Literary Love-Letters and Other Stories Part 3

"It's no place," he muttered, "except for color and for a poet. A man would have to shut himself up in a cellar to escape those glorious hills and the bay, if he wanted to work at that putty." He cast a contemptuous glance at a rough bust of his Cousin Della, the only thing he had attempted. As a solution of his hopeless problem he picked up a pipe and was hunting for some tobacco, preparatory to a stroll up Newport, when someone sounded timidly at the show knocker of the front door.

"Is that you, Miss Marston?" Clayton remarked, in a disappointed tone, as a middle-aged woman entered.

"The servants were all away," she replied, "and Della thought you might like some lunch to recuperate you from your labors." This was said a little maliciously, as she looked about and found nothing noteworthy going on.

"I was just thinking of knocking off for this morning and taking a walk. Won't you come? It's such glorious weather and no fog," he added, parenthetically, as if in justification of his idleness.

"Why do you happen to ask me?" Miss Marston exclaimed, impetuously.

"You have hitherto never paid any more attention to my existence than if I had been Jane, the woman who usually brings your lunch." She gasped at her own boldness. This was not coquettishness, and was evidently unusual.

"Why! I really wish you would come," said the young man, helplessly.

"Then I'll have a chance to know you better."

"Well! I will." She seemed to have taken a desperate step. Miss Jane Marston, Della's sister-in-law, had always been the superfluous member of her family. Such unenviable tasks as amusing or teaching the younger children, sewing, or making up whist sets, had, as is usual with the odd members in a family, fallen to her share. All this Miss Marston hated in a slow, rebellious manner. From always having just too little money to live independently, she had been forced to accept invitations for long visits in uninteresting places. As a girl and a young woman, she had shown a delicate, retiring beauty that might have been made much of, and in spite of gray hair, thirty-five years, and a somewhat drawn look, arising from her discontent, one might discover sufficient traces of this fading beauty to idealize her. All this summer she had watched the wayward young artist with a keen interest in the fresh life he brought among her flat surroundings. His buoyancy cheered her habitual depression; his eagerness and love of life made her blood flow more quickly, out of sympathy; and his intellectual alertness bewildered and fascinated her. She was still shy at thirty-five, and really very timid and apologetic for her commonplaceness; but at times the rebellious bitterness at the bottom of her heart would leap forth in a brusque or bold speech. She was still capable of affording surprise.

"Won't I spoil the inspiration?" she ventured, after a long silence.

"Bother the inspiration!" groaned Clayton. "I wish I were a blacksmith, or a sailor, or something honest. I feel like a hypocrite. I have started out at a pace that I can't keep up!"

Miss Marston felt complimented by this apparent confidence. If she had had experience in that kind of nature, she would have understood how indifferent Clayton was to her personally. He would have made the same confession to the birds, if they had happened to produce the same irritation in his mind.

"They all say your work is so brilliant," she said, soothingly.

"Thunder!" he commented. "I wish they would not say anything kind and pleasant and cheap. At college they praised my verses, and the theatres stole my music for the Pudding play, and the girls giggled over my sketches. And now, at twenty-six, I don't know whether I want to fiddle, or to write an epic, or to model, or to paint. I am a victim of every artistic impulse."

"I know what you should do," she said, wisely, when they had reached a shady spot and were cooling themselves.

"Smoke?" queried Clayton, quizzically.

"You ought to marry!"

"That's every woman's great solution, great panacea," he replied, contemptuously.

"It would steady you and make you work."

"No," he replied, thoughtfully, "not unless she were poor, and in that case it would be from the frying-pan into the fire!"

"You should work," she went on, more courageously. "And a wife would give you inspiration and sympathy."

"I have had too much of the last already," he sighed. "And it's better not to have it all of one sort. After awhile a woman doesn't produce pleasant or profitable reactions in my soul. Yes, I know," he added, as he noticed her look of wonderment, "I am selfish and supremely egotistical. Every artist is; his only lookout, however, should be that his surroundings don't become stale. Or, if you prefer to put it more humanely, an artist isn't fit to marry; it's criminal for him to marry and break a woman's heart."

After this heroic confession he paused to smoke. "Besides, no woman whom I ever knew really understands art and the ends which the artist is after. She has the temperament, a superficial appreciation and interest, but she hasn't the stimulus of insight. She's got the nerves, but not the head."

"But you just said that you had had too much sympathy and molly-coddling."

"Did I? Well, I was wrong. I need a lot, and I don't care how idiotic.

It makes me courageous to have even a child approve. I suppose that shows how closely we human animals are linked together. We have got to have the consent of the world, or at any rate a small part of it, to believe ourselves sane. So I need the chorus of patrons, admiring friends, kind women, etc., while I play the Protagonist, to tell me that I am all right, to go ahead. Do you suppose any one woman would be enough? What a great posture for an arm!" His sudden exclamation was called out by the att.i.tude that Miss Marston had unconsciously a.s.sumed in the eagerness of her interest. She had thrown her hand over a ledge above them, and was leaning lightly upon it. The loose muslin sleeve had fallen back, revealing a pretty, delicately rounded arm, not to be suspected from her slight figure. Clayton quickly squirmed a little nearer, and touching the arm with an artist's instinct, brought out still more the fresh white flesh and the delicate veining.

"Don't move. That would be superb in marble!" Miss Marston blushed painfully.

"How strange you are," she murmured, as she rose. "You just said that you had given up modelling, or I would let you model my arm in order to give you something to do. You should try to stick to something."

"Don't be trite," laughed Clayton, "and don't make me consistent. You will keep yourself breathless if you try that!"

"I know what you need," she said, persistently unmindful of his admonition. "You need the spur. It doesn't make so much difference _what_ you do--you're clever enough."

"'Truth from the mouths of babes----'"

"I am not a babe." She replied to his mocking, literally. "Even if I am stupid and commonplace, I may have intuitions like other women."

"Which lead you to think that it's all chance whether Raphael paints or plays on the piano. Well, I don't know that you are so absurd. That's my theory: an artist is a fund of concentrated, undistributed energy that has any number of possible outlets, but selects one. Most of us are artists, but we take so many outlets that the hogshead becomes empty by leaking. Which shall it be? Shall we toss up a penny?"

"Painting," said Miss Marston, decisively. "You must stick to that."

"How did you arrive at that conclusion--have you observed my work?"

"No! I'll let you know some time, but now you must go to work. Come!"

She rose, as if to go down to the lodge that instant. Clayton, without feeling the absurdity of the comedy, rose docilely and followed her down the path for some distance. He seemed completely dominated by the sudden enthusiasm and will that chance had flung him.

"There's no such blessed hurry," he remarked at last, when the first excitement had evanesced. "The light will be too bad for work by the time we reach Bar Harbor. Let's rest here in this dark nook, and talk it all over."

Clayton was always abnormally eager to talk over anything. Much of his artistic energy had trickled away in elusive s.n.a.t.c.hes of talk. "Come,"

he exclaimed, enthusiastically, "I have it. I will begin a great work--a modern Magdalen or something of that sort. We can use you in just that posture, kneeling before a rock with outstretched hands, and head turned away. We will make everything of the hands and arms!"

Miss Marston blushed her slow, unaccustomed blush. At first sight it pleased her to think that she had become so much a part of this interesting young man's plans, but in a moment she laughed calmly at the frank desire he expressed to leave out her face, and the characteristic indifference he had shown in suggesting negligently such a subject.

"All right. I am willing to be of any service. But you will have to make use of the early hours. I teach the children at nine."

"Splendid!" he replied, as the vista of a new era of righteousness dawned upon him. "We shall have the fresh morning light, and the cool and the beauty of the day. And I shall have plenty of time to loaf, too."

"No, you mustn't loaf. You will find me a hard task-mistress!"

III

True to her word, Miss Marston rapped at the door of the studio promptly at six the next morning. She smiled fearfully, and finding no response, tried stones at the windows above. She kept saying to herself, to keep up her courage: "He won't think about me, and I am too old to care, anyway." Soon a head appeared, and Clayton called out, in a sleepy voice:

"I dreamt it was all a joke; but wait a bit, and we will talk it over."

Miss Marston entered the untidy studio, where the _debris_ of a month's fruitless efforts strewed the floor. Bits of clay and carving-tools, canvases hurled face downward in disgust and covered with paint-rags, lay scattered about. She tip-toed around, carefully raising her skirt, and examined everything. Finally, discovering an alcohol-lamp and a coffee-pot, she prepared some coffee, and when Clayton appeared--a somewhat dishevelled G.o.d--he found her hunting for biscuit.

"You can't make an artist of me at six in the morning," he growled.

In sudden inspiration, Miss Marston threw open the upper half of the door and admitted a straight pathway of warm sun that led across the water just rippling at their feet. The hills behind the steep sh.o.r.e were dark with a mysterious green and fresh with a heavy dew, and from the nooks in the woods around them thrush was answering thrush. Miss Marston gave a sigh of content. The warm, strong sunlight strengthened her and filled her wan cheeks, as the sudden interest in the artist's life seemed to have awakened once more the vigor of her feelings. She clasped her thin hands and accepted both blessings. Clayton also revived. At first he leant listlessly against the door-post, but as minute by minute he drank in the air and the beauty and the hope, his weary frame dilated with incoming sensations. "G.o.d, what beauty!" he murmured, and he accepted unquestioningly the interference in his life brought by this woman just as he accepted the gift of sunshine and desire.

"Come to work," said Miss Marston, at last.