Part 21

No reference from Armstrong to the fact that Atwater had planned to destroy him as soon as he had used him to get the O.A.D.; no reference from Atwater, beyond this smiling and friendly hint, to the fact that Armstrong had allied himself with Atwater ostensibly to destroy Fosdick, and had shifted just in time to outgeneral his ally. Atwater was a fine, strong-looking man of sixty and odd years, with the kindest eyes in the world, and the wickedest jaw--in repose. When he smiled, his whole face was like his eyes. He had a peculiarly agreeable voice, and so much magnetism that his enemies liked him when with him. He was a man of audacious financial dreams, which he carried out with dazzling boldness--at least, carried out to the point where he himself could "get from under" with a huge profit and could shift the responsibility of collapse to others. He was a born pirate, the best-natured of pirates, the most chivalrous and generous. He was of a type that has recurred in the world each time the diffusion of intelligence and of liberty has released the energy of man and given it a chance to play freely. Such men were the distinction of Athens in the heyday of its democracy; of Rome in the period between the austere and cruel republic of the patricians and the ferocious tyranny of Caesardom; of Bagdad and Cordova after the Moslems became liberalized and before they became degenerate; of Italy in the period of the renaissance; of France after the Revolution and before Friedland infatuated Napoleon into megalomania.

During the lunch the two men talked racing and automobile and pictures--Atwater had a good eye for line and color. They would have gone on to talk music, had there been time--for Atwater loved music and sang well and played the violin amazingly, though he practiced only about two hours a day, and that not every day. But they did not get round to music; the coffee and cigars were brought, and the waiters withdrew.

"What is your committee going to do, when it gets together, day after to-morrow?" said Atwater, the instant the door closed on the head waiter.

"You'll have to see Morris, to find out that," replied Armstrong.

Atwater smiled and waved his hand. "Bother!" he retorted. "What's your programme?"

"Morris is the man to see," repeated Armstrong. "I wouldn't give up his secrets, if I knew them."

"Our man up at Buffalo wires," continued Atwater, "that you have got Kenworthy out of bed and completely cured. So, you are going on. And I know you are not the man to wait in the trenches. Now, it happens that Langdon and I have several matters on at this time--as much as we can conveniently look after. Besides, what's to be gained by tearing up the public again, just when it was settling down to confidence? I like a fight as well as any man; but I don't believe in fighting for mere fighting's sake, when there are so many chances for a scrimmage with something to be gained. It ain't good business. The first thing we know, the public is going to have some things impressed on it so deeply that even its rotten bad memory will hold the stamp."

"I agree with you," said Armstrong. "I love peace, myself. But I don't believe in laying down arms while the other fellow is armed to the teeth, and hiding in the bushes before my very door."

"That means me, eh?" inquired Atwater cheerfully.

"That means you," said Armstrong. "And it isn't of any use for you to call out from the bushes that you've gone away and are back at your plowing."

"But I haven't gone away," replied Atwater; "I'm still in the bushes. However, I'm willing to go.

"On what condition?"

"Give us the two first vice-presidents of the O.A.D. and the chairmanship of the Finance Committee."

That meant practical control. Armstrong knew that his worst anticipations were none too gloomy. "And if we don't?" said he.

"Our people have been collecting inside facts about the O.A.D., about its management ever since you came on to take old Shotwell's place--poor old Shotwell! If we are not put in a position where we can bring about reforms in your management and a better state of affairs, we'll have to take the only other alternative. We have the arrangements made to fire a broadside from four newspapers to-morrow morning. And we've got it so fixed that any return fire you might make would get into the columns of only two newspapers--and one of them would discredit you editorially. Also, we will at the same time expose your committee." Atwater set out this programme with the frankness of a large man of large affairs to one of his own class, one with whom evasions, concealments, and circumlocutions would be waste of time.

Armstrong smiled slightly. "Then it's war?" he said.

"If you insist."

"You know we've got the governor and the attorney-general?"

"But we've got the press, practically all respectability, and a better chance with the Grand Jury and the judges."

Armstrong gazed reflectively into space. "A good fight!" he said judicially. "If I were a very rich man I should hesitate to precipitate it. But, having nothing but my salary--and a _good, clean, personal_ record--I think I'll enjoy myself. I'll not try to steal the credit of making the fight, Mr. Atwater. I'll see that you get all the glory that comes from kicking the cover off hell."

"Speaking of your personal record," said Atwater absently. "Let me see, you were in the A. & P. bond syndicate, in the little steel syndicate last spring, in two stock syndicates a couple of months ago. Your profits were altogether $72,356--I forget the odd cents. And they tell me you've sworn to three reports that won't stand examination."

Armstrong lifted his eyebrows, drew at his cigar awhile. "I see you've been looking me up," he said, unruffled apparently. "Of course," he went on, "I shouldn't expect to escape an occasional shot. But they'd hardly be noted in the general fusillade. The Universal has been a mere shell ever since you used it, in that traction reorganization which failed--I've got a safe full of facts about it. And Morris tells me he can have mobs trying to hang Trafford and his board of directors for their doings in the Home Defender."

Atwater smiled grimly. "I'm sorry to say, Armstrong, we'd concentrate on you. Several of the strong men look on you as a dangerous person. They don't like new faces down in this part of the town, unless they wear a more deferential expression than yours does. Personally, I'd miss you. You're the kind of man I like as friend or as foe. But I couldn't let my personal feelings influence me or oppose the advice of the leading men of finance."

"Naturally not," assented Armstrong.

"I've got to be off now," continued Atwater, rising.

"So have I," said Armstrong.

They went to the street door of the building, Atwater holding Armstrong by the arm. There, Armstrong put out his hand. "Good-by, Mr. Atwater," he said; "I'll meet you at Philippi."

"Think it over, young man, think it over," said Atwater, a friendly, sad expression in his handsome, kind eyes. "I don't want to see you come a nasty cropper--one that'll make you crawl about with a broken back the rest of your life. Put off your ambitions--or, better still, come in with us. We'll do more for you than you can do for yourself."

"Thank you," replied Armstrong ironically.

"Consult with your people. The governor has almost weakened, and I'm sure Morris will fall in line with whatever you do."

"You've got my answer," said Armstrong, unruffled in his easy good nature. "And I'll tell you, Mr. Atwater, that if you do take the cover off hell, I'll see that it isn't put on again until you've had a look-in, at least."

"You know the situation too well to imagine you can win," urged Atwater. "You must be thinking I'm bluffing."

"Frankly, I don't know," replied Armstrong. "As you will lose so much and I so little, I rather believe you are."

"Put that idea out of your mind," said Atwater; and now his face, especially his eyes, gave Armstrong a look full into the true man, the reckless and relentless tyrant, with whom tyranny was an instinct stronger than reason.

"I have," was Armstrong's quiet answer.

"Then--you agree?"

Armstrong shook his head, without taking his eyes off Atwater's.

Atwater shrugged his shoulders.

"Fallen women have been known to reform," said Armstrong. "But there's no recorded case of a fallen man's reforming. I find nothing to attract me, Atwater, in the lot of the most splendid of these male Messalinas you and your kind maintain in such luxury as officials, public and private. I belong to myself--and I shall continue to belong to myself."

Atwater's smile was cynical; but there was the cordiality of respect in the hand clasp he abruptly forced on Armstrong, as he parted from him.

*XXIII*

*"THE WOMAN BORIS LOVED"*

At last Neva had made a portrait she could look at without becoming depressed. For the free workman there is always the joy of the work itself--the mingling of the pain which is happiness and the happiness which is pain, that resembles nothing so much as what a woman experiences in becoming a mother. But, with the mother, birth is a climax; with the artist, an anti-climax. The mother always sees that her creation is good; her critical faculty is the docile echo of her love. With the artist, the critical faculty must be never so mercilessly just as when he is judging the offspring of his own soul; he looks upon the finished work, only to see its imperfections; how woefully it falls short of what he strove and hoped. The joy of life is the joy of work--the prize withers in its winner's hand.

After her first year under Raphael, Neva's portraits had been successful--more successful, perhaps, than they would have been if she had had to succeed in order to live. She suspected that her work was overpraised; Raphael said not, and thought not, and his critical faculty was so just that neither vanity nor love could trick it. But when she finished the portrait of Narcisse--Narcisse at her drawing table, her face illumined from within--her eyes full of dreams, one capable yet womanly hand against her smooth, round cheek, the background a hazed, mysterious mirage of fairylike structures--when this portrait was done, Neva looked on it and knew that it was good. "It might be better," said she. "It is far, far from best--even _my_ best, I hope. But it is good."

She did not let her master see it until she had made the last stroke. Theretofore he had always said some word of encouragement the moment he looked at any of her work submitted to him. Now, he stood silent, his eyes searching for flaws, instead of for merits. There was no mistaking the meaning of that criticism; Neva thrilled until she trembled. It was the happiest moment of her life.

"I guess you've hit it, this time," he said at length. "Worse work than that has lived--on its merits."

"I'm afraid I'll never be able to do it again," she sighed. "It seems to me an accident."

"And so it was," replied he. "So is all inspired work. Yes, it's an accident--but that kind of accidents happen again and again to those who keep good and ready for good luck." He turned and, almost forgetting the woman in the artist, put his hand affectionately, admiringly, on her shoulder. "And you--my dear--you have worked well."

"Not so well as I shall hereafter," replied she. "I've been discouraged. This will put heart into me."

He smiled with melancholy. "Yes--you'll work better. But not because you're less discouraged. This picture gives you pleasure now. Six months hence it will be a source of pain every time you think of it. There's a picture I did about twelve years ago that has stretched me on the rack a thousand times. I never think of it without a twinge. Why? Because I feel I've never equaled it since. They say I have--say it's far inferior to my later work. But I know--and it galls."

The bell rang and presently Molly appeared with Raphael's man-of-all-work carrying a large canvas, covered. "Ah--here it is!" cried Boris, and when the two servants were gone, he said to Neva: "Now, shut your eyes, and don't open them till I tell you."

A few seconds, then he cried laughingly, "Behold!" She looked; it was a full-length portrait of herself. She was entering a room, was holding aside a dark purple curtain that was in daring, exquisite contrast with her soft, clinging, silver-white dress, and the whiteness of her slender, long, bare arms. The darkness in which her figure, long and slim and slight, was framed, the flooding light upon it as if from it, the exceeding beauty of her slender face, of her dreaming, dazzled eyes, all combining to suggest a soul, newly awakened from a long, long sleep, and entering life, full equipped for all that life has for a mind that can think and a heart that can love and laugh and weep-- It was Neva at her best, Boris at his best.

He looked from the portrait to her, and back again. "Not right," he muttered discontentedly. "not yet. However, I'll touch it up here." Then to her, "I want a few sittings, if you'll take the trouble to get out that dress."

She was gazing at his work with awe; it did not seem to her to be herself. "It is finished, now," said she to him.

"It will never be finished," he replied. "I shall keep it by me and work at it from time to time." He stood off and looked at it lovingly. "You're mine, there," he went on. "All mine, young woman." And he took one of her long brushes and scrawled "Boris" across the lower left corner of the canvas. "It shall be my bid for immortality for us both. When you've ceased to belong to yourself or anyone, when you shall have passed away and are lost forever in the abyss of forgotten centuries, Boris's Neva will still be Boris's. And men and women of races we never dreamed of will stand before her and say, 'She--oh, I forget her name, but she's the woman Boris loved.'"

A note in his mock-serious tone, a gleam in his smiling gaze made the tears well into her eyes; and he saw them, and the omen put him in a glow. In his own light tone, she corrected, "_A_ woman Boris _fancied_."

"_The_ woman Boris _loved_," he repeated. "The woman he was never separated from, the woman he never let out of his sight. There are two of you, now. And I have the immortal one. What do _you_ think of it?"

"There's nothing left for the mortal one but to get and to stay out of sight. No one that once saw your Neva would take much interest in mine."

"It's a portrait that's a likeness," said he. "With you, the outside happens to be an adequate reflection of the inside." And he smiled at her simplicity, which he knew was as unaffected as it always is with those who think little about themselves, much about their surroundings.

"I wish I could see it," she said wistfully.

"You can see it in the face of any man who happens to be looking at you."

But she had turned to her portrait of Narcisse and was eying it disdainfully. "I must hide that," she went on, "as long as yours is in this room. How clumsy my work looks--how painstaking and 'talented.'" She wheeled it behind a curtain.

"None of that! None of that!" he protested severely. "Never depreciate your own work to yourself. You can't be like me, nor I like you. Each flower its own perfume, each bird its own song. You are a painter born; so am I. No one can be more."

"I know, I know," she apologized. "I'm not as foolishly self-effacing as when you first took me in hand, am I?"

"You make a braver front," replied he, "but sometimes I suspect it's only a front. Will you give me a sitting this afternoon?"

"I'll change to that dress, and tell Molly not to let anyone in."

She had been gone about ten minutes when the bell rang again. Boris continued to busy himself with paints and brushes until he caught Armstrong's voice. He frowned, paused in his preparations, and listened.

"Is Miss Genevieve at home?" Armstrong was saying.

To Boris's astonishment, he heard the old woman answer, in a tone which did not conceal her dislike for the man she was addressing, "Yes, sir. Go into the studio. She will be in shortly."

Armstrong entered, to find himself facing Raphael's most irritating expression--an amused disdain, the more penetrating for a polite pretense of concealment. "Come in, Mr. Armstrong," cried he. "But you mustn't stay long, as we're at work."

"How d'ye do," said Armstrong, all but ignoring him. "Sorry to annoy you. But don't mind me. Go right on." And he began to wander about the room--Raphael had thrown a drape over his picture of Neva. The minutes dragged; the silence was oppressive. Finally Armstrong said, "Miss Carlin must be dressing."

"Beg pardon?" asked Boris, as if he had not heard.

"Nothing," replied Armstrong. "Perhaps I was thinking aloud."

Silence again, until Raphael, in the hope of inducing this untimely visitor to depart, said, "Miss Carlin is getting ready for a sitting."

"You are painting her portrait?"

"Yes."

"That will be interesting. I'd like to see how it's done. I'll sit by quite quietly. You won't mind me."

"I'm afraid you'll have to go," replied the painter. "I'd not be disturbed, but a spectator has a disastrous effect on the sitter."

"I see," said Armstrong. "Well, I'll wait until she comes. Are you just beginning?"

"No," replied Raphael curtly.

"Is that the portrait?" asked Armstrong, indicating the covered canvas.

Boris hesitated, suddenly flung off the cover.

"Ah!" exclaimed Armstrong, under his breath, drawing back a step.

He gazed with an expression that interested Boris the lover even more than Boris the student and painter of human nature. Since the talk with Atwater, Armstrong had been casting this way and that, night and day, for some means, any means, to escape from the sentence the grandee of finance had fixed upon him; for he had not even considered the alternative--to strike his flag in surrender. But escape he could not contrive, and it had pressed in upon him that he must go down, down to the bottom. He might drag many with him, perhaps Atwater himself; but, in the depths, under the whole mass of wreckage would be himself--dead beyond resurrection. At thirty a man's reputation can be shot all to pieces, and heal, with hardly a scar; but not at forty. Still young, with less than half his strength of manhood run, he would be of the living that are dead. And he had come to see Neva for the last time, after fighting in vain against the folly of the longing--of yielding to the longing, when yielding could mean only pain, more pain.

And now that he had weakly yielded, here was this creation of the genius who loved her, to put him quite down. He was like one waking to the sanity of reality from a dream in which he has figured as all that he is not but longs to be. "Even if there had been no one else seeking her," he said to himself, "what hope was there for me? And with this man loving her-- Whether she loves him as yet or not, she will, she must, sooner or later." Beside the power to evoke such enchantment as that which lived and breathed before him, his own skill at cheating and lying in order to shift the position of sundry bags of tawny dirt seemed to him so mean and squalid that he felt as if he were shrinking in stature and Raphael were towering. At last, he was learning the lesson of humility--the lesson that is the beginning of character.

"I'll not wait," said he, in a voice that smote the heart of Boris, the fellow being sensitive to feeling's faintest, finest note. "Say, please, that I had to go."

Raphael astonished himself by having an impulse of compassion. But he checked it. "He'd better go," he said to himself. "Seeing her would only increase his misery." And he silently watched Armstrong move heavily toward the door into the hall. The big Westerner's hand was on the portiere and his sad gray eyes were taking a last look at the picture. The faint rustle of her approach made him hesitate. Before he could go, she entered. She was not in the silver-white evening dress Raphael expected, but in the house dress she was wearing when he came.

"I'm just going," Armstrong explained. "I shan't interrupt your sitting."

"Oh, that's off for to-day," replied she. "Now that I've had the trouble of changing twice on your account, you'll have to stop awhile. Morning is better for a sitting, anyhow. We shouldn't have had more than half an hour of good light."

Boris was tranquilly acquiescent. "To-morrow morning!" he said, with not a trace of irritation.

"If you can come at noon."

"Very well."

He covered the picture, which had been quite forgotten by all three in the stress of the meeting of living personalities. He had a queer ironic smile as he pushed it back against the wall, took up his hat and coat.

"You're not going," she objected.

His face shadowed at her tone, which seemed to him to betray a feeling the opposite of objection. "Yes," said he--"since I can't do this, I must do something else. I haven't the time to idle about."

She colored at this subtle reflection upon her own devotion to work. All she said was, "At noon to-morrow, then. And I'll be dressed and ready."

When he heard the outer door close Armstrong said, "I understand now why you like him." He was looking at the draped easel with eyes that expressed all he was thinking about Neva, and about Neva and Boris.

"You liked the picture?" she asked.

"Yes," he replied. And there he stopped; his expression made her glance away and color faintly.

"What's the trouble?" she inquired with friendly satire. "Have you lost a few dollars?"

He lowered his head. "Don't," he said humbly. "Please--not to-day."

As he sat staring at the floor and looking somewhat shorn, yet a shorn Samson, she watched him, her expression like a veil not thick enough to hide the fact that there is emotion behind it, yet not thin enough to reveal what, or even what kind of, emotion. Presently she went toward the curtain behind which she had put her portrait of Narcisse. "I don't think I've ever shown you any of my work, have I?" said she.

"No, but I've seen--almost everything."

"Why, you never spoke of it."

"No," he said. Then he added, "I've always hated your work--not because it was bad, but because it was good."

She dropped her hand from the curtain she had been about to draw aside.

"Let me see it," said he. "All that doesn't matter, now."

She brought out the portrait. He looked in silence--he had hid himself behind that impenetrable stolidity which made him seem not only emotionless but incapable of emotion. When he took his gaze from the picture, it was to stare into vacancy. She watched him with eyes shining softly and sadly. As he became vaguely conscious of the light upon the dark path and stirred, she said with irresistible gentleness, "What is it, Horace?"

"Blues--only the blues," replied he, rousing himself and rising heavily from his chair. "I must go. I'll end by making you as uncomfortable as I am myself. In the mood I'm in to-day, a man should hide in his bed and let no one come near him."

"Sit down--please," said she, touching his arm in a gesture of appeal. She smiled with a trace of her old raillery. "You are more nearly human than I've ever seen you."

He yielded to the extent of seating himself tentatively on the arm of a chair. "Human? Yes--that's it. I've sunk down to where I think I'd almost be grateful even for pity." The spell of good luck, of prosperity without reverse, that had held him a mere incarnate ambition, was broken, was dissolving.

She seated herself opposite, leaned toward him. "Horace," she said, "can I help you?" And so soothing was her tone that her offer could not have smarted upon the wound even of a proud man less humbled than he.