Kitabı oku: «Fairfax and His Pride: A Novel»

BOOK I
THE KINSMEN

CHAPTER I

One bitter day in January in the year 1880, when New York was a tranquil city, a young man stood at the South Ferry waiting for the up-town horse car. With a few other passengers he had just left the packet which had arrived in New York harbour that afternoon from New Orleans.

Antony Fairfax was an utter stranger to the North.

In his hand he carried a small hand-bag, and by his side on the snow rested his single valise. Before him waited a red and yellow tram-car drawn by lean horses, from whose backs the vapour rose on the frosty air. Muffled to his ears, the driver beat together his hands in their leather gloves; the conductor stamped his feet. The traveller climbed into the car, lifting his big bag after him.

The cold was even more terrible to him than to the conductor and driver. He had come from the South, where he had left the roses and magnolias in bloom, and the warmth of the country was in his blood. He dug his feet into the straw covering the floor of the car, buttoned his coat tight about his neck, pushed his hands deep in his pockets and sat wondering at the numbing cold.

This, then, was the North!

He watched with interest the few other passengers board the little car: two fruit vendors and after them were amiably lifted in great bunches of bananas. Antony asked himself the question whether this new country would be friendly to him, what would its spirit be toward him, he asked this question of the cold winter air the city suddenly took reality and formed for him out of his dreams. Would it be kind or cruel? The coming days would answer: meanwhile he could wait. Some places, like some people whom we meet, at once extend to us a hand; there are some that even seem to offer an embrace. Through the car blew a sudden icy blast and New York's welcome to Fairfax was keen as a blow. There was an actual physical affront in this wind that struck him in the face.

Suppose the elements were an indication of what the rest would be? But no – that was ridiculous! There would be certainly warm interiors behind the snow-fretted panes of the windows in the houses that lined the streets on either side. There would be warm and cordial hearts to welcome him somewhere. There would be understanding of heart, indulgence for youth. He would find open doors for all his ambitions, spurs to his integrity and effort. He would know how to make use of these ways and means of progress. For years he had dreamed of the galleries of pictures and of the museum. It was from this wonderful city whose wideness had the intense outreach of the unknown that Fairfax had elected to step into the world.

New York was to be his threshold. There was no limit to what he intended to do in his special field of work. From his boyhood he had told himself that he would become great. He was too young to have discovered the traitors that hide in the brain and the emptiness of the deepest tears. He was a pioneer and had the faith of the pioneer. According to him everything was real, the beauty of form was enchanting, all hearts were true, and all roads led to fame. His short life focused now at this hour.

Life is a series of successive stages to which point of culmination a man brings all he has of the past and all his hopes. All along the road these blessed visions crowd, fulminate and form as it were torches, and these lights mark the road for the traveller. Now all Antony's life came to a point in this hour. He had longed to go to New York from the day when in New Orleans he had completed his first bust. He had moulded from the soft clay on the banks of the levees the head of a famous general, who had later become president. He was only twelve years old then, but his little work bore all the indications of genius.

He was an artist from the ends of the slender hands to the centre of the sensitive heart. The childlikeness, the beauty of his nature revealed it in everything he did; and he was only twenty-two years old.

As he sat in the horse car, his heart full of hope, his brain teeming with the ideal, he was an interesting figure to watch, and a fine old gentleman on his way up town was struck by the brilliancy, the aspect of the fellow passenger. He studied the young fellow from behind his evening paper, but the old gentleman could not make up his mind what the young man was. Aside from the valise at his feet Antony had no other worldly goods, and aside from the twenty-five dollars in his pocket, he had no other money. There was nothing about him to suggest the artistic type: broad-shouldered, muscular, he seemed built for battles and feats of physical strength, but his face was thoughtful for one so young. His eyes were clear. "He looks," mused the gentleman, "like a man who has come home after a very successful journey. I suspect the young fellow is returning with something resembling the story books' bag of gold." He humorously fancied even that the treasure might be in the valise on the straw of the car at the traveller's feet.

The car tinkled slowly through the cold. After a long while, well above a street marked Fiftieth, its road appeared to lie in the country. There were vacant lots on either side; there were low-roofed, ramshackle shanties; there were stray goats here and there among the rocks. Antony said to the conductor in a pleasant, Southern voice: "You won't forget to let me off at 70th Street." He rose at the conductor's signal and the ringing of the bell. The old gentleman, who was a canon of the Church, saw as the young man rose that he was lame, that he limped, that he wore a high, double-soled boot. As Fairfax went out he lifted his hat with a courteous "Good evening" to his only fellow passenger, for the others had one by one left the car to go to their different destinations. "Too bad," thought the canon to himself, "Lame, by Jove! With a smile like that a man can win the world."

CHAPTER II

The little figure in the corner of the pink sofa had read away the hours of the short winter afternoon curled up in a ball, her soft red dress, her soft red cheeks, her soft red lips vivid bits of colour in the lamplight. She had read through the twilight, until the lamps came to help her pretty eyes, and like a scholar of old over some problem she bent above her fairy tale. The volume was unwieldy, and she supported it on her knees. Close to her side a little boy of six watched the absorbed face, watched the lamp and the shadows of the lamp on the pink walls of the room; watched his mother as she sat sewing, but most devotedly of all he watched through his half-dreaming lids his sister as she read her story. His sister charmed him very much and terrified him not a little; she was so quick, so strong, so alive – she rushed him so. He loved his sister, she was his illustrated library of fairy tales and wonderful plays, she was his companion, his ruler, his dominator, and his best friend.

"Bella," he whispered at the second when she turned the page and he thought he might venture to interrupt, "Bella, wouldn't you read it to me?"

The absorbed child made an impatient gesture, bent her head lower and snuggled down into her feast. She shook her mane of hair.

"Gardiner," his mother noticed the appeal, "when will you learn to read for yourself? You are a big boy."

"Oh, I'm not so vewy big," his tone was indolent, "I'm not so big as Bella. You said yesterday that you bought me five-year-old clothes."

In the distance, above the noise of the wind, came the tinkle of the car-bell. Gardiner silently wished, as he heard the not unmusical sound, that the eternal, ugly little cars, with the overworked horses, could be turned into fairy chariots and this one, as it came ringing and tinkling along, would stop at the front door and fetch… A loud ring at the front door made the little boy spring up.

His sister frowned and glanced up from her book. "It isn't father!" she flashed out at him. "He's got his key. You needn't look scared yet, Gardiner. It is a bundle or a beggar or something or other stupid. Don't disturb."

However, the three of them listened, and in another second the door of the sitting-room was opened by a servant and, behind the maid, on the bare wood floor of the stairs, there fell a heavy step and a light step, a light step and a heavy step. Bella never forgot the first time she heard those footfalls.

The lady at the table put her sewing down, and at that moment, behind the servant, a young man came in, a tall young man, holding out his hand and smiling a wonderful and beautiful smile.

"Aunt Caroline. I'm Antony Fairfax from New Orleans. I've just reached New York, and I came, of course, at once to you."

Not very much later, as they all stood about the table talking, Bella uncurled and once upon her feet, astonishingly tall for twelve years old, stood by Fairfax's side, while Gardiner, an old-fashioned little figure in queer home-made clothes, flushed, delicate and timid, leaned on his mother. The older woman had stopped sewing. With her work in her lap she was looking at the seventh son of her beautiful sister of whom she had been gently, mildly envious all her life.

Bella said brusquely: "You've got an awfully light smile, Cousin Antony."

He laughed. "I suppose that comes from an awfully light heart, little cousin!"

"Bella," her mother frowned, "don't be personal. You will learn not to mind her, Antony; she is frightfully spoiled."

The little girl threw back her hair. "And you've got one light step, Cousin Antony, and one heavy step. No one ever came up our stairs like that before. How do you do it?"

The stranger's face clouded. He had been looking at her with keen delight, and he was caught up short at her words. He put out his deformed shoe.

"This is the heavy step."

Bella's cheeks had been flushed with excitement, but the dark red that rose at Fairfax's words made her look like a little Indian.

"Oh, I didn't know!" she stammered. "I didn't know."

Her cousin comforted her cheerfully. "That's all right. I don't mind. I fell from a cherry tree when I was a little chap and I've stumped about ever since."

His aunt's gentle voice, indifferent and soft, like Gardiner's murmured —

"Oh, don't listen to her, Antony, she's a spoiled, inconsiderate little girl."

But Bella had drawn nearer the stranger. She leaned on the table close to him and lifted her face in which her eyes shone like stars. She had wounded him, and it didn't seem to her generous little heart that she could quite let it go. And under her breath she whispered —

"But there's the light step, isn't there, Cousin Antony? And the smile – the awfully light smile?"

Fairfax laughed and leaned forward as though he would catch her, but she had escaped from under his hand like an elusive fairy, and when he next saw her she was back in her corner with her book on her knees and her dark hair covering her face.

CHAPTER III

He talked with his aunt for a long while. Her grace and dignity suggested his mother, but she was not so lovely as the other woman, whose memory was always thrilling to him. Fairfax ran eagerly on, on fire with his subject, finally stopping himself with a laugh.

"I reckon I'm boring you to death, Aunt Caroline."

"Oh, no," she breathed, "how can you say so? How proud she must be of you!"

Downstairs in the hall he had left his valise and his little hand satchel, with the snow melting on them. He came from a household whose hospitality was as large, as warm, as bright as the sun. He had made a stormy passage by the packet Nore. His head was beginning to whirl. From the sofa there was not a sign. Bella read ardently, her hand pressing a lock of her dark hair across her burning cheek. Gardiner, his eyes on his cousin, drank in, fascinated, the figure of the big, handsome young man.

"He's my relation," he said to himself. "He's one of our family. I know he can tell stories, and he's a traveller. He came in the fairy cars."

Mrs. Carew tapped her lip with her thimble. "So you will learn to model here," she murmured. "Now I wonder who would be the best man?"

And Fairfax responded quickly, "Cedersholm, auntie, he's the only man."

"My husband," his aunt began to blush, "your uncle knows Mr. Cedersholm in the Century Club, but I hardly think…"

Antony threw up his bright head. "I have brought a letter from the President to Cedersholm and several of the little figures I have modelled."

"Ah, that will be better," and his aunt breathed with relief. Mrs. Carew's mention of her husband came to Antony like a sharp chill. Nothing that had been told him of the New York banker who had married his gentle aunt was calculated to inspire him with a sense of kinship. It was as though a window had been opened into the bright room. A slight noise at the door downstairs acted like a current of alarm upon the family. The colour left his aunt's cheeks, and little Gardiner exclaimed, "I hear father's key." The child came over to his mother's side. It seemed discourteous to Antony to suggest going just as his uncle arrived, so he waited a moment in the strange silence that fell over the group. In a few seconds Mr. Carew came in and his wife presented. "My dear, this is Antony Fairfax, my sister Bella's only child, you know. You remember Bella, Henry."

A wave of red, which must have been vigorous in order to sweep in and under the ruddy colour already in Carew's cheeks, testified that he did remember the beautiful Mrs. Fairfax.

"I remember her very well," he returned; "is she as handsome as ever? You have chosen a cold day to land in the North. I presume you came by boat? We have been two hours coming up town. The cars are blocked by snow. It's ten degrees below zero to-night. I wish you would see that ashes are poured on the front steps, Caroline, at once."

The guest put out his hand. "I must be going. Good night, Aunt Caroline – good night, Gardiner. Good night, sir."

Fairfax marked the ineffectuality in his aunt's face. It was neither embarrassment nor shame, it was impotence. Her expression was not appealing, but inadequate, and the slender hand that she gave him melted in his like the snow. There was no grasp there, no stimulus to go on. He turned to the red figure of the huddled child in the sofa corner.

"Good night, little cousin."

Bella dropped her book and sprang up. "Good night," she cried; "why, you're not going, Cousin Antony?"

And as the older woman had done she extended her hand. It was only a small child's hand, but the essential was there. The same sex but with a different hand. It did not melt in Antony's; it lay, it clasped, lost in his big palm. He felt, nevertheless, the vital little grasp, its warmth and sweetness against his hand.

"Where are you going?"

Mr. Carew had passed out now that he had successfully eliminated from the mind of the guest any idea that hospitality was to be extended. Once more the little group were by themselves.

"There is the Buckingham Hotel," Mrs. Carew ventured. "It's an excellent hotel; we get croquettes from there when Gardiner's appetite flags. The children have their hair cut there as well."

Tired as Fairfax was, rebuffed as he was, he could not but be cheered by the bright look of the little girl who stood between him and her mother. She nodded at her cousin.

"Why, the Buckingham is six dollars a day," she said. "I asked the barber when he cut Gardiner's hair."

Fairfax smiled. "I reckon that is a little steep, Bella."

"It's too far away, anyhow, Cousin Antony, it's a mile; twenty blocks is a New York mile. There are the Whitcombs." And the child turned to the less capable woman.

Her mother exclaimed: "Why, of course, of course, there are the Whitcombs! My dear Antony," said his aunt, "if you could only stay with them you would be doing a real charity. They are dear little old maids and self-supporting women. They sell their work in my women's exchange. They have a nice little house."

Bella interrupted. "A dear little red-brick house, Cousin Antony, two stories, on the next block."

She tucked her book under her arm as though it were a little trunk she was tucking away to get ready to journey with him.

"The Whitcombs would be perfectly enchanted, Antony," urged his aunt, "they want a lodger badly. It's Number 700, Madison Avenue."

"It looks like the house that Jack built," murmured Gardiner, dreamily; "they have just wepainted it bwight wed with yellow doors…"

Fairfax thanked them and went, his heavy and his light step echoing on the hard stairway of his kinsmen's inhospitable house. Bella watched him from the head of the stairs, her book under her arm, and below, at the door, he shouldered his bag and went out into the whirling, whirling snow. It met him softly, like a caress, but it was very cold. Bella had said two blocks away to the left, and he started blindly.

This was his welcome from his own people.

His Southern home seemed a million miles away; but come what would, he would never return to it empty-handed as he had left it. He had been thrust from the door where he felt he had a right to enter. That threshold he would never darken again – never. A pile of unshovelled snow blocked his path. As he crossed the street to avoid it, he looked up at the big, fine house. From an upper window the shade was lifted, and in the square of yellow light stood the two children, the little boy's head just visible, and Bella, her dark hair blotting against the light, waved to him her friendly, cousinly little hand. He forged on through the snow to "The House that Jack built."

CHAPTER IV

He was the seventh son, and his mother was tired of child-bearing when Antony was born. The others, mediocre, fine fellows, left to their father's control, had turned out as well as children are likely to turn out when brought up by a man. One by one, during the interval of years before Antony came, one by one they had died, and when Mr. Fairfax himself passed away, he left his wife alone with Antony a baby in her arms. She then gave herself up to her grief and the contemplation of her beauty. Adored, spoiled, an indifferent house-keeper, Mrs. Fairfax was, nevertheless, what is known as a charming creature, and a sincere artist. She had her studio, her canvases, she wrote plays and songs, and nothing, with the exception perhaps of realities, for she knew nothing of them, nothing made less impression on her than did her only child, until one day she suddenly remembered Antony when it was too late.

He was like his mother, but she was unconscious of the fact. She only knew him as a rowdy boy, fond of sports, an alarmingly rough fighter, the chief in the neighbourhood scuffles, a vigorous, out-of-door boy, at the head of a yelling, wild little band that made her nerves quiver. Coloured servants and his Mammy soothed Antony's ills and washed his bruises. With a feeling of shame he thrust aside his artistic inclinations, lest his comrades should call him a milksop, but he drew copiously in secret, when he was kept in at school or housed with a cold. And from the distance at which she kept him, Antony worshipped his mother. He admired her hauteur, the proud cold loveliness. His sunny nature, incapable of morose or morbid brooding, felt no neglect. Late in spring they too had gone north to a water cure popular with Louisiana people, where a more vigorous growth of trees magnetized Antony, who climbed like a squirrel and tore his clothes to his heart's content. He had come in from a tramp and, scandalized by his rough and tumbled appearance as she caught a glimpse of him swinging along, Mrs. Fairfax summoned her little son. Rocking idly on the verandah she watched him obey her call, and there was so much buoyant life in his running step, such a boy's grace and brightness about him that he charmed her beauty-loving eyes.

"Go, wash your face and hands and bring your school books here. I do hope you have brought your books with you."

When he reappeared with the volumes of dog-eared school books, she fingered them gingerly, fell on his drawing portfolio and opened it.

"Who drew these for you, Tony?"

"Mother, no one. I did them. They are rotten."

Mrs. Fairfax exclaimed with excitement: "Why, they are quite extraordinary! You must study with some one."

Blushing, enraptured, Antony was tongue-tied, although a host of things rushed to his lips that now he might be permitted to speak to her he longed to tell everything that was on his heart.

Neither of them forgot that day. The wistaria was purple in the vines, and his mother, a shawl with trailing fringe over her shoulders, rocked indolent and charming in her chair. She had made her husband and her other sons her slaves, and she remembered now, with a sense of comfort, that she had another servitor.

"My shoe is unbuttoned" – she raised her small foot – "button 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'élégance 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 gratitude 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 passed 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.