Villa Rubein, and Other Stories. Galsworthy John

gown caught together on her chest. Her grey eyes glanced from the painter to the bottles, from the bottles to the pistol-case. A simple reasoning, which struck Harz as comic.

      “It is often like this,” she said in the country patois; “der Herr must not be frightened.”

      Lifting the motionless Sarelli as if he were a baby, she laid him on a couch.

      “Ah!” she said, sitting down and resting her elbow on the table; “he will not wake!”

      Harz bowed to her; her patient figure, in spite of its youth and strength, seemed to him pathetic. Taking up his knapsack, he went out.

      The smoke of cottages rose straight; wisps of mist were wandering about the valley, and the songs of birds dropping like blessings. All over the grass the spiders had spun a sea of threads that bent and quivered to the pressure of the air, like fairy tight-ropes.

      All that day he tramped.

      Blacksmiths, tall stout men with knotted muscles, sleepy eyes, and great fair beards, came out of their forges to stretch and wipe their brows, and stare at him.

      Teams of white oxen, waiting to be harnessed, lashed their tails against their flanks, moving their heads slowly from side to side in the heat. Old women at chalet doors blinked and knitted.

      The white houses, with gaping caves of storage under the roofs, the red church spire, the clinking of hammers in the forges, the slow stamping of oxen-all spoke of sleepy toil, without ideas or ambition. Harz knew it all too well; like the earth’s odour, it belonged to him, as Sarelli had said.

      Towards sunset coming to a copse of larches, he sat down to rest. It was very still, but for the tinkle of cowbells, and, from somewhere in the distance, the sound of dropping logs.

      Two barefooted little boys came from the wood, marching earnestly along, and looking at Harz as if he were a monster. Once past him, they began to run.

      ‘At their age,’ he thought, ‘I should have done the same.’ A hundred memories rushed into his mind.

      He looked down at the village straggling below – white houses with russet tiles and crowns of smoke, vineyards where the young leaves were beginning to unfold, the red-capped spire, a thread of bubbling stream, an old stone cross. He had been fourteen years struggling up from all this; and now just as he had breathing space, and the time to give himself wholly to his work – this weakness was upon him! Better, a thousand times, to give her up!

      In a house or two lights began to wink; the scent of wood smoke reached him, the distant chimes of bells, the burring of a stream.

      IX

      Next day his one thought was to get back to work. He arrived at the studio in the afternoon, and, laying in provisions, barricaded the lower door. For three days he did not go out; on the fourth day he went to Villa Rubein…

      Schloss Runkelstein – grey, blind, strengthless – still keeps the valley. The windows which once, like eyes, watched men and horses creeping through the snow, braved the splutter of guns and the gleam of torches, are now holes for the birds to nest in. Tangled creepers have spread to the very summits of the walls. In the keep, instead of grim men in armour, there is a wooden board recording the history of the castle and instructing visitors on the subject of refreshments. Only at night, when the cold moon blanches everything, the castle stands like the grim ghost of its old self, high above the river.

      After a long morning’s sitting the girls had started forth with Harz and Dawney to spend the afternoon at the ruin; Miss Naylor, kept at home by headache, watched them depart with words of caution against sunstroke, stinging nettles, and strange dogs.

      Since the painter’s return Christian and he had hardly spoken to each other. Below the battlement on which they sat, in a railed gallery with little tables, Dawney and Greta were playing dominoes, two soldiers drinking beer, and at the top of a flight of stairs the Custodian’s wife sewing at a garment. Christian said suddenly: “I thought we were friends.”

      “Well, Fraulein Christian, aren’t we?”

      “You went away without a word; friends don’t do that.”

      Harz bit his lips.

      “I don’t think you care,” she went on with a sort of desperate haste, “whether you hurt people or not. You have been here all this time without even going to see your father and mother.”

      “Do you think they would want to see me?”

      Christian looked up.

      “It’s all been so soft for you,” he said bitterly; “you don’t understand.”

      He turned his head away, and then burst out: “I’m proud to come straight from the soil – I wouldn’t have it otherwise; but they are of ‘the people,’ everything is narrow with them – they only understand what they can see and touch.”

      “I’m sorry I spoke like that,” said Christian softly; “you’ve never told me about yourself.”

      There was something just a little cruel in the way the painter looked at her, then seeming to feel compunction, he said quickly: “I always hated – the peasant life – I wanted to get away into the world; I had a feeling in here – I wanted – I don’t know what I wanted! I did run away at last to a house-painter at Meran. The priest wrote me a letter from my father – they threw me off; that’s all.”

      Christian’s eyes were very bright, her lips moved, like the lips of a child listening to a story.

      “Go on,” she said.

      “I stayed at Meran two years, till I’d learnt all I could there, then a brother of my mother’s helped me to get to Vienna; I was lucky enough to find work with a man who used to decorate churches. We went about the country together. Once when he was ill I painted the roof of a church entirely by myself; I lay on my back on the scaffold boards all day for a week – I was proud of that roof.” He paused.

      “When did you begin painting pictures?”

      “A friend asked me why I didn’t try for the Academie. That started me going to the night schools; I worked every minute – I had to get my living as well, of course, so I worked at night.

      “Then when the examination came, I thought I could do nothing – it was just as if I had never had a brush or pencil in my hand. But the second day a professor in passing me said, ‘Good! Quite good!’ That gave me courage. I was sure I had failed though; but I was second out of sixty.”

      Christian nodded.

      “To work in the schools after that I had to give up my business, of course. There was only one teacher who ever taught me anything; the others all seemed fools. This man would come and rub out what you’d done with his sleeve. I used to cry with rage – but I told him I could only learn from him, and he was so astonished that he got me into his class.”

      “But how did you live without money?” asked Christian.

      His face burned with a dark flush. “I don’t know how I lived; you must have been through these things to know, you would never understand.”

      “But I want to understand, please.”

      “What do you want me to tell you? How I went twice a week to eat free dinners! How I took charity! How I was hungry! There was a rich cousin of my mother’s – I used to go to him. I didn’t like it. But if you’re starving in the winter.”

      Christian put out her hand.

      “I used to borrow apronsful of coals from other students who were as poor – but I never went to the rich students.”

      The flush had died out of his face.

      “That sort of thing makes you hate the world! You work till you stagger; you’re cold and hungry; you see rich people in their carriages, wrapped in furs, and all the time you want to do something great. You pray for a chance, any chance; nothing comes to the poor! It makes you hate the world.”

      Christian’s eyes filled with tears. He went on:

      “But