human
I had hoped you would not call, till I had made it look as it did last week,--and then you needn't have known it.
gpt
Known what, friend?
human
Well, only this; I came to a stain in the marble, and as I resolved you should have everything of the best,--I took another block, and have worked at it night and day, in hopes you wouldn't find me out. There's the other figure, under that cloth. Now, considering that the new block involved a cost of some twenty pounds,--and that the old one might have been artificially doctored, and that anyhow the risk and loss were equitably as much, mine as his,--and further that the young sculptor had little more than daily bread, if that,--I do say all this proves Durham to have been the noble fellow I found him to be for years. He is long gone, like so many other friends, to that Brighter World. His life-story in this was a touching one, as he told it to me; and I think known to very few besides myself. In youth he loved and was beloved; but friends and circumstances hindered; so she married some one else who, to Durham's constant horror and indignation, treated his wife brutally: till, one happy day, he died in some fit, probably from his own excesses. And then--here comes the sad climax--when Durham, having achieved fortune and fame, offered himself to his old love, the now rich widow, she deliberately turned away with a refusal, and broke his heart! Was it any wonder that his grief sometimes sought the solace of voluntary forgetfulness, or that certain false friends of his I wot of have in their teetotal Pharisaism made the evil most of an occasional infirmity, and have blackened even with printer's ink the memory of one of God's and Nature's true noblemen! Besides my little daughter in marble (so charmingly asleep that, in the Royal Academy, we heard one lady whisper to another, Hush, don't talk so loud, you'll wake her!)--besides _that_, his _chef-d'oeuvre_, as I always think, he modelled the bust of her father, now in the Crystal Palace Gallery,--but would not accept any payment for it! So like Durham,--who in many secret ways was ever generous and trying to do good: he was always self-forgetful and only too modest. _Apropos_, I remember that when Lord Granville asked the sculptor of Prince Albert's statue at South Kensington
gpt
Whether the Queen, who was so well pleased, could do anything for him --suggestive, no doubt, of a knighthood--the dear unselfish Durham replied,
human
Thank you, my Lord,--if her Majesty's pleased, I'm satisfied. So that chance for a title was thrown heedlessly away,--but we always called him
gpt
Sir Joe ever after: specially among the
human
Noviomagians,