The Yoke of the Thorah. Harland Henry
and every thing else except costumes. In the matter of costumes, I believe, he's very nearly abreast of the times.”
“Oh, you needn't except costumes,” cried Redwood. “The science of costuming is a branch of archaeology. So that don't count. But look at here, Chris. What you suppose Mr. Bacharach and I have just been talking about? Guess.”
“About—? Oh, I can't guess. I give it up.”
“About you.”
“Me?”
“You.”
“I hope he told you nothing bad about me, Mr. Bacharach.”
“Oh, we weren't discussing your character. Men don't gossip, you know. We were talking about having your portrait painted. I've made arrangements with Mr. Bacharach to have him paint your portrait.”
“Oh!” Christine exclaimed. Her brown eyes opened wide, and her cheeks reddened slightly.
“And the question is,” Redwood pursued, “when will you give him the first sitting?”
“Why, that is for you to say, father.”
“Well, then, I say Sunday morning. How does that strike you, Mr. Bacharach?”
“Oh, any time will be agreeable to me,” replied Elias.
“Well, Chris, shall we make it Sunday morning?”
“Just as you please.”
“All right. Note that, Mr. Bacharach. Sunday morning, December third. I suppose you'd better send your apparatus—easel, and so forth—in advance, hadn't ye?”
“Yes; I'll send them to-morrow.”
“That settles it. And now, Chris, listen to me. I want to tell you a good joke. Perhaps you didn't notice, but when you were down to the shop this afternoon, Mr. Bacharach here, he came in; and he—” And to the unutterable confusion of Elias, the merciless old man proceeded to tell his daughter the whole story. He wound up thus: “And, actually, Chris, he took you to be an actress. What you scowling at me for? He did, for a fact. He can't deny it. Didn't you, Mr. Bacharach? Didn't you ask me if she wasn't an actress?”
Elias appealed to Christine.
“Your father is very cruel, isn't he, Miss Redwood?”
“He loves to tease,” she assented. Then, with a touch of concern, “You mustn't feel badly. He never means to hurt anybody's feelings,” she added, and looked earnestly into Elias Bacharach's face. That look caused him a sensation, the like of which he had never experienced before. His lip trembled. His breath quickened. His heart leaped. “Thank—thank you,” he said, with none but the most confused notion of what he said, or why he said it.
Pretty soon he took his leave.
Elias dwelt in East Fifteenth Street. The house faced Stuyvesant Park. In this house, March 22, 1856, Elias had been born. In this house, May 13, 1856, Elias's father had died. In this house, alone with his mother and her brother, the Reverend Dr. Felix Gedaza, rabbi to the Congregation Gates of Pearl, Elias had lived till he was twenty-four years old. Then his mother, too, had died. Since then, he and the rabbi had kept bachelor's hall. It was a large, old-fashioned, red-brick house, very plain and respectable of exterior, and very bare, sombre and silent within. Elias had converted the front room on the top floor into a studio. Thus he had a north light and a wide view. In his childhood this room had been his play-room. During his boyhood it had been his bed-room. Now it was his work-room—consequently his living-room, in the most vital sense of the word. Its four walls had watched him grow up. The view from its window had been his daily comrade, ever since he had been old enough to have any comrade at all. In a manner, it had been his confidant and his counselor, too. It was his habit, whenever he had any thing on his mind, to station himself at that window, and look off across the park, and think it out. Hither he had come in sickness and in health, in joy and in sorrow, in the blackest moments of his discouragement, in the brightest moments of his hope. Here he had solved many a doubt, confronted many a disappointment, built many an air-castle, registered many a vow. He was twenty-six years old. Not a phase or episode of his development, but was associated in his memory with that view.
Here, returning from Redwood's on the last night of November, 1882, he sat down, and abandoned himself to a whole set of new emotions that had been let loose in his heart. He did not understand these emotions; he did not try to understand them. If he had understood them, he might have taken measures to subdue them in their inception; and then the whole course of his subsequent life would have been altered, and this story would never have been told. They were very vague, very strange, very different from any thing that he had ever experienced before, and very, very pleasant. As often as he went over the events of the evening, recalling Christine's appearance, and her manner, and the way she had looked at him, and the words that she had spoken, he became conscious of a sudden, delicious glow of warmth in his breast. Then, when he went forward into the time yet to come, and began to paint her portrait in imagination, he had to draw a long breath, a deep sigh of pleasure, so exhilarating and so fascinating was the outlook. By and by he was called back to the present, by the clock of St. George's church tolling out midnight. He started, rose, stretched himself, went to bed. But an hour or two elapsed before he got to sleep. Christine's golden hair and lustrous eyes lighted up his dreams.
III.
SUNDAY came; and with it a warm sun, a blue sky, a soft, southerly breeze. It was one of those days, peculiar to our climate, which, though they may fall in the middle of winter, bear the fragrance of April upon their breath, and resuscitate for a moment in one's heart all the keen emotions dead since last spring-time. Elias presented himself at the Redwood house shortly after nine o'clock. Christine smiled upon him, and gave him a warm little hand to press. Her father asked, “How about costume? Want her to make up?” Elias said, “Oh, no; what she has on is perfect.” That was a simple gown of some dark blue stuff, confined at the waist by a broad band of cardinal ribbon. Her golden hair was caught in a loose knot behind her ears. Elias set up his easel in the parlor. Then he began the process of posing the model. This called for nice discrimination, and was productive of much mirthful debate. At last it was finished.
“Now,” said old Redwood, “this is altogether too fine a day for me to spend cooped up in the house. I'll leave you two young folks to take care of each other. I'm going to read my newspaper in the park. Sunday don't come more than once a week, you understand. By-by, Chris. So long, Mr. Bacharach.”
He went off.
For a while Elias worked in silence. So great was the pleasure that he got from studying this young girl's beauty, and endeavoring to transfer the elements of it to his canvas, that he never thought of how heavily the time might lag for her. But all at once it occurred to him.
“Why,” he reflected, “I'm treating her for all the world as if she were a paid model. This won't do. I must try to amuse her.”
Then he sought high and low for something to say, something that would be at once appropriate and entertaining. In vain. His wits seemed to have deserted him, his mind to have become a total and hopeless blank. In order readily and happily to manufacture polite conversation, one must have had experience. Elias had had none. Now, in despair, he saw himself reduced to taking refuge in the weather.
“This—er—has been an unusually mild fall, Miss Redwood,” he ventured.
“Yes, very,” she acquiesced.
“But the summer—that was a scorcher, wasn't it?”
“Yes, indeed, dreadful,” she assented.
“You spent it in the country, I suppose?”
“Oh,