CHAPTER XXVIII. AN ART PATRON.
The four years that passed before Gwen Howard-Russell and Lothrop Audouin returned to Rome, were years of bright promise and quick performance for Cohn Churchill. He hadn't been eighteen months with Maradiano, when the master took him aside one day and said to him kindly, 'My friend, you will only waste your time by studying with me any longer. You must take a studio on your own account, and begin earning a little money.'
'But where can I get one?' Colin asked.
'There is one vacant five doors off,' Maragliano answered. 'I have been to see it, and you can have it for very little. It's so near, that I can drop in from time to time and assist you with my advice and experience. But indeed, Churchill, you need either very little; for I fear the time is soon coming when the pupil is to excel the master.'
'If I thought that, master,' Cohn replied smilingly, 'I should stop here for ever. But as I know I can never hope to rival you, I shall take the studio, and tempt fortune.'
It was one morning during the next winter that Cohn was hard at work upon his clay group of Autumn borne by the Breezes, then nearly completed, when the door of the new studio opened suddenly, and a plain, farmer-looking old man in a tweed suit, entered unannounced.
'Good morning, Mr. Churchill,' he said, in a voice of infinite condescension. 'My niece sent me here to look at your statues, you know. You've got some very pretty things here, really. Some very pretty things indeed, as Gwen told me.'
'Oh, I see,' Colin answered, with a smile of recognition. 'It was Miss Howard-Russell, then, who told you where to find me.'
'Well, not exactly,' the visitor went on, peering at the Autumn with a look of the intensest critical interest; 'she told me I should find you at the studio of a man of the name of Miaragliano—or something—I think she called him. Well, I went there, ferreted out the place, and found a fuzzy-headed foreigner Italian fellow, all plastered over with mud and rubbish, who spoke the most ridiculous broken English; and he told me you'd moved to these new quarters. So I came on here to look you up and give you a commission, you know—I think you call it. My niece—she's really a first cousin once removed, or something equally abstruse, I fancy—but I always speak of her as my niece for short, because she's a good deal younger than I am, and I stand to her in loco avunculi; in loco avunculi, Mr. Churchill. Well, she positively insisted upon it that I must come and give you a commission.'
'It was very good of her, I'm sure,' Colin answered, his heart fluttering somewhat; for this was positively his first nibble. 'May I ask if you are also a Mr. Howard-Russell?'