I
MARTHA KEENE had been at work for several months in Etienne’s atelier,
in the Latin quarter of Paris, and although her appearance would have
led one to believe her frail in health, she had never missed a
working-day, and always occupied a good position well in view of the
model, because she always came among the earliest to secure it. Her work
was far from brilliant, and Etienne had noticed her very little at
first. If he did so more of late, it was her ability to stick which had
won her this favor. So many students had come and gone, rousing his
hopes only to disappoint them, that it had got to be rather a comfort to
the little old man to be sure of one earnest worker always in her place;
and while he could not say that her work was good, it was certainly not
bad.
Recently he had told Martha this several times. “Not bad” was about the
highest praise that most of Etienne’s pupils got from him; and when the
young American girl heard it for the first time applied to her work, she
experienced what was perhaps one of the most thrilling sensations of her
life.
It was followed by another thrilling sensation; for, as she looked up
from the canvas which the master had thus commended, she met the
beautiful eyes of the princess, turned upon her with a congratulatory
smile.
It was almost too much for Martha. Her heart thumped so that her
breathing became rapid and a little difficult. Instead of answering the
princess’s smile, a frown contracted her forehead; for she was afraid
that she was going to lose her self-control, and she needed a stern
effort not to do so. Martha had a heart which was made for worshiping.
Etienne and the princess were two of the people that she worshiped, and
there was a third.
When Etienne had passed on, after smudging one part of her drawing with
his thumb until it was a dirty blur, and scratching another part with
ruthless streaks of soft charcoal, she remembered she had received his
first words of encouragement rather coldly, and had made the same sort
of return for the princess’s smile. This plunged her from a state of
delight into one of wretchedness. She looked toward the master with some
hope of making amends; but he was too absorbed in his next criticism,
and it was only too evident that her chance was gone. Then she glanced
at the princess, to receive the same impression from that quarter. The
beautiful young woman on whom her eyes rested had stepped back from her
easel, and with her head turned sidewise, and her eyelids drawn up, was
looking at her picture. She held a brush in one hand, with the fingers
delicately poised, and in the other her palette, laid with brilliant
dabs of color. Her lips were pursed critically, and her whole attitude
and expression showed such absorption in her work that Martha felt it
would be absurd to imagine that she or her behavior could have any part
in that beautiful lady’s consciousness.
As usual, when Martha allowed herself to look at the princess, she
forgot everything else. She had long ago had to make it a rule to place
her easel so that she would be turned away from her enchantress while
she was working; otherwise she could see and think only of her. At the
present moment she was completely fascinated by the tall, strong figure,
so firmly poised, with one foot advanced, and her body thrown backward
from the slender waist, where a belt of old silver confined the folds of
her red silk shirt-waist above the sweep of her skirt of dark green
serge. This was her ordinary working-rig; and as she wore no apron, as
most of the other students did, it was more or less streaked with paint.
Martha herself wore her calico apron religiously, and was always neatly
clothed beneath it; but she would have protested utterly against seeing
her neighbor in an apron. It would have looked so unprincesslike! She
was very tall and straight, this princess, and “Serene Highness” seemed
to Martha to be written on every inch of her.
There was not much sociability among the students in the atelier. They
came from many different countries, and spoke many different tongues;
and they were such a mixture of aristocrats and plebeians--some were so
afraid of patronizing and others of being patronized,--that the
conditions generally were such as were opposed to much mixing. Talking
was forbidden during work-hours, except the little absolutely necessary
whispering; and in the intermission at noon the princess always went
away for lunch, and sometimes did not return. Martha, too, went to her
mother’s apartment for the midday meal, though nothing ever prevented
her from returning. Some of the students had chums, with whom they
chatted glibly in the cloak-room; but as a rule, these intimacies had
been formed outside.
Martha Keene was a girl who would never have made the first advance
toward an acquaintance with any one; for, although she had passed her
twentieth year, she was incorrigibly shy. This reserve of manner was so
evident that it discouraged advances from others. She knew this and
regretted it, but could not help it.
It had pleased Martha very much when, on a single occasion, this wall of
isolation which she had built around herself had been broken through by
a little American chatterbox, who had rattled away to her for ten
minutes one day as she was waiting for her carriage in the cloak-room.
This had been soon after her entrance at Etienne’s, and her voluble
country-woman had vanished from the horizon the next day; but in that
one talk she had got almost all the knowledge of the atelier which she
possessed.
Her informant had told her that the students were not supposed to
inquire about one another at all, the ideal of the atelier being a place
where high and low alike could lay aside their disabilities and get the
benefits of the common workshop. She added that there had been several
personages of importance studying there since she herself had been a
student, but that she had always heard of it from the outside, and they
had generally left before she had identified them. “I spotted the
princess, though,” she had said. “As soon as I heard that there was a
Russian princess studying here, I picked her out. Do you know which one
she is?” Martha had answered, “The lady in the red blouse”--a guess at
once confirmed. “Isn’t she stunning?” her companion had gone on; “I’m
dying to speak to her! If she were not a princess, I’d have done it long
ago. I can’t go the Russian; but no doubt she speaks every language.
Russians always do.” At this point of the conversation the lady herself
had come into the cloak-room. A neat French maid who was
[Illustration: “A LITTLE AMERICAN CHATTERBOX.”]
in waiting had come forward, and held out her lady’s wrap, a magnificent
sable thing, in which the beautiful creature had quickly infolded
herself, and left the room, the two girls meanwhile making a tremendous
effort to cover their breathless interest by an air of unconsciousness.
Ever since that day--indeed, even before it--Martha had been a silent
worshiper at the shrine of the princess. She had a passionate love of
beauty, and her heart, for all her grave and shy exterior, was packed as
full of romance as it could hold. The discovery that this beautiful
being was a princess--and a Russian princess, of all others--was meet
food for this appetite for the romantic; and she dreamed by the hour
about this young woman’s life, and wondered what it had been and was to
be. She knew she could not be many years older than herself, and she
wondered, with burning interest, whether she was or was not married.
Sometimes she would hold to one opinion for days, and then something--a
mere turn of expression, perhaps--would convert her to the opposite one.
She wanted her to be unmarried, so that she might be free to construct
from her imagination a beautiful future for her; and yet she dreaded to
find out that she was married. There was certainly a look about the
princess which contradicted Martha’s ideal of her as the possessor of a
fair, unwritten life-page. Martha had watched her hands to see if she
wore a wedding-ring; but those extraordinarily beautiful hands were
either loaded down with jeweled gauds of antique workmanship or else
quite ringless. Still, many married women were careless about wearing
their wedding-rings, a thing which Martha herself could not comprehend;
but she felt that this wonderful creature was removed as far as possible
from her in both actuality and ideas.
Martha had heard the sound of the princess’s voice only once or twice,
and on those occasions she had spoken French with what seemed to the
American girl an absolutely perfect accent. Once she had been near
enough to hear a little talk between the princess and Etienne, as he was
criticizing the former’s work with rather more humanness, Martha
thought, than he showed to the students generally; and once or twice
when the princess had been placed near the model’s little retiring-room,
Martha had had the joy of hearing her divinity give the summons, in the
usual atelier jargon, “C’est l’heure!” It seemed to the girl a most
lovable act of condescension on the part of her Serene Highness.
One day (it was the day after Etienne had told her that her drawing was
“not bad,” and the princess had smiled at her) Martha was working away,
when she became aware that an easel was being pushed into the unoccupied
space at her right hand. She had known that some one would soon take
possession of this place, and she did not even look round to see who it
was. Her whole attention was bent on making Etienne see that his
encouragement had yielded good fruit, even though she had made no verbal
acknowledgment of it. She went on drawing, with intense concentration,
until, weary at last, she put down her charcoal, and stood resting her
arms, with her hands on her hips. As she finished her scrutiny of her
work, and looked around, she started to discover that it was the
princess who was seated at the easel next her own, and was looking full
at her. As Martha, confused and delighted, encountered that gaze, the
beautiful lady’s lips parted in a friendly smile, and she whispered
gently,
“Bon jour.”
Martha crimsoned with pleasure as she returned the greeting, and then
both fell to work again. The princess was painting, laying on her color
in a broad and daring style that almost frightened her neighbor. Martha
watched her furtively while she crumbled her bread, and pretended to be
erasing and touching up certain points in her picture. It was a
bewildering delight to her to stand so close to the princess and see her
at work, and she was agreeably aware that the princess was also aware of
her, and perhaps even pleased at their being together.
When the time came for the model to rest, and the quiet of the room was
a little relieved by the whispered talk that sprang up among the
students as they waited, Martha felt that the princess had inclined
toward her a little, and was looking at her work. She put down as
childish the impulse that rushed up in her to cover the picture from
sight, or to say how bad she knew it was, and she stood very still and
very much embarrassed until the princess said again, in that exquisite
utterance of French subtleties,
“C’est bien difficile, n’est-ce pas?”
Martha answered her somehow--she never knew what.
When the model came back, and they began to work again, she felt that
she had become part of a wonderful experience. She had never seen the
princess talking to any one else, and, amazing and undeserved as the
tribute was, she could not be mistaken in thinking that the lovely lady
wished to know her, and perhaps to allow her the dear privilege of such
intercourse as their atelier life permitted. She never expected it to go
beyond that; but that was far more than anything she had imagined.
Across one corner of her canvas Martha’s name was scrawled in full, and
she knew that the princess must have seen it. She looked to see if there
was any signature upon the princess’s picture, and, as if interpreting
her thought, her neighbor, with a brilliant smile, dipped her brush in
vermilion, and wrote in a bold, strong hand the word “Sonia.” This name
(which Martha did not know to be the Russian abbreviation of Sophia)
seemed to the girl very odd and beautiful, and peculiarly appropriate to
its possessor.