The Amouretta Landscape by Adeline Adams — Read

"In the midst of death we are in life," he murmured. Below, in the orchard, his wife was carolling old French songs with the children. "_On y danse, on y danse! _" Even Maury junior, a boy to the backbone, and little given to self-expression in song, especially foreign-language song, boomed out a mighty "_Tout en ronde! _" Half an hour before, Maurice senior had stood hand-in-hand with his wife, looking up into the flowery dome of a magnificent pear tree, all aglow with golden-white blossoms, all perfumed with their incense, and musical with legions of bees. He knew just where to find those magic boughs in his landscape; he recognized their golden-veiled whiteness, their garance rose. Left and right the spendthrift river was pouring out its silver in a royal progress, mile after mile in the May sunlight. Ascutney, the great mountain that all the people thereabouts knew as their tutelary deity, had chosen from his myriad mantles the one he might wear for an hour or so, of an entrancing blue to mock the heavens themselves. Smilingly yet warningly he confronted Maurice, singling him out from other persons, to tell him in a secret, consoling way, of the generations of men, those who had gone and those who were yet to come; yes, Ascutney spoke very seriously with Maurice, reminding him of everything, whatever it might be, that he, Maurice Price, in his great good fortune in art and life, owed to those generations, and must joyfully repay, by painting as best he might that lyric scene.

"Generation after generation," thought Maurice, "but no longer Pietro or little Amouretta. " Quivering with emotion as he was, he saw that the passion and skill of that far-away Maurice of the twenties had not vanished. Now, as then, he had in large measure the artist's gift of multiplying his personality when he was at work; his consciousness as an artist rose many-mansioned toward the skies. With heart and mind swelling from the scene he conned and created, he was at once the Maurice who did not need a pearl palette to capture the glory of that violet-edged puff of golden cloud over the meadow, who could hear the bees in the orchard, who could see a jewelled indigo bird flaming out from the locust bush; a Maurice whose whole being overflowed with returning health, with rapture in painting, with pride in Maury junior, with love for the wife of his delight, with affection for good old Jimmy Anthony, and yet a Maurice with sharp remembrance of those vanished children of joy, Pietro and Amouretta.