THE PORTRAIT
To Nancy's surprise Hitty welcomed the little girl warmly, when she
was introduced into the family circle. She liked to be busy all day,
and her duties in taking care of Nancy were not onerous enough to keep
her full energy employed. She liked children and family life, and she
seemed to have the feeling that if Nancy continued to assemble the
various parts that go to make up a family, she would end by adding to
it the essential masculine element, though it was Dick and not Collier
Pratt that she visualized at the head of the table cutting up Sheila's
meat for her. Collier Pratt was to her a necessary but insignificant
detail in Nancy's scheme of things, a poor artist who had "frittered
away so much time in furrin parts" that he was incapable of supporting
his only child--"poor little motherless lamb!"--in anything like a
befitting and adequate manner. Whenever he came to see Sheila she
treated him with the condescension of a poor relation, and served his
tea in the second best china with the kitchen silver and linen, unless
Nancy caught her at it in time to demand the best.
Nancy had expected that Collier Pratt would try to make some business
arrangement with her when she took Sheila in charge,--that he would
insist on paying her at least a nominal sum a week for the child's
board. She had lain awake nights planning the conversations with him
in which she would overcome his delicate but natural scruples in the
matter and persuade him to her own way of thinking. She had even fixed
on the smallest sum--two dollars and a half a week--at which she
thought she might induce him to compromise, if all her eloquence
failed. She knew that he considered her the hard working, paid manager
of Outside Inn, and took it for granted that she had no other source
of income. She was a little disconcerted that he made no effort,
beyond thanking her sincerely and simply for her kindness, to put the
matter on a more concrete basis, but when he told her presently that
he was going to do a portrait of her, she scourged herself for her New
England perspective on an affair that he handled with so much
delicacy.
Her friends were, on the whole, pleased with her experiment in
vicarious motherhood. Dick instinctively resented the fact that Nancy
had taken Collier Pratt's daughter into her home and heart, but the
child herself was a delight to him, and he spent hours romping with
her and telling her stories, loading her with toys and sweetmeats, and
taking her off for enchanting holiday excursions "over the Palisades
and far away." Billy was hardly less diverted with her, and Betty
regarded her advent as a provision on the part of Providence against
things becoming too commonplace. Caroline, as was her wont, took the
child very seriously, and tried to interest Nancy in all the latest
educational theories for her development, including posture dancing,
and potato raising.
Nancy herself had loved the child from the moment the big lustrous
gray eyes opened, on the day of her sudden illness at Outside Inn, and
looked confidingly up into hers. For the first time in her life her
maternal ardor--the instinct which made her yearn to nourish and
minister to a race--had concentrated on a single human being. Sheila,
hungry for mothering, had turned to her with the simplicity of the
people among whom she had been brought up, taking her sympathetic
response as a matter of course; and the two were soon on the closest,
most affectionate terms.
Sheila and Outside Inn divided Nancy's time to the practical exclusion
of all other interests. She had, without realizing her processes,
taken into her life artificial responsibilities in almost exact
proportion to the normal ones of any woman who makes the choice of
marriage rather than that of a career. She was doing housekeeping on a
large scale,--she had a child to care for, and she felt that she had
entirely disproved any lingering feeling in the mind of any one
associated with her that she ought to marry,--at least that she ought
to marry Dick.
No woman ought to marry for the sake of marrying, but she was growing
to understand now that the experiences of love and marriage might be
necessary to the true development of a woman like herself; that there
might even be some tragedy in missing them. She was twenty-five,
practically alone in the world, and the growing passion of her life
was for a child that she had borrowed, and might be constrained to
relinquish at any moment.
She was tired. The unaccustomed confinement of the long hours at the
Inn, the strain of enduring the thick, almost unalleviated heat of an
exceptionally humid New York summer, and the tension engendered by her
various executive responsibilities, all told on her physically, and
her physical condition in its turn reacted on her mind, till she was
conscious of a nostalgia,--a yearning and a hunger for something that
she could not understand or name, but that was none the less
irresistible. She fell into strange moods of brooding and lassitude;
but there were two connections in which her spirit and ambition never
failed her. She never failed of interest in the distribution of food
values to her unconscious patrons, and incidentally to Collier Pratt,
or in directing the activities and diversions of Sheila.
She bathed and dressed the child with her own hands every morning,
combed out the cloudy black hair, fine spun and wavy, that framed the
delicate face, and accentuated the dazzling white and pink of her
coloring. She had bought her a complete new wardrobe--she was spending
money freely now on every one but herself--venturing on one dress at a
time in fear and trepidation lest Collier Pratt should suddenly call
her to account for her interference with his rights as a parent, but
he seemed entirely oblivious of the fact that Sheila had changed her
shabby studio black for the most cobwebby of muslins and linens,
frocks that by virtue of their exquisite fineness cost Nancy
considerably more than her own.
"I say to my father, 'See the pretty new gown that Miss Dear bought
for me,' and my father says to me, 'Comb your hair straight back from
your brow, and don't let your arms dangle from your shoulders.'"
Sheila complained, "He sees so hard the little things that nobody
sees--and big things like a dress or a hat he does not notice."
"Men are like that," Nancy said. "Last night when I put on my new
rose-colored gown for the first time, your friend Monsieur Dick told
me he had always liked that dress best of all."
"_Comme il est drôle_, Monsieur Dick," Sheila said; "he asked me to
grow up and marry him some day. He said I should sit on a cushion and
sew a fine seam, and feast upon strawberries, sugar and cream--like
the poetry."
"And what did you say?" Nancy asked.
"I said that I thought I should like to marry him if I ever got to be
big enough,--but I was afraid I should not be bigger for a long time.
Miss Betty said she would marry him if I was _trop petite_."
"What did Dick say to that?" Nancy could not forbear asking.
"He said she was very kind, and maybe the time might come when he
would think seriously of her offer."
There was a feeling in Nancy's breast as if her heart had suddenly got
up and sat down again. Betty bore no remotest resemblance to the pale
kind girl, practically devoid of feminine allure, that Nancy had
visualized as the mate for Dick, and frequently exhorted him to go in
search of.
"Miss Betty was only making a joke," she told Sheila sharply.
"We were all making jokes, Miss Dear," Sheila explained.
"I have never loved any one in the world quite so much as I love you,
Sheila," Nancy cried in sudden passion as the little girl turned her
face up to be kissed, as she always did when the conversation puzzled
her.
"I like being loved," Sheila said, sighing happily. "My father loves
me,--when he is not painting or eating. He is very good to me, I
think."
"Your father is a very wise man, Sheila," Nancy said, "he understands
beautiful things that other people don't know anything about. He looks
at a flower and knows all about it, and--and what it needs to make it
flourish. He looks at people that way, too."
"But he doesn't always have time to get the flower what it wants,"
Sheila said; "my jessamine died in Paris because he forgot to water
them."
"Your father needs taking care of himself, Sheila. We must plan ways
of trying to make him more comfortable. Don't you think of something
that he needs that we could get for him?"
"More socks--he would like," Sheila said unexpectedly. "When his socks
get holes in them he will not wear them. He stops whatever he is doing
to mend them, and the mends hurt him. He mends my stockings, too,
sometimes, but I like better the holes especially when he mends them
on my feet."
Sheila could have presented no more appealing picture of her father to
Nancy's vivid imagination. Collier Pratt with the incongruous sewing
equipment of the unaccustomed male, using, more than likely, black
darning cotton on a white sock--Nancy's mental pictures were always
full of the most realistic detail--bent tediously over a child's
stocking, while the precious sunlight was streaming unheeded upon the
waiting canvas. She darned very badly herself, but the desire was not
less strong in her to take from him all these preposterous and
unbefitting tasks, and execute them with her own hands. She stared at
the child fixedly.
"You buy him some socks out of your allowance," she said at last. Then
she added an anxious and inadequate "Oh, dear!"
"Aren't you happy?" Sheila asked in unconscious imitation of Dick,
with whom she had been spending most of her time for days, while Nancy
superintended the additions and improvements she was making in the
up-stairs quarters of her Inn, preparatory to moving in for the
winter.
"Yes, I'm happy," Nancy said, "but I'm sort of--stirred, too. I wish
you were my own little girl, Sheila. I think I'll take you with me to
the Inn to-day. You might melt and trickle away if I left you alone
here with Hitty."
"_Quelle joie!_ I mean, how nice that will be! Then I can talk about
Paris to Gaspard, and he will give me some baba, with a _soupçon of
maraschine_ in the sauce, if you will tell him that I may, Miss Dear."
"I'll think about it." It was Nancy's dearest privilege to be asked
and grant permission for such indulgences. "Put on that floppy white
hat with the yellow ribbon, and take your white coat."
"When I had only one dress to wear I suppose I got just as dirty,"
Sheila reflected, "only it didn't show on black satin. Now I can tell
just how dirty I am by looking. I make lots of washing, Miss Dear."
"Yes, thank heaven," Nancy said, unaccountably tearful of a sudden.
The first part of the day at the Inn went much like other days.
Gaspard, eager to retrieve the record of the week when Hitty and a
Viennese pastry cook had divided the honors of preparing the daily
menus between them--for Nancy had never again attempted the
feat--never let a day go by without making a new _plat de jour_ or
inventing a sauce; was in the throes of composing a new casserole, and
it was a pleasure to watch him deftly sifting and sorting his
ingredients, his artist's eyes aglow with the inward fire of
inspiration. Nancy called all the waitresses together and offered
them certain prizes and rewards for all the buttermilk, and prunes
and other health dishes that they were able to distribute among
ailing patrons,--with the result they were over assiduous at the
luncheon hour, and a red-headed young man with gold teeth made a
disturbance that it took both Hilda and Michael, who appeared
suddenly in his overalls from the upper regions where he was
constructing window-boxes, to quell. But these incidents were not
sufficiently significant to make the day in any way a memorable
one to Nancy. It took a telephone message from Collier Pratt,
requesting, nay demanding, her presence in his studio for the first
sitting on her portrait, to make the day stand out upon her calendar.
"Sheila is with me. Shall I bring her?" Nancy asked.
"No," Collier Pratt said uncompromisingly, "I am not a parent at this
hour. She would disturb me."
"What shall I wear?"
"What have you got on?"
"That blue crêpe, made surplice,--the one you liked the other night."
"That's just what I want--Madonna blue. Can you get down here in
fifteen minutes?"
"Yes, I'll send Michael up-town with Sheila."
The bare, ramshackle studio on Washington Square shocked her,--it was
so comfortless, so dingy; but the canvases on the walls, set up
against the wainscoting, stacked on every available chair, gave her a
new and almost appalling impression of his personality, and the
peculiar poignant power of him. She could not appraise them, or get
any real sense of their quality apart from the astounding revelation
of the man behind the work.
"They're wonderful!" she gasped, but "You're wonderful" were the words
she stifled on her lips.
He painted till the light failed him.
"It's this diffused glow,--this gentle, faded afternoon light that I
want," he said. "I want you to emerge from your background as if you
had bloomed out of it that very moment. Oh! I've got you at your hour,
you know! The prescient maternal--that's what I want. The conscious
moment when a woman becomes aware that she is potentially a mother.
Sheila's done that for you. She's brought it out in you. It was ready,
it was waiting there before, but now it's come. It's wonderful!"
"Yes," Nancy said, "it's--it's come."
"It hasn't been done, you know. It's a modern conception, of course;
but they all do the thing realized, or incipient. I want to do it
_implicit_--that's what I want. I might have searched the whole world
over and not found it."
"Well, here I am," said Nancy faintly.
"Yes, here you are," Collier Pratt responded out of the fervor of his
artist's absorption.
"It's rather a personal matter to me," Nancy ventured some seconds
later.
Collier Pratt turned from the canvas he was contemplating, and looked
at her, still posed as he had placed her, upright, yet relaxed in the
scooped chair that held her without constraining her.
"Like a flower in a vase," he said; "to me you're a wonderful
creature."
"I'm glad you like me," Nancy said, quivering a little. "This is a
rather uncommon experience to me, you know, being looked at so
impersonally. Now please don't say that I'm being American."
"But, good God! I don't look at you impersonally."
"Don't you?" Nancy meant her voice to be light, and she was appalled
to hear the quaver in it.
"You know I don't." He glanced toward a dun-colored curtain evidently
concealing shelves and dishes. "Let's have some tea."
"I can't stay for tea." Nancy felt her lips begin to quiver
childishly, but she could not control their trembling. "Oh! I had
better go," she said.
Collier Pratt took one step toward her. Then he turned toward the
canvas. Nancy read his mind like a flash.
"You're afraid you'll disturb the--what you want to paint," she said
accusingly.
"I am." He smiled his sweet slow smile, then he took her stiff
interlaced hands and raised them, still locked together, to his lips
where he kissed them gently, one after the other. "Will you forgive
me?" he asked, and pushed her gently outside of his studio door.