In a week the picture was complete. My model and I went out and celebrated appropriately but frugally.
A small label in the corner gave the title to the picture—“My old Mammy.”
My friend gave my work a place in his window, and my acquaintances generally accorded unqualified praise. The older ones recognized Mammy at once.
Pending a purchaser for this, I started my deferred subject, and changed it into a figure piece. A lovely friend was my model. She contemplated the flowers and letters. Above the old piece of furniture on which she leaned there hung a photograph, a sword, and a sash—a more striking suggestion of my first title, “Dead Hopes.” How little I dreamed, as I worked, that there was such happy irony in the name, and that Mammy could ever, in the remotest way, conduce to such a result!
Nearly every morning I hovered about my friend's establishment at a sufficient distance to elude suspicion of my anxiety, but easily in visual range of my exhibit.
One morning it was not visible. I rushed to the store with a throbbing breast. Alas! the picture had only been shifted to another light. Before the revulsion of feeling had time to overpower me I was seized by my friend the merchant.
“It's a regular play,” he exclaimed.
He forced me to a seat on a pile of cheese-boxes, and facing me, began:
“Yesterday, the old lady,” pointing to the picture, “came in. She took no notice of her portrait, but said that she had failed to find you; that she was anxious to hear what you had done about the Bureau business.” (I had forgotten it utterly.) “Well, I could tell her nothing, and she started to go out just as a group opened the door to come in. Mammy made one of her courtly bows, and gave place. The young lady who was one of the three coming in, the others evidently her parents, said, in a loud whisper, 'Why, it's she!' Mammy, who either did not hear or did not understand, was about to pass out, when the young lady accosted her with, 'I beg your pardon, but isn't that your portrait?'
“'I grant you grace, young mistiss, but sence I looks, hit is. Hit wuz did by my young mahster, which he can do all kinds of pictures lovely.'