CHAPTER III

EVERGREEN AND CANDLELIGHT

After her marriage to Judge Ellis, Cousin Roxy had taken Ella Lou from Maple Lawn over to the big white house behind its towering elms.

“I’ve been driving her ten years and never saw a horse like her for knowingness and perspicacity,” she would say, her head held a little bit high, her spectacles half way down her nose. “I told the Judge if he wanted me he’d have to take Ella Lou too.”

So it was Ella Lou’s familiar white nose that showed at the hitching post the following morning when the Boston cousins came over to get acquainted.

Jean never forgot her introduction to Beth Newell. She was about forty-seven then, with her son Elliott fully five inches taller than herself, but she looked about twenty-seven. Her fluffy brown hair, her wide gray eyes, and quick sweet laughter, endeared her to the girls right away.

“And she’s so slim and dear,” Doris added. “Her dress makes me think of an oak leaf in winter, and she’s a lady of the meads.”

Elliott was about fifteen, not one single bit like his mother, but broad-shouldered and blonde and sturdy. It was so much fun, Kit said, to watch him take care of his mother.

“Where’s your High School out here?” he asked. “I’m at Prep. specializing in mathematics.”

“And how any son of mine can adore mathematics is beyond me,” Cousin Beth laughed. “I suppose it’s reaction. Do you like them, Jean?” She put her arm around the slender figure nearest her.

“Indeed, I don’t,” Jean answered fervently, and then all at once, out popped her heart’s desire before she could check the words. Anybody’s heart’s desire would pop out with Beth’s eyes coaxing it. “I—I want to be an artist.”

“Keep on wishing and working then, dear, and as Roxy says, if it is to be it will be.”

While the others talked of turning New England farms into haunts of ancient peace and beauty, these two sat together on the davenport, Jean listening eagerly and wistfully while her cousin told of her own girlhood aims and how she carried them out.

“We didn’t have much money, so I knew I had to win out for myself. There were two little brothers to help bring up, and Mother was not strong, but I used to sketch every spare moment I could, and I read everything on art I could find, even articles from old magazines in the garret. But most of all I sketched anything and everything, studying form and composition. When I was eighteen, I taught school for two terms in the country. Father had said if I earned the money myself, I could go abroad, and how I worked to get that first nest egg.”

“How much did you get a week?”

“Twelve dollars, but my board was only three and a half in the country, and I saved all I could. During the summers I took lessons at Ellen Brainerd’s art classes in Boston and worked as a vacation substitute at the libraries. You know, Jean, if you really do want work and kind of hunt a groove you’re fitted for, you will always find something to do.”

Jean was leaning forward, her chin propped on her hands.

“Yes, I know,” she said. “Do go on, please.”

“Ellen Brainerd was one of New England’s glorious old maids with the far vision and cash enough to make a few of her dreams come true. Every year she used to lead a group of girl art students over Europe’s beauty spots, and with her encouragement I went the third year, helping her with a few of the younger ones, and paying part of my tuition that way. And, my dear,” Cousin Beth clasped both hands around her knees and rocked back and forth happily, “we set up our easels in the fountain square in Barcelona and hunted Dante types in Florence. We trailed through Flanders and Holland and lived delightfully on the outskirts of Paris in a little gray house with a high stone wall and many flowers.”

“And you painted all those places?” exclaimed Jean. “I’ve longed and longed to go there.”

“Well, I tried to,” Cousin Beth looked ruefully at the fire. “Yes, I tried to paint like all the old masters and new masters. One month we took up this school and the next we delved into something else, studying everything in the world but individual expression.”

“That’s just what a girl friend of mine in New York wrote and said she was doing,” cried Jean, much interested.

“Then she’s struck the keynote. After your second cousin David came over and stopped my career by marrying me I came back home. We lived out near Weston and I began painting things of everyday life just as I saw them, the things I loved. It was our old apple tree out by the well steeped in full May bloom that brought me my first medal.”

“Oh, after Paris and all the rest!”

“Yes, dear. And the next year they accepted our red barn in a snowstorm. I painted it from the kitchen window. Another was a water color of our Jersey calves standing knee deep in the brook in June, and another was Brenda, the hired girl, feeding turkeys out in the mulberry lane. That is the kind of picture I have succeeded with. I think because, as I say, they are part of the home life and scenes I love best and so I have put a part of myself into them.”

“Durer’s heart’s blood,” Jean said softly. “You’ve helped me so much, Cousin Beth. I was just hungry to go back to the art school right now, and throw up everything here that I ought to do.”

“Keep on sketching every spare moment you can. Learn form and color and composition. Things are only beautiful according to the measure of our own minds. And the first of March I want you to visit me. I’ve got a studio right out in my apple orchard I’ll tuck you away in.”

“I’d love to come if Mother can spare me.” Jean’s eyes sparkled.

“Well, do so, child,” Cousin Roxy’s hands were laid on her shoulders from behind. “I’m going up too along that time, and I’ll take you. It’s a poor family that can’t support one genius.” She laughed in her full hearted, joyous way. “Now, listen, all of you. I’ve come to invite you to have Christmas dinner with us.”

“But, Cousin Roxy,” began Mrs. Robbins, “there are so many of us—”

“Not half enough to fill the big old house. Some day after all the girls and Billie are married and there are plenty of grandchildren, then we can talk about there being too many, though I doubt it. There’s always as much house room as there is heart room, you know, if you only think so. They’re going to have a little service for the children at the Center Church, Wednesday night, and Shad had better drive the girls over. Bring along the little lad too.” She smiled over her shoulder at Joe, seated in his favorite corner on the woodbox reading one of Doris’s books, and he gave a funny little onesided grin back in shy return. “Billie’s going away to school after New Year’s, did I tell you?”

“Oh, dear me,” cried Kit, so spontaneously that everyone laughed at her. “Doesn’t it seem as if boys get all of the adventures of life just naturally.”

“He’s had adventures enough, but he does need the companionship of boys his own size. Emerson says that the growing boy is the natural autocrat of creation, and I don’t want him to be tied down with a couple of old folks like the Judge and myself. You’re never young but once. Besides, I always did want to go to these football games at colleges and have a boy of mine in the mixup, bless his heart.”

“My goodness!” Kit exclaimed after the front door had closed on the last glimpse of Ella Lou’s white feet going down the drive. “Doesn’t it seem as if Cousin Roxy leaves behind her a big sort of glow? She can say more nice things in a few minutes than anybody I ever heard. Except about Billie’s going away. I wonder why he didn’t come down and tell me himself.”

“Well, you know, Kit,” Helen remarked, “you haven’t a mortgage on Billie.”

“Oh, I don’t care if he goes away. It isn’t that,” Kit answered comfortably. “I wouldn’t give a snap of my finger for a boy that couldn’t race with other fellows and win. Jean, fair sister, did you realize the full significance of Cousin Roxy’s invitation? No baking or brewing, no hustling our fingers and toes off for dinner on Christmas Day. I think she’s a gorgeous old darling.”

Jean laughed and slipped up the back stairs to her own room. It was too cold to stay there. A furnace was one of the luxuries planned for the following year, but during this first winter of campaigning, they had started out pluckily with the big steel range in the kitchen, the genial square wood heater in the sitting room and open fire places in the four large bedrooms and the parlor.

“We’ll freeze before the winter’s over,” Kit had prophesied. “Now I know why Cotton Mather and all the other precious old first settlers of the New England Commonwealth looked as if their noses had been frost bitten. Sally Peckham leaves her window wide open every night, and says she often finds snow on her pillow.”

But already the girls were adapting themselves to the many ways of keeping warm up in the hills. On the back of the range at night were soapstones heating through, waiting to be wrapped in strips of flannel and trotted up to bed as foot warmers.

Cousin Roxy had sent over several from her own store and told the girls if they ran short a flat iron or a good stick of hickory did almost as well. It was comical to watch their faces. If ever remembrance was written on a face it was on Helen’s the first time she took her soapstone to bed with her. Where were the hot water coils of yester year? Heat had seemed to come as if by magic at the big house at Shady Cove, but here it became a lazy giant you petted and cajoled and watched eternally to keep him from falling asleep. Kit had nicknamed the kitchen stove Matilda because it reminded her of a shiny black cook from Aiken, Georgia, whom the family had harbored once upon a time.

“And feeding Matilda has become one of the things that is turning my auburn tinted locks a soft, delicate gray,” she told Helen. “I know if any catastrophe were to happen all at once, my passing words would be, ‘Put a stick of wood in the stove.’”

Jean felt around in her desk until she found her folio of sketches. The sitting room was deserted excepting for Helen watering the rows of blooming geraniums on the little narrow shelves above the sash curtains. Cherilee, the canary, sang challengingly to the sunlight, and out in the dining-room Doris was outmatching him with “Nancy Lee.”

Helen went upstairs to her father, and Kit appeared with a frown on her face, puzzling over a pattern for filet lace.

“I think the last days before Christmas are terrible,” she exclaimed savagely. “What on earth can we concoct at this last minute for Cousin Beth? I think I’ll crochet her a filet breakfast cap. It’s always a race at the last minute to cover everybody, and you bite off more than you can chew and always forget someone you wouldn’t have neglected for anything. What on earth can I give to Judge Ellis?”

“Something useful,” Jean answered.

“I can’t bear useful things for Christmas presents. Abby Tucker says she never gets any winter clothes till Christmas and then all the family unload useful things on her. I’m going to send her a bottle of violet extract in a green leather case. I’ve had it for months and never touched it and she’ll adore it. I wish I could think of something for Billie too, something he’s never had and always wanted.”

“He’s going away,” Jean mused. “Why don’t you fix up a book of snapshots taken all around here. We took some beauties this summer.”

“A boy wouldn’t like that.”

“He will when he’s homesick.” Jean opened her folio and began turning over her art school studies. Mostly conventionalized designs they were. After her talk with Cousin Beth they only dissatisfied her. Suddenly she glanced up at the figure across the table, Kit with rumpled short curls and an utterly relaxed posture, elbows on table, knees on a chair. There was a time for all things, Kit held, even formality, but, as she loved to remark sententiously when Helen or Jean called her up for her lax ways, “A little laxity is permissible in the privacy of one’s own home.”

Jean’s pencil began to move over the back of her drawing pad. Yes, she could catch it. It wasn’t so hard, the ruffled hair, the half averted face. Kit’s face was such an odd mixture of whimsicality and determination. The rough sketch grew and all at once Kit glanced up and caught what was going on.

“Oh, it’s me, isn’t it, Jean? I wish you’d conventionalized me and embellished me. I’d like to look like Mucha’s head of Bernhardt as Princess Lointaine. What shall we call this? ‘Beauty Unadorned.’ No. Call it ‘Christmas Fantasies.’ That’s lovely, specially with the nose screwed up that way and my noble brow wrinkled. I like that. It’s so subtle. Anyone getting one good look at the helpless frenzy in that downcast gaze, those anguished, rumpled locks—”

“Oh, Kit, be good,” laughed Jean. She held the sketch away from her critically. “Looks just like you.”

“All right. Hang it up as ‘Exhibit A’ of your new school of expression. I don’t mind. There’s a look of genius to it at that.”

“One must idealize some,” Jean replied teasingly. She hung it on the door of the wall closet with a pin, just as Mrs. Robbins came into the room.

“Mother dear, look what my elder sister has done to me,” Kit cried tragically. Jean said nothing, only the color rose slowly in her cheeks as her mother stood before the little sketch in silence, and slipped her hand into hers.

“It’s the first since I left school,” she said, half ashamed of the effort and all it implied. “Kit looked too appealing. I had to catch her.”

“Finish it up, girlie, and let me have it on the tree, may I?” There was a very tender note in the Motherbird’s voice, such an understanding note.

“Oh, would you like it, really, Mother?”

“Love it,” answered Mother promptly. “And don’t give up the ship, remember. Perhaps we may be able to squeeze in the spring term after all.”