Literary Love-Letters and Other Stories Part 4

"That's no go," he replied, "that subject we selected."

"I dare say you won't do much with it, but it will do as well as any other for experiment and practice."

"I see that you want those arms preserved."

The little woman shrank into her sh.e.l.l for a moment: her lazy artist could scatter insults as negligently as epigrams. Then she blazed out.

"Mr. Clayton, I didn't come here to be insulted."

Clayton, utterly surprised, opened his sleepy eyes in real alarm.

"Bless you, my dear Miss Marston, I can't insult anybody. I never mean anything."

"Perhaps that's the trouble," replied Miss Marston, somewhat mollified.

But the sitting was hardly a success. Clayton wasted almost all his time in improvising an easel and in preparing his brushes. Miss Marston had to leave him just as he was ready to throw himself into his work.

He was discontented, and, instead of improving the good light and the long day, he took a pipe and went away into the hills. The next morning he felt curiously ashamed when Miss Marston, after examining the rough sketch on the easel, said:

"Is that all?"

And this day he painted, but in a fit of gloomy disgust destroyed everything. So it went on for a few weeks. Miss Marston was more regular than an alarm-clock; sometimes she brought some work, but oftener she sat vacantly watching the young man at work. Her only standard of accomplishment was quant.i.ty. One day, when Clayton had industriously employed a rainy afternoon in putting in the drapery for the figure, she was so much pleased by the quant.i.ty of the work accomplished that she praised him gleefully. Clayton, who was, as usual, in an ugly mood, cast an utterly contemptuous look at her and then turned to his easel.

"You mustn't look at me like that," the woman said, almost frightened.

"Then don't jabber about my pictures."

Her lips quivered, but she was silent. She began to realize her position of galley-slave, and welcomed with a dull joy the contempt and insults to come.

One morning Clayton was not to be found. He did not appear during that week, and at last Miss Marston determined to find him. She made an excuse for a journey to Boston, and divining where Clayton could be found, she sent him word at a certain favorite club that she wanted to see him. He called at her modest hotel, dejected, listless, and somewhat shamefaced; he found Miss Marston calm and commonplace as usual. But it was the calm of a desperate resolve, won after painful hours, that he little recognized. Her instinct to attach herself to this strange, unaccountable creature, to make him effective to himself, had triumphed over her prejudices. She humbled herself joyfully, recognizing a mission.

"Della said that I might presume on your escort home," she remarked dryly, trembling for fear that she had exposed herself to some contemptuous retort. One great attraction, however, in Clayton was that he never expected the conventional. It did not occur to him as particularly absurd that this woman, ten years his senior, should hunt him up in this fashion. He took such eccentricities as a matter of course, and whatever the circ.u.mstances or the conversation, found it all natural and reasonable. Women did not fear him, but talked indiscreetly to him about all things.

"What's the use of keeping up this ridiculous farce about my work?" he said, sadly. Then he sought for a conventional phrase. "Your unexpected interest and enthusiasm in my poor attempts have been most kind, my dear Miss Marston. But you must allow me to go to the dogs in my own fashion; that's the inalienable right of every emanc.i.p.ated soul in these days." The politeness and mockery of this little epigram stung the woman.

"Don't be brutal, as well as good for nothing," she said, bitterly.

"You're as low as if you took to drink or any other vice, and you know it. I can't appreciate your fine ideas, perhaps, but I know you ought to do something more than talk. You're terribly ambitious, but you're too weak to do anything but talk. I don't care what you think about my interference. I can make you work, and I will make you do something.

You know you need the whip, and if none of your pleasant friends will give it to you, I can. Come!" she added, pleadingly.

"Jove!" exclaimed the young man, slowly, "I believe you're an awful trump. I will go back."

On their return they scarcely spoke. Miss Marston divined that her companion felt ashamed and awkward, and that his momentary enthusiasm had evaporated under the influence of a long railroad ride. While they were waiting for the steamer at the Mount Desert ferry, she said, as negligently as she could, "I have telegraphed for a carriage, but you had better walk up by yourself."

He nodded a.s.sent. "So you will supply the will for the machine, if I will grind out the ideas. But it will never succeed," he added, gloomily. "Of course I am greatly obliged and all that, and I will stick to it until October for the sake of your interest." In answer she smiled with an air of proprietorship.

One effect of this spree upon Clayton was that he took to landscape during the hours that he had formerly loafed. He found some quiet bits of dell with water, and planted his easel regularly every day.

Sometimes he sat dreaming or reading, but he felt an unaccustomed responsibility if, when his mentor appeared with the children late in the afternoon, he hadn't something to show for his day. She never attempted to criticise except as to the amount performed, and she soon learned enough not to measure this by the area of canvas. Although Clayton had abandoned the Magdalen in utter disgust, Miss Marston persisted in the early morning sittings. She made herself useful in preparing his coffee and in getting his canvas ready. They rarely talked. Sometimes Clayton, in a spirit of deviltry, would tease his mentor about their peculiar relationship, about herself, or, worse than all, would run himself and say very true things about his own imperfections. Then, on detecting the tears that would rise in the tired, faded eyes of the woman he tortured, he would throw himself into his work.

So the summer wore away and the brilliant September came. The unsanctified crowds flitted to the mountains or the town, and the island and sea resumed the air of free-hearted peace which was theirs by right. Clayton worked still more out of doors on marines, attempting to grasp the perplexing brilliancy that flooded everything.

"It's no use," he said, sadly, as he packed up his kit one evening in the last of September. "I really don't know the first thing about color. I couldn't exhibit a single thing I have done this entire summer."

"What's the real matter?" asked Miss Marston, with a desperate calm.

"Why, I have fooled about so much that I have lost a lot I learnt over there in Paris."

"Why don't you get--get a teacher?"

Clayton laughed ironically. "I am pretty old to start in, especially as I have just fifty dollars to my name, and a whole winter before me."

They returned silently. The next morning Miss Marston appeared at the usual hour and made the coffee. After Clayton had finished his meagre meal, she sat down shyly and looked at him.

"You've never interested yourself much in my plans, but I am going to tell you some of them. I'm sick of living about like a neglected cat, and I am going to New York to--to keep boarders." Her face grew very red. "They will make a fuss, but I am ready to break with them all."

"So you, too, find dependence a burden?" commented Clayton, indifferently.

"You haven't taken much pains to know me," she replied. "And if I were a man," she went on, with great scorn, "I would die before I would be dependent!"

"Talking about insults--but an artist isn't a man," remarked Clayton, philosophically smoking his pipe.

"I hate you when you're like that," Miss Marston remarked, with intense bitterness.

"Then you must hate me pretty often! But continue with your plans.

Don't let our little differences in temperament disturb us."

"Well," she continued, "I have written to some friends who spend the winters in New York, and out of them I think I shall find enough boarders--enough to keep me from starving. And the house has a large upper story with a north light." She stopped and peeped at him furtively.

"Oh," said Clayton, coolly, "and you're thinking that I would make a good tenant."

"Exactly," a.s.sented Miss Marston, uncomfortably.

"And who will put up the tin: for you don't suppose that I am low enough to live off you?"

"No," replied the woman, quietly. "I shouldn't allow that, though I was not quite sure you would be unwilling. But you can borrow two or three hundred dollars from your brother, and by the time that's gone you ought to be earning something. You could join a cla.s.s; the house isn't far from those studios."

Clayton impulsively seized her arms and looked into her face. She was startled and almost frightened.

"I believe," he began, but the words faded away.

"No, don't say it. You believe that I am in love with you, and do this to keep you near me. Don't be quite such a brute, for you _are_ a brute, a grasping, egotistical, intolerant brute." She smiled slightly.

"But don't think that I am such a fool as not to know how impossible _that_ is."

Clayton still held her in astonishment. "I think I was going to say that I was in love with you."

"Oh, no," she laughed, sadly. "I am coffee and milk and bread and b.u.t.ter, the 'stuff that dreams are made on.' You want some n.o.ble young woman--a G.o.ddess, to make you over, to make you human. I only save you from the poor-house."

IV

There followed a bitter two years for this strange couple. Clayton borrowed a thousand dollars--a more convenient number to remember, he said, than three hundred dollars--and induced a prominent artist "who happens to know something," to take him into his crowded cla.s.ses for a year. He began with true grit to learn again what he had forgotten and some things that he had never known. At the end of the year he felt that he could go alone, and the artist agreed, adding, nonchalantly: "You may get there; G.o.d knows; but you need loads of work."