Babylon. Volume 3

Minna’s face gave her only answer, and Colin accepted it silently with another kiss.

There was a minute’s pause again (the Colian is really such a very awkward place for lovemaking, with all those horrid prying old priests poking about everywhere), and then Minna began once more: ‘You see, Colin, you seemed so cold and indifferent. You were always so wrapped up in your marble and your statues, and you didn’t appear to care a bit for anything but art, till I almost grew to hate it. Oh, Colin, I know the things you make are the most beautiful that ever were moulded, but I almost hated them, because you seemed to think of nothing on earth but your clay and your sculpture. I was afraid you only liked me; I didn’t feel sure whether you really loved me.’

‘Minna,’ Colin said soberly, standing up before her and looking full into those bright black eyes straight in front of him, ‘I love you with all the love in my nature. I have loved you ever since we were children together, and I have never for one moment ceased from loving you. How could I, when you were Minna? If I ever seemed cold and careless, darling, it was only because I loved you so thoroughly and unquestioningly that it didn’t occur to me to waste words in telling you what I thought you yourself could never question. My darling, if I’ve caused you doubt or pain, I can’t tell you how sorry I am for it. I have worked for you, and for you only, all these years. Don’t you remember, little woman, long ago at Wootton, how I always used to make images for Minna?

Well, I’ve been making images for Minna ever since. I never for a moment fancied you didn’t know it. But now, as I love you, and as you love me, tell me, darling, will you marry me on Thursday fortnight? Don’t say no, or wait to think about it, but answer me “yes” at once; now do’ee, Minna, do’ee.’

That half-unconscious, half-artful return on Colin’s part to the old loved familiar dialect of their peasant childhood was more than Minna’s bursting little heart could ever have resisted, even if she had wanted to – which she certainly didn’t. With the tears once more trickling slowly down her cheek, she answered softly, ‘Yes, Colin;’ and Colin pressed her hand a second time in token of the completed contract. And then the two turned slowly back towards the great city, and Minna tried to dry her eyes and look as though nothing at all out of the way had happened against her return to the Via Clementina.

Gwen and Hiram Winthrop, in their little cottage in North Wales, are within easy reach of many wild bits that exactly suit Hiram’s canvas. His natural genius has full play now, and at the Academy every year there are few pictures more studiously avoided by the crowd, and more carefully observed by the best judges, than Mr. Winthrop’s, the famous American landscape painter’s. Now and then he pays a short visit to America, and sketches unbroken nature, as he alone can sketch it, in the Adirondacks, and the White Mountains, and the Upper Alleghanies; but for the most part, as Gwen simply phrases it, ‘Wales and Scotland are quite good enough for us.’ Once a year, too, he runs across for a month or six weeks to Rome and Florence, where Colin and Minna are always glad to give him and his wife a hearty welcome. Even the colonel has relented somewhat in a grim official Anglo-Indian fashion, and as he jogs Gwen’s youngest boy upon his knee to the tune of some Hindustani jingle about Warren Hastings, he reflects to himself that after all that shockheaded Yankee painter fellow isn’t really such a bad sort of person by way of a son-in-law.

And Audouin? Audouin has sold Lakeside, and flits to and fro uneasily between Europe and America in a somewhat vague and purposeless fashion. Sometimes he stops with Colin Churchill at Rome (on a strict pledge that he won’t go out alone without leave to stroll upon the Campagna), and sometimes he wanders by himself, knapsack on back, among the Swiss or Tyrolese mountains; but most often he gravitates towards Bryn-y-mynydd, on the slopes of Aran, where Gwen still greets him always in most daughterly fashion with a kiss of welcome. Gwen’s little boys are firm as a rock upon one point, that except daddy, there isn’t a man in the world at all to be compared for starting a squirrel or scaring a pine marten to Uncle Audouin. But what his precise claim to uncleship may be is a genealogical question that has never for a moment troubled their simple unsophisticated little intellects. They hold ingenuously that a rocking-horse apiece upon their birthdays, and a bright new gold half-sovereign on every visit, is quite sufficient guarantee for that naïf and expansive title of kinship.

THE END