Part 5

“Count Hatzfeldt! Count Hatzfeldt! Hurry up and hide Alice’s picture. Mrs. Wheatley is coming to poke a hole in it.”

Just as we were speaking, there came an impatient rap upon the door and the Count shoved his arms into the sleeves of his old velvet smoking-jacket, and himself flung the door open. Before Mrs. Wheatley, who was out of breath, could say a word, he exclaimed:

“How do you do it, madame? Heavens, it is vonderful, vonderful! How do you do it? Please have the goodness to tell me how you do it?”

“Do what?” she demanded, surprised and taken aback by the Count’s evident admiration and cordiality.

“Why, madame, I thought you were your daughter. You look so young, so sweet, so fresh! Ah, madame, how I should love to paint you as the Spring! It is a treat for a poor artist to see so much freshness and peauty. Gott in Himmel! How do you do it?”

An astounding change had swept all over Mrs. Wheatley. She was simpering like a girl, and her eyes were flashing the most coquettish glances at the Count.

“Now, Count, you flatter me,” she said, “but really I never do anything to make myself look younger. I simply take care of myself and lead a simple life. That is my only secret.”

“Impossible,” said the Count unbelievingly, and then his glance fell down to her feet and he exclaimed excitedly:

“What I have been looking for so many years! It is impossible to find a model with the perfect feets. Madame, you are vonderful!”

Her face was wreathed with smiles, and she stuck out her foot, the instep coyly arched, as she said:

“Yes, it’s true my feet are shapely and small. I only take threes, though I could easily wear twos or twos and a half.” Then with a very gracious bend of her head and a smile she added winningly: “I believe it might be perfectly proper to allow you to use my foot as a model, especially as Marion is here.” She beamed on me sweetly.

I removed her shoe and stocking, and the Count carefully covered over a stool with a soft piece of velvet, upon which he set her precious foot. Enthusiastically he went to work drawing that foot. She playfully demanded that he must never tell anyone that her foot was the model for the sketch, though all the time I knew she wanted him to do just that.

When he was through and we had all loudly exclaimed over the beauty of the drawing, she said:

“And now, Count Hatzfeldt, may I see the copy of my daughter’s picture?”

The Count had covered it over before opening the door.

“Certainly, madame.”

He drew the cover from the painting.

“Here it is. Miss Alice did sit for the face. The lower part--it was posed by a professional model. It is the custom, madame.”

“As I see,” said Mrs. Wheatley, examining the

picture through her lorgnon. “Those professional models have no shame, have they, Count?”

“None, none whatever, madame,” sighed the Count, shaking his head expressively.

XVI

I had received, of course, a great many letters from Reggie, and I wrote to him every day. He expected to return in the fall, and he wrote that he was counting the days. He said very little in his letters about his people, though he must have known I was anxiously awaiting word as to how they had taken the news of our engagement.

Toward the end of summer, his letters came less frequently, and, to my great misery, two weeks passed away when I had not word from him at all. I was feeling blue and heartsick and, but for my work at the Château, I think I would have done something desperate. I was really tremendously in love with Reggie and I worried and fretted over his long absence and silence.

Then one day, in late September, a messenger boy came with a letter for me. It was from Reggie. He had returned from his trip, and was back in Montreal. Instead of being happy to receive his letter, I was filled with resentment and indignation. He should have come himself and, in spite of what he wrote, I felt I could not excuse him. This was his letter:

“DARLING GIRLIE:

I am counting the hours when I will be with you. I tried to get up to see you last night, but it was impossible. Lord Eaton’s son, young Albert, was on the steamer coming over, and they are friends of the governor’s and I simply had to be with them. You see, darling, it means a good deal to me in the future, to be in touch with these people. His brother-in-law, whom I met last night, is head cockalorum in the House of Parliament, and as I have often told you, my ambition is to get into politics. It’s the surest road to fame for a Barrister.

Now I hope my foolish little girl will understand and believe me when I say that I am thinking for you as much as for myself.

I am hungry for a kiss, and I feel I cannot wait till tonight.

Your own,

REGGIE.”

For the first time in my life I experienced the pangs of jealousy and yet I was jealous of something tangible. It was lurking in my thought, and all sorts of suspicions and fears came into my hot head.

When Reggie came that evening I did not open the door as usual. I heard him say eagerly, when the children let him in:

“Where’s Marion?”

I was peeping over the banister, and I deliberately went back into the bedroom and counted five hundred before I went down to see him.

He was walking excitedly up and down and as I came in he sprang to meet me, his arms outstretched; but I drew back coldly. Oh, how bitter I felt, and vindictive, too!

“How do you do, Mr. Bertie,” I said.

“Mr. Bertie! Marion, what does this mean?”

He stared at me incredulously, and then I saw a look of amazement and suspicion come into his face, which had grown suddenly red as with rage.

“Good God!” he cried. “Do you mean you don’t care for me any more? Then you must be in love with someone else.”

“Reggie,” I sneered, “don’t try to cover up your own falseness by accusing me. You pretend to love me, and yet after all these months when you get back, you do not come to _me_, but go to see other women (I was guessing) and men.”

I ended with a sob of rage, for I could see in Reggie’s face that my surmises were correct. He, however, exclaimed:

“Oh, that’s it, is it?” And before I could move, he had seized me impulsively in his arms and was kissing me again and again. I never _could_ resist Reggie once he got his arms about me. I always became just as weak as a kitten and I think I would have believed anything he told me then. I just melted to him, as it were. He knew it well, the power of his strong arms about me, and whenever he wanted his way about anything with me he would pick me right up and hold me till I gave in. After a moment, with me still in his arms, he said:

“It’s true I was with men and women, but that was not my fault. There’s such a thing as duty. I had no pleasure in their society. I was longing for you all the time, but I had to stay with them because they are influential people, and I want to use them to help me--us, Marion.”

“Who were those women?” I demanded.

“Only some friends of my family’s. They had a box at the theatre, and there was young Eaton, of course, and his sister and a cousin. They bored me to death, give you my word they did, darling. Come, come now, be good to your tired old Reggie.”

I was glad to make up with him and, oh! infinitely happy to have him back. The great oceans of water that had been between us seemed to have melted away. Nevertheless, he had planted a feeling in me that I could not entirely rid myself of, a feeling of distrust. Like a weed, it was to grow in my heart to terrible proportions.

XVII

The days that followed were happy ones for me. Reggie was with me constantly, and I even got off several afternoons from the studio and spent the time with him.

One day we made a little trip up the St. Lawrence, Reggie rowing all the way from the wharf at Montreal to Boucherville. We started at noon and arrived at six. There we tied up our boat and went to look for a place for dinner. We found a little French hotel and Reggie said to the proprietor:

“We want as good a dinner as you can give us. We’ve rowed all the way from Montreal and are famished.”

“Bien! You sall have ze turkey which is nearly cook,” said the hotel keeper. “M’sieu he row so far. It is too much. Only Beeg John, ze Indian, row so far. He go anny deestance. Also he go in his canoe down those Rapids of Lachine. Vous connais dat man--Beeg John?”

Yes, we knew about him. Every one in Montreal did.

We waited on the porch while he prepared our dinner. The last rays of the setting sun were dropping down in the wood, and away in the distance the reflections upon the St. Lawrence were turning into dim purple the brilliant orange of a little while ago. Never have I seen a more beautiful sunset than that over our own St. Lawrence. I said wistfully:

“Reggie, the sunset makes me think of this poem:

“The sunset gates were opened wide, Far off in the crimson west, As through them passed the weary day In rugged clouds to rest.”

Before I could finish the last line, Reggie bent over and kissed me right on the mouth.

“Funny little girl,” he said. “Suppose instead of quoting poetry you speak to me, and instead of looking at sunsets, you look at me.”

“Reggie, don’t you like poetry then?”

“It’s all right enough, I suppose, but I’d rather have straight English words. What’s the sense of muddling one’s language? Silly, I call it,” he said.

I felt disappointed. Our family had always loved poetry. Mama used to read Tennyson’s “Idyls of the King,” and we knew all of the characters, and even played them as children. Moreover, papa and Ada and Charles and even Nora could all write poetry. Ada made up poems about every little incident in our lives. When papa went to England, mama would make us little children all kneel down in a row and repeat a prayer to God that she had made up to send him back soon. Ada wrote a lovely poem about God hearing us. She also wrote a poem about our Panama hen who died. She said the wicked cock hen, a hen we had that could crow like a cock, had killed her. How we laughed over that poem. I was sorry Reggie thought it was nonsense, and I wished he would not laugh or sneer at all the things we did and liked.

“Dinner is ready pour m’sieu et madame!”

Gracious! That man thought I was Reggie’s wife. I colored to my ears, and I was glad Reggie did not understand French.

He had set the table for two and there was a big sixteen pound turkey on it, smelling so good and looking brown and delicious. I am sure our Canadian turkeys are better than any I have ever tasted anywhere else. They certainly are not “cold-storage birds.”

They charged Reggie for that whole sixteen-pound turkey. He thought it a great joke, but I wanted to take the rest home. The tide being against us, we left the rowboat at the hotel with instructions to return it, and we took the train back to Montreal.

Coming home on the train, the conductor proved to be a young man who had gone to school with me and he came up with his hand held out:

“Hallo, Marion!”

“Hallo, Jacques.”

I turned to Reggie to introduce him, but Reggie was staring out of the window and his chin stuck out as if it were in a bad temper. When Jacques had passed along, I said crossly to Reggie:

“You needn’t be so rude to my friends, Reggie Bertie.”

“Friends!” he sneered. “My word, Marion, you seem to have a passion for low company.”

I said:

“Jacques is a nice, honest fellow.”

“No doubt,” said Reggie loftily. “I’ll give him a tip next time he passes.”

“Oh, how _can_ you be so despicably mean?” I cried.

He turned around in his seat abruptly:

“What in the world has come over you, Marion! You have changed since I came back.”

I felt the injustice of this and shut my lips tight. I did not want to quarrel with Reggie, but I was burning with indignation and I was hurt through and through by his attitude.

In silence we left the train and in silence went to my home. At the door Reggie said:

“We had a pleasant day. Why do you always spoil things so? Good-night.”

I could not speak. I had done nothing and he made me feel as if I had committed a crime. The tears ran down my face and I tried to open the door. Reggie’s arms came around me from behind, and, tilting back my face, he kissed me.

“There, there, old girl,” he said, “I’ll forgive you this time, but don’t let it happen again.”

XVIII

I had finished the work for the Château de Ramezay, but the Count said I could stay on there, and that he would try to help me get outside work. He did get me quite a few orders for work of a kind he himself would not do.

One woman gave me an order to paint pink roses on a green plush piano cover. She said her room was all in green and pink. When I had finished the cover, she ordered a picture “of the same colors.” She wished me to copy a scene of meadows and sheep. So I painted the sunset pink, the meadows green and the sheep pink. She was delighted and said it was a perfect match to her carpets.

The Count nearly exploded with delight about it. My orders seemed to give him exquisite joy and he sometimes said, to see me at work compensated for much and made life worth while. He used to hover about me, rubbing his hands and chuckling to himself and muttering: “Ya, ya!”

I did a lot of decorating of boxes for a manufacturer and painted dozens of sofa pillows. Also I put “real hand-painted” roses on a woman’s ball dress, and she told me it was the envy of every one at the big dance at which she wore it.

I did not love these orders, but I made a bit of money, and I needed clothes badly. It was impossible to go around with Reggie in my thin and shabby things. Moreover, an especially cold winter had set in and I did want a new overcoat badly. I hated to have to wear my old blanket overcoat. It looked so dreadfully Canadian, and many a time I have seen Reggie look at it askance, though, to do him justice, he never made any comment about my clothes. In a poor, large family like ours, there was little enough left for clothes.

About the middle of winter, the Count began to have bad spells of melancholia. He would frighten me by saying:

“Some day ven you come in the morning, you vill find me dead. I am so plue, I vish I vas dead.”

I tried to laugh at him and cheer him up, but every morning as I came through those ghostly old halls, I would think of the Count’s words and I would be afraid to open the door.

One day, about five in the afternoon, when I was getting ready to go, the Count who was sitting near the fire all hunched up, said:

“Please stay mit me a little longer. Come sit by me a little vile. Your radiant youth vill varm me up.”

I had an engagement with Reggie and was in a hurry to get away. So I said:

“I can’t, Count. I’ve got to run along.”

He stood up suddenly and clicked his heels together.

“Miss Ascough,” he said, “I think after this, you better vork some other place. You have smiles for all the stupid Canadian poys, but you vould not give to me the leastest.”

“Why, Count,” I said, astonished, “don’t be foolish. I’m in a hurry to-night, that’s all. I’ve an engagement.”

“Very vell, Miss Ascough? Hurry you out. It is pest you come not pack again.”

“Oh, very well!” I said. “Good-bye.” I ran down the stairs, feeling much provoked with the foolish old fellow.

Poor old Count! How I wish I had been kinder and more grateful to him; but in my egotistical youth I was incapable of hearing or understanding his pathetic call for sympathy and companionship. I was flying along through life, as we do in youth. I was, indeed, as I had said, “in a hurry.”

He died a few years later in our Montreal, a stranger among strangers, who saw only in the really beauty-loving soul of the artist the grotesque and queer. I wished then that I could have been with him in the end, but I myself was in a strange land, and I was experiencing some of the same appalling loneliness that had so oppressed and crushed my old friend.

XIX

When I told Reggie I was not going to the Château any more, he was very thoughtful for some time. Then he said:

“Why don’t you take a studio up town? You can’t do anything in this God-forsaken Hochelaga.”

“Why, Reggie,” I said, “you talk as if a studio were to be had for nothing. Where can I find the money to pay the rent?”

“Look here,” said he, “I’m sure to pass my finals this spring, and I’m awfully busy. It takes a deuce of a time to get down here. Now if you had a studio of your own it would be perfectly proper for me to see you there, and then, besides, don’t you see, darling, I would have you all to myself? Here we are never alone hardly, unless I take you out.”

“I couldn’t afford to pay for such a place,” I said, sighing, for I would have loved to have a studio of my own.

“Tell you what you do,” said Reggie. “You let me pay for the room. You needn’t get an expensive place, you know--just a little studio. Then you tell your governor that you get the room free for teaching or painting for the landlady, or something like that. What do you say, darling?”

“I thought you said you despised a lie?” was my answer. “You said you would never forgive me if I deceived you or told you a lie.”

“But that was to me, darling. That’s different. It’s not lying exactly--just using a bit of diplomacy, don’t you see?”

“I’m afraid I can’t do it, Reggie. I ought to stay at home. They really need my help, now Ellen and Charles are both married, and Nellie engaged and may marry any time.”

Nellie was the girl next to me. She was engaged to a Frenchman who was urging her to marry right away.

“You see,” I went on, “there’s only Ada helping. The other girls are too young to work yet, though Nora is leaving home next week.”

“Nora! That kid! What on earth is she going to do?”

“Oh, Nora’s not so young. She’s nearly seventeen. You forget we’ve been engaged some time now, and all the children are growing up.”

I said this sulkily. Secretly I resented Reggie’s constantly putting off our marriage day.

“But what is _she_ going to do?”

“Oh, she’s going out to the West Indies. She’s got a position on some paper out there.”

“Whee!” Reggie drew a long whistle. “West Indies! I’ll be jiggered if your parents aren’t the easiest ever. Your mother is the last woman in the world to bring up a family of daughters, and I’m blessed if I ever came across any father like yours. Why, do you know when I asked him for his consent to our engagement, he never asked me a single question about myself, but began to talk about his school days in France, and how he walked when he was a boy from Boulogne to Calais. When I pushed him for an answer, he said absently, ‘Yes, yes, I suppose it’s all right, if she wants you,’ and the next moment asked me if I had read Darwin.”

Reggie laughed heartily at the memory, and then he said:

“Yet I’m fond of your governor, Marion. He is a gentleman.”

“Dear papa,” I said, “wouldn’t hurt a fly, but anybody could cheat him, and that is why I hate to deceive him.”

“Well, don’t lie to him then if you feel that way. Just say you are going to take a studio up town and I bet you anything he’ll never bother his head where you go or how you pay the rent. As for your mother, if you told her the studio was free, she would think that just the usual thing and that you were doing the landlord an honor in using it.”

Again Reggie burst out laughing, but I would not laugh with him, so he stopped and said:

“Your mother’s awfully proud of you, darling, and I don’t blame her. She told me one day that you were the most beautiful baby in England, where she said you were born. She said she used to take you out to show you off, as you were her show child. Your mother is a joke, there’s no mistake about that. And to think you are afraid to leave them to go up town! Come, come darling, don’t be a little goose. Think how cozy it will be for us both!”

It would be “cozy.” I realized that, and then the thought of having a studio all to myself appealed to me. Reggie and I were engaged, and why should I not let him do a little thing like that to help me. Reggie had never been a very generous lover. The presents he made me were few and far between, and often I had secretly compared his affluent appearance with my own shabby self. After all, I could get a room for a fairly nominal price, and perhaps if I got plenty of work, I would soon be able to pay for it myself. So I agreed to look for a place, much to Reggie’s delight.

As Reggie had predicted, papa and mama were not particularly interested when I told them I was going to open a studio up town, and even when I added that I might not be able to come home every night, but would sleep sometimes on a lounge in the studio mama merely said:

“Well, you must be sure to be home for Sunday dinners anyway.”

Ada, however, looked up sharply and said:

“How much will it cost you?”

I stammered and said I did not know, but that I would get a cheap place. Ada then said:

“Well, you ought to try and sell papa’s paintings there, too. Nobody wants to come to Hochelaga to look at them.”

I replied eagerly that I would show papa’s work, and I added that I was going to try and start a class in painting, too.

“If you make any money,” said Ada, “you ought to help the family, as I have been doing for some time now, and you are much stronger than I am, and almost as old.”

Ada had been delicate from a child, and already I was taller and larger than she. She made up in spirit what she lacked in stature. She was almost fanatically loyal to mama and the family. She devoted herself to them and tried to imbue in all of us the same spirit of pride.

XX

Lu Frazer went with me to look for a room. Lu was an Irish-Canadian girl with whom I had gone to school. She worked as a stenographer for an insurance firm, and was very popular with all the girls. There was something about her that made nearly all the girls go to her and consult her about this or that, and tell her all about their love affairs.

I think the attraction lay in Lu’s absolute interest in others. She never talked about her own feelings or affairs, but was always willing to listen to the outpourings of others. When you told her anything she was full of sympathetic murmurs, or screams of joy, or expressions of indignation if the story you told her called for that.

I had formed the habit of going to Lu about all my worries and anxieties over Reggie, and I always found a willing listener and staunch champion. The girls called her the Irish Jew, as she kept a bank account and whenever the girls were short of money they would borrow from Lu, who would charge them interest. Reggie heartily disliked her without any just reason. He said:

“She belongs to a class that should by right be scrubbing floors; only she got some schooling, so she is ticking the typewriter instead.”

Nevertheless, I liked Lu, and in spite of Reggie kept her as my friend, though she knew that he hated her. When I told her about Reggie’s offer to pay for the studio, she said:

“Um! Then take as fine a one as you can get, Marion. Soak him good and hard. I hear he pays a great big price for his own rooms at the Windsor.”

I explained to her that I only wanted as cheap a place as I could get, and that as soon as I made enough money, I intended to pay for it myself.

We looked through the advertisements in the papers, made a list and then went forth to look for that “studio.”

On Victoria Street, we found a nice big front parlor which seemed to be just what I wanted. The landlady offered it to me for ten dollars a month, and when I said that that would do nicely she asked if I were alone, and when I said I was, she said:

“I hope you work out all day.”

I told her I worked in my room, and that I would make a studio out of it. Whereupon she said: