Joan, the little daughter of the hurer, sat on a three-legged stool in the corner of her father’s shop, nursing her baby. It was not much of a baby, being only a piece of wood with a knob on the end. But the shop was not much of a shop. Gilles the hurer was a cripple, and it was all that he could do to give Joan and her mother a roof over their heads. They had sometimes two meals a day; oftener one; occasionally none at all.
If he could have made hats and caps like those which he used to make when he was a tradesman in Milan, every sort of fine goods would have come into the shop. In processions and pageants, at banquets, weddings, betrothals, christenings, funerals, on every occasion in life, the people wore headgear which helped to make the picture. The fashion of a man’s hat suited his position in life. Details and decorations varied more or less, but the styles very seldom did. Velvet and fur were allowed only to persons of a certain dignity; hats were made to show embroidery, which might be of gold thread and jeweled. Merchants wore a sort of hood with a long loose crown which could be used as a pocket. This protected the neck and ears on a journey, and had a lining of wool, fur, or lambskin. Court ladies wore hoods of velvet, silk or fine cloth for traveling. At any formal social affair a lady wore some ornamental head-dress with a veil which she could draw over her face. The wimple, usually worn by elderly women, was a scarf of fine linen thrown over the head, brought closely around the throat and chin, and held by a fillet. In later and more luxurious and splendid times, the cone-shaped and crescent-shaped head-dresses came in.
Hats were not common in the twelfth century. The hair fell in carefully arranged curls, long braids or loose tresses on the shoulders; the face was framed in delicate veils of silk or sendal, kept in place by a chaplet of flowers or a coronet of gold. Every maiden learned to weave garlands in set patterns, and could make a wreath in any one of several given styles, for her own hair or for decorating a building. Red, green and blue were the colors most often used in dress, and on any festival day the company presented a very gay appearance.
Gilles, however, was obliged to confine himself to the making of hures or rough woolen caps for common men. He had no apprentices, although his wife and daughter sometimes helped him. His shop was a corner of a very old building most of which had been burned in a great London fire. It was the oldest house in the street and was roofed with stone, which probably saved it. The ends of the beams in the wall fitted into sockets in other beams, and were set straight, crooked or diagonally without any apparent plan. Two or three hundred years before, when the house was built, the space between the timbers had been filled in with interlaced branches, over which mud was plastered on in thick coats. This made the kind of wall known as “wattle and daub.” It was not very scientific in appearance, but it was weather-proof. As there was no fireplace or hearth, the family kept warm—when it could—by means of an iron brazier filled with coals. Cooking—when they had anything to cook—was done over the brazier in a chafing-dish, or in a tiny stone fireplace outside the rear wall, made of scattered stones by Joan’s mother.
Gilles was a Norman, but he had been born in Sicily, which had been conquered by the Norman adventurer Guiscard long before. He had gone to Milan when a youth, and there he had met Joan’s mother—and stayed. The luxury of Lombard cities made any man who could manufacture handsome clothing sure of a living. “Milaner and Mantua-Maker” on a sign above a shop centuries later meant a shop where one could find the latest fashions. Gilles was prosperous and happy, and his little girl was just learning to walk, when the siege of Milan put an end to everything. He came to London crippled from a wound and palsied from fever and set about finding work.
They might have starved if it had not been for a Florentine artist, Matteo, who was also a stranger in London, but had all that he could do. He lodged for a year in the solar chamber, as the room above the shop was called. Poor as their shelter was, it had this room to spare. Matteo paid his way in more than money; he improved the house. He understood plaster work, and covered the inner walls with a smooth creamy mixture which made a beautiful surface for pictures. On this fair and spotless plaster he made studies of what he saw day by day, drawing, painting, painting out and making new studies as he certainly could not have done had he been lodged in a palace. All along two sides of the shop was a procession of dignitaries in the most gorgeous of holiday robes. In the chamber above were portraits of the King and Queen, the Bishop of London, Prior Hagno preaching to a crowd at Bartlemy Fair, some of the chief men of the government, and animals wild and tame. He told Joan stories about the paintings, and these walls were the only picture-books that she had.
Then they sheltered a smooth-spoken Italian called Giuseppe, who nearly got them into terrible trouble. He not only never paid a penny, but barely escaped the officers of the law, who asked a great many questions about him and how they came to harbor him. After that they made it a rule not to take any one in unless he was recommended by some one they knew. It was worse to go to prison than to be hungry.
One day, when Gilles had just been paid for some work done for Master Nicholas Gay, the rich merchant, a slender, dark-eyed youth with a workman’s pack on his shoulder came and asked for a room. Hardly had Joan called her mother when the stranger reeled and fell unconscious on the floor of the shop. He did not know where he was or who he was for days. They remembered Giuseppe and were dubious, but they kept him and tended him until he was able to talk. His tools and his hands showed him to be a wood-carver, and his dress was foreign. His illness was something like what used to be called ship-fever, due to the hard conditions of long voyages, in wooden ships not too clean.
When their guest was able to talk he told them that he was Quentin, a wood-carver of Peronne. He had met Matteo in Messina and thus heard of this lodging. He had come to London to work at the oaken stalls of the Bishop of Ely’s private chapel in Holborn. These stalls, or choir-seats, in a Gothic church were designed to suit the stately high-arched building. Their straight tall backs were carved in wood, and the arm-rests ended in an ornament called a finial. Often no two stalls were alike, and yet the different designs were shaped to fit the general style, so that the effect was uniform. The carving of one pair of arms might be couchant lions; on the next, leopards; on the next, hounds, and so on. The seats were usually hinged and could be raised when not in use. The under side of the seat, which then formed part of all this elaborate show of decoration, was most often carved with grotesque little squat figures of any sort that occurred to the artist. Here Noah stuck his head out of a nutshell Ark; there a woman belabored her husband for breaking a jug; on the next stall might be three solemn monkeys making butter in a churn. Quentin’s fancy was apt to run to little wood-goblins, mermaids, crowned lizards, fauns, and flying ships. He came from a country where the forests are full of fairy-tales.
Joan would be very sorry to have Quentin go away. She was thinking of this as she sat in the twilight nursing her wooden poppet. When he came in at last he had his tools with him, and a piece of fine hard wood about two feet long. Seating himself on a bench he lit the betty lamp on the wall, and laying out his knives and gouges he began to carve a face on the wood.
Joan could not imagine what he was making, and she watched intently. The face grew into that of a charming little lady, with eyes crinkled as if they laughed, and a dimple in her firm chin. The hair waved over the round head; the neck was as softly curved as a pigeon’s. The gown met in a V shape at the throat, with a bead necklace carved above. There was a close-fitting bodice, with sleeves that came down over the wrists and wrinkled into folds, and a loose over-sleeve that came to the elbow. The skirt fell in straight folds and there was a little ornamental border in a daisy pattern around the hem. When the statuette was finished and set up, it was like a court lady made small by enchantment.
“There is a poppet for thee, small one,” Quentin said smiling.
Joan’s hands clasped tight and her eyes grew big and dark. “For me?” she cried.
“It is a poor return for the kindness that I have had in this house,” answered Quentin brushing the chips into the brazier.
The poppet seemed to bring luck to the hurer’s household. Through Gilles, Master Gay had heard of Quentin’s work, and he ordered a coffret for his wife, and a settle. The arms of the settle were to be carved with little lady-figures like Joan’s, and Master Gay asked if they could not all be portraits of Princesses. Joan’s own poppet was named Marguerite for the daughter of the French King, who had married the eldest son of Henry II. Quentin had copied the face from Matteo’s sketch upon the wall, and in one room or the other were all the other members of the royal family. But as it would not be suitable to show Queens and Princesses upholding the arms of a chair in the house of a London merchant, Quentin suggested that they change the design, and use the leopards of Anjou for the arms, while the statuettes of the Princesses were ranged along the top of the high back. There could be five open-work arches with a figure in each, and plain linen-fold paneling below. Where the carving needed a flower or so he would put alternately the lilies of France and the sprig of broom which was the badge of the Plantagenets. Thus the piece of carving would commemorate the fact that the family of the King of England was related to nearly every royal house in Europe through marriage. It would be a picture-chronicle.
In the middle arch was Marguerite, who would be Queen of England some day if her husband lived. At her right hand was Constance of Brittany, wife of Geoffrey, who through her would inherit that province. The other figures were Eleanor, who was married to Alfonso, King of Castile; Matilda, who was the wife of Henry the Lion, Duke of Saxony, the most powerful vassal of the German Emperor; and Joan, the youngest, betrothed to William, called the Good, King of Sicily.
“There will be two more princesses some day,” said Joan, cuddling Marguerite in her arms as she watched Quentin’s deft strokes. “Prince Richard is not married yet, and neither is Prince John.”
“The work cannot wait for that, little one,” Quentin answered laughing. “Richard is only sixteen, and John still younger. Yet they do say that the King is planning an alliance with Princess Alois of France for Richard, and is in treaty with Hubert the Duke of Maurienne for his daughter to wed with John. I think, myself, that Richard will choose his own bride.”
Joan said nothing, but in her own mind she thought it would be most unpleasant to be married off like that, by arrangements made years before.
“The marriage with Hubert’s daughter,” Quentin added half to himself, “would keep open the way into Italy if it were needed. It is a bad thing to have an enemy blocking your gate.”
Although her poppet was carved so that the small out-held hands and arms were clear of the body, and dresses could be fitted over them, Joan found that there were but few points or edges that were likely to be chipped off. The wood was well seasoned, and the carving followed the grain most cunningly. Neither dampness nor wood-boring insects could easily get into the channels where sap once ran. This was part of the wisdom of wood-carving.
When Joan grew too old to play with her poppet she sometimes carried her to some fine house to show a new fashion, or style of embroidery. Marguerite had a finer wardrobe than any modern doll, for the little hats, hoods and head-dresses had each a costume to go with it, and all were kept in a chest Quentin had made for her, with the arms of Milan on the lid. No exiled Milanese ever quite gave up the hope that some day the city would be rebuilt in all its splendor, and the foreign governors driven from Lombardy. Joan used to hear her father talking of it with their next lodger, Giovanni Bergamotto, who was a peddler at fairs. Gilles had had steady work for a long time, and was making not only the rough caps he used to make, now turned out by an apprentice, but fine hats and caps for the wealthy. A carved and gilded hat swung before the door, and Joan learned embroidery of every kind. She saw Quentin now and then, and one day he sent word to her, by the wool-merchant Robert Edrupt, that Queen Eleanor wished to see the newest court fashions, and that Joan might journey with Edrupt and his wife to the abbey where she was living. It was one of the best known houses in England, and the Abbess was of royal blood. It was not at all unusual for its guest-rooms to be occupied by Queens and Princesses.
Quentin had been sent there to do some work for the Abbey, and in that way the Queen, through Philippa, her maid of honor, had heard of Joan.
“I suppose it is a natural desire in a woman,” Master Edrupt said when they talked of the matter, “but somehow I would stake my head it is not the fashions she is after.”
Barbara his wife smiled but said nothing. She agreed.
When Joan had modestly shown her wares, and the little wooden court lady had smiled demurely through it all, the Queen dandled Marguerite on her knee and thoughtfully looked her over.
“The face is surely like the Princess of France,” she said. And Joan felt more than ever certain that there was a reason for this interest in poppets.
Later in the day she found out what it was. Quentin was carving other little lady-figures like those he had made years ago for Master Gay. He had also made the figures of a Bishop, a King, a Monk, and a Merchant; with a grotesque hump-backed hook-nosed Dwarf for the Jester. It looked as if a giant were about to play chess. Padraig, an Irish scribe who had made some designs for the Queen’s tapestry-workers, was using his best penmanship to copy certain letters on fine parchment. Giovanni, who had sprung up from somewhere, was making a harness-like contrivance of hempen cords, iron hooks and rods, and wooden pulleys. When finished it went into a small bag of tow-cloth; if stretched out it filled the end of a rough wooden frame. Joan began to suspect that the figures were for a puppet-show.
“It is time to explain,” Quentin said to the others. “We can trust Joan. She is as true as steel.”
Joan’s heart leaped with pride. If Milan had only honor left, her children would keep that.
“It is this, Joan,” Quentin went on kindly. “In time of war any messenger may be searched, and we do not know when war will come. King Henry desires above all things the peace of his realm. He will not openly take the side of the Lombard cities against Frederick Barbarossa—yet. But he will throw all his influence into the scale if he can. The Queen has hit upon a way by which letters can be sent safely to the courts of Brittany, France, Castile, Sicily, and even to Saxony, which is in Barbarossa’s own domains. Giovanni will travel as a peddler, with the weaver-boy Cimarron as his servant or companion, as may seem best. He will have a pack full of such pretty toys as maidens love,—broidered veils, pomanders, perfumed gloves, girdles—nothing costly enough to tempt robbers—and these wooden poppets of ours. We cannot trust the tiring-women in times like these, but he may be able to give the letters into the hands of the Queens themselves. No one, surely, will suspect a poppet. These gowns and wimples will display the fashions, and I had another reason for telling you to bring them all. If he cannot get his chance as a peddler he can hang about the court with a puppet-show. Now, look here.”
Quentin took the softly smiling poppet and began to twist her neck. When he had unscrewed the dainty little head a deep hole appeared in the middle of the figure. Into this Padraig fitted a roll of parchment, and over it a wooden peg.
“May she keep it?” Quentin asked gently. “There is need for haste, and I have not time to make another figure.”
Joan swallowed hard. Marguerite had heard many secrets that no one else knew. “Aye,” she said, “I will let her go.”
Then each little figure in turn received its secret to keep, and Joan, Lady Philippa, and the other maids sewed furiously for a day and a half. Each Princess was gowned in robes woven with the arms of her kingdom. The other figures were suitably dressed. The weights which made the jester turn a somersault were gold inside a lead casing—Giovanni might need that. There were jewels hidden safely in his dagger-hilt and Cimarron’s, but to all appearance they were two common chapmen. They were gone for a long time, but Marguerite— the only poppet to return—came back safely, and inside her discreet bosom were letters for the King. Cimarron brought her to the door of Gilles the hurer, and told Joan that Giovanni, after selling the puppet-show, had stayed in Alexandria to fight for Milan.
The smithy was very small compared with a modern foundry. It was not large even for a country blacksmith’s shop; the cottage close by was hardly bigger; yet that forge made iron-work which went all over England. It was on one of the Sussex roads leading into Lewes. Often a knight would stop to have something done to his own armor or his horse’s gear, for the war-horse also wore armor,—on head and breast at least. Some of the work of old Adam Smith had gone as far as Jerusalem. Dickon felt occasionally that if he were a spear-head or a dagger, he would stand more chance of seeing the world than he did as the son of his father.
Adam was secretly proud of the lad who at thirteen could do nearly as much as he himself could. That was saying more than a little, for Adam Smith had the knack of making every blow count by putting it in exactly the right place. A man who can do that will double his strength.
Dickon had inherited the knack, but he had something else besides, of which his father knew nothing. He never did a piece of work that he did not try to make it look right. He could see that when the bar that latched a gate was of a certain length, not too small or too large, it pleased both eye and hand. He did not consider the hinges on the door better looking for being made into an elaborate pattern, unless the pattern was a good one. In short, Dickon had what is known as a sense of beauty. Some have it and some have not. Those who have can invent beautiful patterns, while those who have not can only copy,—and they do not always copy accurately.
It may seem strange to speak of beauty in the iron-work of a little country smithy, but nothing is more beautiful in its way than good iron-work. There are gates, hinges, locks, keys and other furnishings which are so well designed that one is never weary of studying them. Armor has been made beautiful in its time; so have swords, halberds, daggers, fire-baskets, and fire-dogs.
Because iron is so simple, and there is no chance of getting an effect by using color or gilding, the task of making it beautiful is unlike that of painting a picture. The beauty of iron-work is the line, the curve, the proportion. If these are wrong one sees it at once; and the same is true when the work is right. Most of the work of Adam Smith, while strong and well wrought, was only by accident good to look at. Dickon was not allowed to do anything that his father did not oversee, and Adam Smith saw to it that no job left his shop which was not well done. Dickon had found out, little by little, that when a thing is strong enough for its use, with no unnecessary clumsiness, and the handles, catches and rivetings are where they ought to be for strength and convenience, it usually looks very well. That is to say, beautiful iron-work is useful and economical.
Dickon was hammering away, one golden autumn morning, on the latch for a gate. The cattle had broken into the Fore Acre again, and Adam, who had to go to Lewes on business, told Dickon to make that latch and do it properly, so that it would keep the gate shut. Old Wat had gone into the forest for some wood, for the great belt of woodland called the Weald was all around, and the oak from it served for fuel. Dickon had never seen a coal fire in his life. Forges like this were scattered all through the Weald, and what with the iron-workers and the ship-builders, and the people who wainscoted their houses with good Sussex oak, there is no Weald left nowadays. That part of the country keeps its name, and there are groves of oak here and there, but that is all.
Dickon could see from the door the acorns dropping from the great oak that sheltered the smithy and was so huge that a man could not circle it with his arms. He began to wonder if he could put some sort of ornamental work on that latch.
No one could have looked less like an artist than the big, muscular youth in his leathern apron, with his rough tow-head and square-chinned face; but inside his brain was a thought working itself out. He took an oak twig and laid it in this position and that, on the iron.
It is not very easy to work out a design in iron. The iron must be heated, and beaten or bent into shape while it is soft. There is no making a sketch and taking your time with the brushes. Dickon thought he would see if he could draw a pattern. He took a bit of coal and a wooden tile fallen from the roof, and began to combine the lines of the gate-latch with those of the twig. He had not copied iron utensils and other patterns without knowing how to draw the lines of an oak leaf, but he found that somehow or other the leaf, as an ornament to the latch, did not look right. The cluster of acorns was better, but even that did not fit. Dickon’s feeling, though he did not think it out, was that iron is strong, and an oak tree is one of the strongest of trees, and therefore the oak was suitable to decorate Sussex iron. He changed the lines, rubbing out one and then another, until he had got a set of curves and little nubbly knot-like ornaments which were not exactly like the oak twig, but suited the lines of the latch. The leaf-like side-pieces covered the parts of the latch where the fingers and thumb would rest in opening the gate, and the projecting handle might be made into something suggesting an acorn-cluster. He nodded thoughtfully.
“That’s rather good,” said a voice over his shoulder. “Where did you learn to draw?”
Dickon jumped; he had been so busy that he had not heard the sound of a horse’s hoofs on the turf. The stranger who stood there, bridle over arm, was a rather slender man, five or six years older than Dickon, with deep-set hazel eyes, fair hair, and muddy boots that looked as if he had come a long journey.
“Nobody never taught me,” said Dickon soberly. “I was trying to find out how to do it.”
“You found out then. It is good—don’t touch it. Is it for that gate-latch? Go on and finish the job; I won’t hinder you. I’m a Sussex man, but I never came through the Weald this way. I lost my road, and they told me this would take me to Lewes. The nag and I shall both be the better for an hour’s rest.”
Dickon blew up the fire and went to work, with strong, deft strokes. He was not a shy lad, particularly when he was doing what he could do well. He was used to working with people watching him. Not seldom they were making themselves disagreeable because the work was not done more quickly, but iron cannot be hurried. If a smith does not mean to spoil the temper of his work, he must keep his own temper well in hand.
The young man led his horse into the shade, and came to watch Dickon. As the leaf-curves began to stand out and the nubs of the acorn-cluster took shape he seemed more and more interested. Once he began to ask a question, but stopped himself, as if he knew that when a man has his whole mind on a task he cannot spare any part of it for talk. Dickon almost forgot that he was there. He was intent upon putting exactly the right hollows and veins in the leaf, and giving exactly the right twist to the handle.
At last it was done. Dickon straightened his back and looked at it, as the sunlight wavered upon it through the branches. The stranger clapped him on the shoulder.
“It is better than the sketch,” he cried heartily. “It is good indeed. I have been in London, lad, in the Low Countries and in France, and I never saw a sweeter bit of work. How didst know the true line for that handle?”
“That’s to make it open properly,” Dickon explained, “fits the hand, like.”
The other nodded approvingly. “I see. I learned that same lesson in my pottery. ‘Wilfrid,’ my old master used to tell me, ‘never thee make too small an ear to thy jugs if thou lik’st the maids to love ’ee.’ There’s a knack, you see, in making a handle with a good grip to it, that will neither spill the milk nor hinder pouring. My wife she helped me there. She loves good work as well as I do.”
Adam Smith, coming up the Lewes road next day, could not think what had happened when he saw Dickon in eager talk with a stranger. The boy had never been given to words. He was more taken aback when Master Wilfrid told him that his son had the making of a rare workman. He answered gruffly, stroking his big beard:
“Aye, the lad’s well enow. Latch done, Dickon? Go and fit it to yon gate.”
Wilfrid had come back to England full of new ideas, and ambitious above all for the honor of English craftsmen. When he found this youth working out, without any model at all, a thing so good as the oak-leaved gate-latch, he was surer than ever that the land he loved could raise her own smiths. It was his ambition to make his own house beautiful within and without, as were some of the merchants’ houses he had seen in cities. He further astonished the old smith by telling him that if Dickon would put some time on work along his own lines, he would pay him double or treble what he would earn at common labor.
“You see,” explained the potter, as he showed the design he had drafted for a carved oaken chest, “there’s much to be thought of in iron-work. You have to make it strong as well as handsome, and what’s more, nine times out of ten you have to fit it to the work of some other man. It’d never do for the hinges and handles on this coffer to spoil the looks o’ the carving, and that’s to be done in London, d’ ye see? Belike I’ll have you make those first, Dickon, and let Quentin suit his pattern to yours. He can.”
“How does he make his design?” queried Dickon. “Work it out as he goes along—like iron-work?”
“Not always,” Wilfrid answered. “He’s got a many patterns drawn out on parchment besides what he carries in his head. But they’re only for show—to give an idea of the style. When he gets the size and shape and the wood he’s to use settled, he changes the pattern according to his own judgment. If a wood-carver doesn’t know his trade the design can be made by an artist, and all he need do is to follow it. But that’s not my idea of good work. Unless you’ve made such a thing yourself you don’t know how the lines are going to look. I’d never try to make a design for a fire-dog, and I doubt you’d make a poor job at shaping an earthen bowl. Then, if you want to suit yourself and your customer, you’ll be changing your pattern with every job. The work ought to grow—like a plant.”
“I know,” Dickon commented. “You make an iron pot for a woman, and another for her neighbor, and ten to one the second must be a bit bigger or narrower or somehow different. You’ve got to go by your eye.”
“They say,” Wilfrid went on musingly, “that there’s like to be mechanical ways to help the work—turn it out quicker—do the planing and gouging with some kind of engine and finish by hand. It seemed to me that would take the life out o’ the carving. I said so to Quentin, and he laughed. He said a man could use any tool to advantage if he had the head, but without thought you couldn’t make a shovel go right. I reckon that’s so.”
Adam Smith nodded. “Half the smiths don’t know the way to use a hammer,” he said, “and well-nigh all the rest don’t know what they’re making. You stick to the old forge a while yet, lad. There’s a bit to learn afore you’ll be master o’ the trade.”
“Your father’s right,” Master Wilfrid admitted. “You’ll not waste your time by learning all that he can teach you. As I was saying to you yesterday, you’ve been doing good plain work and learned judgment. You know how to bend a rod so that it’ll be strong, and that will make it look strong. And I’ll warrant when you come to make a grille for a pair of iron gates you’ll know where to put your cross-bars.”
For all that, Master Wilfrid did not mean to lose sight of Dickon. He knew how much a youth could learn by talking with men of other crafts, and he intended that Dickon should have his chance. He himself had lost no opportunity, while on his travels, of becoming acquainted with men who were doing good work in England, and now and then one of these men would turn off the main road to see him at his pottery or his home. When the time came to forge a pair of iron gates to the parish church, he saw to it that Dickon got the refusal of the work. With his favorite tools and his father’s gruff “God speed ye, lad!” Dickon rode forth to his first work for himself, and it was done to the satisfaction of every one.
“I knew that Sussex brains could handle that job,” Wilfrid exulted, as they looked at the finished task. In days when churches and cathedrals were open all day long, it was desirable to have some sort of open-work railing to keep stray beasts out of the chancel. In a more splendid building this railing might have been of silver, but the homely farmer-folk thought the iron of the Weald was good enough for them.
Up along the grassy track past the south door of the church rode a company of travelers, middle-class folk by their dress. As they came abreast of the gate the foremost called out, “Ho, Wilfrid, is there any tavern hereabouts? We be lost sheep in the wilderness. The Abbey guest-house is already full and they will not take us in.”
“Faith, it’s good to see thee here, Robert Edrupt,” the potter answered. “I could house three or four of you, but it’s harvest time, that’s a fact. No, there’s no tavern in the village. You see, most of the folk that travel this way go to the Abbey for a lodging.”
“We’ll stick together, I reckon,” answered Edrupt, “if you can give us some kind o’ shelter, and the makings of a meal. A barn would serve.”
“I’ll do better than that,” Wilfrid assured them. “I’ll take ye to Cold Harbor. It’s part of a Roman house that we uncovered near the pottery. The walls were used in the old farmer’s time for a granary. It’s weather-proof, and there’s a stone hearth, and Dickon here will help swing a crane for the kettles. We’ve plenty stores if there’s a cook among ye.”
“We can make shift,” laughed Edrupt. “I’ll come to the house to-morrow and gossip a bit. Quentin here has your carved coffer for ye.”
“And here’s the lad that made the hinges and the handles,” Wilfrid added, with a hand on the big youth’s shoulder. “Sithee here, Dickon, you show them their way to their lodging, and I’ll e’en ride home and tell Edwitha to spare some pots and kettles for the cooking.”
Thus Dickon was shoved all in a moment, in the edge of an autumn evening, into the company of merchants and craftsmen such as he had never met. The North-countryman, Alan of York, was a glazier; David Saumond, a Scotch stone-mason coming up from Canterbury to do some work for an Abbey; Guy of Limoges was a goldsmith; Crispin Eyre, a shoemaker of London; there were two or three merchants, some weavers newly arrived from overseas, various servants and horse-boys, and two peddlers of dark foreign aspect. The talk was mostly in a mixture of French and English, but Dickon understood this better than he could speak it, and several of the men were as English as himself. In the merry company at supper he saw what Wilfrid had meant when he said that hand-skill without head-wisdom was walking blind-fold, and work done alone was limping labor. It was the England of the guilds breaking bread by that fire.
Padraig was having his first view of a foreign country. England, to be sure, was somewhat strange to a boy who had never before been outside Ireland. Brother Basil, who had taught him all that he knew of writing, reading, painting and other arts, had come to England on business for the Irish Abbeys and was going no further. Padraig felt that he wanted to see more of the world.
Perhaps the wise monk felt that unless his pupil had the chance now to wander and come back, he would run away and never return at all; at any rate he told the youth that this would be a good time to make the pilgrimage to Rome if he could. There was peace in Lombardy for the moment, and the Pope, driven out more than once by the warring Emperor of Germany, was now in the Vatican, again.
A fishing-boat, slipping over to Calais in the light of a windy dawn, carried one passenger, a red-headed boy in a hooded cloak of rough black frieze. Padraig’s own feet bore him from town to town until now, in a French city, he stood in the doorway of a gray and stately church alive with pictures. On a scaffold slung up behind the altar a painter sat working on a new altar-piece.
This was something which Padraig had never seen. He had painted pictures himself on parchment, and drawn designs in color for the craftsmen, but a wall-painting so full of life and color that it looked like a live angel come down from the skies, he had never seen made by any man.
It was in three parts, filling three arches, the middle one larger than the others. In the center was the beautiful brooding Mother with the Child in her arms, and her dull red mantle seemed to lift and float like a sunset cloud. In the narrower spaces were figures of saints. One, already finished, was an old man in the dress of a hermit, with a hind; the graceful creature nestled its head against him. An arrow transfixed his knee, and Padraig knew that this was Saint Giles, patron saint of cripples. The last of the three, on which the artist was now working, was Saint Margaret and the dragon. The dragon was writhing away, with a dreadful look of rage and fear, before the cross in the hands of the brave, beautiful young girl. The sun crept through a loophole window and made the pictures, at the end of the long vista of gray arches, as real as living beings.
Even at this distance, nevertheless, the trained eye of Padraig detected something the matter with that dragon. The artist painted, scraped out, scowled, pondered and finally flung down his brushes in impatient disgust. He moved away, his eyes still on the unfinished work, and backed directly into Padraig.
“What—oh, I did not know that there was any one here. Look at that dragon, did you ever see such a creature!”
“Softly, softly, Matteo,” spoke a superior-looking man in the dress of a sub-prior, behind them. “What is wrong with the picture? It looks very well, to me. We must have it finished, you understand, before the feast of Saint Giles, in any case. You must remember, dear son, that these works are not for the purpose of delighting the eye. The figure of Our Lady would be more impressive if you were to add a gold border to the mantle, would it not?”
Padraig retreated. He was still grinning over the expression on the artist’s face, when he took out a bit of crayon and at a safe distance made a sketch of the pompous church-man on a convenient stone. Having caught the likeness he took from his scrip a half-completed “Book of Legends,” and in the wide-open mouth of a squirming dragon which formed the initial he drew the head and shoulders of the half-swallowed Sub-Prior.
Just as he sat back to survey the design, Matteo strode down the path and stopped with his hand on the gate.
“Did you see him?” the artist spluttered. “Did you hear him? Because he is the secretary of the Archbishop and keeps the pay-roll he thinks he can instruct me in my work! If I had to paint the things he describes I would whitewash every one of my pictures and spend the rest of my days in a scullery! There, at least, no fault would be found because the work was too well done!
“That monster will be the death of me yet. I know that Le Gargouille never looked like that. He was a great dragon, you know, who lived in the Seine and ravaged the country until he was destroyed by Saint Romaine. They do not infest our rivers any more—they have taken to the church. My faith, if I knew where to find one I would lead that stupid monk down there by the ear and show him what a dragon is like. I never saw a dragon—it is not my business to paint dragons—but I know that they ought to be slippery shining green like a frog, or a lizard—and I cannot get the color.”
“Is this anything like?” asked Padraig, and he held up the book.
Padraig’s mind worked by leaps, Brother Basil used to say, and it had made a jump while the artist was talking. The most that he had thought of, when he made the sketch in his book, was that the face of the Sub-Prior would be a good one to use some day for a certain kind of character; and then it had occurred to him to fancy the dragon showing his appreciation of the dignitary in a natural way. He had already done the dragon with the last of the green that he and Brother Basil brought from Ireland, before he came to France, and it was a clear transparent brilliant color that looked like a new-born water-plant leaf in the sun. He had watched lizards and frogs, in long dreamy afternoons by the fishing-pools, too many times not to remember.
The painter’s mobile dark face changed to half a dozen expressions in a minute. He chuckled over the caricature; then he looked at the work more closely; then he fluttered over the other leaves of the book.
“Where did you get the color for this?” he queried.
“I made it,” said Padraig.
“Can you make it again?”
Padraig hesitated. “Is there a forest near by?”
“Forest—no; but why? For the hunting of dragons?”
“N-no, b-but—” Padraig was apt to stammer when excited— “if I had balsam like ours I could make the green. We had none, and so we hunted until we found the right resin—Brother Basil and I.”
“Basil Ossorin, an Irish monk from England?” asked Matteo quickly. “I met him ten years since when he was on his way to Byzantium. If he was your master you have had good teaching.”
Padraig nodded. Brother Basil was the man whom he best loved.
“There is no trouble about the balsam if you know it when you see it,” the artist went on. “I will take you to a place where anything may be bought—cobalt, lapis lazuli, cinnabar, orpiment, sandarac—and it is honestly sold.”
Padraig numbered the matters off on his fingers. “Copper,—and Venice turpentine,—and saffron, to make him yellow underneath like water-snakes in an old pond. His wings must be smooth—and green—bright, and mottled with rusty brown—the sun comes from behind, and he must look as if it were shining through the halo round the maiden’s head.”
“I wonder now about that balsam,” mused the painter.
Padraig drew an outline in the dust on the stone flags. “The tree is like this—the leaf and berry like this.”
Matteo laughed with pure satisfaction. “That is all right; the tree grows in the abbey gardens. Come, young imp with the crest of fire, come quickly, and we will have a glorious day.”
It is not certain who painted more of that dragon, the master or the journeyman. Padraig directed the making of the vivid gold-green as if he were the artist and the other the grinder of paints. Matteo dragged old Brother Joseph, the caretaker, from his work in the crypt to scrape the original dragon off the wall until only the outline of curling body and webbed wings remained. The design was all right, for that was Matteo’s especial skill. He could make a wall-painting as decorative and well-proportioned as the stiff symbolic figures, and yet make the picture natural.
There was a fearful moment when the paint was ready and they made the trial, for neither was sure that the pigment would look right on this new surface. But it gleamed a living green. Padraig brightened the scaled body with yellow where the light struck it. Matteo used his knowledge of armor to deepen the shadows with a cunning blend of blue and bronze that made the scales look metallic. Each worked on a wing, spreading it with sure swift strokes across the base of the scene. Just as Padraig drew his brush for the last time along the bony framework of the clutching talons, the painter caught him by the arm and drew him back down the nave.
“Now look!” he said.
The dragon wallowed at the feet of Saint Margaret in furious, bewildered rage. Old Brother Joseph, coming out of the corner where he had been sitting half asleep, looked actually frightened at the creature. Matteo, well pleased, did not wait for the verdict of the monks, but took Padraig home to his lodgings in a narrow street of the town, and they sat up late that night in talk over many things.
The painter was a Florentine, and when at home he lived in a street even then called the Street of the Painters, in Florence. He had been in London years before, in Paris, in Rome, in Spain, in Sicily. Now he had commissions for the decorating of a palace in Rouen, and he took Padraig’s breath away by suggesting that they work together.
“Some day,” Matteo averred thoughtfully, “there will be cathedrals in Italy, France, Normandy, Aquitaine, England, greater than the world has seen. There will be cliffs and forests of stone-work—arches, towers, pinnacles, groined and vaulted roofs, hundreds of statues of the saints. Every inch of it will be made beautiful as the forest is—with vines and creeping mosses, blossoms and the little wood-folk that shelter among trees. There will be great windows of stained and painted glass. There will be altar-pieces like those that we only dream to-day. I tell you, Patricio mio, we are in the dawn of the millennium of the builders. What has been done already is nothing—nothing!”
Padraig found in the following months that a group of young Italians, Matteo and some of his friends, were working along a new line, with models and methods that accounted for the beauty of their achievements. The figures that they painted met with scant appreciation oftentimes, for many of the churchmen desired only symbolic figures of bright colors, with gilding to make them rich. Moreover, there was a very general disbelief in the permanence of wall-painting. Walls were damp, and the only really satisfactory decoration thus far had been the costly and tedious mosaic. Made of thousands of tiny blocks of stone of various colors, the design of the mosaic had to be suited to the infinite network of little cracks and the knowledge of the worker. Kings and noblemen usually preferred tapestry which could be saved in case of disaster, and carried about, to costly wall-paintings which must remain where they were. Yet Padraig found Matteo’s rich and graceful figures equal in their way to the stone sculptures of any French master, and said so.
“It is like this, comrade,” the Florentine explained, slipping his arm across Padraig’s shoulders as they strolled past the church of Saint Ouen. “A picture is a soul; its life on earth depends upon the body that it inhabits; and we have not yet found out how to make its body immortal. I do not believe that my paintings will live more than a few years. You see, a mural painting is not like your illuminations. You can keep a book safe in a chest. But a painting on plaster—or on a wooden panel—is besieged day and night by dampness, and dryness, and dust, and smoke, changes of heat and cold,—everything. The wall may crack. The roof may take fire,—especially when pigeons and sparrows nest in the beams. The mere action of the air on any painting must be proved by years. I got my lesson on that when I was not as old as you. I heard from an ancient monk of a marvelous Madonna, painted from a living model—a beautiful girl pointed out for years as the Madonna of San Raffaele. I tramped over the Apennines to see it. Patricio mio, the face was black! The artist had used oil with resin and wax, and the picture had turned as black as a Florentine lily! I never told the old man about it, and I praised the work to his heart’s content; but to myself I said that I would dream no more of my own immortal fame. I dream only of the work of others.”
“But suppose that a way could be found to make the colors lasting?” queried Padraig.
“Ah, that would be a real Paradise of Painters—until some one came along with a torch. I think, myself, that some day a drying medium will be found which will make it possible to paint in oils for all time to come. There is painting on wood, and on dry plaster—and fresco, where you paint on the plaster while it is still damp. In fresco you must lay out only the work that can be finished that day. Me, I am content for the time to be a fresco painter.”
“And if it is all to vanish in a few years, why do we paint?” mused Padraig with a swift melancholy in his voice.
Matteo’s hand fell heavily upon his arm. “Because we must not lose our souls—that is why. The life of our work will last long enough to be seen and known by others. They will remember it, and do their work better. Thus it will go on, generation after generation, until painters come who can use all that we have learned since Rome fell, and cap it with new visions. Every generation has its dragon to dispose of. When I have tamed my dragon he will take me to the skies—maybe.”
It was not long after this that Matteo, overhauling the flat leather-bound coffer in which he kept his belongings, dragged up from the bottom of the collection some parchments covered with miscellaneous sketches, mostly of heads and figures. He had received a message from a sharp-faced Italian peddler-boy that day, and had been looking rather grave. On the plaster of the wall, in the sunset light, he began to draw, roughing it out with quick sure strokes, a procession of men and horses with some massive wheeled vehicle in the center. Presently this was seen to be a staging like a van, drawn by six white oxen harnessed in scarlet. Upon it stood churchmen in robes of ceremony, grouped about a tall standard rising high above their heads—a globe surmounted by a crucifix. Padraig knew what this was. It was the Carocchio or sacred car bearing the standard of Milan—but Matteo was a Florentine.
“Patricio caro,” said the artist turning to his young pupil, “to-morrow we shall have to part. I have told the Prince that you are quite capable of finishing his banquet-hall, and that I have other business. So I have, but not what he may think. I had word to-day that Barbarossa has crossed the Alps. This time it will be a fight to the end.
“You know, for we have talked often of it, that the League of the Lombard cities is the great hope of the Communes in Italy. Moreover, it is your fight as well as ours. If the Empire conquers it will stamp those Communes flat, and take good care that the cities make no headway toward further resistance. The next step—for Frederick has said that he is another Charlemagne—will be the conquest of France, and then he will try to hurl the whole force of his Empire against Henry Plantagenet, his only great rival. Myself, I doubt if he can do that. When men do not want to fight they seldom win battles.
“Now there are three hundred young men of the leading houses of Lombardy who have sworn to guard the Carocchio with their lives. The Archbishop and his priests will stand upon the car in the battle and administer the sacrament to the dying. If the Emperor takes it this time it will be after the death of every man of the ‘juramento.’ I am a Florentine, that is true, but I shall be a foot-soldier in that fight. If we live, we will have our cities free. If we die—it is for our own cities as well as theirs.
“This is what I want you to do, little brother. Ah, yes, to die is not always the most difficult thing! These are the names and many of the faces of the ‘juramento.’ Keep them, and to-morrow, when I am gone, copy this sketch of the Carocchio going into the battle. Then, if I never come back, there will still be some one to paint the picture. When you find a prince, or some wealthy merchant, who will let you paint the Carocchio on his wall, do it and keep alive the glory of Milan. You will find some Milanese who will welcome you, however the game goes. And the picture will be so good—your picture and mine—that men will see and remember it whether they know the story or not. If they copy it, although the faces may not be like, they will yet carry the meaning—the standard of the free city above the conflict. Your promise, Patricio mio—and then—addio!”
Padraig promised. The next day, when he came back to the little room at the end of the narrow stair, there was only the picture on the white sunlit wall.