AS the winter wore on Ewing fell into doubt and dread. Vague enough they were, but they rested on a sickening effect of emptiness, a time blank of achievement. He still regarded Teevan as quite all of the seven pillars of the house of wisdom. Yet instinct was rebelling. There were tired afternoons when he hungered to eat of the fruit of his own way.
This feeling could not but show in his occasional letters to Mrs. Laithe. She read through all his protestations of cheerfulness to the real dejection beneath them, and was both troubled and mystified, raging at his secretiveness.
When she returned to New York on a day in April and found a note from Mrs. Lowndes asking her to dine that evening, she accepted with a plan in mind. Before she saw Ewing she would try to learn something about him from Sydenham, for Sydenham would also dine with Mrs. Lowndes, and she knew that Ewing had been painting with the old man.
She found Birley the other guest, and that, too, was customary. Birley and Sydenham preserved for their hostess a certain aroma of her youth. Both had wooed her in the long ago; Sydenham in a day when Long Branch was. On its sands in the light of a July moon she had prettily hoped they might always be friends. Birley had heard her intone the same becoming sentiment at Saratoga later in the season. And both rejectedones had been present at St. Paul's on a day in the following June when Kitty Folsom and Jack Lowndes had consented together in holy wedlock.
The girl's hope, perfunctory enough at the time, one may fear, had seen long years of fruition. She liked to have them at her table now. Only, when the three were alone, they remembered too vividly and became, in the silences, too fantastically unlike their aged selves to the misty eyes of one another. The one-time belle found a little of that forgetting and remembering to be salutary, so little as ensued when a fourth guest was present. And Eleanor Laithe had often been that fourth, a saving reminder of the present, to recall them when they had loitered far enough back into the old marrying years.
But she came this night with a reason beyond her wish to please. So eager was she to ask Sydenham about Ewing that she gave scant attention to the searching looks and queries of Birley when she entered the drawing room. The big man rallied her on her pallor and frailness, but with a poor spirit that hardly concealed his real misgiving. She silenced him with impatient denials of illness, but his eyes lingered anxiously on her face.
She sat at table with but half an ear for their old-time gossip, the bantering gallantries of the aged swains, and the outworn coquetries of the one-time beauty. And when they fell silent—oftener now than was their wont, for each was thinking of that other Kitty Lowndes, who had taken matters into her own hands—she forgot to make talk, silent herself for thinking on the son of that Kitty. The dinner lacked the sparkle she had been expected to give it.
As they were about to rise, after coffee, she playfully petitioned for a chat with Sydenham.
"Herbert wants to smoke, and I want to sit here with him. We need a little talk together," she explained. And the other two left them, the old lady leaning on the arm of Birley.
Sydenham lighted a cigar, pushed his chair back, and faced the woman who looked eagerly at him across the disordered table, her arms along its edge, her head tilted to a questionable angle. She flew to her point.
"What about Gilbert Ewing—what trouble is he having?"
Sydenham stared vacantly. He seemed to find it necessary to translate the question into some language of his own.
"Trouble? Oh, all sorts—chrome and indigo, yellow ocher, burnt umber, rose madder, Chinese white—composition, light and shade, vanishing points. You'd have to be one of us to understand."
"Other trouble," she insisted sharply—"personal—not about his painting."
Sydenham stared again, clutching his beard in a dazed search for inspiration. He did not consider people apart from painting. It was impossible that anyone should wish to discuss Ewing except in relation to colors and canvas.
"Well, he has trouble with everything—composition, tone-values, everything."
"But somethingnotpainting."
He looked up at the ceiling helplessly.
"Well, I fancy Randy Teevan worries him."
"Randall Teevan!" She was amazed and alarmed at once.
"Sometimes I get the idea that Randy badgers him, though they're thick as thieves. The boy wouldn't breathe if Randy said it was bad for the lungs."
"How long have they been friends?"
By quick, nervous, point-blank queries she drew from him all that he knew of this intimacy. She puzzled over it.
"Can he know?" She had not meant him to hear this, but he caught the words, and betrayed something like human interest.
"Trust Randy for that! I found it out myself. He had Kitty's portrait—Kitty to the life—stunning brush work. Randy has begged the picture of him for a while. I fancy he didn't want it hanging there for others to see. And he found the fellow here one afternoon. Kitty told me. She was nearly taken off her feet by his story but Randy happened in and cooled things down. It's queer, Randy's setting himself to win over the chap. It's a puzzle-mix. I wonder about it sometimes when the light goes."
She had listened in consternation, a rage for battle rising in her. She was sure Teevan must have some end in view hurtful to Ewing. Yet this was cunningly hidden. She was still puzzling over this when Sydenham recalled her. He had forgotten Ewing, and studied the red light that fell across the table through a shade of silk.
"What fools we are to think of painting shadows! If heaven's the place it's said to be they'll have real shadows put in up tubes, and then—well,thinkof it!"
She laughed at him, her brief laugh, with a sigh to follow.
"We must go to the others. But, Herbert, you'llwatch him as well as you can, won't you? I feel responsible for him in a way."
He hesitated, but the light came. "Oh, you mean Ewing? Of course I'll watch him. I dare say he'll paint some day, after a fashion." He fumbled for the knob and awkwardly opened the door for her.
When the men went Mrs. Laithe asked if she might not linger a moment.
"Dear Aunt Kitty!" she said, going to the other's chair. "OldKitty!" she repeated meaningly. The elder woman glanced quickly at her in faint alarm, half questioning, half defiant.
"Oh, Aunt Kitty! I know—Iknow! and I must talk of him. I suspected something almost from the first, and then I made sure. But I thought that perhaps no one else would find it out. And he was worth it—he is worth it. I couldn't have left him there, even if I'd been sure that everyone would know. He was a man—he had the right to live."
"My child, my child! Oh, you didn't know what you were doing! It was a monstrous thing, an impossible thing!"
"He's Kitty's son. You must feel for him."
"Feel? What haven't I felt since that day he came here?" There had been a break in her voice, but she went quietly on. "I can't make you know, dear. You've torn me—it will hurt to the end. Can you understand that in a terrible, an unspeakable way, my Kitty is still alive, is near me, and yet is not to be known? But you can't understand it. You've never had a child."
"Ah! but I've been one. I know what he would feel."
"Please, dear!" She put up a hand in protest. "As if I don't feel his hurt and Kitty's as well as mine. Ishall be ground between the two every day of my life. Do you think my old arms didn't cry out to be around the mother in him? But think if I had yielded! Picture his own suffering—his own shame. Can you see us meeting, our eyes falling? Even for his own sake, he must never know."
"Isn't there a way, Aunt Kitty? Some way? He's worth finding a way for." She leaned over to stroke the other's hand.
"No way, my girl. Be the world a moment, be cool. He's a nameless thing. You might know him, but nothing more. Could he make a life? Could a woman—come, face it without prejudice—could you see your own sister marry him?" Mrs. Laithe looked blank.
"You see how impossible it is. You, yourself, couldyoustand before the world with him? Could you face the shame?"
The younger woman dropped the hand she held and turned away. The elder regarded her shrewdly.
"There—you see how impossible——"
But the other faced her suddenly, clear-eyed and defiant, her head back.
"Eleanor!" It was a cry of consternation that was yet softened by tenderness, an amazed but comprehending tenderness, for the face of the younger woman was incarnadined, flagrantly, splendidly.
A moment they held each other. But there was no mistaking the thing, for, though the blush had quickly faded, an after glow lingered.
The older woman rose quickly to throw her arms about the other.
"My mad, mad child!" She stood off to search her face incredulously.
"He's alone, Aunt Kitty, and he's so defenseless. He believes in everyone more than in himself. He'll be cured of that some time, but just now I'm his only defender. Others are against him or stand neutral with talk of the 'world.' I can't blame you, dear, I think you must be right for yourself. But when he does awaken"—she narrowed her eyes on the other a moment in calculation—"then I shan't be ashamed to have him know it was always safe to believe in me—whether he was boy or man or no one at all—or less than no one. I'd never bother about names, dear—I'd never bother about names."
She smiled and drew the other close with little reassuring caresses. "You see names aren't much—the directory is full of them, and dreary enough reading they'd make. No, I'd not care for that. I'd only ask that he believe in himself as much as I believe in him, and care as little for names. And I warn you I mean to help him to that if I can."
The eyes of the other sparkled now. There was in her glance the excited admiration of a timid child who watches a reckless playmate dare some dark passage of evil repute for goblins.
"You mad—dear mad girl!" she said.
EWING knew that his lady had come back. She had sent him a note the first day: "I am dining to-night with an old friend. But come to-morrow night."
The next day, while he was saying, "To-night I shall see her—actually see her...." there had come another note in her careless, scrawled writing: "I find, after all, that I shall be engaged to-night. Can you not come to-morrow night instead? I am eager for a talk with you."
"Could" he come! He laughed as he put the thing tenderly away. Could he come, indeed! Could he stay away?
But early in the evening of that same forbidden day he walked to Ninth Street, entering that thoroughfare furtively. He might not see her for another day, but at least he could look fondly at the door by which she had entered, and gaze on the stanch house that enfolded her, even on the steps that must have felt her light, quick tread, perhaps within the hour.
These things would help him to believe in her actuality—she had so come to seem but a dream lady to him.
Thrice he passed the house on the opposite side of the street. A dim light glowed through the curtained windows. Beyond them, he thought, she would be talking; laughing, perhaps; perhaps even thinking of him atthat very moment as she gazed absently at some speaker who thought to have her attention. If only she, too, could be counting the hours! But that was too unlikely. He warned himself not to imagine that. He recalled some of Teevan's speeches about women—"Shallow, pretty fools, for man's amusing—the Oriental alone, my boy, has a sane theory of women; creatures to be kept as choice cabinet bits—under lock and key." Poor Teevan, not to have known the one woman who could have illumined his darkness! Poor Teevan, indeed! He idly wondered if his affair—that troublesome affair of which the little man had spoken so feelingly—had been "broken off."
He slowly walked once more past the Bartell house, beholding a splendid vision of himself as he would leap up those steps the next evening. Then he continued on past Teevan's house, regarding that, also, with great kindness. He stopped a little beyond this, meaning to return. As he did so the door opened and a woman came out. He thought there was something furtive in her glance up and down the street as she paused to gather up her skirts. Then something familiar in the feminine grace of that movement chained him. Surely, but one person had ever done the thing in just that way. There could be no other. He stood staring while she came down the steps and into the light of a street lamp. It was Mrs. Laithe, walking briskly now, toward her own home. He could not mistake that free-swinging, level, deliberate stride, with the head so finely up.
He almost cried out to her in his gladness. He felt as a lost child who wildly claims its own again in some crowded street. He walked back quickly, watching her until her own door swallowed her up.
He felt a lively rejoicing. The unpromising evening had done well by him after all. Thinking but to look tenderly at a house front he had veritably seen his lady—watched her with secret, unrestrained fondness. He had an impulse to follow now and demand her at the door. But he remembered in time; she would be engaged and he would see her soon. That long look was adventure enough for one night.
But he could ring Teevan's bell. That would be a fine thing to do, for Teevan had seen her. Teevan would speak of her, little knowing how his words were hungered for. He was admitted and found the little man on the hearth rug in the library, talking to himself with great animation. He showed surprise, but his welcome was warmer than usual, Ewing thought. He seated his guest and proffered him brandy, pouring a glass for himself from a decanter almost empty. As he drank he beamed shrewdly on Ewing—kindly but shrewdly. "He must have seen her—he must have seen her ..." the little man was saying. Then a vagrant, elfish vanity smote him. He smiled inscrutably on Ewing—Ewing, who had been waiting to say lightly, "I happened to see Mrs. Laithe leaving...." But he did not say this, for the little man's smile came to life in speech.
"Gad! my boy—I'm deuced glad you came. You can make me forget a most distressing half hour I've just gone through."
The light in Ewing's eyes changed perceptibly.
"Oh, these women!" grumbled Teevan pleasantly, with the fine, humorous resignation of a persecuted gallant.
"Women—women?" muttered Ewing, slightly aghast. Teevan's heart beat blithely within his breast.
"Silly, romantic fools! Whatdothey see in a man of my years?" He flourished a gesture of magnificent deprecation. "I think I once mentioned a very irksome affair—" How he blessed, now, that bit of boasting, vague and aimless at the time! "The lady, I blush to say it, becomes exigent. But I'm rightly served. Heaven knows I've seen enough of that sort of thing to know how it ends. But come"—he rose to a livelier manner—"I shouldn't bore you with a matter I'm half ashamed of, man of the world as I am. You'll sound the ennui of it, all in your own good time, when you've lost a few of those precious illusions." He broke off to ring, and directed the man to replenish the decanter.
Ewing gazed stupidly at him, failing of speech. The little man drank again when the brandy came, and Ewing wondered if he could be drunk. He feared not. The men he had known in the hills were noisy in drink—they chiefly yelled. And Teevan was quiet. If his eyes stared vacantly at intervals, if he clipped syllables from his words, and seemed to attack his speech with extreme caution, those might be only the results of his emotion. But what monstrous stuff was this he uttered! What unbelievable stuff! In a fever of apprehension he wondered what Teevan would say next.
But the little man dismissed woman, dismissed her with an exquisite shrug, to speak of his young friend's work, and of painting at large.
"A suggestion of the true manner in that late thing of yours, my boy, really, a hint of Dupré, and he was a colorist of the first rank. And there are fewer colorists, genuine masters of tone, than you'd think. Turner was one, to be sure, but Millet had a restricted sense of color. Corot was great only within a narrow range.Rousseau was only a bit broader, robuster. There's a wretchedly defective color sense in many of the old masters, and in heaven knows how many of the young ones. France must take the blame for that, I'm sure you'd agree with me. The academic sentiment there runs to form and against color. They insist that colorists do little work. It's not an unplausible sophism. One has only to begin counting to see that—counting the host of little niggling, mechanical stipplers it's responsible for. It's true, color has its pitfalls and its gins. There's a temptation to shirk form. Many an aspiring colorist has become at last a mushy mannerist, as vicious in his influence as the chaps who never get beyond smart drawing and clever grouping." The little man was "squeezing" his eyes now as if he judged a row of paintings. He talked on and drank frequently.
But Ewing left as soon as he could do so. Teevan pressed his hand with rare cordiality at parting, as if Ewing were one person in the world still worthy of belief. He wandered blindly home, awkwardly trying to mold this new chaos into an understandable scheme of things. He fell instinctively back on his studies of the drama.
Many nights he had sat before the painted curtain to feast a questing mind on the life it lifted to reveal. He had found its revelations more intimate, more specific, than those of the life outside, and he had seemed to learn many things. Lacking this study he would not have divined that actual men and women might be leading lives of domestic adventure, of romantic vicissitude, of sinister intrigue, lives crowded with love and hate and fear and a thousand lawless complexities.
He had studied the street crowds in the light thus thrown on their inner motives. It had been a fine thing to detect the plotting scoundrel under the placid, dissembling mask of some fellow who bought an evening paper and boarded a street car with elaborate airs of innocence; to probe the secret of the unhappy wife whose white face stared blankly from a passing brougham; to identify the handsome but never culpable hero, unconscious of third-act toils tightening about him; to know the persecuted heroine, or the manly but comic chap who loved her with exquisite restraint, divining that she could never be his.
But, though he had stripped the masks from these mummers in the street crowds, and read their secrets of guilt or innocence, he had not supposed that the people he actually knew could be leading lives complicated in that way. And if Teevan had talked, then Teevan must have been drunk. He would see her to-morrow night, and she would speak casually of her call at Teevan's upon some trifling errand.
Yet, when night came again and he stood in her presence, the first devouring look at her shocked him momentarily out of all thought of Teevan's maunderings. She was drooping and wasted and flatly pale. He scarcely knew her face, with the eyes burning at him from black rings. He took her hand, nursing it gently, standing helpless and hurt before her.
"You are so changed," he said fearfully, "so changed! Oh, you are so changed!"
But she laughed with her familiar gayety, tossing her head in denial. He still scanned her face. Some resemblance there, some sinister memory of her look on another face, was stirring him. He could almostremember what it meant. At last her eyes fell before his and she drew her hand quickly away.
"Really, I won't have any talk of myself. I hear too much of that. I'm a bit run down, that's all. We found Florida enervating. Even dad was affected by it and forgot his philosophy. So, an end to that. I must hear of you, of your work."
She sat down, drawing a white scarf about her shoulders, and leaning toward him in the old inviting way.
"Tell me what you have done—everything there is to tell about it."
All at once he remembered.
"Last night," he began uneasily—"I wanted to see you last night—"
"You couldn't have seen me last night." She smiled in a way that brought out all the weak, wasted look of her face. "I was busy—I was trying to adjust something that has troubled me more than I can tell you."
He stared at her, incredulous, believing he could not have heard.
"... an affair that has worried me," she repeated, noticing his blank look.
Stupefied as he was, he felt a great pity rush over him, an instant longing to be her knight and give battle for her—to be her squire, if she herself must be knight. Yet, if Teevan had spoken truly must it not be a thing in which he was powerless to help her ever so little? A sudden sickness of rage came over him at thought of Teevan. He had almost made a jest of her.
He could not talk of himself after that. She could get nothing from him of his own worries, though she could see that he had these in abundance. At last shetired of striving against him and let him go, out of sheer longing for the touch of his hand at parting. He had regarded her with a moody, almost savage tenderness that made her weak.
As he walked home he felt new to the streets again. They were strange streets in a strange world. But one thing he was sure of; one thing stood clearly out of the puzzle: he must not intrude, must not bother her; must not see her often. In a drama so alien to him he could not act without direction. He knew his own longing too well to trust himself. He sat a long time with his arms clasped across his breast. The anguish in it seemed physical; it was as if a beast were devouring his heart.
HE turned furiously to his work, but, as the summer came on, he realized that he was working with a desperation entirely heartless. He was not only sure, now, that he had taken a wrong road, but that nameless distress of his lady had left his desire benumbed. A fountain had gone dry in him.
At the beginning of the warm days he went into the country on sketching trips with Sydenham. To vales and little rivers north of the city, to flat, green stretches on Long Island, to the Jersey hills, they had gone with sketch traps wherever trolley or steam car could find Nature quickly for them.
Ewing had looked forward to this. He had felt hampered in the studio, where he must pass whole days in futile messing with colors, in rash trials of this or that trick of tint, like an idling schoolboy playing with slate and pencil. Once in the open, he had felt, there would quickly show forth those gifts which Teevan was certain he possessed.
But day by day these excursions with the old painter had brought him to believe that he had lost his way. That trick of color was not to be learned, it was clear, by rough-and-ready advances. Teevan, who was ever watchful of him, who betrayed, indeed, a strange little jealousy of any other influence than his own, scanned his first studies eagerly, and turned an inscrutable faceon his young friend. He did not praise loosely; he did not condemn outright. And he talked not too specifically of the canvases before him. He showed little consciousness of a change in the demeanor of his disciple, though Ewing's eye rested on him with a long, unaccountable regard. Perhaps the boy was turning a little sullen. This amused him. Meanwhile, the youth stood aghast before the dreadful thing he saw in his heart. Hatred of a benefactor! All the good in him struggled against it; all his gratitude pleaded with him to be fair to the friend he had revered so long. Teevan talked more of Corot or Constable, Diaz or Millet than he talked of Ewing; and the young man came at last to the amazing conclusion not only that he was on a wrong road, but that Teevan knew it—that the little man must long have known it. This put him again in that rage of impotence that had seized him in those last days at the League. But he bore it longer now. He felt there was something final about this.
There were long days in the open to think on it, weigh it, and wring the meaning from it. Sydenham placidly criticised his work; but Sydenham could not feel his tragedy of defeat. A man who, at seventy, suffered his own despairs with the poignant ecstasy of youth, could not take a boy's failings seriously. Ewing now saw, moreover—for he was beginning to use another pair of eyes than Teevan's—that Sydenham himself was a hopeless mannerist, a color-mad voluptuary, painting always subjectively, refusing all but the merest hints from his subject.
His last day of confessed futility, his last hour of inner rebellion, came early in June. He carried his sketch trap out that day, but did not unpack it. Helay, instead, pondering, resolving, raging, while Sydenham, a little distance off, delicately corrected the errors of Nature in a vista of meadow. Ewing chewed the juicy ends of long-stemmed grasses and made phrases of disparagement for this sketch of Sydenham's, picturing himself with the courage to utter them. He told himself frankly what he thought of the old man's work—his "brush doddering," he nerved himself to call it.
Immensely refreshed by this exercise in brutality, he rolled over on his grassy bed to follow the shade of the oak under which he lay, and dramatized a meeting with Teevan, in which the little man strangely listened more than he spoke. He uttered his mind again concerning the work of Sydenham, the master Teevan had prescribed, asserting that unsuspecting toiler to be hopelessly "locoed" in the matter of color. He saw Teevan's fine brows go elegantly up at this term, and he explained it to him with a humble sort of boldness.
From this he warmed to sheer audacity, disclosing further to his imagined hearer that the time had come for him to go his own way—still grateful for advice, still yearning for that friendly intimacy, but determined to be done with dreams. He saw Teevan applauding this mild declaration of revolt, with his fine, dark little smile, and a courteous inclination of the head, and he thereupon amplified it. He must go back to himself and stay there stubbornly, wheresoever that self led him. Millet might have a restricted sense of color, Corot might have had his faults, and Rousseau have been less than Teevan could have wished him; but these were dead men. And Ewing was alive, determined to do those things that permitted him to feel the little power he might have. He was throughwith efforts that brought him nothing but a sense of the folly of all effort. And it was to this conviction, he made it plain, that his amazed but still respectful listener had led him. He worked himself into a glow of defiant self-assertion, feeling his own respect, and Teevan's as well, mounting with his heat.
When the light faded he strolled over to look at Sydenham's sketch, bent on testing his self-inspired temerity.
"I wonder if you've gotten that sky?" he began judicially, as the old man invited his comment. Sydenham looked up in some surprise, but Ewing's eyes were still on the sketch.
"Too gray above, isn't it? I thought the gray was only down near the horizon. By the way, I wish I'd roughed in that cow for you. A cow isn't the easiest thing in the world to draw. They look easy, but they're not. That bit of stone wall isn't bad, and your clover effect is first rate." He paused. He had meant only to practice speaking his own mind against the next interview with Teevan. He did not want to hurt Sydenham. The latter was roping his stool and easel together. He had been a little amazed at his pupil's outburst, but he looked up with a smile entirely placid.
"That's the way they all say it. You've caught the trick of art criticism, my boy, if you've caught nothing else."
Ewing saw that he was laughed at. There was a cool little flash to his retort.
"I can make that into a real cow for you, if you like, after we get home."
But the old man only chuckled at him, making him regret that he had ever so little curbed his criticism.He had an impulse to fight, a craving to arouse resistance. But he saw that Sydenham was no target for him, save in a sort of subcaliber practice. He hoped this novel combativeness would not wither under the first glance of Teevan's sharp little eyes.
It was dusk when they reached the city, and Ewing went to the Monastery to dine. He had long shunned the place, for the men there talked of things they had done or were doing, and they had made him, without meaning to, feel "out of it," as he told himself. For he, if he talked, could tell only of wonders he meant to do, and, lacking an audience composed of Teevans, he was shrewd enough to see that these would sound too wonderful and the future too distantly vague.
He had always been glad, however, of his drawing on the east wall. They could not believe him wholly lacking after that, nor refuse him fellowship if he sought it. He avoided the crowd when he entered the room—the men he knew best were at a long table on the rear veranda just outside the open windows—and chose a small table opposite his drawing. He had thought of it often during the afternoon while he harangued Teevan in imagination. It had occurred to him that this was the only thing he had really done since coming to New York, and he had been seized with a longing to look at it again, to prove to his own eyes that the thing which was really his own—not Corot's nor Millet's nor even Sydenham's—was not an inconsiderable thing, not a thing he need despair of building on.
As he ate, his eyes eagerly retraced the lines. After the soup he had to look down to his plate to know if his fork brought him fish or flesh. The sketch delighted him. He was surprised that he had been able to do it.He began to doubt his present mastery of the technique it displayed, fearing he had wandered too long in the Teevan-prescribed maze, dawdled too long in the little man's palace of illusions. One thing he knew: he would not dare mount a table and try another such drawing before them all. He had done this one as unthinkingly as he would have saddled a horse or sighted a rifle, indifferent to observers. It rushed upon him sickeningly that all his association with Teevan had tended to destroy his belief in himself. The coffee found him afraid—ragingly afraid.
The voices from the group outside came to him murmurously, and at intervals he would listen to the careless, bantering talk. One voice related that its wielder had smoked opium in Cairo. He heard cries of mock horror, and the drawl of Chalmers—"Cairo—that's where the 'streets' come from." Griggs was presently extolling some ancient and wonderful sherry. "Great stuff! You take a sip and you don't swallow it—it just floats off through your being like a golden mist. He only has about a dozen bottles—out of a lot that was put down for Napoleon or somebody in 1830." Baldwin's voice floated in: "All right, old man, but they had to put it down a long way to reach Napoleon in 1830."
There was a laugh at this, and it came to the lone listener as the care-free echo of a world he had tried for and lost. Lost thus far—but there was farther to go, other days to live, other wise men to counsel with. He could have believed it heartily, if it were not for that thought of Mrs. Laithe, the thought that was always like a beast devouring his heart. Meantime, if he could only have a breathing spell, some days of quiet. Hewished his own hills were not so far away. He was sure that a little time back in the cabin studio would give him his old bearings.
His thought ran to Mrs. Laithe's brother, who had come to town the week before, bronzed and bearded and violent with enthusiasm for his Western life. He decided that a talk with Bartell would be tonic to his mood; the bare mention of familiar names and places would hearten him—of the Wimmenuche and Bar-7, Old Baldy and Dry Fork. And perhaps he had seen Ben lately; the two might even have driven down to Pagosa together.
And it would be an excuse for seeing her. For two months he had sought her only thus, with something he could hold in his mind as an excuse, for he was abashed by that nameless thing that troubled her, and troubled, as well, the little man who had meant so much to him—for Teevan, when the brandy was low, continued to speak of women.
He walked quickly round to the house in Ninth Street, where he asked for Bartell. But only Mrs. Laithe was at home. This embarrassed him, great as was his solicitude for her. She had sought his confidence more than once of late, but he could not tell her of doubts only half defined, of fears vague to absurdity, of anxieties that might well be baseless. He thought that now he could have talked, finding her alone, but for once she seemed rather curiously preoccupied. They sat together in the library with only a half light, the two windows opened for random breezes. Suddenly, as her face was toward him, dim though the light was, he caught the look that had troubled him so hauntingly in the spring. He knew that look now; it was the look he had seen onhis father's face in the last year of his life—the look of a spirit divesting itself of the flesh.
"Youareill," he said, trying to speak lightly under his sudden alarm. "Let me have a better look at you." He turned the light to a full blaze. Her wonted paleness was warmed to a sinister flush about the eyes and the upper face, and, though her eyes flashed bravely at him in denial, the bones were sharp above her hollowed cheeks, and her once rounded chin had become lean. She shivered as she spoke.
"I'm a little exhausted by the heat; nothing more. Lower the light, please. I don't care to be studied just now."
"But I know you're not well. You ought to go off some place. Get out to pasture at once. You've been 'over-packed,' kept too long on the trail."
"You, too? They all say it. It's so easy to say."
"And easy to do."
"It's hard to do, and yet I'm afraid I must. I've felt that I ought to be here with my charges—you have been one of them." She brightened with a sudden inspiration. "You need rest yourself. Your face shows it. You've been depressed a long time, you are worried now. Let us both rest. My aunt up at Kensington has wanted me there—the aunt my sister is with. She'd be glad to have you as well. It's a big house and she likes young people. There! Will you go with me?"
She rose, waiting, electrified, for his answer. Instantly he felt that he wished this above all things. There he could find himself, fortify his soul for any number of Teevans—perhaps fortify her own.
"I'll go," he answered heartily. "It will be good for us both."
She fell into her chair with a long "Ah!" then she gave the purring little laugh, like that of a child made happy. "We shall go for two blessed weeks and forget this place with its wretched tangles."
"I'm your man!" he said, rising and taking her hand with his old boyish enthusiasm. "Can we start early?"
She kept her hand in his while she laughed again. "The train goes from the Grand Central at one. I'll wire Aunt Joyce."
Outside Ewing met Bartell, but he did not talk of the San Juan.
"You must see to your sister," he said. "She looks the way my father did. You ought to get her out of here. She's going off for two weeks, but that won't set her right. Go look at her!"
Bartell found his sister where Ewing had left her.
"Well, Nell, how is it now? What did Birley say?"
She stirred impatiently in her chair. "He wouldn't commit himself. He told me to rest away from here for two weeks and then come back to see a specialist he'd send me to, a man who knows—such things."
"I just met Ewing—he spoke of how badly you look. I'm worried, Nell. You're not going to be left here."
"I must tell you something, dear—oh, a ghastly joke, if ever there was one: You know that one death trap of a tenement I've had so much trouble with——"
"Where all those consumptives were? Yes."
"They've died there like sheep. I had it inspected—I wanted to have the owner compelled to build it over or something, but we always found that the law had been cunningly met with—not the spirit of it, but the letter. The airshafts and drains were bad enough to kill, but not bad enough to hurt the owner. Yesterday I determinedto find out who the owner was, to make a personal appeal. I was willing to buy the place myself."
She stopped in a fit of coughing, a dry, hard, tearing cough that left her exhausted.
"Well, Sis?"
"I went to the agents—this will make you cry or laugh; I did both—and I found they were my agents—the house was my house."
"Poor Sis!"
"One of those Dick left—mine, you understand. I've been spending the blood of those people, eating, wearing, amusing myself with it."
"Yes, and going down there to get caught in the same trap. I don't see anything funny about that."
"Alden Teevan would. I must tell him of it—my own dungeon closing in on me."
"Nonsense! You're morbid, girl. Tenements have got to be dirty. Trinity Church itself has a fine bunch of the worst kind."
"I'm not a church, dear. This tenement is coming down. I gave orders to-day."
"Well, you stay away from it. You're in bad shape, my girl."
"Two weeks at Kensington will put me right."
"Two weeks nothing! See here, if you act up, I'll rope you and hustle you out to the ranch and close herd you there for about six months."
She smiled weakly at him.
"I shall be all right, dear—but you can help me upstairs now."
"Too tired for a roof garden?"
"I'm afraid so."
"Or a broiled lobster?"
"Not to-night, dear."
He helped her up the stairs, alternately scolding her for her weakness and protesting that broiled lobsters were all that kept him from forgetting the existence of Manhattan.
EWING found Kensington like a village dropped from the clouds of stageland, its wide, grass-bordered streets arched with giant elms and flanked by square old houses, drowsing behind their flower gardens and green lawns. The house to which he went was equally a stage house. Only in that land of pretense had he seen its like: a big, square, gray house, its drab slate roof and red chimneys all but hidden by the elms that towered above it like mammoth feather dusters, its wide piazzas screened from the street by a hoary hedge of lilac. The house seemed to drowse in a comfortable lethargy, confident of the rectitude of builders long dead who had roughhewn its beams and joined them with wooden pins before a day of nails. In Ewing's own room, far up between the hunched shoulders of the house, the windows gave closely on one of the elms, so that he could hear its whispers night and morning from his canopied bed of four posts. The other rooms were broad and low of ceiling, and there were long, high-backed sofas, slim-legged chairs, and tables of mahogany or rosewood, desks, cabinets, and highboys of an outlandish grace, that charmed with hints of a mellowed past—of past overlaying past in sleeping strata.
The woman whose house this was seemed to Ewing to be its true spirit. She, too, drowsed anciently, athing of old lace and lavender, yet of a certain gentle and antique sprightliness, of cheeks preserving a hint of time-worn pink, mellowed like the scrap of her flowered wedding dress shut between the leaves of an "Annual" half a century old.
And Ewing found in the house, too, the girl who had once talked half an hour with him by an exigent tea table. She had been a thing of shy restraint then, showing with an almost old-fashioned simplicity against her background of townish sophistication. Now he found her demurely modern in this huddle of mellowed relics. She it was who interpreted for him the antique mysteries of house and town. She paraded before him the treasures of her aunt, from the pewter plates and silver-gilt candelabra to camphor-scented brocades long hidden in cedar chests in the ghostly attic. But she performed her office with irreverence; as when, in the attic's gloom, she held the festal gown of some departed great-grandmother before her own robust figure to show how tiny were grandmothers in those days, for the yoke but a little more than half spanned her breadth as she smirked above it in scorn of its narrowness.
In that subdued light the girl's skin was flawless, her eyes were shaded to murkiness, and a mote-ridden shaft of sunlight struck her hair to a radiant yellow. But out of doors these matters could be seen to another effect. The hair was only a yellowish brown, the eyes lost their shadows and became the lucid green of sea waves, and the face was spotted with tiny freckles, like a bird's egg. He liked her best out of doors, breathing as she did of wood and field and sky. Skirts she seemed to wear under protest, as a wood nymph might humor, a little awkwardly, the prejudice of an indoor tribe withwhich she chose to tarry. When she raced over the lawn with her dog, it was not hard to see that clothing was an ungraceful impediment, even the short-skirted gowns she wore by day. In the longer affairs of evening, though she strove to subdue her spirits to them, she still had an air of the open, as if she but played at being a lady and might forget at any moment. Ewing was shyer of her when evening brought this change of habit. At such times he found it easier to talk to Mrs. Laithe, who sat—or, oftener, lay—with her eyes turned from the light, speaking but little.
"I'm glad to be away from town," she said to him, as he sat a moment beside her one day, "and I'm glad you're away. I need to be quiet, and you shall do as you like. Virginia will go about with you and make you gay. Virginia always makes us gay."
Unconsciously her hand had fallen on his sleeve, curling and fastening there, and when he rose he was disturbed to see that he had shaken off so tender a thing.
"I didn't know you were holding me," he said, in apology, and lifted the fallen hand.
"Such foolish hands! Your sister's are tiny, too, but they look as if they could turn a doorknob." He leisurely turned it this way and that to see its lines, and compared the fingernails with his own to show how absurd they were. And all the time it seemed to the woman that her hand had a little heart in it that was beating to suffocation.
"There, Virginia is beckoning to you from the path—perhaps you can finish my hand another time." She laughed. "I hope you're not seriously annoyed about it."
"It's foolish," he insisted, and replaced it withelaborate care. Then he ran to join his ruddy cicerone. He found the girl a good comrade, who helped him to forget those things he wished to forget. Somehow in the quiet air, that nameless secret thing that had been eating his heart drew off a little. Almost he could believe it had all been some hideous mistake.
He tried at first to join Virginia in her sports. Tennis looked foolishly easy, but after sending four of the balls beyond recovery he suspected that the game might demand something more than willingness and strength, and relinquished his racquet to watch the girl. He felt the glow of the sport in following her swift movements, and he envied the young men who could play with her.
Golf looked not only easy but useless; and it was with only half a heart that he essayed it. He splintered a driver at his first attempt, and he did not venture a second. Still, he liked golf better than tennis, he decided, for he could carry the bag of things she played with and hunt lost balls, and wander over the course alone with her. He was never able to believe that a stroke more or less in holing the ball could be a matter of real moment, but the girl was worth watching while she believed it. He had never seen a real girl near before, and he was surprised to find it so fine a sight.
In the canoe he was more successful, contriving to accomplish by sheer strength of arm what the girl did more adroitly. They would paddle far up the little river, to float down in the late afternoon. The river, too, was a stage river, running between low, willow-fringed banks, or winding among hay fields that sloped back to the upland, or lush green meadows where cows were posed effectively. The girl became part of thepicture when they turned to float homeward, facing him from the bow, her hair glinting yellow and her skin crystal clear against the crimson cushion she leaned upon.
They rode together, too—he could join her there—over the upland and far into the little hills, between tangled hedge rows, past little farms with orchards of ripening fruit. They passed many deserted places, mournful in their stagnation, overgrown with wild things, the houses forlornly dismantled, perhaps with the roof sunken, the chimney toppled, and the weather-beaten walls in ruinous decay. He was touched by these places. The houses must have been built with high hope, and once have been alive with full-hearted effort. Their walls had enclosed dreams and joyous dramas. Then discouragement had fallen and the search for another place of beginning. He wondered what had become of all the people who had built these homes. He hoped they had begun in another place with undimmed resolve and had found peace. Yet there were sinister hints that their ghosts haunted these spots of their first failures, beseeching of the ruins something of the first freshness of impulse.
He tried to tell Virginia Bartell that he, too, was like a deserted farm, falling into ruin. But this only made her laugh. She could not believe in failure, it seemed. And he laughed with her, after a little. It was not possible, after all, to suppose that he could go on being a ruin forever. These frustrated home makers must have succeeded at last, and so would he. In some manner the girl herself became an assurance of this. Her mere buoyancy uplifted him.
These times alone with the girl were not always to behad for the asking. There abounded other youths who prized her companionship; able, dauntless youths and skilled with accomplishments.
There was one of these, a tall young man, spectacled, of a high shiny forehead, a student of a youth, who haunted the gray house like a malignant wraith of erudition, and condescended to the girl almost as flagrantly as he did to Ewing. His talk, whether of machinery or morals, socialism or chemistry, was meant to instruct. Wherefore the girl slunk from him, not always so skilfully as might have been wished—with far less subtlety, indeed, than her aunt wished.
"I'm almost certain you offended him this afternoon," she remarked on a day when they had fled flagrantly to the river, "though why you should wish to avoid him is beyond me. You know that he's from one of the very oldest families in West Roxbury." The girl's tone was penitent as she answered: "But I'd promised to go in the canoe with Mr. Ewing." There was no penitence, however, in the look she flashed at Ewing over her aunt's shoulder, daring him to prove if he were a man. He nerved himself in the glance.
"But you see, Mrs. Ranley, I'm from one of the very oldest families in Hinsdale County, Colorado." The girl applauded him with her eyes, and the incident was closed with a word of mild gratification from the old lady. She was pleased to observe that he felt a family pride, even though any county in Colorado was, of course, beyond consideration.
Their favorite walk home from the golf links led them through a churchyard, and here they often rested in the cool of the afternoon; not in the new part where monument and mound were obtrusively recent, but upthe hill from these, where death was so ancient as to be touched with the grace of the antique. Here, in a pleasant gloom of oak shade, cypress and elm, they loitered among the drab stones that headed mounds worn down and overgrown with sweetbrier, wild rose, and matted grass; and here Mrs. Laithe sometimes joined them for the homeward stroll, walking too much, Ewing thought, like one who had risen from the forgotten multitude under foot. Yet, when he spoke of her health she always responded with her gay assurances, and seemed, indeed, to be more concerned about his welfare than her own. He had not been able to talk to her freely. There was so much about Teevan that he felt she would not understand. Besides, he could not speak to her about Teevan.
At the end of the first week he had written to Teevan to say that he must talk with him. The little man had replied from his favorite sea place, naming a day when he would be back in town.
The prospect depressed Ewing anew. It had been easy to lie on his back in a field, nettled by disgust with himself, and frame speeches of self-mastery. But reflection had brought him doubt. The speeches would have to be made, and yet, in a way, he was Teevan's property; Teevan had invested money in him. This added to his depression. And this was why the girl reported him to her sister as a youth joyful in odd moments of forgetting, but sunk in some black despair when he remembered; a young man she could not at all understand. And Mrs. Laithe, puzzling over his trouble, divining that Teevan would somehow be at the bottom of it, determined on a move to aid him, a move that would take her once more to Teevan himself.She had sought him the night after her talk with Sydenham, but the interview had come to nothing. Teevan had been so plausibly solicitous about Ewing's success that she had found herself unready to tax him with a knowledge of Ewing's identity, or with motives inimical to him. His excessive amiability, his air of unsuspecting sincerity, had disarmed her. But this time, she determined, there would be no more fencing. She would attack straightforwardly.
The day they left the girl lightly bade Ewing farewell with talk of meetings in town. He had not told her of a resolve formed the day before when they had ridden to a hill above the village from which they could see veritable mountains in the distance—his own delectable mountains they had seemed, calling to him. Instantly he had determined to go back to his own. Not in defeat, but for fresh courage. He would stay there working as he could, until Teevan was paid. Then the Rookery would know him again, and the men of the Monastery—know him going his own way.
He was meditating gloomily on his retreat as the train bore him back to town with Mrs. Laithe. And she, alive to the distress that showed in his face, forgot everything but him, the one she had helplessly and irrevocably taken for her own, half her entreating child, half her master, terrible and beloved. She watched his face from half-closed eyes, finding it unutterably sad, and, without her being able to withhold it, her mind constantly repeated the image of an embrace, to soothe and sustain him. Incessantly this unsubstantial enfoldment took place in her inner sense, like some wild drama among ocean-bed things, far below an unrippled surface. Over and over the phantomwoman beat down his enemies, encircled him from harm, consoled him against her heart, cherished him like the dear walls of a home. And she could not halt this phantom play. Once she divided her arms and raised them a little, as one in a dream faintly acts his vision. Ewing thought she was drawing her chiffon boa about her, and he replaced it on her shoulders.
Floating about this obsession in her mind was the dismayed thought of Teevan. She was fixed on going to him for the truth, and this disturbed her like a coming battle. She was not used to the feeling of antagonism, she, with her gentle woman's life, but she felt an unknown energy welling up in her—the fierceness of the defender. She would have the truth from Teevan.
ELEANOR Laithe started from a half sleep. She had begun to dream while still conscious of the library walls, the couch on which she lay, the curtains swelling in and out of the opened windows with a heated breeze of late afternoon, the rattle of a wagon through the street, and the shrilling of boys at a game.
She turned her face from the wall, fixed the pillows more easily under her head, and stared into the room, her eyes narrowing in calculation as she went lucidly back for the hundredth time since she had flung herself there, to check off the details of that half hour with the man who healed—or did not heal.
She had shrewdly rejected the specialist Birley had named for another who would not know her. She wanted no mistaken kindness, no polite reluctance or glossing, and she feared to find this in one who might regard her as something more than a casual human body in evil case. She had felt bound to have plain words. She would know what she faced as one knows heat or cold.
And she had gained the full of her wish. The man had taken her as casually as she offered herself. His questions were few, his examination mechanically impersonal, his diagnosis cool and informing. She had felt herself a culprit, listening to sentence.
"You think I have a year to live?"
"Longer, perhaps, if you take it this way, without worry. Worry eats the tissue even faster than those little vegetable parasites. I take it you eliminate worry?" He drew on his gloves.
She smiled now, with pride in her cunning. Her simulation of unconcerned curiosity had been perfect, as if it were another's wasting body she brought him. She had hidden all that fond love of life, her life of action, sensation; of hope ever enlarging, of fruitions certain, innumerable, and dear. No sign had the practiced eyes read of the inner rage that maddened her at thought of so much life unlived—life of mirth and tears, height and depth, grief, ecstasy and common levels. She was avid of them all, dared them all, wished only to play the game, vaunting a fine zest for the sport with all its hazards.
She had found in her hour alone there that she did not fear death—only detested it. She feared it as little as a child fears sleep; hated it as a child, torn untimely from play, hates to go to bed.
"Longer, perhaps, if you take it this way—eliminate worry." But she knew she could not take it "this way;" could not give up as this judge believed she had done. She must rebel to the last. As long as she played she must play in the true spirit. She might be vanquished, but she would not debase the sport. She smiled at a reminiscence of her brother's college life, catching at a phrase. "It seems I'm not a 'quitter,'" she thought.
Then she halted this race of thought in sudden amusement. She felt her evening fever rising, the sinister warmth and false glow that burned like a red flamebelow the outer corners of her eyes. It had come earlier than usual, hurried, doubtless, by the very passion of her rebelling. The man had been right. But she would have no waiting, half-hearted conflict, for all that.
She sat up quickly. A certain battle was set for this day, one that would test her gameness. She rose to look at a clock, and knew that Teevan probably awaited Ewing. But she could be first there, and she felt equal to the clash. The very fever would sustain her. And she would be wary once more that day, cunning to learn what she had to oppose. Then she would be valiant. If the fever only gave her strength, small matter the fuel that fed it.
She smoothed her hair, flung a scarf over her shoulders, and stepped out into the early twilight. She felt a slight giddiness as she walked the short distance to Teevan's door, but she had shrugged this away by the time she rang the bell. There was a wait, and she rang again. Then, when she began to fear that she assailed an empty house, she heard rapid steps; the door swung back, and Teevan himself stood before her, Teevan jaunty in summer negligee of flannels and silken shirt, who deftly covered with his froth of gallantry whatever surprise he felt at sight of her.
"My dear lady! So neighborly of you, and what luck I was in! I'm off Neville's yacht for the evening only on a bit of business. Come up to my den. It's stifling down here."
She followed him up the stairs, feeling a reckless strength for combat. He took her to a room at the front of the house where there was a desk, a few lounging chairs, and an air of mannish comfort.
"I'll not keep you long, Randall," she said, hesitating at first to sit, illogically fearing that weakness might seize her if she relaxed her body. After a moment, however, she took the chair he pushed forward.
"As long as you like, Eleanor. The breeze comes cooler through those south windows while you're here. Let me offer you a brandy and soda. No? You'll let me take this alone, then? Thanks! I'm feeling a bit done up by the heat." He seated himself at the desk, sipped from his glass and looked a question at her. She debated her beginning.
"It's about Gilbert Ewing."
His dark little eyes narrowed upon her with agreeable interest.
"Ah, to be sure—Ewing."
"You know he's been staying a fortnight with us at Kensington."
He nodded a gracious assent, still waiting, still veiled with an effect that aroused all her caution.
"He came back to town yesterday."
"He must have enjoyed the place immensely. I'm nowhere so strongly reminded of rural England, saving the architecture, of course. Ewing painted, doubtless?"
"Oh, no, he did nothing. He played with my sister, chiefly. Virginia took him about. They were inseparable. He had heart for nothing but her—no work, nothing else." She had deliberately lengthened the speech, wishing him not to see that she watched for an opening. Teevan seemed to feel a leading. He searched her face as he asked:
"They liked each other immensely, eh?"
"Oh, yes, I couldn't tell you——"
He felt the weariness of her tone, almost a faintness.The color burned darkly high on her cheeks, her eyes showed an exotic and painful splendor. He suddenly saw that she must have sustained some blow; that her luster was a fevered glitter sad and terrible, and that she was nerving herself to some ordeal. He sank back in his seat, all acuteness. Had she betrayed herself in the beginning, struck open the secret for him by her first words? A jealous woman, then—a flouted woman come to turn on the man? It was no conclusion to leap at; rather a piquant suspicion to verify.
He set his glass down and picked up a slender-bladed dagger from the desk before him, absently bending the steel. He knew they were both veiled for the moment. His eyes challenged her to open speech of Ewing as he held the dagger up to her and said lazily, "A beauty, that—undoubted Toledo work. Picked it up in a shop at Newport yesterday. They knew how to temper steel in those days. See its edge—" He tore a bit of paper from a pad and slashed it into strips, his eyes rising to hers at each cut, interrogatory, through the complacence of a man exhibiting a fine property.
"Randall, you've been friendly with him, and yet you know who he is; you've known it a long time. And you—youcan'tlike him."
He still toyed with his plaything, prickling its needle-like point into the pad of paper under his hand. Then he turned on her with a sudden, insinuating droop of the eyelids.
"Very well—and you've been friendly with him, say until two weeks ago. And you're no longer so. I name no reason. But you detest him now. Am I wrong? Can I still read a woman?" He leaned toward her, peering nearer with each query. He meant themto be like thrusts of the dagger which he now threw on the desk. Her eyes fell in unfeigned confusion under his look, her mind running many ways to come on the meaning beneath this preposterous guess. She looked up to him, seeking a hint, but his eyes were inscrutable, his mouth set in a sagacious smile, intimating, accusing. She looked down again, suddenly feeling it wise to let him think as he did—whatever absurd thing it might be. She sighed deeply, relaxed in her chair and met his eyes again. Teevan beheld a woman defenseless to his insight; one too proud to confess in words, but too weak, too vindictive, perhaps, to attempt denial.
"I see, my girl—don't trouble to speak." He replenished his glass from the decanter. He was delighted with his penetration; pleased, also, to believe that here was an ally, if one should be needed. He glanced at her again. She sat silent and drooping.
"You did well to come to me, Eleanor. I fancy you'll be interested to know what our young friend is about to encounter."
"Oh, I shall, I shall! Tell me, please." He smiled at her eagerness, so poorly subdued, recording in a mental footnote the viperish fury of a woman in her plight. Still, he thought she carried it off rather well. There had been need for his keenness to read her secret.
"I'll tell you, my girl, and I'm jolly glad to find some one who can enjoy it with me. What am I going to do with him?" He rose and paced the room for so long a time that she felt she could not bear it. She was about to speak when he abruptly halted and faced her with a petrifying burst of malignance. "What am I going to do with him?—wring him, wreck him, choke him,fling the fool back on his dung heap to rot!" She stared at him, panting; then, summoning all her ingenuity she smiled slowly above the sickening fear that had rushed over her. Teevan glowed. That smile of hers—he could detect something relentless in it—was a tribute to his prowess no less than a confirmation of his power to read her.
"I don't understand," she half whispered, still with that restrained fierceness that gave him joy.
"Of course you don't. Am I to be read as a primer? I'm subtler, I trust, than an earthquake, a cyclone, a deluge. You don't understand, but you shall." He paced the floor again with a foppish air of pride. "Ah, it has worked so beautifully. Really, I've regretted there was no one I could let in to enjoy a work of art with me. But you, I see, will have the taste to applaud it, Nell, now that your eyes are opened. Oh, the thing has gone ideally! Only applause was lacking."
"I don't understand, Randall." She could hardly manage the words. She was afraid her heart would beat them into some wild cry of impatience.
"You shall—you shall." He gazed meditatively at her. "Yes, and you'll have to know it all to understand perfectly, even my—my humiliation." He unlocked the door of a closet and brought out something she did not recognize until he had placed it across the arms of a chair and stepped back. It was the portrait of Ewing's mother. His face was contorted now in a most unpleasant sneer.
"There's themotif." He resumed his seat at the desk, facing the picture. The sneer had gone, and whatever dignity of soul was in him sounded in the next words.
"You can't know what that meant to me when Isaw it, when I knew who had done it, when I thought of the creature who carried it about parading his own shame and hers—andmine!"
"I think I can understand that, Randall."
"You can't, I say. No woman could. You can't begin to know the humiliation, how it tore me, knowing this fellow walked the earth at all, a nameless spawn, holding my shame over me—overme! threatening every instant to cover me again with it. As if I'd not survived enough! Good God! was I to go through it again, and know that this puling whelp was the instrument—a thing to torture me, hold me up to ridicule, to make men smile and titter and mock me in club corners? Wasn'therinsult enough? Must she breed obscene things to echo it?" He groaned and turned away with a gesture of warding off. In the mist of her besetment the woman found herself thinking that the fine little hands in this gesture should have been lace-beruffled at the wrist. He was the figure of stabbed vanity, the bleeding coxcomb. He flung an arm toward the picture with bitter vehemence.
"Ah, my lady! my fine, loose lady, with your high talk and your low way! I hope you've watched me with those painted eyes of yours. Did you think I'd never strike back?"
"But now, Randall—how?" He replenished his glass and turned slowly away from the picture.
"How, indeed? That's where you meet me at last. Not every one could have carried it through, but it was simple for me. Difficult in a way, yes. It's been hard to stomach the fool, with his conceit and his whining. Oh, he fancies himself tremendously, for all his ways of a holy innocent, his damned airs of a sugar-candyGalahad. But I've won him, I tell you, by that very innocence of his. I'm the one soul in the world he truly reveres. His sun rises and sets in me. And now he's where I want him. I've worn out his hope, kept him from doing the thing he wanted to do, kept him on the edge of despair out of respect and fear and love of me. The beggarhasa certain devilish sort of genius, but he doesn't know where it lies, and I've taken precious good care he shouldn't find out. Oh, but I've had a rich time of it—disgusting and rich. Nearly a year it is now that he's led me this dance, but I've hooked him beautifully, and to-night I'll pull him in." She had been watching the play of spite on his face, and it was with difficulty that she moistened her lips to say:
"But what will you do to-night—what can you say?"
"Everything I've laid a train for saying, this year past. Tell him how I despise him for his empty pretensions, his constant, wretched failures. Show him to himself as a conceited dawdler and a cheat who has lived on my bounty—oh, I saw to that—a cheat who has defrauded me of time and money and faith in man. Never fear but I'll know the things to say. I've told them toheroften enough." He thrust viciously at the portrait. "And you'll hear it all, my Lady Disdain, with your face to the wall to hide its belated blushes."
Again she tried to speak but her lips were dry. At last she achieved a few rather husky words.
"Randall, if you please, might I have a glass of something—water, I'd like."
"To be sure, my child. You're certain you won't join me in a brandy and soda? No? I'll get you something below."
She clutched at the moment to quiet, if she could, that tumult of heart and brain. Her mind dwelt chiefly on Ewing's dejection as she had left him the day before. Teevan came back, bearing a carafe and a bottle of soda water. She drank a glass of the water greedily, and murmured her thanks as he gave her more. It refreshed her and she seemed to feel a renewal of strength. Her fever was heating her brain to wild activity. She felt a crazy desire to cool her head, to lean it against snow or cold metal. She thought fleetingly of cold things she had touched, of marble, icicles, a brass rail with frost on it. She was goading her mind for a way to reach Teevan. She drank the second glass of water, and again he refilled it, protesting against so poor a tipple as he took more brandy for himself.