“My darling papa, I love you!”
But what she meant by that absurd demonstration she did not wait to explain. She was out of the room and in her own in a second.
The old man heard her door close, and, taking the lamp, went to an anjoining chamber. It contained a bed, a chair, a bureau and a trunk. He put the lamp on the bureau and moved the bed. Then, kneeling down, he raised a plank from the floor and extracted a package wrapped in oilskin. This, with tender care, he opened, and drew out a bill of the nation of the value of one thousand dollars. Presently he drew out another of the game denomination, then a third, a fourth, until finally be had counted eighty-seven. And it would have been curious if he had not, for he had gone through the same operation almost seven thousand three hundred times—that is to say, twice a day for nearly ten years.
III
Once planted, the germ of friendship blooms apace. Barely a fortnight had gone, and here were these three people on the best of terms. In the discreetest manner, Hugh had managed to ingratiate himself with the old man; he was serviceable, and he asked no questions. The timidity, the shrinking fear of strangers, which was the peculiar characteristic of this curious individual, he treated as he would have one of those natural afflictions, such as rheumatism or baldness, to which advanced age is subject and for which there is no cure. Certainly he made no allusion to it, but then he had so much to occupy him that it may be he gave it, if at all, little more than a passing thought.
Ah, yes! he had much to occupy him. Heliogabalus was indeed turned to the wall, but the atelier was bright with different studies of the same lead, luminous with blue eyes, yellow hair and complexions of roses and cream. Yet, for all his art, there was an intangible something in the original, a freshness, a vivacity, a charm that eluded him and escaped.
“I am too much in love to paint her properly,” he declared to himself; and as a matter of fact he was wholly, turbulently, absurdly in love with a girl whom he had known but a fortnight and of whose previous existence he had been absolutely unaware.
Of this state of affairs Jenny was seemingly ignorant. Now and again of an evening he sat with her and her father in that little sky-parlor where he had first tasted the food of the gods, and there, with a sentiment akin to reverence, listened to the sweet music of her words. Sometimes, when the evening happened to be clear, they took a stroll among the factory girls and mechanics in the Square, and sometimes they would sit awhile on one of the benches and discuss subjects in which—by comparison to one, the great one as yet unbroached—the interest was probably feigned; for there were times when their conversation, however animated, would subside and cease, and the wonder of love would be upon them. These silences, painfully awkward, indeed, Hugh would break with snatches of verse—lines of Owen Meredith, that poet of the nineteenth century who died the other day in his beloved France; quatrains of Browning, too; and once the ill-mannered young fellow recited a conceit of Leigh Hunt’s:
“Jenny kissed me when we met,
Jumping from the chair she sat in;
Time, you thief who love to get
Sweets upon your list, put that in—
Say I’m weary, say I’m sad,
Say that wealth and health have missed me,
Say I’m growing old; but add,
Jenny kissed me.”
At this impertinence, however, the girl’s face took on such mantling hues, that for very shame her companion was obliged to drop into sedater measures, and divert her attention with astronomical hypotheses in regard to the moon, which, at that moment, happened to be suspended above them, a slender sickle of gold.
In parishes like Tompkins Square, that pomp of Satan, which we have agreed to call Etiquette, is not always as punctiliously observed as it is in fairer precincts; and a day or two later when Hugh had related the disadvantages under which he labored, when trying, in the absence of the model, to get a certain face on canvas, not Miss Jenny Sisseton, no, nor her father, either, saw the slightest objection to her sitting in propria persona to this audacious young man. What need had they of our effete survival of the duenna of the past? Theirs was a solitude as harmless, yes, and as fragrant, as that of two flowers on separate stalks.
But one dazzling noon, it so happened, that this young woman, after sitting for at least ten minutes as quiet as a mouse, pouted her pretty lips, and looking straight at Hugh, who was painting them very determinedly, remarked with an air of sweet unconcern:
“Why don’t you tell me something of yourself?”
“Why?” Hugh echoed. “Because there is nothing to tell, I suppose. My life began—” he was about to say, “when I met you,” but he tacked adroitly—“the first time I saw an oil-painting. I was a child then, and ever since I have dreamed of being an artist.”
“But you are.”
“No, an apprentice, merely. And yet when I think of my first efforts, my one grief is that my poor mother could not have lived to see the progress I have made. She never believed much in art, but she did believe in me.”
“Is it long since—”
“Since she died? Yes, it is a long time ago. I was at school in Baltimore; a message came and they sent me to her at once. Our home was in Virginia, a little cottage not far from Richmond. There my mother lived with only an old negress to assist her. When I arrived, she was dead. Some excitement, the receipt of a letter, the old
