Part 12

"Step inside, won't you?" he invited with a dry grin. "You may take cold at the window."

Atwood turned an illumined face.

"It's been years since we met," he explained. "I was not sure at first--the costume, the place."

MacGregor's eye lingered upon him in humorous meditation.

"Perhaps you'll see your way in time to introduce me," he suggested. "This has been a business session, so far. We hadn't come to names."

The younger man floundered, glowing healthily, but Jean retained her wits.

"Miss Fanshaw," she supplied promptly. "I should have mentioned it before."

She vanished into the alcove, questioned her unfamiliar image in the little mirror, and began to resume her street-dress with fingers not under perfect control. There came an indistinct murmur of talk from the studio in which MacGregor's incisive tones predominated. His companion's responses were few and low. When she reëntered, Atwood stood waiting by the outer door.

"At nine, then," reminded MacGregor. "So-long, Craig, if you must go."

"So-long," answered the other, absently.

On the stair they faced each other with the wonder of their meeting still upon them.

"You are not a professional model," he said; "I should have come across you before, if you were."

"You have seen me get my first engagement."

"And with MacGregor! Was it chance?"

"Just chance."

"Jove!" he ejaculated. "It might have been myself. Yet it's strange enough as it is. MacGregor in there was the chap I was to camp with, you remember? The man whose grandmother--"

"Great-grandmother, wasn't it?" she smiled.

"You do remember!"

A silence fell upon them for a little moment and they assayed each other shyly, he keenly aware of the fuller curves which had made a woman of her, she searching rather for reminders of the youth whose image had gone back with her through the gatehouse into bondage. He was more grave, as became a man now looking back upon his golden twenties, with thoughtful lines about the eyes, and a clearer demarcation of the jaw, which was, as of old, shaven, and pale with the pallor of a dweller in cities. The mouth was the mouth of the youth, sensitive, unspoiled; and the direct eyes had lost nothing of their friendliness, though she divined that he weighed her, questioning what manner of woman she had become.

"You went back," he broke the pause, "you went back to that inferno because of what I said. You saw it through. Plucky Jack!"

"Jean," she corrected.

"Why?"

"Jack was another girl, a girl I hope I've outgrown."

"Don't say that," he protested. "I knew her. But this Jean of the staircase--"

"Well?" she challenged, avid for his mature opinion.

"Makes me wonder," he completed, "whether I've not been outgrown, too."

It was not a satisfying answer. She remembered that growth may be other than benign.

"You!" she said.

"Why not? I was young, preposterously young. Had I been older, I should never have dared meddle with your life."

"Meddle!" she repeated, his self-reproach rang so true; "you gave me the wisest advice such a girl could receive. That girl could not appreciate how wise it was, but this one does and thanks you from the bottom of her heart."

Atwood drew a long breath.

"You can say that!" he exclaimed. "You knew what it meant to return; I did not. Since I have realized the truth, the thought of my folly has given me no peace. I imagined--God knows what I haven't imagined! To see you here, as you are; to have you thank me, when I thought I deserved your undying hate, is like a reprieve."

Jean's face went radiant. "Yet you say you knew her!"

Their eyes met an instant; then they laughed together happily.

"You're right," he acknowledged. "It seems I don't know either of you. But we can't talk here, can we? We need--" He paused, then, "Give me this day," he entreated. "We're not strangers. Say you will!"

As they issued upon the pavement, the driver of a passing cab raised an interrogative whip. Atwood nodded, and a moment afterward they had edged into the traffic of one of the avenues and were rolling northward. To Jean, reveling silently in her first hansom, it seemed that they had scarcely started before they turned in at one of the entrances of Central Park, and for a time followed perforce the flashing afternoon parade before striking into a less frequented roadway, where they dismounted. Atwood, too, had said nothing amidst the jingling ostentation of the avenue and main-traveled drives, and he was silent now as they forsook the asphalt walks for quiet paths, where their feet trod the good earth, and the odor of leaf mold rose pungently.

Presently he halted.

"Will you shut your eyes for a little way?" he asked. "It's my whim."

She assented, and they went forward slowly, her hand upon his sleeve. She felt the path drop, by gentle slopes at first, then with sharp turns past jutting rocks, where there seemed no path at all. Her sense of direction failed her, and with it went her recollection of the city's nearness. The immediate sounds were all sylvan. She heard the call of a cat-bird, the bark of a squirrel, the laughing whimper of a brook among stones, which she guessed, if her ear had not lost its woodcraft, merged its peevish identity in some neighboring lake or pool.

"Now," said her guide, pausing.

She looked, started, and rounded swiftly upon Atwood to find him beaming at her instant comprehension.

"It might be the very same!" she exclaimed.

"Mightn't it? The birches, the shore-line--"

"And the stream, even the little stream! Could I find watercress _there_, I wonder?"

The man laughed.

"Ah, it is real to you! I, too, forgot New York when I first stumbled on it. I even _looked_ for watercress. But it knows no such purity, poor little brook! I've had to pretend with it, as I've pretended with the lake. The landscape-gardener was a clever fellow. He makes you believe there are distances out there--winding channels, unplumbed depths; he cheats you into thinking you have a forest at your back. Sometimes he has almost persuaded me to cast a clumsy line into that thicket yonder."

Jean's look returned to him quickly. He was smiling, but with an undercurrent of gravity.

"You know it well," she said.

"I ought. It was here, the summer after we met, that I came to realize something of what I had asked you to do. I began to study refuges. I went to such as I could, boys' places, mainly; I even tried to get sight or word of you. Somehow, though, I never came at the right official, and it seemed that men weren't welcome. I learned a few things, however. I grubbed among reports; I found out what your daily life was like, what your companions must be, and once I saw a newspaper account of a riot. But of you I heard nothing. How could I? I did not even know your name--I, your judge!"

The girl moved toward the border of the lake and for a space stood looking dreamily into its tranquil counterfeit of changing foliage and September sky. To the miracle of their meeting was added the revelation that even as he had filled her thoughts in the dark days, so had she possessed his.

"Will you sit here?" he asked, again beside her. "I want to hear the whole story--the story which began back among the other birches."

"It began farther back than there."

"Not for me."

"But it should. If you thought about me at all, you must have wondered how I came to be in a refuge uniform."

"I wondered, yes; but I never really cared. I could see with my own eyes what you were."

She searched his face with the skepticism which the world had taught, then, with a swift intake of breath, looked believing away.

"We must begin at the beginning," she said.

She told him her story as she had told it to the dentist that hideous night of explanations at the Lorna Doone, but where Paul's black silence had stifled her, lamed her speech, made her almost doubt herself, this listener's faith leaped before her words, bridged the difficult places where she faltered, spread the cloak of chivalry in the miry way. Yet, with all his sympathy, it hurt her, so senseless always seemed the reckoning for her follies, so poignant were her regrets, and once, when she began to speak of Stella and the riot, he stopped her.

"Don't go on," he begged. "I see what it costs you."

"I'd rather you heard it all," she replied. "It's your due."

Nevertheless, she did not tell him all. She could speak of Stella, of Amy, of young Meyer, of the floor-walker, but no word of Paul passed her lips. She let Atwood infer that the stigma of the refuge had driven her from Grimes's employ, as it had thrust her from the department store. The whole chain of circumstances which the dentist's name connoted had become suddenly as inexplicable to herself as to this transcendent hero of a perfect day.

The sun was low when she made an end, and the long-drawn shadows of the birches in the lake turned their thoughts again to that other sundown.

"You were a lonely little figure as I looked back," he said. "I took that picture with me through the hills, and it remained my sharpest memory. It was a sad memory, a mute reproach, like the poor things I bought for you to wear."

"Then you did get them!" she cried, her dress instinct astir. "What were they like?"

"I will show them to you some day."

"You've kept them? I must pay my debt."

He shook his head. "They're not for sale. You shall see them when you come to my studio."

"You are an artist, too?"

"I paint," he replied simply. "When you are not busy with MacGregor, you will find work with me. We'll arrange that among us. Old Mac little dreams our secret."

"It is a secret?"

"With me, at any rate. I've never told. You see"--he looked away with a sudden diffidence almost boyish; then back again with a temerity that was boyish, too--"you see, I was jealous of my memories. I wanted to keep them wholly to myself. Our meeting was--how shall I say it?--a kind of idyl. And you--have you told?"

"Never."

"Was it partly for my reason?"

"Yes," she answered; "partly for your reason."

"But those clothes," he said, after a moment, "you'll smile when you see them. I've tried many a time to imagine you wearing them, braving the world as you planned so stoutly. Perhaps it would have been no harder than the other way. Perhaps--but that's over with, thank heaven! You've earned your freedom and have a brighter lot than a fugitive's to face. I don't mean a model's life. That will be temporary. There's something in you, something fine that only needs its chance. I can't tell you how I know this any more than I can tell you what it is, but I believe in it as I believe in my own existence. I know it's true, as true as the fact that we stand here face to face."

By some necromancy of the mind he mirrored back her own vague hopes.

"But I am a woman," she said, eager for more.

"So much the better. You live in woman's day. But don't forget that you have given me a part of it," he added, as she rose. "My own particular solar day isn't ended yet. When we first met, you had me to luncheon, or was it breakfast? I'm going to return the courtesy."

"But--"

"You couldn't be more appropriately dressed for a park restaurant," he cut in, pursuing her glance. "They'll serve us under an arbor where the wistaria blooms in May. We'll have to pretend about the wistaria, but it ought to be easy. The great pretense has come true."

XX

She learned from MacGregor what Atwood's modest "I paint" signified.

"He is an illustrator who illustrates," he told her their first day, while they worked. "I mean--left arm a trifle higher, please; you've shifted the pose--I mean he gets into the skin of a writer's characters, when they have any. If they're mere abstractions, he creates blood, bones, and epidermis for them outright. Rarer thing than you imagine, I dare say, in spite of the newspaper jokes. You can count the men on one hand who do it here in New York, and to my mind Craig deserves the index finger. He'd find a soul for a rag doll. But I'm only telling you what any top-notch magazine you pick up says more forcibly."

Jean cloaked her ignorance in silence and put her trust in MacGregor's enthusiasm for further light. After an industrious interval it came.

"But that isn't all," he added, tilting back to study his canvas through half-shut eyes. "The public doesn't know Atwood's true _metier_. He's bigger than they think. I'll show you something in a minute. It's time for rest."

He lingered for a brush stroke, which at one sweep filled a languid fold of drapery with action, and then crossed the studio to the stack of unfinished work beside the wall.

"Wait," he warned, placing a canvas in the trial frame and wheeling an easel tentatively. "It's in the rough, but we can give it light and a setting. Now look. That's what I call portraiture."

Even her unschooled eye perceived its strength. It was MacGregor who looked out at her, MacGregor as she herself had twice seen him that day with his working fit upon him, New York forgotten, Africa filling every thought.

"And Mr. Atwood did it?"

"Nobody else. He sat over there in that corner, while I worked in mine, and painted what he saw."

"It's a wonderful likeness."

"Likeness!" MacGregor shook the poor word contemptuously. "Likeness! Child, it's divination!"

He dismissed her early in the afternoon, for it was raining fitfully and the light was uncertain, and on leaving she turned her steps toward the Astor Library, intent on a purpose inspired by MacGregor's talk. She had some acquaintance with the lending libraries, but none with this sedate edifice whose size and gloom oppressed her as she looked vainly about for her elderly fellow-boarder who spent his life somewhere amidst its dinginess. In this quandary, she was spied by a mannered attendant whose young face, framed in obsolete side-whiskers, reminded her of certain middle-Victorian bucks of Thackeray's whom she had come to know during spare moments at the dental parlors. This guide led her into a large reading-room where he assured her ladies were welcome, despite the frowns of the predominant sex whose peace they ruffled, and found her the two or three illustrated periodicals she named.

Without exception these contained Atwood's work, a fact which impressed her tremendously; and without exception they bore testimony to his superiority as emphatically as MacGregor. She pored over these drawings one by one, weighing them much as she weighed his spoken thought, and judging them, no less than his speech, most candid mirrors of his personality. In what this personality's appeal consisted, she had neither the detachment nor the wish to define; she could only uncritically feel its sincerity, its romance, and its power.

She craved a fuller knowledge, however, than these mute witnesses could give, and the desire presently drew her back into the high-vaulted chamber where the library's activities seemed to focus; and here, bewildered by the riches of the card catalogue, she was luckily seen by the quiet old man who lent his dignity to the head of Mrs. St. Aubyn's table. He smiled gently upon her over his spectacles, pondering the motive behind her request as he had speculated about the motives of thousands before her, and instantly, out of a head whose store she felt that she had scantily appreciated, produced half a dozen likely references which he straightway bade a precocious small boy to track to their fastnesses in some mysterious region he called the stacks; himself, meanwhile, with a faded gallantry, escorting her to a desk in a scholarly retreat where only feminine glances questioned her coming.

So ensconced, she came upon the facts she sought in a bound volume of a journal devoted chiefly to the fine arts. She learned here that her knight errant's full name was Francis Craig Atwood, that New York claimed the honor of his birthplace, and that he was a trifle less than ten years older than herself. There followed a list of his schools, which ended with Julien's Academy in Paris, where it appeared he had gone the autumn after their meeting, and had exhibited canvases at the Salons of two successive years. His return to America and his instant recognition coincided closely with her own coming to New York. The concluding analysis of his work bristled with technicalities, but she read into it the qualities which she perceived or imagined in the man, and, staring into the dusty alcove over against her seat, lost herself in a brown study of what such success as this probably meant to him. Newspaper paragraphs about his comings and goings, she supposed, many sketches like this under her hand, social opportunities of course, the flattery of women, friendships with the clever and the rich. It rather daunted her to find him a celebrity, and at this pass nothing could have so routed her self-possession as to discover that a man, of whose nearness at an adjacent bookcase she had been vaguely aware, was no other than Atwood himself.

"Thank you," he laughed, with a wave of the hand toward the telltale page. "But there's better reading in the library."

Jean clapped to the offending volume and blushed her guiltiest.

"You must think me very silly," she stammered. "Mr. MacGregor praised your work, showed me the portrait--"

"Of course he did. You have discovered Mac's weakness and his dangerous charm. He believes all his friends are geniuses. You'll grow as conceited as the rest of us in time."

"And have the other conceited friends done work like yours and said nothing about it?" she asked.

"A thousand times better. You've no idea what a clever lot of men and women Mac knows." He rapidly instanced several artists, sculptors, and writers of prominence, adding: "But you will see them all at The Oasis sooner or later. You've probably noticed that Mac is one of those rareties who can talk while they work. What would hinder most people, only stimulates him. And it stimulates the other fellow, too. I always drop in on him for a tonic when my own stuff lags. I was there this afternoon, in fact, though for another reason. I wanted to see you. It must have been telepathy that brought me down here; I thought it was 'The Gadzooks'!"

"'The Gadzooks,'" she puzzled.

"Merely my slang for the Revolutionary romance," he explained. "I'm illustrating still another one, and ran in here to resolve my doubts about bag-wigs. My novelist seems to have invented a new variety. But about you: if you don't mind the weather, and have nothing better to do, I should like to take you over to a Fifth Avenue picture dealer's to see a so-called Velasquez that's come into the market."

Jean absorbed more than the true rank and value of Velasquez's portraiture. Wet or dry, the weather was irreproachable. Did it rain, there were yet other picture dealers' secluded galleries where one might loiter luxuriously; while for the intervals of sunshine the no less fascinating shop-windows awaited, each a glimpse into the wonderland of Europe, which her guide seemed to know so well. They even discussed going on to the Metropolitan to look in at a Frans Hals and a Rembrandt, which the talk of Velasquez suggested, but Atwood's absurd watch, corroborated by several equally ridiculous clocks of the neighborhood, said plainly that it was well past closing time at the museum and indeed quite the day's end here among the shops.

He was loath to let her go.

"It's been like a too short trip abroad," he said. "I hate to book for home just yet. Why can't we dine as we did last night?"

She shook her head.

"Yesterday was an occasion."

"Say Italy?" he persisted. "We've skimmed England, France, the Low Countries; why not Italy? I know a little place that's as Italian as Naples. You would never guess its existence. It looks like every other brownstone horror outside, with not a hint of its real business, for they say old Gaetano Sanfratello has no license. He looks you over through the basement grating, and, if you're found worthy, leads you through a tunnel of a hallway into the most wonderful kitchen you ever saw. It's as clean as clean and is a regular treasure-house of shining copper. Then you'll find yourself out in what prosaic New York calls a back yard, but which, in fact, is a trattoria in the kingdom of Victor Emmanuel, whose lithograph you will see above the door. There are clusters of ripening grapes in the trellis overhead, and Chianti or Capri antico--real Capri--on the cloth below; and they'll serve you such artichoke soups, cheese soufflés, and reincarnations of the chestnut, as the gods eat! And Gaetano's pretty daughter will wait upon us and sing 'Bella Napoli,' and perhaps, if we're in great luck, she'll let us have a peep at her bambino which she keeps swaddled precisely like the one in that copy of Luca della Robbia you are staring at this minute. Aren't you tempted?"

She was, but resisted successfully; and when he saw that she was inflexible, he walked with her to her own street, planning other holidays of a future which should know no shadows.

"You must forget that gray time you've left behind you," he declared. "Call this your real beginning--your rebirth, your renaissance."

So in truth it was. The weeks following were weeks of rapid growth and ripening, which, Atwood's influence admitted, yet found their compelling force in the girl's own will. The ambition to do her utmost for MacGregor, to learn what books could teach of the life he knew by living, took her back repeatedly to the library; then other suggestions of the studio, which, even at its narrowest, was a school of curious knowledge about common things that few, save the artist, seemed to see as they were. Who but he, for instance, stopped to consider that sunlight filtering through leaves fell in circles; that shadows were violet, not black; that tobacco smoke from the mouth was of another color than the graceful spiral which rose from the tip of a cigarette? But this field opened into innumerable others in the wide domain where her two friends plied their differing talents; while these, in turn, marched with the boundaries of others still, whose only limits were Humanity's. Life itself set the true horizon to MacGregor's Oasis.