PAGE 4
The Artist
by
"’Twas a real lonely place, she told me, and she had been glad to marry and come down in the valley to live closer to folks. Her uncle had given her her wedding outfit. He had done real well by them all, and they were grateful; and now he was getting feeble and had trouble with his heart, they wanted to do something for him. They had thought, perhaps, they could sell some of his pictures for enough to hire a man to help him with the farm work. She had heard that pictures were coming into fashion more than they had been, and she had borrowed that one of her little sister and the kittie, and without her uncle’s knowing anything about it, had sent it off. She was about discouraged waiting for somebody down in the city to make up his mind whether he’d buy it or not.
"I asked her a thousand other questions but she could answer none of them. The only detail I could get from her being an account of her uncle’s habit of ‘staring’ for sometimes a half an hour at something, without once looking away. She’d seen him stop that way, when he’d be husking corn maybe, and stare at a place where a sunbeam came in on a pile of corn. It put him back quite considerable in his work, that habit, but they had nothing to complain of. He’d done well by them, when you considered they weren’t his own children.
"’Hadn’t he ever tried to break away?’ I asked her, amazed.’To leave them? To go back?’
"She told me: ‘Oh, no, he was the only support his mother and his sister had, and there were all the little children. He had to stay.’"
The actress broke in fiercely: "Oh, stop! stop! it makes me sick to hear about. I could boil them in oil, that family! Quick! You saw him? You brought him away? You—"
"I saw him," said Vieyra, "yes, I saw him. "
Madame Orloff leaned toward him, her eyebrows a line of painful attention.
"I drove that afternoon up to a still tinier village in the mountains near where he lived, and there I slept that night—or, at least, I lay in a bed. "
"Of course, you could not sleep," broke in the listening woman; "I shall not to-night. "
"When dawn came I dressed and went out to wander until people should be awake. I walked far, through fields, and then through a wood as red as red-gold—like nothing I ever saw. It was in October, and the sun was late to rise. When I came out on an uplying heath, the mists were just beginning to roll away from the valley below. As I stood there, leaning against a tree in the edge of the wood, some cows came by, little, pinched, lean cows, and a young dog bounding along, and then, after them, slowly, an old man in gray—very lame. "
The actress closed her eyes.
"He did not see me. He whistled to the dog and stroked his head, and then as the cows went through a gate, he turned and faced the rising sun, the light full on his face. He looked at the valley coming into sight through the mists. He was so close to me I could have tossed a stone to him—I shall never know how long he stood there—how long I had that face before me. "
The narrator was silent. Madame Orloff opened her eyes and looked at him piercingly.
"I cannot tell you—I cannot!" he answered her. "Who can tell of life and death and a new birth? It was as though I were thinking with my fingernails, or the hair of my head—a part of me I had never before dreamed had feeling. My eyes were dazzled. I could have bowed myself to the earth like Moses before the burning bush. How can I tell you—? How can I tell you?"
"He was— ?" breathed the woman.
"Hubert van Eyck might have painted God the Father with those eyes—that mouth—that face of patient power—of selfless, still beatitude. —Once the dog, nestling by his side, whimpered and licked his hand. He looked down, he turned his eyes away from his vision, and looked down at the animal and smiled. Jehovah! What a smile. It seemed to me then that if God loves humanity, he can have no kinder smile for us. And then he looked back across the valley—at the sky, at the mountains, at the smoke rising from the houses below us—he looked at the world—at some vision, some knowledge—what he saw—what he saw— !