A week later, Audouin had to write to Hiram, and tell him that the deacon had passed away, and had forgiven him. 'How, my dear Hiram,' Audouin wrote, towards the end of his letter, 'your father leaves the farm at Muddy Creek to you; and if you take my advice, you will sell it at once, for what it'll fetch (not much, I doubt me) and apply the principal to paying your expenses for a year or two more at Seguin's studio. You hold your pictorial talents in trust for the American nation, which even now sadly needs them; and you mustn't throw away your chances of the highest self-improvement for the sake of a little filthy lucre, which, even if invested, would really bring you in next to nothing. Nay, rather, to use it in studying at Rome is really to invest it in the best possible manner; for, merely judging the result as a Wall Street speculator would judge it, by the actual return in dollars and cents, United States currency, your pictures will bring you in tenfold in the end of what you spend in preparing to paint them. Though not for money, I hope, Hiram, not for money, but for art's sake, and for the highest final development of this our poor groping humanity, which is still so base, take it for all in all, that I sometimes almost wonder whether it can be really worth our while to try to do anything to improve it.' Yet so strangely compounded is this human nature of ours for all that, that when Hiram Winthrop read that letter to himself in his own small room beneath the roof of the Roman attic, he lay down upon his bed, and cried passionately in the dusk for the poor narrow-minded old deacon; and thought with a sort of regretful tenderness of the dim old days in the blackberry bottom; and murmured to himself that when he was a boy he was no doubt terribly obstinate and perverse and provoking. And now that he was a man, must he not strive to do as Audouin told him? the one true friend he had yet met with. And then he undressed and lay awake a long time, with the sense of utter loneliness pressing upon his poor solitary head more drearily than ever. CHAPTER XXVIII. AN ART PATRON. |The four years that passed before Gwen Howard-Russell and Lothrop Audouin returned to Rome, were years of bright promise and quick performance for Cohn Churchill. He hadn't been eighteen months with Maradiano, when the master took him aside one day and said to him kindly, 'My friend, you will only waste your time by studying with me any longer. You must take a studio on your own account, and begin earning a little money.' 'But where can I get one?' Colin asked. 'There is one vacant five doors off,' Maragliano answered. 'I have been to see it, and you can have it for very little. It's so near, that I can drop in from time to time and assist you with my advice and experience. But indeed, Churchill, you need either very little; for I fear the time is soon coming when the pupil is to excel the master.'