marble mantelpiece at Netherton Priory.'
Colin leant back against the parapet of the wainscot in blank dismay. What on earth was he to say to this terrible Goth of a Lord Beaminster? He wanted a first commission, badly enough, in all conscience, but how could he possibly consent to throw away the labour of so many days, and to destroy the beauty of that exquisite group by putting a dial in the place of Autumn. The idea was plainly too ridiculous. It was sacrilege, it was crime, it was sheer blasphemy against the divinity of beauty. 'I'm very sorry, Lord Beaminster,' he said, at last, regretfully. 'I should much have liked to execute the group for you in marble; but I really can't consent to sacrifice the Autumn. It's the central figure and inspiring idea of the entire composition. If you take it at all, I think you ought to take it exactly as the sculptor himself has first designed it. An artist, you know, gives much time and thought to what he is working upon. Be it merely the particular turn or twist of the bit of drapery he is just then modelling, his whole soul for that one day is all fixed and centred upon that single feature. The purchaser ought to remember that, and oughtn't to alter on a moment's hasty consideration what has cost the artist whole weeks and months of patient thought and arduous labour. And yet, I'm sorry not to perform my first work in marble for you; for I'm a West Dorset man myself by birth and training, and I should have liked well to see my “Autumn and the Breezes” standing, where it ought to stand, in one of the big oriel windows of Nether ton Priory.' That last touch of unconscious and unintentional flattery just succeeded in turning the sharp edge of Lord Beaminster's anger. When Colin at first positively refused to let him have the group with the dial in the centre, the earl could hardly conceal in his face his smouldering indignation. Such conceit, indeed, and such self-will he could never have believed in if he hadn't himself actually met with them. It positively took his breath away. But when Colin so far relented as to touch his territorial pride upon the quick (for the earl regarded himself as the personal embodiment of all West Dorset), Lord Beaminster relented too, and answered with something like geniality, 'Well, well! I'm always pleased when one of my own people rises to artistic or literary eminence, Mr. Churchill. We won't quarrel about trifles. You come from Wootton Mande ville, don't you? Ah, yes! Well, I'm the lord of the manor of Wootton, as you know, of course, and I'm pleased to think you should have come from one of my own places. We'll take the figures as they stand; we'll take them as they stand, and I'll find a place for them somewhere at Netherton, I can promise you. Now how much will you charge me for this group, Autumn and all, in marble?'
Colin stood for a moment perfectly irresolute. That was a question about which, in his abstract devotion to the goodness of his artistic work, he had never yet given the slightest consideration. 'Well, I should think,' he said hesitatingly—'I don't know if I'm asking too much—it's a big composition, and there are a good many figures in it. Suppose we were to say five hundred guineas?'
The earl nodded a gracious acquiescence.
'But perhaps,' Colin went on timidly, 'I may have asked too much in my inexperience.' 'Oh, no; not at all too much,' the earl answered, with a munificent and expansive wave of his five big farmer fingers. 'I like to encourage art—and above all art in a West Dorset man.'
'You're very kind,' Colin murmured, rather humbly, feeling as though he had much to be grateful for. 'I shall do my best to execute the group in marble to your satisfaction, so that it may be worthy of its place in the oriels at Netherton.'
'I've no doubt you will,' the earl put in with noble condescension: 'no doubt at all in the world about it. I'm glad to have the opportunity of extending my patronage to a Wootton sculptor. I'm devoted to art, Mr. Churchill, quite devoted to it.'
Colin smiled, but answered nothing.
The earl stopped a little longer, inspecting the drawings and models, and then took his departure with much stately graciousness, to Colin's intense relief and satisfaction. As he went out, the door happened to open again, and in walked Hiram Winthrop.
'My dear Winthrop!' Colin cried out in exultation, 'congratulate me! I've just got a commission for Autumn and the Breezes!'
'What, in marble?' Hiram said, grasping his hand warmly.
'Yes, in marble.'
'My dear fellow, I'm delighted. And you deserve it, too, so well. But who from? Not that fat old gentleman with the vacant face that I met just now out there upon the doorstep!'
'The same, I assure you. Our great Dorsetshire magnate, the Earl of Beaminster!' Hiram's face fell a little. 'The Earl of Beaminster!' he echoed with a voice of considerable disappointment. 'You don't mean to say an earl only looks like that! and dresses like that, too! Why, one would hardly know him from a successful dry-goods man!—Besides,' he thought to himself silently, 'shemust have sent him. He's her cousin.'
Colin had no idea what manner of thing a dry-goods man might be, but he recognised that it probably stood for some very prosaic and everyday employment. 'Yes,' he said, half laughing, 'that's an earl; and as you say, my dear fellow, he hardly differs visibly to the naked eye from you and me poor common mortals.'
'But, I say, Churchill,' Hiram put in with American practicality, 'what are you going to let this Beaminster person have the group for?'
'Well, I didn't know exactly what to charge him for it, never having sold a work on my own account before; but I said at a venture, five hundred guineas. I should think that wasn't bad, you know, for a first commission.'
Hiram raised his eyebrows ominously. 'Five hundred guineas, Churchill,' he muttered with obvious mistrust; 'five hundred guineas! Why, my dear fellow, have you asked yet what would be the cost even of the block of marble?'
'The block of marble!' Colin repeated, blankly. 'The cost of the marble! Why, upon my soul, Winthrop, I never took that at all into consideration.'
'Let's go round to Maragliano's at once,' Hiram suggested, in some alarm, 'and ask him what he thinks of your bargain. I'm awfully afraid, do you know, Churchill, that you've put your foot in it.'
When the great sculptor heard that Colin had really got a commission for his beautiful group, he was at first extremely jubilant, clapping his hands, laughing, and crying out eagerly many times over, 'Am I a prophet, then?' with Italian demonstrativeness. But as soon as Colin went on to say that he had promised to execute the thing in marble for 12,500 lire, Maragliano ceased from his capering immediately, and assumed an expression of the most profound and serious astonishment. 'Twelve thousand lire!' he cried in horror, lifting up both his hands with a deprecatory gesture; 'twelve thousand lire! Why, my dear friend, the marble alone will cost you nearly that, without counting anything for your own time and trouble, or the workmen's wages. A splendid stroke of business, indeed! If I were you, I'd go and ask the Count of Beaminster at once to let me off the bargain.'
Colin's disappointment was, indeed, a bitter one; but he had too keen a sense both of commercial honour and of personal dignity to think of begging off a bargain once completed. 'Oh, no,' he said, 'that would never do, master. I shall execute the commission at the price I named, even if I'm actually out of pocket by it. At any rate, it'll be a good advertisement for me. But, after all, I'm really sorry I ever said I'd let him have it! Just think, Winthrop, of my spending so much loving, patient care upon every twist and fold of the robes of those delightful Breezes, and then having to sell them in the end to a monster of a creature who wanted me to replace the Autumn by a bronze dial. It's really too distressing!'
'Ah, my friend,' Maragliano said sympathetically, 'that is the Nemesis of art, and you'll have to get accustomed to it from the beginning. It is the price we pay for the nature of our clientele. We get well paid, because we have to work chiefly for the very wealthy. But after we have worked up some statue or picture till every line and curve of it exactly satisfies our own critical taste, we have to sell it perhaps to some vulgar rich man, who buries it in his own drawing-room in New York or Manchester. The man of letters gets comparatively little, because no rich man can buy his work outright, and keep it for his own personal glorification; but in return, he feels pretty sure that those whose opinion he most wishes to conciliate, those for whose appreciative taste he has polished and repolished his rough diamond, will in the end see and admire the work he has so carefully and lovingly performed for them. We are less lucky in that respect; we have to cast our pearls before swine too often, and all for the sake of filthy lucre.'
As it turned out, however, the group of Autumn and the Breezes, in spite of this unpromising beginning, really formed the foundation of all Colin Churchill's future fortunes. Colin worked away at it with a will, nothing daunted by the discovery that it would probably cost him something more than he got for it; and in due time he despatched it to the earl in England, at a loss to himself of a little over twenty guineas. Still, the earl, being a fussy, consequential man, sent more than one friend during the progress of the work to see the group that Churchill was making for him. 'One of my own people, you know—a poor boy off my Dorsetshire estate—conceited I'm afraid, but not without talent; and I've taken it into my head to patronise him, just for the sake of the old feudal connection and all that sort of thing.' Some of the friends were better judges of sculpture than the earl himself, and when the Autumn was nearly finished, Colin was pleased to find that that distinguished connoisseur, Sir Leonard Hawkins, was much delighted with its execution. Next time Sir Leonard came he looked over Colin's designs carefully, and was greatly struck with the sketch for the Clytemnestra. He asked the price, and Cohn, wise by experience, stipulated for time to consult Maragliano. When he had done so, he said 700L.; and this time he made for himself a clear 250L. That was a big sum for a man in Colin Churchill's position; but it was only the beginning of a great artist's successful career. Commissions began to pour in upon him freely; and before Gwen Howard-Russell returned to Rome, Colin was already making far more money than in his wildest anticipation he had ever dreamt of. He must save up, now, to repay Sam; and when Sam's debt was fairly cancelled, then he must save up again for little Minna.