“I’ve got to have it for Dave,” she said, simply, and she hugged her portfolio of drawings as if therein lay all her hopes.
“I’ve been thinking, Estelle; there is my money in the bank,” I stammered. For even in the stress of hard times I had been able to save a little; my jellies, especially the quince, would always bring their price.
I had hesitated about offering it to pay such debts as Dave had incurred. I inherited the true New England thrift, along with the Partridge nose; moreover it seemed to me better for him to shoulder the burden himself. He had brought quite enough trouble upon others. But before Estelle’s troubled face I weakened.
“I will let Dave have that,” I said.
“He wouldn’t take it! I wouldn’t let him!” she said, almost defiantly; and then her mood softened suddenly. “Dear old Bashie! I know how good it is of you!” she said. “And you must think I’m horribly full of vanity if I can’t bear to be told that my drawings are not good. But it isn’t vanity—scarcely at all vanity. That is,” she added, “of course it hurts. I think it must be like having one’s own children ill-treated. But it is chiefly because I want to be independent, and just now I must help Dave. No, no, Bathsheba, we couldn’t take your money; that would be worse than the shipyard!” The little shiver of repugnance that shook her slender frame made me realize, as I had not done before, how keenly she felt Dave’s disgrace and hardships.
She looked at me meditatively for a moment. I understood afterward, that she had been weighing my critical capacities and, perhaps, trying to have a little faith in them.
“Come with me, Bathsheba,” she said, at length. And I followed her, wondering, up the attic stairs. It was cold; so cold that our breath went before us in little whiffs like smoke. Cyrus almost always had a fire in a little cylinder stove in his den, but the rest of the great attic was filled with the winter’s bitter cold, as with a tangible presence.
In one corner was a screen made of a clothes-horse hung with an old, moth-eaten shawl that our great-aunt, Abby Tewksbury, who was a missionary, had brought from India. It seemed that they had not realized, in Palmyra, the value of an India shawl, for moth and mildew had marked it for their own, and yet the dull, rich colors still showed in the sunlight that flooded the great room. Behind the screen I saw with surprise that Estelle had fitted up a rough little studio for herself and on a clumsy easel was a painting, nearly finished.
It was a landscape, a bit of river—it might be our river—with an old mud-scow and a group of children on the bank. In the background was a mountain, misty about its top; it might be old “Blue.” It was really a picture; it looked to me as if Herr Barmfeld himself might have painted it, and my heart thrilled.
“It’s really a river!” I cried. “And such a pretty blue, and the trees are so lovely on the bank! But instead of the mud-scow and the children I think I would have had a pretty boat and a lady with a parasol. Nothing looks so pretty on the water as a lady with a parasol! Then, I think you might really sell it.”