“Den he ’gun to talk ’bout devotion an’ pholosophy—an’, an’ de end. ‘Dere ain’t goin’ to be no end,’ says I. ‘She ain’t never even dressed herself, alone, yit; nor combed ’er own har. Dere ain’t been a mornin’, nor an evenin’, nor er night, dat her ole mammy wa’n’t dar to help ’er.’ Den I see he was er smilin. ‘Mammy,’ sez he, ‘youse gwine long wid us.’ ‘Praise de Lord,’ sez I. An’ dat’s de way I happin to come North, Marser Crane. I wanter goin’ let mah young mistiss be travellin’ round ’mong dem Northerners, ’thout her ole mammy to teck cyar of ’er.”
She ceased speaking, and moved slowly toward the door. “I’ll git everythin’ ready fer de tea,” she said, brightening. “You needn’t worry ’bout nothin’, Marser Crane. ’Tain’t de fust time mah ole Moses an’ I’se waited on comp’ny.”
Enoch stood listening to her as she descended the stairs. She was crooning softly to herself in a minor key:
“Moonlight on de swamp an’ ’possum in de tree....”
Enoch leaned over the banisters; then the door of her kitchen closed upon her and he returned to his room. For a long moment he stood thoughtfully before his desk, thinking of her devotion, of what the death of her mistress must have meant to her, of the vicissitudes in the years that followed, of their present sordid quarters in comparison to the “big house,” its great rooms, and its bygone hospitality, the picture she had drawn of that young Captain Pendleton and the one he loved, clear in his mind. Then he slowly unbuttoned his watch-chain of braided hair, inserted the flat key in the lock of the little drawer above his inkstand, opened it, felt under a packet of letters tied with a narrow blue ribbon, and drew out a small leather daguerreotype case, unhooked it, and stood gazing at the portrait of the young girl it contained—a young girl in a checkered silk dress, with large, nervous black eyes, her dark hair falling in two soft curls over her neck, a red rose in her hair. He turned it askance to the light, bringing into clearer detail the delicate contour of the wistful face, the drooping, sensitive, melancholy mouth, the bit of lace at her throat, fastened by a brooch of garnets. Then he reverently returned it to the drawer, closed it, and locked it.
It did not, as Matilda had supposed, contain his money—only a memory.
While Enoch had been straightening out his room, Joe had been fidgeting this morning over his work in the office of Atwater & Grimsby, Architects, a modest square room on the third floor of an old brick building in State Street, its two dingy lower floors being filled by Italian fruit merchants and the mingled perfume of the green banana, the orange, the lemon, and the fig. Joe this morning had accomplished nothing, his whole mind elated over Enoch Crane’s invitation to tea and his promised glimpse of Sue. He drew, sprawled over his drawing-board, his pencil and T-square moving at a snail’s pace as he counted the hours that remained before five, which the moon-faced clock, solemnly ticking over his head, appeared in no hurry to shorten; its punctilious hands seemed barely to move. He fussed for an hour over some rough ideas for a dormer window, spent another in searching through a book on early Tudor for a half-timbered inspiration, broke the point of his pencil constantly, and finally, with the memory of Sue’s voice in his ears, upset a full bottle of India ink, its contents flooding the emerald-green water-color lawn in front of Mrs. Amos Jones’s cottage destined for Dunehurst, changing it into a lake of indelible ink that found an outlet for itself over the edge of the drawing-board and went streaming to the floor. Sam Atwater’s thin, alert face raised in disgust. He slid off his stool, readjusted his eye-glasses with his nervous hand, and regarded the ruin of Mrs. Amos Jones’s water-colored country-seat in dismay.
“That’s done for,” said he gloomily.
“By the gods!” cried Joe, flinging up his strong arms in his enthusiasm. “Done for! Why, it’s immense! It’s a hummer, by Jove! Look at the value of black, will you? Ripping! Cast your eyes on that contrast of trees and roof bang up against that ebony lake. Talk about values, picks up that little touch of apple-green on the roof and makes her sing. You wait until I get through with the next water-color. I’ve got a scheme, I tell you, that will make the rest of the boys sit up and blink. Why, black’s the most valuable thing in the world, only you’ve got to have enough of it. We’ve been fooling around with a lot of timid shadows, afraid to smash in a big effect straight from the shoulder. Look at the value of that high light next to the strongest dark. That’s one reason why Rembrandt’s portraits look as if they could step out of the frame and shake you by the hand. Ruined! you sou marqué—it’s a corker! Black—that’s it, and plenty of it, with good, strong drawing and a big, splendid sky smashed in with Chinese white, raw umber, and French blue—I’ve got it, Sam. You wait. No more anæmic water-colors for me, and no more white paper, either. That’s good enough for illustrators, but it’s no good for architects. Give me gray paper—gauche—and charcoal—something you can build on.”
Sam Atwater was studying him as he rattled on with the wide-eyed interest of a man listening to the secret of a new invention, which, although he did not wholly grasp its possibilities, nevertheless was slowly opening his eyes to its logical advantages.