Alfred Pretor

“ Stay your words before you utter that of which all the life that is left you will be too little for repentance. Have you no greater faith in God’s love and mercy than in your own? Nay—less, far less, for even you would have pardoned him. An angry word, that dropt from him in great stress of terror and excitement—is that to weigh against the record of a life that was a model to all of us in brave unselfish effort? ”

“ Agostino was to be immortalised as the painter, Cecco as the model. And their love for each other made them wholly unselfish; each hoped for success solely in the interest of his friend. Nothing short of a perfect likeness would satisfy Agostino, nothing short of a perfect picture would satisfy Cecco’s ambition for his friend. ”

“ And there we said good-bye. “I shall never marry, Harold,” Marion said, “till you come back again to claim me. For come again you surely will. And never think I blame you for this parting. In honour you could not have done otherwise than leave me now. And hard as it is, dear, for us to part so soon, my love (if that be possible) is only made the stronger by the parting.”
And so she left me—with none of the prayers and protests that would only have made my duty harder for me. ”

“ Perhaps the brightest beds in a nobleman’s parterre might suggest the colouring. But the stiff arrangement and orderly rows of bloom are the very antipodes of Nature’s handiwork. A flush of crimson mountain-ash, thrusting itself in irregular patches between groups of dusky pines, and these in their turn lost among beeches of burnished gold, with oak and hornbeam and ash to give the softer intermediate tones is, at best, a poverty-stricken catalogue of the colours that flamed all round us on that autumn day. ”

“ What most impressed me was the terrible truthfulness with which he had realised the details. Surely, such total collapse, such limp and inert limbs, such lights and shadows on the livid skin, were never the outcome of the painter’s consciousness? Death alone, and death that was only just not life, had been the model from which he drew. ”

“ These ruins lay within the precincts of the Manor House. But just outside the boundary, on the summit of an adjoining hill, there rose into the thin air the wondrous shape of a tiny chapel, beside the perfection of which even the Refectory itself looked coarse and material. Coloured by a growth of lichen of the same soft tones, and with all its delicate tracery untouched by the lapse of some five hundred p. ”

“ You know I can never paint the smallest detail without a model. There—p. 202fling yourself down in a heap as if you had lost all strength, all energy. Yes, that is well. You have given me the attitude. But the blood, the rich colouring in your face and limbs—it is life, vigorous life, all of it—and I cannot even picture what they would be like, shrunk and colourless and lifeless. If you could only faint, Cecco, I might do something. Can’t you faint—just for one moment—just to oblige me?’ ‘No, ’Tino, but I will do more for you and the picture than that. ”

“ How, Edgar, you can possibly justify the cruelty of hunting an animal which you can’t eat, or use for any purpose when you’ve killed it, I can’t conceive. Talk of a bull-fight—nonsense, why it’s a fair fight by comparison. The bull is Master of Ceremonies up to the time of its death, and then it’s killed painlessly by a single blow. And its flesh serves the best purpose imaginable, for it’s distributed round among the poor of the city, who, but for the chance, would never taste any meat but pork from one year’s end to another. ”

“ The Old Inn where we met was a picturesque thatched cottage, that had crept up beside the p. 52churchyard porch, either to shelter itself beneath the churchyard trees, or to sanctify its reputation by the proximity of things divine. And as it lay embowered in a valley three miles from our western shore, it was cheered rather than saddened by a gentle sighing from the sea, alternating at times with a deep and hollow roar when a storm was on its way towards the coast. ”

“ Only unluckily it can’t be avoided, they told me in Spain. There’s no man living, whatever his skill and courage, who could tackle one of those wild Spanish bulls if it came fresh and untired to his hand. And the horses are poor wretched screws whose life is valueless and worse to them. Besides, the bull kills them at least as painlessly as they would die by neglect or in some knacker’s yard. Only it’s a sport that does not bear transplanting to the provinces. You must see it at Seville or Madrid—or nowhere. ”

“ And the Rector, who had a fine eye for drawing and colouring, had been not one whit more easy to persuade. “I can’t solve the mystery, Stirling. But of one thing I’m certain—that no copyist did it. Do you mean to tell me that a painter who could do work like that would waste his time on the slavish task of copying? Why, the man who painted that picture might command the Royal Academy. It’s no such easy matter, remember, to reproduce a picture in flaming scarlet, without a touch of any other colour to relieve it. ”

“ In the controversy between the Squire and himself the Rector is by no means guiltless of plagiarism. Ford, who knew Spain as intimately as an Englishman can ever know it, advances the self-same arguments in his comments on the national sport.
A word more and I have done. It is reported on good authority that one of our greatest divines—the author of ‘Butler’s Analogy’—held a confident belief in the re-existence of animals. They share our doom of suffering and death: why not our promise of happiness beyond? They have done nothing to forfeit their reward. ”

“ In my boyish days it seemed to me the height of unwisdom to abandon your city of habitation just when the winter gales were due. But perhaps a rook lives his real life elsewhere, and only comes down to rusticate in the country as a volunteer or militiaman goes into camp, i.e. for duty’s sake, which, in the case of the rook, means the fatigue duty of rearing and raising a family. ”

“ Yes; it was another and a different Eric who was talking to us now from the one with whom I had parted nearly two years ago. The indolent dreamer of those days had been transfigured into the man with a purpose. And I hoped, as I heard him, that he had made a mistress of his art, and might find in his devotion to her the happiness which we are told she always gives to those who worship her with a whole and undivided purpose.
Three days later he left us, to finish, he told us, the first great picture he had attempted. ”

“ Eric, for one, had demonstrated its incompleteness. I had thought him p. 219weak and vacillating. And his weakness, if ever it existed, had become his strength. Strong he had shown himself (in spite of his own words) both for the friend of his youth and the woman of his choice; strong to build himself a grand career; strong above all to conquer a temptation before which the strongest might have fallen; strong finally to fall and rise again, which is greater and grander, I take it, than not to fall. ”

“ Planted against the south-west side of a hill, the ground gently falling away in front of it, it caught the evening sun, which burnished the trees on either side, and called up all the lovely shades of colour that lie dormant in old red brick, as the fires that are latent in opal and carbuncle wake up at the touch of light. ”

“ If, instead of the ‘glad tidings’ that there exists a Being in whom all the excellences which the highest human mind can conceive exist in a degree inconceivable to us, I am informed that the world is ruled by a Being whose attributes are infinite, but what they are we cannot learn, nor what are the principles of his government, except that ‘the highest human morality which we are capable of conceiving’ does not sanction them ”

“ How few of us can say as much, especially when life’s sun begins to verge towards its setting, and the friends we have made are gone before us, and ourselves have lost the will and opportunity to win us new ones. ”

“ Anyhow, no one, certainly not my uncle, would pretend to have a cut-and-dried formula for mapping out the future world as they plan an undeveloped city in America. All he says is that life, like matter, is, in all probability, indestructible. Many persons, I know, regard such speculations as worse than unprofitable. ”

“ Not left you to your own devices if she’s a wise woman.”
“Oh! she’s off to the garden, Cousin Marion, ‘to cut a cabbage to make an apple pie,’ as Verdant Green said. I mean she’s gone to dig up all the weeds and dandelions that lie handy. ‘It must be,’ she said, ‘that I have herbs—savage herbs—to aid the digestion.’ Only the other day she half poisoned herself with celandine roots, which she thought looked promising for the composition of a salad.”
“She’s as good as another gardener,” put in Gertie, “and does all the weeding. ”

“ It was a wild night—p. 201a night like this (for the story is precise in its details) —and the two friends had a hard climb up the hill to the church, where they placed the picture in the side chapel, because they could utilise the stronger light to throw into relief the details of the composition.
“You ask for the result? Well, Cecco was in raptures. ‘It is immortality, ’Tino,’ he cried, ‘for both of us. How great you are! It is I—I myself, and to the very life—only grander, nobler, spiritualised.’ ‘Yes, it is you,’ said ’Tino hesitatingly, ‘you, no doubt, and to the very life, as you say. ”

“ It is simply their beauty, and perhaps their rarity, that constitutes the attraction. At any rate, veiled by long lashes, and set in Italian features, as was the case with Riverdale, it is impossible to hold them indicative of energy or activity in life. ”

“ But the setting provided by Nature, and the requirements of our dull uncongenial atmosphere find their proper complement, I think, in a brick-dust red, just as surely as they repudiate its vile twin brother, the white and yellow clay which time in its progress only makes more and more disreputable. ”

“ I care more for what a man does than for what he thinks, and if you will look after my cottagers, soul and body—beginning with the body first—you and I will get on well together, no matter what opinions you hold on all the open questions of the day. ”

“ But in the bedroom upstairs, as the steps of the officers were heard retreating down the street, the bride was saying: “Up wi’ you, Ned! You’ll be glad, I allow, that I be come to release you. ’Tain’t becomin’ no wise that a bridegroom on the night of his weddin’ should be lyin’ all stark an’ streaked like a corpse. Not but what you look finer and grander-like than ever you’ll do in life agin. Up wi’ you, man, though I be most sorry, that I be, to untie ye.” ”

“ There is nothing that places a man in a more false situation than the fact of his being entirely dependent on his wife’s property. Indeed, no man of any spirit would accept the position.
“There is only one thing more, and then I will dismiss you to join Marion in the drawing-room. To make your income secure, I would suggest to you—simply as a friend—that you remove the part of your capital which you have in the bank—p. 139these new concerns are none of them too safe—and place it in some good security that can be recognised by trustees. ”

“ With a race of men animated by their traditions p. 146King Arthur himself, if he had been cast upon their shore, would never have gained their confidence. And with Ned’s growth in years the feeling against him had only become stronger and more accentuated. A high regard for honour—honour in every word and deed—was the dominant characteristic of his life, shown in nothing more conspicuously than in his scrupulous honesty respecting all property recovered from the sea. ”

“ And now, during the calm and quiet summer months that followed, my life took its tone from the harmony of Nature, and rested itself for a while in one great calm. Taking its rest like Nature, the better to prepare itself against the advent of stress and storm.
Hardly a day passed during this halcyon time that I did not see Marion. Sometimes it would be at the Rectory, sometimes at the Manor House; oftener still in some cottage where there was sickness p. 165or trouble which she could comfort and relieve. To ourselves, at any rate, life in those days was full of interest ”

“ Even that scoundrel Philip II., perhaps the worst and basest coward that ever lived in history, gains something of distinction and nobility by the touch of his pencil. And he can paint you an atmosphere and distance in which a man can breathe and walk. ”

“ You see we outsiders like something a little more solid to begin with.” But my bravery was all on the surface. For how was he to sustain nature on one small savoury, even if he sampled the whole of it? If only I had ordered Peggy to supply the ample rice pudding or elegant dumplings of nursery tradition! ”

“ For the possession of the finest gallery in the world has never tempted the Spaniard of to-day to cultivate art, nor has he established in his capital city a community of copyists like that which flourishes at Rome. ”

“ Nothing left of all she has been secretly and silently creating through the long months of winter, except a few torn and tattered leaves, which she will make all speed she can to discard, seeing that theirs can only be a discredited old age of uniform withered brown. ”

“ Protected by these watchful guardians, it was safe from the withering gales that swept up from the Atlantic. When all the surrounding trees stood bare and blighted by recurrent storms, Nature, in this quiet nook, was permitted to fulfil her perfect work, changing her garb, as month by month passed on, from emerald to sober green, but always keeping her brightest tints to weave her funeral robe, folding it at last upon her bosom with the air of one who has lived her life and done her p. ”

“ For ale and sperrits is better nor beauty, Michael; ’tis so at least when men be gettin’ in the vale, the likes o’ you and I. And what’s more, I’ll go and sample it, just that I may tell the others what ’tis like, ’fore as ever the dancin’ begins. Not but what I likes a funeral better nor a weddin’. ’Tis quieter and more sober-like, and you takes your vittles more peaceable. None of this ’ere het an’ dust an’ potheration what comes o’ the dancin’. No, gi’ I a funeral for comfort, specially when ye be a bit aged. ”