AROUND THE MILO
Still another new and far more bewildering world was opened to Oliver
the night that he entered the cast-room of the School of the National
Academy of Design and took his seat among the students.
The title of the institution, high-sounding as it was, not only
truthfully expressed the objects and purposes of its founders, but was
wofully exact in the sense of its being national; for outside the bare
walls of these rooms there was hardly a student's easel to be found the
country over.
And such forlorn, desolate rooms; up two flights of dusty stairs, in a
rickety, dingy loft off Broadway, within a short walk of Union
Square--an auction-room on the ground floor and a bar-room in the rear.
The largest of these rooms was used for the annual exhibition of the
Academicians and their associates, and the smaller ones were given over
to the students; one, a better lighted apartment, being filled with the
usual collection of casts--the Milo, the Fighting Gladiator, Apollo
Belvidere, Venus de Medici, etc., etc.; the other being devoted to the
uses of the life-class and its models. Not the nude. Whatever may have
been clone in the studios, in the class-room it was always the draped
model that posed--the old woman who washed for a living on the top
floor, or one of her chubby children or buxom daughters, or perhaps the
peddler who strayed in to sell his wares and left his head behind him
on ten different canvases and in as many different positions.
The casts themselves were backed up against the walls; some facing the
windows for lights and darks, and others pushed toward the middle of
the room, where the glow of the gas-jets could accentuate their better
points. The Milo, by right of divinity, held the centre position--she
being beautiful from any point of sight and available from any side.
The Theseus and the Gladiator stood in the corners, affording space for
the stools of two or three students and their necessary easels.
Scattered about on the coarse, whitewashed walls were hung the smaller
life-casts; fragments of the body--an arm, leg, or hand, or sections of
a head--and tucked in between could be found cheap lithographic
productions of the work of the students and professors of the Paris and
Dusseldorf schools. The gas-lights under which the students worked at
night were hooded by cheap paper shades of the students' own
fashioning, and the lower sashes of the windows were smeared with
whitewash or covered with newspapers to concentrate the light. During
working hours the drawing-boards were propped upon rude easels or
slanted on overturned chairs, the students sitting on three-legged
stools.
A gentle-voiced, earnest, whole-souled old man--the one only
instructor--presided over this temple of art. He had devoted his whole
life to the sowing of figs and the reaping of thistles, and in his old
age was just beginning to see the shoots of a new art forcing their way
through the quickening clay of American civilization. Once in awhile,
as assistants in this almost hopeless task, there would stray into his
class-room some of the painters who, unconsciously, were founding a
national art and in honor of whom a grateful nation will one day search
the world over for marble white enough on which to perpetuate their
memories: men as distinct in their aims, methods, and results as was
that other group of unknown and despised immortals starving together at
that very time in a French village across the sea--and men, too,
equally deserving of the esteem and gratitude of their countrymen.
Oliver knew the names of these distinguished visitors to the Academy,
as did all the other members of the Skylarks, and he knew their work.
The pictures of George Inness, Sanford Gifford, Kensett, McEntee, Hart,
Eastman Johnson, Hubbard, Church, Casilaer, Whittredge, and the others
had been frequently discussed around the piano on the top floor at Miss
Teetum's, and their merits and supposed demerits often hotly contested.
He had met Kensett once at the house of Mr. Slade, and McEntee had been
pointed out to him as he left the theatre one night, but few of the
others had ever crossed his path.
Of the group Gifford appealed to him most. One golden "Venice" of the
painter, which hung in a picture-store, always delighted him--a stretch
of the Lagoon with a cluster of butterfly sails and a far-away line of
palaces, towers, and domes lying like a string of pearls on the
horizon. There was another of Kensett's, a point of rocks thrust out
like a mailed hand into a blue sea; and a McEntee of October woods, all
brown and gold; but the Gifford he had never forgotten; nor will anyone
else who has seen it.
No wonder then that all his life he remembered that particular night,
when a slender, dark-haired man in loose gray clothes sauntered into
the class-room and moved around among the easels, giving a suggestion
here and a word of praise there, for that was the night on which
Professor Cummings touched our young hero's shoulder and said: "Mr.
Gifford likes your drawing very much, Mr. Horn"--a word of praise
which, as he wrote to Crocker, steadied his uncertain fingers "as
nothing else had ever done."
The students in his school were from all stations in life: young and
old; all of them poor, and most of them struggling along in kindred
professions and occupations--engravers, house-painters, lithographers,
and wood-carvers. Two or three were sign-painters. One of these--a
big-boned, blue-eyed young follow, who drew in charcoal from the cast
at night, and who sketched the ships in the harbor during the day--came
from Kennedy Square, or rather from one of the side streets leading out
of it. There can still be found over the door of what was once his shop
a weather-beaten example of his skill in gold letters, the product of
his own hand. Above the signature is, or was some ten years since, a
small decorative panel showing a strip of yellow sand, a black dot of a
boat, and a line of blue sky, so true in tone and sure in composition
that when Mr. Crocker first passed that way and stood astounded before
it--as did Robinson Crusoe over Friday's footprint--he was so overjoyed
to find another artist besides himself in the town, that he turned into
the shop, and finding only a young mechanic at work, said:
"Go to New York, young man, and study, you have a career before you."
The old landscape-painter was a sure prophet; little pen-and-ink
sketches bearing the initials of this same sign-painter now sell for
more than their weight in gold, while his larger canvases on the walls
of our museums and galleries hold their place beside the work of the
marine-painters of our own and other times and will for many a day to
come.
This exile from Kennedy Square had been the first man to shake Oliver's
hand the night he entered the cast-room. Social distinctions had no
place in this atmosphere; it was the fellow who in his work came
closest to the curve of the shoulder or to the poise of the head who
proved, in the eyes of his fellow-students, his possession of an
ancestry: but the ancestry was one that skipped over the Mayflower and
went straight back to the great Michael and Rembrandt.
"I'm Jack Bedford, the sign-painter," he said, heartily. "You and I
come from the same town," and as they grasped each other's hands a new
friendship was added to Oliver's rapidly increasing list.
Oliver's seat was next to Fred, with Jack Bedford on his right. He had
asked to join this group not only because he wanted to be near his two
friends but because he wanted still more to be near the Milo. He had
himself selected a certain angle of the head because he had worked from
that same point of sight with Mr. Crocker, and it had delighted him
beyond measure when the professor allowed him to place his stool so
that he could almost duplicate his earlier drawing. His ambition was to
get into the life-class, and the quickest road, he knew, lay through a
good cast drawing. Every night for a week, therefore, he had followed
the wonderful lines of the Milo's beautiful body, which seemed to grow
with warmth under the flare of the overhanging gas-jets.
These favored life students occupied the room next to the casts. Mother
Mulligan, in full regalia of apron and broom, often sat there as a
model. Oliver had recognized her portrait at once; so can anyone else
who looks over the earlier studies of half the painters of the time.
"Oh, it's you, is it--" Mrs. Mulligan herself had cried when she met
Oliver in the hall, "the young gentleman that saved Miss Margaret's
dog? She'll be here next week herself--she's gone home for awhile up
into the mountains, where her old father and mother live. I told her
many times about ye, and she'll be that pleased to meet ye, now that
you're WAN of us."
It was delightful to hear her accent the "wan." Mother Mulligan always
thought the institution rested on her broad shoulders, and that the
students were part of her family.
The old woman could also have told Oliver of Margaret's arrival at the
school, and of the impression which she, the first and only girl
student, made on the night she took her place before an easel. But of
the reason of her coming Mrs. Mulligan could have told nothing, nor why
Margaret had been willing to exchange the comforts of a home among the
New Hampshire hills for the narrow confines of a third-story back room,
with Mrs. Mulligan as house-keeper and chaperon.
Fred knew all the details, of course, and how it had all come about.
How a cousin of Margaret's who lived on a farm near her father's had
one day, years before, left his plough standing in the furrow and
apprenticed himself to a granite-cutter in the next town. How later on
he had graduated in gravestones, and then in bas-reliefs, and finally
had won a medal in Rome for a figure of "Hope," which was to mark the
grave of a millionnaire at home. How when the statue was finished,
ready to be set up, this cousin had come to Brookfield, wearing a
square-cut beard, straight-out mustaches with needle-points, and funny
shoes with square toes. How the girl had been disposed to laugh at him
until he had told her stories of the wonderful cities beyond the sea
and of his life among the painters and sculptors; then she showed him
her own drawings, searching his face anxiously with her big eyes. How
he had been so astounded and charmed by their delicacy and truth, that
he had pleaded with her father--an obstinate old Puritan--to send her
to New York to study, which the old man refused point-blank to do, only
giving his consent at the last when her brother John, who had been
graduated from Dartmouth and knew something of the outside world, had
joined his voice to that of her mother and her own. How when she at
last entered the class-room of the Academy the students had looked
askance at her; the usual talk had ceased, and for a time there had
been an uncomfortable restraint everywhere, until the men found her
laughing quietly at their whispered jokes about her. After that the
"red-headed girl in blue gingham," as she was called, had become, by
virtue of that spirit of camaraderie which a common pursuit develops,
"one of us" in spirit as well as in occupation.
Fred had described it all to Oliver, and every night when Oliver came
in from the hall, his eyes had wandered over the group of students in
the hope of seeing the strange person. A girl studying art, or anything
else for that matter, seemed to him to be as incongruous as for a boy
to learn dress-making or for a woman to open a barber-shop. He knew her
type, he said to himself: she would be thin and awkward, with an
aggressive voice that would jar on the stillness of the room. And she
would believe in the doctrines of Elizabeth Cady Stanton--a name never
mentioned by his mother except apologetically and in a low voice--and
when she became older she would address meetings and become conspicuous
in church and have her name printed in the daily papers.
Our hero's mind was intent upon these phases of character always to be
found, of course, in a girl who would unsex herself to the extent that
Miss Grant had done, when one night a rich, full, well-modulated voice
sounding over his shoulder said:
"Excuse me, but Mother Mulligan tells me that you are Mr. Horn, Fred
Stone's friend. I want to thank you for taking care of my poor Juno. It
was very good of you. I am Margaret Grant."
She had approached him without his seeing her. He turned quickly to
accost her and immediately lost so much of his breath that he could
only stammer his thanks, and the hope that Juno still enjoyed the best
of health. But the deep-brown eyes did not waver after acknowledging
his reply, nor did the smile about the mouth relax.
"And I'm so glad you've come at last," she went on. "Fred has told me
how you wanted to draw and couldn't. I know something myself of what it
is to hunger after a thing and not get it."
He was on his feet now, the bit of charcoal still between his fingers,
his shirt-cuff rolled back to give his hand more freedom. His senses
were coming back, too, and there was buoyancy as well as youth in his
face.
"Yes, I do love it," said Oliver, and his eyes wandered over her
wonderful hair that looked like brown gold illumined by slants of
sunshine, and then rested for an instant on her eyes. "I drew with old
Mr. Crocker at home, but we only had one cast, just the head of the
Milo, and I was the only pupil. Here everything helps me. What are you
at work on, Miss Grant?"
"I'm doing the Milo, too; my seat is right in front of yours. Oh! what
a good beginning," and she bent over his drawing-board. "Why, this
can't be your first week," and she scanned it closely. "One minute--a
little too full under the chin, isn't it?" She picked up a piece of
chalk, and pointed to the shaded lines, looking first with half-closed
eyes at the full-sized cast before them, and then at the drawing.
"Yes, I think you're right," said Oliver, studying the cast also with
half-closed eyes. "How will that do?" and he smudged the shadow with
his finger-tip.
"Just right," she answered. "How well you have the character of the
face. Isn't she lovely!--I know of nothing so beautiful. There is such
a queenly, womanly, self-poised simplicity about her."
Oliver thought so too, and said so with his eyes, only it was of a face
framed in brown-gold that he was thinking and not of one of white
plaster. He was touched too by the delicate way in which she had
commended his drawings. It was the "woman" in her that pleased him,
just as it had been in Sue--that subtle, dominating influence which our
fine gentleman could never resist.
He shifted his stool a little to one side so that he could see her the
better unobserved while she was arranging her seat and propping up her
board. He noticed that, although her face was tanned by the weather,
her head was set on a neck of singular whiteness. Underneath, where the
back hair was tucked up, his eye caught some delicate filmy curls which
softened the line between her throat and head and shone in the light
like threads of gold. The shoulders sloped and the whole fulness of her
figure tapered to a waist firmly held by a leather belt. A wholesome
girl, he thought to himself, and good to look at, and with a certain
rhythmic grace about her movements.
Her crowning glory, though, was her hair, which was parted over her
forehead and caught in a simple twist behind. As the light fell upon it
he observed again how full it was of varying tones like those found in
the crinklings of a satin gown--yellow-gold one minute and dark brown
the next. Oliver wondered how long this marvellous hair might be, and
whether it would reach to the floor if it should burst its fastenings
and whether Sir Peter Lely would have loved it too could he have seen
this flood of gold bathing her brow and shoulders.
He found it delightful to work within a few feet of her, silent as they
had to be, for much talking was discountenanced by the professor: often
hours passed without any sound being heard in the room but that of the
scraping of the chairs on the bare floor or the shifting of an easel.
Two or three times during the evening the old professor emerged from
his room and overlooked his drawing, patiently pointing out the defects
and as patiently correcting them. He was evidently impressed with
Oliver's progress, for he remarked to Miss Grant, in a low voice:
"The new student draws well--he is doing first-rate," and passed on.
Oliver caught the expression of satisfaction on the professor's face
and interpreted it as in some way applying to his work, although he did
not catch the words.
The old man rarely had to criticise Margaret's work. The suggestions
made to her came oftener from the students than from the professor
himself or any one of the visiting critics. In these criticisms, not
only of her own work but of the others, everyone took part, each
leaving his stool and helping in the discussion, when the work of the
night was over. Fred's more correct eye, for instance, would be
invaluable to Jack Bedford, the ex-sign-painter, who was struggling
with the profile of the Gladiator; or Margaret, who could detect at a
glance the faintest departure from the lines of the original, would
shorten a curve on Oliver's drawing, or he in turn would advise her
about the depth of a shadow or the spot for a high light.
As the nights went by and Oliver studied her the closer, the New
England girl became all the more inexplicable to him. She was, he could
not but admit, like no other woman he had ever met; certainly not in
his present surroundings. She really seemed to belong to some fabled
race--one of the Amazons, or Rhine maidens, or Norse queens for whom
knights couched their lances. It was useless to compare her to any one
of the girls about Kennedy Square, for she had nothing in common with
any one of them. Was it because she was unhappy among her own people
that she had thus exiled herself from her home, or had some love-affair
blighted her life? Or could it be, as Fred had suggested, that she was
willing to undergo all these discomforts and privations simply for love
of her art? As this possible solution of the vexing problem became
established in his mind, with the vision of Margaret herself before
him, the blood mounted to his cheeks and an uncontrollable thrill of
enthusiasm swept over him. He could forgive her anything if this last
motive had really controlled and shaped her life.
Had he seen the more closely and with prophetic vision, he would have
discerned, in this Norse queen with the golden hair, the mother of a
long line of daughters, who, in the days to follow, would hang their
triumphant shields beside those of their brothers, winning equal
recognition in salon and gallery and conferring equal honor on their
country. But Oliver's vision was no keener than that of anyone else
about him. It was only the turn of Margaret's head that caught the
young student's eye and the wealth of her brown-gold hair. With the
future he had no concern.
What attracted him most of all in this woman who had violated all the
known traditions of Kennedy Square, was a certain fearlessness of
manner--an independence, a perfect ingenuousness, and a freedom from
any desire to interest the students in herself. When she looked at any
one of them, it was never from under drooping eyelids, as Sue would
have done, nor with that coquettish, alluring glance to which he had
always been accustomed. She looked straight at them with unflinching
eyes that said, "I can trust you, and WILL." He had never seen exactly
that look except in the portrait of his uncle's grandmother by Sir
Peter Lely--the picture he had always loved. Strange to say, too, the
eyes of the portrait were Margaret's eyes, and so was the color of the
hair.
No vexed problems entered Margaret's head regarding the very engaging
young gentleman who sat behind HER stool. He merely represented to her
another student--that was all; the little band was small enough, and
she was glad to see the new ones come. She noticed, it is true, certain
unmistakable differences--a peculiar, soft cadence in his voice as the
words slipped from his lips without their final g's; a certain
deference to herself--standing until she regained her seat, an
attention which she attributed at first to embarrassment over his new
surroundings and to his desire to please. She noticed, too, a certain
grace in his movements--a grace that attracted her, especially in the
way with which he used his hands, and in the way in which he threw his
head up when he laughed; but even these differences ceased to interest
her after the first night of their meeting.
But it did not occur to her that he came from any different stock than
the others about her, or that his blood might or might not be a shade
bluer than her own. What had really impressed her more than anything
else--and this only flashed into her mind while she was looking in the
glass one night at her own--were his big white teeth, white as grains
of corn, and the cleanliness of his hands and nails. She liked these
things about him. Some of the fingers that rested on her drawing-board
were often more like clothes-pins than fingers, and shocked her not a
little; some, too, were stained with acids, and one or more with
printer's ink that no soap could remove.
Before the evening was over Oliver became one of the class-room
appointments--a young man who sat one stool behind her and was doing
fairly well with his first attempt, and who would some day be able to
make a creditable drawing if he had patience and application.
At the beginning of the second week a new student appeared--or rather
an old one, who had been laid up at home with a cold. When Oliver
arrived he found him in Margaret's seat, his easel standing where hers
had been. He had a full-length drawing of the Milo--evidently the work
of days--nearly finished on his board. Oliver was himself a little
ahead of time--ahead of either Margaret or Fred, and had noticed the
new-comer when he entered, the room being nearly empty. Jack Bedford
was already at work.
"Horn," Jack cried, and beckoned to Oliver--"see the beggar in Miss
Grant's seat. Won't there be a jolly row when she comes in?"
Margaret entered a moment later, her portfolio under her arm, and stood
taking in the situation. Then she walked straight to her former seat,
and said, in a firm but kindly tone:
"This is my place, sir. I've been at work here for a week. You see my
drawing is nearly done."
The young man looked up. He toiled all day in a lithographer's shop,
and these precious nights in the loft were his only glimpses of
happiness. He sat without his coat, his shirt-sleeves liberally smeared
with the color-stains of his trade.
"Well, it's my place, too. I sat here a week before I was taken sick,"
he said, in a slightly indignant tone, looking into Margaret's face in
astonishment.
"But if you did," continued Margaret, "you see I am nearly through. I
can't take another seat, for I'll lose the angle. I can finish in an
hour if you will please give me this place to-night. You can work just
as well by sitting a few feet farther along."
The lithographer, without replying, turned from her impatiently, bent
over his easel, picked up a fresh bit of charcoal and corrected a line
on the Milo's shoulder. So far as he was concerned the argument was
closed.
Margaret stood patiently. She thought at first he was merely adding a
last touch to his drawing before granting her request.
"Will you let me have the seat?" she asked.
"No," he blurted out. He was still bending over his drawing, his eyes
fixed on the work. He did not even look up. "I'm going to stay here
until I finish. You know the rules as well as I do. I wouldn't take
your seat--what do you want to take mine for?" There was no animosity
in his voice. He spoke as if announcing a fact.
The words had hardly left his lips when there came the sound of a chair
being quickly pushed back, and Oliver stood beside Margaret. His eyes
were flashing; his right shirt-cuff was rolled back, the bit of
charcoal still between his fingers. Every muscle of his body was tense
with anger. Margaret's quick instinct took in the situation at a
glance. She saw Oliver's wrath and she knew its cause.
"Don't, Mr. Horn, please--please!" she cried, putting up her hand.
"I'll begin another drawing. I see now that I took his seat when he was
away, although I didn't know it."
Oliver stepped past her. "Get up, sir," he said, "and give Miss Grant
her seat. What do you mean by speaking so to a lady?"
The apprentice--his name was Judson--raised his eyes quickly, took in
Oliver's tense, muscular figure standing over him, and said, with a
contemptuous wave of the hand:
"Young feller--you go and cool off somewhere, or I'll tell the
professor. It's none of your business. I know the rules and--"
He never finished the sentence--not that anybody heard. He was
floundering on the floor, an overturned easel and drawing-board lying
across his body; Oliver standing over him with his fists tightly
clenched.
"I'll teach you how to behave to a lady." The words sounded as if they
came from between closed teeth. "Here's your chair, Miss Grant," and
with a slight bow he placed the chair before her and resumed his seat
with as much composure as if he had been in his mother's drawing-room
in Kennedy Square.
Margaret was so astounded that for a moment she could not speak. Then
her voice came back to her. "I don't want it," she cried, in a
half-frightened way, the tears starting in her eyes. "It was never
mine--I told you so. Oh, what have you done?"
Never since the founding of the school had there been such a scene. The
students jumped from their chairs and crowded about the group. The life
class, which were at work in another room, startled by the uproar,
swarmed out eager to know what had happened and why--and who--and what
for. Old Mother Mulligan, who had been posing for the class, with a
cloak about her fat shoulders and a red handkerchief binding up her
head, rushed over to Margaret, thinking she had been hurt in some way,
until she saw the student on the floor, still panting and half-dazed
from the effect of Oliver's blow. Then she fell on her knees beside him.
At this instant Professor Cummings entered, and a sudden hush fell upon
the room. Judson, with the help of Mother Mulligan's arm, had picked
himself up, and would have made a rush at Oliver had not big sack
Bedford stopped him.
"Who's to blame for this?" asked the professor, looking from one to the
other.
Oliver rose from his seat.
"This man insulted Miss Grant and I threw him out of her chair," he
answered quietly.
"Insulted you!" cried the professor, in surprise, and he turned to
Margaret. "What did he say?"
"I never said a word to her," whined Judson, straightening his collar.
"I told her the seat was mine, and so it is. That wasn't insulting her."
"It's all a mistake, professor--Mr. Horn did not understand," protested
Margaret. "It was his seat, not mine. He began his drawing first. I
didn't know it when I commenced mine. I told Mr. Horn so."
"Why did you strike him?" asked the professor, and he turned and faced
Oliver.
"Because he had no business to speak to her as he did. She is the only
lady we have among us and every man in the class ought to remember it,
and every man has since I've been here except this one."
There was a slight murmur of applause. Judson's early training had been
neglected as far as his manners went, and he was not popular.
The professor looked searchingly into Oliver's eyes and a flush of
pride in the boy's pluck tinged his pale cheeks. He had once thrown a
fellow-student out of a window in Munich himself for a similar offence,
and old as he was he had never forgotten it.
"You come from the South, Mr. Horn, I hear," he said in a gentler
voice, "and you are all a hot-tempered race, and often do foolish
things. Judson meant no harm--he says so, and Miss Grant says so. Now
you two shake hands and make up. We are trying to learn to draw here,
not to batter each other's heads."
Oliver's eyes roved from one to the other; he was too astonished to
make further reply. He had only done what he knew every other man
around Kennedy Square would have done under similar circumstances, and
what any other woman would have thanked him for. Why was everybody here
against him--even the girl herself! What sort of people were these who
would stand by and see a woman insulted and make no defence or outcry?
He could not have looked his father in the face again, nor Sue, nor
anyone else in Kennedy Square, if he had failed to protect her.
For a moment he hesitated, his eyes searching each face. He had hoped
that someone who had witnessed the outrage would come forward and
uphold his act. When no voice broke the stillness he crossed the room
and taking the lithographer's hand, extended rather sullenly, answered,
quietly: "If Miss Grant is satisfied, I am," and peace was once more
restored.
Margaret sharpened her charcoals and bent over her drawing. She was so
agitated she could not trust herself to touch its surface. "If I am
SATISFIED," she kept repeating to herself. The words, somehow, seemed
to carry a reproach with them. "Why shouldn't I be satisfied? I have no
more rights in the room than the other students about me; that is, I
thought I hadn't until I heard what he said. How foolish for him to
cause all this fuss about nothing, and make me so conspicuous."
But even as she said the words to herself she remembered Oliver's tense
figure and the look of indignation on his face. She had never been
accustomed to seeing men take up the cudgels for women. There had been
no opportunity, perhaps, nor cause, but even if there had been, she
could think of no one whom she had ever met who would have done as much
for her just because she was a woman.
A little sob, which she could not have explained to herself, welled up
to her throat. Much as she gloried in her own self-reliance, she
suddenly and unexpectedly found herself exulting in a quality
heretofore unknown to her--that quality which had compelled an almost
total stranger to take her part. Then the man himself! How straight and
strong and handsome he was as he stood looking at Judson, and then the
uplifted arm, the quick spring, and, best of all, the calm, graceful
way in which he had handed her the chair! She could not get the picture
out of her mind. Last, she remembered with a keen sense of pleasure the
chivalrous look in his face when he held out his hand to the man who a
moment before had received its full weight about his throat.
She had not regained mastery of herself even when she leaned across her
drawing-board, pretending to be absorbed in her work. The curves of the
Milo seemed in some strange way to have melted into the semblance of
the outlines of other visions sunk deep in her soul since the days of
her childhood--visions which for years past had been covered over by
the ice of a cold, hard puritanical training, that had prevented any
bubbles of sentiment from ever rising to the surface of her heart. As
remembrances of these visions rushed through her mind the half-draped
woman, with the face of the Madonna and the soul of the Universal
Mother shining through every line of her beautiful body, no longer
stood before her. It was a knight in glittering armor now, with drawn
sword and visor up, beneath which looked out the face of a beautiful
youth aflame with the fire of a holy zeal. She caught the flash of the
sun on his breastplate of silver, and the sweep of his blade, and heard
his clarion voice sing out. And then again, as she closed her eyes,
this calm, lifeless cast became a gallant, blue-eyed prince, who knelt
beside her and kissed her finger-tips, his doffed plumes trailing at
her feet.
When the band of students were leaving the rooms that night, Margaret
called Oliver to her side, and extending her hand, said, with a direct
simplicity that carried conviction in every tone of her voice and in
which no trace of her former emotions were visible:
"I hope you'll forgive me, Mr. Horn. I'm all alone here in this city
and I have grown so accustomed to depending on myself that, perhaps, I
failed to understand how you felt about it. I am very grateful to you.
Good-night."
She had turned away before he could do more than express his regret
over the occurrence. He wanted to follow her; to render her some
assistance; to comfort her in some way. It hurt him to see her go out
alone into the night. He wished he might offer his arm, escort her
home, make some atonement for the pain he had caused her. But there was
a certain proud poise of the head and swift glance of the eye which
held him back.
While he stood undecided whether to break through her reserve and join
her, he saw Mrs. Mulligan come out of the basement, stop a passing
stage, and, helping Margaret in, take the seat beside her.
"I am glad she does not go out alone," he said to himself and turned
away.