"I ran in for a moment to see how my lady prospered," with a graceful wave of the expiring match toward Mrs. Lowndes, "and all is well. I find her holding court to youth and age, to wit and wisdom, all of which she combines graciously in her own person. She is looking weary, perhaps, but rejoiced. Gentlemen, you have served her well. Doubtless our young friend here, Mr.—Ah, yes, Mr. Ewing—has talked enchantingly. I've had an art evening with him myself." He bestowed a glance of benevolent approval on Ewing, who smiled in return.
"By the way, my lady, I've sent you a brace of birds that lived their little span of woods life between last spring and yesterday. Ah, but they came to a fluent richness of body, brown and plump and tender as first love, and tanged with autumn spices—so blessed be thepiece that brought them low. Doctor, you'd dissect them for their nerve centers or the intricacies of their bone structure, but I find them admirable in all aspects. They rejoice my scientific soul even as they lure my carnal man. Isn't it Duceps, the falconer, friend of old Izaak, who speaks of birds that both feed and refresh man—'feed him with their choice bodies, and refresh him with their heavenly voices'? There was a normal person, now—not one-sided."
The atmosphere cleared of its cloud wrack as his speech flowed, marked by pointings of the small, crisp mustache and gracious little pauses of appeal to each of the listeners in turn.
From edible songsters he progressed to the cooking of these, and thence to speech on the art of cooking at large. There were pessimists, it seemed, to bemoan the day when amaître d'hôtelwould die rather than outlive the dishonor of his master's table, as when Vatel stabbed himself because the fish for one of Condé's dinners failed to arrive on time—proving, as Savarin observed, that the fanaticism of honor could exist in the kitchen as well as in the camp. But in the opinion of the speaker these were pinchbeck heroics. Vatel would have been the truer Frenchman, certainly the betterchef, if, instead of wreaking a messy violence on himself in his master's kitchen, he had contrived anentréeto replace the missing fish. And we should remember, too, that the French, good cooks as they are, have but elaborated an art for the germinal principals of which they are indebted to Italian genius. Italy first saw the revival of cookery as she first saw the revival of learning. The land of Savarin lay in darkness until light was brought by those incomparable artists in the trainof Catharine de Medicis. One might recall how Montaigne was captivated in the land of Horace by the weighty manner of thechefof Cardinal Caraffa in discoursing upon the occultisms of his art. The Italians even then held the thing hardly second to theology.
The little man here permitted a pause in which he discarded his cigarette and readjusted the carnation in his lapel, with a sniff at its spiciness. Then he turned graciously to Ewing.
"But I must be off—time races so in this little nook! If you're stepping on, Mr.—Ah, yes—Ewing, to be sure—if you're leaving, I shall be glad to join you as far as the avenue. My dutiful love, lady, and to you, doctor, that virtue which superstition ascribes to your pellets. The word 'health' could never have been coined by the healthy, could it? I dislike to use the word baldly."
Ewing rose, glad of the exit thus provided. It was kind of people to concern themselves about his affairs, but he wished they could be less peculiar. He bowed to Mrs. Lowndes and shook hands with the doctor. He, at least, was understandable.
When they had gone the old lady faced her friend with a calmness that surprised him.
"Fred, what sorry, what terrible things can make us young again! I feel now as I felt that other night—just at this hour so many years ago—when I knew she'd gone—knew she'd gone."
"He's Kitty's boy." The big man fronted her as if for a feat of persuasion.
"Don't, Fred! I've just weathered that point. I was weak, but Randall—Randall saved me. He's dreadful, Fred, unnatural, impossible—oh, terriblyimpossible!" She faced him dauntlessly, her cheeks glowing with faint spots of color.
"I liked him, Kitty. He seems——"
"You're a physician, accustomed to monstrosities. He's something we don't speak of, my friend. And see—youmustsee—what he would suffer if he knew."
EWING was delighted by an invitation from the little man to dine. They had reached the avenue after walking in silence through a side street. Such moments were rare with Teevan. Not often did he fail of speech, even in his periods of calculation. But this was a moment requiring nice adjustments. The suggestion about dinner came as they paused at the corner.
"If you'd like to have me I'd be mighty glad," responded Ewing.
They turned toward Ninth Street, and Ewing told of his hour at Mrs. Lowndes', scarce conscious of Teevan's questioning, for the little man probed with an air of discreet condolence that would have won a far more reticent talker. Ewing was gratified by this attention from a man who knew the world of cities, and whose mind must usually be occupied with affairs of importance. He felt himself drawn to Teevan by bonds of sympathy that tightened momentarily.
"My dear mother-in-law is a sentimental thing," the little man confessed with a delicate intimation of apology. "She makes any sad tale her own. The theater affects her, the woes of stage creatures, quite as you tell me your own very human little story did. My arrival must have saved you from one of her rather absurd manifestations. She's a dear old soul, with quantities of temperament, but she recovers with amazingfacility, I'm bound to say. If you met her to-morrow she'd likely freeze you with a nod."
Ewing was not sorry to hear this, though he thought it hardly polite to say so.
When they reached the house in Ninth Street Teevan ushered in his guest with a charming hospitality.
"Come to the library. The man will bring you anaperitifwhile I escape from this accursed frock coat. Not a word about your own dress! I took you as you were—but a jacket for me, if you'll pardon it." A servant entered in answer to his ring.
"Sherry and bitters, Farrish, and Mr. Ewing will dine with us. Is my son in?"
"Mr. Alden is dining out, sir."
"All the better, my boy. We shall be the chummier for Alden's absence. Make the house yours while I change. There are the evening papers; or perhaps you'll be interested by those cabinet bits—jades and scarabs and junk of that sort; a few fairish pieces of Greek glass—that Tanagra isn't bad, nor those Limoges enamels. The netsukes and sword guards are rather good Japanese bits, and there are one or two exquisite etchings on ivory—un instant, n'est-ce pas?"
Ewing lay back in his chair and sipped the sherry when it came. His enjoyment of the room's ensemble was too nearly satisfying to require examination of it by detail. It was a room of discreet and mellowed luxury, with an air of jaunty ripeness that distinguished its composer. The chairs solicited, the walls soothed, the broken light illumined perfectly without dazzling. He was thrilling agreeably to his host's evident interest in him when the latter returned, beaming with a smile of rare good-fellowship.
They were presently at table in a dining room whose plain old mahogany and thin silver produced, like the library, an impression of finished luxury without flaunt. The dinner itself possessed an atmosphere of sophistication, a temperament, even. It sated the exigent appetite of Ewing—his luncheon with Sydenham had been a mere adventure in meagerness—and sated without cloying, but it was more than food to him. As he ate, and drank of a burgundy whose merit he was ill qualified to appraise, he was conscious of a real fascination growing within him for the man who favored him with so distinguished a notice; who talked, seemingly, with the same nice care to please him that he would have exercised for a tableful of more difficult guests.
Nor did Teevan lack the parts of a listener. Ewing found himself talking much and enjoyably. With so tactful a listener, so good a friend, it was no longer necessary to remember that he was new in this land and unknowing of its smaller ways. It occurred to him, indeed, as he reviewed this memorable evening, that he had talked more than his host. But he was spared the youthful blush at this by remembering that he had been questioned persistently—"toled," as Ben would have said, with baits of inquiry. Incredible as it seemed, Teevan wished him to talk and had neatly made him do so. He felt that the little man must know him through and through. He had been, of course, a book in large print and short words, but he was flattered to believe that Teevan had found him worth opening.
And now he was certain he had discovered the longed-for friend; one soul had come from the oblivious throng to touch his own, to call him out and speak him fair. He was companioned by one as likable as he was learned,by one who meant, it was intimated, to seek every opportunity to befriend him.
And the need of such a friend became more and more apparent to Ewing as they sat in the library after dinner over coffee and liqueurs. It was brought upon him that he had never known his own rashness in braving so difficult a world with so modest an equipment. The tragedy of failure was a commonplace in the little man's experience. So many young dreamers like his guest were rejected after bitter trials. It was an inconsequential world, whose denizens chased butterflies and too often permitted sober worth to perish by the wayside.
At times during the evening Ewing had feared a return of that distressing malady to which his host was subject, but this he was happily spared.
When he took a reluctant leave it was with two emotions: a fervent liking for the wise man who had so generously befriended him, and doubt of himself, the first he had known. It came like an icy blast out of summer warmth and shine.
Teevan listened for the door to close on his guest. When he heard this he sank into his chair and chuckled gaspingly. Presently he drank a glass of brandy, smiled in remembering pleasure, lighted a cigarette, and took his post on the hearth rug, his eyes dancing elfishly, his lips moving.
His son found him so an hour later, for the little man was tireless even when, lacking an audience, he merely dramatized his own reflections. Seeing him to be familiarly engaged, Alden Teevan would have withdrawn with a careless, half-contemptuous nod, but his father detained him with a gesture, and a sudden setting of his face into purposeful hardness.
"Sit down." He looked into the hall, then closed the door and faced his son. The latter regarded him with coolly impertinent interest.
"You'd make a ripping conspirator in a melodrama, Randy. What you going to do now—steal the will?"
Teevan laughed grimly. He crossed back to the hearth rug and took a fresh cigarette, which he lighted with studious deliberation. His words followed swiftly upon the first exhalation of smoke, and his eyes fastened venomously on his son's.
"I'll give you a morsel to jest with—conspirator, indeed!—yes, and a will. See if that facile wit of yours is up to it, my bonny stripling." He played with his moment, drawing on the cigarette with leisurely relish, and gazing into the smoke with eyes of an absorbed visionary.
"Well?" The young man yawned ostentatiously.
"You missed dining with your brother this evening. He was good enough to break bread at my table."
The young man took a cigarette from the lacquered bowl at his side and lighted it with the same deliberation his father had shown.
"Really? I didn't know you had another son."
"Thank God I haven't—but your mother had, and that precious sniveling grandmother of yours has another grandson. You might recall that when you chatter of melodrama—and wills. I believe her estate is not one you'd care to divide."
"What rot are you gibbering with those monkey airs of yours?"
"Delicate as ever in your raillery! Perhaps you think I'm drunk. Perhaps I am. But I dropped in on your grandmother this afternoon in time to prevent herclasping that nameless whelp to her breast. A lovely bit I spoiled, my merry-andrew!—tears and fondlings to-night, a codicil to-morrow. I'm none too sure there'd have been a codicil, though. Likelier a new will—'give, devise, and bequeath the sum of one dollar to my grandson Alden Teevan, who has already wheedled me out of more than was good for him, and the residue of my estate, both real and personal, to my beloved grandson, Gilbert Denham Ewing——'"
"Ewing! That chap Nell Laithe brought back with her—that rustic lout——"
"Have I won your attention, lad? Another item I chance to recall—permit me, since you've mentioned the lady's name—have you caught the look of her eye as it rests upon the creature—how it follows him, runs to him, hangs upon him with sweet tenacity? Have you felt the glow in her voice as she speaks to him? A woman of the world, young, tender, romantic, stormed by this Galahad of the hills, who first wins her solicitude by his helplessness, and then, before the lady quite knows it, coerces her whole being by sheer masculine dominance. Ah, you haven't read that—only enough of it to puzzle you, perhaps enrage you. You haven't your father's eyes. I read it all in three glances: one at him and two at her. Decidedly, you've not your father's eyes."
"Nor his love of many words. So that's the son of my mother, of the woman who failed to adore you after a brief but heroic effort?"
"Likewise, I dare say, the lover of a woman who will henceforth fail to appraise you at anything like your extraordinary worth. Such blind things they are, eh, my boy? She regards the two of you superficially,bienentendu, and hence to your prejudice. There's a likeness between you, the same cast of face, even a likeness of voice, and your noses are identical—the nose of that woman—but the differences are all in his favor. You have grace of a drawing-room sort, a certain boudoir polish of manner, but his face is fresher, kinder, quicker of sympathy, more compelling, and there's that out-of-doors look in his eye, the look of readiness and power. You know what that sort of strength means with the pretty animals."
"You speak bitterly—but then, you've competed with that sort."
"My unhappy infant! You'd at least have found a barren sort of dignity in actual competition. As it is——"
"You got her by a trick, I've heard, from the man who took her away from you when she'd found you out."
"Tell that to your grandmother—it may help you out of some money."
"Stop it, governor! I'll quit if you will. Come!" He spoke with a drop of the voice, and lifted a hand in appeal.
"When you like—I've wasted no words."
"It's true, all you've said? Grandmother knows?"
"Thirty seconds later and I'd have had to bless the pair."
"And now?"
"It's safe for the present. She forgot. She'll remember to-morrow. I'd trust him back there then. She'd see only an obscene excrescence."
"It's a pleasant situation!"
"It's hellish! Can you imaginemyfeelings? You've touched on them with your graceful, filial banter."
"What will you do?"
"'What will you do?'" He mimicked the other with a snarl. "Well, I begin by having him to dine. I study him, I win him. I have him now. He will dine with me other times. I'm not so sure he won't come to reverence me. Oh, it's an ideal situation! Damn it! How they fall!Wecouldn't contrive them half so cunningly. The fool hath said in his heart 'There is no God'—a fool, indeed! There is a God, and He has a devil in Him, or He couldn't have given me this to play out. I have him, I tell you, her son and his son, think of it—her lover's son that they both loved—served up to me!"
"What can you do with him?"
"Dowith him?" The elder man eyed his son for a long minute, then dropped into a chair, and for an interval the young man pursued his rather uncomfortable reflections in silence. At last he broke this with another query. As there was no response, and his father's face was turned away, he rose and sauntered in front of him. The eyes met his musingly, and he saw that the mouth was fixed in a rather hideous smile.
THE days that followed were marked for Ewing with a puzzling discouragement; puzzling, because there had been no failure. A failure would have left him reliant, however battered, but nothing good had been disproved. He was fighting some black doubt of himself, insidiously nursed, he knew not how.
His friend, Randall Teevan, almost an intimate since the night they dined together, daily predicted great works of him. Where the careless picture makers of the Rookery were content with assurances that he could turn out marketable "stuff," Teevan showed him far and lofty eminences that he might scale, had he a spirit for the feat.
Undoubtedly there were obstacles that would daunt a less spirited novice, or one with less than the supreme powers of his young friend, but he, the intrepid, the enduring one, could surmount them. The danger in this time of 'prenticeship, Teevan suggested, was sluggish content with a cheap facility. The tyro learns to do a thing that sells, and remains commercially solvent but, spiritually, an example of arrested development—artistically dead.
He left Ewing at these times with a sense of his present futility, but also with a genial pity for the men who were doing things to sell—and selling them; all unconsciousof the remote, the vacant summits, of true art. A little while before he would have rejoiced that his work could appear beside the work of these men. That would have been a triumph glorious enough. But he could no longer desire so mean a success. He must strive for the higher things, if for no other reason, because this fastidious critic expected him to accomplish them. He could not affront that captious taste with things done for a dollar. Teevan, it seemed, had found life wearing on his dearest illusions. Contact with the world had left him little to believe in. Yet he confessed to believe in Ewing; confessed it with a shamed, humorousnaívetée, and with pleasant half doubts, as a man of tried unbelief laying a bed to fall back on at his next undeceiving.
Ewing was fired to high resolve by this witty, this tender betrayal of confidence in his powers. He could not bear to think that his friend should one day find him, too, a bit of specious insincerity. He consecrated himself to guard this last illusion. It was a pleasure, a duty, and an ambition whose rewards would magnify them both.
The hill boy no longer yearned solitary in the crowd for a day with Ben Crider, or perhaps an evening with him of little easy silences. Teevan filled his needs. In some sort the little man became his idol; a constant presence before which every act of his days must be judged. Teevan was a smiling but inexorable arbiter of his destiny: a judge humane but incorruptible, a man experienced in the obliquities of human nature, but never tolerant of these.
Teevan showed him pictures, the work of masters, piloting him through galleries with instructive comment.Ewing instinctively felt the accuracy of his taste, and divined the soundness of his technical knowledge. Often he overlooked a blemish of bad drawing till Teevan pointed it out. Often Teevan defined to his eye some masterly bit of lining in a picture otherwise hopeless. And of color, that splendid mystery, thing of trick and passion, the little man discoursed with rare sanity.
After these provings of his expertness, Ewing was humble when Teevan chose to point out the more striking deficiencies of his own work. If Teevan made him feel that he must unlearn the vicious little he knew, he performed the duty with a tact that left the youth as large with gratitude as with discouragement. It was by Teevan's counsel that he went to the school. The men of the Rookery tried to dissuade him from that.
"They can't give you anything you haven't got," warned Baldwin. "And if you don't act stubborn they may spoil what you have. You've learned your A B C's, and they'll only tell you at the school to learn them another way. They'll make you feel like a clumsy ass. Stay away."
Well-meant advice, but superficial, as Teevan observed when he heard of it.
"Your friend confirms what I suspected," he went on, with a pleasant glint in his eyes. "Those chaps would have you become a decent hack on the pitiful facility you've already acquired. Pitiful, mark me, as compared with your capacity. But I've learned to expect little in this world of weak purpose. I dare say you won't endure it long at the school. I grant you a fortnight there; then you'll tell me you give up."
He began his lessons at the League next day, firedwith intent to please his friend. He would fail, yes—fail seventy times seven, but he would stand up.
He went, however, a little weighed down by the memory of his various advisers. From the entrance he was directed above by an official-looking person who yawned. Then he found himself in one of many cramped, stall-like compartments, facing a plaster woman who crouched on one knee. His position was between two youths who were annoyed by his nearness. When he edged from the glowering of one the other nudged his drawing board with an indignant elbow. There was no retreat, for the students were packed closely about him. The one behind him made disparaging remarks about the dimensions of his back, which seemed unkind, considering that he did not hesitate to use the back from time to time as an easel.
The air was hot and thick with charcoal dust. The crowded disorder confused him. He tried to think only of the cast. He began at the head, as was his custom, and felt a moment's exhilaration in studying the delicate shadows beneath the filleted curls.
He was aroused by sounds of derision from behind, and ominous prophecies of what "Old Velvet" would do to him when he caught sight of that pompadour. He observed then that the other men were not working at the head first, but mapping out the entire figure at once with long, raking, angular lines that blocked the shadows in square masses. He half rose and looked about. They were all working alike, with their drawing boards far out, and with blunt charcoal. He had spent half an hour sharpening his, and had hugged his drawing board.
He sat down again, impelled by protests from behindand drew the entire figure, but he could not bring himself to do it in those rude angles. He drew it with a single line—down the curving flank, about the gracious knees, skirting the feet, and up once more to round the farther shoulder that drooped above the nestling breast. Although he did not know it, this was a feat; the swing of the body was almost perfect, yet he had not skirmished a moment.
The youth behind him was now peering through spectacles above his shoulder.
"You're a queer duck!" he said; "but he'll make you do it his way. What do you mean by drawing like that?"
"Why?" asked Ewing, confused. "Let's see yours."
The other exhibited. There was no outline, there were no gracious curves, only a suggestion of angular shadows, scratched across with brutal straightness. Yet, when Ewing squinted his eyes a bit the thing stood out.
"Wait till I getmyshadows in," he said.
"Cart before the horse!" rejoined the critic. "I see your finish with the old man."
Ewing started to lay in his shadows as the other had done, but it seemed as if that delicate body appealed for gentler treatment. He rubbed out the vandal lines and began swinging around the figure in the curving strokes habitual with him, strokes that nursed each lovely rondure like caresses. Then, until the closing hour, he polished, picking out the precious little reflected lights that saved her treasures from shadow.
"Red ruin for you, my boy!" exclaimed the spectacled one behind him. "Ravage and slaughter! Old Velvet will scalp you."
Ewing stood up, released by his neighbors, who now rose in a clatter of toppled stools.
"What's the matter with it?" he asked.
"Finicky! You'vefussedit to death. Velvet will slay you for those reflected lights alone—and your nice curly lines—oh, Lord!"
"But they're there, those lights," protested Ewing. "And it's the way I've always drawn. I suppose there are different methods."
"There's only one way with Velvet, and that's Velvet's way." Then with a damnatory waving-away of the offensive drawing he sauntered off to put his stuff in his locker.
Ewing dined alone that night. He was in no mood for Teevan.
Back in his place next day, still incredulous of defeat so swift, he waited for the master. He watched him going the rounds of the other students, the light playing on the purple velvet of the garment that gave him his title. His beard was a rich growth, his mustaches curled upward at the ends, his large, heavy eyelids drooped in a perpetualennui. His usual criticism was a weary "Rub it out!"
When at last he stood beside Ewing's work he gave an effect of collapsing, as if his whole being cried out: "This is too much!" He took the drawing from the board and stuck it to the wall with two thumb tacks. Then, picking up a bit of charcoal, he wrote across it, "A perfect example of how not to do it."
He did not return to Ewing, but, after examining a few other drawings, he turned to leave the room. As he passed, Ewing reached across two neighbors—who protested—and caught the velvet jacket.
"Perhaps you can give me an idea," he said. The other looked at him as if he had not seen him before.
"Use intelligence! Good God—use intelligence!" he almost wailed, and made his escape.
Ewing mechanically placed a fresh sheet before him and began again, but he rubbed out as fast as he drew. The next morning he found the paper foul from many erasures, and started afresh. He could see now that his first drawing, posted in irredeemable ignominy, was not all that it should be. It lacked the freedom of work he had done in his solitude. He tried to conjure back that old free feeling, but the days passed and it drew farther away. Some of the students changed places and began on other casts. The better men went every other week into the life class. But Ewing stayed desperately by his crouching woman. He studied her until he loved and loathed her. The master came and went. Sometimes he ignored Ewing. When he did notice him it was always with a fresh blow on the sunk heart of the boy. Once he sat in his place and ran some of his own brusque, effective lines along the figure, the lines that every other youth in the room punctiliously imitated. They mingled with Ewing's strokes as a driving rain mingles with a bed of flowers.
"If you'd only give up your damned little way," he complained.
"I wish you'd explain a bit," pleaded the boy.
"Old Velvet" turned to the spectacled young man. "Give him your study. There, do it like that."
Then came the beginning of the end. He lost himself in a crawling blindness of imitation. The old power that had made him draw without knowing how he did it gathered its splendid garments and withdrew asmysteriously as it had once come to possess him. He drew, but he would no longer have recognized what he did as the work of his own hand. He thought of Griggs, who had said, "Style?—I'd know a scrap of your stuff if I found it in an ash barrel in Timbuctoo!"
The thought of those friendly men knowing his degradation was another stone on the grave of his self-esteem. It was this that made him wait when the others had gone one night, to take down that first crucified drawing from the wall where it had remained, torn and hanging by one tack.
"Will you give it to me?" said a voice, and, as he did not care one way or the other, the spectacled young man put it in his portfolio. Afterwards Ewing thought of asking him why he wanted it, but he did not come back again. He had been advanced to the life class.
The master did not speak to Ewing again. He made, at intervals as he passed, the pantomime of rubbing out. And Ewing obeyed, beginning each time the task that grew day by day more hatefully useless. In the beginning he had felt that if he could get that plaster woman off by himself he could draw her. The long habit of solitude had left him confounded by the crowd. There had been something almost shameful to him about drawing publicly, and he had the impulse to curl an arm about his sketch to hide it a little as he worked. He felt sick with the hot, dry air and the breathing of the stallful of men. When the door was opened the odor of turpentine came from the room where they were painting. It had for him a familiar, happy smell.
"I wish I could go in there," he said once to a fat youth beside him.
"That's what the dubs always say," was the reply. "It's so much easier to paint."
He spent a day going around, looking at the better students' work, asking them how they had learned to draw as "Old Velvet" wanted them to. They had a great many things to say that sounded technical, but he heard nothing that opened a way to him.
He hated the school; he hated the street that led to it, with a quiet ground swell of hatred. But, deepest of all, he hated his own despair. He felt that his shattered courage would never heal. He was like a dishonored soldier whose sword has been publicly broken. He remembered the fine things he had said to Teevan about his ambition, and the blush that suffused him ached. At the thought of Mrs. Laithe bringing him from his wild beast's hole, as if he had been worth her splendid faith, his heart withered within him. At intervals he started as if he suddenly awoke, saying to himself, "And to think it could have ended like this!"
At the end of a fortnight he sat for three days without doing anything, a stick of charcoal in his hand. He did not come again, and his fat neighbor used up his charcoal paper, after putting fine mustaches on all his crouching Venuses.
He had shunned his acquaintances during this time of travail. But twice had he seen Teevan since his first day at the League. He had tried to be cheerful at those meetings, still hoping the lines would come right, but he felt each time that Teevan saw straight to his wretched heart of doubt; and he would not risk another meeting until he could report an overwhelming victory—or defeat, if it must be so.
That he did not for a day forget his good friend, therewas ample testimony; though this was of a nature that Teevan must remain oblivious to. On the night of the day that saw his first buffeting he walked the streets until late, rejoicing mournfully that there were still so many people who did not know his shame. Half unwittingly he wandered into Ninth Street, and stood a long time opposite Teevan's house, finding a solace in his friend's possible nearness. Then, as the days of defeat followed with so deadly a sequence, this walk and vigil became his nightly habit. Sometimes the house was darkened. Then he felt free to gaze at it. Sometimes there were lights, and his survey was brief and furtive. Until the very last there was always a bit of hope to spice the melancholy of this adventure: to-morrow the thing might be done as they all did it, the master be moved from blame to praise, and himself be free to enter this street bravely, noisily, careless of recognition, to tell how the big way had been opened. He had pictured the pleasure that would light Teevan's face as he heard this tale of conquest.
ON the ultimate night of defeat Ewing walked as usual into Ninth Street for his vigil before Teevan's house. He had come to a wall that must be scaled. He could no longer believe in any chance way round it or gracious opening through it. Teevan would have to be told, and he was sorry for Teevan. The little man had believed so.
He scanned the starred strip of sky above him as if for words to renew the faith of his friend. His eye ran along the house fronts opposite, but they were blunt, uninspiring masses with shut doors and curtained windows, houses turned away from him. He wished for another friend, less exacting than Teevan, who would take defeat lightly. Then one of the houses stood out familiarly, the Bartell house, with its generous width and its hospitable white door. He had not cared to go there in his time of suspense, but now he was overwhelmed with a sudden longing to see Mrs. Laithe, to feel her friendliness and confide to her, perhaps, a hint of his plight. At least he could look at her a little while, even if he told her nothing.
He crossed the street quickly, walked toward the avenue until he reached the marble steps, and rang the bell. It occurred to him dismally while he waited that she might not be in; still worse, that there might be people about who would keep him from her. It had beenso most of the few times he had called. There was always friendliness in the look she gave him across those shoreless seas of talk, but too often there had been little beside this look.
The man admitted him and was not sure if Mrs. Laithe was in; he would see. Ewing strolled back to the soothing snugness of the library and dropped on the couch. Even to be there alone was something: the room was alive with her, and the restful quietness of it made him conscious all at once of the long strain he had been under. Leaning his head back, he shut his eyes in a sort of desperate surrender, letting the tragedy of his failure swirl about him. But something from the woman he awaited seemed to have flowed in upon him, healing his hurt with gracious little reminders of her. He breathed a long sigh of relief, and for a moment almost lost himself in unconscious rest. It was good to stop thinking.
It was thus she saw him as she came softly in, with scarce a silken rustle. Her face, as she gazed, lost its look of welcome and ready speech, for she saw all his anguish uncovered there before her. It was in his young face, gaunt and jaded and bleached to the city pallor; in the closed eyes, the folded lips; and in the body wearily relaxed. So little life he showed, it seemed to her he might be sleeping, and again, as at the other time, she was shaken by a rush of tenderness for him—tenderness and fear, alike terrible.
She could not speak. She hovered a half step toward him, with a hand instinctively up to shelter and cherish, her eyes wide with pity and a great gladness. Poised so, she waited, breathless.
Though she had made no sound, he thrilled suddenlyto the knowledge of her presence, and his eyes opened to hers. They stared dully an instant, then shone with a quick light that held her exposed and defenseless, while he came to himself—for the first time in her presence—as a man. Helpless to stay it, she watched this consciousness unfolding within him, traced it lucidly from its birth to the very leaping of it from his lips in a smothered cry of want unutterable.
So he held her with his look. Though every nerve warned her to flight, she was powerless even when he started toward her, raising himself slowly from the couch with his hands; her own hand even groped a little toward him, blindly fighting its way into both his own. It turned and nestled there, unreasoningly, warming itself, clasping and unclasping. He towered above her—she had never felt herself so small, so frail as now. His two hands fiercely smothered her own, and his eyes were on her with a look she had never seen there, a look she could not face. It was then that her tenderness was lost in fear of him, and she forced herself to laugh. She laughed in the desperate knowledge that his rising arm threatened her with some crushing, blinding enfoldment where no striving would avail her—laughed with a little easy, formal grace.
He fell back dazed, scanning her in uncomprehending dismay as they stood apart. Then he seemed to recover himself and smiled foolishly as she moved to a chair.
"I'm so glad you came," she began with nervous quickness. He dropped back on the couch, his eyes still on her—the man's eyes.
She endured the look, but she could not suppress the color she felt rising in her face. It seemed to her that her strength must go if the moment lasted a little longer.She knew now that in the weeks of his absence she had longed for this look—for the fearful joy of it—and the realization left her overpowered.
At last, to her relief, he muttered some conventional phrase of his own pleasure in seeing her. But the look of the man still held her, an implacable look. She felt that the shy, embarrassed boy in him was gone forever. She had aged him all in a moment. There was something splendidly ruthless in his gaze, and in place of the confusion she was wont to wreak on him he showed a strange, dogged coolness.
"You've changed," he continued. "You're not well." The wondrous deep alarm of his tone warmed her through and through. She murmured a careless disavowal, and her low laugh, like the little comprehending chuckle of a pleased child, banished from her face for a moment its almost haggard set. But the face was flatly white again under the dark of her hair, and the white gown defined her frailness and drooping, as of some pale, long-stemmed flower fainting of languor in the still heat of late summer.
"You are whiter than ever," he insisted, "whiter and finer. You are like a white rose that is beginning to let its petals fall. You—you are beyond anything now." She laughed helplessly, as people laugh at something insupportable.
"You're going to tell me that people don't talk that way here," he went on, with his old fling of the head, like that of a horse about to gallop off, "but you understand me." He sighed, remembering his trouble for the first time. "But you understand me," he repeated, with a wistful attenuation of the words.
"Yes, I understand—everything," she said, seeingagain the amazing sadness in him. Her look seized all the dejection of his attitude, the listless lean of his head, once upheld so gayly on the strong neck. She had to exert her will not to go nearer to him. She turned away and closed her eyes for a moment to shut him out, then opened them quickly and began to berate him charmingly for having neglected her. "I've thought of you so much oftener than I've seen you," she concluded.
He floundered in the old shyness. It had come suddenly on him when he thought of himself.
"I've been—at work."
"Your face shows it," she said, with a swift, unsteady look. "You have changed, too. You actually look ill."
He reddened slowly under her scrutiny, stammering protestations, but her eyes were open to him. She shrugged herself together and assumed a brisk, motherly air.
"Is it as bad asthat—truly? And you told me nothing of it! Come—I want to know." There was a ring of authority in her voice as she leaned toward him, her great eyes full of pity and succor. "Is the world different from what you thought? Let me know—where does it hurt? That's what they say to children."
Challenged thus directly, he felt shame at the thought of confession equally direct. He would come to it only by winding ways, asserting at first that there was no trouble; then that the trouble was but a little one; and insisting at last that, though the trouble was great, it might have been greater.
Her eyes beat upon him insistently while she drove him to these admissions. Then she was eager with attention while he compelled himself to details. He told of his two weeks' humiliation at the school, not sparinghimself, confessing his lack of power, and the pain this discovery had cost him. When he had finished, with a self-belittling shrug, she sat silent, bending forward, her hands loosely clasped, her eyes fixed away from him.
Now that it was over he felt a sudden lightening of his mood, a swift consciousness of reliance on the woman, a foreknowledge that her words would profit him. At last she brought her eyes upon him and cut to the heart of his woe with a single stroke.
"The thing is nothing in itself." He drew a long breath of relief. "It's in the way you take it. If it weakens you, it's bad. If it strengthens you, it's good. Call the thing 'failure' if you like—but what has it done to you?"
"Why, of course"—he broke off to laugh under her waiting look—"of course I'm still in the race. I see now that I haven't really doubted myself at all." He looked at her with sudden sharpness. "I'd be ashamed to doubt myself before you." He sprang to his feet in the excitement of this discovery and stood alertly before her.
"It doesn't mean anything, does it?" he went on quickly. "You believe in me?"
She laughed defensively. "I believe in you now. You look so much less like a whipped schoolboy."
"I won't forget again. That school isn't for me. I can do things those poor charcoal dusters won't do for years yet. I know that. Baldwin said they'd spoil me if I wasn't stubborn, and Iwasstubborn—I am. You believe I'm stubborn, don't you?"
She smiled assurance. "You have it—can you use it?"
"You'll see!" He sat down, continuing almost apologetically, "I worried more about the effect on others than on myself. It was that threw me down, a fear that other people might think I was some pretentious fool who had come here to get over big things and stumbled at the first little one. I was deathly afraid of hurting other people."
His eyes had been steadily upon hers with an under-current of consciousness for what he would have called the "queerness" of her look, a baffling look that hinted of many things—of sympathy, consternation, rejoicing, even of embarrassment, and yet it had not distinctly been any one of these, so quick had been the play of light in her eyes to the moment they fell before his.
She released her breath with a sound like a sigh, as if she had been holding it, and there was another look in her eyes when she at last raised them to his, one that he could not read, save that it was wholly serious and, he felt, peculiarly a woman's look.
"I am sure," she began, "that no one—no one you consider in this way, could think less of you for a failure. You ought to know that. I want you to know it." She rose from her chair and stepped to the table with a little shrug, turning over the leaves of a magazine, her back toward him. At last she turned her head only, looking at him over one shoulder and speaking with a laughing, reckless impatience.
"Oh, fail—fail—fail as often as you like—fail a hundred times and then—fail." He felt his cheeks burning under her vehemence. She turned about, facing him squarely.
"Have I said enough? Do you know what I think of failures now?"
He rose and stood before her. "You don't know what you've done for me. You don't know—" Again came that crude impulse to take her in his arms. It left him feeling like a criminal. As if she had discerned this she resumed her seat, speaking quickly.
"Go back to that studio and do things. Do them your own way. It's a better way for you than any they can teach you, and the next time——"
"The next time I have a hell——"
"—a hell of doubt—don't wait—come to me." She rose from her chair.
"You don't know all this has meant to me," he said feelingly as she gave him her hand.
"Good night!" And though the gray eyes were hidden from his, there was the look in them of one who knows more than she is thought to know.
As Ewing went out the man was admitting the younger Teevan, who asked for Mrs. Laithe. Ewing wished it had been the father. He had much of good to tell the little man now.
Neither Mrs. Laithe nor Teevan spoke of Ewing after their greeting, though each was so busy in thought of him that their talk was scant and aimless for the first five minutes. Alden Teevan was brought back to her at length by noticing the drawn, tired look of her face, for the sparkle that Ewing had left there was gone.
"Nell, you look done up. I'm no alarmist, but you really need to be frightened. What is it you're doing to take you down so—the same old round? Is it a visiting guild now, or the Comforters of the Worthy Poor, or just amateur nursing of sin, sickness, and death?"
She smiled wanly.
"The same old round, Alden. I can't keep away from it when I am here. I know it so well. No one could keep away who knew it well."
"Futile, futile, futile! Are you equal to a revolution?"
"More's the pity, no. And I've no time for one. I've a whole family of consumptives on my hands at this moment, father, mother, two girls and a boy."
"And you wear yourself out over a few minor effects like that, instead of going at the cause. You may save one or two of those people—none of them of any value, individually; while the same energy put to the root of the evil might save thousands—and theyareof value in the mass. Think me calloused if you like, but that's mere common sense economy of effort. You and I—our class—make them live as they do, and we grow maudlin over it and take them a little soup and many tracts. But we won't remit our tithes. We keep them down to breed more misery for the exercise of our little philanthropic fads. I'm radical, you see."
She turned her head away with a hand wave that seemed to dismiss an argument familiar and outworn.
"I know—but I must do what I can."
He faced her with a sudden insistent energy.
"Come away, Nell—come farther off. You're too close to the ugly things now—you lose the perspective. Come away—and come with me, won't you, Nell? Come away and live. I must say it—I must ask it—come!"
He read the inexorable in the lift of her head.
"I understand, Alden—and I thank you—but no." She glanced across at him and continued more lightly, "I wasn't meant to go far off—to go above timber line, as Mr. Ewing would say."
He felt bitterness rising in him at her mention of the name, but he laughed it away.
"You'll always do the hardest thing, Nell. I know that. But I—well, one of the old heathen—Heraclitus, wasn't it?—remarked that the ass, after all, would have his thistles rather than much fine gold."
She laughed. "Dad would say, the more ass he, if he wouldn't."
"I know—we'd rather have our own particular thistles, each of us. But to live a day or two before we die, Nell! Come with me—stop trying to mount the whirlwind. You'll only be thrown."
Again she shook her head, and gently shaped "No!" with her lips. It was too unemotionally decisive to warrant of any further urging, and he became silent, with something of pain in his face that her eye caught.
"I'm sorry, Alden—I've never liked you better—but I'd rather you didn't ask."
"You wouldn't have come before, would you, Nell—three months ago?" And she answered "No" again, very quickly.
"I must play my little game out in my own way," she continued. "I must stay beside some one—beside people—who still have heart for trying."
"Someone, Nell?"
She caught her lip.
"Everyone who has fresh hope and stubbornness in defeat."
"If you'd let me, Nell—" There was the note of real pleading in his tone.
"No, Alden."
"Friends, though?" he queried, seeming at last convinced.
She thought there was a trace of bitterness in his voice, but she answered, "Friends, surely, Alden."
"We've skirted this thing often, Nell, but you never seemed certain before."
"I didn't—I think I never wasquiteso certain before, Alden—but now I'm driven all one way."
"I believe that." He rose and spoke in a livelier manner. "But if you won't be wise for me, Nell, be wise for some one else. For God's sake feel a little worry about your health. I say you look unpromising at this moment."
"I've always been well," she insisted brightly.
"And, Nell, I've wanted to be so much more than a friend to you that my feelings are a bit blurred just now—but I believe I'll always do what a friend should."
EWING was loath to sleep that night, for in sleep he must leave the thought of her who, having been only a picture to him, had come suddenly to life. The magic would have seemed no greater if his own mother had issued livingly from the canvas. How it had happened he knew not, but this woman was all at once the living spring of his life. The thought of her was a golden mist enveloping him. He did not once call it love, but he thought of the gracious women he had loved in books, and knew she was all of them in one.
And once he had been almost careless in her presence! How he marveled at that now, when he knew that henceforth every approach to her would be an event. He shuddered at the memory of what he had been saved from—that swift brute impulse to hold her close against his breast. Must he feel that always—fight it always, to be blasted if he lost? At least in his own secret world he was free to treasure each memory of her dearness. And he could make her glad. He could work as man had not worked before. He could make her a little glad.
He feverishly began a drawing for theKnickerbockerthe next morning. Craig, the art editor, had said that he could use six drawings as good as the two he was shown, and they had decided on scenes that would givevariety to the series. But that was before a Teevan had come into his life, and now he had lost a month in the dream of satisfying that patron critic.
It was good to prove that he could still draw in his own way; he had suffered so long in that rage of impotence; and he kept to the work until dusk, making no stop for food, even when the noise of falling bodies came to mark the luncheon hour.
When Teevan sauntered in at six the two went to dine at a restaurant. Ewing had no longer dreaded the meeting. He was ready to show Teevan that there had been no true failure. But Teevan merely listened to the bare outline of fact as they threaded a way through the evening crowd. He made no comment, and Ewing thought this might be due to the difficulty of conversing in a noisy street.
But after ordering dinner with a nice deliberation, Teevan spoke determinedly of other matters. Ewing ventured a humorous reference to his despair when he left the school, meaning to compel the inference that he no longer despaired. Teevan languidly mentioned a violinist he had heard the evening before.
"—Two Bach numbers, the suite in F minor rather exquisitely done. Bach wrote tremendously well for the fiddle. Technical skill in the performer, you ask? Yes, entirely adequate; indeed, he gave rather a warm reading, really not lacking a certain elevation of style, even a nobility of utterance. That was quite all of interest, though. The Dvorakhumoresque—a thing transcribed from a piano piece and made sentimental—has one of those effective passages in double notes, certain to win an encore from the mob; and the twenty-fourth caprice of Paganini was merely a smart exhibitionof harmonic playing—mere squibs and firecrackers and rockets, the veriest fireworks. Ah, it's small wonder the world has so few artists when it demands so little." And Teevan sighed significantly.
Ewing was chilled by this avoidance of himself, though he could not yet believe it intentional.
"I haven't given up," he declared, by way of reminding Teevan. "You shall see that I'm stubborn."
Teevan affected to study a group of diners at a neighboring table as he replied:
"Oh, yes, I gather that you left the school when you found it difficult."
"But you see——"
"This soup is worth while, really. Soup is surprisingly difficult. Yet the world believes perfect soups to be plentiful." He sighed again. "It merely shows the vitality of error."
Ewing felt his woman-given courage leaving him at this attack, or rather at this lack of attack. He had been prepared to have his friend exhibit doubt, disbelief, chagrin—anything that would still show an undiminished esteem. But the intimate note had gone from Teevan's speech. He talked at large as Ewing had heard him talk to roomfuls of people.
"Ah, yes, the vitality of error. Give the world a lie about soup or souls, and you'll not soon worry that lie away. It's clutched with a bulldog jaw. Say good soup is common—God-fearing Christians echo the lie. Say Berkeley denies the existence of matter, and men with Berkeley at hand repeat you. Say Locke denies all knowledge except through the medium of the senses, and students of Locke pass on the absurdity. Bacon was by no means the first thinker to proclaim the deficienciesof the Aristotelian philosophy—a system already in disrepute when he wrote the 'Instauration.' Yet in our crude yearning for concreteness, for specific idols, we laud him as the father of the inductive philosophy—as if induction weren't an inevitable process in any mind grown beyond primitive concepts. Gad! I had a dog once that used induction a dozen times a day, and he'd never so much as heard of Bacon."
Thus he wandered afield during the dinner, with airs of a bored but conscientious host, and Ewing fell lower of heart at each of his periods. He hoped for his chance when the coffee came, but Teevan gave him no opening. The brandy sufficed for his text. We were not brandy-drinkers, unhappily enough—"the wholesomest of all spirits, the distilled essence of cognac grapes, the magic cup of Circe, 'her Orient liquor in a crystal glass'—and we know as little how to drink a liqueur brandy as we know how to buy it. We gulp it from these straight glasses, when it should be taken in sips from a glass small at the top, a glass first warmed in the palm of the hand. Only so may we capture the bouquet, that elusive fragrance of the May-vine blossom, that wraith of spring-perfumes."
Ewing was still unjustified when the waiter helped them on with their coats, and then he was dismayed to observe that Teevan apparently meant to leave him. The little man held out his hand with "So glad to have had your company—another time—I shall see you again, I hope."
"Please come back with me. I'd like to talk to you—to ask your advice." He felt himself an outcast.
Teevan's response, a surprised but coldly polite assent, did not lighten his dejection as they walked back to the studio in silence.
But once there the little man no longer avoided talk of his young friend's fiasco. He let it be seen that another illusion, one fondly cherished, he need not say, had been shattered. He gave the impression that he had talked of other things to forget this—an inadequate device, he let it be inferred.
Ewing confessed his own despondency of the night before, but told how a woman had given him new courage.
"Not the least injury they do us," remarked Teevan of women, somewhat snappishly, "is to wheedle us into taking our failures lightly." That were especially baneful to the artist, it seemed; by his very temperament was he exposed to their blandishing sophistries. The artist cult should be a priesthood, aloof, austere, celibate—deaf to the woman cries of "Never mind!" and "Courage!" and "Another day!" All very well that, but they shut their pretty eyes to real failures, or, at most, survey them with a tender air of belittlement that leaves the defeated one blind to their significance. Speaking largely, the society of women should be shunned by earnest men intent on achievement.
Ewing began to feel that possibly he had taken heart too readily. He was willing to believe this if it would restore him to the little man's esteem. He pointed timidly to the drawing he had begun that morning, eager for the word of praise he believed it to merit.
"Oh,that!" Teevan drawled the words, with lifted brows; then went on to speak of Jean François Millet, unprosperous villager of Barbizon. He tried—unsuccessfully—to recall an instance when that painter had debased his art. Not once had he made a cheap picture for a magazine. He had never put his Muse to the streets. Millet was not pigeon-livered.
Ewing leaned forward in his chair, his head between his hands. He saw that the mere sale of drawings would be a savorless success, if it bereft him of this plain-speaking but just friend. More, it would leave him small in the eyes of a woman who was now even more than Teevan. He got up doggedly, seized the drawing and began to break the tough bristol board, getting it into four pieces at length and flinging these into the grate. He was unable to resist a secret fond look at the lines he had made with such loving care. Teevan's eyes glistened now, and he held out a hand to Ewing.
"Ah—you give me hope. Bravo!"
"Then you do believe in me; you think I have it in me?"
"Power? Yes; I've seen that. I judge men rather accurately. But I saw that you'd be tempted to rest. The more power, the greater the temptation. It's not so hard to fast in a desert—the less gifted man is less tempted. But to fast with plenty at hand for the reaching, and fair women to counsel content—to refuse apples and flagons, waiting for the ultimate jewel—that takes aman. It demands one—there's a certain street saying—who can 'stand the gaff.'"
"And you really think I can stand it? I feel more than ever that I want to succeed."
Teevan beamed on him almost affectionately. "I almost suspect——"
"You shall see that I can," Ewing broke in, but what he thought was, "Shewill see it."
"It's a matter of endurance," resumed Teevan genially. "Genius is no endowment of supreme gifts. Every man of us has something latent that would sethim apart. Genius is only the capacity for expressing that—that phase of yourself which differentiates you from all other selves. Of course only a few succeed. Most of us succumb to the general pressure to be alike. Yet—I almost believe in you."
Ewing regarded him with glad eyes, touched by this stanch yet discerning adherence.
Returning home that night Teevan, in his library, took down a Bible and searched for a passage he only half recalled. He found it at last, one wherein the God of Israel thunders, not without humor, against the foes of His chosen tribe.
"I will send a faintness into their hearts in the land of their enemies; and the sound of a shaken leaf shall chase them; and they shall flee as fleeing from a sword; and they shall fall when none pursueth." He chuckled delightedly as he read it, and wiped tears of mirth from his eyes.
So it befell that Ewing forsook the beaten road of minor achievement that winter, and labored toward the far, high peaks. In his own phrase, the trail was rough and blind. Preceding climbers had not been thoughtful to "blaze" it. But he grudged no effort while he had the little man's applause. And this was not lacking, though it was discreet applause, promoting no slothful content.
It was Ewing who suggested that he paint under the criticism of Sydenham. The little man looked at him in doubt, seeming to suspect a jesting insincerity, then burst into hearty, hand-clapping laughter, crying, "Splendid! An inspiration, indeed! On my word, I hadn't thought of anything half so brilliant."
And Ewing began to paint; to paint like Sydenham,if he might—cloud studies, bits of street perspective, stretches of river, a realistic view of the roofs from his window, with their water butts, chimney pots, and clothes lines. Baldwin looked in once, and carried a word below to the men who sold things: the word "Awful!" He also ventured a friendly remonstrance to Ewing. "If you're going to paint, for God's sake go to some man who knows how!"
Ewing referred to Teevan's conviction that Sydenham was the ideal master for him, and to the attested fact that Teevan knew painting and painters.
"Then I don't understand Teevan," was Baldwin's puzzled response.
"But I'm coming on—Teevan says so."
Baldwin ventured another look at the canvas in hand and fled below.
Teevan was watchful and permitted few chances for meddling of this sort. He contrived to be with Ewing most of the time when Sydenham was not. And Ewing never tired of Sydenham. If they walked the streets together the old man would direct his eye to some unnoticed felicity of color on the walls that shut them in, to bits of enchanting perspective, to subtle plays of light and shade in unpromising spots. Or if they sat alone at night the painter told of color in the world beyond the sea; how from the top of Mont Blanc the stars are seen at midday, points of vivid light in a dark blue-violet field; of the purple nights of the desert, the stars but an arrowshot above; of the cold, pale silvers of dawn in the desert, and the heated gold and scarlet of evening; of the impossible blue of the bay of Naples. His face glowed to such youthfulness at these times that Ewing would forget his futile years until the sigh came.
"But I've always seen too much. Only the fountain of Juventius could have given me time enough. I'm like the lad in the school-reader tale who reached into the jar of nuts and tried to withdraw his hand full—and lost them all."
Between Ewing and Teevan there was even a new bond. Ewing discovered that money inevitably left one's pocket in New York, even if it vanished under auspices less violent and less obscure than Ben had so gloomily feared. The steady dribble was quite as effective. When he awoke to this great fiscal truth he saw that some condescension of effort would be required. He must sell enough drawings to sustain him modestly. He broached this regrettable necessity to Teevan, wishing the little man to understand that, in making a few things for money, he was guilty of no treachery to the Teevan ideal. But Teevan, much to his embarrassment, had extended the full hand of bestowal.
He was hurt when Ewing demurred; then annoyed that so petty an obstacle should retard a progress so splendid. He never dared to suspect a decadence in the resolution of his young friend.
Ewing was cut by his distress, stung by his doubt, and persuaded by his logic. He accepted Teevan's money, though not without instinctive misgiving. There were moments when he traitorously wondered if it might not be better for him to lack a friend with ideals so rigid. And more than once he suffered the disquieting suspicion of some unreality in and through it all—his intimacy with Teevan, and his desertion of a trail whose beginnings, at least, he knew. There was sometimes a faint ring of artificiality in the whole situation.Yet Teevan's heartiness and his certainty—the felicitous certainty of a star in its course—always dispelled this vague unquiet, and at last it brought Ewing a new pleasure to remember that an actual, material obligation—one increasing at measured intervals—now existed between them.
He had never spoken openly to Mrs. Laithe of his intimacy with Teevan. The little man had conveyed his wish of this by indirect speech. He would have liked to tell her of the solace and substantial benefits of their comradeship, to dwell upon the shining merits of this whole-souled but modest benefactor—for Teevan caused his charge to infer that a shame of doing good openly inspired his hints—but he had, perforce, to let the praise die unspoken.
Nor did he speak often of Mrs. Laithe to Teevan, for the little man was not only bitter as to woman's influence on the life artistic, but inclined to hold the sex lightly, it seemed, in a much wider aspect. And he spoke, Ewing was sure, out of a ripe experience. He had no difficulty in detecting, under the little man's self-depreciating talk, that Teevan had ever been a power among women, and was not even yet invincibly averse to gallant adventure; not yet a man to be resisted. He was far from bluntly confessing this, but sometimes, when the brandy was low in the decanter, he would tacitly admit a romantic past; romantic, perhaps, to the point of turbulence. And once, when there was no brandy left, he spoke of specific affairs, particularly of one the breaking off of which was giving him the devil's own worry.
"Gad! She's bent on sacrificing everything for me!"
Ewing innocently murmured words about marriage as an honorable estate.
"Marriage!" said Teevan, and Ewing blushed, noting his tone and the lift of his brows.
"Poor, silly, romantic fools!" sighed Teevan. "One would find it difficult to say what they see in me, I fancy."
Ewing murmured polite protestations. But less than ever did he feel moved to speak of Mrs. Laithe to the little man. It did not seem fitting. "Don Juan" had been among the verse with which the lake cabin was supplied.
Not even when Mrs. Laithe was taken off to Florida by her father did he speak her name, though he was filled with her good-by to him. There had seemed to be so much between them, and yet so little of it that could come to words. But he carried for long the last look of her eyes, and he set to his work with a new resolve. There was incentive enough. Teevan never let him forget that he required signs and miracles, like the doubting ones of old. And she—she knew he would perform them.