That night, under the gas jet and its blue and ghastly light, Fairfax tried to write to his mother, began his letter and left it as he began.

"My dearest Mother...." She had told him little of his kinspeople, the sisters had never been friends. Nevertheless, he quite understood that, whatever she might have thought of the eccentricities of his uncle, this welcome to her boy would cut her cruelly. She had fully expected him to be a guest at the Carews.

"My dearest Mother...." He began to draw idly on the page. A spray of jasmine uncurled its leaves beneath his hand. Across his shoulders he felt the coldness of the room where he sat. A few more hurried strokes and Fairfax had indicated on the page before him a child's head--an upturned face. As he rounded the chin, Antony saw that the sketch would be likely to charm him, and he was tired out and cold. He threw down his pen, dragged out his valise, opened it, took out his things and prepared for his first night's rest in the city of his unfriendly kinsmen.

CHAPTER VI

If it had been only spring, or any season less brutal than this winter, whose severity met him at times with a fresh rebuff and a fresh surprise--if it had been spring, Antony would have procrastinated, hung back, unaccustomed as he was to taking quick, decisive action, but the ugliness of the surroundings at Miss Whitcomb's and the bitter winter weather forced him to a decision. In the three following days he visited every one of the few studios that existed at that period in New York.

What were his plans? What were his ideas? But, when he came face to face with the reality of the matter-of-fact question, he had no plans.

Idealistic, impractical, untried and unschooled, he faced the fact that he had no plan or idea whatsoever of how to forge his life: he never had had any and his mother had given him no advice. He wanted to work at art, but how and where he did not know. Some of the studios could use models--Fairfax burned at the thought. He could not study as a pupil and live on air. No one wanted practical workmen.

The man he most wanted to see was Gunner Cedersholm. He had fallen in love with the works of the Swedish master as he had seen them in photograph and plaster cast at the exposition in New Orleans. He had read all the accounts in the papers he could find of the great Swede.

When he learned that Gunner Cedersholm was in Europe and that he should not be able to see him until spring, poor Antony longed to stow himself on a ship and follow the artist.

Meanwhile, the insignificant fact that an insignificant piece of modelling had been accepted by an inadvertent jury and placed in the New York Academy, began to appear to him ridiculous. He had not ventured to mention this to any one, and the fact that at his fingers' ends lay undoubted talent began to seem to him a useless thing as well. The only moment of balm he knew came to him one afternoon in the Metropolitan Museum. This museum was at that period spa.r.s.ely dowered. Fairfax stood before a plaster figure of Rameses, and for the first time the young artist saw around him the effigies of an art long perfect, long retained and long dead.

Turning down through the Egyptian room, his overcoat on his arm, for, thank Heaven, the place was warmed, his beauty-loving eyes fell on the silent objects whose presence was meed and balm. He took in the nourishment of the food to his senses and the colour in his cheeks brightened, the blue deepened in his eyes. He was repeating the line: "Thou foster-child of Silence and slow Time ..." when two living objects caught his attention, in a room beyond devoted to a collection of sh.e.l.ls. Before a low case stood the figure of a very little boy in a long awkward ulster and jockey cap, and by his side, in a conspicuously short crimson skirt and a rough coat, was a little girl. Her slender legs and her abundant hair that showered from beneath a crimson tam-o'-shanter recalled Miss Mitty's description of Bella; but Antony knew her for herself when she turned.

"Cousin Antony!" She rushed at him. Childlike, the two made no reference to the lapse of time between his first visit and this second meeting.

Gardiner took his hand and Antony thought the little boy clung to it, seized it with singular appealing force, as though he made a refuge of the strong clasp. Bella greeted him with her eager, brilliant look, then she rapidly glanced round the room, deserted save for themselves.

"Something perfectly fearful happened last week, Cousin Antony. Yes, Gardiner, I will tell. Anyhow, it's all over now, thank the stars." (He learned to hear her thank these silent heavenly guardians often.) "What do you think? Last week we came here, Gardiner and me, we come often. We play with the ancient Egyptians. I'm Cleopatra and Gardiner's' different things, and there's a guardian here that we specially like because he taught us things useful for school if you have a weak memory. This is how you remember the poets--

Shakespeare, Milton, Byron, Pope, Go upstairs and get some soap.

So you see we can't forget them like that. And Shakespeare's birth and death I never could remember till he taught me--

Fifteen hundred and sixty-four Shakespeare first was heard to roar.

Sixteen hundred and sixteen Billy Shakespeare last was seen.

When your memory's weak it's a great help, Cousin Antony. Then what do you think Gardiner did?"

Here Fairfax was more than ever sensible of the little boy's clinging hand. He looked down at the sensitive, flushed face, and the fascinated eyes of Gardiner were fixed on the vigorous, ardent little sister.

"Well," said Antony, cordially, "I reckon it's not anything very bad, little cousin."

He led them to a bench under the calm serene chaperonage of Rameses who kept sentinel over them.

"Bad," whispered Bella, "why it was the worst thing you can possibly imagine, Cousin Antony. He stole."

The child's voice dropped solemnly and the silence that fell in the museum was impressive, even though the situation was humorous. Gardiner, whom Antony had lifted on his knee, raised his head and looked his cousin mildly in the eyes.

"It was a sh.e.l.l," he said slowly, "a blue and bwown sh.e.l.l. n.o.body was looking and I took it home."

He confessed calmly and without shame, and his sister said--

"The guardian was cleaning the cases. I think they trusted us, Cousin Antony, we were alone here, and it makes it much worse. When we got home Gardiner showed it to me, and we have had to wait a week to come back and restore it."

"I westored it," repeated the boy, "Bella made me."

With his diminutive hand he made a sh.e.l.l and discoursed regretfully--

"It was a perfectly lovely sh.e.l.l. It's over there in its place. Bella made me put it back again."

"The worst of it is," said the sister, "that he doesn't seem to care. He doesn't mind being a thief."

"Well," laughed Antony, "don't you trouble about it, Bella honey, you have been a policeman and a judge and a benefactor all in one, and you have brought the booty back. Come," said Fairfax, "there's the man that shuts us out and the sh.e.l.ls in, and we must go." And they were all three at the park gate in the early twilight before the children asked him--

"Cousin Antony, where have you been all these days?"

He saw the children to their own door, and on the way little Gardiner complained that his shoes were tight, so his cousin carried him, and nearly carried Bella, who, linking her arm firmly in his, walked close to him, and, un.o.bserved by Antony, with sympathetic gallantry, copied his limp all the way home.

Their companionship had been of the most perfect. He learned where they roller skated, and which were the cracks to avoid in the pavement, and which were the treasure lots. He saw where, in dreary excavations, where plantain and goatweed grew, Bella found stores of quartz and flints, and where she herded the mangy goat when the Irish ragpickers were out ragpicking.

Under his burden of Gardiner Antony's heart had, nevertheless, grown light, and before they had reached the house he had murmured to them, in his rich singing voice, Spartacus' address to the gladiators, and where it says: "Oh, Rome, Rome, thou hast been a tender nurse to me; thou hast given to the humble shepherd boy muscles of iron and a heart of steel,"--where these eloquent words occurred he was obliged to stand still on Madison Avenue, with the little boy in his arms, to give the lines their full impressiveness.

Once deposited on the steps, where Fairfax looked to see rise the effigies of the ashes his uncle had ordered scattered, Gardiner seemed hardly able to crawl.

Trevelyan encouraged him: "Brace up, Gardiner, be a man."

And the child had mildly responded that "his bones were tired." His sister supported him maternally and helped him up, nodding to Antony that she would look after her little brother, and Antony heard the boy say--

"Six and six are twelve, Bella, and you're both, and I'm only one of them. How can you expect...?"

Antony expected by this time nothing.

And when that night the eager Miss Whitcombs handed him a letter from his aunt, with the heading 780, Madison Avenue, in gold, he eagerly tore it open.

"My dear Antony," the letter ran, "the children should have drawing lessons, Gardiner especially draws constantly; I think he has talent.

Will you come and teach them three times a week? I don't know about remuneration for such things, except as the school bills indicate. Shall we say twenty dollars a term--and I am not clear as to what a 'term' is!

In music lessons, for instance--" (She had evidently made some calculations and scratched it out, and here the price was dropped for ever and ever.)

To an unpractical woman such a drop is always soothing, and to a sensitive pauper probably no less so. The letter ended with the suggestion to Antony that he meet them in their own pew on Sunday morning at the Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church, and that he return with them for dinner.

CHAPTER VII

He succeeded in keeping from the kind and curious interest of the little ladies the state of his mind and his pocket, and his intentions.

It had not been easy, for when their courteous hints brought no satisfaction, Miss Eulalie and Miss Mitty asked Fairfax out boldly what he "was going to do"? Miss Mitty, on whom the task of doing up the hall room had fallen, dreamed over the sketches she found (in his valise).

Spellbound, she held in her hand a small head of a dryad, and modestly covered up with her handkerchief a tiny figure whose sweet nudity had startled her. Antony parried questions. He had come to seek Fortune. So far it rolled before him with the very devil in its tantalizing wheel, but he did not say this to Miss Whitcomb. Miss Eulalie suggested to him that his uncle "could make a place for him in the bank," but Fairfax's short reply cooled her enthusiasm, and both ladies took their cue. In the first week he had exhausted his own projects and faced the horrible thought of disaster.