Part 13

Among MacGregor's intimates who shared the secret of a knock which admitted them at all hours, but who, busy men themselves, came oftenest after the north light failed, was a sculptor named Karl Richter. This man's specialty was the American Indian, but he also had known the Arab at first-hand, and Africa in one or another of its myriad phases was ever the topic when he and MacGregor foregathered. Listening to their talk, Jean came to visualize the bronze-skinned folk, the vivid market-places, the wild music of hautboys and tom-toms, the gardens of fig and olive and orange and palm, the waysides thicketed with bamboo, tamarisk, or scarlet geranium, and the desert,--above all, the mysterious, terrible, beautiful desert,--as things which her own senses had known. It chanced one day that they spoke of camels and, as often, began to argue; and that Richter, to prove his point, whipped from his pocket a lump of modeling wax, which, under his wonderful fingers, became in a twinkling a striking counterfeit of the beast itself. It could not have been more than an inch in height, but it was a very camel, stubborn, complaining, alive. MacGregor confuted, the sculptor annihilated the little animal with a careless pinch, tossed the wax aside, and soon after went his way.

Dissatisfied with his work, MacGregor presently caught his canvas from the easel, and, laying it prone upon the floor, began by shifting strips of card-board to hunt the truer composition. Jean, left to herself, took up the discarded wax, tried vainly to coax back the vanished camel, and then amused herself with a conception of her own. So absorbed did she become that MacGregor finished his experiments unheeded, and, receiving no answer to a question, still unregarded came and peered over her shoulder.

"Great Jupiter Pluvius!" he exclaimed.

Jean whirled about.

"How you startled me!" she said.

"It's nothing to the way you've startled me. Where did you see that head you've modeled?"

"Oh, this?" She tried to put the wax away. "It's nothing--only a baby in our block."

MacGregor pounced upon the model and bore it to the light.

"Nothing! Merely a study from life, that's all! Just a trifle thrown off in your odd moments!" He turned the little head round and round, showering exclamations. "Who taught you?" he demanded, striding back. "Somebody had a finger in it besides you. There are lines here that can't be purely intuitive."

"I used to watch my father."

"Was he a sculptor?"

"He might have been, if he'd had the chance. But he had to work at other things, and he married--"

"I know, I know," MacGregor groaned. "Love in a cottage and to hell with art! But he couldn't keep his thoughts or his hands from it. He modeled when he could?"

Jean nodded dreamily.

"Sundays, mainly," she answered. "We used to go into the country together. He found a bed of good clay near a creek where the mint grew. I can never smell mint without remembering. I couldn't go back there after he died."

MacGregor gave her a sidelong glance, hemmed, made an unnecessary trip across the studio, and kicked a fallen burnous violently.

"But you went on modeling?" he asked, returning.

"Yes--by and by. Then, later, I stopped."

"Why?"

"I--I hadn't the clay?" she evaded.

MacGregor brooded over her handiwork a moment longer, then squared his jaw.

"You'll have the 'clay' hereafter," he said.

XXI

At the outset she was rather skeptical of his faith in her. Had not Atwood said that MacGregor saw genius in all his friends? But the younger man now hailed him a most discerning judge.

"It's the something I divined," he declared jubilantly, "the gold-bearing vein I believed in, but hadn't the luck to unearth. Now to develop it! What does Mac advise?"

"One of the art schools," said Jean. "I can go evenings, it seems."

"And work days! It's a stiff programme you plan."

"But the school won't mean work," she declared. "Then, too, the posing comes far easier than it did. Mr. MacGregor says my muscles are almost as steady as a professional's."

"So he tells me. I'm going to insist on sharing your time. He has monopolized you long enough."

MacGregor's monopoly did not cease at once, however. His first step on discovering Jean's talent was to enlist Richter's expert criticism and counsel with the practical outcome that the sculptor's door swung open to her in the daylight hours when MacGregor worked with male models. The clay-modeling-room at the art school was a wonderful place. Its casts, its tools, its methods, were a revelation after the crude shifts with which her father had had to content himself; but Richter's studio transcended it as a university transcends a kindergarten. Here were conceived ideas which found perpetuity in bronze!

Studio and sculptor were each unique. A little man of crippled frame, Karl Richter delighted in the muscular and the colossal and walked a pigmy amidst his own creations. Michael Angelo was his god; but his manner was his own, and the Indians and cow-boys he loved best to express were remote enough from the great Florentine's subjects to acquit him of imitation. His frail physique notwithstanding, he had been at pains to see for himself the primitive life he adored, and the idler who coined "The Oasis" dubbed the sculptor's place "The Wigwam," and spread a facetious tale that Richter went about his work in blanket and moccasins, and habitually smoked a calumet which had once belonged to Sitting Bull. Richter never denied this myth, which by now had received the sanction of print, and took huge satisfaction in the crestfallen glances unknown callers gave his conventional dress. However, the studio itself, a transformed stable, was sufficiently picturesque. It overflowed with spoils from ranch and tepee, and, thanks to the Wild West show which furnished MacGregor occasional Arabs, sometimes sheltered genuine, if sophisticated, red men.

About this time Jean left Mrs. St. Aubyn's, whose neighborhood Paul, after dejected silence, had again begun to haunt. She had thus far eluded him, but meet they must, she felt, if she remained; and with Amy's abrupt departure, which now came to pass, she changed to a boarding-house of Atwood's recommending in Irving Place.

"There are no signs of the trade about it, fashionable or unfashionable," he said. "It's just a homelike place, neither too large nor too small, where you will see mainly art students. Many of them, like you, are making their own way, and all of them are dead in earnest. All the illustrators know Mrs. Saunders. Half of us have lived under her roof some time or other."

"You, too!"

He smiled at her tone.

"I wasn't born with a golden spoon, you know. Some New Yorkers aren't. I inherited a little money, but I'm not a plutocrat yet, even if editors do smile upon me. Julie and I thoroughly mastered the gentle art of scrimping at one time. Have I ever mentioned my sister, Mrs. Van Ostade?"

"You spoke of her the day I saw you first."

"At the birches?" he returned, surprised.

"You said she would not understand."

His eyes sobered.

"I remember," he said. "And it was true. Neither would she understand now, I fear. She has been both wedded and widowed since. You'll see her at the studio yet, if MacGregor ever lets us begin work together. She surprises me there when she thinks I am neglecting my duties as a social being. Julie has all the zeal of a proselyte in her missionary labors for society," he added laughingly. "She married into one of the old Dutch families."

Jean found that a tradition of Mrs. Van Ostade's residence in Irving Place still lingered there. She was spoken of as Craig Atwood's sister, the clever girl who had jockied for position, on nothing a year, by cultivating fashionable charities. Settlement work, it appeared, had been the fulcrum for her lever. No one here, however, had known her personally, save Mrs. Saunders, who was a paragon of reticence when gossip was afield. Indeed, a dearth of gossip, in the invidious sense of the word, was a negative virtue to which her whole establishment might lay claim. Mainly art students, as Atwood had predicted, the sharpest personalities of Jean's new acquaintances dealt with the vagaries of masters whom they furtively admired and not seldom aped. Thus the life-class girl would furrow her pretty forehead over the drawing of a beginner at antique with the precise "Ha!" and "Not half bad!" of the distinguished artist and critic who twice a week set her own heart palpitating with his crisp condemnation or praise.

Illustrating, painting, sculpture, architecture, decorative design, whatever their individual choice, life for each had its center in the

## particular school of his or her adhesion. Art--always Art--was the

beginning and end of their table-talk, and even the two young men who had other interests, a lawyer and a playwright, both embryonic, spoke the language of the studios. To this community of interest was added the discovery that all derived from country stock. Half a dozen states had their nominal allegiance, and not even Mrs. Saunders, who seemed as metropolitan as the City Hall, could boast New York as her birthplace. They brimmed with a fine youthful confidence in their ability to wrest success from this alien land of promise, which charged their atmosphere electrically and spurred Jean's already abundant energy to tireless endeavor. Her days were all too short, and Atwood, whose invitations she repeatedly refused for her art's sake, began to caution her against overwork.

"Philosophic frivolity, as my sister calls it, has its uses," he said. "I usually agree with her social preachments, even if I don't observe them very faithfully. You must know Julie. I'll ask her to call."

Whether he did so or not, Jean was unaware. At all events, Mrs. Van Ostade did not renew her acquaintance with Irving Place, nor did Atwood broach the subject again. If the social columns might be believed, the lady was amply preoccupied with philosophic frivolity. MacGregor presently turned a searching light upon her personality.

"Notice that bit of impertinent detail, the unnecessary jewel?" he queried, stabbing with his pipe-stem at one of Atwood's drawings which a premature Christmas magazine had reproduced in color. "Craig never did it."

"Then who did?" Jean asked.

"His sister."

"Does she draw?"

"By proxy. I mean she suggested this as she has suggested every false, vitiating note that's crept into his work. Left to himself, Craig never paints the lily. But he defers to her as a younger brother often will to a sister who has mothered or stepmothered him. It was probably a good thing once--I admit she has brains and push; but now it's time the coddling stopped. It did let up for a while when she went over to the Dutch--she was too busy to bother with him; but with her husband underground and Craig coming on, it has begun again. Artistically she's his evil genius. Of course he can't see it, or won't. I've done my level best to beat it into him."

"You have told him!"

"Certainly; and her too. I have known them both for years. What are you grinning at?"

"Your candor. What did he say?"

MacGregor scowled.

"Same old rot I'm always hearing," he grumbled. "Called me a woman-hater. What do you think?" challenging her abruptly. "You've seen me at close quarters for some time. Do I strike you as that sort of man? I want your unvarnished opinion."

Jean answered him with his own frankness.

"A woman-hater?" she repeated. "Never. I think you are"--she searched for the word--"a woman-idolater."

MacGregor grimly assured himself that no sarcasm was intended.

"Expound," he directed.

"I mean it seems to me you rate Woman so high that mere women can't realize your ideal."

"Humph!" he commented ungraciously. "Where did you learn to turn cheap epigrams? Probably it's an echo of something you've read."

He addressed her variously as Miss Epigrams, Lady Blessington, and Madame de Staël as the work went forward, always with profound gravity, until finally, when he saw her color rise to his teasing, he gave his full-lunged laugh and confessed.

"All the same, you're right, Miss Epigrams. That's one reason why I'm still unattached. It's also why I haven't cared to see Craig take the only sure cure. A wife would teach his sister her place, if she had the right metal." He chuckled at the vision his words conjured. "But it would be a battle royal."

It was spring before Jean herself saw Mrs. Van Ostade. She had posed for Atwood frequently after Christmas, but had chanced always to be either with MacGregor or Richter when his sister visited the studio, until the April afternoon when Julie's knock interrupted an overdue illustration which Atwood was toiling mightily to finish. He frowned at the summons and answered it without putting down the maul-stick, palette, and brushes with which his hands were cumbered; but his "You, Julie!" at the door hinted no impatience, nor his returning step aught but infinite leisure as he issued with his dark-eyed, dark-haired, dark-skinned caller from behind the screen.

"Those stairs!" sighed the lady. Then, observing Jean, she subjected her to a drastic ordeal by lorgnon, which, raking her from face to gown,--where the inquisition lingered,--returned with added intensity upon her face.

Hot plowshares could have been no more fiery for poor Jean, who, sufficiently aglow with the knowledge that the dress upon her back was a piece of Mrs. Van Ostade's evening finery abandoned to the uses of the studio, found herself tormented by the certainty that somewhere in her vulnerable past she and this sister of Craig Atwood's had met before.

A sympathetic reflection of her embarrassment lit the man's face.

"This is Miss Fanshaw," he interposed, "herself an artist. You have heard me speak of her, Julie."

The lorgnon dropped and the two women exchanged a bow perceptible to the naked eye.

"I know the face," stated Mrs. Van Ostade, with an impersonal air of classifying scientific phenomena. "Where did I see it?"

Jean now recalled this elusive detail most vividly, but she kept her head.

"Probably in Mr. Atwood's work," she suggested coldly.

"Of course," seconded Atwood, keen to end the incident. "You will find Miss Fanshaw in half my recent stuff."

"The living face has no pictorial associations whatever," retorted his sister, with decision. "I shall remember in time. But go on with your work, Craig. I did not come to disturb you--merely to bring a piece of news which I'll tell you as soon as I get my breath."

Atwood placed a chair and, returning to his easel, made a show of work which Jean's trained eye knew for his usual polite pretense with visitors who assumed themselves no hindrance; while Mrs. Van Ostade, throwing back her furs, relegated the model to the ranks of the inanimate studio properties, of which her leisured survey now took stock.

"Those stairs!" she said again, pursuing her breath by the unique method of lavishing more. "Really, Craig, you couldn't have pitched on a more inconvenient rookery."

"We thought it a miracle for the money once," he reminded. "I dare say I could find a more convenient workshop in one of the new office-buildings, but then I shouldn't have my open fire."

"You could have it at the Copley Studios, and modern comforts, too."

"Up there!" he scoffed. "I don't belong in the pink-tea circle, Julie."

Mrs. Van Ostade refused to smile with him.

"The location counts," she insisted.

"With some people."

"With the helpful people. I've thought it over carefully; I've used my eyes and ears. The studio unquestionably carries weight. It ought to be something more than a workshop, as you call it. It should have atmosphere. Even our friend down the street has achieved that. Barbaric as it is, MacGregor's studio has a distinct artistic unity."

"Mac's place reflects his work. So does mine."

"Yours! It's a jumble of everything, a junk-shop."

"Of course it is," he laughed. "I've ransacked two-thirds of these treasures from the Ghetto. But even junk-shops have atmosphere--a musty one--and so, it logically follows, must my studio."

She indulged his trifling with a divine patience.

"Could you receive Mrs. Joyce-Reeves in such a place?" she queried sweetly.

"Certainly; if any possible errand could bring that high and mighty personage over the door-sill."

"There is a possible reason."

Her tone drew him round. Jean, forgotten by both, discerned that he also attached a significance to the hypothetical visit. She was at a loss to account for this, Mrs. Joyce-Reeves's prominence in the social world of New York notwithstanding.

"Is this your news, Julie?" he demanded.

His sister savored his quickened interest a moment.

"Part of it," she replied. "She saw your dry-point of me at Mrs. Quentin Van Ostade's the other day."

"The dry-point!" he deprecated. "It was only an experiment."

"So I told her. She asked if you do anything in the way of portraiture in oil, and of course I answered yes."

"I say!"

"Well, haven't you?"

"Trash, yes; cart-loads of it."

"Perhaps you call your portrait of Malcolm MacGregor trash? Mrs. Joyce-Reeves did not."

"She saw it!"

"I dropped casually that it had been hung with the Fifth Avenue exhibition of MacGregor's African studies, and she took the address. That was day before yesterday. This afternoon I met her again--met her leaving the gallery."

"Well?" jogged Atwood, impatiently.

"She told me she had bought two of MacGregor's things," continued Mrs. Van Ostade, not to be hurried. "She took a desert nocturne and that queer veiled woman at a window--you remember?"

"Do I!" He spun about. "You heard that, Jean? Mrs. Joyce-Reeves has bought 'The Lattice'! Miss Fanshaw posed for it, Julie."

"Indeed!" The lorgnon, again unsheathed at the intimate "Jean," once more took cognizance of that young person's existence. "I don't care for it. But, what is more important, Mrs. Joyce-Reeves mentioned your portrait."

"Yes?"

"And this time asked for your address."

"Jove! You think--"

"I'm positive she'll give you a commission."

"Jove!" he exclaimed again, "what a chance!" and paced the studio. "Yet she may. It's her whim to pose as a discoverer. What a chance! What a colossal chance! It would mean--what wouldn't it mean?" He stopped excitedly before the escritoire where Jean sat waiting to resume her interrupted impersonation of a note-writing débutante. "It would take nerve, no end of it. She's been painted by Sargent, Chartran, Zorn--all the big guns. A fellow would have to find a phase they'd missed. But if he could! You can't conceive her influence, Jean. If she buys a man's pictures, all the little fish in her pond tumble over one another to buy them, too. That's not the main issue, however, though I don't blink its importance. The opportunity to paint _her_, to search out the woman behind--that's the big thing. I have a theory. I met her once--she'd bought an original of mine, thanks again to Julie--and something she let fall makes me think--but I'm talking as if I had the commission in my hands."

Jean scarcely heard. Sympathize with him as she might, Julie Van Ostade's face, from the moment Atwood's talk ceased to be hers exclusively, absorbed her more.

"Craig," broke in his sister, crisply, "my furs."

He touched earth blankly.

"Not going, Julie?"

"My furs," she repeated.

"But I haven't begun to thank you," he said, obeying.

"Is not that also premature?" She rustled majestically toward the door, which he sprang before her to open. The girl was but a lay figure in her path.

Then the door closed and Atwood, wearing a look of bewilderment, came slowly up the studio to meet still another problem in feminine psychology in the now thoroughly outraged Jean.

"Why did you introduce me?" she demanded bitterly. "Why couldn't you let me remain a common model to her? I am a common model in her eyes--common in every sense. I remember well enough where she saw me, and she'll remember, too, never fear."

"Jean! Jean!" He came to her in distress.

"It was a drinking-place, and the girl with me had drunk too much. We amused your sister's theater-party immensely. They were probably slumming--seeing low life!"

He drew a calmer account from her presently.

"I know the place," he said. "It had rather a vogue before people found out that it was only sham-German, after all. It's a perfectly respectable rathskeller. You went with some gentleman, of course?"

Jean's passion for confession flagged.

"With a friend of Amy's from the boarding-house," she answered briefly.

Atwood gave a relieved laugh.

"You have made a mountain of a mole-hill," he told her; "but I'm glad you mentioned the circumstances. I'll explain to Julie, if she ever thinks of it again. Don't misjudge her, Jean. I admit she's unsympathetic at first sight, even brusque; but there's another side, believe me. You saw how devoted she is to my interests."

She had indeed seen, and the knowledge rankled.

"You should not have introduced me, made me share your talk," she said. "You meant a kindness, but it was no kindness; it was a humiliation, a--" Then the tension snapped and her head went down between her arms.

"Kindness!" He swept her stormily to himself. "Kindness, Jean! Can't you see why I wanted you to share it with me? Can't you see that I want you to share everything? I love you, Jean."

For a long moment she yielded; the next she had slipped from him and the escritoire was between them.

"Don't," she forbade. "You must not say these things to me."

"Must not?"

"I can't marry you."

"Can't! Yet a moment ago--"

"I can't marry you," she repeated breathlessly.

"But your kiss--"

"Was a lie--pity--what you like. I was unstrung. I--I don't love you."

He searched her face for a perplexed instant.

"Jean," he commanded; "look at me!"

She faced him.

"Now tell me that again--straight in the eyes."

"Don't," she entreated.

"Say it!"

"You heard me."

"I want to hear it again--on your honor!" He waited.

"I--I refuse."

He strode toward her in triumph.

"You can't," he cried. "The kiss was no lie. It was the truth, the sacred truth! What unselfish madness made you try to deceive me?"

"Remember your career," she protested; "your sister's world, which is your world, too."

But the time for reasoning was past.

XXII

What passed forthwith between brother and sister Jean neither heard nor particularly conjectured. Ways, means, and motives were for the time being eclipsed by the tremendous fact that Julie called. That she acquitted herself of this formality at an hour when the slightest possible knowledge of the girl's habits would argue her absence from Irving Place, roused in Jean only a vast relief. The mute pasteboard was itself sufficiently formidable.

She was even more relieved that through some mischance, for which Atwood, who went with her, taxed himself, her return call found Julie out. Visiting-cards she had none, their urgent need having hitherto never presented itself; but Atwood helped her pretend before the rather overpowering servant that she had forgotten them, and, scribbling her name upon one of his own, bore her off for an evening at the play.

Here, for the space of a week, matters rested, only to hatch a fresh embarrassment in the end, beside which calls were trivialities. This was no less than an invitation to dine, and to dine, not with Mrs. Van Ostade and Atwood merely, but as one of a more or less formal company--so Craig enlightened her--of the clever or socially significant.

Jean heard these depressing explanations with a sick face.

"I can't go," she protested quickly. "Don't ask me."

"Can't!" he repeated. "Why not?"

"You know why. They're different, these people--as different from me as if I were Chinese."

"What rubbish!"