by Grant Allen
Audouin evidently overheard the words, and took in their meaning vaguely, for his eye turned towards Colin, and he seemed to listen with some attention.
‘How much did you sell it for?’ asked Hiram. He hated himself for even seeming to be thus talking about his own wretched pecuniary business when Audouin was perhaps dying, but he knew it was the only chance of rousing his best and earliest friend from that fatal torpor.
‘Seven thousand five hundred lire,’ answered Colin.
‘How much is that in our money?’
‘In English money, three hundred pounds sterling,’ Colin replied, distinctly.
There was a little rustling in the bed, an attempt to sit up feebly, and then Audouin asked in a parched voice, ‘How many dollars?’ ‘Hush, hush, Mr. Audouin,’ Colin said gently, pretending to check him, but feeling in his own heart that their little ruse had almost succeeded already. ‘You mustn’t excite yourself on any account.’
Audouin was silent for a moment; then he said again, in a somewhat stronger and more decided manner, ‘How many dollars, I say: how many dollars?’
‘Five into seven thousand five hundred’ Hiram reckoned with a slight shudder, ‘makes fifteen hundred, doesn’t it, Churchill? Yes, fifteen hundred. Fifteen hundred dollars, Mr. Audouin.’
Audouin fell back upon the pillow, for he had raised his head slightly once more, and seemed for a while to be dozing quietly. At lust he asked again, ‘Who to, did you say?’
‘Focacci of the Piazza di Spagna, agent for Magnus and Hickson of London.’
This time, Audouin lay a long while ruminating in his fevered head over that last important disclosure. He seemed to take it in faintly bit by bit, for after another long pause he asked even more deliberately, ‘How did Magnus and Rickson ever come to hear of you, Hiram?’
Colin thought the time had now come to tell him briefly the good news in its entirety, if it was to keep him from dying of disappointment. ‘Truman has written very favourably about Winthrop’s abilities as a landscape painter,’ he said gently, ‘in his “Fortuna Melliflua,” and a great many London dealers have sent telegrams to buy up all his pictures. I have been round to the studio this morning, and sold almost all of them at high prices.
Truman has spoken so well of them that there can be very little doubt Winthrop’s fortune is fairly made in real earnest.’
They watched Audouin carefully as Colin spoke, for they feared the excitement might perhaps have been too much for him: it was a risky card to play, but they played it in all good intention. Audouin listened quite intelligently to the end, and then he suddenly burst out crying. For some minutes he cried silently, without even a sob to break the deathlike stillness. The tears seemed to do him good, too; for as he cried, Gwen, hanging over him eagerly, noticed that little beads of moisture were beginning to form faintly upon his parched forehead. In their concentrated anxiety for Audouin’s life, neither she nor Hiram had yet found time adequately to realise their own good fortune; they could only think of its effect upon the crisis of that terrible fever.
Audouin cried on without a word for ten minutes, and then he asked once more, in a weak voice, ‘What did Truman say? Have you got “Fortuna?”’
Colin took out the paragraph once more and read it all over, omitting only the Babylonian Woe, which he feared might have the effect of distressing Audouin. When he had finished, Audouin smiled, and answered, smiling faintly, with a touch of his wonted self, ‘Then, like Wolfe, I shall die happy;’ and after a moment he added, in a feebly theatrical fashion, ‘They run. Who run? The Philistines, to buy his pictures. Then I die happy.’
‘No, no, Mr. Audouin,’ Gwen cried passionately, lifting his white hand to her lips and kissing it fervidly. ‘You mustn’t die. For our sakes, you must try to live and share all our happiness.’
Audouin shook his head slowly. ‘No, no,’ he said; ‘the fever has got too strong a hold upon me. I shall never, never recover.’
‘You must, Mr. Audouin,’ Colin Churchill said resolutely. ‘If you go and die after all, I shall never forgive you. You’ve got nothing to die for now, and you mustn’t think of going at last and doing anything so wicked and foolish.’
Audouin smiled again, and turning over on his side, began to doze off in a feverish sleep. He slept so long and so soundly that Gwen was frightened, and insisted upon sending for the doctor. When the doctor came, it was growing dark, and Audouin lay still and peaceful like a child in the cradle. The doctor felt his pulse without awakening him. ‘Why,’ he cried in surprise, ‘he seems to have been very much excited, but his pulse is decidedly fuller and slower than it was this morning. Something unexpected must have occurred to make an improvement in his condition. I think the crisis is over, and he’ll get round again in time with good nursing.’ Gwen and the hired nurse sat up all that night with him.
CHAPTER XLVII. ALL’S WELL THAT ENDS WELL.
Audouin’s recovery was slow, of course; but, he did recover; and as soon as he was safely out of all danger, Gwen and Hiram, now fairly on the road to fortune, proposed that they should forthwith marry. The colonel had almost given up active opposition by this time; he knew that that girl’s temper was absolutely ungovernable; and besides, they said the shock-headed Yankee fellow was beginning to make quite a decent livelihood out of his painting business. So the colonel merely answered when Gwen mentioned to him the date she had fixed upon, ‘You’ll go your own way, I suppose, Miss, whatever I choose to say to you about it,’ and threw no further obstacles in the way of the ceremony.
‘And, Gwen,’ Hiram said to her, as they walked together down the path by the Casca-telli at Tivoli a few days before the wedding, ‘we’ll take the Tyrol, if you’d like it, for our wedding tour, darling.’
‘Yes,’ Gwen answered, ‘we will, and we’ll never come back again to Rome, to live I mean, Hiram, but go to Switzerland, or Wales, or Scotland, or America. You must go, you know, where you can find what you most want to paint — your own beautiful delicate landscapes. I always knew that that was what you could do best; and I always told you that there at least you had real genius.’ Hiram’s answer was of a sort that cannot readily be put down in definite language; and yet Gwen understood it perfectly, and only murmured in a low soft tone, ‘Not here, Hiram, not here, there’s a dear good fellow.’
The bushes around were fairly thick and screening, to be sure, but still, in the open air, you know, and in a place overrun with tourists, like Tivoli — well, it was certainly very imprudent.
When Colin Churchill heard that Hiram and Gwen had definitely fixed the day for their own wedding, he put on his hat and went round to the English quarter to call for Minna. They walked together up from the Piazza del Popolo, by the Pincian and Esquiline, towards the straggling vineyards on the Colian Hill. There the young vines were coming into the first fresh leaf, and the air was thick with perfume from the jonquils and lilacs in the neighbouring flower gardens.
‘Minna darling,’ Colin began quietly, and Minna flushed crimson and thrilled through to her inmost marrow at the sound of the words, for Colin had never before called her ‘darling.’ She looked at him full of tender surmise, and her bursting heart stood still for a moment within her bosom, waiting to know whether it was to bound again with joy, or flutter feebly in disappointment. After all, then, Colin Churchill really loved her!
Colin noticed the evident tokens of suspense upon her dark cheek, with the hot blood struggling red through the rich gipsy complexion, and wondered to himself that she should feel so deeply moved by the simple question he was going to ask her. Had they not always loved one another, all their lives long, and was it not a mere question of time and convenience, now, the particular day they fixed upon for their marriage? He could hardly understand the profoundness of her emotion, though he was too practised an observer of the human face not to read it readily in her flushed features: for, after all, it was nothing more than settling the final arrangements for a foregone conclusion.
‘Minna da
rling,’ he said once more, watching her narrowly all the time, ‘Win-throp and Miss Howard-Russell are going to be married on Thursday fortnight. I was thinking, dearest, that if you could arrange it with your people so soon, it’d be a good plan for us to have our wedding at the same time, for I suppose you don’t think a fortnight too short notice after such a long engagement?’
Minna trembled violently from head to foot as she answered, with a little tremor in her voice, ‘Then Colin, Colin, oh Colin, you really love me!’
Colin caught her small round hand tenderly in his and said, with a tone of genuine surprise, ‘Why, you know perfectly well, my own darling little Minna, I’ve always loved you dearly. All my life long, darling, I’ve always loved you.’
It was well that Colin held the round brown hand tight in his, that moment, for as Minna heard those words — those words that her heart had longed so long to hear, and whose truth she had doubted to herself so often — she uttered a little loud sharp cry, and fell forward, not fainting, but overcome with too sudden joy, so that her head reeled, and she might have dropped unconscious, but that Colin caught her, and pressed her in his arms, and kissed lier, and cried to her in surprise and self-reproach, ‘Why, Minna, Minna, darling Minna, my own heart’s darling, you knew I loved you; you must have known I always loved you.’
Minna’s heart fluttered up and down within her bosom, and heaved and swelled as though it would burst asunder that tight little plain black bodice. (Why do not dressmakers allow something for the natural expansiveness of emotion, I wonder.) It was so sweet to hear Colin say so; and yet even now she could hardly believe her life-long daydream had wrought out at last its own fulfillment. ‘Oh, Colin, Colin,’ she murmured through her tears — for she had found that relief— ‘you never told me so; you never, never told me you loved me.’
‘Told you, Minna!’ Colin cried with another kiss upon the trembling lips (and all this on the open Colian too); ‘told you, Minna darling! Why, who on earth would ever have dreamt of deliberately telling you. But you must have known it; of course you must have known it. Haven’t we been lovers together, darling, from our babyhood upward?’
‘But that was just it, Colin,’ Minna answered, brushing away her tears, and trying to look as if nothing extraordinary at all had happened. ‘We had always known one another, of course, and been very fond of one another, like old companions, and I wasn’t sure, with you, Colin, whether it was love or merely friendship.’
‘And with yourself, Minna?’ Cohn asked, taking her soft wee hand once more between his own two; ‘tell me, darling, which was it, which was it?’
Minna’s face gave her only answer, and Colin accepted it silently with another kiss.
There was a minute’s pause again (the Colian is really such a very awkward place for lovemaking, with all those horrid prying old priests poking about everywhere), and then Minna began once more: ‘You see, Colin, you seemed so cold and indifferent. You were always so wrapped up in your marble and your statues, and you didn’t appear to care a bit for anything but art, till I almost grew to hate it. Oh, Colin, I know the things you make are the most beautiful that ever were moulded, but I almost hated them, because you seemed to think of nothing on earth but your clay and your sculpture. I was afraid you only liked me; I didn’t feel sure whether you really loved me.’
‘Minna,’ Colin said soberly, standing up before her and looking full into those bright black eyes straight in front of him, ‘I love you with all the love in my nature. I have loved you ever since we were children together, and I have never for one moment ceased from loving you. How could I, when you were Minna? If I ever seemed cold and careless, darling, it was only because I loved you so thoroughly and unquestioningly that it didn’t occur to me to waste words in telling you what I thought you yourself could never question. My darling, if I’ve caused you doubt or pain, I can’t tell you how sorry I am for it. I have worked for you, and for you only, all these years. Don’t you remember, little woman, long ago at Wootton, how I always used to make images for Minna?
Well, I’ve been making images for Minna ever since. I never for a moment fancied you didn’t know it. But now, as I love you, and as you love me, tell me, darling, will you marry me on Thursday fortnight? Don’t say no, or wait to think about it, but answer me “yes” at once; now do’ee, Minna, do’ee.’
That half-unconscious, half-artful return on Colin’s part to the old loved familiar dialect of their peasant childhood was more than Minna’s bursting little heart could ever have resisted, even if she had wanted to — which she certainly didn’t. With the tears once more trickling slowly down her cheek, she answered softly, ‘Yes, Colin;’ and Colin pressed her hand a second time in token of the completed contract. And then the two turned slowly back towards the great city, and Minna tried to dry her eyes and look as though nothing at all out of the way had happened against her return to the Via Clementina.
Gwen and Hiram Winthrop, in their little cottage in North Wales, are within easy reach of many wild bits that exactly suit Hiram’s canvas. His natural genius has full play now, and at the Academy every year there are few pictures more studiously avoided by the crowd, and more carefully observed by the best judges, than Mr. Winthrop’s, the famous American landscape painter’s. Now and then he pays a short visit to America, and sketches unbroken nature, as he alone can sketch it, in the Adirondacks, and the White Mountains, and the Upper Alleghanies; but for the most part, as Gwen simply phrases it, ‘Wales and Scotland are quite good enough for us.’ Once a year, too, he runs across for a month or six weeks to Rome and Florence, where Colin and Minna are always glad to give him and his wife a hearty welcome. Even the colonel has relented somewhat in a grim official Anglo-Indian fashion, and as he jogs Gwen’s youngest boy upon his knee to the tune of some Hindustani jingle about Warren Hastings, he reflects to himself that after all that shockheaded Yankee painter fellow isn’t really such a bad sort of person by way of a son-in-law.
And Audouin? Audouin has sold Lakeside, and flits to and fro uneasily between Europe and America in a somewhat vague and purposeless fashion. Sometimes he stops with Colin Churchill at Rome (on a strict pledge that he won’t go out alone without leave to stroll upon the Campagna), and sometimes he wanders by himself, knapsack on back, among the Swiss or Tyrolese mountains; but most often he gravitates towards Bryn-y-mynydd, on the slopes of Aran, where Gwen still greets him always in most daughterly fashion with a kiss of welcome. Gwen’s little boys are firm as a rock upon one point, that except daddy, there isn’t a man in the world at all to be compared for starting a squirrel or scaring a pine marten to Uncle Audouin. But what his precise claim to uncleship may be is a genealogical question that has never for a moment troubled their simple unsophisticated little intellects. They hold ingenuously that a rocking-horse apiece upon their birthdays, and a bright new gold half-sovereign on every visit, is quite sufficient guarantee for that naïf and expansive title of kinship.
THE END
This Mortal Coil
CONTENTS
CHAPTER I.
CHAPTER II.
CHAPTER III.
CHAPTER IV.
CHAPTER V.
CHAPTER VI.
CHAPTER VII.
CHAPTER VIII.
CHAPTER IX.
CHAPTER X.
CHAPTER XI
CHAPTER XII.
CHAPTER XIII
CHAPTER XIV.
CHAPTER XV.
CHAPTER XVI.
CHAPTER XVII.
CHAPTER XVIII.
CHAPTER XIX.
CHAPTER XX.
CHAPTER XXI.
CHAPTER XXII.
CHAPTER XXIII.
CHAPTER XXIV.
CHAPTER XXV.
CHAPTER XXVI.
CHAPTER XXVII.
CHAPTER XXVIII.
CHAPTER XXIX.
CHAPTER XXX.
CHAPTER XXXI.
CHAPTER XXXII.
CHAPTER XXXIII.
CHAPT
ER XXXIV.
CHAPTER XXXV.
CHAPTER XXXVI.
CHAPTER XXXVII.
CHAPTER XXXVIII.
CHAPTER XXXIX.
CHAPTER XL.
CHAPTER XLI.
CHAPTER XLII.
CHAPTER XLIII.
CHAPTER XLIV.
CHAPTER XLV.
CHAPTER XLVI
CHAPTER XLVII.
CHAPTER XLVIII.
CHAPTER XLIX.
CHAPTER L.
CHAPTER LI.
CHAPTER LII.
The first edition’s title page
CHAPTER I.
BOHEMIA.
WHOEVER knows Bohemian London, knows the smoking-room of the Cheyne Row Club. No more comfortable or congenial divan exists anywhere between Regent Circus and Hyde Park Corner than that chosen paradise of unrecognized genius. The Cheyne Row Club is not large, indeed, but it prides itself upon being extremely select — too select to admit upon its list of members peers, politicians, country gentlemen, or inhabitants of eligible family residences in Mayfair or Belgravia. Two qualifications are understood to be indispensable in candidates for membership: they must be truly great, and they must be unsuccessful. Possession of a commodious suburban villa excludes ipso facto. The Club is emphatically the head-quarters of the great Bohemian clan; the gathering-place of unhung artists, unread novelists, unpaid poets, and unheeded social and political reformers generally. Hither flock all the choicest spirits of the age during that probationary period when society, in its slow and lumbering fashion, is spending twenty years in discovering for itself the bare fact of their distinguished existence. Here Maudle displays his latest designs to Postlethwaite’s critical and admiring eye; here Postlethwaite pours his honeyed sonnets into Maudle’s receptive and sympathetic tympanum. Everybody who is anybody has once been a member of the “dear old Cheyne Row:” Royal Academicians and Cabinet Ministers and Society Journalists and successful poets still speak with lingering pride and affection of the days when they lunched there, as yet undiscovered, on a single chop and a glass of draught claret by no means of the daintiest.
