V
PENELOPE AT HOME
Penelope, in the old sense, is no more! No mound of grass and daisies covers her; no shaft of granite or marble marks the place where she rests;—as a matter of fact she never does rest; she walks and runs and sits and stands, but her travelling days are over. For the present, in a word, the reason that she is no longer “Penelope,” with dozens of portraits and three volumes of “Experiences” to her credit, is, that she is Mrs. William Hunt Beresford.
As for Himself, he is just as much William Hunt Beresford as ever he was, for marriage has not staled, nor fatherhood withered, his infinite variety. There may be, indeed, a difference, ever so slight; a new dignity, and an air of responsibility that harmonizes well with the inch of added girth at his waist-line and the grey thread or two that becomingly sprinkle his dark hair.
And where is Herself, the vanished Penelope, you ask; the companion of Salemina and Francesca; the traveller in England, Scotland, Ireland, and Wales; the wanderer in Switzerland and Italy? Well, if she is a thought less irresponsible, merry, and loquacious, she is happier and wiser. If her easel and her palette are not in daily evidence, neither are they altogether banished from the scene; and whatever measure of cunning Penelope’s hand possessed in other days, Mrs. Beresford has contrived to preserve.
If she wields the duster occasionally, in alternation with the paint-brush and the pen, she has now a new choice of weapons; and as for models,—her friends, her neighbours, even her enemies and rivals, might admire her ingenuity, her thrift, and her positive genius in selecting types to paint! She never did paint anything beautifully but children, though her backgrounds have been praised, also the various young things that were a vital part of every composition. She could never draw a horse or a cow or an ox to her satisfaction, but a long-legged colt, or a newborn Bossy-calf were well within her powers. Her puppies and kittens and chickens and goslings were always admired by the public, and the fact that the mothers and fathers in the respective groups were never quite as convincing as their offspring,—this somehow escaped the notice of the critics.
Very well, then, what was Penelope inspired to do when she became Mrs. Beresford and left the Atlantic rolling between the beloved Salemina, Francesca, and herself? Why, having “crossed the sea and back” repeatedly, she found “the sit-fast acres” of the house of Beresford where she “left them” and where they had been sitting fast for more than a hundred years.
“Here is the proper place for us to live,” she said to Himself, when they first viewed the dear delightful New England landscape over together. “Here is where your long roots are, and as my roots have been in half a hundred places they can be easily transplanted. You have a decent income to begin on; why not eke it out with apples and hay and corn and Jersey cows and Plymouth Rock cocks and hens, while I use the scenery for my pictures? There are backgrounds here for a thousand canvases, all within a mile of your ancestral doorstep.”
“I don’t know what you will do for models in this remote place,” said Himself, putting his hands in his pockets and gazing dubiously at the abandoned farm-houses on the hillsides; the still green dooryards on the village street where no children were playing, and the quiet little brick school-house at the turn of the road, from which a dozen half-grown boys and girls issued decorously, looking at us like scared rabbits.
“I have an idea about models,” said Mrs. Beresford.
And it turned out that she had, for all that was ten years ago, and Penelope the Painter, merged in Mrs. Beresford the mother, has the three loveliest models in all the countryside!
Children, of course, are common enough everywhere; not, perhaps, as common as they should be, but there are a good many clean, well-behaved, truthful, decently-featured little boys and girls who will, in course of time, become the bulwarks of the Republic, who are of no use as models. The public is not interested in, and will neither purchase nor hang on its walls anything but a winsome child, a beautiful child, a pathetic child, or a picturesquely ragged and dirty child. (The latter type is preferably a foreigner, as dirty American children are for some reason or other quite unsalable.)
All this is in explanation of the foregoing remarks about Mrs. Beresford’s ingenuity, thrift, and genius in selecting types to paint. The ingenuity lay in the idea itself; the thrift, in securing models that should belong to the Beresford “sit-fast acres” and not have to be searched for and “hired in” by the day; and the genius, in producing nothing but enchanting, engrossing, adorable, eminently “paintable” children. They are just as obedient, interesting, grammatical, and virtuous as other people’s offspring, yet they are so beautiful that it would be the height of selfishness not to let the world see them and turn green with envy.
When viewed by the casual public in a gallery, nobody of course believes that they are real until some kind friend says: “No, oh, no! not ideal heads at all; perfect likenesses; the children of Mr. and Mrs. Beresford; Penelope Hamilton, whose signature you see in the corner, is Mrs. Beresford.”
When they are exhibited in the guise of, and under such titles as: “Young April,” “In May Time,” “Girl with Chickens,” “Three of a Kind” (Billy with a kitten and a puppy tumbling over him), “Little Mothers” (Frances and Sally with their dolls), “When all the World is Young” (Billy, Frances, and Sally under the trees surrounded by a riot of young feathered things, with a lamb and a Jersey calf peeping over a fence in the background), then Himself stealthily visits the gallery. He stands somewhere near the pictures pulling his moustache nervously and listening to the comments of the bystanders. Not a word of his identity or paternity does he vouchsafe, but occasionally some acquaintance happens to draw near, perhaps to compliment or congratulate him. Then he has been heard to say vaingloriously: “Oh, no! they are not flattered; rather the reverse. My wife has an extraordinary faculty of catching likenesses, and of course she has a wonderful talent, but she agrees with me that she never quite succeeds in doing the children justice!”
Here we are, then, Himself and I, growing old with the country that gave us birth (God bless it!) and our children growing up with it, as they always should; for it must have occurred to the reader that I am Penelope, Hamilton that was, and also, and above all, that I am Mrs. William Hunt Beresford.
Himself and I have gone through the inevitable changes that life and love, marriage and parenthood, bring to all human creatures; but no one of the dear old group of friends has so developed as Francesca. Her last letter, posted in Scotland and delivered here seven days later, is like a breath of the purple heather and brings her vividly to mind.
In the old days when we first met she was gay, irresponsible, vivacious, and a decided flirt,—with symptoms of becoming a coquette. She was capricious and exacting; she had far too large an income for a young girl accountable to nobody; she was lovely to look upon, a product of cities and a trifle spoiled.
She danced through Europe with Salemina and me, taking in no more information than she could help, but charming everybody that she met. She was only fairly well educated, and such knowledge as she possessed was vague, uncertain, and never ready for instant use. In literature she knew Shakespeare, Balzac, Thackeray, Hawthorne, and Longfellow, but if you had asked her to place Homer, Schiller, Dante, Victor Hugo, James Fenimore Cooper, or Thoreau she couldn’t have done it within a hundred years.