'Papa,' she said very quietly, 'it's no use telling you, of course, that he's a wonderful artist, and that he's going to make beautiful statues that everybody'll admire and talk about, for you don't understand art, and you don't care for it or see anything in it: but can't you at least understand that Mr. Churchill is a gentleman by nature, that he's rising to be a gentleman by position, that he'll come at last to be a great sculptor, and be made President of the Royal Academy, and be knighted, and entertain the Prince of Wales to dinner—and then, you know, you'd be glad enough to get an invitation anywhere to meet him.'
The colonel coughed. 'It'll be quite time to consider that question,' he said drily, 'when we see him duly gazetted. Every French soldier carries a marshal's bâton in his knapsack, I've been given to understand; but for my part, I prefer not sitting down to dinner with him, all the same, until the marshal's bâton has been properly taken out of the knapsack.'
That night, Hiram Winthrop, creeping up the dim creaking staircase to his small dark bedroom in the narrow dirty Roman lane, said to himself, with something of despair in his soul, 'She will fall in love with Churchill. I feel sure she will fall in love with Churchill. And yet he doesn't seem to notice it, or care for it. While I——'
That night, Colin Churchill, coming back, once more enthusiastic, from Maragliano's, (where the great sculptor had with his own hands rebuilt for him in outline round an iron framework the shattered Calabrian Peasant), and mounting the quaint old Roman staircase to his own funny little attic room, next door to Winthrop's, said to himself casually, in a passing idle moment, 'A beautiful girl, that Miss Howard-Bussell, certainly. More statuesque than Minna, though not perhaps so really pretty. But still, very beautiful. One of the finest profiles, I think, I have ever met with. And what an interest she seems to take in art, too! So anxious to come and see Maragliano, Mr. Audouin told me. Only, she was quite too flattering, really, about Orestes pursued by the Eumenides.'
And that night, away over yonder in lonely London, little Minna read and re-read a long letter from Colin at Rome ten times over, and pressed it tenderly to her heart, and cried to herself over it, and wondered whether Cohn would ever forget her, or would fall in love with one of those splendid dark-eyed treacherous-looking Italian women. And then, as of old, she lay awake and thought of Cohn, and the dangers of absence, with tears in her eyes, till she cried herself to sleep at last with his open letter still pressed tight against her tremulous eager little bosom.
CHAPTER XXIV. GWEN AND HIRAM.
Everybody who went to Audouin's picnic at the Alban lake agreed that it was one of the most delightful entertainments given at Rome during the whole of that season.
The winter—Hiram and Cohn's first winter in Italy—had worn away quickly enough. Hiram had gone every day, as in duty bound, to paint and be chidden at M. Seguin's studio; for Seguin was one of those exalted teachers who instruct rather by example than by precept; who seem to say perpetually to their pupils, 'See how much better I have done it or would have done it than you do;' and he never for a moment succeeded in inspiring the very slightest respect or enthusiasm in Hiram's simple, quiet, unostentatious, straightforward American nature. Of course Hiram worked hard; he felt he ought to work hard. Audouin expected it of him, and he would have done anything on earth to please Audouin; but his heart was not really in it for all that, though he wouldn't for the world have acknowledged as much even to himself, and he got on far less well than many other people would have done with half his talent and half his industry. He hated the whole artifice of drapery and models, and clever arrangement of light and shade, and marvellous minuteness of technical resources, in which his French master positively revelled. He longed for the beautiful native wildness of the American woodlands, or still more, even, for the green hedgerows and parks and meadows of that enchanted England, which he had seen but in a glimpse for two days in his whole lifetime, but in whose mellow beauty, nevertheless, his heart had immediately recognised its true fatherland. It may have been narrow and sectarian and unappreciative in Hiram; no doubt it was; but he couldn't for the life of him really care for Seguin's very greatest triumphs of artistic ingenuity. He recognised their extraordinary skill, he admitted their unrivalled cleverness as tours de force of painting, he even admired their studied grace and exquisite composition as bits of harmonious form and colour; but he never could fall down before them in the least as works of art in the highest sense, or see in them anything more than the absolute perfection of cold, hard, dry, unspiritualised mechanical aptitude.