"Not at all. I am always at work early."
"Well, Ida, does Mr. Eltinge miss your visits very much? It"s selfish in me to let you stay in the city."
"He does indeed, sir," said the artist answering for her. "He talked to me continually about her yesterday, although I can"t say I tried to change the subject."
"Father, Mr. Van Berg shall not shield my short-comings," said Ida, with crimson cheeks. "I forgot to ask about Mr. Eltinge. To tell the truth, we were talking of old times. I met Mr. Van Berg here last June and I made a very bad impression on him."
"And I at the same time made a worse impression on Miss Mayhew,"
added the artist.
"Well," said her father, with a doubtful smile and a puzzled glace from one to the other, "one almost might be tempted to believe that you had been revising your impressions."
"Mine has not been revised, but changed altogether," said Van Berg, decisively.
"Come, father, let us go at once lest Mr. Van Berg"s impressions change again," and her mirthful glance as she gave him her hand in parting revealed a new element in her character. She was not developing the cloying sweetness of honey.
Chapter XLVIII. Ida"s Temptation.
If Van Berg had given thought to himself that evening as he did to Ida Mayhew he might have discovered some rather odd phenomena in his varying mental states. Earlier in the summer he had been a very deliberate and conscientious wooer. He had leisurely taken counsel of his reason, judgment, and good taste; he mentally consulted his parents, and satisfied himself that Miss Burton would have peculiar charms for them, and so it had come to seem almost a duty as well as a privilege to seek that young lady"s hand. The sagacity and nice appreciation of character on which he had so greatly prided himself led to the belief that fortune in giving him a chance to win such a maiden had been very kind. That his pulse was so even and his heart had so little to say in the matter was only a proof that he did not possess an unbalanced head-long nature like that of Stanton, who had soon become wholly mastered by his pa.s.sion. He had at one time reasoned it all out to his satisfaction, and believed he was paying his suit to the woman he would make his wife in an eminently proper way. but now that he was merely trying to obtain a young girl"s friendship, the cool and masterful poise which he had then been able to maintain, was apparently deserting him. He might have asked himself if he ever remembered being such an enthusiastic friend before. He might have considered how often he had kept awake and counted the hours till he should meet a friend from whom he had just parted. That these obvious thoughts and contrasts did not occur to him only proved that he was smitten already by that blindness which a certain spiritual malady usually occasions in its earlier stages.
As for poor Ida, she still felt that her little boat was being carried forward by a shining tide--whither she dared not think.
She had come to the city to escape from the artist, and as a result she might spend long hours alone with him in his studio and see far more of him than if she had remained in the country. She had not sought it--she had not even dared to hope or dream of such a thing; but now that this exquisite cup of pleasure had been pressed to her very lips by other hands she could not refuse it.
Her father had watched her keenly but furtively since she had been his companion, and until the artist had accosted her the evening before had not been able to understand the depression which she could not disguise wholly from him; but the light and welcome that flashed into her face when greeting Van Berg had suggested her secret, and all that followed confirmed his surmise. The truth was plainer still when she came down to their early breakfast the next morning with color in her cheeks and a fitful light of excitement in her eyes.
As he realized the truth he fairly trembled with apprehension and longing. "Oh, if Ida could only marry that man I would be almost beside myself with joy," he thought; "but I fear it is rash even to hope for such a thing. Indeed, I myself am the obstacle that would probably prevent it all. The Van Bergs are a proud race, and this young man"s father knows me too well. O G.o.d! I could be annihilated if thereby my child could be happy."
"Ida," he said, hesitatingly, "perhaps I had better not go with you this morning. I imagine Mr. Van Berg asked me out of politeness rather than from any wish to see me and--and--I think I had better not go."
She looked up at him swiftly, and the rich color mantled her face, for she read his thoughts in part. But she only said quietly:
"Then I will not go."
"That would not be right or courteous, Ida," but I think you young people will get on better without me."
"You are mistaken, Father; I never intend to get on without you, and any friend of mine who does not welcome you becomes a stranger from that hour. But I think you are doing Mr. Van Berg an injustice.
At any rate we will give him a chance to show a better spirit."
"Ida, my child, if you only knew how gladly I would sacrifice myself to make you happy!"
She came to him and put her arms around his neck and looking up into his face said, with the earnestness and solemnity of a vow, "I will take no happiness which I cannot receive as your loving daughter. As long as you are the man you have been since Sunday I will stand proudly at your side. If you should ever be weak again you will drag me down with you."
He held her from him and looked at her as a miser might gloat over his treasure.
"Ida, my good angel," he murmured.
"Nonsense!" she exclaimed, trying to hide her feelings by a little brusqueness, "I"m as human a girl as there is in this city, and will try your patience a hundred times before the year is out. Come, let us go and visit this proud artist. He had better beware, or he may find an expression on my face that he won"t like if I should decide to give him a sitting."
But the artist did like the expression of Ida"s face as he glanced up from his work with great frequency and with an admiring glow in his eyes that was anything but cool and business-like. Even her jealous love had not detected a tone or act in his reception of her father that was not all she could ask, and she had never seen the poor man look so pleased and hopeful as when he left the studio for his office. There had not been a particle of patronage in Van Berg"s manner, but only the cordial and respectful courtesy of a younger gentleman towards an elderly one. Mr. Mayhew had been made at home at once, and before he left, the artist had obtained his promise to come again with his daughter on the following morning.
"His bearing towards father was the perfection of good breeding,"
thought Ida, and it would seem that some of the grat.i.tude with which her heart overflowed found its way into her tones and eyes.
"You look so pleasantly and kindly, that you must be thinking of Mr. Eltinge," said Van Berg.
"You are not to paint my thoughts," said Ida, with a quick flush.
"I wish I could."
"I"m glad you can"t."
"You do puzzle one, Miss Mayhew. On the day of our visit to the old garden your thoughts seemed as clear to me as the water of the little brook, and I supposed I saw all that was in your mind. But before the day was over I felt that I did not understand you at all."
"Mr. Van Berg, I"m astonished you are an artist."
"Because of the character of my work?"
"No, indeed. But such a wonderful taste for solving problems suggests a metaphysician. I think you would become discouraged with such tasks. Just think how many ladies there are in the world, and I"m sure any one of them is a more abstruse problem than I am."
The artist looked up at her in surprise and bit his lip with a faint trace of embarra.s.sment, but he said, after a moment, "But it does not follow that they are interesting problems."
"You don"t know," she replied.
"And never shall," he added. "I do know, however, that you are a very interesting one."
"I didn"t agree to come here to be solved as a problem," she said demurely, but with a mirthful twinkle in her eyes; "I only promised you a sitting for the sake of Mr. Eltinge."
"Two sittings, Miss Mayhew."
"Well, yes, if two are needful."
"By all the nine muses! you do not expect me to make a good picture from only two sittings?"
"You know how slight is my acquaintance with any of those superior divinities, and in this sacred haunt of theirs I feel that I should express all my opinions with bated breath; but truly, Mr. Van Berg, I thought you could make a picture from the sketch you made in the garden."
"Yes, I could make A picture, but every sitting you will give enables me to make a better picture, and you know how much we both owe to Mr. Eltinge."
"I"m learning every day how much, how very much, I owe to him,"
she said, earnestly.
"Then for his sake you will promise to come as often as I wish you to," was his eager response, and it was so eager that she looked up at him in surprise.