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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 pass 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!"
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 sparsely 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 shells. 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 shell," he said slowly, "a blue and bwown shell. Nobody 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 shell and discoursed regretfully —
"It was a perfectly lovely shell. 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 shells 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, unobserved 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 Whitcomb 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.
His nature was not one to harbour anything but sweetness, and the next day, Sunday, when the sunlight poured upon New York, he thought of the little cousins and decided to accept his aunt's invitation. The sky was cloudless and under its hard blue the city looked colder and whiter than ever. It was a sky which in New Orleans would have made the birds sing. The steeples sang, one slender tower rocking as its early ringing bells sang out its Sunday music on the next corner of the street, and Antony listened as he dressed, and recognized the melody. He found it beautiful and sang in his young voice as he shaved and tied his cravat, and made himself impeccable for the Presbyterian Church. His own people were High Church Episcopalians, and from the tone and music of these bells he believed that they rang in an Episcopal building. There was no melancholy in the honied tone of the chime, and it gave him a glow that went with him happily throughout the dreary day.
He found himself between the children in the deep dark pew, where the back of the seat was especially contrived to seize the sinner in a sensitive point, and it clutched Antony and made him think of all the crimes that he had ever committed. Fortunately it met Bella and Gardiner at their heads. Antony's position between the children was not without danger. He was to serve as a quieter for Bella's nerves, spirits and perpetual motion, and to guard against Gardiner's somnolence. He remained deaf to Bella's clear whispers, and settled Gardiner comfortably and propped him up. Finally the little boy fell securely against the cousinly arm. At the end of the pew, Mr. and Mrs. Carew were absorbed, she in her emotional interest in the pastor, a brilliant Irishman who thundered for an hour, and Mr. Carew in his own importance and his position. Antony remembered Miss Mitty and that his uncle was a pillar of the Church, and he watched the pillar support in grave pomposity his part of the edifice.
But neither time nor place nor things eternal nor things present affected the little girl at Antony's side. Sunk in the deep pew, unobserved and sheltered by Antony's figure, she lived what she called her "Sunday pew life," lived it as ardently as she did everything. After a short interval in which she pored over the open hymnbook, she whispered to him —
"Cousin Antony, I have learned the whole hymn, ten verses in five minutes. Hear me."
He tried to ignore her, but he was obliged to hear her as with great feeling and in a soft droning undertone she murmured the hymn through.
"'Abide with me, fast falls the eventide.' Isn't it perfectly beautiful, Cousin Antony?"
This done, she took off her yellow kid gloves carefully, finger by finger, and blew them out into a shapely little hand like Zephyr's, to the dangerous amusement of a child in the next pew. Antony confiscated the gloves. By squeezing up her eyes and making a lorgnon of her pretty bare hand, Bella scrutinized the solemn preacher. Antony severely refused her pencils and paper and remained deaf to her soft questions, and, thrown on her own resources, Bella extracted her father's huge Bible from the rack and, to Fairfax's relief, with much turning of the leaves she finally found a favourite chapter in Revelation and settled down and immersed herself in the Apocalypse. She read with fervour, her bonnet back on her rebellious hair, her legs crossed in defiance of every rule of polite demeanour. Something of the sermon's eloquent, passionate savagery was heard by Fairfax, and at the close, as the preacher rose to his climax, Bella heard too. At the text, "There shall be no more night there, neither candle nor light of the sun," she shut her book.
"He is preaching from my chapter, Cousin Antony," she whispered; "isn't it perfectly beautiful?"
Fairfax learned to wait for this phrase of hers, a ready approval of sensuous and lovely and poetic things. He learned to wait for it as one does for a word of praise from a sympathetic companion. Gardiner woke up and yawned, and Fairfax got him on his feet; his tumbled blonde head reached just to the hymnbook rail. He was a pretty picture with his flushed soft cheeks, red as roses, and his sleepy eyes wide. So they stood for the solemn benediction, "The love of God … go with you … always."
CHAPTER VIII
He decided not to be the one to shut doors against himself. If life as it went on chose with backward fling to close portals behind him of its own accord, he at least would not assist fate, and with both hands, generously, as his heart was generous, Fairfax threw all gates wide. Therefore with no arrière pensée or any rankling thought, he went on the appointed afternoon to teach his little cousins the rudiments of drawing.
The weather continued brutal, grew more severe rather, and smartly whipped him up the avenue and hurled him into the house. He arrived covered with snow, white as Santa Claus, and he heard by the voices at the stair head that he was welcome. The three were alone, the upper floor had been assigned to the drawing party. It was a big room full of forgotten things, tons of books that people had ceased to want to read, the linen chest, a capital hiding-place where a soft hand beneath the lid might prevent a second Mistletoe Bough tragedy. There were old trunks stored there, boxes which could not travel any more, one of which had been on a wedding journey and still contained, amongst less poetic objects, mother's wedding slippers. There was a dear disorder in the big room whose windows overlooked Madison and Fifth Avenues, and the distant, black wintry trees of Central Park. A child on either side of him, Fairfax surveyed his workshop, and he thought to himself, "I could model here, if I only had some clay."
Bella had already installed herself. Their tables and their boards and a prodigal outlay of pencils and paper were in themselves inspiring.
"There is no chair high enough for Gardiner," Bella said, "but we can build him one up out of books."
"I'd wather sit on Cousin Antony's lap," said the little boy; "built-up books shake me off so, Bella."
Both children wore blue gingham play aprons. Fairfax told them they looked like real workmen in a real studio, with which idea they were much delighted.
"Gardiner looks like a charity child," said his sister, "in that apron, and his hair's too long. It ought to be cut, but I gave my solemn word of honour that I wouldn't cut it again."
"Why don't you go to your famous Buckingham barber?" asked the cousin.
"It's too far for Gardiner to walk," she returned, "and we have lost our last ten cents. Besides, it's thirty-five cents to get a hair-cut."
Fairfax had placed the boy before his drawing board, and confiscated a long piece of kitchen bread, telling Bella that less than a whole loaf was enough for an eraser, extracted the rubber from Gardiner's mouth, and sat down by the little boy's side.
"There's not much money in this house, Cousin Antony," Bella informed him when the séance opened. "Please let me use the soft pencils, will you? They slide like delicious velvet."
Fairfax made an equal division of the implements, avoiding a scene, and made Bella a straight line across the page.
"Draw a line under it."
"But any one can draw a straight line," said Bella, scornfully, "and I don't think they are very pretty."
"Don't you?" he answered; "the horizon is pretty, don't you think? And the horizon is a straight line."
"Yes, it is," said Gardiner, "the howizon is where the street cars fall over into the sunset."
"Gardiner's only six," said Bella, apologetically, "you mustn't expect much of him, Cousin Antony."
She curled over the table and bent her head and broke her pencils one by one, and Fairfax guided Gardiner's hand and watched the little girl. She was lightly and finely made. From under her short red skirt the pretty leg in its woollen stocking swung to and fro. There was a hole in the stocking heel, visible above the tiny, tiny slipper. Through the crude dark collar of the gingham apron came her dark head and its wild torrent of curling hair, wonderful hair, tangled and unkempt, curling roundly at the ends, and beneath the locks the curve of her cheek was like ivory. She was a Southern beauty – her little red mouth twisted awry over her drawing.
"I thought dwawing was making pictures, Cousin Antony; if I'd have known it was lines, I wouldn't have taken," said his youngest cousin.
"You have to begin with those things, old man. I'll wipe your hands off on my handkerchief."
"Please do," said the little boy; "my hands leak awful easy."
His sister laughed softly, and said to herself in an undertone —
"I've drawn my lines long – long – ago, and now I'm making…"
"Don't make anything, Bella, until I tell you to," commanded her teacher, and glanced over her page where she had covered the paper with her big formless handwriting, "Dramatiss personi, first act."
"Why, I had a lovely idea for a play, Cousin Antony, and I thought I'd just jot it down. We're the company, Gardiner and I, and we give plays here every now and then. You can play too, if you like, and say 'Spartacus.' Ah, say it now."
Trevelyan felt the appealing little hand of the boy stealing into his.
"Do, please," he urged; "I don't want ever to draw again, never, never."
"Hush," said his sister severely, "you mustn't say that, Gardiner; Cousin Antony is our drawing master."
Gardiner's sensitive face flushed. "I thought he was only my cousin," said the child, and continued timidly, "I'll dwaw a howizon now and then if you want me to, but I'd wather not."
They left their tables. Fairfax said, "I'm no good at teaching, Bella." He stretched his arms. "I reckon you're not much good at learning either. Gardiner's too young and you're not an artist."
"Say about the 'timid shepherd boy,' Cousin Antony."
He had taken his coat off in the furnace-heated room and stood in his snowy shirt sleeves, glad to be released from the unwelcome task of teaching restless children. He loved the ring and the thrill of the words and declaimed the lines enthusiastically.
"You look like a gladiator, Cousin Antony," Bella cried; "you must have a perfectly splendid muscle."
He bared his right arm, carried away by his recitation and the picture evoked. The children admired the sinews and the swelling biceps. Gardiner touched it with his little fingers; the muscular firm arm, ending in the vigorous wrist, held their fascinated gaze. The sculptor himself looked up it with pardonable approval.
"Feel mine," said Gardiner, crimson with the exertion of lifting his tiny arm to the position of his cousin's.
"Immense, Gardiner!" Fairfax complimented, "immense."
"Feel mine," cried Bella, and the sculptor touched between his fingers the fine little member.
"Great, little cousin!"
"I'll be the gladiator's wife and applaud him from the Coliseum and throw flowers on him."
Fairfax lingered with them another hour, laughing at his simplicity in finding them such companions. With compunction, he endeavoured to take up his lesson again with Bella, unwilling and recalcitrant. She drew a few half-hearted circles, a page of wobbly lines, and at the suspicion of tears Fairfax desisted, surprised to find how the idea of tears from her touched him. Then in the window between them, he watched as the children told him they always did, for "mother's car to come home."
"She is sharping," exclaimed Gardiner, slowly; "she has to sharp very hard, my mother does. She comes back in the cars, only she never comes," he finished with patient fatality.
"Silly," exclaimed his sister, "she always comes at dinner-time. And we bet on the cars, Cousin Antony. Now let's say it will be the seventy-first. We have to put it far away off," she explained, "'cause we're beginning early."
Fairfax left them, touched by their patience in watching for the mother bird. He promised to return soon, soon, to go on with his wonderful tales. As he went downstairs Bella called after him.
"But you didn't say which car you bet on, Cousin Antony."
And Fairfax called back in his Southern drawl: "I reckon she'll come in a pumpkin chariot." And he heard their delighted giggles as he limped downstairs.
