Part 11

Freed somehow from that loathsome touch, Jean stumbled to her desk. Patients came and went, the routine of the office ran its course; her share in the mechanism got itself mechanically performed; yet, whether she sped or welcomed, plied the cash-register, receipted bills, or soothed a nervous child, some spiteful goblin at the back of her brain was ever whispering the shameful tale which Stella was pouring out in that inner room. Those lies would be past Paul's forgetting, perhaps even past his forgiving, say what she might in defense. His look at Stella's kiss had been ghastly. What was he thinking now!

Then, when her agony of suspense seemed bearable no longer, came Stella, her pretense of friendship abandoned, her real vengeful self to the fore.

"I guess we're square," she bent to whisper, her face almost touching Jean's. "I guess we're square."

She vanished like the creature of nightmare she was, but the nightmare remained. Paul would demand his reckoning now. He would come and stand over her with his accusing face and ask her what this horror meant. She could not go to him, she felt, or at least unless he sent. But throughout that endless forenoon the dentist kept to his office, though twice there were intervals when she knew him to be alone. Her lunch hour--and his--came at last. She lingered, but still Paul delayed. At last, driven by an imperative craving to be done with it, she hurried to his room and found it empty. Grimes told her that he had seen Paul leave the place by a side door. The news was a dagger-thrust in her pride. Of a surety, now, he must seek her.

Between five o'clock and six, a dull hour, he came, woebegone and conciliatory.

"For God's sake, clear this up," he begged. "Haven't you anything to say?"

"A great deal, Paul. But first tell me what that woman said about me."

"You heard."

"But what else?"

"Nothing."

"Nothing!" The thing was incredible.

"Only that you'd probably be glad to explain things yourself."

At that half her burden fell. Stella's cunning had overreached itself. She had thought to rack her victim most by forcing her to betray herself, but she had reasoned from the false premise that Jean had a truly shameful past to conceal.

"Glad," she repeated. "Yes, I am glad. I should have told you some day, Paul. It's a long story."

The door opened to admit a caller with a swollen jowl.

"To-night, then?" said the dentist, hurriedly.

"Yes," she assented. "I will tell you to-night."

"At the flat?"

"Yes; at the flat."

Spurred on by her unrest, she reached the Lorna Doone before Paul had returned from his evening meal, and found the flat in darkness. She was relieved that this was so. It would give her a quiet interval in which to turn over what she meant to say. She entered the little parlor and seated herself in an open window where a shy midsummer-night's breeze, astray from river or sound, stole gently in and out and fingered her hair. It was wonderfully peaceful for a city. The sounds from below--the footsteps on the pavement, the cries of children at play under the young elms lining the avenue, the jests of the cigar-store loungers, the chatter of the girls thronging the soda-fountain at the corner druggist's, the jingle of bicycle bells, the beat of hoofs, the honk of occasional automobiles, even the strains of a hurdy-gurdy out-Heroding Sousa--one and all ascended, mellowed by distance to something not unmusical and cheerily human. She realized, as she listened, that the city, not the country, this city, this very corner, this hearth which she and Paul had prepared, was at last and truly home.

Presently she heard Paul's latch-key in the lock and his step in the dark corridor.

"You here?" he called tonelessly. "Better have a light, hadn't we?"

"It is cooler without," she answered. Even though her explanations need not fear the light, she thought obscurity might ease their telling.

With no other greeting, the dentist passed to the window opposite hers, slouched wearily into a chair, and waited in silence for her to begin.

Jean told her story in its fullness: her tomboy girlhood, the hateful family jars, the last quarrel with Amelia, her sentence to the refuge, her escape, return, riot-madness, and release, and the inner significance of her late struggle for a living against too heavy odds. She told it so honestly, so plainly, that she thought no sane being could misunderstand; yet, vaguely at first, with fatal clearness as, ending, she strained her eyes toward the dour shadowy figure opposite, she perceived that she had to deal with doubt.

"Do you think I am holding something back?" she faltered, after a long silence. "Must I swear that I've told you the whole truth?"

The man stirred in his place at last.

"I guess an affidavit won't be necessary," he returned grimly.

She endured another silence impatiently, then rose proudly to her feet.

"I'll say it for you," she flashed. "This frees you of any promises to me, Paul. You are as free as if you had never made them. Go your own way: I'll go mine. It--it can't be harder than the one I've come. Good-by."

He roused himself as she made to leave.

"Hold on, Jean," he said, coming closer. "I guess we can compromise this thing somehow."

"Compromise! I have nothing to compromise."

"Haven't you?" He laughed harshly. "I should say--but let that pass. Of course, after what's turned up, you can't expect a fellow to be so keen to marry--"

"I've told you that you are free," she interrupted.

"But I don't want to be free--altogether. We could be pretty snug here, Jean. The parson's rigmarole doesn't cut much ice with me, and I don't see that it need with you. They think downstairs we're married. That part's dead easy. As for Grimes and the rest--"

She had no impulse to strike him as she had the floor-walker. Waiting in his folly for an answer, the man heard only her stumbling flight along the corridor and the jar of a closing door.

XVIII

Yet, an hour later, Paul came seeking her at Mrs. St. Aubyn's, and, failing, returned in the morning before she breakfasted. Unsuccessful a second time, and then a third, he wrote twice, imploring her not to judge him by a moment's madness.

Jean made no reply. Moved by the eloquent memory of Paul's many kindnesses and with the charity she hoped of others for herself, she did him the justice to believe him better than his lowest impulse. But while she was willing to grant that the Paul who, in the first shock of her revelation, thought all the world rotten, was not the real Paul, she would not have been the woman she was, had his offense failed to bar him from her life. Her decision was instinctive and instant, requiring no travail of spirit, though she could not escape subsequent heart-searchings whether she had unwittingly laid herself open to humiliation and a scorching shame that the dentist, or any man, could even for a moment have held her so cheap.

Necessity turned her thoughts outward. The marriage plans had all but devoured her savings, and while she was clothed better than ever before, she lacked ready money for even a fortnight's board. Immediate employment was essential, yet, when canvassed, the things to which she might turn her hand were alarmingly few. After her experience with Meyer & Schwarzschild, she was loath to go back to her refuge-taught trade except as a last resort, while department-store life, as she had found it, seemed scarcely less repellent. At the outset it was her hope to secure somewhere a position like her last, but the advertisements yielded the name of only one dentist in need of an assistant, and this man had filled his vacancy before she applied. Thereafter she roamed the high seas of "Help Wanted: Female" without chart or compass.

The newspapers teemed with offers of work for women's hands. The caption "Domestic Service" of course removed a host of them from consideration, and the demand for stenographers, manicures, and like specialized wage-earners disposed of many others; but, these aside, opportunity still seemed to beckon from infinite directions. Thus, the paper-box industry clamored for girls to seam, strip, glue, turn in, top-label, close, and tie; the milliners wanted trimmers, improvers, frame-makers, and workers in plumage and artificial flowers; the manufacturers of shirt-waists and infants' wear called for feminine fingers to hemstitch, shirr, tuck, and press; deft needles might turn their skill toward every conceivable object from theatrical spangles to gas-mantles; nimble hands might dip chocolates, stamp decorated tin, gold-lay books, sort corks, tip silk umbrellas, curl ostrich feathers, fold circulars, and pack everything from Bibles to Turkish cigarettes.

But this prodigious demand, at first sight so promising, proved on close inspection to be limited. Beginners were either not wanted at all or, if taken on trial, were expected to subsist on charity or air. Experience was the great requisite. Day after day Jean toiled up murky staircases to confront this stumbling-block; day after day her resources dwindled.

Amy was keenly sympathetic and pored over the eye-straining advertisement columns as persistently as Jean herself.

"How's this?" she inquired, glancing up hopefully from one of these quests. "'Wanted: Girl or woman to interest herself in caring for the feeble-minded.'"

"I tried that yesterday."

"No good?"

"They only offered a home."

"And with idiots! They must be dotty themselves."

Then Jean, ranging another column, thought that she detected a glimmer of hope.

"Listen," she said. "'Wanted: Girl to pose for society illustrations.' Do you think there is anything in this?"

"Too much," returned Amy, sententiously. "Don't answer model ads. It isn't models those fellows want any more than they are artists. Real artists don't need to advertise. They can get all the models they want without it. I never thought to mention posing. Why don't you try it? You have got the looks, and it's perfectly respectable."

"Is it?" rejoined Jean, dubiously. "I thought this advertisement sounded all right because it says 'society illustrations.'"

"It's just as proper to pose nude, if that's what you're thinking about. I know the nicest kind of a girl who does. Her mother is paralyzed. But that's only one branch of the business, and it's all respectable. Why, you'll find art students themselves doing it to help along with their expenses. I know what I'm talking about, because I've posed."

"You!"

"Just a little. It was for an artist who boarded here a while before you came. He moved uptown when he began to get on, and now you see his pictures in all the magazines. I was a senator's daughter in one set of drawings and a golf-girl in a poster. It's easy work as soon as your muscles get broken in, and it stands you in fifty cents an hour at least. The girl I told you of sometimes makes twenty-five or thirty dollars a week, but she poses for life classes; they're in the schools, you know. I made up my mind to go into it once."

"Why didn't you?"

Amy laid a derisive finger on her tip-tilted nose.

"Here's why," she laughed. "It was this way: The artist who used to board here told me of another man who paid three or four models regular salaries. He did pictures about Greeks and Romans, and all those girls had to do, I heard, was to loaf round in pretty clothes, and once in awhile be painted. I went up there one day and it certainly was a lovely place, just like a house in a novel I'd read called 'The Last Days of Pompey-eye.' A girl was posing when I came, and, if you'll believe me, that man had rigged up a wind-machine that blew her clothes about just as though she was running a race. Well, I didn't stay long. The artist--he was seventy-five or eighty, I should say, and grumpy--turned me sideways, took one look at my nose, and said I was too old, nineteen hundred years too old! He thought he was funny. Somebody told me afterward that he was a has-been and couldn't sell his pictures any more."

With the idea that posing might answer as a stop-gap until she found some other means of support, Jean forthwith visited an agency whose address Amy furnished. She found the proprietor of this enterprise a jerky little man with a disquieting pair of black eyes which thoroughly inventoried her every feature, movement, and detail of dress.

"Chorus, front row, show-girl, or church choir?" he demanded briskly.

"I thought this was a model agency," Jean said; "I wish to try posing if--"

"Right shop. What line, please?"

"In costume."

"You don't follow me. Fashion-plate, illustrating, lithography, or commercial photography."

"I'm not sure," she hesitated, bewildered by this unexpected broadening of the field. "What can I earn?"

The little man waved his arms spasmodically.

"Might as well ask me what the weather'll be next Fourth of July," he sputtered. "See that horse there?" pointing out of his window at a much-blanketed thoroughbred on its way to the smith's. "How fast can he trot? You don't know! Of course you don't. How much can you earn? I don't know. Of course I don't. You see my point? Same case exactly. Illustrators pay all the way from half a dollar to a dollar and a half an hour. Camera-models make from one dollar to three. And there you are."

"I've had no experience."

"That's plain enough. Sticks out like a sore thumb. But you don't need any. Fact, you don't. That's the beauty of the business. Appearance and gumption, they're the cards to hold. You've got appearance. A girl has to have the looks, or I don't touch her fee. Fair all round, you see. If a girl's face or get-up is against her, I've no business taking her money. If an illustrator says, 'Send me up a model who looks so and so,' that's just the article he gets. First-class models, first-class illustrators, there's my system."

"I need work at once," Jean stated. "What is my chance?"

"Prime. You ought to fill the bill for a man who 'phoned not two minutes before you walked through the door. High-class artist, known everywhere, liberal pay. There needn't have been any delay whatever, if you'd thought to bring your father or mother along."

Jean's rising spirits dropped dismally at this remark.

"My father is dead," she explained. "My mother lives in the country."

"Then get her consent in writing. Means time, of course, and time's money, but it can't be helped."

"Is it absolutely necessary?"

"You'll have to have it to do business with me," replied the agent, beginning to shuffle among his papers.

"But my mother knows I am trying to earn a living," she argued. "Besides, I'm nearly of age. I shall be twenty-one next week."

"Drop in when you get your letter," directed the little man, inflexibly. "Minor or not, I make it a rule to have parents' consent. Troubles enough in my line without papa and mamma. Good day."

Outside the door Jean decided upon independent action. This last resource was at once too attractive and too near to be relinquished lightly. The idea of obtaining Mrs. Fanshaw's consent was preposterous, even if she could bring herself to ask it--the term "artist's model" conveyed only scandalous suggestions to Shawnee Springs; but there was nothing to prevent her hunting employment from studio to studio. Amy had mentioned the address of the illustrator whom success had translated from Mrs. St. Aubyn's world, and to him Jean determined to apply first.

Her errand brought her to one of the innumerable streets from which wealth and fashion are ever in retreat before a vanguard of the crafts of which wealth and fashion are the legitimate quarry, and to a commercialized brownstone dwelling with a modiste established in its basement, a picture-dealer tenanting its drawing-room, and a mixed population of artists, architects, and musicians tucked away elsewhere between first story and roof. She found the studio of Amy's acquaintance readily, and obeying a muffled call, which answered her knock, pushed open the door of an antechamber that had obviously once done service as a hall-bedroom. Here she hesitated. The one door other than that by which she entered led apparently into the intimacies of the artist's domestic life, for the counterpane of a white iron bed, distinctly visible from her station, outlined a woman's recumbent form.

"In here, please," called the voice. "I'm trying to finish while the light holds."

On the threshold Jean had to smile at her own unsophistication. The supposed bedroom was a detail of the studio proper, the supposed wife a model impersonating a hospital patient who held the centre of interest in a gouache drawing, to which the illustrator was adding a few last touches by way of accent.

"I see you don't need a model," Jean said, with a smile inclusive of the girl in the bed.

He scrutinized her impersonally, transferred a brush from mouth to hand, and caught up a bundle of galley-proofs.

"No," he decided, more to himself than Jean. "It's another petite heroine, drat her! But I'd be glad to have you leave your name and address," he added, indicating a paint-smeared memorandum book which lay amidst the brushes, ink-saucers, and color-tubes littering a small table at elbow. "I may need your type any day."

Jean complied, thanked him, and turned to go.

"Try MacGregor, top floor--Malcolm MacGregor," he suggested. "Tell him I said to have a look at your eyes."

Much encouraged, she mounted two more flights, knocked, and, as before, let herself in at an unceremonious hail. This time, however, she passed directly from hall to studio, coming at once into an atmosphere startling in its contrast to the life she left behind. MacGregor's Oasis, one of the illustrator's friends called it, and the phrase fitted happily. The rack of wonderfully chased small arms and long Arab flintlocks; the bright spot of color made upon the neutral background of the wall by some strange musical instrument or Tripolitan fan; the curious jugs, gourds, and leathern buckets of caravan housekeeping; the careless heaps of oriental stuffs and garments from which, among the soberer folds of a barracan or camel's-hair jellaba, one caught the red gleam of a fez or the yellow glow of a vest wrought with intricate embroideries; the tropical sun-helmet,--MacGregor's own,--its green lining bleached by the reflected light of Sahara sand; the antelope antlers above the lintel; the Soudanese leopard skins under foot--these and their like, in bewildering number and variety, recalled the charm and mystery of the African desert which this man knew, loved, and painted superlatively.

MacGregor himself, whom she found at his easel, was, despite his name, not Scotch, but American, with seven generations of New England ancestors behind him. Tall, thin-featured, alert, and apparently in his late thirties, he had the quizzical, shrewdly humorous eye which passes for and possibly does express the Connecticut Yankee's outlook upon life. In nothing did he suggest the artist.

"I'll be through here in no time, if you'll take a chair," he said, when Jean had repeated the other artist's message.

Her wait was fruitful, for it emphasized most graphically the dictum of the agent that gumption was fundamental in the successful model's equipment. The man now posing for MacGregor in the character of an aged Arab leading a caravan down a rocky defile, was mounted upon nothing more spirited than an ingenious arrangement of packing-cases, but he bestrode his saddle as if he rode in truth the barb which the canvas depicted. He dismounted presently and disappeared in an adjacent alcove from which he shortly issued a commonplace young man in commonplace occidental garb, who pocketed his day's wage and went whistling down the stairs.

MacGregor turned to Jean.

"I do want a model," he said. "I want one bad. By rights I should be painting over yonder,"--his gesture broadly signified Africa,--"but my market, the devil take it! is here. So I'm hunting a model. I have had plenty come who look the part (which you don't) even Arabs from a Wild West show; but I've yet to strike one who has any more imagination than a rabbit. I tell you this frankly because it's easy to see you're not the average model. That is why I asked you to wait. The model I'm looking for must work under certain of the Arab woman's restrictions. Out there"--his hand again swept the Dark Continent--"you never see her face, as you probably know. You glimpse her eyes, if they're not veiled; you try to read their story. If even the eyes are hidden, you find yourself attempting to read the draperies. Do you grasp my difficulty? I want some one who can express emotions not only with the eyes, but without them. Now you," he ended, with a note of enthusiasm, "you have the eyes. Don't tell me you haven't the rest."

Jean laughed.

"I won't if I can help it," she assured him.

He caught up a costume which lay upon a low divan, and ransacked a heap of unframed canvases that leaned backs outward against the wall.

"This sketch will give you a notion how the dress goes," he said, and carried his armful into the alcove.

When she reëntered the studio, MacGregor was arranging a screen of a pattern Jean had never seen.

"It was made from an old lattice," he explained, placing a chair for her behind it. "I picked it up in Kairwan. This little door swings in its original position. You are looking now from a window--a little more than ajar, so--from which generations of women, dressed as you are dressed, have watched an Arab street."

He passed round to the front of the screen and studied her intently.

"Eyes about there," he said, indicating a rose-water jar upon a low shelf. "Expression," he paused thoughtfully. "How shall I tell you what I want you to suggest from the lattice? Don't think of those women of the Orient. You can't truly conceive their life. Think of something nearer home. Imagine yourself in a convent--no, that won't do at all. Imagine yourself a prisoner, an innocent prisoner, peering through your grating at the world, longing--"

"Wait," said Jean.

She threw herself into his conception, closed her mental vision upon the studio and its trophies, erased the bustling city from her thoughts. She was again a resentful inmate of Cottage No. 6, lying in her cell-like room at twilight, while the woods called to her with a hundred tongues. There were flowers in the sheltered places; arbutus, violets--

"You've got it!" MacGregor's exultant voice brought her back. "You've got it! We'll go to work to-morrow at nine."

"No admission, Mac?" asked a man's voice from the doorway. "I gave the regulation knock, but you seemed--" He stopped and gazed hard into the eyes which met his with answering wonder from the lattice.

"I've found her, Atwood," MacGregor hailed him jubilantly. "I've found her at last."

The newcomer took an uncertain step forward, halted again, then strode suddenly toward the screen.

"I think I have, too," he said, at the little window now. "It's Jack, isn't it?"

XIX

And Jean?

It was as if she still dwelt in fancy in that unforgettable past. She had burst her bars; she had come, a fugitive, to the birch-edged shore of a lonely lake; her knight of the forest stood before her.

[Illustration: Her knight of the forest stood before her.]

The astonished MacGregor, having waited a decent interval for some rational clew to the situation, recalled his own existence by the simple expedient of folding the screen.