Stories from Everybody's Magazine Part 12

"I did--you're quite right!" he answered quickly. "And do you know what became of the money?" he demanded, pausing long enough to wet his lips, but giving her no time to reply "Well, it bought the clothes you wore--your hats--your gloves--your jewels. It's paid for your extravagances--or a part of them. It bought you the carriage you wanted; your string of pearls too. My soul!" he cried in a kind of fierce wonderment, "it bought nearly all there is of you, I think! It bought you, besides--that money did--his, with a lot more added to it!"

Mrs. Willoughby stared at him confounded--the situation had become reversed. She found herself impugned and called to defend when she had thought only to attack. It was a bitter reflection that he had, all along, hidden his contempt, while she had been idly picking flaws in him.

"Oh, yes!" he cried, going on; "all you looked for or lived for was money. I'd heard your father drum it into your head, and I'd seen the way you took it in!" He threw up his hand with a gesture of intolerable regret, this man who had been only a money-grubbing automaton. "I was ashamed, at first, but as you'd seemed to take a fancy to me, I deluded myself into thinking you cared. I knew Severance, too. He was clever and shrewd, but crooked as a fish-hook. At the time he was making love to you, there was another. But, never mind, I won't talk of that. I saw you, and it didn't take long to turn my head." He smiled wistfully, as before. "I'd never seen a woman like you, you know.

I'd been too busy trying to keep alive. But there was this Severance, and--oh, well, what's the use?" he muttered again thickly. "You got your money, and I got the woman I loved. Yes, I got her--my soul!" he protested; "and it's a pretty trial balance, isn't it, to cast up on a day like this?"

Silenced, she stood and watched him, waiting for the next storm of his pa.s.sion. But Willoughby's rage seemed to have burned itself out. He drifted across the room and reached his hand for the bell-pull. "Put away that trunk," he ordered quietly, facing her; "I'm going to run things now. If you're determined to leave me, you'll have to put it off a while. I'm going to save the boy.

When I'm on my feet again, I'll give you what money you want; but there shall be no open scandal." Still silent, she was watching him, when the maid came in answer to the bell. "Help Mrs.

Willoughby with these," he said curtly, denoting the half-packed trunk; "we're not going away." And in the presence of the servant she dared make no rejoinder. Later in the day he looked in again; Mrs. Willoughby and the maid were rearranging the room, and the trunk had been whisked away. He smiled grimly, and withdrew.

There could be but two results from a conflict like this: she would either scorn him the more or she would come to respect him.

For days the outcome wavered in the balance. They met at the table only--she sitting preoccupied, he talking quietly with the boy. At the week end he brought her a roll of bills. "For the house money," he said briefly; and when she would not reach out a hand for it, he dropped it in her lap, and went away. But that night she entered into the talk at the table, a little quiet, still repressed, and showing her hurt. Willoughby, quietly deferential, kept to his part of the conversation exactly as if nothing ugly had occurred between them. His bantering with his son was genial and affectionate, and once she thought he tried to include her in this camaraderie. The few last shreds of her vanity, however, still waved distressing signals of the hurt, and she evaded it. But she felt strangely alone, notwithstanding; with an almost unconquerable self-pity she reflected on the fair-weather friends that had deserted her. A little sense of comfort trickled into her heart, though, when she thought of her boy. HE, at all events, had not been affected by the rumble of drums that had beaten her out of the worldly camp where once she had commanded. That night Willoughby looked in at her, while she sat musing over a book, and when she would not look up at him he went away again. A more complete sense of her loneliness came over her as the hours pa.s.sed in the big, silent house. So she laid down her book, and went up-stairs to her boy's room.

"Who's there?" he cried, awakening from a doze.

"Just I, Willard. I came up to see whether you were all right."

"Oh, yes, I am!" he answered, a little perplexed; it had not been often that she had found time from her busy affairs for a visit like this. The boy took her hand in his and snuggled down in the pillows. "It's nice to have you, mumsy," he mumbled, comfortably.

Willoughby, coming home the next evening, heard her talking to the cook. "You mustn't be so wasteful, Annie. Unless you can do better, I shall have to get some one else." Her voice was peevish, but to Willoughby it sounded full of inexplicable melody. Nor when she carried her complaint to him later, at the dinner-table, was he less affected with a secret joy.

"Harmon--we'd better take a smaller house. I can't do it any longer on what we have."

"You needn't," he answered lightly; "I can let you have more.

Things are working out better than I expected. Just let me know what you're short at the end of the week. I can manage it."

That night, too, he came and sat in the room where she was reading. He said nothing, and picked up another book. But she knew what he wished, and resolutely steeled herself. The next night he was there again. "Good night, dear," he said cheerfully, daring the added word when she arose to go.

"Good night," she answered.

But on the evening following they talked together, each evading the shoals of past regret, and threading only the safe channels of the commonplace. "Good night, Stella dear," he said, unaffectedly, as she picked up her things; and she answered: "Good night, Harmon."

He came close to her, and looked down into her face. "Stella," he said, quietly; "Stella, it would make me very happy if you--if I might--why, kiss you good night."

Mrs. Willoughby gathered up the remainder of her things, and then slowly shook her head.

"No, we won't talk of that--yet!" she answered, and went away up the stairs. Willoughby bit his lip, looking silently after her.

"Why, mumsy!" exclaimed the boy, his hand touching his mother's cheek as she leaned over him. "What's wrong?"

She shook her head vehemently in the dark. "Nothing at all, dear.

You must go to sleep now."

The next day, Willoughby, on his return from down-town, found her busily superintending the two servants while they cleaned up his room. It was an unexpected attention on her part. He withdrew quietly. A little while later, leaning over the bal.u.s.ters, she saw Willard whispering to him earnestly. "Did she, my boy?" she heard the man cry under his breath. "Why, now, mumsy must just have been a little tired. I don't think it was anything else."

Willoughby's smile seemed enough at the moment to rea.s.sure almost any one.

At dinner his lightness, good-nature, geniality became infectious. Even Mrs. Willoughby suffered herself to smile at his whimsical jollity with the boy. Later there was the little comedy of the good night; and then they parted again. But Willoughby did not go out as usual.

It was very late that night when Mrs. Willoughby awoke with the conviction that some one was in her room. Her first impulse was to cry out in alarm; then, in terror she lay quiet, peering from beneath her half-closed lids. Across the lighter background of the curtained window a figure moved, big and familiar in its bulk. She knew then, and there seemed a greater reason than ever why she should remain quiet.

Nor was she wrong in her surmise. A moment later Willoughby leaned over, and she felt his lips lightly brush her cheek. A little sigh followed, and then he was gone, tiptoeing cautiously.

Mrs. Willoughby sat up in bed, her face in her hands, and reflected in the stillness that presages the storm. But loneliness no longer pained her; the solitude had become suddenly peopled with vivid, poignant regrets, shouting loudly their indictment and their appeal.

Then, with the curious informality of a woman's emotion--whether of grief or of joy, whether of pleasure or of pain--she rocked down her head to her knees, while through her fingers poured the scalding tears. Mrs. Willoughby had become sincere at last.

Vol. XXIII No.1 JULY 1910

The Painter of "Diana of the Tides" {pages 95-103}

By WALTER PRICHARD EATON

Author of "The American Stage of To-day," etc.

Given nearly three hundred square feet of blank wall s.p.a.ce, and it takes something of an artist to fill it up with interesting paint. Probably you would not pick a miniature painter for the task. Yet, curiously, John Elliott, creator of "Diana of the Tides," the great mural painting which adorns the large gallery to the right of the entrance of the new National Museum at Was.h.i.+ngton, also paints on ivory. He works, likewise, in silver point, that delicate and difficult medium; he draws pastel ill.u.s.trations for children's fairy tales; he works in portraiture with red chalk or oils. And, when the need comes, he has shown that he can turn stevedore, carpenter, and architect, to slave with the relief party at Messina, finally to help design and build, in four months, an entire village for the stricken sufferers, including a hotel, a hospital, three schoolhouses, and a church. The too frequent scorn of the "practical man of affairs" for the artist and dreamer, the world's sneaking tolerance for the temperament which creates in forms of ideal beauty rather than in bridges or factories or banks, finds in the life and work of such a man as John Elliott such complete, if unconscious, refutation, that his story should have its place in the history of the day.

John Elliott was born on Good Friday, 1859, one of a famous Scottish border family. His residence is now in Boston, Ma.s.sachusetts, at the home of his mother-in-law. Mrs. Julia Ward Howe. Robert Louis Stevenson had Elliott blood in his veins.

"Parts of me," he once wrote, "have shouted the slogan of the Elliotts in the debatable land." If Stevenson's Homeric account of the Four Black Elliotts in "Weir of Hermiston" is historically veracious, we might fancy that one of their descendants would feel his activities somewhat cramped on Beacon Street, Boston.

The Elliotts were a wild lot, and some of them did not escape the hangman. Their family tree appears to have been the gallows. But Stevenson tells us they were noted for their prayers, and at least one of them wrote poetry, and declaimed it, drunk, to Walter Scott, who retaliated in kind.

But the present John Elliott, artist, though he is of the kin of Stevenson, and bears the dark hair and rather prominent, melancholy eyes of the traditional Elliott stock, yet physically much more closely resembles Edgar Allan Poe. If you press him hard, he will confess that he began life by studying for the stage, and "almost played Romeo," before painting drew him away.

Reaching Italy, he aspired to enter the studio of Don Jose di Villegas, now director of the Prado Museum in Madrid, but then in Rome. Villegas took no pupils. But "Jack" Elliott is Scotch. He made a bargain. He would teach the master English, in return for instruction in painting. At the end of two years, young Elliott had learned much about art, but the master, he says, had acquired only one English phrase--"I haf no money!"

At the end of two years, Elliott wished to leave, because he despaired of painting like his master. "That is why I keep you,"

said Villegas; "you have retained your own manner and choice of subjects." So the pupil stayed on in Rome for five years, sharing his studio later with Aristide Sartorio, now a leading Italian painter. Here, in the Via Flaminia, he painted his first important mural decoration, for the dining room of Mrs. Potter Palmer's Chicago Lake Sh.o.r.e mansion. This work, called "The Vintage," is decorously inebriate, a vinous riot of little cupids. It led, shortly after his marriage in 1887 to Miss Maud Howe, a daughter of Mrs. Julia Ward Howe, to his establis.h.i.+ng himself in Chicago, where he did many decorations and portraits.

In 1894, he went back to Rome to execute a commission for a huge ceiling piece for the Boston Public Library. The piece was for a room later converted into a children's room, and after the canvas was placed, in 1901, the incongruity of the adult painting and the purposes of the room caused unfavorable comment. But the room has been recently readjusted. It is now lined with high oak shelves, almost to the cornice, filled with musty old books of a beautiful brown--perhaps the most effective decoration in the world--and the ceiling tells at its true value.

This ceiling, fifty feet square, divided into two equal panels, represents the twenty Christian centuries, as horses, led by the hours (winged female figures) out of the mists of the past into the illumination of the present. The models for the horses were the undersized nags of the Roman Campagna, which are "small but decorative beasties," as Mr. Elliott puts it, and lend themselves to a slightly conventional treatment. They sweep two by two, out of a cool mistiness, round the ceiling past the suggestion of a pale moon, into the full radiance of the golden orb of the sun.

The triumph of the picture is its handling of the problem of light. This golden daybreak pierces the mists whereon the horses gallop, touches here a flank, there a wing feather on one of the hours, and warms to rosy glow the tip of a cloud. It appears in unexpected places, grows where only shadow seemed to be, and surprises you anew each time you look up. Painted in the flat--that is, with no part of the picture telling as farther from the eye than another, to distort the proportions of the room--the ceiling yet has great depth, distance, airy lightness.

It is a true decorative painting.

While at work upon it, Mr. Elliott painted many portraits, including the well-known red chalk heads of the "Soldiers Three,"

Lord Ava, the Marquis of Winchester, and General Wauchope; the portrait of His Royal Highness the Duke of Cambridge; and that of Lady Katherine Thynne, now Lady Cromer, a celebrated English beauty. Indeed, he made her the model for the second hour in the Boston ceiling, the figure next to the leader in the procession.

Three studies of her head for this figure, well known from reproduction, are now in the possession of Thomas W. Lawson.

In Rome the Elliotts occupied for some time the apartments of Mrs. Elliott's cousin, the late F. Marion Crawford, in the Palazzo Santa Croce. In writing "With the Immortals," Mr.

Crawford had collected many death masks, including one of Dante, which fascinated Mr. Elliott. Two pictures of "Dante in Exile"

were the result. One of them now hangs in the living room of Queen Margherita of Italy, the other in the house of Mrs. J.

Montgomery Sears of Boston. A third pastel study was made, an unfinished head of the poet, and thrown into a wastebasket. By a curious fatality, it is now better known than either of the paintings. Mrs. Elliott rescued the drawing, smoothed it out, framed it, and was allowed to hang it in her chamber. Later it was seen and purchased by Mrs. David Kimball of Boston, and in reproduction has gone all over the world, receiving honors in j.a.pan and the higher honor of a place over the desk of many Dante students. Yet few who possess the reproduction know anything of the artist.

Mr. Elliott, receiving his commission to do a great mural painting for the new National Museum in Was.h.i.+ngton, again went to Rome four years ago. "Diana of the Tides" was completed and signed on Christmas day, 1908. Three days later came the awful news of the Messina earthquake, and the Hon. Lloyd Griscom, then American Amba.s.sador to Italy, at once called for volunteers for his relief expedition. John Elliott was among the first to respond. He went south officially as an interpreter. Actually, he played the part of stevedore as well for ten days on the relief s.h.i.+p.

"I have dropped my last knuckle down the hold this morning," he wrote back, "and I have only two fingers left that I can wash."

After a few weeks, he hastened back to Rome, to give a promised public exhibition of "Diana of the Tides," and, as soon as the exhibition was over, rushed down to Messina again.

There Commander Belknap, who was at the head of the American relief forces, put him to work, as architect, on the erection of the American village, in the lemon groves on the outskirts of the stricken city. "I had never been trained as an architect," he says, "but I once made over a house up in Cornish, New Hamps.h.i.+re, and that gave me a practical experience which came in remarkably handy."