You can see at a glance, as you watch him standing by the big easel, his coat off, to give his arm freer play, squeezing the tubes of color on his palette, that he is not the boy you knew some years ago. He is, you will admit, as strong and alert-looking as he was that morning when he cleared the space in front of Margaret's brother with a cart-rung. You will concede, too, that the muscles about his chest and throat are as firmly packed, the eyes as keen, and the smile as winning, but you will acknowledge that the boy in him ends there. As you look the closer you will note that the line of the jaw is more cleanly cut than in his younger days; that the ears are set closer to the finely modelled head; that the nose is more aquiline, the eyes deeper, and that the overhanging brow is wrinkled with one or more tight knots that care has tied, and which only loosen when his face breaks into one of his old-time smiles. The mustache is still there --the one which Sue once laughed at; but it has lost its silky curl and stands straight out now from the corners of his mouth, its points reaching almost to the line of his ears. There is, too, beneath it a small imperial, giving to his face the debonair look of a cavalier, and which accentuates more than any other one thing his Southern birth and training. As you follow the subtle outlines of his body you find too, that he is better proportioned than he was in his early manhood; thinner around the waist, broader across the shoulders; pressed into a closer mold; more compact, more determined-looking. But for the gleam that now and then flashes out of his laughing eyes and the winning smile that plays about his mouth, you would, perhaps, think that the years of hardship through which he has passed have hardened his nature.
But you would be wrong about the hardening process, although you would have been entirely right about the hardship.
They had, indeed, been years of intense suffering, full of privations, self-denial, and disappointments, not only in his New York home but in Kennedy Square, whenever at long intervals he had gone back to the old house to cheer its inmates in their loneliness --a loneliness relieved only by the loyalty of old Malachi and Hannah and the affection and sympathy of their immediate relatives and of such close friends as Amos Cobb, who had never left his post, Miss Clendenning, Dr. Wallace, Nathan and some others.
But this sympathy had not always been extended to Oliver--not, by his old schoolmates and chums at least. Even Sue had passed him in the street with a cold stare and not a few of the other girls--girls he had romped with many a night through the cool paths of Kennedy Square, had drawn their skirts aside as he passed lest he should foul them with his touch.
But his courage had not wavered nor had his strength failed him. The same qualities that had made Richard stick to the motor were in his own blood. His delicately modelled slender fingers, white as ivory, and as sure as a pair of callipers --so like his father's--and which as we watch him work so deftly arranging the colors on his palette, adjusting the oil-cup, trying the points of the brushes on his thumb-nail, gathering them in a sheaf in his left hand as they answer his purpose, had served him in more ways than one since he took that midnight ride back from his old home in Kennedy Square. These same hands that look so white and well-kept as he stands by his easel in the full glare of the gas-jets, had been his sole reliance during these days of toil and suffering. They had provided all the bread that had gone into his mouth, and every stitch of clothes that had covered his back. And they had not been over-particular as to how they had accomplished it nor at what hours or places. They had cleaned lithographic stones, the finger-nails stained for weeks with colored inks; they had packed hardware; they had driven a pen far into the night on space work for the daily papers; they had carried a dinner-pail to and from his lodgings to the factory two miles away where he had worked--very little in this pail some of the time; they had posted ledgers, made office-fires, swept out stores--anything and everything that his will compelled, and his necessities made imperative. And they had done it all forcefully and willingly, with the persistence and sureness of machines accomplishing a certain output in so many hours. Joyfully too, sustained and encouraged by the woman he loved and whose heart through all his and her vicissitudes was still his own.
All this had strengthened him; had taught him that any kind of work, no matter how menial, was worthy of a gentleman; so long as his object was obtained--in this case his independence and his livelihood. It had been a bitter experience at first, especially for a Southerner brought up as he had been; but he had mastered it at last. His early training had helped him, especially that part which he owed to his mother, who had made him carry the market-basket as a boy, to humble a foolish and hurtful pride. He was proud enough of it now.
But never through all these privations had these same white hands and this tired body and brain been so occupied that they could not find time during some one of the hours of the day and night to wield the brush, no matter how urgent had been the call for the week's board--wielding it, too, so lovingly and knowingly, and with such persistency, that to-night although still poor--he stood recognized as a rising man by the men in the front rank of the painters of his time.
