Babylon. Volume 2

‘Bless my soul, you don’t mean to say so! the colonel ejaculated parenthetically.

‘And modern practice was doubtless founded on the mistake of supposing that, because the torsos we dig up are white now, they were white originally. But even the example of the Greeks doesn’t settle every question without appeal. We’ve tried white marble, and found it succeed. We’ve tried tinting, and found it wanting. The fact is, you see, the attention of the eye can’t be distracted. Either it attends to form, or else it attends to colour; rarely and imperfectly to both together. Take a vase. If it’s covered with figures or flowers, our attention’s distracted from the general outline to the painted objects it encloses. If its colouring’s uniform, we think only of the beauty of form, because our attention isn’t distracted from it by conflicting sensations. That’s the long and the short of it, I think. Beauty of form’s a higher taste than beauty of colour – at least, so we sculptors always fancy.’

Colin delivered these remarks as if he intended them for the colonel (though they were really meant for Miss Gwen’s enlightenment), and the colonel was decidedly flattered by the cunning tribute to his tastes and interests thus delicately implied. But Gwen drank in every word the young man said with the deepest attention, and managed to make him go on with his subject till he had warmed to it thoroughly, and had launched out upon his own peculiar theories as to the purpose and function of his chosen art. All along, however, Colin pointed his remarks so cleverly at the colonel, while giving Gwen her fair share of the conversation, that the colonel quite forgot his first suspicions about the young sculptor, and grew gradually quite cordial and friendly in demeanour. So well did they get on together that, by the time they had had lunch out of the colonel’s basket, Colin had given the colonel his ideas as to the heinousness of palming off as sculpture veiled ladies and crying babies (both of which freaks of art, by the way, the colonel had hitherto vastly admired); while the colonel in return had imparted to Colin his famous stories of how he was once nearly killed by a tiger in a jungle at Boolundshuhr in the North-West Provinces, and how he had assisted to burn a fox out in a hunt at Gib., and how he had shot the biggest wapiti ever seen for twenty years in the neighbourhood of Ottawa. All which surprising adventures Colin received with the same sedulous show of polite interest that the colonel had extended in turn to his own talk about pictures and statues.

At last, they reached Dijon, and there Colin got out, as in duty bound, to inquire whether his master was in want of anything. Sir Henry didn’t need much, so Colin returned quickly to his own carriage.

‘You have a friend in a coupé-lit, I see,’ the colonel said, opening the door for the young stranger. ‘An invalid, I suppose.’ Colin blushed visibly, so that Miss Gwen noticed his colour, and wondered what on earth could be the meaning of it. Till that moment, to say the truth, he had been so absorbed in his talk about art, and in observing Gwen (who interested him as all beautiful women interest a sculptor), that he had almost entirely forgotten, for the time being, his anomalous position. ‘No, not an invalid,’ he answered evasively, ‘but a very old gentleman.’ ‘Ah,’ the colonel put in, as the train moved away from Dijon station, ‘I don’t wonder people travel by coupe-lit when they can afford it, in spite of the prohibitive prices set upon it by these French companies. It’s most unpleasant having nothing but first-class carriages on the train. You have to travel with your own servants.’

Colin smiled feebly, but said nothing. It began to strike him that in the innocence of his heart he had made a mistake in being beguiled into conversation with these grand people. And yet it was their own fault. Miss Gwen had clearly done it all, with her seductive inquiries about art and artists.

‘Or rather,’ the colonel went on, ‘one can always put one’s own servants, of course, into another carriage; but one’s never safe against having to travel with other people’s. We’re lucky to-day in being a pleasant party all together (these French gentlemen, though they’re not companionable, are evidently very decent people); but sometimes, I know, I’ve had to travel on the Continent here, wedged in immovably between a fat lady’s-maid and a gentleman’s gentleman.’

Colin’s face burned hot and crimson. ‘I beg your pardon,’ he said, in a faltering voice, almost relapsing in his confusion into his aboriginal Dorsetshire, ‘but I ought, perhaps, to have told you sooner who you are travelling with. I am valet to Sir Henry Wilberforce: he is the gentleman in the coupé-lit, and he’s my master.’

The colonel sank back on his cushions with a face as white as marble, while Colin’s now flushed as red as a damask rose. ‘A valet!’ he cried faintly. ‘Gwen, my dear, did he say a valet? What can all this mean? Didn’t he tell us he was a sculptor going to Rome to practise his profession?’

‘I did,’ Colin answered defiantly, for he was on his mettle now. ‘I did tell you so, and it’s the truth. But I’m going as a valet. I couldn’t afford to go in any other way, and so I took a situation, meaning to use my spare time in Rome to study sculpture.’

The colonel rocked himself up and down irresolutely for a while; then he leant back a little more calmly in his seat, and gave himself up to a placid despair. ‘At the next stopping station,’ he thought to himself, ‘we must get out and change into another carriage.’ And he took up the ‘Continental Bradshaw’ with a sigh, to see if there was any chance of release before they got to Ambérieu.

But if the colonel was quite unmanned by this shocking disclosure, Miss Gwen’s self-possession and calmness of demeanour was still wholly unshaken. She felt a little ashamed, indeed, that the colonel should so openly let Colin see into the profound depths of his good Philistine soul; but she did her best to make up for it by seeming not in any way to notice her father’s chilling reception of the charming young artist’s strange intelligence. ‘A valet, papa,’ she cried in her sprightly way, as unconcernedly as if she had been accustomed to associating intimately with valets for the last twenty years; ‘how very singular! Why, I shouldn’t be at all surprised if this was that Mr. Churchill (I think the name was) that Eva told us all about, who did that beautiful bas-relief, you know, ever so long ago, for poor dear uncle Philip.’ Colin bowed, his face still burning. ‘That is my name,’ he said, pulling out a card, on which was neatly engraved the simple legend, ‘Mr. Colin Churchill, Sculptor.’

‘And you used to live at Wootton Mandeville?’ Gwen asked, with even more of interest in her tone than ever.

‘I did.’

‘Then, papa, this is the same Mr. Churchill. How very delightful! How lucky we should happen to meet you so, by accident! I call this really and truly a most remarkable and fortunate coincidence.’

‘Very remarkable indeed,’ the colonel moaned half inarticulately from his cushion.

Miss Gwen was a very clever woman, and she tried her best to whip up the flagging energies of the conversation for a fresh run; but it was all to no purpose. Colin was too hot and uncomfortable to continue the talk now, and the colonel was evidently by no means anxious to recommence it. His whole soul had concentrated itself upon the one idea of changing carriages at Ambérieu. So after a while Gwen gave up the attempt in despair, and the whole party was carried forward in moody silence towards the next station.

‘How awfully disappointing,’ Gwen thought to herself as she relapsed, vanquished, into her own corner. ‘He was talking so delightfully about such beautiful things, before papa went and made that horrid, stupid, unnecessary observation. Doesn’t papa see the difference between an enthusiast for art and a common footman? A valet! I can see it all now. Every bit as romantic as Millet, except for the sabots. No wonder his face glowed so when he spoke about the painter who had risen from the ranks of the people. I think I know now what it is they mean by inspiration.’

At last the train reached Amberieu. Great wits jump together; and as the carriage pulled up at the platform, both the colonel and Colin jumped out unanimously, to see whether they could find a vacant place in any other compartment. But the train was exactly like all other first-class expresses on the French railways; every place was taken through the whole long line of closely packed carriages. The colonel was the first to return. ‘Gwen,’ he whispered angrily to his daughter, in a fierce undertone, ‘there isn’t a solitary seat vacant in the whole of this confounded train: we shall have to go on with this manservant fellow, at least as far as Aix, and perhaps even all the way to Modane and Turin. Now mind, Gwen, whatever you do, don’t have anything more to say to him than you can possibly help, or I shall be very severely displeased with you. How could you go on trying to talk to him again after he’d actually told you he was a gentleman’s servant? I was ashamed of you, Gwen, positively ashamed of you. You’ve no proper pride or lady-like spirit in you. Why, the fellow himself had better feelings on the subject than you had, and was ashamed of himself for having taken us in so very disgracefully.’

‘He was not,’ Gwen answered stoutly. ‘He was ashamed of you, papa, for not being able to recognise an artist and a gentleman even when you see him.’

The colonel’s face grew black with wrath, and he was just going to make some angry rejoinder, when Colin’s arrival suddenly checked his further colloquy.

The young man’s cheeks were still hot and red, but he entered the carriage with composure and dignity, and took his place once more in solemn silence. After a minute he spoke in a low voice to the colonel: ‘I’ve been looking along the train, sir,’ he said, ‘to see if I could find myself a seat anywhere, but I can’t discover one. I think you would have felt more comfortable if I could have left you, and I don’t wish to stay anywhere, even in a public conveyance, where my society is not welcome. However, there’s no help for it, so I must stop here till we reach Turin, when some of the other passengers will no doubt be getting out. I shall not molest you further, and I regret exceedingly that in temporary forgetfulness of my situation I should have been tempted into seeming to thrust my acquaintance unsolicited upon you.’

The colonel, misunderstanding this proud apology, muttered half-audibly to himself: ‘Very right and proper of the young man, of course. He’s sorry he so far forgot his natural station as to enter into conversation with his superiors. Very right and proper of him, under the circumstances, certainly, though he ought never to have presumed to speak to us at all in the first instance.’

Gwen bit her lip hard, and tried to turn away her burning face, now as red almost as Colin’s; but she said nothing.

That evening, about twelve, as they were well on the way to the Mont Cenis, and Colin was dozing as best he might in his own corner, he suddenly felt a little piece of pasteboard thrust quietly into his half-closed right hand. He looked up with a start. The colonel was snoring peacefully, and it was Miss Gwen’s fingers that had pushed the card into his hollow hand. He glanced at it casually by the dim light of the lamp. It contained only a few words. The engraved part ran thus: ‘Miss Gwen Howard-Russell, Denhurst.’ Underneath, in pencil, was a brief note – ‘Excuse my father’s rudeness. I shall come to see your studio at Rome. G. H. R.’

Minna was the prettiest girl Colin Churchill had ever seen; but Miss Howard-Bussell had exquisitely regular features, and when her big eyes met his for one flash that moment, they somehow seemed to thrill his nature through and through with a sort of sudden mesmeric influence.

CHAPTER XVIII. HIRAM IN WONDERLAND

Just a week after Colin Churchill reached Rome, three passengers by an American steamer stood in the big gaudy refreshment-room at Lime Street Station, Liverpool, waiting for the hour for the up express to start for London.

‘We’d better have a little lunch before we get off,’ St in Churchill said to his two companions, ‘Don’t you think so, Mr. Audouin?’

Audouin nodded. ‘For my part,’ he said, ‘I shall have a Bath bun and a glass of ale. They remind one so delightfully of England, Will you give me a glass of bitter, please.’

Hiram drew back a little in surprise. He gazed at the gorgeous young lady who pulled the handle of the beer-engine (of course he had never seen a woman serving drink before), and then he glanced inquiringly at Sam Churchill. ‘Do tell me,’ he whispered in an awe-struck undertone; ‘is that a barmaid?’ Sam hardly took in the point of the question for the moment, it seemed so natural to him to see a girl drawing beer at an English refreshment-room, though in the land of his adoption that function is always performed by a male attendant, known as a saloon-keeper; but he answered unconcernedly: ‘Well, yes, she’s about that, I reckon, though I dare say she wouldn’t admire at you to call her so.’ Hiram looked with all his eyes agog upon the gorgeous young lady. ‘Well,’ he said slowly, half to himself, ‘that’s just charming. A barmaid! Why it’s exactly the same as if it were in “Tom Jones” or “Roderick Random.”’

Sam Churchill’s good-humoured face expanded slowly into a broad smile. That was a picturesque point of view of barmaids which he had never before conceived as possible ‘What’ll you take, Hiram?’ he asked. ‘This is a pork-pie here; will you try it?’

‘A pork-pie!’ Hiram cried, enchanted.

‘A pork-pie! You don’t mean to say so! Will I try it? I should think I would, rather. Why, you know, Sam, one reads about pork-pies in Dickens!’