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 signboard, 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 help was there none. His fate was fixed. He was dried with a
drench of turpentine, hastily clothed in a coat of copal, and here
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 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 signboard! Nothing but a signboard!
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. Never more 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 marshaling 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 raindrops, 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 raindrops 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, 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.