Barriers Burned Away

by Edward Payson Roe

Her artistic aims were clear and definite. In the first place she meant perfectly to master the human face as it expressed emotions, especially such as were of a tender nature; and in the second place she intended to paint a picture that in itself would make her famous. She chose a most difficult and delicate subject—of the character she had ever failed in—a declaration of love.

When Dennis began to work again in her presence, the picture was well advanced.

In a grand old hall, whose sides were decorated with armor and weapons, a young man stood pleading his cause with a lady whose hand he held. The young girl's face was so averted that only a beautiful profile was visible, but her form and attitude were grace itself. The lovers stood in an angle of the hall near an open window, through which was seen a fine landscape, a picture within a picture. But Christine meant to concentrate all her power and skill on the young knight's face. This should be eloquent with all the feeling and passion that the human face could express, and she would insure its truthfulness to life by copying life itself—the reality. Dennis Fleet was the human victim that she was offering on the altar of her ambition.

Much of the picture was merely in outline, but she finished the form and features of the suppliant in all save the expression, and this she meant to paint from his face whenever she was in the right mood and could bring matters to a crisis.

After he had been coming to the house two or three times a week for nearly a month she felt that she was ready for the final scene, and yet she dreaded it, she had staked so much hope upon it. It also provoked her to find that she was really afraid of him. His was such a strong, sincere nature, that she felt increasingly the wrong of trifling with it. In vain she tried to quiet herself by saying, "I do not care a straw for him, and he will soon get over his infatuation on discovering the truth."

But she had a lesson to learn as well as he, for as we have intimated, unrecognized as yet, there was a process going on in her mind that in time would make strange havoc in her cold philosophy. Her heart's long winter was slowly breaking up; her girlish passion, intense as it was foolish, proved that she had a heart. Everything had been against her. Everything in her experience and education, and especially in her father's strong character and prejudices, had combined to deaden and to chill her; and had these influences continued, she would undoubtedly have become as cold and hard as some whom we find in advanced life with natures like the poles, where the ice gathers year after year, but never melts.

But in Dennis Fleet she met a nature as positive as she was becoming negative. He was so warm and earnest that when she commenced to fan his love into a stronger flame for purely artistic purposes, as she vowed to herself, some sparks of the sacred fire fell on the cold altar of her own heart and slowly began to kindle.

But this awakening would not now be that of a child, but of a woman.
Therefore, Mr. Ludolph, beware!

But she had yet much to learn in the hard, strange school of experience before she would truly know herself or her own needs.

Success in art, however, was still her ruling passion. And though strange misgivings annoyed and perplexed her, though her respect for Dennis daily increased, and at times a sudden pity and softness made her little hands hesitate before giving an additional wrench to the rack of uncertainty upon which she kept him; still, she would not for the world have abandoned her purpose, and such compunctions were as yet but the little back eddies of the strong current.