"Your lordship has done a noble act," cheerfully cried old Mr. Creeps, as he rubbed his hands. "Of course you will trounce Abrahams. When the artistic world hears of this morning's work, Lord Pit Town, it will know what it owes to England's most distinguished amateur."
"No, no, Mr. Creeps. I must ask you to keep this business a secret; no cheap popularity for me," replied the old lord.
"Cheap!" echoed the critic, as he raised his eyes to the skylight. "Good heavens! he calls it cheap," whispered the old man to John Buskin.
"His lordship is right," was the oracle's oracular reply.
Men said that Lord Pit Town was eccentric. Gossips said that he was mad. Perhaps after all he was only honest according to his lights. Next day the handsome frame, carefully packed, was returned to Mr. Abrahams; it was duly deducted from his account. But he got his cheque for the price of the picture, and his very liberal commission.
In vain did the artists who frequented Walls End Park attempt to stalk the old nobleman in his lonely walks. They never succeeded in selling him a picture from the easel. "Capital, capital," his lordship would remark with great alacrity, when there was no other way of escape. The eldest Miss Solomonson, the most talented member of that clever Hebrew family—she is great at animals—tried to shoot the wary old lord with her well-known picture of "The Timid Fawn," but she ignominiously failed.
"The old wretch called me 'my dear,' and said he liked my sky, when I hadn't even indicated the sky," she indignantly remarked to her amused father.
Miss Solomonson's masses of jetty hair, and the fire from the glances of her oriental eyes, were said to have melted the stony hearts even of dealers who were her co-religionists. But with all her advantages Miss Solomonson failed with the old lord, and she abuses him to this day. She had her revenge, however, for in her well-known Academy picture of the following year, "Balaam and his Ass," the angel was represented by a glorified portrait of Miss Solomonson herself, who glared down in an indignant manner upon the terrified and kneeling Balaam. Old Mr. Creeps and the other art-critics chuckled as they recognized the angelic portrait; but they chuckled still more, when they saw that the terrified Balaam was but an ill-natured caricature of John, Earl of Pit Town.
"I'd have done him as the ass, you know, only he was too ugly. I hope he'll like the figures better than the sky this time," snorted the indignant Hebrew maiden.
The curse of the Earl of Pit Town's life was the so-called gallery of old masters in Walls End Castle. He couldn't sell them; he couldn't burn them; he was even compelled to insure them, to his intense disgust. For when a former lord had inherited Walls End Castle from the Chudleighs, old masters had been the fashion; and the purchaser, delighted with his toy, had made the pictures heirlooms. But the present lord had shut up what to him was a mere chamber of horrors. He and Dr. Wolff had actually composed a catalogue raisonné of the entire collection, in which the fictitious nature of the claims to respect of each monstrous daub was triumphantly demonstrated. The sprawling Rubenses were shown to be but inferior copies, the Paul Veronese was proved a transparent sham, while the great Vandyck, representing the Martyr-King seated on a gigantic grey horse, was demonstrated to be but a wretched replica of a miserable original. There they hung, the old Pit Town heirlooms, grimy with dirt; for as the old lord used to say, "To have cleaned them would have been only to make their natural hideousness still more apparent." Each picture bore a label, giving a true description of the once-honoured gem. Alas! these veracious tablets cruelly contrasted with the flourishes of the old housekeeper's descriptions.