He was a most extraordinary-looking man,—Mr. Van-brugh. Olive had, indeed, reason to call him “not handsome,” for you probably would not see an uglier man twice in a lifetime. Gigantic and ungainly in height, and coarse in feature, he certainly was the very antipodes of his own exquisite creations. And for that reason he created them. In his troubled youth, tortured with the sense of that blessing which was denied him, he had said, “Providence has created me hideous: I will outdo Providence; I with my hand will continually create beauty.” And so he did—ay, and where he created, he loved. He took his art for his mistress, and, like the Rhodian sculptor, he clasped it to his soul night and day, until it grew warm and life-like, and became to him in the stead of every human tie. Thus Michael Vanbrugh had lived, for fifty years, a life solitary even to moroseness; emulating the great Florentine master, whose Christian name it was his glory to bear. He painted grand pictures, which nobody bought, but which he and his faithful little sister Meliora thought the greater for that. The world did not understand him, nor did he understand the world; so he shut himself out from it altogether, until his small and rapidly-decreasing income caused him to admit into his house as lodgers the widow and daughter.
He might not have done so, had not Miss Meliora hinted how lovely the former was, and how useful she might be as a model when they grew sociable together.
He came to make his request now, and he made it with the greatest unconcern. In his opinion everything in life tended toward one great end—Art He looked on all beauty as only made to be painted. Accordingly, he stepped up to his inmate, with the following succinct address:
“Madam, I want a Grecian head. Yours just suits me; will you oblige me by sitting?” And then adding, as a soothing and flattering encouragement: “It is for my great work—my 'Alcestis!'—one of a series of six pictures, which I hope to finish one day.”
He tossed back his long iron-grey hair, and scanned intently the gentle-looking lady whom he had hitherto noticed only with the usual civilities of an acquaintanceship consequent on some months' residence in the same house.
“Excellent! madam. Your features are the very thing—they are perfect.”
“Really, Mr. Vanbrugh, you are very flattering,” began the widow, faintly colouring, and appealing to Olive, who looked delighted; for she regarded the old artist with as much reverence as if he had been Michael Angelo himself.
He interrupted them both. “Ay, that will just do;” and he drew in the air some magic lines over Mrs. Rothesay's head. “Good brow—Greek mouth, If, madam, you would favour me with taking off your cap. Thank you, Miss Olive. You understand me, I see. That will do—the white drapery over the hair—ah, divine! My 'Alcestis' to the life! Madam—Mrs. Rothesay, your head is glorious; it shall go down to posterity in my picture.”
And he walked up and down the room, rubbing his hands with a delighted pride, which, in its perfect simplicity, could never be confounded with paltry vanity or self-esteem. “My work, my picture,” in which he so gloried, was utterly different from, “I, the man who executed it” He worshipped—not himself at all; and scarcely so much his real painted work, as the ideal which ever flitted before him, and which it was the one great misery of his life never to have sufficiently attained.
“When shall I sit?” timidly inquired Mrs. Rothesay, still too much of a woman not to be pleased by a painter's praise.