University of Virginia Library

5. CHAPTER V.

In the back wing of one of the old half-ruined palaces
under the Eastern wall of Florence—(the once splendid
home of one of the decayed Tuscan nobility, but now, like
others in its unfashionable neighborhood, rented for mere
pittances of rent to the painters and sculptors who needed
the favoring light of the tall windows and lofty ceilings)—
in the north corner of the Palazzo F—, on a still, mellow
morning of April, 1832, two artists, busy with color
and pencil, stood before their respective easels, in the same
room. They were in opposite corners, on either side of
the only unshuttered window, and, upon a raised platform
on the other side of the large apartment, with a flood of
the golden light of that beautiful sky pouring down upon
her nude shoulders and loosened locks, knelt the female

model, of whom they were each making a study for a picture.
The girl's mother, who accompanied her always, sat
knitting on a low chair near by, and in the sketch on one
of the easels, the picturesque head and figure of the elder
female were very strikingly included.

“Ten cents an hour, and the mother thrown in, is what
I call moderate damages,” said Blivins, putting a wrinkle
into the forehead under his hand with a single dash of his
brush, “but I don't intend to swindle the old woman. It's
a Bible Sarah I want, and she isn't quite used-up enough
to justify my Abraham, as it were. I have to imagine the
flesh-flats at low water, and the tear-troughs and cavings-in.
But her daughter is a slap-up Hagar and no mistake,
and if I get a good picture out of the old cow and her
pretty heifer, why, I'll behave handsomely, and fork over
the consideration.”

“Right, and fair, my dear Bosh,” said Paul, “though
Giulietta's `ten cents an hour' is for letting one pair of
eyes drink of her beauty, and there are two of us having
that pleasure. So, she is entitled to double wages on her
own account, and the mother's extra into the bargain.
But come, see what a charming Psyche she makes!—the
same head you have made into that pork-fed looking
Hagar of yours, you awful aggravator!”

Blivins stood half way between the two pictures, looking
first at his strapping Hagar receiving her doom of exile

from old Sarah, at the door of Abraham's tent, and then at
the timid Psyche just venturing, with her half-shaded lamp,
upon the slumber of the yet unseen Cupid.

“Not much like pictures of the same woman, that's a
fact,” he said, after a moment of musing; “and there's a
likeness of the girl in yours, too—but it's mine that looks
as most people like to have their women look”—

“But why not paint what they ought to like, and so
help people to better taste?” interrupted Paul, who kept
up a daily hammering upon Bosh's exaggerations of fancy.
“Look at that girl, now!”

And, as he spoke, Giulietta, taking advantage of the unoccupied
moment for a change of posture, rose and walked
dreamily about the room, her exquisitely rounded arms
folded across her undraped bust—superbly lovely, and yet
as innocently unconscious of the exposure from her waist
upwards as a nymph in marble.

“What could be more ethereal and pure? And yet
your Hagar, there, looks anything but proper, with all that
flesh and color, my dear Bosh!”

“I don't doubt you are entirely unanimous in thinking
so,” said Bosh, with a tone of injured mournfulness, “but
most folks prefer lips with a landing-place to 'em, and
something to make fast to, here and there. That moonshine
woman of yours wouldn't do for my customers, Mr.
Paul! Did I ever tell you who my Hagar is to stand for?”

“No,” said his friend, who had resumed his study of
Giulietta; and Paul went on sketching, while Blivins, with
his attention mostly occupied with his work, entered upon
a careless and interrupted narrative of one of his Western
experiences—showing the good influence of criticism, however,
by shading away, as he talked, some of the superfluous
plumptitude of his Hagar.

“Wall, you see, I was drifting round through the back
settlements in Michigan, on a propagation of the Fine Arts
—getting commissions, that is to say, to come out here.
* * * But people don't buy pictures very spontaneously,
particularly if they haven't seen 'em; and it took
`soft sodder' to start the subject, and then it had to be
piety or politics where you put in your persuader; or perhaps
something curious had happened to themselves, or,
with a sharp look out, the weak spot would turn up, and
you might stand a picture on that. It was tight electioneering,
though, and I could go to Congress with half the
steam. * * * Come to a river one night, horseback;
I found I was close by the diggings of Deacon Superior
Nash, and he and my old gentleman had lumbered together,
and so I reckoned I'd got a picture on to him. * * *
Horse put up—all right—nobody at home but the Deacon
—and, to talking we went, over cider and sausages.” * * *

“Topics, pork and lumber, I suppose,” said Paul, breaking
the silence, while Bosh became abstracted for a minute

or two in gazing at a new turn of the light upon the superb
shoulders of Giulietta.

“No,” continued Blivins, “I got him confidential by
the third or fourth mug, and then he began telling about
his wives.”

“But the Abraham that is to serve for his likeness,
there, had two wives at a time,” suggested Fane.

“So had the Deacon,” pursued Bosh, “and there lay
my high water for business. He told me the whole story
—too long to go over now—but I saw my opportunity,
and put in at the right place. `Just like Abraham and
Hagar,' says I, and it hit him exactly on the raw. His
first wife was a high-pressure old spitfire, and he had compassed
Heaven and Michigan, lobby and Legislature, to
get a divorce from her. * * * At last he thought he
had it. * * * Rafting-time came round, and he went
down stream with a mile of lumber, calm and comfortable.
* * * Well, the Deacon made a good sell at New
Orleans, smarted up, and started for home. But the
thought of the old woman still troubled him, and on the
way he married another woman, to take the taste out of
his mouth.”

“Then it was his Sarah driven into the wilderness, not
his Hagar,” observed Paul.

“No, no; back water, if you please! He hadn't yet got
his papers, and the old woman managed to slip her foot

out of the trap while he was away. So he had hardly
got home and held the first prayer-meeting in his own
house as a bridegroom, when he had to cut loose from his
pretty new wife, and begin to pay bills again for the old
one.”

“Then that robustious young woman you have been
painting there, went home somewhat a-Miss?” said Paul.

“A miss and nothing else,” assented Blivins, who did
not see the pun.

“And so, Giulietta, my dear,” said Paul with a tone of
compassion, as he walked across the room to lay away one
of the waves of raven hair that was hiding the arch of her
beautiful throat, “you are not to be Mrs. Deacon Nash,
after all!”

“Signore!” murmured the half couchant peasant-girl,
on hearing her name—but with a look of tender earnestness
in her large dark eyes, though she got no answer,
which showed that the voice and manner of Paul even in
a strange language, were very sweet to hear.

“But Giulietta is to hang up in the Deacon's parlor for
the Mrs. Nash that was to be,” continued Bosh, “and very
happy the old Deacon was, to find that Hagar in Genesis
had just such a time of it as his poor girl, and that he
himself was no worse off than Abraham, after all. He'll
think it a pity that his live Mrs. Hagar Nash can't get

into his house and stay there, as peaceably as my painted
one will, that's all.”

“And which do you think would be the happier, Bosh
—Giulietta as Mrs. Deacon Nash, or Mrs. Deacon Nash as
Giulietta?”

Blivins, for once in a way, gave a loud laugh.

“Well, I think I see the wife of a Michigan Deacon
showing herself round for ten cents an hour—even if her
mother went along! Rather low water for Captain Nash's
family to drift in, Mr. Paul!”

“But, persisted Fane, who was beginning to have his
own ideas about comparative happiness, “do you think
Giulietta would be happier and more innocent if she could
change places even with Mrs. Sarah Nash?”

“Why,” said Bosh, rather dodging the point in dispute,
“the Deacon will, like as not, be Governor of Michigan?”

“But look at that face, my popular Blivins! Every
line of it, spite of her un-republican industry, has the repose
of completely untroubled happiness. Giulietta has
never had an illness, never had a care. I have seen where
they live, in the valley just over Fiesole, and, with what
Italian I had picked up and added to my Latin, I managed,
the other day, to hear their whole story. She has bed-ridden
grand-parents and a troop of young brothers and
sisters—her father unable to get half a livelihood for them.

But they bless the Holy Virgin, night and morning, that
the eldest daughter, Giulietta, was born beautiful and symmetrical
enough to be a model to the artists. She commenced
at ten years of age, sitting to the sculptors for their
cherubs and cupids, and has supported her mother's family
ever since, in comfort and happiness, with a profession
which, in her rank of life, while conducted properly, is both
respected and envied.”

“All very well, out here,” Blivins partly knocked under,
by saying, as Paul took breath, “but it'll be a long time
before they'll turn it to account that way, if a girl is born
handsome out West!”

“Yet here and there a Western beauty, I fancy, would
like to be the type, as Giulietta is, of many a work of
genius—copied, idealized, immortalized, on canvas and in
marble—studied and worshipped, daily and all day, by the
eyes in the world that best know how to reverence and
prize what, in her beauty, God has made admirable.”

“You're putting it strong, Paul,” said Bosh, giving more
eyes than before, however, to the beauty that was so discoursed
upon, “for I don't believe Giulietta cares a fig what
the artists copy, or what they think while they're doing it.”

“Mezzo giorno, Signori,” said the mother, rising, as the
convent bell rang for noon, and so interrupting the argument
with the announcement of the close of the hour.

And Giulietta stepped from the platform and drew up

the shoulder-straps of the coarse petticoat that had fallen
around her hips, twisted her heavy masses of long raven
hair into a knot, and, with her mantle drawn modestly
around her faultless form, and her straw hat gracefully set
upon her nymph-like head, courtesied her “Addio,” and
gave a last sweet smile to Paul.

And, as they set back their easels for that day, both
artists wished it were the time to-morrow when she would
come again.