CHAPTER III.
New Orleans is pre-eminent among the cities of the New World for more than one reason. Certain characteristics more European than American are here found, and the mingling of the ceremonious politeness of the French people with the just and liberal spirit of the American has brought about a code of manners superior to that either of France or of our purely American cities. Deference to women still obtains, and the chivalrous attitude of men toward them has not diminished, as in so many parts of our country it has done, in proportion as laws, social and municipal, leave less room for oppression of what is so often called the "weaker sex." Is the phrase a satire, and to-day is the balance of power in the hands of men, or women?
For quaint houses no city in the United States—nay, I had almost said in the world,—can rival New Orleans. The dear queer, rickety little one-story tenements, with rude red terra-cotta tiles and wide eaves leaning over to the edge of the narrow banquette (a "side-walk" is an unknown term in the Crescent City), and the high dark Spanish buildings, with mysterious passages leading to hidden courts,—one hesitates to say which are the most attractive. To Margaret Ruysdale, sculptor, from the North, whose native New England town was anything but picturesque, the choice of habitation had been a difficult one. For days she had wandered about the streets of the older portion of the city looking at houses of all degrees.
One morning as she started on her search she stopped suddenly before a small house which she had passed perhaps a hundred times, and had never seen before. It stood on a wide thoroughfare, which boasted a green ribbon of turf, running through its middle like a cool, verdant river bordered by two rows of trees. The large, pretentious dwellings on either side of the little house seemed to be anxious to elbow their humbler neighbor out of sight. It stood back a dozen feet from the street, and with an effort at self-effacement hid its modest front behind two straight tall magnolia-trees standing on either side of the door. When one did at last obtain a sight of the house, the only wonder was that one had ever looked at anything else in all the wide pleasant street. It was a very low wooden building, of a dull, unaggressive tint of pearl gray, a story and a half in height. A piazza, ran across the front, with delicately carven pillars and lattice-work. The narrow doorway was flanked by quaint side-lights, through which it was impossible to catch a glimpse of the interior. Overhead, two gable windows leaned gravely over the piazza roof, strewn with leaves fallen from the magnolias. It seemed an ideal dwelling for a maiden, quiet, retired, and yet linked with the busy life of the city, from which it seemed to draw modestly back. Three days later the Ruysdales were settled in the little house, whose interior proved in every way as attractive as Margaret had fancied it to be. Beside the main building there was a large airy room in the rear, which was soon converted into a studio; this was detached, and stood at some distance from the house in a pleasant garden shut, in from the thoroughfare in the rear by a high iron fence of very beautiful workmanship. Cunning artificers in iron New Orleans has known, and his must have been a master-hand which moulded the convolvulus vine and flowers twisting about the sheaves of ripe corn in the garden rail. And what a garden it was, with its many tinted roses, one sort for every month in the year, its thick bed of violets all abloom in these first days of February!
Two months have passed since General Stuart Ruysdale and his daughter came to New Orleans,—the former in search of health, the latter to bear him company. Stuart Ruysdale was not a general in rank; but the loss of his strong right arm in the war had won for him that title with his fellow-townspeople. He had lost more than his right arm in that terrible struggle,—he had lost his health and strength; and he remained for the rest of his days a broken, disappointed man.
When at the breaking out of the Civil War he had been given the commission of captain in a volunteer regiment, Ruysdale had already made some reputation as a sculptor. He had loved his profession with all the passion of a fervent artistic nature springing up in a community where art exists only in its embryonic phase. He had deemed it his mission to nourish that love of the beautiful which is latent in the hearts of men, and to develop sculpture, the greatest of the arts, in his native country, from which he held that all that is best must be evolved, and into which it cannot be imported.
His good right arm had been smitten off, his whole body was maimed and disabled, when, four years later, he came back to Woodbridge at the head of his broken regiment. In his deserted studio he found the tools he could never use again; but in the bitterness of that hour he made a resolve that the power within him should not rest unrevealed, that another hand should give shape to the creations of his brain. The son for whose birth he prayed and looked should be but a finer tool through which his genius should animate the bronze and marble of his native land. He had reckoned, as so many of us do, without his host; for no son was born to him, only a small daughter, who blinked blindly in his face and put out her wee hands to grasp him on the day when her mother died, a month after her birth. Stuart Ruysdale was a man with an iron will. Fate had beaten him at every bout so far, but yield he would not. Son or daughter, his child should be a sculptor; and thus it was that the girl whom Philip Rondelet had met at the house of Mrs. Darius Harden was vowed from her birth a priestess of the plastic art. From her babyhood she had been given wax and clay to model; and, to the passionate delight of her father, the child showed an unusual aptitude for the profession to which he had dedicated her. Her education had been carried on entirely to this end; and at twenty, Margaret Ruysdale had certainly produced uncommonly good work for so young a sculptor. Her father's strong conceptions, growing more delicate in passing through the medium of her mind, were to the man like the children of some dear dead child, dearer to him than his own child had been, because of the suffering that had gone before. Margaret loved her profession and her father, the only two things given her to love, with all the strength of her young heart. The two passions were so blended that the serving of the one meant for her the service of the other. There was none of that strife between love and work which vexes so many a woman's life, making the work seem at times a sin, and the love too great a sacrifice.
On a certain soft February afternoon, when the air which stirred the roses outside the studio door was cool and brilliantly pure, Margaret sat at her work while her father, sitting near her, read aloud. The girl had abandoned the bas-relief she had been modelling, and was moulding a bird's nest, to the delight of a small negro child seated at her feet.
"How many eggs, General?" whispered Margaret. The child, a son of the cook, had been baptized General Jackson.
"Three, missy," said the baby, holding up the requisite number of fat black fingers.
"'When Angelo heard of the proposed alterations in his plans.'—are you paying attention, Margaret?"
"Yes, papa." (Sotto voce) "That 's the mother bird, General." Inarticulate admiration from General Jackson.
"'He left Florence in the greatest haste, and repaired to Rome, where he solicited an interview with the Pope—'"
"Where shall I put the mother bird?" whispers Margaret.
"On de eggs," answers General Jackson, in the same low voice.
"But that will hide the eggs," objects Margaret.
"Margaret, what are you whispering to that child about? Can't you send him away?"
"Yes, papa. Be still, General, can't you?" very severely.
"'He found the Holy Father much inclined to coincide with his views, and the difficulties would have been easily smoothed over had it not been for the mischievous intriguing of a certain cardinal—'"
"See, General, there 's the father bird."
"He must have a worm," insisted the child.
"I see there is no use in trying to interest you in Michael Angelo to-day, Margaret. You seem to find that black child vastly more important."
"He is n't quite so remote, papa, and to-day I am rather in a mood for the present; and General Jackson means the present, don't you, General?"
"Yes, missy."
Stuart Ruysdale put the book down, and with a half-impatient sigh came and stood beside the two culprits. General Jackson looked rather shy, and beat a hasty retreat under Margaret's chair. The young sculptor added the worm to the small bill of the father bird, and placed him in an appropriate attitude by the edge of the nest. Then she laughed.
"Why, you little stupid thing, the birds are not out of the shells yet. What does the father bird bring the worm for?"
"For de mudder," answered the child promptly, with a shrewd glance at General Ruysdale's sober face.
"Is n't he bright, papa?"
"I suppose so, my child; but have you been modelling playthings all day, when your Atalanta is in such a condition?"
Margaret rose, and standing on tiptoe, kissed her father's careworn forehead, mutely asking forgiveness for a neglected duty.
Both the generals soon left her; and when Philip Rondelet, now a frequent visitor at the house, came into the studio half an hour later, he found Margaret standing at the window with her bird's nest in her hand, looking out into the deepening afternoon sky. He stood watching her a few minutes before he spoke.
"Mademoiselle, what troubles you? You are sad this afternoon."
"Ah! is it you? I am so glad you have come. I am full of unrest to-day, and it always does me good to see you in these moods," said Margaret, giving him her hand, and forgetting the trace of clay still clinging to it. "Forgive my working woman's hands," she added, with a blush.
"I have always noticed," answered Rondelet, still holding the small firm fingers in his grasp and examining them curiously, "that women who use their hands have a curious false shame at any trace of their work being detected. Coming upon you at your modelling, how could I expect to find your hands like Mrs. Darius Harden's jewelled fingers, white and cared for, lying idly in your lap?"
"Yours are so white, I almost doubt if they ever work."
Rondelet laughed rather uneasily, and changed the conversation.
"You have not answered my question. Why are you troubled and restless to-day?"
"I do not know; I feel a sort of tumult in my blood,—almost a rebellion against existence. And yet I am well and happy, if it is happiness to be without a grief or a care."
"You live too much among your marbles; they chill you."
"But I am feverish, not chilled. I want to be young. My youth is slipping from me, and yet my life is as old and cold as if I carried half a century of years on my shoulders. Is it my fate or my nature which compels me to put all my life and love into this wet clay, which absorbs more and more of me each day, and puts me farther and farther from my kind? I want youth and sunlight and foolish gayety. Take me somewhere where there is something young!"
She spoke passionately, and threw down her little modelling tool with a gesture of aversion. Rondelet, who had learned to know Margaret Ruysdale very well, had never seen her in such a humour as this; and for the first time since he had met her he found it impossible to understand her, facile as he was in taking the impress of her thoughts and feelings. He looked at her, doubtful, embarrassed, not knowing what to say next; and in that moment of hesitation a shadow fell between them,—a third person had entered the studio. Margaret was looking appealingly into Philip's face. He had helped her so often with his quick sympathy, could he not devise something to soothe this new mood, incomprehensible to herself as it was to him? His delicate fair face flushed painfully beneath her gaze, but he had nothing to say.
The man who had just come in greeted Rondelet and Margaret with a silent bow, and then stood leaning against the door-post, looking at the sculptor with inquiring eyes. Margaret answered the unspoken question with a shake of her head.
"No, I do not need your services as a model to-day, Mr. Feuardent; it is too late to begin to work. Besides, I am very tired of work; if you could take a new rôle, now, and help me to play a little."
"To play?—why, willingly; that is the easiest thing in the world for me. Take off your apron and come; we will go to the fête at the fairgrounds and amuse ourselves with the people. Come, it is a glorious afternoon."
Margaret hastily unfastened and laid aside the long straight blue apron which hid all the pretty curves of her small elastic figure.
"Will they be young and happy and alive?" she asked.
"We will make them so," answered Feuardent, with a ringing laugh. "If you and I cannot stir them up to-day, they must be cold people indeed."
Margaret answered with a full peal of merriment, and danced away to the house, pausing a moment to toss General Jackson in her strong arms.
The two men left together in the studio presented a striking contrast of types. Rondelet, who was well over middle height, looked almost short beside Robert Feuardent, whose great size raised him above the heads of other men. So perfect were his proportions that he always had the effect of dwarfing other people rather than of towering above them. He was a younger man than his companion, and could not have seen more than twenty-five years. His head, which he habitually held rather high, was small and of a Greek mould, and was finely set upon the broad shoulders by a round smooth throat, beautiful as a woman's. His complexion was of the color of a late autumn peach which has hung long upon the tree and acquired a bronze tinge, through which the red shows with a splendid warmth of color. Thick eyebrows, which looked as if they might frown ominously, arched a pair of eyes fearless, open, and with a certain savage beauty, like those of some untamed creature of the woods. His thick dark-brown hair was without curl, but looked full of life and electricity, as did the small mustache which hid the upper lip. When he laughed and showed his small, even, white teeth, the impression of a wild, untamed being was deepened; it was such a hearty, unconventional laugh, they were such firm, dangerous-looking white teeth. Margaret Ruysdale had told him once that his civilization was only a sham; that he only masqueraded in broadcloth, and that his proper dress would be a suit of skins.
To the young artist, accustomed to intercourse with people of her own profession and way of thought, this simple natural man, with few broad traits of character and strong instincts and prejudices, was a constant wonder and amusement. She had understood him instinctively, as Joachim might understand the simple instrument of the Egyptian Fellaheen, two strings stretched over a gourd. But to the peasant musician, the Stradivarius of the master would be a thing of mystery and awe.
So Margaret Ruysdale was to Robert Feuardent a perfect enigma. Her delicate, complex nature, fine and strong, impressed him very much. He could not fail to admire her, but neither could he understand her.
Day after day he had sat by and listened while Margaret worked on her bas-relief and conversed with his friend Philip Rondelet of things as foreign to Robert Feuardent as art is foreign to nature.
It was his turn to-day. Rondelet was left outside, wondering and not understanding, and he, Feuardent, had caught the spirit and the meaning of Margaret's mood, as a dark mountain lake reflects the image of the maiden moon. When Robert was sure that Margaret was out of ear-shot, he said in a low voice,—
"I say, Philip, what does Atalanta mean, anyhow?"
The young physician smiled, and answered, in a tone not quite free from irony,—
"My dear fellow, that's a difficult question. It has puzzled wiser people than you or me. The story goes that many a poor fellow lost his head, in more ways than one, in trying to find out what Atalanta did mean. It's a riddle. Give it up—that 's my advice."
"I never was good at riddles," Robert answered gravely, not without a suspicion that his friend was laughing at him. Philip saw this in his face; and repenting his first impulse to chaff his less erudite friend, was about to enlighten him on the subject of Atalanta's identity, when Robert cried out, "Good-by, Rondelet, I see she is ready;" and waving his hand to Philip, he ran to meet Margaret, who at that moment appeared on the gallery. Without a word of farewell, Margaret turned, and in a joyous mood sprang down the garden path, with Robert at her side. The iron wicket shut behind them with a sharp snap, and Rondelet was left alone. As he walked toward the house, he heard a shrill cry of grief. General Jackson had broken his bird's nest, and was shrieking inconsolably.
"Bring it here, my boy; I will mend it for you," said Philip. Taking up a morsel of wet clay, he repaired the toy; and warning the child not to play with it till the sun had hardened it, he turned into the house to seek for General Ruysdale.