A Romance of Two Worlds | Page 6

wilderness of roses in full bloom, and an avenue
of orange-trees beginning to flower cast a delicate fragrance on the
warm delicious air.
Mrs. Everard was delighted.
"If you do not recover your health here," she said half laughingly to me
on the second morning after our arrival, "I am afraid your case is
hopeless. What sunshine! What a balmy wind! It is enough to make a
cripple cast away his crutches and forget he was ever lame. Don't you
think so?"
I smiled in answer, but inwardly I sighed. Beautiful as the scenery, the
air, and the general surroundings were, I could not disguise from
myself that the temporary exhilaration of my feelings, caused by the
novelty and excitement of my journey to Cannes, was slowly but surely
passing away. The terrible apathy, against which I had fought for so
many months, was again creeping over me with its cruel and resistless
force. I did my best to struggle against it; I walked, I rode, I laughed
and chatted with Mrs. Everard and her husband, and forced myself into
sociability with some of the visitors at the hotel, who were disposed to
show us friendly attention. I summoned all my stock of will-power to
beat back the insidious physical and mental misery that threatened to

sap the very spring of my life; and in some of these efforts I partially
succeeded. But it was at night that the terrors of my condition
manifested themselves. Then sleep forsook my eyes; a dull throbbing
weight of pain encircled my head like a crown of thorns; nervous
terrors shook me from head to foot; fragments of my own musical
compositions hummed in my ears with wearying
persistence--fragments that always left me in a state of distressed
conjecture; for I never could remember how they ended, and I puzzled
myself vainly over crotchets and quavers that never would consent to
arrange themselves in any sort of finale. So the days went on; for
Colonel Everard and his wife, those days were full of merriment,
sight-seeing, and enjoyment. For me, though outwardly I appeared to
share in the universal gaiety, they were laden with increasing despair
and wretchedness; for I began to lose hope of ever recovering my once
buoyant health and strength, and, what was even worse, I seemed to
have utterly parted with all working ability. I was young, and up to
within a few months life had stretched brightly before me, with the
prospect of a brilliant career. And now what was I? A wretched
invalid--a burden to myself and to others--a broken spar flung with
other fragments of ship wrecked lives on the great ocean of Time, there
to be whirled away and forgotten. But a rescue was approaching; a
rescue sudden and marvellous, of which, in my wildest fancies, I had
never dreamed.
Staying in the same hotel with us was a young Italian artist, Raffaello
Cellini by name. His pictures were beginning to attract a great deal of
notice, both in Paris and Rome: not only for their faultless drawing, but
for their wonderfully exquisite colouring. So deep and warm and rich
were the hues he transferred to his canvases, that others of his art, less
fortunate in the management of the palette, declared he must have
invented some foreign compound whereby he was enabled to deepen
and brighten his colours for the time being; but that the effect was only
temporary, and that his pictures, exposed to the air for some eight or
ten years, would fade away rapidly, leaving only the traces of an
indistinct blur. Others, more generous, congratulated him on having
discovered the secrets of the old masters. In short, he was admired,
condemned, envied, and flattered, all in a breath; while he himself,

being of a singularly serene and unruffled disposition, worked away
incessantly, caring little or nothing for the world's praise or blame.
Cellini had a pretty suite of rooms in the Hotel de L----, and my friends
Colonel and Mrs. Everard fraternized with him very warmly. He was
by no means slow to respond to their overtures of friendship, and so it
happened that his studio became a sort of lounge for us, where we
would meet to have tea, to chat, to look at the pictures, or to discuss our
plans for future enjoyment. These visits to Cellini's studio, strange to
say, had a remarkably soothing and calming effect upon my suffering
nerves. The lofty and elegant room, furnished with that "admired
disorder" and mixed luxuriousness peculiar to artists, with its heavily
drooping velvet curtains, its glimpses of white marble busts and broken
columns, its flash and fragrance of flowers that bloomed in a tiny
conservatory opening out from the studio and leading to the garden,
where a fountain bubbled melodiously--all this