This letter will be enclosed to you in one from my lawyer, telling you the business side of my wishes. The heart side no one can tell. I swell with longing for your success, and happiness; and so good-bye.
The mother who never had a son, gains one in you. The painter who never was an artist, becomes one in you!
And so, dear, I am your happy
Mary Sidney and her boy exchanged a look. With unsteady hands Phil straightened the legal letter, and they read it together. Then they rose from the table with one accord.
Mrs. Fabian, wrapped in thought, looked up at the sudden movement.
Phil's concentrated gaze went past her to the fire, and he stood motionless, one hand leaning on the table, the other arm around his mother. Mary Sidney clasped the rustling paper to her breast. All the self-forgetfulness of mother-love shone in her wet eyes as she met Mrs. Fabian's questioning look.
"Isabel, I told you it would come," she said. "I told you we should know. The light is here. Phil is going to New York."
CHAPTER II
SEVERED COMPANIONSHIP
Eliza Brewster could count on the fingers of one hand the number of times that tears had escaped her pale eyes. She had always felt for those who wept easily, the same leniency without comprehension that she entertained for women who fainted.
Trials had come and gone in her life; but never, since the day when she discovered some boys maltreating her cat, had she shed such tears as flowed now in her sorrow. The cat's abbreviated tail bore witness still to that day's conflict, but both his wound and hers had healed.
When would this new wound cease to ache and palpitate! Each day there in the lonely flat, Eliza Brewster renewed war with the memories to which she had no mind to succumb. The gentleness of her mistress, her innocent, ever-springing hope, her constant disappointments, the solitariness of her narrow life, the neglect of her relatives – all these things recurred to the faithful handmaiden with the terrific appeal which contracts the newly bereft heart, causing it to bleed afresh. Mary Ballard, in spite of her twenty years' greater age, had been child as well as mistress to the faithful woman, who cared for the quiet, shy dreamer of dreams through the twenty-five years of the latter's widowhood.
Now Eliza's occupation was gone. All her rather hard philosophy, all her habitual self-possession, was swamped in a world where she could no longer call her dear one from the easel to her meals; and where the rooms of the little apartment grew spacious and echoed from sheer emptiness.
Mrs. Ballard had bequeathed her maid all her clothing, and all her personal possessions, save one old-fashioned diamond brooch, which was to be sent to her namesake, Mary Sidney. Some weeks before her death, she told Eliza of the disposition of her effects. In referring to the small gift of money which was to be hers, she said: —
"I wish it were more, Eliza, but," looking wistfully into the eyes of her companion, "I have a great mission for my little capital as I have told you. If only the amount were as great as the object!"
"Nonsense, talking about wills," rejoined Eliza brusquely, a new delicacy in the loved face making her tone sharp, "more likely I'll be leaving something to you; though I don't know what it would be, unless 'twas the cat."
Mrs. Ballard smiled. "Not a bad legacy," she replied. "Pluto is very sympathetic. He likes to watch me paint. He has really concluded to endure the smell of oil and turpentine just to keep me company."
At the moment the night-black cat was lifting green eyes of approval to his own portrait which stood near, and Mrs. Ballard buried a veined hand in his glossy fur. A few weeks later that hand was still. Oh, the dear garments with the outline of the wearer still warm in their curves! Who has not known the tender, overpowering anguish of their touch? Every day Eliza tried to systematize and pack her new belongings, and every day she postponed the ordeal until to-morrow.
Mrs. Ballard's watch alone stood on the table at the head of her bed, hanging in the little satin slipper just as it had ticked beside her mistress's sleeping form so many years. The watch seemed as alive as Pluto, and almost as much of a companion. It spoke eloquently of the gentle being who had always been unconscious of its warnings.
On the mantelpiece in the living-room, which had been studio as well, was Philip Sidney's photograph and his two sketches, one of his mother, and one of a storm-beaten tree. They were the two that Mary Sidney had sent in response to her aunt's gift in the summer-time. All three pictures were turned now to the wall. Mrs. Sidney was a relative. That stamped her for Eliza. The sketches had been either the vainglorious gift of a fond mamma, or else prompted by hope of the very result they had gained. As for the photograph of the artist, Eliza could not deny that it had marvellously cheered and companioned the last months of her dear one's life.
Indeed, in those days, recent yet already seeming so long past, Eliza, out in her kitchen, had often laughed grimly to herself at the infatuation for the picture shown by her mistress.
"If she was sixteen she couldn't be more head over heels in love," she would soliloquize. "I s'pose an artist has got to be just so stirred up by good looks, whether it's a landscape or a human; but I know I wouldn't trust a handsome man around the corner with a dog's dinner."
In pursuance of these reflections, when her mistress had gone, Phil's picture went with the sketches, his face to the wall.
Eliza's attitude toward the whole world was defiance on the subject of her mistress's lifework. Of course, Mrs. Ballard was an artist; a great artist. Eliza knew it must be so, there were so many of her pictures that she could not understand.
A canvas which was a blur to her contained so much which the painter would explain while Eliza stood devotedly by, dutifully assenting to the unravelling of the snarl of form and color.
"You don't care for it, do you, Eliza?" the artist would say sometimes, wistfully.
"Indeed, I do, Mrs. Ballard," would come the response, and never words rang more prompt and true. "I'm just one o' those folks so practical, I can't see an inch before my nose and I've never had advantages. I haven't got any insight, as you call it, beyond a dishpan; but when you explain it so clear, that's when I begin to see."
This latter was a loyal lie; as a rule, Eliza never did see; but she applauded just the same with vague murmurs of wonder and admiration.
It hurt the faithful soul even now to recall how, when the sketches came from the West, her mistress had eagerly examined them, and bitten her lip, her eyes glistening. "There's the true touch, Eliza," she had said quietly. "This boy has a spark of the divine fire."
"Pooh! I don't think so at all," Eliza had returned stoutly and contemptuously. "Of course, that drawin' of his mother is pleasant enough, but you haven't seen her in years. You don't know how good the likeness is; and as for that landscape, that rough twisted tree most blown off its feet and clouds racin' above those rocks, nobody'd ever think they was anything except just what they are, a tree and rocks and clouds; awful pokerish, I call it, not a bit pretty." Eliza's long nose lifted in scorn.
Mrs. Ballard smiled and bowed her head over the wind-blown tree.
"My flesh and blood, still," she murmured.
Now, in the dreary days, Eliza moved about aimlessly, forgetting to eat, and roused only by Pluto's indignant meows, to remember that, though he might mourn, still he felt that he owed it to himself to keep his coat glossy by milk baths, taken internally.
Never had he known such long luxurious naps in the lap of his mistress as now. Wrapped in thought she sat for hours without moving; the irrepressible tears welling up from her heart and creeping, one by one, down her thin cheeks.
She had made no friends in the cheap apartment building where they lived. It was a changing population, which ebbed and flowed at the mercy of its own financial tide.
"There ain't a lady in this house except you," Eliza had been wont to say to her mistress.
"I don't believe