Somers rode slowly over the low Iowa hills, fitting an air in his mind to Andrew Lang\'s dainty verses. Presently, being quite alone on the country road, he began to sing:
"In dreams doth he behold her,
Still fair and kind and young."
The gentle strain of melancholy and baffled desire faded into silence, but the young man\'s thoughts pursued it. A memory of his own that sometimes stung him, sometimes plaintively caressed him, stirred in his heart. "I am afraid you hit it, Andy," he muttered, "and I should have found it only a dream had I won."
At thirty Somers imagined himself mighty cynical. He consorted with daring critics, and believed the worst both of art and letters. He was making campaign cartoons for a daily journal instead of painting the picture of the future; the panic of \'93 had stripped him of his little fortune, and his sweetheart had refused to marry him. Therefore he said incessantly in the language of Job, "I do well to be angry."
The rubber tires revolved more slowly as his eyes turned from the wayside to the smiling hills. The corn ears were sheathed in silvery yellow, but the afternoon sun jewelled the green pastures, fresh as in May, for rain had fallen in the morning, and maples, oaks and elms blended exquisite gradations of color and shade here and there among the open fields. Long rows of poplars recalled France to Somers and he sighed. "These houses are all comfortable and all ugly," thought the artist. "I never saw anything less picturesque. The life hasn\'t even the dismal interest of poverty and revolt, for they are all beastly prosperous; and one of the farmers has offered me a hundred dollars and my expenses to come here and make a pastel of his wife. And I have taken the offer because I want to pay my board bill and buy a second-hand bicycle. The chances are he is after something like a colored photograph, something slick and smooth, and every hair painted—Oh, Lord! But I have to have the money; and I won\'t sign the cursed thing. What does he want it for though? I wonder, did he ever know love\'s dream? Dream? It\'s all a dream—a mirage of the senses or the fancy. Confound it, why need I be harking back to it? I must be near his house. House near the corner, they said, where the roads cross. Ugh! How it jumps at the eyes."
The house before him was yellow with pea-green blinds; the great barns were Indian red; the yard a riot of color from blooming flowers.
Somers wheeled up to the gate and asked of the old man who was leaning upon the fence where Mr. Gates lived.
"Here," said the old man, not removing his elbows from the fence bar.
"And, may I ask, are you Mr. Gates?" said Somers.
"Yes, sir. But if you\'re the young man was round selling \'Mother, Home and Heaven,\' and going to call again to see if we liked it, we don\'t want it. My wife can\'t read and we\'re taking a Chicago paper now, and ain\'t got any time."
Somers smiled. "I\'m not selling anything but pictures," said he, "and I believe you want me to make one for you."
"Are you Mr. Somers, F. J. S.?" cried the farmer, his face lighting in a surprising manner. "Well, I\'m glad to see you, sir. My wife said you\'d come this afternoon and I wouldn\'t believe her. I\'m always caught when I don\'t believe my wife. Come right in. Oh, did you bring your tools with you?"
He guided Somers into the house and into a room so dark that he stumbled.
"There\'s the sofy; set down," said Gates, who seemed full of hospitable cheer. "I\'ll get a blind open. Girl\'s gone to the fair and Mother\'s setting out on the back piazza, listening to the noises on the road. She\'s all ready. Make yourself to home. Pastel like them pictures on the wall\'s what I want. My daughter done them." His tone changed on the last sentence, but Somers did not notice it; he was drinking in the details of the room to describe them afterwards to his sympathizing friends in Chicago.
"What a chamber of horrors," he thought, "and one can see he is proud of it." The carpet was soft to the foot, covered with a jungle of flowers and green leaves—the pattern of carpet which fashion leaves behind for disappointed salesmen to mark lower and lower until it shall be pushed into the ranks of shopworn bargains. The cheap paper on the wall was delicately tinted, but this boon came plainly from the designers, and not the taste of the buyer, since there was a simply terrible chair that swung by machinery, and had four brilliant hues of plush to vex the eye, besides a paroxysm of embroidery and lace to which was still attached the red ticket of the county fair. More embroidery figured on the cabinet organ and two tables, and another red ticket peeped coyly from under the ornate frame of a pastel landscape displaying every natural beauty—forest, mountain, sunlit lake, and meadow—at their bluest and greenest. There were three other pictures in the room, two very large colored photographs of a lad of twelve and of a pretty girl who might be sixteen, in a white gown with a roll of parchment in her hand tied with a blue ribbon; and the photograph of a cross of flowers.
The girl\'s dark, wistful, timid eyes seemed to follow the young artist as he walked about the room. They appealed to him. "Poor little girl," he thought, "to have to live here." Then he heard a dragging footfall, and there entered the mistress of the house. She was a tall woman who stooped. Her hair was gray and scanty, and so ill-arranged on the top of her head that the mournful tonsure of age showed under the false gray braid. She was thin with the gaunt thinness of years and toil, not the poetic, appealing slenderness of youth. She had attired herself for the picture in a black silken gown, sparkling with jet that tinkled as she moved; the harsh, black, bristling line at the neck defined her withered throat brutally. Yet Somer\'s sneer was transient. He was struck by two things—the woman was blind, and she had once worn a face like that of the pretty girl. With a sensation of pity he recalled Andrew Lang\'s verses; inaudibly, while she greeted him he was repeating:
"Who watches day by day
The dust of time that stains her,
The griefs that leave her gray,
The flesh that still enchains her,
Whose grace has passed away."
Her eyes were closed but she came straight toward him, holding out her hand. It was her left hand that was extended; her right closed over the top of a cane, and this added to the impression of decrepitude conveyed by her whole presence. She spoke in a gentle, monotonous, pleasant voice. "I guess this is Mr. Somers, the artist. I feel—we feel very glad to have the honor of meeting you, sir."
No one had ever felt honored to meet Somers before. He thought how much refinement and sadness were in a blind woman\'s face. In his most deferential manner he proffered her a chair. "I presume I am to paint you, madam?" he said.
She blushed faintly. "Ain\'t it rediculous?" she apologized. "But Mr. Gates will have it. He has been at me to have somebody paint a picture of me ever since I had my photograph taken. It was a big picture and most folks said it was real good, though not flattering; but he wouldn\'t hang it. He took it off and I don\'t know what he did do to it. \'I............