The Fortunes of Oliver Horn Part 23

"And you would give up your career because she wants it? How do you know she's right about it? And who's to suffer if she's wrong? Be a painter, Oliver, if you want to! Your mother can't coddle you up forever! No mother should. Do what you can do best, and to please yourself, not somebody else," and then she laughed lightly as if to break the force of her words.

Oliver looked at her in indignation that anyone--even Margaret--should speak so of his mother. It was the first time in all his life that he had heard her name mentioned without the profound reverence it deserved. Then a sense of the injustice of her words took possession of him, as the solemn compact he had made with his mother not to be a burden on her while the mortgage was unpaid, rose in his mind. This thought and Margaret's laugh softened any hurt her words had given him, although the lesson that they were intended to teach lingered in his memory for many days thereafter.

"You would not talk that way, Madge, if you knew my dear mother," he said, quietly. "There is nothing in her life she loves better than me.

She doesn't want me to be a painter because--" He stopped, fearing she might not understand his answer.

"Go on--why not?" The laugh had faded out of her voice now, and a tone almost of defiance had taken its place.

"She says it is not the profession of a gentleman," he answered, sadly.

"I do not agree with her, but she thinks so, and nothing can shake her."

"If those are her opinions, I wonder what she would think of ME?" There was a slight irritation in her voice--somehow she always became irritable when Oliver spoke of his mother. She was ashamed of it, but it was true.

All his anger was gone now. Whatever opinion the world might have on any number of things there could be but one opinion of Madge. "She would LOVE you, little girl," he burst out as he laid his hand on her arm--the first time he had ever touched her with any show of affection.

"You'd make her love you. She never saw anybody like you before, and she never will. That you are an artist wouldn't make any difference.

It's not the same with you. You're a woman."

The girl's eyes again sought the woodp.e.c.k.e.r. It was stabbing away with all its might, driving its beak far into the yielding bark. It seemed in some way to represent her own mood. After a moment's thought she said thoughtfully as she rested her head on the edge of the slant:

"Ollie, what is a gentleman?" She knew, she thought, but she wanted him to define it.

"My father is one," he said, positively, "--and so is yours," and he looked inquiringly into her face.

"That depends on your standard. I don't know your father, but I do mine, and from what you have told me about yours I think they are about as different as two men can be. Answer my question--what is a gentleman?" She was leaning over a little, and tucking a chip under her toes to keep the water away from her shoes. Her eyes sought his again.

"A gentleman, Madge--why, you know what a gentleman is. He is a man well born, well educated, and well bred. That's the standard at home--at least, that's my mother's. Father's standard is the same, only he puts it in a different way. He says a gentleman is a man who tolerates other people's mistakes and who sympathizes with other people's troubles."

"Anything else?" She was searching his face now. There were some things she wanted to settle in her own mind.

"I don't think of anything else, Madge, dear--do you?" He was really dismissing the question. His thoughts were on something else--the way her hair curled from under her worsted cap and the way her pink ears nestled close to her head, especially the little indents at each corner of her mouth. He liked their modelling.

"And so according to your mother's and father's ideas, and those of all your aristocratic people at home, Hank here could not be a gentleman if he tried?"

The idea was new to Oliver. He had become conscious now. What had gotten into Margaret to-day!

"Hank?--no, certainly not. How could he?"

"By BEING a gentleman, Mr. Aristocrat. Not in clothes, mind you--nor money, nor furniture, nor wines, nor carriages, but in HEART. Think a moment, Ollie," and her eyes snapped. "Hank finds a robin that has tumbled out of its nest, and spends half a day putting it back. Hank follows you up the brook and sees you try to throw a fly into a pool, and he knows just how awkwardly you do it, for he's the best fisherman in the woods--and yet you never see a smile cross his face, nor does he ever speak of it behind your back--not even to me. Hank walks across Moose Hillock to find old Jonathan Gordon to tell him he has some big trout in Loon Pond, so that the old man can have the fun of catching them and selling them afterward to the new hotel in the Notch. He has walked twenty-four miles when he gets back. Do these things make Hank a gentleman, or not?"

"Then you don't believe in Sir Walter Raleigh, Miss Democrat, simply because he was a lord?"

"Yes--but I always thought he wore his old cloak that day on purpose, so he could be made an earl." And a ripple of laughter escaped her lips.

Oliver laughed too, sprang to his feet, and held out his hands so as to lift her up. None of these fine-drawn distinctions really interested him--certainly not on this day, when he was so happy. Why, he wondered, should she want to discuss theories and beliefs and creeds, with the beautiful forest all about and the sky breaking overhead?

"Well, you've walked over mine many a time, Miss Queen Elizabeth, and you haven't decorated me yet, nor made me an earl nor anything else for it, and I'm not going to forgive you either," and he rose to his feet.

"Look! Madge, look!" he cried, and sprang out into the path, pointing to the sunshine bursting through the trees--the storm had pa.s.sed as suddenly as it had come. "Isn't it glorious! Come here quick! Don't wait a minute. I should try to get that with Naples yellow and a little chrome--what do you think?" he asked when she stood beside him, half closing his eyes, to get the effect the better.

Margaret looked at him curiously for a moment. She did not answer. "I cannot fasten his mind on anything in which I am interested," she said to herself, with a sigh, "nor shall I ever overcome these prejudices which seem to be part of his very life."

She paused a moment and an expression of pain pa.s.sed over her face.

"Pale cadmium would be better," she said, quietly, with a touch of indifference in her tone, and led the way out of the forest to the main road.

CHAPTER XV

MRS. TAFT'S FRONT PORCH

The autumn fires were being kindled on the mountains--fires of maple, oak, and birch. Along the leaf-strewn roads the sumach blazed scarlet, and over the rude stone fences blood-red lines of fire followed the trend of leaf and vine. Golden pumpkins lay in the furrows of the corn; showers of apples carpeted the gra.s.s of the orchards; the crows in straight lines, and the busy squirrels worked from dawn till dark.

Over all settled the requiem haze of the dead summer, blurring the Notch and softening Moose Hillock to a film of gray against the pale sky.

It had been a summer of very great sweetness and charm--the happiest of Oliver's life. He had found that he could do fairly well the things that he liked to do best; that the technical difficulties that had confronted him when he began to paint were being surmounted as the weeks went by, and that the thing that had always been a pain to him had now become a pleasure--pain, because, try as he might, the quality of the result was always below his hopes; a pleasure, because some bit of bark, perhaps, or glint of light on moss-covered rock, or tender vista had at last stood out on his canvas with every tone of color true.

Only a painter can understand what all this meant to Oliver; only an out-of-door painter, really. The "studio-man" who reproduces an old study which years before has inspired him, or who evolves a composition from his inner consciousness, has no such thrills over his work. He may, perhaps, have other sensations, but they will lack the spontaneous outburst of enthusiasm over the old sketch.

And how glorious are the memories!

The victorious painter has been weeks over these same trees that have baffled him; he has painted them on gray days and sunny days; in the morning, at noon, and in the gloaming. He has loved their texture and the thousand little lights and darks; the sparkle of the black, green, or gray moss, and the delicate tones that played up and down their stalwart trunks. He has toiled in the heat of the day, his nerves on edge, and sometimes great drops of sweat on his troubled forehead. Now and then he has sprung from his seat for a farther-away look at his sketch. With a sigh and a heart bowed down (oh, how desolate are these hours!) he has noted how wooden and commonplace and mean and despicable his work was--what an insult he has cast upon the beautiful yellow birch, this outdoor, motionless, old model that has stood so patiently before him, posing all day without moving; its big arms above its head its leaves and branches stock-still to make it all the easier for him.

Suddenly in all this depression, an inspiration has entered his dull brain--he will use burnt umber in stead of Vand.y.k.e brown for the bark!

or light chrome and indigo instead of yellow ochre and black for the green!

Presto! Ah, that's like it! Another pat, and another, and still one more!

How quickly now the canvas loses its pasty mediocrity. How soon the paint and the brush-marks and the niggly little touches fade away and the THING ITSELF comes out and says "How do you do?" and that it is so glad to see him, and that it has been lurking behind these colors all day, trying to make his acquaintance, and he would have none of it.

What good friends he and the sketch have become now; how proud he is of it, and of possessing it and of CREATING it! Then little quivery-quavers go creeping up and down his spine and away out to his fingertips; and he KNOWS that he has something really GOOD.

He carries it home in his hand, oh, so carefully (he strapped its predecessor on his back yesterday without caring), and a dozen times he stops to look at its dear face, propping it against a stump for a better light, just to see if he had not been mistaken after all. He can hardly wait until it is dark enough to see how it looks by gas-light, or candle-light, or kerosene, or whatever else he may have in his quarters. Years after, the dear old thing is still hanging on his studio wall. He has never sold it nor given it away. He could not--it was too valuable, too constantly giving him good advice and showing him what the thing WAS. Not what he thought it was, or hoped it was, or would like it to be, but what it WAS.

Yes, there may be triumphs that come to men digging away on the dull highway of life--triumphs in business; in politics; in discovery; in law; medicine, and science. To each and every profession and pursuit there must come, and does come, a time when a rush of uncontrollable feeling surges through the victor's soul, crowning long hours of work, but they are as dry ashes to a thirsty man compared to the boundless ecstasy a painter feels when, with a becaked palette, some half-dried tubes of color, and a few worn-out, ragged brushes, he compels a six-by-nine canvas to glow with life and truth.

All this Oliver knew and felt. The work of the summer, attended at first with a certain sense of disappointment, had, during the last few weeks of sojourn, as his touch grew surer, not only become a positive pleasure to him, but had produced an exaltation that had kept our young gentleman walking on clouds most of the time, his head in the blue ether.

Margaret's nice sense of color and correct eye had hastened this result. She could grasp at the first glance the ma.s.ses of light and shade, giving each its proper value in the composition. She and Oliver.

really studied out their compositions together before either one set a palette, a most desirable practice, by the way, not only for tyros, but for Academicians.

This relying upon Margaret's judgment had become a habit with Oliver.

He not only consulted her about his canvases, but about everything else that concerned him. He had never formulated in his mind what this kind of companionship meant to him (we never do when we are in the midst of it), nor had he ever considered what would become of him when the summer was over, and the dream would end, and they each would return to the customary dulness of life; a life where there would be no blue ether nor clouds, nor vanishing points, nor values, nor tones, nor anything else that had made their heaven of a summer so happy.

They had both lived in this paradise for weeks without once bringing themselves to believe it could ever end (why do not such episodes last forever?) when Oliver awoke one morning to the fact that the fatal day of their separation would be upon him in a week's time or less.

Margaret, with her more practical mind, had seen farther ahead than Oliver, and her laugh, in consequence, had been less spontaneous of late, and her interest in her work and in Oliver's less intense. She was overpowered by another sensation; she had been thinking of the day, now so near, when the old stage would drive up to Mrs. Taft's pasture-gate, and her small trunk and trap would be carried down on Hank's back and tumbled in, and she would go back alone to duty and the prosaic life of a New England village.

Neither of them supposed that it was anything else but the grief of parting that afflicted them, until there came a memorable autumn night--a night that sometimes comes to the blessed!--when the moon swam in the wide sky, breasting the soft white clouds, and when Oliver and Margaret sat together on the porch of Mrs. Taft's cottage--he on the steps at her feet, she leaning against the railing, the moonlight full upon her face.