The Adventures of Allegra Fullerton (18 page)

“And therein lay the poor lady's undoing!” sister Lucy said suddenly. She looked at each of us in turn. “This second marriage, this youthful temptation, was the great error of her life, I believe.” She shook her head and became silent. I looked at her to say I understood.

“Indeed,” Mr. Stock continued. “Her son was a well-bred and beautiful little boy, and Mr. K. made the boy feel his dislike. In but a few years, her son ran away from his persecutor and lived with a relative whose sympathies for his plight led her to raise him along with her own children. But the lad disowned his poor mother, never returned to see her, never found it in his heart to understand how she could have married such a man, a man who had come to frighten even her. She told me she was glad of her son's deliverance from the frightful circumstances of his life on the farm. Moreover, she said, he did better to keep away, given the enduring dislike between the man and the boy. Of course all these circumstances in her new life wounded her deeply.

“She gave birth to her daughters; Mr. K. began to let the farm go, and they did not prosper. What she had inherited from Mr. L. her new husband squandered in his own vices. She had secreted only a small amount for herself. Those beautiful objects she had brought with her from Boston she now had to sell—the chandelier and sconces, the china, and some paintings were all finally trucked away. One can hardly imagine such refinements installed like family ghosts up in the old farmhouse for a lonely farm wife to dream over. But so it must have been.

“Such, you see, were her circumstances when she came to me. She had saved some of her old finery to wear, no doubt, because that was how she wished to be painted—along with her pen, book, and rose. When we were finished she returned to her desolate farm where already—as the innkeeper's wife told me—the woods were creeping back into the pastures and fields, the broken fences went unmended.”

“And there the poor woman and her daughters remain to this day?” I asked.

“From what people say, there is one exception now: the elder daughter, who apparently inherited her mother's beauty. Therein lies another tale. Mr. F., you see, the other young man who had come to the village that night long ago and first asked Mrs. L. to dance, had been the one friend who had helped her move from Boston. He came to see her from time to time, perhaps out of pity and fear for her well-being. He offered to educate the elder daughter in Boston. But Mrs. L., knowing the ways of the city, forbade it unless he marry the daughter, despite her youth. He did so, and surrounded the girl, as her mother had been, with every delight and luxury of city life. But I have heard, on inquiry, that the girl does not thrive, has never taken to the city. What shall become of her, no one can say.”

“It must all seem like a dream to Mrs. L., and not a very pleasant one,” Tom offered. “Especially when she thinks back to her happy days in her Boston mansion.”

“And her daughter after her,” Mr. Stock said. “A wonderful dream of beauty and ease from which each has irrevocably awakened. Or which has turned into nightmare.”

Lucy was silent. She sat staring blankly at the wall behind her brother, her face impassive, as if to mask a degree of pain. Perhaps she felt as wounded as I by this tale of widowhood and disastrous second marriage. (“A youthful temptation,” as Lucy had put it. “And a warning?” I had wondered). Perhaps she too was dismayed by continual manifestations that the good are defeated while the bad triumph over them. From the first I had recognized a feeling of wistful renunciation about Mr. Stock's sister.

B
EFORE HE LEFT
for his travels, our new friend Mr. Stock not only introduced Tom and me to some of the citizens of Springfield, as I have said, he also introduced us to other painters who happened to travel through. These men told wonderful stories as well, some comical, some mysterious, some tragic, some as affecting as the story of Mrs. L.

I found I enjoyed this loose brotherhood of the road. There was also much comparing of techniques and inventions, with certain secrets and efficiencies withheld, no doubt. The most memorable of these men was Charles Sparhawk, a proud, contumacious man who might have sat for a Spartan hero, but who regaled us endlessly with his extravagant adventures. Known among painters of the primitive sort as the “He-Man Limner,” Mr. Sparhawk, or Chas, as he was called by everyone, could as readily mend a roof, build a shed or a house, plow a field straight, work leather and tin, train a horse or a dog, cook, and cut and sew a man's suit of clothes, as he could paint an acceptable sunset or take your shadow or produce an affordable likeness of your wizened grandmother in her gauze-ribbon cap. He was also capable of somnambulistic displays (and considerable other humbug, I imagined), if a crowd were willing to pay for them.

But he painted me, in fact, for Tom, and at the cost only of his supplies. He and Tom took a liking to one another. If Tom relished Chas's adventures, Chas relished Tom's explanations of mechanical processes and current experiments in English and American manufacturing.

For my own part, I found it difficult to keep my eyes off this handsome, rantipole titan. He arranged his apparel for comfort rather than the fashionable observances of season or station—as when on a hazy afternoon of Indian summer he wore his tow-cloth pantaloons, which seemed to match his mane of hair, a less than spotless shirt open at the breast and sleeves rolled up at the elbows, and a dirty-white straw hat. Yet by his demeanor no one would mistake him for a man of the subservient orders or of insufficient composure and self-respect.

Mr. Stock must have noticed my fascination, for he said to me one afternoon while his sister served tea: “Oh, Mrs. Fullerton, it's quite all right … this ogling of poor old Chas. He's used to it. I don't think he's ever met a woman who hasn't looked at him such wise.” He and Tom laughed, but I noticed Lucy became quiet.

“Is it so plain as that, Mr. Stock?” I said. “In my own defense, I simply find the man unique, just as no doubt you and Tom do. He seems to be cut from some ancient mold, of a former more vital race, does he not? Infused, perhaps by this legacy, with a strange sort of magnetism when compared to the puny tribe of fretfully ambitious men in our age.”

“
Touché
,” Mr. Stock said and laughed.

“Allegra,” Tom said, “maybe you have finally found
another
man worthy of your interest.” He was smiling tenderly, but I felt hurt that he should insinuate in company a certain incapacity on my part since the death of my husband.

Lucy Stock looked up. “He is an eminently striking and capable man, Mrs. Fullerton,” she offered. “It would take a woman such as you to interest, or should I say to tame, such an audacious spirit. There are perhaps few enough to be his equal.”

She glanced at her brother and her pale face suddenly darkened. It was the first time I had seen this delicate woman in high color.

I had noticed that when he was present she habitually avoided Mr. Sparhawk's unearthly blue eyes. Later, I discovered in private from Mr. Stock that Lucy had once fallen in love with Mr. Sparhawk herself. Being Chas Sparhawk, he could not help leading her on during his infrequent visits, but her fragile health and her modesty, Mr. Stock explained, rendered her “unequal to Chas's legendary vigor and appetites. She has found,” he continued, “a perfectly suitable husband.” We had not met this gentleman, however.

Mr. Stock did not at that moment prolong his sister's embarrassment, if that's what it was, but rather took up Lucy's theme.

“Our friend Chas Sparhawk,” Mr. Stock began, “has left a wake of broken hearts wherever he has traveled, which is of course far and wide. I'm sure I've never seen his equal. Wives, maidens, spinster aunties—no one's safe from his unfailing effect upon the fair. It's a most amazing thing to behold, the way they appear to open and turn their very souls in his direction, and it is amusing, I find, to watch those especially who would not, or who think they are not, responding noticeably to his, as Mrs. Fullerton put it, ‘magnetic presence.' For they too give themselves away, like simple, polite children.

“And add to these broken hearts his most unsettling habit of leaving as unceremoniously or mysteriously as he arrives, whether it be leaving a farmer or inn-keeper with whom he has lived for months or a year, or a woman who has thrown everything over for such a heartless dog.” He paused, shook his head, smiled, and then launched into one of his favorite Chas Sparhawk stories.

“He once had a portrait rejected by a dour clergyman who did not care for the likeness. I suspect it was merely too truthful. But old Chas just went on about his business up in old Salem and Marblehead and those parts, painting such a raft of sea captains that he soon ran out of prepared canvas, or any canvas or board at all. And of course time, or the lack of expending it unprofitably on any portrait, being the essence of making one's living, Chas was at a loss when a handsome commission came his way before leaving town. So he merely drew forth from his wagon—he used to drive a farm cart in those days painted up for a circus and festooned with hawkers' red flags—the old rejected canvas. He showed nothing of it to his patron and simply painted right over the clergyman's portrait. But he was also nearly out of oil and color, so he worked in a very thin layer, and went on his way.” Mr. Stock stopped to chuckle, and then went on.

Portrait of a Woman from Marblehead, Massachusetts
, Artist Unknown. Published courtesy of the Fruitlands Museums, Harvard, Massachusetts.

“But he made the mistake of returning some months later with paints and canvas aplenty and set up another raft of lucrative seafarers' portraits. Before he could properly begin, however, he was run out of town by a group of armed men!

“You see, the thin layer of oils could not suppress the slow, ghostly emergence of the old clergyman upon that twice-painted canvas! This mysterious appearance disturbed the family greatly, as if it had been some sort of miraculous stigmata or the possession of the captain's favorite image of himself by a devouring demon.

“As you might imagine,” he laughed and went on, “the captain was a superstitious man, as are many men of the sea, and became deeply agitated himself, so much so that he became, or fancied himself become, ill, and fatally so. Word had it that he finally shot the portrait through the heart and burned it. So Marblehead would have no more of Chas Sparhawk.”

We all laughed to think of this giant of a man chased out of town by a rabblement.

Chas is the man, I say, who painted
my
portrait for Tom. Under his penetrating blue gaze, while his charcoal and brushes worked surely in his large shapely hands, I felt restless, a feeling I did not wish to display. He had admired the portraits I had been working on, and he skillfully drew out of me the story of how I became a traveler, as if I could not resist his pleasant inquires. I said nothing of the Dudley affair, of course. And then we discussed prices and the different kinds of sitters.

When he finally allowed me to see the portrait, however, I found that although it was an acceptable if rather flat depiction, in the manner of country limners, he had captured a flash of ambivalence about the mouth and eyes. It was as if this man had glimpsed my divided soul and then rather off-handedly frozen it in oil on canvas. If I was intrigued by his capacity to see beneath a sitter's face, I also disliked (perhaps as much as that old cleric!) his having displayed what he had discerned.

“It is hardly civil, Mr. Sparhawk,” I said, “to attribute to your subject some … mysterious uncertainty or dispossession she does not feel.”

“Ah, my dear Mrs. Fullerton,” he said, “you're not of that lyingflattering school of portraitists, are you? And do you really believe that men don't notice the eyeshot of a woman, any less than a woman notices the eyeshot of a man? If as the saying goes a woman can feel the interest or admiration of a man through walls, then can't a man feel the same merely at the other end of a room? In conversation with his host? Up to his ears in tack or rigging, a medley or an operetta, or a heel-and-toe with your rival? Do you believe you can lift an eyelash and we won't know it, even as you know it when we do? Come now, neither the fair nor the unfair sex is so constructed.”

“You are overhabituated to the admiration of women, I think, Mr. Sparhawk. So that you attribute enchantment even where there is innocence.”

“Innocence is it, Mrs. Fullerton?” He looked straight through me. “Well, you would know best, of course. And you say I've made such an error in this instance?”

“I say you are habituated to admiration and tactless as a consequence.”

“Then I've made a mistake, I take it. Nonetheless, I assure you, Mrs. Fullerton, that I've regarded you without vacillation on my part.”

“Then you are impudent and churlish.”

After a moment, we both began to laugh as we stood in front of my portrait. Yet the more I looked at the face he had painted, the more exposed I felt. While I examined the portrait, he moved over to my chair and sat down.