Babylon. Volume 2. Allen Grant
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lessons in manners – ‘I – I’ve come about your advertisement for a valet. I – I’ve come, in fact, to apply for the situation.’
Sir Henry glanced at him curiously. ‘The deuce you have,’ he said, dropping back chillily into his easy chair, and surveying Colin over from head to foot with an icy scrutiny. ‘You’ve come to apply for the situation! Why, Wilkinson said, “Mr. Colin Churchill.’” ‘He mistook my business, I suppose,’ Colin answered quietly, but with some hesitation. It somehow struck him already that he would find it hard to drop back once more into the long-forgotten position of a valet. ‘I came to ask whether it was likely I would suit you. I can speak Italian.’
That was his trump card, in fact, and he thought it best to play it quickly.
Sir Henry looked at him again. ‘Oh, you can speak Italian. Well, that’s good as far as it goes; but how much Italian can you speak, that’s the question?’ And he added a few words in the best Tuscan he could muster up, to test the applicant’s exact acquirements.
Colin answered him more quickly and idiomatically than Sir Henry had expected. In fact, Cicolari’s lessons had been sound and practical. Sir Henry kept up the conversation, still in Italian, for a few minutes, and then, being quite satisfied on that score, returned with a better grace to his native English. ‘Have you been out as a valet before?’ he asked.
‘Not for some years, sir.’ Colin replied frankly. ‘I went out to service at first, and was page and valet to a clergyman in Dorsetshire – Mr. Howard-Bussell, of Wootton Mandeville – ’
‘Knew him well,’ Sir Henry repeated to himself reflectively. ‘Old Howard-Russell of Wootton Mandeville! Dead these five years. Knew him well, the selfish old pig; as conceited, self-opinionated an old fool as ever lived in all England. He declared my undoubted Pinturicchio was only a Giovanni do Spagno. Whereas it’s really the only quite indubitable Pinturiccliio in a private gallery anywhere at all outside Italy.’
‘Except the St. Sebastian at Knowle, of course,’ Colin put in, innocently.
Sir Henry turned round and stared at him again. ‘Except the St. Sebastian at Knowle,’ he echoed coldly. ‘Except the St. Sebastian at Knowle, no doubt. But how the deuce did he come to know the St. Sebastian at Knowle was a Pinturiccliio, I wonder? Anyhow, it shows he’s lived in very decent places. Well, and so you used to be with old Mr. Howard-Russell, did you? And since then – since then – what have you been doing?’
‘At present, sir,’ Cohn went on, ‘I’m working as a marble-cutter; but circumstances make me wish to go back again to service now, and as I happen to know Italian, I thought perhaps your place might suit me.’
‘No doubt, no doubt. I dare say it would. But the question is, would you suit me, don’t you see? A marble-cutter, he says – a marble-cutter! How deuced singular! Have you got a character?’
‘I could get one from Mr. Russell’s friends, I should think, sir; and of course my present employer would speak for my honesty and so forth.’
Sir Henry asked him a few more questions, and then seemed to be turning the matter over in his own mind a little. ‘The Italian,’ he said, speaking to himself – for he had a habit that way, ‘the Italian’s the great thing. I’ve made up my mind I’ll never go to Rome again with a valet who doesn’t speak Italian. Dobbs was impossible, quite impossible. This young man has some Italian, but can he valet, I wonder? Here, you! come into my bedroom, and let me see what you can do in the way of your duties.’
Colin followed him upstairs, and, being put through his paces as a body-servant, got through the examination with decent credit. Next came the question of wages and so forth, and finally the announcement that Sir Henry meant to start for Rome early in October.
‘Well, he’s a very fair-spoken young man,’ Sir Henry said at last, ‘and he knows Italian. But it’s devilish odd his being a marble-cutter. However, I’ll try him. I’ll write to your master, Churchill – what’s his name – I’ll write to him and enquire about you.’
Colin gave him Cicolari’s name and address, and Sir Henry noted them deliberately in his pocket-book. ‘Very good,’ he said; ‘I’ll write and ask about your character, and if everything’s all correct, I shall let you know and engage you.’
Colin found it rather hard to answer ‘Thank you, sir;’ but it was for Rome and art, and he managed to say it.
CHAPTER XVI. COLIN’S DEPARTURE
When Minna learnt from Colin that he had finally accepted Sir Henry Wilberforce’s situation, her heart was very heavy. She wanted her old friend to do everything that would make him into a great sculptor, of course; but still, say what you will about it, it’s very hard to have your one interest in life taken far away from you, and to be left utterly alone and self-contained in the great dreary world of London. Have you ever reflected, dear sir or madam, how terrible is the isolation of a girl in Minna Wroe’s position – nay, for the matter of that, of your own housemaid, of cook, or parlour-maid, in that vast, unsympathetic, human ant-hill? Think, for a moment, of the warm human heart within her, suddenly cramped and turned in upon itself by the unspeakable strangeness of everything around her. She has come up from the country, doubtless, to take a ‘better’ place in London, and there she is thrown by pure chance into one situation or another, with two or three more miscellaneous girls from other shires, having other friends and other interests; and from day to day she toils on, practically alone, among so many unknown, or but officially known, and irresponsive faces. Is it any wonder that, under such circumstances, she looks about her anxiously for some living object round which to twine the tendrils of her better nature? – it may be only a bird, or a cat, or a lap-dog; it may be Bob the postman or policeman Jenkins. We laugh about her young man, whom we envisage to ourselves simply as a hulking fellow and a domestic nuisance; we never reflect that to her all the interest and sympathy of life is concentrated and focussed upon that one single shadowy follower. He may be as uninteresting a slip of a plough-boy, turned driver of a London railway van, as ever was seen in this realm of England; or he may be as full of artistic aspiration and beautiful imaginings as Colin Churchill; but to her it is all the same; he is her one friend and confidant and social environment; he represents in her eyes universal society; he is the solitary unit who can play upon the full gamut of that many-toned and exquisitely modulated musical instrument, her inherited social nature. Take him away, and what is there left of her? – a mere automatic human machine for making beds or grinding out arithmetic for junior classes.
Has not humanity rightly pitched, by common consent, for the main theme of all its verse and all its literature, upon this one universal passion, which, for a few short years at least, tinges with true romance and unspoken poetry even the simplest and most commonplace souls?
Colin felt the sadness of parting, too, but by no means so acutely as Minna. The door of fame was opening at last before him; Rome was looming large upon the mental horizon; dreams in marble were crystallising themselves down into future actuality; and in the near fulfilment of his life-long hopes, it was hardly to be expected that he should take the parting to heart so seriously as the little pupil-teacher herself had taken it. Besides, time, in anticipation at least, never looks nearly so long to men as to women. Don’t we all know that a woman will cry her eyes out about a few months’ absence, which to a man seems hardly worth making a fuss about? ‘It’s only for three or four years, you know, Minna,’ Colin said, as lightly as though three or four years were absolutely nothing; and ah me, how long they looked to poor, lonely, heartsick little Minna! She felt almost inclined to give up this up-hill work of teaching and self-education altogether, and return once more to the old fisherman’s cottage away down at Wootton Mandeville. There at least she would have some human sympathies and interests to comfort and sustain her.
But Colin had lots of work to do, getting himself ready for his great start in life; and he hardly entered to the full into little Minna’s fears and troubles. He had to refurbish his entire wardrobe on a scale suited to a gentleman’s servant – Minna was working hard in all her spare hours at making new shirts for him or mending old ones: he had to complete arrangements of all sorts for his eventful journey; and he had to select among his books