A Puritan Bohemia/Chapter 19
CHAPTER XIX
The April air had grown warm and sweet. Each day the sun went down in a golden haze. The willow branches were long ripples of pale green. Along the busy streets and in the quiet Square, flower-boys stood with baskets of pansies, arbutus, anemones, violets, "fi' cents a bunch." In the air a fresh quick wind beat with the beating of the pulses.
Through the swift days of sunshine dashed with rain, Helen followed a vision of Howard, ill and beyond her reach. Anne wandered, uneasy and idle, about Bohemia. For Mrs. Kent the past grew warm in the sunlight that fell upon her face. And Howard?
Howard stood one day by his window, pale still from his recent illness. Mrs. Orr and Annabel were busy in the room.
"Give me days of golden glory,
With my windows open wide,"
he hummed.
But Mrs. Orr forbade him to open the window.
"Sure as you do, you'll have a relapse," she insisted, as she left the room, "and me with Tommy and Sarah and you all on my hands."
He sank meekly into a chair.
"I haven't the nerve to assert myself," he said. "My spirit is broken by an infant disease."
He looked languidly at the pile of mail that had accumulated on his table during the past weeks. Then he tore off the cover of the Art Review.
"My little sisters are both drowned," remarked Annabel mournfully.
"What little sisters?" he asked absent-mindedly. He was reading, not without interest, some comments on his work.
"Not a mere tour-de-force—a keenly intelligent facility—sensitive and thoughtful method—a not unnatural divergence into purely subjectless and impersonal motifs—subtle in effect, ingenious in process—note the intensity of expression"
"That's not bad," commented the artist; "only I don't half deserve it. A little sharp criticism would be better for me."
"My little sisters, Euphrasia and Amanda," continued Annabel, in a rather loud tone.
"Oh," answered Mr. Stanton. "I remember your little sisters. But I thought their names were Ellen and Malvina."
"I guess I'd better go and get my dust-cloth," remarked Annabel. When she came back her face had brightened.
"My little sisters have two names apiece," she said patronizingly. "I couldn't explain, because I was in a hurry. Please," she added in a whisper, "don't say anything to my mother about my little sisters."
"Why not?"
"Because it will make her feel so bad. My mother was very fond of them. It's awful hard for her."
But Mr. Stanton was busy with another article. He had found it in the News of two weeks ago.
"Mr. Stanton has attempted the impossible with commendable courage," wrote the critic, "but without succeeding in making it convincing. In facing 'Art and Need' we stand in the full blast of the orchestral colour-box. His gorgeous skies, of greenish hue, combine with his trees of violet to set forth an idea better adapted to the lecture-platform than to canvas. This is mere rhetoric."
"The idiot!" remarked Mr. Stanton politely, tossing the paper across the room.
He was not comforted even by the mystic notice in the Spectator.
"While it might be urged that Mr. Stanton's design is rather decorative than pictorial, suited rather to large architectural spaces than to a single canvas, there is an unspeakable something about the work that holds the spectator. In this, reduced as it is to the indifferent naked typical, one detects a soaring quality. Here is a constant aspiration toward the unattainable. Here is an insatiable need of the beyond. A brilliant future"
"Oh, rats!" interrupted the artist. He lost himself in gloomy thoughts. His admirers misinterpreted him. His critics misrepresented him. And what did it all matter? Anne—Anne would not listen. He had chosen the wrong guiding-star, and all his reckonings were false.
"I'm like that young man of fame," he mused. "My brilliant future is behind me."
His convalescent melancholy took a didactic turn.
"Annabel," he said, turning to the child, "we have made a mistake about you. You ought to have been a story-writer. You have a genius for circumstantial invention."
"What is that, sir?"
"It's lying," said the young man gravely. "Now it's all very well, Annabel, for you to make things up when people know that you are telling stories. But when you are trying to make people believe what isn't so, it's downright wicked. It's mean. You might do no end of harm."
Annabel looked bewildered, then burst into tears.
"Oh, stop that!" said Mr. Stanton cheerfully. "I'm not scolding. I just wanted to make you see. What are you crying for?"
"I'm afraid you won't like me any more," sobbed Annabel, drying her eyes in the cheese-cloth duster.
"Yes I shall. I like you very much. You are the nicest little girl I know. But I want to be able to depend on what you say. Did you think that I believed your yarns?"
"Yes, sir."
"Well, I didn't. You are just as transparent as glass."
"I can't help it," wailed Annabel. "I'm just sick of living. I don't have any pleasures. I wash my little brother every day, and scrub my steps, and work from morning till night. When I go out I see the same wagons standing in front of the same houses every day. My life is perfect misery."
"There, don't cry," said the young man. "I didn't mean to hurt your feelings. You haven't told any lies about me, I know."
"Yes I have," howled Annabel.
"What?"
"I told Miss Wistar and Miss Bradford things because I liked you. I told them how good you was."
"Is that a lie?"
"I told 'em how you brought things home for us, and how one day you was a-bringing home a mop and pail, and you had a high silk hat on. And an old gentleman came along and you said, 'You wouldn't do things like this for poor people!'"
The young man shouted with laughter, then became suddenly grave. Annabel was on the qui vive. Confession was almost as dramatic an experience as lying.
"Tell me what else you've done," said Mr. Stanton sternly. "Have you told Miss Bradford any more things that aren't true?"
"Yes," whimpered Annabel. "I've told her the things you've said about Miss Wistar."
"What have I said about Miss Wistar?"
The fixed idea in Annabel's imagination had become half reality.
"Why, when you talked to her picture," said Annabel reproachfully.
"Her picture!" gasped Howard.
"Once," asserted Annabel, "when you was sick, you said, 'O my Amanda, the task of forgetting you could never be accomplished.' And once you said, 'To you I am bound by a sentiment stronger than love,—by honour.'"
Annabel's eyes were shining with interest through her tears. Mr. Stanton had grown white with anger. The child was frightened.
"Have you told any of this nonsense to Miss Wistar?"
"No," answered Annabel eagerly; "not a word. Honestly I haven't."
"Then," he said with a sigh of relief, "you haven't done quite as much harm as you might have done. But you've come pretty near it. This explains the 'inconstancy,'" he muttered under his breath.
"I'm glad I didn't tell Miss Wistar," said Annabel guilelessly. "I thought you wouldn't like it."