The second year of a new order brings fewer radical changes than the
first. Samson's work began to forge out of the ranks of the ordinary,
and to show symptoms of a quality which would some day give it
distinction. Heretofore, his instructors had held him rigidly to the
limitations of black and white, but now they took off the bonds, and
permitted him the colorful delight of attempting to express himself
from the palette. It was like permitting a natural poet to leave prose,
and play with prosody.
Sometimes, when his thoughts went back to the life he had left, it
seemed immensely far away, as though it were really the life of another
incarnation, and old ideas that had seemed axiomatic to his boyhood
stood before him in the guise of strangers: strangers tattered and
vagabond. He wondered if, after all, the new gods were sapping his
loyalty. At such times, he would for days keep morosely to himself,
picturing the death-bed of his father, and seeming to hear a small
boy's voice making a promise. Sometimes, that promise seemed monstrous,
in the light of his later experience. But it was a promise--and no man
can rise in his own esteem by treading on his vows. In these somber
moods, there would appear at the edges of his drawing-paper terrible,
vividly graphic little heads, not drawn from any present model. They
were sketched in a few ferociously powerful strokes, and always showed
the same malevolent visage--a face black with murder and hate-endowed,
the countenance of Jim Asberry. Sometimes would come a wild, heart-
tearing longing for the old places. He wanted to hear the frogs boom,
and to see the moon spill a shower of silver over the ragged shoulder
of the mountain. He wanted to cross a certain stile, and set out for a
certain cabin where a certain girl would be. He told himself that he
was still loyal, that above all else he loved his people. When he saw
these women, whose youth and beauty lasted long into life, whose
manners and clothes spoke of ease and wealth and refinement, he saw
Sally again as he had left her, hugging his "rifle-gun" to her breast,
and he felt that the only thing he wanted utterly was to take her in
his arms. Yes, he would return to Sally, and to his people--some day.
The some day he did not fix. He told himself that the hills were only
thirty hours away, and therefore he could go any time--which is the
other name for no time. He had promised Lescott to remain here for
eighteen months, and, when that interval ended, he seemed just on the
verge of grasping his work properly. He assured himself often and
solemnly that his creed was unchanged; his loyalty untainted; and the
fact that it was necessary to tell himself proved that he was being
weaned from his traditions. And so, though he often longed for home, he
did not return. And then reason would rise up and confound him. Could
he paint pictures in the mountains? If he did, what would he do with
them? If he went back to that hermit life, would he not vindicate his
uncle's prophecy that he had merely unplaced himself? And, if he went
back and discharged his promise, and then returned again to the new
fascination, could he bring Sally with him into this life--Sally, whom
he had scornfully told that a "gal didn't need no l'arnin'?" And the
answer to all these questions was only that there was no answer.
One day, Adrienne looked up from a sheaf of his very creditable
landscape studies to inquire suddenly:
"Samson, are you a rich man, or a poor one?"
He laughed. "So rich," he told her, "that unless I can turn some of
this stuff into money within a year or two, I shall have to go back to
hoeing corn."
She nodded gravely.
"Hasn't it occurred to you," she demanded, "that in a way you are
wasting your gifts? They were talking about you the other evening
--several painters. They all said that you should be doing portraits."
The Kentuckian smiled. His masters had been telling him the same
thing. He had fallen in love with art through the appeal of the skies
and hills. He had followed its call at the proselyting of George
Lescott, who painted only landscape. Portraiture seemed a less-artistic
form of expression. He said so.
"That may all be very true," she conceded, "but you can go on with
your landscapes, and let your portraits pay the way. With your entrée,
you could soon have a very enviable _clientèle_."
"'So she showed me the way, to promotion and pay,
And I learned about women from her,'"
quoted Samson with a laugh.
"And," she added, "since I am very vain and moderately rich, I hereby
commission you to paint me, just as soon as you learn how."
Farbish had simply dropped out. Bit by bit, the truth of the
conspiracy had leaked, and he knew that his usefulness was ended, and
that well-lined pocketbooks would no longer open to his profligate
demands. The bravo and plotter whose measure has been taken is a broken
reed. Farbish made no farewells. He had come from nowhere and his going
was like his coming.
* * * * *
Sally had started to school. She had not announced that she meant to
do so, but each day the people of Misery saw her old sorrel mare making
its way to and from the general direction of Stagbone College, and they
smiled. No one knew how Sally's cheeks flamed as she sat alone on
Saturdays and Sundays on the rock at the backbone's rift. She was
taking her place, morbidly sensitive and a woman of eighteen, among
little spindle-shanked girls in short skirts, and the little girls were
more advanced than she. But she, too, meant to have "l'arnin'"--as much
of it as was necessary to satisfy the lover who might never come. It
must be admitted that learning for its own sake did not make a clarion-
tongued appeal to the girl's soul. Had Samson been satisfied with her
untutored, she would have been content to remain untutored. He had said
that these things were of no importance in her, but that was before he
had gone forth into the world. If, she naïvely told herself, he should
come back of that same opinion, she would never "let on" that she had
learned things. She would toss overboard her acquirements as ruthlessly
as useless ballast from an over-encumbered boat. But, if Samson came
demanding these attainments, he must find her possessed of them. So
far, her idea of "l'arnin'" embraced the three R's only. And, yet, the
"fotched-on" teachers at the "college" thought her the most voraciously
ambitious pupil they had ever had, so unflaggingly did she toil, and
the most remarkably acquisitive, so fast did she learn. But her studies
had again been interrupted, and Miss Grover, her teacher, riding over
one day to find out why her prize scholar had deserted, met in the road
an empty "jolt-wagon," followed by a ragged cortège of mounted men and
women, whose faces were still lugubrious with the effort of recent
mourning. Her questions elicited the information that they were
returning from the "buryin'" of the Widow Miller.
Sally was not in the procession, and the teacher, riding on, found her
lying face down among the briars of the desolate meeting-house yard,
her small body convulsively heaving with her weeping, and her slim
fingers grasping the thorny briar shoots as though she would still hold
to the earth that lay in freshly broken clods over her mother's grave.
Miss Grover lifted her gently, and at first the girl only stared at
her out of wide, unseeing eyes.
"You've nothing to keep you here now," said the older woman, gently.
"You can come to us, and live at the college." She had learned from
Sally's lips that she lived alone with her mother and younger brother.
"You can't go on living there now."
But the girl drew away, and shook her head with a wild torrent of
childish dissent.
"No, I kain't, neither!" she declared, violently. "I kain't!"
"Why, dear?" The teacher took the palpitating little figure in her
arms and kissed the wet face. She had learned something of this sweet
wood-thrush girl, and had seen both sides of life's coin enough to be
able to close her eyes and ears, and visualize the woman that this
might be.
"'Cause I kain't!" was the obstinate reply.
Being wise, Miss Grover desisted from urging, and went with Sally to
the desolated cabin, which she straightway began to overhaul and put to
rights. The widow had been dying for a week. It was when she lifted
Samson's gun with the purpose of sweeping the corner that the girl
swooped down on her, and rescued the weapon from her grasp.
"Nobody but me mustn't tech thet rifle-gun," she exclaimed, and then,
little by little, it came out that the reason Sally could not leave
this cabin, was because some time there might be a whippoorwill call
out by the stile, and, when it came, she must be there to answer. And,
when at the next vacation Miss Grover rode over, and announced that she
meant to visit Sally for a month or two, and when under her deft hands
the cabin began to transform itself, and the girl to transform herself,
she discovered that Sally found in the graveyard another magnet. There,
she seemed to share something with Samson where their dead lay buried.
While the "fotched-on" lady taught the girl, the girl taught the
"fotched-on" lady, for the birds were her brothers, and the flowers her
cousins, and in the poetry that existed before forms of meter came into
being she was deeply versed.
Toward the end of that year, Samson undertook his portrait of Adrienne
Lescott. The work was nearing completion, but it had been agreed that
the girl herself was not to have a peep at the canvas until the painter
was ready to unveil it in a finished condition. Often as she posed,
Wilfred Horton idled in the studio with them, and often George Lescott
came to criticize, and left without criticizing. The girl was impatient
for the day when she, too, was to see the picture, concerning which the
three men maintained so profound a secrecy. She knew that Samson was a
painter who analyzed with his brush, and that his picture would show
her not only features and expression, but the man's estimate of herself.
"Do you know," he said one day, coming out from behind his easel and
studying her, through half-closed eyes, "I never really began to know
you until now? Analyzing you--studying you in this fashion, not by your
words, but by your expression, your pose, the very unconscious essence
of your personality--these things are illuminating."
"Can I smile," she queried obediently, "or do I have to keep my face
straight?"
"You may smile for two minutes," he generously conceded, "and I'm
going to come over and sit on the floor at your feet, and watch you do
it."
"And under the X-ray scrutiny of this profound analysis," she laughed,
"do you like me?"
"Wait and see," was his non-committal rejoinder.
For a few moments, neither of them spoke. He sat there gazing up, and
she gazing down. Though neither of them said it, both were thinking of
the changes that had taken place since, in this same room, they had
first met. The man knew that many of the changes in himself were due to
her, and she began to wonder vaguely if he had not also been
responsible for certain differences in her.
He felt for her, besides a deep friendship--such a deep friendship
that it might perhaps be even more--a measureless gratitude. She had
been loyal, and had turned and shaped with her deft hand and brain the
rough clay of his crude personality into something that was beginning
to show finish and design. Perhaps, she liked him the better because of
certain obstinate qualities which, even to her persuasive influence,
remained unaltered. But, if she liked him the better for these things,
she yet felt that her dominion over him was not complete.
Now, as they sat there alone in the studio, a shaft of sunlight from
the skylight fell on his squarely blocked chin, and he tossed his head,
throwing back the long lock from his forehead. It was as though he was
emphasizing with that characteristic gesture one of the things in which
he had not yielded to her modeling. The long hair still fell low around
his head. Just now, he was roughly dressed and paint-stained, but
usually he presented the inconspicuous appearance of the well-groomed
man--except for that long hair. It was not so much as a matter of
personal appearance but as a reminder of the old roughness that she
resented this. She had often suggested a visit to the barber, but to no
avail.
"Although I am not painting you," she said with a smile, "I have been
studying you, too. As you stand there before your canvas, your own
personality is revealed--and I have not been entirely unobservant
myself."
"'And under the X-ray scrutiny of this profound analysis,'" he quoted
with a laugh, "do you like me?"
"Wait and see," she retorted.
"At all events"--he spoke gravely--"you must try to like me a little,
because I am not what I was. The person that I am is largely the
creature of your own fashioning. Of course, you had very raw material
to work with, and you can't make a silk purse of"--he broke off and
smiled--"well, of me, but in time you may at least get me mercerized a
little."
For no visible reason, she flushed, and her next question came a
trifle eagerly:
"Do you mean that I have influenced you?"
"Influenced me, Drennie?" he repeated. "You have done more than that.
You have painted me out, and painted me over."
She shook her head, and in her eyes danced a light of subtle coquetry.
"There are things I have tried to do, and failed," she told him.
His eyes showed surprise.
"Perhaps," he apologized, "I am dense, and you may have to tell me
bluntly what I am to do. But you know that you have only to tell me."
For a moment, she said nothing, then she shook her head again.
"Issue your orders," he insisted. "I am waiting to obey."
She hesitated again, then said, slowly:
"Have your hair cut. It's the one uncivilized thing about you."
For an instant, Samson's face hardened.
"No," he said; "I don't care to do that."
"Oh, very well!" she laughed, lightly. "In that event, of course, you
shouldn't do it." But her smile faded, and after a moment he explained:
"You see, it wouldn't do."
"What do you mean?"
"I mean that I've got to keep something as it was to remind me of a
prior claim on my life."
For an instant the girl's face clouded, and grew deeply troubled.
"You don't mean," she asked, with an outburst of interest more vehement
than she had meant to show, or realized that she was showing--"you don't
mean that you still adhere to ideas of the vendetta?" Then she broke off
with a laugh, a rather nervous laugh. "Of course not," she answered
herself. "That would be too absurd!"
"Would it?" asked Samson, simply. He glanced at his watch. "Two
minutes up," he announced. "The model will please resume the pose. By
the way, may I drive with you to-morrow afternoon?"
* * * * *
The next afternoon, Samson ran up the street steps of the Lescott
house, and rang the bell, and a few moments later Adrienne appeared.
The car was waiting outside, and, as the girl came down the stairs in
motor coat and veil, she paused and her fingers on the bannisters
tightened in surprise as she looked at the man who stood below holding
his hat in his hand, with his face upturned. The well-shaped head was
no longer marred by the mane which it had formerly worn, but was close
cropped, and under the transforming influence of the change the
forehead seemed bolder and higher, and to her thinking the strength of
the purposeful features was enhanced, and yet, had she known it, the
man felt that he had for the first time surrendered a point which meant
an abandonment of something akin to principle.
She said nothing, but as she took his hand in greeting, her fingers
pressed his own in handclasp more lingering than usual.
Late that evening, when Samson returned to the studio, he found a
missive in his letter-box, and, as he took it out, his eyes fell on the
postmark. It was dated from Hixon, Kentucky, and, as the man slowly
climbed the stairs, he turned the envelope over in his hand with a
strange sense of misgiving and premonition.