Some accidents may be classified as vicarious. For example a man is shown beating a mule. He does this without inconvenience to himself; but the resentful mule, who is evidently no discerner of persons, is kicking another (and probably quite innocent) man very cruelly in the stomach with its fore hoof.
LAGHET: ONE OF THE CLOISTERS.
Then too there are complex happenings which must have involved a great strain upon the invention and resource of any artist who wished to be accurate. For instance here is a house being struck by lightning. The house, for the sake of clearness, is shown in section, like a doll’s house with the front open. In an upper chamber are members of the family engaged in cooking. The lightning passes ostentatiously through the room, leaving the occupants unharmed; but it escapes by the front door and there kills a donkey which is lying dead on the doorstep. Then again the average artist if asked how he would proceed to paint a picture to illustrate “recovery from inflammation of the right jaw” might find himself perplexed since the subject is so lacking in tangible incident. The ingenious limner of Laghet is, however, at no loss and proceeds to carry out the commission, with a light heart and in the following fashion. We see a bedroom with a bed in it and a chair. There are pictures on the wall. There is a table on which are a candle, a cup and a species of pot. On a cane sofa sits a solitary gentleman dressed in a frock coat and light trousers. His face is tied up in a handkerchief. The right side of the face is swollen. He appears to be about to leap from the sofa, his eyes being directed to a vision of the Madonna in a cloud on the wall. The picture clearly suggests that the sufferer has been laid up in bed; the candle hints at restless nights; the cup and pot at medical treatment. The fact that the patient is clothed in a frock coat shows improvement, while his apparent intention to spring from the sofa conveys the idea that the final cure has been sudden.
There are very many sick-room scenes, complete with puzzled doctors and weeping relations around the bedside. In certain of these illustrations individual and unpleasant symptoms are depicted with so conscientious a determination and so complete a disregard for the feelings of the onlooker as fully to support the dictum that “Art is Truth.”
One picture may have puzzled the hanging committee of Laghet. It depicts a smiling man being released from prison. The occasion is one that no doubt evoked thankfulness on the part of the captive, but the inference that his incarceration was an “accident” opens up a legal point of some delicacy. Curious presents have been bestowed upon Laghet. Among them is the gift of the Princess Maria Josephina Baptista. It consisted of a silver leg of the same size and weight as her own leg which was happily cured at the convent.
In certain places on the walls of this strange Cloister of Calamity hang crutches and sticks, discarded surgical appliances, boots for deformed feet, spinal supports and splints. They speak for themselves. The little crutches and the little splints speak with especial eloquence; while, as a most pathetic object amid the grosser implements of suffering, is a small steeled shoe which must have belonged to a very tiny pilgrim indeed.
On the cross-piece of one crutch a swallow has built a nest. The crutch and the swallow may almost be taken as symbolic of Laghet—the crutch the emblem of the halting cripple, the swallow of the joyous heart winging its way through the blue of heaven.