This word in the Italian country, where the English painter’s studio
was, means, Do not trespass, Do not shoot, Do not show yourself here:
anything, indeed, that is uncivil to all comers. In these seven letters,
outspread upon the board, was Lampblack disgraced!
Farewell, hopes and dreams! He had been employed to paint a sign-board, a
thing stoned by the boys, blown on by the winds, gnawed by the rats, and
drenched with the winter’s rains. Better the dust and the cobwebs of his
old corner than such shame as this!
But there was no help for it. He was dried with a drench of turpentine,
hastily clothed in a coat of copal, and, ere he yet was fully aware of
all his misery, was being borne away upon the great board out of doors
and handed to the gardener. It was the master himself who did this to
him. As the door closed on him, he heard all the colors laughing, and the
laugh of little Rose Madder was highest of all as she cried to Naples
Yellow, who was a dandy and made court to her, “Poor old ugly Deposit!
He will grumble to the owls and the bats now!”
The door shut him out forever from all the joyous company and the palace
of beauty, and the rough hands of the gardener grasped him and carried
him to the edge of the garden, where the wall overlooked the public road,
and there fastened him up on high with a band of iron round the trunk of
a tree.
That night it rained heavily, the north wind blew, and there was thunder.
Lampblack, out in the storm without his tin house to shelter him, felt
that of all creatures wretched on the face of the earth there was not one
so miserable as he. A sign-board! Nothing but a sign-board!
A color, created for art and artists, could not feel more grievously
disgraced. Oh, how he longed for his tin tube and the quiet nook with the
charcoal and the palette-knife! He had been unhappy there indeed, but he
had had some sort of hope to comfort him,—some chance still remaining
that one day he might be allowed to be at least the shadow of some
immortal work. Now—nevermore could he be anything but what he was; change
there could be none till weather and time should have done their work on
him, and he be rotting on the wet earth, a shattered and worm-eaten wreck.
Day broke,—a gloomy, misty morning.
From where he was disgraced upon the tree-trunk he could no longer even
see his beloved home, the studio; he could see only a dusky, intricate
tangle of branches all about him, and below the wall of flint, with the
Banksia that grew on it, and the hard muddy highway, drenched with the
storm of the night.
A man passed in a miller’s cart, and stood up and scowled at him, because
the people had liked to come and shoot and trap the birds of the master’s
wooded gardens, and they knew that they must not do it now. A slug
crawled over him, and a snail also. A woodpecker hammered at him with
its strong beak. A boy went by under the wall, and threw stones at him,
and called him names. The rain poured down again heavily. He thought of
the happy painting-room, where it had seemed always summer and always
sunshine, and where now in the forenoon all the colors were marshaling in
the pageantry of the Arts, as he had seen them do hundreds of times from
his lonely corner. All the misery of the past looked happiness now.
“If I were only dead, like Flakewhite,” he thought; but the stones only
bruised, they did not kill him; and the iron band only hurt, it did not
stifle him. For whatever suffers very much, has much strength to continue
to exist. His loyal heart almost hated the master who had brought him to
such a fate as this.
The day grew apace, and noon went by, and with it the rain passed. The
sun shone out once more, and Lampblack, even imprisoned and wretched as
he was, could not but see how beautiful the wet leaves looked, and the
gossamers all hung with rain-drops, and the blue sky that shone through
the boughs; for he had not lived with an artist all his days to be blind,
even in pain, to the loveliness of nature. Some little brown birds
tripped out too with the sun—very simple and plain in their dress, but
Lampblack knew they were the loves of the poets, for he had heard the
master call them so many times in summer nights. The little brown birds
came tripping and pecking about on the grass underneath his tree-trunk,
and then flew on the top of the wall, which was covered with Banksia and
many other creepers. The brown birds sang a little song, for though they
sing most in the moonlight they do sing by day too, and sometimes all day
long. And what they sang was this:
“Oh, how happy we are, how happy!
No nets dare now be spread for us,
No cruel boys dare climb,
And no cruel shooters fire.
We are safe, quite safe,
And the sweet summer has begun!”
Lampblack listened, and even in his misery was soothed by the tender
liquid sounds that these little throats poured out among the bloom of
the Banksia flowers. And when one of the brown birds came and sat on a
branch by him, swaying itself and drinking the rain-drops off a leaf, he
ventured to ask, as well as he could for the iron that strangled him, why
they were so safe, and what made them so happy.
The bird looked at him in surprise.
“Do you not know?” he said. “It is you!”
“I!” echoed Lampblack, and could say no more, for he feared that the bird
was mocking him, a poor, silly, rusty black paint, only spread out to rot
in fair weather and foul. What good could he do to any creature?
“You,” repeated the nightingale. “Did you not see that man under the
wall? He had a gun; we should have been dead but for you. We will come
and sing to you all night long, as you like it; and when we go to bed
at dawn, I will tell my cousins, the thrushes and merles, to take our
places, so that you shall hear somebody singing near you all day long.”
Lampblack was silent. His heart was too full to speak. Was it possible
that he was of use, after all.
“Can it be true?” he said, timidly.
“Quite true,” said the nightingale.
“Then the master knew best,” thought Lampblack.
The colors in the studio had all the glories of the world, but he was of
use in it, after all; he could save these little lives. He was poor and
despised, bruised by stones and drenched by storms; yet was he content,
for he had not been made quite in vain.
The sunset poured its red and golden splendors through the darkness
of the boughs, and the birds sang all together, shouting for joy and
praising God.
—LA RAMÉE