“Oh, you men, how dreadfully stupid you are sometimes!” exclaimed Mrs. Blyth. “Why, Valentine, dear, it’s the easiest thing in the world to guess what she has had the drawing framed for. To make it a present to somebody, of course! And who does she mean to give it to?”
“Ah! who indeed?” interrupted Zack, sliding down cozily in his chair, resting his head on the back rail, and spreading his legs out before him at full stretch.
“I have a great mind to throw the drawing at your head, instead of giving it to you!” cried Mrs. Blyth, losing all patience.
“You don’t mean to say the drawing’s a present to me!” exclaimed Zack, starting from his chair with one prodigious jump of astonishment.
“You deserve to have your ears well boxed for not having guessed that it was long ago!” retorted Mrs. Blyth. “Have you forgotten how you praised that very drawing, when you saw it begun in the studio? Didn’t you tell Madonna—”
“Oh! the dear, good, generous, jolly little soul!” cried Zack, snatching up the drawing from the couch, as the truth burst upon him at last in a flash of conviction. “Tell her on your fingers, Mrs. Blyth, how proud I am of my present. I can’t do it with mine, because I can’t let go of the drawing. Here, look here!—make her look here, and see how I like it!” And Zack hugged the copy of the Venus de’ Medici to his waistcoat, by way of showing how highly he prized it.
At this outburst of sentimental pantomime, Madonna raised her head and glanced at young Thorpe. Her face, downcast, anxious, and averted even from Mrs. Blyth’s eyes during the last few minutes (as if she had guessed every word that could pain her, out of all that had been said in her presence), now brightened again with pleasure as she looked up—with innocent, childish pleasure, that affected no reserve, dreaded no misconstruction, foreboded no disappointment. Her eyes, turning quickly from Zack, and appealing gaily to Valentine, beamed with triumph when he pointed to the drawing, and smilingly raised his hands in astonishment, as a sign that he had been pleasantly surprised by the presentation of her drawing to his new pupil. Mrs. Blyth felt the hand which she still held in hers, and which had hitherto trembled a little from time to time, grow steady and warm in her grasp, and dropped it. There was no fear that Madonna would now leave the side of the couch and steal away by herself to the fireplace.
“Go on, Mrs. Blyth—you never make mistakes in talking on your fingers, and I always do—go on, please, and tell her how much I thank her,” continued Zack, holding out the drawing at arm’s length, and looking at it with his head on one side, by way of imitating Valentine’s manner of studying his own pictures. “Tell her I’ll take such care of it as I never took of anything before in my life. Tell her I’ll hang it up in my bed-room, where I can see it every morning as soon as I wake. Have you told her that?—or shall I write it on her slate? Hullo! here comes the tea. And, by heavens, a whole bagful of muffins! What!!! the kitchen fire’s too black to toast them. I’ll undertake the whole lot in the drawing academy. Here, Patty, give us the toasting-fork: I’m going to begin. I never saw such a splendid fire for toasting muffins before in my life! Rum-dum-diddy-iddy-dum-dee, dum-diddy-iddy-dum!” And Zack fell on his knees at the fireplace, humming “Rule Britannia,” and toasting his first muffin in triumph; utterly forgetting that he had left Madonna’s drawing lying neglected, with its face downwards, on the end of Mrs. Blyth’s couch.
Valentine, who in the innocence of his heart suspected nothing, burst out laughing at this new specimen of Zack’s inveterate flightiness. His kind instincts, however, guided his hand at the same moment to the drawing. He took it up carefully, and placed it on a low bookcase at the opposite side of the room. If any increase had been possible in his wife’s affection for him, she would have loved him better than ever at the moment when he performed that one little action.
As her husband removed the drawing, Mrs. Blyth looked at Madonna. The poor girl stood shrinking close to the couch, with her hands clasped tightly together in front of her, and with no trace of their natural lovely color left on her cheeks. Her eyes followed Valentine listlessly to the bookcase, then turned towards Zack, not reproachfully nor angrily—not even tearfully—but again with that same look of patient sadness, of gentle resignation to sorrow, which used to mark their expression so tenderly in the days of her bondage among the mountebanks of the traveling circus. So she stood, looking towards the fireplace and the figure kneeling at it, bearing her new disappointment just as she had borne many a former mortification that had tried her sorely while she was yet a little child. How carefully she had labored at that neglected drawing in the secrecy of her own room! How happy she had been in anticipating the moment when it would be given to young Thorpe; in imagining what he would say on receiving it, and how he would communicate his thanks to her; in wondering what he would do with it when he got it: where he would hang it, and whether he would often look at his present after he had got used to seeing it on the wall! Thoughts such as these had made the moment of presenting that drawing the moment of a great event in her life—and there it was now, placed on one side by other hands than the hands into which it had been given; laid down carelessly at the mere entrance of a servant with a tea-tray; neglected for the childish pleasure of kneeling on the hearth-rug, and toasting a muffin at a clear coal-fire!