Babylon, Volume 3

CHAPTER XLI. AUDOUIN'S MISTAKE. CHAPTER XLI. AUDOUIN'S MISTAKE. L othrop Audouin walked round a little tremblingly to the Villa Panormi. He wasn't generally a shy or nervous man, but on this particular afternoon he felt an unwonted agitation in his breast, for he was bound to the Villa on a very special errand; and he was glad when he saw Gwen Howard-Russell walking about alone in the alleys of the garden, for it saved him the necessity of having to make a formal call upon her in the big salon. Gwen saw him coming, and moved towards the heavy iron gate to meet him. She gave him her hand with one of her sunniest smiles, and Audouin took it, as he always did, with antique Massachusetts ceremoniousness. Then he turned with her, almost by accident as it were, down the path bordered by the orange-trees, and began to talk as he loved so well to talk, about the trees, and the flowers, and the green-grey lizards, that sat sunning themselves lazily upon the red Roman tiles which formed the stiff and formal garden edging. 'Though these are not my own flowers, you know, Miss Russell,' he said at last, looking at her a little curiously. 'These are not my own flowers; and indeed everything here in Rome, even nature itself, always seems to me so overlaid by the all-pervading influence of art that I fail to feel at home with the very lilies and violets in this artificial atmosphere In America, you know, my surroundings are so absolutely those of unmixed nature: I lead the life of a perfect hermit in an unsophisticated and undesecrated wilderness.' 'Mr. Winthrop has told me a great deal about Lakeside,' Gwen answered lightly, and Audouin took it as a good omen that she should have remembered the very name of his woodland cottage. 'You live quite among the primæval forest, don't you, by a big shallow bend in Lake Ontario?' 'Yes, quite among the primæval forest indeed; from my study window I look out upon nothing but the green pines, and the rocky ravine, and the great blue sheet of Ontario for an infinite background. Not a house or a sign of life to be seen anywhere, except the flying-squirrels darting about among the branches of the hickories.' 'But don't you get very tired and lonely there, with nobody but yourself and your servants? Don't you feel dreadfully the want of congenial cultivated society?' Audouin sighed pensively to hide the beating of his heart at that simple question. Surely, surely, the beautiful queenly Englishwoman was leading up to his hand! Surely she must know what was the natural interpretation for him to put upon her last inquiry! It is gross presumptuousness on the part of any man to ask a woman for the priceless gift of her whole future unless you have good reason to think that you are not wholly without hope of a favourable answer; but Gwen Howard-Russell must certainly mean to encourage him in the bold plunge he was on the verge of taking. It is hard for a chivalrous man to ask a woman that supreme question at any time: harder still when, like Lothrop Audouin, he has left it till time has begun to sprinkle his locks with silver. But Gwen was evidently not wholly averse to his proposition: he would break the ice between them and venture at last upon a declaration. 'Well,' he answered slowly, looking at Gwen half askance in a timid fashion very unlike his usual easy airy gallantry, 'I usen't to think it so, Miss Howard; I usen't to think it so. I had my books and my good companions—Plato, and Montaigne, and Burton, and Rabelais. I loved the woods and the flowers and the living creatures, and all my life long, you know, I have been a fool to nature, a fool to nature. Perhaps there was a little spice of misanthropy, too, in my desire to fly from a base, degrading, materialised civilisation. I didn't feel lonely in those days;—no, in those days, in those days, Miss Russell, I didn't feel lonely.' He spoke hesitatingly, with long pauses between each little sentence, and his lips quivered as he spoke with girlish tremulousness and suppressed emotion. He who was usually so fluent and so ready with his rounded periods—he hardly managed now to frame his tongue to the few short words he wished to say to her. Profoundly and tenderly respectful by nature to all women, he felt so deeply awed by Gwen's presence and by the magnitude of the favour he wished to ask of her, that he trembled like a child as he tried to speak out boldly his heart's desire. It was not nervousness, it was not timidity, it was not diffidence; it was the overpowering emotion of a mature man, pent up till now, and breaking over him at last in a perfect inundation through the late-opened floodgates of his repressed passion. For a moment he leaned his hand against the projecting rockery of the grotto for support; then he spoke once more in a hushed voice, so that even Gwen vaguely suspected the real nature of his coming declaration. 'In those days,' he repeated once more, with knees failing under him for trembling, 'in those days I didn't feel lonely; but since my last visit to Rome I have felt Lakeside much more solitary than before. I have tired of my old crony Nature, and have begun to feel a newborn desire for closer human companionship. I have begun to wish for the presence of some kind and beautiful friend to share its pleasures with me. I needn't tell you, Miss Russell, why I date the uprising of that feeling from the time of my last visit to Italy. It was then that I first learned really to know and to admire you. It is a great thing to ask, I know, a woman's heart—a true noble woman's whole heart and affection; but I dare to beg for it—I dare to beg for it. Oh, Miss Russell—oh, Gwen, Gwen, will you have pity upon me? will you give it me? will you give it me?' As he spoke, the tall strong-knit man, clutching the rock-work passionately for support, he looked so pale and faint and agitated that Gwen thought he would have fallen there and then, if she gave him the only possible answer too rudely and suddenly. So she took his arm gently in hers, as a daughter might take a father's, and led him to the seat at the far end of the orange alley by the artificial fountain. Audouin followed her with a beating heart, and threw himself down half fainting on the slab of marble. 'Mr. Audouin,' Gwen began gently, for she pitied his evident overpowering emotion from the bottom of her heart, 'I can't tell you how sorry I am to have to say so, but it cannot possibly be; it can never be, never, so it's no use my trying to talk about it.' A knife struck through Audouin's bosom at those simple words, and he grew still paler white than ever, but he merely bowed his head respectfully, and, crushing down his love with iron resolution, murmured slowly, 'Then forgive me, forgive me.' His unwritten creed would not have permitted him in such circumstances to press his broken suit one moment longer. 'Mr. Audouin,' Gwen went on, 'I'm afraid I have unintentionally misled you. No, I don't want you to go yet,' she added with one of her imperious gestures, for he seemed as if he would rise and leave her; 'I don't want you to go until I have explained it all to you. I like you very much, I have always liked you; I respect you, too, and I've been pleased and proud of the privilege of your acquaintance. Perhaps in doing so much, in seeking to talk with you and enjoy your society, I may have seemed to have encouraged you in feelings which it never struck me you were at all likely to harbour. I—I liked you so sincerely that I never even dreamt you might fancy I could love you.' 'And why, Miss Russell?' Audouin pleaded earnestly. 'If you dismiss me so hopelessly, let me know at least the reason of my dismissal. It was very presumptuous of me, I know, to dare to hope for so much happiness; but why did you think me quite outside the sphere of your possible suitors?' 'Why, Mr. Audouin,' Gwen said in a low tone, 'I have always looked upon you rather as one might look upon a father than as one might look upon a young man of one's own generation. I never even thought of you before to-day except as somebody so much older and wiser, and altogether different from myself, that it didn't occur to me for a single moment you yourself wouldn't feel so also.' Audouin's despairing face brightened a little as he said, 'If that is all, Miss Russell, mayn't I venture to look upon your answer as not quite final; mayn't I hope to leave the question open yet a little, so that you may see what time may do for me, now you know my inmost feeling? Don't crush me hopelessly at once; let me linger a little before you utterly reject me. If you only knew how deeply you have entwined yourself into my very being, you wouldn't cast me off so lightly and so easily.' Gwen looked at him with a face full of unfeigned pity. 'Mr. Audouin,' she answered, 'I know how truly you are speaking. I should read your nature badly if I didn't see it in your very eyes. But I cannot hold you out any hope in any way. I like you immensely; I feel profoundly sorry to have to speak so plainly to you. I know how great an honour you confer upon me by your offer; but I can't accept it—it's quite impossible that I can ever accept it. I like you, and respect you more than I ever liked or respected any other person, except one; but there is one person I like and respect even more, so you see at once why it's quite impossible that I should listen to you about this any longer.' 'I understand,' Audouin answered slowly. 'I understand. I see it all now. Colin Churchill has been beforehand with me. While I hesitated, he has acted.' Gwen's lips broke for a moment into a quiet smile, and she murmured softly, 'No, not Colin Churchill, Mr. Audouin, not Colin Churchill, but Hiram Winthrop. I think, as I have said so much, I ought to tell you it is Hiram Winthrop.' Audouin's brain reeled round madly in grief and indignation at that astonishing revelation. Hiram Winthrop! His own familiar friend; his dearest ward and pupil! Was it he, then, who had stolen this prize of life, unseen, unsuspected, beneath his very eyesight? If Gwen had never fancied that Audouin could fall in love with her, neither could Audouin ever have suspected it of Hiram Winthrop. If Gwen had looked upon Audouin as a confirmed old bachelor of the elder generation, Audouin had looked upon Hiram as a mere boy, too young yet to meddle with such serious fancies. And now the boy had stolen Gwen from him unawares, and for half a second, all loyal as he was, Audouin felt sick and angry in soul at what he figured to himself as Hiram's cruel and ungrateful duplicity. 'Hiram Winthrop!' he muttered angrily. 'Hiram Winthrop! How unworthy of him! how unkind of him! how unjust of him to come between me and the one object he ever knew me set my heart upon!' 'But, Mr. Audouin,' Gwen cried in warmer tones, 'Hiram no more dreamt of this than I did; he took it for granted all along that you knew he loved me, but he never spoke of it because you know he is always reserved about everything that concerns his own personal feelings.' The marble seat reeled and the ground shook beneath Audouin's feet as he sat there, his brow between his hands, and his elbows upon his knees, trying to realise the true bearings of what Gwen was saying to him. Yes, he saw it all plainly now; it dawned upon him slowly: in his foolish, selfish, blind preoccupation, he had been thinking only of his own love, and wholly overlooking Gwen's and Hiram's. 'What a short-sighted fool I have been, Miss Russell!' he cried, broken-spirited. 'Yes, yes; Hiram is not to blame. I only am to blame for my own folly. If Hiram loves you, and you love Hiram, I have only one duty left before me: to leave you this moment, and to do whatever in me lies to make you and Hiram as happy as I can. No two people on this earth have ever been dearer to me. I must try to change my attitude to you both, and learn that I am old enough to help even now to make you happy.' In his perfect loyalty, Audouin almost forgot at once his passing twinge of distrust for Hiram, and thought only of his own blindness. He rose slowly from the marble seat, and Gwen noticed that as he rose he seemed to have aged visibly in those few minutes. The suddenness and utterness of the disappointment had unmistakably crushed him. He staggered a little as he rose; then in a faltering voice he said, 'Good-bye, good-bye, Miss Russel.' Gwen turned away her face, and answered regretfully, 'Good-bye, Mr. Audouin.' He raised his hat, with a touch of old-fashioned courtesy in his formal bow, and walked away quickly, out of the garden, and back towards the hotel where he had been then stopping. For some time his disappointment sat upon him so heavily that he could only brood over it in a vague, half unconscious fashion; but at last, as he passed the corner of the big piazza a thought seemed to flash suddenly across his dazzled brain, and he turned round at once, in feverish haste, pacing back moodily towards the Villa Panormi. 'How selfish of me!' he said to himself in angry self-expostulation, 'how selfish and cruel of me to have forgotten it! How small and narrow and petty we men are, after all! In my dejection at my own disappointment, I have quite overlooked poor Hiram. Love may be all that the poets say about it—I don't know, I can't say—how should I, a lonely wild man of the woods, who know not the ways of women? But one thing I do know: it's a terrible absorbing and self-centring passion. A man thinks only of him and her, and forgets all the rest of the world entirely, as though he were a solitary savage wooing in the gloom his solitary squaw. And yet they write about it as though it were the very head and front of all the beatitudes!' He walked, or almost ran, to the Villa Panormi, and looked anxiously for Gwen in the alleys of the garden. She wasn't there: she had gone in evidently. He must go to the door and boldly ask for her. Was the signorina at home, he enquired of the servant. Yes, the signorina had just come in: what name, signor? Audouin handed the man his card, and waited with a burning heart in the long open salon. In a minute Gwen sent down word by her English maid: she was very sorry; would Mr. Audouin kindly excuse her?—she was suffering from headache. 'Tell Miss Russell,' Audouin answered, so earnestly that the girl guessed at once something of his business, 'that I must see her without delay. The matter is important, immediate, urgent, and of more interest to her than even to me.' He waited again for fully ten minutes. Then Gwen sailed into the room, queen-like as ever, and advanced towards him smiling; but he saw she had been crying, and had bathed her eyes to hide it, and he felt flattered in his heart even then at that womanly tribute of sympathy to his bitter disappointment. 'Miss Russell,' he said, with all the sincerity of his inner nature speaking vividly in his very voice, 'I am more sorry than I can say that I'm compelled to come back so soon and speak with you again after what has just happened. We may still be always firm friends, I'm sure; I shall try to feel towards you always as an elder brother: but I know you would have liked a day or two to pass before we met again on what is to me at least a new footing. Still, I felt compelled to come back and tell you something which it is of great importance that you should know at once. Miss Bussell, you mustn't on any account breathe a word of all this in any way to Hiram. Don't think I'm speaking without good reason. As you value your own happiness, don't breathe a word of it to Hiram.' Gwen saw from his exceeding earnestness that he had some definite ground for this odd warning, and it piqued her curiosity to know what that ground could possibly be. 'Why, Mr. Audouin?' she asked simply. 'Because it would cause you great distress, I believe,' Audouin answered evasively. 'Because it would probably prevent his ever marrying you. Oh, Miss Russell, do please promise me that you'll say nothing at all to him about it.' 'But I can't promise, Mr. Audouin,' Gwen answered slowly. 'I can't promise. I feel I ought to tell him. I think a woman ought to tell her future husband everything.' 'Miss Russell,' Audouin went on, still more solemnly than before, 'I beg of you, I implore you, I beseech you, for the sake of your own future and Hiram's, don't say a word to him of this.' 'But why, why, Mr. Audouin? You give me no reason, no explanation. If you won't explain to me, you'll only frighten me the more into telling Hiram, because your manner seems so excited and so mysterious. I can't promise or refuse to promise until I understand what you mean by it.' 'I had rather not explain to you,' Audouin went on hesitatingly. 'I should prefer not to have told you. Indeed, unless you compel me, I will never tell you. But from my own knowledge of Hiram's character I feel sure that if you let him know about this he will never, never marry you. He is so unselfish, so good, so delicately self-sacrificing, that if he hears of this he will think he mustn't claim you. I have known him, Miss Russell, longer than you have; I can count better on what he would do under any given circumstances. Most men are selfish and blind in love; I was so just now: I have been all along, when in my personal eagerness to win your esteem I never noticed what was indeed as clear as daylight, that Hiram must have been in love with you too. But Hiram is not selfish and blind, even in love; of that I'm certain. He would never marry you if he thought that by so doing he was putting himself in rivalry with me.' 'And why not?' Gwen asked, with her large eyes looking through and through Audouin's to their very centre. 'Why not with you in particular?' 'Because,' Audouin answered, faltering, and trying to withdraw his gaze from hers, but unsuccessfully, for she seemed to mesmerise him with her keen glance, 'because, Miss Bussell, if you force me to tell you, I have been of some little service at various times to Hiram, and have placed him under some slight obligations, whose importance his generous nature vastly overestimates. I am quite sure, from what I know of him, that if he thought I had ever dreamt of the possibility of asking you to put up with my poor little individuality, he would never feel himself at liberty to marry you; he would think he was being unfriendly and (as he would say) ungrateful. I dare say you will fancy to yourself that I am making him out but a cold lover. I am not, Miss Russell; I am giving him the highest praise in my power. I feel confident that, though he loved you as the apple of his eye, he wouldn't sacrifice what he thought honour and duty even for your sake.' Gwen looked at him steadily, and answered in a trembling voice, 'I will say nothing to him about it, Mr. Audouin, nothing at all until after we are married. Then, you know, then I must tell him.' 'Thank you,' Audouin said gently. 'That will do sufficiently. Thank you, thank you. If it hadn't been a matter of such urgency I wouldn't have troubled you with it now. But as I went along the road homeward, heavy at heart, as you may imagine, it struck me like a flash of lightning that you might speak to Hiram about it this very day, and that Hiram, if he heard it, might withdraw his pretensions, so to speak, and feel compelled to retire in my favour. And as he loves you, and as you love him, I should never have forgiven myself if that had happened—had even momentarily happened. You will have difficulties and perplexities enough in any case without my adding my mite to them, I feel certain. And I was so appalled at my own wicked selfishness in having overlooked all this, that I felt constrained to come back, even at the risk of offending you, and set the matter at rest this very afternoon. I won't detain you a moment longer now. Good-bye, Miss Russell, good-bye, and thank you.' Gwen looked at him again as he stood there, with his face so evidently pained with the lasting pain of his great disappointment, utterly oblivious of self even at that supreme hour in his thought for his friend, yet reproaching himself so unfeignedly for his supposed selfishness, and she thought as she looked how truly noble he was at heart after all. The outer shell of affectation and mannerism was all gone now, and the true inner core of the man lay open before her in all its beautiful trustful simplicity. At that moment Gwen Howard-Russell felt as if she really loved Lothrop Audouin—loved him as a daughter might love a pure, generous, tender father. She looked at him steadily for a minute as he stood there with his hand outstretched for hers, and then, giving way to her natural womanly impulse for one second, she cried, 'Oh, Mr. Audouin, I mustn't love you, I mustn't love you; but I can't tell you how deeply I respect and admire you!' And as she spoke, to Audouin's intense surprise and joy—yes, joy—she laid both her hands tenderly upon his shoulders, drew him down to her unresisting, and kissed him once upon the face as she had long ago kissed her lost and all but forgotten mother. Then, with crimson cheeks, and eyes flooded with tears, she rushed away, astonished and half angry with herself for the audacious impulse, yet proudly beautiful as ever, leaving Audouin alone and trembling in the empty salon. Audouin was too pure at heart himself not to accept the kiss exactly as it was intended. He drew himself up once more, ashamed of the fluttering in his unworthy bosom, which he could not help but feel; and saying in his own soul gently, 'Poor little guileless heart! she takes me for better than I am, and treats me accordingly,' he sallied forth once more into the narrow gloomy streets of Rome, and walked away hurriedly, he cared not whither. CHAPTER XLII. A DISTINGUISHED CRITIC. I t was a very warm morning in the Via Colonna, for many weeks had passed, and May was coming on: it was a warm morning, and Hiram was plodding away drearily by himself at his heroic picture of the Capture of Babylon, with a stalwart young Roman from the Campagna sitting for his model of the Persian leader, when the door unexpectedly opened, and a quiet-looking old gentleman entered suddenly, alone and unannounced. This was one of Hiram's days of deepest despondency, and he was heartily sorry for the untimely interruption. 'Mr. Churchill sent me to look at your pictures.' the stranger said in explanation, in a very soft, pleasant voice. 'He told me I might possibly see some things here that were really worth the looking at.' Poor Hiram sighed somewhat wearily. 'Churchill has too good an opinion altogether of my little attempts,' he said in all sincerity. 'I'm afraid you'll find very little here that's worthy your attention. May I venture to ask your name?' 'Never mind my name, sir,' the old gentleman said, with a blandness that contrasted oddly with the rough wording of his brusque sentences. 'Never you mind my name, I say,—what's that to you, pray? My name's not at all in question. I've come to see your pictures.' 'Are you a dealer, perhaps?' Hiram suggested, with another sigh at his own excessive frankness in depreciating what was after all his bread and butter—and a great deal more to him. 'You want to buy possibly? 'No, I don't want to buy,' the old gentleman answered flatly, with a certain mild and kindly fierceness. 'I don't want to buy certainly. I'm not a dealer; I'm an art-critic.' 'Oh, indeed,' Hiram said politely. The qualification is not one usually calculated to endear a visitor to a struggling young artist. 'And you, I should say by your accent, are an American. That's bad, to begin with. What on earth induced you to leave that cursed country of yours? Oh generation of vipers—don't misinterpret that much-mistaken word generation; it means merely son or offspring—who has warned you to flee from the wrath that is?' Hiram smiled in spite of himself. 'Myself,' he said; 'my own inner prompting only.' 'Ha, that's better; so you fled from it. You escaped from the city of destruction. You saved yourself from Sodom and Gomorrah. Well, well, having had the misfortune to be born an American, what better thing could you possibly do? Creditable, certainly, very creditable. And now, since you have come to Rome to paint, pray what sort of wares have you got to show me?' Hiram pointed gravely to the unfinished Capture of Babylon. 'It won't do,' the old gentleman said decisively, after surveying the principal figures with a critical eye through his double eyeglass. 'Oh, no, it won't do at all. It's painted—I admit that; it's painted, solidly painted, which is always something nowadays, when coxcombs go splashing their brushes loosely about a yard or two of blank canvas, and then positively calling it a picture. It's painted, there's no denying it. Still, my dear sir, you'll excuse my saying so, but there's really nothing in it—absolutely nothing. What does it amount to, after all? A line farrago of tweedledum and tweedledee, in Assyrian armour and Oriental costume, and other unnatural, incongruous upholsterings, with a few Roman models stuck inside it all, to do duty instead of lay figures. Do you really mean to tell me, now, you think that was what the capture of Babylon actually looked like? Why, my dear sir, speaking quite candidly, I assure you, for my own part I much prefer the Assyrian bas-reliefs.' Hiram's heart sank horribly within him. He knew it, he knew it; it was all an error, a gigantic error. He had mistaken a taste for painting for a genius for painting. He would never, never, never make a painter; of that he was now absolutely certain. He could have sat down that moment with his face between his hands and cried bitterly, even as he had done years before when the deacon left him in the peppermint lot, but for the constraining presence of that mild-mannered ferocious oddly-compounded old gentleman. 'Is this any better?' he asked humbly, pointing with his brush-handle to the Second Triumvirate. 'No sir, it is not any better,' the relentless critic answered as fiercely yet as blandly as ever. 'In fact, if it comes to that, it's a great deal worse. Look at it fairly in the face and ask yourself what it all comes to. It's a group of three amiable sugar-brokers in masquerade costume discussing the current price-lists, and it isn't even painted, though it's by way of being finished, I suppose, as people paint nowadays. Is that drawing, for example,' and he stuck his forefinger upon young Cæsar's foreshortened foot, 'or that, or that, or that, or that, sir? Oh, no, no; dear me, no. This is nothing like either drawing or colouring. The figure, my dear sir—you'll excuse my saying so, but you haven't the most rudimentary conception even of drawing or painting the human figure.' Hiram coincided so heartily at that moment in this vigorous expression of adverse opinion, that but for Gwen he could have pulled out his pocket-knife on the spot and made a brief end of a life long failure. But the stranger only went coolly through the studio piece by piece, passing the same discouraging criticisms upon everything he saw, and after he had finally reduced poor Hiram to the last abyss of unutterable despair, he said pleasantly in his soft, almost womanly voice, 'Well, well, these are all sad trash, sad trash certainly. Not worth coming from America to Rome to paint, you must admit; certainly not. Who on earth was blockhead enough to tell you that you could ever possibly paint the figure? I don't understand this. Churchill's an artist; Churchill's a sculptor; Churchill knows what a human body's like, he's no fool, I know. What the deuce did he send me here for, I wonder? How on earth could he ever have imagined that those stuffed Guy Fawkeses and wooden marionettes and dancing fantoccini were real living men and women? Preposterous, preposterous. Stay. Let me think. Churchill said something or other about your trying landscape. Have you got any landscapes, young man, got any landscapes?' 'I've a few back here,' Hiram answered timidly, 'but I'm afraid they're hardly worth your serious consideration. They were mostly done before I left America, with very little teaching, or else on holidays here in Europe, in the Tyrol chiefly, without much advice or assistance from competent masters.' 'Bring them out!' the old gentleman said in a tone of command. 'Produce your landscapes. Let's see what this place America is like, this desert of newfangled towns without, any castles.' Hiram obeyed, and brought out the poor little landscapes, sticking them one after another on the easel in the light. There were the Thousand Island sketches, and the New York lakes, and the White Mountains, and a few pine-clad glens and dingles among the Tyrolese uplands and the lower Engadine. The stranger surveyed them all attentively through his double eyeglass with a stony critical stare, but still said absolutely nothing. Hiram stood by in breathless expectation. Perhaps the landscapes might fare better at this mysterious person's unsparing hands than the figure pieces. But no: when he had finished, the stranger only said calmly, 'Is that all?' 'All, all,' Hiram murmured in blank despair. 'The work of my lifetime.' The stranger looked at him steadily. 'Young man,' he said with the voice and manner of a Hebrew prophet, 'believe me, you ought never to have come away from your native America.' 'I know it, I know it,' Hiram cried, in the profoundest depth of self-abasement. 'No, you ought never to have come away from America. As I wrote years ago in the Seven Domes of Florence——' 'What!' Hiram exclaimed, horror-stricken. 'The Seven Domes of Florence! Then—then—then you are Mr. Truman?' 'Yes,' the stranger went on unmoved, without heeding his startled condition. 'My name is John Truman, and, as I wrote years ago in the Seven Domes of Florence——' Hiram never heard the end of his visitor's long sonorous quotation from his former self (in five volumes), for he sank back unmanned into an easy-chair, and fairly moaned aloud in the exceeding bitterness of his disappointment. John Truman! It was he, then, the great art-critic of the age; the man whose merest word, whose slightest breath could make or mar a struggling reputation; the detector of fashionable shams, the promoter of honest artistic workmanship—it was he that had pronounced poor Hiram's whole life a miserable failure, and had remitted him remorselessly once more to the corn and potatoes of Geauga County. The tears filled Hiram's eyes as he showed the great man slowly and regretfully out of his studio; and when that benevolent beaming face had disappeared incongruously with the parting Parthian shot, 'Go back to your woods and forests, sir; go back immediately to your woods and forests,' Hiram quite forgot the very presence of the decked-out Persian commander, and burst into hot tears such as he had not shed before since he ran away to nurse his boyish sorrows alone by himself in the old familiar blackberry bottom. How very differently he might have felt if only he could have followed that stooping figure down the Via Colonna and heard the bland old gentleman muttering audibly to himself, 'Oh, dear no, the young barbarian ought never to have come away from his native America. No castles—certainly not, but there's nature there clearly, a great deal of nature; and he knows how to paint it too, he knows how to paint it. Great purity of colouring in his Tyrolese sketches; breadth and brilliancy very unusual in so young an artist; capital robust drawing; a certain glassy liquid touch that I like about it all, too, especially in the water. Who on earth ever told him to go and paint those incomprehensible Assyrian monstrosities? Ridiculous, quite ridiculous. He ought to have concentrated himself on his own congenial lakes and woodlands. He has caught the exact spirit of them—weird, mysterious, solemn, primitive, unvulgarised, antidemotic, titanic, infinite. The draughtsmanship of the stratification in the rocks is quite superb in its originality. Oh, dear no, he ought never to have come away at all from his native natural America. CHAPTER XLIII. THE SLOUGH OF DESPOND. M r. Audouin,' Hiram cried, bursting into his friend's rooms in a fever of despair, three days later, 'I've come to tell you I'm going back to America!' 'Back to America, Hiram!' Audouin cried in dismay, for he guessed the cause instinctively at once. 'Why, what on earth do you want to do that for?' Hiram flung himself back in moody dejection on the ottoman in the corner. 'Why,' he said, 'do you know who has been to see me? Mr. Truman.' 'Well, Hiram?' Audouin murmured, trembling. 'Well, he tells me I've made a complete mistake of it. I'm not a painter, I can't be a painter, and I never could possibly make a painter. Oh, Mr. Audouin, Mr. Audouin, I knew it myself long ago, but till this very week I've hoped against hope, and never ventured fully to realise it. But I know now he tells the truth. I can't paint, I tell you, I can't paint—no, not that much!' And he snapped his fingers bitterly in his utter humiliation. Audouin drew a chair over softly to his friend's side, and laid his hand with womanly tenderness upon the listless arm. 'Hiram,' he said in a tone of deep self-reproach, 'it's all my fault; my fault, and mine only. I am to blame for all this. I wanted to help and direct and encourage you; and in the end, I've only succeeded in making both of us supremely miserable!' 'Oh, no,' Hiram cried, taking Audouin's hand warmly in his own, 'not your fault, dear Mr. Audouin, not your fault, nor mine, but nature's. You thought there was more in me than there actually was—that was kindly and friendly and well-meant of you. You fancied you had found an artistic genius, an oasis in the sandy desert of Geauga County, and you wanted to develop and assist him. It was generous and noble of you; if you were misled, it was your own sympathetic, appreciative, disinterested nature that misled you. You were too enthusiastic. You always thought better of me than I have ever thought of myself; but if that's a fault, it's a fault on the nobler side, surely. No, no, nobody is to blame for this but myself, my own feeble self, that cannot rise, whatever I may do, to the difficult heights you would have me fly to.' Audouin looked at him long and silently. In his own heart, he had begun to feel that Hiram's heroic figure-painting had turned out a distinct failure For that figure-painting he, Lotlirop Audouin, was alone responsible. But, even in spite of the great name of Truman urged against him, he could hardly believe that Hiram would not yet succeed in landscape. 'Did Truman see the Tyrolese sketches?' he asked anxiously at last. 'Yes, he did, Mr. Audouin.' 'And what did he say about them?' 'Simply that he thought I ought never to have come away from America.' Audouin drew a long breath. 'This is very serious, Hiram,' he said slowly. 'I apprehend certainly that this is very serious. Truman's opinion is worth a great deal; but, after all, it isn't everything. I've led you wrong so long and so often, my poor boy, that I'm almost afraid to advise you any farther; and yet, do you know, I can't help somehow believing that you will really do great things yet in landscape.' 'Never, never,' Hiram answered firmly. 'I shall never do anything better than the edge of the lake at Chattawauga!' 'But you have done great things, Hiram,' Audouin cried, warming up with generous enthusiasm, just in proportion as his protégés spirits sank lower and lower. 'My dear fellow, you have done great things already. I'll stake my reputation upon it, Hiram, that the lake shore at Chattawauga's a piece of painting that'll even yet live and be famous.' Hiram shook his head gloomily. 'No, no,' he said; 'I mean to take Mr. Truman's advice, and go back to hoe corn and plant potatoes in Muddy Creek Valley. That's just about what I'm fit for.' 'But, Hiram,' his friend said, coming closer and closer to him, 'you mustn't dream of doing that. In justice to me you really mustn't. I've misled you and wasted your time, I know, by inducing you to go in for this wretched figure-painting. It doesn't suit you and your idiosyncrasy: that I see now quite clearly. All my life long it's been a favourite doctrine of mine, my boy, that the only true way of salvation lies in perfect fidelity to one's own inner promptings. And how have I carried out that gospel of mine in your case? Why, by absurdly inducing you to neglect the line you naturally excel in, and to take up with a line that you don't personally care a pin for. Now, dear Hiram, my dear, good fellow, don't go and punish me for this by returning in a huff' to Geauga County. Have pity upon me, and spare me this misery, this degradation. I've suffered much already, though you never knew it, about this false direction I've tried to give your genius (for you have genius, I'm sure you have ): I've lain awake night after night and reproached myself for it bitterly: don't go now and put me to shame by making my mistake destroy your whole future career and chances as a painter. It need cost you nothing to remain. I misled you by getting you to paint those historical subjects. I see they were a mistake now, and I will buy the whole of them from you at your own valuation. That will be only just, for it was for me really that you originally painted them. Do, do please reconsider this hasty decision.' Hiram rocked himself to and fro piteously upon the ottoman, but only answered, 'Impossible, impossible. You are too kind, too generous.' Audouin looked once more at his dejected dispirited face, and then, pausing a minute or two, said quietly and solemnly, 'And how about Gwen, Hiram?' Hiram started up in surprise and discomfiture, and asked hastily, 'Why, what on earth do you know about Gwen—about Miss Russell, I mean—Mr. Audouin?' 'I can't tell you how I've surprised your secret, Hiram,' Audouin said, his voice trembling a little as he spoke: 'perhaps some day I may tell you, and perhaps never. But I've found it all out, and I ask you, my boy, for Gwen's sake—for Miss Russell's sake—to wait awhile before returning so rashly to America. Hiram, you owe it as a duty to her not to run away from her, and fame and fortune, at the first failure.' Hiram flung himself down upon the ottoman again in a frenzy of despondency. 'That's just why I think I must go at once, Mr. Audouin,' he cried, in his agony. 'I only know two alternatives. One is America; the other is the Tiber.' 'Hiram, Hiram!' his friend said soothingly. 'Yes, yes, Mr. Audouin, I know all that, I know what you want to say to me. But I can't drag down Gwen—born and brought up as she has been—I can't drag her down with me to a struggling painter's pot-boiling squalidness. I can't do it, and I won't do it, and I oughtn't to do it; and the kindest thing for her sake, and for all our sakes, would be for me to get out of it all at once and altogether.' 'Then you will go, Hiram?' 'Yes, I will go, Mr. Audouin, by the very next Trieste steamer.' He rose slowly from the ottoman, shook his friend's hand in silence, and went away without another word. Audouin saw by his manner that he really meant it, and he sat down wondering what good he could do to countervail this great unintentional evil he had done to Hiram. 'Lothrop Audouin,' he said to himself harshly, 'a pretty mess you have made now of your own life and of Hiram Winthrop's! Is this your perfect fidelity to the inner promptings—this your obedience to the unspoken voice of the divine human consciousness? You poor, purblind, affected, silly, weak, useless creature, I hate you, I hate you. Go, now, see what you can do to render happy these two better lives that you have done your best to ruin for ever.' If any other man had used such words of Lothrop Audouin, he would have shown himself a bitter, foolish, short-sighted cynic. But as Lothrop Audouin said it himself, of course he had a full right to his own opinion. Yet some men, not wholly bad men either, might have rejoiced at the thought that they would thus get rid of a successful rival. They would have said to themselves, 'When Hiram is gone, Gwen will soon forget him, and then I may have a chance at least of finally winning her favour.' In this belief, they would have urged Hiram, in a halfhearted way only, not to return to America; and if afterwards he persisted in his foolish intention, they might have said to themselves, 'I did my best to keep him, and now I wash my hands forever of it.' All's fair, says the proverb, in love and war; and many men still seem to think so. But Audouin was made of different mould; and having once frankly wooed and lost Gwen, he had no single shadow of a thought now left in his chivalrous mind save how to redress this great wrong he conceived he had done them, and how to make Gwen and Hiram finally happy. He sat there long, musing and wondering, beating out a plan of action for himself in his own brain, till at last he saw some gleam of hope clear before him. Then he rose, took down his hat quickly from the peg, and hurried round to Colin Churchill's studio. He found Colin working away busily at the moist clay of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra. 'Churchill,' he said seriously, 'you must put away your work for an hour. I want to speak to you about something very important.' Colin laid down his graver reluctantly, and turned to look at his unexpected visitor. 'Why, great heavens, Mr. Audouin,' he said, 'what can be the matter with you? You really look as white as that marble.' 'Matter enough, Churchill. Who do you think has been to see Winthrop? Why, John Truman.' 'Oh, I know,' Colin answered cheerfully. 'I sent him myself. And what did he say then?' 'He said that Winthrop ought to go back to America, and that he would never, never, never make a decent painter.' Colin whistled to himself quickly, and then said, 'The dickens he did! How remarkable! But did Winthrop show him the landscapes?' 'Yes, and from what he says, Truman seems to have thought worse of them than even he thought of the figure pieces.' 'Impossible!' Colin cried incredulously. 'I don't believe it; I can't believe it. Truman knows a landscape when he sees it. There must be some mistake somewhere.' 'I'm afraid not,' Audouin answered sadly. 'I've begun to despair about poor Winthrop myself, a great deal of late, and to reproach myself terribly for the share I've had in putting his genius on the wrong metals. The thing we've got to do now is to face the actuality, and manage the best we can for him under the circumstances. Churchill, do you know, Hiram threatens to go back to America by the next steamer, and take to farming for a livelihood.' Colin whistled low again. 'He mustn't be allowed to do it,' he said quickly. 'He must be kept in Rome at all hazards. If we have to lock him up in jail or put him into a lunatic asylum, we must keep him here for the present, whatever comes of it. I'm sure as I am of anything, Mr. Audouin, that Hiram Winthrop has a splendid future still before him.' 'Well, Churchill,' Audouin said calmly, 'I want you to help me in a little scheme I've decided upon. I'm going to make my will, and I want you to be trustee under it.' 'Make your will, Mr. Audouin! Why, what on earth has that to do with Hiram Winthrop? I hope you'll live for many years yet, to see him paint whole square yards of splendid pictures.' Audouin smiled a little sadly. 'It's well to be prepared against all contingencies,' he said with a forced gaiety of tone: 'and I want to provide against one which seems to me by no means improbable. There's no knowing when any man may die. Don't the preachers tell us that our life hangs always by a thread, and that the sword of Damocles is suspended forever above us?' Colin looked at him keenly and searchingly. Audouin met his gaze with frank open eyes, and did not quail for a moment before his evident curiosity. 'Well, Churchill,' he went on more gravely, 'I'm going to make my will, and I'll tell you how I'm going to make it. I propose to leave all my property in trust to you, as a charity in perpetuity. I intend that you shall appoint some one young American artist as Audouin Art Scholar at Home, and pay to him the interest on that property, so long as he considers that he stands in need of it. As soon as he, by the exercise of his profession, is earning such an income that he feels he can safely do without it, then I leave it to him and you to choose some other American Art student for the scholarship, to be enjoyed in like manner. On that second student voluntarily vacating the scholarship, you, he, and the first student shall similarly choose a third incumbent; and so on for ever. What do you think of the plan, Churchill, will it hold water?' 'But why shouldn't you leave it outright to Winthrop?' Colin asked, a little puzzled by this apparently roundabout proceeding. 'Wouldn't it be simpler and more satisfactory to give it to him direct, instead of in such a complicated fashion?' 'Who said a word about Winthrop being the first scholar?' Audouin answered with grave irony. 'You evidently misunderstand the spirit of the bequest. I want to advance American art, not to make a present to Hiram Winthrop. Besides,' and here Audouin lowered his voice a little more confidentially, 'if I left it to Hiram outright, I feel pretty confident he wouldn't accept it; he'd refuse the bequest as a personal matter. I know him, Churchill, better than you do; I know his proud sensitive nature, and the way he would shrink from accepting a fortune as a present even from a dead man—even from me, his most intimate friend and spiritual father. But if it's left in this way, he can hardly refuse; it will be only for a few years, till he gets his name up; it'll leave him free meanwhile to live and marry (if he wants to), and it'll be burdened with a condition, too—that he should go on studying and practising art, and that he should assist at the end of his own tenure in electing another scholar. That, I hope, would reconcile him (if the scholarship were offered to him) to the necessity of accepting and using it for a few years only. However, I don't wish, Churchill, to suggest any person whatsoever to you as the first student; I desire to leave your hands perfectly free and untied in that matter.' 'I see; I understand,' Cohn answered, smiling gently to himself. 'I will offer it, should the occasion ever arise, to the most promising young American student that I can anywhere discover.' 'Quite right, Churchill; exactly what I wish you to do. Then you'll accept the trust, and carry it out for me, will you? 'On one condition only, Mr. Audouin,' Colin said firmly, looking into his blanched face and straining eyeballs. 'On one condition only. Let me be quite frank with you—no suicide.' Audouin started a little. 'Why, that's a fair enough proviso,' he answered slowly after a moment. 'Yes, I promise that. No suicide. We shall trust entirely to the chapter of accidents.' 'In that case,' Colin continued, reassured, 'I hope we may expect that the trusteeship will be a sinecure for many a long year to come. But I fail to see how all this will benefit poor Winthrop in the immediate future, if he means to sail for New York by the next steamer.' 'The two questions ought to be kept entirely distinct,' Audouin went on sharply, with perfect gravity. 'I fail myself to perceive how any possible connection can exist between them. Still, we will trust to the chapter of accidents. There's no knowing what a day may bring forth. We must try at least to keep Wintlirop here in Rome for another fortnight. That's not so very long to stay, and yet a great deal may be done in a fortnight. I'll go and look out at once for an American lawyer to draft my will for me. Meanwhile, will you just sign this joint note from both of us to Winthrop?' He sat down hurriedly at Cohn's desk, and scribbled off a short note to poor Hiram. 'Dear Winthrop,—Will you as a personal favour to us both kindly delay your departure from Rome for another fortnight, by which time we hope we may be able to make different arrangements for you? 'Lothrop Audouin.' He passed the note to Colin, and the pen with it. Colin read the doubtfully worded note over twice in a hesitating manner, and then, after some mental deliberation, added below in his clear masculine hand—'Colin Churchill.' 'Remember, Mr. Audouin,' he said as a parting warning. 'It's a bargain between us. No suicide.' 'Oh, all right,' Audouin answered lightly with the door in his hand. 'We trust entirely to the chapter of accidents.'

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