Chapter 197: Introductions
Of course, even after a month, the work was only halfway done. They still spent days and days cementing the thing in place once Bertrand was happy with the placement of all the pieces. It was only when the entire project wasfinished, and they’d spent half a day sealing and polishing it with a cake of beeswax that they sat on the canyon rim and admired it from above with a celebratory bottle of wine.
Simon was pleased. Even if it wasn’t perfect, the giant mosaic below was a much better effort than all of the paintings that Bertrand had made up until now. Once he stopped obsessing over the quality of his lines and his strokes and was forced to use nothing but imperfections, he finally got out of his own way, Simon thought to himself. He said none of that to the boy, though. He was already smiling from ear to ear. Now, all that needed to be done was show his father.
The two of them returned from the canyon skinner and dirtier from the wear. Simon said nothing about the fight, and Lord Alexin was pleased enough at the mosaic once he’d set eyes on it that he said, “It’s a shame you put it all the way out here where I cannot rub the faces of my rivals in the work of my son.” That was as high a praise as Bertrand was ever likely to receive from the man, but even so, he beamed.
“Sometimes art must be done for its own sake,” Simon said, “In this case, the audience was only a single person.” He let that comment hang there, unwilling to specify whether the audience was the father, the teacher, or the artist himself. That was the main lesson he’d got from being a teacher so far. The longer he asked questions of children to get them to think about things, the more he realized there were often many answers to the same question.
The three of them rode back to the house together after that, and on the way, Bertrand’s father offered him a commission to retile the guest house at their summer estate in similar heroic themes. The price for the task was a little low, but that was the way the man was with his tests, and Simon vowed to help the boy cut some costs with a couple of the suppliers he knew to make the project that much more lucrative for him.
In private, Lord Alexin confessed, “I did not know if your mad plan would work, but now, after thinking on it, I believe that simply tearing that boy away from his friends and the girls might have done as much good as all the broken pottery and high-minded ideals in the world.”
“Hence the guest house,” Simon said, acting perfectly aware of the man’s ulterior motive, even though he hadn’t given the isolation part of the project a lot of thought since those first few days when his pupil had been nothing but complaints.
“Hence the guest house,” the Lord agreed.
Bertrand never mentioned the way that Simon slew the bandits to anyone, but once he completed his task and redid the floors with brand-new works of art for his father to brag about, he begged Simon to add sword lessons to his curriculum. Simon saw no problem with that. He’d done plenty of art at this point and was spending more and more time teaching Bertrand’s younger siblings, so he had plenty of time. He was running down the clock now.