Penelope's Postscripts

Atlas was young, warm of heart, high of mind, and generous of soul.  All the necessary chords, therefore, were in him, ready to be set in vibration.  No one could do this more cunningly than Egeria; the only question was whether love would “run out to meet love,” as it should, “with open arms.”

We simply waited to see.  Mrs. Jack, with that fine lack of logic that distinguished her, disclaimed all responsibility.  “He is awake, at least,” she said, “and that is a great comfort; and now and then he observes a few very plain facts, mostly relating to Egeria, it is true.  If it does come to anything, I hope he won’t ask her to live in a college settlement the year round, though I haven’t the slightest doubt that she would like it.  If there were ever two beings created expressly for each other, it is these two, and for that reason I have my doubts about the matter.  Almost all marriages are made between two people who haven’t the least thing in common, so far as outsiders can judge.  Egeria and Atlas are almost too well suited for marriage.”

The progress of the affair had thus far certainly been astonishingly rapid, but it might mean nothing.  Egeria’s mind and heart were so easy of access up to a certain point that the traveller sometimes overestimated the distance covered and the distance still to cover.  Atlas quoted something about her at the end of the very first day, that described her charmingly: “Ordinarily, the sweetest ladies will make us pass through cold mist and cross a stile or two, or a broken bridge, before the formalities are cleared away, to grant us rights of citizenship.  She is like those frank lands where we have not to hand out a passport at the frontier and wait for dubious inspection.”  But the description is incomplete.  Egeria, indeed, made no one wait at the frontier for a dubious inspection of his passport; but once in the new domain, while he would be cordially welcomed to parks, gardens, lakes, and pleasure grounds, he would find unexpected difficulty in entering the queen’s private apartments, a fact that occasioned surprise to some of the travellers.

We all took the greatest interest, too, in the romance of Phoebe and Jem, for the course of true love did not run at all smooth for this young couple.  Jack wrote a ballad about her, and Egeria made a tune to it, and sang it to the tinkling, old-fashioned piano of an evening:—

“Have you e’er seen the street of Clovelly?The quaint, rambling street of Clovelly,With its staircase of stone leading down to the sea,To the harbour so sleepy, so old, and so wee,The queer, crooked street of Clovelly.“Have you e’er seen the lass of Clovelly?The sweet little lass of Clovelly,With kirtle of grey reaching just to her knee,And ankles as neat as ankles may be,The yellow-haired lass of Clovelly.“There’s a good honest lad in Clovelly,A bold, fisher lad of Clovelly,With purpose as straight and swagger as freeAs the course of his boat when breasting a sea,The brave sailor lad of Clovelly.“Have you e’er seen the church at Clovelly?Have you heard the sweet bells of Clovelly?The lad and the lassie will hear them, maybe,And join hand in hand to sail over life’s seaFrom the little stone church at Clovelly.”

When the nights were cool or damp we crowded into Mrs. Jack’s tiny china-laden sitting-room, and had a blaze in the grate with a bit of driftwood burning blue and green and violet on top of the coals.  Tommy sometimes smelled of herring to such a degree that we were obliged to keep the door open; but his society was so precious that we endured the odours.

But there were other evenings out of doors, when we sat in a sheltered corner down on the pier, watching the line of limestone cliffs running westward to the revolving light at Hartland Point that sent us alternate flashes of ruby and white across the water.  Clovelly lamps made glittering disks in the quay pool, shining there side by side with the reflected star-beams.  We could hear the regular swish-swash of the waves on the rocks, and to the eastward the dripping of a stream that came tumbling over the cliff.

Such was our last evening in Clovelly; a very quiet one, for the charm of the place lay upon us and we were loath to leave it.  It was warm and balmy, and the moonlight lay upon the beach.  Egeria leaned against the parapet, the serge of her dress showing white against the background of rock.  The hood of her dark blue yachting-cape was slipping off her head, and her eyes were as deep and clear as crystal pools.

Presently she began to sing,—first, “The Sands o’ Dee,” then,—

“Three fishers went sailing out into the west,Out into the west as the sun went down;Each thought of the woman who loved him the best,And the children stood watching them out of the town.”

Egeria is one of the few women who can sing well without an accompaniment.  She has a thrilling voice, and what with the scene, the hour, and the pathos of Kingsley’s verses, tears rushed into my eyes, and Bill Marks’ words came back to me—“Two-and-twenty men drowned; that’s what it means to plough the great salt field that is never sown.”

Atlas gazed at her with eyes that no longer cared to keep their secret.  Mrs. Jack was still uncertain; for me, I was sure.  Love had rushed past him like a galloping horseman, and shooting an arrow almost without aim, had struck him full in the heart, that citadel that had withstood a dozen deliberate sieges.

It was midnight, and our few belongings were packed.  Egeria had come to the Inn to sleep, and stole into my room to warm her toes before the blaze in my grate, for I was chilly and had ordered a sixpenny fire.  When I say that she came in to warm her toes, I am asking you to accept her statement, not mine; it is my opinion that she came in for no other purpose than to tell me something that was in her mind and heart pleading for utterance.

I didn’t help her by leading up to the subject, because I thought her fib so flagrant and unnecessary; accordingly, we talked over a multitude of things,—Phoebe and Jem and their hard-hearted parents, our visit to Cardiff and Ilfracombe, Bill Marks and his wife, the service at the church, and finally her walk with Atlas in the churchyard.

“We went inside,” said Egeria, “and I copied the inscription on the bronze tablet that Atlas liked so much on Sunday: ‘Her grateful and affectionate husband’s last and proudest wish will be that whenever Divine Providence shall call him hence, his name may be engraved on the same tablet that is sacred in perpetuating as much virtue and goodness as could adorn human nature.’”  Then she went on, with apparent lack of sequence: “Penelope, don’t you think it is always perfectly safe to obey a Scriptural command, because I have done it?”

“Did you find it in the Old or the New Testament?”

“The Old.”

“I should say that if you found some remarks about breaking the bones of your enemy, and have twisted it out of its connection, it would be particularly bad advice to follow.”

“It is nothing of that sort.”

“What is it, then?”

She took out a tortoise-shell dagger just here, and gave her head an absent-minded shake so that her lustrous coil of hair uncoiled itself and fell on her shoulders in a ruddy spiral.  It was a sight to induce covetousness, but one couldn’t be envious of Egeria.  She charmed one by her lack of consciousness.

“The happy lotBe his to followThose threads through lovely curve and hollow,And muse a lifetime how they gotInto that wild, mysterious knot,”—

quoted I, as I gave her head an insinuating pat.  “Come, Egeria, stand and deliver!  What is the Scriptural command, that having first obeyed, you ask my advice about afterwards?”

“Have you a Bible?”

“You might not think it, but I have, and it is here on my table.”

“Then I am going into my room, to lock the door, and call the verse through the keyhole.  But you must promise not to say a word to me till to-morrow morning.”

I was not in a position to dictate terms, so I promised.  The door closed, the bolt shot into the socket, and Egeria’s voice came so faintly through the keyhole that I had to stoop to catch the words:—

“Deuteronomy, 10:19.”

I flew to my Bible.  Genesis—Exodus—Leviticus—Numbers—Deuteronomy—Deut-er-on-omy—Ten—Nineteen—

“Love ye therefore the stranger—”

V

PENELOPE AT HOME

“’Tis good when you have crossed the sea and backTo find the sit-fast acres where you left them.”Emerson.Beresford Broadacres, April 15, 19–.

Penelope, in the old sense, is no more!  No mound of grass and daisies covers her; no shaft of granite or marble marks the place where she rests;—as a matter of fact she never does rest; she walks and runs and sits and stands, but her travelling days are over.  For the present, in a word, the reason that she is no longer “Penelope,” with dozens of portraits and three volumes of “Experiences” to her credit, is, that she is Mrs. William Hunt Beresford.

As for Himself, he is just as much William Hunt Beresford as ever he was, for marriage has not staled, nor fatherhood withered, his infinite variety.  There may be, indeed, a difference, ever so slight; a new dignity, and an air of responsibility that harmonizes well with the inch of added girth at his waist-line and the grey thread or two that becomingly sprinkle his dark hair.

And where is Herself, the vanished Penelope, you ask; the companion of Salemina and Francesca; the traveller in England, Scotland, Ireland, and Wales; the wanderer in Switzerland and Italy?  Well, if she is a thought less irresponsible, merry, and loquacious, she is happier and wiser.  If her easel and her palette are not in daily evidence, neither are they altogether banished from the scene; and whatever measure of cunning Penelope’s hand possessed in other days, Mrs. Beresford has contrived to preserve.

If she wields the duster occasionally, in alternation with the paint-brush and the pen, she has now a new choice of weapons; and as for models,—her friends, her neighbours, even her enemies and rivals, might admire her ingenuity, her thrift, and her positive genius in selecting types to paint!  She never did paint anything beautifully but children, though her backgrounds have been praised, also the various young things that were a vital part of every composition.  She could never draw a horse or a cow or an ox to her satisfaction, but a long-legged colt, or a newborn Bossy-calf were well within her powers.  Her puppies and kittens and chickens and goslings were always admired by the public, and the fact that the mothers and fathers in the respective groups were never quite as convincing as their offspring,—this somehow escaped the notice of the critics.

Very well, then, what was Penelope inspired to do when she became Mrs. Beresford and left the Atlantic rolling between the beloved Salemina, Francesca, and herself?  Why, having “crossed the sea and back” repeatedly, she found “the sit-fast acres” of the house of Beresford where she “left them” and where they had been sitting fast for more than a hundred years.

“Here is the proper place for us to live,” she said to Himself, when they first viewed the dear delightful New England landscape over together.  “Here is where your long roots are, and as my roots have been in half a hundred places they can be easily transplanted.  You have a decent income to begin on; why not eke it out with apples and hay and corn and Jersey cows and Plymouth Rock cocks and hens, while I use the scenery for my pictures?  There are backgrounds here for a thousand canvases, all within a mile of your ancestral doorstep.”

“I don’t know what you will do for models in this remote place,” said Himself, putting his hands in his pockets and gazing dubiously at the abandoned farm-houses on the hillsides; the still green dooryards on the village street where no children were playing, and the quiet little brick school-house at the turn of the road, from which a dozen half-grown boys and girls issued decorously, looking at us like scared rabbits.

“I have an idea about models,” said Mrs. Beresford.

And it turned out that she had, for all that was ten years ago, and Penelope the Painter, merged in Mrs. Beresford the mother, has the three loveliest models in all the countryside!

Children, of course, are common enough everywhere; not, perhaps, as common as they should be, but there are a good many clean, well-behaved, truthful, decently-featured little boys and girls who will, in course of time, become the bulwarks of the Republic, who are of no use as models.  The public is not interested in, and will neither purchase nor hang on its walls anything but a winsome child, a beautiful child, a pathetic child, or a picturesquely ragged and dirty child.  (The latter type is preferably a foreigner, as dirty American children are for some reason or other quite unsalable.)

All this is in explanation of the foregoing remarks about Mrs. Beresford’s ingenuity, thrift, and genius in selecting types to paint.  The ingenuity lay in the idea itself; the thrift, in securing models that should belong to the Beresford “sit-fast acres” and not have to be searched for and “hired in” by the day; and the genius, in producing nothing but enchanting, engrossing, adorable, eminently “paintable” children.  They are just as obedient, interesting, grammatical, and virtuous as other people’s offspring, yet they are so beautiful that it would be the height of selfishness not to let the world see them and turn green with envy.

When viewed by the casual public in a gallery, nobody of course believes that they are real until some kind friend says: “No, oh, no! not ideal heads at all; perfect likenesses; the children of Mr. and Mrs. Beresford; Penelope Hamilton, whose signature you see in the corner, is Mrs. Beresford.”

When they are exhibited in the guise of, and under such titles as: “Young April,” “In May Time,” “Girl with Chickens,” “Three of a Kind” (Billy with a kitten and a puppy tumbling over him), “Little Mothers” (Frances and Sally with their dolls), “When all the World is Young” (Billy, Frances, and Sally under the trees surrounded by a riot of young feathered things, with a lamb and a Jersey calf peeping over a fence in the background), then Himself stealthily visits the gallery.  He stands somewhere near the pictures pulling his moustache nervously and listening to the comments of the bystanders.  Not a word of his identity or paternity does he vouchsafe, but occasionally some acquaintance happens to draw near, perhaps to compliment or congratulate him.  Then he has been heard to say vaingloriously: “Oh, no! they are not flattered; rather the reverse.  My wife has an extraordinary faculty of catching likenesses, and of course she has a wonderful talent, but she agrees with me that she never quite succeeds in doing the children justice!”

Here we are, then, Himself and I, growing old with the country that gave us birth (God bless it!) and our children growing up with it, as they always should; for it must have occurred to the reader that I am Penelope, Hamilton that was, and also, and above all, that I am Mrs. William Hunt Beresford.

April 20, 19–.

Himself and I have gone through the inevitable changes that life and love, marriage and parenthood, bring to all human creatures; but no one of the dear old group of friends has so developed as Francesca.  Her last letter, posted in Scotland and delivered here seven days later, is like a breath of the purple heather and brings her vividly to mind.

In the old days when we first met she was gay, irresponsible, vivacious, and a decided flirt,—with symptoms of becoming a coquette.  She was capricious and exacting; she had far too large an income for a young girl accountable to nobody; she was lovely to look upon, a product of cities and a trifle spoiled.

She danced through Europe with Salemina and me, taking in no more information than she could help, but charming everybody that she met.  She was only fairly well educated, and such knowledge as she possessed was vague, uncertain, and never ready for instant use.  In literature she knew Shakespeare, Balzac, Thackeray, Hawthorne, and Longfellow, but if you had asked her to place Homer, Schiller, Dante, Victor Hugo, James Fenimore Cooper, or Thoreau she couldn’t have done it within a hundred years.

In history she had a bowing acquaintance with Napoleon, Washington, Wellington, Prince Charlie, Henry of Navarre, Paul Revere, and Stonewall Jackson, but as these gallant gentlemen stand on the printed page, so they stood shoulder to shoulder, elbowing one another in her pretty head, made prettier by a wealth of hair, Marcel-waved twice a week.

These facts were brought out once in examination, by one of Francesca’s earliest lovers, who, at Salemina’s request and my own, acted as her tutor during the spring before our first trip abroad, the general idea being to prepare her mind for foreign travel.

I suppose we were older and should have known better than to allow any man under sixty to tutor Francesca in the spring.  Anyhow, the season worked its maddest pranks on the pedagogue.  He fell in love with his pupil within a few days,—they were warm, delicious, budding days, for it was a very early, verdant, intoxicating spring that produced an unusual crop of romances in our vicinity.  Unfortunately the tutor was a scholar at heart, as well as a potential lover, and he interested himself in making psychological investigations of Francesca’s mind.  She was perfectly willing, for she always regarded her ignorance as a huge joke, instead of viewing it with shame and embarrassment.  What was more natural, when she drove, rode, walked, sailed, danced, and “sat out” to her heart’s content, while more learned young ladies stayed within doors and went to bed at nine o’clock with no vanity-provoking memories to lull them to sleep?  The fact that she might not be positive as to whether Dante or Milton wrote “Paradise Lost,” or Palestrina antedated Berlioz, or the Mississippi River ran north and south or east and west,—these trifling uncertainties had never cost her an offer of marriage or the love of a girl friend; so she was perfectly frank and offered no opposition to the investigations of the unhappy but conscientious tutor, meeting his questions with the frankness of a child.  Her attitude of mind was the more candid because she suspected the passion of the teacher and knew of no surer way to cure him than to let him know her mind for what it was.

When the staggering record of her ignorance on seven subjects was set down in a green-covered blank book, she awaited the result not only with resignation, but with positive hope; a hope that proved to be ill-founded, for curiously enough the tutor was still in love with her.  Salemina was surprised, but I was not.  Of course I had to know anatomy in order to paint, but there is more in it than that.  In painting the outsides of people I assure you that I learned to guess more of what was inside them than their bony structures!  I sketched the tutor while he was examining Francesca and I knew that there were no abysmal depths of ignorance that could appall him where she was concerned.  He couldn’t explain the situation at all, himself.  If there was anything that he admired and respected in woman, it was a well-stored, logical mind, and three months’ tutoring of Francesca had shown him that her mental machinery was of an obsolete pattern and that it was not even in good working order.  He could not believe himself influenced (so he confessed to me) by such trivial things as curling lashes, pink ears, waving hair (he had never heard of Marcel), or mere beauties of colour and line and form.  He said he was not so sure about Francesca’s eyes.  Eyes like hers, he remarked in confidence, were not beneath the notice of any man, be he President of Harvard University or Master of Balliol College, for they seemed to promise something never once revealed in the green examination book.

“You are quite right,” I answered him; “the green book is not all there is of Miss Monroe, but whatever there is is plainly not for you”; and he humbly agreed with my dictum.

Is it not strange that a man will talk to one woman about the charms of another for days upon days without ever realizing that she may possibly be born for some other purpose than listening to him?  For an hour or two, of course, any sympathetic or generous-minded person can be interested in the confidences of a lover; but at the end of weeks or months, during which time he has never once regarded his listener as a human being of the feminine gender, with eyes, nose, and hair in no way inferior to those of his beloved,—at the end of that time he should be shaken, smitten, waked from his dreams, and told in ringing tones that in a tolerably large universe there are probably two women worth looking at, the one about whom he is talking, and the one to whom he is talking!

May 12, 19–.

To go on about Francesca, she always had a quick intelligence, a sense of humour, a heart, and a conscience; four things not to be despised in the equipment of a woman.  The wit she used lavishly for the delight of the world at large; the heart had not (in the tutor’s time) found anything or anybody on which to spend itself; the conscience certainly was not working overtime at the same period, but I always knew that it was there and would be an excellent reliable organ when once aroused.

Of course there is no reason why the Reverend Ronald MacDonald, of the Established Church of Scotland, should have been the instrument chosen to set all the wheels of Francesca’s being in motion, but so it was; and a great clatter and confusion they made in our Edinburgh household when the machinery started!  If Ronald was handsome he was also a splendid fellow; if he was a preacher he was also a man; and no member of the laity could have been more ardently and satisfactorily in love than he.  It was the ardour that worked the miracle; and when Francesca was once warmed through to the core, she began to grow.  Her modest fortune helped things a little at the beginning of their married life, for it not only made existence easier, but enabled them to be of more service in the straggling, struggling country parishes where they found themselves at first.

Francesca’s beautiful American clothes shocked Ronald’s congregations now and then, and it was felt that, though possible, it was not very probable, that the grace of God could live with such hats and shoes, such gloves and jewels as hers.  But by the time Ronald was called from his Argyllshire church to St. Giles’s Cathedral in Edinburgh there was a better understanding of young Mrs. MacDonald’s raiment and its relation to natural and revealed religion.  It appeared now that a clergyman’s wife, by strict attention to parochial duties; by being the mother of three children all perfectly well behaved in church; by subscribing generously to all worthy charities; by never conducting herself as light-mindedly as her eyes and conversation seemed to portend,—it appeared that a woman could live down her clothes!  It was a Bishop, I think, who argued in Francesca’s behalf that godliness did not necessarily dwell in frieze and stout leather and that it might flourish in lace and chiffon.  Salemina and I used to call Ronald and Francesca the antinomic pair.  Antinomics, one finds by consulting the authorities, are apparently contradictory poles, which, however, do not really contradict, but are only correlatives, the existence of one making the existence of the other necessary, explaining each other and giving each other a real standing and equilibrium.

May 7, 19–.

What immeasurable leagues of distance lie between Salemina, Francesca, and me!  Not only leagues of space divide us, but the difference in environment, circumstances, and responsibilities that give reality to space; yet we have bridged the gulf successfully by a particular sort of three-sided correspondence, almost impersonal enough to be published, yet revealing all the little details of daily life one to the other.

When we three found that we should be inevitably separated for some years, we adopted the habit of a “loose-leaf diary.”  The pages are perforated with large circular holes and put together in such a way that one can remove any leaf without injuring the book.  We write down, as the spirit moves us, the more interesting happenings of the day, and once in a fortnight, perhaps, we slip a half-dozen selected pages into an envelope and the packet starts on its round between America, Scotland, and Ireland.  In this way we have kept up with each other without any apparent severing of intimate friendship, and a farmhouse in New England, a manse in Scotland, and the Irish home of a Trinity College professor and his lady are brought into frequent contact.