Afterwards I joined Eric in the Strand, and he took me into a room from which all natural light had been carefully excluded. And as I stood looking at a curtain which shrouded the farther wall, it suddenly rolled back, and under a perfect light, and with all the accessories that art could lend to its environment, I saw before me the picture that had made him famous.
It was in no wise a sensational subject. Only a precipitous rock, rent in twain by a huge fissure, through which I looked down upon a valley which opened and fell away in front of me. From its foot a mountain stream foamed and fretted down a steep incline. And on either side of the valley, wherever a projection or an eminence promised safety from the torrents that scored the declivities, tiny sparks of fire, few and far between, flickered from the cottage windows, with a pleasant suggestion of the cheeriness within. Crowning the precipice which occupied the foreground on the right hand of the picture, I could see the outline of the village church, where glowed a larger, ruddier flame, from the lamp, no doubt, which burned before the altar of the sanctuary.
It was a wonderful piece of work for a lad so young in years. I am no painter, and the defects there may have been in it were all invisible to me. But the cleverness of the composition, and the marvellous adjustment of the lights and shadows, flung by the afterglow upon the surrounding hills, could only have been inspired by genius. No wonder that his work had made him famous.
He had entitled it “Val Verde.”
“It commemorates a story, Harold,” he whispered—for there were visitors besides ourselves—“that has grown up around a picture which forms the altar-piece of the church. Whether the legend rests on any historic ground-work, I could never satisfactorily determine. I only know that versions of it, in many various forms, are current in most of the adjoining villages. But this evening, if you like, I will tell it to you precisely as it was told to me by the curé of the parish. True or untrue, it is interesting enough as a story, though I could wish we had fallen upon a more cheerful topic for the enlivenment of our last evening.”
As we were leaving the gallery, I bethought me of the picture which Reggie had unearthed for me at Cambridge.
“By the way, Eric,” I said, “I’ve got a picture, too, in my possession, on which I want your opinion. If you don’t mind the trouble, old man, I’ll send it up to you when I get home to-morrow. It’s only a copy, for I’ve seen the original. But it’s a fairly good one, unless I am much mistaken. And in these days, when I don’t know where to look for a five-pound note, anything, however small, will come in handy. So, if you think it’s worth a few pounds, please do the best you can for me, and I’ll be awfully grateful.”
CHAPTER XVIII
In the evening, as we sat before the fire, Eric told me the story. [190]
“I had lost my way in the Abruzzi. All the day long I had wandered in fruitless quest of a subject to complete my series of Italian sketches. And now the twilight had fallen upon me with the suddenness of an Italian autumn. Up to this time I had followed the guidance of a faint bridle-path, but on a sudden the ground shelved downwards, and I found myself at the entrance of a narrow ravine, confronted by a blank, precipitous rock, while the path I had been following wandered off to the left, and was lost in the obscurity of the moor beyond. Nothing in the shape of a village, nothing that promised me a shelter for the night, was visible on the moorland I had been traversing. So my only hope lay in the chance of what might lie beyond the rock that barred my progress.