CHAPTER XIX.
READ BY ANOTHER'S EYES.
On looking at the picture, the next day, Bella was painfully dissatisfied with her work. What she had done with so much care and diligence seemed to her false in drawing and expression. She grew positively angry over it, and would have made a fresh beginning had not Clodwig, by his gentle persuasions and judicious praise of the many excellencies of her picture, succeeded in soothing her. She could not help saying, however, with some bitterness, that it was her fate to have everything she undertook turn out otherwise than she had desired, and upon Clodwig's assuring her that such was the necessary result of every attempt to embody our conceptions, she exclaimed impatiently, "I am not what I am." The real cause of her discontent was hard to determine. It was more than the mere dissatisfaction of the artist and disappointment in her own powers.
The strict discipline which Eric had wished to maintain was now much broken in upon. Bella always carried through whatever plan she had laid out for herself, acting upon her favorite theory that it was well to allow men to think they had some authority, but that must be all.
Roland soon turned the conversation to the subject always uppermost in his mind, the life of Franklin. Bella expressed a wish to learn something about it, and Clodwig, after a little sketch had been given of what bad been already gone over, was quite ready to resume the reading where it had been dropped before. Eric and Roland, who sat upon a raised platform, listened eagerly. The reading gave rise to many an animated discussion, for Bella entered with remarkable ease and readiness into everything that was presented to her. Eric was disturbed by her speedy detection in Franklin of "a certain dry pedantry, a stinginess of nature," which her acute criticisms set forth in strong relief. He could feel the emotion her words caused in Roland, who was sitting on his knee.
In these days, it is impossible for a young man of Roland's antecedents and present position to preserve a perfect ideal. If rightly guided, and established on a solid footing, it might perhaps be useful for him to see his ideal attacked, and even distorted.
With all the eloquence at his command, Eric stated the difficulty that beset the enlightened mind of the present day, in having no authoritative voice in the place of that of the Church, to say at every point of life's journey, "Follow thou me." We moderns must recognize what is pure and lofty in noble natures, though cramped by the many limitations incident to our age and individual constitution.
Bella's pencil worked rapidly while he was speaking, and she often nodded, her head assentingly. When he ended she looked full at him, and said,—
"You are the best teacher I ever met with;" then, with beaming eyes and glowing cheeks, she turned again to her work.
"That depends upon the pupil," answered Eric, politely acknowledging the compliment.
"I want you, now," continued Bella, still blushing deeply, "I want you to lay your hand on Roland's head. Please do; it will give precisely the effect I desire. Please do as I say."
He consented, protesting at the same time that the idea did not please him, for Roland should learn to carry his head free.
Bella shook her head with vexation, and continued her work, no longer, however, on the figure of Eric, but solely on that of Roland.
"Now I have it!" she suddenly exclaimed; "that is it! You resemble Murillo's St. Anthony."
"That is just what I noticed," cried Roland. "Manna scolded me for it at the musical festival."
Clodwig also agreed with his wife.
"It is a favorite picture of mine," he said. "How plainly I can see it now before me! The figure of Anthony on his knees, with a knotted staff beside him; the landscape barely indicated; a tree in the background, and the thicket near by. Angels are playing on the ground and floating in the air; one turns over the leaves of the Saint's book, while another holds up to an angel hovering in the heavens a lily which has grown from the earth; the flower thus forming, as it were, a link between heaven and earth."
Eric was somewhat embarrassed by Roland's relating how he had fallen asleep in the chapel of the convent, and how suddenly the black nun stood beside him, and he saw the picture above him.
A request of Eric's that the reading might stop here, and the reasons on which he based his request, assumed various shapes in the minds of his hearers.
"To-day's experience convinces me," he said, "that we cannot control our thoughts or pursue them to any worthy issue, when obliged to remain in a position foreign to those thoughts, or in one at least that has no connection with them. There is a mysterious sympathy between our thoughts and the position and state of our bodies."
Eric's words worked in four different ways upon the party assembled. In his own case, they served to describe his position as tutor. Roland thought of the masons at work on the castle, and wondered what they must be thinking of while perched in mid air on their scaffoldings, or while hammering the stone. Clodwig, too, must have found the words bear in some way upon his life, for he shook his head and pressed his lips hard together, as he was wont to do when thinking. But upon Bella they produced the most striking impression; she suddenly let fall from one hand her pencils, and from the other the bread which she used for the occasional erasing of a line. Eric instantly restored them to her, and she took them from him with a vacant look and no word of thanks. He had brought before her the picture of her married life. Thus this one key-note had struck four different chords.
For a long time no word was spoken.
The presence of Clodwig and his family at Villa Eden caused great excitement in the neighborhood, and appeared to place the tutor in a very peculiar position, Pranken, however, viewed the matter quite differently, and, as acknowledged son of the house, invited to Villa Eden the Justice, with his wife and daughter, who had just returned from the Baths.
His manner towards Lina was particularly friendly and intimate; he took long walks in the garden with her, and made her tell him about her life in a convent, which she did most amusingly, giving comical descriptions of the sisters, the Superior, and her different companions. Her only object in staying at the convent had been the learning of foreign languages. Lina's perpetually gay spirits began to have a cheering effect upon the melancholy Pranken. Something of the Pranken of old times was roused within him. Why need the present be empty and barren? it said. Bella has her flirtation with the Captain, why should he not have his with Lina? Why not indulge in a little harmless jesting, perhaps even admit the excitement of some feeling? He could control himself at any moment.
The old Pranken, the Pranken of the days before, seized his rescued moustache with both hands and twirled it in the air.
It was a good idea, during this pause in his life, to amuse himself with the Justice's Lina. He could imagine himself transported back to the days before that visit to the convent, and add this to the many other experiences of his past life which Manna would have to forget.
Lina meanwhile received his attentions very unconcernedly, showing equal friendliness of manner towards both him and Eric, whom she always called her brother in music.
There was a constant stream of jesting and laughter in the Villa and park. One day Pranken induced his brother-in-law to go boating with Lina and himself, while Bella remained at home to draw. He wanted to take Roland also, wishing, with a certain recklessness, to leave the other two alone together for once. But Roland would not leave Eric; he even openly avoided Pranken's society.
Lina sang gaily as they sat together in the boat. Her love-songs were given with a sweetness, an abandonment, that Pranken had never heard from her before. Clodwig described her singing to his wife, on his return, as being as simple and beautiful as a field flower.
Bella begged the Justice and his wife to let her take Lina back with her to Wolfsgarten. The Justice's objections were overruled by his wife, and Lina was full of delight at setting off with Bella and Clodwig.
Pranken rode beside the carriage.
The quiet of this loneliness weighed heavily again upon Eric and Roland, after the animated society of the last few days. Eric, beside, was out of tune, weary and dull. He found it a burden to be obliged to devote himself from morning to night to this boy, to have to watch his undisciplined, and often capricious, fluctuations of mind. He longed for the society of Clodwig; still more, though he hardly acknowledged it to himself, for that of Bella. There had been a novelty, an animation, an excitement, an atmosphere of graceful elegance, about the rooms, which were now so desolate. Nevertheless, he resisted for several days Roland's entreaties that they should make the promised visit to Wolfsgarten. The house had been entrusted to his care, and he refused to leave it, until Pranken, at length, offered to take all the responsibility upon himself. There was a sting in his words, as he said to Eric,—
"You were present at the musical festival, and left the house then in charge of only the servants. Besides, as I say, I assume the entire responsibility."