Part 22 (2/2)

”She looks like one of those people you would have just loved to lift the burdens off and make everything smooth for,” Aurora said; ”and yet she looks like one of those people who spend their whole lives trying to make things smooth for others.”

”Yes,” said Gerald to that artless description of the feminine woman his mother had been, and stood beside his guest, looking pensively up at the portrait.

All at once, Aurora felt like crying. It had been increasing, the oppression to her spirits, ever since she entered this house to which she had come filled with gay antic.i.p.ation and innocent curiosity. It had struck her from the first moment as gloomy, and it was undoubtedly cold, with its three sticks of wood ceremoniously smoking in the unaccustomed chimney-place. Its esthetic bareness had affected her like the meagerness of poverty. And now it seemed to her sad, horribly so, haunted by the gentle ghosts of that mother and sister who had known and touched all these things, sat in the chairs, looked through the windows, and who conceivably came back in the twilight to flit over the uncarpeted floor and peer in the dim mirrors to see how much the grave had changed them. She s.h.i.+vered. Yes, cold and bare and sad seemed Gerald's dwelling. And Gerald, whose very bearing was a dignified denial that anything about himself or his circ.u.mstances could call for compa.s.sion--Gerald, thin and without color, looked to her cold-pinched and under-nourished. She had a sense of his long evenings alone, drearily without fire, his solitary meals in that dining-room so unsuggestive of good cheer; she thought of that single candle on the night-table burning in this cold, large room where he went to bed in that bed of iron, laying his head on that small hair pillow, to dream bitter dreams of a fair girl's treachery.

She wanted to turn to him protesting:

”Oh, I can't stand it! What makes you do it?”

His next words changed the current of her thoughts.

”I have another portrait of my mother,” he said; ”one I painted, which I will show you if you care to see it.”

She cheered up.

”Do! do!” she urged heartily. ”I'm crazy to see something you've painted.”

”You won't care for my painting,” he p.r.o.nounced without hesitation; ”but the portrait gives a good idea of my mother, I think, when she was older than this.”

They returned to the drawing-room, where their friends were in the same way engaged as when they left them. One pair was looking at a large ill.u.s.trated book; the other two sat leaning toward each other talking in undertones.

”The bird which you see,” the abbe was saying, ”with the smaller birds crowding around him, is a pelican. The pelican, you know, who opens his breast to feed his young, is a symbol of the Church.”

”It's not true, though, that the pelican does that,” Estelle was on the point of saying with American freedom, ”any more than that a scorpion surrounded by fire commits suicide. I read it in a Sunday paper where a lot of old superst.i.tions were exploded.” But she tactfully did nothing of the sort. She appeared instructed and impressed.

What Miss Seymour was saying to Mrs. Foss would have sounded a little singular to any one overhearing. The two women had been friends for years, but never come so near to each other as, it chanced, they did that afternoon, when all fell so favorably for a heart to heart talk.

”I feel as if I had lost a key!” said Miss Seymour, and looked like a bewildered princess turned old by a wicked fairy's spell. ”When I possessed it I thought nothing of it. It opened all the doors, but I didn't know what it was made them so easy to open. Only now, when it's gone, I know the value of that little golden key.”

”I know,” said Mrs. Foss, sympathetically. ”There's no use in us women pretending we don't mind! Those who really and truly don't must be great philosophers or great fools, or else selfless to a degree that is rarer even than philosophy....”

Gerald and Aurora crossed the room unhailed and entered the room beyond, where dusty canvases, many deep, stood face to the wall.

He found the unframed painting of his mother and placed it on the easel.

The short winter day was waning, but near the window where the easel stood there was still light enough to see by.

Aurora looked a long time without saying anything; Gerald did not speak either. After the length of time one allows for the examination of a picture, he took away that one and put another in its place; and so on until he had shown her a dozen.

”I don't know what to say,” she finally got out, as if from under a crus.h.i.+ng burden of difficulty to express herself.

”Please don't try!” he begged quickly. ”And please not to care a bit if you don't like them.”

She let out her breath as at the easing of a strain. He heard it.

”I won't be so offensive,” he went on, ”as to say that in not liking them you merely add yourself to the majority, nor yet that my feelings are in no wise hurt by your failure to like them. But I do wish you to know that I think it a sin and a shame to get a person like you, who can't pretend a bit, before a lot of beastly canvases inevitably repugnant to your mood and temperament, and make you uncomfortable with the feeling that compliments are expected.”

”All right, then; I won't tell any lies.” She added in a sigh, ”I did want so much to like them!”

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