The blood came in my face. No, I had never pressed him; I had never even encouraged him to come. I was proud of him, proud of his handsome looks, of his kind, gentle ways, of that bright face he could show when others were happy; proud, too—meanly proud, if you like—of his great wealth and startling liberalities. And yet he would have been in the way of my Paris life, of much of which he would have disapproved. I had feared to expose to criticism his innocent remarks on art; I had told myself, I had even partly believed, he did not want to come; I had been, and still am, convinced that he was sure to be unhappy out of Muskegon; in short, I had a thousand reasons, good and bad, not all of which could alter one iota of the fact that I knew he only waited for my invitation.
“Thank you, Myner,” said I; “you’re a much better fellow than ever I supposed. I’ll write to-night.”
“O, you’re a pretty decent sort yourself,” returned Myner, with more than his usual flippancy of manner, but, as I was gratefully aware, not a trace of his occasional irony of meaning.
Well, these were brave days, on which I could dwell for ever. Brave, too, were those that followed, when Pinkerton and I walked Paris and the suburbs, viewing and pricing houses for my new establishment, or covered ourselves with dust and returned laden with Chinese gods and brass warming-pans from the dealers in antiquities. I found Pinkerton well up in the situation of these establishments as well as in the current prices, and with quite a smattering of critical judgment. It turned out he was investing capital in pictures and curiosities for the States, and the superficial thoroughness of the creature appeared in the fact that although he would never be a connoisseur, he was already something of an expert. The things themselves left him as near as may be cold, but he had a joy of his own in understanding how to buy and sell them.
In such engagements the time passed until I might very well expect an answer from my father. Two mails followed each other, and brought nothing. By the third I received a long and almost incoherent letter of remorse, encouragement, consolation, and despair. From this pitiful document, which (with a movement of piety) I burned as soon as I had read it, I gathered that the bubble of my father’s wealth was burst, that he was now both penniless and sick; and that I, so far from expecting ten thousand dollars to throw away in juvenile extravagance, must look no longer for the quarterly remittances on which I lived. My case was hard enough; but I had sense enough to perceive, and decency enough to do, my duty. I sold my curiosities—or, rather, I sent Pinkerton to sell them; and he had previously bought, and now disposed of them, so wisely that the loss was trifling. This, with what remained of my last allowance, left me at the head of no less than five thousand francs. Five hundred I reserved for my own immediate necessities: the rest I mailed inside of the week to my father at Muskegon, where they came in time to pay his funeral expenses.
The news of his death was scarcely a surprise and scarce a grief to me. I could not conceive my father a poor man. He had led too long a life of thoughtless and generous profusion to endure the change; and though I grieved for myself, I was able to rejoice that my father had been taken from the battle. I grieved, I say, for myself; and it is probable there were at the same date many thousands of persons grieving with less cause. I had lost my father; I had lost the allowance; my whole fortune (including what had been returned from Muskegon) scarce amounted to a thousand francs; and, to crown my sorrows, the statuary contract had changed hands. The new contractor had a son of his own, or else a nephew; and it was signified to me, with business-like plainness, that I must find another market for my pigs. In the meanwhile I had given up my room, and slept on a truckle-bed in the corner of the studio, where, as I read myself to sleep at night, and when I awoke in the morning, that now useless bulk, the Genius of Muskegon, was ever present to my eyes. Poor stone lady! born to be enthroned under the gilded, echoing dome of the new capitol, whither was she now to drift? for what base purposes be ultimately broken up, like an unseaworthy ship? and what should befall her ill-starred artificer, standing with his thousand francs on the threshold of a life so hard as that of the unbefriended sculptor?
It was a subject often and earnestly debated by myself and Pinkerton. In his opinion I should instantly discard my profession. “Just drop it, here and now,” he would say. “Come back home with me, and let’s throw our whole soul into business. I have the capital; you bring the culture. Dodd and Pinkerton—I never saw a better name for an advertisement; and you can’t think, Loudon, how much depends upon a name.” On my side I would admit that a sculptor should possess one of three things—capital, influence, or an energy only to be qualified as hellish. The first two I had now lost; to the third I never had the smallest claim; and yet I wanted the cowardice (or, perhaps it was the courage) to turn my back on my career without a fight. I told him, besides, that however poor my chances were in sculpture, I was convinced they were yet worse in business, for which I equally lacked taste and aptitude. But upon this head he was my father over again; assured me that I spoke in ignorance; that any intelligent and cultured person was bound to succeed; that I must, besides, have inherited some of my father’s fitness; and, at any rate, that I had been regularly trained for that career in the commercial college.
“Pinkerton,” I said, “can’t you understand that, as long as I was there, I never took the smallest interest in any stricken thing? The whole affair was poison to me.”
“It’s not possible,” he would cry; “it can’t be; you couldn’t live in the midst of it and not feel the charm; with all your poetry of soul you couldn’t help! Loudon,” he would go on, “you drive me crazy. You expect a man to be all broken up about the sunset, and not to care a dime for a place where fortunes are fought for and made and lost all day; or for a career that consists in studying up life till you have it at your finger-ends, spying out every cranny where you can get your hand in and a dollar out, and standing there in the midst—one foot on bankruptcy, the other on a borrowed dollar, and the whole thing spinning round you like a mill—raking in the stamps; in spite of fate and fortune.”
To this romance of dickering I would reply with the romance (which is also the virtue) of art: reminding him of those examples of constancy through many tribulations, with which the rôle of Apollo is illustrated—from the case of Millet, to those of many of our friends and comrades, who had chosen this agreeable mountain path through life, and were now bravely clambering among rocks and brambles, penniless and hopeful.