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CHAPTER XI. EDUCATIONAL ADVANTAGES.
And now, while Minna Wroe was waiting at table in Regent's Park, and while Colin Churchill was modelling sepulchral images for his Italian master, Cicolari, how was our other friend, Hiram Winthrop, employing his time beyond the millpond?
'Bethabara Seminary, at the time when Hiram Winthrop, the eminent American artist, was enrolled among its alumni' (writes one of his fellow-students), 'occupied a plain but substantially built brick structure, commodiously located in the very centre of a large cornfield, near the summit of a considerable eminence in Madison County, N.Y. It had been in operation close on three years when young Winthrop matriculated there. He secured quarters in a room with four fellow-students, each of whom brought his own dipper, plate, knife, fork, and other essential requisites. Mr. Winthrop was always of a solitary, retiring character, without much command of language, and not given to attending the Debating Forum or other public institutions of our academy. Nor was he fond of the society of the lady students, though one or two of them, and notably the talented Miss Aimed A. Stiles, now a prominent teacher in a lyceum at Smyrna, Mo., early detected his remarkable gifts for pictorial art, and continually importuned him to take their portraits, no doubt designing them for keepsakes to be given to the more popular male students. Young Winthrop always repelled such advances: indeed, he was generally considered in the light of a boorish rustic; and his singular aversion towards the Hopkinsite connection (in which he had nevertheless been raised by that excellent man, his father, late Deacon Zephaniah Winthrop, of Muddy Creek, N.Y.) caused him to be somewhat disliked among his college companions. His chief amusement was to retire into the surrounding country, oddly choosing for the purpose the parts remotest from the roads and houses, and there sketch the animated creation which seemed always to possess a greater interest for his mind than the persons or conversation of his fellow-citizens. He had, indeed, as facts subsequently demonstrated, the isolation of a superior individual. Winthrop remained at Bethabara, so far as my memory serves me, for two years only.'
Indeed, the Hopkinsite Seminary was not exactly the sort of place fitted to suit the peculiar tastes of Hiram Winthrop. The boys and girls from the farms around had hardly more sympathy with him than the deacon himself. Yet, on the whole, in spite of the drawbacks of his surroundings, Athens was a perfect paradise to poor Hiram. This is a universe of relativities: and compared with life on the farm at Muddy Creek, life at Bethabara Seminary was absolute freedom and pure enjoyment to the solitary little artist. Here, as soon as recitation was over, he could wander out into the woods alone (after he had shaken off the attentions of the too sequacious Almeda), whenever he liked, no man hindering. The country around was wooded in places, and the scenery, like all that in Madison County, was beautifully undulating. Five miles along the leafy highroad brought him to the banks of Cananagua Lake, one of those immeasurable lovely sheets of water that stud the surface of Western New York for miles together; and there Hiram would sit down by the shore, and watch the great divers disappearing suddenly beneath the surface, and make little pictures of the grey squirrels and the soldier-birds on the margin of Cyrus Choke's 'Elements of the Latin Language,' which he had brought out with him, presumably for purposes of preparation against to-morrow's class-work. But best of all there was a drawing-master at Athens, and from him, by Audouin's special arrangement, the boy took lessons twice a week in perspective and the other technical matters of his art—for, as to native ability, Hiram was really far better fitted to teach the teacher. Not a very great artist, that struggling German drawing-master at Athens, with his formal little directions of how to go jig-jig for a pine-tree, and to-whee, whee, whee, for an oak; not a very great artist, to be sure; but still, a grand relief for Hiram to discover that there were people in the world who really cared about these foolish things, and didn't utterly despise them though they were so irrelevant to the truly important questions of raising corn, and pork, and potatoes.
The great joy and delight of the term, however, was Audouin's periodical visit to his little protégé. Audouin at least was determined to let Hiram's individuality have fair play. He regarded him as a brand plucked from the burning of that corn-growing civilisation which he so cordially detested; and he had made up his own mind, rightly or wrongly, that Hiram had genius, and that that genius must be allowed freely to develop itself. Hiram loved these quarterly visits better than anything else in the whole world, because Audouin was the one person he had met in his entire life (except Sam Churchill) who could really sympathise with him.
Two years after Hiram Winthrop went to Bethabara, Audouin wrote to ask whether he would come and spend a week or two at Lakeside during the winter vacation. Hiram cried when he read the letter; so much pleasure seemed almost beyond the possibilities of this world, and the deacon would surely never consent; but to his great surprise, the deacon wrote back gruffly, yes; and as soon as term was finished, Hiram gladly took the cars on the New York Central down to Nine Mile Bottom, the depot for Lakeside. Audouin was waiting to meet him at the depot, in a neat little sleigh; and they drove away gaily to the jingling music of the bells, in the direction of Audouin's cottage.
'A severe artist, winter,' Audouin said, glancing around him quickly over the frozen fields. 'No longer the canvas and the colours, but the pure white marble and the flowing chisel. How the contours of the country soften with the snow, Hiram; what a divine cloak the winter clouds spread kindly over the havoc man has wrought upon this desecrated landscape! It was beautiful, once, I believe, in its native woodland beauty; and it's beautiful even now when the white pall comes down, so, to screen and cover its artificial nakedness. The true curse of Ham (and worse) is upon us here; we have laughed at the shame of our mother earth.'
Hiram hardly understood him—he seldom quite understood his friend—but he answered, with a keen glance over the white snow, 'I love the winter, Mr. Audouin; but I apprehend I like the summer an' autumn best. You should jest have seen the crimson and gold on Cananagua Lake last fall; oh, my, the colours on the trees! nobody could ever have painted 'em. I took out my paints an' tried, but I wasn't anywhere like it, I can tell you; Mr. Mooller, he said he didn't b'lieve Claude or Turner could ever have painted a bit of Amurrican fall scenery.'
'Mr. Müller isn't a conclusive authority,' Audouin answered gravely, removing his cigar as he spoke; 'but on this occasion I surmise, Hiram, he was probably not far from a correct opinion. Still, Mr. Müller won't do for you any longer. The fact is, Hiram, sooner or later you must go to Europe. There's no teaching here good enough for you. I've made up my mind that you must go to Europe. Whether the deacon likes it or not, you've got to go, and we must manage one way or another.'
To Europe! Hiram's brain reeled round at the glorious, impossible notion. To Europe! Why, that was the wonderful romantic country where Tom Jones ran away with Amelia, where Mr. Tracy Tupman rode to Ipswich on top of the mail-coach, where Moses bought the gross of green spectacles from the plausible vagabond at the country fair. Europe! There were kings and princes in Europe; and cathedrals and castles; and bishops and soldiers; ay, he could almost believe, too, there were giants, ogres, ghosts, and fairies. In Europe, Sam Wellers waited at the wayside inns; mysterious horsemen issued darkling from arched castle gates; Jews cut pounds of flesh, Abyssinian fashion, from the living breasts of Venetian shipowners; and itinerant showmen wandered about with Earley's waxworks across a country haunted by masked highwaymen and red-coated squires, who beat you half to death for not telling them immediately which way the hare ran. As such a phantasmagoria of incongruous scenes did the mother continent of the American race present itself in some swimming panorama to Hiram's excited brain. It was almost as though Aladdin and the oneeyed calender had suddenly appeared to him in the familiar woods of Geauga County, and invited him forthwith to take the cars for Bagdad at the urgent personal request of the good Caliph Haroun al Raschid.
The boy held his breath hard, and answered in his self-restrained American manner, 'To Europe, Mr. Audouin! Well, I guess I should appreciate that, consid'able.'
'Yes, Hiram,' Audouin went on, 'I've made my mind up to that. Sooner or later you must go to Europe. But not just at once, my boy. Not till you're about nineteen, I should say; it wouldn't do you so much good till then. Meanwhile, we must put you to some other school. Bethabara has done its little best for you: you must go elsewhere, meanwhile. I mean that you shall go to some one of the eastern colleges, Yale if possible.'
'But what about father?' Hiram asked.
'Your father must be made to do as I tell him. Look here, Hiram, the fact is this. You're a boy whose individuality must be developed. The deacon mustn't be allowed to prevent it. I've taken you in hand, and I mean to see you through it. Look yonder, my boy, at the edge of the ice there on the creek; look at the musquash sitting in the sun on the brink of the open water eating a clam, and the clamshells he has left strewed along the shore and beach behind him. See him drop in again and bring up another clam, and stride sleek and shining from the water on to his little cliff of ice again. You and I know that that sight is beautiful. You and I know that it's the only thing on earth worth living for—that power of seeing the beautiful in art and nature—but how many people do you suppose there are in all America that would ever notice it? What percentage, Hiram, of our great, free, intelligent, democratic people, that sing their own praises daily with so shrill a voice in their ten thousand “Heralds,” and “Tribunes,” and “Courants,” and “Mirrors “? How small a percentage, Hiram; how small a percentage!'
The boy coloured up crimson to the very roots of his shaggy hair. It was such a very new point of view to him. He had always known that he cared for these things towards which all other boys and men were mere dull materialistic Gallios; but it had never before occurred to him that his doing so was any mark of a mental superiority on his part. Father had he thought that it betokened some weakness or foolishness of his own nature, for he wasn't like other boys; and not to be like other boys is treated so much as a crime in junior circles that it almost seems like a crime at last even to the culprit himself in person. So Hiram coloured up with the shame of a first discovery of his own better-ness, and merely answered in the same quiet self-restrained fashion, 'I apprehend, Mr. Audouin, there ain't many folks who pay much attention to the pecooliarities of the common American musk-rat.'
All the rest of the way home, Audouin plied the boy with such subtle flattery—not meant as flattery, indeed, for Audouin was incapable of guile; if he erred, it was on the side of too outspoken truthfulness: yet, in effect, his habit of speaking always as though he and Hiram formed a class apart was really flattery of the deepest sort to the boy's nature. At last they drew up at a neat wooden cottage in a small snow-covered glen, where the circling amphitheatre of spruce pines opened out into a long sloping vista in front, and the frozen arm of the great lake spread its limitless ice sheet beyond, away over in weird perspective toward the low unseen Canadian shore. The boy uttered a little sharp cry of delight at the exquisite prospect. Audouin noticed it with pleasure. 'Well, Hiram,' he said, 'here we are at last at my lodge in the wilderness.'
'I never saw anything in all my life,' the boy answered truthfully, 'one-thousandth part so beautiful.'
Audouin was pleased at the genuine tone of the compliment. 'Yes, Hiram,' he said, looking with a complacent smile down the pine-clad glen toward the frozen lake, 'it certainly does help to wash out Broadway.'
Hiram's three weeks at Lakeside Cottage were indeed three weeks of unalloyed delight to his eager, intelligent nature. There were books there, books of the most delicious sort; Birds of America with coloured plates; Flora of New York State with endless figures; poems, novels, histories—Prescott's 'Peru,' and Macaulay's 'England.' There were works about the Indians, too; works written by men who actually took a personal interest in calumets and tomahawks. There were pictures, books full of them; pictures by great painters, well engraved; pictures, the meaning of which Audouin explained to him carefully, pointing out the peculiarities of style in each, so far as the engravings could reproduce them. Above all, there was Audouin's own conversation, morning, noon and night, as well as his friend the Professor's, who was once more staying with him on a visit. That was Hiram's first extended glimpse of what a cultivated and refined life could be made like, apart from the sordid, squalid necessities of raising pork and beans and Johnny cake.
Best of all, before Hiram left Lakeside, Audouin had driven him over to the Deacon's in his neat little sleigh, and had seriously discussed the question of his further education. And the result of that interview was that Hiram was to return no more to Bethabara, but (being now nearly sixteen) was to go instead to the Eclectic Institute at Orange. It was with great difficulty that this final step was conquered, but conquered it was at last, mainly by Audouin's masterful persistence.
''Tain't convenient for me, mister,' the deacon said snappishly, 'to go on any longer without the services of that thar boy. I want him to home to help with the farm work. He's progressing towards citizenship now, an' I've invested quite a lot of capital in his raisin', an' it's time I was beginnin' to see some return upon it.'
'Quite true and very natural,' Audouin answered with his diplomatic quickness. 'Still, you must consider the boy's future. He won't cost you much, deacon. He's a smart lad, and he can help himself a great deal in the off seasons. There's a great call for school-teachers in the winter, and college students are much sought after.'
'What might be the annual expense to an economical student?' asked the deacon dubiously.
'A hundred dollars a year,' Audouin replied boldly. He murmured to himself that whatever the difference might be between this modest estimate and the actual truth, he would pay it out of his own pocket.
The deacon gave way grudgingly at last, and to the end neither he nor Hiram ever knew that Hiram's three years at the Eclectic Institute cost his unsuspected benefactor some two hundred dollars annually.
CHAPTER XII. AN ARTISTIC ENGAGEMENT.
Three years at Orange passed away quickly enough, and Hiram enjoyed his time there far better than he had done even in the solitude of Bethabara Seminary. He didn't work very hard at the classics and mathematics, it must be admitted: Professor Hazen complained that his recitations in Plato were not up to the mark, and that his Cicero was seldom prepared with sufficient diligence: but though in the dead languages his work was most too bad, the Professor allowed that in English literatoor he did well, and seemed to reach out elastically with his faculties in all directions. He spent very little time over his books to be sure, but he caught the drift, appropriated the kernel, and let the rest slide. Fact was, he created his own culture. He didn't debate in the lyceum, or mix much in social gatherings of an evening (where the female stoodents entertained the gentlemen with tea, and Johnny cake, and crullers, and improving conversation), but he walked a great deal alone in the hills, and interested himself with sketching, and the pursoot of natural history. Still, he wasn't social; so much Professor Hazen was compelled by candour to admit. When the entire strength of the Eclectic Institoot went in carriages to the annual grove-meeting at Rudolph, Hiram Winthrop was usually conspicuous by his absence. The lady stoodents fully expected that a gentleman of such marked artistic and rural proclivities would on such occasions be the life and soul of the whole party: that he would burst out occasionally into a rapturous strain at the sight of an elegant bird, or a trailing vine, or a superb giant of the primæval forest. They calculated confidently on his reciting poetry appropriate to the scene and the social occasion. But Hiram generally stopped away altogether, which operated considerable disappointment on the ladies; or if he went at all, accompanied the junior stoodents in the refreshment waggon, and scarcely contributed anything solid to the general entertainment. In short, he was a very bashful and retiring person, who didn't amalgamate spontaneously or readily with the prevalent tone of life at the Eclectic Institoot.
Nevertheless, in spite of the solitude, Hiram Winthrop liked the Institute, and often looked back afterwards upon the time he had spent there as one of the happiest portions of his life. He worked away hard in all his spare moments at drawing and painting; and some of the lady students still retain some of his works of this period, which they cherish in small gilt frames upon the parlour wall, as mementoes of their brief acquaintance with a prominent American artistic gentleman. Miss Almeda A. Stiles in particular (who followed Hiram from Betha-bara to Orange, where she graduated with him in the class of 18—) keeps even now two of his drawings in her rooms at the lyceum at Smyrna, Mo. One of them represents a large Europian bird, seated upon the bough of a tree in winter; it is obviously a copy from a drawing-master's design: the other, which is far finer and more original, is a sketch of Chattawauga Falls, before the erection of the existing sawmills and other improvements. Hiram was singularly fond of Chattawauga; but strange to say, from the very first day that the erection of the sawmills was undertaken, he refused to go near the spot, alleging no other reason for his refusal except that he regarded these useful institootions in the light of a positively wicked desecration of the work of nature. There was a general feeling at Orange that in many respects young Winthrop's sentiments and opinions were in fact painfully unAmerican.
In the holidays—no, vacation—(one mustn't apply European names to American objects), Hiram found enough to do in teaching school in remote country sections. Nay, he even managed to save a little money out of his earnings, which he put away to help him on his grand project of going to Europe—that dim, receding, but now far more historical and less romantic Europe towards which his hopes were always pointing. Audouin would gladly have sent him on his own account—Hiram knew that much well; for Audouin was comfortably rich, and he had taken a great fancy to his young protégé. But Hiram didn't want to spend his friend's money if he could possibly help it: he had the honest democratic feeling strong upon him, that he would like to go to Europe by his own earnings or not at all. So as soon as his three years at Orange were over, he determined to go to Syracuse (not the Sicilian one, but its namesake in New York State), and start in business for the time being as a draughtsman on the wood. He was drawn to this scheme by an advertisement in the 'Syracuse Daily Independent,' requiring a smart hand at drawing for a large blockengraving establishment in that city.
'My dear Hiram,' Audouin exclaimed in dismay, when his young friend told him of his project, 'you really mustn't think of it. At Syracuse, too! why, what sort of work do you conceive people would want done at Syracuse? Nothing but advertisement drawings of factories for the covers of biscuit tins, or flaring red and yellow fruits for the decoration of canned peaches.'
'Well, Mr. Audouin,' Hiram answered with a smile, 'I guess I must go in for the canned peaches, then, if nothing better offers. I've got to earn enough to take me across to Europe, one way or the other;—no, don't say that now,' for he saw Audouin trying to cut in impatiently with his ever friendly offer of assistance: 'don't say that,' and he clutched his friend's arm tightly. 'I know you would. I know you would. But I can't accept it. This thing has just got to be done in the regular way of business or not at all; and what's more, Mr. Audouin, I've just got to go and do it.'
'But, Hiram,' Audouin cried, half angrily, 'I want you to go to Europe and learn to paint splendid pictures, and make all America proud of your talent. I found you out, and I've got a sort of proprietary interest in you; and just when I expect you to begin doing something really great, you calmly propose to go to Syracuse, and draw designs for canned peaches! You ought to consider your duty to your country.'
'I'm very sorry, Mr. Audouin,' Hiram answered with his accustomed gravity, 'if I disappoint you personally; but as for the rest of America, I dare say the country'll manage to hold on a year or two longer without my pictures.'
So Hiram really went at last to Syracuse (pronounced Sirrah-kyooze), and duly applied for the place as draughtsman. The short boy who showed him in to the office went off to call one of the bosses. In a few minutes, the boss in question entered, and in a quiet American tone, with just a faint relic of some English country dialect flavouring it dimly in the background, inquired if this was the young man who had come about the drawing. 'For if so, mister,' he said with the true New Yorker ring, 'just you step right back here with me, will 'ee, a minute, and we'll settle this little bit of business right away, smart and handy.'
Hiram knew the boss in a moment, in spite of his altered voice and manner. 'Sam,' he said, taking his hand warmly (for he hadn't had so many friends in his lifetime that he had forgotten how to be grateful to any single one of them): 'Sam, don't you remember me? I'm Hiram Winthrop.'
Sam's whole voice and manner changed in a moment, from the sharp, official, Syracuse business man to something more like the old simple, easygoing, bucolic Sam Churchill, who had come out so long ago from Dorsetshire. 'Why, bless my soul, Hiram,' he exclaimed, grasping both his hands at once in an iron grip, 'so it's you, lad, is it? Well, I am glad to see you. You step right back here and let's have a look at you! Why, how you've grown, Hiram! Only don't call me Sam, too open, here; here, I'm one of the bosses, and get called Mr. Churchill. And how's the deacon, and the missus, and old Major (you don't mind old Major? he was the off-horse at the plough, always, he was). And how are you? Been to college, I reckon, by the look of you. You come right back here and tell me all about it.'
So Hiram went right back (behind the little counter in the front office), and told Sam Churchill his whole story. And Sam in return told his. It wasn't very long, but it was all prosperous. He had left, the deacon soon after Hiram went to live at Bethabara Seminary; he had come to Syracuse in search of work; had begun trying his hand as draughtsman for a wood-engraver; had gone into partnership with another young man, on his own account; had risen as fast as people in America do rise, if they have anything in them; and was now joint boss of the biggest woodcut establishment in the whole Lake Shore section of New York State. 'See here,' he cried with infinite pride to Hiram. 'Just you look at all these labels. Hemmings' Patent Blacking—nigger woman admiring her own teeth in her master's boots—that's ours. And this: Chicago General Canning Company; Prime Fruit: I did that myself. And this: Philbrick's Certain Death to Eats: good design, rather, that one, ain't it? Here's more: Potterton's Choke-cherry Cordial; Old Dr. Hezekiah Bowdler's Elixir of Winter-green; Eselmann and Schneider's Eagle Brand Best Old Bourbon Whiskey; Smoke None but Cyrus A. Walker's Original and Only Genuine Old Dominion Honeydew. That's our line of business, you see, Hiram. That's where we've got on. We've put mind into it. We've struck out a career of our own. We've determined to revolutionise the American advertisement illustration market, When we took the thing in hand, it was all red and yellow uglinesses. We've discarded crudeness and vulgarity, we have, and gone in for artistic colouring and the best sentiments. Look at Philbrick's Certain Death, for example. That's fine, now, isn't it? We've made the fortune of the Certain Death. When we took it up, advertising I mean, there wasn't a living to be got out of Philbrick's. They had a sort of comic picture of four rats, poisoned, with labels coming out of their mouths, saying they were gone coons, and so forth. Vulgar, vulgar, very. We went in for the contract, and produced the chaste and elegant design you see before you. It has succeeded, naturally,' and Sam looked across at Hiram with the serious face of profound conviction with which he was always wont to confront the expected customer, in the interests of the joint establishment.
Poor Hiram! his heart sank within him a little when he looked at the chaste and elegant design; but he had put his hand to the plough, and he would not look back: so before the end of that day Sam Churchill had definitely engaged him as chief draughtsman to his rising establishment.
That was how Hiram came to spend two years as an advertisement draughtsman at Syracuse. He didn't deny, afterwards, that those two years were about the dreariest and most, disappointing of his whole lifetime. In his spare moments, to be sure, he still went on studying as well as he was able; and on Sundays he stole away with his easel and colours to the few bits of decently pretty scenery that lie within reach of that flat and marshy mushroom city: but for the greater part of his time he was employed in designing neat and appropriate wrappers for quack medicine bottles, small illustrations for catalogues or newspaper advertisements, and huge flaring posters for mammoth circuses or variety dramatic entertainments. It was a grinding, horrible work; and though Sam Churchill did his best to make it pleasant and bearable for him, Hiram cordially detested it with all his heart. The only thing that made it any way endurable was the image of that far-off promised European journey, on which Hiram Winthrop had fixed all his earthly hopes and ambitions.
Sam often told him of Colin, for Colin had kept up a correspondence with his thriving American brother; and it was a sort of daydream with Hiram that one day or other Colin Churchill and he should go to Rome together. For Audouin's encouragement and Colin's eagerness had inspired Hiram with a like desire: and he saved and hoarded in hopes that the time would at last come when he might get rid of advertisements, and take instead to real painting. Meanwhile he contented himself with working at his art by himself, or with such little external aid as he could get in a brand-new green-and-white American city, and hoping for the future that never came but was always coming.
CHAPTER XIII. AN EVE IN EDEN.
Once a year, and once only, Hiram had a holiday. For a glorious fortnight every summer, Sam Churchill and his partner gave their head draughtsman leave to go and amuse himself wheresoever the spirit led him. And on the first of such holidays, Hiram went with Audouin to the Thousand Islands, and spent a delightful time boating, fishing, and sketching, among the endless fairy mazes of that enchanted region, where the great St. Lawrence loses itself hopelessly in innumerable petty channels, between countless tiny bosses of pine-clad rock. It was a fortnight of pure enjoyment for poor drudging advertisement-drawing Hiram, and he revelled in its wealth of beauty as he had never revelled in anything earthly before during his whole lifetime.
One morning Hiram had taken his little easel out with him from Alexandria Bay to one of the prettiest points of view upon the neighbouring mainland—a jutting spit of ice-worn rock, projecting far into the placid lake, and thickly overhung with fragrant brush of the beautiful red cedar—and was making a little water-colour sketch of a tiny islet in the foreground, just a few square yards of smooth granite covered in the centre with an inch deep of mould, and crowned by a single tall straight stem of sombre spruce fir. It was a delicate, dainty little sketch, steeped in the pale morning haze of Canadian summer; and the scarlet columbines, waving from the gnarled roots of the solitary fir tree, stood out like brilliant specks of light against the brown bark and dark green foliage that formed the background. Hiram was just holding it at arm's length, to see how it looked, and turning to ask for Audouin's friendly criticism, when he heard a clear bright woman's voice close behind him speaking so distinctly that he couldn't help overhearing the words.
'Oh, papa,' the voice said briskly, 'there's an artist working down there. I wonder if he'd mind our going down and looking at his picture. I do so love to see an artist painting.'
The very sound of the voice thrilled through Hiram's inmost marrow as he heard it, somewhat as Audouin's voice had done long ago, when first he came upon him in the Muddy Creek woodland—only more so. He had never heard a woman's voice before at all like it. It didn't in the least resemble Miss Almeda A. Stiles's, or any other one of the lady students at Bethabara or Orange, who formed the sole standard of female society that Hiram Winthrop had ever yet met with. It was a rich, liquid, rippling voice, and it spoke with the soft accent and delicate deliberate intonation of an English lady. Hiram, of course, didn't by the light of nature recognise at once this classificatory fact as to its origin and history, but he did know that it stirred him strangely, and made him look round immediately to see from what manner of person the voice itself ultimately proceeded.
A tall girl of about nineteen, with a singularly full ripe-looking face and figure for her age, was standing on the edge of the little promontory just above, and looking down inquisitively towards Hiram's easel. Her cheeks had deeper roses in them than Hiram had ever seen before, and her complexion was clearer and more really flesh-coloured than that of most pale and sallow American women. 'What a beautiful skin to paint!' thought Hiram instinctively; and then the next moment, with a flush of surprise, he began to recognise to himself that this unknown girl, whose eyes met his for an infinitesimal fraction of a second, had somehow immediately impressed him—nay, thrilled him—in a way that no other woman had ever before succeeded in doing. In one word, she seemed to him more womanly. Why, he didn't know, and couldn't have explained even to himself, for Hiram's forte certainly did not lie in introspective analysis; but he felt it instinctively, and was conscious at once of a certain bashful desire to speak with her, which he had never experienced towards a single one of the amiable young ladies at Bethabara Seminary.
'Gwen, my dear,' the father said in a dried-up Indian military tone, 'you will disturb these artists. Come away, come away; people don't like to be watched at their duties, really.'
Gwen, by way of sole reply, only bent over the edge of the little bluff that overhung the platform of rock where Hiram was sitting, and said with the same clear deliberate accent as before, 'May I look? Oh, thank you. How very, very pretty!'
'It isn't finished yet,' Audouin said, taking the words out of Hiram's mouth almost, as he held up the picture for Gwen's inspection. 'It's only a rough sketch, so far: it'll look much worthier of the original when mv friend has put the last little touches to it. In art, you know, the last loving lingering touch is really everything.'
Hiram felt half vexed that Audouin should thus have assumed the place of spokesman for him towards the unknown lady; and yet at the same time he was almost grateful to him for it also, for he felt too abashed to speak himself in her overawing presence.
'Yes, the original's beautiful,' Gwen answered, taking her father's arm and leading him down, against his will, to the edge of the water: 'but the sketch is very pretty too, and the point of view so exquisitely chosen. What a thing it is, papa, to have the eye of an artist, isn't it? You and I might have passed this place a dozen times over, and never noticed what a lovely little bit it is to make a sketch of; but the painter sees it at once, and picks out by instinct the very spot to make a beautiful picture.'
'Ah, quite so,' the father echoed in a cold unconcerned voice, as if the subject rather bored him. 'Quite so, quite so. Very pretty place indeed, an excellent retired corner, I should say, for a person who has a taste that way, to sit and paint in.'
'It is beautiful,' Audouin said, addressing himself musingly to the daughter, 'and our island in particular is the prettiest of all the thousand, I do believe.'
'Your island?' Gwen cried interrogatively. 'Then you own that sweet little spot there, do you?'
'My friend and I, yes,' Audouin answered airily, to Hiram's great momentary astonishment. 'In the only really worthy sense of ownership, we own it most assuredly. I dare say some other man somewhere or other keeps locked up in his desk a dirty little piece of crabbed parchment, which he calls a title-deed, and which gives him some sort of illusory claim to the productive power of the few square yards of dirt upon its surface. But the island itself and the enjoyment of it is ours, and ours only: the gloss on the ice-grooves in the shelving granite shore, the scarlet columbines on the tall swaying stems, the glow of the sunlight on the russet boles of the spruce fir—you see my friend has fairly impounded them all upon his receptive square of cartridge paper here for our genuine title-deed of possession.'
'Ah, I see, I see,' the old gentleman said testily. 'You and your friend claim the island by prescription, but your claim is disputed by the original freeholder.'
The three others all smiled slightly. 'Oh dear, no, papa,' Gwen answered with a touch of scorn and impatience in her tone. 'Don't you understand? This gentleman——'
'My name is Audouin,' the New Englander put in with a slight inclination.
'Mr. Audouin means that the soil is somebody else's, but the sole enjoyment of the island is his friend's and his own.'
'The so-called landowner often owns nothing more than the dirt in the ditches,' Audouin explained with a wave of the hand, in his romantic mystifying fashion, 'while the observer owns all that is upon it, of any real use or beauty. For our whole lifetime, my friend and I have had that privilege and pleasure. The grass grows green for us in spring; the birds build nests for us in early summer; the fire-flies flit before our eyes on autumn evenings; the stoat and hare put on their snow-white coat for our delight in winter weather. I've seen a poet enjoy for a whole season the best part of a farm, while the crusty farmer supposed he had only had out of it a few worthless wild apples. We are the real freeholders, sir; the man with the title-deeds has merely the usufruct.'
'Oh, ah,' the military gentleman repeated, as if a light were beginning slowly to dawn upon his bewildered intelligence. 'Some reservation in favour of rights of way and royalties and so forth, in America, I suppose. Only owns the dirt in the ditches, you say,—the soil presumably. Now, in England, every landowner owns the mines and minerals and springs and everything else beneath the soil, to the centre of the earth, I believe, if I've been rightly instructed.'
'It can seldom be worth his while to push his claims so far.' Audouin replied with great gravity, still smiling sardonically.
Gwen coloured slightly. Hiram noticed the delicate flush of the colour, as it mantled all her cheek for a single second, and was hardly angry with his friend for having provoked so pretty a protest. Then Gwen said with a little cough, as if to change the subject: 'These islands are certainly very lovely. They're the most beautiful thing we've seen in a six weeks' tour in America. I don't think even Niagara charmed me so much, in spite of all its grandeur.'
'You're right,' Audouin went on (a little in the Sir Oracle vein, Hiram fancied); 'at any rate, the islands are more distinctly American. There's nothing like them anywhere else in the world. They're the final word of our level American river basins. You have grand waterfalls in Europe; you have broad valleys; you have mountains finer than any of ours here east at least; but you've nothing equal in its way to this flat interwoven scenery of river and foliage, of land and water. It has no sublimity, not a particle; it's utterly wanting in everything that ordinarily makes beautiful country; but it's absolutely fairy like in its endless complexity of channels and islands, and capes and rocks and lakelets, all laid out on such an infinitesimally tiny scale, as one might imagine the sylphs and gnomes or the Lilliputians would lay out their ground plan of a projected paradise.'
'Yes, I think it's exquisite in its way,' Gwen went on. 'My father doesn't care for it because it's so flat: after Naini Tal and the Himalayas, he says, all American scenery palls and fades away into utter insignificance. Of course I haven't seen the Himalayas—and don't want to, you know—but I've been in Switzerland; and I don't see why, because Switzerland is beautiful as mountain country, this shouldn't be beautiful too in a different fashion.'
'Quite so,' Audouin answered briskly. 'We should admire all types of beauty, each after its own kind. Not to do so argues narrowness—a want of catholicity.'
The military gentleman fidgeted sadly by Gwen's side; he had caught at the word 'catholicity,' and he didn't like it. It savoured of religious discussion; and being, like most other old Indian officers, strictly evangelical, he began to suspect Audouin of High Church tendencies, or even dimly to envisage him to himself in the popular character of a Jesuit in disguise.
As for Hiram, he listened almost with envy to Audouin's glib tongue, as it ran on so lightly and so smoothly to the beautiful overawing stranger. If only, now, he himself dared talk like that, or rather if only he dared talk after his own fashion—which, indeed, to say the truth, would have been a great deal better! But he didn't dare, and so he let Audouin carry off all the conversation unopposed; while Audouin, with his easy Boston manners, never suspected for a moment that the shy, self restraining New Yorker countryman was burning all the time to put in a little word or two on his own account, or to attract some tiny share of the beautiful stranger's passing attention. And thus it came to pass that Audouin went on talking for half an hour or more uninterruptedly to Gwen, the military gentleman subsiding meanwhile into somewhat sulky silence, and Hiram listening with all his ears to hear what particulars he could glean by the way as to the sudden apparition, her home, name, and calling. They had come to America for a six weeks' tour, it seemed, 'Papa' having business in Canada, where he owned a little property, and having leave of absence for the purpose from his regiment at Chester. That was almost all that Hiram gathered as to her actual position; and that little he treasured up in his memory most religiously against the possible contingency of a future journey to England 'And you contemplate returning to Europe shortly?' Hiram ventured to ask at last of the English lady. It was the first time he had opened his lips during the entire conversation, and he was surprised even now at his own temerity in presuming to say anything.
Gwen turned towards the young artist carelessly. Though she had been evidently interested in Audouin's talk, she had not so far even noticed the painter of the little picture which had formed the first introduction to the entire party. 'Yes,' she said, as unconcernedly as if Europe were in the same State; 'we sail next Friday.'
It was the only sentence she said to him, but she said it with a bright frank smile, which Hiram could have drawn from memory a twelvemonth after. As a matter of fact, he did draw it in his own bedroom at the Alexandria Bay Hotel that very evening: and he kept it long in his little pocket-book as a memento of a gleam of light bursting suddenly upon his whole existence. For Hiram was not so inexperienced in the ways of the world that he couldn't recognise one very simple and palpable fact: he was in love at first sight with the unknown English lady.
'Really, Gwen,' the military gentleman said at this point in the conversation, 'we must go back to lunch, if we're going to catch our steamer for Montreal. Besides, you're hindering our friend here from finishing his picture. Good morning—good morning; thank you so very much for the opportunity of seeing it.'
Gwen said a little 'Good morning' to Audouin, bowed more distantly to Hiram, and taking her father's arm jumped lightly up the rocks again, and disappeared in the direction of the village. When she was fairly out of sight, Hiram sat down once more and finished his water-colour in complete silence.
'Pretty girl, Hiram,' Audouin said lightly, as they walked back to their quarters at lunch-time.
'I should think, Mr. Audouin,' Hiram answered slowly, with even more than his usual self-restraint, 'she must be a tolerably favourable specimen of European women.'
Audouin said no more; and Hiram, too, avoided the subject in future. Somehow, for the first time in his life, he felt just a little bit aggrieved and jealous of Audouin. It was he, Hiram, who had painted the picture which first caught Gwen's fancy—he called her 'Gwen' in his own mind, quite simply, having no other name by which to call her. It was he who was the artist and the selector of that particular point of view; and yet Audouin, all unconsciously as it seemed, had stepped in and appropriated to himself, by implication, the artistic honours of the situation. Audouin had talked his vague poetical nature-worship talk—it seemed to Hiram a trifle affected somehow, to-day; and had monopolised all Gwen's interest in the interview, and had left him, Hiram (the founder of the feast, so to speak), out in the cold, while he himself basked in the full sunshine of Gwen's momentary favour. And yet to Audouin what was she, after all, but a pretty passing stranger? while to him she was a revelation, a new birth, a latter-day Aphrodite, rising unbidden with her rosy cheeks from the very bosom of the smiling lake. And now she was going back again at once to Europe, that great, unknown, omnipotential Europe; and perhaps Hiram Winthrop would never again see the one woman who had struck him at first sight with the instantaneous thrill which the man who has once experienced it can never forget. Colin Churchill hadn't once yet even asked himself whether or not he was in love with Minna; but Hiram Winthrop acknowledged frankly forthwith to his own heart that he was certainly and undeniably in love with Gwen.
Who was she? that was the question. He didn't even know her surname: his sole information about her amounted exactly to this, that she was called Gwen, and that her father had been quartered at Chester. Hiram smiled to himself as he recollected the old legend of how St. Thomas à Becket's mother, a Saracen maiden, had come to England from the East, in search of her Christian lover, knowing only the two proper names, Gilbert and London. Was he, Hiram Winthrop, in this steam-ridden nineteenth century, in like manner to return to the old home of his forefathers, and make inquiry with all diligence for Gwen, Chester? The notion was of course too palpably absurd (though Audouin would have been charmed with it). Yet there can be no denying that from the moment Hiram met that beautiful English girl by the Lake of the Thousand Islands, his desire to see Europe was quickened by yet one more unacknowledged, but very powerful private attraction. If anybody had talked to him about marrying Gwen, he would have honestly laughed at the improbable notion, but in the indefinite way that young men often feel, he felt as though some vague influence drew him on towards Gwen, not as a woman to be wooed and won, but as a central object of worship and admiration.
At the hotel, they didn't know the name of the English gentleman and his daughter; the clerk said they only came for a day and expected no letters. Another guest had asked about them, too, he mentioned casually; but Hiram, accustomed to looking upon his friend as so much older than himself as to have outgrown the folly of admiring female beauty, never dreamt of supposing that that other guest was Lothrop Audouin. He searched the 'Herald,' indeed, a week later, to see if any English officer and his daughter had sailed from New York on the Friday, but there were no passengers whom he could at all identify with Gwen and her father. It didn't occur to him that they might have sailed, as they did sail, by the Canadian mail steamer from Quebec, where he couldn't have failed to discover them in the list of passengers; so he was left in the end with no other memorial of this little episode save the sketch of that sunny face, and the two names, Gwen and Chester. To those little memorials Hiram's mind turned back oftener than less solitary people could easily imagine during the next long twelve months of dreary advertisement-drawing at long, white, dusty, sun-smitten Syracuse.