Part 14

"Shouldn't have showed my face here if it wasn't," Paul retorted, with a flicker of his old spirit. "The luck changed just when I'd about decided to go back to Grimes. Yes, I'm doing so-so. Nothing record-breaking, but I'm out of debt."

"I'm very glad."

"Thanks," he said gratefully. "You've no call to be, God knows! When I think--but what's the good? I've thought till I'm half crazy. Just to look into the little place at the Lorna Doone queers a whole week for me. It stands about as it did, Jean. All the time the pinch was hardest, I had to carry the flat, too--empty. I couldn't live there, and nobody else wanted it. I missed my chance to clear out when the building changed hands--I tumbled just too late, not being on the spot. The new owners would make trouble, and I've had trouble enough. I just _can't_ sell the things--leastways some of them--and I thought perhaps you--they're really yours, you know--perhaps you--No? Well, I don't blame you. If folks were only living there, I guess I'd feel different. I would sublet for a song."

Amy's consuming desire flashed into Jean's mind to relieve a situation too tense for long endurance, and Paul thankfully made note of the drummer's address. This mechanical act seemed to put a period to their meeting and both rose; but although they shook hands again, and exchanged commonplaces concerning neither knew what, the man continued to imprison her fingers in an awkward solemnity which, more sharply than words, conveyed his sense of a bitter, yet just, finality.

So occupied, Atwood's hurried entrance found them.

"I'm late, very late," he said from the hall, at first seeing only Jean; "but the cab-horse looks promising, and the driver says--I beg your pardon!"

Acutely conscious of a burning flush, which Paul's red-hot confusion answered like an afterglow, Jean made the presentation.

"Bartlett--not Barclay," Paul corrected Atwood's murmured greeting, with the footless particularity of the embarrassed.

"I beg your pardon," said Atwood again.

"Often mixed, those two names, Bartlett and Barclay," babbled the dentist, with desperate stage laughter. "Half the people who come to my office call me Barclay. Feel sometimes as if it must be Barclay after all. Dare say Barclay is as good a name--that is--"

Jean stilled the parrot cry with an apology for running off, and the trio passed down the steps together. Atwood glanced back curiously as they whipped away.

"Who is Mr. Bartlett--not Barclay?" he smiled.

"A dentist I knew when I worked for the Acme Company," she answered, and then, with a generous impulse added, "He was very kind to me once when I needed kindness."

"So?" Atwood's interest livened. "Then I have double reason not to forget his name. I don't dare picture what Julie's thinking," he went on, peering at a jeweller's street-clock. "We're undeniably late. But I have the best excuse in the world. Guess!"

Jean tried, but found her wits distraught between the scene just past and the trial to come.

"No; tell me," she entreated.

He drew a full exultant breath.

"It's the Joyce-Reeves commission," he said. "I received the order to-night."

XXIII

They were not unpardonably late, yet were tardy enough to render their coming conspicuous to what seemed to Jean an ultramodish company which peopled not only Mrs. Van Ostade's drawing-room, but the connecting music-room and library as well.

Julie, her dark good looks set off by yellow, met them with observant eyes, nodded "Yes, Craig; I know" to Atwood's great news, murmured a conventional word of regret to Jean that both their calls should have been fruitless, made two or three introductions to those who chanced nearest, and with the lift of an eyelid set in motion the mechanism of a statuesque butler; whereupon Jean found herself hazily translated to her place at table between a blond giant, who took her in, and a shadowy-eyed person with a pointed beard, who languidly quoted something resembling poetry about what he called the tinted symphony of Mrs. Van Ostade's candle-light.

"How clever!" said Jean, at a venture, and welcomed the voice of her less ethereal neighbor.

"Corking race," remarked the giant, beaming at her over the rim of his cocktail.

This was concrete, if indefinite.

"You mean--"

"Yesterday--France. Wonderful! Gummiest kind of course--two days' hard rainfall, you know. I've been saying 'I told you so' all day. Didn't surprise me in the least. I knew her, d'ye see, I knew her."

Jean looked as intelligent as she could, and hoped for a clew. The big man checked his elliptical remarks altogether, however, and, still beaming, awaited her profound response.

"Is she French?" she hazarded, jumping at an inference.

"But it was a man won. The sporting duchess, you mean, drew out."

"I'm speaking of the horse," Jean struggled.

"Horse! What horse?" ejaculated the giant. "I'm talking automobiles."

She judged frankness best.

"There is nothing for it but to confess," she said. "I know nothing about automobiles. I never set foot in one in my life."

Her companion wagged a large reproachful finger.

"Don't string me," he begged. "Didn't Julie Van Ostade put you up to this? I know I'm auto-mad and an easy mark, but--Jove! I believe you're serious. Why, it's--it's incredible! Just think a bit. You must have been in one of those piffling little runabouts?"

"Never."

"Well, then, a cab--an electric cab?"

"Not even a 'bus."

He shook his head solemnly and besought the attention of the petite guest in mauve on his left.

"What do you think?" Jean heard him begin. "Miss Fanshaw here--"

Then the shadowy-eyed seized his chance.

"I hail a kindred spirit," he confided softly. "To me the automobile is the most hideous, blatant fact of a prosaic age. Its coarsening pleasures are for the few; its brutal sins against life's meager poetry touch the unprivileged millions."

"Rot!" cut in the giant, whose hearing was excellent. "The motor is everybody's servant. As for poetry, man alive! you would never talk such drool again if you could see a road-race as the man in the car sees it. Poetry! It's an epic!" Wherewith he launched into terse description, jerky like the voice of his machine and bestrewn with weird technicalities, but stirring and roughly eloquent of a full-blooded joy in life.

While the battle raged over her--for the man with the pointed beard showed unexpected mettle--Jean evolved a working theory as to the uses of unfamiliar forks and crystal, and took stock of her other fellow-guests. It was now, with a start of pleasure, that she first met the eye of MacGregor, whom she had overlooked in the hurry of their late arrival. His smile was encouraging, as if he divined her difficulties, and she took a comfort in his presence, which Atwood's, for once, failed to inspire.

Craig seemed vastly remote. He was in high spirits and talking eagerly to an odd-looking girl with a remarkable pallor that brought out the vivid scarlet of her little mouth and the no less striking luster of her raven hair, which she wore low over the ears after a fashion Jean associated with something literary or theatrical. She caught a word or two of their conversation, and it overshot her head, though the talk at MacGregor's Oasis had acquainted her with certain labels for uncertain quantities known as Nietzsche and George Bernard Shaw. She perceived a sophisticated corner of Atwood's mind, hitherto unsuspected, so deceptive was his boyish manner; and the anæmic girl, juggling the Superman with offhand ease, became clothed with piquant interest. She wondered who she was, what Atwood saw in her, and whether they knew each other well.

Of his own accord her neighbor with the beard enlightened her.

"Pictorial, isn't she?" he said. "Pre-Raphaelite, almost, as to features; hair Cleo de Merode. I hope Mrs. Van Ostade pulls the match off. They're so well suited; clever, both of them, and in different ways. Then, her money. That is a consideration."

"Is it?" groped Jean.

"Rather! Wealthy in her own name, you know, and virtually sure of her uncle's fortune. They're very soundly invested, the Hepworth millions. But it's the psychological phase of it that interests me. I'm curious to see what effect she'll have upon his work. For the artistic temperament marriage is twice a lottery. I've never dared risk it myself."

His tone offered confidences, but Jean found his celibacy of slight interest beside Miss Hepworth's. She was conscious that he was permitting her glimpses into the lone sanctities of what he termed his priesthood, as she was aware of a whir and rush of motor-maniacal anecdote on her other side, and of a ceaseless coming and going of courses amidst the generally pervasive fog of conversation. She made the automatic responses which seemed all her immediate fellow-guests required of her, and masked her face with a smile, into which she threw more spontaneity after the bearded one said it suggested Mona Lisa's and belied her glorious youth.

"For she is 'older than the rocks among which she sits,'" he quoted. "You remember Pater's famous interpretation?"

Jean knew neither quotation nor writer, but she was familiar with Leonardo's picture and turned the personality with a neutral question, which served the man as a spring-board for fresh verbal acrobatics, amusing to him and restful for her. He was shrewder than she had thought. In truth, she felt both young and old; young, if this dismal futility could be the flower of much living; old, if by chance it should be, as she questioned, merely puerile.

She sighed for the dinner's end, but when it came and the women, following a custom she had read about without dreaming she should yet encounter it, left the men behind, she sighed to be back with her loquacious seat-mates, talk what jargon they would. Her sex imposed no conversational burden upon any one here. She fitted naturally into none of the little clusters into which the rustling file dissolved; and, after some aimless coasting among these groups where women to whom she had been presented smiled upon her vaguely and chattered of intimacies and happenings peculiarly their own, she cut adrift altogether and grounded with feigned absorption by a cabinet of Chinese lacquer. If Julie meant her kindness, she told a remarkable golden dragon, this was the time to show it, but her hostess remained invisible, and the dragon's gaze, though sympathetic, seemed presently to suggest that the social possibilities of lacquer had their limits. In this crisis, she made a lucky find of a portfolio of Craig's sketches, none of which she had ever seen.

While turning these drawings, she was approached by some one, and, looking up with the expectation of seeing Mrs. Van Ostade, met instead the gaze of a very old and excessively wrinkled lady, who, without tedious formalities, calmly possessed herself of the sketch Jean had in hand.

"They're amazingly deft," she said, after a moment. "Even the academic things have their charm. Take this charcoal, for instance," she went on, selecting another drawing. "It's not the stereotyped Julien study in the least. They couldn't extinguish the boy's individuality. Somewhere here there is another still better."

"You mean this, don't you?" Jean asked, delving into the portfolio for a bold rendering of a human back.

"Ha!" said the old lady, staring. "Of course I do. But what made you think so?"

"It was the only one of the Julien studies you could mean," returned Jean, promptly. "He did not draw like this till the year he exhibited."

The explosive "Ha!" was repeated, and the girl felt herself thoroughly assayed by the shrewd old eyes.

"You are a close student of Mr. Atwood, my dear," came dryly. "Perhaps you are a critic of contemporary art?"

Jean reddened, but, surprising the twinkle behind the sarcasm, laughed.

"Is it probable?" she asked.

"It's possible. Half the celebrities I meet seem young enough to be my grandchildren. But you are telling me nothing. Are you one of Julie Van Ostade's discoveries? She collects geniuses, you know. What is your name?"

Jean told her.

"It means nothing, you see," she smiled. "I am only a student."

"Of painting?"

"No; sculpture."

"Are you! But you look original. Where are you at work? I hope you don't mind my questions? I'm an inquisitive old person."

Jean named her school and mentioned Richter.

"But I have accomplished nothing yet," she added.

"Ha!" said the old lady. "Then it's time you did. I shall ask Richter about it. If I forget your name, I'll describe your eyes. There is something singularly familiar about your eyes."

The men and Mrs. Van Ostade made a simultaneous entrance, and the latter at once bore down on Jean's catechist.

"Peroni will sing," she announced with a note of triumph. "He volunteered as a mark of respect to you."

"Really!" The octogenarian's smile was extraordinarily expressive. "Yet they call him mercenary."

The opening bar of an accompaniment issued from the music-room, and Jean joined the drift toward the piano. She wondered who this sprightly personage might be for whom the spoiled tenor volunteered, and then, in the magic of his voice, forgot to wonder.

In the babel following the hush, MacGregor leaned over her chair.

"So the irrepressible conflict is on?" he greeted her.

Jean's welcome was whole-hearted.

"Craig has told you?" she said softly.

"Yesterday. I wish you both all the usual things. I ought to have seen it from the first, I suppose, but as a matter of fact I did not. Certainly I never figured you in the lists when I spoke of the battle royal. Any war news?"

"We have exchanged calls without meeting."

"Preliminary skirmishes."

"Next came the dinner-invitation. Not exactly a war measure, should you say?"

"Knowing Julie, yes. I should call it the first engagement."

Jean perceived his military metaphor was but a thin disguise for a serious opinion.

"And the victor?" she said.

"Apparently yourself."

"I don't feel especially victorious," she said, a little wistfully. "What makes you think the battle is on? Oh, but we must not talk this way here," she immediately added. "We've eaten her salt."

"What if the salt is an ambush?" queried MacGregor. "Besides, I never pretended to be a gentleman. Look over this menagerie carefully, guileless child! Do you suppose Julie usually selects her dinner-guests after this grab-bag fashion? Not to my knowledge. She loathes big dinners, so she has told me. It's her study and pride to bring together people of like tastes. The seating of a dinner-party is to her like a nice problem at chess. Do you think it a mere chance shuffle that settled your destiny at table? Do you know one automobile from another?"

"No."

"Of course not. And half the time you hadn't a glimmer of a notion what the decadent poet with the Vandyck beard was driving at?"

"More than half."

"Neither should I. A steady diet of the hash he serves up to women's clubs would land me in a padded cell. But perhaps the general talk amused you?"

"I could not make much of it," she admitted.

"Sensible girl! Neither could most of the talkers. But--here was where you scored a point--you looked as if you did. The minor poet and the motor-maniac couldn't wait their turns to bore you. Then, point number two, your gown. Logically, it's point number one, and a big point, too. I happened to be watching Julie when you arrived. Yes; you scored."

Jean caught gratefully at the tribute. She remembered that Craig had been too preoccupied with the Joyce-Reeves commission to notice her dress, and wondered whether the pictorial girl's æsthetic draperies had drawn his praise. She was shy of mentioning Miss Hepworth to MacGregor; he might think her jealous. Nor did he speak her name, though Craig and his dinner-partner, again in animated converse, were in plain view from their own station. Jean guessed that he trusted her instinct to light readily on the significance of this factor in Mrs. Van Ostade's strategy.

"Lastly," he enumerated, "you bagged Mrs. Joyce-Reeves."

"What! The woman who talked to me about Craig?"

"You're surprised to find her here? So was Julie. She invited herself. Julie met her somewhere this afternoon and mentioned that she was giving a dinner. Mrs. Joyce-Reeves asked questions--you discovered that trait of hers, probably--and said she'd be punctual. Quite royal, isn't she? She is strong enough to be as eccentric as she pleases. So Craig was your topic? Then she had your secret out of you, mark my word. How did you fall in with her?"

"She came to me while I was turning over some of Craig's sketches."

"Pretending to enjoy yourself, but really feeling as lonesome as Robinson Crusoe?"

"Almost."

"That is very likely why she spoke to you. She does that sort of thing, they say. It's one of her curious eccentricities. I think your motor-maniac is edging this way," he added. "Yes, and your poet, too. Can it be that you are going to score again!"

With the three men grouped about her chair, Jean had an intoxicating suspicion that she was scoring, provided MacGregor's embattled theory held; and when Mrs. Van Ostade herself entered the scene just as the blond giant, under fire from the Vandyck beard, was begging her to set a day for her initiation into the joys of motoring, a certain rigidity in Julie's smile convinced her that MacGregor was right. Atwood's opportune arrival in his sister's wake charged the situation, she felt, with the last requisite of drama. But Mrs. Van Ostade's eye was restless, however staccato her smile, and Jean, conscious, though no longer unhappy under its regard, reflected that even without its terrible lorgnon it had its power. Then, even as she framed the thought, she beheld its sudden concentration, tracked its cause, and caught its glittering rebound from the nether edge of her too tempestuous petticoat. For an instant the brown eyes braved the black, then struck their colors, conquered.

Without a word Julie Van Ostade had shouted, "Cast-off clothes!" louder than the raucous dealers of the curb.

Luckily, the ghastly business was not prolonged. The leave-takings began at once, and Jean passed out among the first. Some hitch in the carriage arrangements delayed her a moment in the vestibule, however, and MacGregor came by.

"Did something happen back there?" he asked bluntly. "I don't think the others noticed anything; I didn't grasp anything tangible myself; but still--are the honors doubtful, after all?"

Jean shook her head.

"No," she answered grimly; "not doubtful in the least. She won."

Then Craig put her in the coupé, and asked if it had not been a jolly evening.

"It was a mixed crowd for Julie," he said, "but it seems she wanted to show you all sorts. You see how absurd it was to dread coming. Every time I laid eyes on you, you were holding your own. Virginia Hepworth asked who you were. Did you notice her? I want you to know her. You mightn't think it at first blush, but she's very stimulating; at least I always find her so. We had a famous powwow. I should like to paint her sometime against a sumptuous background. What did you think of her hair?"

Jean's response was incoherent. Then an illuminated turning brought her face sharply from the shadows.

"Jean!" he cried. "What is it? What's wrong?"

"Myself. We had best face it--face it now; better now than later. I am only a drag upon you, a handicap--not the kind of woman you should marry. You must marry a stim--stim--stimulus."

Atwood drew her into his arms.

"And so I shall," he answered, "so I shall the first minute she'll let me. To-night even! Do you understand me, Jean? Why shouldn't it be to-night? What do you say?"

Jean said nothing. What folly she had uttered! Give him up! His mere touch exorcised that madness. All the primitive woman in her revolted from the sacrifice. He was hers--_hers_! Could that pale creature love him as she loved him? Could Julie love him as she loved him? Julie! A gust of passion shook her; part anger with herself for the weakness to which she had stooped, part hot resentment against this superior being who set traps for her inexperience. For it was a trap, that dinner! MacGregor was wholly right. There was war between them; the night had witnessed a battle. What was it all but a manœuvre to humble her before her lover, prove her unfitness, alienate his love?

Then Craig's words took on a meaning.

"I'm in earnest," he was saying. "It isn't a spur-of-the-moment idea. These three days I've had it in mind to ask you to slip off with me quietly and without fuss. We've never been conventional, you and I. Why should we begin now? Nothing could be simpler. It is early yet--little more than ten o'clock. I'll drop you in Irving Place long enough for you to change your dress and pack a bag. Meanwhile I can pick up my own and make sure of the clergyman. That part is easy, too. I'll ask a friend of mine who lives not five blocks off. His wife and sister will be our witnesses. Then the midnight train for Boston and a honeymoon in some coast village."

"But the portrait?" she wavered.

"The best of reasons. The sensible thing is to marry before I begin work. Don't hunt for reasons against it, dear. None of them count. It's our wedding, not Mrs. Grundy's. We'll let her know by one of the morning papers, if there's time to give notice on our way to the train. Julie I'll wire."

A blithe vision of Julie digesting her telegram flitted across Jean's imagination with an irresistible appeal.

"I'll need half an hour, Craig," she said, as the carriage halted.

XXIV

Julie's congratulations reached them three days later at the decayed seaport, an hour's run out of Boston, which they had chosen at laughing haphazard in their flight. It was a skillful piece of literature. Ostensibly for both, its real message was for the errant Craig. There were delicate allusions to their close companionship of years, so precious to her. To him, a man, it had of course meant less. A woman's devotion--but she would not weary him with protestations. What she had been, she would always be. She bore him no unkindness for shutting her out at the momentous hour; she knew marriage would raise no future barrier. That was all.

"Dear old Julie!" said Atwood. "It did cut her." He smoked for a pensive interval, gazing out from their balcony over the rotting hulks of a vanished trade. "She's been my right hand almost," he went on presently. "Not many endearments between us--surface tendernesses. Some people think her hard, but she's as stanch as stanch. Did I tell you how she nursed me through typhoid?"

"Yes."

"That showed! Or take our Irving Place days. Many a play or concert she gave up for me--and gowns! She believed in me from the first. I can't forget that. What nonsense to talk of marriage shutting her out! We must not let her feel that way, Jean."

"No," said the wife; for to such charity toward the beaten enemy had she already come.

Indeed, her happiness had softened her to a point where she questioned whether MacGregor did Julie complete justice. He was a man of strong prejudices, set, dogmatic; even, she suspected, a man with a grievance, for Craig now told her that something in the nature of an engagement had once existed between his sister and his friend. Might not Atwood's insight be the truer? She began to put herself in Julie's place, and then, without much difficulty, saw herself acting Julie's part. Ambitious for Craig, scheming for him always, self-sacrificing if need arose, why should she not resent his marriage to a nobody whom she knew only as a model?