From month to month his sister had written to him, at her father's dictation: "You cannot come yet, and we cannot make any decision concerning our own future. The sick man is as well as a man can be who has lost the use of his arms and his legs. But his head still lives and retains a remnant of power. Here is some money; be careful of it, my child; for, although I have all the work I want, wages are lower here than at Rome."
Michel tried to be careful of the money, which represented to him the sweat of his father's brow. He quivered with shame and dismay when his young sister, who worked at spinning silk—a very common industry in that part of Sicily,—secretly added a gold piece to her father's remittance. Evidently the poor child subjected herself to great privations to obtain for her brother the wherewithal to amuse himself for an hour. Michel vowed that he would not touch those gold pieces, but would save them and carry back to Mila all her little savings.
But Michel loved pleasure; he craved a certain amount of luxury, and he did not know how to save. He had princely tastes, that is to say, he loved to give, and rewarded handsomely any facchino who brought him a picture or a letter. And then too, painting materials are very expensive. Again, when Michel was in the company of wealthy young men, he would have blushed not to pay his scot like the rest. So that he ran in debt to a small amount, albeit very large for the budget of a poor decorator. There came a time when, the debt imitating the snow-ball, it became necessary for him either to fly in disgrace or to resign himself to take up some more humble occupation than historical painting. Trembling with rage and grief, Michel sacrificed the gold pieces which he had determined to carry back to Mila some day. But, finding that he was still far from solvent, he confessed everything in a letter to his father, blaming himself with something very like despair. A week later a banker forwarded to the young man the sum necessary to pay his debt, and to live some time longer on the same footing. Then came a letter from Mila, who said, still at Pier-Angelo's dictation: "A kind friend lent me the money I have sent to you; but I shall have to work six months to repay the loan. Try, my son, not to run in debt again until then, for if you do we shall have arrears of indebtedness which we can never discharge."
Although Michel had never been reprimanded by his father, he expected something in the nature of a rebuke this time. When he realized the excellent man's inexhaustible kindness and philosophic courage, he was heartbroken, and though unable to blame himself for errors into which his position had irresistibly led him, he did blame himself, as for a crime, for having accepted that too brilliant position. He formed a mighty resolution, and was assisted in carrying it out by the idea that he was consummating a great sacrifice, and that if he had not the making of a great painter in him, he had at all events the heroism of a great character. Thus vanity had much to say in this effort of his will, but it was an ingenuous and noble vanity. He paid his debts and bade his friends farewell, announcing his purpose to abandon painting and to work with his father at his trade.
Then, without informing his father of his coming, he packed in a bag a few choice clothes, a sketch-book, and a number of boxes of water-colors, not realizing that those symbols of luxury and art showed that he carried the thought of luxury and art with him; and he started for Catania, where we have seen him on the point of arriving.
III
MONSIGNORE
Despite this heroic renunciation of all the dreams of his youth, poor Michel experienced at that moment a sort of grief-stricken dismay. The journey had diverted his thoughts from the consequences of his sacrifice. The sight of Ætna had exalted his imagination. The joy he felt at the thought of seeing his excellent father and his dear little sister had sustained his courage. But this unlucky accident of a trifling wound in the foot, and the necessity of halting for an instant, gave him leisure for reflection for the first time since he had left Rome.
Moreover, that was an exceedingly solemn moment to his youthful mind. He saw before him the domes of his native city, one of the loveliest cities in the world, even to him who comes from Rome, and the one of all others whose location is most imposing to the eye.
This city, so many times devastated by the volcano, is not very ancient, and the style of the seventeenth century, which prevails in its buildings, has not the grandeur or the pure taste of earlier periods. Nevertheless, Catania, built upon an extensive plan and of antique spaciousness, is of a Greek type, taken as a whole. The sombre color of the lava from which it has risen again and again after being swallowed up by it, as if it had found the seeds of renewed life in its own ashes, after the manner of the phœnix, the open plain which surrounds it, and the cruel reefs of lava which have taken root in its harbor, as if to darken with their stern shadow even the shimmer of the waves—everything about the city is majestic and melancholy.
But it was not the aspect of the place that engrossed the thoughts of our young traveller. His own plight made it seem to him more gloomy and terror-inspiring than it had been made by the passage of the flames that belched forth from the cave of the Cyclops. He saw before him a place of trials and of expiation, in face of which a cold perspiration burst from every pore. It was there that he was about to bid farewell to the world of art, to the society of enlightened men, to unchecked reveries, and to the studious leisure of the artist summoned to an exalted destiny. It was there that he must resume, after ten years of a highly-favored existence, the artisan's apron, the hateful sizing-pot, the conventional festoon, the decoration of reception rooms and corridors. And, worse than all the rest, it was there that he would have to work twelve hours a day and go to bed exhausted, lacking time and strength to read or muse in a picture gallery; there that he must resign himself to do without other society than that of the Sicilian common people, so poor and so unclean that the poetic charm of his features and his intellect could scarcely penetrate the rags and degradation of poverty. In a word, the gate of Catania was, to that poor exile, the gate of the accursed city described by Dante.