Hillsboro People Part 27

"He had stayed there the rest of his life, and worked the little farm that was all his sister had, and made a living for them--not large, the farm being poor and he not a first-cla.s.s farmer, but still enough. He had always been kind to them--if he was quite queer and absent. She had heard her grandmother say that at first, the first ten years, perhaps, he had had strange, gloomy savage fits like a person possessed that you read of in the Bible; but she herself could never remember him as anything but quiet and smiling. He had a very queer smile unlike anyone else, as I would notice for myself when I went to see him about the picture. You could tell him by that, and by his being very lame.

"That brought me back with a start. I rushed at her with questions. 'How about the picture? Were there others? Were there many? Had he always painted? Had he never shown them to anyone? Was he painting now?

"She could not tell me much. It had been a detail of their common life she had but absently remarked, as though she had lived with a man who collected snail-sh.e.l.ls, or studied the post-marks on letters. She 'had never noticed'--that was the answer to most of my questions. No, she did not think there were very many now, though he must have painted 'most a million. He was always at it, every minute he could spare from farming.

But they had been so poor he had not felt he could afford many canvases.

The paints cost a good deal too. So he painted them over and over, first one thing and then another, as he happened to fancy. He painted in the horse-barn. 'Had a place rigged up,' in her phrase, in one corner of the room where the hay was stored, and had cut a big window in the roof that was apt to let in water on the hay if the rain came from the north.

"'What did he paint?' 'Oh, anything. He was queer about that. He'd paint _any_thing! He did one picture of nothing but the corner of the barnyard, with a big white sow and some little pigs in the straw, early in the morning, when the dew was on everything. He had thought quite a lot of that, but he had had to paint over it to make the picture of her little sister with the yellow kittie--the one she'd sent down to the village to try to sell, the one--'

"'Yes, yes,' I told her, 'the one I saw. But did he never try to sell any himself? Did he never even show them to anyone?'

"She hesitated, tried to remember, and said that once when they were very poor, and there was a big doctor's bill to pay, he _had_ sent a picture down to New York. But it was sent back. They had made a good deal of fun of it, the people down there, because it wasn't finished off enough. She thought her uncle's feelings had been hurt by their letter. The express down and back had cost a good deal too, and the only frame he had got broken. Altogether, she guessed that discouraged him. Anyhow, he'd never tried again. He seemed to get so after a while that he didn't care whether anybody liked them or even saw them or not--he just painted them to amuse himself, she guessed. He seemed to get a good real of comfort out of it.

It made his face very still and smiling to paint. n.o.body around there so much as knew he did it, the farm was so far from neighbors.

"'Twas a real lonely place, she told me, and she had been glad to marry and come down in the valley to live closer to folks. Her uncle had given her her wedding outfit. He had done real well by them all, and they were grateful; and now he was getting feeble and had trouble with his heart, they wanted to do something for him. They had thought, perhaps, they could sell some of his pictures for enough to hire a man to help him with the farm work. She had heard that pictures were coming into fas.h.i.+on more than they had been, and she had borrowed that one of her little sister and the kittie, and without her uncle's knowing anything about it, had sent it off. She was about discouraged waiting for somebody down in the city to make up his mind whether he'd buy it or not.

"I asked her a thousand other questions but she could answer none of them.

The only detail I could get from her being an account of her uncle's habit of 'staring' for sometimes a half an hour at something, without once looking away. She'd seen him stop that way, when he'd be husking corn maybe, and stare at a place where a sunbeam came in on a pile of corn. It put him back quite considerable in his work, that habit, but they had nothing to complain of. He'd done well by them, when you considered they weren't his own children.

"'Hadn't he ever tried to break away?' I asked her amazed. 'To leave them?

To go back?'

"She told me: 'Oh, no, he was the only support his mother and his sister had, and there were all the little children. He _had_ to stay.'"

The actress broke in fiercely: "Oh, stop! stop! it makes me sick to hear.

I could boil them in oil, that family! Quick! You saw him? You brought him away? You--"

"I saw him," said Vieyra, "yes, I saw him."

Madame Orloff leaned toward him, her eyebrows a line of painful attention.

"I drove that afternoon up to a still tinier village in the mountains near where he lived, and there I slept that night--or, at least, I lay in a bed."

"Of course, you could not sleep," broke in the listening woman; "I shall not to-night."

"When dawn came I dressed and went out to wander until people should be awake. I walked far, through fields, and then through a wood as red as red-gold--like nothing I ever saw. It was in October, and the sun was late to rise. When I came out on an uplying heath, the mists were just beginning to roll away from the valley below. As I stood there, leaning against a tree in the edge of the wood, some cows came by, little, pinched, lean cows and a young dog bounding along, and then, after them, slowly, an old man in gray--very lame."

The actress closed her eyes.

"He did not see me. He whistled to the dog and stroked his head, and then as the cows went through a gate, he turned and faced the rising sun, the light full on his face. He looked at the valley coming into sight through the mists. He was so close to me I could have tossed a stone to him--I shall never know how long he stood there--how long I had that face before me."

The narrator was silent. Madame Orloff opened her eyes and looked at him piercingly.

"I cannot tell you--I cannot!" he answered her. 'Who can tell of life and death and a new birth? It was as though I were thinking with my finger-nails, or the hair of my head--a part of me I had never before dreamed had feeling. My eyes were dazzled. I could have bowed myself to the earth like Moses before the burning bush. How can I tell you--? How can I tell you?"

"He was--?" breathed the woman.

"Hubert van Eyck might have painted G.o.d the Father with those eyes--that mouth--that face of patient power--of selfless, still beat.i.tude.--Once the dog, nestling by his side, whimpered and licked his hand. He looked down, he turned his eyes away from his vision, and looked down at the animal and smiled. Jehovah! What a smile. It seemed to me then that if G.o.d loves humanity, he can have no kinder smile for us. And then he looked back across the valley--at the sky, at the mountains, at the smoke rising from the houses below us--he looked at the world--at some vision, some knowledge--what he saw--what he saw--!

"I did not know when he went. I was alone in that crimson wood.

"I went back to the village. I went back to the city. I would not speak to him till I had some honor worthy to offer him. I tried to think what would mean most to him. I remembered the drawing of the Ste. Anne. I remembered his years in Paris, and I knew what would seem most honor to him. I cabled Drouot of the Luxembourg Gallery. I waited in New York till he came. I showed him the picture. I told him the story. He was on fire!

"We were to go back to the mountains together, to tell him that his picture would hang in the Luxembourg, and then in the Louvre--that in all probability he would be decorated by the French government, that other pictures of his would live for all time in Paris, in London, in Brussels--a letter came from the woman, his niece. He was dead."

The actress fell back in her chair, her hands over her face.

The surgeon stirred wrathfully. "Heavens and earth, Vieyra, what beastly, ghastly, brutally tragic horror are you telling us, anyhow?"

The old Jew moistened his lips and was silent. After a moment he said: "I should not have told you. I knew you could not understand."

Madame Orloff looked up sharply. "Do you mean--is it possible that _you_ mean that if we had seen him--had seen that look--we would--that he had had all that an artist--"

The picture-dealer addressed himself to her, turning his back on the doctor. "I went back to the funeral, to the mountains. The niece told me that before he died he smiled suddenly on them all and said: 'I have had a happy life,' I had taken a palm to lay on his coffin, and after I had looked long at his dead face, I put aside the palm. I felt that if he had lived I could never have spoken to him---could never have told him."

The old Jew looked down at the decorations on his breast, and around at the picture-covered walls. He made a sweeping gesture.

"What had I to offer him?" he said.

WHO ELSE HEARD IT?

A lady walking through the square With steams.h.i.+p tickets in her hand, To spend her summer in the Alps, Her winter in the Holy Land,

Heard (or else dreamed), as she pa.s.sed by The Orphan Home across the way, A small and clear and wondering voice From out a dormer window say,

"And would you really rather climb Mont Blanc alone, than walk with me Out hunting Mayflowers in the woods Of Westerburn and Cloverlea?

"Alas! And would you rather hear Cathedral choirs in cities far Than one at bedtime, on your lap, Say 'Twinkle, twinkle, little star'?"

"A lonely Christmas would you spend By Galilee or Jordan's tide When a child's stocking you might fill And hang it by your own fireside?"

A DROP IN THE BUCKET

There is no need to describe in detail the heroine of this tale, because she represents a type familiar to all readers of the conventional New-England-village dialect story. She was for a long time the sole inhabitant of Hillsboro, who came up to the expectations of our visiting friends from the city, on the lookout for Mary Wilkins characters. We always used to take such people directly to see Cousin Tryphena, as dwellers in an Italian city always take their foreign friends to see their one bit of ruined city wall or the heap of stones which was once an Inquisitorial torture chamber, never to see the new water-works or the modern, sanitary hospital.

On the way to the other end of the street, where Cousin Tryphena's tiny, two-roomed house stood, we always laid bare the secrets of her somnolent, respectable, unprofitable life; we always informed our visitors that she lived and kept up a social position on two hundred and fifteen dollars a year, and that she had never been further from home than to the next village. We always drew attention to her one treasure, the fine Sheraton sideboard that had belonged to her great-grandfather, old Priest Perkins; and, when we walked away from the orderly and empty house, we were sure that our friends from the city would always exclaim with great insight into character, "What a charmingly picturesque life! Isn't she perfectly delicious!"

Next door to Cousin Tryphena's minute, snow-white house is a forlorn old building, one of the few places for rent in our village, where nearly everyone owns his own shelter. It stood desolately idle for some time, tumbling to pieces almost visibly, until, one day, two years ago, a burly, white-bearded tramp stopped in front of it, laid down his stick and bundle, and went to inquire at the neighbor's if the place were for rent, then moved in with his stick and bundle and sent away for the rest of his belongings, that is to say, an outfit for cobbling shoes. He cut a big wooden boot out of the side of an empty box, painted it black with axle-grease and soot, hung it up over the door, and announced himself as ready to do all the cobbling and harness-repairing he could get ... and a fine workman he showed himself to be.

We were all rather glad to have this odd new member of our community settle down among us ... all, that is, except Cousin Tryphena, who was sure, for months afterward, that he would cut her throat some night and steal away her Sheraton sideboard. It was an open secret that Putnam, the antique-furniture dealer in Troy, had offered her two hundred and fifty dollars for it. The other women of the village, however, not living alone in such dangerous proximity to the formidable stranger, felt rea.s.sured by his long, white beard, and by his great liking for little children.