PART I

HE THREATENS TO ARRIVE

“We will not endeavor to modify the motions of the elements, or fix the destiny of kingdoms. It is our business to consider what beings like us may perform: each laboring for his own happiness by promoting within his circle, however narrow, the happiness of others.”--_Rasselas._

“Come into the painting-room,” said Julian, “and let’s talk it over.”

“How excited you are!” I said.

“Well, after balancing one way and another for years, my mind’s made up. We’re going.”

“To Europe?”

“Yes, to Europe.”

“Oh, what a beautiful prospect,” I said. And then leaning against his elbow I heaved a great sigh.

“It must be a beautiful prospect if you groan like that over it.”

“The groan’s because I can’t go.”

Julian sat down and took me indulgently on his knee. Some women in marriage have their pride gratified by a good match, by all the pomps of life, or by unlimited allowances of spending money. But my portion is to be loved and cherished and fondled like an infant. I like it very much. Some part of me lingers in eternal babyhood. In the glass I frequently see a juvenile face with dimples around the mouth, that disowns its thirty years.

“You think,” said Julian, after kissing me in a way which would scandalize some of the girls who made the best matches, “that we can’t raise the money.”

Such a thought would have been justified by the fact that we seldom could raise the money.

“But we can. And what’s the use of waiting around till we are old? I’m in my thirties. And if I ever do anything now’s the time to do it. A man can’t make a success of painting here in the west.”

I looked all around Julian’s studio. He had done many portraits, and hated them. They made our living. But he believed he was wasting time.

I always loved to be in the studio, and sometimes sat there a whole afternoon, with bits of sewing, behind a screen. A great many people took the elevator to explore Julian’s work place. He had reputation in his native city. And when they stumbled around the screen on me, they might have taken me for a model. But most of the explorers were country people, piloted by their town friends to see the sights. I only looked odd to them. I know I looked odd, because Julian had me dress in loose gowns and broad hats. Cheese cloth is only four cents a yard and very wide, and with borders of velvet or lace it made sumptuous cool toilets. I was slim; and a dull blue gown, belted just under my arms and puffed at the shoulders, with an aureole of dull blue hat over it, made me look nice in Julian’s eyes or I never should have had the courage to face the street. When a person is slim and lithe, however, her daring clothes have not the aggressive grossness of a fat woman’s daring clothes.

Looking around the painting-room, I could not think Julian a failure. He had made it so pretty with tiles and pottery and draping stuff, and flowers painted in dull red or bronze vases, or in masses wasting their petals, and landscapes, some blurred so you had to squint your eyes to get the outlines. Looking at himself I always considered him a great success. His mouth and chin were so refined. He was muscular and alert in his carriage for a man of his profession, and his ideas were far grander than mine.

“So I’m going to sell the little farm,” said Julian.

“Oh!” I exclaimed, “that’s all the property we’ve got.”

“Why, I thought you were perfectly willing. What does it amount to, anyhow? Fifteen acres and a scrubby house and barn.”

“What will old Lena do?”

“Oh, she’ll continue her gardening. I’ve had an offer of two thousand dollars for it. One thousand down, five hundred in one year, and the balance in eighteen months. We can live a long time abroad on that. And I shall get hold of something then. We’ll never come back here.”

I did not mind that at all. The prospect was dazzling. But I saw I should have to tell him at once.

“You didn’t know your poor painter would take you to Europe, did you? Think of Rome, think of Paris, think of being domesticated in some ancient German city while I paint!”

“Oh, I think of it, Julian; but could you go without me?”

“Could I go without you?” said Julian, setting me off on the tip of his knees. “Did I ever go to any place without you? Didn’t I manage that jaunt up to Canada with you? Did I scour out to Colorado and leave you at home? Do you _want_ me to go without you?”

“Oh, no!”

“Then what are you talking about?”

“I don’t know.”

“You certainly don’t know,” said Julian severely, “if you think I would go off to Europe for even a limited time, to say nothing of an indefinite time, without _you_. Why, you great baby, you’d cry your eyes out! And if you got sick who would do you up in packs and give you your medicine? You can’t get along away from me.”

“I know it, Julian.”

“And where would you stay!” continued Julian with increasing indignation. “You wouldn’t want to keep up a house, and you wouldn’t want to board. And what business would you have over here by yourself, anyhow! You provoke me!”

“I believe I’m going to cry,” I said.

“I should think you would, for proposing such a thing. But don’t do it.”

“I _am_ going to cry,” I affirmed, and put my hands up to my face, while I quivered all over. These mute fits of sobbing, relics of my babyhood which I try so hard to outgrow, seize me unreasonably. They take away every scrap of dignity. I never could get the best end of a quarrel on account of this weakness; for who could sweep out of a room with a stinging retort, when at the door she was sure to break down, lay her cheek against the frame, and sob until every fibre in her seemed melting!

The only good effect of my crying, besides the delicious languor it left over me, was that it melted Julian also. I have known it to be a very convenient solvent when he hardened himself into a male tyrant. His face was sure to relax and his motherly arms to gather me in. Some men will run from tears, and very disagreeable men they are. Julian seems to like the soaking. It is tribute to him as a man, and certifies to his grip on my individuality. He is convinced I am very fond of him, and dependent on his gracious favor, when I creep to his knees to cry.

Julian wiped my tears and comforted me upon his shoulder, his face assuming its usual superior expression.

When I got my breath and knew that I could talk becomingly between little hiccoughs, I told him the message I had from T’férgore, and he saw at once how it would prevent the European trip.

He whistled a minute, and we studied each other’s eyes.

“Well,” said Julian, “I suppose we owe everything to the old fellow, and if he is really coming we’ll have to prepare for him.”

“Perhaps we better go out to the little farm,” I suggested.

“Yes, I think we better. We’ll have to economize, to gratify all his fastidious tastes.”

“I wish he’d sent word to you, instead of to me,” I burst out. “It’s your relation this time.”

“Yes, I wish he had,” said Julian, smiling.

“Are you glad or sorry, Julian?”

“Glad, of course. But why didn’t you tell me before?”

“How could I tell you what I didn’t know myself?”

“Oh, it’s his fault, evidently,” said Julian.

I began to wonder if Julian would not be a little jealous of T’férgore. As I had never seen T’férgore myself, I did not know what his aptitude might be at putting himself forward and eclipsing the master of the house. But I was glad it was Julian’s relation this time.

We had had several of my kin living upon our hearthstone at various times, and though Julian was always kind, I think he undervalued the stock from which I sprung. He said I must have been changed in the cradle, for refinement was my natural atmosphere. I did myself feel a creeping of the flesh at brother Jack’s ways; but the dear boy had been brought up away from me, and his manners were not his fault. He had an affectionate and honorable nature, and soon quit spitting upon our Brussels rugs and hard finished floors; his English, however, was beyond all help. I loved Jack so dearly that it was a grief to me to see him falling to pieces in his clothes, and slipping up and down in shoes that were never buttoned. He frequently put his trousers on wrong side foremost, and came to me to help him hunt the pockets. With my own pin-money I bought him hats that must adorn his rosy face, but after he slouched out in them once they looked disreputable. His coat-sleeves hung over his dirty fists like a hackman’s. Whenever he passed through his room he left it as if it had been struck by a tornado. The earth adhered to Jack. Stray burrs and dumpings of gravel appeared by the chair where he sat to put on his slippers. He had no cattish horror of mud, and left the print of his foot on his napkin under the table. When Jack was partially dressed, he shouted for me, to the remotest corners, to come and button his sleeves and hand him his tie.

The more fastidious our company, the louder would Jack bite his nails, while he sprawled like a spread eagle on the sofa, until every pause in conversation became vocal with that horrible cracking. He lost everything portable which was not tied or buttoned about his person, but he was always so good-natured about the losses it seemed stingy to regret the money it cost to replace things.

As he had no inclination toward Art, and walked flat-footed over canvases whenever he came into the studio, Julian got him employment. Jack’s apprenticeship to buying and selling was to me a long period of alternate hopes and despairs. He would begin well, and in fancy I saw him a merchant prince; but eventually he fell out with everybody and thought himself abused when his employer objected to his dribbling small change along the streets, and losing keys. I did not know what to do for Jack when the despair seasons came upon me. But in the end he did very well for himself. He got tired of the city, and no cajoling of mine could keep him from thrusting some shirts into a valise, grasping a pair of heavy boots in his hand, and starting for the country, sowing handkerchiefs and unmated socks in his wake. He went to work for a middle-aged widow with considerable property, and she got the dear boy’s consent to marry him: so there he is, a landed proprietor, with a thrifty wife to button his sleeves and join knives with him in the butter. Our bric-à-brac ways trouble him no more, and what he loses in the furrow at planting time he may find again during harvest. And when he comes to see us, his loving heart is as mellow as the apples he brings.

Then there was Aunt Lizy. I suppose she was christened Eliza, but her name was always pronounced Lizy with a plaintive lingering on the _i_. We had her with us two years. She was a stepsister of my stepmother’s. She looked like an Indian, and had seen more trouble than any other woman with whom she ever measured experiences. Her breathing was all done in sighs, and she tweaked her nose so much it was twisted at the end, and all of a dark red color. She and I never could understand why fortune hit her so hard, and we talked about it so much that I was kept quite bilious.

Aunt Lizy felt too low to sit in the parlor unless dragged there by entreaties, and spent a great deal of her time on the back stairs with a sunbonnet drawn over her eyes. She did not want to go anywhere, and the sound of the door-bell exorcised her as if she were a ghost. She compared her lot to mine until I was ashamed of myself, wondering if I had not stood in her sun.

I think Julian secretly regarded her as a trying disease that we had in the house, and that must be doctored and endured. She was so much in awe of him that I suffered anguish with her whenever he tried to show a man’s bluff kindness to her.

Aunt Lizy finally died, and her face looked young and cheerful in the coffin. We scraped some money together and bought a lot in the cemetery, and her misused body rests there under roses, myrtle, and verbenas. I take pains to keep her shade pleasant and her sod well trimmed; and when the flowers look particularly thrifty, I feel as if Aunt Lizy were learning how to laugh, at last.

Her daughter, who had been deserted by a husband as soon as she gave him a child to support, came to the funeral, and remained to make an unlimited visit and pick up such wearing apparel and other comforts as we had given Aunt Lizy.

She took entire possession of the house, being as loud-voiced and self-assertive as her mother was crushed and sensitive. But she owned me before everybody as her cousin, and took notice of Julian, though she preferred Irish society in the kitchen, and installed me as her nurse, while she enjoyed it. The baby’s usual expression was that of a young bird when it hears the parent return to the nest with a full beak. I used to sit studying the interior of the poor child’s throat, while its voice pierced my marrow. Julian made a sketch of the pimply little face, but finished it up with a black cat’s body and a high fence. It cried steadily during its stay, and had the croup and the doctor and our sleep, until Julian said he must follow the excusable example of its father and abandon it. He paid the fare of Aunt Lizy’s daughter to relations in the far west, and loaded her with whatever she fancied her mother’s. Yet she probably thought we shirked kinsmen’s duty toward her, for we have since heard the whisper that we got all that Aunt Lizy ought to have left her.

So I was glad that T’férgore and not one of my own stock now dictated a postponement of the foreign trip.

Next day we drove out to the little farm and saw old Lena. Julian declared she was worth driving the five miles to see, if it was only to say “Good-day, Lena,” and watch her shriveled smiles. She always wore a blue calico or blue woolen dress, low shoes, and scarlet stockings. Her gait was a cheerful trot, but her tongue was lamest at the English language of any tongue I have ever heard. She had a grandson named Fritz, tallow-colored and blue-eyed, and covered with contagious smiles. He never had forgotten the feeling of wooden shoes on his feet, and clumped conscientiously in leather. Lena and Fritz rented the little farm, and Fritz pushed the vegetables, fruit, and butter to market in a hand-cart. Summer or winter, the road, a turnpike, was as smooth and hard as a floor. Every inch of the fifteen acres was under cultivation. Such weeds as were allowed to grow had some medicinal property, or were good for feeding Lena’s birds. She had her cages hung along the porch, the two canaries, the red-bird, and the mockingbird trying to out-sing and out-chatter the wild things in the cherry-trees.

It was the last of May, and I snuffed delightful odors from the little farm. Nasturtium vines were already running up strings at the window. They produced little pods of which Lena made my favorite pickles. She had one blazing bed of tulips in the garden, and her early vegetables were showing green. Everything Lena tended grew like magic. Fritz had raked every stick and bit of trash into the meadow, and the heap was burning with a pale flicker in the sunlight, and raising smoke like incense from the sod. Whenever I smell that smoke I think I must tell my sensations to somebody who can put them in a poem: a homely poem about last year’s pea-vines and strawberry and currant leaves, exhaling the dew as they turned into blue vapor, and suggesting, though I cannot tell why, the old home garden life when Adam and Eve were content to lean down to the sweet ground and feel the loam with their fingers, or take delight in the breath of fresh-cut grass.

The walk up to the porch was of uneven stones, each outlined by moss. Lena arose between two gaping cellar doors at the side of the house, and ambled down the walk to meet us.

“Wie befinden, Lena?” said Julian. “Suppose we put off that sale and you take us to live on your prospective estate?”

“Was Lena going to buy it?” I exclaimed.

“Of course. She’s grown so wealthy off my land that she was going to turn me away entirely.”

Lena laughed and shook her head and made gestures of good-will.

We went into the house, and Julian bargained with Lena to take us home unto our estate. There was plenty of room for our furniture. Lena had nothing but a spinning-wheel in one long slant-sided room over the wing. Julian said he should leave the spinning-wheel alone, hang his draperies and pictures there, set up his easels, and make it a painting-room. The house had all sorts of tags and after-thoughts built to the main part. Some boards in the floors arched downwards like inverted rainbows. You mounted two steps to one room and descended three to another. There were tall mantles and unexpected closets. The staircase twisted in a way I fancied T’férgore would not like. I sat down on the porch bench while Julian was giving Lena directions, and tried to picture T’férgore coming up the walk toward the house. Was he white or brown? Would he be churlish or full of the spirit of laughter? Was he bringing trouble or gladness to Julian and me?