Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 6, July 1905

“Here she is, Betsy,” said Tom, gayly, as he sat down with the youngster on his lap. “Now tell me what you want her to do, and I will translate for you, for I must leave her with you while I go to the office.” Elizabeth looked at the child, who was gravely inspecting the studio with wise-looking eyes.

“But, Tom, suppose she should cry or anything; what am I to do? She can’t understand me, and I shouldn’t know what to say, anyway.”

“And this is what comes of being an independent woman,” he said, looking at her in disapproval. “Well, you will have to take a chance, and get on the best you know how, but I shall have luncheon sent in here, and come back to eat it with you, for I can’t trust the child’s diet to a bachelor maid.”

Carlotta was frightened when Tom left, and Elizabeth began, rather timidly, to comfort her; but she found it an easier task than she had imagined. The feeling of the warm young body against her breast, the sweet perfume of the child’s hair and the caressing touch of the little hands as they crept about her neck, were grateful to the lonely artist, and somewhere in the womanhood within her, she found words which Carlotta could understand, although they belonged to no language known to grownups. After the first feeling of strangeness had worn off, the child was quite contented with her, and so comfortable and comforting in her arms that but little progress had been made with the portrait when a waiter brought in the luncheon which Tom had ordered from a neighboring restaurant. Tom came back to eat it with them, and he was entirely satisfied with the friendship which had sprung up between the woman and the child.

“I was asked to give you this; it seems that it is an Italian custom to pay part in advance,” he said, handing her an envelope as he left her, and when she opened it she found a crisp and substantial bank note. He took the little girl home that night, and when he returned to take Elizabeth out to dinner, she was so elated that she seemed to be walking on air; but she insisted that they go to a little Italian restaurant, where she had been in the habit of dining.

“I was getting awfully tired of it, Tom, but Carlotta has given me a liking for everything Italian,” she said, merrily, and Tom, in the happiness which the change in her brought to him, ate the indifferent food and drank the doubtful wine contentedly. A few days later he heard singing when he knocked on Elizabeth’s door for luncheon, and recognized an old nursery rhyme, which he had not heard since his childhood, and when he came in he found her seated on the floor with Carlotta, in the midst of a collection of toys, which must have made a decided hole in her advance payment.

“Is this the way you attend to your ‘life work,’ young woman?” he asked, with mock severity, and she seemed a little shamefaced; but when the waiter brought the luncheon, he found all three of them on the floor, and Elizabeth not at all pleased with the fickle Carlotta’s preference for the house which Tom had built with the blocks. But nothing could disturb Tom’s good nature these days, for he realized that Elizabeth was growing fonder of the child each day, and with it all she seemed happier and more feminine. About a week after the sittings commenced, he noticed that her hair was arranged in the fluffy, loose way he had admired so much three years before, giving her face more of the girlish expression it had lost, and a bright ribbon at the throat relieved the somberness of her working gown.

“Why, Betsy, you are growing younger,” he said, looking at her in admiration, and she blushed in confusion.

“You mean my hair and the ribbon,” she replied, with a little trace of self-consciousness in her manner. “Well, you see, Carlotta is of a race which likes bright colors, so I thought it would please her.”

“And incidentally you have given me great pleasure,” he said, smiling at her, approvingly, and a song was in his heart as he went down the stairs.

Sunshine is not abundant in a New York winter, and none of it enters the northern windows of a studio; but Elizabeth’s tiny apartment came to have an entirely different atmosphere while the child spent her days in it. The program remained the same as on the first day; but Elizabeth employed so much of her time in petting and playing with the child, that the portrait did not advance rapidly, although enough had been accomplished to show that it promised to be, by far, the best thing which she had ever done. The jolly luncheons were a joy to both of them, and Carlotta always gave a crow of delight, which Elizabeth’s heart was beginning to echo, when Tom’s merry whistle heralded his arrival.

But on the day he had noticed the change in Elizabeth’s hair, there was a marked restraint in her manner when he came in for luncheon, and Carlotta, with the sensitiveness which makes children so quick to recognize the moods of their elders, was sitting on the couch, finger in mouth, and with widely opened eyes, which threatened tears.

“Tom, I must have a talk with you,” said Elizabeth, her voice trembling a little as he looked inquiringly from one to the other.

“Have you two had a falling out?” he asked, laughing, but Elizabeth’s expression checked his merriment.

“No, but I will tell you just what has happened, and then I want an explanation. Let me speak without interruption, and then I will hear what you have to say.” He took off his coat and sat down without speaking, and Elizabeth faced him.

“The Italian woman who cleans this place came in this morning with her mop and pail, and Carlotta commenced chattering with her at once, and the woman laughed, so that I asked her what she was saying. She told me that Carlotta said she looked like her mother, and that she had the same kind of mop and pail. Of course, judging from the appearance and expensive clothing of the child, she thought it was absurd; but I got her to question Carlotta for me, and she persisted in her story, and described their home, which seems to consist of two overcrowded rooms on Mulberry Street.” She paused, and Tom looked at her with no trace of embarrassment.

“Well, what of it?” he asked, defiantly. “The child was telling the truth, and there is no reason to punish her.”

“Punish her!” exclaimed Elizabeth, taken aback. “It is not a question of what she has said or done; but of your conduct. Rich Italians do not live in two rooms on Mulberry Street, and you have deceived me and humiliated me by using this means to give me money.”

“Nothing of the sort,” he replied. “I haven’t deceived you; although I will admit that you deceived yourself, and I did not set you right. The child’s father was one of my mother’s gardeners in Florence, and when he decided to bring his large family over here, she gave him a letter to me. He came to my office the morning after we dined together, and I went to see his family, and fell in love with Carlotta at once. The father was delighted to have her portrait painted, and I thought it would be better to get fresh clothes for such an important occasion.”

“But immigrants are not making advance payments which are more than I should have charged for a half-dozen portraits, and you have done this simply to cloak an advance of money to me,” she said, indignantly. “I suppose that you meant it in kindness, but you have put me under an obligation which I hate and which it will take me years to repay.”

“There is no question of obligation,” he replied, gently. “If I, as the child’s foster father, wish a portrait of her, it is my own business whom I get to paint it, and how much I pay for it. I have made arrangements to care for Carlotta, and I wish you to finish the portrait for me, so that I may have something to remember her and this happy time by, when she grows up and leaves me.”

“Oh, Tom, you must not take her away from me!” exclaimed Elizabeth, in dismay. “If you will let me finish this portrait and exhibit it, I am sure that it will bring me other orders, and then I can repay you and keep her with me.”

“Do what? Keep the child with you?” asked Tom, in amazement.

“Yes, if you will help that much,” she faltered. “I have thought it all out since the woman translated for me. I know that I can get other orders from this portrait, and I will be able to keep her, if the parents will permit it, and they have so many children that I am sure they will. Oh, Tom, it has been so lonely here, and now I can’t let you come any more – and I want her so!” She covered her face with her hands, and, although Tom was not a man to be amused by a woman’s tears, he smiled and winked solemnly at the frightened looking child, before he took them and held them in his own.

“Elizabeth Thornton,” he said, seriously, “I will not relinquish my claim on Carlotta, and if you want her, you must take me, too. It is time to stop this foolishness about ‘life work,’ and to remember that you are a woman, with all the weaknesses of the sex, which we condone, and with all of its sweetness, which we love.”

Carlotta looked at them wonderingly as Elizabeth put her arms around his neck and her head on his breast; but when he raised Elizabeth’s face and kissed her lips, she clapped her tiny hands and gave a crow of joy; for she knew that her friends had found happiness.

SONG

Love planted my rose in his garden fair —My rose of heart’s delight —And he laughed with joy when he saw it bearA crown of blossoms bright.But the harsh wind shattered the petals red’Twixt darkness and the dew;What blossoms were living, what blooms were dead,Ah, Love nor cared nor knew!Charlotte Becker.

THE DESPOT

By Johnson Morton

It was the boast of the summer dwellers in Roscoe that they had not spoiled the place. Mr. William Bangs was reiterating this to his wife’s niece, who stood regarding his potato patch rather disdainfully through the glamour of a lorgnette.

“You see, Annie, my house is no better than my neighbors’, my land not so good,” he went on. “We keep no servants, in the accepted sense, only the girls whom you have seen – farmers’ daughters from the mountain road – or, as your aunt Mary will put it, ‘We look to the hills whence cometh our help.’ And the outside work is done by Paterson Roscoe and myself, with occasional aid in haying time. The Smiths live in quite the same fashion, the Jacksons, with all their money, just as simply, and the Babbits and Thomases follow the lead. As a result” – he dug his hoe into a hill of potatoes and Miss Jenkins drew back a high-heeled slipper from the contact – “we have an ideal community. The villagers haven’t lost their proper sense of democracy and equality. And we – the outsiders – have learned much from meeting these plain, simple folk on their own ground. So I don’t really approve of this plan of yours. It’s a tremendous innovation. We’ve got on quite well enough for nearly four years without entertainments, save those which are, so to speak, indigenous and natural. I don’t at all like the idea of vaudeville, and I abhor a raffle!”

“But the church does need the money so much, Uncle William,” the girl interrupted, “and it’s a Unitarian church, so the raffle doesn’t matter. Mr. Blythe says he sees no objection to it if it’s conducted properly, and everyone is so interested. All the Pungville people will come in quite a procession, and Tom Mason is to drive the performers over on his coach.”

“Oh, if Tom Mason’s the reason” – uncle William’s hoe rested helplessly – “there’s nothing more to be said.” Annie frowned behind a smile. “But we’ve been thanking Heaven every night of our lives that nineteen stiff miles lay between us and that barbarous Pungville.”

He picked up a handful of warm, brown potatoes and threw them into the basket.

“My dear girl, you’re a wonder! You’ve been here five days, and you’ll tear down in just that time what it has taken us four years to build up.”

“Then have I your blessing?”

The girl showed roguish under her insistence, but uncle William shook his head. “The best you’ll get from me, young woman, is a most reluctant sufferance. You are hopeless. I don’t see why you asked me at all, with the thing as good as settled. Go on; but don’t come back to your old uncle with the demoralization of an entire village on your conscience.”

“Nonsense!” laughed the other. “That won’t trouble me one bit. Just now I’m much more concerned as to what you’re to do for us at the fair – something that will be popular and yet entail no loss of dignity.” She regarded him quizzically. “Ah! I have it! Fortunes told by the cards! A magician in gown and fez, behind a curtain. Slight extra charge, flattering and profitable alike.” She clapped her hands and Mr. Bangs groaned.

“Don’t make me face details yet.”

He struck at another potato hill, and Annie turned to the road. “Wait a minute,” he called after her; “this is serious. Have you spoken to Miss Pamela yet?”

“Miss Pamela Roscoe, you mean? No, of course not; why should I?”

“Why should you?” Uncle William leaned on his hoe and fixed her with stern eye. “Easier a brick without straw, a law without a legislature, than to foist an idea, a plan, a measure on this village save in one way. My dear Annie, haven’t you found out in five days that Miss Pamela is chief of the clan? Sister, aunt, cousin, in varying degrees, to every Roscoe and Collamer in the township – and there are no others worthy the count. Don’t you know that she lives in the biggest house, has money in the bank, owns railroad stock, preserves opinions and never goes out of doors? That last is enough to surround her with a wall of mystery, and her own personality does the rest. Her position is almost feudal; the others may be jealous, most of the women are, for she is as acquisitive as she is dogmatic, and somehow she has been able to deflect nearly all the family possessions to her own line of inheritance; but, though they scold behind her back, they bend the knee, every one of them.

“You really must see her and get her consent, or gradually you will have the whole village backing out of its agreements. You’d better go before she hears of the plan from anyone else. I dare say you’re too late already. You’ll need all your diplomacy, and I wouldn’t attempt it till after dinner. Get some points from your aunt Mary. We’ll talk it over by and by. Now, speaking of dinner, do you mind taking these potatoes to Cassandra as you go by the kitchen door? They’re my very first. They’re late enough, but I guess I’m a week ahead of Smith, anyway. Thank you.” He turned to his work again.

Miss Pamela Roscoe lived in a large house freshly painted white, with dark green blinds, chronically closed. To the front door wandered a box-bordered gravel path, and up this avenue Annie Jenkins walked in the red radiance of the September afternoon. Like a good soldier, she had donned her brightest armor, and her muslin skirts flicked in a friendly yet business-like way against the green. She raised the heavy brass knocker, its rattle shook the door and echoed through an empty hall.

Miss Pamela Roscoe heard the sound, and went softly, with no show of haste, to a window that commanded what is, in local parlance, known as a handsome view of the front porch, from which vantage she remarked her visitor through peeping shutters.

But she waited – it is not considered good form in Roscoe to admit a stranger too eagerly – for a decent interval to elapse. Thanks to aunt Mary’s coaching, Annie did not knock again, but stood in pretty decision with her eyes straight before her. A leisurely footstep sounded within; the latch lifted with dignity, the door opened a crack at first, then more widely; and, outlined against a blacker background, stood the tall, stern, forbidding figure of Miss Pamela Roscoe herself!

She was a lady of fateful appearance, black-haired and pale, with a marvelous impression of preservation. Her manner was of the nil admirari sort, and her voice what Annie afterward described as mortuary. The girl murmured her name, a wan smile welcomed her.

“Come right in, Miss Jenkins,” the gloomy voice began, “only I don’t want you should step off that oilcloth. I ain’t going to get that carpet all tracked up. You go right on into the front room” – a gaunt arm pushed her toward a darker space – “and I’ll open up there in a minute.”

Miss Pamela, at the window, threw back the shutter, rolled up a curtain and the western sunlight filled the place. Annie took the chair which her hostess dusted ostentatiously, a stout, wooden rocker with a tidy – Bo-Peep in outline stitch in red – flapping cozily at its back but Miss Roscoe still stood.

“It ain’t hospitable, I know,” her monotone apologized; “a first visit, too – but I’m going to ask you to excuse me a minute right at the set-off. When you knocked, I was buying some berries of the Collamer twins, and just a-measuring of them. I don’t allow no one to measure in my house but myself, if they are my grand-nephews, and I most ought to go back to the summer kitchen to finish and pay ’em – if you don’t mind. There’s the album and last week’s paper, and you just make yourself to home till I get back.”

Left alone, in somewhat austere comfort, Miss Jenkins’ eyes wandered over the room, from the strips of bunting at the windows – black alternating with red, white and blue, which a card in pale, cramped writing explained: “In Memory of Garfield, 1881” – to two elaborate fly-catchers which did duty as chandeliers from vantage points of the ceiling. The simpler, made of straw tied with bows of red worsted, paled before the glories of the other – a structure of silver cardboard in cubes, the smaller depending from the corners of the larger in diminishing effect, ribbon-bound, with a gleaming pearl bead in the center of each.

A pair of strange tables, laden with still stranger ornaments, filled the larger spaces of the floor and bore testimony to the prowess of some pioneer in the line of industrial adornment.

“Poor soul,” thought the girl, “here is the decorative instinct untrammeled by imitation. Individuality inherent! Unkind fate, furnishing no models, has produced originality.” She walked toward the larger table for closer scrutiny just as Miss Pamela re-entered the room. A faint accent of gratification colored the latter’s voice.

“I see you looking at them stands,” she said; “mosaic, I call ’em. I made every stitch of ’em myself. Soft pine they are; my brother Nathan gave me the wood, and I’d been saving the pieces of crockery for years. You cut places in the wood and stick ’em in close in patterns with colors that look pretty together – sometimes you have to use a hammer – and then you sandpaper the rough places – it’s terrible on the hands – and put on a couple of coats o’ shellac. I call ’em pretty handsome. Cousin Parthenia Roscoe was here the day I was finishing them, and I tell you she admired ’em. Those crackle ware pieces were from an old pitcher of her mother’s that came to me – it got broken, and I worked ’em in at the corners. I don’t set no great store by that alum cross. They’re kind o’ common, but it turned out so nice I let it stand there. How did I make it? Why you just take a cross of wood and wind it with yarn and let it hang overnight in a solution of alum and water, and in the morning it’s all crystal. ’Tain’t no work; but, land’s sakes! there’s enough to make up in those wax autumn leaves; I call that a likely spray of woodbine. It took me the bigger part of three mornings to get it done, and ’twas in the winter I made it, so I didn’t have nothing to go by but my memory.”

She pinched the stiff little garland into a more aggressive attitude, and turned, with a sort of caress, to a jar of colored pampas grass that flaunted itself in the corner. Annie’s eyes followed the motion, and Miss Pamela answered the question in them by handing her the jar for a closer inspection.

There was pride in her voice as she spoke, though her tone was casual. “It’s just one of my what-not vases, I call ’em. I invented it myself. ’Twas a blacking bottle, to begin with, but I covered it with putty, good and thick, and then I stuck all them things on it. Here’s a peach-stone basket and a couple of Florida beans and some seashells that were brought me from down East. The sleeve buttons on the front were broken, but I think they stand up well, and that gold paint does set off the whole. It’s been imitated, you’ll find,” she added, dismally, “but the idea’s original with me.”

She replaced the jar in its corner. Then, as a sudden realization of the duty of a hostess seized her, she seated herself decorously in a stiff-backed chair opposite her visitor, and, adjusting primly what is technically known as a “front breadth,” gave herself unreservedly to polite inquiry.

“Is your health good?” she asked, with an air of expecting the worst.

“Oh, very good, indeed,” said Annie, conscious that she brought disappointment on the wings of her voice.

“It has been a sickly season,” remarked the elder lady.

“I am always well,” laughed Annie, but it was the ghost of a laugh.

“And is Mr. Bangs well, and your aunt?” The voice rose at the last word – expectantly. And Annie clutched at the fact that she had left aunt Mary lying down at home.

“My uncle? Yes. But my aunt has a headache. Otherwise she’d have come with me this afternoon.”

“She’d better keep quiet.” Miss Pamela shook her head. “A cousin of mine, over Rutland way – Andromeda Spear, you’ve heard of her, maybe – your aunt always puts me in mind of her – she used to have headaches like that, and she wouldn’t hear to reason about ’em. So she kept on her feet when she’d ought to be lyin’ down, and one day – ’twas a fall day, like this, I remember – she had a seizure in the hen house, and she never got over it – though she lingered for years,” she added, by way of consideration.

“But, you see, Miss Roscoe, we have no hen house,” retorted Annie, with a sort of flippant desperation.

“Well, there’s plenty of places,” remarked the other, sententiously. “Bed’s not the only place to die in, and I’ve always believed in proper precautions. You give Miss Bangs my respects, and tell her that she can’t be too careful.”

Then followed a fusillade of questions – the length of her stay, her graduation from college in June, her likelihood of marriage, and her religious beliefs.

Dazed, depleted, the girl’s answers grew monosyllabic, in spite of an air of forced gayety which she strove hard to maintain. Somehow the inherent and masterful depression of her hostess was weighing her down. Outside the sun had settled in clouds, and a somber twilight stole in through the window. The voice opposite droned on, engrossing, dominating, hypnotic. Annie realized that unless she roused herself she would relapse into permanent silence, and so, in a lucky pause, as her eyes fell upon a strange object hanging above the mantelpiece, she grew aggressive for the moment, and boldly asked a question herself.

“Pardon my interrupting, Miss Roscoe, but do you mind telling me what is that mysterious and interesting —thing?”

Miss Pamela’s gaze followed the turn of Annie’s head. She rose grimly from her seat and went to the further corner of the room, whence she abstracted a yardstick and stood before the fire-board. Deftly she pushed off a cloth that enshrouded the object, and disclosed what had evidently been, at one time, a chromo of vast dimensions; its bright gilt frame remained intact, but the picture itself was entirely obliterated by successive coatings of her useful gold paint, and to the center was affixed half of a flower basket – the flaring kind – cut longitudinally. This basket, also gilded heavily, was filled with a varied profusion of artificial fruits.

Annie turned her chair. Miss Pamela cleared her throat and pointed with the yardstick.

“It’s not a thing, Miss Jenkins,” she began, with some severity, “but a sort of monument that I have made – I call it my ‘Memorial Fruit Piece.’” There was about Miss Roscoe something of the pride of the discoverer, and she warmed to her subject.

“You see, ours was a large family, and, from time to time, many of us were taken away – ‘called home,’ you might say – and those that went left to those that remained a good many relics and keepsakes like. They came to mother first, and after mother’s death they came to me, and I had ’em round in bureau drawers and bandboxes and trunks, and they was in the way when I was cleaning house or making changes of arrangements, and I won’t say that such as was fabrics wasn’t attracting moths. But I couldn’t think of no way to remedy it. Till suddenly – let’s see, ’twas eleven weeks ago last Tuesday – the idea came to me, and I grouped ’em together, like you see ’em here – this tribute.”