“You are a clever man,” she said. “It is fortunate you are a good one.”
“Oh,” he returned, almost brusquely, though he took her hand and kissed it, “I don’t know that I can lay claim to any especial virtue. Are you remembering Hawthorne’s story of ‘The Prophetic Pictures,’ that you think my goodness particularly fortunate in this connection?”
Instead of replying, she moved across the studio with her graceful, firm walk, which had won Tom’s deep admiration before he knew even her name. She took up a light old-fashioned silk shawl, yellow with time, and threw it across her arm.
“I must go home,” she remarked, as if no subject were under discussion. “I am sure I don’t know what I was thinking of to stay here so late.”
“Oh, there is no time in sleepy old Salem,” was his response, “so it can’t be late; but if you will go, I shall be proud to walk up with you.”
He flung away the end of his cigarette, locked the studio, and together they took their way out of the region of wharves, along the quaint old dinginess of Essex Street. It is a thoroughfare full of suggestions of the past, and they both were susceptible to its influences. Here of old the busy life of Salem flowed in vigorous current, laden with interests which embraced half the globe; here sailors from strange lands used to gather, swarthy and bold, pouring into each other’s ringed ear talk of adventure wild and daring; here merchants walked counting their gains on cargoes brought from the far Orient and islands of which even the names had hardly grown familiar to the Western World.
Hawthorne has somewhere spoken of the old life of New England as all too sombre, and declared that our forefathers “wove their web of life with hardly a single thread of rose-color or gold;” but surely the master was misled by the dimness gathered from time. Into every old web of tapestry went many a bright line of scarlet and green and azure, many a woof of gold that time has tarnished and the dust of years dulled until all is gray and faded. Along the memory-haunted streets of Salem, from the first, went, side by side or hand in hand, the happy maiden and her lover; stepped the bridal train; passed the young wife bearing under her heart with fearful bliss the sweet secret of a life other than her own; or the newly made mother bore her first-born son through a glory half sunlight and half dreams of his golden future. In later days all the romance of the seas, the teeming life which inspired the tongue of the prophet’s denouncing lyre to break into rhapsodies of poetry, the stir of adventurous blood, and the boldness of daring adventurers have filled these old streets with vivid and undying memories.
The artist and his companion were rather silent as they walked, he studying the lights and shadows with appreciative eye, and she apparently absorbed in thought. At length she seemed to come in her reverie to some doubt which she needed his aid to resolve.
“Tom,” she asked, rather hesitatingly, “have you noticed any change in Ralph lately?”