CHAPTER VIIThere is a serio-comic, yet charming, sort of tragedy—fortunately only temporary—in the attachment of a little girl for an older boy. It often bores him so; and she is so daintily in earnest.The one adores, tags after, and often annoys; the other, if chivalrous, submits.It began this way between Stephanie Quest and Jim Cleland. It continued. She realized with awe the discrepancy in their ages; he was amiable enough to pretend to waive the discrepancy. And his condescension almost killed her.The poor child grew older as fast as she possibly could; resolute, determined to overtake him somewhere, if that could be done. For in spite of arithmetic she seemed to know that it was possible. Moreover, it was wholly characteristic of her to attack with pathetic confidence the impossible—to lead herself as a forlorn hope and with cheerful and reckless resolution into the most hopeless impasse.Cleland Senior began to notice this trait in her—began to wonder whether it was an admirable trait or a light-headed one.Once, an imbecile canary, purchased by him for her, and passionately cherished, got out of its open cage, out of the open nursery window, and perched on a cornice over one of the windows. And out of the window climbed Stephanie, never hesitating, disregarding consequences, clinging like a desperate kitten to sill and blind, negotiating precarious ledges with steady feet; and the flag-stones of the area four stories below her, and spikes on the iron railing.A neighbour opposite fainted; another shouted incoherently. It became a hair-raising situation; she could neither advance nor retreat. The desperate, Irish keening of Janet brought Meacham; Meacham, at the telephone, notified the nearest police station, and a section of the Fire Department. The latter arrived with extension ladders.It was only when pushed violently bed-ward, as punishment, that the child realized there had been anything to be frightened about. Then she became scared; and was tearfully glad to see Cleland when he came in that evening from a print-hunting expedition.And once, promenading on Fifth Avenue with Janet, for the sake of her health—such being the régime established—she separated two violently fighting school-boys, slapped the large one, who had done the bullying, soundly, cuffed another, who had been enjoying the unequal combat, fell upon a fourth, and was finally hustled home with her expensive clothing ruined. But in her eyes and cheeks still lingered the brilliant fires of battle, when Janet stripped her for a bath.And once in the park she sprang like a young tigress upon a group of ragamuffins who had found a wild black mallard duck, nesting in a thicket near the lake, and who were stoning the frightened thing.All Janet could see was a most dreadful melée agitating the bushes, from which presently burst boy after boy, in an agony of flight, rushing headlong and terror-stricken from that dreadful place where a wild-girl raged, determined on their extermination.Stephanie's development was watched with tender, half-fearful curiosity by Cleland.As usual, two separate columns were necessary to record the varied traits so far apparent in her. These traits Cleland noted in the book devoted to memoranda concerning the child, writing them as follows:Inclined to self-indulgence. Easily moved to impulsiveConsequently, a trifle self-sacrifice.selfish at times. Ardent in her affections;Over-sensitive and likely loyal to friendship; andto exaggerate. essentially truthful.Very great talent latent: Indignation quickly excitedpossibly histrionic. by any form of cruelty orAnger, when finally treachery. Action likely toaroused, likely to lead to be immediate without regardextremes. for personal considerations.Generous with her possessions.So far he could discover nothing vicious in her, no unworthy inherited instincts beyond those common to young humans, instincts supposed to be extirpated by education.She was no greedier than any other healthy child, no more self-centred; all her appetites were normal, all her inclinations natural. She had a good mind, but a very human one, fairly balanced but sensitive to emotion, inclination, and impulse, and sometimes rather tardy in readjusting itself when logic and reason were required to regain equilibrium.But the child was more easily swayed by gratitude than by any other of the several human instincts known as virtues.So she grew toward adolescence, closely watched by Cleland, good-naturedly tolerated by Jim, worshipped by Janet, served by Meacham with instinctive devotion—the only quality in him not burnt out in his little journeys through hell.There were others, too, in the world, who remembered the child. There was her aunt, who came once a month and brought always an expensive present, over the suitability of which she and Cleland differed to the verge of rudeness. But they always parted on excellent terms. And there was Chiltern Grismer, who sat sometimes for hours in his office, thinking about the child and the fortune which threatened her.Weeks, adhering to one another, became months; months totalled years—several of them, recorded so suddenly that John Cleland could not believe it.He had arrived at that epoch in the life of man when the years stood still with him: when he neither felt himself changing nor appeared to grow older, though all around him he was constantly aware of others aging. Yet, being always with Stephanie, he could not notice her rapid development, as he noted the astonishing growth of his son when the boy came home after brief absences at school.Stephanie, still a child, was becoming something else very rapidly. But still she remained childlike enough to idolize Jim Cleland and to show it, without reserve. And though he really found her excellent company, amusing and diverting, her somewhat persistent and dog-like devotion embarrassed and bored him sometimes. He was at that age.Young Grismer, in Jim's hearing, commenting upon a similar devotion inflicted on himself by a girl, characterized her as "too damn pleasant"—a brutal yet graphic summary.And for a while the offensive phrase stuck in Jim's memory, though always chivalrously repudiated as applying to Stephanie. Yet, the poor girl certainly bored him at times, so blind her devotion, so pitiful her desire to please, so eager her heart of a child for the comradeship denied her in the dreadful years of solitude and fear.For a year or two the affair lay that way between these two; the school-boy's interest in the little girl was the interest of polite responsibility; consideration for misfortune, toleration for her sex, with added allowance for her extreme youth. This was the boy's attitude.Had not boarding-school and college limited his sojourn at home, it is possible that indifference might have germinated.But he saw her so infrequently and for such short periods; and even during the summer vacation, growing outside interests, increasing complexity in social relations with fellow students—invitations to house parties, motor trips, camping trips—so interrupted the placid continuity of his vacation in their pleasant summer home in the northern Berkshires, that he never quite realized that Stephanie Quest was really anything more than a sort of permanent guest, billeted indefinitely under his father's roof.When he was home in New York at Christmas and Easter, his gravely detached attitude of amiable consideration never varied toward her.The few weeks at a time that he spent at "Runner's Rest," his father's quaint and ancient place on Cold River, permitted him no time to realize the importance and permanency of the place she already occupied as an integral part of the house of Cleland.A thousand new interests, new thoughts, possessed the boy in the full tide of adolescence. All the world was beginning to unclose before him like the brilliant, fragrant petals of a magic flower. And in this rainbow transformation of things terrestrial, a boy's mind is always unbalanced by the bewildering and charming confusion of it all—for it is he who is changing, not the world; he is merely learning to see instead of to look, to comprehend instead of to perceive, to realize instead of to take for granted all the wonders and marvels and mysteries to which a young man is heir.It is drama, comedy, farce, tragedy, this inevitable awakening; it is the alternate elucidation and deepening of mysteries; it is a day of clear, keen reasoning succeeding a day of illogical caprice; an hour aquiver with undreamed-of mental torture followed by an hour of spiritual exaltation; it is the era of magnificent aspiration, of inexplicable fear, of lofty abnegations, of fierce egotisms, of dreams and of convictions, of faiths for which youth dies; and, alas, it is a day of pitiless development which leaves the shadowy memory of faith lingering in the brain, and, on the lips, a smile.And, amid such emotions, such impulses, such desires, fears, aspirations, hopes, regrets, the average boy puts on that Nessus coat called manhood. And he has, in his temporarily dislocated and unadjusted brain, neither the time nor the patience, nor the interest, nor the logic at his command necessary to see and understand what is happening under his aspiring and heavenward-tilted nose. Only the clouds enrapture him; where every star beckons him he responds in a passion of endeavour.And so he begins the inevitable climb toward the moon—the path which every man born upon the earth has trodden far or only a little way, but the path all men at least have tried.In his freshman year at Harvard, he got drunk. The episode was quite inadvertent on his part—one of those accidents incident to the vile, claret-coloured "punches" offered by some young idiot in "honour" of his own birthday.The Cambridge police sheltered him over night; his fine was over-subscribed; he explored the depths of hell in consequence of the affair, endured the agony of shame, remorse, and self-loathing to the physical and mental limit, and eventually recovered, regarding himself as a reformed criminal with a shattered past.However, the youthful gloom and melancholy dignity with which this clothed him had a faint and not entirely unpleasant flavour—as one who might say, "I have lived and learned. There is the sad wisdom of worldly things within me." But he cut out alcohol. It being the fashion at that time to shrug away an offered cup, he found little difficulty in avoiding it.In his Sophomore year, he met the inevitable young person. And, after all that had been told him, all that he had disdainfully pictured to himself, did not recognize her when he met her.It was one of those episodes which may end any way. And it ended, of course, in one way or another. But it did end.Thus the limited world he moved in began to wear away the soft-rounded contours of boyhood; he learned a little about men, nothing whatever about women, but was inclined to consider that he understood them sadly and perfectly. He wrote several plays, novels and poems to amuse himself; wrote articles for the college periodicals, when he was not too busy training with the baseball squad or playing tennis, or lounging through those golden and enchanted hours when the smoke of undergraduate pipes spins a magic haze over life, enveloping books and comrades in that exquisite and softly brilliant web which never tears, never fades in memory while life endures.He made many friends; he visited many homes; he failed sometimes, but more often he made good in whatever he endeavoured.His father came on to Cambridge several times—always when his son requested it—and he knew the sympathy of his father in days of triumph, and he understood his father's unshaken belief in his only son when that son, for the moment, faltered.For he had confided in his father the episodes of the punch and the young person. Never had his father and he been closer together in mind and spirit than after that confession.In spite of several advances made by Chiltern Grismer, whose son, Oswald, was also at Harvard and a popular man in his class, John Cleland remained politely unreceptive; and there were no social amenities exchanged. Jim Cleland and Oswald Grismer did not visit each other, although friendly enough at Cambridge. Cleland Senior made no particular effort to discourage any such friendly footing, and he was not inclined to judge young Grismer by his father. He merely remained unresponsive.In such cases, he who makes the advances interprets their non-success according to his own nature. And Grismer concluded that he had been a victim of insidious guile and sharp practice, and that John Cleland had taken Stephanie to his heart only after he had learned that, some day, she would inherit the Quest fortune from her eccentric relative.Chagrin and sullen irritation against Cleland had possessed him since he first learned of this inheritance; and he nourished both until they grew into a dull, watchful anger. And he waited for something or other that might in some way offer him a chance to repair the vital mistake he had made in his attitude toward the child.But Cleland gave him no opening whatever; Grismer's social advances were amiably ignored. And it became plainer and plainer to Grismer, as he interpreted the situation, that John Cleland was planning to unite, through his son Jim, the comfortable Cleland income with the Quest millions, and to elbow everybody else out of the way."The philanthropic hypocrite," mused Grismer, still smarting from a note expressing civil regrets in reply to an invitation to Stephanie and Jim to join them after church for a motor trip to Lakewood."Can't they come?" inquired Oswald."Previous engagement," snapped Grismer, tearing up the note. His wife, an invalid, with stringy hair and spots on her face, remarked with resignation that the Clelands were too stylish to care about plain, Christian people."Stylish," repeated Grismer, "I've got ten dollars to Cleland's one. I can put on style enough to swamp him if I've a mind to!—m-m-m'yes, if I've a mind to.""Why don't you?" inquired Oswald, with a malicious side glance at his father's frock coat and ready-made cravat. "Chuck the religious game and wear spats and a topper! It's a better graft, governor."Chiltern Grismer, only partly attentive to his son's impudence, turned a fierce, preoccupied glance upon him. But his mind was still intrigued with that word "stylish." It began to enrage him.He repeated it aloud once or twice, sneeringly:"So you think we may not be sufficiently stylish to suit the Clelands—or that brat they picked out of the sewer? M-m-m'yes, out of an east-side sewer!"Oswald pricked up his intelligent and rather pointed ears."What brat?" he inquired.Chiltern Grismer had never told his son the story of Stephanie Quest. In the beginning, the boy had been too young, and there seemed to be no particular reason for telling him. Later, when Grismer suddenly developed ambitions in behalf of his son for the Quest fortune, he did not say anything about Stephanie's origin, fearing that it might prejudice his son.Now, he suddenly concluded to tell him, not from spite entirely, nor to satisfy his increasing resentment against Cleland; but because Oswald would, some day, inherit the Grismer money. And it might be just as well to prime him now, in the event that any of the Clelands should ever start to reopen the case which had deprived Jessie Grismer of her own inheritance so many years ago.The young fellow listened with languid astonishment as the links of the story, very carefully and morally polished, were displayed by his father for his instruction and edification."That is the sort of stylish people they are," concluded Grismer, making an abrupt end. "Let it be a warning to you to keep your eye on the Clelands; for a man that calls himself a philanthropist, and is sharp enough to pick out an heiress from the gutter, will bear watching!—m-m-m'yes, indeed, he certainly will bear watching."Mrs. Grismer, who was knitting with chilly fingers, sighed."You always said it was God's judgment on Jessie and her descendants, Chiltern. But I kind of wish you'd been a little mite more forgiving.""Who am I?" demanded Grismer, sullenly, "to thwart God's wrath ... m-m-m'yes, the anger of the Lord Almighty! And I never thought of that imbecile aunt.... It was divine will that punished my erring sister and her children, and her children's chil——""Rot!" remarked Oswald. "Cleland caught you napping and put one over. That's all that worries you. And now you are properly and piously sore!""That is an impious and wickedly outrageous way to talk to your father!" said Grismer, glaring at him. "You have come back from college lacking reverence and respect for everything you have been taught to consider sacred!—m-m-m'yes—everything! You have returned to us utterly demoralized, defiant, rebellious, changed! Every worldly abomination seems to attract you: you smoke openly in your mother's presence; your careless and loose conversation betrays your contempt for the simple, homely, and frugal atmosphere in which you have been reared by Christian parents. Doubtless we are not sufficiently stylish for you any longer!" he added sarcastically."I'm sorry I was disrespectful, governor——""No! You arenotsorry!" retorted Grismer tartly. "You rejoice secretly in your defiance of your parents! You have been demoralized by the license permitted you by absence from home. You live irresponsibly; you fling away your money on theatres! You yourself admit that you have learned to dance. Nothing that your pastor has taught you, nothing that our church holds sacred seems capable of restraining you from wickedness. That is the truth, Oswald. And your mother and I despair of your future, here and——" he lifted his eyes solemnly—"above."There was an awkward silence. Finally Oswald said with sullen frankness:"You see I'm a man, now, and I've got to do my own thinking. Things I used to believe seem tommyrot to me now——""Oswald!" sighed his mother."I'm sorry to pain you, Mother, but they do! And about everything you object to I find agreeable. I'm not very bad, Mother. But this sort of talk inclines me to raise the devil. What's the harm in going to a show? In dancing? In smoking a cigar? For heaven's sake, let a fellow alone. The line of talk the governor hands me makes a cynic of a man who's got any brains."There was another silence; then Oswald continued:"And, while we are trying to be frank with each other this pleasant Sunday morning, what about my career? Let's settle it now!""I'm opposed to any such frivolous profession!" snapped Grismer angrily. "That's your answer. And that settles it.""You mean that you still oppose my studying sculpture?""Emphatically.""Why?" demanded the youth, rather white, but smiling."Because it is no business career for a Christian!" retorted his father, furious. "It is a loose, irregular, eccentric profession, beset with pitfalls and temptations. It leads to immorality and unbelief—m-m-m'yes, to hell itself! And that is why I oppose it!"Oswald shrugged:"I'm sorry you feel that way but I can't help it, of course.""Do you mean," inquired his mother, "that you intend to disregard our solemn wishes?""I don't know," said the young fellow, "I really don't know, Mother. I can't seem to breathe and expand at home. You've never made things very cheerful for me.""Oswald! You are utterly heartless!""I've been fed up on the governor's kind of religion, on narrow views and gloom; and that's no good for a modern boy. It's a wonder I have any heart at all, and sometimes I think it's dried up——""That will do!" shouted Grismer, losing all self-control. "If your home, your parents, and your Creator can not make a Christian of you, there is nothing to hope from you! ... I'll hear no more from you. Go and get ready for church!""I sha'n't go," said the young fellow calmly.When he went back to Cambridge at the end of the week, it was with the desire never to see his home again, and with a vague and burning intention to get even, somehow, by breaking every law of the imbecile religion on which he had been "fed up."CHAPTER VIIIWhen Stephanie was fifteen years old, John Cleland took her to Cambridge.The girl had been attending a celebrated New York school during the last two years. She had developed the bearing and manners which characterized the carefully trained products of that institution, but the régime seemed to have subdued her, and made her retiring and diffident.She could have formed friendships there had she desired to do so; she formed none; yet any girl there would have been happy and flattered to call Stephanie Quest her friend. But Stephanie cared little for those confidential and intimate relations so popular among school girls of her age.She made no enemies, however. An engaging reticence and reserve characterized her—the shy and wistful charm of that indeterminate age when a girl is midway in the delicate process of transformation.If she cared nothing about girls, she lacked self-confidence with boys, though vastly preferring their society; but she got little of it except when Jim's school friends came to the house during holidays. Then she had a heavenly time just watching and listening.So when John Cleland took her to Cambridge, she had, in the vernacular of the moment, a "wonderful" experience—everything during that period of her career being "wonderful" or "topping."Jim, as always, was "wonderful;" and the attitude of his friends alternately delighted and awed her, so gaily devoted they instantly became to Jim's "little sister."But what now secretly thrilled the girl was that Jim, for the first time, seemed to be proud of her, not tolerating her as an immature member of the family, but welcoming her as an equal, on an equal footing. And, with inexpressible delight, she remembered her determination, long ago, to overtake him; and realized that she was doing it very rapidly.So she went to a football game at the stadium; she took tea in the quarters of these god-like young men; she motored about Cambridge and Boston; she saw all that a girl of fifteen ought to see, heard all that she ought to hear, and went back to New York with John Cleland in the seventh paradise of happiness fulfilled, madly enamoured of Jim and every youthful superman he had introduced to her.Every year while Jim was at college there was a repetition of this programme, and she and John Cleland departed regularly for Cambridge amid excitement indescribable.And when, in due time, Jim prepared to emerge from that great university, swaddled in sheepskin, and reeking with Cambridge culture, Stephanie went again to Cambridge with her adopted father—a girl, then, of seventeen, still growing, still in the wondering maze of her own adolescence, exquisitely involved in its magic, conscious already of its spell, of its witchcraft, which lore she was shyly venturing to investigate.She had a "wonderful" week in Cambridge—more and more excited by the discovery that young men found her as agreeable as she found them, and that they sought her now on perfectly even terms of years and experience; regarded her as of them, not merely with them. And this enchanted her.Two of her school friends, the Hildreth girls, were there with their mother, and the latter very gladly extended her wing to cover Stephanie for the dance, John Cleland not feeling very well and remaining in Boston.And it chanced that Stephanie met there Oswald Grismer; and knew him instantly when he was presented to her. Even after all those years, the girl clearly recollected seeing him in the railroad station, and remembered the odd emotions of curiosity and disapproval she experienced when he stared at her so persistently—disapproval slightly mitigated by consciousness of the boyish flattery his manner toward her implied.He said, in his easy, half-mischievous way:"You don't remember me, of course, Miss Quest, but when you were a very little girl I once saw you at the Grand Central Station in New York."Stephanie, as yet too inexperienced a diplomat to forget such things, replied frankly that she remembered him perfectly. When it was too late, she blushed at her admission."That's unusually nice of you," he said. "Maybe it was my bad manners that impressed you, Miss Quest. I remember that I had never seen such a pretty little girl in my life, and I'm very sure I stared at you, and that you were properly annoyed."He was laughing easily, as he spoke, and she laughed, too, still a trifle confused."I did think you rather rude," she admitted. "But what a long time ago that was! Isn't itstrangethat I should remember it? I can even recollect that you and my brother had had a fight in school and that dad made you both shake hands there in the station, before you went aboard the train.... Naturally, I didn't feel kindly toward you," she added, laughingly."Jim and I are now on most amiable terms," he assured her, "so please feel kindly toward me now—kindly enough to give me one unimportant dance. Will you, Miss Quest?"Later when he presented himself to claim the dance, her reception of him was unmistakably friendly.He had grown up into a spare, loosely coupled, yet rather graceful young fellow, with hair and eyes that matched, both of a deep amber shade.But there was in his bearing, in his carelessly attractive manner, in his gaze, a lurking hint of irresponsibility, perhaps of mischief, which did not, however, impress her disagreeably.On the contrary, she felt oddly at ease with him, as though she had known him for some time."Have you forgiven me for staring at you so many years ago?" he inquired, smilingly.She thought that she had.But his next words startled her a little; he said, still smiling in his careless and attractive way:"I have a queer idea that we're beginning in the middle of everything—that we've already known each other long enough to waive preliminaries and begin our acquaintance as old friends."He was saying almost exactly what she had not put into words. He was still looking at her intently, curiously, with the same slightly importunate, slightly deferential smile which she now vividly remembered in the boy."Do you, by any chance, feel the same about our encounter?" he asked."What way?""That we seem to have known each other for a long time?"Stephanie had not yet learned very much in the art of self-defense. A question to her still meant either a truthful answer or a silence. She remained silent."Do you, Miss Quest?" he persisted."Yes, I do.""As though," he insisted, "you and I are beginning in the middle of the book of friendship instead of bothering to cut the pages of the preface?" he suggested gaily.She laughed."You know," she warned him, "that I have not yet made up my mind about you.""Oh. Concerning what are you in doubt?""Concerning exactly how I ought to consider you.""As a friend, please.""Perhaps. Are we going to dance or talk?"After they had been dancing for a few moments:"So you are a crew man?""Who told you?""I've inquired about you," she admitted, glancing sideways at the tall, spare, graceful young fellow with his almost golden colouring. "I have questioned various people. They told me things.""Did they give me a black eye?" he asked, laughingly."No. But somebody gave you a pair of golden ones.... Like two sun-spots on a brown brook. You've a golden look; do you know it?""Red-headed men turn that way when they're in the sun and wind," he explained, still laughing, yet plainly fascinated by the piquant, breezy informality of this young girl. "Tell me, do you still go to school, Miss Quest?""How insulting! ... Yes! But it was mean of you to ask.""Good Lord! You didn't expect me to think you the mother of a family, did you?"That mollified her."Where do you go to school?" he continued."Miss Montfort's. I finish this week.""And then?""To college, I'm afraid.""Don't you want to?""I'd rather go to a dramatic school.""Is that your inclination, Miss Quest?""I'd adore it! But dad doesn't.""Too bad.""I don't know. I'm quite happy, anyway. I'm having a wonderful time, whatever I'm doing.""Then it isn't an imperious call from Heaven to leave all and elevate the drama?" he asked, with a pretense of anxiety that made her laugh."You are disrespectful. I'm sure I could elevate the drama if I had the chance. But I sha'n't get it. However, next to the stage I adore to paint," she explained. "There is a class. I have attended it for two years. I paint rather nicely.""No wonder we feel so friendly," exclaimed Grismer."Why? Doyoupaint?""No, but I'm to be a sculptor.""Howwonderful! I'm simply mad to do something, too! Don't you love the atmosphere of Bohemia, Mr. Grismer?"He said that he did with a mischievous smile straight into her grey eyes."It is my dream," she went on, slightly confused, "to have a studio—not a bit fixed up, you know, and not frilly—but with just one or two wonderful old objects of art here and there and the rest a fascinating confusion of artistic things.""Great!" he assented. "Please ask me to tea!""Wouldn't it bewonderful? And of course I'd work like fury until five o'clock every day, and then just have tea ready for the brilliant and interesting people who are likely to drop in to discuss the most wonderful things! Just think of it, Mr. Grismer! Think what a heavenly privilege it must be to live such a life, surrounded by inspiration and—and atmosphere and—and such things—and listening to the conversation of celebrated people telling each other all about art and how they became famous! What a lofty, exalted life! What a magnificent incentive to self-cultivation, attainment, and creative accomplishment! And yet, how charmingly informal and free from artificiality!"Grismer also had looked forward to a professional career in Bohemia, with a lively appreciation of its agreeable informalities. And the irresponsibility and liberty—perhaps license—of such a life had appealed to him only in a lesser degree than the desire to satisfy his artistic proclivities with a block of marble or a fistful of clay."Yes," he repeated, "that is undoubtedlythelife, Miss Quest. And it certainly seems as though you and I were cut out for it."Stephanie sighed, lost in iridescent dreams of higher things—vague visions of spiritual and artistic levels from which, if attained, genius might stoop to regenerate the world.But Grismer's amber eyes were brilliant with slumbering mischief."What do you think of Grismer, Steve?" inquired Jim Cleland, as they drove back to Boston that night, where his father, at the hotel, awaited them both."I really don't exactly know, Jim. Do you like him?""Sometimes. He's crew, Dicky, Hasty Pudding. He's a curious chap. You've got to hand him that, anyway.""Cleverness?""Oh, more than that, I think. He's an artist through and through.""Really!""Oh, yes. He's a bird on the box, too.""What!""On the piano, Steve. He's the real thing. He sings charmingly. He draws better than Harry Beltran. He's done things in clay and wax—really wonderful things. You saw him in theatricals.""Did I? Which was he?""Why, theDuke of Brooklyn, of course. He was practically the whole show!""I didn't know it," she murmured. "I did not recognize him. How clever he really is!""You hadn't met him then," remarked Jim."But I had seen him, once," she answered in a low, dreamy voice.Jim Cleland glanced around at her. Again it struck him that Stephanie was growing up very rapidly into an amazingly ornamental girl—a sister to be proud of."Did you have a good time, Steve?" he asked."Wonderful," she sighed; smiling back at him out of sleepy eyes.The car sped on toward Boston.CHAPTER IXStephanie Quest was introduced to society when she was eighteen, and was not a success. She had every chance at her debut to prove popular, but she remained passive, charmingly indifferent to social success, not inclined to step upon the treadmill, unwilling to endure the exactions, formalities, sacrifices, and stupid routine which alone make social position possible. There was too much chaff for the few grains of wheat to interest her.She wanted a career, and she wanted to waste no time about it, and she was delightfully certain that the path to it lay through some dramatic or art school to the stage or studio.Jim laughed at her and teased her; but his father worried a great deal, and when Stephanie realized that he was worrying she became reasonable about the matter and said that the next best thing would be college."Dad," she said, "I adore dancing and gay dinner parties, but there is nothing else to them but mere dancing and eating. The trouble seems to be with the people—nice people, of course—but——""Brainless," remarked Jim, looking over his evening paper."No; but they all think and do the same things. They all have the same opinions, the same outlook. They all read the same books when they read at all, go to see the same plays, visit the same people. It's jolly to do it two or three times; but after a little while you realize that all these people are restless and don't know what to do with themselves; and it makes me restless—not for that reason—but because Idoknow what to do with myself—only you, darling——" slipping one arm around John Cleland's neck, "—don't approve.""Yours is a restless sex, Steve," remarked Jim, still studying the evening paper. "You've all got the fidgets.""A libel, my patronizing friend. Or rather a tribute," she added gaily, "because only a restless mind matures and accomplishes.""Accomplishes what? Suffrage? Sex equality? You'll all perish with boredom when you get it, because there'll be nothing more to fidget about.""He's just a bumptious boy yet, isn't he, Dad?"Jim laughed and laid aside his paper:"You're a sweet, pretty girl, Steve——""I'll slay you if you call me that!""Why not be what you look? Why not have a good time with all your might, marry when you wish, and become a perfectly——""Oh, Jim, youareannoying! Dad, is there anything more irritating than a freshly hatched college graduate? Or more maddeningly complacent? Look at your self-satisfied son! There he sits, after having spent the entire day in enjoyment of his profession, and argues that I ought to be satisfied with an idle day in which I have accomplished absolutely nothing! I'm afraid your son is a pig."Jim laughed lazily:"The restless sex is setting the world by the ears," he said tormentingly. "All this femininist business, this intrusion into man's affairs, this fidgety dissatisfaction with a perfectly good civilization, is spoiling you all.""Is that the sort of thing you're putting into your wonderful novel?" she inquired."No, it's too unimportant——""Dad! Let's ignore him! Now, dear, if you feel as you do about a career for me at present, I really think I had better go to college. I do love pleasure, but somehow the sort of pleasure I'm supposed to enjoy doesn't last; and it's the people, I think, that tire one very quickly. Itdoesmake a difference in dancing, doesn't it?—not to hear an idea uttered during an entire evening—not to find anybody thinking for themselves——""Oh, Steve!" laughed Jim, "you're not expected to think at your age! All that society expects of you is that you chatter incessantly during dinner and the opera and do your thinking in a ballroom with your feet!"She was laughing, but an unwonted colour brightened her cheeks as she turned on him from the padded arm of John Cleland's chair, where she had been sitting:"If I really thought you meant that, Jim, I'd spend the remainder of my life in proving to you that I have a mind.""Never mind him, Steve," said John Cleland. "If you wish to go to college, you shall.""How about looking after us?" inquired Jim, alarmed."Dad, if my being here is going to makeyoumore comfortable," she said, "I'll remain. Really, I am serious. Don't you want me to go?""Are you really so restless, Steve?""Mentally," she replied, with a defiant glance at Jim."This will be a gay place to live in ifyougo off for four years!" remarked that young man."You don't mean thatyou'dmiss me!" she exclaimed mockingly."Of course I'd miss you.""Miss the mental stimulus I give you?"—sweetly persuasive."Not at all. I'd miss the mental relaxation you afford my tired brain——""You beast! Dad, I'mgoing! And some day your son will find out that it's anidlemind that makes a girl restless; not a restless mind that makes her idle!""I was just teasing, Steve!""I know it." She smiled at the young fellow, but her grey eyes were brilliant. Then she turned and nestled against John Cleland: "I have made up my mind, darling, and I have decided to go to Vassar."Home, to John Cleland and his son, had come to mean Stephanie as much as everything else under the common roof-tree.For the background of familiar things framed her so naturally and so convincingly and seemed so obviously devised for her in this mellow old household, where everything had its particular place in an orderly ensemble, that when she actually departed for college, the routine became dislocated, jarring everything above and below stairs, and leaving two dismayed and extremely restless men."Steve's going off like this has put the whole house on the blink," protested Jim, intensely surprised to discover the fact.It nearly finished Janet, whose voice, long afflicted with the cracked tremolo of age, now became almost incoherent at the very mention of Stephanie's name.Old Lizzie, the laundress, deeply disapproving of Stephanie's departure, insisted on doing her linen and sheer fabrics, and sending a hamper once a week to Poughkeepsie. Every week, also, Amanda, the cook, dispatched cardboard boxes Vassarward, containing condiments and culinary creations which she stubbornly refused to allow Cleland Senior to censor."Ay t'ank a leetle yelly-cake and a leetle yar of yam it will not hurt Miss Stephanie," she explained to Cleland. And he said no more.As for Meacham, he prowled noiselessly about his duties, little, shrunken, round-shouldered, as though no dislocation in the family circle had occurred; but every day since her departure, at Stephanie's place a fresh flower of some sort lay on the cloth to match the other blossom opposite.In the library together, after dinner, father and son discussed the void which her absence had created."She'll get enough of it and come back," suggested Jim, but without conviction. "It's beastly not having her about.""Perhaps you have a faint idea how it was for me when you were away," observed his father."I know. Ihadto go through, hadn't I?""Of course.... But—with your mother gone—it was—lonely. Do you understand, now, why I took Steve when I had the chance?"The young fellow nodded, looking at his father:"Of course I understand. But I don't see why Steve had to go. She has everything here to amuse her—everything a girl could desire! Why the deuce should she get restless and go flying about after knowledge?""Possibly," said John Cleland, "the child has a mind.""A feminine one. Yes, of course. I tell you, Father, it's all part and parcel of this world-wide restlessness which has set women fidgeting the whole world over. What is it they want?—because they themselves can't tell you. Do you know?""I think I do. They desire to exercise the liberty of choice.""They have it now, haven't they?""Virtually. They're getting the rest. If Steve goes through college she will emerge to find all paths open to women. It worries me a little."Jim shrugged:"What is it she calls it—I mean her attitude about choosing a career?""She refers to it, I believe, as 'the necessity for self-expression.'""Fiddle! The trouble with Steve is that she's afflicted with extreme youth.""I don't know, Jim. Shehasa mind.""It's a purely imitative one. People she has read about draw, write, compose music. Steve is sensitive to impression, high strung, with a very receptive mind; and the idea attracts her. And what happens? She sees me, for example, scribbling away every day; she knows I'm writing a novel; it makes an impression on her and she takes to scribbling, too."Oswald Grismer drops in and talks studio and atmosphere and Rodin and Manship. That stirs her up. What occurs within twenty-four hours? Steve orders a box of colours and a modelling table; and she smears her pretty boudoir furniture with oil paint and plasticine. And that's all it amounts to, Father, just the caprice of a very young girl who thinks creative art a romantic cinch, and takes a shy at it."His father, not smiling, said:"Possibly. But the mere fact that shedoestake a shy at these things—spends her leisure in trying to paint, model, and write, when other girls of her agedon't, worries me a little. I do not want her to become interested in any profession of an irregular nature. I want Steve to keep away from the unconventional. I'm afraid of it for her.""Why?""Because all intelligence is restless—and Steve is very intelligent. All creative minds desire to find some medium for self-expression. And I'm wondering whether Steve's mind is creative or merely imitative; whether she is actually but blindly searching for an outlet for self-expression, or whether it's merely the healthy mental energy of a healthy body requiring its share of exercise, too."Jim laughed:"It's in the air, Father, this mania for 'doing things.' It's the ridiculous renaissance of the commonplace, long submerged. Every college youth, every school girl writes a novel; every janitor, every office boy a scenario. The stage to-day teems with sales-ladies and floor-walkers; the pants-presser and the manufacturer of ladies' cloaks direct the newest art of the moving pictures. Printers' devils and ex-draymen fill the papers with their draughtsmanship; head-waiters write the scores for musical productions. Art is in the air. So why shouldn't Steve believe herself capable of creating a few things? She'll get over it.""I hope she will.""She will. Steve is a reasonable child.""Steve is a sweet, intelligent and reasonable girl.... Very impressionable.... And sensitive.... I hope," he added irrelevantly, "that I shall live a few years more.""You hadn't contemplated anything to the contrary, had you?" inquired Jim.They both smiled. Then Cleland Senior said in his pleasant, even way:"One can never tell.... And in case you and Steve have to plod along without me some day, before either of you are really wise enough to dispense with my invaluable advice, try to understand her, Jim. Try always; try patiently.... Because I made myself responsible.... And, for all her honesty and sweetness and her obedience, Jim, there is—perhaps—restless blood in Steve.... There may even be the creative instinct in her also.... She's very young to develop it yet—to show whether it really is there and amounts to anything.... I should like to live long enough to see—to guide her for the next few years——""Of course you are going to live to see Steve's kiddies!" cried the young fellow in cordially scornful protest. "You know perfectly well, Father, that you don't look your age!""Don't I?" said Cleland Senior, with a faint smile."And you feel all right, don't you, Father?" insisted the boy in that rather loud, careless voice which often chokes tenderness between men. For the memory that these two shared in common made them doubly sensitive to the lightest hint that everything was not entirely right with either."Do you feel perfectly well?" repeated the son, looking at his father with smiling intentness."Perfectly," replied Cleland Senior, lying.He had another chat with Dr. Wilmer the following afternoon. It had been an odd affair, and both physician and patient seemed to prefer to speculate about it rather than to come to any conclusion.It was this. A week or two previous, lying awake in bed after retiring for the night, Cleland seemed to lose consciousness for an interval—probably a very brief interval; and revived, presently, to find himself upright on the floor beside his bed, holding to one of the carved posts, and unable to articulate.He made no effort to arouse anybody; after a while—but how long he seemed unable to remember clearly—he returned to bed and fell into a heavy sleep. And in the morning when he awoke, the power of speech had returned to him.But he felt irritable, depressed and tired. That was his story. And the question he had asked Dr. Wilmer was a simple one.But the physician either could not or would not be definite in his answer. His reply was in the nature of a grave surmise. But the treatment ordered struck Cleland as ominously significant.
CHAPTER VII
There is a serio-comic, yet charming, sort of tragedy—fortunately only temporary—in the attachment of a little girl for an older boy. It often bores him so; and she is so daintily in earnest.
The one adores, tags after, and often annoys; the other, if chivalrous, submits.
It began this way between Stephanie Quest and Jim Cleland. It continued. She realized with awe the discrepancy in their ages; he was amiable enough to pretend to waive the discrepancy. And his condescension almost killed her.
The poor child grew older as fast as she possibly could; resolute, determined to overtake him somewhere, if that could be done. For in spite of arithmetic she seemed to know that it was possible. Moreover, it was wholly characteristic of her to attack with pathetic confidence the impossible—to lead herself as a forlorn hope and with cheerful and reckless resolution into the most hopeless impasse.
Cleland Senior began to notice this trait in her—began to wonder whether it was an admirable trait or a light-headed one.
Once, an imbecile canary, purchased by him for her, and passionately cherished, got out of its open cage, out of the open nursery window, and perched on a cornice over one of the windows. And out of the window climbed Stephanie, never hesitating, disregarding consequences, clinging like a desperate kitten to sill and blind, negotiating precarious ledges with steady feet; and the flag-stones of the area four stories below her, and spikes on the iron railing.
A neighbour opposite fainted; another shouted incoherently. It became a hair-raising situation; she could neither advance nor retreat. The desperate, Irish keening of Janet brought Meacham; Meacham, at the telephone, notified the nearest police station, and a section of the Fire Department. The latter arrived with extension ladders.
It was only when pushed violently bed-ward, as punishment, that the child realized there had been anything to be frightened about. Then she became scared; and was tearfully glad to see Cleland when he came in that evening from a print-hunting expedition.
And once, promenading on Fifth Avenue with Janet, for the sake of her health—such being the régime established—she separated two violently fighting school-boys, slapped the large one, who had done the bullying, soundly, cuffed another, who had been enjoying the unequal combat, fell upon a fourth, and was finally hustled home with her expensive clothing ruined. But in her eyes and cheeks still lingered the brilliant fires of battle, when Janet stripped her for a bath.
And once in the park she sprang like a young tigress upon a group of ragamuffins who had found a wild black mallard duck, nesting in a thicket near the lake, and who were stoning the frightened thing.
All Janet could see was a most dreadful melée agitating the bushes, from which presently burst boy after boy, in an agony of flight, rushing headlong and terror-stricken from that dreadful place where a wild-girl raged, determined on their extermination.
Stephanie's development was watched with tender, half-fearful curiosity by Cleland.
As usual, two separate columns were necessary to record the varied traits so far apparent in her. These traits Cleland noted in the book devoted to memoranda concerning the child, writing them as follows:
Inclined to self-indulgence. Easily moved to impulsiveConsequently, a trifle self-sacrifice.selfish at times. Ardent in her affections;Over-sensitive and likely loyal to friendship; andto exaggerate. essentially truthful.Very great talent latent: Indignation quickly excitedpossibly histrionic. by any form of cruelty orAnger, when finally treachery. Action likely toaroused, likely to lead to be immediate without regardextremes. for personal considerations.Generous with her possessions.
So far he could discover nothing vicious in her, no unworthy inherited instincts beyond those common to young humans, instincts supposed to be extirpated by education.
She was no greedier than any other healthy child, no more self-centred; all her appetites were normal, all her inclinations natural. She had a good mind, but a very human one, fairly balanced but sensitive to emotion, inclination, and impulse, and sometimes rather tardy in readjusting itself when logic and reason were required to regain equilibrium.
But the child was more easily swayed by gratitude than by any other of the several human instincts known as virtues.
So she grew toward adolescence, closely watched by Cleland, good-naturedly tolerated by Jim, worshipped by Janet, served by Meacham with instinctive devotion—the only quality in him not burnt out in his little journeys through hell.
There were others, too, in the world, who remembered the child. There was her aunt, who came once a month and brought always an expensive present, over the suitability of which she and Cleland differed to the verge of rudeness. But they always parted on excellent terms. And there was Chiltern Grismer, who sat sometimes for hours in his office, thinking about the child and the fortune which threatened her.
Weeks, adhering to one another, became months; months totalled years—several of them, recorded so suddenly that John Cleland could not believe it.
He had arrived at that epoch in the life of man when the years stood still with him: when he neither felt himself changing nor appeared to grow older, though all around him he was constantly aware of others aging. Yet, being always with Stephanie, he could not notice her rapid development, as he noted the astonishing growth of his son when the boy came home after brief absences at school.
Stephanie, still a child, was becoming something else very rapidly. But still she remained childlike enough to idolize Jim Cleland and to show it, without reserve. And though he really found her excellent company, amusing and diverting, her somewhat persistent and dog-like devotion embarrassed and bored him sometimes. He was at that age.
Young Grismer, in Jim's hearing, commenting upon a similar devotion inflicted on himself by a girl, characterized her as "too damn pleasant"—a brutal yet graphic summary.
And for a while the offensive phrase stuck in Jim's memory, though always chivalrously repudiated as applying to Stephanie. Yet, the poor girl certainly bored him at times, so blind her devotion, so pitiful her desire to please, so eager her heart of a child for the comradeship denied her in the dreadful years of solitude and fear.
For a year or two the affair lay that way between these two; the school-boy's interest in the little girl was the interest of polite responsibility; consideration for misfortune, toleration for her sex, with added allowance for her extreme youth. This was the boy's attitude.
Had not boarding-school and college limited his sojourn at home, it is possible that indifference might have germinated.
But he saw her so infrequently and for such short periods; and even during the summer vacation, growing outside interests, increasing complexity in social relations with fellow students—invitations to house parties, motor trips, camping trips—so interrupted the placid continuity of his vacation in their pleasant summer home in the northern Berkshires, that he never quite realized that Stephanie Quest was really anything more than a sort of permanent guest, billeted indefinitely under his father's roof.
When he was home in New York at Christmas and Easter, his gravely detached attitude of amiable consideration never varied toward her.
The few weeks at a time that he spent at "Runner's Rest," his father's quaint and ancient place on Cold River, permitted him no time to realize the importance and permanency of the place she already occupied as an integral part of the house of Cleland.
A thousand new interests, new thoughts, possessed the boy in the full tide of adolescence. All the world was beginning to unclose before him like the brilliant, fragrant petals of a magic flower. And in this rainbow transformation of things terrestrial, a boy's mind is always unbalanced by the bewildering and charming confusion of it all—for it is he who is changing, not the world; he is merely learning to see instead of to look, to comprehend instead of to perceive, to realize instead of to take for granted all the wonders and marvels and mysteries to which a young man is heir.
It is drama, comedy, farce, tragedy, this inevitable awakening; it is the alternate elucidation and deepening of mysteries; it is a day of clear, keen reasoning succeeding a day of illogical caprice; an hour aquiver with undreamed-of mental torture followed by an hour of spiritual exaltation; it is the era of magnificent aspiration, of inexplicable fear, of lofty abnegations, of fierce egotisms, of dreams and of convictions, of faiths for which youth dies; and, alas, it is a day of pitiless development which leaves the shadowy memory of faith lingering in the brain, and, on the lips, a smile.
And, amid such emotions, such impulses, such desires, fears, aspirations, hopes, regrets, the average boy puts on that Nessus coat called manhood. And he has, in his temporarily dislocated and unadjusted brain, neither the time nor the patience, nor the interest, nor the logic at his command necessary to see and understand what is happening under his aspiring and heavenward-tilted nose. Only the clouds enrapture him; where every star beckons him he responds in a passion of endeavour.
And so he begins the inevitable climb toward the moon—the path which every man born upon the earth has trodden far or only a little way, but the path all men at least have tried.
In his freshman year at Harvard, he got drunk. The episode was quite inadvertent on his part—one of those accidents incident to the vile, claret-coloured "punches" offered by some young idiot in "honour" of his own birthday.
The Cambridge police sheltered him over night; his fine was over-subscribed; he explored the depths of hell in consequence of the affair, endured the agony of shame, remorse, and self-loathing to the physical and mental limit, and eventually recovered, regarding himself as a reformed criminal with a shattered past.
However, the youthful gloom and melancholy dignity with which this clothed him had a faint and not entirely unpleasant flavour—as one who might say, "I have lived and learned. There is the sad wisdom of worldly things within me." But he cut out alcohol. It being the fashion at that time to shrug away an offered cup, he found little difficulty in avoiding it.
In his Sophomore year, he met the inevitable young person. And, after all that had been told him, all that he had disdainfully pictured to himself, did not recognize her when he met her.
It was one of those episodes which may end any way. And it ended, of course, in one way or another. But it did end.
Thus the limited world he moved in began to wear away the soft-rounded contours of boyhood; he learned a little about men, nothing whatever about women, but was inclined to consider that he understood them sadly and perfectly. He wrote several plays, novels and poems to amuse himself; wrote articles for the college periodicals, when he was not too busy training with the baseball squad or playing tennis, or lounging through those golden and enchanted hours when the smoke of undergraduate pipes spins a magic haze over life, enveloping books and comrades in that exquisite and softly brilliant web which never tears, never fades in memory while life endures.
He made many friends; he visited many homes; he failed sometimes, but more often he made good in whatever he endeavoured.
His father came on to Cambridge several times—always when his son requested it—and he knew the sympathy of his father in days of triumph, and he understood his father's unshaken belief in his only son when that son, for the moment, faltered.
For he had confided in his father the episodes of the punch and the young person. Never had his father and he been closer together in mind and spirit than after that confession.
In spite of several advances made by Chiltern Grismer, whose son, Oswald, was also at Harvard and a popular man in his class, John Cleland remained politely unreceptive; and there were no social amenities exchanged. Jim Cleland and Oswald Grismer did not visit each other, although friendly enough at Cambridge. Cleland Senior made no particular effort to discourage any such friendly footing, and he was not inclined to judge young Grismer by his father. He merely remained unresponsive.
In such cases, he who makes the advances interprets their non-success according to his own nature. And Grismer concluded that he had been a victim of insidious guile and sharp practice, and that John Cleland had taken Stephanie to his heart only after he had learned that, some day, she would inherit the Quest fortune from her eccentric relative.
Chagrin and sullen irritation against Cleland had possessed him since he first learned of this inheritance; and he nourished both until they grew into a dull, watchful anger. And he waited for something or other that might in some way offer him a chance to repair the vital mistake he had made in his attitude toward the child.
But Cleland gave him no opening whatever; Grismer's social advances were amiably ignored. And it became plainer and plainer to Grismer, as he interpreted the situation, that John Cleland was planning to unite, through his son Jim, the comfortable Cleland income with the Quest millions, and to elbow everybody else out of the way.
"The philanthropic hypocrite," mused Grismer, still smarting from a note expressing civil regrets in reply to an invitation to Stephanie and Jim to join them after church for a motor trip to Lakewood.
"Can't they come?" inquired Oswald.
"Previous engagement," snapped Grismer, tearing up the note. His wife, an invalid, with stringy hair and spots on her face, remarked with resignation that the Clelands were too stylish to care about plain, Christian people.
"Stylish," repeated Grismer, "I've got ten dollars to Cleland's one. I can put on style enough to swamp him if I've a mind to!—m-m-m'yes, if I've a mind to."
"Why don't you?" inquired Oswald, with a malicious side glance at his father's frock coat and ready-made cravat. "Chuck the religious game and wear spats and a topper! It's a better graft, governor."
Chiltern Grismer, only partly attentive to his son's impudence, turned a fierce, preoccupied glance upon him. But his mind was still intrigued with that word "stylish." It began to enrage him.
He repeated it aloud once or twice, sneeringly:
"So you think we may not be sufficiently stylish to suit the Clelands—or that brat they picked out of the sewer? M-m-m'yes, out of an east-side sewer!"
Oswald pricked up his intelligent and rather pointed ears.
"What brat?" he inquired.
Chiltern Grismer had never told his son the story of Stephanie Quest. In the beginning, the boy had been too young, and there seemed to be no particular reason for telling him. Later, when Grismer suddenly developed ambitions in behalf of his son for the Quest fortune, he did not say anything about Stephanie's origin, fearing that it might prejudice his son.
Now, he suddenly concluded to tell him, not from spite entirely, nor to satisfy his increasing resentment against Cleland; but because Oswald would, some day, inherit the Grismer money. And it might be just as well to prime him now, in the event that any of the Clelands should ever start to reopen the case which had deprived Jessie Grismer of her own inheritance so many years ago.
The young fellow listened with languid astonishment as the links of the story, very carefully and morally polished, were displayed by his father for his instruction and edification.
"That is the sort of stylish people they are," concluded Grismer, making an abrupt end. "Let it be a warning to you to keep your eye on the Clelands; for a man that calls himself a philanthropist, and is sharp enough to pick out an heiress from the gutter, will bear watching!—m-m-m'yes, indeed, he certainly will bear watching."
Mrs. Grismer, who was knitting with chilly fingers, sighed.
"You always said it was God's judgment on Jessie and her descendants, Chiltern. But I kind of wish you'd been a little mite more forgiving."
"Who am I?" demanded Grismer, sullenly, "to thwart God's wrath ... m-m-m'yes, the anger of the Lord Almighty! And I never thought of that imbecile aunt.... It was divine will that punished my erring sister and her children, and her children's chil——"
"Rot!" remarked Oswald. "Cleland caught you napping and put one over. That's all that worries you. And now you are properly and piously sore!"
"That is an impious and wickedly outrageous way to talk to your father!" said Grismer, glaring at him. "You have come back from college lacking reverence and respect for everything you have been taught to consider sacred!—m-m-m'yes—everything! You have returned to us utterly demoralized, defiant, rebellious, changed! Every worldly abomination seems to attract you: you smoke openly in your mother's presence; your careless and loose conversation betrays your contempt for the simple, homely, and frugal atmosphere in which you have been reared by Christian parents. Doubtless we are not sufficiently stylish for you any longer!" he added sarcastically.
"I'm sorry I was disrespectful, governor——"
"No! You arenotsorry!" retorted Grismer tartly. "You rejoice secretly in your defiance of your parents! You have been demoralized by the license permitted you by absence from home. You live irresponsibly; you fling away your money on theatres! You yourself admit that you have learned to dance. Nothing that your pastor has taught you, nothing that our church holds sacred seems capable of restraining you from wickedness. That is the truth, Oswald. And your mother and I despair of your future, here and——" he lifted his eyes solemnly—"above."
There was an awkward silence. Finally Oswald said with sullen frankness:
"You see I'm a man, now, and I've got to do my own thinking. Things I used to believe seem tommyrot to me now——"
"Oswald!" sighed his mother.
"I'm sorry to pain you, Mother, but they do! And about everything you object to I find agreeable. I'm not very bad, Mother. But this sort of talk inclines me to raise the devil. What's the harm in going to a show? In dancing? In smoking a cigar? For heaven's sake, let a fellow alone. The line of talk the governor hands me makes a cynic of a man who's got any brains."
There was another silence; then Oswald continued:
"And, while we are trying to be frank with each other this pleasant Sunday morning, what about my career? Let's settle it now!"
"I'm opposed to any such frivolous profession!" snapped Grismer angrily. "That's your answer. And that settles it."
"You mean that you still oppose my studying sculpture?"
"Emphatically."
"Why?" demanded the youth, rather white, but smiling.
"Because it is no business career for a Christian!" retorted his father, furious. "It is a loose, irregular, eccentric profession, beset with pitfalls and temptations. It leads to immorality and unbelief—m-m-m'yes, to hell itself! And that is why I oppose it!"
Oswald shrugged:
"I'm sorry you feel that way but I can't help it, of course."
"Do you mean," inquired his mother, "that you intend to disregard our solemn wishes?"
"I don't know," said the young fellow, "I really don't know, Mother. I can't seem to breathe and expand at home. You've never made things very cheerful for me."
"Oswald! You are utterly heartless!"
"I've been fed up on the governor's kind of religion, on narrow views and gloom; and that's no good for a modern boy. It's a wonder I have any heart at all, and sometimes I think it's dried up——"
"That will do!" shouted Grismer, losing all self-control. "If your home, your parents, and your Creator can not make a Christian of you, there is nothing to hope from you! ... I'll hear no more from you. Go and get ready for church!"
"I sha'n't go," said the young fellow calmly.
When he went back to Cambridge at the end of the week, it was with the desire never to see his home again, and with a vague and burning intention to get even, somehow, by breaking every law of the imbecile religion on which he had been "fed up."
CHAPTER VIII
When Stephanie was fifteen years old, John Cleland took her to Cambridge.
The girl had been attending a celebrated New York school during the last two years. She had developed the bearing and manners which characterized the carefully trained products of that institution, but the régime seemed to have subdued her, and made her retiring and diffident.
She could have formed friendships there had she desired to do so; she formed none; yet any girl there would have been happy and flattered to call Stephanie Quest her friend. But Stephanie cared little for those confidential and intimate relations so popular among school girls of her age.
She made no enemies, however. An engaging reticence and reserve characterized her—the shy and wistful charm of that indeterminate age when a girl is midway in the delicate process of transformation.
If she cared nothing about girls, she lacked self-confidence with boys, though vastly preferring their society; but she got little of it except when Jim's school friends came to the house during holidays. Then she had a heavenly time just watching and listening.
So when John Cleland took her to Cambridge, she had, in the vernacular of the moment, a "wonderful" experience—everything during that period of her career being "wonderful" or "topping."
Jim, as always, was "wonderful;" and the attitude of his friends alternately delighted and awed her, so gaily devoted they instantly became to Jim's "little sister."
But what now secretly thrilled the girl was that Jim, for the first time, seemed to be proud of her, not tolerating her as an immature member of the family, but welcoming her as an equal, on an equal footing. And, with inexpressible delight, she remembered her determination, long ago, to overtake him; and realized that she was doing it very rapidly.
So she went to a football game at the stadium; she took tea in the quarters of these god-like young men; she motored about Cambridge and Boston; she saw all that a girl of fifteen ought to see, heard all that she ought to hear, and went back to New York with John Cleland in the seventh paradise of happiness fulfilled, madly enamoured of Jim and every youthful superman he had introduced to her.
Every year while Jim was at college there was a repetition of this programme, and she and John Cleland departed regularly for Cambridge amid excitement indescribable.
And when, in due time, Jim prepared to emerge from that great university, swaddled in sheepskin, and reeking with Cambridge culture, Stephanie went again to Cambridge with her adopted father—a girl, then, of seventeen, still growing, still in the wondering maze of her own adolescence, exquisitely involved in its magic, conscious already of its spell, of its witchcraft, which lore she was shyly venturing to investigate.
She had a "wonderful" week in Cambridge—more and more excited by the discovery that young men found her as agreeable as she found them, and that they sought her now on perfectly even terms of years and experience; regarded her as of them, not merely with them. And this enchanted her.
Two of her school friends, the Hildreth girls, were there with their mother, and the latter very gladly extended her wing to cover Stephanie for the dance, John Cleland not feeling very well and remaining in Boston.
And it chanced that Stephanie met there Oswald Grismer; and knew him instantly when he was presented to her. Even after all those years, the girl clearly recollected seeing him in the railroad station, and remembered the odd emotions of curiosity and disapproval she experienced when he stared at her so persistently—disapproval slightly mitigated by consciousness of the boyish flattery his manner toward her implied.
He said, in his easy, half-mischievous way:
"You don't remember me, of course, Miss Quest, but when you were a very little girl I once saw you at the Grand Central Station in New York."
Stephanie, as yet too inexperienced a diplomat to forget such things, replied frankly that she remembered him perfectly. When it was too late, she blushed at her admission.
"That's unusually nice of you," he said. "Maybe it was my bad manners that impressed you, Miss Quest. I remember that I had never seen such a pretty little girl in my life, and I'm very sure I stared at you, and that you were properly annoyed."
He was laughing easily, as he spoke, and she laughed, too, still a trifle confused.
"I did think you rather rude," she admitted. "But what a long time ago that was! Isn't itstrangethat I should remember it? I can even recollect that you and my brother had had a fight in school and that dad made you both shake hands there in the station, before you went aboard the train.... Naturally, I didn't feel kindly toward you," she added, laughingly.
"Jim and I are now on most amiable terms," he assured her, "so please feel kindly toward me now—kindly enough to give me one unimportant dance. Will you, Miss Quest?"
Later when he presented himself to claim the dance, her reception of him was unmistakably friendly.
He had grown up into a spare, loosely coupled, yet rather graceful young fellow, with hair and eyes that matched, both of a deep amber shade.
But there was in his bearing, in his carelessly attractive manner, in his gaze, a lurking hint of irresponsibility, perhaps of mischief, which did not, however, impress her disagreeably.
On the contrary, she felt oddly at ease with him, as though she had known him for some time.
"Have you forgiven me for staring at you so many years ago?" he inquired, smilingly.
She thought that she had.
But his next words startled her a little; he said, still smiling in his careless and attractive way:
"I have a queer idea that we're beginning in the middle of everything—that we've already known each other long enough to waive preliminaries and begin our acquaintance as old friends."
He was saying almost exactly what she had not put into words. He was still looking at her intently, curiously, with the same slightly importunate, slightly deferential smile which she now vividly remembered in the boy.
"Do you, by any chance, feel the same about our encounter?" he asked.
"What way?"
"That we seem to have known each other for a long time?"
Stephanie had not yet learned very much in the art of self-defense. A question to her still meant either a truthful answer or a silence. She remained silent.
"Do you, Miss Quest?" he persisted.
"Yes, I do."
"As though," he insisted, "you and I are beginning in the middle of the book of friendship instead of bothering to cut the pages of the preface?" he suggested gaily.
She laughed.
"You know," she warned him, "that I have not yet made up my mind about you."
"Oh. Concerning what are you in doubt?"
"Concerning exactly how I ought to consider you."
"As a friend, please."
"Perhaps. Are we going to dance or talk?"
After they had been dancing for a few moments:
"So you are a crew man?"
"Who told you?"
"I've inquired about you," she admitted, glancing sideways at the tall, spare, graceful young fellow with his almost golden colouring. "I have questioned various people. They told me things."
"Did they give me a black eye?" he asked, laughingly.
"No. But somebody gave you a pair of golden ones.... Like two sun-spots on a brown brook. You've a golden look; do you know it?"
"Red-headed men turn that way when they're in the sun and wind," he explained, still laughing, yet plainly fascinated by the piquant, breezy informality of this young girl. "Tell me, do you still go to school, Miss Quest?"
"How insulting! ... Yes! But it was mean of you to ask."
"Good Lord! You didn't expect me to think you the mother of a family, did you?"
That mollified her.
"Where do you go to school?" he continued.
"Miss Montfort's. I finish this week."
"And then?"
"To college, I'm afraid."
"Don't you want to?"
"I'd rather go to a dramatic school."
"Is that your inclination, Miss Quest?"
"I'd adore it! But dad doesn't."
"Too bad."
"I don't know. I'm quite happy, anyway. I'm having a wonderful time, whatever I'm doing."
"Then it isn't an imperious call from Heaven to leave all and elevate the drama?" he asked, with a pretense of anxiety that made her laugh.
"You are disrespectful. I'm sure I could elevate the drama if I had the chance. But I sha'n't get it. However, next to the stage I adore to paint," she explained. "There is a class. I have attended it for two years. I paint rather nicely."
"No wonder we feel so friendly," exclaimed Grismer.
"Why? Doyoupaint?"
"No, but I'm to be a sculptor."
"Howwonderful! I'm simply mad to do something, too! Don't you love the atmosphere of Bohemia, Mr. Grismer?"
He said that he did with a mischievous smile straight into her grey eyes.
"It is my dream," she went on, slightly confused, "to have a studio—not a bit fixed up, you know, and not frilly—but with just one or two wonderful old objects of art here and there and the rest a fascinating confusion of artistic things."
"Great!" he assented. "Please ask me to tea!"
"Wouldn't it bewonderful? And of course I'd work like fury until five o'clock every day, and then just have tea ready for the brilliant and interesting people who are likely to drop in to discuss the most wonderful things! Just think of it, Mr. Grismer! Think what a heavenly privilege it must be to live such a life, surrounded by inspiration and—and atmosphere and—and such things—and listening to the conversation of celebrated people telling each other all about art and how they became famous! What a lofty, exalted life! What a magnificent incentive to self-cultivation, attainment, and creative accomplishment! And yet, how charmingly informal and free from artificiality!"
Grismer also had looked forward to a professional career in Bohemia, with a lively appreciation of its agreeable informalities. And the irresponsibility and liberty—perhaps license—of such a life had appealed to him only in a lesser degree than the desire to satisfy his artistic proclivities with a block of marble or a fistful of clay.
"Yes," he repeated, "that is undoubtedlythelife, Miss Quest. And it certainly seems as though you and I were cut out for it."
Stephanie sighed, lost in iridescent dreams of higher things—vague visions of spiritual and artistic levels from which, if attained, genius might stoop to regenerate the world.
But Grismer's amber eyes were brilliant with slumbering mischief.
"What do you think of Grismer, Steve?" inquired Jim Cleland, as they drove back to Boston that night, where his father, at the hotel, awaited them both.
"I really don't exactly know, Jim. Do you like him?"
"Sometimes. He's crew, Dicky, Hasty Pudding. He's a curious chap. You've got to hand him that, anyway."
"Cleverness?"
"Oh, more than that, I think. He's an artist through and through."
"Really!"
"Oh, yes. He's a bird on the box, too."
"What!"
"On the piano, Steve. He's the real thing. He sings charmingly. He draws better than Harry Beltran. He's done things in clay and wax—really wonderful things. You saw him in theatricals."
"Did I? Which was he?"
"Why, theDuke of Brooklyn, of course. He was practically the whole show!"
"I didn't know it," she murmured. "I did not recognize him. How clever he really is!"
"You hadn't met him then," remarked Jim.
"But I had seen him, once," she answered in a low, dreamy voice.
Jim Cleland glanced around at her. Again it struck him that Stephanie was growing up very rapidly into an amazingly ornamental girl—a sister to be proud of.
"Did you have a good time, Steve?" he asked.
"Wonderful," she sighed; smiling back at him out of sleepy eyes.
The car sped on toward Boston.
CHAPTER IX
Stephanie Quest was introduced to society when she was eighteen, and was not a success. She had every chance at her debut to prove popular, but she remained passive, charmingly indifferent to social success, not inclined to step upon the treadmill, unwilling to endure the exactions, formalities, sacrifices, and stupid routine which alone make social position possible. There was too much chaff for the few grains of wheat to interest her.
She wanted a career, and she wanted to waste no time about it, and she was delightfully certain that the path to it lay through some dramatic or art school to the stage or studio.
Jim laughed at her and teased her; but his father worried a great deal, and when Stephanie realized that he was worrying she became reasonable about the matter and said that the next best thing would be college.
"Dad," she said, "I adore dancing and gay dinner parties, but there is nothing else to them but mere dancing and eating. The trouble seems to be with the people—nice people, of course—but——"
"Brainless," remarked Jim, looking over his evening paper.
"No; but they all think and do the same things. They all have the same opinions, the same outlook. They all read the same books when they read at all, go to see the same plays, visit the same people. It's jolly to do it two or three times; but after a little while you realize that all these people are restless and don't know what to do with themselves; and it makes me restless—not for that reason—but because Idoknow what to do with myself—only you, darling——" slipping one arm around John Cleland's neck, "—don't approve."
"Yours is a restless sex, Steve," remarked Jim, still studying the evening paper. "You've all got the fidgets."
"A libel, my patronizing friend. Or rather a tribute," she added gaily, "because only a restless mind matures and accomplishes."
"Accomplishes what? Suffrage? Sex equality? You'll all perish with boredom when you get it, because there'll be nothing more to fidget about."
"He's just a bumptious boy yet, isn't he, Dad?"
Jim laughed and laid aside his paper:
"You're a sweet, pretty girl, Steve——"
"I'll slay you if you call me that!"
"Why not be what you look? Why not have a good time with all your might, marry when you wish, and become a perfectly——"
"Oh, Jim, youareannoying! Dad, is there anything more irritating than a freshly hatched college graduate? Or more maddeningly complacent? Look at your self-satisfied son! There he sits, after having spent the entire day in enjoyment of his profession, and argues that I ought to be satisfied with an idle day in which I have accomplished absolutely nothing! I'm afraid your son is a pig."
Jim laughed lazily:
"The restless sex is setting the world by the ears," he said tormentingly. "All this femininist business, this intrusion into man's affairs, this fidgety dissatisfaction with a perfectly good civilization, is spoiling you all."
"Is that the sort of thing you're putting into your wonderful novel?" she inquired.
"No, it's too unimportant——"
"Dad! Let's ignore him! Now, dear, if you feel as you do about a career for me at present, I really think I had better go to college. I do love pleasure, but somehow the sort of pleasure I'm supposed to enjoy doesn't last; and it's the people, I think, that tire one very quickly. Itdoesmake a difference in dancing, doesn't it?—not to hear an idea uttered during an entire evening—not to find anybody thinking for themselves——"
"Oh, Steve!" laughed Jim, "you're not expected to think at your age! All that society expects of you is that you chatter incessantly during dinner and the opera and do your thinking in a ballroom with your feet!"
She was laughing, but an unwonted colour brightened her cheeks as she turned on him from the padded arm of John Cleland's chair, where she had been sitting:
"If I really thought you meant that, Jim, I'd spend the remainder of my life in proving to you that I have a mind."
"Never mind him, Steve," said John Cleland. "If you wish to go to college, you shall."
"How about looking after us?" inquired Jim, alarmed.
"Dad, if my being here is going to makeyoumore comfortable," she said, "I'll remain. Really, I am serious. Don't you want me to go?"
"Are you really so restless, Steve?"
"Mentally," she replied, with a defiant glance at Jim.
"This will be a gay place to live in ifyougo off for four years!" remarked that young man.
"You don't mean thatyou'dmiss me!" she exclaimed mockingly.
"Of course I'd miss you."
"Miss the mental stimulus I give you?"—sweetly persuasive.
"Not at all. I'd miss the mental relaxation you afford my tired brain——"
"You beast! Dad, I'mgoing! And some day your son will find out that it's anidlemind that makes a girl restless; not a restless mind that makes her idle!"
"I was just teasing, Steve!"
"I know it." She smiled at the young fellow, but her grey eyes were brilliant. Then she turned and nestled against John Cleland: "I have made up my mind, darling, and I have decided to go to Vassar."
Home, to John Cleland and his son, had come to mean Stephanie as much as everything else under the common roof-tree.
For the background of familiar things framed her so naturally and so convincingly and seemed so obviously devised for her in this mellow old household, where everything had its particular place in an orderly ensemble, that when she actually departed for college, the routine became dislocated, jarring everything above and below stairs, and leaving two dismayed and extremely restless men.
"Steve's going off like this has put the whole house on the blink," protested Jim, intensely surprised to discover the fact.
It nearly finished Janet, whose voice, long afflicted with the cracked tremolo of age, now became almost incoherent at the very mention of Stephanie's name.
Old Lizzie, the laundress, deeply disapproving of Stephanie's departure, insisted on doing her linen and sheer fabrics, and sending a hamper once a week to Poughkeepsie. Every week, also, Amanda, the cook, dispatched cardboard boxes Vassarward, containing condiments and culinary creations which she stubbornly refused to allow Cleland Senior to censor.
"Ay t'ank a leetle yelly-cake and a leetle yar of yam it will not hurt Miss Stephanie," she explained to Cleland. And he said no more.
As for Meacham, he prowled noiselessly about his duties, little, shrunken, round-shouldered, as though no dislocation in the family circle had occurred; but every day since her departure, at Stephanie's place a fresh flower of some sort lay on the cloth to match the other blossom opposite.
In the library together, after dinner, father and son discussed the void which her absence had created.
"She'll get enough of it and come back," suggested Jim, but without conviction. "It's beastly not having her about."
"Perhaps you have a faint idea how it was for me when you were away," observed his father.
"I know. Ihadto go through, hadn't I?"
"Of course.... But—with your mother gone—it was—lonely. Do you understand, now, why I took Steve when I had the chance?"
The young fellow nodded, looking at his father:
"Of course I understand. But I don't see why Steve had to go. She has everything here to amuse her—everything a girl could desire! Why the deuce should she get restless and go flying about after knowledge?"
"Possibly," said John Cleland, "the child has a mind."
"A feminine one. Yes, of course. I tell you, Father, it's all part and parcel of this world-wide restlessness which has set women fidgeting the whole world over. What is it they want?—because they themselves can't tell you. Do you know?"
"I think I do. They desire to exercise the liberty of choice."
"They have it now, haven't they?"
"Virtually. They're getting the rest. If Steve goes through college she will emerge to find all paths open to women. It worries me a little."
Jim shrugged:
"What is it she calls it—I mean her attitude about choosing a career?"
"She refers to it, I believe, as 'the necessity for self-expression.'"
"Fiddle! The trouble with Steve is that she's afflicted with extreme youth."
"I don't know, Jim. Shehasa mind."
"It's a purely imitative one. People she has read about draw, write, compose music. Steve is sensitive to impression, high strung, with a very receptive mind; and the idea attracts her. And what happens? She sees me, for example, scribbling away every day; she knows I'm writing a novel; it makes an impression on her and she takes to scribbling, too.
"Oswald Grismer drops in and talks studio and atmosphere and Rodin and Manship. That stirs her up. What occurs within twenty-four hours? Steve orders a box of colours and a modelling table; and she smears her pretty boudoir furniture with oil paint and plasticine. And that's all it amounts to, Father, just the caprice of a very young girl who thinks creative art a romantic cinch, and takes a shy at it."
His father, not smiling, said:
"Possibly. But the mere fact that shedoestake a shy at these things—spends her leisure in trying to paint, model, and write, when other girls of her agedon't, worries me a little. I do not want her to become interested in any profession of an irregular nature. I want Steve to keep away from the unconventional. I'm afraid of it for her."
"Why?"
"Because all intelligence is restless—and Steve is very intelligent. All creative minds desire to find some medium for self-expression. And I'm wondering whether Steve's mind is creative or merely imitative; whether she is actually but blindly searching for an outlet for self-expression, or whether it's merely the healthy mental energy of a healthy body requiring its share of exercise, too."
Jim laughed:
"It's in the air, Father, this mania for 'doing things.' It's the ridiculous renaissance of the commonplace, long submerged. Every college youth, every school girl writes a novel; every janitor, every office boy a scenario. The stage to-day teems with sales-ladies and floor-walkers; the pants-presser and the manufacturer of ladies' cloaks direct the newest art of the moving pictures. Printers' devils and ex-draymen fill the papers with their draughtsmanship; head-waiters write the scores for musical productions. Art is in the air. So why shouldn't Steve believe herself capable of creating a few things? She'll get over it."
"I hope she will."
"She will. Steve is a reasonable child."
"Steve is a sweet, intelligent and reasonable girl.... Very impressionable.... And sensitive.... I hope," he added irrelevantly, "that I shall live a few years more."
"You hadn't contemplated anything to the contrary, had you?" inquired Jim.
They both smiled. Then Cleland Senior said in his pleasant, even way:
"One can never tell.... And in case you and Steve have to plod along without me some day, before either of you are really wise enough to dispense with my invaluable advice, try to understand her, Jim. Try always; try patiently.... Because I made myself responsible.... And, for all her honesty and sweetness and her obedience, Jim, there is—perhaps—restless blood in Steve.... There may even be the creative instinct in her also.... She's very young to develop it yet—to show whether it really is there and amounts to anything.... I should like to live long enough to see—to guide her for the next few years——"
"Of course you are going to live to see Steve's kiddies!" cried the young fellow in cordially scornful protest. "You know perfectly well, Father, that you don't look your age!"
"Don't I?" said Cleland Senior, with a faint smile.
"And you feel all right, don't you, Father?" insisted the boy in that rather loud, careless voice which often chokes tenderness between men. For the memory that these two shared in common made them doubly sensitive to the lightest hint that everything was not entirely right with either.
"Do you feel perfectly well?" repeated the son, looking at his father with smiling intentness.
"Perfectly," replied Cleland Senior, lying.
He had another chat with Dr. Wilmer the following afternoon. It had been an odd affair, and both physician and patient seemed to prefer to speculate about it rather than to come to any conclusion.
It was this. A week or two previous, lying awake in bed after retiring for the night, Cleland seemed to lose consciousness for an interval—probably a very brief interval; and revived, presently, to find himself upright on the floor beside his bed, holding to one of the carved posts, and unable to articulate.
He made no effort to arouse anybody; after a while—but how long he seemed unable to remember clearly—he returned to bed and fell into a heavy sleep. And in the morning when he awoke, the power of speech had returned to him.
But he felt irritable, depressed and tired. That was his story. And the question he had asked Dr. Wilmer was a simple one.
But the physician either could not or would not be definite in his answer. His reply was in the nature of a grave surmise. But the treatment ordered struck Cleland as ominously significant.