A Cathedral Singer. Allen James Lane
a while after she is posed you will no doubt see many different expressions pass rapidly over her face. This will be a new and painful experience to which she will not be able to adapt herself at once. She will be uncomfortable, she will be awkward, she will be embarrassed, she will be without her full value. But I think from what I discovered while talking with her that she will soon grow oblivious to her surroundings. They will not overwhelm her; she will finally overwhelm them. She will soon forget you and me and the studio; the one ruling passion of her life will sweep back into consciousness; and then out upon her features will come again that marvelous look which has almost remodeled them to itself alone."
He added, "I will go for her. By this time she must be waiting down-stairs."
As he turned he glanced at the screens placed at that end of the room; behind these the models made their preparations to pose.
"I have arranged," he said significantly, "that she shall leave her things down-stairs."
It seemed long before they heard him on the way back. He came slowly, as though concerned not to hurry his model, as though to save her from the disrespect of urgency. Even the natural noise of his feet on the bare hallway was restrained. They listened for the sounds of her footsteps. In the tense silence of the studio a pin-drop might have been noticeable, a breath would have been audible; but they could not hear her footsteps. He might have been followed by a spirit. Those feet of hers must be very light feet, very quiet feet, the feet of the well-bred.
He entered and advanced a few paces and turned as though to make way for some one of far more importance than himself; and there walked forward and stopped at a delicate distance from them all a woman, bareheaded, ungloved, slender, straight, of middle height, and in life's middle years—Rachel Truesdale.
She did not look at him or at them; she did not look at anything. It was not her role to notice. She merely waited, perfectly composed, to be told what to do. Her thoughts and emotions did not enter into the scene at all; she was there solely as having been hired for work.
One privilege she had exercised unsparingly—not to offer herself for this employment as becomingly dressed for it. She submitted herself to be painted in austerest fidelity to nature, plainly dressed, her hair parted and brushed severely back. Women, sometimes great women, have in history, at the hour of their supreme tragedies, thus demeaned themselves—for the hospital, for baptism, for the guillotine, for the stake, for the cross.
But because she made herself poor in apparel, she became most rich in her humanity. There was nothing for the eye to rest upon but her bare self. And thus the contours of the head, the beauty of the hair, the line of it along the forehead and temples, the curvature of the brows, the chiseling of the proud nostrils and the high bridge of the nose, the molding of the mouth, the modeling of the throat, the shaping of the shoulders, the grace of the arms and the hands—all became conspicuous, absorbing. The slightest elements of physique and of personality came into view powerful, unforgetable.
She stood, not noticing anything, waiting for instructions. With the courtesy which was the soul of him and the secret of his genius for inspiring others to do their utmost, the master of the class glanced at her and glanced at the members of the class, and tried to draw them together with a mere smile of sympathetic introduction. It was an attempt to break the ice. For them it did break the ice; all responded with a smile for her or with other play of the features that meant gracious recognition. With her the ice remained unbroken; she withheld all response to their courteous overtures. Either she may not have trusted herself to respond; or waiting there merely as a model, she declined to establish any other understanding with them whatsoever. So that he went further in the kindness of his intention and said:
"Madam, this is my class of eager, warm, generous young natures who are to have the opportunity of trying to paint you. They are mere beginners; their art is still unformed. But you may believe that they will put their best into what they are about to undertake; the loyalty of the hand, the respect of the eye, the tenderness of their memories, consecration to their art, their dreams and hopes of future success. Now if you will be good enough to sit here, I will pose you."
He stepped toward a circular revolving-platform placed at the focus of the massed easels: it was the model's rack of patience, the mount of humiliation, the scaffold of exposure.
She had perhaps not understood that this would be required of her, this indignity, that she must climb upon a block like an old-time slave at an auction. For one instant her fighting look came back and her eyes, though they rested on vacancy, blazed on vacancy and an ugly red rushed over her face which had been whiter than colorless. Then as though she had become disciplined through years of necessity to do the unworthy things that must be done, she stepped resolutely though unsteadily upon the platform. A long procession of men and women had climbed thither from many a motive on life's upward or downward road.
He had specially chosen a chair for a three-quarter portrait, stately, richly carved; about it hung an atmosphere of high-born things.
Now, the body has definite memories as the mind has definite memories, and scarcely had she seated herself before the recollections of former years revived in her and she yielded herself to the chair as though she had risen from it a moment before. He did not have to pose her; she had posed herself by grace of bygone luxurious ways. A few changes in the arrangement of the hands he did make. There was required some separation of the fingers; excitement caused her to hold them too closely together. And he drew the entire hands into notice; he specially wished them to be appreciated in the portrait. They were wonderful hands: they looked eloquent with the histories of generations; their youthfulness seemed centuries old. Yet all over them, barely to be seen, were the marks of life's experience, the delicate but dread sculpture of adversity.
For a while it was as he had foreseen. She was aware only of the brutality of her position; and her face, by its confused expressions and quick changes of color, showed what painful thoughts surged. Afterward a change came gradually. As though she could endure the ordeal only by forgetting it and could forget it only by looking ahead into the happiness for which it was endured, slowly there began to shine out upon her face its ruling passion—the acceptance of life and the love of the mother glinting as from a cloud-hidden sun across the world's storm. When this expression had come out, it stayed there. She had forgotten her surroundings, she had forgotten herself. Poor indeed must have been the soul that would not have been touched by the spectacle of her, thrilled by her as by a great vision.
There was silence in the room of young workers. Before them, on the face of the unknown, was the only look that the whole world knows—the love and self-sacrifice of the mother; perhaps the only element of our better humanity that never once in the history of man kind has been misunderstood and ridiculed or envied and reviled.
Some of them worked with faces brightened by thoughts of devoted mothers at home; the eyes of a few were shadowed by memories of mothers alienated or dead.
II
That morning on the ledge of rock at the rear of the cathedral Nature hinted to passers what they would more abundantly see if fortunate enough to be with her where she was entirely at home—out in the country.
The young grass along the foot of this slope was thick and green; imagination missed from the picture rural sheep, their fleeces wet with April rain. Along the summit of the slope trees of oak and ash and maple and chestnut and poplar lifted against the sky their united forest strength. Between the trees above and the grass below, the embankment spread before the eye the enchantment of a spring landscape, with late bare boughs and early green boughs and other boughs in blossom.
The earliest blossoms on our part of the earth's surface are nearly always white. They have forced their way to the sun along a frozen path and look akin to the perils of their road: the snow-threatened lily of the valley, the chill snowdrop, the frosty snowball, the bleak hawtree, the wintry wild cherry, the wintry dogwood. As the eye swept the park expanse this morning, here and there some of these were as the last tokens of winter's mantle instead of the first tokens of summer's.
There were flushes of color also, as where in deep soil, on a projection of rock, a pink hawthorn stood studded to the tips of its branches with leaf and flower. But such flushes of color were as false