Colonel Carter's Christmas and The Romance of an Old-Fashioned Gentleman

by Francis Hopkinson Smith

Had he been of a different temperament he would have forgotten her and that night in the improvised studio, but he was not constituted to forget. He was constituted to remember, and to remember with all his soul. Every day of his life he had missed her; never was there a night that she was not in his thoughts before he dropped to sleep. What would have been his career had fate brought them together before the blight fell upon her? What intimacies, what enjoyment, what ideals nurtured and made real. And the companionship, the instant sympathy, the sureness of an echo in her heart, no matter how low and soft his whisper! These thoughts were never absent from his mind.

Moreover, his life had been one of standards: the greatest painter, the greatest picture, the finest piece of bronze. It was so when he looked over curios at the dealer’s: it was the choicest of its kind that he must have; anything of trifling value, or anything commonplace—he ignored. Olivia had also fixed for him a standard. Compared to her, all other women were trite and incomplete. No matter how beautiful they might be, a certain simplicity of manner was lacking, or the coloring was bad, or the curve of the neck ungraceful. All of these perfections, and countless more, made up Olivia’s personality, and unless the woman before him possessed these several charms she failed to interest him. The inspection over and the mental comparison at an end, a straightening of the shoulders and a knitting of the brow would follow, ending in a far-away look in his brown eyes and an unchecked sigh—as if the very hopelessness of the comparison brought with it a certain pain. As to much of the life of the Quartier about him, he shrank from it as he would from a pestilence. Certain men never crossed his threshold—never dared.

One morning there came to him the crowning honor of his career. A new hotel de ville was about to be erected in a neighboring city, and the authorities had selected him to paint the great panel at the right of the main entrance. As he threw the letter containing the proposition on his desk and leaned back in his chair a smile of supreme satisfaction lighted up his face. He could now carry out a scheme of color and massing of figures which had been in his mind for years, but which had heretofore been impossible owing to the limited area covered by the canvases of his former orders. This space would give him all the room he needed. The subject was to be an incident in the life of Rochambeau, just before the siege of Yorktown. Gregg had been selected on account of his nationality. Every latitude was given him, and the treatment was to be distinctly his own.

It was while searching about the streets and cafés of Paris for types to be used in the preliminary sketches for this, the supreme work so far of his life, that he took a seat one afternoon in the early autumn at a table outside one of the cheap cafés along the Seine. He could study the faces of those passing, from a position of this kind. In his coming picture there must necessarily be depicted a group of the great Frenchman’s followers, and a certain differentiation of feature would be necessary. On this afternoon, then, he had taken his sketch-book from his breast pocket and was about to make a memorandum of some type that had just attracted him, when a young man in a student’s cap twisted his head to get a closer view of the work of Gregg’s pencil.

An intrusion of this kind from any one but a student would have been instantly resented by Adam. Not so, however, with the young fellow at his elbow; these were his wards, no matter where he met them.

“Come closer, my boy,” said Gregg in a low voice. “You belong to the Quartier, do you not?”

“Yes.”

“Are you English?”

“No, an American. I am from Maryland.”

“From Maryland, you say!” exclaimed Adam with a sudden start, closing his sketch-book and slipping it into his pocket. The name always brought with it a certain rush of blood to his cheek—why, he could never tell. “How long have you been in Paris, my lad?” He had moved back now so that the stranger could find a seat beside him.