Free The Adventures of Allegra Fullerton by Robert J. Begiebing Page A

in her thin face.
    â€œAnd did your poor mother relent?” I asked.
    â€œFor the most part, yes,” Harriet said. “And why should she not, once having thought over our propositions? When we visit now she seems proud of us, and the only concern she expresses is that we might suffer periods of loneliness without husband and children to occupy us. I confess I once had similar thoughts myself.”
    â€œBut we suffer no such episodes,” Tirzah assured me, smiling. “All our days are full, and many delicious. As Miss Taylor at the Academy used to say to us girls, ‘A rich and curious mind is the path to freedom of body and soul.’”
    â€œAfter we lay our day’s work aside,” Harriet added, “we often find time for lectures, papers, meetings, and causes of every kind.”
    â€œIt’s a strange and lovely world,” Tirzah said. “And so much there is to be learned.”
    They both wore their hair as plain as their dresses. But I believe I succeeded in portraying Tirzah’s simple beauty. I also endeavored to capture the more ready, if less serene, smile in Harriet’s thin face, with its almost too-firm chin. And Harriet’s somehow more mischievous eyes, I did my best to express.
    As I painted these two sisters, I found myself speculating that had Tom not suffered so much in his recent failure to win over Miss Parrie, he might have shone his light upon Tirzah. But had he done so, he would most likely have had as little effect in that quarter. Even as spouses are so rarely fit together upon a single canvas, it seemed to me the more suitable, though no one said so, that these two should be portrayed like verso and recto sides of their accounts book, the very book which each sister in this double portrait holds by one hand. The sisters paid me promptly and fully, quite satisfied by their likenesses.
    B Y LATE OCTOBER that year our business with the mill hands and shopkeepers began to hang off, so Tom and I started to think of employments for the coming winter. Before we were able to decide to our best advantage, however, we were forced to decamp.
    Perhaps it was the penetrating glance from some pedestrian in the street, or perhaps some stranger’s shadow in a doorway, or perhaps an eye cast in my direction from a passing carriage or cart, or perhaps all of these, but for some time I had a sort of oppressive intuition that I was being watched. Only Mr. Joseph Dudley’s arrival at my studio one afternoon, even while I was engaged with a patron, revealed the true basis of my apprehensions.
    I told him that I was busily employed with a portrait. Mr. Dudley responded that he would be pleased to wait upon me and would return in one hour. When he returned, he laid out for me, while the darkening November afternoon began to enshroud my studio, the results of what must have been assiduous machinations. He had somehow discovered the origins of my and Tom’s arrival in Worcester County. His mission now, it appeared, was to threaten me into submission.
    â€œYour Uncle Simeon,” he told me in a calm voice, “was much displeased with your … absconding, which he maintains he had every right to consider a betrayal of his long and devoted provision for you as a family member over the years.”
    I was so taken aback that I could not speak.
    Mr. Dudley began to pace about the room, handling his watch fob officiously, while he continued and I sat on the chair so recently occupied by my patron.
    â€œYour uncle further charges that you stole a wagon and a mare from his farm and shamelessly enchanted his nephew (whom he much needed in the growing and harvesting seasons) by the promise of ‘God only knows what Babylonian wantonness and adventure.’”
    I found my tongue and stood up. “Mr Dudley! How dare you come here and voice such lies to me!”
    â€œGladly will I leave, Madam, but hear one thing more, in consideration of your own