The Morrell Twins were among the newer powers. They had rolled up a surprisingly big fortune—if itwasa fortune—in a surprisingly short time, and were looked up to as very perfect gentle knights by all the ambitious young fry of the "street." They were the head and front of the Pin-and-Needle Combine. They did not deal with the Grindstone only; they had made their business the business of half the banks of the town,—for how could these institutions be expected to stand out when all the investors and speculators of the street were pressing forward eager to add to their collections a few good specimens of the admirably engraved and printed certificates of the Combine, and more than willing to pay any price that anybody might ask? Some of the banks—the more fortunate among them—were attending to this business during business hours; others of them worked on it overtime, and one or two were beginning to work on it all night as well as all day. They worried. The Twins were not worrying nearly so much,—they knew they must be seen through.
The Twins had been grinding pins and needles for a year or two with striking acumen and dexterity. Sometimes Richard would turn the handle and Robin would hold the poor dull pins to the stone; and then again they would change places. Whichever arrangement happened to be in force, people said the work had never been done more neatly, more precisely. And now the Twins had enlarged their field and had begun to grind noses. They were showing themselves past masters in the art. They had all the legislation of nose-grinding at their fingers' ends; the lack of legislation, too, as well as the probabilities of legislation yet to come. They knew just how fast the wheel might be turned in this State, and just how close the nose might be held in that, and just how loud the victim must cry out before the Rescue Band might be moved to issue from some Committee Room to stop the treatment. They knew where nose-grinding was prohibited altogether, and they knew where enactments against it had thus far completely failed. They knew where the penalty was likely to be enforced, and they knew where it might be evaded. "Learn familiarly the whole body of legislative enactment, state by state, and then keep a little in advance of it,"—such was their simple rule.
No man is to be denied the right to profit by his own discovery, and so, though the glory of the Twins was envied, their right to luxuriate in it was seldom questioned. They were seen in all sorts of prominent and expensive places—at the opera, at the horse-show, on the golf links, and were very much envied and admired,—envied by other young men that were trying to do as they had done, but not succeeding; admired by multitudes of young women who felt pretty sure that to "have things," and to have them with great abundance and promptness and conspicuousness, was all that made life worth living. In this environment Richard Morrell could hardly fail to be fairly well satisfied with himself. To ask and to receive would come to the same thing. And so he spoke to Virgilia one crisp October morning, between the fifth and sixth holes in Smoky Hollow, and awaited in all confidence her reply. But Virgilia quickly made it plain that he would not do—not for her, at least. She was by no means one of the kind to be impressed by tally-ho coaches, however loudly and discordantly the grooms might trumpet, nor to be brought round by country-club dinners, however deafening the chatter or however preponderant the phalanx of long-necked bottles. So his raw, red face turned a shade redder still; and as he sat, later, on the club veranda, hectoring the waiter and scowling into his empty glass, he growled to himself in a thick undertone:
"What's the matter with the girl, anyway? If she doesn't want me, who does she want?"
Virgilia wanted, in a general way, an intimate and equal companionship, a trafficking in the things that interested her—the higher things, she sometimes called them to herself. She wanted a gentleman; she wanted cultivation, refinement—even to its last debilitating excess. What she wanted least of all was a "provider," a steward, an agent, a business machine. "We mustlive," she would say, looking forward toward her matrimonial ideal; "we mustn't let our whole life run out in a mere stupid endeavour to accumulate the means of living, and then find ourselves only beginning when at the finish:"—an idea held substantially by so different a young person as Preciosa McNulty, who was preparing to set aside her mother's careful ambitions and to take a step forward on her own account. Only, Preciosa was looking less for cultivation and gentility than for "temperament." Less the dry specialist, however successful in the accumulation of this world's goods, than the resonant adventurer that would bring her full chance at all the manifold haps and mishaps of life as it runs.
"Nothing more tedious than a set programme," declared Preciosa. "If my whole future were to be arranged for me to-morrow, I should want to die the day after. A whole play"—Preciosa was a most persevering little theatre-goer—"carried through with one stage-setting—how tiresome that would be!"
"Come, now," said Little O'Grady; "help the lame duck over the stile. Be a good Gowan—give the poor fellow the use of your studio. Mordreth's isn't enough better to be worth asking for, and Stalinski is working from the model. Come,—as a personal favour to me. It was I let you in on the bank scheme and gave you a chance to make big money; and now you must just let Ignace have the use of your place for a few hours—he can't paint the girl's picture in that little hole upstairs."
"Much you let me in!" retorted Gowan with a grin. "Tell me who is in, anyway, and how far, and for how much, and I'll give you half I get."
"Haven't I seen them?" returned Little O'Grady. "Didn't I address the whole board? Didn't I go for them with the architect himself to help me? Haven't I got the mantel-piece in the president's parlour? And now if Ignace can only get a chance to paint the fav'rite grandchild of one of the——Yes, sir; I talked to them as a business-man to business-men, and it went. They're square; they're solid; they'll treat us right. Never you fear. In a year from now you'll be wearing diamonds and saying: 'O'Grady, you're the wan that hung them on me.'Nowwill you give Ignace your room?"
"Why, he's no portrait painter, is he?"
"She thinks he is. And it's what the girls think of us that makes us what we are. As for me, I believe he can do anything. Come, give the poor lad a show."
"What could he do in an hour or two?"
"He could get acquainted with her," said Little O'Grady.
Preciosa, thanks to O'Grady's chatterings through the Temple of Art—he blew in and out with great freedom and was as much at home there as in the humbler establishment—had come to some knowledge of Ignace Prochnow. She learned his name—in itself an immense advance, and the location of his studio; and she arranged with the Gibbons girls, who, by reason of their fencing, were developing great self-reliance and a high capacity for initiative, to search him out in his private haunts.
"Set the day," chirped Little O'Grady, "and we'll be ready for you."
Preciosa set the day; Little O'Grady traced Prochnow's name in elaborate letterings and clapped this new placard over Gowan's own; and all waited intent to see just what of interest would develop in the countenance of the daughter of the McNultys, and just what Ignace Prochnow would be able to make of it.
Preciosa wore her green velvet toque, and let her chestnut hair stray and ramble whithersoever it would, and sat in Gowan's best high-backed mahogany chair with the brass rosettes, and tried to view with kindly indulgence his flimsy knick-knacks and shabby hangings (they came nowhere near Dill's) on account of her interest in their supposed proprietor. Nor did she find in her painter any of Dill's soft suavity. Prochnow was direct and downright almost to brusqueness, seeming to see no need of such graduated preliminaries as even O'Grady found place and reason for. He admired her, and admired her extremely, as she perceived at once; but he offered none of the appropriate deferences that she had received on occasion from obscure young men of less than modest fortune. He was intent, he was earnest, he was even a bit peremptory; but she felt perfectly certain that he was not treating her as a subject and a subject merely. His black eyes looked at her with a sort of sharp severity across the leg of the easel, and his rasping crayon promptly scratched down his impressions upon the promising blank of his canvas. Preciosa was slightly puzzled, but on the whole pleased. She knew she was worth looking at, and felt herself fit to stand the keenest scrutiny. She leaned back easily in her chair. Let time attend to the rest.
"Doesn't shecompose!" said Little O'Grady in a poignant whisper to Elizabeth Gibbons, as he thrust out his arms akimbo and squinted learnedly at Preciosa through his fingers. "And hasn't the lad gotline!" he presently added in a rapturous undertone, as the black and white tracing began to take shape. Prochnow was drawing with immense freedom, decision, confidence; every stroke told, and told the first time. "He knows how! He knowshow!" moaned Little O'Grady, locking his hands and forearms in a strange twist and rocking to and fro with emotion. "He's got the wrist!—thewrist!" he exclaimed further, liberating his hands and fanning the air with long pendulous fingers. "There, he's caught her already!" he cried, leaning forward,—"inside of five minutes. Not a line more, Ignace; not a line more!"
Prochnow turned on him with a grim tight smile—a smile that slightly dilated the nostrils of his good firm nose and shifted in ever so small a degree the smutch of black beneath that was slowly advancing to the status of a moustache. It was an acknowledgment from one whocouldto one whoknew. "Ah, si jeunesse…!" ejaculates the poet; but herejeunesse, by a doubling of forces, bothpouvaitandsavait.
Then Prochnow turned the canvas itself round toward Preciosa. "DoesMademoiselle recognise herself?"
"It's you, Preciosa, to the life," said the daughter of Roscoe OrlandoGibbons.
"Oh, Ig!" cried Little O'Grady, much moved, "you're the king-pin sure.Peopleshallknow you; peoplemustknow you!" He faced about towardPreciosa. "Ah, my fair young thing, he's got you dead. Why, Daff himselfcouldn't have reached this in an hour!"
Preciosa was like most of the rest of us—inclined to take good workmanship for granted; where there was nothing to criticise there was nothing to take hold of. But the words and actions of Little O'Grady—he was now hopping about on one leg, holding the other in his hand—made the matter perfectly certain. Her painter had done a notable thing, and done it easily, promptly, without revisions, without fumblings. His own face and attitude expressed his consciousness of this. "Nobody could have done it better," she read in his eyes; "and you, you blooming young creature, have been the inspiration." He had called her "Mademoiselle" too; could anything be more charming? Nothing save his accent itself,—a trick of the tongue, an intonation ever so slightly alien that addressed her ear just as some perfume's rich but smothered pungency might address the nose. Yes, the first stage in her apotheosis was an undoubted success. All that was needed now was her translation from black and white to colour. Well, the chariot was ready to take her up still higher.
"I have found you very easily, Mademoiselle,"—Preciosa felt a sugary little shudder at this repetition of the word,—"I have found you very easily," said Prochnow, casting about for his palette and brushes; "and now I may just as easily lose you."
"Oh no," said Elizabeth Gibbons, with great earnestness.
"Never fear," said Little O'Grady confidently. "Though the likeness generally gets submerged at first, it comes to the surface again in the end."
"Don't risk it," continued Elizabeth Gibbons.
"What has been done once," said Prochnow, motioning with a brush-handle toward the charcoal sketch, "can be done once more."
Prochnow handled his brushes with the same firmness and confidence that he had shown in handling his crayon. The "resemblance" soon sank beneath the waves, as prophesied, but Little O'Grady continued to ride on the topmost crest with unabated enthusiasm. "Whee! hasn't he got the nerve! hasn't he got the stroke! Doesn't he just more than slather it on!" he cried. "Catch the shadows in that green velvet! R-r-rip!—and the high light on that tan jacket!" he proceeded in a smothered shout, as he nudged Elizabeth Gibbons in the side. Elizabeth had never been nudged before, and moved farther down the settle, after giving him alook. Little O'Grady, who never knew when he was squelched—he never, as a fact, had been squelched by anybody whomsoever—moved along after her. "Oh, my! Can't hepaint! Can't he more than lay iton! Did you get that last one, now?"
Buoyed up by such support as this, Prochnow forged ahead with quadrupledbrio, and Preciosa felt the chariot rising heavenward cloud by cloud. Little O'Grady continued to lead the performance, prompting Preciosa to look her prettiest and Prochnow to do his best. "Ah, my sweet child," he declared, "you've fallen into good hands. You're trying to get away, true: you've nearly lost those bright eyes, and I wouldn't want to swear to your ears or your chin, just yet; but your blessed old-gold hair is there all right, and it's put on to stay. The rest of you will be coming back tomorrow, or next day, or the day after. And then you'll be all on deck, jew'l. You'll see; you'll hear; you'll speak, by heaven! Won't she, Lizzie?"
Miss Gibbons gave Little O'Grady anotherlook. Preciosa paused in her heavenward ascent, and seemed to be wondering with a questioning little glance just how far along, after all, she had got. When she finally left her high-backed chair—"That's as far as we will go to-day," Prochnow had said—she felt herself very close to earth again: the cherished "resemblance" had vanished altogether. But Prochnow seemed satisfied with the result, and Little O'Grady was rapturously fluent over the brushwork. "Ignace is a wunder-kind," he declared to the doubting girl. "I never saw such swing, such certainty. He'll fish you back, and he'll have you to the life in less than a week. Or I'll eat my hat."
There was a knock at the door. O'Grady rushed to open it. "Go right away," Miss Gibbons thought she heard him say, in a tense undertone.
The face of Kitty Gowan showed in the doorway, puzzled, protesting.Medora Joyce was behind, her hands full of parcels.
"Go away?" repeated Mrs. Gowan. "What does this mean? Let me in at once."
"Depart!" hissed Little O'Grady. "This is not Mr. Prochnow's day. Come to-morrow."
"Step aside, O'Grady," said Kitty Gowan spunkily. "Let me pass." An afternoon of shopping had tired her and shortened her temper.
"Well, as a visitor, possibly," said O'Grady condescendingly. "Ignace, do you feel disposed to——" He glanced back and forth between Prochnow and the petitioners.
Prochnow took down the canvas and set its face against the wall.
Kitty Gowan strode in holding her head high. "How do?" she said carelessly, by way of general salute. "Sit there, Medora," she directed Mrs. Joyce, indicating a chair.
"Sit here, Medora," said O'Grady firmly, placing another. "Prochnow, Preciosa dear, allow me to present——" and so on. "And you sit here," he said to Kitty Gowan, placing a third chair. "You're a visitor, remember," he whispered to her fiercely; "so behave like one. Stay where you're put and don't own the earth. We have loaned the shop for the day. Understand?"
Preciosa passed lightly over Kitty Gowan, whom she found brusque in her manners and plain in her looks; but she fixed her best attention on Medora, with whom she was as much charmed as at the first. Idealist and heroine-worshipper, she was always ready to prostrate herself before a young married woman of Medora's gracious and fashionable cast.
O'Grady lingered over Medora's chair. "We've had a wonderful session," he said, laying his hand affectionately on her shoulder. "You ought to have come a bit sooner, my dear."
Preciosa shivered. It was like the profanation of an idol.
Medora unconcernedly pushed away his hand. Preciosa envied such serenity and self-poise.
"Why, how's this?" asked O'Grady, studying his hand curiously, as some detached thing, some superfluity rejected and returned. "Ain't we friends? Ain't we old pals? You can't mean to stand me off with your London clothes and your London manners? Don't say you're trying to do that, Dodie!"
Preciosa shuddered. Medora laughed carelessly—oh, how could she! Kitty Gowan jumped up and boxed O'Grady's ear with one of Medora's long, flat parcels. "Get away, you saucy child!" she said.
O'Grady grimaced and nursed his ear. "It serves you right!" saidElizabeth Gibbons tartly.
Preciosa was placated; the great retribution had fallen. She banished the wish that she herself might have had the daring to be a third avenging fury, and fell to studying the folds of Medora's bottle-green cloak. She wondered if she herself were not as pretty as Mrs. Joyce—oh, in an entirely different way!—and if she were glad or sorry that Medora and her companion had come a little late for seeing the picture. Would it be a success—this portrait? Was it all that Mr. Prochnow's lively little friend seemed to think?
Prochnow, putting away his palette and brushes, grandly overlooked the late irruption of trivialities. He glanced across to Preciosa, and she felt that he was thanking her for having held herself quite aloof from them.
Preciosa went away not completely reassured, yet on the whole pretty well pleased. She felt that she had been taken hold of by a strong, decided hand. She had made an excursion into a new land where feeble compliments were dispensed with and where meek-eyed ingratiation seemed not to exist. Yes, he was a forcible, clever fellow. That Virgilia Jeffreys should have tried to make her think anything else, and that she should have permitted Virgilia to make the attempt! She should see Virgilia soon, somewhere, and should regain the lost ground; she should not allow herself to be walked over a second time. She should probably say something very cutting, too—if she could but find the right words. Suppose she were younger than Virgilia and less expert? Was that any reason why she should be played with, be cajoled into making fun of a——Yes, Ignace Prochnow was a fine clever fellow; good-looking too, in a way; and masterful, beyond a doubt. Had she been kind enough to him to cancel her cruelty at their first meeting? She was afraid not. Should she have been kinder but for the abundance of company and the absorbing nature of the work? Probably so. Should she be kinder next time? That would depend on him;—yes, if he became a little less professional and a little more personal. Would he become so? She hoped he might. And if he didn't? Then he might be encouraged to. How? Preciosa opened her purse for her fare and postponed an answer.
At that same moment, Prochnow, banished along with the canvas to his own room by the return of Gowan, sat staring at the portrait as it stood propped against his trunk. Little O'Grady, if he had been present, instead of being occupied on the other side of the partition in sweeping up the dried plaster that littered his floor, would have decided that the personal interest was in fair proportion to the professional, and would have rated Prochnow no higher as an artist than as a man.
Virgilia, after dismissing Daffingdon with the detailed memoranda of her great decorative scheme, went through the vain forms of going upstairs and getting to bed. But sleep was out of the question. Her brain still kept at work, elaborating the ideas already proposed and adding still others to the plan. Why hadn't she laid more stress on the Medici? How had she contrived to overlook John Law and the South Sea Bubble, with all its attendant wigs, hooped petticoats and shoe-buckles? Then the Pine-Tree Shilling jumped to her eyes, and Virginia's use of tobacco as a currency;—possibly the entire scheme might be arranged on a purely American basis, in case sympathy for her wider outlook were to fail.
Virgilia ate her breakfast soberly enough; she checked all tendency toward expansiveness with her own people, who were sadly earth-bound and utilitarian. But immediately after breakfast she put on her things and stepped round the corner to have a confab with her aunt. She found Eudoxia upstairs, clad in a voluminous dressing-gown and struggling with her over-plump arms against the rebelliousness of her all but inaccessible back hair. Virgilia was very vivid and sprightly in her report on the evening's conference, and Eudoxia, studying her with some closeness, was barely able to apply the check when she found herself asking:
"Has he—has he——?"
Virgilia dropped her eyes. No, he hadn't.
But the acceptance of these magnificent proposals might easily make another proposal possible, and again Eudoxia Pence asked herself:
"Do I want it, or don't I? Certainly only the bank's acceptance of Daff's scheme will make possible Virgilia's acceptance of Daff himself."
That evening Dill called again on Virgilia, bringing the Hill-McNulty plan.
"Sothisis the sort of thing they want?" she cried. "They insist on it, after all, do they?" She cast her eye over the paper and hardly knew whether to laugh or to weep. "'The First Fire-Engine House,'" she read. '"Old Fort Kinzie'; 'The Grape-Vine Ferry'; 'The Early Water-Works'—oh, this is terrible!" she exclaimed.
"Read on," said Dill plaintively.
"'The Wigwam'——"
"What in heaven's name is that?"
"A place where they used to hold conventions, I believe. 'The SuccotashTavern'——"
"What does that mean?"
"I've heard it spoken of, I think," said Virgilia faintly. "It was built of cottonwood logs and stood at the fork in the river. 'The Hard-Shell Baptist Church,'——" she read on.
"Do you know anything about that?"
"I think I've seen it in old photographs. It stood on one side ofCourt-House Square."
"Did it have a steeple?" asked Dill droopingly.
"I believe it did—quite a tall one."
"Of course it did!" he groaned. "And so it goes. One building hugs the ground and the next cleaves the sky. Yet they've all got to be used for the decorative filling of a lot of spaces precisely alike."
"What does Giles think of this?" asked Virgilia.
"He's crazy."
"And Adams, at the Academy?"
"He's gone out to buy a rope."
"And Little O'Grady?"
"He fell over in a dead faint. He's lying in it yet. But before he lost consciousness he made one suggestion——"
"What was it?"
Dill paused. "Have you ever heard of a painter named Proch—Prochnow?" he presently asked, with some disrelish. "A newcomer, I believe."
"I don't think I have."
"He has lately taken a studio in the Warren. O'Grady has seen his work and speaks well of it."
"What particular kind of work?"
"Decorative. Portraits too, I understand. He has been doing one of that little Miss McNulty."
Virgilia frowned. "What!" she was thinking to herself, "have I been taken in by that viper, that traitress?—by a child who looked like an innocent flower and is turning out to be the serpent under it? Prochnow!—the hard name that nobody could pronounce! It's easy enough: Prochnow; Prochnow. She could have pronounced it fast enough if she had wanted to! And now she has gone over to the other side and taken O'Grady with her—and her grandfather too!" Then, aloud:
"Well?"
"O'Grady says he's full of—ideas——"
"And what has O'Grady got to do with it?" asked Virgilia tartly. "Has anybody asked his help? Why is he mixing up in the matter, anyway? And if he wants to suggest, let him stop suggesting painters and suggest a few sculptors. I haven't heard of his doing anything like that!"
Dill sighed wearily. "You can't keep O'Grady out if he wants to get in. But I must say I hadn't expected to be loaded down with any more of the Warren people. Gowan is more a drag than a help, and O'Grady is doing all he can to bring us under a cloud. The directors can't understand such freedom, such language, such shabbiness, such Bohemianism. Take it all around, they are making it a heavier load than I can carry through."
"And now they want to add another of their miserable crowd to it. Well, there will be no room for Prochnows and their ideas," declared Virgilia, wounded in her tenderest point. "Wewill attend to the ideas. Let us take Hill's absurd notion, if we must, and rush in and wrench victory from defeat. Let us take his cabins and taverns and towers and steeples and use them in the background——"
"That would be the only way."
"—and then put in people—Hill and McNulty can't be insisting upon mere 'views.' Fill up your foregrounds with traders and hunters and Indians and 'early settlers' and 'prairie-schooners'——"
"Giles has gone out to bring them round to something like that."
"They really won't have the Bank of Genoa? They won't listen to Phidion of Argos?"
"I couldn't bring them within hailing distance of him."
"Where is Roscoe Orlando Gibbons in such an hour as this?"
"I haven't been able to find him."
"Ishall find him. Aunt Eudoxia is a large stock-holder in that wretched bank, and he's the only man of taste and refinement on the board. If we have lost Jeremiah, that's all the more reason why we should have Roscoe Orlando. I shall get her and go to his office at once. He can't refuse support to our plan; he won't let this barbarous notion of Hill's make any headway."
Dill looked at Virgilia with mounting appreciation. Where was her equal for resource, for elasticity, for devotion, for erudition? She was at home in Grote and Sismondi, and she was just as much at home in the early local annals of the town itself. She knew about the Parthenon and Giotto's Tower, and she knew about the Succotash Tavern and the Hard-Shell Baptist Meeting-House too. With matchless promptitude and resiliency she began the broad sketching out of an entirely new scheme—a thoroughly local one. Was there not Pere Marquette and the Sieur Joliet and La Salle and Governor D'Artaguette? Was there not the Fort Kinzie Massacre and the Last War-Dance of the Pottawatomies? Was there not the prairie mail-coach and the arrival of the first vessel in the harbour? Were there not traders and treaties and Indian commissioners? "There!" she cried, "you and Stephen Giles just sharpen your teeth on such matters as those! We have almost got the Nine Old Ogres on the run, and we mustn't slow up on them for a single minute!"
Dill stared at her with dazzled eyes. Such vim, such spirit, such knowledge, such loyalty!—and all for him, all in his service! He felt confusedly that he was upon the verge of taking her hand and saying in broken trembling tones that she was his guiding star, his ruling spirit, his steadfast hope—what lesser expressions could fitly voice his gratitude, his admiration, his devotion? Then he caught himself: things were still in the air. His fortune was yet to be made, and who could say but that its making might yet be marred? Let him once come to an understanding with those trying old fellows, let him but have a hard-and-fast agreement with them in downright black and white, and then—who could tell what might be said and done?
Dill and his coadjutors had two or three more conferences, and a second detailed scheme was sent over to the bank. History in general was decisively thrust aside,—the only history worth recording was the history the Nine themselves had helped to make. "We will go to the libraries for 'ana,'" said Gowan; "they will help us with the earlier years of the last century."
"And to the Historical Association for more," said Giles. "Old Oliver Dowd is an ex-secretary of it, and him at least we can capture beyond a doubt."
"Hurray!" cried Little O'Grady, who had insisted on being present. That very afternoon he threw his "First Coinage of Venetian Sequins" back into the clay-box and started in on a relief of "The Earliest Issue of Wild-Cat Currency."
"We've got a good thing this time," said Adams. "It's homogeneous; it's picturesque; it's local. It gives all they want and a great deal more. I think we can tussle with it successfully and not be ashamed of the outcome."
"As business-men they ought to appreciate the completeness of our new scheme," said Giles, "and our promptness in furnishing it."
"They will," said Joyce. "This beats the other idea all hollow. Go in and win."
Each one of them spoke in terms of unwonted confidence. Little O'Grady himself was in such a state of irrepressible buoyancy that he left the earth and fairly sailed among the clouds. All this reacted on Dill. For the first time he felt the great commission fully within his grasp and the net profits as safely to be counted upon. He began to warm to his subjects. To him, who had learned a good deal in regard to shipping and the handling of water from lounging about the ports of Marseilles and Leghorn, had fallen the arrival of the first vessel: he would reconstruct the primitive lighthouse that Mr. Hill had set his heart on, and would eke out the angular emptiness of the subject by a varied group of expectant pioneers big in the foreground. He had also taken the Baptist church, of whose Bible-class Andrew P. Hill had been a member. He would suppress the spire, and would show the pillared front on some Sunday morning in midsummer, with an abundance of wide petticoats and deep bonnets of the period of 1845, or thereabouts, displayed upon its front steps. And finally, as he was fairly strong on figures in action, he had intrepidly undertaken the Pottawatomie war-dance; and as soon as the conference in Giles's studio broke up, he took the express-train out to the Memorial Museum to see what the ethnological department there could do for him in the way of moccasins, tomahawks and war-bonnets.
He made his way through several halls filled with tall glass cases, skirting the Polynesians, bearing away from the Eskimos and finally reaching the North Americans. Their room was empty, save for a slender girl in brown who was making notes on a collection of war-bonnets in a morocco memorandum-book. It was Virgilia.
"Why, what are you doing out here?" he asked.
"Turning the odd moments to account. Collecting data for you on the aborigines,—I am sure we can put them to use. I ran out to hear the lecture on Earthquakes in Japan—you know I have a chance to go there with the Knotts in April—and I thought I might incidentally pick up a few notions for the War-Dance."
So authentic and thoroughgoing a piece of loyalty as this affected Dill tremendously; the hint of an Oriental exodus scarcely less so. Never should she go to Japan with the Knotts; she should go with him. His share in the work at the Grindstone would make this the easiest as well as the most delightful of possibilities. Now was the time; no matter about waiting for the contract. He felt the flood rising within him. Here at last was the moment for taking her hand (she had put the memorandum-book back into her pocket), and for looking earnestly into her eyes with all the ardour perfect good taste would permit, and for saying in a voice tremulous with well-bred passion the words that would make her his loyal coadjutor through life. These different things he now said and did with a flawless technique (Virgilia recalled how sadly the young real-estate dealer had boggled), and a row of gaudy Buddhistic idols that looked in through the wide door leading to the Chinese section stood witnesses to her unaffected surrender. The pair passed back through the Aztecs and the South Sea Islanders in a maze of happy murmurs and whisperings, and when next Eudoxia Pence asked her niece:
"Has he—has he——?"
Virgilia, as she again dropped her eyes, was able to reply, this time:
"He has."
Daffingdon and Virgilia passed out through the great row of Ionic columns and down the wide flight of steps into the bare, brown wind-swept landscapes of the park.
"And about Japan?" asked Dill. "You can wait a year longer for that, can't you? We shall find the earthquakes just the same."
Virgilia laughed happily. "Of course I can. What will such a year count for as a mere delay?—a year so short, so full, so busy, so happy, so successful! BynextFebruary we shall be famous, we shall be rich, the whole country will be ringing with our pictures——"
Dill found it easy to fall in with her mood. He foresaw the immediate acceptance of a scheme so complete and so well-considered; the early signing of a binding contract; the receipt, without undue delay, of his honorarium—a business-like tribute from a methodical and trustworthy body of business-men; growing fame, increasing prosperity——After all, why dwell on Japan? The world was beautiful everywhere, even in the bare, flat rawness of the suburbs.
A few days later, and his bold step seemed justified. The directors were an elusive body, and even when got together they found it hard to act with anything like unanimity and despatch; but one afternoon Stephen Giles encountered Mr. Holbrook in the office of one of the hotels and was told that the plan was receiving favourable consideration and was not unlikely to be accepted. As Mr. Holbrook was the most passive member of the directorate, drifting quietly along with the general current, it seemed safe to accept him as representing the feeling of that body.
Giles carried the good news to Adams, at the Academy. Adams hurried home with it to his wife and little Frankie.
A few days more, and it laboriously transpired that old Jeremiah McNulty was readjusting himself to the plan as modified and elaborated by Dill and his associates. Old Jeremiah was particularly taken by the idea of the First Ferry—suggesting only that the scene be slightly enlarged, so as to take in the site of his early "yard."
"At last we're gathering them in!" declared Adams to his wife. They began to figure up their share of the spoils and to study how they would lay this immense sum out.
First of all they would bring a smile to the wan face of a patient landlord by paying the back rent in full. As for the rest, Frankie must have a pair of new shoes; and a thousand dollars at least must be placed on deposit in some good savings bank.
"For we have never been able to put anything by, and now at last comes this chance to provide for the rainy day." They looked at each other in mutual content and admiration—this was prudence, this was thrift.
Next, word came to Dill that the attorney for the bank was actually engaged in drawing up the contract. "We may even be able to sign it to-morrow," he said to Virgilia. "We shall have Japan in good season, and much more in between. Tell me; are we not selfish in keeping our happiness to ourselves? Shall you not——"
"I am ready to let the whole world know, dear Daff," she responded. "And oh, to think that I have had my part in bringing your great good fortune about!"
At the very moment when Daffingdon and Virgilia were taking notes on the aborigines and planning for Japan, Preciosa McNulty was strolling with Ignace Prochnow through the galleries of the Art Academy. The portrait was now finished. The submerged "resemblance" had risen once more to the surface, as Little O'Grady had foretold, and the canvas had been borne home in triumph to Preciosa's fond, admiring family.
"Who did it?" asked her grandfather, boundlessly pleased.
"That young man," replied Preciosa.
"What young man?"
"The one who came here that night and threw those big sheets of paper all over the furniture."
"It's you to the life, my child," he said.
"Grandpa," proceeded Preciosa, "I want him to come here again and throw some more sheets over the furniture. He's awfully smart, and he's just bursting with ideas."
Her grandfather scratched his chin. There were so many smart young men bursting with ideas—the wrong sort of ideas. "Let him go to Mr. Hill."
"They're better than those others were."
Still the old man shook his head. "Let him go to Mr. Hill," he repeated.
"With a letter or something from you?"
"Let him go and talk for himself."
"No. You just sit down and write it now." Then, to herself: "There! I think Virgilia Jeffreys will find she can't wind me round her finger quite as easily as she thought she could!"
Preciosa gave Prochnow his letter in front of the Parthenon pediment (where the current of visitors was thinnest), and counselled him to advance on the Grindstone. He was as quick and clever as any of them, she declared, and was entitled to take his share.
Prochnow tossed his head. "I don't know that I care for a 'share,'" he said.
"Do you want to do it all?" asked Preciosa, awe-struck.
"All or none," replied Prochnow loftily. "I am not one to co-operate. I could do the whole as easily as a part."
They strolled on through one spacious hall after another; none seemed too roomy for the manoeuvres of this young genius. The largest studio in the Burrow, Gowan's own, cramped him—most of all on the days when Mrs. Gowan came down, set forth the tea-pot, lit up her candles and gave her moving little imitation of the handsomer functions that took place through the upper tiers of the Temple of Art. Prochnow had scant patience with the mild hospitalities that accompanied, obbligato-like, art's onward course; he could not accommodate himself, he could not fit in. There were days when the streets and the parks themselves seemed none too spacious, and Preciosa, who was beginning to accompany him abroad, soon got the widest notion of his limitless expansiveness. He saw things with an eye that was new, informed, penetrating, and he spread comments acute, critical, pungent, with the freest possible tongue. He showed her the tawdry, restless vulgarity of the architecture along the most splendid of her favourite thoroughfares, and the ludicrousness of much of the sculpture that cumbered the public parks; and with the mercilessness of youth for mediocrity in his seniors, thearrives,he would run through the canvases of current exhibitions, displaying an abrupt arrogance, a bald, raw, cursory cruelty that only the Uebermensch of art would have ventured to employ.
"And what do you think of our front parlour furniture?" asked Preciosa; "and of all that fancy woodwork on our cupola?"
Prochnow placed his hand over his mouth and turned away. It seemed as if these things were too awful for characterization, yet he would spare them for her sake. Let him laugh, though, if he wished; and she would laugh with him.
Thus her world daily became smaller, more insignificant, less to be regarded, while Ignace himself grew bigger, more preponderant. How could she refuse confidence in one who had such boundless confidence in himself?
In the course of these strolls he told her something about his own early life. He had been born, she made out, somewhere between the Danube and the Oder; he spoke familiarly of the frontier of Silesia. He had studied in Munich and Vienna, and some of his things—sumptuous, highly-charged, over-luscious—showed clearly enough the influence of Makart and the lawless vicinity of gipsy Hungary. He had crossed to America with his family five years before; they were still in New Jersey. "They came half-way," he declared; "and I have come all the way—an adventurer in a new land."
Preciosa tried to realize the newness, which she had always taken for granted, and the remoteness, which had never made itself particularly plain to her consciousness; all this that she might reach some appreciation of his venturesomeness,—a gallant, spirited quality not misplaced in one so youthful, so self-confident, so fitted for success and mastery.
"Well, you're ready for one adventure, anyway," declared Preciosa, motioning toward the letter still held in Prochnow's brown, veined hand. She saw herself helping him into the saddle and passing him up his lance.
"So I am," he acquiesced. He brought his eyes back from the large, pale, formidable Amazonian figures before him to the warm-hearted, warm-coloured little creature by his side. Her wealth of chestnut hair was glowing in its most artful disorder; and there was limitless enticement in the turn of her long curling eyelashes, just on a level with his moustache-to-be. Her slim little body was subordinated to her head and to her spreading hat in precisely the degree imposed by modern taste and recognised by the canons of modern art; nothing less grandiose, pallid, remote was to be imagined. Her dress, full of rich, daring colours and latter-day complications of design, completed the spell; those very large white women in crinkled draperies might remain where they were, when such a one as this was here, as close to him as his own self, as contemporaneous as the last stroke of the clock, as rich and brilliant in colouring as any of the canvases of his master's master, as necessary as bread and wine. He must put to its best use the weapon she had placed in his hand, when there was so much—all the world, in fact—to gain.
"Do your best," said Preciosa, mindful of the portfolios that LittleO'Grady had lugged downstairs and had opened in Festus Gowan's studio."Leave them all behind," she added, feeling as keenly as ever the smartof her feeble complaisance toward Virgilia Jeffreys.
"Can I fail with such encouragement?" asked Prochnow, in an intonation unwontedly tender, as he tried to look under those long curling lashes.
Preciosa flushed—a thing those great, over-admired marble women would have tried in vain to do. Yes, she was no closer to him than she was necessary to him. He began to look forward to the time when he might take her by the hand, restraining such modest impulse as she was now showing to move on to the next room, and reproduce that blush by telling her all she was to him and must be ever. Only the wills, the whims, the prejudices of a few unenlightened old men stood in his way; these he must bend, dissipate, brush aside. He felt himself equal to the task.
Eudoxia Pence, after receiving the news of Virgilia's engagement, felt more easy in her mind; she knew, now, just what ground she stood on and saw just what she had to do. She realized that she had rather liked Daffingdon Dill all along and had secretly been hoping that he and Virgilia would hit it off. What she must see to was that Daffingdon got the commission from the Grindstone, or his proper share in it: those nine old men must accept his ideas and his sketches if this marriage were to become a fact. Virgilia, who always ran with wealthy people, often gave the impression of possessing greater means than she really commanded; this was doubly serious when it came to her taking up with a man who was altogether dependent on his wits, his skill and his invention, and subject to the passing whims of a fickle public taste. She went down to the library, to discuss the affair with her husband.
"It isn't as if Palmyra had been left with abundant means and only one daughter," she submitted. "It's different when Virgilia is one of four. And her brother is too taken up with his own wife and children to be of——Are you listening, Palmer?"
"Eh? What's that?" asked her husband, lifting his elderly face from a mass of papers that lay in the bright circle made by the library lamp. He was generally deep in his own concerns, and they were large ones. He seldom gave more than scant attention to such domestic details as developed from relations through marriage.
Eudoxia sighed and forbore to tax him further. And when, next morning, Virgilia came round to report the fate of the second decorative scheme she sighed again.
For the new plan had not been successful, after all; it had failed ignominiously at the eleventh hour. A great deal of effort had been expended in the private office of this director and that, and a futile attempt made to bring four or five of them together at the office of the bank itself, that the matter might be clenched and the contract signed. But the directors were elusive, and cost a great deal of time; and when found, evasive, and cost a great deal of patience. But it was the delay that had worked the ruin. It gave opportunity for tangles and hitches, for the reconsideration of points already settled, for the insinuation of doubts as to this, that and the other. Andrew P. Hill developed a sulky dislike for all the laboured superfluities that now encumbered the chaste simplicity of his original conception, and Roscoe Orlando Gibbons began to question (though, to tell the truth, he was just about to bring forward a candidate of his own) whether the artists thus far considered were sufficiently skilled to carry out the work. As a matter of fact, the only striking and convincing demonstration of ability witnessed thus far was that reported by his daughter from the studio of Festus Gowan.
No, that overwrought presentation of early local history was not quite what they wanted. The contract remained unsigned, and presently it slid off into the waste-paper basket under Andrew P. Hill's desk.
The whole circle boiled at this outrage. Joyce, who was highly articulate and who possessed a tremendous capacity for indignation, would have made himself a mouth-piece to voice the protests of his infuriate friends; but Little O'Grady wrenched the task from him.
O'Grady could not contain himself—nor did he try to. "This is business-dealing with business-men, is it?" he cried to Dill. "This is what comes of treating with solid citizens of means and method, is it? Where is my hat? I'll go round to that bank and just tell them what I——"
"O'Grady!" protested Dill. "Behave! or you'll have the fat in the fire for good and all."
"No, Daff," insisted Little O'Grady. "I got you into this, and now——"
"I don't understand it so," said Dill coldly.
"Oh yes, I did. And now I'll see you through. Where is my hat?"
While Daffingdon was trying to hold O'Grady in check, Virgilia was making moan to her aunt.
She sat down on Eudoxia's bed with a desperate flounce. "They don't want it! What, in heaven's name, do they want?" she asked angrily. "I think it is time for you, aunt, to make yourself felt. You are as much interested in the bank as any of them, and as much entitled to speak. Go down there as a stock-holder and find out what they are trying to do."
"I will if you wish," said her aunt. "In the meantime, why don't you go round and talk to Mr. Gibbons? He's an agreeable enough man, and the only one of the lot that knows anything about such things. Learn from him, if you can, what the trouble is."
Virgilia found Roscoe Orlando Gibbons in the midst of his plats and charts—he was pushing a new subdivision to the northward; but he gallantly dropped his work at the entrance of a lady.
Virgilia asked for his support; she appealed to him both as a man of business who should be willing to carry on things in a business way, and as a cultivated amateur whose influence should not fail in supporting a fine scheme contrived by reputable artists.
"Ah—um, yes," replied Roscoe Orlando vaguely. "The town is developing a number of strong talents—really, we are pushing ahead wonderfully. I—ah, in fact, I may say," he went on, with some little grandiloquence, "that I have just been the means of bringing such a talent to light myself—an absolute discovery, and one of no little importance."
"Indeed?" said Virgilia coldly.
"Yes; a young Pole—a young Bohemian—a young I-don't-know-what." Roscoe Orlando waved his fingers with a vague, easy carelessness. "His name is Prochnow. Very, very gifted. I found him living out on the West Side—incredible distance—impossible neighbourhood—starving in the midst of masterpieces," pursued Roscoe Orlando complacently. "I bought a few."
"Prochnow!" thought Virgilia angrily; "that fellow who painted Preciosa McNulty's portrait!" He had doubtless won over old Jeremiah by that stroke, and now he was running off with Roscoe Orlando Gibbons. It was little less than a landslide; she and her aunt must stop it.
"One of his pictures is in my own drawing-room," said Gibbons. "The other I have presented to our club. Such colour!" he cried, rolling his eyes. "Such composition!" he added, running his fat fingers through his whiskers. "A talent of the first order; more—an out-and-out genius!" he concluded.
Yes, it was Roscoe Orlando who had purchased Prochnow's pictures and thus enabled him to take quarters in the Burrow. They were large unwieldy things, painted in the latter days of his Viennese apprenticeship, and they had cost him cruelly for freight and storage; but he had always clung to the belief that he could sell them sometime, to somebody: at least, they would serve to show what he could do. Or rather, what he had once done and been satisfied to do. He should hardly care to do such things now; he was not ashamed of them—he had merely left them a little behind.
"Oh, Ig, Ig, Ig!" Little O'Grady had cried upon learning of all this, "why won't you be fair and above-board? Why will you be so secretive, so self-sufficient? Why didn't you tell me it was Roscoe Orlando Gibbons who had bought those pictures?"
"Why, what difference does it make?" asked the other, in wonder.
"It makes all the difference in the world—to anybody who knows this town and its people. Has nobody ever told you that Roscoe Orlando Gibbons was one of the directors of the Grindstone?"
"No."
"Well, he is, and you've got him on your side. Did you say he had given one of 'em to some club?"
"Yes. Why?"
"What club?"
"The——. Is there such a club as the Michigan?"
"Yes. And old Oliver Dowd is the president of it. Now you can gethimtoo."
"Him?"
"Yes; he's another of the directors. Oh, Ignace, you poor lost lamb, why haven't you told your Terence all these things before?"
As a fact, Roscoe Orlando's gift to the club (it had not cost him any great sum) had been accepted with empressement and given a good place in the general lounge. The younger members welcomed it gladly. It presented an odalisque, very small in the waist and with a wealth of tawny hair black in the shadows; the foreground was a matter of fountain basins and barbaric rugs; infants with prominent foreheads waved palm-branches in the corners; and one or two muscular bronzed slaves loomed up in the dim background. Dill, who had some acquaintance among the members of the club and was now and then asked in to lunch, was promptly brought up to look at it. To him it had a public, official aspect, not amiss in that place—surely the lady offered herself most admirably to the general male gaze. The thing was done knowingly, and with a certainbrio, he acknowledged; but it seemed rather exotic and already slightly out of date. He saw Roscoe Orlando Gibbons openly gloating over its floridity, and bringing up other members, old and young, to gloat with him; but he thought it more than doubtful whether its dripping lusciousness would prove grateful to the dry mind and sapless person of Oliver Dowd. And he was glad to notice that Abner Joyce, who had lately joined (in the hope that the club's well-known interest in public affairs would offer him some opportunity to work for civic and national betterment), turned away from Gibbons's ill-judged offering with disdain and disgust.
"The fellow has training and facility," said Daffingdon; "but a great monumental scheme conceived in such a spirit as that——No, we have nothing to fear from him."
But there was much to fear from the complacency of Roscoe Orlando Gibbons. Could he, as he asked Virgilia with a maddening, self-satisfied smile, withdraw his support from a talent that he had introduced into his own house and indorsed in the eyes of the commercial and professional public? Virgilia saw that what she had to contend against was vanity, and she went away in very low spirits. If Prochnow had but come to Roscoe Orlando's notice through the ordinary channels! If his patron were not glowing, palpitating, expanding with the conscious joy of discovery! But crude ore brought to light by our own pick and shovel is more precious to us than refined gold that enters into circulation through the assayer and the mint.
"Ugh!" said Virgilia to her aunt; "you should have heard him. He simply—blatted. It was disgusting. And now, what are we going to do?"
"We must get at the girl herself," declared Eudoxia,—"that is, if it isn't too late, if she isn't utterly infatuated with him."
"I don't think I've heard as much asthatsaid," replied Virgilia. She knew of but one young woman who might justly go to such a length. "What shall you do first? Shall you ask her to pour tea?"
"No need, yet, of going as far as that. Can't you get together a little party and give her a sort of lunch out at the Whip and Spur? Then one of us, I suppose, might call on her mother—if she's got one."
"Whatever you suggest," said Virgilia, with a suppressed sob. "You may think I'm a perpetual fount of ideas, but I'm not." The Grindstone's rejection of her second scheme had hurt her cruelly. She put her handkerchief to her eyes—as if she had become, instead, a fount of tears.
And as such she next appeared to Dill. "I felt so sure, dear Daff, that we could put it through," she mourned. "And now—and now——"
Daffingdon drew her discouraged head down against his shoulder, in his most noble and manful mode. "Let the lions take us, if they will," he seemed to say, casting his eyes around the arena.
Little O'Grady came over, bearing a martyr's palm. The universal sadness was reflected in his face. Little Frankie Adams was to go along wearing his old shoes, and Kitty Gowan, who had been figuring on a belated winter suit, had tearfully thrown a handful of samples in the fire and put the fond notion aside.
Little O'Grady wiped a sympathetic eye. "Oh, Daff, I'm so sorry for you; just at the time, too, when——" He dared not proceed, awed by Dill's protesting pathos. "Come, now," he ventured presently, "why shouldn't we let Ignace in on this? He's so inventive; he's so full of ideas——"
Daffingdon recalled the sensuous Oriental masterpiece at the club and saw no reason why the possessor of such a particular talent could be expected to succeed in a bank. He shook his head; no member of another sect—no heretical Viennese—should share his martyrdom with him. This left Prochnow free to rush upon the lions on his own account. Little O'Grady, returning to the Rabbit-Hutch, found his neighbour's loins fully girded for the task—the fine frenzy of inspiration had already turned the place upside down.
"That's right, Ignace!" he called from the threshold; "sail in. What is the plan this time?" he asked, tiptoeing along over the scattered sheets that littered the floor.
Prochnow ran his nervous fingers through his wild black forelock, and cast on Little O'Grady a piercing, inspirational glance from a pair of glittering eyes.
"The two great modern forces," he pronounced, "are Science and Democracy. I shall show how each has contributed to the progress of society. Science shall have the six lunettes on the right and Democracy the six on the left."
"H'm," said Little O'Grady; "an allegory?"
"Precisely. No better basis for a grand monumental work."
"Well, Ignace," declared Little O'Grady, "you'll put it through if anybody can!"
He hurried back to his own room, shrugged himself into his plaster-flecked blouse of robin's-egg blue, threw "The First Issue of Wild-Cat Currency" (a group of frontier financiers in chokers and high beaver hats) back into the clay-box, and began at once on a bold relief of "Science and Democracy Opening the Way for the Car of Progress."
"Science," he explained to Prochnow, next day, "will be clearing the air of the bats of ignorance, and Democracy will be clearing the ground of the imps of aristocracy—or maybe they'll be demons. And between the two, right in the middle, of course, the Car of Progress will advance in very low relief. I haven't quite got it all where it will pull together yet, and I can see the foreshortening of the horses will be something terrible; but I'm pretty sure I shall find some way out within a week or so. Let me tell you one thing, though, about your own job, Ignace. Your allegory will go down easier if——Say, you wouldn't take Hill's hints, would you?"
"No," said Prochnow, with the loftiest contempt.
"It will go down easier, I say, if you'll just work in some portraits of our Nine Worthies. Ghirlandajo did that racket, for instance; so did Holbein. So did plenty of others. Wouldn't Andrew P. Hill's chin-beard come in great on Fortitude? And if you've got any gratitude in your composition, Roscoe Orlando ought to go in as Prosperity. Give him two cornucopias, instead of one, to balance those side-whiskers——"
"Hush!" called Prochnow reprovingly. He never jested about his patrons and he never made facetious observations about art.
"Well, don't get mad," said Little O'Grady, slightly abashed. "I'm doing just that thing with Simon Rosenberg; he's going to be my archdemon of aristocracy."
Prochnow remained smilelessly severe; and Little O'Grady, after one or two more feeble efforts to save his "face," slunk away—vastly impressed, as he never failed to be when he met the rare person that could put him down.
"What makes Ignace so grouchy to-day, I wonder?" he muttered, as he returned to the Car of Progress.
Prochnow soon forgot this interruption and jumped back into his work with redoubled vigour. He took a serious view of himself, of his art, of things in general; above all, he took a serious view of his immediate future and of the place that Preciosa McNulty might come to have in it. Little O'Grady, an easygoing bachelor, everybody's friend, and too much the champion of the whole gentler sex to set any one of its members apart from all the rest, might indulge in such jestings about his own life and his own work as he saw fit. But for himself, a man of the warmest and highest ambitions, yet with the most restricted means for realizing them, play by the roadside was quite out of the question.