|Acute Roman fever is a very serious matter. For seven days Audouin
lay in extreme danger, hovering between life and death, with the crisis
always approaching but never actually arriving. Every day, when the
English doctor came to see him, Audouin asked feebly from his pillow,
'Am I getting worse?' and the doctor, who fancied he was a nervous man,
answered cheerfully, 'Well, no, not worse; about the same again this
morning, though I'm afraid I can't exactly say you're any better.
Audouin turned round wearily with a sigh, and thought to himself, 'How
hard a thing it is to die, after all, even when you really want to.'
Colin Churchill came to see him as soon as ever he heard of his illness,
and sitting in the easy-chair by the sick man's bedside, he said to him
in a reproachful tone, 'Mr. Audouin, you don't play fair. You've broken
the spirit of the agreement. Our compact was, no suicide. Now, I'm sure
you've been recklessly exposing yourself out upon the Campagna, or else
why should you have got this fever so very suddenly?'
Audouin smiled a faint smile from the bed, and answered half
incoherently, 'Chapter of accidents. Put your trust in bad luck, and
verily you will not be disappointed. But I'm afraid it's a terribly long
and tedious piece of work, this dying.'
'If you weren't so ill,' Colin answered gravely and sternly, 'I think I
should have to be very angry with you. You haven't stood by the
spirit of the contract. As it is, we must do our best to defeat your
endeavours, and bring you back to life again.'
Audouin moved restlessly in the bed. 'You must do your worst, I
recognise,' he said; 'but I don't think you'll get the better of the
fever for all that: she's a goddess, you know, and had her temple once
upon the brow of the Palatine. Many have prayed to her to avoid them; it
must be a novelty for her to hear a prayer for her good company. Perhaps
she may be merciful to her only willing votary. But she's long about it;
she might have got through by this time. Anyhow, you mustn't be too hard
upon me, Churchill.'
As for Hiram, Audouin's illness came upon him like a final thunderclap.
Everything had gone ill with him lately; he had reached almost the
blackest abyss of despondency already; and if Audouin were to die now,
he felt that his cup of bitterness would be overflowing. Besides, though
he knew nothing, of course, of Audouin's interview with Colin Churchill,
he had a grave suspicion in his own mind that his friend had egged
himself into an illness by brooding over Truman's visit and Hiram's own
proposals for returning to America. Of course all that was laid aside
now, at least for the present. Whatever came, he must stop and nurse
Audouin; and he nursed him with all the tender care and delicacy of a
woman.
Gwen came round often, too, and sat watching in the sick-room for hours
together. The colonel objected to it seriously--so very extraordinary,
you know; indeed, really quite compromising; but Gwen was not to be kept
away by the colonel's scruples and prejudices; so she watched and waited
in her own good time, taking turns with Hiram in day and night nursing.
It was all perfect misery to Audouin; the more he wanted to die for
Gwen's and Hiram's convenience, the more utterly determined they both
seemed to be to keep him living somehow at all hazards.
On the seventh day, the crisis came, and Audouin began to sink rapidly.
Gwen and Hiram were both by his bedside, and Colin Churchill and Minna
were waiting anxiously in the little salon alongside. When the doctor
came, he stopped longer than usual; and as he passed out, Colin asked
him what news this morning of the poor patient. The doctor twirled his
watch-chain quietly. 'Well,' he said, in his calm professional manner,
'I should say it was probable he would get through the night; but I
doubt if he'll live over Sunday.'
'Then there's no hope, you think?' Minna asked with tears in her eyes.
'Well, I couldn't exactly say that,' the doctor answered. 'A medical
man always hopes to the last moment, especially in acute diseases. The
critical point's hardly reached yet. Oh yes, he might recover; he might
recover, certainly; but it isn't likely.'
Colin and Minna sat down once more in the empty salon, and looked at one
another long, without speaking. At last there came a knock at the
door. Colin answered 'Enter,' and a servant entered. 'A card for Signor
Vintrop,' he said, handing it to Colin. 'The bringer says he must see
him on important business immediately.'
Colin cast a careless glance at the card. It was that of a well-known
Roman picture-dealer, agent for one of the largest firms of fine art
auctioneers in London. 'How very ill-timed,' he said to Minna, handing
her the card. At any other moment, Hiram would have been delighted; but
it's quite impossible to trouble him with this at such a crisis.
'Does he want to buy some of Mr. Winthrop's pictures, do you think,
Colin?' Minna asked anxiously.
'I'm sure he does; but it can't be helped now. Tell the gentleman that
Mr. Winthrop can't see him now, if you please, Antonio. He's watching by
the side of the American signor who is dying.'
Antonio bowed and went out. In a minute he returned once more. 'The
person can't wait,' he said; 'the affair is urgent. He wishes to give
Signor Vintrop an important commission. He wishes to buy pictures, many
pictures, immediately. He has come from the studio, hearing that Signor
Vintrop was at the hotel, and he wishes particularly to speak with him
instantaneously.'
Colin looked at Minna and shook his head.
'This is very annoying, really, Minna,' he said with a sigh. 'At any
other time, it would have been a perfect godsend; but now--one can't
drag him away from poor Audouin's bedside. Tell the gentleman, Antonio,'
he went on in Italian, 'that Mr. Winthrop can't possibly see him. It is
most absolutely and decidedly impossible.'
Antonio went away, and for half an hour more Colin and Minna conversed
together in an undertone without further interruption. Then a knock
came again, and Antonio entered with a second card. It bore the name
of another famous Roman picture-dealer, the agent for the rival London
firm. 'He says he must see Signor Vintrop without delay,' Antonio
reported, 'upon important business of the strictest urgency.'
Colin hesitated a moment. 'This is really very remarkable, Minna,' he
said slowly, turning over the card in great perplexity. 'Why on earth
should the two principal picture-dealers in Rome want to see Hiram
Winthrop so very particularly on the same morning?'
'I can't imagine,' Minna answered, looking at the card curiously.
'Don't you think, Colin, you'd better see the man and ask him what's the
meaning of it?'
Colin nodded assent, and went to the door to speak to the dealer. As
he did so, a second servant stepped up with yet another card, that of a
Manchester picture-agent in person.
'What do you want to see Mr. Winthrop for in such a hurry?' Colin asked
the Italian dealer. 'How is it you all wish to buy his pictures the same
morning? He's been in Rome a good many years now, but nobody ever seemed
in any great haste to become a purchaser.'
'I cannot tell you, signor,' the dealer answered blandly; 'but I have
my instructions from London. I have a telegram direct from a most
illustrious firm, requesting me to buy up the landscapes, and especially
the American landscapes, of Signor Vintrop.'
'And if Mr. Winthrop's too ill himself to come and show me his studio,'
the Manchester agent put in, in English, 'perhaps, sir, you might step
round yourself and arrange matters with me on his behalf.'
Colin hesitated a moment. It was an awkward predicament. He didn't like
to go away selling pictures when Audouin was actually dying; and
yet, knowing what he knew, and taking into consideration Audouin's
particular mental constitution, he saw in it a possible chance of saving
his life indirectly. Something or other had occurred, that was clear,
to make a sudden demand arise for Hiram's pictures. If the demand was a
genuine one, and if he could sell them for good prices, the effect upon
Audouin might be truly magical. The man was really dying, not of fever,
of that Colin felt certain, but of hopeless chagrin and disappointment.
If he could only learn that Hiram's landscapes were meeting with due
appreciation after all, he might perhaps even now recover.
Colin went back to Minna for a few minutes' whispered conversation;
and then, having learned from Gwen (without telling her his plans) that
Audouin was no worse, and that he would probably go on without serious
change for some hours, he hurried off to the studio between the two
intending purchasers.
As he got to the door, he saw a small crowd of artistic folk,
mostly agents or dealers, and amongst them he noticed a friend and
fellow-student at Maragliano's, the young Englishman, Arthur Forton.
'Why, what on earth's the meaning of this, Forton?' he asked in fresh
amazement. 'All the world seems to have taken suddenly to besieging
Winthrop's studio.'
'Ah, yes,' Forton answered briskly; 'I thought there was sure to be a
run upon his bank after what I saw in Truman's paper; and I happened to
be at Raffaele Pedrocchi's when a telegram came in from Magnus of London
asking him to buy up all Winthrop's landscapes that he could lay
his hands upon at once, and especially authorising him to pay up to
something in cypher for Chattawauga Lake or some such heathenish Yankee
name or other. So I came round immediately to see Winthrop, and advise
him not to let the things go for a mere song, as Magnus is evidently
anxious to get them almost at any price.'
Colin listened in profound astonishment. 'Truman's paper!' he cried in
surprise. 'Why, Winthrop positively assured me that Truman told him he
ought to go back at once to America.'
'So he did, no doubt,' Forton replied carelessly. 'Indeed, he tells him
so in print in _Fortuna Melliflua_. Here's the cutting: I cut it out on
purpose, so that Winthrop might take care he wasn't chiselled, as you
were, you know, over “Autumn and the Breezes.”'
Colin took the scrap of paper from the little pamphlet from Forton's
hands, and read the whole paragraph through with a thrill of pleasure.
'And yet from this same entirely damned land of America,' ran Mr.
Truman's candid and vigorous criticism, 'some good thing may haply come,
even as (cynical Nathaniel to the contrary notwithstanding) some good
thing did indubitably come out of Nazareth of Galilee. The other day,
walking by chance into a certain small shabby studio, down a side alley
from the Street of the Beautiful Ladies at Rome, I unearthed there
busily at work upon a Babylonian Woe one Hiram Winthrop, an American
artist, who had fled from America and the City of Destruction to come
enthusiastically Romeward. He had better far have stopped at home. For
this young man Winthrop, a God-sent landscape painter, if ever there
was one, has in truth the veritable eye for seeing and painting a bit of
overgrown rank waterside vegetation exactly as nature herself originally
disposed it, with no nice orthodox and academical graces of arrangement,
but simply so--weeds and water--no more than that; just a tangled corner
of neglected reeds and waving irises, seen in an aerial perspective
which is almost stereoscopic. Strange to say, this American savage from
the wild woods can reproduce the wild woods from which he came, in all
their native wildness, without the remotest desire to make them look
like a Dutch picture of the garden of Eden. Moreover, he positively
knows that red things are red, green things green, and white things
white; a piece of knowledge truly remarkable in this artificially
colour-blind age of dichroic vision (I get my fine words from a
scientific treatise on the subject by Professor Stilling of Leipzig,
to whose soul may heaven be merciful). There was one picture of his
there--Chattawauga Lake I think he called it--which I had it in my mind
to buy at the moment, and had even gone so far as to purse up my lips
into due form for saying, “How much is it?” (as we price spring
chickens at market), but on deeper thought, I refrained deliberately,
because I am now a poor man, and I do not want to buy pictures at low
rates, being fully of opinion, on good warranty, that the labourer is
worthy of his hire. So I left it, more out of political than personal
economy, for some wealthier man to buy hereafter. Yet whoever does buy
Chattawauga Lake (the name alone is too repellant) will find himself
in possession, I do not hesitate to say, of the finest bit of entirely
sincere and scrupulous landscape that has ever been painted since
Turner's brush lay finally still upon his broken palette. And young
Mr. Hiram Wintlirop himself, I dare predict, will go back to America
hereafter and give us other landscapes which will more than suffice
to wash out the Babylonian woes whereupon he is at present engaged in
sedulously wasting a most decisive and categorical genius.'
Colin took the scrap of paper in his hands, and went with Forton into
the disorderly studio.
'May I take it to show Winthrop and Audouin?' he asked.
Forton nodded.
They turned to the pictures, and Chattawauga Lake having been duly
produced, Colin found himself at a moment's notice turned into a sort of
amateur auctioneer, receiving informal bids one after another from the
representatives of almost all the best picture firms in the whole of
England.
He had soon got rid of Chattawauga Lake, and before an hour and a half
was over, the agents had almost made a clean sweep of the entire
studio. Even the Babylonian Woe was bought up at a fair price by one
enthusiastic person, on the ground that it had been immensely enhanced
in value by being mentioned, although unfavourably, in a note of
Truman's. The great critic had simply made Hiram Winthrop's fortune;
people were prepared to buy anything he might paint now, on the strength
of Truman's recommendation.
As soon as Colin had got rid of the more pressing purchasers, he left
Forton in charge of the studio, and ran back hastily to Audouin's hotel.
Would the good news be in time to save the dying man's life? that was
the question. Colin wondered what he could make of it, and turned over
the matter anxiously in his own mind, as he went back to Minna, Gwen,
and Hiram.