Volume 3 Babylon, (of 3), by Grant Allen
|In the
midst of an undulating sunlit plain, fresh with flowers in spring, burnt and
yellow in summer and autumn, a great sordid shrivelled city blinks and
festers visibly among the rags and tatters in the eye of day. Within its huge
imperial walls the shrunken modern town has left a broad skirt of unoccupied
hillocks; low mounds covered by stunted straggling vineyards, or broken here
and there by shabby unpicturesque monasteries, with long straight
pollard-lined roads stretching interminably in dreary lines between the
distant boundaries. In the very centre, along some low flats that bound a
dull, muddy, silent river, the actual inhabited city itself crouches humbly
beneath the mouldering ruins of a nobler age. A shapeless mass of dingy,
weather-stained, discoloured, tile-roofed buildings, with all its stucco
peeling in the sun, it lies crowded and jammed into a narrow labyrinth of
tortuous alleys, reeking with dirt, and rich in ragged filthy beggars. One
huge lazaretto of sin and pestilence, choked with the accumulated rubbish
and kitchen-middens of forty centuries--that was Hiram Winthrop's
Rome--the Rome which fate and duty compelled him to exchange for the wild
woods and the free life of untrammelled nature.
Step into one of the
tortuous alleys, and you see this abomination of desolation even more
distinctly, under the pitiless all-exposing glare of an Italian sky. The
blotchy walls rise so high into the air to right and left, that they make the
narrow lane gloomy even at midday; and yet, the light pours down obliquely
upon the decaying plaster with so fierce a power that every rent and gap and
dirt-stain stands out distinctly, crying in vain to the squalid tenants in
the dens within to repair its unutterable dilapidation. Beneath, the little
slippery pavement consists of herringbone courses of sharp stones; overhead,
from ropes fastened across the street, lines of rags and tatters flutter idly
in the wind, proving (what Hiram was otherwise inclined to doubt) that people
at Rome _do_ sometimes ostensibly wash their garments, or at least damp
them. Dark gloomy shops line either side; shops windowless and
doorless, entered and closed by shutters, and just rendered visible by the
feeble lamp that serves a double duty as lightener of the general
darkness, and taper to the tiny painted shrine of the wooden Madonna. A
world of hungry ragged men, hungry dirty slatternly women, hungry children
playing in the gutter, hungry priests pervading the very atmosphere--that on
a closer view was Rome as it appeared to Hiram Winthrop.
To be sure,
there was a little more of it. Up towards the Corso and Piazza del Popolo,
there was a gaunt, modern Haussmannised quarter, the Rome of the
strangers--cleaner by a fraction, whiter by a great deal, less odorous by a
trifle, but still to Hiram Winthrop utterly flat, stale, and unprofitable.
The one Rome was ugly, if picturesque; the other Rome was modern, and not
even ugly.
Work at Seguin's studio was also to Hiram a wretched mockery
of an artistic training. The more he saw of the French painter, the more
he disliked him: and what was worse, the dislike was plainly mutual.
For Audouin's sake, because Audouin had wished it, Hiram went on
working feebly at historical pictures which he hated and could never
possibly care for; but he panted to be free from the wretched bondage at once
and for ever. Two years after his arrival in Rome, where he was now
living upon the little capital he had derived from the sale of the
deacon's farm, Hiram determined, on Audouin's strenuous advice, by
letter delivered, to send a tentative painting to Paris for the Salon.
Seguin watched it once or twice in the course of its completion, but he
only shrugged his lean shoulders ominously, and muttered
incomprehensible military oaths to himself, which he had picked up half a
century before from his father, the ex-corporal. (On the strength of that
early connection with the army, Seguin, in spite of his shrivelled
frame, still affected a certain swaggering military air and bearing
upon many occasions.) When it was finished, he looked at it a
trifle contemptuously, and then murmured: 'Good. That will finish him.
After that-----' An ugly grimace did duty for the rest of the
sentence.
Still, Hiram sent it in, as Audouin had desired of him; and in
due time received the formal intimation from the constituted authorities of
the Salon that his picture had been rejected. He knew it would be, and
yet he felt the disappointment bitterly. Sitting alone in his room
that evening (for he would not let even Colin share his sorrow) he
brooded gloomily by himself, and began to reflect seriously that after all
his whole life had been one long and wretched failure. There was no
denying it, he had made a common but a fatal error; he had mistaken the
desire to paint for the power of painting. He saw it all quite clearly
now, and from that moment his whole career seemed in his eyes to be
utterly dwarfed and spoiled and blighted.
There was only one part of
each of those four years of misery at Rome that Hiram could ever afterwards
look back upon with real pleasure. Once every summer, he and Colin started
off together for a month's relaxation in the Tyrol or Switzerland. On those
trips, Hiram forgot all the rest of his life altogether, and lived for thirty
clear days in a primitive paradise. His sketch-book went always with him, and
he even ventured to try his hand upon a landscape or two in oils, now that he
was well out of the way of Seguin's chilly magisterial interference. Colin
Churchill always praised them warmly: 'But then Colin, you know' (Hiram said
to himself). 'is always such a generous enthusiastic fellow. He has such a
keen artistic eye himself, of course, that he positively reads beauty into
the weakest efforts of any other beginner. Still, I do feel that I can put my
soul into drawing these rocks and mountains, which I never can do in painting
a dressed-up model in an artificial posture, and pretending that I think
she's really Cleopatra. If one had the genuine Cleopatra to paint, now,
exactly as she threw herself naturally down upon her own Egyptian sofa, why
that might possibly be quite another matter. But, even so, Cleopatra could
never have moved me half so much as the gloss on the chestnuts and the
shimmer of the cloud-light on the beautiful purple water down below
there.'
Sometimes, too, Hiram took Colin with him out into the Campagna;
not that he loved the Campagna--there was an odour of Rome about it;
but still at least it was a sort of country, and to Hiram Winthrop that
was everything. One day, in his fourth year in Italy, he was sitting on
a spring afternoon with Colin beside the arches of a broken aqueduct
in that great moorland, which he had been using as the foreground for
a little water-colour. He had finished his sketch, and was holding it
at different angles before him, when Colin suddenly broke the silence
by saying warmly: 'Some day, Winthrop, I'm sure you must sell
them.'
Hiram shook his head despondently. 'No, no, Churchill,' he
answered with a half-angry wave of his disengaged hand. 'Even while I was at
Seguin's, I knew I could never do anything worth looking at, and since I took
this little studio myself, I feel sure of it. It's only your kindness
that makes you think otherwise.'
Colin took the sketch from him for a
moment and eyed it carefully. 'My dear fellow,' he said at last, 'believe me,
you're mistaken. Just look at that! Why, Winthrop, I tell you candidly, I'm
certain there's genius in it.'
Hiram smiled bitterly. 'No, no, not
genius, I assure you,' he answered with a sigh, 'but only the longing for it.
You have genius, I have nothing more than aspiration.'
Yet in his own
heart, when Colin once more declared he was mistaken, Hiram Winthrop, looking
at that delicate sketch, did almost for the moment pluck up courage again,
and agree with his friend that if only the public would but smile upon him,
he, too, might really do something worth the looking at.
He went home,
indeed, almost elated, after so many months of silent dejection, by that
new-born hope. When he reached their rooms in the alley (for Colin, in his
desire to save, still stood by him, in spite of altered fortunes) he found a
large official envelope of French pattern lying casually upon the table. He
knew it at once; it bore the official seal of the Académie Française. He tore
open the letter hastily. Was it possible that this time they might really
have hung him? What did it say? Let him see... A stereotyped form.... 'Regret
to announce to you.... great claims upon their attention.... compelled to
refuse admission to the painting submitted to their consideration by
M. Winthrop.'
Hiram let the letter drop out of his hands without a
word. For the third time, then, his picture had been rejected for the Paris
Salon!
A day or iwo later, the agent to whom he always confided his works
for the necessary arrangements, wrote to him with florid French
politeness on the subject of its final disposal. Last year he had been able
to give Monsieur but forty francs for his picture, while the year before he
had felt himself justified in paying sixty. Unfortunately, neither of
these pictures had yet been sold; Monsieur's touch evidently did not
satisfy the exacting Parisian public. This year, he regretted to tell
Monsieur, he would be unable to offer him anything for the picture itself;
but he would take back the frame at an inestimable depreciation on the
original figure. He trusted to merit Monsieur's honoured commands upon
future occasions.
Those four pounds were all the money Hiram had yet
earned, in four years, by the practice of his profession; and the remains of
the deacon's patrimony would hardly now suffice to carry him through
another winter.
But then, that winter, Gwen was coming.
If it
had not been for the remote hope of still seeing Gwen before he left Rome for
ever, Hiram was inclined to think the only bed he would have slept in, that
dreary, weary, disappointing night, was the bed of the
Tiber.
CHAPTER XXX. MINNA'S RESOLUTION.
|As Minna Wroe
opened her eyes that morning in the furnished house in the Via Clementina,
she could hardly realise even now that she was actually at Rome, and within
half-an-hour's walk of dear Colin.
Yes, that was mainly how the Eternal
City, the capital of art, the centre of Christendom, the great museum of all
the ages, envisaged itself as of course to the frank barbarism of poor wee
Minna's simple little bosom. Some of us, when we go to Rome, see in it
chiefly a vast historical memory--the Forum, the Colosseum, the arch of
Titus, the ruined Thermæ, the Palace of the Caesars. Some of us see in it
rather a magnificent panorama of ancient and modern art, the Vatican,
St. Peter's, the Apollo, the Aphrodite, the great works of Michael
Angelo, and Raphael, and the spacious broad-souled Renaissance painters.
Some see in it a modern gimcrack Italian metropolis; some, a
fashionable English winter residence; some, a picturesque, quaint
old-world mediæval city; some, a Babylon doomed before long to a terrible
fiery destruction; and some, a spiritual centre of marvellous
activity, with branches that ramify out in a thousand directions over the
entire civilised and barbarous world. But Minna Wroe thought of that
wonderful composite heterogeneous Rome for the most part merely as the
present home and actual arena of Colin Churchill, sculptor, at Number 84 in
the Via Colonna.
It had been a grand piece of luck for Minna, the
chance that brought her the opportunity of taking that long-looked-for, and
much desired journey. To be sure, she had been very happy in her own way down
in the pretty little rural Surrey village. Mr. O'Donovan was the kindest
and most fatherly old clergyman that ever lived; and though he _did_
bother her just a little now and then with teaching in the Sunday
school and conducting the Dorcas society, and taking charge of the
Mothers' meeting, still he was so good and gentle and sympathetic to her
at all times, that Minna could easily have forgiven him for twice as
much professional zeal as he ever himself displayed in actual reality.
Yet for all that, though the place was so pretty, and the work so
light, and the four little girls on the whole such nice pleasant
well-behaved little mortals, Minna certainly did miss Colin very terribly.
Some employers would doubtless have said to themselves when they saw
the governess moping and melancholy in spite of all the comfort that
was provided for her: 'Well, what more on earth that girl can possibly
be wanting really passes my poor finite comprehension.' But Mr.
O'Donovan knew better. He was one of those people who habitually and
instinctively put themselves in the place of others; and when on Sunday
mornings after the letter with the twenty-five centesimi stamp had arrived at
the rectory, he saw poor Minna moving about the house before church,
looking just a trifle tearful, he said to himself with a shake of his
dear kindly old broken-nosed head: 'Ah well, ah well; young people will
be young people; and I've often noticed that however comfortable a girl
of twenty-two may be in all externals, why, God bless my soul, if she's
got a lover five hundred miles away, she can't help crying a bit about
him every now and then--and very natural!' Minna gratefully observed
too, that on all such occasions Mr. O'Donovan treated her with more than
his usual consideration, and seemed to understand exactly what it was
that made her rather sharper than her wont with the small feelings of
the four little ones.
And Mr. O'Donovan never forgot his promise to
Minna to look out for a family who were going to Rome and who wanted an
English governess. 'But, bless my soul,' he thought to himself, 'who on earth
would ever have believed beforehand what a precious difficult thing it is to
find a person who fulfils at once both the conditions? People going to
Rome, dozens of 'em; people wanting a governess, dozens of 'em also;
but people going to Rome _and_ wanting a governess, I regret to say, not
a soul to be heard of. Sounds just like a Senate House problem, when I
was a young fellow at Cambridge: If out of x A's there are y B's and z
C's, what are the chances that any B is also a C?
Answer, precious
little.' Indeed, the good old parson even went the length of putting an
advertisement into the _Guardian_ twice a year, without saying a word about
it to Minna: 'A Clergyman (beneficed) wishes to recommend highly qualified
Young Lady as English nursery Governess to a Family wintering at Rome.' But
he never got a single answer. 'Dear, dear,' the kind old gentleman muttered
to himself, on each such occasion when the post passed by day after day
without bringing him a single one of the expected applications, 'that's
always the way, unfortunately. Advertise that you want a governess, and you
have fifty poor young girls answering at once, wasting a penny stamp a-piece,
and waiting eagerly to know whether you'll be kindly pleased to engage 'em.
Advertise that you want a place as governess, and never a soul will take a
moment's notice of you. Supply and demand, I believe they call it in the
newspapers; supply and demand; but in a Christian country one might have
imagined they'd have got something more charitable to give us by this
time than the bare gospel of Political Economy. When I was young, we
didn't understand Political Economy; and Mr. Malthus, who wrote about it,
used to be considered little better than a heathen. Still, I've done my
duty, as far as I've been able; that's one comfort. And if I can't succeed
in getting a place for George Wroe's daughter to go and join this
wonderful clever lover of hers at Rome (confound the fellow, he's making a
pot of money I see by the papers; why the dickens doesn't he send over
and fetch her?)--well anyhow, dear Lucy's children are getting the
benefit of her attention, meanwhile, and what on earth I should do without
her now, I'm sure I haven't the slightest conception.'
At last,
however, after one of these regular six-monthly notices the rector happened
to come down to breakfast one morning, and found a letter in a strange
foreign-looking hand lying beside his porridge on the dining-room table. He
turned it over and looked anxiously at the back:--yes, it was just as he
hoped and feared; it bore a London post-mark, and had a Byzantine-look-ing
coronet embossed upon it in profuse gilding and brilliantly blazoned heraldic
colours. The old man's heart sank within him. 'Confound it,' he said to
himself, half-angrily, 'I do believe I've gone and done my duty this time
with a regular vengeance. This is an answer to the advertisement at last, and
it's an application from somebody or other to carry off dear little Miss Wroe
to Rome as somebody's governess. Hang it all, how shall I ever manage,
at my age too, to accommodate myself to another young woman! I won't
open it now. I can't open it now. If I open it before prayers and
breakfast, and it really turns out to be quite satisfactory, I shall break
down over it, I know I shall; and then little Miss Wroe will see I've
been crying about it, and refuse to leave us--she's a good girl, and if
she knew how much I valued her, she'd refuse to leave us; and so after
all she'd never get to join this sculptor son of young Sam
Churchill's that she's for ever thinking of. I'll put it away till after
breakfast. Perhaps indeed it mayn't be at all the thing for her--which would
be very lucky--no, I mean unlucky;--well, there, there, what a set
of miserable selfish wretched creatures we are really, whenever it
comes to making even a small sacrifice for one another. Con O'Donovan, my
boy, you know perfectly well in your heart of hearts you were
half-wishing that that poor girl wasn't going at last to join her lover that
she's so distracted about; and yet after that, you have the impudence to get
up in the pulpit every Sunday morning, and preach a sermon about our
duty to others to your poor parishioners--perhaps, even out of the
fifth chapter of Matthew, you confounded hypocrite! It seems to me
there's a good deal of truth in that line of Tennyson's, though it sounds
so cynical:
_However we brave it out, we men are a little
breed!_
Upon my soul, when I come to think of it, I'm really and truly
quite ashamed of myself.'
Do you ever happen to have noticed that the
very men who have the smallest possible leaven of littleness, or meanness, or
selfishness, in their own natures are usually the exact ones who most often
bitterly reproach themselves for their moral shortcomings in this
matter?
When the rector came to open the envelope by-and-by in his own
study, he found it contained a letter in French from a Russian countess, then
in London, who proposed spending the winter in Italy. 'Madame had seen
M. O'Donovan's Advertisement in a journal of his country, and would be
glad to learn from Monsieur some particulars about the young lady whom
he desired to recommend to families. Madame required a governess for
one little girl, and proposed a salary of 2,500 francs.' The old
man's eyes brightened at the idea of so large an offer--one hundred
pounds sterling--and then he laid down the letter again, and cried gently
to himself, as old people sometimes do, for a few minutes. After that, he
reflected that Georgey Wroe's daughter was a very good girl, and deserved any
advancement that he could get for her; and Georgey was a fine young fellow
himself, and as clever a hand at managing a small smack in a squall off the
Chesil as any fisherman, bar none, in all England. God bless his soul, what a
run that was they had together, the night the 'Sunderbund' East Indiaman went
to pieces off Deadman's Bay, from Seaton Bar right round the Bill to
Lulworth! He could mind even now the way the water broke over the gunwale
into Georgey's face, and how Georgey laughed at the wind, and swore it was a
mere breeze, and positively whistled to it. Well, well, he would do what he
could for Georgey's daughter, and he must look out (with a stifled sigh) for
some other good girl to take care of Lucy's precious little ones.
So
he sat down and wrote off such a glowing account of Minna's many virtues to
the Russian countess in London--an account mainly derived from his own calm
inner belief as to what a perfect woman's character ought to be made up
of--that the Russian countess wrote back to say she would engage Mdlle. Wroe
immediately, without even waiting to see her. Till he got that answer, Mr.
O'Donovan never said a word about the matter to Minna, for fear she might be
disappointed; but as soon as it arrived, and he had furtively dried his eyes
behind his handkerchief, lest she should see how sorry he was to lose her, he
laid the two letters triumphantly down before her, and said, in a voice which
seemed as though he were quite as much interested in the event as she
was: 'There you see, my dear, I've found somebody at last for you to go
to Rome with.' Minna's head reeled and her eyes swam as she read the
two letters to herself with some difficulty (for her French was of
the strictly school-taught variety); but as soon as she had spelt out
the meaning to her own intense satisfaction, she flung her arms round
old Mr. O'Donovan's neck, and kissed him twice fervently. Mr.
O'Donovan's eyes glistened, and he kissed her in return gently on her
forehead. She had grown to be to him almost like a daughter, and he loved her
so dearly that it was a hard wrench to part from her. 'And you know,
my dear,' he said to her with fatherly tenderness, 'you won't mind
my mentioning it to you, I'm sure, because I need hardly tell you how
much interest I take in my old friend Georgey's daughter; but I think
it's just as well the lady's a foreigner, and especially a Russian,
because they're not so particular, I believe, about the conventionalities
of society as our English mothers are apt to be; and you'll probably
get more opportunities of seeing young Churchill when occasion offers than
you would have done if you'd happened to have gone abroad with an English
family.'
When Minna went away from the country rectory, at very short
notice, some three weeks later, Mary the housemaid observed, with a
little ill-natured smile to the other village gossips, that it wasn't before
it was time, neither; for the way that that there Miss Wroe, as she
called herself, had been carrying on last month or two along of poor
old master, and him a clergyman, too, and old enough to know better,
but there, what can you expect, for everybody knows what an old gentleman
is when a governess or anybody can twist him round her little finger,
was that dreadful that really she often wondered whether a
respectable girl as was always brought up quite decent and her only a
fisherman's daughter, too, as master hisself admitted, but them governesses,
when they got theirselves a little eddication and took a sitooation, was
that stuck-up and ridiculous, not but what _she_ made her always keep
her place, for that matter, for _she_ wasn't going to be put down by none
of your governesses, setting themselves up to be ladies when they wasn't
no better nor she was, but at any rate it was a precious good thing she
was gone now before things hadn't gone no further, for if she'd stayed,
why, of course, there wouldn't have been nothing left for her to do, as
had always lived in proper families, but to go and give notice herself
afore she'd stop in such a sitooation.
And Mrs. Upjohn, the doctor's
wife, smiled blandly when Mary spoke to her about it, and said in a grave
tone of severe moral censure: 'Well, there, Mary, you oughtn't to want to
meddle with your master's business, whatever you may happen to fancy. Not but
what Miss Wroe herself certainly did behave in a most imprudent and
unladylike manner; and I can't deny, of course, that she's laid herself open
to every word of what you say about her. But then, you know, Mary, she isn't
a lady; and, after all, what can you expect from such a person?' To which
Mary, having that profound instinctive contempt for her own class which
is sometimes begotten among the essentially vulgar by close
unconscious introspection, immediately answered: 'Ah, what indeed!' and went
on unrebuked with her ill-natured gossip. So high and watchful is
social morality amid the charming Arcadian simplicity of our outlying
English country villages.
But poor little Minna, waking up that very
morning in the Via Clementina, never heeded their venomous backbiting one
bit, and thought only of going to see her dear Colin. What a surprise it
would be to him to see her, to be sure; for Minna, fearful that the scheme
might fall through before it was really settled, had written not a word to
him about it beforehand, and meant to surprise him by dropping in upon
him quite unexpectedly at his studio without a single note of
warning.
'Ah, my dear,' the countess said to her, when Minna,
trembling, asked leave to go out and visit her cousin--that dim relationship,
so inevitable among country folk from the same district, had
certainly more than once done her good service--'you have then a parent at
Rome, a sculptor? Yes, yes, I recall it; that good Mr. O'Donovan made
mention to me of this parent. He prayed me to let you have the opportunity
from time to time of visiting him. These are our first days at Rome.
For the moment, Olga will demand her vacations: she will wish to
distract herself a little with the town, before she applies herself seriously
to her studies of English. Let us say to-day, then: let us say this
very morning. You can go, my child: you can visit your parent: and if
his studio encloses anything of artistic, you pass me the word, I go to
see it. But if they have the instinct of the family strong, these
English! I find that charming; it is delicious: it is all that there is of
most pure and poetical. She wishes to visit her cousin, who is a
sculptor and whom she has not seen, it is now a long time; and she blushes
and trembles like a French demoiselle who comes from departing the
day itself from the gates of the convent. One would say, a lover. I find
it most admirable, this affection of the family, this lasting
reminiscence of the distant relations. We others in Russia, we have it too:
we love the parent: but not with so much empressement. I find that trait
there altogether essentially English.'
Mrs. Upjohn would have
considered the countess 'scarcely respectable,' and would have avoided her
acquaintance carefully, unless indeed she happened to be introduced to her by
the squire's lady, in which case, of course, her perfect propriety would have
been sufficiently guaranteed: but, after all, which of them had the heart the
most untainted? To the pure all things are pure: and contrariwise.
So
Minna hastened out into those unknown streets of Rome, and by the aid of her
self-taught Italian (which was a good deal better than her French, so potent
a tutor is love) she soon found her way down the Corso, and off the side
alley into the narrow sunless Via Colonna. She followed the numbers down to
the familiar eighty-four of Colin's letters, and there she saw upon the door
a little painted tin-plate, bearing in English the simple inscription: 'Mr.
C. Churchill's Studio.' Minna's heart beat fast for a moment as she mounted
the stairs unannounced, and stood within the open door of Colin's modelling
room.
A few casts and other sculptor's properties filled up the space
between the door and the middle of the studio. Minna paused a second, and
looked timidly from behind them at the room beyond. She hardly liked
to come forward at once and claim acquaintance: it seemed so strange
and unwomanly so to announce herself, now that she had actually got to
face it. A certain unwonted bashfulness appeared somehow or other to
hold her back; and Minna, who had her little superstitions still, noted
it in passing as something ominous. There were two people visible in
the studio--both men; and they were talking together quite earnestly,
Minna could see, about somebody else who was obviously hidden from her by
the Apollo in the foreground. One of them was a very handsome young man
in a brown velvet coat, with a loose Rembrandtesque hat of the same
stuff stuck with artistic carelessness on one side of his profuse curls:
her heart leaped up at once as she recognised with a sudden thrill that
that was Colin---- transfigured and glorified a little by success, but
still the same dear old Colin as ever, looking the very image of a
sculptor, as he stood there, one arm poised lightly on his hip, and
turning towards his companion with some wonderful grace that no other race
of men save only artists can ever compass. Stop, he was speaking again
now; and Minna, all unconscious of listening or prying, bent forward to
catch the sound of those precious words as Colin uttered them.
'She's
splendid, you know, Winthrop,' Colin was saying enthusiastically, in a voice
that had caught a slight Italian trill from Maragliano, unusual on our
sterner English lips: 'she's grand, she's beautiful, she's terrible, she's
magnificent. Upon my word, in all my life I never yet saw any woman one-half
so glorious or so Greek as Cecca. I'm proud of having discovered her;
immensely proud. I claim her as my own property, by right of discovery. A lot
of other fellows would like to inveigle her away from me; but they won't get
her: Cecca's true metal, and she sticks to her original inventor. What a
woman she is, really! Now did you ever see such a perfectly glorious arm as
that one?'
Minna reeled, almost, as she stood there among the casts and
properties, and felt half inclined on the spur of the moment to flee away
unseen, and never again speak or write a single word to that perfidious
Colin. Cecca, indeed! Cecca! Cecca! Who on earth was this woman Cecca,
she would like to know; and what on earth did the faithless Colin ever
want with her? Splendid, grand, beautiful, glorious, terrible,
magnificent! Oh, Colin, Colin, how could you break her poor little heart so?
Should she go back at once to the countess, and not even let Colin know she
had ever come to Rome at all to see him? It was too horrible, too
sudden, too crushing, too unexpected!
The other man looked towards the
unseen Cecca--Minna somehow felt in her heart that Cecca was there, though
she couldn't see her--and answered with an almost imperceptible American
accent, 'She's certainly very beautiful, Churchill, very beautiful. My dear
fellow, I sincerely congratulate you.'
Congratulate you! What! had it
come to that? Oh horror! oh shame! had Colin been grossly deceiving her? Had
he not only made love in her absence to that black-eyed Italian woman of whom
she had always been so much afraid, but had he even made her an offer of
marriage, without ever mentioning a word about it to her, Minna? The
baseness, the deceit, the wickedness of it! And yet--this Minna thought with
a sickening start--was it really base, was it really deceitful, was it
really wicked? Colin had never said he would marry her; he had never
been engaged to her--oh no, during all those long weary years of doubt
and hesitation she had always known he wasn't engaged to her--she had
known it, and trembled. Yes, he was free; he was his own master; he could
do as he liked: she was only his little cousin Minna: what claim,
after all, had she upon him?
At that moment Colin turned, and looked
almost towards her, without seeing her. She could have cried out 'Colin!' as
she saw his beautiful face and his kindly eyes--too kindly to be untrue,
surely--turned nearly upon her; but Cecca, Cecca, the terrible unseen Cecca,
somehow restrained her. And Cecca, too, had actually accepted him. Didn't
the Yankee man he called Winthrop say, 'I congratulate you'? There
was only one meaning possible to put upon such a sentence. Accept him!
Why, how could any woman conceivably refuse him? as he moved forward there
with his delicate clear-cut face, a face in which the aesthetic temperament
stood confessed so unmistakably--Minna could hardly blame this unknown Cecca
if she fell in love with him. But for herself--oh, Colin, Cohn, Colin, it was
too cruel.
She would at least see Cecca before she stole away unperceived
for ever; she would see what manner of woman this was that had enticed away
Colin Churchill's love from herself, if indeed he had ever loved her,
which was now at least far more than doubtful. So she moved aside
gently behind the clay figures, and came in sight of the third
person.
It was the exact Italian beauty of her long-nursed girlish
terrors! A queenly dark woman, with supple statuesque figure and splendidly
set head, was standing before the two young artists in an attitude
half studied pose, half natural Calabrian peasant gracefulness. Her
brown neck and arms were quite bare; her large limbs were scarcely
concealed below by a short and clinging sculpturesque kirtle. She was
looking towards Colin with big languishing eyes, and her smile--for she
was smiling--had something in it of that sinister air that northerners
often notice among even the most beautiful women of the Mediterranean
races. It was plain that she couldn't understand what her two admirers
were saying in their foreign language; but it was plain also that she
knew they were praising her extraordinary beauty, and her eyes flashed
forth accordingly with evident pride and overflowing self-satisfaction.
Cecca was beautiful, clearly beautiful, both in face and figure, with
a rich, mature southern beauty (though in years perhaps she was
scarcely twenty), and Minna was forced in spite of herself to admire her
form; but she felt instinctively there was something about the girl that
she would have feared and dreaded, even if she hadn't heard Colin
Churchill speaking of her with such unstinted and unhesitating admiration. So
this was Cecca! So this was Cecca! And so this was the end, too, of all
her long romantic day-dream!
As she stood there, partly doubting
whether to run away or not, Cecca caught sight of her half hidden behind the
Apollo, and turning to Colin, cried out sharply in a cold, ringing, musical
voice as clear and as cold as crystal, 'See, see; a signorina! She waits to
speak with you.'
Colin looked round carelessly, and before Minna could
withdraw his eyes met hers in a sudden wonder.
'Minna!' he cried,
rushing forward eagerly to meet her, 'Minna! Minna! Why, it must be Minna!
How on earth did you manage to get to Rome, little woman? and why on earth
didn't you let me know beforehand you were really coming?'
He tried to
kiss her as he spoke, but Minna, half doubtful what she ought to do, with
swimming brain and tearful eyes, held him off mechanically by withdrawing
herself timidly a little, and gave him her hand instead with strange
coldness, much to his evident surprise and disappointment.
'She's too
modest to kiss me before Winthrop and Cecca,' Colin thought to himself a
little nervously; 'but no matter--Winthrop, this is my cousin from England,
Miss Wroe, that I've so often spoken to you about.'
His cousin from
England! His cousin!! His cousin!!! Ah, yes, that was all he meant by it
nowadays clearly. He wanted to kiss her, but merely as a cousin; all his
heart, it seemed, was only for this creature he called Cecca, who stood there
scowling at her so savagely from under her great heavy eyebrows. He had gone
to Rome, as she feared so long ago, and had fallen into the clutches of that
dreaded terrible Italian woman.
'Well, Minna,' Colin said, looking at her
so tenderly that even Minna herself half believed he must be still in
earnest, 'and so you've come to Italy, have you? My dear little girl, why
didn't you write and tell me all about it? You've broken in upon me so
unexpectedly.' ('So I see,' thought Minna.) 'Why didn't you write and let me
know beforehand you were coming to see me?
Minna's heart prompted her
inwardly to answer with truth, 'Because I wanted to surprise you, Colin;' but
she resisted the natural impulse, much against the grain, and answered
instead with marked chilliness, 'Because I didn't know my movements were at
all likely to interest you.'
As they two spoke, Hiram Winthrop noticed
half unconsciously that Cecca's eyes were steadily riveted upon the newcomer,
and that the light within them had changed instantaneously from the quiet
gleam of placid self-satisfaction to the fierce glare of rising anger and
jealous suspicion.
Colin still held Minna's hand half doubtfully in
his, and looked with his open face all troubled into her pretty brown eyes,
wondering vaguely what on earth could be the meaning of this unexpected
coldness of demeanour.
'Tell me at least how you got here, little
woman,' he began again in his soft, gentle voice, with quiet persuasiveness.
'Whatever brought you here, Minna, I'm so glad, so very glad to see you. Tell
me how you came, and how long you're going to stop with me.'
Minna sat
down blankly on the one chair that stood in the central area of the little
studio, not because she wanted to stay there any longer, but because she felt
as if her trembling knees were positively giving way beneath her. 'I've taken
a place as governess to a Russian girl, Colin,' she answered shortly; 'and
I've come to Rome with my pupil's mother.'
Colin felt sure by the
faintness of her voice that there was something very serious the matter.
'Minna dearest,' he whispered to her half beneath his breath, 'you aren't
well, I'm certain. I'll send away my friend and my model, and then you must
tell me all about it, like a dear good little woman.'
Minna started,
and her face flushed suddenly again with mounting colour. 'Your model,' she
cried, pointing half contemptuously towards the scowling Cecca. 'Your model!
Is that woman over there a model, then?'
'Yes, certainly,' Colin answered
lightly.
'This lady's a model, Minna. We call her Cecca--that's short
for Francesca, you know--and she's my model for a statue of a Spartan
maiden I'm now working upon.'
But Cecca, though she couldn't follow
the words, had noticed the contemptuous tone and gesture with which Minna had
scornfully spoken of 'that woman,' and she knew at once in her hot Italian
heart that she stood face to face with a natural enemy. An enemy and a rival.
For Cecca, too, had in her own way her small fancies and her bold
ambitions.
'She's very beautiful, isn't she?' Hiram Winthrop put in
timidly, for he saw with his keen glance that Cecca's handsome face was
growing every moment blacker and blacker, and he wanted to avert the coming
explosion.
'Well, not so very beautiful to my mind,' Minna answered, with
studied coolness, putting her head critically a little on one side, and
staring at the model as if she had been made of plaster of Paris; 'though I
must say you gentlemen seemed to be admiring her immensely when I came
into the room a minute or two ago. I confess she doesn't exactly take my
own personal fancy.'
'What is the signorina saying?' Cecca broke in
haughtily, in Italian. She felt sure from the scornful tone of Minna's voice
that it must at least be something disparaging.
'She says you are
beautiful, Signora Cecca,' Colin answered hurriedly, with a sidelong
deprecatory glance at Minna. 'Bella bella,
bella, bellissima.'
'Bellissima, si, bellissima,' Minna echoed, half
frightened, she knew not why; for she felt dimly conscious in her own little
mind that they were all three thoroughly afraid in their hearts of the
beautiful, imperious Italian woman.
'It is a lie,' Cecca murmured to
herself quietly. 4 But it doesn't matter. She was saying that she didn't
admire me, and the Englishman and the American tried to stop her. The
sorceress! I hate her!'
CHAPTER XXXI. COUSINS.
|They
stood all four looking at one another mutely for a few minutes longer, and
then Colin broke the ominous silence by saying as politely as he was able,
'Signora Cecca, this lady has come to see me from England, and we are
relations. We have not met for many years. Will you excuse my dismissing you
for this morning?'
Cecca made a queenly obeisance to Colin, dropped a
sort of saucy Italian curtsey to Minna, nodded familiarly to Hiram, and swept
out of the studio into the dressing-room without uttering another
word.
'She'll go off to Bazzoni's, I'm afraid,' Hiram said, with a sigh
of relief, as she shut the door noiselessly and cautiously behind
her. 'He's downright anxious to get her, and she's a touchy young
woman, that's certain.'
'I'm not at all afraid of that,' Colin
answered, smiling; 'she's a great deal too true to me for any such tricks as
those, I'm sure, Winthrop. She really likes me, I know, and she won't desert
me even for a pique, though I can easily see she's awfully
offended.'
'Well, I hope so,' Hiram replied gravely. 'She's far too good
a model to be lost. Goodbye, Churchill.--Good morning, Miss Wroe. I hope
you'll do me the same honour as you've done your cousin, by coming to take a
look some day around my studio.'
'Well, Minna,' Colin said as soon as
they were alone, coming up to her and offering once more to kiss her--'why,
little woman, what's the matter? Aren't you going to let me kiss you any
longer? We always used to kiss one another in the old days, you know, in
England.'
'But now we're both of us quite grown up, Colin,' Minna
answered, somewhat pettishly, 'so of course that makes all the
difference.'
Cohn couldn't understand the meaning of this chilliness; for
Minna's late letters, written in the tremor of delight at the surprise she
was preparing for him, had been more than usually affectionate; and it
would never have entered into his head for a moment to suppose that she
could have misinterpreted his remarks about Cecca, even if he had known
that she had overheard them. To a sculptor, such criticism of a
model, such enthusiasm for the mere form of the shapely human figure, seem
so natural and disinterested, so much a necessary corollary of his art,
that he never even dreams of guarding against any possible misapprehension.
So Colin only bowed his head in silent wonder, and answered slowly, 'But then
you know, Minna, we're cousins. Surely there can be no reason why cousins
when they meet shouldn't kiss one another.' He couldn't have chosen a worse
plea at that particular moment; for as he said it, the blood rushed from
Minna's cheeks, and she trembled with excitement at that seeming knell to all
her dearest expectations. 'Oh, well, if you put it upon that ground, Colin,'
she faltered out half tearfully, 'of course we may kiss one another--as
cousins.'
Colin seized her in his arms at the word, and covered her
pretty little gipsy face with a string of warm, eager kisses. Even little
Minna, in her fright and anxiety, could not help imagining to herself that
those were hardly what one could call in fairness mere everyday
cousinly embraces. But her evil genius made her struggle to release
herself, according to the code of etiquette which she had learnt as
becoming from her friends and early companions; and she pushed Colin away
after a moment's doubtful acquiescence, with a little petulant gesture
of half-affected anger. The philosophic observer may indeed note that
among the English people only women of the very highest breeding know how
to let themselves be kissed by their lovers with becoming and
unresisting dignity. Tennyson's Maud, when her cynic admirer kissed her for
the first time, 'took the kiss sedately.' I fear it must be admitted
that under the same circumstances Minna Wroe, dear little native-born
lady though she was, would have felt it incumbent upon her as a woman and
a maiden to resist and struggle to the utmost of her power.
As for
Colin, having got rid of that first resistance easily enough, he soon settled
in his own mind to his own entire satisfaction that Minna had been only a
little shy of him after so long an absence, and had perhaps been playing off
a sort of mock-modest coyness upon him, in order to rouse him to an effective
aggression. So he said no more to her about the matter, but asked her full
particulars as to her new position and her journey; and even Minna herself,
disappointed as she was, could not help opening out her full heart to dear
old Colin, and telling him all about everything that had happened to her in
the last six weeks, except her inner hopes and fears and lamentations. Yes,
she had come to Rome to live--she didn't say 'on purpose to be near you,
Colin'--and they would have abundant opportunities of seeing one another
frequently; and Madame was very kind, for an employer, you know--as
employers go--you can't expect much, of course, from an employer. And Colin
showed her all his busts and statues; and Minna admired them profoundly with
a genuine admiration. And then, what prices he got for them! Why,
Colin, really nowadays you're become quite a gentleman! And Colin, to whom
that social metamorphosis had long grown perfectly familiar, laughed
heartily at the naïve remark and then looked round with a touch of
professional suspicion, for fear some accidental patron might have happened
to come in and overhear the simple little confession. Altogether,
their conversation got very close and affectionate and cousinly.
At
last, after they had talked about everything that most concerned them both,
save only the one thing that concerned them both more than anything, Minna
asked in as unconcerned a tone as she could muster up, 'And this model,
Colin--Cecca, I think you called her--what of her?'
Colin's eye lighted
up with artistic enthusiasm as he answered warmly, 'Oh, she's the most
beautiful girl in all Rome, little woman. I found her out by accident last
year, at a village in Calabria where Winthrop and I had gone for a Christmas
holiday; and I induced her to come to Rome and go in for a model's life as a
profession. Isn't she just magnificent, Minna?'
'Very magnificent
indeed, I dare say,' Minna answered coldly; 'but not to my mind by any means
pleasing.'
'I wonder you think that,' Colin said in frank astonishment:
for he was too much a sculptor even to suspect that Minna could take any
other view of his model except the purely artistic one. 'She was the original
of that Nymph Bathing of mine that you see over yonder.'
Minna looked
critically at the Nymph Bathing--a shameless hussy, truly, if ever there was
one--and answered in a chilly voice, 'I like it the least of all your
statues, if you care to have my opinion, Colin.'
'Well, now, I'm awfully
sorry for that, Minna,' Colin went on seriously, regarding the work with that
despondent eye with which one always views one's own performances after
hearing by any chance an adverse criticism; 'for I rather liked the nymph
myself, you know, and I can generally rely upon your judgment as being about
the very best to be had anywhere in the open market. There's no denying, little
woman, that you've got a born taste somehow or other for the art of sculpture.' |
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