Page:The Pacific Monthly volumes 1-3.djvu/106

 "I met Colton outside. He was on his way home from Dana's house. Mrs. Dana died this evening," and McArthurs turned and left us before we had recovered from the shock of this sad news sufficiently to put a single question.

But we got the particulars later from Colton. They had sent for him at the first apprehension of danger. Mrs. Dana, the nurse said, had rested well all day. Somewhere near 5 o'clock in the afternoon she turned upon her pillow, clasped her hands under her pale cheek and sighed softly. The nurse leaned over and spoke to her, but she only smiled contentedly and did not answer.

Shortly after this, Dana entered the room. She had made him promise to come to her the moment the picture was finished. He went close to the low couch upon which she was lying. "Is she asleep?" he asked the nurse. "No, I think not," was the reply, and he called her gently two or three times by name. She did not make any response; did not even seem to hear, only lay there with half-shut eyes, smiling sweetly. They tried in vain to rouse her, and, at length, becoming alarmed, sent hurriedly for Colton, who could do nothing when he arrived.

The end came with the twilight. Exhausted vitality, Colton said it was, but he had a theory as to the cause which he did not announce to the public, the truth of which, strange and incredible as it seemed to us then — he told McArthurs and me only, I believe — was seemingly proven by subsequent events.

Dana never painted another picture. That one whose completion was marked by the close of a noble life, was his last. I don't mean by this that he shut up shop. It would have been better for his reputation as a genius if he had. On the contrary, he continued to paint as industriously as ever, but his work was dead and dull as ditchwater.

He had lost his inspiration, but he never seemed to realize it. 1 think he missed his wife and mourned for her as deeply as a man of his sort could, but he married again in the course of a couple of years, and was quite as content with the frivolous fashion-plate who became the second Mrs. Dana as he had been with the rare creature whose love had inspired him to the point of greatness.

That was Colton's theory — that inspiration business. He held that through her abiding faith and affection she had unconsciously influenced him to paint the beautiful conceptions of her own artistic soul. That all the living loveliness his skilled brush transferred to canvas had birth and being in her fertile brain and fervid heart. "Love's unconscious telepathy," he called it. He claimed that Dana, being a mere negative, without force or originality, had readily acted as a medium through which her wonderful visions found form and expression. Her love was of a nature so deep and tender and unselfish — so full of faith in him — as to impel, to irresistibly impel, him to become for the time the artist she believed him to be.

But the delicate cords of life had snapped under the strain of such exalted spiritual pressure. She died and never knew that she had sacrificed herself for — Augustus Dana.