"Indeed! I must hear him sing more," she managed with some difficulty.
The sorrowful one arose as they entered, hastily thrusting aside his guitar as might an assassin have cast away his weapon. His face was shaven to a bitter degree; in spots it was scarified. But the drooping lines of woe unutterable were still there in opposition to his Sabbath finery—a spreading blue-satin cravat, lighted by a stone of impressive bulk, elegant black trousers, and suspenders of red silk embroidered with pansies and a running vine of green. He greeted the visitor as one who would say, "Yes, it's a sad affair—wholly unexpected," and, cocking an eye of long-suffering negation on Ewing, he went out to the horses.
As they entered the studio Mrs. Laithe saw that the easel had been wheeled into the light from the big window and that a woman's portrait had been placed upon it. Had Ewing looked at her on the instant he might have detected that her face seemed to ripple under some wind of emotion. But his own eyes had been on the portrait.
"That's my mother," he said, unconsciously hushing his voice.
"I should have known it," she answered, with a kind of spurious animation. "The face is so much like yours. It is a face one seems to have known before, one of those elusive resemblances that haunt the mind. It is well done." She ended the speech glibly enough.
"She was beautiful. My father did it. He had that trick of color, as you call it, or he could never have painted her. She was so slight, but she had color. And she was quick and fiery. I used to see her rage when I was very small. I believed there were coals in her eyes, and that something blew on them inside to make them blaze. I wouldn't know what it was about, only that it wasn't us she raged at—not my father or me. I could go up and catch her hand even when she frightened me. And sometimes, after a while, my father would get excited, too. He was slower to take fire, but he burned longer. And at last she would become afraid and grow quiet herself and try to soothe him. I never could tell what they were at war with."
They looked in silence at the vivid young face on the canvas, a thin, daring, eager face, a face of delicate features, but strong in a perfect balance. The eyes were darkly alive.
"You were young when she died?" the woman asked at last.
"Too young to understand. I was eight, I think. There was a lot I shall never understand. Sometimes my father would tell me about their life here in the West, but never of the time before they came here. It always seemed to me that either he or she had quarreled with their people. They were poor when they came here. We lived in Leadville when I first remember. My mother sang in a church choir and made a little money and nights—you'll think this queer—my father played a piano in a dance hall. They had to live. Days, he painted. He had studied abroad in Paris and Munich, but he wasn't selling his pictures then. It took him years to do much of that. Sometimes they were hungry, though I didn't know it." He paused, overwhelmed by a sudden realization that he was talking much.
"Tell me more," she said very quietly. "I wish to hear the rest."