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<h2>The Wizard's Touch</h2> <h3 class="sc2">by Alice Brown</h3> Jerome Wilmer sat in the garden, painting in a background, with the carelessness of ease. He seemed to be dabbing little touches at the canvas, as a spontaneous kind of fun not likely to result in anything serious, save, perhaps, the necessity of scrubbing them off afterwards, like a too adventurous child. Mary Brinsley, in her lilac print, stood a few paces away, the sun on her hair, and watched him. "Paris is very becoming to you," she said at last. "What do you mean?" asked Wilmer, glancing up, and then beginning to consider her so particularly that she stepped aside, her brows knitted, with an admonishing, "Look out! you'll get me into the landscape." "You're always in the landscape. What do you mean about Paris?" "You look so—so travelled, so equal to any place, and Paris in particular because it's the finest." Other people also had said that, in their various ways. He had the distinction set by nature upon a muscular body and a rather small head, well poised. His hair, now turning gray, grew delightfully about the temples, and though it was brushed back in the style of a man who never looks at himself twice when once will do, it had a way of seeming entirely right. His brows were firm, his mouth determined, and the close pointed beard brought his face to a delicate finish. Even his clothes, of the kind that never look new, had fallen into lines of easy use. "You needn't guy me," he said, and went on painting. But he flashed his sudden smile at her. "Isn't New England becoming to me, too?" "Yes, for the summer. It's over-powered. In the winter Aunt Celia calls you 'Jerry Wilmer.' She's quite topping then. But the minute you appear with European labels on your trunks and that air of speaking foreign lingo, she gives out completely. Every time she sees your name in the paper she forgets you went to school at the Academy and built the fires. She calls you 'our boarder' then, for as much as a week and a half." "Quit it, Mary," said he, smiling at her again. "Well," said Mary, yet without turning, "I must go and weed a while." "No," put in Wilmer, innocently; "he won't be over yet. He had a big mail. I brought it to him." Mary blushed, and made as if to go. She was a woman of thirty-five, well poised, and sweet through wholesomeness. Her face had been cut on a regular pattern, and then some natural influence had touched it up beguilingly with contradictions. She swung back, after her one tentative step, and sobered. "How do you think he is looking?" she asked. "Prime." "Not so—" "Not so morbid as when I was here last summer," he helped her out. "Not by any means. Are you going to marry him, Mary?" The question had only a civil emphasis, but a warmer tone informed it. Mary grew pink under the morning light, and Jerome went on: "Yes, I have a perfect right to talk about it, I don't travel three thousand miles every summer to ask you to marry me without earning some claim to frankness. I mentioned that to Marshby himself. We met at the station, you remember, the day I came. We walked down together. He spoke about my sketching, and I told him I had come on my annual pilgrimage, to ask Mary Brinsley to marry me." "Jerome!" "Yes, I did. This is my tenth pilgrimage. Mary, will you marry me?" "No," said Mary, softly, but as if she liked him very much. "No, Jerome." Wilmer squeezed a tube on his palette and regarded the color frowningly. "Might as well, Mary," said he. "You'd have an awfully good time in Paris." She was perfectly still, watching him, and he went on: "Now you're thinking if Marshby gets the consulate you'll be across the water anyway, and you could run down to Paris and see the sights. But it wouldn't be the same thing. It's Marshby you like, but you'd have a better time with me." "It's a foregone conclusion that the consulship will be offered him," said Mary. Her eyes were now on the path leading through the garden and over the wall to the neighboring house where Marshby lived. "Then you will marry and go with him. Ah, well, that's finished. I needn't come another summer. When you are in Paris, I can show you the boulevards and cafés." "It is more than probable he won't accept the consulship." "Why?" He held his palette arrested in mid-air and stared at her. "He is doubtful of himself—doubtful whether he is equal to so responsible a place." "Bah! it's not an embassy." "No; but he fancies he has not the address, the social gifts—in fact, he shrinks from it." Her face had taken on a soft distress; her eyes appealed to him. She seemed to be confessing, for the other man, something that might well be misunderstood. Jerome, ignoring the flag of her discomfort, went on painting, to give her room for confidence. "Is it that old plague-spot?" he asked. "Just what aspect does it bear to him? Why not talk freely about it?" "It is the old remorse. He misunderstood his brother when they two were left alone in the world. He forced the boy out of evil associations when he ought to have led him. You know the rest of it. The boy was desperate. He killed himself." "When he was drunk. Marshby wasn't responsible." "No, not directly. But you know that kind of mind. It follows hidden causes. That's why his essays are so good. Anyway, it has crippled him. It came when he was too young, and it marked him for life. He has an inveterate self-distrust." "Ah, well," said Winner, including the summer landscape in a wave of his brush, "give up the consulship. Let him give it up. It isn't as if he hadn't a roof. Settle down in his house there, you two, and let him write his essays, and you—just be happy." She ignored her own part in the prophecy completely and finally. "It isn't the consulship as the consulship," she responded. "It is the life abroad I want for him. It would give him—well, it would give him what it has given you. His work would show it." She spoke hotly, and at once Jerome saw himself envied for his brilliant cosmopolitan life, the bounty of his success fairly coveted for the other man. It gave him a curious pang. He felt, somehow, impoverished, and drew his breath more meagrely. But the actual thought in his mind grew too big to be suppressed, and he stayed his hand to look at her. "That's not all," he said. "All what?" "That's not the main reason why you want him to go. You think if he really asserted himself, really knocked down the spectre of his old distrust and stamped on it, he would be a different man. If he had once proved himself, as we say of younger chaps, he could go on proving." "No," she declared, in nervous loyalty. She was like a bird fluttering to save her nest. "No! You are wrong. I ought not to have talked about him at all. I shouldn't to anybody else. Only, you are so kind." "It's easy to be kind," said Jerome, gently, "when there's nothing else left us." She stood wilfully swaying a branch of the tendrilled arbor, and, he subtly felt, so dissatisfied with herself for her temporary disloyalty that she felt alien to them both: Marshby because she had wronged him by admitting another man to this intimate knowledge of him, and the other man for being her accomplice. "Don't be sorry," he said, softly. "You haven't been naughty." But she had swung round to some comprehension of what he had a right to feel. "It makes one selfish," she said, "to want—to want things to come out right." "I know. Well, can't we make them come out right? He is sure of the consulship?" "Practically." "You want to be assured of his taking it." She did not answer; but her face lighted, as if to a new appeal. Jerome followed her look along the path. Marshby himself was coming. He was no weakling. He swung along easily with the stride of a man accustomed to using his body well. He had not, perhaps, the urban air, and yet there was nothing about him which would not have responded at once to a more exacting civilization. Jerome knew his face,—knew it from their college days together and through these annual visits of his own; but now, as Marshby approached, the artist rated him not so much by the friendly as the professional eye. He saw a man who looked the scholar and the gentleman, keen though not imperious of glance. His visage, mature even for its years, had suffered more from emotion than from deeds or the assaults of fortune. Marshby had lived the life of thought, and, exaggerating action, had failed to fit himself to any form of it. Wilmer glanced at his hands, too, as they swung with his walk, and then remembered that the professional eye had already noted them and laid their lines away for some suggestive use. As he looked, Marshby stopped in his approach, caught by the singularity of a gnarled tree limb. It awoke in him a cognizance of nature's processes, and his face lighted with the pleasure of it. "So you won't marry me?" asked Wilmer, softly, in that pause. "Don't!" said Mary. "Why not, when you won't tell whether you're engaged to him or not? Why not, anyway? If I were sure you'd be happier with me, I'd snatch you out of his very maw. Yes, I would. Are you sure you like him, Mary?" The girl did not answer, for Marshby had started again. Jerome got the look in her face, and smiled a little, sadly. "Yes," he said, "you're sure." Mary immediately felt unable to encounter them together. She gave Marshby a good-morning, and, to his bewilderment, made some excuse about her weeding and flitted past him on the path. His eyes followed her, and when they came back to Wilmer the artist nodded brightly. "I've just asked her," he said. "Asked her?" Marshby was about to pass him, pulling out his glasses and at the same time peering at the picture with the impatience of his near-sighted look. "There, don't you do that!" cried Jerome, stopping, with his brush in air. "Don't you come round and stare over my shoulder. It makes me nervous ad the devil. Step back there—there by that mullein. So! I've got to face my protagonist. Yes, I've been asking her to marry me." Marshby stiffened. His head went up, his jaw tightened. He looked the jealous ire of the male. "What do you want me to stand here for?" he asked, irritably. "But she refused me," said Wilmer, cheerfully. "Stand still, that's a good fellow. I'm using you." Marshby had by an effort pulled himself together. He dismissed Mary from his mind, as he wished to drive her from the other man's speech. "I've been reading the morning paper on your exhibition," he said, bringing out the journal from his pocket. "They can't say enough about you." "Oh, can't they! Well, the better for me. What are they pleased to discover?" "They say you see round corners and through deal boards. Listen." He struck open the paper and read: "'A man with a hidden crime upon his soul will do well to elude this greatest of modern magicians. The man with a secret tells it the instant he sits down before Jerome Wilmer. Wilmer does not paint faces, brows, hands. He paints hopes, fears, and longings. If we could, in our turn, get to the heart of his mystery! If we could learn whether he says to himself: "I see hate in that face, hypocrisy, greed. I will paint them. That man is not man, but cur. He shall fawn on my canvas." Or does he paint through a kind of inspired carelessness, and as the line obeys the eye and hand, so does the emotion live in the line?'" "Oh, gammon!" snapped Wilmer. "Well, do you?" said Marshby, tossing the paper to the little table where Mary's work-box stood. "Do I what? Spy and then paint, or paint and find I've spied? Oh, I guess I plug along like any other decent workman. When it comes to that, how do you write your essays?" "I! Oh! That's another pair of sleeves. Your work is colossal. I'm still on cherry-stones." "Well," said Wilmer, with slow incisiveness, "you've accomplished one thing I'd sell my name for. You've got Mary Brinsley bound to you so fast that neither lure nor lash can stir her. I've tried it—tried Paris even, the crudest bribe there is. No good! She won't have me." At her name, Marshby straightened again, and there was fire in his eye. Wilmer, sketching him in, seemed to gain distinct impulse from the pose, and worked the faster. "Don't move," he ordered. "There, that's right. So, you see, you're the successful chap. I'm the failure. She won't have me." There was such feeling in his tone that Marshby's expression softened comprehendingly. He understood a pain that prompted even such a man to rash avowal. "I don't believe we'd better speak of her," he said, in awkward kindliness. "I want to," returned Wilmer. "I want to tell you how lucky you are." Again that shade of introspective bitterness clouded Marshby's face. "Yes," said he, involuntarily. "But how about her? Is she lucky?" "Yes," replied Jerome, steadily. "She's got what she wants. She won't worship you any the less because you don't worship yourself. That's the mad way they have—women. It's an awful challenge. You've got a fight before you, if you don't refuse it.". "God!" groaned Marshby to himself, "it is a fight. I can't refuse it." Wilmer put his question without mercy. "Do you want to?" "I want her to be happy," said Marshby, with a simple humility afar from cowardice. "I want her to be safe. I don't see how anybody could be safe—with me." "Well," pursued Wilmer, recklessly, "would she be safe with me?" "I think so," said Marshby, keeping an unblemished dignity. "I have thought that for a good many years." "But not happy?" "No, not happy. She would—We have been together so long." "Yes, she'd miss you. She'd die of homesickness. Well!" He sat contemplating Marshby with his professional stare; but really his mind was opened for the first time to the full reason for Mary's unchanging love. Marshby stood there so quiet, so oblivious of himself in comparison with unseen things, so much a man from head to foot, that he justified the woman's loyal passion as nothing had before. "Shall you accept the consulate?" Wilmer asked, abruptly. Brought face to face with fact, Marshby's pose slackened. He drooped perceptibly. "Probably not," he said. "No, decidedly not." Wilmer swore under his breath, and sat, brows bent, marvelling at the change in him. The man's infirmity of will had blighted him. He was so truly another creature that not even a woman's unreasoning championship could pull him into shape again. Mary Brinsley came swiftly down the path, trowel in one hand and her basket of weeds in the other. Wilmer wondered if she had been glancing up from some flowery screen and read the story of that altered posture. She looked sharply anxious, like a mother whose child is threatened. Jerome shrewdly knew that Marshby's telltale attitude was no unfamiliar one. "What have you been saying?" she asked, in laughing challenge, yet with a note of anxiety underneath. "I'm painting him in," said Wilmer; but as she came toward him he turned the canvas dexterously. "No," said he, "no. I've got my idea from this. To-morrow Marshby's going to sit." That was all he would say, and Mary put it aside as one of his pleasantries made to fit the hour. But next day he set up a big canvas in the barn that served him as workroom, and summoned Marshby from his books. He came dressed exactly right, in his every-day clothes that had comfortable wrinkles in them, and easily took his pose. For all his concern over the inefficiency of his life, as a life, he was entirely without self-consciousness in his personal habit. Jerome liked that, and began to like him better as he knew him more. A strange illuminative process went on in his mind toward the man as Mary saw him, and more and more he nursed a fretful sympathy with her desire to see Marshby tuned up to some pitch that should make him livable to himself. It seemed a cruelty of nature that any man should so scorn his own company and yet be forced to keep it through an allotted span. In that sitting Marshby was at first serious and absent-minded. Though his body was obediently there, the spirit seemed to be busy somewhere else. "Head up!" cried Jerome at last, brutally. "Heavens, man, don't skulk!" Marshby straightened under the blow. It hit harder, as Jerome meant it should, than any verbal rallying. It sent the man back over his own life to the first stumble in it. "I want you to look as if you heard drums and fife," Jerome explained, with one of his quick smiles, that always wiped out former injury. But the flush was not yet out of Marshby's face, and he answered, bitterly, "I might run." "I don't mind your looking as if you'd like to run and knew you couldn't," said Jerome, dashing in strokes now in a happy certainty. "Why couldn't I?" asked Marshby, still from that abiding scorn of his own ways. "Because you can't, that's all. Partly because you get the habit of facing the music. I should like—" Wilmer had an unconsidered way of entertaining his sitters, without much expenditure to himself; he pursued a fantastic habit of talk to keep their blood moving, and did it with the eye of the mind unswervingly on his work. "If I were you, I'd do it. I'd write an essay on the muscular habit of courage. Your coward is born weak-kneed. He shouldn't spill himself all over the place trying to put on the spiritual make-up of a hero. He must simply strengthen his knees. When they'll take him anywhere he requests, without buckling, he wakes up and finds himself a field-marshal. Voilà!" "It isn't bad," said Marshby, unconsciously straightening. "Go ahead, Jerome. Turn us all into field-marshals." "Not all," objected Wilmer, seeming to dash his brush at the canvas with the large carelessness that promised his best work. "The jobs wouldn't go round. But I don't feel the worse for it when I see the recruity stepping out, promotion in his eye." After the sitting, Wilmer went yawning forward, and with a hand on Marshby's shoulder, took him to the door. "Can't let you look at the thing," he said, as Marshby gave one backward glance. "That's against the code. Till it's done, no eye touches it but mine and the light of heaven." Marshby had no curiosity. He smiled, and thereafter let the picture alone, even to the extent of interested speculation. Mary had scrupulously absented herself from that first sitting; but after it was over and Marshby had gone home, Wilmer found her in the garden, under an apple-tree, shelling pease. He lay down on the ground, at a little distance, and watched her. He noted the quick, capable turn of her wrist and the dexterous motion of the brown hands as they snapped out the pease, and he thought how eminently sweet and comfortable it would be to take this bit of his youth back to France with him, or even to give up France and grow old with her at home. "Mary," said he, "I sha'n't paint any picture of you this summer." Mary laughed, and brushed back a yellow lock with the back of her hand. "No," said she, "I suppose not. Aunt Celia spoke of it yesterday. She told me the reason." "What is Aunt Celia's most excellent theory?" "She said I'm not so likely as I used to be." "No," said Jerome, not answering her smile in the community of mirth they always had over Aunt Celia's simple speech. He rolled over on the grass and began to make a dandelion curl. "No, that's not it. You're a good deal likelier than you used to be. You're all possibilities now. I could make a Madonna out of you, quick as a wink. No, it's because I've decided to paint Marshby instead." Mary's hands stilled themselves, and she looked at him anxiously. "Why are you doing that?" she asked. "Don't you want the picture?" "What are you going to do with it?" "Give it to you, I guess. For a wedding-present, Mary." "You mustn't say those things," said Mary, gravely. She went on working, but her face was serious. "It's queer, isn't it," remarked Wilmer, after a pause, "this notion you've got that Marshby's the only one that could possibly do? I began asking you first." "Please!" said Mary. Her eyes were full of tears. That was rare for her, and Wilmer saw it meant a shaken poise. She was less certain to-day of her own fate. It made her more responsively tender toward his. He sat up and looked at her. "No," he said. "No. I won't ask you again. I never meant to. Only I have to speak of it once in a while. We should have such a tremendously good time together." "We have a tremendously good time now," said Mary, the smile coming while she again put up the back of her hand and brushed her eyes. "When you're good." "When I help all the other little boys at the table, and don't look at the nice heart-shaped cake I want myself? It's frosted, and got little pink things all over the top. There! don't drop the corners of your mouth. If I were asked what kind of a world I'd like to live in, I'd say one where the corners of Mary's mouth keep quirked up all the time. Let's talk about Marshby's picture. It's going to be your Marshby." "What do you mean?" "Not Marshby's Marshby—yours." "You're not going to play some dreadful joke on him?" Her eyes were blazing under knotted brows. "Mary!" Wilmer spoke gently, and though the tone recalled her, she could not forbear at once, in her hurt pride and loyalty. "You're not going to put him into any masquerade?—to make him anything but what he is?" "Mary, don't you think that's a little hard on an old chum?" "I can't help it." Her cheeks were hot, though now it was with shame. "Yes, I am mean, jealous, envious. I see you with everything at your feet—" "Not quite everything," said Jerome. "I know it makes you hate me." "No! no!" The real woman had awakened in her, and she turned to him in a whole-hearted honesty. "Only, they say you do such wizard things when you paint. I never saw any of your pictures, you know, except the ones you did of me. And they're not me. They're lovely—angels with women's clothes on. Aunt Celia says if I looked like that I'd carry all before me. But, you see, you've always been—partial to me." "And you think I'm not partial to Marshby?" "It isn't that. It's only that they say you look inside people and drag out what is there. And inside him—oh, you'd see his hatred of himself!" The tears were rolling unregarded down her face. "This is dreadful," said Wilmer, chiefly to himself. "Dreadful." "There!" said Mary, drearily, emptying the pods from her apron into the basket at her side. "I suppose I've done it now. I've spoiled the picture." "No," returned Jerome, thoughtfully, "you haven't spoiled the picture. Really I began it with a very definite conception of what I was going to do. It will be done in that way or not at all." "You're very kind," said Mary, humbly. "I didn't mean to act like this." "No,"—he spoke out of a maze of reflection, not looking at her. "You have an idea he's under the microscope with me. It makes you nervous." She nodded, and then caught herself up. "There's nothing you mightn't see," she said, proudly, ignoring her previous outburst. "You or anybody else, even with a microscope." "No, of course not. Only you'd say microscopes aren't fair. Well, perhaps they're not. And portrait-painting is a very simple matter. It's not the black art. But if I go on with this, you are to let me do it in my own way. You're not to look at it." "Not even when you're not at work?" "Not once, morning, noon, or night, till I invite you to. You were always a good fellow, Mary. You'll keep your word." "No, I won't look at it," said Mary. Thereafter she stayed away from the barn, not only when he was painting, but at other times, and Wilmer missed her. He worked very fast, and made his plans for sailing, and Aunt Celia loudly bemoaned his stinginess in cutting short the summer. One day, after breakfast, he sought out Mary again in the garden. She was snipping Coreopsis for the dinner table, but she did it absently, and Jerome noted the heaviness of her eyes. "What's the trouble?" he asked, abruptly, and she was shaken out of her late constraint. She looked up at him with a piteous smile. "Nothing much," she said. "It doesn't matter. I suppose it's fate. He has written his letter." "Marshby?" "You knew he got his appointment?" "No; I saw something had him by the heels, but he's been still as a fish." "It came three days ago. He has decided not to take it. And it will break his heart." "It will break your heart," Wilmer opened his lips to say; but he dared not jostle her mood of unconsidered frankness. "I suppose I expected it," she went on. "I did expect it. Yet he's been so different lately, it gave me a kind of hope." Jerome started. "How has he been different?" he asked. "More confident, less doubtful of himself. It's not anything he has said. It's in his speech, his walk. He even carries his head differently, as if he had a right to. Well, we talked half the night last night, and he went home to write the letter. He promised me not to mail it till he'd seen me once more; but nothing will make any difference." "You won't beseech him?" "No. He is a man. He must decide." "You won't tell him what depends on it!" "Nothing depends on it," said Mary, calmly. "Nothing except his own happiness. I shall find mine in letting him accept his life according to his own free will." There was something majestic in her mental attitude. Wilmer felt how noble her maturity was to be, and told himself, with a thrill of pride, that he had done well to love her. "Marshby is coming," he said. "I want to show you both the picture." Mary shook her head. "Not this morning," she told him, and he could see how meagre canvas and paint must seem to her after her vision of the body of life. But he took her hand. "Come," he said, gently; "you must." Still holding her flowers, she went with him, though her mind abode with her lost cause. Marshby halted when he saw them coming, and Jerome had time to look at him. The man held himself wilfully erect, but his face betrayed him. It was haggard, smitten. He had not only met defeat; he had accepted it. Jerome nodded to him and went on before them to the barn. The picture stood there in a favoring light. Mary caught her breath sharply, and then all three were silent. Jerome stood there forgetful of them, his eyes on his completed work, and for the moment he had in it the triumph of one who sees intention, brought to fruitage under perfect auspices. It meant more to him, that recognition, than any glowing moment of his youth. The scroll of his life unrolled before him, and he saw his past, as other men acclaimed it, running into the future ready for his hand to make. A great illumination touched the days to come. Brilliant in promise, they were yet barren of hope. For as surely as he had been able to set this seal on Mary's present, he saw how the thing itself would separate them. He had painted her ideal of Marshby; but whenever in the future she should nurse the man through the mental sickness bound always to delay his march, she would remember this moment with a pang, as something Jerome had dowered him with, not something he had attained unaided. Marshby faced them from the canvas, erect, undaunted, a soldier fronting the dawn, expectant of battle, yet with no dread of its event. He was not in any sense alien to himself. He dominated, not by crude force, but through the sustained inward strength of him. It was not youth Jerome had given him. There was maturity in the face. It had its lines—the lines that are the scars of battle; but somehow not one suggested, even to the doubtful mind, a battle lost. Jerome turned from the picture to the man himself, and had his own surprise. Marshby was transfigured. He breathed humility and hope. He stirred at Wilmer's motion. "Am I"—he glowed—"could I have looked like that?" Then in the poignancy of the moment he saw how disloyal to the moment it was even to hint at what should have been, without snapping the link now into the welding present. He straightened himself and spoke brusquely, but to Mary: "I'll go back and write that letter. Here is the one I wrote last night." He took it from his pocket, tore it in two, and gave it to her. Then he turned away and walked with the soldier's step home. Jerome could not look at her. He began moving back the picture. "There!" he said, "it's finished. Better make up your mind where you'll have it put. I shall be picking up my traps this morning." Then Mary gave him his other surprise. Her hands were on his shoulders. Her eyes, full of the welling gratitude that is one kind of love, spoke like her lips. "Oh!" said she, "do you think I don't know what you've done? I couldn't take it from anybody else. I couldn't let him take it. It's like standing beside him in battle; like lending him your horse, your sword. It's being a comrade. It's helping him fight. And he will fight. That's the glory of it!" <hr /> <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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