About Jan the silence was breathless. The bow-legged boy literally laid his hand upon his mouth, and he had better have laid it over his eyes, for they seemed in danger of falling out of their sockets.
Jan covered his for a moment, and then looked upwards. Back upon his sensitive memory rolled the past, like a returning tide which sweeps every thing before it. Much clearer than those roofs and chimney-stacks the windmill stood against the sky, with arms outstretched as if to recall its truant son. If he had needed it to draw from, it was there, plain enough. But how should he need to see it, on whose heart every line of it was written? He could have laid his hand in the dark upon the bricks that were weather-stained into fanciful landscapes upon its walls, and planted his feet on the spot where the grass was most worn down about its base.
He drew with such power and rapidity that only some awe of the look upon his face could have kept silence in the little crowd whom he had forgotten. And when the last scrap of chalk had crumbled, and he dragged his blackened finger over the foreground till it bled, the voice which broke the silence was the voice of a stranger, who stood with the master on the threshold of the court-yard.
Never perhaps was more conveyed in one word than in that which he spoke, though its meaning was known to himself alone,—
“WITHOUT CHARACTER?”—THE WIDOW.—THE BOW-LEGGED BOY TAKES SERVICE.—STUDIOS AND PAINTERS.
“MANAGE it as you like,” the artist had said to the master of the Boys’ Home. “Lend him, sell him, apprentice him, give him to me,—whichever you prefer. Say I want a boot-black—a clothes-brusher—a palette-setter—a bound slave—or an adopted son, as you please. The boy I must have: in what capacity I get him is nothing to me.”
“I am bound to remind you, sir,” said the master, “that he was picked up in the streets, and has had no training, and earned no outfit from us. He comes to you without clothes, without character”—
“Without character?” cried the artist. “Heavens and earth! Did you ever study physiognomy? Do you know any thing of faces?”
“It is part of my duty to know something of them, sir,” began the master, who was slightly nettled.
“Then don’t talk nonsense, my friend, but send me the boy, as soon as is consistent with your rules and regulations.”