To herself and to March, later and confidentially, Hetty spoke of it as “Hester glorified.” At times, she was almost afraid to look at it. It was the face of an infant, but an infant whose soul had outleaped the limitations of years. The filmy gold of her hair lay, cloudlike, about her, her perfectly molded hands were clasped in the fearless delight of ignorance as she leaned forward to welcome the enemy her custodian was ready to beat off. It was Hester in every lineament.
Even the baby knew it. But it was Hester as her brothers and sisters would never see her unless among the fadeless blossoms of the world where crooked things will be made straight.
March Gilchrist was not poetical except with his brush. It was his tongue, his song, his story. Through it Hetty Alling first learned to know him, yet they were never strangers after that earliest meeting in the orchard. She was a capital sitter, and he lingered over her portrait as he dared not over Hester’s for fear of wearying her. While Hetty posed, and he painted, May and Hester became warm friends. Miss Gilchrist had her own sketchbook, and March improvised an easel for it, which was attached to the wheeled chair, in desk fashion. Under May’s tutelage Hester made a study of apple blossoms, and another of plumy grasses which the overlooker praised with honest warmth, and promised to keep forever as souvenirs of the “pink-and-white week.” The robins were so used to the sight of the social group that they exchanged tender confidences freely overhead, as to summer plans and prospective birdlings. Thor’s massive bulk crushed, daily, the same area of sunny turf, and he may have had canine views as to the folly of working when the sun was warm and the sod softest. The orchard, where every tree was a mighty bouquet, was an impervious screen between the party and the streets and such windows as commanded the slope.
“It is paradise, with rows upon rows of shining, fluffy angels to keep out the rest of the world!” said Hester, on the afternoon of the last sitting. “I’m glad it is we who are inside! And not another soul!”
March was dabbling his brushes in a wide-mouthed bottle of turpentine, preparatory to putting them up.
“Nothing exclusive about her—is there?” he laughed to Hetty, in mock admiration.
She answered in the same vein:
“She was always an incorrigible aristocrat!”
“Say a beggarly aristocrat, and free your mind!” retorted Hester good-humoredly. “I don’t care who knows it. Who doesn’t prefer a select coterie to a promiscuous ‘crush’? I’d like to dig out this orchard just as I would a square of turf, and set it down in the middle of the South Seas (wherever they may be) where the trees wouldn’t shed their blossoms the whole year round, and we four—with the robins and Thor thrown in ornamentally—might paint and talk and live forever and a day. I used to wonder what answer I would make to the fairy who offered three wishes—but I am quite ready for her now. I’d fuse them all into one!”
“Are you sure? Going! Going! the last call! Gone!” cried March, bringing down his biggest brush, à la auctioneer’s hammer, upon Thor’s head.