The San Rosario Ranch
visit her mother's country before she decided the important question of
where she should establish herself for life. The idea seemed a just one
to her; and acting on a tender impulse roused by the loving words of her
unknown brother, she had telegraphed her departure, and forthwith
started on her long journey accompanied by her capable French maid. The
Abigail discharged her trust faithfully, as far as San Francisco, from
which city she turned her face on the very day of her arrival, unwilling
to remain longer in what she called "_le plus triste pays du monde_."
If the truth could have been known, Millicent would have signed away ten
years of her life to have gone back with the woman to the Old World, the
only home she had ever known.
Graham had not been mistaken when he predicted to Millicent that she
would grow more in sympathy with the race from which she drew her
inheritance of character and temperament than at first seemed possible.
Nature is stronger than habit, well called second nature; and as the
surface roughness became familiar to her, she began to feel the strong
life and vigor of the young Western land quickening her pulses and
stimulating her whole being. The poverty of intellectual intercourse
was more than compensated by the tremendous power of work, the
electrical force which accomplishes so rapidly in this new land what in
other countries has been the slow growth of centuries.
An answering glow of enthusiasm flushed her with hope, with a keener,
fuller, more intense life than she had ever known before. She had clung
at first to her traditions, and fought against the tide which seemed to
be sweeping this people on and on and ever on. But nature was too
strong for habit; her upright, fearless mind acknowledged kinship with
these hard-working men and women, to whom pleasure is not save in toil,
whose whole life is one long unconscious sacrifice to their country. On
the eastern margins of our land the austere simplicity and purity have
become infested with plague-spots brought--ay, imported with care and
expense--from the Old World, and fostered like exotics on the clean
soil. But from the great Western prairie comes a fresh, strong breeze
which sweetens all the foulness of the Atlantic cities, and makes the
breath of Columbia still pure and fragrant.
With this new sentiment for her new-found country came the first
passionate love to the heart of the beautiful and unhappy young woman.
She had breathed the spicy air of the Californian forests, bracing and
sweet, and her cheek had grown fuller and fairer in the perfect climate.
Her empty, hollow heart was filled by a great love and strength,
all-sustaining and soothing.
When Graham had first seen her lying in the fire-light, with cool, deep
eyes, before the light of love had dawned in her flower face, she had
seemed to him like a perfect white rose. Then the rose flushed palely,
as the love-light trembled to a flame; and he brought her flowers of the
color of the sea-shells, and she wore them in her hair. Last of all, he
laid at her feet deep-red damask rosebuds; and these she placed on her
white breast, where they bloomed and died in a single night. He had
painted her by the waves, as he had once seen her on that strange day
when death had seemed so near and life so beautiful. He had painted her
standing at the sea edge with pallid roses in her little hands, her
graceful head set about with the same soft-hued flowers, and a single
crimson rose lying lightly over her heart. He had hung the sketch
against the wall where the sunlight fell upon it early in the morning;
and Millicent had bade him remember, while he slept or waked, that she
was near him.
CHAPTER XV.
"It cannot be that love so deep as mine
Could fail to stay you like ethereal wine."
When he first understood the full import of the dreadful story, John
Graham had been dazed with grief. He had sought distraction from his
torturing thoughts in action, and had spent that first day in wandering
through the forest. When he lay down to sleep that night in the lodge,
his heart was burdened with the double weight of Millicent's secret and
Millicent's deceit. He said to himself that they had put an insuperable
bar between her and himself. He could have pardoned the disgrace which
had befallen her, and was not her fault, but he could never forgive her
deceit toward him. The finding of her kerchief the next morning, and
the terrible apprehension which the blood-stain had aroused in him,
swept away the anger and sorrow from his heart, leaving nothing there
but an agonizing fear. This had been, in turn, banished by the joy of
finding her alive and unharmed, waiting for him amidst the roses. The
great fear had softened the anger in his heart; the sudden happiness
exalted his soul from the hell of anguish in which it had dwelt, into a
perfect and pure peace. Pride, anger, and resentment were swept away,
and love swayed him with its mastery. He knew her now, faulty as she
was; and his higher nature forgave her, because of her great love,
because of her great wrong. But in his stormy breast the tide of
feeling flowed and ebbed; pride had reigned there so long that love
could not all at once claim undisputed sway. He could not learn in an
instant that pride is born of hell, while love is breathed from heaven.
In that strange moment when their two beings had seemed etherealized, he
had forgiven her all; but in the days that followed, pride, doubt, and
prejudice came forward one by one to do combat with victorious love. It
might be that they would conquer in the struggle; it might even be that
pride, being selfish, should make him doubt and finally even forget
love, which is unselfish. But he had pardoned her, and loved her with
all her sins; he had acknowledged that bond of spirit which made them
one; he had knelt before her and kissed her feet in a passionless
embrace full of reverence. No matter what griefs should fall upon her,
no matter what deed or word of his might put them apart in this world,
she should carry through her life, and beyond it, the knowledge that
what was highest in him had leapt to meet her love, and acknowledged
that they belonged each to other for eternity.
John Graham awoke one morning to find himself possessed of a picture.
He had seen it between waking and sleeping, in the early hours of the
night, and it had haunted his dreams till sunrise. He heard the
wondrous carolling of the birds just before dawn, with a joy greater
than was his wont, for it heralded the day which should bring light for
his work. French John, coming in with his breakfast, for the first time
in his life entered and left the tower without word or look of greeting
from the artist, who, with bent brow and serious face, was sketching in
the first lines of his picture with a bit of white chalk. The
half-finished portrait of Mrs. Patrick Shallop looked at him with one
reproachful eye from the easel; but Graham paid no heed to the neglected
portrait; he was deeply engrossed in pursuing his thought and preserving
it in a tangible shape. It is a rare thing, in this age of the worship
of the golden calf, for the artist even to be absorbed in the love of
his profession. Of old, it seems that the sages and the sculptors
wrought and thought for the sake of art and learning, the spur of
ambition being all that was necessary to urge them forward. To-day the
goal toward which such men strive is a golden one, and the worship of
money is more in vogue than the pursuit of glory.
When artists sell their souls, brains, and talents to dealers, engaging
to deliver so many works of art in so many months, on such and such a
class of subjects, bargaining by the wholesale for the work which they
shall produce during the coming twelve-month, what wonder that the cry
of the connoisseur is, Too much technique, too little sentiment! "What
is sentiment?" one would ask such a babbler; is it a thing to be
measured off by the yard, or sold in canvases to suit traders, who feel
the pulse of the public, and if it is feverish give more stimulant, or
if it is fainting prescribe an anodyne? To such prostitution do these
men strive to degrade the arts, but in vain. Apollo's voice is still
stronger than the chink of doubloons; and there are those whose ears are
ever strained to catch his mystic music. The art trade, the literary
trade, may flourish luxuriantly, growing like weeds, with a rank
prodigality; but the flowers of art and literature, for all that, stand
serenely strong in the garden of our fair young world, growing day by
day in beauty and strength. Their blossoming may be rare in this day
and generation, but the plants are sound and full of a mighty sap.
Though John Graham was a man of the world, there was no taint of
worldliness about him; he knew the world, because he had lived somewhat
in it, but more, perhaps, because he had studied the lives of the
world's people. The painting of a picture was to him of more importance
than its sale; the conception of a work more than its accomplishment.
His enthusiasm was apt to wane as his picture neared completion. The
great glow with which the idea came to him kept him warm and interested
through all the stages of the crystallization of his thought; but when
the work was finished he ceased to prize it, and either threw himself
into a new composition, or patiently labored at uninteresting mechanical
work until he was again inspired. It was with difficulty that he could
be induced to sell his pictures; he would sometimes keep them before him
for years, waiting to alter some detail or to remedy some defect. His
friends, knowing his reluctance to part with them, were wont to wait
till they knew the artist to be in absolute need of funds, and then
quietly to walk away with the coveted picture, forcing him to accept its
price. A few people only in California understood or cared for his
landscapes, or the rare works of imagination which he produced; and it
was through his portraits that he was chiefly known. He felt in himself
an unfitness for this line of work; and had it not been for the sake of
his beloved mother, partially dependent on him, it is not likely that he
would ever have followed it. The reason was not far to seek why.
Graham did not succeed in that important branch of art: the individual
had little interest for him; men and women absorbed him less than
nature. Every tree and brooklet, dead forest leaf or purpled
thunder-cloud, held for him a lesson. Men and women seen from a
distance were more likely to interest him than those with whom he was
thrown in close contact. When their lives and actions were viewed in an
impersonal perspective, he understood them better, and often theorized
about them. His thoughts were oftener occupied with people of whom he
knew little than with his friends and intimates. To seek truth first
and beauty second, was his creed; but his life was not always guided by
that high rule; and the jack-o'-lantern beauty sometimes tempted him
from the pursuit of truth, leading him on long rambles over smiling
meads and into flower-hedged swamp lands. There would he lie undone,
angry and smarting from the thorns through which beauty had led him; and
then, turning his back upon her, would trudge earnestly along the road
which leads truthward. Millicent had once whispered to him that he
mistook two loving sisters for dread rivals, and that truth and beauty,
when truly seen, are found together; whereat Graham had looked full into
her eyes, long and steadily, and kissing her hand, with a sigh, had
spoken of other things.
Lying beside him on the floor, as he worked upon his newly imagined
picture, was a painting nearly finished, on which he had been working