One day, Adrienne looked up from a sheaf of his very creditable
landscape studies to inquire suddenly: "Samson, are you a rich man, or a poor one?"
He laughed. "So rich," he told her, "that unless I can turn some of
this stuff into money within a year or two, I shall have to go back to
hoeing corn."
She nodded gravely.
"Hasn't it occurred to you," she demanded, "that in a way you are
wasting your gifts? They were talking about you the other evening
--several painters. They all said that you should be doing portraits."
The Kentuckian smiled. His masters had been telling him the same
thing. He had fallen in love with art through the appeal of the skies
and hills. He had followed its call at the proselyting of George
Lescott, who painted only landscape. Portraiture seemed a less-artistic
form of expression. He said so.
"That may all be very true," she conceded, "but you can go on with
your landscapes, and let your portraits pay the way. With your entrée,
you could soon have a very enviable clientèle."
"'So she showed me the way, to promotion and pay,
And I learned about women from her,'"
quoted Samson with a laugh.
"And," she added, "since I am very vain and moderately rich, I hereby
commission you to paint me, just as soon as you learn how."
Farbish had simply dropped out. Bit by bit, the truth of the
conspiracy had leaked, and he knew that his usefulness was ended, and
that well-lined pocketbooks would no longer open to his profligate
demands. The bravo and plotter whose measure has been taken is a broken
reed. Farbish made no farewells. He had come from nowhere and his going
was like his coming.
* * * * * Sally had started to school. She had not announced that she meant to
do so, but each day the people of Misery saw her old sorrel mare making
its way to and from the general direction of Stagbone College, and they
smiled. No one knew how Sally's cheeks flamed as she sat alone on
Saturdays and Sundays on the rock at the backbone's rift. She was
taking her place, morbidly sensitive and a woman of eighteen, among
little spindle-shanked girls in short skirts, and the little girls were
more advanced than she. But she, too, meant to have "l'arnin'"--as much
of it as was necessary to satisfy the lover who might never come. It
must be admitted that learning for its own sake did not make a clarion-
tongued appeal to the girl's soul. Had Samson been satisfied with her
untutored, she would have been content to remain untutored. He had said
that these things were of no importance in her, but that was before he
had gone forth into the world. If, she naïvely told herself, he should
come back of that same opinion, she would never "let on" that she had
learned things. She would toss overboard her acquirements as ruthlessly
as useless ballast from an over-encumbered boat. But, if Samson came
demanding these attainments, he must find her possessed of them. So
far, her idea of "l'arnin'" embraced the three R's only. And, yet, the
"fotched-on" teachers at the "college" thought her the most voraciously
ambitious pupil they had ever had, so unflaggingly did she toil, and
the most remarkably acquisitive, so fast did she learn. But her studies
had again been interrupted, and Miss Grover, her teacher, riding over
one day to find out why her prize scholar had deserted, met in the road
an empty "jolt-wagon," followed by a ragged cortège of mounted men and
women, whose faces were still lugubrious with the effort of recent
mourning. Her questions elicited the information that they were
returning from the "buryin'" of the Widow Miller.