Page:Littell's Living Age - Volume 132.djvu/155

Rh , "tell me something about your life. Account for yourself. If you will make a friendship of it, you must do that."

"I will, sir," said Malcolm, and with the word began to tell him most things he could think of as bearing upon his mental history up to and after the time also when his birth was disclosed to him. In omitting that disclosure he believed he had without it quite accounted for himself. Through the whole recital he dwelt chiefly on the lessons and influences of the schoolmaster.

"Well, I must admit," said Lenorme when he had ended, "that you are no longer unintelligible, not to say incredible. You have had a splendid education, in which I hope you give the herring and Kelpie their due share." He sat silently regarding him for a few moments. Then he said, "I'll tell you what, now: if I help you to buy a horse, you must help me to paint a picture."

"I don't know how I'm to do that," said Malcolm, "but if you do, that's enough. I shall only be too happy to do what I can."

"Then I'll tell you. But you're not to tell anybody: it's a secret. I have discovered that there is no suitable portrait of Lady Lossie's father. It is a great pity. His brother and his father and grandfather are all in Portland Place, in Highland costume, as chiefs of their clan: his place only is vacant. Lady Lossie, however, has in her possession one or two miniatures of him, which, although badly painted, I should think may give the outlines of his face and head with tolerable correctness. From the portraits of his predecessors, and from Lady Lossie herself, I gain some knowledge of what is common to the family; and from all together I hope to gather and paint what will be recognizable by her as a likeness of her father; which afterward I hope to better by her remarks. These remarks I hope to get first from her feelings unadulterated by criticism, through the surprise of coming upon the picture suddenly: afterward from her judgment at its leisure. Now, I remember seeing you wait at table — the first time I saw you — in the Highland dress: will you come to me so dressed, and let me paint from you?"

"I'll do better than that, sir," cried Malcolm, eagerly. "I'll get up from Lossie House my lord's very dress that he wore when he went to court — his jewelled dirk, and Andrew Ferrara broadsword with the hilt of real silver. That'll greatly help your design upon my lady, for he dressed up in them all more than once just to please her."

"Thank you!" said Lenorme very heartily: "that will be of immense advantage. Write at once."

"I will, sir. Only I'm a bigger man than my — late master; and you must mind that."

"I'll see to it. You get the clothes and all the rest of the accoutrements — rich with barbaric gems and gold, and ——"

"Neither gems nor gold, sir — honest Scotch cairngorms and plain silver," said Malcolm.

"I only quoted Milton," returned Lenorme.

"Then you should have quoted correctly, sir. 'Showers on her kings barbaric pearl and gold' — that's the line, and you can't better it. Mr. Graham always pulled me up if I didn't quote correctly. By-the-bye, sir, some say it's kings barbaric, but there's barbaric gold in Virgil."

"I dare say you are right," said Lenorme. "But you are far too learned for me."

"Don't make game of me, sir. I know two or three books pretty well, and when I get a chance I can't help talking about them. It's so seldom now I can get a mouthful of Milton. There's no cave here to go into and roll the mimic thunder in your mouth. If the people here heard me reading loud out, they would call me mad. It's a mercy in this London if a workingman get loneliness enough to say his prayers in."

"You do say your prayers, then?" asked Lenorme, looking at him curiously.

"Yes: don't you, sir? You had so much sense about the beasts, I thought you must be a man that said his prayers."

Lenorme was silent. He was not altogether innocent of saying prayers, but of late years it had grown a more formal and gradually a rarer thing. One reason of this was that it had never come into his head that God cared about pictures, or had the slightest interest whether he painted well or ill. If a man's earnest calling, to which of necessity the greater part of his thought is given, is altogether dissociated in his mind from his religion, it is not wonderful that his prayers should by degrees wither and die. The question is, whether they ever had much vitality. But one mighty negative was yet true of Lenorme: he had not got in his head, still less had he ever cherished in his heart, the thought that there was anything fine in disbelieving in a God, or anything

