open casements were hung with myrtle and passion-flower, and whose
silence was filled with the singing of nightingales. Cobalt, with a
touch or two, became the loveliness of summer skies at morning; the
Lakes and Carmines bloomed in a thousand exquisite flowers and fancies;
the Chromes and Ochres (mere dull earths) were allowed to spread
themselves in sheets of gold that took the shine of the sun into the
darkest places; Umber, a sombre and gloomy thing, could lurk yet in a
child’s curls and laugh in a child’s smiles; whilst all the families of
the Vermilions, the Blues, the Greens, lived in a perpetual glory of
sunset or sunrise, of ocean waves or autumn woods, of kingly pageant or
of martial pomp.
It was very hard. Poor Lampblack felt as if his very heart would
break, above all when he thought of pretty little Rose Madder, whom he
loved dearly, and who never would even look at him, because she was
so very proud, being herself always placed in nothing less than rosy
clouds, or the hearts of roses, or something as fair and spiritual.
“I am only a wretched deposit!” sighed Lampblack, and the rusty
palette-knife grumbled back, “My own life has been ruined in cleaning
dirty brushes, and see what the gratitude of men and brushes is!”
“But at least you have been of use once; but I never am--never!” said
Lampblack, wearily; and indeed he had been there so long that the
spiders had spun their silver fleeces all about him, and he was growing
as gray as an old bottle does in a dark cellar.
At that moment the door of the studio opened, and there came a flood of
light, and the step of a man was heard: the hearts of all the colors
jumped for joy, because the step was that of their magician, who out
of mere common clays and ground ores could raise them at a touch into
splendors of the gods and divinities immortal.
Only the heart of poor dusty Lampblack could not beat a throb the more,
because he was always left alone and never was thought worthy even
of a glance. He could not believe his senses when this afternoon--oh,
miracle and ecstasy!--the step of the master crossed the floor to the
obscured corner where he lay under his spiders’ webs, and the hand of
the master touched him. Lampblack felt sick and faint with rapture. Had
recognition come at last?
The master took him up: “You will do for this work,” he said; and
Lampblack was borne trembling to an easel. The colors, for once in
their turn neglected, crowded together to watch, looking in their
bright tin tubes like rows of little soldiers in armor.
“It is the old dull Deposit,” they murmured to one another, and felt
contemptuous, yet were curious, as scornful people often will be.
“But I am going to be glorious and great,” thought Lampblack, and his
heart swelled high; for never more would they be able to hurl the name
of Deposit at him, a name which hurt him none the less, but all the
more indeed, because it was unintelligible.
“You will do for this work,” said the master, and let Lampblack out of
his metal prison-house into the light and touched him with the brush
that was the wand of magic.
[Illustration: “OLD DEPOSIT IS GOING TO BE A SIGN-POST,” THEY CRIED]
“What am I going to be?” wondered Lampblack, as he felt himself taken
on to a large piece of deal board, so large that he felt he must be
going to make the outline of an athlete or the shadows of a tempest at
the least.
Himself he could not tell what he was becoming: he was happy enough and
grand enough only to be employed, and, as he was being used, began to
dream a thousand things of all the scenes he would be in, and all the
hues that he would wear, and all the praise that he would hear when he
went out into that wonderful great world of which his master was an
idol. From his secret dreams he was harshly roused; all the colors were
laughing and tittering round him till the little tin helmets they wore
shook with their merriment.
“Old Deposit is going to be a sign-post,” they cried to one another so
merrily that the spiders, who are not companionable creatures, felt
themselves compelled to come to the doors of their dens and chuckle,
too. A sign-post! Lampblack, stretched out in an ecstasy upon the
board, roused himself shivering from his dreams, and gazed at his own
metamorphosis. He had been made into seven letters, thus:
BANDITA.
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 peremptory and uncivil to all trespassers. In
these seven letters, outspread upon the board, was Lampblack crucified!
Farewell, ambitious hopes and happy 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 a shame as this!
But help was there none. His fate was fixed. 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. For the master
was a hasty and ardent man, and had been stung into impatience by
the slaughter of some favorite blue thrushes in his ilex-trees that
day, and so in his haste had chosen to do journeyman’s work himself.
Lampblack was carried out of the studio for the last time, and 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, shutting him out forever from all that joyous company
and palace of fair visions, and the rough hands of the gardener grasped
him and carried him to the edge of the great 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, and the north wind blew, and there was
thunder also. 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!
The degradation of a color, created for art and artists, could not be
deeper or more grievous anywhere. Oh, how he sighed for his tin tube
and the quiet nook with the charcoal and the palette-knife!
He had been unhappy there indeed, but still had had always some sort of
hope to solace him,--some chance still remaining that one day fortune
might smile and he be allowed to be at least the lowest stratum of some
immortal work.
But now hope was there none. His doom, his end, were fixed and
changeless. Nevermore could he be anything but what he was; and 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 crucified upon the tree-trunk he could no longer even
see his beloved home, the studio: he could only see 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 from the
storm of the night.
A man passed in a miller’s cart, and stood up and swore at him, because
the people had liked to come and shoot and trap the birds of the
master’s wooded gardens, and 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 marshalling in the pageantry of the Arts, as he had seen them do
hundreds of times from his lone 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 always so much strength
to continue to exist. And almost his loyal heart blasphemed and cursed
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 a great artist all his days to be
blind, even in pain, to the loveliness of nature. The sun came out, and
with it some little brown birds tripped out too,--very simple and plain
in their costumes and ways, but which Lampblack knew 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
sung 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 touched and soothed by
the tender liquid sounds that these little throats poured out among the
light-yellow 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?
[Illustration: “THEN THE MASTER KNEW BEST,” THOUGHT LAMPBLACK.]
“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, since 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 the 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.
Never would he adorn a palace or be adored upon an altar. His high
hopes were all dead, like last year’s leaves. 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, nailed there upon
his tree, 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.
THE AMBITIOUS ROSE-TREE
THE AMBITIOUS ROSE-TREE
SHE was a Quatre Saison Rose-tree.
She lived in a beautiful old garden with some charming magnolias for
neighbors: they rather overshadowed her, certainly, because they were
so very great and grand; but then such shadow as that is preferable,
as every one knows, to a mere vulgar enjoyment of common daylight, and
then the beetles went most to the magnolia-blossoms, for being so great
and grand of course they got very much preyed upon, and this was a vast
gain for the rose that was near them. She herself leaned against the
wall of an orange-house, in company with a Banksia, a buoyant, active,
simple-minded thing, for whom Rosa Damascena, who thought herself
much better born than these climbers, had a natural contempt. Banksiæ
will flourish and be content anywhere, they are such easily-pleased
creatures; and when you cut them they thrive on it, which shows a very
plebeian and pachydermatous temper; and they laugh all over in the face
of an April day, shaking their little golden clusters of blossom in
such a merry way that the Rose-tree, who was herself very reserved and
thorny, had really scruples about speaking to them.
For she was by nature extremely proud--much prouder than her lineage
warranted--and a hard fate had fixed her to the wall of an orangery,
where hardly anybody ever came, except the gardener and his men to
carry the oranges in winter and out in spring, or water and tend them
while they were housed there.
She was a handsome rose, and she knew it. But the garden was so
crowded--like the world--that she could not get herself noticed in it.
In vain was she radiant and red close on to Christmas-time as in the
fullest heats of midsummer. Nobody thought about her or praised her.
She pined and was very unhappy.
The Banksiæ, who are little, frank, honest-hearted creatures, and say
out what they think, as such plebeian people will, used to tell her
roundly she was thankless for the supreme excellence of her lot.
“You have everything the soul of a rose can wish for: a splendid old
wall with no nasty chinks in it; a careful gardener, who nips all the
larvæ in the bud before they can do you any damage; sun, water, care;
above all, nobody ever cuts a single blossom off you! What more can you
wish for? This orangery is paradise!”
She did not answer.
What wounded her pride so deeply was just this fact, that they never
_did_ cut off any of her blossoms. When day after day, year after
year, she crowned herself with her rich crimson glory and no one ever
came nigh to behold or to gather it, she could have died with vexation
and humiliation.
Would nobody see she was worth anything?
The truth was that in this garden there was such an abundance of very
rare roses that a common though beautiful one like Rosa Damascena
remained unthought of; she was lovely, but then there were so many
lovelier still, or, at least, much more _à la mode_.
In the secluded garden-corner she suffered all the agonies of a pretty
woman in the great world, who is only a pretty woman, and no more. It
needs so _very_ much more to be “somebody.” To be somebody was
what Rosa Damascena sighed for, from rosy dawn to rosier sunset.
From her wall she could see across the green lawns, the great parterre
which spread before the house terrace, and all the great roses that
bloomed there--Her Majesty Gloire de Dijon, who was a reigning
sovereign born, the royally-born Niphétos, the Princesse Adelaïde,
the Comtesse Ouvaroff, the Vicomtesse de Cazes all in gold, Madame de
Sombreuil in snowy white, the beautiful Louise de Savoie, the exquisite
Duchess of Devoniensis--all the roses that were great ladies in their
own right, and as far off from her as were the stars that hung in
heaven. Rosa Damascena would have given all her brilliant carnation
hues to be pale and yellow like the Princesse Adelaïde, or delicately
colorless like Her Grace of Devoniensis.
[Illustration: ONE DAY THE GARDENER APPROACHED AND STOOD AND LOOKED AT
HER]
She tried all she could to lose her own warm blushes, and prayed that
bees might sting her and so change her hues; but the bees were of low
taste, and kept their pearl-powder and rouge and other pigments for the
use of common flowers, like the evening primrose or the buttercup and
borage, and never came near to do her any good in arts of toilet.
One day the gardener approached and stood and looked at her: then all
at once she felt a sharp stab in her from his knife, and a vivid pain
ran downward through her stem.
She did not know it, but gardeners and gods “this way grant prayer.”
“Has not something happened to me?” she asked of the little Banksiæ;
for she felt very odd all over her; and when you are unwell you cannot
be very haughty.
The saucy Banksiæ laughed, running over their wires that they cling to
like little children.
“You have got your wish,” they said. “You are going to be a great lady;
they have made you into a Rosa Indica!”
A tea-rose! Was it possible?
Was she going to belong at last to that grand and graceful order, which
she had envied so long and vainly from afar?
Was she, indeed, no more mere simple Rosa Damascena? She felt so
happy she could hardly breathe. She thought it was her happiness that
stifled her; in real matter of fact it was the tight bands in which the
gardener had bound her.
“Oh, what joy!” she thought, though she still felt very uncomfortable,
but not for the world would she ever have admitted it to the Banksiæ.
The gardener had tied a tin tube on to her, and it was heavy and
cumbersome; but no doubt, she said, to herself, the thing was
fashionable, so she bore the burden of it very cheerfully.
The Banksiæ asked her how she felt; but she would not deign even to
reply; and when a friendly blackbird, who had often picked grubs off
her leaves, came and sang to her, she kept silent: a Rosa Indica was
far above a blackbird.
“Next time you want a caterpillar taken away, he may eat you for
_me_!” said the blackbird, and flew off in a huff.
She was very ungrateful to hate the blackbird so, for he had been most
useful to her in doing to death all the larvæ of worms and beetles and
caterpillars and other destroyers which were laid treacherously within
her leaves. The good blackbird, with many another feathered friend,
was forever at work in some good deed of the kind, and all the good,
grateful flowers loved him and his race. But to this terribly proud and
discontented Rosa Damascena he had been a bore, a common creature, a
nuisance, a monster--any one of these things by turns, and sometimes
all of them altogether. She used to long for the cat to get him.
“You ought to be such a happy rose!” the merle had said to her, one
day. “There is no rose so strong and healthy as you are, except the
briers.”
And from that day she had hated him. The idea of naming those hedgerow
brier roses in the same breath with her!
You would have seen in that moment of her rage a very funny sight had
you been there; nothing less funny than a rose-tree trying to box a
blackbird’s ears!
But, to be sure, you would only have thought the wind was blowing about
the rose, so you would have seen nothing really of the drollery of it
all, which was not droll at all to Rosa Damascena, for a wound in one’s
vanity is as long healing as a wound from a conical bullet in one’s
body. The blackbird had not gone near her after that, nor any of his
relations and friends, and she had had a great many shooting and flying
pains for months together, in consequence of aphides’ eggs having been
laid inside her stem--eggs of which the birds would have eased her long
before if they had not been driven away by her haughty rage.
However, she had been almost glad to have some ailment. She had called
it aneurism, and believed it made her look refined and interesting. If
it would only have made her pale! But it had not done that: she had
remained of the richest rose color.
When the winter had passed and the summer had come round again, the
grafting had done its work: she was really a Rosa Indica, and timidly
put forth the first blossom in her new estate. It was a small, rather
puny yellowish thing, not to be compared to her own natural red
clusters, but she thought it far finer.
Scarcely had it been put forth by her than the gardener whipped it
off with his knife, and bore it away in proof of his success in such
transmogrifications.
She had never felt the knife before, when she had been only Rosa
Damascena: it hurt her very much, and her heart bled.
“Il faut souffrir pour être belle,” said the Banksiæ in a good-natured
effort at consolation. She was not going to answer them, and she made
believe that her tears were only dew, though it was high noon and all
the dew-drops had been drunk by the sun, who by noon-time gets tired of
climbing and grows thirsty.
Her next essay was much finer, and the knife whipped that off also.
That summer she bore more and more blossoms, and always the knife cut
them away, for she had been made one of the great race of Rosa Indica.
Now, a rose-tree, when a blossom is chopped or broken off, suffers
precisely as we human mortals do if we lose a finger; but the
rose-tree, being a much more perfect and delicate handiwork of nature
than any human being, has a faculty we have not: it lives and has a
sentient soul in every one of its roses, and whatever one of these
endures the tree entire endures also by sympathy. You think this
very wonderful? Not at all. It is no whit more wonderful than that a
lizard’s tail chopped off runs about by itself, or that a dog can scent
a foe or a thief whilst the foe or the thief is yet miles away. All
these things are most wonderful, or not at all so--just as you like.
In a little while she bore another child: this time it was a fine
fair creature, quite perfect in its hues and shapes. “I never saw a
prettier!” said an emperor butterfly, pausing near for a moment; at
that moment the knife of the gardener severed the rosebud’s stalk.
“The lady wants one for her bouquet de corsage: she goes to the opera
to-night,” the man said to another man, as he took the young tea-rose.
“What is the opera?” asked the mother-rose wearily of the butterfly.
He did not know; but his cousin the death’s-head moth, asleep under a
magnolia-leaf, looked down with a grim smile on his quaint face.
“It is where everything dies in ten seconds,” he answered. “It is a
circle of fire; many friends of mine have flown in, none ever returned:
your daughter will shrivel up and perish miserably. One pays for
glory.”
The rose-tree shivered through all her stalks; but she was still proud,
and tried to think that all this was said only out of envy. What should
an old death’s-head moth know, whose eyes were so weak that a farthing
rushlight blinded them?
So she lifted herself a little higher, and would not even see that the
Banksiæ were nodding to her; and as for her old friend the blackbird,
how vulgar he looked, bobbing up and down hunting worms and woodlice!
could anything be more outrageously vulgar than that staring yellow
beak of his? She twisted herself round not to see him, and felt quite
annoyed that he went on and sang just the same, unconscious of, or
indifferent to, her coldness.
With each successive summer Rosa Damascena became more integrally and
absolutely a Rosa Indica, and suffered in proportion to her fashion and
fame.
True, people came continually to look at her, and especially in
May-time would cry aloud, “What a beautiful Niphétos!” But then she was
bereaved of all her offspring, for, being of the race of Niphétos, they
were precious, and one would go to die in an hour in a hot ball-room,
and another to perish in a Sèvres vase, where the china indeed was
exquisite but the water was foul, and others went to be suffocated in
the vicious gases of what the mortals call an opera-box, and others
were pressed to death behind hard diamonds in a woman’s bosom; in
one way or another they each and all perish miserably. She herself
also lost many of her once luxuriant leaves, and had a little scanty
foliage, red-brown in summer, instead of the thick, dark-green clothing
that she had worn when a rustic maiden. Not a day passed but the knife
stabbed her; when the knife had nothing to take she was barren and
chilly, for she had lost the happy power of looking beautiful all the
year round, which once she had possessed.