“Cheer up, old man! I shall not disappoint
you this time. You have my promise.”
“Yes.”
A two-horse carriage was at the door. Mallard
looked at it from the balcony, and was direly tempted.
No fear of his yielding, however, It was not his fate
to scamper whither desire pointed him.
“I have already begun to work out an idea,”
said Elgar, as he breakfasted merrily. “I
woke in the night, and it came to me as I heard the
bell striking. My mind is always active when I
am travelling; ten to one I shall come back ready
to begin to write. I fear there’s no decent
ink purchasable in Amalfi; I mustn’t forget
that. By-the-bye, is there anything I can bring
you?”
“Nothing, thanks.”
They went down together, shook hands, and away drove
the carriage. At the public fountain in the little
piazza, where stands the image of Sant’ Andrea,
a group of women were busy or idling, washing clothes
and vegetables and fish, drawing water in vessels of
beautiful shape, chattering incessantly—such
a group as may have gathered there any morning for
hundreds of years. Children darted after the
vehicle with their perpetual cry of “Un sord’,
signor!” and Elgar royally threw to them a handful
of coppers, looking back to laugh as they scrambled.
A morning of mornings, deliciously fresh after the
rain, the air exquisitely fragrant. On the mountain-tops
ever so slight a mist still clinging, moment by moment
fading against the blue.
“Yes, I shall be able to work here,” said
Elgar within himself. “December, January,
February; I can be ready with something for the spring.”
THE MARTYR
Clifford Marsh left Pompeii on the same day as his
two chance acquaintances; he returned to his quarters
on the Mergellina, much perturbed in mind, beset with
many doubts, with divers temptations. “Shall
I the spigot wield?” Must the ambitions of his
glowing youth come to naught, and he descend to rank
among the Philistines? For, to give him credit
for a certain amount of good sense, he never gravely
contemplated facing the world in the sole strength
of his genius. He knew one or two who had done
so before his mind’s eye was a certain little
garret in Chelsea, where an acquaintance of his, a
man of real and various powers, was year after year
taxing his brain and heart in a bitter struggle with
penury; and these glimpses of Bohemia were far from
inspiring Clifford with zeal for naturalization.
Elated with wine and companionship, he liked to pose
as one who was sacrificing “prospects”
to artistic conscientiousness; but, even though he
had “fallen back” on landscape, he was
very widely awake to the fact that his impressionist
studies would not supply him with bread, to say nothing
of butter—and Clifford must needs have both.
