"My shoe is unb.u.t.toned"--she raised her small foot--"b.u.t.ton it, Tony."

The boy fell on his knees, eager to offer his first service to the lovely woman, but his hands were awkward. He bungled and pinched the delicate skin. The mother cried out, leaned over and smartly boxed his ears.

"Stupid boy, go; send me Emmeline."

Poor Antony retired, and as Emmeline took his place he heard his mother murmur--

"Aren't the cherries ripe yet, Emmy? I'm dying to taste some cherries, they're so delicious in the North."

Emmeline had fastened the shoe and lagged away with southern negligence, leaving Antony's books as he had flung them on the porch, and though it was an effort to lean over, Mrs. Fairfax did so, picked up the drawing-book and studied it again.

"Talented little monkey," she mused, "he has my gift, my looks too, I think. How straight he walks! He has '_l'elegance d'un homme du monde_.'"

She called herself Creole and prided herself on her French and her languor.

She sat musing thus, the book on her knees, when half an hour later they carried him in to her. He had fallen from a rotten branch on the highest cherry tree in the grounds.

He struck on his hip.

All night she sat by his side. The surgeons had told her that he would be a cripple for life if he ever walked again. Toward morning he regained his senses and saw her sitting there. Mrs. Fairfax remembered Antony that day. She remembered him that day and that night, and his cry of "Oh, mother, I was getting the cherries for you!"

Before they built him his big, awkward boot, when he walked again at all, Antony went about on crutches, debarred from boyish games. In order to forget his fellows and the school-yard and "the street" he modelled in the soft delicious clay, making hosts of creatures, figures, heads and arms and hands, and brought them in damp from the clay of the levee.

His own small room was a studio, peopled by his young art. No sooner, however, was he strong again and his big shoe built up, than his boy-self was built up as well, and Antony, lame, limping Antony, was out again with his mates. He never again could run as they did, but he contrived to fence and spar and box, and strangely enough, he grew tall and strong. One day he came into his little room from a ball game, for he was the pitcher of the nine, and found his mother handling his clayey creatures.

"Tony, when did you do these?"

"Oh, they are nothing. Leave them alone, mother. I meant to fire them all out."

"But this is an excellent likeness of the General, Tony."

He threw down his baseball mask and gloves and began to gather up unceremoniously the little objects which had dried crisp and hard.

"Don't destroy them," his mother said; "I want every one of them. And you must stop being a rowdy and a ruffian, Antony--you are an artist."

He was smoothing between his palms one of the small figures.

"Professor Dufaucon could teach you something--not much, poor old gentleman, but something elementary. To-morrow, after school, you must go to take your first lesson."

Mrs. Fairfax took the boy herself, with the bust of the famous General in her hands, and afterwards sent the bust to Washington, to its subject himself, who was pleased to commend the portrait made of him by the little Southern boy from the clay of the New Orleans levee.

Professor Dufaucon taught him all he knew of art and something of what he knew of other things. In the small hall-room of the poor French drawing-master, Antony talked French, learned the elements of the study of beauty and listened to the sweet strains of the Professor's flute when he played, "J'ai perdu ma tourterelle...."

In everything that he modelled Antony tried to portray his mother's face. As she had been indifferent to him before, so ardently Mrs.

Fairfax adored him now. She poured out her tenderness on this crippled boy. He had been known to say to his Mammy that he was glad that he had fallen from the cherry tree because his mother had never kissed him before, and her tears and her love, he thought, were worth the price.

She was as selfish with him in her affection as she had been in her indifference. She would not hear of college, and he learned what he could in New Orleans. But the day came when his mistress, art, put in a claim so seductive and so strong that it clouded everything else.

Professor Dufaucon died, and in the same year Antony sent a statuette to the New York Academy of Design. It was accepted, and the wine of that praise went to his head.

Mrs. Fairfax, broken as no event in her life had been able to break her, saw Antony leave for the North to seek his fortune and his fame.

She owned her house in Charles Street, and lived on in it, and the little income that she had barely sufficed for her needs. She showed what race and what pride she had when she bade Antony good-bye, standing under the jasmine vine. She never wore any other dress than a loose morning robe of a white or a soft mauve material. Standing there, with a smile of serene beauty, she waved her handkerchief to him as she saw him go limping down the walk from the garden to the street and put of sight.

True to her type then, she fainted dead away, and Emmeline and Mammy brought her to.

He thought of things in Miss Whitcomb's front room. There was nothing fairylike about the red-brick dwelling, although at the corner of the New York Avenue these two stories seemed diminutive and out of place. He made with the timid maiden ladies his own timid arrangement. He was so poor and they were so poor that the transaction was timorous--Antony on his part was afraid that they might not take him in, they, on theirs, were terrified lest the lodger would not come in. When at length they left him alone, his first feeling was grat.i.tude for a room of any kind that represented shelter from the Northern cold, but when he had divested himself of his coat, he realized that the little unheated room was as cold as the outside. A meagre bed, a meagre bureau and washstand, two unwelcoming chairs, these few inanimate objects were shut in with Antony, and unattractive as they were, they were appealing in their scant ugliness. Before the window slight white curtains hung, the same colour as the snow without. They hung like little shrouds. Around the windows of his Southern home the vine had laid its beauty, and the furnishings had been comfortable and tasteful. The homelessness of this interior, to the young man who had never pa.s.sed a night from under his own roof, struck with a chill, and he thought of the sitting-room in the vast house of his kinsmen not a block away. His kinspeople had not even asked him to break bread. Dressed as he was, he lay down exhausted on his bed, and when a knock came and Miss Whitcomb's voice invited him to supper, Fairfax sprang up and answered as out of a dream.

CHAPTER V

His fortune of twenty-five dollars he divided into five equal packets.

His weekly bill with the old ladies, to whom his aunt had begged Antony to go _in charity_, was to be six dollars. There would of course be extras, car-fare and so forth. With economy--it would last. Antony saw everything on the bright side; youth and talent can only imagine that the best will last for ever. Decidedly, before his money gave out he would have found some suitable employment.

With the summons for supper he flung on his coat, plunged downstairs and into the dining-room, and shone upon his hostesses over their tea and preserves. The new boarder chatted and planned and listened, jovial and kindly, his soul's good-fellowship and sweet temper shedding a radiance in the chill little room. Miss Eulalie Whitcomb was in the sixties, and she fell in love with Antony in a motherly way. Miss Mitty was fifteen years her junior, and she fell in love with Antony as a woman might.

Fairfax never knew the poignant ache he caused in that heart, virginal only, cold only because of the prolonged winter of her maidenhood.

That night he heard his aunt's praises sung, and listened, going back with a pang to the picture the family group had made before his home-loving eyes.

Such a marvellous woman, Mr. Fairfax (she must call him Antony if he was to live with them. Miss Mitty couldn't. She must. Well, Mr. Antony then), such a brilliant and executive woman. Mrs. Carew had founded the Women's Exchange for the work of indigent ladies, such a dignified, needed charity.

Miss Mitty knew a little old lady who made fifteen hundred dollars in rag dolls alone.

"Dear me," said Fairfax, "couldn't you pa.s.s me off for a niece, Miss Whitcomb? I can make clay figures that will beat rag dolls to bits."

Fifteen hundred dollars! He mused on his aunt's charity.

"And another," murmured Miss Eulalie, "another friend of ours made altogether ten thousand dollars in chicken pies."

"Ah," exclaimed the lodger, "that's even easier to believe. And does my uncle Carew make pies or dolls?"

"He is a pillar of the Church," said his hostess gravely, "a very distinguished gentleman, Mr. Antony. He bowed once to one of us in the street. Which of us was it, sister?"

Not Miss Mitty, at any rate, and she was inclined to think that Mr.

Carew had made a mistake, whichever way it had been!

Their lodger listened with more interest when they spoke of the children. The little creatures went to school near the Whitcomb house.

Gardiner was always ailing. Miss Mitty used to watch them from her window.

"Bella runs like a deer down the block, you never saw such nimble legs, and her skirts are _so_ short! They _should_ come down, Mr. Antony, and her hair is quite like a wild savage's."

Miss Eulalie had called Bella in once to mend a hole in her stocking "really too bad for school."

"She should have gone into the Women's Exchange," suggested her cousin, "and employed some one who was out of orders for chicken pies or dolls!"