Mrs. Farrell. William Dean Howells
the way, and I’m not going to have a woman of genius asking common clay if it will take some more of the hash or another help of pie in my presence. Yes, I say genius, Rachel; and Mrs. Gilbert said so, too,” cried Mrs. Farrell, at some signs in the girl, who seemed a little impatient of the subject, as of something already talked over; “and I’m proud of having been in the secret of it. I never shall forget how they all looked when I came dancing out with it and stood it up at the head of the table, where they could see it! They thought I did it, and they had quite a revulsion of feeling when they found it was yours. Where are you going, Rachel? To Florence, or the Cooper Institute, or Doctor Rimmer?”
“I have no idea of going anywhere. I have no money; father couldn’t afford to send me. I don’t expect to leave home.”
“Well, then, I’ll tell you: you must. Why can’t you come and stay with me in Boston, this winter? I’ve got two rooms, and money enough to keep a couple of mice—especially if one’s a country mouse—and we’ll study art together. I might as well do that as anything—or nothing. Come, is it a bargain?”
“If I could get the money to pay for my boarding, I think I should like it very much. But I couldn’t,” answered Rachel, quietly.
“Why, Rachel, can’t you understand that you are to be my guest?”
Even the women of West Pekin are slow to melt in gratitude, and Rachel replied without effusion:
“Did you mean that? It is very good of you—but I could never think of it,” she added, firmly. “I never could pay you back in any way. It would come to a great deal in a winter—city board.”
“Do I understand you to refuse this handsome offer, Rachel?”
“I must.”
“All right. Then I shall certainly count upon your being with me, for it would be foolish not to come, and whatever you are, Rachel, you’re not foolish. I’m going to talk with your mother about it. Why, you little—chipmunk,” cried Mrs. Farrell, adding the term of endearment after some hesitation for the precise expression, “I want you to come and do me credit. When your things are on exhibition at Williams and Everett’s, and Doll and Richards’s, I’m going to gather a few small spears of glory for myself by slyly telling round that I gave you your first instruction, and kept you from blushing unseen in West Pekin. I’ve felt the want of a protégée a good while, and here you are, just made to my hand. I heard before I came away that they were going to get up a life class next winter. Perhaps we could get a chance to join that.”
“Life class?”
“Yes; to draw from the nude, you know.”
“From the—” Rachel hesitated.
“Yes, yes, yes! my wild-wood flower. From the human being, the fellow-creature, with as little on as possible,” shouted Mrs. Farrell. “How can you learn the figure any other way?”
A puzzled, painful look came into the girl’s eyes, and “Do—do—ladies go?” she asked, faintly.
“Of course they go!” said Mrs. Farrell. “It’s a regular part of art-education. The ladies have separate classes in New York; but they don’t abroad.”
Rachel seemed at a loss what to answer. She dropped her eyes under Mrs. Farrell’s scrutiny, and softly plucked at a tuft of grass. At last she said, without looking up, “It wouldn’t be necessary for me to go. I only want to paint animals.”
“Well, and aren’t men animals?” demanded Mrs. Farrell, leaning forward and trying to turn the girl about so as to look into her averted face.
“Don’t!” said the other, in a wounded tone.
“Rachel, Rachel!” cried Mrs. Farrell, tenderly, “I’ve really shocked you, haven’t I? Don’t be mad at me, my little girl: I didn’t invent the life class, and I never went to one. I don’t know whether it’s exactly nice or not. I suppose people wouldn’t do it if it wasn’t. Come, look round at me, Rachel: I’m so glad of your liking me that if you stop it for half a second you’ll break my heart!” She spoke in tones of anxious appeal, and then suddenly added, “If you’ll visit me this winter we won’t go to the life class; we’ll sleep together in the parlor and keep a cow in the back room.”
Rachel gave way to a laugh, with her face hidden in her hands, and Mrs. Farrell fell back, satisfied, against her comfortable rock again, and put her hand in her pocket. “Look here, Rachel,” she said, drawing it out. “Here’s something of yours.” She tossed a crisp, rattling ten-dollar note into the girl’s lap, and nodded as Rachel turned a face of question upon her. “I sold your Blossom for that this morning; I forgot to tell you before. No, ma’am; I didn’t buy it. Mrs. Gilbert bought it. The others praised it, Mrs. Gilbert paid for it: that’s Mrs. Gilbert. I told her something about you and how you owed everything to my instruction, and she offered ten dollars for Blossom. I tried to beat her down to five,” she continued, while Rachel stared dumbly at the money, “but it was no use. She wouldn’t fall a cent. She. … Ugh! What’s that?” cried Mrs. Farrell.
She gathered her dispersed picturesqueness hastily up, threw her head alertly round, and confronted a mild-faced cow, placidly pausing twenty paces off under the bough of a tree, through which she had advanced her visage, and softly regarding them with her gentle brown eyes. “Why, Blossom, Blossom!” complained the lady. “How could you come up in that startling way? I thought it was a man! Though of course,” she added, less dramatically, “I might have remembered that there isn’t a man within a hundred miles.”
She was about to lean back again in her lazy posture, when voices made themselves heard from the wood beside the pasture out of which Blossom had emerged. “Men’s voices, Rachel!” she whispered. “An adventure! I suppose we must run away from it!”
Mrs. Farrell struggled up from her sitting posture, and, entangling her foot in her skirt, plunged forward with graceful awkwardness, but did not fall. She caught the pins out of her drapery, and Rachel and she were well on their way to the bars which would let them into the road, when two men emerged from the birch thicket out of which Blossom had appeared. One was tall and dark, with a firm, very dark mustache branching across a full beard. The other was a fair man, with a delicate face; he was slight of frame, and of the middle stature; in his whole bearing there was an expression of tacit resolution, which had also a touch of an indefinable something that one might call fanaticism. Both were city-clad, but very simply and fitly for faring through woods and fields; the dark man wore high boots; he carried a trouting rod, and at his side was a fish basket.
They looked after the two women with eyes that clung charmed to the figure of Mrs. Farrell, as she drifted down the sloping meadow-path.
“Magnificent!” said the dark man, carelessly. “‘A daughter of the gods, divinely tall and most divinely fair!’”
A flush came over the cheek of the other, but he said nothing, while he absently advanced to the rock beside which the women had been sitting, as if that superb shape had drawn him thus far after her. A little book lay there, which he touched with his foot before he saw it. As he stooped to pick it up, Mrs. Farrell stopped fleetly, as a deer stops, and, wheeling round, went rapidly back toward the two men. When Mrs. Farrell advanced upon you, you had a sense of lustrous brown eyes growing and brightening out of space, and then you knew of the airy looseness of the overhanging hair and of the perfection of the face, and last of the sweeping, undulant grace of the divine figure. So she came onward now, fixing her unfrightened, steadfast eyes upon the young man, out of whose face went everything but worship. He took off his hat, and bent forward with a bow, offering the pretty volume, at which he had hardly glanced.
“Thanks,” she breathed, and for an instant she relaxed the severe impersonality of her regard, and flooded him with a look. He stood helpless, while she turned and swiftly rejoined her companion, and so he remained standing till she and Rachel had passed through the meadow bars and out of sight.
Then the dark man