“Was it in the London papers?” he cried. “Oh, I see; you have been talking to the driver of the car. Poor ould Denny! He was everybody’s friend.”
“And yet quite harmless? The place will never seem the same to me as it would have done if I had not arrived too late to see Denny. Was he your assistant, or what?”
“He was simply ‘poor ould Denny!”’ he said. “That was his profession. It was pretty comprehensive, I can tell you. He was here when the house would be overcrowded with ten guests. He roofed a whole wing with his own hands. Then he dug the pit for the gasometer, thirty years ago, and he lived to dam the trout stream that works the dynamo for the electric light. He was also an accomplished _masseur_, and set up the hatchery that supplied the stream with trout.”
“His name should have been Crichton, not Callan. Anything else?”
“He could do tricks on the billiard table, and he knew all that there is to be known about hair-cutting.”
“That’s all--no, stay! he was a sculptor’s model for some time. I can show you the result of his labours in this direction, if you would care to see it.”
He led me half-way round the building, from where the two storeys of the centre block dwindled away to the single bedroom sheds of one wing. We passed by the side of the terrace garden, and I made a remark respecting the fine carving on some of the stone vases.
“They were the work of the sculptor who chose Denny for his model,” said the doctor. “Here we are.”
I followed him between two fine cedars, and in another instant we were face to face with a very striking colossal figure of a man holding aloft a goblet. The head and the torso were very powerful, but the latter was joined on to a conventional Greek pedestal, at the foot of which there peeped out four tiny hoofs of satyrs.
“What do you think of it? my friend inquired?” I told him that I thought there was a good deal of strength in the modelling of the figure, but I could not understand the satyrs’ hoofs.
“I take it for granted that the sculptor left the hair unfinished,’ I added; for one could not help remarking the roughness of the masses at the top of the head. The sculptor had merely blocked out the heavy locks of hair; he had made no attempt to define them.