The Coast Of Bohemia. William Dean Howells
eyes were streaming with tears, and the passion in her heart was twisting her face with its anguish. She flung her arms round her mother's neck, and sobbed on her breast. "Oh, I'm going, I'm going, and you don't seem to care whether I go or stay, and it'll kill me to leave you."
Mrs. Saunders smiled across the tempest of grief in her embrace, at her own tranquil image in the glass, and took it into the joke. "Well, you ain't going to leave this minute," she said, smoothing the girl's black hair. "And I don't really care if you never go, Nie. You mustn't go on my account."
"Don't you want me to?"
"Not unless you do."
"And you don't care whether I'm ever an artist or not?"
"What good is your being an artist going to do me?" asked her mother, still with a joking eye on herself in the mirror.
"And I'm perfectly free to go or to stay, as far as your wish is concerned?"
"Well!" said Mrs. Saunders, with insincere scorn of the question.
The girl gave her a fierce hug; she straightened herself up, and dashed the water from her eyes. "Well, then," she said, "I'll see. But promise me one thing, mother."
"What is it?"
"That you won't ask me a single thing about it, from this out, if I never decide!"
"Well, I won't, Nie. I promise you that. I don't want to drive you to anything. And I guess you know ten times as well what you want to do, as I do, anyway. I ain't going to worry you."
Three weeks later, just before fair time, Cornelia went to see Mrs. Burton. It was warm, and Mrs. Burton brought out a fan for her on the piazza.
"Oh, I'm not hot," said Cornelia. "Mrs. Burton, I've made up my mind to go to New York this winter, and study art."
"I knew you would, Nie!" Mrs. Burton exulted.
"Yes. I've thought it all out. I've got the money, now. I keep wanting to paint, and I don't know whether I can or not, and the only way is to go and find out. It'll be easy enough to come home. I'll keep money enough to pay my way back."
"Yes," said Mrs. Burton, "it's the only way. But I guess you'll find out you can paint fast enough. It's a pretty good sign you can, if you want to."
"Oh, I don't know. Some girls want to write poetry awfully, and can't. Mrs. Burton," she broke off, with a nervous laugh, "I don't suppose you expect that Mr. Ludlow out to the fair this year?"
"No, Nelie, I don't," said Mrs. Burton, with tender reluctance.
"Because," said the girl with another laugh, "he might save me a trip to New York, if he could see my drawings." Something, she did not know what, in Mrs. Burton's manner, made her ask: "Have you heard from him lately? Perhaps he's given it up, too!"
"Oh, no!" sighed Mrs. Burton, with a break from her cheerfulness with Cornelia, which set its voluntary character in evidence to the girl's keen, young perception. "But he seemed to be rather discouraged about the prospects of artists when he wrote." She was afraid Cornelia might ask her when he had written. "He seemed to think the ranks were very full. He's a very changeable person. He's always talked, before now, about there being plenty of room at the top."
"Well, that's where I expect to be," said the girl, smiling but trembling. She turned the talk, and soon rose to go, ignoring to the last Mrs. Burton's forced efforts to recur to her plan of studying art in New York. Now she said: "Mrs. Burton, there's one thing I'd like to ask you," and she lifted her eyes upon her with a suddenness that almost made Mrs. Burton jump.
"What is it, Nelie?"
"You've always been so good to me—and—and taken such an interest, that I'm afraid—I thought you might try—I want you to promise me you won't write to Mr. Ludlow about me, or ask him to do the least thing, for me!"
"I won't, I won't indeed, Nelie!" Mrs. Burton promised with grateful perfervor.
"Because," said the girl, taking her skirt in her left hand, preparatory to lifting it for her descent of the piazza steps, "now that I've made up my mind, I don't want to be discouraged, and I don't want to be helped. If I can't do for myself, I won't be done for."
After she got down through the maples, and well out of the gate, Burton came and stood in the hall door-way, with his pipe in his mouth. "Saved your distance, Polly, as usual; saved your distance."
"What would you have done?" retorted his wife.
"I should have told her that I'd just got a letter from Ludlow this morning, and that he begged and entreated me by everything I held dear, to keep the poor girl from coming to New York, and throwing away her time and health and money."
"You wouldn't!" cried Mrs. Burton. "You wouldn't have done anything of the kind. It would have made her perfectly hate him."
Burton found his pipe out. He lighted a match and hollowed his hands over it above the pipe, to keep it from the draught. "Well," he said, avoiding the point in controversy, "why shouldn't she perfectly hate him?"
IX.
September was theoretically always a very busy month with Mrs. Saunders. She believed that she devoted it to activities which she called her fall work, and that she pressed forward in the fulfilments of these duties with a vigor inspired by the cool, clear weather. But in reality there was not much less folding of the hands with her in September than there was in July. She was apt, on the coolest and clearest September day, to drop into a chair with a deep drawn "Oh, hum!" after the fatigue of bringing in an apronful of apples, or driving the hens away from her chrysanthemums, and she spent a good deal of time wondering how, with all she had to do, she was ever going to get those flowers in before the frost caught them. At one of these times, sitting up slim, graceful and picturesque, in the feather-cushioned rocker-lounge, and fanning her comely face with her shade-hat, it occurred to her to say to Cornelia, sewing hard beside the window, "I guess you won't see them in blossom this Christmas, Nie."
"Not unless you cut them at the roots and send them to me by mail to look at," said the girl.
Her mother laughed easily. "Well, I must really take hold and help you, or you'll never get away. I've put off everybody else's work, till it's perfectly scandalous, and I'm afraid they'll bring the roof about my ears, and yet I seem to be letting you do all your sewing. Well, one thing, I presume I hate to have you go so!"
"Mother!" cried the girl, drawing out her needle to the full length of her thread before she let her hand drop nervelessly at her side, and she fell back to look fixedly at Mrs. Saunders. "If that's the way you feel!"
"I don't! I want you to go just as much as ever I did. But looking at you there, just against the window, that way, I got to thinking you wouldn't be there a great while; and——" Mrs. Saunders caught her breath, and was mute a moment before she gave way and began to whimper. From the force of habit she tried to whimper with one side of her mouth, as she smiled, to keep her missing teeth from showing; and at the sight of this characteristic effort, so familiar and so full of long association, Cornelia's heart melted within her, and she ran to her mother, and pulled her head down on her breast and covered the unwhimpering cheek with kisses.
"Don't you suppose I think of that, too, mother? And when you go round the room, or out in the yard, I just keep following you as if I was magnetized, and I can see you with my eyes shut as well as I can with them open; and I know how I shall feel when that's all I've got of you! But I'll soon be back! Why I'll be here in June again! And it's no use, now. I've got to go."
"Oh, yes," said her mother, pushing herself free, and entering upon so prolonged a search for her handkerchief that her tears had almost time to dry without it before she found it. "But that don't make it any easier, child."
They had agreed from the time Cornelia made up her mind to go,