‘Never, never,’ Hiram answered firmly.
‘I shall never do anything better than the edge of the lake at Chattawauga!’
‘But you have done great things, Hiram,’ Audouin cried, warming up with generous enthusiasm, just in proportion as his protégés spirits sank lower and lower. ‘My dear fellow, you have done great things already. I’ll stake my reputation upon it, Hiram, that the lake shore at Chattawauga’s a piece of painting that’ll even yet live and be famous.’ Hiram shook his head gloomily. ‘No, no,’ he said; ‘I mean to take Mr. Truman’s advice, and go back to hoe corn and plant potatoes in Muddy Creek Valley. That’s just about what I’m fit for.’
‘But, Hiram,’ his friend said, coming closer and closer to him, ‘you mustn’t dream of doing that. In justice to me you really mustn’t. I’ve misled you and wasted your time, I know, by inducing you to go in for this wretched figure-painting. It doesn’t suit you and your idiosyncrasy: that I see now quite clearly. All my life long it’s been a favourite doctrine of mine, my boy, that the only true way of salvation lies in perfect fidelity to one’s own inner promptings. And how have I carried out that gospel of mine in your case? Why, by absurdly inducing you to neglect the line you naturally excel in, and to take up with a line that you don’t personally care a pin for. Now, dear Hiram, my dear, good fellow, don’t go and punish me for this by returning in a huff’ to Geauga County. Have pity upon me, and spare me this misery, this degradation. I’ve suffered much already, though you never knew it, about this false direction I’ve tried to give your genius (for you have genius, I’m sure you have ): I’ve lain awake night after night and reproached myself for it bitterly: don’t go now and put me to shame by making my mistake destroy your whole future career and chances as a painter. It need cost you nothing to remain. I misled you by getting you to paint those historical subjects. I see they were a mistake now, and I will buy the whole of them from you at your own valuation. That will be only just, for it was for me really that you originally painted them. Do, do please reconsider this hasty decision.’ Hiram rocked himself to and fro piteously upon the ottoman, but only answered, ‘Impossible, impossible. You are too kind, too generous.’
Audouin looked once more at his dejected dispirited face, and then, pausing a minute or two, said quietly and solemnly, ‘And how about Gwen, Hiram?’
Hiram started up in surprise and discomfiture, and asked hastily, ‘Why, what on earth do you know about Gwen – about Miss Russell, I mean – Mr. Audouin?’
‘I can’t tell you how I’ve surprised your secret, Hiram,’ Audouin said, his voice trembling a little as he spoke: ‘perhaps some day I may tell you, and perhaps never. But I’ve found it all out, and I ask you, my boy, for Gwen’s sake – for Miss Russell’s sake – to wait awhile before returning so rashly to America. Hiram, you owe it as a duty to her not to run away from her, and fame and fortune, at the first failure.’
Hiram flung himself down upon the ottoman again in a frenzy of despondency. ‘That’s just why I think I must go at once, Mr. Audouin,’ he cried, in his agony. ‘I only know two alternatives. One is America; the other is the Tiber.’
‘Hiram, Hiram!’ his friend said soothingly. ‘Yes, yes, Mr. Audouin, I know all that, I know what you want to say to me. But I can’t drag down Gwen – born and brought up as she has been – I can’t drag her down with me to a struggling painter’s pot-boiling squalidness. I can’t do it, and I won’t do it, and I oughtn’t to do it; and the kindest thing for her sake, and for all our sakes, would be for me to get out of it all at once and altogether.’
‘Then you will go, Hiram?’
‘Yes, I will go, Mr. Audouin, by the very next Trieste steamer.’
He rose slowly from the ottoman, shook his friend’s hand in silence, and went away without another word. Audouin saw by his manner that he really meant it, and he sat down wondering what good he could do to countervail this great unintentional evil he had done to Hiram.
‘Lothrop Audouin,’ he said to himself harshly, ‘a pretty mess you have made now of your own life and of Hiram Winthrop’s! Is this your perfect fidelity to the inner promptings – this your obedience to the unspoken voice of the divine human consciousness? You poor, purblind, affected, silly, weak, useless creature, I hate you, I hate you. Go, now, see what you can do to render happy these two better lives that you have done your best to ruin for ever.’
If any other man had used such words of Lothrop Audouin, he would have shown himself a bitter, foolish, short-sighted cynic. But as Lothrop Audouin said it himself, of course he had a full right to his own opinion.
Yet some men, not wholly bad men either, might have rejoiced at the thought that they would thus get rid of a successful rival. They would have said to themselves, ‘When Hiram is gone, Gwen will soon forget him, and then I may have a chance at least of finally winning her favour.’ In this belief, they would have urged Hiram, in a halfhearted way only, not to return to America; and if afterwards he persisted in his foolish intention, they might have said to themselves, ‘I did my best to keep him, and now I wash my hands forever of it.’ All’s fair, says the proverb, in love and war; and many men still seem to think so. But Audouin was made of different mould; and having once frankly wooed and lost Gwen, he had no single shadow of a thought now left in his chivalrous mind save how to redress this great wrong he conceived he had done them, and how to make Gwen and Hiram finally happy.
He sat there long, musing and wondering, beating out a plan of action for himself in his own brain, till at last he saw some gleam of hope clear before him. Then he rose, took down his hat quickly from the peg, and hurried round to Colin Churchill’s studio. He found Colin working away busily at the moist clay of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra.
‘Churchill,’ he said seriously, ‘you must put away your work for an hour. I want to speak to you about something very important.’
Colin laid down his graver reluctantly, and turned to look at his unexpected visitor.
‘Why, great heavens, Mr. Audouin,’ he said, ‘what can be the matter with you? You really look as white as that marble.’
‘Matter enough, Churchill. Who do you think has been to see Winthrop? Why, John Truman.’
‘Oh, I know,’ Colin answered cheerfully. ‘I sent him myself. And what did he say then?’
‘He said that Winthrop ought to go back to America, and that he would never, never, never make a decent painter.’
Colin whistled to himself quickly, and then said, ‘The dickens he did! How remarkable! But did Winthrop show him the landscapes?’ ‘Yes, and from what he says, Truman seems to have thought worse of them than even he thought of the figure pieces.’
‘Impossible!’ Colin cried incredulously. ‘I don’t believe it; I can’t believe it. Truman knows a landscape when he sees it. There must be some mistake somewhere.’
‘I’m afraid not,’ Audouin answered sadly. ‘I’ve begun to despair about poor Winthrop myself, a great deal of late, and to reproach myself terribly for the share I’ve had in putting his genius on the wrong metals. The thing we’ve got to do now is to face the actuality, and manage the best we can for him under the circumstances. Churchill, do you know, Hiram threatens to go back to America by the next steamer, and take to farming for a livelihood.’
Colin whistled low again. ‘He mustn’t be allowed to do it,’ he said quickly. ‘He must be kept in Rome at all hazards. If we have to lock him up in jail or put him into a lunatic asylum, we must keep him here for the present, whatever comes of it. I’m sure as I am of anything, Mr. Audouin, that Hiram Winthrop has a splendid future still before him.’
‘Well, Churchill,’ Audouin said calmly, ‘I want you to help me in a little scheme I’ve decided upon. I’m going to make my will, and I want you to be trustee under it.’
‘Make your will, Mr. Audouin! Why, what on earth has that to do with Hiram Winthrop? I hope you’ll live for many years yet, to see him paint whole square yards of splendid pictures.’
Audouin smiled a little sadly. ‘It’s well to be prepared against all contingencies,’ he said with a forced gaiety of tone: ‘and I want to provide against one which seems to me by no means improbable. There’s no knowing when any man may die. Don’t the preachers tell us that our life hangs always by a thread, and that the sword of Damocles is suspended forever above us?’
Colin looked at him keenly and searchingly. Audouin met his gaze with frank open eyes, and did not quail for a moment before his evident curiosity. ‘Well, Churchill,’ he went on more gravely, ‘I’m going to make my will, and I’ll tell you how I’m going to make it. I propose to leave all my property in trust to you, as a charity in perpetuity. I intend that you shall appoint some one young American artist as Audouin Art Scholar at Home, and pay to him the interest on that property, so long as he considers that he stands in need of it. As soon as he, by the exercise of his profession, is earning such an income that he feels he can safely do without it, then I leave it to him and you to choose some other American Art student for the scholarship, to be enjoyed in like manner. On that second student voluntarily vacating the scholarship, you, he, and the first student shall similarly choose a third incumbent; and so on for ever. What do you think of the plan, Churchill, will it hold water?’
‘But why shouldn’t you leave it outright to Winthrop?’ Colin asked, a little puzzled by this apparently roundabout proceeding. ‘Wouldn’t it be simpler and more satisfactory to give it to him direct, instead of in such a complicated fashion?’
‘Who said a word about Winthrop being the first scholar?’ Audouin answered with grave irony. ‘You evidently misunderstand the spirit of the bequest. I want to advance American art, not to make a present to Hiram Winthrop. Besides,’ and here Audouin lowered his voice a little more confidentially, ‘if I left it to Hiram outright, I feel pretty confident he wouldn’t accept it; he’d refuse the bequest as a personal matter. I know him, Churchill, better than you do; I know his proud sensitive nature, and the way he would shrink from accepting a fortune as a present even from a dead man – even from me, his most intimate friend and spiritual father. But if it’s left in this way, he can hardly refuse; it will be only for a few years, till he gets his name up; it’ll leave him free meanwhile to live and marry (if he wants to), and it’ll be burdened with a condition, too – that he should go on studying and practising art, and that he should assist at the end of his own tenure in electing another scholar. That, I hope, would reconcile him (if the scholarship were offered to him) to the necessity of accepting and using it for a few years only. However, I don’t wish, Churchill, to suggest any person whatsoever to you as the first student; I desire to leave your hands perfectly free and untied in that matter.’
‘I see; I understand,’ Cohn answered, smiling gently to himself. ‘I will offer it, should the occasion ever arise, to the most promising young American student that I can anywhere discover.’
‘Quite right, Churchill; exactly what I wish you to do. Then you’ll accept the trust, and carry it out for me, will you?
‘On one condition only, Mr. Audouin,’ Colin said firmly, looking into his blanched face and straining eyeballs. ‘On one condition only. Let me be quite frank with you – no suicide.’
Audouin started a little. ‘Why, that’s a fair enough proviso,’ he answered slowly after a moment. ‘Yes, I promise that. No suicide. We shall trust entirely to the chapter of accidents.’
‘In that case,’ Colin continued, reassured, ‘I hope we may expect that the trusteeship will be a sinecure for many a long year to come. But I fail to see how all this will benefit poor Winthrop in the immediate future, if he means to sail for New York by the next steamer.’
‘The two questions ought to be kept entirely distinct,’ Audouin went on sharply, with perfect gravity. ‘I fail myself to perceive how any possible connection can exist between them. Still, we will trust to the chapter of accidents. There’s no knowing what a day may bring forth. We must try at least to keep Wintlirop here in Rome for another fortnight. That’s not so very long to stay, and yet a great deal may be done in a fortnight. I’ll go and look out at once for an American lawyer to draft my will for me. Meanwhile, will you just sign this joint note from both of us to Winthrop?’
He sat down hurriedly at Cohn’s desk, and scribbled off a short note to poor Hiram.
‘Dear Winthrop, – Will you as a personal favour to us both kindly delay your departure from Rome for another fortnight, by which time we hope we may be able to make different arrangements for you?
‘Lothrop Audouin.’
He passed the note to Colin, and the pen with it. Colin read the doubtfully worded note over twice in a hesitating manner, and then, after some mental deliberation, added below in his clear masculine hand – ‘Colin Churchill.’
‘Remember, Mr. Audouin,’ he said as a parting warning. ‘It’s a bargain between us. No suicide.’
‘Oh, all right,’ Audouin answered lightly with the door in his hand. ‘We trust entirely to the chapter of accidents.’
CHAPTER XLIV. THE CHAPTER OF ACCIDENTS
Next day, after seeing the American lawyer (caught by good luck at the Hôtel de Russie), and duly executing then and there his will in favour of Colin Churchill as trustee, Audouin sauntered down gloomily to the San Paolo station, and took the train by himself to a miserable little stopping place in the midst of the dreary desolate Campagna. It was a baking day, even in the narrow shaded streets of Rome itself; but out on the shadeless scorched-up Agro Romano the sun was pouring down with tropical fierceness upon the flat levels, one vast stretch of silent slopes, with lonely hollows interspersed at intervals, where even the sheep and cattle seemed to pant and stagger under the breathless heat of the Italian noontide. Audouin got out at the wayside road, gave up his ticket to the dirty military-looking official, passed the osteria and the half dozen feverish yellow-washed houses that clustered round the obtrusive modern railway, and turned away from the direction of the mouldering village on the projecting buttress of rock towards the mysterious, melancholy, treeless desert on the other side. It was just the place for Audouin to walk alone on such a day, with his whole heart sick and weary of a generous attempt ill frustrated by the unaccountable caprice of fate. He had tried to do his best for Hiram Winthrop, and he had only succeeded in making himself and his friend supremely unhappy. Audouin had never cared much for life, and he cared less for it that day than ever before. ‘After all,’ he said to himself, ‘what use is existence to me? I had one mistress, nature: I have almost tired of her: she palled upon me, and I wanted another. That other would not take my homage; and nature, it seems, in a fit of jealousy, has revenged her slighted pretensions upon me, in most unfeminine fashion, by making herself less beautiful in my eyes than formerly. How dull and gloomy it all looks to-day! What a difficult world to live in, what an easy world to leave; if we had but the trick to do it!’
He walked along quickly, away from the hills and the village perched on an outlying spur of the distant Apennines, on to the summit of a rolling undulation in that great grassy sea of wave-like hillocks. Not a sound stirred the stagnant air. Away in front, towards the dim distant Mediterranean, the flat prairies of Ostia steamed visibly in the flickering sunlight; a low region of reeds and cane-brake, with feathery herbage unruffled by any passing breath of wind, and barely relieved from utter monotony by the wide dry umbrella-shaped bosses of the basking stone-pines of Castel Fusano. The malaria seemed to hang over it like a terrible pall, blinking before the eye over the heated reach of sweltering pasture lands. Yonder lay Alsium – Palo they call it nowadays – a Dutch oven of pestilence, breeding miasma in its thousand foul nooks for the inoculation of all the country round. In truth a sickly, sickening spot; but here, Audouin whispered to himself half apologetically, with self-evident hypocrisy, here on the higher moorlands of the Campagna, among the shepherds and the sheep, beside the shaggy briar and hillocks, a man may walk and not hurt himself surely. Colin Churchill had said, ‘No suicide;’ and that was a bargain between them; yet suicide was one thing, and a quiet afternoon stroll through the heart of the country was really another.
He had bought a flask of ‘sincere wine’ at the osteria, and had brought some biscuits with him in his pocket from Rome. He meant to lunch out here on the Campagna, and only return late to the hotel for dinner. When a man feels broken and dispirited, what more natural than that he should wish to escape by himself for a lonely tramp in the fields and meadows, where none will interrupt his flow of spleen and the run of his solitary meditations?
It would be quite untrue to say that Lothrop Audouin had come into the Campagna by himself that day on purpose to catch the Roman fever. Nothing could be more unjust or unkind to him. Wayward natures like his do not expect to have their actions so harshly judged by the unsympathetic tribunal of common-sense. They seldom do anything on purpose. Audouin was only tempting nature. He was trusting to the chapter of accidents. A man has a right to walk over the ground (if unenclosed and unappropriated) whenever he chooses; there can be nothing wrong in taking a little turn by oneself even among the desolate surging undulations of the great plain that rolls illimitably between Rome and Civita Vecchia. He was exercising his undoubted rights as an American citizen; he could go where he chose over those long unfenced slopes, where you may walk in a straight line for miles ahead, with nothing to hinder you save the sun and the fever. And the fever! Well, yes; he did perhaps have some slight passing qualms of conscience on that head, when he thought of his promise to Colin Churchill; but then of course that was straining language – interpreting it in non-natural senses. A man isn’t bound to make a mollycoddle of himself simply because he has promised a friend that he won’t commit suicide.
He sat down in the eye of the sun on a bit of broken rock – or at least it looked like rock, though it was really a fragment from the concrete foundations of some ancient villa – with his legs dangling over the deep brown bank of pozzolano earth, and his hat slouched deeply above his eyes to protect him from the penetrating sunlight. Dead generations lay beneath his feet; the air was heavy with the dust of unnumbered myriads. Lothrop Audouin took out his flask and drank his wine and ate his biscuits. An old contadino came up suspiciously to watch the stranger; Audouin offered him the remainder of the wine, and the man drank it off at a gulp and thanked his excellency with Italian profuseness.
Would his excellency buy a coin, the contadino went on slowly, with the insinuating Roman begging whine. Audouin looked at the thing carelessly, and turned it round once or twice in his fingers. It was a denarius of Trajan, apparently; he could read the inscription, Avg. Ger. Dac. p.m. Tri. pot. Cos. vii., and so forth. It might be worth half a lire or so. He gave the man two lire for it. Suicide indeed! Who talks of suicide? Mayn’t a bit of a virtuoso come out on to the Campagna, quite legitimately, to collect antiquities?
The fancy pleased him, and he talked awhile with the contadino about the things he had found in the galleries that honeycomb for miles the whole Campagna. Yes, the man had once found a beautiful scarabæus, a scarabæus that might have belonged to Cæsar or St. Peter. He had found a lachrymatory, too, a relic of an ancient Christian; and many bones of holy martyrs. How did he know they were holy martyrs? The most illustrious was joking. When one finds bones in a catacomb, one knows they must have been preserved by miraculous interference.
Much ague on the Campagna? No, no, signor; an air most salubrious, most vital, most innocent. In the Ptfntine Swamps? oh there, by Bacchus, excellency, it is far different. There, the people die of fever by hundreds; it is a most desolate country; encumbered with dead and rotting vegetation, it procreates miasma, and is left to stagnate idly in the sun. The bottoms are all soft slime and ooze, where buffaloes wallow and wild boars hide. Nothing there save a solitary pot-house, and a few quaking, quavering, ague-smitten contadini – a bad place to live in, the Pontine Marshes, excellency. But here on the Agro Romano, high and dry, thanks to the Madonna and all holy saints, why, body of Bacchus, there is no malaria.
Or if any, very little. Towards nightfall, perhaps; yes, just a trifle towards nightfall; but what of that? One wraps one’s sheepskin close around one; one takes care to be home early; one offers a candle now and then to the blessed Madonna; and the malaria is nothing. Except for foreigners. Ah, yes, foreigners ought always to be very sure not to stop out beyond nightfall.
Audouin let the man run on as long as he chose, and when the contadino was tired of conversation, he lay back upon the dry yellow grass, and thought bitterly to himself about life and fate, and Gwen and Hiram. What a miserable, foolish, impossible sort of world we all lived in after all! He had more money himself than he needed; he didn’t want the nasty stuff – filthy lucre – filthy indeed in these days; dirty bank-notes, Italian or American, the first perhaps a trifle the dirtier and racrgeder of the two. He didn’t want it, and Hiram for need of it was going to the wall; and yet he couldn’t give it to Hiram, and Hiram wouldn’t take it if he were to give it to him. Absurd conventionality! There was Gwen, too; Gwen; how happy he could make them both, if only they would let him; and yet, and yet, the thing was impossible. If only Hiram had those few wretched thousand dollars, scraps and scrips, shares and houses – Audouin didn’t know exactly what they were or what was the worth of them; a lawyer in Boston managed the rubbish – if only Hiram had them, he could take to landscape, marry Gwen, and undo the evil that he, Lothrop Audouin, had unwittingly and unwillingly wrought in his foolish self-confidence, and live happily ever after. In fairy tales and novels and daydreams everybody always did live happy ever after – it’s a way they have, somehow or other. The whole course of individual human history for the great Anglo-American race, in fancy anyhow, seems always to end with a wedding as its natural finale and grand consummation. Yet here he was, boxed up alone with all that useless money, and the only way he could possibly do any good with it was by ceasing to exist altogether. No suicide! oh, no, certainly not. Still, if quite accidentally he happened to get the Roman fever, nobody would be one penny the worse for it, while Gwen and Hiram would doubtless be a good deal the better.
The afternoon wore away slowly, and evening came on at last across the great shifting desolate panorama. The dirty greens and yellows began to flush into gold and crimson; the misty haze from the Pontine Marshes began to creep with deadly stealth across the Agro Romano; the grey veil began to descend upon the softening Alban hills in the murky distance; the purples on the hillside hollows began to darken into gloomy shadows. A little breeze had sprung up meanwhile, and rain was dropping slowly from invisible light drifting clouds upon the parched Campagna. The malaria is never so dangerous as after a slight rain, that just damps the dusty surface without really penetrating it; for then the germs that lie thick among the mouldering vegetation are quickened into spasmodic life, and the whole Campagna steams and simmers with invisible eddies of vaporous effluvia. But Audouin sat there still, moodily pretending to himself that his headache would be all the better for a few cooling drops upon his feverish forehead. Even the old contadino was on his way back to his wretched hut, and as he passed he begged his excellency to get back to the railway with the most rapid expedition. ‘Fa cattivo tempo,’ he cried with a warning gesture. But his excellency only strolled slowly towards the yellow-washed station, dawdling by the way to watch the shadows as they grew deeper and blacker and ever longer on the distant indentations of the circling amphitheatre of hills.
