Alva painted unweariedly for several hours, and declared herself
charmed with her lovely, patient model.
Floy was enthusiastic, too. She declared that she could not be grateful
enough to Miss Beresford for putting her face in that enchanting
picture.
“Only think!” she cried. “When I am dead and gone--when the light has
faded from my eyes--when this form of mine is dust in a forgotten
grave--this beauty will live on upon the deathless canvas, and some one
may say of me: ‘She was so pretty, this little Floy Fane, that Miss
Beresford made her face immortal by painting it as Cupid.’”
Alva saw that the girl’s delight was genuine, and it charmed her very
much.
“I shall put you in other pictures, too,” she said. “Last night, after
I left you, the thought came to me to paint your portrait in a simple
white gown, and call it ‘Maidenhood.’ Do you like the idea?”
“I am charmed!” cried Floy.
“You remember Longfellow’s ‘Maidenhood’?” continued Alva; and she
murmured some of the verses:
“‘Maiden with the meek brown eyes,
In whose orbs a shadow lies,
Like the dusk in evening skies.
“‘Thou whose locks outshine the sun,
Golden tresses wreathed in one,
As the braided streamlets run:
“‘Standing with reluctant feet,
Where the brook and river meet,
Womanhood and childhood fleet.’”
“How old are you, Floy?”
“Almost seventeen.”
“A charming age--the time of illusions! I am twenty-eight, dear--almost
an old maid.”
“You do not look twenty.”
“So they tell me; but my heart is even older than my years,” with a
suppressed sigh; then, smiling: “Have you ever had a lover, Floy? Why,
how frightened you look--how deeply you blush! Never mind; you needn’t
answer, child; your face tells its own conscious story.”
“Oh, if she only knew the name of that lover!” thought Floy, with
quickened heart-beats; but she did not feel much frightened. She hoped
that the haughty Beresfords who admired her so much would find it easy
to forgive St. George for his choice.
But in the meantime she must keep her pretty secret, as he had
commanded her to do. She would not tell them a word till he should take
her by the hand and say:
“Pretty little Floy is my heart’s choice.”
How impatiently she waited for that day, only God and the angels knew.
For the thought of his illness and the secret terror that he might die,
far away from his beloved, kept Floy awake many hours each night.
But if Alva were uneasy over her sick brother, she concealed it
cleverly, or did not think that her pretty model had any interest in
the subject, for she never mentioned it again until more than a week
had passed away.
Then Floy, tortured by a secret unrest, cried out one day:
“Have you never heard from your parents yet?”
Alva was so busy she did not look around from her picture, and only
answered:
“No. It is only a week since they went, you see, and they would not
send a cablegram unless St. George was very ill. I dare say it was all
a false alarm.”
Floy feared it was not, for although she had written secretly to the
postmaster at Mount Vernon to forward her letters, none had been
received, and she knew there must be some reason for his ceasing to
write.
At last she ventured on a little loving letter to him, but by freak of
fate it went astray, and the lover’s heart lost the joy it would have
brought.
At length there came letters for Alva from abroad, and then she said to
Floy:
“It was all true about my brother, mamma says. He has been very, very
ill with brain fever, and came near to death.”
They were sitting alone in the twilight, so Alva did not see the
corpse-like pallor of the listener’s face as Floy clinched her dimpled
hands together in her lap, silently praying Heaven not to let her cry
out in her anguish and betray her loving secret.
“But,” continued Alva, “the crisis passed the day they reached
London, and my brother is slightly better. The physicians say he may
recover--unless he has a relapse.”
Floy could not answer one word. It was all that she could do to keep
her reeling senses from failing altogether.
St. George, her heart’s love, her idol, ill unto death, and parted from
her by the breadth of the terrible sea! Oh, it was cruel, cruel!
And she dared not cry out to this woman, his own sister:
“Pity me, sympathize with me, for I love him; he is my own, my own, and
if he dies my heart will break!”
Not one word of grief must she utter unless the tidings came that he
was dead.
Then she might open the flood-gates of her love and despair, for
betrayal would not matter when he was gone.
But she sat like a stone in the twilight of the room, so cold, so
white, so still, and waited for Alva to say more.
Alva was in a bitter mood, that came to her sometimes when the memory
of her past was revived.
She had been struggling to repress herself, but all in vain, for
now, half forgetting Floy’s presence, she cried out with passionate
indignation:
“If he dies, that poor boy, my brother, his broken heart and early
death will lie at his mother’s door!”