Part 11

“Why, Uncle Steve,” he cried, “you have it too, that face called Forgiveness!”

“Is that its name?” asked Steven Grant quietly.

“I don’t really know, but it’s the only name I’ve heard given to it. I never saw any cast of it till yesterday, coming home from my trip West. I had an hour before my train left, so I ran in to take a look at the Museum. Say, those Middle-Westerners are alive, all right! Priceless, that Museum! And just as I was leaving, my eyes fell on this wonderful, wonderful thing. Seeing it was the big adventure of my whole trip. Its beauty has haunted me ever since.”

“Take down my copy, if you like,” said Grant.

“Oh, how exquisitely you’ve colored it, Stevedear! No one can beat you in such things. You’ve brought out every beauty, somehow. And it suggests both dawn and twilight.” Gerald passed his fingers with appreciative tenderness over the broad brow of the face called Forgiveness, and went on, with animation.

“At the Museum, there was a nice old cabinet-maker, German type, fitting a frame for their cast. Recent addition, it seems. He looked intelligent, so I asked him what it was. He said he didn’t know exactly; it hadn’t been ‘catalocked’ yet. But a poet friend of his had said it ought to be called the Rose of Pardon. Then he told me, musingly, that it made him think of the Virgin at Nuremberg.”

“That might well be,” observed Uncle Steve, pushing over the matches.

“Well, then, next a little Italian girl came along, with her sketch-book. She saw my interest, and showed me the astonishingly good pencil sketch she had made from the cast. So I asked her what it was, where it was from. She said she didn’t know; she understood that it was called Forgiveness. Then she looked me all over to see what manner of man I was, and shyly said that to her it was very beautiful, like the Madonna at Perugia.”

“I can see what she meant, of course.”

“But that isn’t the half, dearie! Just then a French painter, evidently a Friday lecturer or something of the sort, came in with a class of young boys. Lord, how they burbled, all over the place! One of the kids asked him the question that was trembling on my lips, and he answered that he wasn’t sure, but that he believed the cast was called Forgiveness. It was rather touching to hear him repeat very reverently, in his pronounced ‘Parrhisian’ accent, ‘Forgive us our trespasses.’ The boys felt it, too, and they were very quiet for a moment. Then the Frenchman, with a bright glance at me (guessing no doubt that I too was an artist), added that for him, it was like the Virgin of the Visitation, so miraculously saved out of the destruction at Reims.”

“It seems to me more beautiful than that, even,” interposed the elder man, “but I can understand his feeling.”

“Exactly! And then, last of all, a real live American art student came hustling up, just the kind you see here at the League, only more so. He, too, said the face was called Forgiveness, adding briskly, ‘Perfect American type, don’t you think? Beats Gibson, what?’”

“They were all more or less right, you thought?” Steven Grant’s eyes were fixed curiously on Gerald’s face, still bent over the cast.

Gerald looked up. “Yes, they were right, each in his own way. You know, Stevedear, it all reminded me, in a beautifully wrong-side-out fashion, of the different witnesses in Poe’s murder story, you remember?”

“You mean the one where men of different nationalities all hear an ape chattering in the dark, and not knowing in the least what it is, each one is sure it’s some language not his own?”

“That’s right! The Frenchman, who doesn’t know Spanish, says it’s Spanish, the Englishman, who doesn’t understand German, says it’s German, while the Italian, who doesn’t know English, feels sure it’s English, and so on. But those people at the Museum were all so splendidly different from that! Each one wanted to guard and to claim for his own race the heritage of beauty breathing from the mask. The German, the little Italian girl, the French painter, the American art student—they were all alike in this. They found in that cast Nuremberg, Perugia, Reims, Chicago!”

“‘Beats Gibson, what?’” mocked Steven Grant.

“Do you think it’s a cast from nature?” asked Gerald, still intent on the face. “Perhaps a death-mask?”

The other nodded. “Without doubt, a death-mask.”

“But there’s nothing of the sharpness of death about it, is there? It seems a face unprofaned by earthly suffering.”

Again Steven Grant gazed at his nephew, as if waiting for the eyes of young manhood to see more.

“Strange,” pursued Gerald, “that a mere death-mask can mean so much to living men. There’s Fraser’s Roosevelt, and the Lincoln, and the Dante that used to be in everybody’s library, and—”

A silence fell between the two. Surely Mrs. Storms, the lady who was the limit, was far from their thoughts. The dinner, that masterpiece, had faded from the foreground.

“I never told you,” said Gerald, abruptly, “how I longed to make a death-mask of father, when he died there in London, away from you all. I wanted to preserve—and to show to you yourself, Stevedear!—the look of peace that came upon him. As a sculptor, I knew how, of course. Every kid studying sculpture has made casts—from life, anyway. But when mother saw what I was about, she trembled so violently I couldn’t go on, in the presence of her suffering. And _I_ trembled, too. I’ve never told you about it, because I was ashamed of my weakness, or whatever it was! Well, since then, I’ve never even _tried_ to make a death-mask! People send for me, of course, and I often go, when they seem to need a friendly presence. But it’s some moulder who does the work, not I. I can’t seem to bring myself—”

He set the cast on the table beside him, still conning its planes and shadows. Again the silence of understanding enveloped uncle and nephew, until Steven Grant said, as if in answer to a question, “Well, yes; it was much the same with me. I never made but one death-mask. Just one. There was no way out.”

“How was that?”

“It happened when I was younger than you are, so I couldn’t be expected to have much sense, could I? You trembled, because it was your father. I trembled, because it was the girl I’d loved, and in a sense, lost.”

“Oh, I could understand!” And Gerald, thinking of that most lovely lady with the glittering train, stretched out a sympathetic hand.

“A very beautiful girl she was, Anita Vaughn! The pride of our young circle. I made the mistake, if it was a mistake, of introducing my best friend to her. After that, I had no show whatever. They fell in love.”

“Hard luck, for you, anyway!”

“Yes, and a shock to my conceit, too. In a way, it was one of the sacrifices I made to art. I’d been moving Heaven and Hell to get that Emancipation group of mine well along. I didn’t want to ask Anita to marry me until I had proved my earning power, and that group would have settled things. Your gramper, as you know, didn’t think much of sculpture, and I was shy about asking him to shell out. So I waited and worked, and in the meantime,—ah, well, it was all simple enough. She preferred my friend to me, as well she might—”

“I don’t know about that,” bristled Gerald.

“No, you don’t, but I do. You see, it was Janvier.”

The younger man started. “Not Janvier, the famous Dr. Janvier!”

“Yes, _the_ Dr. Janvier. And no finer fellow ever lived. I’ve been thankful ever since that I didn’t let his luck in love stand between us as friends. Oh, of course, I sulked in my studio a few weeks, and took on a deep cynicism about life and love. But nobody seemed to notice my airs, so I gave ’em up, and picked out the prettiest wedding-present I could find for Anita.”

“And of course you had your work—”

“Indeed I had! My career was very much on my mind, those days!” He smiled at young ambition, and dexterously flicked a lengthened cigar ash into the fireplace. “But I suffered, too, don’t think I didn’t suffer! And strange as you may find it, that pair comforted me. To be sure, it never works out so, in books; but it was so, with us. The Janviers had me with them often, after their marriage. As I look back on it, I see that it was all far more beautiful than I could know, then. They were rare souls, both.”

“Did Janvier’s fame come early in life?”

“Yes, but he was too busy and quixotic to take much note of it. I first met him when I was making my studies for that confounded Emancipation group, and we became friends at once, because of my subject. He was interested in the welfare of the negroes, and gave up a lot of his time to charitable work among them. He used to bring me different types of colored men as models; I’ve often told you how I studied thirty-five different darkies for those reliefs on the pedestal. In our leisure, when we had it, Janvier and I would discuss racial traits, and so on.”

“New Yorker?”

“Yes, but of Canadian ancestry. His father was one of the early lumber kings, and left him a lot of money; otherwise, he couldn’t have given so much unpaid service among the negroes. I never knew a human being so frantically possessed with the idea of justice for all the world.”

“His wife sympathized?”

“Oh, Lord, yes! Whatever he did was perfect in her sight. Strange, too, because she was a Louisiana girl, whose family had lost their all through the Civil War. And of course her ideas about the negro race were not in the least like his. How could they be? Ah, well, Anita Janvier, my lost Anita Vaughn, was certainly a shining example of that motto there, under your feet!”

Gerald picked up the bellows from the hearthrug, and studied its carven legend, as he had often done when a child. “‘_Amor Omnia Vincit._’ Love conquers all.”

“Love surely had his hands full, in her case. Just fancy the prejudices Anita Janvier had to overcome, before she could enter into her husband’s work as she did! She told me once, with that wonderful smile of hers, that she was glad she had been brought up on a plantation, because understanding negroes so much better than Dr. Janvier could, she could save him from the sort of mistakes most Northerners made.”

“Did she win out?” laughed Gerald.

Steven Grant did not answer directly, but continued in musing recollection.

“Franklin Janvier had a house and office in Tenth Street, just a few doors from my studio here. We saw each other constantly, and kept in touch with each other’s work. I was surprised, however, when he took on, as office assistant, a young surgeon just graduated from a foreign school, a man who looked like a Spaniard, but who had a trace, oh, a mere trace, of negro blood. Pleasant fellow, too; very gifted and modest, and with an attachment for Janvier that amounted to idolatry, all told. A doctor born, Janvier said. His grandfather was a noted English surgeon who came out to the West Indies in the old days. Well, Charles Richmond was a fixture in Frank’s office before Anita came to live in the big Tenth Street house. She accepted him just as simply as she accepted all the rest of her new life. But she told her husband, very frankly, that Dr. Richmond’s strain of the darker blood, however negligible for us Northerners, was perfectly evident to any one brought up among negroes.”

“Southerners often say such things,” said Gerald, “but I never know quite all they mean, do you?”

“We tried to make her explain. It was a little of everything; just this and that; hair, lips, nails, palms, of course! And a certain indescribable smooth fullness under the skin, a rounder build of the eyeball, a more springing curve of the lashes, and so on. Janvier was even then getting together the data for that famous book of his on ‘Ethnic Details,’ and he used to encourage Anita in such observations, and check them up. One couldn’t help admiring her astonishing acuteness and probity. The three of us would often compare notes about young Richmond, but never with malicious intent, I assure you. And though Anita always treated him with the respect she knew was due him, it sometimes fell short of what he longed for.”

“The Moor was haughty, then?”

“Haughty enough, but by no means a Moor, any more than you are. His eyes were blue, and really lighter than yours, my boy. With a queer shine in them, sometimes! I was sorry for him, and so was Anita. But Janvier, with his obsession about equality and justice, sturdily refused to see that there was anything to be sorry about, except our nasty human point of view. He gave a lot of the care of his colored patients to Richmond, who did nobly by them, too. Only, by some mysterious instinct, they always recognized _him_ as one of _them_. And it hurt him, clean through and through. How that boy suffered! He had real genius, we knew. And I suppose this helped Janvier to put up with Richmond’s occasional frantic outbursts against his fate. We used to call them his cyclones of the soul, not dreaming that a similar expression was to be invented long afterward. These storms of passion always left him crumpled up into nothingness before Janvier, Anita, even myself! I tell you, Gerald, the man’s agonies were atrocious. He had a kind of gallant courage, too, for all his self-abasement; you would be pretty dull, if you couldn’t see the sublimity of it. After every outbreak, and the subsequent surrender, he would painfully pick up the pieces of himself, and put them together again in a dazed sort of way, and next day devote himself to his work, more single-mindedly than ever. Janvier was his chosen pattern and example, in that.”

“But perhaps the poor chap worked _too_ hard,” suggested Gerald.

“Exactly! And there’s where Janvier and I were wrong, not to have known it. Anita, with a far finer vision than we had, often warned us that the bent bow was strung too tight. But we couldn’t see it so; men are blind, sometimes, in the heat and burden of the day. Richmond was six feet tall, and broad in proportion. A magnificent physique! That’s what we went by. We laughed at Anita’s fears—accused her of plantation-coddling. And there was a lot to be done, too, that year after the Janviers were married. It was a horrible winter, disease stalking everywhere, especially among the ‘coloreds.’ Both Janvier and Richmond were overworked. You would have thought that the sort of office Janvier had, with so many colored patients, would have hurt his practice. Not a bit of it. People felt a trust in him. Children always took to him, and he was very successful, as you know, in children’s diseases.

“It happened that in the following spring, Janvier was suddenly called to Toronto to see his mother, who had but a few days to live. He asked me to look after things a little, in his absence. Of course, I said I would, but I told him, half-laughingly, that I hoped to goodness Charles Richmond wouldn’t treat me to a cyclone of the soul; and if he did, I should turn the hose on him. Janvier looked rather troubled, but said he didn’t expect anything of the sort. In fact, a storm had occurred only the day before, and another such tempest wouldn’t be due for a long time. It struck me that if I’d been in Frank’s place, I would have been worried about leaving Anita. Very likely, Frank _was_ worried, for he had tried to persuade her to visit her sister while he was away. But the girl was tremendously interested in some sick little pickaninnies she was helping both doctors to pull out of various croups and itises, and she felt that those children needed her. And, anyway, Frank would be back in a few days.”

A new tone had crept into the sculptor’s voice, and Gerald guessed that his uncle was about to speak of things hitherto untold. “Poor Stevedear,” he thought, with a thrill of loving sympathy, “he’s come to the place where the novels always have a row of asterisks, or something.”

“And,” continued the other steadily, “Franklin Janvier did come back, summoned by a telegram I sent him, telling him that Richmond had committed suicide. He had shot himself at the Tenth Street house. More than that, Anita had seen it all, and was prostrated by the shock. She had often warned us that Richmond’s end might be madness. We had laughed at her, and now—Well, no use dwelling on that part now, this evening of your happiness, Gerald! It’s enough to tell you that Janvier went through the hell of seeing his young wife’s mind give way completely, from the shock. Specialists came, and after a while they held out a distinct hope that a few months might bring a change for the better. She regained something of her former sweetness, but it was evident that most of the time her mind was a blank. Once, in one of her rare outbursts, she cried out that her soul was snared in a web, not of her own weaving. You can imagine what Janvier felt, hearing this truth from her lips.

“The young couple had looked forward happily to the birth of children; but now, in extreme anguish of spirit, Frank Janvier told me that it was not worth the price; nothing could be worth the price his wife was paying. But he didn’t give up hope. The doctors still believed that the coming of the child might end forever the terrible shadow. Anita was naturally an unusually well-balanced person. It was part of her charm, the kind of sweet steadiness she had. I know Janvier counted on it to save her, in the end. So it was with very great eagerness that we all awaited the arrival of the Janvier heir.

“By tacit agreement, I stopped going to the Tenth Street house, but Janvier came often to my studio. He seemed to cling to me in his trouble, and I wanted to help him, of course. He kept himself in hand, pluckily enough; but sometimes, in unguarded moments, the suffering that showed itself in his face was horrible to see. So summer and autumn passed, and winter came.

“One bitter December night as I was reading in this very room, a messenger brought me a note from Janvier, begging me to come to him at once. He had, as I already knew, passed through two days of alternate hope and despair. And now, so the note told me, both wife and child had died. Anita’s face had taken on a look of exquisite beauty, the look of her wedding-day. He wanted me to make the mask that would preserve it. You know how I must have felt.”

“Oh, Stevedear!”

“I felt I couldn’t do it! But I had a studio-man who was an expert in casting, and I roused him from his bed to go with me to Janvier’s. Poor Giuseppe had been up several nights with his youngest child. It happened that Dr. Janvier, who had a helping hand for every workman in the quarter, had been taking care of Giuseppe’s boy, right in the midst of his own troubles; and Giuseppe was glad enough to do anything he could for _il Signor Dottore_.

“Well, I won’t tell you about that bedside, and Frank’s silent anguish; you know well enough about such scenes—The room was large and lofty, not unlike this. At the far end was an alcove, curtained off; and behind the drapery I could discern a light, and a cradle; but we did not speak of those things. There was no attendant. Anita’s old nurse, Loretta, who was a kind of mother to us all, was sleeping in the next chamber, worn out with labor and sorrow. And the others, those terrible, necessary others that you and I can never get used to, were not to appear until the morrow.

“It was like Janvier not to waken Loretta. He himself brought water and towels. Giuseppe was just about to mix his first plaster when a knock was heard. Janvier stepped out, but soon returned to tell Giuseppe, very gravely, that little Emilio was once more in agony, and that both of them must go at once, in the hope of saving the child’s life. You see Janvier had made some important studies in children’s lung troubles, and had worked out some successful methods that he didn’t yet dare trust to others, without supervision.”

“You mean to say he and Giuseppe left you there?”

“It was the only thing to do, wasn’t it? If Janvier could bear his part, why shouldn’t I bear mine? I knew it might be hours before he would leave Giuseppe’s child. And I knew, too, that the exalted loveliness of that dead face might vanish at any moment; such looks do not stay long among us. Janvier’s quiet putting aside of his own feelings showed me what to do. I steeled myself and made the mould. I don’t mind telling you, a cold sweat broke out all over me; but dreading it was really much harder to bear than doing it. There was something in the still beauty of the girl’s face that strengthened me; I seemed to see and feel this loveliness even while I was veiling it under layers of plaster. And when I had taken the mould away, and the face was revealed again, no less peaceful than before, and quite unprofaned by my work, I felt a kind of consolation. My part of the work had been rightly done, for all my trembling; and Giuseppe could easily make the cast itself, in my studio.

“A long time, as it seemed to me, I sat there by the bed, watching that beloved face. I wondered whether the same radiant peace shone from the face of the dead child. I knew Anita would wish to have me look at her child; I owed it to her memory.

“I parted the alcove curtains, and turning up the light, I lifted the delicate little linen sheet that covered the cradle. What I saw I have never yet spoken of to any one, not even to Janvier; perhaps least of all to Janvier, Janvier with his great dream of justice! I know that what I say is safe with you, Gerald? You promise? The little face, exquisitely fashioned and peaceful, indeed, was unmistakably one of those darker blossoms on the tree of life. The darker strain! And it was far more clearly marked than in Richmond.”

Gerald recoiled in horror. “Richmond—”

“Yes! In one hideous, backward-looking lightning-flash, I saw just what had been Anita’s fate. I saw her long months of mental eclipse, following the attack of a madman. I had often noted her not unkindly meant attitude of racial superiority toward the frantically sensitive Richmond; and I understood just how a mere glance or word of hers had whipped to the surface the one black drop in his high-strung, overwrought frame, driving him to an unspeakable betrayal. No wonder he had killed himself. No wonder the proud, blameless girl had cried aloud to her husband, out of the abyss of darkened reason, that she was caught and crushed in a web not of her own weaving!”

“I suppose,” hesitated Gerald, “there was never any doubt of Richmond’s crime?”

“None whatever. There was even a witness! As a matter of fact, poor faithful Loretta, who worshipped Anita, and followed her like a shadow, had been working in the room next to the office, when she heard Richmond talking to Mrs. Janvier, in a crazy, shrieking way, about a prescription. His tone was so strange and threatening that she was terrified for her mistress, and rushed toward the office. The door was slammed violently in her face, and locked. She beat on the panels, and screamed, but help came too late.”

The level voice faltered a moment, then continued: “My first impulse was to escape from the room, anywhere, anywhere, out of the horror of it. But Anita’s face with its majestic calm held me there; that, and the example of Janvier’s fortitude. And, well, life must be lived! There might be something I could do for Janvier, or Giuseppe, for that matter, on their return. Once again I went to the alcove, this time carrying a lighted candle, to be doubly sure of a dreadful thing. The tiny bronze face with closed eyes implored only peace—a shadow praying to return to its rest among shadows.

“Until gray morning, I waited in that still house for Janvier. I did not know what I should do or say; I only knew that I knew what were better left unknown, perhaps. But how small my own distresses seemed when he came in, and shed the light of his indomitable spirit over that place of sorrows! He seemed a creature emerging out of the wreck of all his own hopes, supported out of chaos solely by his will to re-create hope in the world.