"No; the premiums had been bestowed on the crazy quilts and the medley
pictures--what extraordinarily idiotic inventions!--and Miss Saunders
was tearing down her sketches in the next section. One of them slipped
through on the floor, and they came round after it to where I was."
"And so you got acquainted with Mrs. Saunders?" said Mrs. Burton.
"No. But I got intimate," said Ludlow. "I sympathized with her, and she
advised with me about her daughter's art-education."
"What did you advise her to do?" asked Burton.
"Not to have her art-educated."
"Why, don't you think she has talent?" Mrs. Burton demanded, with a
touch of resentment.
"Oh, yes. She has beauty, too. Nothing is commoner than the talent and
beauty of American girls. But they'd better trust to their beauty."
"I don't think so," said Mrs. Burton, with spirit.
"You can see how she's advised Mrs. Saunders," said Burton, winking the
eye next Ludlow.
"Well, you mustn't be vexed with me, Mrs. Burton," Ludlow replied to
her. "I don't think she'll take my advice, especially as I put it in
the form of warning. I told her how hard the girl would have to work:
but I don't think she quite understood. I told her she had talent, too;
and she did understand that; there was something uncommon in the
child's work; something--different. Who _are_ they, Mrs. Burton?"
"_Isn't_ there!" cried Mrs. Burton. "I'm glad you told the poor thing
that. I thought they'd take the premium. I was going to tell you about
her daughter. Mrs. Saunders must have been awfully disappointed."
"She didn't seem to suffer much," Ludlow suggested.
"No," Mrs. Burton admitted, "she doesn't suffer much about anything. If
she did she would have been dead long ago. First, her husband blown up
by his saw-mill boiler, and then one son killed in a railroad accident,
and another taken down with pneumonia almost the same day! And she goes
on, smiling in the face of death----"
"And looking out that he doesn't see how many teeth she's lost," Burton
prompted.
Ludlow laughed at the accuracy of the touch.
Mrs. Burton retorted, "Why shouldn't she? Her good looks and her good
nature are about all she has left in the world, except this daughter."
"Are they very poor?" asked Ludlow, gently.
"Oh, nobody's _very_ poor in Pymantoning," said Mrs. Burton. "And Mrs.
Saunders has her business,--when she's a mind to work at it."
"I suppose she has it, even when she hasn't a mind to work at it," said
Burton, making his pipe purr with a long, deep inspiration of
satisfaction. "I know I have mine."
"What _is_ her business?" asked Ludlow.
"Well, she's a dressmaker and milliner--when she _is_." Mrs. Burton
stated the fact with the effect of admitting it. "You mustn't suppose
that makes any difference. In a place like Pymantoning, she's 'as good
as anybody,' and her daughter has as high social standing. You can't
imagine how Arcadian we are out here."
"Oh, yes, I can; I've lived in a village," said Ludlow.
"A New England village, yes; but the lines are drawn just as hard and
fast there as they are in a city. You have to live in the West to
understand what equality is, and in a purely American population, like
this. You've got plenty of independence, in New England, but you
haven't got equality, and we _have_,--or used to have." Mrs. Burton
added the final words with apparent conscience.
"Just saved your distance, Polly," said her husband. "We haven't got
equality now, any more than we've got buffalo. I don't believe we ever
had buffalo in this section; but we did have deer once; and when I was
a boy here, venison was three cents a pound, and equality cheaper yet.
When they cut off the woods the venison and the equality disappeared;
they always do when the woods are cut off."
"There's enough of it left for all practical purposes, and Mrs.
Saunders moves in the first circles of Pymantoning," said Mrs. Burton.
"When she _does_ move," said Burton. "She doesn't _like_ to move."
"Well, she has the greatest taste, and if you can get her to do
anything for you your fortune's made. But it's a favor. She'll take a
thing that you've got home from the city, and that you're frantic
about, it's so bad, and smile over it a little, and touch it here and
there, and it comes out a miracle of style and becomingness. It's like
magic."
"She _was_ charming," said Ludlow, in dreamy reminiscence.
"_Isn't_ she?" Mrs. Burton demanded. "And her daughter gets all her
artistic talent from her. Mrs. Saunders _is_ an artist, though I don't
suppose you like to admit it of a dressmaker."
"Oh, yes, I do," said Ludlow. "I don't see why a man or woman who
drapes the human figure in stuffs, isn't an artist as well as the man
or woman who drapes it in paint or clay."
"Well, that's sense," Mrs. Burton began.
"She didn't know you had any, Ludlow," her husband explained.
Mrs. Burton did not regard him. "If she had any ambition she would be
anything--just like some other lazy-boots," and now she gave the large,
dangling congress gaiter of her husband a little push with the point of
her slipper, for purposes of identification, as the newspapers say.
"But the only ambition she's got is for her daughter, and she _is_
proud of her, and she would spoil her if she could get up the energy.
She dotes on her, and Nie is fond of her mother, too. Do you think she
can ever do anything in art?"
"If she were a boy, I should say yes; as she's a girl, I don't know,"
said Ludlow. "The chances are against her."
"Nature's against her, too," said Burton.
"_Human_ nature ought to be for her, then," said Mrs. Burton. "If she
were your sister what should you wish her to be?" she asked Ludlow.
"I should wish her to be"--Ludlow thought a moment and then
concluded--"happily married."
"Well, that's a shame!" cried Mrs. Burton.
Her husband laughed, while he knocked the ashes out of his pipe against
the edge of his chair-seat. "Rough on the holy estate of matrimony,
Polly."
"Oh, pshaw! I believe as much in the holy estate of matrimony as
anybody, but I don't believe it's the begin-all or the end-all for a
woman, any more than it is for a man. What, Katy?" she spoke to a girl
who appeared and disappeared in the doorway. "Oh! Well, come in to
supper, now. I hope you have an appetite, Mr. Ludlow. Mr. Burton's such
a delicate eater, and I like to have _some_body keep me in
countenance." She suddenly put her hand on the back of her husband's
chair, and sprung it forward from its incline against the wall, with a
violence that bounced him fearfully, and extorted a roar of protest
from him.
They were much older than Ludlow, and they permitted themselves the
little rowdy freedoms that good-natured married people sometimes use,
as fearlessly in his presence as if he were a grown-up nephew. They
prized him as a discovery of their own, for they had stumbled on him
one day before any one else had found him out, when he was sketching at
Fontainebleau. They liked the look of his picture, as they viewed it at
a decent remove over his shoulder, and after they got by Burton
proposed to go back and kill the fellow on account of the solemn
coxcombery of his personal appearance. His wife said: "Well, ask him
what he'll take for his picture, first," and Burton returned and said
with brutal directness, while he pointed at the canvas with his stick,
"_Combien?_" When Ludlow looked round up at him and answered with a
pleasant light in his eye, "Well, I don't know exactly. What'll you
give?" Burton spared his life, and became his friend. He called his
wife to him, and they bought the picture, and afterwards they went to
Ludlow's lodging, for he had no studio, and conscientiously painted in
the open air, and bought others. They got the pictures dog cheap, as
Burton said, for Ludlow was just beginning then, and his reputation
which has never since become cloud-capt, was a tender and lowly plant.
They made themselves like a youngish aunt and uncle to him, and had him
with them all they could while they stayed in Paris. When they came
home they brought the first impressionistic pictures ever seen in the
West; at Pymantoning, the village cynic asked which was right side up,
and whether he was to stand on his head or not to get them in range.
Ludlow remained in France, which he maintained had the only sun for
impressionism; and then he changed his mind all at once, and under an
impulse of sudden patriotism, declared for the American sky, and the
thin, crystalline, American air. His faith included American subjects,
and when, after his arrival in New York, Burton wrote to claim a visit
from him and ironically proposed the trotting-match at the County Fair
as an attraction for his pencil, Ludlow remembered the trotting-matches
he had seen in his boyhood, and came out to Pymantoning with a
seriousness of expectation that alarmed and then amused his friends.
He was very glad that he had come, and that night, after the supper
which lasted well into the early autumn lamp-light, he went out and
walked the village streets under the September moon, seeing his picture
everywhere before him, and thinking his young, exultant thoughts. The
maples were set so thick along the main street that they stood like a
high, dark wall on either side, and he looked up at the sky as from the
bottom of a chasm. The village houses lurked behind their door-yard
trees, with breadths of autumnal bloom in the gardens beside them.
Within their shadowy porches, or beside their gates, was
"The delight of happy laughter,
The delight of low replies,"
hushing itself at his approach, and breaking out again at his retreat.
The air seemed full of love, and in the midst of his proud, gay hopes,
he felt smitten with sudden isolation, such as youth knows in the
presence of others' passion. He walked back to Burton's rather
pensively, and got up to his room and went to bed after as little stay
for talk with his hosts as he could make decent; he did not like to
break with his melancholy.
He was roused from his first sleep by the sound of singing, which
seemed to stop with his waking. There came a confused murmur of girls'
and young men's voices, and Ludlow could see from his open window the
dim shapes of the serenaders in the dark of the trees below. Then they
were still, and all at once the silence was filled with a rich
contralto note, carrying the song, till the whole choir of voices took
up the burden. Nothing prettier could have happened anywhere in the
world. Ludlow hung rapt upon the music till Burton flung up his window,
as if to thank the singers. They stopped at the sound, and with gay
shouts and shrieks, and a medley of wild laughter, skurried away into
the farther darkness, where Ludlow heard them begin their serenade
again under distant windows as little localized as any space of the
sky.