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THE MASTER OF BERYL HEIGHTS
RUE to his word, Dr. Bard called
on Lynne next morning. She
boarded with a Mrs. Hammond,
the widow of a Confederate offi
cer, who had saved nothing out of
the late war but the handsome
home where she now lived, which
in happier years had been simply
her winter residence.
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The parlor into which Dr. Bard found him
self ushered, was furnished plainly, but taste
fully, and there was nothing in it to hint at
the magnificence once common to the family,
except the ancestral portraits on the walls and
some Bohemian vases on the high mantel. Al
together Dr. Bard decided, after he had taken
in the surroundings with experienced eyes for
a few minutes, that he felt pleased with
Lynne’s discretion in selecting such a quiet,
refined home. He did not see her landlady,
but he was sure she must be a trustworthy
woman, for Lynne spoke of her most kindly,
telling him how this delicate, high-bred wom
an had supported and educated four children
with the income from her home. And though
she was an ex-congressman’s daughter, she had
not scorned the necessity that often made her
both chamber maid and cook. After her home
and its owner had been thus pleasantly dis
cussed, Dr. Bard let his eyes linger on the fair
fine face of the girl as she sat opposite him,
the embodiment of unconscious grace, and he
said:
“Well, my child, this is not telling me about
yourself, though I am glad to find you with
such agreeable surroundings. Would you con
sider it an impertinence for me to ask what you
have been doing these two years since you left
us?”
“I thought you knew. lam teaching in the
high school here.”
“So, so, but I happen to be better informed
on that subject, it seems, than you are aware.
I believe you are not required to teach, even in
this soi-disant hub, longer than two o’clock.
And that would leave, let me see;” and he hes
itated a moment with mischievous intent, “five
hundred and twenty-two afternoons of leis
ure.”
“As a physician, don’t you think I should
have devoted this margin of my time to rest
and recuperation?”
“Assuredly, but all the same I know it has
not been so. A girl who was so ambitious that
she half killed herself to graduate at fifteen,
and afterward instead of trying to make a
grand match, went and scared up a mission
right under my benevolent nose, couldn’t have
missed the opportunity of doing something in
dividually extra, when she got off in a big city
like this by herself. Come, confess, I have seen
the editorial by the editor of the Eclectic, and
I know who the young author of the future is,
so graeicimly complimented and criticised, as
well as you do.”
“Then 1 suppose that it is no use for me to
deny that I have written a book.”
“None; when will your publishers get it
out?”
“It has been in the book-stores for sale a
fortnight.”
“Really? then as soon as I can go down
town and get one, I can have have the p'easure
of dissecting it.”
“And thou, too, Brutus?” she quoted with
a fearless smile.
“You began the work before you left Beryl
Heights, did you not?”
‘ ‘ Yes sir. ’ ’
“Who is the hero, Paul Gordon?”
“No, it is Dr. Bard.”
He laughed; and a moment later she turned
to him with winning grace.
“If you are so anxious to wear the purple
of an art critic,” she said, with a certain
By Odessa Strickland Payne, Author of the “Mission Girl”, “Esther Ferr all's Experiment 99 ,'Etc.
The Grolden Age for October 12, 1911.
charming uplifting of her eyebrows, “I can
furnish you with a subject now, if you will be
so kind as to go with me up stairs.”
“What is it?” he inquired as they arose and
passed through the parlor door.
“Precede me up stairs, and you shall be en
lightened.”
After the last landing, as he followed her
graceful lead through the upper hall, he said:
“Angels and ministers of grace defend us.
I hope it is not another book in manuscript.”
“Patience,” she replied, as she turned the
knob of a door on the right. There was noth
ing in the room which they entered except a
covered easel, and a table with paint brushes,
tubes and pallet lying on it in most pictur
esque confusion. Lynne glided past Dr. Bard
and took off the curtain, which concealed a
large picture—her first design in oils. She did
not tell him, but she had outlined it one night
when she could not sleep for memory’s bitter
moan over the days that were dead, and she
called it ‘Left Behind.’ First, there was a bar
ren coast that stretched along by a grey, mur
murless sea, in the distance the tender glory of
dawn that broke too far away to ever reach
the desolate shore you saw, but still reflected
in dream-like colors upon the white sails of a
stately ship, gliding on toward the golden east,
through the unrippling gloom of the waters.
On deck there was no sign nor stir of life, but
with his arm for a pillow, and a military cloak
for a covering, a man with a grand fair face
lay dead beneath the immobile cordage; and a
girl in black stood upon the sands, that the
day was not to illumine, with despair in her
eyes, “Left Behind.” Her power was not
more perceptible in the bold originality of con
ception, than in her peculiar treatment of the
subject. The ship, sailing on toward the radi
ance of another world, and the monotonous low
lying coast, an indifferent artist might have
painted. But the face of the man on deck,
strong, sweet and grand as that
of a young Norsegod, with that un
earthly rose-light kindling across its
dead fairness, hinted at some power in the
creative hand beyond ultra mechanism. But
her genius reached its highest expression in
the girl whom she had not represented as
kneeling with imploring hands outstretched
toward the receding vessel, in the old, exhaust
ed way of portraying grief, but the heroine of
her chef-d’oeuvre stood upon a broken rock in
a close-fitting, long shroud-like dress, knee
deep in the sea-weed, with a mantle wound
about the head, and clenched tightly by one.
gleaming ivory hand beneath the square chin.
The face thrown out in strong relief by the
cowl-like folds, appeared full of the patient,
white intensity of unspeakable anguish.
More pathetic, this awful, quiet, statuesque
grief, watching without sign the last glad hope
fade forever from view, than all the contor
tions of attitude and feature possible to a more
pathetic, but less grand despair.
Dr. Bard turned from the picture at last,
with moisture in his fine old eyes.
“Child,” he said, “have you universal
genius?”
“No. I don’t think I have any talent for
painting. It was simply the passion of my
grief which exalted me to this expression of
it.”
“May it exalt you to many more,” he re
turned heartily.
“It never will,” she said, half-sadly. “I
have painted my last picture.”
And she told the truth.
When Dr. Bard had left her, as he walked
back to his hotel through the heat and glare
of the noontide, he muttered to himself, per
plexedly :
‘ ‘ This morning I could have sworn she loved
Paul, but since I have seen that wonderful pic-
ture I feel as ready to declare that she loved
the cripple. Well, I guess,” with a soft
wheeze, “I’ll have to defer the problem to
Hester. She can enlighten me if she will —
only, as Aunt Philo says, it will be a ‘doubt
less speriment.”
But no one could have answered the ques
tion rightly except the girl herself, who as lit
tle as her friend suspected it, was living her
life out in the city in an isolation that was pro
foundly sad for one of her years. She had no
intimacies. She knew a number of people in
a general friendly way, but she had found no
friends to take the place Schiller and his moth
er left vacant. With the intellect of a Corinne,
and the soul of a Sappho, it was strange that
she should so often miss the appreciation of
others; but she bore it with a patience that
was very proud, a resignation that was almost
grand. A narrower nature would have been
dwarfed by the desolate circumstances of
such a destiny; but already she had won the
strength that comes from indulgence in pro
found and impersonal thought. And though
orphaned as she was, cut off from sympathy
and understanding, she accepted her fate with
out bitterness, because she had the royalty to
endure, the heroism to wait. But sometimes
the genius within awoke in passionate rebel
lion against the monotonous commonplace
ness of her existence, and she suffered then,
keenly and terribly as those do who will not
murmur. Was she indeed beyond the compre
hension of any other life? Was it quite im
possible that any one should understand her?
Schiller Gordon asleep where early summers
break to bloom, meant to her only a friend
dead, and yet it meant as well sometimes, de
spair. While she lived she would deplore his
loss; the bitterness of regret would always be
hers when she thought of him. Dying, he had
written her the note characteristic of him, and
which she alone perhaps could understand, and
often she read it when she thirsted for intel
lectual sympathy, and there was none to
whom she could go; read it, and longed to be
with him amid the palm shades of the eternal
summer. She longed for a friend who would
believe with her as he had in things uncompre
hended in the world’s philosophy, who would
allow a dreamer’s faith in the possibilities of
life for the doing of good. Ah, a friend in
deed! whose spirit has seen the light Goethe
motioned for in dying, who has found the
peace of the highest heights, who walks on to
ward the dark of the infinite, hopeful of men
because trusting in God. And so the heart of
the girl had found its only utterance without
peril to its sanctity in authorship—feeling al
ways that hungering outward from the barren
earth, and yet alone and unregarded, working
out her life’s young days. There is something
very mournful in the necessity of genius that
makes a young girl write, for the world is still
unchanged in cruelty, the world which as
sassinated a Chatterton and exiled a Dante.
And to the gifted among women it is even more
merciless, because it grants complacently the
“comparative respect, which means the abso
lute scorn.”
(To Be Continued.)
A BOON
For Busy Girls
THE GOLDEN AGE CIRCLE
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