“I am certain you did not take your quittance from the General in that way. You surely wrote to Margory or to him with an explanation?”
The sculptor smiled.
“Wrote!” cried he. “Do you think that so obvious an idea would not occur to me? But reflect again, I pray you, on the circumstances,—an obscure and degraded drummer—the daughter of one of the oldest families in the Highlands—the damning circumstantiality of her uncle’s evidence of my alleged poltroonery. My explanation was too incredible for pen and paper; and the poltroon himself, the man who had brought the disgrace upon me, was beyond my identification, even had I known where to look for him.”
“And yet, Mr Urquhart,” I insisted, all my instincts as romancer assuring me of some other conclusion to a tale that had opened on a note so cheerful, “I feel sure it was neither a tragedy nor a farce in the long-run.”
“Well, you are right,” he confessed, smiling. “It was my drum that lost me the lady before ever I met her, as it were, and it was but fair that my drum should be the means of my recovering her ten years later. A reshuffling of the cards of fortune in my family brought me into a position where I was free to adopt the career of Art, and by-and-by I had a studio of my own in Edinburgh. It was the day of the portrait bust in marble. To have one’s own effigy in white, paid for by one’s own self, in one’s own hall, was, in a way, the fad of fashionable Edinburgh. It was profitable for the artist, I admit, but—but—”
“But it palled,” I suggested.
“Beyond belief! I grew to hate the appearance of every fresh client, and it was then that I sought the solace of this drum. When a sitter had gone for the day I drummed the vexation out of me, feeling that without some such relief I could never recover a respect for myself. And by-and-by I began to discover in the instrument something more than a relief for my feelings of revolt against the commercial demands on my art. I found in it an inspiration to rare emotions: I found in it memory. I found, in the reveilles and chamades that I played in fields of war and in the forest to my Marjory, love revived and mingled with a sweet regret, and from these—memory, regret, and love—I fashioned what have been my most successful sculptures.
“One day a gentleman came with a commission for his own portrait. It was General Fraser! Of course, he did not recognise me. Was it likely he should guess that the popular sculptor and the lad he had sent in disgrace from the tall white house in the distant Highland burgh town were one? Nor did I at first reveal myself. Perhaps, indeed, he would never have discovered my identity had not his eyes fallen on my drum.
“‘You have had a military subject lately?’ he said, indicating the instrument.
“‘No, General,’ I answered on an impulse. ‘That is a relic of some years of youthful folly when I played Kildalton’s silver drum, and it serves to solace my bachelor solitude.’