'A very well-behaved young man indeed,' the colonel put in, looking at the sketch casually, as if it were an object unworthy of a British field-officer's serious attention. 'A very well-behaved young man, although an American, and much less forward than that sculptor fellow, who's always thrusting himself upon us on every conceivable occasion.'
Hiram Winthrop had no photographs, but he had a great many little pencil sketches of a certain beautiful, proud-faced Englishwoman, which he didn't display upon the mantelpiece of his attic bedroom down the narrow Roman alley, because he preferred to keep them securely locked up in a small box, whence he took them out religiously every night and morning during the four years he spent in exile in that terrible, grimy, unnatural city. It was a very clear-cut, sculpturesque face indeed, but in spite of all Hiram's efforts at softening, it somehow managed to look most terribly inexorable. If Gwen found Colin Churchill blind, Hiram Winthrop found Gwen herself absolutely adamantine.
CHAPTER XXVII. THE DEACON MAKES A GOOD END.
In his bright little study at Lakeside, Lothrop Audouin had just laid down a parchment-bound volume of Carlyle's 'French Revolution' and turned to look out of the pretty bay-window, embowered in clematis and Virginia creeper, that opened on to the placid tawny creek and the blue expanse of more distant Ontario. 'How unawares the summer has crept upon us,' he murmured to himself, half-audibly, as was his fashion. 'When I first got back from Rome in early May, the trees were all but leafless; and now July is far gone, and before many weeks we shall be beginning to think of the melting tints of our golden autumn. That's the difference, really, between revolution and evolution. The most truly important events make no stir on their first taking place; they grow, surely but silently. The changes to which all things conspire, and for which they have prepared the way beforehand, produce no explosion, because they are gradual, and the universe consents to them. A birth takes place in silence, and sums up the result of endless generations; but a murder, which is at war with the constitution of things, creates a tumult immediately. What a fracas over Camille at the Café Foy! and yet, with a whiff of grapeshot, the whole fabric of liberty disappears bodily. What a slow growth the democratic constitution of Massachusetts! and yet, when a convulsion seizes on the entire continent, and north and south tear one another to pieces for a grand idea, the democratic constitutions float unhurt upon the sea of commotion, and come out intact in the fulness of time with redoubled splendour! A good idea! I'll enter it in my diary, elaborated a little into better English.' For Audouin was a writer by instinct, and though he had never yet perpetrated a printed book, he kept a dainty little journal in his desk, in which he jotted down side by side his pretty thoughts, as they occurred to him, and his observations, half-scientific, half-fanciful, on the progress of nature all around him. This diary he regarded as his chief literary testament; and he meant to leave it in his will to Hiram Winthrop, with strict injunctions that it should be published after his death, for private circulation only, among the select few who were competent to understand it. Surely a good man and true may be permitted, in the byways and background of his inner nature, to indulge in his harmless little foibles and affectations.
He had risen to take out the diary, full of his little poetical conceit, when the maid (Audouin wasn't such a recluse that he didn't like to keep his hermitage well-appointed) brought in a note for him on a quaintly chased Japanese salver. He took the note and glanced at it casually. It hadn't come by post, but by hand—a rare event in the isolation of Lakeside, where neighbours were none, and visitors few and distant. He broke open the envelope, and read the few pencilled lines within hastily:—
'Deacon Winthrop would be obliged if you would come over at once to see him, as I am seriously ill, and the Lord is calling me. For Deacon Winthrop, faithfully, Keziah H. Hoptree.'
Audouin put on his hat at once, and went to the porch, with its clambering roses, to see the bearer, who sat in a high buggy, flipping the flies off his horse's ear with his long whipcord.
'Wal,' the man said, 'I guess, Mr. Audouin, you'd better look alive if you want to see the deacon comfortably afore the Lord's taken him.'