ROSALEEN AMONG THE ARTISTS

ELISABETH SANXAY HOLDING

“Rosaleen observed that this fiercely scorned and detested sentimentality very often caused people to act with the greatest nobility. While common-sense and enlightened self-interest seemed frequently to bring forth incredible baseness.”

ROSALEEN
AMONG THE ARTISTS

BY
ELISABETH SANXAY HOLDING
AUTHOR OF “INVINCIBLE MINNIE,” ETC.

NEW

YORK
GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
TO
E. E. S.

CONTENTS

BOOK ONE: THE BETRAYAL

CHAPTER ONE

No sooner had she got inside the door than the tears began to fall; and all the way up the four flights of dark stairway they were raining down her cheeks. She had to wipe them away before she could see to put the latchkey into the lock.

Everything neat, orderly, familiar; just as she had left it a few hours ago, and all seeming in its blank sobriety to rebuke her for her desperate hopes. She went into her own bare and chilly little room and lay down on the cot there, sobbing forlornly, clutching in her hand the card he had given her—a sort of talisman by means of which she could reconstruct the enchanted hour of that afternoon. She remembered every word he had said, every detail of his appearance. And, recollecting them, wept all the more to think what she must forego.

“Of course, I’ll never see him again!” she cried. “I’ll have to forget all about him....”

But she knew that she could not forget him. It seemed to her that she had never seen so remarkable, so attractive a person. His face, when he had turned round, that thin, dark face with its haughty nose, the underlip scornfully protruding, the serious regard of his black eyes....

She had not particularly noticed him at first, except as a gaunt and rather shabby young man sitting on the bench behind her on top of the bus. She had been absorbed in watching Fifth Avenue, which had, on that bright October afternoon, the absurd and exciting festival air it so unaccountably assumes. She was solemnly happy, singing under her breath, looking down at the people, the shops, the motor cars that were going by; when there came a sudden violent jolt and the coin she was holding had leaped out of her hand and fallen to the street below. And it was the only one she had!

She had sprung up in a panic; ready to jump off the bus and walk all the long way home, but at the top of the little stairway she had met the conductor coming up.

“Fare!” he had said, with suspicion.

“I just dropped it—a minute ago!” she explained. “I was ... I had a quarter in my hand—and it fell out....”

“Oh, it did, did it?” said he.

“I’ll get off at once,” she said.

“Oh, yes!” said the conductor. “Of course you dropped it! But you just happened to be where you wanted to get off when you dropped it, though, didn’t you?”

She gave a miserable, deprecating smile, anxious only to escape from this humiliation, to get away. When suddenly that young man had got up, put a dime into the conductor’s register, and raised his hat ceremoniously to Rosaleen.

“Allow me!” he had said.

“Oh! Thank you!” she had cried. “Thank you!...”

“Not at all!” said he.

She had resumed her seat on the bench ahead of him, and tried to look with exaggerated interest at the street. But she was terribly distressed. She felt that she hadn’t said enough—not nearly enough. Surely she ought at least to suggest repaying him, or something of that sort;—not to sit there and ride along, with her back turned to him.

And though of course she couldn’t know it, he was just as troubled. He had heard her say that she had dropped a quarter, and it occurred to him that she might very well need the rest of it badly, for more carfare, perhaps, or something else very necessary.... In the course of time the idea became intolerable. He leaned forward and touched her gently on the shoulder; and she had turned to regard him with alarmed grey eyes.

“I beg your pardon...” he began. “But ... I’d be very glad ... if you would permit me....”

He saw that she didn’t comprehend.

“I overheard you say that it was a quarter you had dropped,” he said. “If you—perhaps you particularly wanted the change...?”

“Oh!... No!... No, thank you very much, indeed, but I don’t. I’m going right home. I—No, thank you just the same!”

She was so immeasurably grateful that she could not bear to turn her back on him; she faced him, confused, but smiling, passionately anxious to be nice to one who had been so nice to her.

“Isn’t it a beautiful day?” she had said.

“Yes, it is!” said he. “Very!”

She kept on smiling, but it was a strained and wretched smile, and the colour in her cheeks deepened. A ridiculous, an intolerable situation! She couldn’t keep on in that way, twisted half round in her seat, and smiling and smiling.... She had to turn away.

But a little later she turned back again.

“Isn’t that florist’s window lovely?” she had said.

“Yes, it is!” he answered. “Very!”

He, too, wished to be nice, but couldn’t; and once she had resumed her normal position, although then he thought of a number of things he wished to say, he couldn’t suddenly make remarks to her back. Neither could he touch her on the shoulder again, for he considered that would be vulgar. So after much thought, he finally got up and standing beside her and holding fast to the back of the seat to keep his footing on the lurching deck, he asked her if she could tell him what building that was?

She did so, gladly.

“I haven’t been in the city long,” he said, with a chivalrous desire to give her information about himself. “I’m from Charleston.”

“Oh, are you? Do you like it here?”

“No,” he answered, promptly. “Not much.”

She was a little taken aback at that, and while she was thinking of a polite rejoinder, the young man had taken from his pocket a leather case, and was proffering a card.

Mr. Nicholas Landry.

“Thank you!” she murmured.

He waited a moment, hoping perhaps for some sort of reciprocation, but none came. So—

“May I sit down?” he asked.

“Oh, yes, do!” she answered.

A long time seemed to go by.

“I wish—” he said, and paused. “I wish I could see you again.”

There was a sort of self-assurance about him that somehow inspired her with confidence in him. It had not the least trace of effrontery, nor was there anything ingratiating about him. His air seemed to tell her that, if she didn’t want to see him, she need only say so, and that would be the end of it. He was quiet, courteous, but far from humble. He was, in fact, rather lordly. And she liked it.

“Well...” she began. “I—I’d like to—pay you back that fare....”

“Perhaps you’d let me call?”

He was startled at her vehemence.

“Oh, no!” she cried. “Oh, no! You couldn’t! I’m sorry—but you couldn’t!”

Her face had grown crimson and her eyes were filled with tears, and she kept her head resolutely turned aside.

This surprised, embarrassed and a little annoyed him. Did she think he was trying to force himself upon her? He said nothing more after that.

But at last, as they drew near his corner, he spoke again.

“Well!” he said, rising, with a slight sigh. “I’m sorry!”

She turned quickly.

“If—if you’d like ... to-morrow ... in the Fifth Avenue Library...?”

Again he was surprised, amazed at this sudden and anxious invitation. But he politely concealed his surprise.

“Nothing I’d like better,” he said. “What time?”

“About three?”

“I’ll be there!” he assured her. “Just where?”

“Oh ... that hall that goes down to the circulating room....”

He stretched out his hand to ring the bell.

“But you haven’t told me your name!” he said.

“Oh! Rosaleen!” she said. “Rosaleen—Humbert.”

Then once more raising his hat with a smile that enthralled her, he had vanished down the stairs, and a moment later she had seen him going down a side street—a lean young figure with a long stride.

. . . . . . . . . .

“I shan’t go!” she sobbed. “Of course not! What would be the sense? I’d just better forget all about him.”

“It wouldn’t be fair!” she went on. “Because—if he knew ... he wouldn’t want to see me....”

Useless to recollect newspaper tales of dukes and chorus girls, of millionaires and waitresses, of Cophetua and the beggar maid in all its modern guises. All those people were different. There was no other man like him, no other woman like her. What is more, Rosaleen had no faith in romance. Had not her history been what anyone would call romantic, and wasn’t it as cruel and dull and cold as any life could be?

She sat up and dried her eyes.

“No!” she said. “No use thinking about it.... No use making a fool of myself.”

It had grown quite dark. She got up and lighted the flaring gas jet on a wall bracket, and looked at the big impudent face of the alarm clock standing on her austere bureau top. And at the same time caught sight of her own face, stained and swollen with tears, but still lovely in its pure young outline, with the wise innocence of those drowned grey eyes. The type one calls “flower-like,” with the exquisite fineness of her old, old race, the deep set eyes, the passionate and sensitive mouth, the strange look of resignation. She was rather fair, with light brown hair and a sweet and healthy colour; she was slender and not very tall; she looked fragile, but she was not. She had a strength, an energy, an endurance beyond measure.

An endurance well known and profited by in this household. She brushed her fine hair and pinned it up tightly and carelessly; she bathed her eyes in cold water and tied an apron about her waist. And went along the corridor of the dark, old-fashioned flat to the kitchen. All neat as a pin there. Potatoes closely pared, soaking in cold water, lettuce in a wet cloth, a jar of lard set to cool on the window sill, ready for the inevitable frying. She set to work briskly to prepare the supper, and when it was cooking on the stove, she set up the ironing board and began to press a pile of napkins and handkerchiefs. And began to sing to herself in a low and mournful voice.

At six o’clock came the expected sound of a key in the latch, and presently a venerable grey-bearded old gentleman put his head into the kitchen.

“Well! Well! Well!” he said, benevolently. “Aha! Something very savoury there, I think, Rosaleen!”

“I hope you’ll like it,” she said, smiling.

“Will it be long?”

“Not an instant. I’ll set the table now. Shall we wait for Miss Amy?”

“I think not. I think not. Better get it over with, eh?”

She smiled again, and putting up the ironing board, began at once to lay the table for three. The venerable old gentleman had vanished into his room, and was seen no more until she knocked on his door.

“Dinner!” she said.

He came out again very promptly, closing the door behind him, and took his place at the head of the table. He bowed his grey head, Rosaleen bent her sleek one, and he said a solemn grace. And then set to work to carve the scraggy little steak. It didn’t take much to make him grateful; their standard of living wasn’t exalted; tough meat, with potatoes and a canned vegetable, that was the regulation; then as a dessert either canned fruit or a pie from the baker’s. And the lettuce, which it was considered necessary for his health that Mr. Humbert should eat every evening.

Rosaleen sat opposite him, still in her apron, thankful for once for his inhuman indifference. He wouldn’t notice that she had been crying. They didn’t talk; they never did. What could they possibly have to say to each other?

The light from two jets in the gasolier over the table shone clearly, illumined every corner. All quite neat and clean, with a sort of bright stuffiness about it; a greenish brown carpet on the floor, a couch bed concealed by a green corduroy cover, four varnished oak chairs spaced primly against the wall. In one corner stood a sewing machine covered with a lace tablecloth, on which was a fern in a pot decorated with a frill of green crêpe paper. On the mantelpiece stood a geranium similarly ornamented, and on the table another. From the gasolier and from the curtain pole over the doorway were suspended half coconut shells filled with ferns. Hanging in the windows by gilt chains were two “transparencies”; one was moonlight in Venice, all a ghastly green, and the other was a church with lighted windows gleaming redly over the snow: no doubt they were to compensate for the lack of any view except that of the wall of a courtyard. Nothing in this familiar hideousness to arrest Rosaleen’s glance; she looked restlessly about, longing for the venerable old gentleman to have done with his coconut custard pie.

At last (of course) he did.

“Don’t forget to save something for Miss Amy!” he said, and disappeared again into his cubicle.

While Rosaleen went about her solitary work, washed the dishes, scoured the pots, boiled the dishtowels and hung them to dry, swept the floor, and at last could put out the gas and go away, leaving her domain in perfect order. Nothing more to be done....

Then was the time when the pain, the unhappiness which she had thought to be conquered, and lost in resignation, came back to her again, stronger, more bitter than ever. In all her hard life there had never been anything so hard as the renunciation of this unknown young man.

“But I won’t go to meet him!” she said. “He’d be sure to find out. And then it would be all the worse.... Now I’ve only seen him once, and if I never see him again, I’ll soon forget him. Oh, much, much better not to go!”

“But if he liked me very much, he wouldn’t care who I was!”

That thought, however, held no consolation. He would care. She knew it. She had read in every feature of his face the most obstinate and tyrannical pride.

“But maybe he’d never find out?” she persisted, desperately.

And looked and looked in the mirror, with fervent anxiety. One might have thought she expected to see her secret stamped on her brow.

CHAPTER TWO

I

They thought she had forgotten, because she never mentioned anything of that, never asked a question. But she hadn’t. No! She remembered, and at her worst and loneliest, she longed for the old times. Besides, she had three times heard Miss Amy relating the story when they believed her to be asleep in bed, and each time she had heard it told, the most immeasurable bitterness, the most devastating misery had rushed over her.

“Why ever was I born?” she used to cry to herself.

And hadn’t she also heard Miss Amy murmur, not imagining herself overheard, that: You can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear! What else can you expect from a girl like that?

It had hurt and angered her so; it had left her without gratitude, without even justice. She quite hated Miss Amy.

Lying in her bed that night all these feelings flamed in her with fiercest intensity, shame, bitterness, and, above all, a great and unassuaged grief for that incomparable friend whom she had lost, for the kind and sturdy Miss Julie, dead these five long years.

Miss Julie had meant to do a kindness. She intended—and if she had lived she would have succeeded in—benefiting Rosaleen.

“I remember it as if it were yesterday,” Miss Amy had begun her thrice-told tale, “The day that Julie brought her here....”

Well, and didn’t Rosaleen remember it, too? Who better?

II

It had begun ten years ago in the Life Class at the Girls’ Institute of Practical Art where Miss Julie, bravely disregarding her thirty-five years, had commenced to study. Upon the death of their very old father, the three Humberts, brother and two sisters, had left their farm in Maine and had come to New York to live. They were independent now, and in a hurry to leave their old homestead, to be free from that atmosphere, where they had passed a dreary childhood and a youth frightfully oppressed by the old man. Crude, strong people, they were possessed of a strange and pitiful craving for “culture.” Perhaps because they were rather too old and too repressed for pleasure.

Mr. Humbert had found a position in an office, fulfilling a lifelong dream of gentility, and his great hands, worn and roughened with the hard labour of the farm, seized eagerly upon the pen. He had made himself into the likeness of a scholar, without learning, without aptitude; he had covered himself with the shell of a scholar, and he deceived himself and his sisters and all the rest of their little world. Miss Amy had found it hardest to adapt herself. She was by nature the perfect village gossip, the meddlesome and vindictive spinster inflicted upon every community in all corners of this earth. She was cruel, jealous and stupid. Left to herself she had been unable to discover in all the city anything which really interested her. But a casual neighbour had taken her in hand, and under her direction she developed strangely. She became absorbed in Interior Decorating. She had not a vestige of taste; she never dreamt of applying at home any of the principles of which she read, but she dearly loved to see pictures and to read about fine old furniture, about rugs, about Antiques. She used to go to Auction Sales with great pleasure. Also, with mysterious facility, she made a number of friends. In the stores, the markets, in the street cars, she would drop into conversation with strangers, and she would never let them go. She managed so that within a year’s time she was able to go out somewhere nearly every day.

Miss Julie, as we said, began at once to study art, with rapture. No one could imagine how she enjoyed that Life Class—a most refined and earnest class, thoroughly feminine, and inclined to fussiness. There were only twelve members and five of them had scholarships of which they were doggedly determined to take advantage. They came early, so as not to waste a minute, and they carried out every minute suggestion of the teacher. The models were all investigated, and a good reputation was of more avail than a fine body. Respectable women, generally a trifle heavy, “picturesque” old men with white beards, a young man or so who was invariably struggling to study something, and was not to be discouraged by posing all day and amusing himself all evening.

The class was on this particular morning assembled, all ready, sitting before their drawing boards, and a little indignant at the delay. They couldn’t bear to waste time.

“Ten minutes late!” said one of them. “It’s to be a child to-day, isn’t it, Miss Humbert?”

Miss Julie, as monitor, was informed and answered yes.

“I don’t care about doing children,” said the student, “I don’t think they’re interesting. That last little boy was perfectly square.”

Just then in came a fat, smiling woman in black, holding a little girl by the hand. Miss Julie pointed out the dressing screen, and they disappeared behind it. For an unreasonably long time their voices were heard, whispering.

It was Miss Julie who voiced the indignation of the serious class.

“Aren’t you ready to pose yet?” she called out. “We’ve wasted over twenty minutes.”

“Just a moment, please ma’am!” answered the woman’s pleasant voice, and presently she emerged, still leading the child by the hand. Reluctantly the little thing came out from behind the screen, a thin, white body; then suddenly she broke violently away from her mother and disappeared again.

“Saints deliver us!” said the woman with a sigh. “Did you ever see the like?”

And she went after the child, and evidently tried to drag it out, for it began to cry, in a low, hoarse little voice.

“No! No! I can’t! No, Mommer! I can’t!”

“Naughty little thing!” said one of the serious students, with a frown.

But Miss Julie had got up and gone behind the screen.

“What’s the matter?” she demanded, with severity.

“That child!” said the mother. “She’s that obstinate there is no reasoning with her at all. She’s made up her mind she will not stand out there for the young ladies to draw.”

“Why?” demanded Miss Julie.

“Some silly notion,” said the mother.

Miss Julie looked down at the little girl; she had pulled her dress round her shivering little body and was crouched against the wall, with eyes to break your heart, full of terror and anguish. Miss Julie was shocked.

“What’s the matter, pet?” she asked, gently. “Aren’t you well?”

The child couldn’t answer, only shook her head, while tears began to roll slowly down her cheeks. Miss Julie went down on her knees beside her, and tried to put an arm about her, but she cowered away.

“Tell me!” she entreated. “Why don’t you want to pose, my dear?”

With lips trembling so that she could scarcely speak, the child told her.

“I want ... to—get dressed.... I don’t ... want them to see me.”

“Hasn’t she posed before?” Miss Julie asked the mother.

“No, she has not. I’ve done the best I——”

“Do you mean to say you’re trying to force her—when she feels as she does—when she’s ashamed?”

The stout woman did not flinch at all before Miss Julie’s stern glance.

“It will do her no harm,” she said. “Only for these young ladies and while she’s so young.”

“It’s very wrong!” cried Miss Julie. “It’s—it shouldn’t be allowed.”

“She’s engaged already. For two hours at fifty cents an hour. She needs the money and she will have to do the work for it,” the mother remarked grimly. “Go on with you, Rosaleen!”

“Get dressed!” said Miss Julie to the child. “You can pose in a costume. I’ll find something.”

She explained as well as she could to her classmates, but received no general sympathy. Most of them thought the child was awfully silly.

“And she’s made us waste half our time,” said one of them. “I’m going to complain in the office.”

Miss Julie devised a costume which she said was a gipsy dress. She went behind the screen again and found the little girl in underwaist and petticoat, buttoning up her poor, scuffed little boots.

“We’ll take those off,” she said. “You won’t mind being bare-legged.”

She dressed the little thing while it stood there like a doll. A beautiful child, too thin and altogether too small for its years, but very charmingly and gracefully built; it had deep-set clear grey eyes and a wistful small face, broad at the brow and tapering to a pointed chin, like a kitten’s. And it had about it something which enslaved Miss Julie, some mystic and adorable quality which she could not name, and which no one else saw.

She unfastened the two scrawny little “pig tails” and let her ill-kept brown hair fall about the neck, pitifully thin, like a bird’s; then she tied a broad scarlet ribbon about her forehead and put on a short spangled jacket over the underwaist. She looked very unlike a gipsy, with her meek glance and her fair skin, but she was undeniably lovely, and the class set to work drawing her without further grumbling. She was quiet as a lamb, quick to obey any suggestion, evidently anxious to atone for her naughtiness. She looked pitifully tired, too.

Miss Julie was quite determined not to let this child vanish. She resolutely stopped the stout woman as she was leaving.

“You won’t make her pose any more, will you?” she said, entreating.

“I’m a poor woman,” said the mother, “and I have to do the best I can.”

“But it’s——”

“It’s fifty cents an hour, Miss, that’s what it is. And I need the money that bad.”

“I’ll find something better for her to do,” said Miss Julie, rashly. “If you’ll give me your name and address, I’ll find something much better. Only—she mustn’t do this. It’s not right, feeling as she does.”

“Only Saturdays and after school,” said the mother. “I do the best I can for her, but ’tis not very much, where there are six and me a widow. She goes regular to the Sisters’ school, and she is doing fine there. She’s not twelve yet and——”

“She’s very small for that age,” said Miss Julie.

“She is small,” her mother agreed, “and childish-like for her age. But she’s smart. Last Christmas didn’t they give her a prize—a book with poetry in it—for elocution.”

Miss Julie had wished to regard this mother as a brute, a fiend; she had not enough experience or subtlety to comprehend lights and shades. Everyone must be good or bad, and no shilly-shallying. So she regarded this note of pride in the woman’s voice as hypocrisy.

She watched them as they went out, the rusty widow with her profoundly cynical red face, the fragile, shabby child clinging to her, stealing sidelong glances at the “young ladies,” who were getting ready to go home. She was determined to save that lovely and abused child.

She had hurried home to “consult” her brother. Not that she had any real regard for his opinion or any desire to know what it was; she knew, in fact, that he probably would advise her to use her own judgment. But she considered it decent to consult the man in the house; so she approached him with her idea.

“A lovely little thing,” she said. “Really beautiful—and so intelligent looking.”

“Yes?” said Mr. Humbert.

“And something really refined about her.... Really, Morton, I should like to adopt her.”

That roused him. A child in the place! Impossible! He tried to argue, but he couldn’t. He was never able to. He had some queer constitutional inability for argument; a fatal lassitude would overwhelm him before he had begun even to express his views. He always ran away, shut himself into his own room and forced himself to forget whatever it was that he had found unpleasant.

“I’d have to see the woman, of course,—investigate...” he said, hoping in this way to push the whole topic away into the distance.

But his sister agreed with alarming promptness.

“Of course!” she said.

Well, then, two days later, when he came home from his office, and as usual put his head in at the kitchen door to announce himself and to see what was going forward, he saw sitting in two chairs side by side a voluminous widow and a thin little girl, drinking cocoa with relish and with elegance, little fingers crooked in the air.

“This is Mrs. Monahan!” said Julie, briefly.

He saw that he was expected to go in and question this stout woman with an amused red face, and he would have preferred death.

“I’ll leave the matter in your hands, Julie,” he said, and hastened into his own room, positively trembling with fright.

It wasn’t long before Julie knocked at his door.

“We’ve come to a temporary arrangement,” she said. “I actually believe that woman’s glad to be rid of her child.”

Forgetting that the forlorn little child was still sitting in the kitchen, and able to hear every word.

III

Quite true that Mrs. Monahan had agreed to abandon her child almost completely. She loved Rosaleen, but she didn’t feel it necessary to have her with her; and anyway, hadn’t she plenty of others? To know that Rosaleen was living in comfort somewhere in God’s world was quite enough. She hadn’t a trace of sentimentality. An excess, even very slight, of whiskey or even of strong boiled tea, could cause Mrs. Monahan to shed tears and to shake her head with delicious melancholy over life and its pains, and she professed to look upon death as a blessed release. But all this in no way affected her actions. She resigned her lovely child to this erratic and sentimental spinster because she saw very clearly the benefits which might be obtained. But she would not even pretend to be grateful.

Later in the evening she returned as she had promised, bringing with her a bundle of Rosaleen’s effects, and she found her child sitting on a sofa in the sitting room, holding before her face a big geography book which Miss Julie had said contained interesting pictures, while behind it the tears were trickling slowly down her cheeks. She rushed at her mother like a whirlwind, and kissed her and embraced her, clinging to her desperately. Mrs. Monahan also wept, but nevertheless went away.

Miss Julie’s heart ached for the deserted little creature.

“There! There!” she said. “You mustn’t cry, dear! Come! We’ll go into your own nice, comfy little room and put your things away, and then you’ll feel more at home.”

She led her into a decent enough little cell, clean and orderly, and opened the little bundle. It did not contain what, according to all proper stories of poor little girls, it should have contained, the traditional clothes, few in number, but neatly patched and darned, and spotlessly clean. Mrs. Monahan had taken it for granted that a new outfit would be bought for Rosaleen, and she hadn’t wasted her time mending things that would certainly be discarded. She had, on the contrary, kept all Rosaleen’s better things at home, for the other children, so that what Miss Julie unwrapped was poor enough.

“A bundle of rags!” she reflected, shocked.

She didn’t quite know what to do with the child that evening. She was very anxious to make her happy, to console and comfort her. She sat down at the piano and played all her small repertory—marches, polkas, mazurkas, and waltzes, all of the brilliant style. But Rosaleen was thoroughly accustomed to piano playing; every family she knew had one piano-playing daughter. Her mother had once had a piano, on “time payments”; it had had to go back whence it came after three months, but she had enjoyed experimenting on it while it lasted.

Then Miss Julie gave her picture books to look at, things insultingly beneath her intelligence. This good lady didn’t realise that Rosaleen had for a long time been treated as an adult; that she sat with her mother and her mother’s friends, listening with profound interest to long tales of illnesses, births, deaths, of bad husbands and good ones, of tragedies beyond the knowledge of this household. Babies scalded in wash tubs, women maltreated by their men, girls who disappeared, lingering illnesses in bleak poverty. So blank and desolate for her was this first evening at the Humberts, that she was glad enough to go to bed at nine o’clock, although her usual time was at least two hours later.

Miss Julie tucked her comfortably into her clean little bed, opened the window, put out the light and kissed her good-night.

“If you want anything, call me!” she said. “Are you quite comfortable, and all right, pet?”

The child answered, “Yes, ma’am!” But almost before the door had closed upon her benefactress, she was weeping bitterly.

Miss Julie let her sleep late the next morning, and when she finally awakened, she was greeted by a new face, beyond words welcome to her, a good wrinkled old Irish face. It was Mrs. Cronin, who came in to wash by the day.

“They’re all out!” she announced to the little girl. “You and me will be keeping house together all the day. How will that suit ye?”

Rosaleen said it would suit her grand; she dressed in great haste and hurried into the kitchen, where Mrs. Cronin gave her some nice bitter black tea which had been sitting on the stove this long while to get the strength out of it. She likewise pilfered a little bacon fat from Miss Amy’s carefully preserved jar, and fried an egg in it.

And in the process muttered of Miss Amy, in uncomplimentary vein.

“Her, with the long nose of her poking into every bit and bite a poor old woman would be eating.... Never a drop of milk does she leave for me, nor meat to taste on the tip of your tongue.... Well, now, then, how do you like all of this, and the fine new home, and all?”

“I do not like it,” said Rosaleen. “I wish....” She choked back a sob. “I wish I was home again.”

“Whist! Ye have no sinse at all!” cried Mrs. Cronin, secretly delighted. “Did ye not sleep in a fine bed last night?”

“The wind did be blowing on me!” she said. “For the window was left open.”

“’Tis one of their notions,” said Mrs. Cronin, scornfully. “They pay for coal to keep up a fire the night long and then lave the windows wide.”

Rosaleen then told her that she wasn’t used to sleeping in a room alone or in the dark.

“There’s a street light shines in our window the night through,” she said, “and there’s the lot of us, my mother and my sister and the baby and myself. ’Tis more sociable like.”

They talked with gusto for hours. They were equals, in spite of the fact that Mrs. Cronin was sixty and Rosaleen eleven. Mrs. Cronin told a deeply interesting story of her sister’s boy who had been sent to a Protectory, for no proper reason at all; a case of flagrant injustice which Rosaleen understood perfectly, one of her own brothers having been threatened. Rosaleen was not downcast now, or tongue tied; she, too, had stories to tell. Modest and gentle she was, as ever, but a citizen of the world, with experience, albeit vicarious.

IV

It had gone on for five years, a life of boredom, of loneliness, mitigated only by the unfailing kindness of Miss Julie. A flat, insipid existence. She found the Humberts’ conversation unfailingly dull, their routine almost intolerably stupid. She longed beyond measure for the comfort and freedom of her old home.

All this had astounded Miss Julie. She was never able really to see how impossible was her task, never realised that she could not mould this fragile and wistful child into a Humbert. Or reach her. Material pleasures made no appeal to that simple soul; she cared next to nothing for good food, good clothes, a soft bed. She was always docile, thoroughly a good child, ready, obedient, sweet-tempered. She didn’t give the least trouble, and never asked for anything. But she nevertheless disappointed Miss Julie. She didn’t seem to change as she should have changed. Their cultured atmosphere didn’t transform her. She sat at their table night after night, meek and clean, with downcast eyes, never speaking unless spoken to, always and forever the poor widow’s child in the stranger’s house.

Miss Julie did her best. She sent her to school; she gave her kind and tactful information about baths and toothbrushes; she saw that she was well fed and nicely dressed. She took her to the circus every spring, and now and then to an entertainment considered suitable. Also she taught her to play a few babyish pieces on the piano, and, what most pleased the little girl, she had begun to teach her to draw. When all those activities were cut short by her death.

Even now, after five years, Rosaleen couldn’t bear to look back upon that. She had been desperate with grief, a little mad thing. She had been brought in to look for the last time at her friend, she had seen her lying there, much the same as usual, a stout, sallow woman with blunt, good-humoured features. And for the first time that face did not smile at her, that voice did not speak to console and to reassure her.

Miss Amy had no comfort to give. She had never liked the child. She consented now to keep her, because “dear Julie would have wished it,” but she kept her as a servant, an unpaid servant, with “privileges.” She sat at the table with them, she was still nicely dressed, she was given a little—a very little—pocket money. And she was permitted to go every Sunday afternoon to see her mother. Miss Amy had no inclination for continuing Miss Julie’s battle. She did not wish to improve Rosaleen. Miss Julie had tried with all her tact, all her ability, to divorce the child from her family, but Miss Amy encouraged intercourse. It helped to keep Rosaleen in her place.

CHAPTER THREE

I

Those days were gone now. There were no more of those Sunday afternoons in her mother’s kitchen. A sister had married well, and the whole family had migrated to Boston, where the unwilling and resentful son-in-law could “keep an eye” on them. Rosaleen had written two or three times to her mother, but had never had an answer. And with her sorrowful resignation, had given her up as lost.

But whenever a dark hour came, her memory flew back to that spot, recalled to her that time spent in the dreadful dirty old kitchen with her mother, a little bit intoxicated, seated before the table covered with oilcloth, and usually a neighbor or two, widow women, or married as it might be, all drinking tea and complaining. There was always a baby sister or brother crawling about the floor, and a cat; it was always warm, steamy, indescribably friendly. The depth of it, the vitality, the kind, consoling human flavour of it, of those slovenly women who were forever bearing children, whose talk was of life and death, of pain, sorrow and earthly joys! Compared with it, the hurried artificial conversation of Miss Amy and Mr. Humbert was like the talk of shadows....

She was thinking and thinking of it that night.

“All right!” she said, bitterly. “I won’t deny it! I’m common! I’m not happy here. I don’t belong here. I don’t appreciate it. I hate it! I wouldn’t be like Miss Amy for anything.... Of course he’d soon see that. He’d find out that I’m—common....”

But she couldn’t bear the thought. She sat up in bed.

“Oh, but I haven’t had a chance!” she cried. “I’ve never had a chance! Oh!... If I could just see him alone, I could show him that I’m....”

She could not explain to herself just what she knew herself to be, just what it was that she wished this young man to know. It was that pitiful secret thought of all human beings, whether a fallacy or a profound truth can never be demonstrated—the thought that if you know me, you will love me, that if you hold a poor opinion of me, it is because you misunderstand me.

Perhaps after all she would go, just this once, just see him, and trust to his comprehension....

She waked up the next morning, still undecided, her heart as heavy as lead. She dressed in the dismal twilight of her little cell, weighing and deliberating, hesitating miserably. At last it resolved itself into this bald alternative—which way would cause her the least pain—not to meet him, to lose him forever now, at the very beginning, to destroy this promise of the first interest any man had yet shown in her—or to let it go on, to let her starved and ardent affection rush out to him, to become fatally entangled in the web of her own making, only to have him find her out and despise her?

She went into the kitchen to get ready the breakfast, and in there, a back room looking out over little yards, the sun was beginning to enter. She could see a soft blue morning sky, with shadowy white clouds blown across it by a mild and steady wind. It cheered her marvellously. She was as easily made happy as she was easily hurt.

She started to grind the coffee, in itself a cheerful morning noise.

“Oh, nonsense!” she said to herself. “I’m making a mountain out of a molehill. Of course I’ll go and meet him. Why shouldn’t I? It’s just a lark. It won’t lead to anything, if I don’t want it to. There’s no need for me to be so serious about it. I’m going!”

She was well used to keeping her own counsel. She looked and she acted just the same as usual; when Miss Amy appeared she found breakfast on the table, as it should be, and Rosaleen occupying a few spare moments in dusting.

“Good morning, Miss Amy!” she said, in her gentle, her almost meek little voice.

Miss Amy answered curtly, and looked into the kitchen to see if all was in order. She was a stout grey haired woman with a face as dark as a gypsy’s and a long, sharp—an almost wolfish, nose. She had a perpetual smile, a smile which she had schooled her lips to assume, in her terrible efforts to subdue her own fierce nature. She was a woman of natural ferocity and violence, but controlled and dominated by a passionate desire to be good. So well did she rule herself that she very rarely spoke a sharp word, and though she had a deep-rooted and unshakable dislike for Rosaleen, she treated her with generosity. She made her work; that, she considered, was good for her, and in every way fitting and proper. But she likewise considered that she and her brother were morally responsible for this girl, and she paid out of her own pocket for Art Lessons, for an occasional Shakespearian matinée and other items of cultural importance.

Anyone who has experienced it will admit how immeasurably painful is the combination of hostility and gratitude. Rosaleen was obliged by her own heart to dislike Miss Amy, and by her soul to recognise her benefactions. They were in all things opposed and hostile. Rosaleen was a fool possessed of common sense and Miss Amy was a practical woman without any.

Rosaleen brought in Miss Amy’s little dish of prunes.

“Anything I can do for you downtown to-day, Miss Amy?” she asked.

“Oh, yes, of course! It’s your lesson day. No, thank you, Rosaleen, there is nothing.”

Mr. Humbert now appeared to be fed. He ate, pretending to be absent minded so that no one should bother him about anything, and went away to his office. Then Miss Amy began leisurely to get herself ready to go to market, while Rosaleen washed the dishes and made the beds.

“You’d better hurry!” she said. “You’ll be late, Rosaleen!”

But Rosaleen was only waiting for her to be gone, so that she could put on her best blouse and her white gloves.

II

Miss Julie had always encouraged Rosaleen’s fondness for drawing. In fact, it may have been the drawing lessons she had given the little girl and her fervent talk of “art” which had given Rosaleen the idea of becoming an artist. But, whether the ambition was implanted by nature or by Miss Julie, the ability was born with her. She had an undoubted facility. In the long hours she had spent alone in the flat, she had comforted herself with her little talent, copying the covers of magazines and inventing romances around the imbecile beauties. And as time went on, and her companions at school admired her work, her pride and her hope increased. She saw in this career as an artist a chance of escape, for freedom.

When she was graduated from the High School, at eighteen, she said that she should like to study art seriously. Miss Amy had agreed at once, and Rosaleen had then showed her an advertisement in the Sunday paper which she had noticed for some weeks.

European Art Teacher would accept one or two more young lady pupils. Very moderate terms. Address F. W.

They had addressed F. W., and in the due course of time received a letter signed “Faith Waters,” inviting them to call the next afternoon at four. They had discovered the European Art Teacher living in a dark, old-fashioned flat on Tenth Street, with one light room at the back which she had made into a studio by filling it with plaster casts on crooked shelves put up by her own hands. The teacher herself was a withered little woman in a crushed and dusty brown dress, with a black velvet bow in her cottony white hair, and she had the cultured voice of one who has been to Europe.

Rosaleen looked about at the photographs on the walls of various persons in stage costume, signed A ma chère Miss—Bien à vous—and so on. She supposed that these were artistic foreign friends of Miss Waters’, never suspecting that they were nothing more nor less than second rate stage people to whom she had taught English.

“I suppose you’ve lived abroad a long time?” said Miss Amy.

“Oh, dear me, yes!” said Miss Waters. “I studied in Brussels for years!”

She didn’t explain that this had been thirty years ago, and in a cheap pension de demoiselles, and that she had never seen the inside of a foreign art school, or studied under any master except the miserable old man who had taught drawing as an extra to the demoiselles.

“I’ll show you some of my work,” she had said. “I haven’t a proper place to hang them here. The light is so bad you’ll hardly be able to judge.... But still....”

She led the way to the dining-room, where her canvases hung in profusion. She specialised in animal life, kittens, puppies, and—timidly—horses. The horses were supernaturally stalwart and spirited, with tremendous chests and heads flung back splendidly, but Miss Waters was conscious of many weak points in them, grave deficiencies. She knew that sweet little kittens were more in her line. Horses were, after all, rather grossly big animals, and she did them only as an exercise in virtuosity.

Rosaleen and Miss Amy had been a trifle disappointed in Miss Waters’ work. They both had a feeling that animals were not truly artistic. Flowers, landscapes, women and children, were what they had expected and desired. Still, a group of six puppies in a row, astoundingly alike and yet each one in a different attitude, compelled their admiration.

“Of course,” said Miss Waters, “this is my real work. The teaching is only a side line. But I do love teaching. It is such a wonderful privilege to help in developing a talent. Some of my pupils are among the foremost artists in the country.”

She needn’t have gone on so recklessly, because her visitors were already in quite the frame of mind she desired. That, however, she couldn’t know.

“Portrait painters, landscape painters, painters of historical and religious subjects.... I’ve taught them all. And I’ve been—well,” she confessed, with a modest smile. “I’ve been very fortunate, I must say. My pupils are among the most celebrated artists in this country. Not always the best known,” she hastened to add. “Their names might not be familiar to you.... But they rank very high.”

All superfluous. For Rosaleen and Miss Amy the fact of her being an artist sufficed. They took it for granted that any artist knew all about art, just as they would have expected any blacksmith to understand all about horseshoeing. Then and there Rosaleen was put into her hands to be developed.

And she had been going faithfully, three days a week, for nearly two years, progressing steadily under the system which Miss Waters had found successful with her pupils in the past. A great deal of drawing in charcoal from casts at first, then watercolours, and then oils. When you began to work with oils, the drudgery was over; accuracy was no longer required, or outlines. The system also included what Miss Waters called “just a bit of the History of Art,” short talks and readings, which contained not a vestige of information about art and some very remarkable history. It was in fact nothing more than a collection of anecdotes about artists. Generally there was a king, who visited the artist in disguise, or came up behind him on tiptoe, and who was struck dumb by the verisimilitude of the painting before him. That was indeed the measure of an artist’s greatness—that a horse tried to eat his painted hay, a bird his fruit, that a man tried to sit upon his picture of a chair, or to smell his flowers. A picture was a picture.

Rosaleen had progressed beyond casts now, and was devoting herself to watercolours. She was learning the Rules of Perspective, and her suspicion was becoming confirmed, that Art was a sort of professional mystery to be learned as one learned law or medicine. She began to feel that she was getting a grasp of the thing.

She was an altogether satisfactory pupil and Miss Waters was proud of her; she was bright, docile, and very industrious.

But what was the matter with her on this morning?

She sat before her patient little drawing of a ruined castle on a hilltop, unable to draw a line, making a weak little scratch now and then, and rubbing it out as soon as it had appeared.

“What is the trouble, Rosaleen?” asked Miss Waters. “Don’t you feel well?”

“Oh, yes, thank you, Miss Waters! I feel well. Only ... I don’t know how it is ... but—I don’t feel like drawing a bit to-day.”

“I know, my dear child!” said Miss Waters. “I’m the same way myself. It’s the beautiful autumn weather. It’s hard to concentrate on work. It puts me in mind of my student days, in Brussels.”

She sighed. Those long years, in Paris and Brussels, trotting about from one English family to another, teaching drawing, from one jolly demi-mondaine to another, teaching English; the bare little rooms she had shivered in, the dismal pensions, the dreadful straits in which she had so often found herself, poor solitary muddle-headed little foreigner! And yet she had loved it, that illusion of an artistic life; friendless and poor as she was, she had had her pleasures, had dined at the little restaurants where she could at least see artists, had spent hours and days in the picture galleries, had felt gay and adventurous and irresponsible.

“I’ll tell you what, Rosaleen!” she cried suddenly. “Suppose we both go out and take a turn round the square? It might do us both good—freshen our brains!”

Rosaleen looked at the clock. Half past two; her lesson didn’t end till three, and she had allowed herself half an hour to get up to the Library. She couldn’t think what to say.

Miss Waters believed that she hesitated because she didn’t want to waste any of her lesson time.

“We’ll go out, just for a ‘blow’,” she said. “And then you can come back and work extra late, and we’ll have tea together. I haven’t any pupils this afternoon.”

“But—I have to stop at the Library and get a book for Miss Amy,” said Rosaleen. “And—I promised to take it home early.”

Miss Waters looked a trifle disappointed.

“Well, then,” she said. “Go ahead working until your time’s up, and then I’ll walk up to the Library with you.”

Aghast, horrified, Rosaleen pretended to draw, thinking desperately of some means of getting rid of Miss Waters. While all the time she could hear Miss Waters getting ready, scrabbling about in her bedroom, dropping things, and hunting for other things in bureau drawers. Presently she came out, and in spite of the mild October day, she was wearing her dreadful old sealskin coat with the high, puffed shoulders that made her look so huddled, and perched high on her cottony hair, the small fur hat that always blew off. It was always an infliction for Rosaleen to walk with this poor old scarecrow, and on this day it was nothing short of torture.

Sedately, arm in arm, they walked along Tenth Street and turned up Fifth Avenue, Miss Waters leaning heavily upon Rosaleen and chattering with youthful exuberance, roguishly aware of the glances that followed her. And her hat did blow off, and bowled along ahead of them, like a dusty, terrified little animal, until a man stopped it with his foot and with disdain and in silence returned it to the dishevelled artist. She thanked him, giggling, gathering her cottony hair in both hands to stuff it back under the hat.

“I thought I had a pin in it,” she explained.

After this, she looked wilder than ever, and the rough October wind swirling about her skirts revealed a hole in each of her stockings. And presently she gave a dismayed shriek, and clutched her sealskin coat about her.

“Oh!” she cried. “The button’s just come off!”

“What button?” asked Rosaleen.

“The button on my coat. Have you a pin, my dear?”

“I’m sorry, but I haven’t. Does it matter much?”

“Of course! How can I keep my coat together?” Miss Waters demanded, plaintively.

“But—you must have more than one button!”

“No, I really didn’t bother about sewing on the others.... Oh! ... My hat!”

And as she grasped after the hat with both hands the coat flew wide open, to reveal its tattered rose coloured lining, hanging in shreds, and the crushed and dusty old dress.

“Hadn’t we better go back?” said Rosaleen. “And I’ll come in and sew your coat for you.”

Anything would be better than to meet him with this companion; better to lose him forever.

“Oh, no, thank you, my dear. As long as I’ve gone this far, I’ll go the rest of the way. I’ll fix it in the library.”

So there was no escape possible. Arm in arm with Miss Waters she must ascend the imposing flight of steps, enter the library, and advance along the lofty corridors.

She saw him! Sitting on a bench, reading a magazine with a sort of severe preoccupation. But Rosaleen knew that he had seen them and was only pretending he hadn’t. They drew nearer and nearer. She was thinking frantically. Should she speak to him anyway, or was he annoyed at her for coming with Miss Waters? Or was he simply being tactful, desiring to avoid embarrassing her with his unsanctioned presence? She couldn’t decide. They drew nearer and nearer ... they were abreast of him.... She threw him one anguished glance, but he did not look up from his magazine.... They passed him, and went into the circulating room.

This was too awful!

“Would you just please ask if they have ‘Some Colonial Chairs’?” she cried hastily to Miss Waters. “I think I see someone I know....”

And rushed out. But he was no longer sitting on the bench. She caught a glimpse of him, vanishing round the corner.

She went back to Miss Waters, and had to carry home a huge, heavy volume which she remembered Miss Amy having had from the library some years ago.

She got into the bus with it, waved a cheerful good-bye to Miss Waters, and went off home.

CHAPTER FOUR

I

She was lost in an apathy of despair. He had come and he had gone, this lover for whom she had been waiting for years. In all her solitude, her restlessness, her great discontent, that had been her great hope; any day she might meet him, any day it might happen, and her life would really begin at last.

And now it was over; he was gone, and there was nothing further to expect. She let herself into the flat—her home—her prison—her grave.

There was a great bolt of white stuff lying folded on the sewing machine to be made up into respectable and sturdy underclothing for Miss Amy. After she had taken off her hat and jacket and washed her hands, she sat down before this work, which she usually attacked with such earnestness, such professional interest. But her heart failed; she let the scissors drop idly in her lap; to-day she could not work, to-day she didn’t care. Her sombre eyes stared straight before her, at the transparency of moonlit Venice.

“Oh!... If I’d been alone, we’d have taken a walk together ... I’d have had a chance to be—attractive.... Now, of course, I’ll never see him again. How can I? I don’t know where he lives.... He’ll never bother with me any more. Why should he? Of course, he knows lots and lots of beautiful society girls....”