Part 15

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

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

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

Jean's welcome was whole-hearted.

"Craig has told you?" she said softly.

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

"We have exchanged calls without meeting."

"Preliminary skirmishes."

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

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

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

"And the victor?" she said.

"Apparently yourself."

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

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

"No."

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

"More than half."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Almost."

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

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

[Illustration: She was scoring.]

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

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

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

Jean shook her head.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Atwood drew her into his arms.

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

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

Then Craig's words took on a meaning.

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

"But the portrait?" she wavered.

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

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

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

XXIV

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

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

"Yes."

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

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

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

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!"