Page:Harper's New Monthly Magazine - v109.djvu/278

258 life, as a life, he was entirely without self- consciousness in his personal habit. Jerome liked that, and began to like him better as he knew him more. A strange illuminative process went on in his mind toward the man as Mary saw him, and more and more he nursed a fretful sympathy with her desire to see Marshby tuned up to some pitch that should make him livable to himself. It seemed a cruelty of nature that any man should so scorn his own company and yet be forced to keep it through an allotted span. In that sitting Marshby was at first serious and absent-minded. Though his body was obediently there, the spirit seemed to be busy somewhere else.

"Head up!" cried Jerome at last, brutally. "Heavens, man, don't skulk!"

Marshby straightened under the blow. It hit harder, as Jerome meant it should, than any verbal rallying. It sent the man back over his own life to the first stumble in it.

"I want you to look as if you heard drums and fife," Jerome explained, with one of his quick smiles, that always wiped out former injury.

But the flush was not yet out of Marshby's face, and he answered, bitterly, "I might run."

"I don't mind your looking as if you'd like to run and knew you couldn't," said Jerome, dashing in strokes now in a happy certainty.

"Why couldn't I?" asked Marshby, still from that abiding scorn of his own ways.

"Because you can't, that's all. Partly because you get the habit of facing the music. I should like—" Wilmer had an unconsidered way of entertaining his sitters, without much expenditure to himself; he pursued a fantastic habit of talk to keep their blood moving, and did it with the eye of the mind unswervingly on his work. "If I were you, I'd do it. I'd write an essay on the muscular habit of courage. Your coward is born weak-kneed. He shouldn't spill himself all over the place trying to put on the spiritual make-up of a hero. He must simply strengthen his knees. When they'll take him anywhere he requests, without buckling, he wakes up and finds himself a field-marshal. Voila!"

"It isn't bad," said Marshby, unconsciously straightening. "Go ahead, Jerome. Turn us all into field-marshals."

"Not all," objected Wilmer, seeming to dash his brush at the canvas with the large carelessness that promised his best work. "The jobs wouldn't go round. But I don't feel the worse for it when I see the recruity stepping out, promotion in his eye."

After the sitting, Wilmer went yawning forward, and with a hand on Marshby's shoulder, took him to the door.

"Can't let you look at the thing," he said, as Marshby gave one backward glance. "That's against the code. Till it's done, no eye touches it but mine and the light of heaven."

Marshby had no curiosity. He smiled, and thereafter let the picture alone, even to the extent of interested speculation. Mary had scrupulously absented herself from that first sitting; but after it was over and Marshby had gone home, Wilmer found her in the garden, under an apple-tree, shelling pease. He lay down on the ground, at a little distance, and watched her. He noted the quick, capable turn of her wrist and the dexterous motion of the brown hands as they snapped out the pease, and he thought how eminently sweet and comfortable it would be to take this bit of his youth back to France with him, or even to give up France and grow old with her at home.

"Mary," said he, "I sha'n't paint any picture of you this summer."

Mary laughed, and brushed back a yellow lock with the back of her hand.

"No," said she, "I suppose not. Aunt Celia spoke of it yesterday. She told me the reason."

"What is Aunt Celia's most excellent theory?"

"She said I'm not so likely as I used to be."

"No," said Jerome, not answering her smile in the community of mirth they always had over Aunt Celia's simple speech. He rolled over on the grass and began to make a dandelion curl. "No, that's not it. You're a good deal likelier than you used to be. You're all possibilities now. I could make a Madonna out of you, quick as a wink. No, it's because I've decided to paint Marshby instead."

Mary's hands stilled themselves, and