Part 15

This flooding charity likewise embraced Mrs. Fanshaw. Her mother's chronicles of the small beer of Shawnee Springs had continued with the punctuality of tides. The weekly letter seemed to present itself to her mind as an imperative duty, like the Wednesday prayer-meeting, Saturday's cleaning, or church-going Sunday. Duty bulked less prominently in Jean's view of it, but she had answered, desultorily at first, and then by habit, almost with her mother's regularity. Yet she had told little of her life. The changes from cloak-factory to department store, from store to the Acme Company, and from the dental office to the studio had been briefly announced, but despite questions, never lengthily explained. Now she felt the need for confidence. Feelings quickened in her which she supposed atrophied, and under their impulsion she wrote her mother for the first time the true history of her flight from the refuge and traced the romance there begun to its miraculous flower.

A second note from Mrs. Van Ostade, received two days later, voiced in the friendliest way her acceptance of things as they were. She wondered whether they had formulated any plans for living? Craig's bachelor quarters, she pointed out, were scarcely adaptable for housekeeping, and surely they would not care for hotel life or furnished apartments? What they did want, she assumed, was an apartment of their own; that is, eventually. But, again, did they at this time of such critical importance in Craig's work, want the exhausting labor of house-hunting? Her suggestion--she was diffident, but oh, not lukewarm, in broaching it--was that for the time being they make the freest use of her much too spacious home. Craig knew how burdensome the East Fifty-third Street place had seemed to her since Mr. Van Ostade's death; he would remember how often she had urged his sharing it. Well, why not now? It need be only temporary, if they wished; merely for the critical present. It could easily be arranged from a financial point of view. When had he and she ever quarreled over money! And the domestic problem was as simple. Wouldn't they consider it? She meant literally _consider_, not decide. They could decide on the spot, for come to her they must on their return. She claimed that of them at least. They should be her guests first; then--but no more of that now.

They read the letter shoulder to shoulder; and so, without speaking, sat for a long moment after they reached the end.

"Well?" he said at last, with a vain reading of the still face.

"Well, Craig?"

"Bully of her, isn't it?"

She assented.

"And practical," he added; "more practical than our air-castles, I dare say."

A quick fear caught at her throat.

"Could you give them up, Craig?"

"Give them up!" he exclaimed. "Give up the air-castles that we've planned while drifting in the bay, roaming the fields, watching the sunset from this dear window? Never! We'll have our own home yet. But it does mean time, as Julie says, and this is a critical period in my affairs. I feel it strongly."

"And I."

"It would be practical," he said again thoughtfully. "We must admit it, Jean. How Julie seems to set her heart upon it! We owe her some reparation, I suppose. We might--at least, till the portrait is under way? Oh, but you must decide this point."

"No," she answered. "Your work must decide. But need we worry over it _now_?"

"Indeed, we'll not," he declared. "When we reach town will be soon enough, as Julie says. Come out for a row."

The end of the honeymoon came sooner than they thought. A third missive from Julie, laid before them at breakfast, asked when she might look for them, and added that Mrs. Joyce-Reeves also wished enlightenment, as she should soon be leaving town. Jean herself had urged a prompt return for the portrait's sake, but it seemingly needed his sister's spur to prick Craig to action. Time-tables immediately absorbed him. Noon saw them in Boston and the evening in New York, where a week to a day, almost to an hour, from the fateful dinner, they passed again through Mrs. Van Ostade's door.

Throughout the homeward journey Jean had shrunk from this moment, and, though he said nothing, she divined that Craig himself dreaded facing Julie. But the actual meeting held no terrors. Mrs. Van Ostade greeted them cordially and at once led the way to the suite of rooms set apart for their use.

"This is your particular corner," she said at the threshold, "but the whole house, remember, is yours."

"My books!" exclaimed Atwood, bringing up in the little living-room, the charm of which won Jean instantly. "My old French prints! Have you moved me bag and baggage, Julie?"

"I did send to your rooms for a few things to make you comfortable. I think you'll find the essentials. Had I dared," she added, turning smilingly on Jean, "I should have laid hands on your belongings, too."

They came upon discovery after discovery as they traversed the successive rooms. Julie's deft touch showed itself everywhere. Flowers met them on every hand, and a great bowl of bride's roses lavished its fragrance from Jean's own dressing-table. Her face went down among their petals.

"You don't mind?" murmured Julie at her side. "I wanted to do something, belated as it seems."

Atwood caught up one of the dainty trifles with which the dressing-table was strewn.

"See, Jean!" he called. "They're yours. This is your monogram."

The remorseful lump in the girl's throat stifled speech.

"You don't mind?" Julie repeated.

Jean's response was mute, but convincing. Atwood went out precipitately and closed the door upon his retreat.

Nor did Mrs. Van Ostade's thoughtfulness stop at their welcome, or yet at the almost imperceptible point where, the portrait deciding, their status as guests changed to a relation less transient. It concerned itself with the revision of Jean's wardrobe, with the more effective dressing of her hair, with the minutiæ of calls and social usages, intricate beyond her previous conception, but not lacking rime and reason in her altered life.

Jean had no galling sense of pupilage--the thing was too delicately done. Often Julie's lessons took the sugar-coated form of a gentle conspiracy against Craig, who, his sister confided, had in some respects lapsed into a bohemianism which needed its corrective. A portrait-painter, she reasoned, must defer to society more than other artists. It was an essential part of his work to acquaint himself sympathetically with the ways of the leisured class who made his profession commercially possible. Mrs. Joyce-Reeves furnished a concrete illustration. Even if the studio stairs had not proved too great an obstacle for her years, how enormously more to Craig's advantage it was that he could paint her here! Coming to this house, his sitter entered no alien environment. She retained her atmosphere.

"I make it a point to serve tea at their afternoon sittings," she added. "And I try to chat with her whenever I can. It draws her out, lets Craig see her as she really is, makes up for his lack of knowledge of her individuality."

Plastic as she was under coaching, Jean nursed a healthy doubt of the wisdom of Mrs. Van Ostade's constant presence in the billiard-room over the extension, which Atwood had chosen for the work because of its excellent north light. When had he so changed that the chatter of a third person helped him to paint?

Moreover, Craig was openly dissatisfied.

"I'm only marking time," he fretted, as he and Jean sat together before the canvas after Mrs. Joyce-Reeves's third sitting. "All my preconceived notions were merely blind scents. I'm not getting at the woman behind."

"Yet it's wonderfully like her," she encouraged, studying the strong, mocking old face.

"So are her photographs! Is that portraiture? Look at their stuff," he cried, catching a handful of unmounted prints from a drawer. "See what Huntington did with her girlhood! See Millais's woman of thirty! Look at Zorn's great portrait! Take Sargent's!"

"But none of them have painted her old age," she reminded. "You have that advantage."

"And what have I got out of it? Wrinkles!"

Crossing Madison Square a day or two later, Jean met MacGregor. He had congratulated them promptly by letter and sent them one of his desert studies which he knew for a favorite; but she had not come face to face with him since her marriage. She wanted to speak to him, for an unfulfilled penance hung over her, and almost her first word was a confession of her feeling that she had done Julie an injustice.

He listened with a caustic stare.

"Buried the hatchet?" he remarked.

"If there ever was a hatchet. I'm not so sure there was. I think we both misjudged her."

"Both, eh!" snorted MacGregor, huffily. "I dare say. After all, I'm a raw young thing with no experience."

"No; seriously," Jean laughed.

He changed the topic.

"Is the portrait coming on?" he asked.

"Craig is despondent."

"Good thing!" he ejaculated. "Stimulates the gray matter." His face went awry, however, when she mentioned Julie's theory and practice. "So it's the tea-drinking Mrs. Joyce-Reeves our mighty painter thinks most important," he broke out acidly, after violent bottling of comment more pungent. "Fine! What insight! What originality!"

Jean's eyes snapped loyally.

"Don't be disagreeable," she retorted. "You know Craig doesn't think anything of the kind."

They separated with scant courtesy, but she had not quitted the park before MacGregor's tall figure again towered over her.

"Enlighten the brute a little further," he said with elaborate meekness. "What is to become of your work? Richter says you haven't darkened his door since your marriage."

"Four whole weeks!"

"Oh, jeer away," he grumbled. "Honeymoon or not, it's too long."

"I must think of Craig's interests first."

MacGregor lifted his hat.

"Your father also dabbled in clay--and matrimony, I believe," he said, and left her definitely to herself.

She admitted the justice of his reminder when her cheek cooled, and, turning into a cross-town street, set a straight course for Richter's. The swathed model of a colossal group called "Agriculture," which he had in hand for a Western exposition, hid the sculptor as she pushed open the door of the big studio, and when she finally came upon the little man it was to discover Mrs. Joyce-Reeves beside him in close examination of an uncovered bit of foreground where a child tumbled in joyous, intimate communion with the soil.

They broke out laughing at sight of Jean.

"I told you I should ask Richter," declared the old lady, briskly. "His answer was to show me this."

Jean flushed at this indirect praise from the master.

"Mr. Richter let me have a hand in it," she said.

"A hand! He told me he should have had to leave the figure out altogether if you had not experimented with the janitor's baby."

The sculptor was now blushing, too.

"He did not tell me," Jean laughed.

"Why didn't you?" demanded Mrs. Joyce-Reeves, abruptly. "Why didn't you encourage the girl?"

"I think praise should be handled gingerly," he explained.

"Is it such moral dynamite? I don't believe it."

She beamed her approval of Jean's physical endowments as well, lingering in particular upon her eyes. Suddenly she gave a little cluck of surprise, whipped out a handkerchief, and laid it unceremoniously across the girl's lower face.

"Do you know Malcolm MacGregor?" she demanded. "Yes? Then I'm the owner of your portrait. It's called 'The Lattice.' Atwood's wife, MacGregor's inspiration, Richter's collaborator--my dear, you are very wonderful. Shall I take you home? I've promised your husband a sitting."

Jean said she must remain and work. She had thought only to run in and appease Richter, but between his grudging praise and MacGregor's goad, she found her fingers itching for the neglected tools; and she was into her comprehensive studio-apron before Mrs. Joyce-Reeves's electric brougham had purred halfway down the block. The sculptor squandered no more compliments that day, however. Indeed, he swerved heavily to the opposite extreme, but Jean dreamed audacious dreams over the penitential copying of a battered antique, and the afternoon was far gone when she reluctantly stopped work.

Leaving Richter's door, she beheld her husband swinging gayly down the street. He waved to her boyishly and quickened his step.

"Good news?" she queried.

"The very best," he said, seizing both her hands, to the lively edification of two nursemaids, a policeman, and the driver of a passing dray. "I've got my interpretation, Jean! Got it at last! And it came through you!"

For some reason, he told her, Mrs. Joyce-Reeves had arrived earlier than her appointment. Julie was out, but luckily she caught him, and so an hour of vast significance tamely began. By and by his sitter mentioned Jean, her work, and Richter's opinions, and plied him with kindly inquisitive questions about their love affair and elopement, till--all in a lightning flash--it came to him that here, peeping from behind the worldly old mask which everybody knew, was another, unguessed Mrs. Joyce-Reeves with a schoolgirl's appetite for romance.

"And that is what I want to paint," he declared. "Cynic on the surface, romanticist at heart."

The way home was too ridiculously short, and they pieced it out with park and shop-window saunterings. The future was big with promise. Both should wear the bays.

"For something she dropped set me thinking," Atwood said. "She sees, like all of us, that children are your forte, and she thinks that in this day of child study, your talent can't fail to make its mark. The janitor's baby seems to have swept her off her feet. She said the janitors, proud race though they be, must not be allowed to monopolize your time. Then she spoke of her great-grandchild, and I think there's something in the wind."

Jean trifled with the intoxicating possibilities for a dozen paces.

"Oh," she said finally, as if shaking herself awake, "Richter would never consent to my trying such things yet."

They composed their frivolous faces under the solemn regard of Julie's butler, who told Jean that a caller awaited her in the library.

"A lady from out of town," he added.

Jean wondered, "Why the library?" and, then, advancing, wondered again as a silvery tinkle reached her ears; but the chief marvel of all was the spectacle of Julie Van Ostade and Mrs. Fanshaw in amicable, even intimate, converse over afternoon tea.

XXV

Surprise held her at the threshold an instant, whereupon a rare, beaming, even effusive, Mrs. Fanshaw, whom Jean's memories linked with calls from the minister, bore down on her, two steps to her one, and engulfed her in a prolonged embrace. Then, holding her daughter at arm's length in swift appraisement of her dress and urban air,--

"Death brought me," she explained.

"Death!"

"Your great-aunt Martha Tuttle died last Friday at brother Andrew's in Paterson," she announced in lugubrious tones with which her blithe visage could not instantly be brought in harmony. "I am on my way home from the funeral."

"I've been trying to persuade your mother to break her journey here for a few days," Julie contributed, with a fugitive smile; "but she says she must hurry away."

"Amelia expects her little stranger any time now," murmured Mrs. Fanshaw, chastely. "But I will stop overnight, perhaps part of to-morrow, thanking you kindly, Mrs. Van Ostade."

"Pray don't," deprecated Julie, moving toward the door. "This is Jean's home, you know. Unfortunately, I'm dining out this evening."

Jean learned of Mrs. Fanshaw's haste and Julie's engagement with equal relief. She felt no snobbish shame for her mother's rusticity, but she did fear her babbling tongue, and her first word on Julie's withdrawal was one of caution.

"Not a syllable about the refuge here," she charged. "Neither Craig nor I wish Mrs. Van Ostade to know. Remember, mother."

The visitor's eyes widened.

"Oh," she observed slowly, "I don't see--"

"We see," Jean cut her short. "You must respect my wishes in this."

"All right," assented Mrs. Fanshaw, with amazing meekness. "Is your husband on the premises?"

"You will meet him soon," she replied, thinking it expedient that Julie or herself should first give Atwood some hint of what lay in store.

"He is really quite well known, isn't he? I've taken more notice of magazine pictures since I heard I had another son-in-law. I hope he's not wild. They tell of such goings-on among artists and models. I seem to recollect, though, they were French."

"Craig is a gentleman."

"I'm bound to say his sister is a lady," Mrs. Fanshaw replied to this laconic statement. "Is she any connection of that Mrs. Quentin Van Ostade the papers mention so much?"

"Julie is her daughter-in-law."

"You don't tell me!" She was impressed to the verge of awe. "Why, that makes you sister-in-law to Mrs. Quentin Van Ostade's son!"

"He is dead."

"Dead!" Her face paid the late Mr. Van Ostade the fleeting tribute of a shadow. "What a pity! But I presume his mother still sees something of his widow?"

"Oh, yes."

"And comes here sometimes?"

"Frequently."

Mrs. Fanshaw resurveyed her surroundings as if they had taken on historic interest.

"You've seen her?"

"Yes."

"I mean, really met her--been introduced?"

"Yes," Jean admitted, without humility.

Her mother eyed her with respectful interest.

"I hope you'll keep your head, Jean," she admonished solemnly. "This is a great come-up in the world for you."

An impish impulse took shape in Jean's brain, and, under cover of showing the house, she guided Mrs. Fanshaw by edifying stages to Craig's temporary studio and the great work.

"A portrait he's doing!" she dropped carelessly.

Her mother as carelessly bestowed a brief glance upon the canvas.

"What a wrinkled old woman," she commented, turning away. "But I suppose it is the money your husband is thinking of?"

"Partly."

"What will he get for it?"

Jean pondered demurely.

"It is hard to say. Perhaps a thousand, perhaps two thousand dollars."

"What!" She wheeled upon the portrait. "Why, who is the woman?"

"Mrs. Joyce-Reeves."

The effect was as dramatic as Jean's unfilial fancy had hoped.

"The Mrs. Joyce-Reeves of Fifth Avenue and Newport?"

"And of Lenox, Aiken, and Ormond--yes."

Mrs. Fanshaw's attitude toward the portrait became reverential. Here was hallowed ground!

"Have you met _her_, too?" she asked finally, with the realization that even her child might share the sacerdotal mysteries.

"Yes."

"You have _talked_ with her?"

"Only this afternoon."

"Here?"

"She was here to-day, for a sitting, but I ran across her at Mr. Richter's studio."

"That is where you go to--"

"To model; yes." Then, with great calm, "Mrs. Joyce-Reeves admires my work."

A chastened, pensive, almost deferential, being, who from time to time stole puzzled glances at her ugly duckling turned swan, let herself be shown to her room and smartened for dinner, to which she descended at what seemed to her robust appetite an unconscionably late hour. Here the fame of her son-in-law and the even more disconcerting attentions of the butler combined to make her subjugation complete.

Sweet as was her victory, however, Jean had no wish to see her mother ill at ease, and she rejoiced when Craig exerted himself to entertain this visitor whose subdued, almost shy, manner was so bewilderingly at variance with the forbidding image his fancy had set up. Moreover, he succeeded. If Mrs. Fanshaw's parochial outlook dulled the edge of his choicer quips and anecdotes, his boyish charm, at least, required no footnotes; and before the dinner ended she was bearing her gustful share in the conversation with such largess of detail that a far less imaginative listener than he might reconstruct therefrom the whole social and economic fabric of Shawnee Springs.

To Jean, who in dark moments had longed to forget it utterly, the narrow little town recurred with sharp, unlovely lines. Forget it! She could as easily forget that this was her mother. Flout it as she would, it yet stood closer to her than any spot on earth. Its censure and its respect were neither despicable; her rehabilitation in its purblind eyes was a thing desirable above all other ambitions. Then, presently, in this hour when she craved such justification deepest, its possibility, even its certainty, came to her. She had slipped away to answer one of the more imperative letters which Craig's detestation of affairs left to her, and as she mused a moment over her finished task, the drift of Mrs. Fanshaw's monologue in the room beyond penetrated her revery.

She was talking, as Jean had heard her talk times innumerable, with endless variations upon a single theme. But the burden of her laud was no longer Amelia! Now it was Jean--her childish spirit, her school-time precocity, her early love of shaping things in clay, her promise, her beauty, her future--Jean, always Jean! And as the girl at the desk drank it in thirstily, she foresaw the end. Signs there had been already that Amelia was wavering on her pedestal--her husband and her husband's family, the proud Fargos, had impaired her sainthood; and now in the tireless, fatuous, sweet refrain, Jean read her own elevation to the vacant niche. Hot tears blinded her. It might not be her noblest compensation; but it was the dearest.

If Mrs. Fanshaw's coming marked the dawn of another day in Jean's spirit, its effect on her external welfare was less happy. Her relations with Julie were beyond question altered, though precisely where the difference lay was not easy to detect. Intuition, rather than any overt act or word of Mrs. Van Ostade's, told her this, for their surface intercourse went on much as before; but, elusive and volatile as this changed atmosphere was, she nevertheless knew it for something real, alert, and vaguely hostile. Yet this aloofness, if aloofness it could be called, was so bound up in Julie's propaganda on behalf of Craig's career that Jean took it for a not unnatural jealousy.

Atwood fed the flame with repeated acknowledgments of his wife's share in solving his riddle, the fervor of which leaped from bud to bloom with tropic extravagance as the portrait went rapidly forward and the judgment of MacGregor and other experts assured him of its strength. His sister, Jean noted, always took these outbursts in silence. The portrait expressed a Mrs. Joyce-Reeves with whom she was unfamiliar, either over the tea-cups or elsewhere, but she had the breadth to recognize its bigness and set her restless energy to work to exploit it with all her might.

Of her methods Jean perhaps saw more than Mrs. Van Ostade supposed. For a fortnight Atwood let the nearly finished portrait cool, as he said, and busied himself at his regular studio with such illustrative work as he was still under contract to deliver. This was Julie's opportunity. That Atwood was painting Mrs. Joyce-Reeves was no secret--a discreet paragraph or two had sown the seed of publicity in fertile ground; and Julie furthermore let it leak out among those it might interest that the sittings took place beneath her roof. Skillful playing of influential callers who rose eagerly to allusions to the opinions of the critics--Mr. Malcolm MacGregor, for example--would lead usually, in strictest confidence, to a stolen view of the masterpiece. By such devices--and others--it came to pass that Atwood, happily ignorant of the wire-pulling which loosed the falling manna, found himself commissioned to paint three more persons of consequence so soon as his engagements to Mrs. Joyce-Reeves and the publishers would permit.

Craig ascribed it all to society's proneness to follow its bell-wethers.

"But I never gauged Mrs. Joyce-Reeves's true power, the magic of her mere name," he said repeatedly. "Three orders on the bare gossip that she has given me sittings!"

Julie begged Jean not to undeceive him.