第57章

Very fine performances,--very fine! --truly elegant productions, truly elegant! --Had seen Miss Linwood's needlework in London, in the year (eighteen hundred and little or nothing, I think he said,)-patronized by the nobility and gentry, and Her Majesty,--elegant, truly elegant productions, very fine performances; these drawings reminded him of them;--wonderful resemblance to Nature; an extraordinary art, painting; Mr.Copley made some very fine pictures that he remembered seeing when he was a boy.Used to remember some lines about a portrait Written by Mr.Cowper, beginning,Oh that those lips had language! Life has pass'd With me but roughly since I heard thee last."And with this the old gentleman fell to thinking about a dead mother of his that he remembered ever so much younger than he now was, and looking, not as his mother, but as his daughter should look.The dead young mother was looking at the old man, her child, as she used to look at him so many, many years ago.He stood still as if in a waking dream, his eyes fixed on the drawings till their outlines grew indistinct and they ran into each other, and a pale, sweet face shaped itself out of the glimmering light through which he saw them.

--What is there quite so profoundly human as an old man's memory of a mother who died in his earlier years? Mother she remains till manhood, and by-and-by she grows to be as a sister; and at last, when, wrinkled and bowed and broken, he looks back upon her in her fair youth, he sees in the sweet image he caresses, not his parent, but, as it were, his child.

If I had not seen all this in the old gentleman's face, the words with which he broke his silence would have betrayed his train of thought.

--If they had only taken pictures then as they do now!--he said.

--All gone! all gone! nothing but her face as she leaned on the arms of her great chair; and I would give a hundred pound for the poorest little picture of her, such as you can buy for a shilling of anybody that you don't want to see.--The old gentleman put his hand to his forehead so as to shade his eyes.I saw he was looking at the dim photograph of memory, and turned from him to Iris.

How many drawing-books have you filled,--I said,--since you began to take lessons? --This was the first,--she answered,--since she was here; and it was not full, but there were many separate sheets of large size she had covered with drawings.

I turned over the leaves of the book before us.Academic studies, principally of the human figure.Heads of sibyls, prophets, and so forth.Limbs from statues.Hands and feet from Nature.What a superb drawing of an arm! I don't remember it among the figures from Michel Angelo, which seem to have been her patterns mainly.

>From Nature, I think, or after a cast from Nature.--Oh!

--Your smaller studies are in this, I suppose,--I said, taking up the drawing-book with a lock on it,--Yes,--she said.--I should like to see her style of working on a small scale.--There was nothing in it worth showing,--she said; and presently I saw her try the lock, which proved to be fast.We are all caricatured in it, I haven't the least doubt.I think, though, I could tell by her way of dealing with us what her fancies were about us boarders.Some of them act as if they were bewitched with her, but she does not seem to notice it much.Her thoughts seem to be on her little neighbor more than on anybody else.The young fellow John appears to stand second in her good graces.I think he has once or twice sent her what the landlady's daughter calls bo-kays of flowers,--somebody has, at any rate.--I saw a book she had, which must have come from the divinity-student.It had a dreary title-page, which she had enlivened with a fancy portrait of the author,--a face from memory, apparently,--one of those faces that small children loathe without knowing why, and which give them that inward disgust for heaven so many of the little wretches betray, when they hear that these are "good men," and that heaven is full of such.--The gentleman with the diamond--the Koh-i-noor, so called by us--was not encouraged, Ithink, by the reception of his packet of perfumed soap.He pulls his purple moustache and looks appreciatingly at Iris, who never sees him, as it should seem.The young Marylander, who I thought would have been in love with her before this time, sometimes looks from his corner across the long diagonal of the table, as much as to say, I wish you were up here by me, or I were down there by you,--which would, perhaps, be a more natural arrangement than the present one.But nothing comes of all this,--and nothing has come of my sagacious idea of finding out the girl's fancies by looking into her locked drawing-book.

Not to give up all the questions I was determined to solve, I made an attempt also to work into the Little Gentleman's chamber.For this purpose, I kept him in conversation, one morning, until he was just ready to go up-stairs, and then, as if to continue the talk, followed him as he toiled back to his room.He rested on the landing and faced round toward me.There was something in his eye which said, Stop there! So we finished our conversation on the landing.The next day, I mustered assurance enough to knock at his door, having a pretext ready.--No answer.--Knock again.A door, as if of a cabinet, was shut softly and locked, and presently Iheard the peculiar dead beat of his thick-soled, misshapen boots.

The bolts and the lock of the inner door were unfastened,--with unnecessary noise, I thought,--and he came into the passage.He pulled the inner door after him and opened the outer one at which Istood.He had on a flowered silk dressing-gown, such as "Mr.Copley" used to paint his old-fashioned merchant-princes in;and a quaint-looking key in his hand.Our conversation was short, but long enough to convince me that the Little Gentleman did not want my company in his chamber, and did not mean to have it.