XXV

"BUT WITH YOU, 'YES, SIR'"

As Jack came out of the office, Mortimer appeared from an adjoining room in furtive, mouselike curiosity.

"Not much damage done!" said Jack, in happy relief from the ordeal. "I am without a hat, but I have the rose." He held it up before Mortimer's worn, kindly face that had been so genuine in welcome. "Yes, I must have kept it to decorate you, Peter!"

Ineffectually, in timorous confusion, the old secretary protested while Jack fastened it in his b.u.t.tonhole.

"And you are going to help me, aren't you, Peter?" Jack went on, seriously. "You are going to hold up a finger of warning when I get off the course. I am to be practical, matter-of-fact; there's to be an end to all fantastic ideas."

An end to all fantastic ideas! But it was hardly according to the gospel of the matter-of-fact to take Burleigh, the fitter, out to luncheon. Jack might excuse himself on the ground that he had not yet begun his apprenticeship and had several hours of freedom before his first lesson at dinner. This ecstasy of a recess, perhaps, made him lay aside the derby, which the clerk said was very becoming, and choose a softer head-covering with a bit of feather in the band, which the clerk, with positive enthusiasm, said was still more becoming. At all events, it was easy on his temples, while the derby was stiff and binding and conducive to a certain depression of spirits.

Burleigh, the fitter, was almost as old as Mortimer. He rose to the exceptional situation, his eyes lighting as he surveyed the form to be clothed with a professional gratification unsurpa.s.sed by that of Dr.

Bennington in plotting Jack's chest with a stethoscope.

"Yes, sir, we will have that dinner-jacket ready to-night, sir, depend upon it--and couldn't I show you something in cheviots?"

Jack broke another precedent. A Wingfield, he decided to patronize the Wingfield store, because he saw how supremely happy every order made Burleigh.

"You can do it as well as Thompson's?" he asked.

"With you, yes, sir--though Thompson is a great expert on round shoulders. But with you, yes, sir!"

When the business of measuring was over, while Burleigh peered triumphant over the pile of cloths from which the masterpieces were to be fashioned, Jack said that he had a ripping appet.i.te and he did not see why he and Burleigh should not appease their hunger in company. Burleigh gasped; then he grinned in abandoned delight and slipped off his shiny coat and little tailor's ap.r.o.n that bristled with pins.

They went to a restaurant of reputation, which Jack said was in keeping with the occasion when a man changed his habits from Arizona simplicity to urban multiplicity of courses. And what did Burleigh like? Burleigh admitted that if he were a plutocrat he would have caviar at least once a day; and caviar appeared in a little gla.s.s cup set in the midst of cracked ice, flanked by crisp toast. After caviar came other things to Burleigh's taste. He was having such an awesomely grand feast that he was tongue-tied; but Jack could never eat in silence until he had forgotten how to tell stories. So he told Burleigh stories of the trail and of life in Little Rivers in a way that reflected the desert sunshine in Burleigh's eyes. Burleigh thought that he would like to live in Little Rivers. Almost anyone might after hearing Jack's description, in the joy of its call to himself.

"Now, if you would trust me," said Burleigh, when they left the restaurant, "I should like to send out for some cloths not in stock for a couple of suits. And couldn't I make you up three or four fancy waistcoats, with a little color in them--the right color to go with the cloth? You can carry a little color--decidedly, yes."

"Yes, I rather like color," said Jack, succ.u.mbing to temptation, though he felt that the heir to great responsibilities ought to dress in the most neutral of tones.

"And I should like to select the ties to go with the suits and a few shirts, just to carry out my scheme--a kind of professional triumph for me, you see. May I?"

"Go ahead!" said Jack.

"And you can depend on your evening suit to be up in time. But I am going to rush a little broader braid on those ready-made trousers--you can carry that, too," Burleigh concluded.

When they parted Jack turned into Fifth Avenue. Before he had gone a block the bulky eminence of a Fifth Avenue stage awakened his imagination. How could anybody think of confinement in a taxicab when he might ride in the elephant's howdah of that top platform, enjoying mortal superiority over surrounding humanity? Jack hung the howdah with silken streamers and set a mahout's turban on the head of the man on the seat in front of him, while the glistening semi-oval tops of the limousines floating in the mist of the rising grade from Madison Square to Forty-second Street, swarmed and halted in a kind of blind, cramped _pas de quatre_ from cross street to cross street, amid the breaking surge of pedestrians.

"Such a throbbing of machine motion," he thought, "that I don't see how anybody can have an emotion of his own without b.u.mping into somebody else's."

It was a scene of another age and world to him, puzzling, overpowering, dismal, mocking him with a sense of loneliness that he had never felt on the desert. Could he ever catch up with this procession which had all the time been moving on in the five years of his absence? Could he learn to talk and think in the regulated manner of the traffic rules of convention? The few chums of his brief home school-days were long away from the fellowship of academies; they had settled in their grooves, with established intimacies. If he found his own flock he could claim admission to the fold only with the golden key of his millions, rather than by the pa.s.sword of kindred understanding.

The tripping, finely-clad women, human flower of all the maelstrom of urban toil, in their detachment seemed only to bring up a visualized picture of Mary. What would he not like to do for her! He wished that he could pick up the Waldorf and set it on the other side of the street as a proof of the overmastering desire that possessed him whenever she was in his mind.

And the Doge! He was the wisest man in the world. With a nod of well-considered and easy generosity Jack presented him with the new Public Library. And then all the people on the sidewalks vanished and the buildings melted away into sunswept levels, and the Avenue was a trail down which Mary came on her pony in the resplendent sufficiency of his dreams.

"Great heavens!" he warned himself. "And I am to take my first lesson in running the business this evening! What perfect lunacy comes from mistaking the top of a Fifth Avenue stage for a howdah!"

XXVI

THE PORTRAIT OF A LADY

How thankful he was that the old brick corner mansion in Madison Avenue, with age alone to recommend its architecture of the seventies--let it stand for what it was--had not been replaced by one of stone freshly polished each year! The butler who opened the door was new and stiffer than the one of the old days; but he saw that the broad hall, with the stairs running across the rear in their second flight, was little more changed than the exterior.

Five years since he had left that hall! He was in the thrall of antic.i.p.ation incident to seeing old a.s.sociations with the eyes of manhood. The butler made to take his hat, but Jack, oblivious of the attention, went on to the doorway of the drawing-room, his look centering on a portrait that faced the door. In this place of honor he saw a Gainsborough. He uttered a note of pained surprise.

"There used to be another portrait here. Where is it?" he demanded.

The butler, who had heard that the son of the house was an invalid, had not recovered from his astonishment at the appearance of health of the returned prodigal.

"Upstairs, sir," he answered. "When Mr. Wingfield got this prize last year, sir--"

Though the butler had spoken hardly a dozen words, he became conscious of something atmospheric that made him stop in the confusion of one who finds that he has been garrulous with an explanation that does not explain.

"Please take this upstairs and bring back the other," said Jack.

"Yes, sir. You will be going to your room, sir, and while--" The butler had a feeling of a troublesome future between two masters.

"Now, please!" said Jack, settling into a chair to wait.

The Gainsborough countess, with her sweeping plumes, her rich, fleshy, soft tones, her charming affectation, which gave you, after the art interest, no more human interest in her than in a draped model, was carried upstairs and back came the picture that it had displaced. The frame still bore at the bottom the t.i.tle "Portrait of a Lady," under which it had been exhibited at the Salon many years ago. It was by a young artist, young then, named Sargent. He had the courage of his method, this youngster, no less than Hals, who also worked his wonders with little paint when this suited his genius best. The gauze of the gown where it blended with the background at the edge of the line of arm was so thin, seemingly made by a single brush-stroke, that it almost showed the canvas.

A purpose in that gauze: The thinness of transparency of character! The eyes of the portrait alone seemed deep. They were lambent and dark, looking straight ahead inquiringly, yet in the knowledge that no answer to the Great Riddle could change the course of her steps in the blind alley of a life whose tenement walls were lighted with her radiance. You could see through the gown, through the flesh of that frail figure, so lacking in sensuousness yet so glowing with a quiet fire, to the soul itself. She seemed of such a delicate, chaste fragility that she could be shattered by a single harsh touch. There would be no outcry except the tinkle of the fragments. The feelings of anyone who witnessed the breaking and heard the tinkle would be a criterion of his place in the wide margin between nerveless barbarism and sensitive gentility.

"I give! I give! I give!" was her message.

For a long time, he had no measure of it, Jack sat studying the portrait, set clear in many scenes of memory in review. It had been a face as changeful as the travels, ever full of quick lights and quick shadows. He had had flashes of it as it was in the portrait in its very triumph of resignation. He had known it laughing with stories of fancy which she told him; sympathetic in tutorial illumination as she gave him lessons and brought out the meaning of a line of poetry or a painting; beset by the restlessness which meant another period of travel; intense as fire itself, gripping his hands in hers in a defiance of possession; in moods when both its sadness and its playfulness said, "I don't care!" and again, fleeing from his presence to hide her tears.

It was with the new sight of man's maturity and soberness that he now saw his mother, feeling the intangible and indestructible feminine majesty of her; feeling her fragility which had brought forth her living soul in its beauty and impressionableness as a link with the cause of his Odyssey; believing that she was rejoicing in his strength and understanding gloriously that it had only brought him nearer to her.

After he had been to his room to dress he returned to the same chair and settled into the same reverie that was sounding depths of his being that he had never suspected. He was mutely asking her help, asking the support of her frail, feminine courage for his masculine courage in the battle before him; and little tremors of nervous determination were running through him, when he heard his father's footstep and became conscious of his father's presence in the doorway.

There was a moment, not of hesitation but of completing a thought, before he looked up and rose to his feet. In that moment, John Wingfield, Sr.

had his own shock over the change in the room. The muscles of his face twitched in irritation, as if his wife's very frailty were baffling invulnerability. Straightening his features into a mask, his eyes still spoke his emotion in a kind of stare of resentment at the picture.

Then he saw his son's shoulders rising above his own and looked into his son's eyes to see them smiling. Long isolated by his power from clashes of will under the roof of his store or his house, the father had a sense of the rippling flash of steel blades. A word might start a havoc of whirling, burning sentences, confusing and stifling as a desert sandstorm; or it might bring a single killing flash out of gathering clouds.

Thus the two were facing each other in a silence oppressive to both, which neither knew how to break, when relief came in the butler's announcement of dinner. Indeed, by such small, objective interruptions do dynamic inner impulses hang that this little thing may have suppressed the lightnings.

The father was the first to speak. He hoped that a first day in New York had brought Jack a good appet.i.te; certainly, he could see that the store had given him a wonderful fit for a rush order.