The Potter and the Clay: A Romance of Today

by Maud Howard Peterson

"What right had he to look for a woman's face in the foam?"

And the song of the sea was the song of death and dishonor. He might climb the crag to-day, and to-morrow, and every to-morrow of his life, and the song would not change. The sea was a vast organ; he could not change its tunes back to the old ones; he could not control it, and it went on, rolling out its fierce, deep music of dishonor.

And then he would leave the sea and the crags and go back into the empty house. The house was only a shade less bad; with its deserted rooms and its long gallery of dead and gone Campbells and Trevelyans.

He had wandered into the gallery once or twice. The faces on the canvases, grown indistinct with the years, seemed to look back at him without recognition that he was of their race and line. What claim had they on him or he on them? The men had been brave and the women fair—so the history and traditions of the house had said, even if the stiff painted figures and the severe painted faces often said otherwise—the men had always been in the front wherever they were needed for the defense of Scotland and her rights, and later they had defended England too. If they had not fought for her with the sword, they had with tongue or pen—if they had not been soldiers, they had been powers in the government or in the pulpit. Even the solemn-faced preacher near the big window at the furthest end of the gallery, when eloquence had failed, had left the old kirk to strike a blow for King Charlie. The women, too, had been brave—brave in the sacrifice of beauty and wealth for the upholding of Scottish rights, and the renouncing of husbands and lovers and sons for Scotland.

At the other side of the gallery hung his father's race—the Trevelyans; and opposite the solemn-faced preacher, near to the window where the sun struck it in the morning, was the picture of his mother. It had been taken of her in the first years of her marriage, soon after he had been born. People had said that, as a child, he had held his head proudly, like hers.

The grave, smiling eyes seemed to follow him as he turned hastily from the portrait. She had gloried in the traditions of her race; she had been proud—justly—of her line. He thanked God she was dead—that he might remember her as the portrait had painted her to be—on the flood tide of her love and her beauty and her strength.

There was the picture of his father, in his full regimentals. He had been years older than his wife, but how they had loved each other; how proud they had been of each other's race, and how proud they had been of him. He was glad that his father was traveling in the Far East and had not seen him or demanded explanations since his return. He would have been obliged to meet the questionings with silence. It was better so.

Between the two portraits hung one of himself as a child. How his father and mother had watched the growing of the portrait under the master's brush, waiting for its completion, that it might be hung in the gallery. It had been painted the year his mother had died—a year before he went to America. The artist had taken something of the grace and alertness of the great hound that had rested at the boy's feet and put it into the supple limbs of the boy himself. He had painted into the boy's eyes the reflection of the gray stormy sea, and had lent them something of the gray sea's strength.

And he had been like that as a child, with all the promise of a ripe manhood! And now that he had grown to be a man——

There was a long stretch of empty wall space next to the portrait of his father, and his father had once laughingly told him that his portrait should hang there, painted in uniform, when he had left Woolwich and won his spurs and returned after seeing service.