She decided, when she came out of the apartment building, that she would take a little walk. It was just cold enough to be exhilarating, and she felt the need of something bracing. She was wishing as she walked along very fast, responding to the keen, good air, that Karl were with her now.

Karl did not exercise enough, and when he did yield to her supplications and go for a walk with her he did not seem to enjoy it as she wished he might. "After a while, liebchen," he would say. "I'll be more accustomed to things after a while. And meanwhile there's plenty of fresh air right here in our back yard." "But it isn't just getting the fresh air," she would protest, "it's enjoying it while you're getting it."--"Wait till spring comes," he would sometimes answer. "I'm going to get out more then."

When she saw she was near one of the stations of the Illinois Central she stopped, a little confused. Could it be she had meant all the time to come here? Looking to the south, she saw that at the next station, not three blocks away, the train which would take her to the city in ten minutes was just arriving. The Art Inst.i.tute was only two blocks from the Van Buren Street station;--those facts a.s.sociated themselves quickly in her mind. She looked at her watch: not quite three. Karl had said he would be busy with Mr. Ross until five. She stood there in hesitation.

She had seen no pictures since--oh it was too long ago to remember. What harm could it do her? And anyway--this with something of the uprising of the truant child--it was Christmas time! Every one else was taking a vacation, why--but here it was all swept into the imperative consciousness that she had no time to lose, and she was at the ticket window before she was quite sure that she had made up her mind.

It was all so strange then; exhilaration mounted high for a little while, but there followed a very tense excitement. She tried to laugh at herself, contend that she was coming for enjoyment, relaxation, that it was absurd to go to pieces this way; but things long suppressed called for their own, and the man to whom she gave her admission fee wondered for a long time after she had pa.s.sed him just what it was about her seemed so strange.

How good it was! How good to be back among her own kind of things! In the laboratory every one knew more than she did; there she was repressed, humble even, gratefully accepting the crumbs of knowledge falling from their tables. It was good to feel for a little while that she was some place where she knew a great deal about things. She wished Mr. Willard or Mr. Beason would happen along that she might give them some insight into the colossalness of their ignorance.

She turned down the corridor leading to the room where she would find the special exhibit. She stopped before many of the pictures--reverting to that joy of the spirit in dominance. There was exultation, almost rapture, in this quick, firm rush of understanding; deep joy in just knowing the good from the bad.

But when she reached the pictures she had come to see it was different.

She walked to the middle of the room, and in one slow sweep of glance, punctuated with long pauses, took them in. And she responded to them with a warm, glad rush of tears.

They fell upon her artist's soul as the very lovely rain upon the thirsty meadow. They drew her to them as the mother the homesick child, and like the homesick child, back at last after weary days, she knew only that she had come home. In this first overflowing moment there was no thought of colour--brush work--this or that triumphant audacity; it was a coming to her own, a home-coming of the spirit--the heart's pa.s.sionate thankfulness, the heart's response.

A few minutes of reverent pause, a high delight, deep response, and then--the inevitable. Clear as a bell upon the midnight air was that call from soul to kindred soul. a.s.surance and longing and demand possessed her beyond all power to stay. The work she stood before now called to her as naturally and inevitably as the bird to its mate, as undeniably as the sea to the river, as potently as spring calls upon earth for its own, as autumn calls to summer for harvest time.

It frightened her. It seemed something within her over which she had no control. It surged through her as far beyond all reason as the tides of the sea are beyond the hand of man. It was procreative power demanding fulfillment as the child ready for birth demands that it be born.

She was conscious of some one's having come into the room. That her face might not be seen she turned away and sat down before one of the pictures. She was quivering so pa.s.sionately that it seemed almost impossible to hold herself within command.

The girl who had come in was moving restlessly from one picture to another; at last she walked over and sat down on the seat by Ernestine.

"I think I like this one best," she said, abruptly, nodding to the picture before them.

Ernestine nodded in reply. She was not sure what would happen were she to speak. The girl she supposed to be one of the students there.

"I would give anything in the world--just anything in the world--if I could do it too!"

At the pa.s.sion of that she turned quickly and looked at the girl. In spite of the real feeling of her tone a fretful look was predominant in her face.

"Do you--work hard?" she asked, merely to relieve the pause.

"Work--yes; but mere work won't do it. I can't do anything like this,"--it was in bitterness she said it.

"Very few can, you know," murmured Ernestine.

"Yes--but I want to! I don't care anything about life--I don't care anything about anything--if I can't paint!"

It struck her immediately as so entirely wrong. She looked at the girl, and then again at the pictures. All the great things they conveyed were pa.s.sing her by. She missed the essence of it. The greatness of the work merely moved her to anger because she was not great herself. It was an att.i.tude to close the soul.

"But you should care for life," she said, in her very gentle way. "Do the best you can with your own work, but work like this should, above everything else, make you care for life."

The girl moved impatiently. "You don't understand. I guess you are not an artist," and she rose and went away.

Ernestine smiled a trifle, but the strange little interview had opened up a long vista. The girl represented, in extreme measure, but fundamentally, the professional att.i.tude. Most artists saw work in relation to themselves. Pictures were either better or worse than they could do. They came to the great things like these, seeking something, usually some mechanical device, to take away to their own work. She could see so plainly now the shallowness of that.

Her own mood had changed,--broken. Perhaps it was the consciousness that she too had been seeing it in relation to herself, or it may have been but natural reaction. The big uprising was dying down; the heat of the pa.s.sion had pa.s.sed; it was all different now, and in the wake of her br.i.m.m.i.n.g moment there came the calm that follows storm, the sadness of spirit which attends the re-enthronement of reason, but also the understanding, far-seeingness, which is the aftermath of great pa.s.sion like that.

There had come to her, as she sat there beside the girl, a throbbing determination to do both things. The thought had come before, but always to be banished. It came now with new insistence just because anything else seemed so impossible. There had never come, even to the outermost edge of her consciousness, the thought of giving up the work she was going to do for Karl. Her hardest hour had never even suggested the possibility of surrender. Her love had seen its way; her life had been consecrated. But now, when it seemed no longer within her power to deny the work for which she had been ordained, it seemed that to fulfill both things was the one thing possible. But in this after-moment of unblurred understanding she saw she could do both things only by taking from the things she gave to Karl. It would mean giving her soul to the one, and what she had left to the other. And she knew that she could never do what she meant to do for Karl unless she gave everything within herself to that cause. The chief aim of her struggle in the laboratory had not been to acquire knowledge and usefulness--that she could do, she knew; her real aim had been to give to Karl's work the things she had always given to her own. With a divided soul she could do no more for him than any other a.s.sistant. She was seeking to give him herself. Oh no--it was simple enough; she had no thought of offering Karl an empty vessel.

Her mind saw it all, her will never wavered, but the bruised, conquered spirit quivered under the pain. A long time she sat there, and as the hour went by a strange thing happened. The pictures were healing the spirit which they had torn. As they had first moved her to the frenzy for achievement, had then left her with the pain of relinquishment, they were bringing her now something of the balm of peace. How big they were!--first pa.s.sion, then pain, then understanding, now strength.

Ernestine came in that hour to see a great truth. It was something she worked out for herself, something taught her by life and her own heart, and that is why it reached her soul as it could never have done had she but read it in books. She came to see that the greatest thing in life was to be in harmony with the soul of the world. She came into the understanding that to do that, one need not of necessity paint great pictures, one need not stand for any specific achievement, one need only so work out one's life that one made for harmony and not for discord. The greatest thing pictures could do was to draw men into this world harmony.

These pictures were great because they reached the soul, and she came to see, and this is what few do see, that the soul which is reached is not less great than the soul which has spoken. She too could have been one of the souls to speak; she accepted that in the simplicity with which we receive the indisputable, but it was good to think that she would not have failed utterly in fulfilling herself, if at the end, no matter through what, she made for harmony, and not for discord.

She grew so quiet then: the quiet of deep understanding. A long time she sat before a picture of light out beyond some trees. Oh what a world--with the light coming through the trees like that, and men to see it, and make it seen! She wished Karl might see these pictures; she looked at them with a new intentness,--she would tell Karl all about them; he would be so glad she had come.

She rose to go. Once more she looked around at the pictures, and to her eyes there came a dimness, and to her spirit a deep and tender yearning.

There would be joy in having done such work as this. But there were other things! To work out one's life as bravely and well as one knew how, to do what seemed best, to be faithful and unfailing to those who were nearest one, to be willing to lay down one's life for one's love,--perhaps when the end of the world was reached, and all things translated in terms of universal things, to have done that would itself mean the painting of a masterpiece. Perhaps the G.o.d of things as they are would see the unpainted pictures.

CHAPTER x.x.x

EYES FOR TWO

"This day smells as though it had been made in the country," Karl said, leaning from the dining room window which Ernestine had thrown wide open as she rose from the breakfast table.

"Yes, and looks that way," she responded, leaning out herself, and taking a long draught of the spring.

"Let's take a walk," he said abruptly.

"Except when you asked me to marry you--you never proposed a more delightful thing," she responded with gayer laugh than he had heard for a long time.

"Suppose we walk down through the park and take a look at the lake," he suggested.

"I call that a genuine inspiration!"--losing no time in getting Karl's things and her own.

Nothing could have pleased her more than this. It seemed beginning the spring right.

"I can fancy we are in Europe," he said, after they had gone a little way, and she laughed understandingly;--this seemed closer to the spirit of the old days than they had come for a long time.

Her guiding hand was on his arm, but more as if she liked to have it there, than as though necessary. "Your little finger could pilot me through Hades" he said, lovingly, gratefully, as a light touch told him of a step to go down, and again she laughed; it was very easy to laugh this morning.

The winter, full of hard things for them both, had gone now, and spring, as is spring's way, held promise. In the laboratory they no longer treated Ernestine with mere courteous interest. That day in December when she went down to Dr. Parkman's operation had marked a change. Since then there had been a light ahead, a light which shed its rays down the path she must go.

What did it matter if she were a little stupid about this or that, if Mr.

Beason was unconsciously rude or Mr. Willard consciously polite? For she _knew_ now--and did anything matter save the final things? With her own feeling of its not mattering their att.i.tude had seemed to change; she became more as one with them--she was quick to get that difference.

"You're arriving on the high speed," Dr. Parkman had a.s.sured her when he visited the laboratory a few days before.

So she knew why she was happy, for added to all that was it not a glorious and propitious thing that Karl felt like taking a walk? Did it not argue a new interest in life--a new determination not to be shut off from it? And Karl--why did he too seem to feel that the spring held new and better things? Was it just the call of spring, or did Karl sense the good things ahead? Could it be that her soul, unable to contain itself longer, had whispered to his that new days were coming?

"Why, even a fellow on his way to the penitentiary for life would have to get some enjoyment out of this morning," he said, after they had stood still for a minute to listen to the song of a bird, and had caught the sweetness of a flowering tree.

"And oh, Karl," she laughed, joyously, "you're _not_ on your way to the penitentiary for life."