READ BY ANOTHER'S EYES.
On looking at the picture, the next day, Bella was painfully
dissatisfied with her work. What she had done with so much care and
diligence seemed to her false in drawing and expression. She grew
positively angry over it, and would have made a fresh beginning had not
Clodwig, by his gentle persuasions and judicious praise of the many
excellencies of her picture, succeeded in soothing her. She could not
help saying, however, with some bitterness, that it was her fate to
have everything she undertook turn out otherwise than she had desired,
and upon Clodwig's assuring her that such was the necessary result of
every attempt to embody our conceptions, she exclaimed impatiently, "I
am not what I am." The real cause of her discontent was hard to
determine. It was more than the mere dissatisfaction of the artist and
disappointment in her own powers.
The strict discipline which Eric had wished to maintain was now much
broken in upon. Bella always carried through whatever plan she had laid
out for herself, acting upon her favorite theory that it was well to
allow men to think they had some authority, but that must be all.
Roland soon turned the conversation to the subject always uppermost in
his mind, the life of Franklin. Bella expressed a wish to learn
something about it, and Clodwig, after a little sketch had been given
of what bad been already gone over, was quite ready to resume the
reading where it had been dropped before. Eric and Roland, who sat upon
a raised platform, listened eagerly. The reading gave rise to many an
animated discussion, for Bella entered with remarkable ease and
readiness into everything that was presented to her. Eric was disturbed
by her speedy detection in Franklin of "a certain dry pedantry, a
stinginess of nature," which her acute criticisms set forth in strong
relief. He could feel the emotion her words caused in Roland, who was
sitting on his knee.
In these days, it is impossible for a young man of Roland's antecedents
and present position to preserve a perfect ideal. If rightly guided,
and established on a solid footing, it might perhaps be useful for him
to see his ideal attacked, and even distorted.
With all the eloquence at his command, Eric stated the difficulty that
beset the enlightened mind of the present day, in having no
authoritative voice in the place of that of the Church, to say at every
point of life's journey, "Follow thou me." We moderns must recognize
what is pure and lofty in noble natures, though cramped by the many
limitations incident to our age and individual constitution.
Bella's pencil worked rapidly while he was speaking, and she often
nodded, her head assentingly. When he ended she looked full at him, and
said,--
"You are the best teacher I ever met with;" then, with beaming eyes and
glowing cheeks, she turned again to her work.
"That depends upon the pupil," answered Eric, politely acknowledging
the compliment.
"I want you, now," continued Bella, still blushing deeply, "I want you
to lay your hand on Roland's head. Please do; it will give precisely
the effect I desire. Please do as I say."
He consented, protesting at the same time that the idea did not please
him, for Roland should learn to carry his head free.
Bella shook her head with vexation, and continued her work, no longer,
however, on the figure of Eric, but solely on that of Roland.
"Now I have it!" she suddenly exclaimed; "that is it! You resemble
Murillo's St. Anthony."
"That is just what I noticed," cried Roland. "Manna scolded me for it
at the musical festival."
Clodwig also agreed with his wife.
"It is a favorite picture of mine," he said. "How plainly I can see it
now before me! The figure of Anthony on his knees, with a knotted staff
beside him; the landscape barely indicated; a tree in the background,
and the thicket near by. Angels are playing on the ground and floating
in the air; one turns over the leaves of the Saint's book, while
another holds up to an angel hovering in the heavens a lily which has
grown from the earth; the flower thus forming, as it were, a link
between heaven and earth."
Eric was somewhat embarrassed by Roland's relating how he had fallen
asleep in the chapel of the convent, and how suddenly the black nun
stood beside him, and he saw the picture above him.
A request of Eric's that the reading might stop here, and the reasons
on which he based his request, assumed various shapes in the minds of
his hearers.
"To-day's experience convinces me," he said, "that we cannot control
our thoughts or pursue them to any worthy issue, when obliged to remain
in a position foreign to those thoughts, or in one at least that has no
connection with them. There is a mysterious sympathy between our
thoughts and the position and state of our bodies."
Eric's words worked in four different ways upon the party assembled. In
his own case, they served to describe his position as tutor. Roland
thought of the masons at work on the castle, and wondered what they
must be thinking of while perched in mid air on their scaffoldings, or
while hammering the stone. Clodwig, too, must have found the words bear
in some way upon his life, for he shook his head and pressed his lips
hard together, as he was wont to do when thinking. But upon Bella they
produced the most striking impression; she suddenly let fall from one
hand her pencils, and from the other the bread which she used for the
occasional erasing of a line. Eric instantly restored them to her, and
she took them from him with a vacant look and no word of thanks. He
had brought before her the picture of her married life. Thus this one
key-note had struck four different chords.
For a long time no word was spoken.
The presence of Clodwig and his family at Villa Eden caused great
excitement in the neighborhood, and appeared to place the tutor in a
very peculiar position, Pranken, however, viewed the matter quite
differently, and, as acknowledged son of the house, invited to Villa
Eden the Justice, with his wife and daughter, who had just returned
from the Baths.
His manner towards Lina was particularly friendly and intimate; he took
long walks in the garden with her, and made her tell him about her life
in a convent, which she did most amusingly, giving comical descriptions
of the sisters, the Superior, and her different companions. Her only
object in staying at the convent had been the learning of foreign
languages. Lina's perpetually gay spirits began to have a cheering
effect upon the melancholy Pranken. Something of the Pranken of old
times was roused within him. Why need the present be empty and barren?
it said. Bella has her flirtation with the Captain, why should he not
have his with Lina? Why not indulge in a little harmless jesting,
perhaps even admit the excitement of some feeling? He could control
himself at any moment.
The old Pranken, the Pranken of the days before, seized his rescued
moustache with both hands and twirled it in the air.
It was a good idea, during this pause in his life, to amuse himself
with the Justice's Lina. He could imagine himself transported back to
the days before that visit to the convent, and add this to the many
other experiences of his past life which Manna would have to forget.
Lina meanwhile received his attentions very unconcernedly, showing
equal friendliness of manner towards both him and Eric, whom she always
called her brother in music.
There was a constant stream of jesting and laughter in the Villa and
park. One day Pranken induced his brother-in-law to go boating with
Lina and himself, while Bella remained at home to draw. He wanted to
take Roland also, wishing, with a certain recklessness, to leave the
other two alone together for once. But Roland would not leave Eric; he
even openly avoided Pranken's society.
Lina sang gaily as they sat together in the boat. Her love-songs were
given with a sweetness, an abandonment, that Pranken had never heard
from her before. Clodwig described her singing to his wife, on his
return, as being as simple and beautiful as a field flower.
Bella begged the Justice and his wife to let her take Lina back with
her to Wolfsgarten. The Justice's objections were overruled by his
wife, and Lina was full of delight at setting off with Bella and
Clodwig.
Pranken rode beside the carriage.
The quiet of this loneliness weighed heavily again upon Eric and
Roland, after the animated society of the last few days. Eric, beside,
was out of tune, weary and dull. He found it a burden to be obliged to
devote himself from morning to night to this boy, to have to watch his
undisciplined, and often capricious, fluctuations of mind. He longed
for the society of Clodwig; still more, though he hardly acknowledged
it to himself, for that of Bella. There had been a novelty, an
animation, an excitement, an atmosphere of graceful elegance, about the
rooms, which were now so desolate. Nevertheless, he resisted for
several days Roland's entreaties that they should make the promised
visit to Wolfsgarten. The house had been entrusted to his care, and he
refused to leave it, until Pranken, at length, offered to take all the
responsibility upon himself. There was a sting in his words, as he said
to Eric,--
"You were present at the musical festival, and left the house then in
charge of only the servants. Besides, as I say, I assume the entire
responsibility."