The children of Ella’s husband’s nephew have something much more substantial as an inheritance than that. For the young man with a fortune was married by a competent, ambitious girl as soon as he came of age. They have three children, who learned very young how to spend a great deal of money with great speed. The money which the Italian day-laborers and small-farmers earn by patient endurance of hardships, by eating rough, poor, scanty food, by working their pregnant wives to the day before their confinements, by taking their children out of school before they can read, is sent month by month to America and spent in buying a new fur set for Ella’s husband’s nephew’s young-lady daughter, a ten-thousand-dollar racing-car for Ella’s husband’s nephew’s seventeen-year-old son, and to keep Ella’s husband’s nephew from doing anything more strenuous than clipping the end of his cigars.
THIRTY YEARS AFTER
A long time ago, when Duane Bellamy was at the height of his brilliant fame, and when I was a little girl, his daughter chanced to be a school-mate of mine for a winter. And one Sunday evening I was invited to their supper-table. I was very much impressed by the momentous occasion which it seemed to me, and I have not forgotten a word he said, nor a gesture he made, nor an expression of his face. I can still see his darkly handsome face, with his glossy black mane, his large bright eyes, his great curling Assyrian beard. And if ever I saw a human being saturated to the bone with satisfaction, it was at that Sunday evening supper. He was acclaimed as the greatest portrait painter in America, and he accepted this well-deserved reputation with no mock modesty. The knowledge of it did not make him coarsely vain or puffed up. It acted on him like a generous wine, made him extravagantly kind and over-flowing with high spirits. His little girl told me that night that her princely father had been known to stop a tired coal-heaver at his work, hand him a twenty-dollar bill and walk on. He was like a great fountain of enjoyment, splashing with its clear waters all who came near it, even the little schoolgirl at the other end of the table.
But there were people he could not help to enjoyment. The name of one of them came up in the conversation that evening: “Poor old Hendricks!” said our host, “what can you do for the poor old chap? He doesn’t even know what hit him!”
One of the younger painters there was a protégé of Bellamy’s, admiring him so greatly that his paintings were scarcely to be told from his master’s. He now answered, “Oh, the old Rip Van Winkle! He ought to be told to crawl into his hole and pull it in after him. Making a laughing-stock of himself with those sooty old landscapes of his, year after year.”
Our host took a great draught of the beer in his stein, wiped his great mustache with his fine damask napkin, and turned comfortably in his chair. “Hendrick got me in a tight place the other day,” he began, “At this year’s exhibition he marched me up to one of his bitumen-black, woolly horrors, and said, ‘Now, Bellamy, you’re an honest man. Tell me what it is you youngsters don’t like in that? It looks all right to me. I can’t see why they all jump on me so. I look at theirs, and then I look at mine.... I can’t see what they’re talking about.’”
“Well, for God’s sake, what nerve!” ejaculated the disciple, very much astonished. “What did you say?”
“What could I say?” said Bellamy. “I didn’t want to hurt the old man’s feelings. I hadn’t supposed till then that he’d so much as noticed how people feel about his work. I didn’t try to explain to him, of course. What’s the use? He can’t understand! If I’d talked to him all day about what we’re after—light, and shimmer, and vibration—he wouldn’t have known what I was talking about. If it were in him to understand, he’d die before he’d paint the way he does. So I just patted him on the back and said, ‘Oh, you’re all right, Mr. Hendricks. What makes you think there is anything the matter with your work?’ and pretended that somebody was calling to me from the other side of the gallery.”