""My brother Nat is not a child," replied I, "and we do not wished to be helped. If the designs are not worth money, will you be so good as to give them back to me?" and I stepped nearer the desk and stretched out my hand toward the pictures which were lying there. But Agent Wilkins s.n.a.t.c.hed them up quickly, and casting an angry glance at his brother, exclaimed:--
""Oh, you quite mistake my brother, Miss Kent; the designs are worth money and we are glad to buy them; but they are not worth so much as they would be if done by an experienced hand. We will give you ten dollars for the three," and he held out the money to me. Involuntarily I exclaimed, "I had not dreamed that they would be worth so much." Nat could earn then in four hours" work as much as I could in a week; in that one moment the whole of life seemed thrown open for us. All my distrust vanished. And when the agent added, kindly, "Be sure and bring us all the designs which your brother makes. I think we shall want to buy as many as he will draw; he certainly has rare talent,"--I could have fallen on the floor at his feet to thank him, so grateful did I feel for this new source of income for us, and still more for the inexpressible pleasure for my poor Nat.
"From that day Nat was a changed boy. He would not go to school in the afternoons, but spent the hours from two till five in drawing. I had a cord arranged from our room to Miss Penstock"s, so that he could call her if at any moment he needed help, and she was only too glad to have him in the house. When I reached home at six, I always found him lying back in his chair with his work spread out before him, and such a look of content and joy on his face, that more than once it made me cry instead of speaking when I bent over to kiss him. "Oh, Dot--oh, Dot!" he used to say sometimes, "it isn"t all for the sake of the money, splendid as that is; but I do feel as if I should yet do something much better than making designs for calicoes. I feel it growing in me. Oh, if I could only be taught; if there were only some one here who could tell me about the things I don"t understand!"
""But you shall be taught, dear," I replied; "we will lay up all the money you earn. I can earn enough for us to live on, and then, with your money, in a few years we can certainly contrive some way for you to study."
"It seemed not too visionary a hope, for Nat"s designs grew prettier and prettier, and the agent bought all I carried him. One week I remember he paid me thirty dollars; and as he handed it to me, seeing how pleased I looked, he said,--
""Your brother is getting quite rich, is he not, Miss Kent?" Something sinister in his smile struck me at that moment as it had not done for a long time, and I resolved to go more seldom to the office.
"We did not lay up so much as we hoped to; we neither of us had a trace of the instinct of economy or saving. I could not help buying a geranium or fuchsia to set in the windows; Nat could not help asking me to buy a book or a picture sometimes, and his paints and pencils and brushes and paper cost a good deal in the course of six months. Still we were very happy and very comfortable, and the days flew by. Our little room was so cozy and pretty, that Miss Penstock"s customers used often to come in to see it; and if they happened to come when Nat was there, they almost always sent him something afterward; so, at the end of two years you never would have known the bare little room. We had flowers in both windows, and as each window had sun, the flowers prospered; and we had a great many pretty pictures on the walls, and Nat"s sketches pinned up in all sorts of odd places. A big beam ran across the ceiling in the middle, and that was hung full of charcoal sketches, with here and there a sheet just painted in bars of bright color--no meaning to them, except to "light up," Nat said. I did not understand him then, but I could see how differently all the rest looked after the scarlet and yellow were put by their side. Some of our pictures had lovely frames to them, which Nat had carved out of old cigar-boxes that Patrick brought him. Sometimes he used to do nothing but carve for a week, and he would say, "Dot, I do not believe drawing is the thing I want to do, after all. I want more; I hate to have everything flat." Then he would get discouraged and think all he had done was good for nothing. "I never can do anything except to draw till I go somewhere to be taught," he would say, and turn back to the old calico patterns with fresh zeal.
"One day a customer of Miss Penstock"s brought Nat a book about grapes, which had some pictures of the different methods of grape-culture in different countries. One of these pictures pleased him very much. It showed the grape-vines looped on low trees, in swinging festoons. He had the book propped up open at that picture day after day, and kept drawing it over and over on the blackboard and on paper till I was tired of the sight of it. It did not seem to me remarkably pretty. But Nat said one day, when I told him so,--
""It isn"t the picture itself, but what I want to make from it. Don"t you see that the trees look a little like dancers whirling round, holding each other by the hand--one-legged dancers?"
"I could not see it. "Well," said Nat, "look at this, and see if you can see it any better;" and he drew out of his portfolio a sheet with a rough charcoal sketch of six or seven low, gnarled, bare trees, with their boughs inter-locked in such a fantastic manner that the trees seemed absolutely reeling about in a crazy dance. I laughed as soon as I saw it.
"There!" said Nat triumphantly; "now, if I can only get the vines to go just as I want them to, in and out, you see that will dress up the dancers." He worked long over this design. The fancy seemed to have taken possession of his brain. He gave names to the trees, but he called them all men: "It"s a jolly crew of old kings," he said; "that"s Sesostris at the head, and there"s Herod; that old fellow with the gouty stomach under his left arm." Nat was now so full of freaks and fun, that our little room rang with laughter night after night. Patrick used to sit on the floor sometimes, with his broad Irish mouth stiffened into a perpetual grin at the sight of the mirth, which, though he could not comprehend it, he found contagious.
""But what will you do with it, Nat?" said I. "It will never do for a calico pattern."
""I don"t know," said he reflectively; "I might make it smaller and hide the faces, and not make the limbs of the trees look so much like legs, and call it the "vine pattern," and I guess old Wilkins would think it was graceful, and I dare say Miss Wilkins would wear it, if n.o.body else did."
""Oh! Nat, Nat, how can you," exclaimed I, "when they have been so good to pay us so much money?"
""I know it," said Nat, "it"s too bad; I"m ashamed now. But doesn"t this look like the two Wilkins brothers? You said they looked like frogs?" he ran on, holding up a most ludicrous picture of two tall, lank frogs standing behind a counter, and stretching out four front legs like greedy hands across the counter, with a motto coming out of the right-hand frog"s mouth: "More designs, if you please, Mr. Kent--something light and graceful for summer wear."
"These were the words of a note which Mr. Wilkins had sent to Nat a few weeks before. I laughed till the tears ran down my cheeks, for really the frogs did look like the brothers Wilkins. The picture haunted my mind for weeks afterward, and seemed somehow to revive my old distrust of them.
"A few days after this Nat had finished a set of designs "for summer wear," as the order said, and among them he had put in the "One-Legged Dancers."
""It"ll do no harm to try it," said he. "I think it would be lovely printed in bright-green on a white ground, and n.o.body but you and me would ever see the kings" legs in it."
"It really was pretty; still I could not help seeing legs and heads and King Herod"s stomach in it; and, moreover, it was entirely too large a figure for that year"s fashions in calico or muslin. However, I said nothing and carried it with the rest. When I went the next day, Mr.
Wilkins said, as he handed me the money,--
""Oh, by the way, Miss Kent, one of the drawings has been mislaid. I suppose it is of no consequence; we could not use it; it was quite too large a figure, and seemed less graceful than your brother"s work usually is; it was a picture of grape-vines."
""Oh," said I, "I told Nat I didn"t believe that would be good for anything. No, it is not of the least consequence."
"When I repeated this to Nat, he did not seem surprised at their refusal of the design; they had already refused several others in the course of the year. But he seemed singularly disturbed at the loss of the drawing.
At last he urged me to go and ask if it had not been found.
""I may do something with it yet, Dot," he said. "I know it is a good design for something, if not for calico, and I don"t believe they have lost it. It is very queer."
"But Mr. Wilkins a.s.sured me, with great civility and many expressions of regret, that the design was lost: that they had made careful search for it everywhere.
"The thing would have pa.s.sed out of my mind in a short time but for Nat"s pertinacious reference to it. Every few days he would say, "It is very queer, Dot, about the One-Legged Dancers. How could such a thing be lost?
They never lost a drawing before. I believe Miss Wilkins has got it, and is going to paint a big picture from it herself!"
""Why, Nat!" I exclaimed, "aren"t you ashamed? that would be stealing."
""I don"t care, Dot," he said again and again, "I never shall believe that paper was lost."
"I grew almost out of patience with him; I never knew him to be unjust to any one, and it grieved me that he should be so to people who had been our benefactors.
"About four months later, one warm day in April, I walked over to the town after my day"s work was done, to buy a gown for myself, and a new box of paints for Nat. I did not go to town more than two or three times a year, and the shop-windows delighted me as much as if I had been only eleven years old. As I walked slowly up and down, looking at everything, I suddenly started back at the sight of a glossy green and white chintz, which was displayed conspicuously in the central window of one of the largest shops. There they were, just as Nat had drawn them on the missing paper, "The One-Legged Dancers!" Nat was right. It was a pretty pattern, a very pretty pattern for a chintz; and there was--I laughed out in spite of myself, as I stood in the crowd on the sidewalk--yes, there was the ugly great knot in one of the trees which had made King Herod"s stomach. But what did it mean? No chintzes were made in any of Mr. Maynard"s mills, nor, so far as I knew, in any mill in that neighborhood. I was hot with indignation. Plainly Nat"s instinct had been a true one. The Wilkinses had stolen the design and had sold it to some other manufacturers, not dreaming that the theft could ever be discovered by two such helpless children as Nat and I.
"I went into the shop and asked the price of the chintz in the window.
""Oh, the grape-vine pattern? that is a new pattern, just out this spring; it is one of the most popular patterns we ever had. A lovely thing, miss,"
said the clerk, as he lifted down another piece of it.
""I will take one yard," said I with a choking voice. I was afraid I should cry in the shop. "Do you know where this chintz is made?" I added.
"The clerk glanced at the price-ticket and read me the name. It was made by a firm I had never heard of, in another State. No wonder the Wilkinses thought themselves safe.
"When I showed Nat the chintz he seemed much less excited than I expected.
He was not so very much surprised; and, to my great astonishment, he was not at first sure that it would be best to let the Wilkinses know that we had discovered their cheating. But I was firm; I would have no more to do with them. My impulse was to go to Mr. Maynard. Although during these three years he had never come to see us, I felt sure that, in the bottom of his heart, there still was a strong affection for us; and, above all, he was a just man. He would never keep in his employ for one day any person capable of such wrong as the Wilkinses had done us.
""But," persisted Nat, "you do not know that either of the Mr. Wilkinses had anything to do with it. They may both have honestly supposed it was lost. It"s much more likely that their sister stole it."
"I had not thought of this before. Poor Miss Wilkins! Nat"s artistic soul had been so outraged by some of her flagrant calicoes that he believed her capable of any crime.
"At last I consented to go first to the Wilkinses themselves, and I promised to speak very calmly and gently in the beginning, and betray no suspicion of them. I carried the chintz. When I entered the office, the overseer was talking in one corner with a gentleman whose back was turned to me. The agent sat by the counter.
""Mr. Wilkins," said I, "do you remember the grape-vine pattern my brother drew last winter--the one which you refused?"
"The instant I spoke, I saw that he did remember. I saw that he was guilty, and I saw it all with such certainty that it enabled me to be very calm.
""Let me see," said he, trying to pretend to be racking his memory; "the grape-vine pattern? It seems to me that I do recall something about a design with that name. Did you say we refused it?"
""Yes, you refused it, but you did not return the drawing. You said it had been lost," I replied.
""Ah, yes, yes--now I recollect," he said, recovering himself somewhat; "we made great search for the drawing; I remember all about it now;" and he paused as if waiting civilly to know what more there could possibly be to be said on that point. But I watched him closely and saw that he was agitated. I looked him steadily in the eye and did not speak, while I slowly opened my little bundle and unrolled the piece of chintz.
""Can you possibly explain this mystery, then, sir, that here is my brother"s design printed on this chintz?" said I, in a clear, distinct tone, holding out the yard of chintz at its full length. As I said the words "my brother"s design," the gentleman who had been talking with the overseer turned quickly round, and I saw that it was Mr. Maynard"s youngest son Robert, who a year before had come home from Germany, and had recently been taken into the firm as partner. He stepped a little nearer me, and was evidently listening to my words.
""Come into this room, Mr. Maynard, if you please, and we will finish discussing the matter we were speaking of," said Overseer Wilkins, turning pale, and speaking very hurriedly, and trying to draw Mr. Maynard into the inner office-room.
""And--if you will call some other time, Miss Kent," said Agent Wilkins, turning away from me and walking toward Mr. Maynard, in his anxiety to prevent my being seen or heard, "I will try to attend to this matter; but just now I have not another moment to spare," and he began at once to talk in a loud and voluble manner.
"I do not know how I had strength and courage to do what I did then; I do not know where the voice came from with which I spoke then; Robert has always said that I looked like a young lioness, and that my voice sounded like the voice of one crying "fire." I stepped swiftly up to him, and before the astounded Wilkins could speak a word, I had held up the chintz and exclaimed, "But Mr. Maynard will have time to spare, and I thank G.o.d he is here. Mr. Maynard, this design is one of my brother"s drawing; he has made most of the calico designs printed in your father"s mills for a year and a half: I brought this one to the agent; he said it was not good for anything, but he stole the paper and sold it, and here it is!" and then suddenly my strength all disappeared, great terror seized me, and I burst into tears. Both the agent and the overseer began to speak at once.
""Be silent," thundered Robert, in the most commanding tone I ever heard out of human lips. "Be silent, both of you!" Then he took the chintz away from me, and taking both my hands in his, led me to a chair, saying, in a voice as sweet and gentle as the other was terrible, "Pray be calm, my dear young lady--this matter shall be looked into. Sit down and do not try to speak for a few minutes."
"Then he walked over to the brothers; even through my tears I could see how terrified they looked; they seemed struck dumb with fright; he spoke to them now in the most courteous manner, but the courtesy was almost worse than the anger had been before.