little for what the early Christians believed, either in religion or
art, and she remembered nothing at all of his deep instruction on the
inferences to be drawn from the contents of crypts and catacombs. The
more earnest he became, the less could she make out his meaning. She
could not reconcile herself to draw the attenuated figures and haggard
forms of the early martyrs merely because they suited the style of
church decoration; and she could see no striking harmony of relation
between these ill-looking beings and the Fifth Avenue audience to whom
they were supposed to have some moral or sentimental meaning. After one
or two hesitating attempts to argue this point, she saw that it was
useless, and made up her mind that as a matter of ordinary good manners,
the least she could do was to treat Mr. Hazard civilly in his own
church, and listen with respect to his lectures on Christian art. She
even did her best to obey his wishes in all respects in which she
understood them, but here an unexpected and confusing play of
cross-purposes came in to mislead her. Wharton suddenly found that
Hazard let Miss Dudley have her own way to an extent permitted to no one
else. Esther was not conscious that the expression of a feeling or a
wish on her part carried any special weight, but there could be no doubt
that if Miss Dudley seemed to want any thing very much, Mr. Hazard
showed no sense of shame in suddenly forgetting his fixed theories and
encouraging her to do what she pleased. This point was settled when she
had been some ten days at work trying to satisfy Wharton's demands,
which were also Mr. Hazard's, in regard to the character and expression
of St. Cecilia. Catherine was so earnest not to be made repulsive, and
Esther's own tastes lay so strongly in the same direction, that when it
came to the point, she could not force herself to draw such a figure as
was required; she held out with a sort of feminine sweetness such as
cried aloud for discipline, and there was no doubt that Wharton was
quite ready to inflict it. In spite of Catherine, and Esther too, he
would have carried his point, had Esther not appealed to Mr. Hazard;
but this strenuous purist, who had worried Wharton and the building
committee with daily complaints that the character of their work wanted
spiritual earnestness, now suddenly, at a word from Miss Dudley, turned
about and encouraged her, against Wharton's orders, to paint a figure,
which, if it could be seen, which was fortunately not the case, must
seem to any one who cared for such matters, out of keeping with all the
work which surrounded it.
"Do you know," said Esther to Mr. Hazard, "that Mr. Wharton insists on
my painting Catherine as though she were forty years old and rheumatic?"
"I know," he replied, glancing timidly towards the procession of stern
and elderly saints and martyrs, finished and unfinished, which seemed to
bear up the church walls. "Do you think she would feel at home here if
she were younger or prettier?"
"No! Honestly, I don't think she would," said Esther, becoming bold as
he became timid. "I will paint Cecilia eighty years old, if Mr. Wharton
wants her so. She will have lost her touch on the piano, and her voice
will be cracked, but if you choose to set such an example to your choir,
I will obey. But I can't ask Catherine to sit for such a figure. I will
send out for some old woman, and draw from her."
"I can't spare Miss Brooke," said Hazard hastily. "The church needs her.
Perhaps you can find some middle way with Wharton."
"No! If I am to paint her at all, I must paint her as she is. There is
more that is angelic in her face now, if I could only catch it, than
there is in all Mr. Wharton's figures put together, and if I am to
commit sacrilege, I would rather be untrue to Mr. Wharton, than to her."
"I believe you are right, Miss Dudley. There _is_ a little look of
heaven in Miss Brooke's eyes. If you think you can put it into the St.
Cecilia, why not try? If the experiment fails you can try again on
another plan. After all, the drapery is the only part that needs to be
very strictly in keeping."
Thus this despotic clergyman gave way and irritated Wharton, who, having
promised to let him decide the dispute, was now suddenly overruled. He
shrugged his shoulders and told Esther in private that he had struggled
hard to get permission to do what she was doing, but only the sternest,
strongest types would satisfy the church then. "It was all I could do to
get them down to the thirteenth century," he said; "whenever I begged
for beauty of form, they asked me whether I wanted the place to look
like a theater."
"You know they're quite right," said Esther. "It has a terribly
grotesque air of theater even now."
"It _is_ a theater," growled Wharton. "That is what ails our religion.
But it is not the fault of our art, and if you had come here a little
earlier, I would have made one more attempt. I would like now, even as
it is, to go back to the age of beauty, and put a Madonna in the heart
of their church. The place has no heart."
"I never could have given you help enough for that, Mr. Wharton; but
what does it matter about my poor Cecilia? She does no harm up here. No
one can see her, and after all it is only her features that are modern!"
"No harm at all, but I wish I were a woman like you. Perhaps I could
have my own way."
Esther liked to have her own way. She had the instinct of power, but not
the love of responsibility, and now that she found herself allowed to
violate Wharton's orders and derange his plans, she became alarmed,
asked no more favors, stuck closely to her work, and kept Catherine
always at her side. She even tried to return on her steps and follow
Wharton's wishes, until she was stopped by Catherine's outcry. Then it
appeared that Wharton had gone over to her side. Instead of supporting
Esther in giving severity to the figure, he wanted it to be the closest
possible likeness of Catherine herself. Esther began to think that men
were excessively queer and variable; the more she tried to please them,
the less she seemed to succeed; but Mr. Wharton certainly took more
interest in the St. Cecilia as it advanced towards completion, although
it was not in the least the kind of work which he liked or respected.
Mr. Hazard took not so much interest in the painting. His pleasure in
visiting their gallery seemed to be of a different sort. As Esther
learned to know him better, she found that he was suffering from
over-work and responsibility, and that the painters' gallery was a sort
of refuge, where he escaped from care, for an entire change of
atmosphere and thought. In this light Esther found him a very charming
fellow, especially when he was allowed to have his own way without
question or argument. He talked well; drew well; wrote well, and in case
of necessity could even sing fairly well. He had traveled far and wide,
and had known many interesting people. He had a sense of humor, except
where his church was concerned. He was well read, especially in a kind
of literature of which Esther had heard nothing, the devotional writings
of the church, and the poetry of religious expression. Esther liked to
pick out plums of poetry, without having to search for them on her own
account, and as Hazard liked to talk even better than she to listen,
they babbled on pleasantly together while Catherine read novels which
Hazard chose for her, and which he selected with the idea of carrying
her into the life of the past. There was an atmosphere of romance about
her novels, and not about the novels alone.
_Chapter V_
While this ecclesiastical idyl was painting and singing itself in its
own way, blind and deaf to the realities of life, this life moved on in
its accustomed course undisturbed by idyls. The morning's task was
always finished at one o'clock. At that hour, if the weather was fine,
Mr. Dudley commonly stopped at the church door to take them away, and
the rest of the day was given up to society. Esther and Catherine drove,
made calls, dined out, went to balls, to the theater and opera, without
interrupting their professional work. Under Mrs. Murray's potent
influence, Catherine glided easily into the current of society and
became popular without an effort. She soon had admirers. One young man,
of an excellent and very old Dutch family, Mr. Rip Van Dam, took a
marked fancy for her. Mr. Van Dam knew nothing of her, except that she
was very pretty and came from Colorado where she had been brought up to
like horses, and could ride almost any thing that would not buck its
saddle off. This was quite enough for Mr. Van Dam whose taste for horses
was more decided than for literature or art. He took Catherine to drive
when the sleighing was good, and was flattered by her enthusiastic
admiration of his beautiful pair of fast trotters. His confidence in her
became boundless when he found that she could drive them quite as well
as he. His success in winning her affections would have been greater if
Catherine had not found his charms incessantly counteracted by the
society of the older and more intelligent men, whom she never met at
balls, but whom she saw every morning at the church, and whose tastes
and talk struck her imagination. She liked Mr. Van Dam, but she laughed
at him, which proved a thoughtless mind, for neither artists, clergymen
nor professors were likely to marry her, as this young man might perhaps
have done, under sufficient encouragement. When, towards the first of
January, Catherine left Mrs. Murray, in order to stay with Esther, for
greater convenience in the church work, Mr. Van Dam's attentions rather
fell off. He was afraid of Esther, whom he insisted on regarding as
clever, although Esther took much care never to laugh at him, for fear
of doing mischief.
Catherine learned to play whist in order to amuse Mr. Dudley. They had
small dinners, at which Hazard was sometimes present, and more often
Strong, until he was obliged to go West to deliver a course of lectures
at St. Louis. In spite of Mr. Dudley's supposed dislike for clergymen,
he took kindly to Hazard and made no objection to his becoming a tame
cat about the house. To make up a table at whist, Hazard did not refuse
to take a hand; and said it was a part of his parochial duty. Mr. Dudley
laughed and told him that if he performed the rest of his parochial
duties equally ill, the parish should give him a year's leave of absence
for purposes of study. Mr. Dudley disliked nothing so much as to be
treated like an invalid, or to be serious, and Hazard gratified him by
laughing at the doctors. They got on wonderfully well together, to the
increasing amazement of Esther.
Card-playing and novel-reading were not the only cases in which Mr.
Hazard took a liberal view of his functions. His theology belonged to
the high-church school, and in the pulpit he made no compromise with the
spirit of concession, but in all ordinary matters of indifference or of
innocent pleasure he gave the rein to his instincts, and in regard to
art he was so full of its relations with religion that he would admit of
no divergence between the two. Art and religion might take great
liberties with each other, and both be the better for it, as he thought.
His thirteenth-century ideas led him into a curious experiment which was
quite in the thirteenth-century spirit. Catherine's insatiable spirit of
coquetry was to blame, although it was not with him that she coquetted.
Ready enough to try her youthful powers on most men, she had seemed to
recognize by instinct that Mr. Hazard did not belong to her. Yet she
could not rest satisfied without putting even him to some useful purpose
of her own.
During Hazard's visits to the scaffold, he sometimes took up a pencil
and drew. Once he drew a sketch of Wharton in the character of a monk
with his brush and pallet in his hands. Catherine asked what connection
there was between Mr. Wharton and a monastery.
"None!" replied Mr. Hazard; "but I like to think of church work as done
by churchmen. In the old days he would have been a monk and would have
painted himself among these figures on the walls."
Esther ventured to criticise Wharton's style; she thought it severe,
monotonous, and sometimes strained.
"Wharton's real notion of art," said Hazard, "is a volcano. You may be a
volcano at rest, or extinct, or in full eruption, but a volcano of some
kind you have got to be. In one of his violent moods he once made me go
over to Sicily with him, and dragged me to the top of Etna. It
fascinated him, and I thought he meant to jump into it and pull me after
him, but at that time he was a sort of used-up volcano himself."
"Then there is really something mysterious about his life?" asked
Catherine.
"Only that he made a very unhappy marriage which he dislikes to think
about," replied Hazard. "As an artist it did him good, but it ruined his
peace and comfort, if he ever had any. He would never have made the
mistake, if he had not been more ignorant of the world than any mortal
that ever drew breath, but, as I was saying, a volcano was like a
rattlesnake to him, and the woman he married was a volcano."
"What has become of her?" asked Esther.
"I have not dared to ask for years. No one seems to know whether she is
living or dead."
"Did he leave her?"
"No; she left him. He was to the last fascinated by her, so much so
that, after she left him, when I persuaded him to quit Paris, he
insisted on going to Avignon and Vaucluse, because Petrarch had been
under the same sort of fascination, and Wharton thought himself the only
man in the world who could understand Petrarch. If you want to insult
him and make him bitterly hate you, tell him that Laura was a married
woman with a dozen children."
"Who was Laura?" asked Catherine; "and why should she not have a dozen
children?"
"Laura was a beautiful girl with golden hair and a green dress whom
Petrarch first saw in a church at Avignon," answered Hazard. "She was
painted among the frescoes of the cathedral, as you are being painted
now, Miss Brooke; and Petrarch wrote some hundreds of sonnets about her
which Wharton undertook to translate, and made me help him. We were
both poets then."
"I want to hear those sonnets," said Catherine, quite seriously, as
though the likeness between herself and Laura had struck her as the most
natural thing in the world. "Can you remember them?"
"I think I could. Don't find fault with me if you dislike the moral. I
approve it because, like Petrarch, I am a bit of a churchman, but I
don't know what you may think of a lover who begins by putting his
mistress on the same footing with his deity and ends by groaning over
the time he has thrown away on her."
"Not to her face?" said Esther.
"Worse! He saw her in church and wrote to her face something like this:
'As sight of God is the eternal life,
Nor more we ask, nor more to wish we dare,
So, lady, sight of thee,'
and so on, or words to that effect. Yet after she was dead he said he
had wasted his life in loving her. I remember the whole of the sonnet
because it cost me two days' labor in the railway between Avignon and
Nice. It runs like this:--
'For my lost life lamenting now I go,
Which I have placed in loving mortal thing,
Soaring to no high flight, although the wing
Had strength to rise and loftier sweep to show.
Oh! Thou that seest my mean life and low!
Invisible! Immortal! Heaven's king!
To this weak, pathless spirit, succor bring,
And on its earthly faults thy grace bestow!
That I, who lived in tempest and in fear,
May die in port and peace; and if it be
That life was vain, at least let death be dear!
In these few days that yet remain to me,
And in death's terrors, may thy hand be near!
Thou knowest that I have no hope but thee!'
In the Italian this is very great poetry, Miss Brooke, and if you don't
think it so in my English, try and see if you can do better."
"Very well," said Catherine, coolly. "I've no doubt we can do it just as
well as you and Mr. Wharton. Can't we, Esther?"
"You are impudent enough to make St. Cecilia blush," said Esther, who
happened to be wondering whether she might dare to put a little blush
into the cheeks of the figure on which she was painting. "You never read
a word of Italian in your little life."
"No! But you have!" replied Catherine, as though this were final.
"The libretto of Lucia!" said Esther with scorn.
"No matter!" resumed Catherine. "Bring me the books, Mr. Hazard, and I
will translate one of those sonnets if I have to shut up Esther in a
dark closet."
"Catherine! Don't make me ridiculous!" said Esther; but Catherine was
inspired by an idea, and would not be stopped.
"Bring me the volume now, Mr. Hazard! You shall have your sonnet for
Sunday's sermon."
"Don't do it, Mr. Hazard!" exhorted Esther solemnly. "It is one of her
Colorado jokes. She does not know what a sonnet is. She thinks it some
kind of cattle-punching."
"If I do not give you that sonnet," cried Catherine, "I will give you
leave to have me painted as much like an old skeleton as Mr. Wharton
chooses."
"Done!" said Hazard, who regarded this as at least one point worth
gaining. "You shall have the books. I want to see Wharton's triumph."
"But if I do poetry for you," continued Catherine, "you must do painting
for me."
"Very well!" said Hazard. "What shall it be?"
"If I am Laura," said Catherine, "I must have a Petrarch. I want you to
put him up here on the wall, looking at me, as he did in the church
where he first saw me."
"But what will Wharton and the committee say?" replied Hazard, startled
at so monstrous a demand.
"I don't believe Mr. Wharton will object," answered Catherine. "He will
be flattered. Don't you see? He is to be Petrarch."
"Oh!" cried Hazard, with a stare. "Now I understand. You want me to
paint Wharton as a scriptural character looking across to Miss Dudley's
Cecilia."
"You are very slow!" said Catherine. "I think you might have seen it
without making me tell you."
To a low-church evangelical parson this idea might have seemed
inexpressibly shocking, but there was something in it which, after a
moment's reflection, rather pleased Hazard. It was the sort of thing
which the Florentines did, and there was hardly an early church in Italy
about whose walls did not cling the colors of some such old union of art
and friendship in the service of religion. Catherine's figure was
already there. Why not place Wharton's by its side and honor the artist
who had devoted so large a share of his life to the service of the
church, with, it must be confessed, a very moderate share of worldly
profit. The longer Hazard thought of it, the less he saw to oppose. His
tastes were flattered by the idea of doing something with his own hand
that should add to the character and meaning of the building. His
imagination was so pleased with the notion that at last he gave his
consent:--"Very well, Miss Brooke! I will draw a figure for this next
vacant space, and carry it as far as I know how. If Wharton objects he
can efface it. But Miss Dudley will have to finish it for me, for I
can't paint, and Wharton would certainly stop me if I tried."
Although this pretty bargain which seemed so fair, really threw on
Esther the whole burden of writing sonnets and painting portraits for
the amusement of Catherine and Mr. Hazard, Catherine begged so hard that
she at last consented to do her best, and her consent so much delighted
Hazard that he instantly searched his books for a model to work from,
and as soon as he found one to answer his purpose, he began with
Esther's crayons to draw the cartoon of a large figure which was to
preserve under the character of St. Luke the memory of Wharton's
features. When Wharton came next to inspect Esther's work, he was told
that Mr. Hazard wished to try his hand on designing a figure for the
vacant space, and he criticised and corrected it as freely as the rest.
For such a task Hazard was almost as competent as Wharton, from the
moment the idea was once given, and in this dark corner it mattered
little whether a conventional saint were more or less correct.
Meanwhile Catherine carried off a copy of Petrarch, and instantly turned
it over to Esther, seeming to think it a matter of course that she
should do so trifling a matter as a sonnet with ease. "It won't take you
five minutes if you put your mind to it," she said. "You can do any
thing you like, and any one could make a few rhymes." Esther, willing to
please her, tried, and exhausted her patience on the first three lines.
Then Catherine told the story to Mr. Dudley, who was so much amused by
her ambition that he gave his active aid, and between them they
succeeded in helping Esther to make out a sonnet which Mr. Dudley
declared to be quite good enough for Hazard. This done, Esther refused
to mix further in the matter, and made Catherine learn her verses by
heart. The young woman found this no easy task, but when she thought
herself perfect she told Mr. Hazard, as she would have told a
schoolmaster, that she was ready with her sonnet.
"I have finished the sonnet, Mr. Hazard," she said one morning in a
bashful voice, as though she were again at school.
"Where is it, Miss Brooke?"
Then Catherine, drawing herself up, with her hands behind her, began to
recite:
"Oh, little bird! singing upon your way,
Or mourning for your pleasant summer-tide,
Seeing the night and winter at your side,
The joyous months behind, and sunny day!
If, as you know your own pathetic lay,
You knew as well the sorrows that I hide,
Nestling upon my breast, you would divide
Its weary woes, and lift their load away.
I know not that our shares would then be even,
For she you mourn may yet make glad your sight,
While against me are banded death and heaven;
But now the gloom of winter and of night
With thoughts of sweet and bitter years for leaven,
Lends to my talk with you a sad delight."
Esther laughed till the tears rolled down her face at the droll effect
of these tenderly sentimental verses in Catherine's mouth, but Hazard
took it quite seriously and was so much delighted with Catherine's
recitation that he insisted on her repeating it to Wharton, who took it
even more seriously than he. Hazard knew that the verses were Esther's,
and was not disposed to laugh at them. Wharton saw that Catherine came
out with new beauties in every _rôle_ she filled, and already wanted to
use her as a model for some future frescoed Euterpe. Esther was driven
to laugh alone.
Petrarch and Laura are dangerous subjects of study for young people in a
church. Wharton and Hazard knew by heart scores of the sonnets, and were
fond of repeating verses either in the original or in their own
translations, and Esther soon picked up what they let fall, being quick
at catching what was thrown to her. She caught verse after verse of
Hazard's favorites, and sometimes he could hear her murmuring as she
painted:
"Siccome eterna vita è veder dio,
Nè più si brama, nè bramar piu lice;"
and at such moments he began to think that he was himself Petrarch, and
that to repeat to his Laura the next two verses of the sonnet had become
the destiny of his life.
So the weeks ran on until, after a month of hard work, the last days of
January saw the two figures nearly completed. When in due time the
meaning of St. Luke became evident, Esther and Catherine waited in fear
to see how Wharton would take the liberty on which they had so rashly
ventured. As the likeness came out more strongly, he stopped one morning
before it, when Esther, after finishing her own task, was working on Mr.
Hazard's design.
"By our lady of love!" said Wharton, with a start and a laugh; "now I
see what mischief you three have been at!"
"The church would not have been complete without it," said Esther
timidly.
For several minutes Wharton looked in silence at the St. Cecilia and at
the figure which now seemed its companion; then he said, turning away:
"I shall not be the first unworthy saint the church has canonized."
Esther drew a long breath of relief; Catherine started up, radiant with
delight; and thus it happens that on the walls of St. John's, high above
the world of vanities beneath them, Wharton stands, and will stand for
ages, gazing at Catherine Brooke.
Now that the two saints were nearly finished, Esther became a little
depressed. This church life, like a bit of religious Bohemianism and
acted poetry, had amused her so greatly that she found her own small
studio dull. She could no longer work there without missing the space,
the echoes, the company, and above all, the sense of purpose, which she
felt on her scaffolding. She complained to Wharton of her feminine want
of motive in life.
"I wish I earned my living," she said. "You don't know what it is to
work without an object."
"Much of the best work in the world," said he, "has been done with no
motive of gain."
"Men can do so many things that women can't," said she. "Men like to
work alone. Women cannot work without company. Do you like solitude?"
"I would like to own a private desert," he answered, "and live alone in
the middle of it with lions and tigers to eat intruders."
"You need not go so far," said she. "Take my studio!"
"With you and Miss Brooke in the neighborhood? Never!"
"We will let you alone. In a week you will put your head out of the door
and say: 'Please come and play jack-straws with me!'"
Catherine was not pleased at the thought that her usefulness was at an
end. She had no longer a part to play unless it were that of duenna to
Esther, and for this she was not so well fitted as she might have been,
had providence thought proper to make her differently. Indeed, Esther's
anxiety to do her duty as duenna to Catherine was becoming so sharp that
it threatened to interfere with the pleasure of both. Catherine did her
best to give her friend trouble.
"Please rub me all out, Mr. Wharton," said she; "and make Esther begin
again. I am sure she will do it better the next time."