MRS. NEWELL, that afternoon, met him on the threshold of her sitting-room with a "Well?" of pent-up anxiety.
In the room itself, Baron Schenkelderff sat with crossed legs and head thrown back, in an attitude which he did not see fit to alter at the young man's approach.
Garnett hesitated; but it was not the summariness of the Baron's greeting which he resented.
"You've found him?" Mrs. Newell exclaimed.
"Yes; but—"
She followed his glance and answered it with a slight shrug. "I can't take you into my room, because there's a dress-maker there, and she won't go because she is waiting to be paid. Schenkelderff," she exclaimed, "you're not wanted; please go and look out of the window."
The Baron rose and, lighting a cigarette, laughingly retired to the embrasure. Mrs. Newell flung herself down and signed to Garnett to take a seat at her side.
"Well—you've found him? You've talked with him?"
"Yes; I have talked with him—for an hour."
She made an impatient movement. "That's too long! Does he refuse?"
"He doesn't consent."
"Then you mean—?"
"He wants time to think it over."
"Time? Thereisno time—did you tell him so?"
"I told him so; but you must remember that he has plenty. He has taken twenty-four hours."
Mrs. Newell groaned. "Oh, that's too much. When he thinks things over he always refuses."
"Well, he would have refused at once if I had not agreed to the delay."
She rose nervously from her seat and pressed her hands to her forehead. "It's too hard, after all I've done! The trousseau is ordered—think how disgraceful! You must have managed him badly; I'll go and see him myself."
The Baron, at this, turned abruptly from his study of the Place Vendome.
"My dear creature, for heaven's sake don't spoil everything!" he exclaimed.
Mrs. Newell coloured furiously. "What's the meaning of that brilliant speech?"
"I was merely putting myself in the place of a man on whom you have ceased to smile."
He picked up his hat and stick, nodded knowingly to Garnett, and walked toward the door with an air of creaking jauntiness.
But on the threshold Mrs. Newell waylaid him.
"Don't go—I must speak to you," she said, following him into the antechamber; and Garnett remembered the dress-maker who was not to be dislodged from her bedroom.
In a moment Mrs. Newell returned, with a small flat packet which she vainly sought to dissemble in an inaccessible pocket.
"He makes everything too odious!" she exclaimed; but whether she referred to her husband or the Baron it was left to Garnett to decide.
She sat silent, nervously twisting her cigarette-case between her fingers, while her visitor rehearsed the details of his conversation with Mr. Newell. He did not indeed tell her the arguments he had used to shake her husband's resolve, since in his eloquent sketch of Hermione's situation there had perforce entered hints unflattering to her mother; but he gave the impression that his hearer had in the end been moved, and for that reason had consented to defer his refusal.
"Ah, it's not that—it's to prolong our misery!" Mrs. Newell exclaimed; and after a moment she added drearily: "He has been waiting for such an opportunity for years."
It seemed needless for Garnett to protract his visit, and he took leave with the promise to report at once the result of his final talk with Mr. Newell. But as he was passing through the ante-chamber a side-door opened and Hermione stood before him. Her face was flushed and shaken out of its usual repose of line, and he saw at once that she had been waiting for him.
"Mr. Garnett!" she said in a whisper.
He paused, considering her with surprise: he had never supposed her capable of such emotion as her voice and eyes revealed.
"I want to speak to you; we are quite safe here. Mamma is with the dress-maker," she explained, closing the door behind her, while Garnett laid aside his hat and stick.
"I am at your service," he said.
"You have seen my father? Mamma told me that you were to see him to-day," the girl went on, standing close to him in order that she might not have to raise her voice.
"Yes; I have seen him," Garnett replied with increasing wonder. Hermione had never before mentioned her father to him, and it was by a slight stretch of veracity that he had included her name in her mother's plea to Mr. Newell. He had supposed her to be either unconscious of the transaction, or else too much engrossed in her own happiness to give it a thought; and he had forgiven her the last alternative in consideration of the abnormal character of her filial relations. But now he saw that he must readjust his view of her.
"You went to ask him to come to my wedding; I know about it," Hermione continued. "Of course it is the custom—people will think it odd if he does not come." She paused, and then asked: "Does he consent?"
"No; he has not yet consented."
"Ah, I thought so when I saw Mamma just now!"
"But he hasn't quite refused—he has promised to think it over."
"But he hated it—he hated the idea?"
Garnett hesitated. "It seemed to arouse painful associations."
"Ah, it would—it would!" she exclaimed.
He was astonished at the passion of her accent; astonished still more at the tone with which she went on, laying her hand on his arm: "Mr. Garnett, he must not be asked—he has been asked too often to do things that he hated!"
Garnett looked at the girl with a shock of awe. What abysses of knowledge did her purity hide?
"But, my dear Miss Hermione—" he began.
"I know what you are going to say," she interrupted him. "It is necessary that he should be present at the marriage or the du Trayas will break it off. They don't want it very much, at any rate," she added with a strange candour, "and they will not be sorry, perhaps—for of course Louis would have to obey them."
"So I explained to your father," Garnett assured her.
"Yes—yes; I knew you would put it to him. But that makes no difference, Mr. Garnett. He must not be forced to come unwillingly."
"But if he sees the point—after all, no one can force him!"
"No; but if it is painful to him—if it reminds him too much ... Oh, Mr. Garnett, I was not a child when he left us.... I was old enough to see ... to see how it must hurt him even now to be reminded. Peace was all he asked for, and I want him to be left in peace!"
Garnett paused in deep embarrassment. "My dear child, there is no need to remind you that your own future—"
She had a gesture that recalled her mother. "My future must take care of itself; he must not be made to see us!" she said imperatively. And as Garnett remained silent she went on: "I have always hoped he did not hate me, but he would hate me now if he were forced to see me."
"Not if he could see you at this moment!" he exclaimed.
She lifted her face with swimming eyes.
"Well, go to him, then; tell him what I have said to you!"
Garnett continued to stand before her, deeply struck. "It might be the best thing," he reflected inwardly; but he did not give utterance to the thought. He merely put out his hand, holding Hermione's in a long pressure.
"I will do whatever you wish," he replied.
"You understand that I am in earnest?" she urged tenaciously.
"I am quite sure of it."
"Then I want you to repeat to him what I have said—I want him to be left undisturbed. I don't want him ever to hear of us again!"
The next day, at the appointed hour, Garnett resorted to the Luxembourg gardens, which Mr. Newell had named as a meeting-place in preference to his own lodgings. It was clear that he did not wish to admit the young man any further into his privacy than the occasion required, and the extreme shabbiness of his dress hinted that pride might be the cause of his reluctance.
Garnett found him feeding the sparrows, but he desisted at the young man's approach, and said at once: "You will not thank me for bringing you all this distance."
"If that means that you are going to send me away with a refusal, I have come to spare you the necessity," Garnett answered.
Mr. Newell turned on him a glance of undisguised wonder, in which an undertone of disappointment might almost have been detected.
"Ah—they've got no use for me, after all?" he said ironically.
Garnett, in reply, related without comment his conversation with Hermione, and the message with which she had charged him. He remembered her words exactly and repeated them without modification, heedless of what they implied or revealed.
Mr. Newell listened with an immovable face, occasionally casting a crumb to his flock. When Garnett ended he asked: "Does her mother know of this?"
"Assuredly not!" cried Garnett with a movement of disgust.
"You must pardon me; but Mrs. Newell is a very ingenious woman." Mr. Newell shook out his remaining crumbs and turned thoughtfully toward Garnett.
"You believe it's quite clear to Hermione that these people will use my refusal as a pretext for backing out of the marriage?"
"Perfectly clear—she told me so herself."
"Doesn't she consider the young man rather chicken-hearted?"
"No; he has already put up a big fight for her, and you know the French look at these things differently. He's only twenty-three and his marrying against his parents' approval is in itself an act of heroism."
"Yes; I believe they look at it that way," Mr. Newell assented. He rose and picked up the half-smoked cigar which he had laid on the bench beside him.
"What do they wear at these French weddings, anyhow? A dress-suit, isn't it?" he asked.
The question was such a surprise to Garnett that for the moment he could only stammer out—"You consent then? I may go and tell her?"
"You may tell my girl—yes." He gave a vague laugh and added: "One way or another, my wife always gets what she wants."
MR. NEWELL'S consent brought with it no accompanying concessions. In the first flush of his success Garnett had pictured himself as bringing together the father and daughter, and hovering in an attitude of benediction over a family group in which Mrs. Newell did not very distinctly figure.
But Mr. Newell's conditions were inflexible. He would "see the thing through" for his daughter's sake; but he stipulated that in the meantime there should be no meetings or farther communications of any kind. He agreed to be ready when Garnett called for him, at the appointed hour on the wedding-day; but until then he begged to be left alone. To this decision he adhered immovably, and when Garnett conveyed it to Hermione she accepted it with a deep look of understanding. As for Mrs. Newell she was too much engrossed in the nuptial preparations to give her husband another thought. She had gained her point, she had disarmed her foes, and in the first flush of success she had no time to remember by what means her victory had been won. Even Garnett's services received little recognition, unless he found them sufficiently compensated by the new look in Hermione's eyes.
The principal figures in Mrs. Newell's foreground were the Woolsey Hubbards and Baron Schenkelderff. With these she was in hourly consultation, and Mrs. Hubbard went about aureoled with the importance of her close connection with an "aristocratic marriage," and dazzled by the Baron's familiarity with the intricacies of the Almanach de Gotha. In his society and Mrs. Newell's, Mrs. Hubbard evidently felt that she had penetrated to the sacred precincts where "the right thing" flourished in its native soil. As for Hermione, her look of happiness had returned, but with an undertint of melancholy, visible perhaps only to Garnett, but to him always hauntingly present. Outwardly she sank back into her passive self, resigned to serve as the brilliant lay-figure on which Mrs. Newell hung the trophies of conquest. Preparations for the wedding were zealously pressed. Mrs. Newell knew the danger of giving people time to think things over, and her fears about her husband being allayed, she began to dread a new attempt at evasion on the part of the bridegroom's family.
"The sooner it's over the sounder I shall sleep!" she declared to Garnett; and all the mitigations of art could not conceal the fact that she was desperately in need of that restorative. There were moments, indeed, when he was sorrier for her than for her husband or her daughter; so black and unfathomable appeared the abyss into which she must slip back if she lost her hold on this last spar of safety.
But she did not lose her hold; his own experience, as well as her husband's declaration, might have told him that she always got what she wanted. How much she had wanted this particular thing was shown by the way in which, on the last day, when all peril was over, she bloomed out in renovated splendour. It gave Garnett a shivering sense of the ugliness of the alternative which had confronted her.
The day came; the showy coupe provided by Mrs. Newell presented itself punctually at Garnett's door, and the young man entered it and drove to the rue Panonceaus. It was a little melancholy back street, with lean old houses sweating rust and damp, and glimpses of pit-life gardens, black and sunless, between walls bristling with iron spikes. On the narrow pavement a blind man pottered along led by a red-eyed poodle: a little farther on a dishevelled woman sat grinding coffee on the threshold of abuvette. The bridal carriage stopped before one of the doorways, with a clatter of hoofs and harness which drew the neighbourhood to its windows, and Garnett started to mount the ill-smelling stairs to the fourth floor, on which he learned from theconciergethat Mr. Newell lodged. But half-way up he met the latter descending, and they turned and went down together.
Hermione's parent wore his usual imperturbable look, and his eye seemed as full as ever of generalisations on human folly; but there was something oddly shrunken and submerged in his appearance, as though he had grown smaller or his clothes larger. And on the last hypothesis Garnett paused—for it became evident to him that Mr. Newell had hired his dress-suit.
Seated at the young man's side on the satin cushions, he remained silent while the carriage rolled smoothly and rapidly through the net-work of streets leading to the Boulevard Saint-Germain; only once he remarked, glancing at the elaborate fittings of the coupe: "Is this Mrs. Newell's carriage?"
"I believe so—yes," Garnett assented, with the guilty sense that in defining that lady's possessions it was impossible not to trespass on those of her friends.
Mr. Newell made no farther comment, but presently requested his companion to rehearse to him once more the exact duties which were to devolve on him during the coming ceremony. Having mastered these he remained silent, fixing a dry speculative eye on the panorama of the brilliant streets, till the carriage drew up at the entrance of Saint Philippe du Roule.
With the same air of composure he followed his guide through the mob of spectators, and up the crimson velvet steps, at the head of which, but for a word from Garnett, a formidable Suisse, glittering with cocked hat and mace, would have checked the advance of the small crumpled figure so oddly out of keeping with the magnificence of the bridal party. The French fashion prescribing that the familycortegeshall follow the bride to the altar, the vestibule of the church was thronged with the participatore in the coming procession; but if Mr. Newell felt any nervousness at his sudden projection into this unfamiliar group, nothing in his look or manner betrayed it. He stood beside Garnett till a white-favoured carriage, dashing up to the church with a superlative glitter of highly groomed horseflesh and silver-plated harness, deposited the snowy apparition of the bride, supported by her mother; then, as Hermione entered the vestibule, he went forward quietly to meet her.
The girl, wrapped in the haze of her bridal veil, and a little confused, perhaps, by the anticipation of the meeting, paused a moment, as if in doubt, before the small oddly-clad figure which blocked her path—a horrible moment to Garnett, who felt a pang of misery at this satire on the infallibility of the filial instinct. He longed to make some sign, to break in some way the pause of uncertainty; but before he could move he saw Mrs. Newell give her daughter a sharp push, he saw a blush of compunction flood Hermione's face, and the girl, throwing back her veil, bent her tall head and flung her arms about her father.
Mr. Newell emerged unshaken from the embrace: it seemed to have no effect beyond giving an odder twist to his tie. He stood beside his daughter till the church doors were thrown open; then, at a sign from the verger, he gave her his arm, and the strange couple, with the long train of fashion and finery behind them, started on their march to the altar.
Garnett had already slipped into the church and secured a post of vantage which gave him a side-view over the assemblage. The building was thronged—Mrs. Newell had attained her ambition and given Hermione a smart wedding. Garnett's eye travelled curiously from one group to another—from the numerous representatives of the bridegroom's family, all stamped with the same air of somewhat dowdy distinction, the air of having had their thinking done for them for so long that they could no longer perform the act individually, and the heterogeneous company of Mrs. Newell's friends, who presented, on the opposite side of the nave, every variety of individual conviction in dress and conduct. Of the two groups the latter was decidedly the more interesting to Garnett, who observed that it comprised not only such recent acquisitions as the Woolsey Hubbards and the Baron, but also sundry more important figures which of late had faded to the verse of Mrs. Newell's horizon. Hermione's marriage had drawn them back, had once more made her mother a social entity, had in short already accomplished the object for which it had been planned and executed.
And as he looked about him Garnett saw that all the other actors in the show faded into insignificance beside the dominant figure of Mrs. Newell, became mere marionettes pulled hither and thither by the hidden wires of her intention. One and all they were there to serve her ends and accomplish her purpose: Schenkelderff and the Hubbards to pay for the show, the bride and bridegroom to seal and symbolize her social rehabilitation, Garnett himself as the humble instrument adjusting the different parts of the complicated machinery, and her husband, finally, as the last stake in her game, the last asset on which she could draw to rebuild her fallen fortunes. At the thought Garnett was filled with a deep disgust for what the scene signified, and for his own share in it. He had been her tool and dupe like the others; if he imagined that he was serving Hermione, it was for her mother's ends that he had worked. What right had he to sentimentalise a marriage founded on such base connivances, and how could he have imagined that in so doing he was acting a disinterested part?
While these thoughts were passing through his mind the ceremony had already begun, and the principal personages in the drama were ranged before him in the row of crimson velvet chairs which fills the foreground of a Catholic marriage. Through the glow of lights and the perfumed haze about the altar, Garnett's eyes rested on the central figures of the group, and gradually the others disappeared from his view and his mind. After all, neither Mrs. Newell's schemes nor his own share in them could ever unsanctify Hermione's marriage. It was one more testimony to life's indefatigable renewals, to nature's secret of drawing fragrance from corruption; and as his eyes turned from the girl's illuminated presence to the resigned and stoical figure sunk in the adjoining chair, it occured to him that he had perhaps worked better than he knew in placing them, if only for a moment, side by side.
IN the good days, just after we all left college, Ned Halidon and I used to listen, laughing and smoking, while Paul Ambrose set forth his plans.
They were immense, these plans, involving, as it sometimes seemed, the ultimate aesthetic redemption of the whole human race; and provisionally restoring the sense of beauty to those unhappy millions of our fellow country-men who, as Ambrose movingly pointed out, now live and die in surroundings of unperceived and unmitigated ugliness.
"I want to bring the poor starved wretches back to their lost inheritance, to the divine past they've thrown away—I want to make 'em hate ugliness so that they'll smash nearly everything in sight," he would passionately exclaim, stretching his arms across the shabby black-walnut writing-table and shaking his thin consumptive fist in the fact of all the accumulated ugliness in the world.
"You might set the example by smashing that table," I once suggested with youthful brutality; and Paul, pulling himself up, cast a surprised glance at me, and then looked slowly about the parental library, in which we sat.
His parents were dead, and he had inherited the house in Seventeenth Street, where his grandfather Ambrose had lived in a setting of black walnut and pier glasses, giving Madeira dinners, and saying to his guests, as they rejoined the ladies across a florid waste of Aubusson carpet: "This, sir, is Dabney's first study for the Niagara—the Grecian Slave in the bay window was executed for me in Rome twenty years ago by my old friend Ezra Stimpson—" by token of which he passed for a Maecenas in the New York of the 'forties,' and a poem had once been published in the Keepsake or the Book of Beauty "On a picture in the possession of Jonathan Ambrose, Esqre."
Since then the house had remained unchanged. Paul's father, a frugal liver and hard-headed manipulator of investments, did not inherit old Jonathan's artistic sensibilities, and was content to live and die in the unmodified black walnut and red rep of his predecessor. It was only in Paul that the grandfather's aesthetic faculty revived, and Mrs. Ambrose used often to say to her husband, as they watched the little pale-browed boy poring over an old number of theArt Journal:"Paul will know how to appreciate your father's treasures."
In recognition of these transmitted gifts Paul, on leaving Harvard, was sent to Paris with a tutor, and established in a studio in which nothing was ever done. He could not paint, and recognized the fact early enough to save himself much wasted labor and his friends many painful efforts in dissimulation. But he brought back a touching enthusiasm for the forms of beauty which an old civilization had revealed to him and an apostolic ardour in the cause of their dissemination.
He had paused in his harangue to take in my ill-timed parenthesis, and the color mounted slowly to his thin cheek-bones.
"Itisan ugly room," he owned, as though he had noticed the library for the first time.
The desk was carved at the angles with the heads of helmeted knights with long black-walnut moustaches. The red cloth top was worn thread-bare, and patterned like a map with islands and peninsulas of ink; and in its centre throned a massive bronze inkstand representing a Syrian maiden slumbering by a well beneath a palm-tree.
"The fact is," I said, walking home that evening with Ned Halidon, "old Paul will never do anything, for the simple reason that he's too stingy."
Ned, who was an idealist, shook his handsome head. "It's not that, my dear fellow. He simply doesn't see things when they're too close to him. I'm glad you woke him up to that desk."
The next time I dined with Paul he said, when we entered the library, and I had gently rejected one of his cheap cigars in favour of a superior article of my own: "Look here, I've been looking round for a decent writing-table. I don't care, as a rule, to turn out old things, especially when they've done good service, but I see now that this is too monstrous—"
"For an apostle of beauty to write his evangel on," I agreed, "itisa little inappropriate, except as an awful warning."
Paul colored. "Well, but, my dear fellow, I'd no idea how much a table of this kind costs. I find I can't get anything decent—the plainest mahogany—under a hundred and fifty." He hung his head, and pretended not to notice that I was taking out my own cigar.
"Well, what's a hundred and fifty to you?" I rejoined. "You talk as if you had to live on a book-keeper's salary, with a large family to support."
He smiled nervously and twirled the ring on his thin finger. "I know—I know—that's all very well. But for twenty tables that Idon'tbuy I can send some fellow abroad and unseal his eyes."
"Oh, hang it, do both!" I exclaimed impatiently; but the writing-table was never bought. The library remained as it was, and so did the contention between Halidon and myself, as to whether this inconsistent acceptance of his surroundings was due, on our friend's part, to a congenital inability to put his hand in his pocket, or to a real unconsciousness of the ugliness that happened to fall inside his point of vision.
"But he owned that the table was ugly," I agreed.
"Yes, but not till you'd called his attention to the fact; and I'll wager he became unconscious of it again as soon as your back was turned."
"Not before he'd had time to look at a lot of others, and make up his mind that he couldn't afford to buy one."
"That was just his excuse. He'd rather be thought mean than insensible to ugliness. But the truth is that he doesn't mind the table and is used to it. He knows his way about the drawers."
"But he could get another with the same number of drawers."
"Too much trouble," argued Halidon.
"Too much money," I persisted.
"Oh, hang it, now, if he were mean would he have founded three travelling scholarships and be planning this big Academy of Arts?"
"Well, he's mean to himself, at any rate."
"Yes; and magnificently, royally generous to all the world besides!" Halidon exclaimed with one of his great flushes of enthusiasm.
But if, on the whole, the last word remained with Halidon, and Ambrose's personal chariness seemed a trifling foible compared to his altruistic breadth of intention, yet neither of us could help observing, as time went on, that the habit of thrift was beginning to impede the execution of his schemes of art-philanthropy. The three travelling scholarships had been founded in the first blaze of his ardour, and before the personal management of his property had awakened in him the sleeping instincts of parsimony. But as his capital accumulated, and problems of investment and considerations of interest began to encroach upon his visionary hours, we saw a gradual arrest in the practical development of his plan.
"For every thousand dollars he talks of spending on his work, I believe he knocks off a cigar, or buys one less newspaper," Halidon grumbled affectionately; "but after all," he went on, with one of the quick revivals of optimism that gave a perpetual freshness to his spirit, "after all, it makes one admire him all the more when one sees such a nature condemned to be at war with the petty inherited instinct of greed."
Still, I could see it was a disappointment to Halidon that the great project of the Academy of Arts should languish on paper long after all its details had been discussed and settled to the satisfaction of the projector, and of the expert advisers he had called in council.
"He's quite right to do nothing in a hurry—to take advice and compare ideas and points of view—to collect and classify his material in advance," Halidon argued, in answer to a taunt of mine about Paul's perpetually reiterated plea that he was still waiting for So-and-so's report; "but now that the plan's mature—andsucha plan! You'll grant it's magnificent?—I should think he'd burn to see it carried out, instead of pottering over it till his enthusiasm cools and the whole business turns stale on his hands."
That summer Ambrose went to Europe, and spent his holiday in a frugal walking-tour through Brittany. When he came back he seemed refreshed by his respite from business cares and from the interminable revision of his cherished scheme; while contact with the concrete manifestations of beauty had, as usual, renewed his flagging ardour.
"By Jove," he cried, "whenever I indulged my unworthy eyes in a long gaze at one of those big things—picture or church or statue—I kept saying to myself: 'You lucky devil, you, to be able to provide such a sight as that for eyes that can make some good use of it! Isn't it better to give fifty fellows a chance to paint or carve or build, than to be able to daub canvas or punch clay in a corner all by yourself?'"
"Well," I said, when he had worked off his first ebullition, "when is the foundation stone to be laid?"
His excitement dropped. "The foundation stone—?"
"When are you going to touch the electric button that sets the thing going?"
Paul, with his hands in his sagging pockets, began to pace the library hearth-rug—I can see him now, setting his shabby red slippers between its ramified cabbages.
"My dear fellow, there are one or two points to be considered still—one or two new suggestions I picked up over there—"
I sat silent, and he paused before me, flushing to the roots of his thin hair. "You think I've had time enough—that I ought to have put the thing through before this? I suppose you're right; I can see that even Ned Halidon thinks so; and he has always understood my difficulties better than you have."
This insinuation exasperated me. "Ned would have put it through years ago!" I broke out.
Paul pulled at his straggling moustache. "You mean he has more executive capacity? More—no, it's not that; he's not afraid to spend money, and I am!" he suddenly exclaimed.
He had never before alluded to this weakness to either of us, and I sat abashed, suffering from his evident distress. But he remained planted before me, his little legs wide apart, his eyes fixed on mine in an agony of voluntary self-exposure.
"That's my trouble, and I know it. Big sums frighten me—I can't look them in the face. By George, I wish Ned had the carrying out of this scheme—I wish he could spend my money for me!" His face was lit by the reflection of a passing thought. "Do you know, I shouldn't wonder if I dropped out of the running before either of you chaps, and in case I do I've half a mind to leave everything in trust to Halidon, and let him put the job through for me."
"Much better have your own fun with it," I retorted; but he shook his head, saying with a sigh as he turned away: "It'snotfun to me—that's the worst of it."
Halidon, to whom I could not help repeating our talk, was amused and touched by his friend's thought.
"Heaven knows what will become of the scheme, if Paul doesn't live to carry it out. There are a lot of hungry Ambrose cousins who will make one gulp of his money, and never give a dollar to the work. Jove, itwouldbe a fine thing to have the carrying out of such a plan—but he'll do it yet, you'll see he'll do it yet!" cried Ned, his old faith in his friend flaming up again through the wet blanket of fact.
PAUL AMBROSE did not die and leave his fortune to Halidon, but the following summer he did something far more unexpected. He went abroad again, and came back married. Now our busy fancy had never seen Paul married. Even Ned recognized the vague unlikelihood of such a metamorphosis.
"He'd stick at the parson's fee—not to mention the best man's scarf-pin. And I should hate," Ned added sentimentally, "to see 'the touch of a woman's hand' desecrate the sublime ugliness of the ancestral home. Think of such a house made 'cozy'!"
But when the news came he would own neither to surprise nor to disappointment.
"Goodbye, poor Academy!" I exclaimed, tossing over the bridegroom's eight-page rhapsody to Halidon, who had received its duplicate by the same post.
"Now, why the deuce do you say that?" he growled. "I never saw such a beast as you are for imputing mean motives."
To defend myself from this accusation I put out my hand and recovered Paul's letter.
"Here: listen to this. 'Studying art in Paris when I met her—"the vision and the faculty divine, but lacking the accomplishment," etc.... A little ethereal profile, like one of Piero della Francesca's angels ... not rich, thank heaven,but not afraid of money, and already enamored of my project for fertilizing my sterile millions...'"
"Well, why the deuce—?" Ned began again, as though I had convicted myself out of my friend's mouth; and I could only grumble obscurely: "It's all too pat."
He brushed aside my misgivings. "Thank heaven, she can't paint, anyhow. And now that I think of it, Paul's just the kind of chap who ought to have a dozen children."
"Ah, then indeed: goodbye, poor Academy!" I croaked.
The lady was lovely, of that there could be no doubt; and if Paul now for a time forgot the Academy, his doing so was but a vindication of his sex. Halidon had only a glimpse of the returning couple before he was himself snatched up in one of the chariots of adventure that seemed perpetually waiting at his door. This time he was going to the far East in the train of a "special mission," and his head was humming with new hopes and ardors; but he had time for a last word with me about Ambrose.
"You'll see—you'll see!" he summed up hopefully as we parted; and what I was to see was, of course, the crowning pinnacle of the Academy lifting itself against the horizon of the immediate future.
It was in the nature of things that I should, meanwhile, see less than formerly of the projector of that unrealized structure. Paul had a personal dread of society, but he wished to show his wife to the world, and I was not often a spectator on these occasions. Paul indeed, good fellow, tried to maintain the pretense of an unbroken intercourse, and to this end I was asked to dine now and then; but when I went I found guests of a new type, who, after dinner, talked of sport and stocks, while their host blinked at them silently through the smoke of his cheap cigars.
The first innovation that struck me was a sudden improvement in the quality of the cigars. Was this Daisy's doing? (Mrs. Ambrose was Daisy.) It was hard to tell—she produced her results so noiselessly. With her fair bent head and vague smile, she seemed to watch life flow by without, as yet, trusting anything of her own to its current. But she was watching, at any rate, and anything might come of that. Such modifications as she produced were as yet almost imperceptible to any but the trained observer. I saw that Paul wished her to be well dressed, but also that he suffered her to drive in a hired brougham, and to have her door opened by the raw-boned Celt who had bumped down the dishes on his bachelor table. The drawing-room curtains were renewed, but this change served only to accentuate the enormities of the carpet, and perhaps discouraged Mrs. Ambrose from farther experiments. At any rate, the desecrating touch that Halidon had affected to dread made no other inroads on the serried ugliness of the Ambrose interior.
In the early summer, when Ned returned, the Ambroses had flown to Europe again—and the Academy was still on paper.
"Well, what do you make of her?" the traveller asked, as we sat over our first dinner together.
"Too many things—and they don't hang together. Perhaps she's still in the chrysalis stage."
"Has Paul chucked the scheme altogether?"
"No. He sent for me and we had a talk about it just before he sailed."
"And what impression did you get?"
"That he had waited to send for metilljust before he sailed."
"Oh, there you go again!" I offered no denial, and after a pause he asked: "Didsheever talk to you about it?"
"Yes. Once or twice—in snatches."
"Well—?"
"She thinks it alltoobeautiful. She would like to see beauty put within the reach of everyone."
"And the practical side—?"
"She says she doesn't understand business."
Halidon rose with a shrug. "Very likely you frightened her with your ugly sardonic grin."
"It's not my fault if my smile doesn't add to the sum-total of beauty."
"Well," he said, ignoring me, "next winter we shall see."
But the next winter did not bring Ambrose back. A brief line, written in November from the Italian lakes, told me that he had "a rotten cough," and that the doctors were packing him off to Egypt. Would I see the architects for him, and explain to the trustees? (The Academy already had trustees, and all the rest of its official hierarchy.) And would they all excuse his not writing more than a word? He was really too groggy—but a little warm weather would set him up again, and he would certainly come home in the spring.
He came home in the spring—in the hold of the ship, with his widow several decks above. The funeral services were attended by all the officers of the Academy, and by two of the young fellows who had won the travelling scholarships, and who shed tears of genuine grief when their benefactor was committed to the grave.
After that there was a pause of suspense—and then the newspapers announced that the late Paul Ambrose had left his entire estate to his widow. The board of the Academy dissolved like a summer cloud, and the secretary lighted his pipe for a year with the official paper of the still-born institution.
After a decent lapse of time I called at the house in Seventeenth Street, and found a man attaching a real-estate agent's sign to the window and a van-load of luggage backing away from the door. The care-taker told me that Mrs. Ambrose was sailing the next morning. Not long afterward I saw the library table with the helmeted knights standing before an auctioneer's door in University Place; and I looked with a pang at the familiar ink-stains, in which I had so often traced the geography of Paul's visionary world.
Halidon, who had picked up another job in the Orient, wrote me an elegiac letter on Paul's death, ending with—"And what about the Academy?" and for all answer I sent him a newspaper clipping recording the terms of the will, and another announcing the sale of the house and Mrs. Ambrose's departure for Europe.
Though Ned and I corresponded with tolerable regularity I received no direct answer to this communication till about eighteen months later, when he surprised me by a letter dated from Florence. It began: "Though she tells me you have never understood her—" and when I had reached that point I laid it down and stared out of my office window at the chimney-pots and the dirty snow on the roof.
"Ned Halidon and Paul's wife!" I murmured; and, incongruously enough, my next thought was: "I wish I'd bought the library table that day."
The letter went on with waxing eloquence: "I could not stand the money if it were not that, to her as well as to me, it represents the sacred opportunity of at last giving speech to his inarticulateness ..."
"Oh, damn it, they're too glib!" I muttered, dashing the letter down; then, controlling my unreasoning resentment, I read on. "You remember, old man, those words of his that you repeated to me three or four years ago: 'I've half a mind to leave my money in trust to Ned'? Well, ithascome to me in trust—as if in mysterious fulfillment of his thought; and, oh, dear chap—" I dashed the letter down again, and plunged into my work.
"WON'T you own yourself a beast, dear boy?" Halidon asked me gently, one afternoon of the following spring.
I had escaped for a six weeks' holiday, and was lying outstretched beside him in a willow chair on the terrace of their villa above Florence.
My eyes turned from the happy vale at our feet to the illuminated face beside me. A little way off, at the other end of the terrace, Mrs. Halidon was bending over a pot of carnations on the balustrade.
"Oh, cheerfully," I assented.
"You see," he continued, glowing, "living here costs us next to nothing, and it was quiteheridea, our founding that fourth scholarship in memory of Paul."
I had already heard of the fourth scholarship, but I may have betrayed my surprise at the plural pronoun, for the blood rose under Ned's sensitive skin, and he said with an embarrassed laugh: "Ah, she so completely makes me forget that it's not mine too."
"Well, the great thing is that you both think of it chiefly as his."
"Oh, chiefly—altogether. I should be no more than a wretched parasite if I didn't live first of all for that!"
Mrs. Halidon had turned and was advancing toward us with the slow step of leisurely enjoyment. The bud of her beauty had at last unfolded: her vague enigmatical gaze had given way to the clear look of the woman whose hand is on the clue of life.
"She'snot living for anything but her own happiness," I mused, "and why in heaven's name should she? But Ned—"
"My wife," Halidon continued, his eyes following mine, "my wife feels it too, even more strongly. You know a woman's sensitiveness. She's—there's nothing she wouldn't do for his memory—because—in other ways.... You understand," he added, lowering his tone as she drew nearer, "that as soon as the child is born we mean to go home for good, and take up his work—Paul's work."
Mrs. Halidon recovered slowly after the birth of her child: the return to America was deferred for six months, and then again for a whole year. I heard of the Halidons as established first at Biarritz, then in Rome. The second summer Ned wrote me a line from St. Moritz. He said the place agreed so well with his wife—who was still delicate—that they were "thinking of building a house there: a mere cleft in the rocks, to hide our happiness in when it becomes too exuberant"—and the rest of the letter, very properly, was filled with a rhapsody upon his little daughter. He spoke of her as Paula.
The following year the Halidons reappeared in New York, and I heard with surprise that they had taken the Brereton house for the winter.
"Well, why not?" I argued with myself. "After all, the money is hers: as far as I know the will didn't even hint at a restriction. Why should I expect a pretty woman with two children" (for now there was an heir) "to spend her fortune on a visionary scheme that its originator hadn't the heart to carry out?"
"Yes," cried the devil's advocate—"but Ned?"
My first impression of Halidon was that he had thickened—thickened all through. He was heavier, physically, with the ruddiness of good living rather than of hard training; he spoke more deliberately, and had less frequent bursts of subversive enthusiasm. Well, he was a father, a householder—yes, and a capitalist now. It was fitting that his manner should show a sense of these responsibilities. As for Mrs. Halidon, it was evident that the only responsibilities she was conscious of were those of the handsome woman and the accomplished hostess. She was handsomer than ever, with her two babies at her knee—perfect mother as she was perfect wife. Poor Paul! I wonder if he ever dreamed what a flower was hidden in the folded bud?
Not long after their arrival, I dined alone with the Halidons, and lingered on to smoke with Ned while his wife went alone to the opera. He seemed dull and out of sorts, and complained of a twinge of gout.
"Fact is, I don't get enough exercise—I must look about for a horse."
He had gone afoot for a good many years, and kept his clear skin and quick eye on that homely regimen—but I had to remind myself that, after all, we were both older; and also that the Halidons had champagne every evening.
"How do you like these cigars? They're some I've just got out from London, but I'm not quite satisfied with them myself," he grumbled, pushing toward me the silver box and its attendant taper.
I leaned to the flame, and our eyes met as I lit my cigar. Ned flushed and laughed uneasily. "Poor Paul! Were you thinking of those execrable weeds of his?—I wonder how I knew you were? Probably because I have been wanting to talk to you of our plan—I sent Daisy off alone so that we might have a quiet evening. Not that she isn't interested, only the technical details bore her."
I hesitated. "Are there many technical details left to settle?"
Halidon pushed his armchair back from the fire-light, and twirled his cigar between his fingers. "I didn't suppose there were till I began to look into things a little more closely. You know I never had much of a head for business, and it was chiefly with you that Paul used to go over the figures."
"The figures—?"
"There it is, you see." He paused. "Have you any idea how much this thing is going to cost?"
"Approximately, yes."
"And have you any idea how much we—how much Daisy's fortune amounts to?"
"None whatever," I hastened to assert.
He looked relieved. "Well, we simply can't do it—and live."
"Live?"
"Paul didn'tlive," he said impatiently. "I can't ask a woman with two children to think of—hang it, she's under no actual obligation—" He rose and began to walk the floor. Presently he paused and halted in front of me, defensively, as Paul had once done years before. "It's not that I've lost the sense ofmyobligation—it grows keener with the growth of my happiness; but my position's a delicate one—"
"Ah, my dear fellow—"
"Youdosee it? I knew you would." (Yes, he was duller!) "That's the point. I can't strip my wife and children to carry out a plan—a plan so nebulous that even its inventor.... The long and short of it is that the whole scheme must be re-studied, reorganized. Paul lived in a world of dreams."
I rose and tossed my cigar into the fire. "There were some things he never dreamed of," I said.
Halidon rose too, facing me uneasily. "You mean—?"
"Thatyouwould taunt him with not having spent that money."
He pulled himself up with darkening brows; then the muscles of his forehead relaxed, a flush suffused it, and he held out his hand in boyish penitence.
"I stand a good deal from you," he said.
He kept up his idea of going over the Academy question—threshing it out once for all, as he expressed it; but my suggestion that we should provisionally resuscitate the extinct board did not meet with his approval.
"Not till the whole business is settled. I shouldn't have the face— Wait till I can go to them and say: 'We're laying the foundation-stone on such a day.'"
We had one or two conferences, and Ned speedily lost himself in a maze of figures. His nimble fancy was recalcitrant to mental discipline, and he excused his inattention with the plea that he had no head for business.
"All I know is that it's a colossal undertaking, and that short of living on bread and water—" and then we turned anew to the hard problem of retrenchment.
At the close of the second conference we fixed a date for a third, when Ned's business adviser was to be called in; but before the day came, I learned casually that the Halidons had gone south. Some weeks later Ned wrote me from Florida, apologizing for his remissness. They had rushed off suddenly—his wife had a cough, he explained.
When they returned in the spring, I heard that they had bought the Brereton house, for what seemed to my inexperienced ears a very large sum. But Ned, whom I met one day at the club, explained to me convincingly that it was really the most economical thing they could do. "You don't understand about such things, dear boy, living in your Diogenes tub; but wait till there's a Mrs. Diogenes. I can assure you it's a lot cheaper than building, which is what Daisy would have preferred, and of course," he added, his color rising as our eyes met, "of course, once the Academy's going, I shall have to make my head-quarters here; and I suppose even you won't grudge me a roof over my head."
The Brereton roof was a vast one, with a marble balustrade about it; and I could quite understand, without Ned's halting explanation, that "under the circumstances" it would be necessary to defer what he called "our work—" "Of course, after we've rallied from this amputation, we shall grow fresh supplies—I mean my wife's investments will," he laughingly corrected, "and then we'll have no big outlays ahead and shall know exactly where we stand. After all, my dear fellow, charity begins at home!"