The Adventures of Allegra Fullerton

by Robert J. Begiebing

  Some sort of similar journey began to intrigue us now. We might make a full harvest in likenesses of the multitudes who tour the falls of Trenton and Niagara. And the landscape along the Mohawk I understood to be particularly glorious, a painter’s paradise. But we knew only that we had to travel beyond Connecticut, where we were now known to be, and beyond the investigative authorities of Massachusetts.

  “The railroad through to Albany is not yet opened, Allegra,” Tom reminded me. “And we are a long, costly journey from those sublimities beyond the Catskills.”

  “Length of journey is the advantage of it!” I said. “And isn’t the railroad to Albany due to be completed soon?”

  “Can anyone say for certain? In July they bridged the Connecticut and quickly completed the line up the Westfield river. They are open, I understand, as far as Chester, and construction continues apace all along the remaining line. The rumor is that they are pushing to complete the road to Albany by year’s end. But we can’t count on it, and we can’t stay here waiting. We may have to endure the bone-jarrings of the stage and the alarums of public houses.”

  Within a week Tom grew so anxious that we decided any movement was better than staying put and exposed. So we would earn our way west even as the railroad opened before us.

  That October we gathered our belongings, took leave of our generous hosts, and took the return stage for Providence. Our plan was to travel right through Boston and Worcester and alight in Springfield. There we would resume our traffic in portraits and, in fair seasons, slip away gradually westward as patrons began to thin out in the villages along the ever-lengthening rail line.

  WE WERE PLEASED with Springfield from the first—a pretty town situated on the east bank of the grand Connecticut, with a handsome bridge spanning the more than one thousand feet across the river to West Springfield. Here were mills, tanneries, and the largest manufacturing armory in the nation, but also many elegant private residences and buildings, to say nothing of the beautiful common with its fountain at Court Square. We had long since learned to avoid public houses whenever possible because of the noise of travelers continually coming in and going out and being called for their boats or stages before daylight. So we put up at the Connecticut Hotel and the following day found suitable rooms by answering to announcements in the Washingtonian. But we were so cautious and inconspicuous for a week or two that business was slow in coming. More than once we were hungry, yet we had to guard against the slightest appearance of indigence and make every respectable appearance abroad. And we soon discovered that we had competitors. The most formidable was Mr. Joseph Whiting Stock—a man whose power of will and talent surmounted his chief disadvantage, viz., that he had been from age eleven paralyzed below the waist when an ox-cart, leaned against the side of a building, fell upon him.

  But Mr. Stock proved congenial, and after we knew him a little he told us the story of how one of his physicians, Dr. Loring (himself a painter who had studied with Franklin White), had recommended that he take up painting and music to enliven his childhood of confinement to bed. I found his countenance pleasant, with large, mild eyes, a prominent but not disproportionate nose, and a firm jaw covered by a trim beard. His thick dark hair was parted neatly and combed to curl just below his ears. His neck and shoulders were sturdy, not frail as one might expect of a man crippled from childhood. He was a skilled and quick painter of landscapes as well as portraits. He worked on a large or medium canvas and would also make deft miniatures, which he frequently set beautifully in morocco or gold platings. He took an occasional pupil to supplement his income; Tom and I found him to be a shrewd man of business. But he was generous, as if he despised competitiveness as beneath him and trusted completely his own merit and skill.

  A natural gentleman, Mr. Stock introduced us to persons of some distinction in Springfield. One evening, after his sister arrived to help him prepare for his journey, he invited Tom and me to an intimate supper in his rooms above the post office.

  Mr. Stock showed himself to be a man of sentiment who enjoyed hearing and telling affecting stories garnered in his travels about New England. During the blancmange, he began a story that took us well into the evening and made Lucy, a woman of sensibility, weep.

  It seems that once, in a village he did not name, a still lovely woman in her forties had heard that a painter, Mr. Stock, had taken rooms for a portrait studio at an inn on the stage line. He referred to this lady only as Mrs. L.

  “When she came to me,” he told us, “she was wearing a dress of black velvet, a lace collar falling over a white embroidered chemisette. On her breast, a gold pin. Around her neck, a black mourning cord woven out of some departed’s hair. And into her belt she had thrust a gold pen, as if it were a rapier. She wanted for her attributes a red book in one hand, and a Carolina Rose in the other.

  “Her portrait,” I asked, “was perhaps to be the story—her pen and book, so to speak—of such dangers as she had discovered in love?”

  “Something of the sort, I believe,” Mr. Stock answered. “You may judge better for yourself once you hear her story. Let me say at this point that I did not stint, therefore, in portraying, I must admit, her unnerving spirit and beauty. Her hair was as dark and full as one half her age, and it was all her own hair. Her dark eyes flashed a vigor I was unable to capture fully on my canvas. There was about her beauty, nonetheless, a strange melancholy unlike anything I have quite seen. Neither shall I ever forget her story, told to me finally during her long sitting. You see, I took the utmost care in rendering her likeness.” He paused to glance at his sister, who appeared to be in delicate health. But Lucy sat calmly, hand on her chin, looking pensively at the table top. It struck me that she had heard this tale before. Mr. Stock continued, however, as if she had not.

  “I found out from the innkeeper’s wife that Mrs. L. had inquired of me and had decided on the commission only after she understood that I had been crippled since childhood. Perhaps she took a certain unnecessary pity upon me, as people sometimes do, but I think rather she wanted to be sure that her portraitist would not presume to develop a romantic interest in his subject. For I can only imagine her experience to have been that men invariably developed such interest.

  “The innkeeper’s wife also told me that Mrs. L. had come down from the hill-farm where she at that time lived in virtual isolation with her daughters and husband. I found it all very curious, and at first she would not respond to my simple questions about her farm and children—you know, the sort of harmless badinage in which we portraitists engage our sitters. Instead, she turned the tables and asked me how I came into my profession.

  “So I told her the story of my accident in youth and of how I had managed to overcome my infirmity and get about as well as any limner. After taking up drawing and painting, you see, I had been engaged to do anatomical drawings for another physician who took pity on me and invented a type of chair on wheels, with handles for steering. This device, I explained, had delivered me from my long confinement. Indeed, it did not take me long to so far improve my condition that I was able to dress myself, get into the chair without assistance, and move about the first floor of the Springfield house where I was born. With this conveyance, I assured her, I had traveled extensively from 1836. Moreover, I soon discovered that this conveyance was readily placed onto a railway carriage, thereby releasing me to work in Wilbraham, Hartford, New Haven, Boston, and New Bedford, among other towns and ports.”

  It struck me as he spoke that the amount of work he accomplished in his condition was inspiring, but it was no more so than Julian’s friend Fitz Lane, who himself from infancy got about only on a pair of crutches as a result, so they say, of eating an Apple-Peru plant in his father’s garden. I came to attribute Mr. Stock’s productivity to his keen ability to sense the first hint of dwindling patronage wherever he worked and move on, to his personal discipline, and to his sister Lucy—a mild and lovely woman who had at first accompanied him in his travels and helped in uncountable sma
ll and significant ways.

  “Perhaps,” he continued, “such candor on my part helped her ultimately to speak with equal candor to me. As you well know, Mrs. Fullerton, there is no explanation or predictable pattern to the way our sitters come to tell us things they might not tell others, or the way, for that matter, some remain resolutely reticent.

  “The point is that she came to trust me. I sometimes think it is my infirmity that helps people come to believe in my discretion, my powers of sympathy, or my heightened understanding, if you will. People often seem to tell me their ambitions, their joys, their troubles.” He laughed. Lucy looked up and smiled.

  “Be that as it may, Mrs. L.’s story touched me deeply. She grew up a simple farm girl, not poor. Her father was a hard-working and prosperous enough man, and he insisted that all his children contribute to the prosperity of the family. One night in the village there was a dance, however, and Mrs. L., then in the bloom of maidenly beauty, attended along with many of her friends.

  “Two young men, students at Harvard College, who happened to be adventuring about during their vacation, came into the village and heard about the dance, either from someone or from the sound of young people dancing and singing in the hall. They insinuated themselves into the crowd and the more forward of the two, I shall call him Mr. F., saw Mrs. L., or Miss O. at the time, and fell immediately under her charm. She agreed to dance with such a fine-looking young gentleman, and before she knew it these two, by turns, became her partners to the exclusion of others. She must have been so taken, as any girl would, by the attentions of two such bright, attractive, well-bred young fellows that she could not bring herself to shun them for the attentions of the more familiar young men.

  “As fate would have it, however, the other young man, Mr. L., found himself so smitten by her that he could not leave the next day as they had planned. They stayed in the village and Mr. L. sought Miss O.’s company continually. ‘He was as straightforward as he was handsome,’ she told me as she sat before my canvas. ‘I was quite flattered and excited by all the attention. In brief, he declared his love, or as he put it, his desperate love, and told me of his life and family in Boston. They were wealthy beyond anything a farm girl like me could have imagined,’ she said. ‘I felt as if I were in a fairy tale. My feelings soon grew from the mere enjoyment of his flattery, to infatuation, to love on my part as well, and we determined to marry.’

  “Of course,” Mr. Stock explained, “his family wanted no part of such a match, believing that their high-spirited son merely had become enchanted by his youthful enthusiasm for her inordinate beauty. But the young man left his parents in Boston, married her anyway, and then returned with her to Boston and established themselves in a beautiful home on Beacon Street with a fashionable view of the Common. As mistress of this establishment, she was provided with all the accoutrements of her new position: gowns, jewelry, works of art, everything suitable to one in her new station in life, everything to give her joy.

  “Soon she had a child, a son, within their first year together, but it was not long—it must have been two or three years later—before her devoted husband took ill and died.”

  I felt a harsh flash of sympathy strike my heart for another young wife who suddenly lost her beloved husband. But Mr. Stock continued without pause.

  “If there was now no animosity from his friends and family, neither was there friendship nor love. Moreover, although her husband had been of old Boston family, he counted among his friends the usual assortment of parvenus and pretenders who cannot go back more than twenty-five or fifty years in their ancestry without stumbling, much to their chagrin, upon a butcher, a tailor, a blacksmith, or some other merely respectable mechanic. And of course these people, particularly, now regarded her in bleak light.

  “She soon grew lonely in her big house in the city and decided it would be best for her and her son to return to the place of her birth. She put the Beacon Street house up for sale and took only a few items she could not bring herself to leave behind: a crystal chandelier and matching crystal wall sconces, several sets of china, some clothes, and a few personal items.

  “From then on her life was to change in every way. She returned to the farm, but in the few years she had been away, her parents had died as well. In the absence of other living children, they had left the farm to a valued, long-time farm worker, one Mr. K., an uncouth, uneducated man, but he agreed to take them in, at least for a time. She did not wish to impose on anyone else. He was the kind of man she had known all her life before the Boston years, and he was, as she said, remarkably handsome in his coarse way. Without detail, she told me that out of her dire circumstances and her attraction to him she married Mr. K.”

  “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 wonde
red). 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.

  BEFORE 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.