The stranger looked at him steadily.
'Young man,' he said with the voice and manner of a Hebrew prophet, 'believe me, you ought never to have come away from your native America.'
'I know it, I know it,' Hiram cried, in the profoundest depth of self-abasement.
'No, you ought never to have come away from America. As I wrote years ago in the Seven Domes of Florence——'
'What!' Hiram exclaimed, horror-stricken.
'The Seven Domes of Florence! Then—then—then you are Mr. Truman?'
'Yes,' the stranger went on unmoved, without heeding his startled condition. 'My name is John Truman, and, as I wrote years ago in the Seven Domes of Florence——'
Hiram never heard the end of his visitor's long sonorous quotation from his former self (in five volumes), for he sank back unmanned into an easy-chair, and fairly moaned aloud in the exceeding bitterness of his disappointment.
John Truman! It was he, then, the great art-critic of the age; the man whose merest word, whose slightest breath could make or mar a struggling reputation; the detector of fashionable shams, the promoter of honest artistic workmanship—it was he that had pronounced poor Hiram's whole life a miserable failure, and had remitted him remorselessly once more to the corn and potatoes of Geauga County. The tears filled Hiram's eyes as he showed the great man slowly and regretfully out of his studio; and when that benevolent beaming face had disappeared incongruously with the parting Parthian shot, 'Go back to your woods and forests, sir; go back immediately to your woods and forests,' Hiram quite forgot the very presence of the decked-out Persian commander, and burst into hot tears such as he had not shed before since he ran away to nurse his boyish sorrows alone by himself in the old familiar blackberry bottom.
How very differently he might have felt if only he could have followed that stooping figure down the Via Colonna and heard the bland old gentleman muttering audibly to himself, 'Oh, dear no, the young barbarian ought never to have come away from his native America. No castles—certainly not, but there's nature there clearly, a great deal of nature; and he knows how to paint it too, he knows how to paint it. Great purity of colouring in his Tyrolese sketches; breadth and brilliancy very unusual in so young an artist; capital robust drawing; a certain glassy liquid touch that I like about it all, too, especially in the water. Who on earth ever told him to go and paint those incomprehensible Assyrian monstrosities? Ridiculous, quite ridiculous. He ought to have concentrated himself on his own congenial lakes and woodlands. He has caught the exact spirit of them—weird, mysterious, solemn, primitive, unvulgarised, antidemotic, titanic, infinite. The draughtsmanship of the stratification in the rocks is quite superb in its originality. Oh, dear no, he ought never to have come away at all from his native natural America.