|Churchill,' said the vicar, pulling up his cob opposite the gate of the
little market garden, 'I want to speak to you a minute about that boy of
yours. He's twelve years old and more, I should say, by the look of him,
and he's hanging about the village all his time, doing nothing. Do you
want a place to put him to? What are you going to do with him?'
'Wull, passon,' Sam Churchill answered, touching his hat in
a semi-deferential manner (as a liberal politician, Sam was
constitooshionally agin the passon), 'Us _did_ think o' zendin' un
to school a bit longer, and tryin' vor to prentice un to zum trade
zumwhere; but if a good place at sarvice was goin' a beggin', wy, me
an' 'is mother wouldn't stand in the way of 'is takin' it, sartinly,
noways.'
'Don't send the boy to school any more, Churchill,' the vicar said
decisively. 'This education business is being overdone. You allowed your
other boy--Sam I think you called him--to read a pack of nonsensical
books about going to sea and so forth, and what's the result? He's gone
off to America and left you alone, just as he was beginning to be fitted
for a useful assistant. Depend upon it, Churchill, over-education's a
great error.'
'That's just what my missus do zay, zur,' Sam chimed in respectfully.
'If us 'adn't let Sam read them Cap'n Marryat books, 'ur do zay,' e
'ouldn't never 'ave gone off a-zeekin' 'is fortune awver yander to
'Murrica. Howsom-dever, what place 'ave 'ee got in yer eye vor our
Colin, passon?'
'Let him come to the vicarage,' the parson said, 'and I'll train him to
be my own servant. Then he can get to be a gentleman's valet, and take
a good place by-and-by in London. The boy's got good manners and good
appearance, and would make a capital servant in time, I don't doubt it.'
'Wull, I'll talk it awver wi' the missus,' old Sam replied dubiously.
When Colin was asked whether he would like to go to the vicarage or not,
he answered, with the true west-country insouciance, that he didn't much
care where he went, so long as the place was good and the work was
aisy: and so, before the week was out, he had been duly installed as
the vicar's buttons and body-servant, and initiated into the work of
brushing clothes, opening doors, announcing visitors, and all the other
mysteries of his joint appointment.
The vicar of Wootton was a very great person indeed. He was second
cousin to the Earl of Beaminster, the greatest landowner in that part of
Dorset; and he never for a moment forgot that he was a Howard-Russell,
the inheritor of two of the noblest names in England, and of nothing
else on earth except a remarkably narrow and retreating forehead.
The vicar was not clever; to that he had no pretensions: but he was a
high-minded, honourable, well-meaning English gentleman and clergyman
of the old school; not much interested in their new-fangled questions of
High Church, and Low Church, and Broad Church, and all the rest of it,
yet doing his parochial duty as he conceived of it in a certain honest,
straightforward, perfunctory, official fashion. 'In my young days, my
dear,' he used to say to his nieces (for he was a bachelor), 'we
didn't have all these high churches, and low churches, and mediumsized
churches, that people have nowadays.
We had only one church, the Church of England. That's the only church
that I for my part can ever consent to live and die in.'
In the vicar's opinion, a clergyman was an officer charged with the
maintenance of spiritual decorum in the recognised and organised system
of this realm of England. His chief duty was to dispense a decorous
hospitality to his friends and equals, to display a decorous pattern of
refined life to his various inferiors, to inculcate a decorous morality
on all his parishioners, and to take part in a decorous religious
service (with the assistance of his curates) twice every Sunday. The
march of events had latterly compelled him to add morning prayer on
Wednesdays and Fridays in Lent to this simple list of functions; but
further than that the vicar resolutely refused to go. When anyone talked
to him about matins and evensong, or discussed the Athanasian Creed, or
even spoke of the doings of Convocation, the vicar sniffed a little with
his aristocratic nose, and remarked stiffly that people didn't go in for
those things in his young days, thank goodness. So far as his opinion
went, he hated innovations; the creeds were very good creeds indeed,
and people had got along very well with them, and without matins or
convocations, ever since he could remember.
Still, the vicar was a man of taste. A cousin of Lord Beaminster's and
a vicar of Wootton Mandeville ought, he felt, in virtue of his position,
to be a man of taste. Not an admirer of new fads and fancies in art:
oh, no, no; by no means: not a partisan of realism, or idealism, or
romanticism, or classicism, or impressionism, or any other of their
fashionable _isms_; certainly not: but in a grand, old-fashioned,
unemotional, dignified sort of way, a man of taste. The vicar had two
Romneys hanging in his dining-room; graceful ancestresses with large
straw-hats and exquisitely highborn eighteenth-century Howard faces (the
Russell connection hadn't then got into the family); and he had good
engravings from originals in the Vatican and the Pitti Palace
well displayed in his drawingroom: and he had even a single small
Thorwaldsen, a Thetis rising from the sea, which fronted him as he sat
in the oak-wainscoted study, and inspired his literary efforts while
engaged on the composition of his three annual new sermons. It was
impossible to enter the vicarage, indeed, without feeling at once the
exact artistic position of its excellent occupant. He was decorously
æsthetic, just as he was decorously religious and decorously obedient
to the usages of society. The Reverend Philip Howard-Russell, in fact,
hated enthusiasm in every form. He hated earnest dissent most of all, of
course; it was an irregular, indecorous, unauthorised way of trying
to get to heaven on one's own account, without the aid of the duly
constituted ecclesiastical order: but he hated all nonsense about art
almost equally. He believed firmly in Raffael and Michael Angelo, as
he believed in church and state: he thought Correggio and Guido almost
equally fine; but he had a low opinion of the early Italian masters,
and would have looked askance at Botticelli or Era Angelico, wherever
he found them, even in a ducal mansion. He didn't live (as good fortune
would have it) to see the extremely ill-balanced proceedings of Mr.
Burne Jones and his school: indeed the vicar could never have consented
to prolong his life into such an epoch of 'movements' and 'earnestness'
as our own: but he distinctly recollected, with a thrill of horror, that
when he was a tutor at Christ Church there were two or three young men
who got up something they called a Preraphaelite Brotherhood, which
ultimately came to no good. 'One of them, by name Millais,' he used to
say, 'got rid of all that nonsense at last, and has become a really very
promising young painter: but as to the others, that fellow Hunt, and a
half-Italian man they call Rossetti--well, you know the things they paint
are really and truly quite too ridiculous.'
On the whole, Colin Churchill liked his place at the vicarage fairly
well. To be sure, passon was exacting sometimes; he had a will of his
own, the Reverend Philip, and knew what was becoming from the lower
classes towards their natural superiors--but, for all that, Colin liked
it. The work wasn't very hard; there was plenty of time to get out into
the fields still and play with Minna at odd minutes; the vicarage was
pretty and prettily furnished; and above all, it was full of works of
art such as Colin had never before even imagined. He didn't know why, of
course, but the Romneys and the Thorwaldsen in particular took his fancy
immensely from the very first moment he saw them. The Thetis was his
special adoration: its curves and lines never ceased to delight and
surprise him. An instinctive germ of art which was born in all the
Churchill family was beginning to quicken into full life in little
Colin. Though the boy knew it not, nor suspected it himself, he was in
fact an artistic genius. All the family shared his gifts more or less:
but in Colin those gifts were either greater by original endowment, or
were more highly developed by the accidents of place and time--who shall
say which? Perhaps Sam, put where Colin was, might have become a
great sculptor: perhaps Colin, put where Sam was, might have become a
respectable American citizen. And perhaps not. These are mysteries which
no man yet can solve, least of all the present biographer.
The vicar had a large collection of prints in his study; and when
visitors came who were also men of taste with no nonsense about them,
it was his custom to show them his collection on a little frame made for
the purpose. On such occasions, Colin had to perform the duty of placing
the prints one after another upon the frame: and while the vicar and his
guests looked at them critically, the boy, too, would gaze from behind
them, and listen open-mouthed to their appreciative comments. There was
one picture in particular that Colin especially admired--a mezzotint
from a fresco of the Four Seasons, by a nameless Renaissance artist,
in an out-of-the-way church at Bologna. Perhaps it was the classical
bas-relief air of the picture that struck the boy's fancy so much;
for the native bent of Colin Churchill's genius was always rather
sculpturesque than pictorial: but at any rate he loved that picture
dearly, and more than once the vicar noticed that when they came to it,
his little page lingered behind abstractedly, and didn't go on to the
next in order as soon as he was told to.
'Churchill,' the vicar once said to him sharply on such an occasion,
'why don't you mind when you're spoken to? I said “Next!” Didn't you
hear me?'
'I beg your pardon, zur--sir, I mean,' Colin answered, relapsing for
the moment into his original barbarism: 'I heer'd you, but--but I was
a-lookin' at it and forgot, sir.'
The vicar gazed at the boy for a moment in mute astonishment. 'Looking
at it!' he murmured at last, half to himself, with a curious curl about
the corner of his mouth; 'goodness gracious, what are we coming to
next, I wonder! He was looking at my mezzotints! Extraordinary. Young
Churchill looking at my mezzotints!--The next, you see, Colonel, is a
very rare print by Cornelius Bloemart after Mieris. Exquisitely delicate
engraving, as you observe; very remarkable purity and softness. A
capital conjunction in fact: no burin but Bloemart's could render so
finely the delicate finish of Frans Mieris. The original is almost
worthy of Gerard Douw; you've seen it, I dare say, at Leyden. Next, boy:
next.--Looking at it! Well, I declare! He says he was looking at it!
That man Churchill always _was_ an ill-mannered, independent, upstanding
sort of fellow, and after all what can you expect from his children?
In spite of occasional little episodes like this, however, Colin and the
parson got on fairly well together in the long-run. The parson's first
task had been, of course, to take care that that boy's language should
be reduced to something like the queen's English: and to that effect,
Capel, the butler (better known in Wootton as the Dook, on account
of his distinguished and haughtily aristocratic manners) had been
instructed to point out to Colin the difference in pronunciation between
the letters hess and zud, the grammatical niceties of this, these,
those, they and them, and the formalities necessary to be used by men
of low estate in humbly addressing their duly constituted pastors and
masters. Colin, being naturally a quick boy, had soon picked up as much
of all this as the Dook was able to teach him; and if there was still
a considerable laxity in the matter of aspiration, and a certain
irregularity in the matter of moods and tenses, that was really more the
fault of the teacher than of the pupil. The Dook had been to London and
even to Rome, and had picked up the elegant language of the best footmen
in west-end society. Colin learnt just what the Dook taught him; he had
left behind the crude West-Saxon of the court of King Alfred, on which
he had been nurtured as his mother-tongue, and had almost progressed
to the comparatively cultivated and cosmopolitan dialect of an ordinary
modern English man-servant.
At first, little Minna was in no small degree contemptuous of Colin's
'vine new-vangled talkin'.' '“Don't you,” indeed,' she cried one day in
her supremely sarcastic little manner, when Colin had ventured to use
that piece of superfine English in her very ears, instead of his native
West-Saxon 'don't 'ee;' 'vine things we're comin' to nowadays, Colin,
wen the likes o' thee goes sayin' “don't you.” I s'pose 'ee want to grow
up an' be like the Dook, some o' these vine days. Want to be a butler,
an' 'old theeself so stiff, and talk that vine that plain volk can't
'ardly tell what thee's talkin' about. Gurt stoopid, I do call 'ee.' But
Colin, in spite of ridicule, continued on his own way, and Minna, who
had her pride and her little day-dreams on her own account, too, at last
began to think that perhaps after all Colin might be in the right of it.
So, being a west-country girl with a mind of her own (like most of
them), Minna set to work on her part also to correct and get rid of
her pretty, melting native dialect. She went to school at the British
National School (the vicar had carefully warded off that last disgrace
of the age, the blatant board school, from his own village ); and even
as Colin set himself to attain the lofty standard of excellence afforded
him by the Dook, so did Minna do her best to follow minutely the voice
and accent of the head pupil-teacher, who had actually been for three
terms at the Normal College in London. There she had picked up a very
noble vulgar London twang, learnt to pronounce 'no' as 'na-o,' and
acquired the habit of invariably slurring over or dropping all her short
unaccented syllables.
In all these splendid characteristics of the English language as
currently spoken in the great metropolis, Minna endeavoured to the best
of her ability to follow her leader; and at the end of a year she had so
far succeeded that Colin himself complimented her on the immense advance
she had lately made in her new linguistic studies.
Colin's greatest delight, however, was still to go down in the
afternoon, when the vicar was out, to the brook in the meadow, and there
mix up as of yore a good big batch of plastic clay with which to model
what he used to call his little images. The Dook complained greatly of
the clay, 'a nasty dirty mess, indeed, to go an' acshally bring into
any gentleman's house, let alone the vicar's, and him no more nor a page
neither!' but Colin managed generally to appease his anger, and to gain
a grudging consent at last for the clay to be imported into the house
under the most stringent sumptuary conditions. The vicar must never
see it coming or going; he mustn't be allowed to know that the Dook
permitted such goings-on in the house where he was major-domo. On that
point Mr. Capel was severity itself. So when the images were fairly
finished, Colin used to take them out surreptitiously at night, and then
hand them over to Minna Wroe, who had quite a little museum of the young
sculptor's earliest efforts in her own bedroom. She had alike the Thetis
after Thorwaldsen (a heathenish, scarce half-clad huzzy, who shocked
poor Mrs. Churchill's sense of propriety immensely, until she was
solemnly assured that the original stood in the vicar's study), and the
Infant Samuel after the plaster cast on the cottage mantelpiece; as well
as the bust of Miss Eva, the vicar's favourite niece, studied from life
as Colin stood behind her chair at night, or handed her the potatoes at
dinner. If Miss Eva hadn't been eighteen, and such a _very_ grand young
lady, little Minna might almost have been jealous of her. But as it
was--why, Colin was only the page boy, and so really, after all, what
did it matter?
For three years Colin continued at the vicarage, till he was full
fifteen, and then an incident occurred which gave the first final
direction to his artistic impulses.
One afternoon he had been down to the brook, talking as usual with his
old playmate Minna (even fifteen and thirteen are not yet very dangerous
ages), when he happened, in climbing up that well-known clay cliff, to
miss his foothold on the sticky slippery surface, and fell suddenly into
the bed of the stream below. His head was sadly cut by the flints at the
bottom, and two neighbours picked him out and carried him between them
up to the vicarage. There he was promptly laid upon his own bed, while
Capel sent off hurriedly for the Wootton doctor to staunch the flow of
blood from the ugly cut.
When the vicar heard of the accident from the Dook, he was sitting
in the drawing-room listening to Miss Eva playing a then fashionable
gavotte by a then fashionable composer. 'Is he badly hurt, Capel?' the
vicar asked, with decorous show of interest.
'Pretty bad, sir,' the Dook answered in his official manner. 'I should
judge, sir, by the look of it, that the boy had cut a artery, sir, or
summat of that sort; leastways, the wownd is bleeding most uncommon
profusely.'
'I'll come and see him,' the vicar said, with the air of a man who
decorously makes a sacrifice to Christian principles. 'You may tell the
poor lad, Capel, that I'll come and see him presently.'
'And I will too,' Eva put in quickly.
'Eva, my dear!' her uncle observed with chilling dignity. 'You had
better not. The sight would be a most unpleasant one for you. Indeed,
for all of us. Capel, you may tell Churchill that I am coming to see
him. Eva, I'm afraid I interrupted you: go on, my dear.'
Eva played out the gavotte to the end a little impatiently, and then the
vicar rose after a minute or two of decent delay (one mustn't seem in
too great a hurry to sympathise with the accidents which may befall
one's poorer neighbours), and walked in his stately leisurely fashion
towards the servants' quarters. 'Which is Churchill's room, Capel?' he
asked as he went along. 'Ah, yes, this one, to be sure. Poor lad, I hope
he's better now.'
But as soon as the vicar stood within the room, which he had never
entered before since Colin had used it, he had hardly any eyes for the
boy or the surgeon, and could scarcely even ask the few questions which
decorum demanded as to his state and probable recovery.
For the walls of Colin Churchill's bedroom were certainly of a sort
gravely to surprise and disquiet the unsuspecting vicar. All round the
room, a number of large sheets of paper hung, on which were painted in
bright water-colours cartoon-like copies of the engravings which formed
the chief decoration of the vicar's drawing-room.
'Who did these?' he asked sternly.
'Me, sir,' the boy answered, trembling, from the bed.
The Reverend Philip Howard-Russell started visibly. He displayed
astonishment even before his own servants. In truth, he was too good a
judge of art not to see at a glance that the pictures were well drawn,
and that the colouring, which was necessarily original, had been
harmonised with native taste. All this was disquieting enough; but more
disquieting than all was another work of art which hung right on the top
of Colin's bed-head. It was a composition in clay of the Four Seasons,
reproduced in bas-relief from the mezzotint in the vicar's portfolio,
over which he now at once remembered Colin had so often and so
constantly lingered.
Though he ought to have been looking at the boy, the vicar's eyes
were fixed steadily during almost all the interview on this singular
bas-relief. If the water-colours had merit, the vicar, as a man
of taste, could not conceal from himself the patent fact that the
bas-relief showed positive signs of real genius. It was really most
untoward, most disconcerting! A lad of that position in life to go and
model a composition in relief from an engraving on the flat, and to do
it well, too! The vicar had certainly never heard of anything like it!
He said a few words of decorously conventional encouragement to Colin,
told the surgeon he was delighted to hear the wound was not a serious
one, and then beckoned the Dook quietly out of the room as he himself
took his departure.
'Capel,' he said, in a low voice on the landing, 'what on earth is the
meaning of that--ur--that panel at Churchill's bedside?'
'Well, sir, the boy likes to make a mess with mud and water, you see,'
the butler answered submissively, 'and I didn't like to prevent him,
because he's a well-conducted lad in gen'ral, sir, and he seems to have
took a awful fancy to this sort of imaging. I hope there ain't no harm
done, sir. I never allows him to make a mess with it.'
'Not at all, not at all, Capel,' the vicar continued, frowning slightly.
'No harm in the world in his amusing himself so, of course; still'--and
this the vicar added to himself as though it were a peculiarly
aggravating piece of criminality--'there's no denying he has reproduced
that mezzotint in really quite a masterly manner.'
The vicar went back to the drawing-room with a distressed and puzzled
look upon his clean-shaven clear-cut countenance. 'Is he badly hurt,
uncle?' asked Eva. 'No, my dear,' the vicar replied, testily; 'nothing
to speak of; but I'm afraid he has made himself a very singular and
excellent bas-relief.'
'A what?' cried Eva, imagining to herself that she had overlooked the
meaning of some abstruse medical term which sounded strangely artistic
to her unaccustomed ears.
'A bas-relief,' the vicar repeated, in a disgusted tone. 'Yes, my
dear, I'm not surprised you should be astonished at it, but I said
a bas-relief. He has reproduced my Bologna Four Seasons in clay, and
what's worse, Eva, he has really done it extremely well too, confound
him.'
It was only on very rare occasions that the vicar allowed himself the
use of such doubtful expressions, and even then he employed them in his
born capacity as a Howard-Russell rather than in his acquired one as a
clergyman of the Church of England.
'Eva, my dear,' he said again after a long pause,'the boy's head is
bandaged now, and after all there's really nothing in any way in his
condition to shock you. It might be as well, perhaps, if you were to
go to see him, and ask Mr. Walkem whether the cook ought to make him
anything in the way of jelly or beef-tea or any stuff of that sort, you
know. These little attentions to one's dependents in illness are only
Christian, only Christian. And, do you know, Eva, you might at the same
time just glance at the panel by the bed-head, and tell me by-and-by
what you think of it. I've great confidence in your judgment, my dear,
and after all it mayn't perhaps be really quite so good as I'm at first
sight inclined to believe it.'
When niece and uncle met again at dinner, Eva unhesitatingly proclaimed
her opinion that the bas-relief was very clever (a feminine expression
for every degree of artistic or intellectual merit, not readily
apprehended by the ridiculous hair-splitting male intelligence). The
vicar moved uneasily in his chair. This was most disconcerting. What
on earth was he to do with the boy? As a man of taste, he felt that
he mustn't keep a possible future Canova blacking boots in his back
kitchen; as a Christian minister, he felt that he must do the best he
could to advance the position of all his parishioners; yet finally, as
a loyal member of this commonwealth, he felt that he ought not to
countenance people of that position in life in having tastes and
occupations above their natural station. Old Churchill's son, too! Could
anything be more annoying? 'What on earth ought we to do with him, Eva?'
he asked doubtfully.
'Send him to London to some good artist, and see what he can make of
him,' Eva replied with astonishing promptitude. (It's really wonderful
how young people of the present day will undertake to solve the most
difficult practical problems off-hand, as if there were absolutely
nothing in them.)
The vicar glanced towards the Dook uneasily. 'It's a very extraordinary
thing,' he said, 'for a lad of his class to go and dream of going and
doing. I may be old-fashioned, Eva, my dear, but I don't quite like it.
I won't deny that I don't quite like it.'
'Haven't I read somewhere,' Eva went on innocently, 'that Giotto or
somebody was a peasant boy who fed sheep, and that some one or other,
Cimabue, I think (only I don't know how to pronounce his name properly),
saw some drawings he'd made with a bit of charcoal on some rock, and
took him for his pupil, and made him into, oh, such a great painter?
I know it was such a delightfully romantic story, wherever I read it.'
The vicar coughed drily. 'That was in the thirteenth century, my dear,'
he said, in his coldest and most repressive tone. 'The thirteenth
century was a very long time ago, Eva. Society hadn't organised itself
then, as it has done in our own day. Besides, the story has been
critically doubted. Ci-ma-bu-e,' and the vicar dwelt carefully on each
syllable of the name with a little distinct intonation which mutely
corrected Eva's faulty Italian without too obtrusively exciting the
butler's attention, 'had probably very little to do with discovering
Giot-to.--Capel, this is not the green seal claret. Go and decant some
green seal at once, will you.--My dear, this is a discussion which had
better not be carried on before the servants.'
In three days more the Dook was regaling the gossips of the White Lion
with the whole story how the vicar, with his usual artistic sensibility,
had discovered merit in that lad of Churchill's, and had found out
as the thing the lad had made out of mud were really what they call a
bas-relief, 'which I've seen 'em, of course,' said the Dook, loftily,
'in lots of palaces in Italy, carved by Jotter, and Bonnomey, and
Jamberty, and all them old swells; but I never took much notice of this
one o' young Churchill's, naterally, till the vicar came in; and then,
as soon as ever he clapped eyes on it, he says at once to me, “Capel,”
says he, “that's a bas-relief.” And then, I remembered as I'd seen
just the same sort of things, as I was sayin', over in Italy, by the
cart-load; but, Lord, who'd have ever thought old Sam Churchill's son
could ever ha' done one! And now the vicar's asted Sam to let him get
the boy apprenticed to a wood-carver: and Sam's give his consent; and
next week the boy's going off to Exeter, and going to make his fortune
as sure as there's apples in Herefordshire.'
The idea of the wood-carver may be considered as a sort of compromise on
the vicar's part between his two duties, as a munificent discoverer
of rising talent, and a judicious represser of the too-aspiring lower
orders. A wood-carver's work is in a certain sense artistic, and yet
it isn't anything more, as a rule, than a decent handicraft. The vicar
rather prided himself upon this clever sop to both his consciences: he
chuckled inwardly over the impartial manner in which he had managed to
combine the recognition of plastic merit with the equal recognition of
profound social disabilities. Eva, to be sure, had stood out stoutly
against the wood-carving, and had pleaded hard for a sculptor in London:
but the vicar disarmed her objections somewhat by alleging the admirable
precedent of Grinling Gibbons. 'Gibbons, you know, my dear, rose to the
very first rank as a sculptor from his trade as a wood-carver. Pity
to upset the boy's mind by putting him at once to a regular artist. If
there's really anything in him, he'll rise at last; if not, it would
only do him harm to encourage him in absurd expectations.' Oh, wise
inverted Gamaliels! you too in your decorous way, with your topsyturvy
opportunism, cannot wholly escape the charge of quenching the spirit.