I

It was one of the secret opinions, such as we all have, of Peter Brench that his main success in life would have consisted in his never having committed himself about the work, as it was called, of his friend Morgan Mallow.  This was a subject on which it was, to the best of his belief, impossible with veracity to quote him, and it was nowhere on record that he had, in the connexion, on any occasion and in any embarrassment, either lied or spoken the truth.  Such a triumph had its honour even for a man of other triumphs—­a man who had reached fifty, who had escaped marriage, who had lived within his means, who had been in love with Mrs Mallow for years without breathing it, and who, last but not least, had judged himself once for all.  He had so judged himself in fact that he felt an extreme and general humility to be his proper portion; yet there was nothing that made him think so well of his parts as the course he had steered so often through the shallows just mentioned.  It became thus a real wonder that the friends in whom he had most confidence were just those with whom he had most reserves.  He couldn’t tell Mrs Mallow—­or at least he supposed, excellent man, he couldn’t—­that she was the one beautiful reason he had never married; any more than he could tell her husband that the sight of the multiplied marbles in that gentleman’s studio was an affliction of which even time had never blunted the edge.  His victory, however, as I have intimated, in regard to these productions, was not simply in his not having let it out that he deplored them; it was, remarkably, in his not having kept it in by anything else.

The whole situation, among these good people, was verily a marvel, and there was probably not such another for a long way from the spot that engages us—­the point at which the soft declivity of Hampstead began at that time to confess in broken accents to Saint John’s Wood.  He despised Mallow’s statues and adored Mallow’s wife, and yet was distinctly fond of Mallow, to whom, in turn, he was equally dear.  Mrs Mallow rejoiced in the statues—­though she preferred, when pressed, the busts; and if she was visibly attached to Peter Brench it was because of his affection for Morgan.  Each loved the other moreover for the love borne in each case to Lancelot, whom the Mallows respectively cherished as their only child and whom the friend of their fireside identified as the third—­but decidedly the handsomest—­of his godsons.  Already in the old years it had come to that—­that no one, for such a relation, could possibly have occurred to any of them, even to the baby itself, but Peter.  There was luckily a certain independence, of the pecuniary sort, all round:  the Master could never otherwise have spent his solemn Wanderjahre in Florence and Rome, and continued by the Thames as well as by the Arno and the Tiber to add unpurchased group to group and model, for what was too apt to prove in the event