Chapter VI

The preliminary modelling had been done in plaster, and only at one end had the cement work been begun. The unearthly skill of the thing seized me. But it was horrible, too. There was hate in it, as well as beauty; there was a sneer on the face of the Roman centurion as he gazed up at the Cross, and such malignity and lust of suffering on the countenances of the Jews who stared as fairly shook me.

“Come away, Maurice! It’s terrible,” said Ellice Valentine, and caught me by the arm.

“It is incomplete, madame,” said the Italian who escorted us. “It is right that this portion should be terrible. But the figure of Our Lady will redeem it. The sculptor is working on that now, but he is not satisfied.”

And then it happened. Behind us, on the floor—of cement, of course!—I heard the sharp and regular tapping of a cane. Ellice turned around, and I felt her grip on my arm tighten.

“Maurice!” she said, and caught her breath.

It was Sidney Bush, and he was blind.

He walked without hesitation toward the composition at the end of the studio. He was on familiar ground here, evidently, and the tap-tapping of his stick ceased. He took off his coat and hat, laid the cane carefully away, felt for and picked up a smock and drew it over his head.

Ellice Valentine was crying.

“Take me away, Maurice,” she whispered. “It is too pitiful.”

But—let me be clear about this—there was tragedy, but nothing pitiful about Sidney. He had lost no trace of his old arrogance. Fallen, the sculptor of Cynara, to a worker in cement, there was something imperious in the very tilt of his head as he marched the length of the studio. And as we turned to go we heard him calling to his helper in his old insolent voice.

In the cement factory, with only his hands now for eyes, he still was king.

The Italian stood for an instant, staring at him as he swung himself to the high platform.

“He is a good workman. A real artist,” he said. “But he is a hard man to work with. He has made already a dozen beautiful figures of the Holy Mother, but he is not satisfied.”

Thinking it over later, I read the old struggle still going on in Sidney, as revealed in the altar piece. Ellice Valentine had been right. He could only do the thing he felt, and he was feeling now—had been for years—only hate and bitterness. Suffering he could do, too; the Christ was the epitome of the anguish of the world. The Jews summarised hatred, resentment and the spirit of revenge. But love and sacrifice were not in him.

I did not believe he would ever do the Mother.