Lodusky | Page 9

he had gradually begun to regard his work aroused in Rebecca a faint wonder. He seemed hardly to like it, and yet to be fascinated by it. He was averse to speaking freely of it, and still he thought of it continually. Frequently when they were together, he wore an absent, perturbed air.
"You do not look content," she said to him once.
He passed his hand quickly across his forehead and smiled, plainly with an effort, but he made no reply.
The picture progressed rather slowly upon the whole. Rebecca had thought the subject a little fantastic at first, and yet had been attracted by it. A girl in a peculiar dress of black and white bent over a spring with an impatient air, trying in vain to catch a glimpse of her beauty in the reflection of the moonlight.
"It 's our spring, shore," commented "Mis'" Dunbar. "'N' its Dusk--but Lord! how fine she's fixed. Ye're as fine as ye want to be in the picter, Dusk, if ye wa'n't never fine afore. Don't ye wish ye had sich dressin' as thet thar now?"
The sittings were at the outset peculiarly silent. There was no untimely motion or change of expression, and yet no trying passiveness. The girl gave any position a look of unconsciousness quite wonderful. Privately, Lennox was convinced that she was an actress from habit--that her ease was the result of life-long practice. Sometimes he found his own consciousness of her steady gaze almost unbearable. He always turned to meet her deep eyes fixed upon him with an expression he could not fathom. Frequently he thought it an expression of dislike--of secret resentment--of subtle defiance. There came at last a time when he knew that he turned toward her again and again because he felt that he must--because he had a feverish wish to see if the look had changed.
Once when he did this he saw that it had changed. She had moved a little, her eyes were dilated with a fire which startled him beyond self-control, her color came and went, she breathed fast. The next instant she sprang from her chair.
"I wont stand it no longer," she cried panting: "no longer--I wont!"
Her ire was magnificent. She flung her head back, and struck her side with her clinched hand.
"No longer!" she said; "not a minute!"
Lennox advanced one step and stood, palette in hand, gazing at her.
"What have I done?" he asked. "What?"
"What?" she echoed with contemptuous scorn. "Nothin'! But d'ye think I don't know ye?"
"Know me!" he repeated after her mechanically, finding it impossible to remove his glance from her.
"What d'ye take me me fur?" she demanded. "A fool? Yes, I was a fool--a fool to come here, 'n' set 'n' let ye--let ye despise me!" in a final outburst.
Still he could only echo her again, and say "Despise you!"
Her voice lowered itself into an actual fierceness of tone.
"Ye've done it from first to last," she said. "Would ye look at her like ye look at me? Would ye turn half way 'n' look at her, 'n' then turn back as if--as if--. Aint there"--her eyes ablaze--"aint there no life--to me?"
"Stop!" he began hoarsely.
"I'm beneath her, am I?" she persisted. "Me beneath another woman--Dusk Dunbar! It's the first time!"
She walked toward the door as if to leave him, but suddenly she stopped. A passionate tremor shook her; he saw her throat swell. She threw her arm up against the logs of the wall and dropped her face upon it sobbing tumultuously.
There was a pause of perhaps three seconds. Then Lennox moved slowly toward her. Almost unconsciously he laid his hand upon her heaving shoulder and so stood trembling a little.
When Rebecca paid her next visit to the picture it struck her that it appeared at a standstill. As she looked at it her lover saw a vague trouble growing slowly in her eyes.
"What!" he remarked. "It does not please you?"
"I think," she answered,--"I feel as if it had not pleased you."
He fell back a few paces and stood scanning it with an impression at once hard and curious.
"Please me!" he exclaimed in a voice almost strident. "It should. She has beauty enough."
On her return home that day Rebecca drew forth from the recesses of her trunk her neglected writing folio and a store of paper.
Miss Thorne, entering the room, found her kneeling over her trunk, and spoke to her.
"What are you going to do?" she asked.
Rebeeca smiled faintly.
"What I ought to have begun before," she said. "I am behindhand with my work."
She laid the folio and her inkstand upon the table, and made certain methodical arrangements for her labor. She worked diligently all day, and looked slightly pale and wearied when she rose from her seat in the evening. Until eleven o'clock she sat at the open door, sometimes