Read Online The Adventures of Allegra Fullerton by Robert J. Begiebing - Free Book Online

person represented to suggest the lessons embodied in these waxworks. Stopping before a figure, he’d light several candles, hold one close to a face or weapon as he spoke, and then snuff out the candles and move us along to the next display.
    Every sort of person seemed to walk up the stairs to his showroom—the mechanic, the bumpkinish squire, a knot of ogling girls or boys, weekend guests at one hotel or another—their faces flushed with House Punch, cigars, and Sunday fare. Some of these looked to be merely Sunday gentlemen and ladies, the women in their waist belts and loose gowns, dry-good clerks, and such. These ladies seemed less apt at imitating the gentility they sought, yet they delighted in this brutal menagerie of wax demons—all the more so for the showman’s play of shadow and candlelight. Indeed, I found that during the nights that followed, one horrid figure or another rose leering into my dreams.

SIX
    Little Effie again, and women who discovered independence
    D uring these endless days and nights locked in my room, I remembered and sometimes dreamed, as I say, many of my old adventures before making the acquaintance of my Tormentor. I frequently recalled the very morning Tom and I had left the highway to Worcester to detour for a shady byway, as much to escape the heat and road dust as to secure a midday meal of bread and cider (and perhaps a bit of cheese). We stopped at the first roadside dwelling, tucked in by rolling fields, orchards, a dense kitchen garden, and two shade trees, to offer a few pennies for refreshment. The housewife squinted at our wagon, with paint boxes and easels atop our other impedimenta, and at the inscription on the sideboard (in my best painter’s hand) “Fullerton & Wentworth—Likenesses To Your Order.”
    â€œThe Good Lord must have sent you, is all’s I can say,” she told us. Yet she seemed unnaturally morose for seeing such a Godsend. As I removed my straw sunbonnet, we were ushered into her parlor. The parlor had been darkened, but for three candles and rare threads of sunlight making their way through tiny gaps in the drawn, heavy curtains.
    A man and four children were gathered around the bier of a girl who could have been no more than eleven years of age at the time of her death. The scent of her newly made coffin filled the room. There was such a peacefulness about the corpse and so clearly a childish beauty and innocence remaining, in spite of the pallor and sunken features betokening long illness and death-struggle, that I found tears welling into my eyes.
    Even now it is too painful to dwell upon the stricken family. In short, the mother begged us to take the child’s likeness from her face in death so that they might have a remembrance of her in life. Perhaps struck by my own emotion, the wounded mother said she was sure I was just the lady to capture her daughter’s spirit. They would compensate us, she assured me, in all the provisions we could reasonably require, for of provisions they had a good deal more than coin.
    â€œWe had thought to bury her today,” she told us, “but could not bring ourselves to it yet. Now, you’ve come and I feel it is a sign for us to bury her cast-off husk and remember the life in her, our dear Effie.”
    And so it was that I found myself with easel and palette before the one opened window through which, as I had arranged it, sunlight bathed the body of the deceased. I was, to be sure, stricken by the poignancy of my task, yet I could hardly refuse the poor mother her natural wishes, my only requirement being that she and I alone remain in the room while I worked.
    Even in the severe sweetness of death, the little face seemed lovely. And my imagination seemed to revivify the girl into her brightest intervals of health. It was the face, of course, upon which I devoted my greatest care, filling in rapidly afterward, as was my customary method, the clothing, in this