Part 15

The artist was now at work again; he was mounted on his step-ladder, that is to say, with brush poised and palette displayed, and at intervals he gave a masterly stroke to the Alban hills. He wanted to get “a little more nerve, more _race_, into the folds”: such was his odd expression. The crowd had cleared, but there was a small knot of people still clustered about him, and the braver occasionally sent a compliment or a question bawling up at him. “Don’t talk to me of ‘movements,’” he genially cried back; “the only movement a painter should think of is _this_”--and he twirled his brush in a narrowing spiral till it lighted on tiptoe in a fold of the hills. “The only movement I attend to is my own,” he exclaimed, swinging round, flashing on us superbly; “it extends from my house to my studio and back again. ‘Don’t talk about art--show me your work--here’s mine’: that’s what I say to the youngsters. My trade is paint, and I stick to it. An honest tradesman before the world--that’s what an artist should make and keep himself. Before the world, mark you!--his dreams are his own affair. Ah, his dreams--!” Mr. Vickery paused, dropping his brush, and he smote his hand to his eyes and held it there in a long silence. “My God, his dreams!” he murmured. The little group of us stood in a row below him, hushed and intent. The grand old figure of the painter towered against the monument of his toil, and the light of a spacious age seemed to beat on him in the hush. An old master-craftsman of the Renaissance, in his flat velvet cap, his loose blue working-garb--a tradesman he called himself, sturdy in his pride, but we had a glimpse of what he hid from the world. More than a glimpse indeed; for it was a long minute, I should think, before he turned and caught up his brush and set boisterously to work again. As he did so I was sharply prodded from behind--by the lady-reporter, I discovered. “What was that about dreams?” she asked; “did he mean _art_-dreams?” She wanted to have it clear, but Mrs. Vickery stole swiftly forward and nudged her for another point. “You quite understand,” Mrs. Vickery distinctly whispered, “that it mustn’t appear to come from _him_--what I told you.”

Before long the painter stepped down from his ladder, inspected the nerve of the hills from the proper distance and declared himself satisfied. He stretched his arms with a long happy sigh. “Well, well, well, it’s a great game--thank the gods for it! Where should I have been without it these fifty years? Can you imagine me without my poor old toys, Marchesa? Colour-box and canvas--give me them and take the rest! ‘He was born, he painted, he died’--my biography; when you write it don’t add another word.” The Marchesa looked at him with kind timid eyes (she was a very tall and angular Englishwoman) and answered vaguely; she spoke vaguely because it was impossible for her to reach Mr. Vickery’s hearing with her gentle huskiness, so that it didn’t matter what she said. The artist motioned her to a big divan and threw himself beside her among the cushions. He talked on. “Ah, there has been some work done in this old room for fifty years! What’s been happening all that time in the world, Marchesa? You great ones of the earth have had your hour and your power, and I hope you’ve enjoyed it. A poor painter wishes well to the world, always, for so long as the world is happy and busy it will forget the poor painter--he counts on that.” Mr. Vickery’s glance roved for a moment, taking in the circle of his listeners; his wife was still engaged with the reporter at a distance, but she looked hastily round on the pause and gave the reporter a little push, directing her towards the divan. This lady hurried across and took a vacant chair by my side. Mr. Vickery had turned again to address the Marchesa, and he proceeded to speak with emotion of the long lonely laborious service to which a painter is dedicated; and insensibly he lifted the veil, musing to himself, and the light fell upon the hope, the faith, the ambition that an artist so jealously hugs and hides. “He hugs them like a secret,” said Mr. Vickery, his voice dropping almost to a whisper, “a secret that he daren’t profane.” Once more there was a silence. My neighbour bent to me anxiously: “Did he say ‘profane’?” she enquired; “why profane, do you think?--do ask him.”

I don’t know in what form the “Roman studio-chat” appeared in the brazen journal, but if the good lady had as much difficulty in sorting her impressions as I had over mine she can’t have got them ready for the following Saturday. The Marble Faun, the Brownings, the goatherd and the bandit, and then the resplendence of Mr. Vickery--in all this there was far too much for an easy cosy column with plenty of “cross-headings,” even if one left out the array of the types. Mrs. Vickery by herself might be the substance of a leisurely chat; she didn’t attend the session of the divan--she was very busy at a writing-table in a far corner, where she seemed to be sorting papers, making entries in books, stowing things into drawers and locking them up with jingling keys. She at least was forgotten by the world and obviously knew she could count on it; but if one happened to notice her she appeared as the one small sign of lonely concentration in the decorative staging of an artist’s life. I watched her examining a slip of paper, biting her pen; and presently she left her place, edged round the wall to the divan, and unobtrusively offered the paper and the pen to one of our party, a well-fed middle-aged man with side-whiskers. “You’ve forgotten to fill in the date,” I heard her say softly. He filled it in, apologizing, and as she moved away she added that it would be sent without fail to his hotel next morning. Mrs. Vickery was attending to business, assured that the world was happy without her; she locked up the slip of paper and returned to the entries in her note-book. Yes, I think she would have made the best subject of all for one of the “jottings in Rome”; but the jotter missed it--she was preparing to ask Mr. Vickery about the profanity that she had also inadvertently missed.

He gave her no opportunity, however, so I suppose she had to supply it herself in the chat. I too had had my own question for Mr. Vickery, if I could have found the courage to bawl it--or rather if I could have framed it in any words. But I no longer desired to ask him about the Brownings, and indeed the air of the studio wasn’t favourable to questions, with its comfort so easy and public and its pictures so candid and explicit. If you want the answer to any question, look round you!--the room tells you all there is to be told. There was certainly nothing mysterious about the pictures; with one voice they declared themselves, repeating their frank formula with the glibness of fifty voluble years. There was nothing questionable about the luxurious installation of their maker--nothing, at any rate, if one noticed the obscure corner of industry that attracted so little attention. And least of all did the painter himself provoke any doubts that he didn’t plainly satisfy, with his picturesque frontage turned so full to the light; the fumbling reporter was the only person who had missed a syllable of anything he intended to convey. And the upshot of it all was that Mr. Vickery had endured from a blander age, bringing a waft of its goodly confidence and ease, trailing a train of its illustrious memories--only _not_ bringing, as it happened, the forgotten secret on which its glory and its confidence reposed. The blander world of romantic Rome didn’t greatly trouble itself with questions, didn’t object to a florid style, wasn’t afraid of the telling effect of a handsome old head against the bluest hills of Italy; but there _had_ been something else, and Mr. Vickery didn’t chance to have brought it with him--it remained with the Brownings, they kept it. Let me ask Miss Gadge what it was. She thinks it must have been their _depth_, and she is ready to intone the whole of “Abt Vogler” to bear out her opinion.

Mr. Vickery, then, survived in our thin and acid air, to meet the assault of carping doubts from which his prime was protected; and he hadn’t the depth (if that is Miss Gadge’s word) to keep the faith of the romantic age as impressively as it was kept in his youth. I was glad that he had escaped the eye of Deering, to whom I should never betray him; Mr. Vickery, taken as he stood, too freely gave away the honour of Roman romance to be revealed to Deering. With me it was safe; but that sardonic observer, I am sure, wouldn’t consent to view the old survivor as I did, as I still can, when he placed himself before the dark tapestry with the golden light streaming full upon his patriarchal nobility. For me he was the man who remembered the great days, who had roamed in the Campagna with poets, and the man in whose studio the shadows of genius were still to be seen and talked with if one loved them. I loved them myself so dearly that I could easily give Mr. Vickery the benefit of their presence; and in their presence one didn’t take him as he stood, far from it, but with the lustre of his association upon him, strange and new. Deering wouldn’t have had this fond understanding; indeed he would have steeled himself against it with his modern doctrine that one mustn’t read books, at any rate in Rome. “Come out of your books,” he had exhorted me, and it wasn’t likely that he would relapse with me into Browning at this hour--into Browning, whose influence had been strong on him during a period of manly piety through which he had passed in the nursery. So I kept Mr. Vickery to myself, hugging him in secret, and I was content to ask no questions about those eagle-feathered picnics of the past. It is much for us if we can catch but a reflection of the light of the great days; it is enough, even though their depth is screened from us by fifty commoner years. Mr. Vickery shall not be exposed to the daunting chill of Deering’s irony if I can help it.

Such was my feeling; for it seemed clear to me that Mr. Vickery had lived on incautiously till he faced a critical age, knowing nothing of its deadly arts, needing protection. And thereupon I noticed that he was now conducting the Marchesa and the well-fed man on a tour round the studio, pausing at one after another of the pictures; and I began to perceive, following and listening, how much he required my kindly care while he was flanked by the great ones of the earth. The well-fed man was Lord Veneering (or something to that effect), and he explained to the Marchesa that he was “forming a gallery” at a little place he had bought in the country, and that Mr. Vickery had very obligingly “aided him with expert advice”; and the Marchesa said pleasantly that one couldn’t do better than follow Mr. Vickery’s taste, because he possessed, what is nowadays so rare, the spirit of the great masters. “This,” said Mr. Vickery, indicating one of the canvases, “is a little smudge of paint that pleases me as well as anything I ever did--which may seem odd to a layman, for it’s purely a painter’s picture. Very bad policy, in these days, to spend time over work like that; but we paint for each other, we of the trade--we understand.” The velvet breeches and the sheepskin seemed to me to occupy their usual places in this picture, but his lordship was particularly struck by their “high relief.” Mr. Vickery didn’t hear, he was lost for a moment in contemplation. “Yes,” he said, “a painter would understand what I’ve tried to say there.” Our carping age, represented by the Marchesa and Lord Veneering, reverently gazed. Mrs. Vickery, still over her papers at the table, glanced up at her husband with a look that understood more, I incline to think, than many painters. Certainly he was well muffled against our chilling and doubting day; but I wonder how he would have shielded his complacency if his wife had spoken her mind. However she was much too deep in her entries and reckonings for a wild idea like that.

XV. VIA DELLE BOTTEGHE OSCURE

I don’t pledge myself to the actual street, twisting into the dark heart of Rome, that led me to the great solemn palace of the Marchesa; but it might have been the street of the Dark Shops, and I am apt to think it may. It rambled vaguely into the gloom of all the ages and brought me to a stand before an immense _portone_, the doorway of a family whose classic name was inscribed in monumental lettering upon the lintel. What a name!--it strode away across the long centuries, it wore the purple and the tiara, it raised its shout in the bloody brawls of its faction, it disappeared into the barbaric night; and again it emerged, plain to see, clear in the classic day, the pride and the renown of the young republic. It seems, as you read it over the doorway, to speak casually of Scipio, of Cincinnatus, friends of yesterday, vanished so lately that there has barely been time to miss them; and there may be a touch of parade in this, but who shall prove it?--and anyhow it is a great and glorious name, nobly time-worn from its immemorial journey, and it is written over the dark archway of the palace for its only and sufficient decoration. You enter accordingly under the sign of all the Roman history that you ever read, you cross the cloistered court and mount the broad sweep of the staircase; and you find yourself in the presence of a shy kind elderly Englishwoman, who appears to be still wondering a little, after many years, how she came there.

The great old family, though it still held up its head with high dignity, seemed to have outlived its fortune in the world. The Marchesa sat in the midst of tattered and shredded relics of splendour, mildly boiling her kettle over a spirit-lamp; and I don’t know how she came there, but in many years she had never succeeded in wearing her faded state with confidence, and she looked forlorn and patient, quietly accepting as a duty a condition of things that she didn’t understand. She was too lady-like in her gentle manners for the worldly pride of her majestic drawing-room; and whereas its majesty held aloof more proudly than ever in impoverishment, she herself was too humble to reject the little comfort and kindness of a hissing kettle and a few sociable friends to tea. She tried to keep one hand upon their homely support without losing touch at the same time with the palatial scorn that watched her; and yet there was a disconnexion somehow, and she hadn’t the power, the impudence, the adaptability, whatever it might be, to make herself the link between the two. It may have been easier in the Marchese’s lifetime (he was long departed); but now she had to carry her prodigious name by herself, and the weight of the responsibility, and her earnest sense of her duty, and her simple unassuming inefficiency--what with it all there was much to make her look anxious and bewildered while we sat, she and I, waiting for the kettle to boil. She was conscious of having too much history on her hands; and yet she couldn’t in loyalty disown it and settle comfortably down upon the style and culture of a plain quiet Englishwoman.

The good Marchesa, she had somehow been left all alone in her august establishment by deaths, accidents, dispositions that are obscure to me; but the result of them was that she sat by herself in a corner of her mighty palace, watched and terrorized from a distance by a crowd of her kindred, offshoots in many degrees of her husband’s race--a needy Roman throng possessing complicated claims on her, rights to bully her, chances to torment her with conscientious scruples; and no doubt she had found that her integrity and her perfect manners were a very poor match for the guile of twenty centuries of Rome. “I’m expecting two English nephews of mine this afternoon,” she said--“such dear boys”; and again, “My sister writes to me from Devonshire to ask me if I can introduce them to a few nice friends”: that was the tone of the Marchesa, and it wouldn’t seem that she could offer much resistance to a band of hungry wily Romans. It was more, however, than might be thought, for her back was straight and firm in her duty at any cost to herself; only it all made a puzzling task, and there was no one and nothing around to support her, to stand by her side with encouragement and explanation, unless it was the companionable English tea-cup in a corner of her huge old drawing-room. It will presently appear how it is that I can read such a tale in her shy plainness, but much of it would be legible even without what I afterwards learned. She was an exceedingly simple soul.

The Principessa was simple too in her way, but it was not the same way. “Why, Gertrude,” she cried, rustling down the long room from the doorway, “don’t you look lovely to-day!” (It was the voice of New York.) “But that’s nothing new--I don’t tell you what you don’t _very_ well know--only it strikes me fresh every time I see you!” And indeed the slight flush and smile that began to spread upon the Marchesa’s brownish pallor did become her, as she rose to greet her guest. “Every time I see you,” repeated the Principessa, brightly glancing. “There’s something about you that’s perfection, and I shall _never_ know just what it is. Don’t you want to tell me what it is? You needn’t be afraid--I shan’t ever be able to copy it. I watch my little girl every day to see if she won’t catch a look of it somehow. ‘My blessed child,’ I say to her, ‘for mercy’s sake try to look _real_--like the Marchesa.’ But she doesn’t, she looks like her father--and you know the sort of old Greek plaster-cast that _he_ is, and all his family. I tell them they can’t impose on _me_ with their grand pretences; I’ve seen the real thing. I never meant to marry Filippo, I meant to marry a man out of an English novel--yes, the same novel that _you_ come out of, Gertrude, whichever it is; if I happen to find it I shall throw over Filippo and bolt--he’s well aware of it. Don’t you want to tell me his name, Gertrude--the name of the hero in your novel? Maltravers, Sir John Mauleverer, something like that; you know I come here in the hope of meeting him. Some day he’ll turn up and I shall fly into his arms; he’ll quite understand.”

The Principessa was perfect too in her way, but it was not the way of the Marchesa. They sat side by side on a broad couch; and if the most eloquent aspect of their contrast was on their lips and in their speech, there was another almost as vivid that was plainly displayed at this moment on the floor. The Marchesa’s long flat foot, with its well-worn shoe and the hole in her grey stocking, rested on the floor beside the Principessa’s smart little arch, with its dolphin-like plunge from heel to toe and its exquisite casing of down-soft leather and filigree silk; it was a lucid contrast, the two of them side by side. The Principessa was altogether small, compact, and neater than I should have thought it possible for any one to be neat on our rolling globe; but small and trim as she was she managed to rustle (to rustle!--I revive the forgotten word in an age that no longer knows the liquefaction of her clothes whenas she goes!)--she rustled in a manner that the Marchesa, though with so much more height to sweep from, had never dreamed of emulating. Rustling, it may be, depended more on depth of purse than height of person; and indeed you couldn’t notice the tip of the Principessa’s little finger, let alone the brilliant arch of her foot, without observing that it cost more at every breath she drew than the whole angular person of the Marchesa through the long quiet day. The Principessa was consummately expensive--though with a finely pointed extremity of taste that again the Marchesa had never caught a glimpse of; from the tilt of her big hat the little Principessa was the spirit of expense to the click of her neat heel. And yet, yet--what is it that she sees in the good incompetent Marchesa, sees and admires and owns to be beyond imitation? Let me ask--why yes, most appropriately, let me ask Miss Gilpin.

Miss Gilpin, however, is not so ready with information as Miss Gadge; for Miss Gilpin in the palace of the Marchesa is considerably more pre-occupied, less communicative, than she is in the lodging of the Clarksons. Several other people had arrived or were arriving, and a side-glance of her attention in passing was all she could spare for her awkward young friend. She was very agile and easy herself, slipping among the company like a bird of pretty plumage, moving so lightly that you would never suppose such a fresh young thing to be a woman of professional learning and experience. She lifts her wide clear gaze to the face of the person whom she addresses, and it might be almost embarrassing in its frank admiration, but her gay little well-worded remarks relieve it; and she never lingers, never clings, she is drawn away to somebody else and flits on with a shining look behind her; and so she weaves her dance-figure through the company, and it brings her gradually to the side of the Principessa--at sight of whom she gives a tiny jump, as the unexpected pleasure beams out in her childlike eyes. The Principessa seemed to be less surprised, and Miss Gilpin got rather a cool return for her sparkle of delight. The dance was arrested with some abruptness; but there is this about Miss Gilpin, that she always has her wits about her and can adapt herself to a sudden change of plan. Her eye darted quickly forward to the Marchesa--and it was to the Marchesa after all that she had a particular word to say, if the other lady would forgive her for hastening on. One can safely count on the excellent Marchesa; yet it must be confessed that life is complicated, and Miss Gilpin sank a little wearily into an absorbing conversation with our hostess.

But what was the pretty plumage of Miss Gilpin, even at its most unruffled, compared with the rich hues of the creature that now swooped upon the modest gathering? Half flower and half bird--half peony and half macaw--Madame de Baltasar was in our midst; and so much so that nothing else for a while was in our midst--the central object was Madame de Baltasar. Peony in face, macaw in voice and raiment, she embraced and enveloped the Marchesa--who closed her eyes, evidently in prayer, as she nerved herself for the assault. The poor pale lady bore it unflinchingly, but that was all; she was cowed, she was numbed, by the mere voice of the visitor, equally penetrating in any language. The visitor, however, had no further need for the Marchesa; what she needed was a slim and very beautiful young man who happened to be talking to the Principessa--she plucked and removed him without delay. Even as she did so another young man, also very well in his fashion, appeared accidentally in her path; he too was annexed; and Madame de Baltasar, doing what she could to lend them a conquering rather than a consenting air, established them in a corner with herself between them. The Marchesa, reviving, gave a sudden gasp at the sight; for the second victim, who was a very British and candid-looking youth in naval uniform, was one of the dear boys, her nephews, and a glimpse of the peony-face beside him brought the letter from Devonshire very sharply to her mind. “A few nice friends--!” The Principessa looked up with humour. “I feel for you, dear Gertrude,” she said, “but what do you expect? Why ever do you let that woman into your house?” “I don’t let her,” wailed the Marchesa, very helpless. “Well, she’s grabbed Don Mario from me and your nephew from you,” said the Principessa comically; “at any rate they’ll keep her quiet for a time.” A peal of liberal shrieks rang out from the lady in the corner, and the Marchesa closed her eyes again in a mute petition.