Jan of the Windmill Part 34

"Where did you see him?" asked Amabel.

"Well, you know I've told you I get up very early just now?"

"I wish you wouldn't tell me," interrupted Amabel, "when you know Mademoiselle won't let me get up till half-past eight. Oh, I wish we were going home this week!"

"I'm very sorry, Amabel, but do listen. I was down by the river, and there he was sketching; and oh, so beautifully! I shall burn all my copies; I can never draw like him. Amabel, he is AWFULLY like me, and he must be very near my age. He's like what people's twin-brothers are, you know. I wish he were my twin-brother!"

"He couldn't be your twin-brother," said Amabel, gravely; "he's not a gentleman."

"Well, he's not exactly not a gentleman," said D'Arcy. "However, I asked him if he sent his pictures to the Academy, and he said no, but his master does, the artist he lives with. And he told me his master's name, and the number of his pictures; and I've brought you a catalogue, and the numbers are 401, 402, and 403. And we are going to the Academy this afternoon, and I've asked mamma to ask Lady Louisa to let you come with us. But don't say any thing about me and the boy, for I don't want it to be known I have been out early."

At this moment Mademoiselle, who had been looking into the garden from an upper window, hastened to fetch Amabel indoors.

It was between three and four o'clock in the afternoon, and the Academy was crowded. The crush was so oppressive that Lady Adelaide wanted to go away, but D'Arcy had expressed a wish to see No. 401, and D'Arcy's wishes were law to his father, so he struggled in search of the picture, and the others followed him. And when a small crowd that was round it had dispersed, they saw it quite clearly.

It was the painter's PICTURE. As the other spectators pa.s.sed, they spoke of the coloring and the draughtsmanship; of the mellow glow of sunshine, which, faithful to the richness of southern summers, carried also a poetical hint of the air of glory in which genius lives alone. To some the graceful figure of Cimabue was familiar, but the new group round the picture saw only the shepherd lad. And if, as the spectators said, his eyes haunted them about the room, what ghosts must they not have summoned to haunt Mr. Ford's client as he gazed?

"Mais c'est Monsieur D'Arcy!" screamed the French governess. And Amabel said, "It's Bogy; but he's got no leaves." Lady Adelaide was quite composed. The likeness was very striking, but her maternal eyes saw a thousand points of difference between the Giotto of the painting and her son. "How very odd!" she said. "I wonder who sat for the Giotto? If he really were the boy Amabel thinks she saw in the wood, I think her Bogy and the model must both be the same as a wonderful child Mr. Ammaby was telling me about, who painted the sign of the inn in his village; but his father was a windmiller called Lake, and" -

"Mamma! mamma!" cried D'Arcy, "papa is ill."

The sound of his son's voice recalled Mr. Ford's client to consciousness; but it was a very partial and confused consciousness.

He heard voices speaking of the heat, the crush, etc., as in a dream. He was not sure whether he was being carried or led along.

The painting was no longer before him, but it mattered little. The shepherd boy's eyes were as dark as his own; but that look in their upward gaze, which stirred every heart, pierced his as it had moved it years ago from eyes the color of a summer sky. To others their pathos spoke of yearning genius at war with fortune; but for Mr.

Ford's client they brought back, out of the past, words which rang more clearly in his ears than the condolences of the crowd, -

"You'll remember your promise, D'Arcy? You will be quite sure to take me home to bury me? And you will call my child after my father,--JAN?"

CHAPTER XLI.

THE DETECTIVE.--THE "JOOK."--JAN STANDS BY HIS MOTHER'S GRAVE.--HIS AFTER HISTORY.

As he had resolved, the painter secured the help of the police in tracing Jan's pedigree. He did not take the bow-legged boy into his confidence, but that young gentleman recognized the detective officer when he opened the door for him; and he laid his finger by his snub nose, with a wink of intense satisfaction.

On hearing the story, the detective expressed his opinion (founded on acquaintance with Sal) that George's pocket had been picked by his companions, and not by chance thieves in the fair; and he finally proved his sagacity in the guess by bringing the pocket-book and the letter to the artist.

With his mother's letter (it had been written at Moerdyk, on her way to England) before them, Jan and the artist were sitting, when Mr.

Ford's client was announced, and Jan stood face to face with his father.

The gentle reader will willingly leave a veil over that meeting, which the artist felt a generous shame to witness. With less delicacy, the bow-legged boy had lingered outside the door, but when the studio rang with a pa.s.sionate cry,--"My son! my son!"--he threw his green baize ap.r.o.n over his head, and crying, "The jook!" plunged downwards into the bas.e.m.e.nt, and shed tears of sympathy amongst the boots and bottles.

To say that Lady Adelaide forgave the past, and received her husband's son with kindness, is to do scant justice to the generous affection which he received from her. With pity for her husband mingled painful astonishment that he should have trusted her so little; but if the blow could never be quite repaired, love rarely meets with its exact equivalent in faith or tenderness, and she did not suffer alone. She went with Jan and his father to visit Master Lake, and her gracious thanks to the windmiller for his care of her step-son gave additional bitterness to her husband's memories of the windmill.

It was she who first urged that they should go to Holland. Jan's grandfather was dead,--Mr. Ford's client could make no reparation there,--but the cousin to whom the old wooden house now belonged gave Jan many things which had been his mother's. Amongst these was a book of sketches by herself, and a collection of etchings by her great-grandfather, a Dutch artist; and in this collection Jan found the favorite of his childhood. Did the genius in him really take its rise in the old artist who etched those willows which he had once struggled to rival with slate-pencil?

His mother's sketches were far inferior to his own; but with the loving and faithful study of nature which they showed, perhaps, too, with the fact that they were chiefly gathered from homely and homelike scenes, from level horizons and gray skies, Jan felt a sympathy which stirred him to the heart. His delight in them touched Lady Adelaide even more than it moved his father. But then no personal inconvenience in the past, no long habits of suffering and selfishness, blunted her sense of the grievous wrong that had been done to her husband's gifted son. Nor to him alone! It was with her husband's dead wife that Lady Adelaide's sympathies were keenest,--the mother, like herself, of an only child.

Mr. Ford's client went almost unwillingly to his wife's grave, by the side of which her old father's bones now rested. But Jan and Lady Adelaide hastened thither, hand in hand, and the painter's pledge was redeemed. Since the old man died, it had been little tended, and weeds grew rank where flowers had once been planted.

Jan threw himself on the neglected grave. "My poor mother!" he cried, almost bitterly. For a moment the full sense of their common wrong seemed to overwhelm him, and he shrank even from Lady Adelaide. But when, kneeling beside him, she bent her face as if the wind that sighed among the gra.s.s stalks could carry her words to ears long dulled in death,--"My POOR child! _I_ will be a mother to your son!"--Jan's heart turned back with a gush of grat.i.tude to his good stepmother.

He had much reason to be grateful: then, and through many succeeding years, when her training fitted him to take his place without awkwardness in society, and her tender care atoned (so she hoped) for the hardships of the past.

The brotherly love between Jan and D'Arcy was a source of great comfort to her. Once only was it threatened with estrangement. It was when they had grown up into young men, and each believed that he was in love with Amabel. Jan had just prepared to sacrifice himself (and Amabel) with enthusiasm to his brother, when D'Arcy luckily discovered that he and the playmate of his childhood were not really suited to each other. It was the case. The conventionalities of English society in his own rank were part of D'Arcy's very life, but to Amabel they had been made so distasteful in the hands of Lady Craikshaw that her energetic, straight-forward spirit was in continual revolt; and it was not the least of Jan's merits in her eyes that his life had been what it was, that he was so different from the rest of the people amongst whom she lived, and that the interests and pleasures which they had in common were such as the world of fashion could neither give nor take away.

Withheld from sacrificing his affections to his brother, Jan joined with his father to cut off the entail of his property. "D'Arcy is your heir, sir," he said. "I hope to live well by my art, and G.o.d forbid that I should disinherit Lady Adelaide's son."

His great gift did indeed bring fortune as well as fame to our hero.

The Boys' Home knows this. It has some generous patrons (it should have many!), and first amongst them must rank the great painter who sometimes presides at its annual festival, and is wont on such occasions pleasantly to speak of himself as "an old boy."

More accurately ent.i.tled to that character is the bow-legged man- servant of another artist,--Jan's old master. These two live on together, and each would find it difficult to say whether pride and pleasure in the good luck of their old companion, or the never healed pain of his loss, is the stronger feeling in their kindly hearts.

Amabel was her father's heir, and in process of time Jan became the Squire, and went back to spend his life under the skies which inspired his childhood. But his wife is wont to say that she believes his true vocation was to be a miller, so strong is the love of windmills in him, and so proud is he of his Miller's Thumb.

At one time Mr. Ammaby wished him to take his name and arms, but Jan decided to keep his own. And it is by this name that Fame writes him in her roll of painters, and not by that of the old Squires of Ammaby, nor by the name he bore when he was a Child of the Windmill.

CHAPTER XLII.

CONCLUSION.

A south-west wind is blowing over the plains. It drives the "messengers" over the sky, and the sails of the windmill, and makes the dead leaves dance upon the graves. It does much to dispel the evil effects of the foul smells and noxious gases, which are commoner yet in the little village than one might suppose. (But it is a long time, you see, since the fever was here.) It shows the silver lining of the willow leaves by the little river, and bends the flowers which grow in one glowing ma.s.s--like some gorgeous Eastern carpet--on Master Swift's grave. It rocks Jan's sign in mid-air above the Heart of Oak, where Master Chuter is waiting upon a newly arrived guest.

It is the man of business. Long has he promised to try the breezes of the plains for what he calls dyspepsia, and the artist calls "money-grubbing-on-the-brain," but he never could find leisure, until a serious attack obliged him to do so. But at that moment the painter could not leave London, and he is here alone. He has not said that he knows Jan, for it amuses him to hear the little innkeeper ramble on with anecdotes of the great painter's childhood.

"This ale is fine," says the man of business. "I never can touch beer at home. The painter is married, you say?"

"He've been married these two year," Master Chuter replies. "And they do say Miss Amabel have been partial to him from a child. He come down here, sir, soon after his father took to him, and he draad out Miss Amabel's old white horse for her; and the butler have told me, sir, that it hangs in the library now. It be more fit for an inn sign, sartinly, it be, but the gentry has their whims, sir, and Miss Amabel was a fine young lady. The Squire's moral image she be; affable and free, quite different to her ladyship. Coffee, sir?

No, sir? Dined, sir? It be a fine evening, sir, if you'd like to see the church. I'd be glad to show it you, myself, sir. Old Solomon have got the key."

In the main street of the village even the man of business strolls.

There is no hurrying in this atmosphere. It is a matter of time to find Old Solomon, and of more time to make him hear when he is found, and of most time for him to find the key when he hears. But time is not money to the merchant just now, and he watches the western sky patiently, and is made sleepy by the breeze. When at last they saunter under the shadow of the gray church tower, his eye is caught by the ma.s.s of color, out of which springs a high cross of white marble, whose top is just flushed by the setting sun. It is of fine design and workmanship, and marks the grave where the great man's schoolmaster sleeps near his wife and child. Hard by, Master Chuter shows the "fever monument," and the names of Master Lake's children. And then, as Daddy Solomon has fumbled the door open, they pa.s.s into the church. The east end has been restored, the innkeeper says, by the Squire, under the advice of his son-in-law.

And then they turn to look at the west window,--the new window, the boast of the parish,--at which even old Solomon strains his withered eyes with a sense of pride. The man of business stands where Jan used to sit. The unchanged faces look down on him from the old window. But it is not the old window that he looks at, it is the new one. The glory of the setting sun illumines it, and throws crimson lights from the vesture of the princ.i.p.al figure--like stains of blood--upon the pavement.

"It be the Good Shepherd," Master Chuter explains, but his guest is silent. The pale-faced, white-haired angels in the upper lights seem all ablaze, and Old Solomon cannot look at them.

"Them sheep be beautiful," whispers the innkeeper; but the stranger heeds him not. He is reading the inscription: -

To the Glory of G.o.d, And in pious memory of Abel, my dear foster-brother: I, who designed this window, Dedicate it.

HE shall gather the lambs into His arms.