CHAPTER XII
Inspite of the preoccupations incident to the season, Miss Anthon found an opportunity of seeing Erard. She preferred to tell him of her new step rather than write a letter; for her curiosity about his opinion on the subject was quite keen. They were examining an Ingres at the Louvre and Erard was engaged in convincing her of its regular merits. In her present mood the smooth, polished surface of the nude figures struck her as vacant and useless. Imaginatively she began to see that all art was of the same nature as this Ingres,—a little dead.
“I have taken your advice,” she remarked casually, “and chosen the active life. I am to marry—Mr. Wilbur.”
“Ah!” Erard exclaimed, recovering his balance neatly. “You will be the Chicago matron after all. And what shall I do for an assistant? I had just taught you a few things: you were beginning to be useful!”
“That was mere play, you know well enough. I could never be more than an intelligent clerk.” She was disappointed that his manner was so completely impersonal. He took it altogether as too trivial a matter, too much of course. After a few minutes he returned to the subject.
“May I paint you, Miss Anthon, asLa grande dame de Chicago, U. S. A.I should like to make you a wedding gift, and perhaps, if Mr. Wilbur doesn’t object, it might be in this form.”
“You may ask him,” she replied shortly, silly pique rising at his insolent calmness. She evidently meant very little to him, personally. He was quite right; but to please her, he ought to be wrong. Even his interest in lecturing to her about pictures seemed to flag; making some conventional excuse he cut short the visit to the Louvre. It was as if he regarded time spent on her now as wasted—it would lead to nothing. As they parted he arranged for sittings, and then remarked,—
“You will be very happy of course, after you have shaken into place and got used to yourself. The commonplace thing is the best for most of us.”
“Yes, I shall be very happy,” she replied shortly, turning away.
With scarcely less curiosity she waited for her uncle’s comment on the news. It came promptly, and if brief and rather conventional, was kindly. One sentence stung her. “So you have given up exploding and decided to be a good girl.”
She flung the note down irritably. “I believe he would have liked it better if I had told him I was going to marry Erard.” She felt that the old man was bored, if not disappointed, in finding that all her rebellion had come to this decorous end.
Walter Anthon wrote their mother at great length. The substance of his remarks was the relief which theymust all feel that Adela, if she had not done the brilliant thing, at least had ended safely and properly; if itwere safe, that is if Wilbur were really sound financially, and that, he supposed his mother and uncle had taken pains to find out. Beyond that he was sorry that her life was inevitably to be so divided from his. “We shall be country cousins,” she explained to Wilbur, “and he hopes that we shall not put him in the awkward position of ever visiting London.”
Wilbur left for Chicago, after a week in Paris. The portrait came off while the Anthons were waiting for the trousseau. The sittings were full of ennui to the subject, for Mrs. Anthon insisted defiantly on attending every one. She persisted in regarding this portrait as an instalment of Erard’s debt to the Anthons, although her daughter explained elaborately that it was an act of mere friendship. While he painted, Erard talked merrily of the coming life in Chicago, advising and exhorting her on matters of taste.
“Of course you will build a house—a palace I should say. Do induce Mr. Wilbur to have a good architect, if there is one to be had over there. Bad architecture has such a subtle influence for deterioration on the person, and bad architecture has been the order of the day pretty generally in your new home. Tell Mr. Wilbur that he will distinguish himself in the best way by putting up a house that is more than ‘elegant,’ and ‘big,’ and ‘costly.’”
“We may live in a hotel for a time,” Miss Anthon answered shortly.
Erard lifted his eyebrows deprecatingly and dropped his glass. “No, you mustn’t live in a hotel—an American hotel above all!—it is so degenerating. I haven’t painted the portrait with that view.”
“Why? Would you have made me into a kind of barmaid, or grass-widow?”
“I should have sprinkled in diamonds a little more freely.”
Another time he continued the same vein. “Of course you will have the furnishing and all that on your hands. Do have Lemerre design the chairs. I will write him myself, if you want me to. He is rather dear: you couldn’t have him do the whole place at once—that would take a duke’s fortune. But get a little at a time, one or two chairs and a table. You can’t think how much good you will do your neighbours, when they come to call or to dine. And the stuffs,—there is only one place for good colours—Maron. You ought to have some artist design the whole for you at the same time. When you come to pictures, that will besodifficult. Do, dear Miss Anthon, go slow. Don’t let Mr. Wilbur buy old masters, because there aren’t any, or ’way beyond a millionaire’s purse. You could start in with some good etchings and old engravings. Then I could get you a Degas for a thousand pounds, an early Degas. It is a great find, I assure you, and one Degas would go a great way towards furnishing your house.”
“One of those women in a bath-tub!” Mrs. Anthon ejaculated.
“Whatever you do, my dear Miss Anthon,” Erard continuedtranquilly, “go slow. Get one good thing at a time, and make your house a shrine for that.”
Miss Anthon felt as if she were being tutored for some missionary service. About to go forth to the wilderness, she was receiving the last advice of the father superior.
“Of course you will be coming over here frequently to get your ideas straightened out, and to fortify your tastes. Six months there will make you provincial.”
Occasionally this note of condescension stung her. “Of course we shall travel a great deal.” Her conception of the future was large. She and her husband were to take their life, which happened to be for the immediate present in a western metropolis, and mould it in an original and free pattern. The years of great things were just ahead.
She had refused to look at the picture until it should be in nearly final shape. One afternoon, towards the end of their stay in Paris, she took Molly Parker with her for a first view. Erard was in, when they arrived, standing idly before the picture, which he had brought out into the centre of the empty studio. He was smoking a cigarette, in a mincing manner, his hands in his pockets. The two women sank into the chairs he placed for them.
Erard had insisted upon painting her in a white satin evening dress, half reclining upon a crimson divan as though tired by the fatigue of receiving. It was undoubtedly a clever piece of work, painted knowingly and for the world successfully. He had made the most of her tall form, her ability to carry clothes. He had turned her indefinably from a girl to a woman; her physiqueseemed a bit more robust and solid than actually true; her face, a trifle full and less mobile. In expression she wore a half-smile, looking down at the roses which drooped from her hot hand. Yet it was not the expression of one altogether pleased with herself, in spite of the smile, which seemed to be caused by some pleasant flattery that still hung in her mind.
After the first long look, Miss Anthon glanced reproachfully at Erard.
“You haven’t paintedme.”
“Wait five years,” he emitted shortly, dangling the cigarette from his lips.
“I didn’t expect to have your prophecy.”
Erard shrugged his shoulders.
“I paint whatIsee.”
“And shall I be like that? Dissatisfied and bored and a little heavy?”
“You will know some facts, then. Now you are fooling.”
Miss Anthon would have liked, impulsively, to seize a brush and paint out the face, which would grow to have the power of a sneer at her present self. But she was restrained by the presence of Molly Parker.
“A stunning piece of work,” Miss Parker remarked, eyeing the portrait intently.
“La grande dame de Chicago, U. S. A.,” Erard assented softly.
“But I shouldn’t hang it except in the attic,” Miss Parker continued. “Ask Mr. Wilbur if he wants it around.”
Erard smiled as if sure on that point. What Chicago magnate would not like to show off that superb, commanding person? “Will you let me exhibit it?”
“Certainly,” Miss Anthon replied coolly, drawing on her gloves. “It can make no difference to me.”
But it had made a difference to her already.
“So these are your real views of my marriage!” she exclaimed, as Miss Parker wandered off to the old spinet.
Erard’s amused glance said, “Well, yes! if you want to know.”
Her former ambitions tantalized her; this cynical, absurd little man tantalized her. Was she selling herself cheap? Was Erard stronger and finer than she?
“Good-by.” She turned away with a last look at the picture. They shook hands. She seemed to be making her farewell to a few mad dreams.
On the drive back she maintained a moody silence. The past month since her engagement, life had seemed free and simple and full of interests. Her equanimity had comforted her and assured her that she was making no mistake. Now the horizon contracted again, and she wondered whether she had broken the traces that galled her, or only shifted them for a time.
“Marriage ought not to be such a mystery!” she exclaimed at last.
“You ought to feel sure enough,” Miss Parker replied encouragingly. “All the money you want and a good fellow whom you took of your own free will.”
“Thereisno reason to expect mistakes, Molly, andalmost every girl feels the same way, I suppose, when she is engaged. But the smashes come, all the same.”
Miss Parker looked at her curiously.
“I wonder if you really love him! You always look at your marriage from the personal point of view, as a kind of happy solution to a difficult problem. You don’t seem to seehim,” she continued, in a far-away tone. “And I believe something always tells a woman when she is justified in taking her chances. Of course she may have a hard time, but if she is the right sort, and that something comes into her heart, why! all the after tragedies don’t matter. For you everything seems serene, and yet you haven’t that something, I feel. You don’t really love him now.”
“How dare you say that!” Miss Anthon exclaimed harshly.
Molly Parker looked as if she dared say anything. To be obliged to give her reasons was another matter.
“Oh! you take life, marriage, your career—‘broadly,’ as you say, like a thorough course in self-development. Perhaps you will carry it through that way. But if I hadn’t thatsomethingin my heart which would make me go barefoot with a man and have a good time, I would run away. If I were married to a man without that something, I should stick a hat-pin into him, or make his life a little hell, no matter how good he was. But you may be different. ‘Love with you may be an affair of growth.’” Her voice dwelt mockingly on this last sentence. Miss Anthon drew herself up proudly, with the air of having been guilty of familiarities with aninferior. They drove on some minutes in silence. Then Miss Anthon said sombrely—
“There is this life, and Iwillmake the most of it.”
They were crossing the Place de la Concorde in the early lamp-light of a November evening. The splendid lines of light in every direction flashed on the slippery, damp pavements; carriages were dashing from the Rue de Rivoli across the Place into the broad avenue leading to the dominant arch. The individual hum of Paris, that Paris she had so much loved and wondered at, the Paris that had aroused slumbering instincts and had mocked at her, surged through her brain:—yes, there was much to grasp in this life!
“And there are other things,” Miss Parker murmured, “which we cannot manage always. We can only dream and hope, for after all life may be too great for you and break you.”