Argosy and Railroad Man's Magazine — page 165: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

THE HAMMER. ceasing, They heard him cursing. Then he broke off and sang a bit of .a ballad. They clutched each other and fell a-whis- pering. That evening gradually drew on. The light dimmed slightly. . ‘Tt is half dark!” they would say. “ He cannot see to work! Yes, yes, this is mad- ness! He is ruined, and the Venus must be spoiled!” “I would give my hopes of heaven for one glance at that work he has done to-day. It must be a terrible or a beautiful thing.” The apprentices broke off their comments on their master to eye a girl dressed in much-worn clothes, with a lute pressed under her arm. She came directly toward them. . “Who is this singing girl who comes?” they asked each other. “Look! her dress is dusty, and there is a crown of withered leaves on her hair.” ‘““] have never seen such hair! The last of the sun shining through it makes it a fire.” She stood before them, her lute under her arm. “ Gentle sirs, I have been to the house of Messer Peter Warburton, and one told me that I should find him here.” “Vou may not go in. Are you a model? Come to-morrow. It would be worth my place to let you in to him now. There is a mood on him.” The hammering within ceased, the pause continued for the first time that day. Hope, fear and sorrow were in her smile. “ Kind sirs, I have come many hundred leagues to see him.” “The hammer has stopped,” said one of them. ‘‘ Perhaps he will work no more in the half light. Yes, you may go in now, but be cautious. He is in his mood.” Shaking and blind with labor, Peter stepped back from the statue, the last of his inspiration worked out of him by that terrific day. The Venus was done, and in the relaxation of that knowledge his head swam and a mist rose in his eyes so that he could not see his work. At the opening of the door behind he turned with a curse and faced Sonia. Be- hind her the three assistants: peered with 507 fearful eyes. She seemed to Peter like a figure known in a dream and now seen for the first time in daylight. But her glance was not for him. Straight past him she looked to the statue, and there her eyes. held, fascinated. A vague trouble grew in him. He saw the assistants look to one another and whisper together. “The Venus! The singing girl!” “ Singing girl, fools?”’ he cried, his weak- ness passing from him in a sudden childlike anger, and he turned toward the statue with outstretched arms. “No, but Venus, the goddess of love. The goddess of—” He stopped. His arm stiffened in the midst of its gesture, and the whole shop . went dim with shadows. Suppose a man climbed a mountain- range, expecting to view from the top wide fields of rich grain in the opposite valley, but when he reached the summit should see the awful expanse of the sea instead—such bewilderment was Peter’s. Out of the mass of shadows, reeling drunkenly before him, one object held true and whitely clear, the face of the statue. It was the sight of this which dazed him. He struck his hand heavily against his forehead with a groan, and stared again. The illu- sion still held. He made a long stride closer to it. No, it was not an illusion. It was a fact ——an unalterable fact in everlasting marble. The face of the statue was not Beatrice, but Sonia! He no longer heard the horrified whispers of his assistants as they stole back through the door. They left him. All Rome—all his flatterers would leave with them. He had betrayed the commission of the Pope. It was not Beatrice he had made, but the image of a nameless girl—a singing, barbarian girl! He felt like a man awaked from a night of debauch, with the past hours a blank in his. mind while a com- panion sits beside him and reconstructs his wild exploits during that lapse of memory. He turned again. “Tt is I! It is I!” she was whispering over and-over. “But you have made me more beautiful. I never knew—Peter—” comnniclooolkks.comnn