Long before that time grandma had to weep alone over the will, for mother had married the young artist who had pitched his white umbrella tent all summer on the green slope of our orchard, and painted old “Blue” in its brooding stillness, and with its shifting shadows, and the beautiful vista of the river through our Norway pines.
An artist! The name savored of unconventionality to grandma, and of shiftlessness as well, to grandpa. But they gave in—to mother’s dimple—stern Uncle Horace said. He declared, furthermore, this severe relative of ours, that grandpa would never have been coerced by the dimple, if he had not been enfeebled in body and mind by his inveterate foe, asthma.
Grandma, we learned, as we grew up, was suspected of secretly favoring the match. She cried and feared that it was not marrying in the Lord, for the young artist had been reared in a different faith from ours; but,—dear grandma!—she loved a romance. Stories were not favored in those days, by the strictest of the sect to which we belonged, and grandpa was of the strictest. She read them privately, sometimes, with a deep sense of guilt. When, by great good fortune—and some one’s oversight—I found one in the Sunday-school library, she would ask me, with wistful eagerness, if it were “a pretty story.” And although I never saw her read it, she knew “how it ended” while I was still at the beginning.
I suppose it was a pretty story, a very pretty drama of human life, that was played before grandma’s eyes in that summer when Royce Dupont painted pictures on our orchard slope, and “leaf by leaf the rose of youth came back” to mother. And in spite of her religious misgivings—he had a bewildering veneration for the saints—and in spite of her loyalty to the dead, grandma had a furtive joy in it.
They were married in the autumn, and her artist husband took mother abroad with him, leaving the children, Cyrus and Octavia and me, to comfort and make things lively for grandpa and grandma. And our half-sister and half-brother were born in Paris. That is why Palmyra people will call them French children, although their father was an Englishman by birth and only from very remote ancestors was there a drop of French blood in his veins.
In less than five years mother came back widowed, to the Groundnut Hill farm, bringing with her Estelle and David, children of two and three. Cyrus was twelve by that time, and Octavia ten, and I was nine, a tall slip of a girl, loving my patchwork and my knitting, and to help Loveday stamp the butter, much better than I loved my book; and yet wrestling with many more problems than any one wot of under my sandy-thatched poll.
People said that I looked very much like my father, and perhaps that was why my mother clung to me with passionate, half-remorseful tenderness, and wished to take me with her when she married and went abroad.
Grandfather had set his face firmly against that. A vague impression remained with me, gathered, perhaps, from Loveday’s remarks, that he did not wish to give me over to my stepfather’s saints. I had seen his paintings of them, in strange robes of scarlet, violet and yellow; and Loveday had whispered darkly of idolatry, a phrase quite beyond my comprehension, but which made me cry in my bed at night for fear of the painted saints.
Loveday would read to me on Sunday afternoons about the homely fishermen who had left their nets upon the Galilean shores to follow in the footsteps of our Lord. She told me that these were the real saints, as they were on earth, and we could not hope to know how they looked in the blessed company beyond. I was comforted, but a horror of saints and of those who painted them remained with me for years.
I set down these childish vagaries because I think a story is only of value in so far as it is a transcript of real life, and I mean this to be as frank as if it were a diary, which no eyes but my own should ever see. And small things went far toward the shaping of character on Groundnut Hill—as they do everywhere in this dimly-apprehended scheme of things.