Rebecca Wentworth's Distraction by Robert J. Begiebing Page A

contemporary English authors: Swift, Pope, Shaftesbury, Addison, and Steele, among others. It was a matter of some pride with the colonel to say that if Colonel Pepperrell’s library was the only one on the Piscataqua to rival his own, his, Browne’s, nonetheless, exceeded that of his august competitor on the north bank of the great river.
    Sanborn learned that as a young man William Browne had been sent to Harvard where, Miss Norris assured him, he had graduated high in his class in recognition of his social position among the colonies. He was not an ignorant tradesman who had somehow managed to rise in the world, though his father had also sent him to Boston to be trained in a counting house before he became a partner in the family’s business.
    Sanborn silently and quickly passed through a number of other illustrations. He came upon the canvas of her self-portrait.
    He held up the painting and looked at it for some time, turning it this way and that. The face and hands were everything, as if the very opposite of his own rendering. He held the painful thought only a moment, as if she were instructing him by example.
    Yet even in her self-portrait was another vision, if clearly the girl’s own face. Here, too, some fanciful power was being expressed, rather than a conventional or literal rendering. Here again the face and limbs, the whole body, were merely the material vessel of some other energy, an energy that seemed to arise out of her deeper, more vital character. Once again the artist had focused—he could think of no other way to express it—on a reality behind the physical reality. Not Amos, this time. Not God. Not demons or dragons, but just the girl herself, beautifully, strangely, vibrantly animated with inanimate pigment on inanimate canvas.
    Such mystic musings were not natural to him, or easy for him by education or training. But the girl’s pictures forced the viewer’s mind to dwell on these, as he now put it to himself, “other matters.” He knew, of course, that artists in other epochs had painted work that might be considered in “the mystic line”; he knew of, even if he hadn’t read, the mystics of the Word as well. All these were not unheard of, but rather simply beyond his ken.
    â€œIt is Rebecca herself, is it not, Mr. Sanborn?” Miss Norris asked, disturbing his ruminations.
    She startled him back into awareness of her and of the great silent house around them. He looked about the room, as if for a last time. “It is she, Miss Norris, but something more as well, wouldn’t you say?”
    â€œSomething more? Some grace beyond the reach of art?” She offered a complacent smile. “Well, yes, Mr. Sanborn, I think you are correct on that point. And perhaps that’s where the trouble lies.”
    â€œPerhaps,” he agreed. “But I would have said something beyond grace, too, some amazement in the soul.” He looked at her and she stared back as if untouched by his extravagance. “Of course it is a commonplace as well, is it not, that those having the most delicate sensation and taste, whose faculties are the brightest, the most keen and penetrating, nay, even the most spiritual, are most given to nervous disorders.” He held up Rebecca’s own portrait to better light.
    â€œMay I keep this one alone, Miss Norris?” She did not answer. “For a brief time at least,” he went on. “I’ll make you a personal deposit for security, to assure you nothing will befall the portrait until I have finished my considerations of it and return it to you for disposal.”
    â€œI can’t take such a chance,” she finally said, “circumventing my employer’s wishes.”
    He decided not to argue or insist. He could see that would lead nowhere at the moment, except to make her more adamant on principle. He knew that she had already given in to his pleadings more than she thought