Rebecca Wentworth's Distraction (13 page)

“Yes. Mr. Prescott told me of your efforts on my behalf. I'm grateful.”

“I suppose you managed to continue with the Watts, or some other innocent sketching.” He smiled. He lowered his voice conspiratorially. “I can't imagine you don't steal a private moment for yourself.”

“Very few.”

He wondered if she had not returned a look of conspiratorial impishness. “I'm sure most of your hours are occupied.”

“That's so. It's the way of life here.”

“Well, I mean to daub a bit while I'm here. Would you not spare me a moment to show some of your own drawings? You've finished Watts? And what else have you turned to at odd moments?”

“I completed my Watts a long time ago, yes. I draw a few pictures that are in my head from time to time, or something of particular interest I've seen.”

“A private pastime. And harmless enough.”

“Yes, I'm private about it. But I think the Prescotts don't mind how I spend a free hour, now and again. They have business enough of their own.”

“I quite imagine they do.” He stopped to consider his words. “It's always dangerous to avert the wishes of your elders, but in this instance you are only exercising the gifts God has given you, in rare moments of well-earned leisure.” He found he was beginning to enjoy their confidence. Her winsome smile encouraged him. And again he felt astonished by the character of her new womanly beauty.

“I believe the Prescotts see that, given my own rare leisure, as you put it, this scratching on paper is necessary to my composure. They've come to an opinion of raising me in their own way. I've been dutiful since arriving here, and they appreciate my contributions to the household.”

“And, thus, do not begrudge you the occasional peccadillo.”

“Well, they simply do not ask after it, and I still have no colors, since I've used what you left behind, that is. I ask for nothing, and make use of whatever comes to hand.”

“May I see a few then?”

She wiped her soil-darkened hands on her apron. “I suppose we can take a moment. Shall we go in?”

Once inside the empty house, she hurried up to a room under the eaves. In a few moments she had returned, with a sheaf of drawings from Watts and a handful of other sketches.

He looked through the completed Watts. What struck him immediately was her reversal of the typical emblem book, and even of Watts's crude
Divine Songs.
The pictures were no longer dull and subservient to the text. She had shifted the emphasis onto the designs, to which the text now seemed subservient.

“You've done well, as always,” he said. “I half wonder if we might not submit the Watts to a Boston printer, perhaps under another name,” he added, almost as if musing. “A notice or two in the Boston press, a word here and there, and we might gather some demand for these.”

“Do you really think so, sir?”

“And why not? They are well done, and better than what's available. What else have we here?”

“Odd sketches.” She handed them over to him. They were all plain and harmlessly lifelike. Trees, birds, forest streams and flowers. And very well executed, intimating some of the energy of her more mystic productions, as he remembered them. Then she uncovered several pen-and-ink portrait sketches.

“Some of the people I know here,” she explained.

On each of three sheets were studies of heads and faces, the same face from three or four different angles.

“I see, yes,” he said as he held them up and looked them over. “Sitters?”

“No, I sketched these from memory. I see the faces clearly in my mind.”

“These are very finely done,” he said quietly. “As are all of these you have here.” He looked her in the eye. “And the other kind, the more . . . visionary fancies. You have left off those?”

“Yes.” She smiled at him. He continued to look directly at her. “For the most part,” she added.

“I see. Well, sometime perhaps you will honor me with a few of those, as well.”

“If the occasion arises, sir.”

“I will be here on business of my own for some days, at least, so perhaps it will.”

“Perhaps,” she said.

T
HE NEXT MORNING
Mr. Prescott called on him, and after breakfasting at the tavern, they set out together and with two other townsmen, all well armed on horseback, to view some new properties in which Sanborn had an interest. There were no house lots on these yet, nor had the land been broken up and fenced, as the property was more outlying. For some time no one would build, whether they preferred to buy or to rent. He thought that was probably just as well for now. The property might be all the more valuable one day, perhaps not too far off, for never having undergone any destruction in war raids.

During their return, Sanborn took the opportunity to ask whether Mr. Prescott knew of any likely patrons for a portrait or two.

“You might try the Wiggin family,” he suggested. “They have labored to prosper. You did not limn them in the past?”

“I did not. Thank you. I'll call on them, tomorrow before the dinner hour.”

As they rode on, Sanborn debated to himself whether he should raise the question of Rebecca's drawing. Finally, the two other horsemen a short distance behind them, he decided there was nothing to lose.

“It is a shame Rebecca cannot exercise her talents by painting a portrait now and again,” Sanborn said. “It would be a delight to the community and a source of remuneration to your family.”

“I had thought of it, but I've wished, in the main, to honor Squire Browne's wishes. When I spoke to him, he did not express complete disapproval of her Watts and sacred drawings, but he doesn't intend to countenance anything more.”

“I understand.”

“She has no colors, no canvass, no oils of any kind. But I tell you in confidence we don't make a particular point of forbidding her use of pen and paper.”

“Yes, that is good of you. Rebecca intimated as much when I spoke to her briefly yesterday.”

“She hasn't much leisure, as things are.”

“Of course, and in that you fulfill Squire Browne's design.”

“My feelings precisely, Mr. Sanborn.”

When they rode into the village center in silence and mutual understanding, Sanborn was already thinking up ways to peruse Rebecca's more exotic sketches. And he still had hope that he would be able to talk them into allowing her to take likenesses of Blackstone gentry, a project she seemed to have begun on her own.

Chapter 21

S
OON INTO HIS SOJOURN
in Blackstone, he was standing before the three Wiggin children, taking their group portrait. The eldest, a girl, was seven; the others, two boys, were five and three. At Sanborn's request, Tristram Prescott had agreed to release Rebecca for a few hours because the Wiggins, associates of Prescott, were concerned over their children's capacity to endure a lengthy sitting. The strategy was working well; Rebecca was good with children and the Wiggins all liked her.

He would not have admitted it to himself, but Sanborn was taking more care than usual, and trying the children's patience. He felt a vague apprehension over Rebecca's eye on his work. But by the end of that long session, he had enough to go on; he could finish the portrait another day. He could return Rebecca to the Prescotts without begging them to release her again. And it was as they walked to her house that he repeated his interest in viewing her other productions.

“If we are alone for a moment, I'll bring down a few sheaves,” she finally agreed.

As he awaited her in the parlor, he tried to examine his feelings toward Rebecca. That strange, unpredictable turn of mind that had marked the child seemed to have calmed under the influences, he assumed, of her maturing and rusticating. Yet her mind was as agile and unclouded as ever. And now, more than the appeal of a brilliant, even exotic child, there was the undeniable appeal of the young woman. Suitors indeed! he thought.

She entered the room with a slim bundle of papers tied around with white ribbon.

“Aha,” he said.

She placed the bundle on a table before him and untied it carefully. She hung the white ribbon around her shoulders and removed the protective cover. The first drawing had been colored in, from the pastel chalks he had left behind long ago. Perhaps, he thought, these were arranged chronologically.

It was a drawing of lambs gamboling in a spring pasture of an evening. Swallows, like sparks of pure energy, or joy, darted about them. A sort of golden late light suffused the scene. It was meticulously executed yet full of feeling.

“Happy lambs, those!” he said.

“And swallows, too.” She laughed a little.

“Indeed they are.” He turned the picture over to the next. It was like an opposing vision. A dog before his master's door, in the city. The dog, in a supplicating posture, was obviously underfed. And the artist had somehow depicted the body so as to give the impression of shivering. It was winter, clearly. She had not colored this one. Black on white made it particularly affecting, as if he had received bad news in the midst of a satisfactory day.

The next drawing had been colored, however. It was of a titanic, shapely woman giving birth to a child resplendent in glorious light. The woman's flesh shone as well. To the left of the scene, a dark, rather caterpillarlike figure stood by observing the birth and recoiling in horror. Along the bottom of the drawing were St. Augustine's name and some of his more notorious words:
“Inter faeces et urinam nascimur.”
It was a brilliant—he searched for an appropriate word: speculative? philosophical?—picture, as if executed by a master. In a sense, all her pictures were speculative, but he could discern no systematic philosophy or vision. He began to understand, as by her own testimony, that she did not merely see things differently; rather, she saw different things.

“That must be St. Augustine, then,” he said, pointing to the small dark figure.

“I believe it is, yes,” she said.

“I can think of a parson or two who would agree with you about him.” He smiled.

“It's no doubt all popery to them.”

He laughed. “These are extraordinary,” he said, for lack of a better word at the moment. “Disturbing, some of them, but extraordinary all.”

“You believe so? Thank you, sir.”

“Have you kept up your reading?”

“Not as at Squire Browne's, before he forbade me. Much of his library was open to me, for a time. But since coming here, my reading is limited. Mr. Prescott has a small collection, mostly devotional and didactic. I read whatever I can, but I find I have to make words and stories of my own. And pictures.”

“And these more ominous fancies. You continue to depict those as well?”

“These are private depictions, or, well, meditations. How can there be light without darkness, Mr. Sanborn?”

“How indeed,” he said, turning over the drawings.

“‘Must we employ all our faculties merely to humor and please men in their vices and follies?'” she said.

He looked at her, confusion on his face.

She smiled. “Blackmore,” she said, “from
Prince Arthur.”

“I see.” He turned back to the drawings. One of the darker ones caught his eye particularly. It was a scene of pestilence of some sort. Perhaps inspired by the distemper that had carried away her own family and her brotherly cousins. In a city street among Greco-Roman buildings, children lay dying, while small bodies were being carted off to common graves. In their passion to find hope, parents and citizens dressed in robes were gathering around energetically somber clergymen who held prayer books aloft. The effect was one of timelessness, as if in one such catastrophe lay eons of all such catastrophes. The next scene of devastation looked like something out of Revelations: a decimated forest, cut over, burning in great dragon flames, with scores of God's creatures fleeing like outcast Adams and Eves toward distant, brooding mountains.

Another depicted men aiming muskets in sport at fish teeming and leaping in the river.
Shooting Salmon,
she had labeled it. She had captured, as if sidelong, even in this picture of destruction, something that evoked a powerful memory from his first journey through the woods to Blackstone.

He and Ladd had dismounted to water their horses down a side path in a part of the forest seemingly untouched by Europeans. As he stood beside his drinking horse, he became aware—in his whole body more than in his ears—of the thrumming of insects, the voices and movements of birds, and the mild wind pushing against the high, deep canopies of foliage. It struck him that the whole forest was heaving with some energy not unlike the music of a great organ or the deeper chanting of monkish choristers—subdued yet profound enough to reach into his muscle, sinew, and bone. He had no name for it, or for the resonances in his being. Was it something of God speaking in biblical wildernesses? Or something awakened out of timeless heathen demonologies? He stood there looking into the canopy, ignorant and amazed, listening until Ladd asked him what he heard.

“The forest,” was all he could say at the moment.

Now, however, he stood before Rebecca wondering how she had evoked the memory through the picture he had in hand.

“You say you draw these in secret?” he said.

“In private.”

“Not in secret, but not openly,” he suggested.

“Privately,” she insisted.

He could not numb the effect her pictures had upon him—the enduring impression. He recalled one of his masters, a curmudgeon with little patience for fashion, once saying to him in a picture gallery, “Too many of these men know everything of artifice and nothing of art.” It was a sentence that had haunted him for years, probably because he could not understand it adequately. But Rebecca's pictures seemed to give him better understanding now. It was as if she avoided all formulas, as if all her heresies were singularly her own, as if she abjured merely describing a thing in favor of seeing it more deeply, penetrating it with a more primordial eye.

Her drawings infatuated him, and humbled him. He felt a shiver run along his spine, up to his neck and ears. He put down the stack that had accumulated in his hand and looked at her. Finally he found his voice. “Rebecca, I find you amaze me.” He arranged the drawings neatly and in the order she had presented them. Without speaking she carefully placed the cover over them, pulled the long white ribbon off her shoulders, and tied it around the bundle again.

“It would cause trouble for you if some of these were to be seen.”

“I know that, Mr. Sanborn. Yet I would not destroy them.”

“No. You should not. But you had better take care they don't fall into another's hands. Greater care even than you have, I mean to say.”

“Perhaps you are right.”

“Please don't misunderstand me,” he said, “but I wonder if you might like me to care for some of these.” She looked up at him. “For you, I mean. To preserve and secrete them, so to speak. You must know I would allow no harm to befall them.”

“I believe you would not, but I don't think I want to part with them.”

“Nevertheless, I advise you to consider the matter.”

She picked up the portfolio and held it to her breast. “I shall. Thank you, Mr. Sanborn. I believed you would understand.”

As she was about to turn away, he stopped her. “Rebecca, I wonder if you might do better to turn to plain, simple portraits. Your gifts, properly directed, surely these people would appreciate, and you might thereby contribute further to the income of this household.”

“I don't think they would be friendly to the idea. And besides, I have no proper colors and equipment.”

“Well, I spoke to Mr. Prescott, and I think he might be persuaded with more effort. And as to colors and equipment, I shall leave you with mine, those I have brought here.”

“You're being too generous, Mr. Sanborn. It's too much to ask, and you must attain your own commissions, rather than making of me your competitor.”

“Nonsense, Rebecca. In the first place, I'm leaving soon. There is nothing further for me here, unless I can persuade you to accompany me—for your personal security. In the second, it is nothing for me to leave a few items behind, to get you started, until you can command your own materials by virtue of your success.” He felt certain that if he could distract her away from these melancholic illustrations and toward portraits, she would discover a proper outlet for her desires, which would be constrained, and at the same time discover an occupation that the Prescotts would soon find remunerative and congenial.

“I'll consider what you have said, Mr. Sanborn.”

“Consider it well.”

“I shall,” she said “I've much work to catch up on now. Many obligations here.” When she smiled her whole face brightened; then she turned again and headed for the stairs.

He stood there, as if to leave, yet frozen, looking after her. He recognized the signs. He was smitten. In every way and by everything about her, he was smitten. She had transformed into an appealing, beautiful young woman, and she was undeniably an artist he could not yet understand perhaps, but an artist of great dedication and fearsome originality nonetheless. What might she be capable of producing, he wondered, with proper training and the appropriate restraint of taste?

Moreover, he felt certain that although Rebecca had learned to contain herself under the strictures of her guardians and her service here, a deeper, even more troublesome life stirred within her still. It was just this deeper life, whatever it might be, that was so mysterious and compelling to him.