Part 16

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

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

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

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

Jean trifled with the intoxicating possibilities for a dozen paces.

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

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

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

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

XXV

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

"Death brought me," she explained.

"Death!"

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

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

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

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

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

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

The visitor's eyes widened.

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

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

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

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

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

"Craig is a gentleman."

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

"Julie is her daughter-in-law."

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

"He is dead."

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

"Oh, yes."

"And comes here sometimes?"

"Frequently."

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

"You've seen her?"

"Yes."

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

"Yes," Jean admitted, without humility.

Her mother eyed her with respectful interest.

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

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

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

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

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

"Partly."

"What will he get for it?"

Jean pondered demurely.

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

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

"Mrs. Joyce-Reeves."

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

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

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

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

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

"Yes."

"You have _talked_ with her?"

"Only this afternoon."

"Here?"

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

"That is where you go to--"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Julie begged Jean not to undeceive him.

"At least not yet," she qualified. "He is quixotic enough to throw his chance away, if he thought I used a little business common sense to make his art pay. I've never dared let him know the labor it cost to interest Mrs. Joyce-Reeves. Not that it was illegitimate or in any way underhanded. All this is as legitimate as the social pressure a clever architect brings to bear, and nobody thinks of censuring. But illusions are precious to Craig; they feed his inspiration. So I say, let him enjoy them while he can. Let him think commissions drop from the skies."

Jean doubted the truth of this estimate of Craig, but she did full justice to Mrs. Van Ostade's motives and to the signal success of her campaign which, for all she knew of such matters, might be, as Julie said, legitimate, and at this time even vitally important. The necessity for a change of studio, which now recurred, seemed logical, too.

"You now see for yourself, Craig, how unsuited to portrait work your old quarters are," Julie argued.

"Virginia Hepworth won't mind coming here--she is next, you know; but you can't go on this way indefinitely. Of course, it's possible that you may find it desirable to take a temporary studio at Newport for the summer; but in the fall people will expect a city studio worthy of your reputation."

Atwood was tractable.

"We must have a look around," he assented.

"I have looked around," announced his sister; "and I've found something you couldn't possibly better. It has every convenience--a splendid workroom, a large reception-room, a dressing-room, and an extra chamber which would be useful for the caterer when you receive. It will require very little redecorating, though they're willing to do it throughout, if we like."

"That sounds like the Copley Studios."

"It is."

Atwood laughed.

"Must it be the pink-tea district, after all, Julie? Boy in buttons at the door, velvet-coated poseur--Artist with a capital _A_--in the holy of holies. What will old Mac say! Jean, what do you think?"

She felt Julie's compelling eye upon her, and resented its domination; but she saw no choice of ways.

"The velvet jacket isn't compulsory, is it?" she said lightly. "Why not look at the studio?"

"I'll drop in the first time I am near," he agreed.

Julie coughed.

"I ventured to make an appointment," she said. "They only show it by special permission of the owners, the Peter Y. Satterlee Company. Mr. Satterlee himself offered to be at the building at twelve o'clock to-morrow, if that hour will suit. To deal with him in person would be an advantage."

"Would it?" responded Craig, hazily. "Very well. Can you go, Jean?"

"If you want me," she returned, feeling outside the discussion.

"Of course. I count on you and Julie to browbeat the real-estate shark into reducing the summer's rent. All I shall be good for is to tell you whether there is a practicable north light."

Jean came late. Richter had abruptly taken her off the spirit-mortifying antique to aid him with one of his lesser studies for the Western exposition, and the forenoon had been absorbing. To watch Richter model was much; to help him a heaven-sent boon to be exercised in fear and trembling and exceeding joy. The stroke of twelve, which should have found her with Craig, saw her but leaving Richter's door. The distance was short, however, and at a quarter past the hour the overupholstered elevator of the Copley Studios bore her without vulgar haste aloft.

It was all vastly different from Craig's unfashionable top-story back, a mile or more down-town. No shabby street confronted this temple of the fine arts; its benign façade overlooked a trim park and the vehicles of elegant leisure. No base odor of cabbage or garlic rose from the nether lair of its janitor; no plebeian tailor or dressmaker debased the tone of its lower floors. Its courts were of marble, and its flunkies had supple spines.

The door to which Jean was directed stood ajar, and she let herself in to encounter other mighty differences. The entrance to the down-town studio precipitated the caller squarely into the travail of artistic production, but the architect who planned the Copley Studios had interposed a little hall with a stained-glass window-nook and a reception-room of creamy empire fittings between genius and its interruptions.

From the studio proper issued Julie's level tones, presumably in discussion with Peter Y. Satterlee, for Jean heard Craig's meditative whistle in another direction. Following a small passage, she came upon him studying the convolutions of a nervous jet of steam which found vent among the myriad chimneys of the nearer outlook.

"Will it do?" she smiled.

"Splendidly--almost too splendidly. Julie and the magnificent Satterlee are settling terms, I believe. Behold your studio, sculptress mine!" he added with a grandiloquent gesture. "This is the extra chamber of Julie's rhapsodies, otherwise a bachelor's bedroom about to be dedicated to nobler ends. Notice your view, Jean! New York, the Hudson, Jersey's hills, and the promise of sunsets beyond compare! And look here"--descending to practicality--"running water handy and my workshop next. We shall virtually work side by side."

He pushed open the connecting door, and they entered the studio. Julie and a globular man in superfine raiment stood like ill-balanced caryatids in support of either end of the mantelpiece.

"I agree to everything," he was saying. "The leases shall be ready to-morrow."

The voice signaled some cell in Jean's brain. The face, which he turned immediately upon her, gave memory its instant clew, and she felt her skin go hot and cold under Peter Y. Satterlee's earnest gaze.

"Have you a double, Mrs. Atwood?" he asked, after a moment's idle discussion of the studio.

She tried to face him calmly.

"A double? I think not."

"Why?" demanded Julie.

Satterlee pursued his investigations with maddening care.

"It's a most extraordinary resemblance, particularly as to eyes," he said. "There was a young woman, a dentist's wife, living in a Harlem apartment of ours--the Lorna Doone, it was--who might be Mrs. Atwood's twin. You didn't marry a widow, sir?" he broke off jocularly.

Atwood laughingly shook his head.

"How curious!" he exclaimed. "What was her name?"

"There you have me," admitted the agent, after brain-fagging efforts. "I can't recollect. I sold the property very soon."

XXVI

Rid of them all, Jean was tormented by a host of replies and courses of

## action, any one of which, she believed, would have blunted the edge of

Julie's suspicion. For she was suspicious! There could be no doubt of it. To Craig she longed to offer some explanation, but her love bade her reject anything short of the whole truth, even as it told her that the whole truth was impossible. Every hour of her wedded happiness heaped proof on proof of the joy he took in the belief that he alone had filled her heart. And was he not right? Had not his dear image persisted--canonized, enshrined, worshiped--since their forest meeting! Paul had never displaced it. In truth, it had shone the brighter because of Paul. But how put this holy mystery in words!

She took refuge in an opportunism not unlike Amy's. Did not time and chance rule the world! Yet her peace of mind was fitful, and she shunned the Copley Studios with a fear which hearkened to no argument. It was useless to remind herself that Satterlee was a man of many interests. Her imagination always figured him as haunting the room where she had come upon him. There he waited, a rotund bomb by the mantelpiece, with the explosive "Bartlett" in his subconsciousness ready to destroy her the instant her face should at last apply the fatal spark. So it fell out that, pleading her own work whenever Craig, himself absorbed in the Hepworth portrait, asked her opinion of his sister's ideas, the new studio's furnishing went forward without her and in unhampered accord with Julie's ambitious plans.

How far-reaching these plans were she first adequately perceived through MacGregor, whose card came up to her one evening when both Atwood and Mrs. Van Ostade were out.

"I counted on finding you alone," he owned with characteristic bluntness. "Craig has gone to the Salmagundi doings, of course,--I'm due there later; while I happen to know that Julie is dining with her mother-in-law. I met Julie this afternoon at the Copley Studios."

"Then you saw Craig's new quarters?"

"Yes. Have you seen them?"

"Why do you ask that question?"

"I gathered that you hadn't."

"I went there the day Craig took the place."

"And have not returned! Why?"

"I am working hard with Richter."

"So he tells me. Don't overwork. Art isn't everything."

"Aren't you inconsistent?" she laughed.

"Lord, yes! Consistently inconsistent. Life would lose half its sparkle, if I weren't. But the new studio; you should have a look in; it would interest you. I don't often trouble the pink-tea district, but an errand took me into the Copley building to-day just as Julie entered, and she offered to show me through."

His meditations became irksome.

"Well?" Jean prompted.

"Julie should have been a stage-manager," he said. "Her scenic instinct is remarkable. She sees Craig's place peopled with a fashionable portrait-painter's clientele, and has set her properties accordingly. His Italian finds,--his tapestries, his old furniture, his Pompeian bronzes,--the new grand piano, and the various other newnesses, all present themselves as background for society drama. I take off my hat to her. She, too, is an artist, an artist of imagination. It is all perfectly done. Nothing lacks but the fashionable portrait-painter."

"And the drama?" Jean suggested.

"Oh, that is being looked after. She plans a house-warming of some sort. You haven't been consulted?"

"No."

"Neither has Craig, I dare say. Perhaps the idea only took shape while she talked with me. I can't give you the technical name of the function, but it will be worthy of the manager's reputation. The scheme is to get Mrs. Joyce-Reeves's portrait, Miss Hepworth's, and mine--yes, mine!--before as many as possible of the opulent beings who itch to hand their empty faces down to posterity. By the way, I want to see the Hepworth portrait."

She took him to the billiard-room and brought the unfinished picture to the easel. MacGregor turned off a warring light, chose a view-point, bestrode a chair, and lapsed into a long silence. Jean tried to read his rugged face, but finding it inscrutable, herself studied the canvas. Fuller knowledge of Craig's sitter had failed to reveal the qualities of mind he found so stimulating; but now, confronting the immobile counterfeit, she hit with disturbing certainty upon the truth that Virginia Hepworth's appeal was physical, and to men as men.

A moment afterward MacGregor confirmed her intuition.

"I don't know her any better," he said. "Outwardly she is the same neurotic creature I've seen all along. Apathetic with other women, she stirs to life and takes her tints from the particular male with whom she chances to be. Craig has missed an opportunity to dissect a chameleon."

"You think it's a failure!"

"Psychologically, I do; technically, no. In color, texture, it is masterly. Don't distress yourself about its success; it will be only too successful. I think it will even have the bad luck to be popular."

Jean's loyalty rose to do battle.

"It's to Craig's credit that he could not see her truly," she retorted. "If she takes her tints from the man with whom she talks, then he has painted into her something of himself, something fine. But wasn't it hers for the moment? Why, then, shouldn't he show her at her best, not her worst?"

MacGregor laughed immoderately.

"That is stanch and wifely and nonsensical. It is not a portrait-painter's business to supply the virtues or the vices. His palette ought to contain neither mud nor whitewash. It is his duty to see things as they are."

"But how can you expect Craig to see Miss Hepworth as she is? He's not--"

"Middle-aged, like myself," suggested MacGregor, as she hesitated. "Say it! It makes your fling concrete, personal, feminine."

Jean's wrath cooled in a smile.

"I was going to add, cynical," she said. "Is that a personality?"

"It's wide of the mark, whatever we call it. I'm no cynic. If I were, I should merely stand by and laugh, not interfere."

"Don't put it that way."