"It is rather wonderful to turn around and findyouhere, Peter,—and to find you so unchanged. Because you haven't changed, really; you've just grown up," said Mrs. Hemingway, holding his hand. Her face was excited and glad. "I should have known you instantly, anywhere."
"I am told my legs are quite unmistakable. Some have said I appear to be walking on fishing-poles," said Peter.
Mrs. Hemingway laughed. "They seem to be good, long, serviceable legs," she said, gaily. "But it is your eyes I recognized, Peter. One couldn't mistake your eyes."
Peter smiled at her gratefully. "The really wonderful thing is that you should remember me at all," he told her happily, and his face glowed. That her reappearance should be timed to the outset of his great adventure into life seemed highly significant. One might almost consider it an omen.
As if they had parted but yesterday, they were able to resume their old sympathetic friendship, with its satisfying sense of comradely understanding. Her heart warmed to him now as it had warmed to the shabby boy she had first seen running after the Red Admiral in the fields beyond the river swamp. No, she reflected appraisingly, he had not changed. He had somehow managed to retain a certain quality of childlikeness that made her feel as if she were looking through crystal. She was grateful that no contact had been able to blunt it, that it remained undimmed and serene.
Briefly and rather baldly Peter outlined his years of struggle, dismissing their bleak hardships with a tolerant smile. What he seemed chiefly to remember was the underlying kindness and good humor of the folk back there in Riverton; if they had ever failed to be kind, it was because they hadn't understood, he thought. There was no resentment in him. Why, they were his own folks! His mother's grave was one of their graves, his name one of their names, their traditions and heritages were part and parcel of himself. The tide-water was in his blood; his flesh was dust of the South Carolina coast.
She saw that, while he was speaking. And against the vivid, colorful coast background she caught haunting glimpses of a tireless small figure toiling, sweating, always moving toward a far-off goal as with the inevitable directness of a fixed law. She marveled at the patience of his strength, and she loved his gentleness, his sweetness that had a flavor of other-worldliness in it.
He was telling her now of Chadwick Champneys and how his coming had changed things. But of the price he had had to pay he said nothing. He tried not to think of the bride his uncle had forced upon him, though her narrowed eyes, her red hair, her mouth set in a hard red line haunted him like a nightmare. His soul revolted against such a mockery of marriage. He could imagine his mother's horror, and he was glad Maria Champneys slept beside the husband of her youth in the cemetery beside the Riverton Road. She wouldn't have asked him to pay such a price, not for all the Champneyses dead and gone! But Chadwick Champneys had held him to his bargain, had forced him to give his name, his father's name, of which his mother had been so proud.
Peter smarted with humiliation. It was as if he had been bought and sold, and he writhed under the disgrace of such bondage. He felt the helpless anger of one who realizes he has been shamefully swindled, yet is powerless to redress his injury; and what added insult to injury was that a Champneys, his father's brother, had inflicted it.
Yet he had no faintest notion of breaking or even evading his pledged word; such a thought never once occurred to him. He meant to live up to the letter of his bargain; his honor would compel him to fulfil his obligation scrupulously and exactly.
"And so my uncle and I came to terms," he told Mrs. Hemingway. And he added conscientiously: "He is very liberal. He insisted upon placing to my credit what he says I'll need, but what seems to me too much. And so here I am," he finished.
"Yes, here you are. It had to be," said she, thoughtfully. "It's your fate, Peter."
"It had to be. It's my fate," agreed Peter.
"And that nice, amusing old colored woman who kept house for you—what became of her?"
"Emma? Oh, she wouldn't stay behind, so she came along with me. And she couldn't leave the cat, so he came along, too," said Peter, casually.
Mrs. Hemingway laughed as his uncle had laughed.
"There's an odd turn to your processes, Peter," she commented. "One sees thatyou'llnever be molded into a human bread pill! I'm glad we've met again. I think you're going to need me. So I'm going to look after you."
"I have needed you every day since you left," he told her.
He didn't as yet know what deep cause he had to feel grateful for Mrs. John Hemingway's promise to look after him; he didn't as yet know what an important person she was in the American colony in Paris, as well as in certain very high circles of French society itself. And what was true of her in Paris was also true of her in London. Mrs. John Hemingway's promise to look after a young man hall-marked him. She was more beautiful and no less kind than of old, and absence had not had the power to change his feelings for her. As simply and whole-heartedly as he had loved her then, he loved her now. So he looked at her with shining eyes. Reticence was ingrained in Peter, but the knowledge that she liked and understood him had the effect of sunlight upon him.
"He's as simple as the Four Gospels," she thought, "and as elemental as the coast country itself. One couldn't spoil him any more than one could spoil the tide-water.
"Yes, indeed! I'm going to look after you," she repeated.
He discovered, from what she herself chose to tell him, that there had been some unpleasant years for her too. But that had all ended when she married John Hemingway, then with a New York firm and later sent abroad to represent the interests of the company of which he was now a member. His chief office was in Paris, though he had to spend considerable time in London. When she spoke of John Hemingway his wife's face glowed with quiet radiance. The one drop of bitterness in her cup was that there were no children.
"I hope you marry young, Peter, and that there'll be a houseful of little Champneys," she said, and sighed a bit enviously.
At that the face of Mrs. Peter Champneys rose before her bridegroom and the very soul of him winced and cringed. He averted his face, staring seaward.
"I know so many charming young girls," said Mrs. Hemingway, musingly, as if she were speaking to herself.
"They don't come any prettier than they come in Riverton," Peter parried. "And you're to remember I'm coming over here towork."
"I'll remember," said she, smiling. "But all the same, I mean you to go about it the right way. I'm going to introduce you to some very delightful people, Peter."
Then Peter took her to see Emma Campbell and the cat.
Emma would have crawled into her berth and stayed there until the ship docked if it hadn't been for the cat. Satan had to be given a daily airing; he had to be looked after by some one she could trust, and Emma rose to the occasion. She crawled out of her berth and on deck, where, steamer rug over her knees, her head tightly bound in a spotless white head-handkerchief, she sat with her hand on the big bird-cage set upon a camp-stool next her chair.
"I don' say one Gawd's word aboutme, dough I does feel lak I done swallahed my own stummick. All I scared of is dat dis po' unforch'nate cat 's gwine to lose 'is min' befo' we-all lan's," she told Mrs. Hemingway, and cast a glance of deep distaste at the tumbling world of waters around her. Emma didn't like the sea at all. There was much too much of it.
"I got a feelin' heart for ole man Noah," she concluded pensively.
When they sighted the Irish coast, Emma discovered a deep sense of gratitude to the Irish: no matter what they didn't have, they did haveland; and land and plenty of it, land that you could walk on, was what Emma craved most in this world. When they presently reached England, she was so glad to feel solid earth under her feet once more that she was jubilant.
"Cat, we-all is saved!" she told Satan. "You en me is chillun o' Israel come thoo de Red Sea. We-all got a mighty good Gawd, cat!"
They went up to London with Mrs. Hemingway, and were met by Hemingway himself, who gave Peter Champneys an entirely new conception of the term "business man." Peter knew rice- and cotton- and stock-men, even a provincial banker or two—all successful men, within their limits. But this big, quiet, vital man hadn't any limits, except those of the globe itself. A tall, fair man with a large head, decided features, chilly gray eyes, and an uncompromising mouth adorned with a short, stiff mustache, his square chin was cleft by an incomprehensible dimple. His wife declared she had married him because of that cleft; it gave her an object in life to find out what it meant.
Hemingway studied Peter curiously. He had a great respect for his wife's nice and discriminating judgment, and it was plain that this long-legged, unpretentious young man was deeply in her good graces. Evidently, then, this chap must be more than a bit unusual. Going to be an artist, was he? Well, thank God, he didn'tlookas if he were afflicted with the artistic temperament; he looked as if he were capable of hard work, and plenty of it.
People liked to say that John Hemingway was a fine example of the American become a cosmopolitan. As a matter of fact, Hemingway wasn't. He liked Europe, but in his heart he wearied of its over-sophistication, its bland diplomacy. His young countryman's unspoiled truthfulness delighted him. He was proud of it. A man trained to judge men, he perceived this cub's potential strength. That he should so instantly like his wife's protégé raised that charming lady's fine judgment even higher in his estimation. A man always respects his wife's judgment more when it tallies with his own convictions.
The Hemingways insisted that Peter should spend some time in England. Mrs. Hemingway was going over to Paris presently, and he could accompany her. In the meantime she wanted him to meet certain English friends of hers. Peter was perfectly willing to wait. He was enchanted with London, and although he would have preferred to be turned foot-loose to prowl indefinitely, his affection for Mrs. Hemingway made him amenable to her discipline. At her command he went with Hemingway to the latter's tailor. To please her he duteously obeyed Hemingway's fastidious instructions as to habiliments. He overcame his rooted aversion to meeting strangers, and when bidden appeared in her drawing-room, and there met smart, clever, and noted London.
Hemingway thereafter marked his progress with amusement not unmixed with amazement. It came to him that there was a greater difference, a deeper divergence between himself and Peter than between Peter and these Britishers. The earmark of your coast-born South Carolinian is the selfsame, absolute sureness of himself, his place, his people, in the essential scheme of things. Wasn't he born in South Carolina? Hasn't he relatives in Charleston? Very well, then!
In Peter's case this essential sureness had developed into a courtesy so instinctive, a democracy so unaffectedly sincere, that it flavored his whole personality with a pleasing distinctiveness. The British do not expect their very young men to be too knowing or too fatally bright; they mark the promise rather than the performance of youth, and spaciously allow time for the process of development. And so Peter Champneys found himself curiously at home in democratically oligarchic England.
"I feel as if I were visiting my grandmother's house," he confided to a certain lady next whom he was seated at one of Mrs. Hemingway's small dinners.
"And where is your mother's house?" wondered the lady, who found herself attracted to him.
"Over home in Riverton," said Peter Champneys. And his face went wistful, remembering the little town with the tide-water gurgling in its coves, and its great oaks hung with long gray swaying moss, and the sinuous lines of the marshes against sky and water, and the smell of the sea—all the mellow magic of the coast that was Home. It didn't occur to him that an English lady mightn't know just where "over home in Riverton" might be. She was so great a lady that she didn't ask. She looked at him and said thoughtfully:
"I wonder if you wouldn't like to see an old place of ours. I'm having the Hemingways down for a week, and I should like you to come with them." And she added, with a charming smile: "As you are an artist, you'll like our gallery. There's a Rembrandt you should see."
Peter's eyes of a sudden went deep and golden, and their dazzling depths had so instant and so sweet a recognition that her heart leaped in answer. It was as if a young archangel had secretly signaled her in passing.
When the formal invitation arrived, Mrs. Hemingway was delighted with what she termed Peter's good fortune. The invitations to that house were coveted and prized she explained. Really, Peter Champneys was unusually lucky! She felt deeply gratified.
Peter hadn't known that there existed anywhere on earth anything quite so perfect as the life in a great English country house. He thought that perhaps the vanished plantation life of the old South might have approximated it. His delight in the fine old Tudor pile, in its ordered stateliness, its mellowed beauty, pleased his hostess and won the regard of the rather grumpy gentleman who happened to be her husband and its owner. To her surprise, he took Peter under his wing, and showed himself as much interested in this modest guest as he was ordinarily indifferent to many more important ones. It was his custom to take what he called a stroll before breakfast—a matter of a mere eight or ten miles, maybe—and he found to his hand a young man with walking legs, seeing eyes, and but a modicum of tongue. He showed Peter that country-side with the thoroughness of a boy birds'-nesting, as Peter had once showed the Carolina country-side to Claribel Spring. They went over the venerable house with the same thoroughness, and Peter sensed the owner's impersonally personal delight in the stewardship of a priceless possession. He held it in trust, and he loved it with a quiet passion that was as much a part of himself as was his English speech. Every now and then he would pause before some rusty sword, or maybe a tattered and dusty banner; and although he was of a very florid complexion, and his nose was even bigger than Peter's, in such moments there was that in the eye and brow, in the expression of the firm lips, that made him more than handsome in the young man's sight. Through him he glimpsed that something silent and large and fine that is England.
"And we're going," said the nobleman, pausing before the portrait of a gentleman who had fallen at Marston Moor. "Oh, yes, we are vanishing. After a while the great breed of English gentlemen will be as extinct as the dodo. And this house will be turned into a Dispensary for Dyspeptic Proletarians, or more probably an American named Cohen will buy it and explain to his guests at dinner just how much it cost him."
Peter remembered broken and vine-grown chimneys where stately homes had stood, the extinction of a romantic plantation life, the vanishing of the gentlemen of the old South, as the Champneys had vanished. They had taken with them something never to be replaced in American life, perhaps; but hadn't that vanished something made room for a something else intrinsically better and sounder, because based on a larger conception of freedom and justice? The American looked at the cavalier's haughty, handsome face; he looked at the Englishman thoughtfully.
"Yes. You will go," he agreed presently. "All things pass. That is the law. In the end it is a good law."
"I should think it would altogether depend on what replaces us," said the other, dryly.
"And that," said Peter, "altogether depends upon you, doesn't it? It's in your power to shape it, you know. However, if you'll notice, things somehow manage to right themselves in spite of us. Now, over home in Carolina we haven't come out so very badly, all things considered."
"Got jolly well licked, didn't you?" asked the Englishman, whose outstanding idea of American military history centered upon Stonewall Jackson.
"Just about wiped off the slate. Had to begin all over, in a world turned upside down. Yet, you see, here I am! And I assure you I shouldn't be willing to change places with my grandfather." With a shy friendliness he laid his fingers for a moment on his host's arm. "Your grandson won't be willing to change, either, because he'll be the right sort.That'swhat your kind hands down." He spoke diffidently, but with a certain authority. Each man is a sieve through which life sifts experiences, leaving the garnering of grain and the blowing away of chaff to the man himself. Peter had garnered courage to face with a quiet heart things as they are. He had never accepted the general view of things as final, therefore he escaped disillusionment.
"They thought the end of the world had come—my people. So it had—for them. But not for us. There's always a new heaven and a new earth for those who come after," he finished.
The Englishman smiled twistedly. After a while he said unexpectedly:
"I wish you'd have a try at my portrait, Mr. Champneys. I think I'd like that tentative grandson of mine to see the sort of grandfather he really possessed."
"Why, I haven't had any training! But if you'll sit for me I'll do some sketches of you, gladly."
"Why not now?" asked the other, coolly. "I have a fancy to see what you'll make of me." He added casually: "Whistler used the north room over the stables when he stayed here. You've seen his pastels, and the painting of my father."
"Yes," said Peter, reverently. And he stared at his host, round-eyed.
"We've never changed the room since his time. Should you like to look over it now? You'll find all the materials you are likely to need,—my sister has a pretty little talent of her own, and it pleases her to use the place."
"Why, yes, if you like," murmured Peter, dazedly. And like one in a dream he followed his stocky host to the room over the stables. One saw why the artist had selected it; it made an ideal studio. A small canvas, untouched, was already in place on an easel near a window. One or two ladylike landscapes leaned against the wall.
"She has the talent of a painstaking copyist," said her brother, nodding at his sister's work. "Shall you use oils, or do you prefer chalks, or water-colors?"
"Oils," decided Peter, examining the canvas. "It will be rough work, remember." He made his preparations, turned upon his sitter the painter's knife-like stare, and plunged into work. It was swift work, and perhaps roughly done, as he had said, but by the miracle of genius he managed to catch and fix upon his canvas the tenacious and indomitable soul of the Englishman. You saw it looking out at you from the steady, light blue eyes in the plain face with its craggy nose and obstinate chin; and you saw the kindness and delicacy of the firm mouth. There he stood, flat-footed, easy in his well-worn clothes, one hand in his pocket, the other holding the blackthorn walking-stick he always carried, and looked at you with the quiet sureness of integrity and of power. Peter added a few last touches; and then, instead of signing his name, he painted in a small Red Admiral, this with such exquisite fidelity that you might think that gay small rover had for a moment alighted upon the canvas and would in another moment fly away again.
His lordship studied his painted semblance critically.
"I rather thought you could do it," he said quietly. "I usually manage, as you Americans say, to pick a winner. You'll be a great painter if you really want to be one, Mr. Champneys. Should you say sixty guineas would be a fair price for this?"
"That's something like three hundred dollars, isn't it?" asked Peter, interestedly. "Suppose we call this a preliminary sketch for a portrait I'm to paint later—say when I've had a few years of training."
"You will charge me very much more than sixty guineas for a portrait, two or three years from now," said the other, smiling. He looked at the swiftly done, vivid bit of work. "Thisis what I want for my grandson; it is his grandfather as nature made him. It is as true and as homely as life itself." And he looked at Peter respectfully, so that that young man blushed to his ears. And that is how and when Peter Champneys painted his first ordered picture, signed with the Red Admiral; and how he won the faithful friendship of a crusty Englishman. It was a very real friendship. His lordship had what he himself called a country heart, and as Peter Champneys had the same sort, and neither man outraged the other by too much talk, they got along astonishingly well.
"He's deucedly intelligent," his lordship explained, with quiet enthusiasm. "We'll tramp for miles, and I give you my word that for an hour on end he won't say three words!"
Hemingway, to whom this confidence was given, chuckled. It amused him to watch his wife's wild goose putting on native swan feathers. Yet it pleased him, for he knew the boy appealed to her romantic as well as to her maternal instinct. She handled him skilfully, and it was she who passed upon his invitations. She wished him to meet clever and brilliant men and women; and at times she left him in the hands of young girls, pink-and-white visions who troubled as well as interested him. He felt that he was really meeting them under false pretenses. Their youth called to his, but he might not answer. Between him and youth stood that unloved and unlovely girl in America.
Mrs. Hemingway watched him with the eyes of the woman who has a young man upon her hands. His reactions to his contacts interested her immensely. His worldly education was progressing with entire satisfaction to her.
"I want him to marry an English wife," she confided to her husband. They were to leave for Paris that night, and she was summing up the results of his stay in London, the balance being altogether in his favor. "A well-bred, normal English girl with good connections, a girl entirely untroubled by temperament, who will love him tenderly, look out for his physical well-being, and fill his house with healthy children, is exactly what Peter Champneys needs. And the sooner it happens to him the better. Peter has a lonely soul. It shouldn't be allowed to become chronic."
Hemingway looked at her apprehensively. "Sounds to me as if you were trying to make Peter pick a peck of pickled peppers," he commented. And Peter coming in at this opportune moment, he grinned at the boy cheerfully.
"Peter," he smiled, "the sweet chime of merry wedding-bells in the distance falls softly on mine ear; my wife thinks you should be altar-broke. Charming domestic interior, happy fireside clime, flag of our union fluttering from the patent clothes-line! Futurist painting of Young Artist Pushing a Pram! Don't look at me with such an agonized expression of the ears, Peter!"
But Peter had no answering smile. His face had changed, and there was that in his eyes which gave Hemingway pause.
"Why, old chap, I was merely joking!" he began, with real concern.
"Peter!" said the woman, softly. "You have had—a disappointment? But, my dear boy, you are soveryyoung. Don't take it too much to heart, Peter. At your age nothing is final, really." And she smiled at him.
A flush suffused the young man's forehead. He felt shamed and miserable. Hecouldn'tflaunt his price-tag before these unbuyable souls whose beautiful and true marriage was based upon love, and sympathy, and mutual ideals! Hecouldn'trattle his chains, or explain Anne Champneys. He couldn't, indeed, force himself to speak of her at all. The thing was bad enough, but to talk about it—No! He lifted troubled eyes.
"I am afraid—in my case—it is final," he said, in a low voice. And after a pause, in a louder tone: "Yes—please understand—it is final."
"Oh, Peter dear, I'm sorry! But—"
"You're talking nonsense. Why, you're barely twenty-one!" protested Hemingway. "Much water must flow under the bridge, Peter, before you can say of anything: it is final. You've got a long life ahead of you to—"
"Work in," finished Peter. "Yes, I know that. I have my chance to work. That is enough." At that his head went up.
Mrs. Hemingway puckered her brows. She leaned toward him, her eyes lighting up.
"Peter!" said she, mischievously, her cheek dimpling. "Peter, aren't you rather leaving the Red Admiral out of your calculations?"
Mrs. Peter Champneys drove away from the scene of her wedding, feeling as if boiling water had been poured over her. No man of all the men she had ever met had looked at her with just such an expression as she had encountered in Peter Champneys's eyes, and the memory of it filled her with a rankling sense of injustice. He had married her for the same reason she had married him, hadn't he? Then why should he think himself a whit better than she was? It seemed to her that all the unkindness, all the slights she had ever endured, had come to a head in Peter's distressed and astonished glance.
Nancy had no illusions as to her own personal appearance, but it occurred to her that her bridegroom left considerable to be desired in that respect, himself. With his hatchet face and his outstanding ears and his big nose—why, he was as homely as that dried old priest in the glass case in the museum!—and him looking down on people every mite as good as he was! That was really the crux of the thing: Nancy had her own pride, and Peter had managed to trample upon it roughshod. She felt she could never forgive him, and her sense of injury included Chadwick Champneys as well. She hadn't asked him to make his nephew marry her, had she? The suggestion had come from the Champneys, not from her. Yet it was plain to her that both these men considered her a very inferior person. She couldn't understand them.
She liked the furnished apartment she and Mr. Champneys were to occupy until their house was ready, better than she had liked the hotel, though the Japanese butler, Hoichi, overawed her. She wasn't used to Japanese butlers and she didn't know exactly how to treat this suave, deft, silent yellow man who was so efficient and so ubiquitous. It was different where the maids were concerned; she who had been so lately an unpaid drudge was afraid these trained, clever servants might suspect her former state of servitude and she covered her fear with a manner so insupportable that Mr. Chadwick Champneys, who looked upon arrogant rudeness to social inferiors as a sort of eighth deadly sin, was presently forced to remonstrate.
"Nancy," he ventured one morning, "I have been observing your manner to the servants with—er—disapproval. A habitual lack of consideration is a serious deficiency. It is really a lack of breeding—and of heart. A lady"—he fixed his large dark eyes upon her—"is never impolite."
He touched her on the quick. Sheknewthese Champneys didn't think she was a lady, but for this old man to come right out and say so to her face—"Say, I guess I know how to be a lady without you havin' to tell me!"
"I am more than willing to be convinced," said the South Carolinian, pointedly.
At that, of a sudden, Nancy flared. She lifted a pair of sullen and mutinous eyes, and her lips quivered. He saw with surprise that she was trembling.
"Say, you look here—I done what you told me to do, didn't I? I ain't no more nor no less a lady than I was before I done it, am I? What you pickin' on me for, then? What more you want?"
He sighed. Milly's niece was distinctly difficult, to say the least. How, he asked himself desperately, was one to make a dent in her appalling ignorance? She irritated him. And as is usual with people who do not understand, he took exactly the wrong course with her.
"I want you at least to try to live up to your position," he said with cold directness, beetling his brows at her. "I want you to do what you're told—and to keep on doing it! Do you understand that?" He felt that he was allowing himself to be more wrought up than was good for him, and this added to his annoyance.
She considered this, sullenly. "I'm not exackly straight in my mind what I understand and what I don't understand, yet," she replied. "But I got this much straight: If I done what I done to please you, I done it to please me, too!"
This was logical enough; it had even a note of common sense and justice. But her crude method of expressing it filled him with cold fury. The Champneys temper strained at the leash.
"Ah!" said he, a dark flush staining his face, "ah! Then get this straight, too: you'll please me onlyifyou carry out your part of our contract. What! do you dream I would ruin my nephew's life for a self-willed, undisciplined minx? Nothing could be farther from my thoughts! Nancy,Imade you Mrs. Peter Champneys: you will qualify for the position—or lose it!" He tapped his foot on the floor, and glared at her.
Nancy gave him glare for glare. "Yeah, you said it! You made me Mrs. Peter Champneys, and all I got to do is to do what I don't want to do, to hold down the job! What you askin'himto do to pleaseme? How'shequalifyin'? Is he so much I'm nothin'? Because that's what he thinks! Oh, you needn't talk! I guess I got eyes, at least!"
"I suggest that you use them to your own advantage, then," said he, disgustedly. "Let us have done with such squabbling! You agreed to obey. Very well, then, you will do so, or I shall take steps to put you outside of my calculations. In other words, I will wash my hands of you. Is that perfectly clear to you?" How else, he asked himself, was he to make her understand?
She saw that he was in a towering rage, and she reflected that if she had made Baxter that mad he'd have banged her with his fists. For a long minute the two stared at each other. She was about to make a defiant reply and let come what might, when a sort of spasm distorted his face. His mouth opened gaspingly, his eyes rolled back in his head like a dying man's. He seemed to crumple up, and she caught him as he fell. Her terrified shriek brought Hoichi, who took instant charge of the situation. He made the unconscious man comfortable on a divan, applied such restoratives as were at hand, and directed a frightened maid to telephone for physicians.
Nancy fled to her own room, and sat on the edge of her bed, frightened and subdued. That quarrel and its serious effect made a turning-point in her life, though she attached no blame to herself for the man's illness. She had no love for him, but her heart was not callous to suffering, and his distorted and agonized face had terrified and shocked her.
The suddenness of the seizure made his words more impressive. Suppose he died: what of her? She was not sure that any definite provision had as yet been made for her. What, then, should she do?
Suppose he recovered: what then? She had cause for serious thought. All this luxury and ease, this pleasant life of plenty, in which she reveled with the deep delight of one quite unused to it, hung upon a contingency—the contingency of absolute obedience. She was not naturally supine, and her spirit rose against an unconditional self-surrender to a hot-tempered, imperious old man, who would mold her to his will, make her over to his own notions, quite as high-handedly as if she'd been a lump of putty and not a human being. Nancy tasted the bitterness of having no voice in the making of her own destiny.
Well, but suppose she defied him? He was quite capable of washing his hands of her, just as he had threatened. And then? Before that possibility Nancy recoiled. No. She couldn't, she wouldn't go back to that old life of squalid slavery—eating bad food, wearing wretched clothes, suffering all the sodden and sordid misery of the ignorant, abjectly poor, a suffering twice as poignant now that she knew better things. She knew poverty too well to have any illusions about it. The Baxter kitchen rose before her. Why! while she was sitting here now, in this luxurious room, back there they'd be getting ready for the noonday dinner. The close kitchen would be reeking with the odor of boiling potatoes and cabbage, from which a greasy steam would be arising, so that one saw things as through a hot mist. One of the children would be screaming, somewhere about the house, and Mrs. Baxter, in an unsavory wrapper, her face streaming with perspiration, her hair in sticky strands on her hot forehead, would be shrilly threatening personal chastisement: "You shut up, out there! Just you wait till I get this batch o' biscuits off my hands an' I bet I fixyou! didn't I say shut up?" The hateful voice seemed so close to Nancy's ear that the girl shrank back, shivering with distaste.
She fingered the soft, fine stuff of the frock she was wearing. She stared about the room,—herroom, which she didn't have to share with one of the Baxter children, who squirmed and kicked all night in summer, and pulled the bed-coverings off her in winter. She went over to her dressing-table and fingered its pretty accessories, sniffing with childish pleasure the delicately scented powder and cologne. She looked at her reflection in the mirror, and scowled. Then she began to walk restlessly up and down the room. She had to think this thing out.
Why should she go, and leave the road clear for Peter Champneys? It occurred to her that, seen from his point of view, her elimination from the scene might be regarded somewhat in the light of providential interference in his behalf. She flushed. It wasn't fair! The thought of Peter Champneys was gall and wormwood to her.
Nancy wasn't a fool. Her honesty had a blunt directness, a sort of cave-woman frankness. In her, truthfulness was not so much a virtue as an energy. The hardness of her unloved life had bred a like hardness in her sense of values; she was distrustful and suspicious because she had never had occasion to be anything else. In that suspicion and distrustfulness had lain her safety. She had no sense of spiritual values as yet. Religion had meant going to church on Sundays when you had clean clothes in which to appear. Morals had meant being good, and to Nancy being good simply meant not being bad—and you couldn't be bad, go wrong, if you never trusted any man. A girl that trusted none of 'em could keep respectable. Nancy had seen girls who trusted men, in her time. Nothing like that forher! But she knew, also, the price the woman pays whether she trusts or distrusts, and the matrimony which at times rewarded the distrustful didn't appear much more alluring than the potter's field which waited for the credulous. Anyway you looked at it, what happened wasn't pleasant. And it was worse yet when you knew there was something better and different. You had to pay a price to get that something better and different, of course. The fact that one pays for everything one gets was coming home to Nancy with increasing force; the problem, then, was to get your money's worth.
She took her head in her hands, and tried to concentrate all her faculties. She wasn't a shirker, and she realized that she must decide upon her course of conduct now and stick to it. If she didn't look out for herself, who would? And presently she had reached the conclusion that when Mr. Peter Champneys reappeared upon the scene, he must find Mrs. Peter Champneys occupying the foreground, and occupying it creditably, too. She'd do it! When Mr. Chadwick Champneys recovered, she'd come to terms with him. She'd keep faith.
She spent three or four anxious days, while specialists came and went, and white-capped, starched, authoritative personages relieved each other in the sick-room, their answers to all queries being that the patient was doing quite as well as could be expected. At the end of the fifth day they admitted that the patient was recovering,—was, in fact, out of danger, though he wouldn't leave his room for another week or ten days; and he wasn't to be worried or disturbed about anything.
Satisfied, then, that he was on the highroad to recovery, and having made up her mind as to her own course of procedure, Nancy rather enjoyed these few days of comparative freedom. She supplied herself with a huge box of bonbons, "Junie's Love Test" and "The Widowed Bride,"—books begun long ago, but wrested from her untimely by the ruthless Mrs. Baxter, on the score of takin' her time off: her rightful work for them that'd took her in, and fillin' her red head with the foolishest sort o' notions. She had had so much to do that to have nothing to do but lie around in a red silk kimona and nibble chocolates and read love stories, seemed to her the supreme height of felicity.
She reveled in these novels. They represented that something different toward which her untutored and stinted heart groped blindly. Otherwise her mind, by no means a poor one, lay fallow and untilled. The beauty and wonder of the world, the pity and terror of fate, the divine agony of love which sacrifices and endures, did not as yet exist for her. She merely sensed that there was something different, somewhere—maybe on the road ahead. And so she wept over the woes of star-crost lovers, and sentimentalized over husky heroes utterly unlike any male beings known to nature, and believed she didn't believe that disinterested and unselfish love existed in the world. As she hadn't the faintest gleam of self-knowledge, in all this she was perfectly sincere.
She did not see Mr. Champneys for two weeks or so. In his nervous condition he evinced a singular reluctance to have her come near him, although others saw him daily. For instance, Mr. Jason Vandervelde appeared at half after ten o'clock every morning during his client's convalescence, was immediately admitted to Mr. Champney's room, and left it upon the stroke of eleven.
Nancy watched this man curiously. When he met her in the hall, he spoke to her in a nice, full-toned, modulated voice, exceedingly pleasing to the ear. His eyes were small but of a deep and bright blue, and although he was heavily built he wore his clothes so well that he gave the effect of strength rather than of clumsiness. He was clean-shaven and ruddy, and his large, well-shaped mouth was deeply curled at the corners. His hands were not fat and white, as one might expect, but tanned and muscular, and slightly hairy. His glasses gave him a certain precision, and his curled lips suggested irony. Nancy liked to look at him. He discomfited her understanding of men, for, she couldn't tell why, she both liked and trusted him. There was nothing romantic about him,—a well-fed, well-groomed lawyer-man in his late thirties, with a handsome wife in a handsome house,—yet he had the faculty of making her wonder about him, and wonder with kindness at that. She wished she knew just how much he knew about her, her early upbringing, her sad lack of education. What had Mr. Champneys told him? Or had he really told him anything?
When her uncle finally overcame his reluctance and sent for her, she entered his room quietly and stood looking at him with an honest concern that was in her favor. She was always honest, he reflected. There was nothing of the hypocrite or the coward in those wary gray-green eyes that always met one's glance without flinching.
The change in his appearance shocked her. His eyes were hollow, his tall form looked meager and shrunken. He was growing to be anoldman. She said awkwardly:
"I'm real sorry you been so sick." And she made no attempt to apologize for her share in the quarrel that had led to his seizure. She ignored it altogether, and for this he was grateful.
"Thank you. I am getting along nicely," he said civilly. And with a slightly impatient gesture he dismissed all further mention of illness. He leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes, the better to collect his thoughts. He wished to make his wishes perfectly clear to her. But she surprised him by saying quietly:
"I been thinking things over while you was sick, and I come to the conclusion you was right. I got to have more education. There's things I just got to know—how to talk nice, and what to wear, and what fork you'd ought to eat with. Forks and things drive me real wild."
"I had thought, at first, of sending you to some particularly fine boarding-school—" he began, but Nancy interrupted him.
"If I was six instead o' sixteen, you might do it. As 't is, I wouldn't learn nothin' except to hate the girls that'd be turnin' up their noses at me. No. I don't want to go to boardin'-school. I've saw music-teachers that come to folks' houses to give lessons, and I been thinkin', why can't you get me a school-teacher that'll teach me right at home!"
"As I was saying when interrupted,"—he looked at her reprovingly—"I had at first thought of sending you to some finishing school. I gave up that idea almost at once. I agree with you that it is best you should be taught at home. In fact, I have already engaged the lady who will be your companion as well as your teacher."
"I don't know as I'm crazy about a lady companion as a steady job," said Nancy, doubtfully. She feared to lose her new liberty, to forego the amazing delight of living by herself, so to speak. "But now you've done it, I sure hope you've picked out somebodyyoung. If I got to have a lady companion, I want she should be young."
"Mr. Vandervelde attended to the matter for me," said Mr. Champneys, in a tone of finality. "He is sure that the lady in question is exactly the person I wish. Mrs. MacGregor is an Englishwoman, the widow of a naval officer. She is in reduced circumstances, but of irreproachable connections. She has the accomplishments of a lady of her class, and her companionship should be an inestimable blessing to you. You will be governed by her authority. She will be here to-morrow."
"A ole widder woman! Good Lord! I—" here she stopped, and gulped. An expression of resignation came over her countenance. "Oh, all right. You've done it an' I'll make the best of it," she finished, not too graciously.
"It is not proper to refer to a lady as 'a ole widder woman'."
"Well, but ain't she?" And she asked: "What else you know about her?"
"Mr. Vandervelde attended to the matter," he repeated. "He is thoroughly satisfied, and that is enough for me—and for you. I sent for you to inform you that she is to be here to-morrow. See that you receive her pleasantly. Your hours of study and recreation will be arranged by her. She will also overlook your wardrobe. And, I do not wish to hear any complaints."
"I can't even pick out my own clothes?"
"You lack even the rudiments of good taste."
"What's wrong with my clothes?" she demanded.
"Everything," said he, succinctly, and with visible irritation. He remembered the wedding-gown, and his face twitched. She watched him intently.
"Oh, all right. I said I'd obey, an' I will. I ain't forgettin'," said she, wearily.
"Very well. I am glad you understand." He closed his eyes, and understanding that the interview was at an end, Nancy withdrew.
Mrs. MacGregor arrived on the morrow. The attorney had been given explicit orders and instructions by his exacting client, who had his own notions of what a teacher for his niece should and shouldn't be. Vandervelde congratulated himself on having been able to meet them so completely in the person of the estimable Mrs. MacGregor.
Mr. Champneys demanded a lady middle-aged but not too middle-aged, not overly handsome, but not overly otherwise; an excellent disciplinarian, of a good family, and with impeccable references.
For the rest, Mrs. MacGregor was a tall, spare, high-nosed lady, with a thin-lipped mouth full of large, sound teeth of a yellowish tinge, and high cheek-bones with a permanent splash of red on them. Her eyes were frosty, and her light hair was frizzled in front, and worn high on her narrow head. She dressed in plain black silk of good quality, wore her watch at her waist, and on her wrist a large, old-fashioned bracelet in which was set a glass-covered, lozenge-shaped receptable holding what looked like a wisp of bristles, but which was a bit of the late Captain MacGregor's hair.
Mr. Champneys had wanted a lady who was a church member. He had a vague idea that if a lady happened to be a church member you were somehow or other protected against her. Mrs. MacGregor was orthodox enough to satisfy the most rigid religionist. Mr. Champneys gathered that she believed in God the father, God the son, and God the Holy Ghost, three in One, and that One a dependable gentleman beautifully British, who dutifully protected the king, fraternally respected the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Prime Minister, and was heartily in favor of the British Constitution. Naturally, being a devout woman, she agreed with Deity.
An American family domiciled for a while in England had secured her services as companion to an elderly aunt of theirs, fetching her along with them, on their return to America. The aunt had been a family torment until the advent of Mrs. MacGregor, but in the hands of that disciplinarian she had become a mild-mannered old body. On her demise the grateful family settled a small annuity upon her whom they couldn't help recognizing as their benefactor. Finding Americans so grateful, Mrs. MacGregor decided to remain among them and with her recommendations secure another position of trust in some wealthy family. This, then, was the teacher selected by Mr. Jason Vandervelde, who thought her just what Mr. Champneys wanted and his ward probably needed.
Mrs. MacGregor never really liked anybody, but she could respect certain persons highly; she respected Mr. Chadwick Champneys at sight. His name, his appearance, the fact that Jason Vandervelde was acting for him, convinced her that he was "quite the right sort"—for an American. She was as gracious to him as nature permitted her to be to anybody. And the salary was very good indeed.
It was only when Nancy put in her appearance that Mrs. MacGregor's satisfaction withered around the edges. The red on her high cheeks deepened, and she fixed upon her new pupil a cold, appraising stare. She made no slightest attempt to ingratiate herself; that wasn't her way; what she demanded, she often said, was Respect. The impossible young person who was staring back at her with hostile curiosity wasn't overcome with Respect. The two did not love each other.
Strict disciplinarian though she might be where others were concerned, Mrs. MacGregor treated herself with lenient consideration. She was selfish with a fine, Christian zeal that moved Nancy to admiring wonder. Nancy's own selfishness had been superimposed upon her by untoward circumstances. This woman's selfishness was a part of her nature, carefully cultivated. She believed her body to be the temple of the Holy Ghost, and she made herself exceedingly comfortable in the building, quite as if the Holy Ghost were an obliging absentee landlord. Nancy observed, too, that although the servants did not like her, they obeyed her without question. She got without noise what she wanted.
But she really could teach. Almost from the first lesson, Nancy began to learn, the pure hatred she felt for her instructress adding rather than detracting from her progress. Had the woman been broader, of a finer nature, she might have failed here; but being what she was, immovable, hard as nails, narrow and prejudiced, sticking relentlessly to the obviously essential, she goaded and stung the girl into habits of study.
Her reaction to Mrs. MacGregor really pushed her forward. She knew that the woman could never overcome a secret sense of amaze that such a person as herself should be a member of Chadwick Champneys's family—the man was agentleman, you see. And she called Nancy "Anne." Her lifted eyebrows at Nancy's English, her shocked, patient, parrot-like, "Not 'seen him when he done it,'please. Yousawhim when hedidit!—No, 'I come in the house' isn't correct. Try to remember thatwell-bredpersons use the past tense of the verb; thus: 'Icameinto the house.'—WhatdoI hear, Anne? You 'taken'it? No! You TOOK it!" And she would look at Nancy like a scandalized martyr, ready to die for the noble cause of English grammar! Rather than endure that look, rather than face those uplifted eyebrows, Nancy, gritting her teeth, set herself seriously to the task of making over her method of speech.
It was Mrs. MacGregor who, discovering the girl's unstinted allowance of candy, cut off the supply. She didn't care much for candies herself, but she did like fruit, and fruit was substituted for the forbidden sweets. She had the healthy, wholesome English habit of walking, and unless the weather was impossible she forced her unwilling charge to take long tramps with her, generally immediately after breakfast. They would set out, Nancy dressed in a plain blue serge, her pretty, high-heeled pumps discarded for flat-heeled walking-shoes, Mrs. MacGregor flat-footed also, tall, bony, in a singular bonnet, but nevertheless retaining an inherent stateliness which won respect. Sometimes they tramped up Riverside Drive, their objective being Grant's tomb. Mrs. MacGregor respected Grant; and the stands of dusty flags brought certain old British shrines to her mind. On stated mornings they visited the Library, while Mrs. MacGregor selected the books Nancy was to read, books that Nancy looked at askance. They had their mornings for the museums, too. Mrs. MacGregor knew nothing of art, except that, as she said to Nancy, well-bred persons simplyhadto know something about it. After their walk came lessons, grueling, dry-as-dust, nose-to-the-grindstone lessons, during which Nancy's speech was vivisected. At two o'clock they lunched, and Nancy had further critical instructions. The dishes she had once been allowed to order were changed, greatly to her annoyance; Mrs. MacGregor liked such honest stuff as mutton chops and potatoes, just as she insisted upon oatmeal for breakfast. Porridge, she called it. In the afternoon they motored; Mrs. MacGregor, who detested speed, became the bane of the hard-faced chauffeur's life.
They dined at seven, and for an hour thereafter Mrs. MacGregor either read aloud from some book intended to edify the young person, or forced Nancy to do so. She was possibly the only person alive who delighted in Hannah More. She said, modestly, that at an early age she had been taught to revere this paragon, and whatever happy knowledge of the virtues proper to the female state she possessed, she owed in a large measure to that model writer. Nancy conceived for Hannah More a hatred equaled in intensity only by that cherished for Mrs. MacGregor herself.
Mrs. MacGregor's notions of dress and her own were asunder, even as the poles. But here again that rigid duenna did her invaluable service, for if she didn't look handsome in the clothes selected for her, she didn't, as that lady said frankly, look vulgar in them. No longer would you be liable to mistake her for somebody's second-rate housemaid on her day out. The simple diet and the inexorable regularity of her hours also told in her favor, although she herself wasn't as yet aware of the change taking place. Already you could tell that hers was a supple and shapely young body, with promise of a magnificent maturity; you glimpsed behind the fading freckles a skin like a water-lily for creamy whiteness; and that red hair of hers, worn without frizzings, began to take on a glossy, coppery luster.
That spring they moved into the new house. It was so different from the average newly-rich American home that it moved even Mrs. MacGregor to praise. Nancy thought it rather bare. It hadn't color enough, and there were but few pictures. Yet the old rosewood and mahogany furniture pleased her. She remembered that golden-oak, red-plush parlor at Baxter's with a sort of wonder. Why! she had thought that parlor handsome! And now she was beginning to understand how hideous it had been.
She saw little of Mr. Champneys, who seemed to be plunged to the eyes in business. Occasionally he appeared, looked at her searchingly, said a few words to her and Mrs. MacGregor, and vanished for another indefinite period. Mr. Jason Vandervelde was almost a daily visitor when Mr. Champneys happened to be in the city. At times Mr. Champneys went away, presumably to look after business interests, and Nancy thought that at such times the lawyer accompanied him. She had no friends of her own age, and Mrs. MacGregor wasn't, to say the least, companionable. And the books she was compelled to read bored her to distraction. She took it for granted they must be frightfully good, they were so frightfully dull! The deadliest, dullest of all seemed to be reserved for Sunday. She didn't mind going to church; in church you could watch other people, even though Mrs. MacGregor sat rigidly erect by your side, and expected you to be able to find your place in a Book of Common Prayer entirely unfamiliar to you. While she sat rapt during what you thought an unnecessarily long sermon, you could look about you slyly, and take note of the people within your immediate radius.
Nancy liked to observe the younger people. Sometimes a bitter envy would almost choke her when she regarded some girl who was both pretty and prettily dressed, and, apparently, care-free and happy. She watched the younger men stealthily. Some of them pleased her; she would have liked to be admired by at least one of them, and she felt jealous of the fortunate young women singled out for their attentions. Think of being pretty, and having beautiful clothes, and swell fellows like that in love with you! That any one of these fine young men should cast a glance in her own direction never entered her mind. No. Loveliness and the affection and gaiety of youth were for others; for her—Peter Champneys. At that she fetched a deep sigh. She always went home from church silent and subdued. Mrs. MacGregor thought this a proper attitude of mind for the Sabbath.
The girl was vaguely disturbed and uneasy without knowing why. The newness and glamour of the possession of creature comforts, the absence of want, was wearing thin in spots. She was conscious of a lack. She was beginning to think and to question, and as there was no one in whom she might confide, she turned inward. Naturally, she couldn't answer her own questions, and all her thoughts were as yet chaotic and confused. She wanted—well, what did she want, anyhow? She repeated to herself, "I want something different!" That something different should not include a dreary round of Mrs. MacGregor, a cold inspection by Mr. Chadwick Champneys; nor the thought of Peter Champneys. Itwouldinclude laughter and—and people who were neither teachers nor guardians, but who were gay, and young, and kind. She began to be conscious of her own isolation. She had always been isolated. Once poverty had done it; and now money was doing it. Those girls she saw at church—she'd bet they went to parties, had loads of friends, had a good time, were loved; plenty of people wanted their love. For herself, as far back as she could look, she had never had a friend. Who cared for her love? Sometimes she watched the new maid, a distractingly pretty little Irish girl, black-haired, blue-eyed, rosy-faced. The girl tried to be demure, to restrain the laughter that was always near the surface; but her eyes danced, her cheek dimpled, she had what one might call a smiling voice. And the handsome young policeman on the corner was acutely aware of her. Nancy remembered one afternoon when she and Mrs. MacGregor happened to be coming in at the same time with Molly. It was Molly's afternoon off and she was dressed trimly, and with taste. Under her little close-fitting hat her hair was like black satin, her face like a rose. The young policeman managed to pass the house at that moment, and lifted his cap to her; Nancy saw the look in the young man's eyes. She followed Mrs. MacGregor into the house, rebelliously. Nobody had ever looked atherlike that. Nobody was ever going to look at her like that. She remembered Peter Champneys's eyes when they had first met hers. A dull flush stained her face, and bitterness overwhelmed her.
Mr. Champneys was busy; Mrs. MacGregor was satisfied—she had a position of authority; her creature comforts were exquisitely attended to; her salary was ample. The man saw his plans being carried forward, if not brilliantly at least creditably; the woman saw that her tasks were fulfilled. It never occurred to either that the girl might or should ask for more than she received, or that she might find her days dull. But Nancy was discovering that the body is more than raiment, and that one does not live by bread alone.