42
CHAPTER III
A NEW DAWN
It was pretty to see the little Signorina revive under the favouring influences of prosperity; and indeed the soft airs of the southern seas were never sweeter nor more caressing than those which came to console our voyagers for their short-lived storm.
Life was full of interest and excitement for the little girl. The heavy lassitude of her steerage days had fallen from her, and already that first morning a delicate glow of returning vigour touched the little cheek.
“She’s picking up, isn’t she?” Mr. DeWitt remarked, as he joined Blythe and the child at the head of the steerage gangway, where the little one was throwing enthusiastic kisses and musical Italian43phrases down upon the hardly less radiant Giuditta.
“Oh, yes!” was the confident reply. “She’s a different child since her saltwater bath and her big bowl of oatmeal. Mamma says she really has a splendid physique, only she was smothering down there in the steerage.”
Then Mr. DeWitt stooped and, lifting the child, set her on the railing, where she could get a better view of her faithful friend below.
“There! How do you like that?” he inquired.
Upon which the little girl, finding herself unexpectedly on a level with Blythe’s face, put up her tiny hand and stroked her cheek.
“Like-a Signorina,” she remarked with apparent irrelevance.
“Oh! You do, do you? Well, she’s a nice girl.”
“Nice-a girl-a,” the child repeated, adding a vowel, Italian fashion, to each word.
Then, with an appreciative look into the pleasant, whiskered countenance,44whose owner was holding her so securely on her precarious perch, she pressed her little hand gently against his waistcoat, and gravely remarked, “Nice-a girl-a,anche il Signore!”
“So! I’m a nice girl too, am I?” the old gentleman replied, much elated with the compliment.
And Giuditta, down below, perceiving that her Signorina was making new conquests, snatched her bright handkerchief from her head, and waved it gaily; whereupon a score of the steerage passengers, seized with her enthusiasm, waved their hats and handkerchiefs and shouted; “Buon’ viaggio, Signorina! Buon’ viaggio!”
And the little recipient of this ovation became so excited that she almost jumped out of the detaining arms of Mr. DeWitt, who, being of a cautious disposition, made haste to set her down again; upon which they all walked aft, under the big awning.
“She makes friends easily,” Mr. Grey remarked, later in the morning, as he and45Blythe paused a moment in their game of ring-toss. The child was standing, clinging to the hand of a tall woman in black, a grave, silent Southerner who had hitherto kept quite to herself.
“Yes,” Blythe rejoined, “but she is fastidious. She will listen to no blandishments from any one whom she doesn’t take a fancy to. That good-natured, talkative Mr. Distel has been trying all day to get her to come to him, but she always gives him the slip.” And Blythe, in her preoccupation, proceeded to throw two rings out of three wide of the mark.
“Has the Count taken any more notice of her?” Mr. Grey inquired, deftly tossing the smallest of all the rings over the top of the post.
“Apparently not; but she takes a great deal of notice of him. See, she’s watching him now. I should not be a bit surprised if she were to speak to him of her own accord one of these days.”
“There are not many days left,” her companion remarked. “The Captain says46we shall make Cape St. Vincent before night.”
“Oh, how fast the voyage is going!” Blythe sighed.
Yet, sorry as she would be to have the voyage over, no one was more enchanted than Blythe when Cape St. Vincent rose out of the sea, marking the end of the Atlantic passage. It was just at sundown, and the beautiful headland, bathed in a golden light, stood, like the mystic battlements of a veritable “Castle in Spain,” against a luminous sky.
“Mamma,” Blythe asked, “did you ever see anything more beautiful than that?”
They were standing at the port railing, with the little girl between them, watching the great cliffs across the deep blue sea.
“Nothing more beautiful than that seen through your eyes, Blythe.”
“I believe you do see it through my eyes, Mumsey,” Blythe answered, thoughtfully, “just as I am getting to see things through Cecilia’s eyes. I never realised before how things open up when you look at them that way.”47
And Mrs. Halliday smiled a quiet, inward smile that Blythe understood with a new understanding.
They took little Cecilia ashore with them at Gibraltar the next morning, and again Blythe experienced the truth of her new theory.
It was our heroine’s first glimpse of Europe, and no delectable detail of their hour’s drive, no exotic bloom, no strange Moorish costume, no enchanting vista of cliff or sea, was lost upon her. Yet she felt that even her enthusiasm paled before the deep, speechless ecstasy of the little Cecilia. It was as if, in the tropical glow and fragrant warmth, the child were breathing her native air,—as if she had come to her own.
On their return, as the grimy old tug which had carried them across the harbour came alongside the big steamer, the child suddenly exclaimed, “Ecco, il Signore!” and, following the direction of her gesture, their eyes met those of the Count looking down upon them. He instantly moved away, and they had soon48forgotten him, in the pleasurable excitement of bestowing upon Giuditta the huge, hat-shaped basket filled with fruit which they had brought for her.
Later in the day, as they weighed anchor and sailed out from the shadow of the great Rock, Blythe found herself standing with Mr. Grey at the stern-rail of their own deck, watching the face of the mighty cliff as it changed with the varying perspective.
“Oh! I wish I were a poet or an artist or something!” she cried.
“Would you take that monstrous fortress for a subject?” he asked.
“Yes, and I should do something so splendid with it that nobody would dare to be satirical!” and she glanced defiantly at her companion, whose good-humoured countenance was wrinkling with amusement.
“Let us see,” he said. “How would this do?” And he gravely repeated the following:
“There once was a fortress named Gib,Whose manners were haughty and—
49
What rhymes with Gib?”
“Glib!” Blythe cried.
“Good!
Whose manners were haughty and glib.If you tried to get in,She replied with a grin,—
Quick! Give me another rhyme for Gib.”
“Rib!” Blythe suggested, audaciously.
“Excellent, excellent! Rib! Now, how does it go?
There once was a fortress named Gib,Whose manners were haughty and glib!If you tried to get in,She replied, with a grin,‘I’m Great Britain’s impregnable rib!’
Rather neat! Don’t you think?”
“O Mr. Grey!” Blythe cried. “You’ve got to write that in my voyage-book! It’s the––”
At that moment, a gesture from her companion caused her to turn and look behind her. There, only a few feet from where they were standing, but with his back to them, was the Count, sitting on one of the long, stationary benches fastened50against the hatchway, while just at his knees stood little Cecilia. She was balancing herself with some difficulty on the gently swaying deck, holding out for his acceptance a small bunch of violets, which one of the market-women at Gibraltar had bestowed upon her.
As he appeared to hesitate: “Prendili!” she cried, with pretty wilfulness. Upon which he took the little offering, and lifted it to his face.
The child stood her ground resolutely, and presently, “Put me up!” she commanded, still in her own sweet tongue.
Obediently he lifted her, and placed her beside him on the seat, where she sat clinging with one little hand to the sleeve of his coat to keep from slipping down, with the gentle dip of the vessel.
The two sat, for a few minutes, quite silent, gazing off toward the African coast, and Blythe and her companion drew nearer, filled with curiosity as to the outcome of the interview.
Presently the child looked up into the Count’s face and inquired, with the pretty51Tuscan accent which sounded like an echo of his own question on the evening of the dance:
“What is thy name?”
“Giovanni Battista Allamiraviglia.”
Cecilia repeated after him the long, musical name, without missing a syllable, and with a certain approving inflection which evidently had an ingratiating effect upon the many-syllabled aristocrat; for he lifted his carefully gloved hand and passed it gently over the little head.
The child took the caress very naturally, and when, presently, the hand returned to the knee, she got possession of it, and began crossing the kid fingers one over the other, quite undisturbed by the fact that they invariably fell apart again as soon as she loosed her hold.
At this juncture the two eavesdroppers moved discreetly away, and Blythe, leaving her fellow-conspirator far behind, flew to her mother’s side, crying:
“O Mumsey! She’s simply winding him round her finger, and there’s nothing he won’t be ready to do for us now!”52
“Yes, dear; I’m delighted to hear it,” Mrs. Halliday replied, with what Blythe was wont to call her “benignant and amused” expression. “And after a while you will tell me what you are talking about!”
But Blythe, nothing daunted, only appealed to Mr. Grey, who had just caught up with her.
“You agree with me, Mr. Grey; don’t you?” she insisted.
“Perfectly, and in every particular. Mrs. Halliday, your daughter and I have been eavesdropping, and we have come to confess.”
Whereupon Blythe dropped upon the foot of her mother’s chair, Mr. Grey established himself in the chair adjoining, and they gave their somewhat bewildered auditor the benefit of a few facts.
“I really believe,” the Englishman remarked, in conclusion,—“I really believe that haughty old dago can help us if anybody can. And when your engaging young protégée has completed her conquest,—to-morrow, it may be, or the day53after, for she’s making quick work of it,—we’ll see what can be done with him.”
And, after all, what could have been more natural than the attraction which, from that time forth, manifested itself between the Count and his small countrywoman? If the little girl, in making her very marked advances, had been governed by the unwavering instinct which always guided her choice of companions, the old man, for his part, could not but find refreshment, after his long, solitary voyage, in the pretty Tuscan prattle of the child. Most Italians love children, and the Count Giovanni Battista Allamiraviglia appeared to be no exception to his race.
The two would sit together by the hour, absorbed, neither in the lovely sights of this wonderful Mediterranean voyage, nor in the movements of those about them, but simply and solely in one another.
“She’s telling her own story better than we could do,” Mr. Grey used to say.
It was now no unusual thing to see the child established on the old gentleman’s knee, and once Blythe found her fast54asleep in his arms. But it was not until the very last day of the voyage that the most wonderful thing of all occurred.
The sea was smooth as a lake, and all day they had been sailing the length of the Riviera. All day people had been giving names to the gleaming white points on the distant, dreamy shore,—Nice, Mentone, San Remo,—names fragrant with association even to the mind of the young traveller, who knew them only from books and letters.
Blythe and the little girl were sitting, somewhat apart from the others, on the long bench by the hatchway where Cecilia had first laid siege to the Count’s affections, and Blythe was allowing the child to look through the large end of her field-glass,—a source of endless entertainment to them both. Suddenly Cecilia gave a little shriek of delight at the way her good friend, Mr. Grey, dwindled into a pigmy; upon which the Count, attracted apparently by her voice, left his chair and came and sat down beside them.
As he lifted his hat, with a polite55“Permetta, Signorina,” Blythe noticed, for the first time on the whole voyage, that he was without his gloves. Perhaps the general humanising of his attitude, through intercourse with the child, had caused him to relax this little point of punctilio.
Cecilia, meanwhile, had promptly climbed upon his knee, and now, laying hold of one of the ungloved hands, she began twisting a large seal ring which presented itself to her mind as a pleasing novelty. Presently her attention seemed arrested by the device of the seal, and she murmured softly, “Fideliter.”
Blythe might not have distinguished the word as being Latin rather than Italian, had she not been struck by the change of countenance in the wearer of the ring. He turned to her abruptly, and asked, in French:
“Does she read?”
“No,” Blythe answered, thankful that she was not obliged to muster her “conjugations” for the emergency!
There was a swift interchange of question and answer between the old man and56the child, of which Blythe understood but little. She heard Cecilia say “Mamma,” in answer to an imperative question; the words “orologio” and “perduto” were intelligible to her. She was sure that the crest and motto formed the subject of discussion, and it was distinctly borne in upon her that the same device—a mailed hand and arm with the wordFideliterbeneath it—had been engraved on a lost watch which had belonged to the child’s mother. But it was all surmise on her part, and she could hardly refrain from shouting aloud to Mr. Grey, standing over there, in dense unconsciousness, to come quickly and interpret this exasperating tongue, which sounded so pretty, and eluded her understanding so hopelessly.
The mind of the Count seemed to be turning in the same direction, for, after a little, he arose abruptly, and, setting the child down beside Blythe, walked straight across the deck to the Englishman, whom he accosted so unceremoniously that Blythe’s sense of wonders unfolding was but confirmed.57
The two men turned and walked away to a more secluded part of the deck, where they remained, deep in conversation, for what seemed to Blythe a long, long time. She felt as if she must not leave her seat, lest she miss the thread of the plot,—for a plot it surely was, with its unravelling close at hand.
At last she saw the two men striding forward in the direction of the steerage, and with a conspicuous absence of that aimlessness which marks the usual promenade at sea.
The little girl was again amusing herself with the glasses, and, as the two arbiters of her destiny passed her line of vision, she laughed aloud at their swiftly diminishing forms. Impelled by a curious feeling that the child must take some serious part in this crucial moment of her destiny, Blythe quietly took the glasses from her and said, as she had done each night when she put her little charge to bed:
“Will you say a little prayer, Cecilia?”
And the child, wondering, yet perfectly docile, pulled out the little mother-of-pearl58rosary that she always wore under her dress, and reverently murmured one of the prayers her mother had taught her. After which, as if beguiled by the association of ideas into thinking it bedtime, she curled herself up on the bench, and, with her head in Blythe’s lap, fell fast asleep.
And Blythe sat, lost in thought, absently stroking the little head, until suddenly Mr. Grey appeared before her.
“You have been outrageously treated, Miss Blythe,” he declared, seating himself beside her, “but I had to let the old fellow have his head.”
“Oh, don’t tell me anything, till we find Mamma,” Blythe cried. “It’s all her doing, you know,—letting me have Cecilia up here,” and, gently rousing the sleeper, she said, “Come, Cecilia. We are going to find the Signora.”
“And you consider it absolutely certain?” Mrs. Halliday asked, when Mr. Grey had finished his tale. She was far more surprised than Blythe, for she had had a longer experience of life, to teach her a distrust in fairy-stories.59
“There does not seem a doubt. The child’s familiarity with the crest was striking enough, but that BelliniMadonnaclinches it. And then, Giuditta’s description of both father and mother seems to be unmistakable.”
“Oh! To think of his finding the child that he had never heard of, just as he had given up the search for her mother!” Blythe exclaimed.
Cecilia was again playing happily with the glasses, paying no heed to her companions.
“The strangest thing of all to me,” Mrs. Halliday declared, “is his relenting toward his daughter after all these years.”
“You must not forget that Fate had been pounding him pretty hard,” Mr. Grey interposed. “When a man loses in one year two of his children, and the only grandchild he knows anything about, it’s not surprising that he should soften a bit toward the only child he has left.”
They were still discussing this wonderful subject, when, half an hour later, the tall figure of the Count emerged from the60companionway. As he bent his steps toward the other side of the deck he was visible only to the child, who stood facing the rest of the group. She promptly dropped the glasses upon Blythe’s knee, and crying, “Il Signore!” ran and took hold of his hand; whereupon the two walked away together and were not seen for a long, long time.
Then Blythe and Mr. Grey went up on the bridge and told the Captain. No one else was to know—not even Mr. DeWitt—until after they had landed, but the Captain was certainly entitled to their confidence.
“For,” Blythe said, “you know, Captain Seemann, it never would have happened if you had not sent us up in the crow’s nest that day.”
Upon which the Captain, beaming his brightest, and letting his cigar go out in the damp breeze for the sake of making his little speech, declared:
“I know one thing! It would neffer haf happen at all, if I had sent anybody else up in the crow’s nest but just Miss61Blythe Halliday with her bright eyes and her kind heart!”
And Blythe was so overpowered by this tremendous compliment from the Captain of theLoreleithat she had not a word to say for herself.
That evening Mr. Grey inscribed his nonsense-verse in Blythe’s book; and not that only, for to those classic lines he added the following:
“The above was composed in collaboration with his esteemed fellow-passenger, Miss Blythe Halliday, by Hugh Dalton,alias‘Mr. Grey.’”
It was, of course, a great distinction to own such an autograph as that; yet somehow the kind, witty Mr. Grey had been so delightful just as he was, that Blythe hardly felt as if the famous name added so very much to her satisfaction in his acquaintance.
“I knew it all the time,” she declared, quietly; “but it didn’t make any difference.”
“That’s worth hearing,” said Hugh Dalton.62
They parted from the little Cecilia at sunrise, but with promises on both sides of a speedy meeting among the hills of Tuscany.
The old Count, with the child’s hand clasped in his, paused as he reached the gangway, at the foot of which the triumphant Giuditta was awaiting them, and pointed toward the rosy east which was flushing the beautiful bay a deep crimson.
“Signorina,” he said in his careful French, made more careful by his effort to control his voice,—“Signorina, it is to you that I owe a new dawn,—to you and to your honoured mother.”
Then, as Mr. DeWitt and Mr. Grey approached, to tell them that everything was in readiness for them to land, Blythe turned, with the light of the sunrise in her face, and said, under her breath, so that only her mother could hear:
“O Mumsey! How beautiful the world is, with you and me right in the very middle of it!”
Artful Madge
CHAPTER I
THE PRIZE CONTEST
“Artful Madge” was the very flippant name by which Madge Burtwell’s brother Ned had persisted in calling her from the time when, at the age of sixteen, she gained reluctant permission to become a student at the Art School.
“Not that we have any objection to art,” Mrs. Burtwell was wont to explain in a deprecatory tone; “only we should have preferred to have Madge graduate first, before devoting herself to a mere accomplishment. It seems a little like putting the trimming on a dress before sewing the seams up,” she would add; “I did it once when I was a girl, and the dress always had a queer look.”
But Mrs. Burtwell, though firm in her66own opinions, was something of a philosopher in her attitude toward the contrary-minded, and even where her own children were concerned she never allowed her influence to degenerate into tyranny. When she found Madge, at the age of sixteen, more eager than ever before to study art, and nothing else, she told her husband that they might as well make up their minds to it, and, at the word, their minds were made up. For Mr. Burtwell was the one entirely and unreasoningly tractable member of Mrs. Burtwell’s flock; in explanation of which fact he was careful to point out that only a mature mind could appreciate the true worth of Mrs. Burtwell’s judgment.
The Burtwells were people of small means and of correspondingly modest requirements. They lived in an unfashionable quarter of the city, kept a maid-of-all-work, sent their children to the public schools, and got their books from the Public Library. Having no expensive tastes, they regarded themselves as well-to-do and envied no one.67
If Madge Burtwell’s eyes had been a whit less clear, or her nature a thought less guileless, Ned would not have been so enchanted with his new name for her. Indeed, a few years ago she had been described by an only half-appreciative friend as “a splendid girl without a mite of tact,” and if she had succeeded in somewhat softening the asperity of her natural frankness, there was enough of it left to lend a delicate shade of humour to the name.
Artful Madge, then, was a student at the Art School, and a very promising one at that. At the end of three years she had made such good progress that she was promoted to painting in the Portrait Class, and since her special friend and crony, Eleanor Merritt, was also a member of that class, Madge considered her cup of happiness full. Not that there were not visions in plenty of still better things to come, but they seemed so far in the future that they hardly took on any relation with the actual present. Madge and Eleanor dreamed of Europe, of the old masters68and of the great Paris studios, but it is a question whether the fulfillment of any dream could have made them happier than they were to-day. Certain it is, that, as they stood side by side in the great barren studio, clad in their much-bedaubed, long-sleeved aprons, and working away at a portrait head, they had little thought for anything but the task in hand. The one vital matter for the moment was the mixing and applying of their colours, and, in their eagerness to reproduce the exact contour of a cheek, or the precise shadow of an unbeautiful nose, they would hardly have transferred their attention from the most ill-favoured model to the last and greatest Whistler masterpiece.
The girls at the Art School had got hold of Ned’s name for his sister and adopted it with enthusiasm.
“If you want to know the truth, ask Artful Madge,” was a very common saying among them.
“Artful Madge says it’s a good likeness, anyhow!” modest little Minnie Drayton would maintain, when hard69pressed by the teasing of the older girls.
The incongruity of the name seemed somehow to throw into brighter relief the peculiar sincerity of its bearer’s character, and by the time it was generally adopted among the students Madge Burtwell’s popularity was established.
It was well that Madge was a favourite, for in certain respects she was the worst sinner in the class. To begin with, her palette was the very largest in the room, and the most plentifully besmeared with colours, and woe to the girl who ventured too near it! As Madge stood before her easel, tall and fair and earnest, painting with an ardour and concentration which was all too sure to beguile her into her besetting sin of “exaggerating details,” she wielded both brush- and palette-arm with a genial disregard of consequences. Nor could one count upon her confining her activities to one location. Like all the students, she was in the habit of backing away from her natural anchorage from time to time, the better to judge of her70work, and not one of them all had such a fatal tendency to come up against an unoffending easel in the rear, sending canvas and paint-tubes rattling upon the floor.
Instantly she would drop upon her knees, overcome with contrition, and help collect the scattered treasures, giving many a jar or joggle to neighbouring easels in the process.
“It’s a shame, Miss Folsom!” she would cry, struggling to her feet again, still clutching her beloved palette, which seemed fairly to rain colours on every surrounding object. “It’s a shame! But if you will just cast your eye upon that thing of mine, you will perceive that it was the recklessness of desperation. Look at it! There’s not a value in it!”
Artful Madge was always forgiven, and no one ever thought of calling her awkward, and when, in the early autumn, a Saturday sketching club was organised, it was christened “The Artful Daubers” in honor of Madge, and she was unanimously elected president.
The girls were not in the habit of paying71much attention to chance visitors who came in from time to time and made the perilous passage among the easels, and lucky was the “parent” or “art-patron” who escaped without a streak of colour on some portion of his raiment. When Mrs. Oliver Jacques looked in upon them one memorable morning in February no premonition of great things to come stirred the company; only indifferent glances were directed upon her by the few who deigned to observe her at all. And this pleased Mrs. Oliver Jacques very much indeed.
Yet, if the girls had paused to consider,—a thing which they never did when there was a model on the platform,—they would have been aware that their visitor was a person of importance in the world of Art, for importance in no other world would have secured to her the personal escort of Mr. Salome, the adored teacher of their class. Yet Mrs. Jacques was a charming little old lady who would have commanded attention on her own merits in any less preoccupied assembly than72that of the studio. Her exceedingly bright eyes and her exceedingly white hair seemed to accentuate her animation of manner; there was so much sparkle in her face that even her silence did not lack point.
She had accomplished her tortuous passage among the easels without meeting with any mishaps in the shape of Cremnitz-white or crimson-lake. She had paused occasionally and had bestowed a critical nod upon the one “blocked-in” countenance, or had drawn her brows together questioningly over a study in which the nose had a startlingly finished appearance in a still sketchy environment, but not until she had successfully avoided the last easel, planted at an erratic angle just where the unwary would be sure to stub his toe, did she make any remark.
“A lot of them, aren’t there?” she observed.
“Yes, the school is pretty full,” Mr. Salome replied. “In fact, we’re a little bothered for room.”
“Any imagination among them?”73
“Well, as to that, it’s rather early to form an opinion. Our aim just now is to keep them to facts. Some of them,” the artist added with a smile, “are rather too much inclined to draw upon their imagination. Now there is one girl there who is, humanly speaking, certain to paint the model’s hair jet-black, or as black as paint can be made. And yet, you see, there is not a black thread in it.”
“I wonder whether you would object to my making an experiment?” Mrs. Jacques asked, abruptly.
And from that seemingly unpremeditated question of Mrs. Jacques’, and from the consultation that ensued, grew the Prize Contest, destined to be famous in the annals of the school.
When, on that very afternoon, the students were assembled for the occasion, they had not yet had time to adjust their minds to the magnitude of the interests involved. Yet the conditions were simple enough. That student who should, in the space of two hours, produce the best composition illustrative of “Hope” was to74receive a prize of five hundred dollars! The conviction prevailed among them that the vivacious little old lady with the white hair could be none other than the fairy godmother of nursery lore, and it was only too delightful to find that agile and beneficent myth interesting herself in the cause of Art.
When once the class was fairly launched upon its new emprise, a change in the usual aspect of things became apparent. In the first place, most of the students were seated; for, in a task of pure composition, there was no occasion either for standing or for “prowling,”—the term familiarly applied to the sometimes disastrous backward and forward movements of which mention has been made, and which ordinarily gave so much action to the scene. Furthermore, the use of watercolor, as lending itself more readily than oils to rapid execution, deprived the scene of one of its most picturesque features,—namely, the brilliant-hued palette which, with its similarity to a shield, was wont to lend its bearer an Amazonian air, not lost75upon the class caricaturists. Subdued, however, and almost “lady-like” as the appearance of the class had become, hardly half an hour had passed before the genial spirit of creation had so taken possession of the assembly as to cast a glow and glamour of its own upon it. Here and there, to be sure, might still be seen an anxious, intent young face with eyes fixed upon vacancy, or an idle, if somewhat begrimed and parti-coloured hand, fiercely clutching a dejected head; but nearly all were already busily at work, eagerly painting, or as eagerly obliterating strokes too hastily made. The subject, hackneyed as it certainly is, had pleased and stimulated the girls. There was a mingled vagueness and familiarity in its suggestion which puzzled them and spurred them on at the same time.
Among the most impetuous workers, almost from the outset, was Artful Madge. She had instantly conceived of Hope as a vague, beckoning figure, which was to take its significance from the multitude and variety of its followers. She chose a large76sheet of paper and quickly sketched in the upper left-hand corner a very indefinite hint of a winged, luminous something,—it might have been an angel or a bird or a cloud, seen from a great distance, against a somewhat threatening sky. Without defining the form at all she very cleverly produced an impression of receding motion;—she ventured even to hope that there was something alluring in the motion. That, however, must be made unmistakably clear through the pursuing figures with which she proposed to fill the foreground.
She glanced at Eleanor, who had not yet mixed a colour.
“What are you waiting for?” she asked.
“I don’t seem ready to begin,” said Eleanor, in an absent tone of voice.
“Have you got an idea?”
“I think so.”
“Then do hurry up and go ahead, or you’ll get left.”
Madge sat a moment, looking straight before her.77
“What are you going to put in there?” asked Eleanor.
“What I want is all the people in the world,” Madge replied, with perfect gravity. “But there is not room for them.”
A moment later she was working furiously, with hot cheeks and shining eyes and breath coming faster and faster.
First she would have a soldier. Madge had always loved a soldier; her father had been one in the great and splendid days before she was born. Yes, a soldier must come first. And forthwith a very sketchy warrior stepped, with a very martial air, upon the paper. Then an artist ought to come next;—only she could not think of any way of indicating his calling without the aid of some conventional emblem. A mere look of inspiration might belong to a poet or a preacher as well as to an artist. Besides which, she was by no means sure that she knew how to paint a look of inspiration. And then it came to her that, unless she could paint just that, her picture must be a failure; and so she fell upon it, and began sketching in figures of78old and young, rich and poor, trying only to put into each face the eager, upward look which should focus all, in spirit as well as in actual direction, upon the flying, luminous figure. In some attempts she succeeded and in some she failed. There was one old woman, with abnormally deep wrinkles, and shoulders somewhat out of drawing, whose face had caught a curiously inspired look; Madge did not dare touch her again for fear of losing it. Her artist, on the other hand, the young man with the ideal brow and very large eyes, grew more and more inane and expressionless the more eagerly his creator worked at him.
On the whole, the production as a two-hour composition by a three-year student was rather good than bad. When time was called Madge felt pretty sure that she should not win the prize; she had undertaken too much, both for the occasion and for her own ability. And yet it was borne in upon her to-day that she was going to make a better artist than she had ever before dared hope.79
So absorbed had she been in her own work, that she had completely forgotten Eleanor, and had not even been aware that her friend had begun painting an hour ago. Now she turned to her with compunction in her heart. Eleanor held her finished sketch in her hand, but her eyes had wandered to the high, broad north window which was one great sheet of radiant blue sky.
Eleanor’s composition was very simple, but extremely well done, and in the glance Madge was able to give it before the sketches were handed in she saw that it was delicately suggestive. It represented a curving shore, a quiet sea, and a saffron sky,—no sails on the sea, no clouds in the sky. Upon the shore stood a solitary pine-tree, almost denuded of branches, and against the tree leaned the slender figure of a youth, looking dreamily across the sea to the horizon, where the saffron colour was tinged with gold. That was all, but Madge felt sure that it was enough; and, as she thought about it, she felt herself very small and crude and80confused, and she was conscious of a perfectly calm and dispassionate wish to tear her own sketch in two. She did not do so, however. There was no irritation, nor envy, nor even displeasure, in her mind. She had not supposed that either she or Eleanor could do anything so good as that sketch,—since one of them could, why, that was just so much clear gain.
A moment later the studio was in a tumult. The sketches had been handed over to the three judges, who had gone into instant consultation over them. Mrs. Jacques had decreed, with characteristic decision, that the judges were bound to be as prompt as the competitors, and the award was promised within half an hour. What wonder if the usual tumult of dispersion was increased tenfold by the excitement of the occasion? The voices were pitched in a higher key, the easels clattered more noisily than ever, there was a more lively movement among the many-hued aprons, as they were pulled off and consigned with many a shake and a flourish to their respective pegs.
“Eleanor’s eyes had wandered to the high, broad north window.”
“Eleanor’s eyes had wandered to the high, broad north window.”
81
“What did you paint?” asked one high voice, whose owner was enthusiastically shaking the water from her paint-brush all over the floor.
“I painted you—working for the prize.”
“Not really!”
“Yes, really! You were just at the right angle for it, and you did look so hopeful!”
“You can’t make me believe you played such a shabby trick upon me, Mary Downing!”
“Shabby! If you knew how good-looking you were at a three-eighths’ angle you would be grateful to me! You did have such an inspired look for a little while,—before you got disgusted, and began to wash out.”
“Jane Rhoades did an awfully pretty thing—a white bird with a boy running after it. But I felt perfectly certain that the little wretch had a gun in his other hand!”
“What a fiery head you gave your angel, Mattie Stiles! He looked like Loge inRheingold!”
“I don’t care,” said Mattie, in a tone of82voice that showed that she did care very much indeed. “I do like red hair, and we haven’t had a chance to paint any all winter.”
“Red hair wouldn’t make Titians of us,” sighed Miss Isabella Ricker, who was of a despondent temperament.
“It wouldn’t be any hindrance, anyhow!” Mattie insisted.
Meanwhile the half-hour was drawing to a close. A general air of rough order had descended upon the studio. The girls were sitting or standing about in groups, their remarks getting more disjointed and irrelevant as the nervousness of anticipation grew upon them. Madge and Eleanor had found a seat on the steps of the platform. The former was making a pencil sketch of Miss Isabella Ricker, who had abandoned herself to dejection in a remote corner of the room. Madge looked up suddenly, and found that Eleanor was watching her work.
“Your thing is very interesting,” she remarked, in a reserved tone, which, nevertheless, sent the colour mounting slowly83up her friend’s sensitive cheek. They both understood that no more commendatory adjective than “interesting” was to be found in the art-student’s vocabulary.
“You’re partial, Madge.”
“Not a bit of it. But I know an interesting thing when I see it. If you win the prize,” she asked abruptly, “what shall you do with the money?”
“If you go to the moon next week, what shall you do with the green cheese?” Eleanor retorted, with an unprecedented outburst of sarcasm.
“I think you might answer my question,” said Madge; and at that instant the door opened and a hush fell upon the room.
The suspense was not painfully prolonged. The Curator of the Art Museum, who had been associated with Mrs. Jacques and Mr. Salome as judge, stepped upon the platform, from which Madge and Eleanor had precipitately retreated, and made the following announcement:
“We have, on the whole,” he said, “been very well pleased with the work we84have had to consider. In fact, several of the sketches were better than anything we had looked for. Nevertheless our decision was not a difficult one, and our choice is unanimous. The prize which Mrs. Jacques has had the originality and the generosity to offer has been awarded to Mary Eleanor Merritt.”
“And now will you answer my question?”
Madge and Eleanor were walking home together through the light snow which had just begun to fall. They had been curiously shy of speaking, and, before the silence was broken, a pretty wreath of snow had formed itself about the rim of each of their black felt hats, while little ribbons of it were decorating the folds of their garments.
“What are you going to do with your green cheese?”
“I shall go to Paris next autumn,” said Eleanor, tightly clasping the check which she held inside her muff.85
“That’s what I thought,” said Madge; and if her eyes grew a trifle red and moist it was perhaps natural enough, since the snow was flying straight into them.