THE PORTRAIT
Mallowbanks, January fifth.
_Carin_, _my own one_:
Mallowbanks is entertaining an artist—a painter of portraits. His name
is Keefe O’Connor; his residence is New York. He was wired for
imperatively by Madam Knox who offered him more for the painting of her
portrait than he had previously received for any such commission.
Telegrams were exchanged. The artist, it appeared, was much engaged.
Madam Knox wished more than ever to secure him. She increased her offer.
He came—he is here in “the artist’s suite.” Madam Knox sits to him in
gray velvet and pearls. Her hair is as white as the drifted snow; her
eyebrows are dark and pointed, her little mouth looks secret and proud,
her aristocratic nose is a straight line, her old, beautiful eyes are
full of vanity and wisdom, sternness and kindness, memories and hopes.
She is very wrinkled and very beautiful. The portrait painter appears to
be in raptures, and he works early and late and is growing hollow-eyed.
My own conviction is that he does not eat enough nor sleep very well.
Semmy seems to think he has a secret sorrow.
“Miss Zalie,” said she to me—she learned to call me Zalie from the
McBirneys—“that theah painter man has somethin’ gnawin’ him, suah.”
The painter man avoids me. When I come near, he goes—as soon as
politeness permits. I retire to my room and read his assurances of
friendship; I remember my own, and wonder if my imagination is not
running away with me. But no—he avoids me. The other day, however, we
were left together at the breakfast table and conversation became
absolutely necessary. What he said was:
“How changed you are, Miss Azalea.”
“And you don’t like the change, Mr.—Keefe?”
“My liking or disliking it has nothing to do with the case,” he answered
gloomily. “I repeat, you are changed.”
“Yes,” I admitted. “I have changed a number of times in the course of my
life, but so, I suppose, have others.”
“Yes.”
“Should you say I had changed for the worse or the better?”
“It is not a question of better or worse. You wrote me that you were the
same old Azalea, but I do not find you so. Why, how meek you used to
be!”
“Meek! I never was! I wouldn’t be! Meek!”
“When I think of you teaching those mountain children so lovingly, going
around in your little pink sunbonnet, chatting by the hour with Mrs.
Medicine Bottle—what was her name?—and look at you as you are now, and
hear you talk as you do now—”
“Oh, very well,” I said. “I will withdraw my presence and my voice.”
So I did. I ran up to my room, and I found that pink gingham I used to
wear up at Sunset Gap, and the funny little sunbonnet you used to think
too becoming for a school-teacher. I put on the pink dress, though it
was halfway up to my knees; I let my hair down my back in braids, and
pulled the sunbonnet over it. Then I waited till I knew grandmother was
sitting for her painter and I got Semmy to go down and knock on the door
and call Mr. Painter out for a minute.
In that minute I ran in, kissed madam grandmother and bribed her to get
behind a screen, and when our portrait painter returned, I was on the
dais looking as demure as a kitten.
He came in looking at a letter Semmy had given him, and said:
“Will you pardon me, ma’am, for one moment?” He glanced through his
letter. Then he bowed, and took up his brushes again. That was when he
saw me. He gave a sort of a gasp and broke into the good old, beautiful
smile we used to see on him up at Sunset Gap.
“Azalea!” he cried.
Then he frowned.
“I do not like to paint a person in masquerade,” he said.
“But this,” I said, “is a return to type.”
He still frowned.
“Perhaps you don’t like the type?”
He did not answer.
“Are we keeping Madam Knox waiting?” he asked.
I dropped a curtsy and found grandmother behind the screen. She too, was
looking not particularly well pleased.
I kissed her again and helped her up to her chair.
“Grandmother,” I explained, “was not a party to the deception which has
moved you to such violent rage, Mr. O’Connor. She was taken by storm;
was overcome by force of arms and a superior enemy. I withdraw. I never
did see why anybody wanted to go to the Arctic regions.”
I curtsied again—twice—once to grandmother and once to him. They both
looked sulky. I got into my riding habit, called for Sally McLean, the
darling little mare they let me use, and went off for the rest of the
morning. At noon I found myself at the house of a Ravanel—Delight
Ravanel. She is a spinster, quite wrinkled and rather depressed, but she
got her Christian name when she gave promise, I suppose, of other things.
She asked me to stay to luncheon. I did, and found her a dear. She told
me stories about who married whom and why. She proved to me that I was
some sort of a cousin of hers. It was the middle of the afternoon before
I started for home.
A rain had set in and the roads were very muddy, so Sally McLean had a
bad time of it. She is such a dainty thing that mud makes her miserable.
Besides, she was shivering with cold and nervousness, though I can’t
quite see what made her nervous. But Sally has her moods, like the rest
of us. I made up my mind, however, that Paprika was the last horse that
was ever going to throw me, and so I gentled poor Sally, and made my way
along the road in the best spirit I could command. I fell to thinking
about little Paprika, and Jim’s Mustard, and how we used to scamper down
the long mountain road to school, and about the times when you and Annie
Laurie and I used to race down the valley; and then I thought over the
excursion Haystack Thompson and Miss Pace and Keefe and you and I made
with Paralee Panther away over the nag road to the Panther’s, and how we
dug them out of their cave, so to speak. I hear from Paralee quite
often, by the way. She is teaching now in the Industrial School. Yes,
she is really a teacher, just as she said she would be. Of course that
is owing to the start you gave her, Carin; but I’m very proud to think
how she has got on. She has been independent of all help for two years
at least, hasn’t she? Perhaps she has written you about her teacher’s
position, but I mention it, thinking she might not have ventured to
write. She always stood in some awe of you, you were so beautiful and so
far removed from her.
She, reminds me, someway, of those people I did not meet in the little
cabin that lay between Mount Tennyson and Mount Hebron—the cabin, I mean,
where I went in and helped myself to soup and firewood, and where I left
the cake and sugar and things in exchange. I told you Mother McBirney
met them afterward and learned their name. Wixon, it was, by the way.
Well, just for fun, I sent them some Christmas presents—nothing really
sensible and necessary, but something perfectly luxurious—a talking
machine with a lot of records of various kinds. Also a year’s
subscription to a good magazine which has many illustrations. I thought
these things might help them to become alive. Oh, it certainly is
glorious to have money!
But I am still out in the rain on Sally McLean’s back, in a bad fit of
homesickness, am I not? These homesick spells do not come as often as
they did and they are not as bad as they were, but still I have them, and
while they last I am miserable enough. I could feel my tears trickling
down my cold nose, but I was having such work to keep Sally on her feet
that I couldn’t wipe them away. I suppose we made a pathetic pair,
struggling along in the sodden afternoon in that friendless, forsaken
way. (I’m not sure but Sally was crying too. I think I heard her
sniffle.)
Then, just as we were in the worst of our dumps, who should appear on the
landscape but “a solitary horseman”! He was riding Wellington, a tall,
elegant looking horse belonging to Uncle David, and he himself—of course
it was Keefe—looked tall and elegant, too, though he had on a raincoat
and a little cap which fitted close to his head. He didn’t seem to mind
the rain, but rode with his face turned up to it as if he liked it. When
he saw me he stopped riding that way and tried to look as commonplace as
he could.
“How do you do?” he said as if we were not very well acquainted neighbors
meeting by chance on the road.
“Very well, thank you, Rain-in-the-Face.”
“You are angry with me! You have been away all day because you were
angry with me.”
“I fled, Rain-in-the-Face, from the Arctic chilliness of Mallowbanks. I
have in my time lived among strangers, I have danced and sung to stupid
audiences, I have been hungry and wet through with the rain, I have slept
on mouldy straw in a wretched tent, but never was I so chilled as
to-day.”
“Azalea!”
He seemed shocked.
“Do you mean,” I asked him, angry, Carin, for one of the few times in my
life, “that I ought not to mention that I was once a poor little waif, a
show girl, a sad-hearted dancer? Yes, I was an ill-cared for, shamed
little Infant Phenomenon, and I don’t care who knows it. And then I was
poor Ma McBirney’s beloved child, and I took the place to her of her
little dead daughter; that warmed and saved me and taught me love and
faith, and I don’t care who knows that, either. Then I was Carin
Carson’s friend, and we worked and learned together, and you saw us, and
you liked me as I was then. Now I’m Azalea Knox of Mallowbanks, with
such relatives and acquaintances as Fate has given me, and I’m grateful
and proud of that, too. I take all as it comes, Rain-in-the-Face, and I
cannot for the life of me understand what you are sulking about.”
“Am I sulking? I am unhappy. How could you change so? You used not to
talk as you do now, nor dress as you do now. You asked me to forgive you
your fortune and your place in the world, and I liked it and laughed at
it and—and forgave it. Though it was hard. But still I didn’t want to
come down here. I fought against it. I had too dear a memory of you,
Azalea, to want to come down here in any other way than as your lover,
and I knew it would never be fair to come that way—that your relatives
would object. So I found one excuse after another for not coming, but
your grandmother over-persuaded me. And my heart out-argued me, too. I
had to come. I thought: ‘All the world may change, but she never will.
She will be the same.’ But you aren’t—you aren’t!”
“Are you?” I retorted. “Do you imagine for a moment, Rain-in-the-Face,
that after three years in New York City, making your way among artists
and other clever, charming people, that you are the same boy who went
singing over Sunset Gap? You are not, at all. Now you are not afraid to
be rude or disagreeable or masterful, but then you would not have been
one of those things. You were too kind.”
“So you think me unkind?”
“Horribly.”
“I am sorry.”
“But I’m sorrier.”
“What can I do to make you change your mind?”
“Reform.”
“If I stay here where you are, I shall say something to be regretted.”
“Who will regret it?”
“I. Your uncle and aunt, above all, your grandmother, will look on me as
an adventurer. They will even accuse you of—”
“Of what?”
I could see him turn scarlet.
“I can’t say it.”
“You must.”
“Of having asked me down here knowing that—that I was fond of you.”
“Well, what of that? I’m not ashamed of that. I don’t believe that
girls have to sit around without making any effort to get what they want
in life.”
Carin, you are horrified, aren’t you? Darlin’, it just slipped out. But
it was the truth.
“Do you mean—” he cried, putting his horse up beside Sally McLean. But I
told you Sally was in a mood. She didn’t like that way of doing things.
Perhaps she thought he meant to brush me off of her, or maybe she
imagined that it was a race. I can’t say, because Sally and I do not
understand each other very well yet. But at any rate, she was off down
the road, mud or no mud, and I did not even try to hold her in.
I could hear Keefe thundering along behind me, crying:
“Can’t you hold her? Throw yourself off.”
But not I. I let her go as fast as she wished. At least, until I got
near home and on the macadam, and then I gently drew her in. I didn’t
know but she might be beyond all reason by that time, but she wasn’t, and
I felt terribly ashamed of having let uncle’s fine mare get in such a
fume.
“I do hope and pray, Sally,” I said, “that I haven’t ruined your
disposition with my wretched temper.”
Just then it came over me that there was nothing at all the matter with
Sally’s disposition. The trouble was all with me. I had been in a
trembling rage all day and the sensitive creature had taken it from me.
I was disgusted with myself.
“Little Sally,” I whispered in her ear as I dropped off her at the house
door, “I’ll never, never act like that again.”
She has wonderful eyes. I wish I had eyes like that creature. She
looked at me straight and we kissed and made up. That is to say, I made
the boy hold her till I got her some sugar, and I told him to rub her
down well and blanket her and feed her very lightly.
“She got a little excited,” I said. It was young James, and he looked at
me curiously. I wondered if he, too, saw that I was the excited one.
“Yassum,” he said. “No-um. Yassum.” I thought it covered the ground.
I saw Keefe swinging around the drive just then, and I ran straight up to
my room.
Oh, Carin, how safe and sweet it seemed there. I called Semmy and had
her draw my bath and help me off with my wet things, and I told her to
lay out my new flame-colored silk. It is gorgeous in hue but modest in
make. “For dull nights,” said Aunt Lorena when she gave it to me. “A
country house, my dear, can be particularly gloomy. I trust you to
brighten this one up at such times. Perhaps you can do it successfully
without the aid of a flame-colored gown, but in case—” Well, I put on
the flame-colored dress; likewise the slippers that went with it. No
jewels. I have only my little pearls, and the gold beads and the amber
ones. The dress would have put any of those out. I did my hair low. I
took off my one ring. The dress, I thought, could have the whole road to
itself.
I was one minute late to dinner, and grandmother was watching for me.
“Madam grandmother,” I said, “will you do me the honor?” I gave her my
arm, and we went out to the dining room. Grandmother, of course, always
precedes the others.
I minded my manners and did not speak till I was spoken to.
“Where were you to-day, Azalea?” asked Aunt Lorena. “Not in your room, I
know. You should not go out, child, without letting us know where you
were going.”
I apologized.
“I went for a little ride, Auntie, and the imps took hold of my bridle
and led me farther than I meant. I lunched with Miss Delight Ravanel.
You wished, I think, to have me with the Ravanels as much as possible.”
“It was your grandmother who recommended the Ravanels to you
particularly, I think.”
“I thank whoever it was. I had a beautiful time. Miss Ravanel is as
quaint as an old gift book, and as lonely as—as a rook.”
“Rooks are not lonely,” said Keefe. “They go together in swarms.”
“Lonely rooks are lonely,” I said.
“I hope Miss Ravanel had received the apricot jam I sent her?”
“I have a note from her, aunt, to that effect. She has been meaning to
thank you in person. She also—in the note—begs that I may spend the next
fortnight with her.”
“Should you like to?” asked Uncle David in great surprise.
“Oh, immensely.”
“My dear Azalea!” cried Aunt Lorena incredulously.
“Why not? You advised me to make new friends. I have. She is my new
friend.”
“But Delight Ravanel is old enough to be your mother! And she’s always
raging at things and people. How can you possibly endure her for two
weeks?”
“She was very pleasant indeed to-day. Perhaps she is grouchy because she
is lonely.”
“Azalea,” gasped my grandmother, “what was the word you used? Grouchy?
What does that mean, pray? No such word was in use in my day.”
Then I saw myself as I was, a very naughty young person, setting all
these lovely folks at odds.
“It means what I am to-night—cross and hateful, dearest grandmother.
Please, please forgive me for using it. I ought never to use anything
but the nicest words I know in your presence.”
I picked up her little wrinkled hand and squeezed it, and she looked at
me as I love to have her, with something of the love in her eyes which
she gave in the old days to my unforgotten, wayward father.
“Aunt Lorena,” I said, “she really does want me to visit her. But I’ll
make it a weekend instead of two weeks if you think best.”
“We couldn’t spare you for two weeks, Azalea,” said Uncle David kindly.
“Make it a week-end, do. For my part, I am glad you like her.
Particularly glad. She is a lonely and hurt soul, is poor Delight, who
delights nobody.”
At that, Carin, things I had heard came back to me, and I knew she once
had loved uncle. It must be a terrible thing to love someone, always,
who cares nothing for you. I can’t think of anything worse.
“I already had made up my mind to like her,” I said.
When we went to the drawing-room it was raining so terribly, and the wind
was blowing so wildly, that the great room was unbearable.
“Let’s go to the writing room,” said Aunt Lorena.
The writing room is a delightful little place, mostly occupied by a great
sofa. There is a wide fireplace, too, and seats coming out from it at
right angles. Young James built a great fire for us, and Semmy brought
in some marvelous nut candies she had made, and Martha served the coffee
there.
“No light but the firelight, please, Lorena,” commanded grandmother.
So we sat there by the light of the fire and listened to the storm.
Uncle and auntie were together on one of the cushioned benches beside the
fire; grandmother was on the huge lounge, wrapped in her camel’s hair
shawl and heaped about with pillows; I sat down on the other bench beside
the fire. Keefe looked at me a moment as if undecided what to do. Then
he bowed and asked:
“Have I your permission?”
“Oh, yes,” said I as simply as I could. So we sat side by side for the
first time in all our lives, and after a time—after quite a time—I felt
his hand touching mine under the folds of my flame-colored dress. It has
a scarf to it, that floats from the shoulders. It is quite vol—how do
you spell it?—voluminous. That is why we could hold hands.
But I was afraid uncle and auntie were watching us. So I had an idea.
“Oh, dearest dear grandmother,” I said, “this is the night of all the
world for a story. Grandmother, you _must_ tell us a story—if you
_please_.”
Grandmother gave a little laugh.
“I will do it,” she said. “I will tell you the story of an ancestress of
yours.”
I have partly written that story, Carin, and when I have finished it I
shall send it to you.
_Love—love from_
_Azalea_.