Part 7 (1/2)

The bright serene hours of the day pa.s.sed one by one with nature's carelessness about the human tragedy. It was afternoon and near the hour for the choral even-song across the way at the cathedral, the temporary windows of which were open.

She had relieved the nurse, and was alone with him. Often during these days he had put out one of his hands and groped about with it to touch her, turning his head a little toward her under his bandaged eyes, and apparently feeling much mystified about her, but saying nothing. She kept her bandaged hands out of his reach but leaned over him in response and talked ever to him, barely stroking him with the tips of her stiffened fingers.

The afternoon was so quiet that by and by through the opened windows a deep note sent a thrill into the room--the awakened soul of the organ.

And as the two listened to it in silence, soon there floated over to them the voices of the choir as the line moved slowly down the aisle, the blended voices of the chosen band, his school-fellows of the altar.

By the bedside she suddenly rocked to and fro, and then she bent over and said with a smile in her tone:

”_Do you hear? Do you hear them?_”

He made a motion with his lips to speak but they hurt him too much. So he nodded: that he heard them.

A moment later he tugged at the bandage over his eyes.

She sprang toward him:

”O my precious one, you must not tear the bandage off your eyes!”

”I want to see you!” he mumbled. ”It has been so long since I saw you!

What's the matter with you? Where are your hands? Why don't you put your arms around me?”

VI

The cla.s.s had been engaged with another model. Their work was forced and listless. As days pa.s.sed without the mother's return, their thought and their talk concerned itself more and more with her disappearance. Why had she not come back? What had befallen her? What did it all mean?

Would they ever know?

One day after their luncheon-hour, as they were about to resume work, the teacher of the cla.s.s entered. He looked shocked; his look shocked them; instant sympathy ran through them. He spoke with difficulty:

”She has come back. She is down-stairs. Something had befallen her indeed. She told me as briefly as possible and I tell you all I know.

Her son, a little fellow who had just been chosen for the cathedral choir school was run over in the street. A mention of it--the usual story--was in the papers, but who of us reads such things in the papers?

They bore us; they are not even news. He was taken to St. Luke's, and she has been at St. Luke's, and the end came at St. Luke's, and all the time we have been here a few yards distant and have known nothing of it.

Such is New York! It was to help pay for his education in music that she first came to us, she said. And it was the news that he had been chosen for the choir school that accounts for the new happiness which we saw brighten her day by day. Now she comes again for the same small wage, but with other need, no doubt: the expenses of it all, a rose-bush for his breast. She told me this calmly as though it caused her no grief. It was not my privilege, it is not our privilege, to share her unutterable bereavement.

”She has asked to go on with the sittings. I have told her to come to-morrow. But she does not realize all that this involves with the portrait. You will have to bring new canvases, it will have to be a new work. She is in mourning. Her hands will have to be left out, she has hurt them; they are bandaged. The new portrait will be of the head and face only. But the chief reason is the change of expression. The light which was in her face and which you have partly caught upon your canvases, has died out; it was brutally put out. The old look is gone.

It is gone, and will never come back--the tender, brooding, reverent happiness and peace of motherhood with the child at her knee--that great earthly beacon-light in women of ages past. It was brutally put out but it did not leave blankness behind it. There has come in its place another light, another ancient beacon-light on the faces of women of old--the look of faith in immortal things. She is not now the mother with the tenderness of this earth but the mother with the expectation of eternity. Her eyes have followed him who has left her arms and gone into a distance. Ever she follows him into that distance. Your portrait, if you can paint it, will be the mother with the look of immortal things in her face.”

When she entered the room next morning, at the sight of her in mourning and so changed in every way, with one impulse they all rose to her. She took no notice,--perhaps it would have been unendurable to notice,--but she stepped forward as usual, and climbed to the platform without faltering, and he posed her for the head and shoulders. Then, to study the effect from different angles, he went behind the easels, pa.s.sing from one to another. As he returned, with the thought of giving her pleasure, he brought along with him one of the sketches of herself and held it out before her.

”Do you recognize it?” he asked.

She refused to look at first. Then arousing herself from her indifference she glanced at it. But when she beheld there what she had never seen--how great had been her love of him; when she beheld there the light now gone out and realized that it meant the end of happy days with him, she shut her eyes quickly and jerked her head to one side with a motion for him to take the picture away. But she had been brought too close to her sorrow and suddenly she bent over her hands like a snapped reed and the storm of her grief came upon her.

They started up to get to her. They fought one another to get to her.