The autumn fires were being kindled on the mountains --fires of maple, oak, and birch. Along the leaf-strewn r the sumach blazed scarlet, and over the rude stone fences blood-red lines of fire followed the trend of leaf and vine. Golden pumpkins lay in the furrows of the corn; showers of apples carpeted the grass of the orchards; the crows in straight lines, and the busy squirrels worked from dawn till dark.
Over all settled the requiem haze of the dead summer, blurring the Notch and softening Moose Hillock to a film of gray against the pale sky.
It had been a summer of very great sweetness and charm--the happiest of Oliver's life. He had found that he could do fairly well the things that he liked to do best; that the technical difficulties that had confronted him when he began to paint were being surmounted as the weeks went by, and that the thing that had always been a pain to him had now become a pleasure--pain, because, try as he might, the quality of the result was always below his hopes; a pleasure, because some bit of bark, perhaps, or glint of light on moss-covered rock, or tender vista had at last stood out on his canvas with every tone of color true.
Only a painter can understand what all this meant to Oliver; only an out-of-door painter, really. The "studio-man" who reproduces an old study which years before has inspired him, or who evolves a composition from his inner consciousness, has no such thrills over his work. He may, perhaps, have other sensations, but they will lack the spontaneous outburst of enthusiasm over the old sketch.
And how glorious are the memories!
The victorious painter has been weeks over these same trees that have baffled him; he has painted them on gray days and sunny days; in the morning, at noon, and in the gloaming. He has loved their texture and the thousand little lights and darks; the sparkle of the black, green, or gray moss, and the delicate tones that played up and down their stalwart trunks. He has toiled in the heat of the day, his nerves on edge, and sometimes great drops of sweat on his troubled forehead. Now and then he has sprung from his seat for a farther-away look at his sketch. With a sigh and a heart bowed down (oh, how desolate are these hours!) he has noted how wooden and commonplace and mean and despicable his work was--what an insult he has cast upon the beautiful yellow birch, this outdoor, motionless, old model that has stood so patiently before him, posing all day without moving; its big arms above its head its leaves and branches stock-still to make it all the easier for him.
Suddenly in all this depression, an inspiration has entered his dull brain--he will use burnt umber in stead of Vandyke brown for the bark! or light chrome and indigo instead of yellow ochre and black for the green!
Presto! Ah, that's like it! Another pat, and another, and still one more!
How quickly now the canvas loses its pasty mediocrity. How soon the paint and the brush-marks and the niggly little touches fade away and the THING ITSELF comes out and says "How do you do?" and that it is so glad to see him, and that it has been lurking behind these colors all day, trying to make his acquaintance, and he would have none of it. What good friends he and the sketch have become now; how proud he is of it, and of possessing it and of CREATING it! Then little quivery-quavers go creeping up and down his spine and away out to his fingertips; and he KNOWS that he has something really GOOD.
He carries it home in his hand, oh, so carefully (he strapped its predecessor on his back yesterday without caring), and a dozen times he stops to look at its dear face, propping it against a stump for a better light, just to see if he had not been mistaken after all. He can hardly wait until it is dark enough to see how it looks by gas-light, or candle-light, or kerosene, or whatever else he may have in his quarters. Years after, the dear old thing is still hanging on his studio wall. He has never sold it nor given it away. He could not--it was too valuable, too constantly giving him good advice and showing him what the thing WAS. Not what he thought it was, or hoped it was, or would like it to be, but what it WAS.
Yes, there may be triumphs that come to men digging away on the dull highway of life--triumphs in business; in politics; in discovery; in law; medicine, and science. To each and every profession and pursuit there must come, and does come, a time when a rush of uncontrollable feeling surges through the victor's soul, crowning long hours of work, but they are as dry ashes to a thirsty man compared to the boundless ecstasy a painter feels when, with a becaked palette, some half-dried tubes of color, and a few worn-out, ragged brushes, he compels a six-by- nine canvas to glow with life and truth.
All this Oliver knew and felt. The work of the summer, attended at first with a certain sense of disappointment, had, during the last few weeks of sojourn, as his touch grew surer, not only become a positive pleasure to him, but had produced an exaltation that had kept our young gentleman walking on clouds most of the time, his head in the blue ether.
Margaret's nice sense of color and correct eye had hastened this result. She could grasp at the first glance the masses of light and shade, giving each its proper value in the composition. She and Oliver. really studied out their compositions together before either one set a palette, a most desirable practice, by the way, not only for tyros, but for Academicians.
This relying upon Margaret's judgment had become a habit with Oliver. He not only consulted her about his canvases, but about everything else that concerned him. He had never formulated in his mind what this kind of companionship meant to him (we never do when we are in the midst of it), nor had he ever considered what would become of him when the summer was over, and the dream would end, and they each would return to the customary dulness of life; a life where there would be no blue ether nor clouds, nor vanishing points, nor values, nor tones, nor anything else that had made their heaven of a summer so happy.
They had both lived in this paradise for weeks without once bringing themselves to believe it could ever end (why do not such episodes last forever?) when Oliver awoke one morning to the fact that the fatal day of their separation would be upon him in a week's time or less. Margaret, with her more practical mind, had seen farther ahead than Oliver, and her laugh, in consequence, had been less spontaneous of late, and her interest in her work and in Oliver's less intense. She was overpowered by another sensation; she had been thinking of the day, now so near, when the old stage would drive up to Mrs. Taft's pasture-gate, and her small trunk and trap would be carried down on Hank's back and tumbled in, and she would go back alone to duty and the prosaic life of a New England village.
Neither of them supposed that it was anything else but the grief of parting that afflicted them, until there came a memorable autumn night--a night that sometimes comes to the blessed!--when the moon swam in the wide sky, breasting the soft white clouds, and when Oliver and Margaret sat together on the porch of Mrs. Taft's cottage--he on the steps at her feet, she leaning against the railing, the moonlight full upon her face.
They had been there since sunset. They had known all day what was in each other's mind, but they had avoided discussing it. Now they must face it.
"You go to-morrow, Madge?" Oliver asked. He knew she did. He spoke as if announcing a fact.
"Yes."
The shrill cry of a loon, like the cry of a child in pain, sifted down the ravine from the lake above and died away among the pines soughing in the night- wind. Oliver paused for a moment to listen, and went on:
"I don't want you to go. I don't know what I am going to do without you, Madge," he said with a long indrawn sigh.
"You are coming to us at Brookfield, you know, on your way back to New York. That is some thing." She glanced at him with a slightly anxious look in her eyes, as if waiting for his answer to reassure her.
He rose from his seat and began pacing the gravel. Now and then he would stop, flick a pebble from its bed with his foot, and walk on. She heard the sound of his steps, but she did not look at him, even when he stopped abruptly in front of her.
"Yes, I know, but--that will only make it worse." He was leaning over her now, one foot on the steps. "It tears me all to pieces when I think this is our last night. We've had such a good time all summer. You don't want to go home, do you?"
"No--I'd rather stay." The words came slowly, as if it gave her pain to utter them.
"Well--stay, then," he answered with some animation. "What difference does a few days makes? Let us have another week. We haven't been over to Bog Eddy yet; please stay, Madge."
"No, I must go, Ollie."
"But we'll be so happy, little girl."
"Life is not only being happy, Ollie. It's very real sometimes. It is to me--" and a faint sigh escaped her.
"Well, but why make it real to-morrow? Let us make it real next week, not now."
"It would be just as hard for you next week. Why postpone it?" She was looking at him now, watching his face closely.
Her answer seemed to hurt him. With an impatient gesture he straightened himself, turned as if to resume his walk, and then, pushing away the end of her skirt, sat down beside her.
"I don't understand your theories, Madge, and I'm not going to discuss them. I don't want to talk of any such things; I'm too unhappy to-night. When I look ahead and think that if the Academy should not open, you wouldn't come back at all, and that I might not see you for months, I'm all broken up. What am I going to do without you, Madge?" His voice was quivering, and a note of pain ran through it.
"Oh, you will have your work--you'll do just what you did before I came up." She was holding herself in by main strength; why, she could not tell --fighting an almost irresistible impulse to hide her face on his breast and cry.
"What good will that do me when you are gone?" he burst out, with a quick toss of his head and a certain bitterness in his tone.
"Well, but you were very happy before you saw me."
Again the cry of the loon came down the ravine. He turned and with one of his quick, impatient gestures that she knew so well, put his hand on her shoulder.
"Stop, Madge, stop! Don't talk that way. I can't stand it. Look at me!" The pain had become unbearable now. "You've got to listen. I can't keep it back, and I won't. I never met anybody that I loved as I do you. I didn't think so at first. I never thought I could think so, but it's true. You are not my sweetheart nor my friend, nor my companion, nor anything else that ever came into my life. You are my very breath, my soul, my being. I never want you to leave me. I should never have another happy day if I thought this was to end our life. I laid awake half the night trying to straighten it out, and I can't, and there's no straightening it out and never will be unless you love me. Oh, Madge! Madge! Don't turn away from me. Let me be part of you--part of everything you do --and are--and will be."
He caught her hand in his warm palm and laid his cheek upon it. Still holding it fast he raised his head, laid his other hand upon her hair, smoothing it softly, and looked long and earnestly into her eyes as if searching for something hidden in their depths. Then, in a voice of infinite tenderness, he said:
"Madge, darling! Tell me true--could you ever love me?"
She sat still, her eyes fixed on his, her hand nestling in his grasp. Then slowly and carefully, one at a time, she loosened with her other hand the fingers that lay upon her hair, held them for an instant in her own, bent her head and touched them with her lips.
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