The River's Children: An Idyl of the Mississippi

by Ruth McEnery Stuart

"Yes, he has made a sketch of it from memory, and I am sorry. Why? Oh, because I was sure at first that it was not correct, and now it has come to stand to me in place of the true picture, which has faded. It is a way with pictures if we let them over-ride us. Why, my grandmother in Boston has a friend who had his wife's portrait painted after she was lost at sea. He spent all the money he had to have it done by a 'best artist who had made a hasty sketch of her in life,' and when it came home he did not recognize it—really thought a mistake had been made. Then, seeing that it was she as authoritatively pictured, and that he had paid his all to get it, he bethought him to study it, hoping some day to find her in it. And so he did, gradually.

"He had it hung over his smoking-table, and every evening he scrutinized it until its insistence conquered. For a whole year he lived in the companionship of an absent wife as seen in an artist's mood (this last sentence is a direct quotation from my Boston grandmama, who is fond of the story). And—well, 'what happened?' Why, this: One day the woman came home. People 'lost at sea' occasionally do, you know. And would you believe it? Her widower—I mean to say her husband—refused to receive her. He did not know her! He simply pointed to the painting and shook his head. And if she hadn't been a person of resolution and resource,—descended from the Mayflower,—why, she would have had to go away. But she had her trunk brought in and quietly paid the expressman and took off her bonnet—and stayed. But it was an absurdly long time before her husband was wholly convinced that he was not the victim of an adventuress. And she says that even now he sometimes looks at her in a way she does not like.

"So, you see, we cannot always believe our own eyes, which are so easily tricked.

"Still, even knowing all this, we consent to be duped. Now I like the picture of the cabin, even while I regret it, and, although I know better, I accept it.

"What is truth, anyway? That is what you hear said so often in Boston, where we are said to try to make pivots of it for the wheels of all our little hobbies.

"'Do I like Boston?' Like Boston? No. I adore it! Oh, yes! But yet, when I am there, I am a little rebel. And at each place I am quite honest, I assure you. You see, I have a grandmother at both places—here and there. Such dears, they are—adorable, both, and so different!

"Yes, that is true. Papa's portrait, the one Mammy had in the cabin,—yes, we have it,—twice recovered from the river. My father offered a reward, and a man brought it out of the mud, a little way down the levee, and not seriously hurt. It is a funny little picture of papa at six, in a Highland costume, with his arm over a strange dog which belonged to the artist. He looks in the picture as if he were stuffed—the dog does; but papa denies that. I believe this same dog appeared in most of the portraits done by this man, in all of those of boys, at least. For the girls he supplied a cat, or occasionally a parrot. The bird was stuffed, I believe. He did my stepmother at five, and she holds the cat. The portraits hang side by side now. If we could find him, and the parrot, he should paint me, and we would start a menagerie.

"Oh, yes; going back to the subject, there are many little things which I remember, without a doubt, for I could never imagine them. For instance, I remember at least one of my baptisms—the last, I suppose. I know I was frightened because the minister shouted, and Mammy kept whispering to me that he wouldn't harm me; and then he suddenly threw water all over me and I bawled. No, I have no idea who he was; but it was out of doors, and there was a rooster in it someway. I suppose it was on the levee and the rooster came to see what was happening.

"There is a picture which always reminds me of the time we lived behind the woodpiles, that called 'The Soldier's Dream,' in which a poor fellow, asleep on the battle-field, sees dimly, as in the sky, a meeting between himself and his family.

"I am sure that while we sat on the levee and Mammy talked to me of papa's coming, I used to picture it all against the sunset sky. Just look at it now. Was anything ever more gorgeous and at the same time so tender? One could easily imagine almost any miracle's happening over there in the west.