"Probably I told you my father lived at Syracuse. I"ve been in New York ever since I came home from Paris," said Beaton, with the confusion of a man who feels himself played upon by a woman.
"From Paris!" Alma echoed, leaning forward, with her smiling mask tight on. "Wasn"t it Munich where you studied?"
"I was at Munich, too. I met Wetmore there."
"Oh, do you know Mr. Wetmore?"
"Why, Alma," her mother interposed again, "it was Mr. Beaton who told you of Mr. Wetmore."
"Was it? Why, yes, to be sure. It was Mrs. Horn who suggested Mr. Ilcomb.
I remember now. I can"t thank you enough for having sent me to Mr.
Wetmore, Mr. Beaton. Isn"t he delightful? Oh yes, I"m a perfect Wetmorian, I can a.s.sure you. The whole cla.s.s is the same way."
"I just met him and Mrs. Wetmore at dinner," said Beaton, attempting the recovery of something that he had lost through the girl"s shining ease and steely sprightliness. She seemed to him so smooth and hard, with a repellent elasticity from which he was flung off. "I hope you"re not working too hard, Miss Leighton?"
"Oh no! I enjoy every minute of it, and grow stronger on it. Do I look very much wasted away?" She looked him full in the face, brilliantly smiling, and intentionally beautiful.
"No," he said, with a slow sadness; "I never saw you looking better."
"Poor Mr. Beaton!" she said, in recognition of his doleful tune. "It seems to be quite a blow."
"Oh no--"
"I remember all the good advice you used to give me about not working too hard, and probably it"s that that"s saved my life--that and the house-hunting. Has mamma told you of our adventures in getting settled?
"Some time we must. It was such fun! And didn"t you think we were fortunate to get such a pretty house? You must see both our parlors." She jumped up, and her mother followed her with a bewildered look as she ran into the back parlor and flashed up the gas.
"Come in here, Mr. Beaton. I want to show you the great feature of the house." She opened the low windows that gave upon a glazed veranda stretching across the end of the room. "Just think of this in New York!
You can"t see it very well at night, but when the southern sun pours in here all the afternoon--"
"Yes, I can imagine it," he said. He glanced up at the bird-cage hanging from the roof. "I suppose Gypsy enjoys it."
"You remember Gypsy?" she said; and she made a cooing, kissing little noise up at the bird, who responded drowsily. "Poor old Gypsum! Well, he sha"n"t be disturbed. Yes, it"s Gyp"s delight, and Colonel Woodburn likes to write here in the morning. Think of us having a real live author in the house! And Miss Woodburn: I"m so glad you"ve seen her! They"re Southern people."
"Yes, that was obvious in her case."
"From her accent? Isn"t it fascinating? I didn"t believe I could ever endure Southerners, but we"re like one family with the Woodburns. I should think you"d want to paint Miss Woodburn. Don"t you think her coloring is delicious? And such a quaint kind of eighteenth-century type of beauty! But she"s perfectly lovely every way, and everything she says is so funny. The Southerners seem to be such great talkers; better than we are, don"t you think?"
"I don"t know," said Beaton, in pensive discouragement. He was sensible of being manipulated, operated, but he was helpless to escape from the performer or to fathom her motives. His pensiveness pa.s.sed into gloom, and was degenerating into sulky resentment when he went away, after several failures to get back to the old ground he had held in relation to Alma. He retrieved something of it with Mrs. Leighton; but Alma glittered upon him to the last with a keen impenetrable candor, a child-like singleness of glance, covering unfathomable reserve.
"Well, Alma," said her mother, when the door had closed upon him.
"Well, mother." Then, after a moment, she said, with a rush: "Did you think I was going to let him suppose we were piqued at his not coming?
Did you suppose I was going to let him patronize us, or think that we were in the least dependent on his favor or friendship?"
Her mother did not attempt to answer her. She merely said, "I shouldn"t think he would come any more."
"Well, we have got on so far without him; perhaps we can live through the rest of the winter."
"I couldn"t help feeling sorry for him. He was quite stupefied. I could see that he didn"t know what to make of you."
"He"s not required to make anything of me," said Alma.
"Do you think he really believed you had forgotten all those things?"
"Impossible to say, mamma."
"Well, I don"t think it was quite right, Alma."
"I"ll leave him to you the next time. Miss Woodburn said you were freezing him to death when I came down."
"That was quite different. But, there won"t be any next time, I"m afraid," sighed Mrs. Leighton.
Beaton went home feeling sure there would not. He tried to read when he got to his room; but Alma"s looks, tones, gestures, whirred through and through the woof of the story like shuttles; he could not keep them out, and he fell asleep at last, not because he forgot them, but because he forgave them. He was able to say to himself that he had been justly cut off from kindness which he knew how to value in losing it. He did not expect ever to right himself in Alma"s esteem, but he hoped some day to let her know that he had understood. It seemed to him that it would be a good thing if she should find it out after his death. He imagined her being touched by it under those circ.u.mstances.
VI.
In the morning it seemed to Beaton that he had done himself injustice.
When he uncovered his Judas and looked at it, he could not believe that the man who was capable of such work deserved the punishment Miss Leighton had inflicted upon him. He still forgave her, but in the presence of a thing like that he could not help respecting himself; he believed that if she could see it she would be sorry that she had cut herself off from his acquaintance. He carried this strain of conviction all through his syndicate letter, which he now took out of his desk and finished, with an increasing security of his opinions and a mounting severity in his judgments. He retaliated upon the general condition of art among us the pangs of wounded vanity, which Alma had made him feel, and he folded up his ma.n.u.script and put it in his pocket, almost healed of his humiliation. He had been able to escape from its sting so entirely while he was writing that the notion of making his life more and more literary commended itself to him. As it was now evident that the future was to be one of renunciation, of self-forgetting, an oblivion tinged with bitterness, he formlessly reasoned in favor of reconsidering his resolution against Fulkerson"s offer. One must call it reasoning, but it was rather that swift internal dramatization which constantly goes on in persons of excitable sensibilities, and which now seemed to sweep Beaton physically along toward the "Every Other Week" office, and carried his mind with lightning celerity on to a time when he should have given that journal such quality and authority in matters of art as had never been enjoyed by any in America before. With the prosperity which he made attend his work he changed the character of the enterprise, and with Fulkerson"s enthusiastic support he gave the public an art journal of as high grade as "Les Lettres et les Arts", and very much that sort of thing. All this involved now the unavailing regret of Alma Leighton, and now his reconciliation with her they were married in Grace Church, because Beaton had once seen a marriage there, and had intended to paint a picture of it some time.
Nothing in these fervid fantasies prevented his responding with due dryness to Fulkerson"s cheery "h.e.l.lo, old man!" when he found himself in the building fitted up for the "Every Other Week" office. Fulkerson"s room was back of the smaller one occupied by the bookkeeper; they had been respectively the reception-room and dining-room of the little place in its dwelling-house days, and they had been simply and tastefully treated in their transformation into business purposes. The narrow old trim of the doors and windows had been kept, and the quaintly ugly marble mantels. The architect had said, Better let them stay they expressed epoch, if not character.
"Well, have you come round to go to work? Just hang up your coat on the floor anywhere," Fulkerson went on.
"I"ve come to bring you that letter," said Beaton, all the more haughtily because he found that Fulkerson was not alone when he welcomed him in these free and easy terms. There was a quiet-looking man, rather stout, and a little above the middle height, with a full, close-cropped iron-gray beard, seated beyond the table where Fulkerson tilted himself back, with his knees set against it; and leaning against the mantel there was a young man with a singularly gentle face, in which the look of goodness qualified and transfigured a certain simplicity. His large blue eyes were somewhat prominent; and his rather narrow face was drawn forward in a nose a little too long perhaps, if it had not been for the full chin deeply cut below the lip, and jutting firmly forward.
"Introduce you to Mr. March, our editor, Mr. Beaton," Fulkerson said, rolling his head in the direction of the elder man; and then nodding it toward the younger, he said, "Mr. Dryfoos, Mr. Beaton." Beaton shook hands with March, and then with Mr. Dryfoos, and Fulkerson went on, gayly: "We were just talking of you, Beaton--well, you know the old saying. Mr. March, as I told you, is our editor, and Mr. Dryfoos has charge of the publishing department--he"s the counting-room incarnate, the source of power, the fountain of corruption, the element that prevents journalism being the high and holy thing that it would be if there were no money in it." Mr. Dryfoos turned his large, mild eyes upon Beaton, and laughed with the uneasy concession which people make to a character when they do not quite approve of the character"s language.
"What Mr. March and I are trying to do is to carry on this thing so that there won"t be any money in it--or very little; and we"re planning to give the public a better article for the price than it"s ever had before.
Now here"s a dummy we"ve had made up for "Every Other Week", and as we"ve decided to adopt it, we would naturally like your opinion of it, so"s to know what opinion to have of you." He reached forward and pushed toward Beaton a volume a little above the size of the ordinary duodecimo book; its ivory-white pebbled paper cover was prettily ill.u.s.trated with a water-colored design irregularly washed over the greater part of its surface: quite across the page at top, and narrowing from right to left as it descended. In the triangular s.p.a.ce left blank the t.i.tle of the periodical and the publisher"s imprint were tastefully lettered so as to be partly covered by the background of color.
"It"s like some of those Tartarin books of Daudet"s," said Beacon, looking at it with more interest than he suffered to be seen. "But it"s a book, not a magazine." He opened its pages of thick, mellow white paper, with uncut leaves, the first few pages experimentally printed in the type intended to be used, and ill.u.s.trated with some sketches drawn into and over the text, for the sake of the effect.
"A Daniel--a Daniel come to judgment! Sit down, Dan"el, and take it easy." Fulkerson pushed a chair toward Beaton, who dropped into it.
"You"re right, Dan"el; it"s a book, to all practical intents and purposes. And what we propose to do with the American public is to give it twenty-four books like this a year--a complete library--for the absurd sum of six dollars. We don"t intend to sell "em--it"s no name for the transaction--but to give "em. And what we want to get out of you--beg, borrow, buy, or steal from you is an opinion whether we shall make the American public this princely present in paper covers like this, or in some sort of flexible boards, so they can set them on the shelf and say no more about it. Now, Dan"el, come to judgment, as our respected friend Shylock remarked."
Beacon had got done looking at the dummy, and he dropped it on the table before Fulkerson, who pushed it away, apparently to free himself from partiality. "I don"t know anything about the business side, and I can"t tell about the effect of either style on the sales; but you"ll spoil the whole character of the cover if you use anything thicker than that thickish paper."
"All right; very good; first-rate. The ayes have it. Paper it is. I don"t mind telling you that we had decided for that paper before you came in.
Mr. March wanted it, because he felt in his bones just the way you do about it, and Mr. Dryfoos wanted it, because he"s the counting-room incarnate, and it"s cheaper; and I "wanted it, because I always like to go with the majority. Now what do you think of that little design itself?"
"The sketch?" Beaton pulled the book toward him again and looked at it again. "Rather decorative. Drawing"s not remarkable. Graceful; rather nice." He pushed the book away again, and Fulkerson pulled it to his aide of the table.
"Well, that"s a piece of that amateur trash you despise so much. I went to a painter I know-by-the-way, he was guilty of suggesting you for this thing, but I told him I was ahead of him--and I got him to submit my idea to one of his cla.s.s, and that"s the result. Well, now, there ain"t anything in this world that sells a book like a pretty cover, and we"re going to have a pretty cover for "Every Other Week" every time. We"ve cut loose from the old traditional quarto literary newspaper size, and we"ve cut loose from the old two-column big page magazine size; we"re going to have a duodecimo page, clear black print, and paper that "ll make your mouth water; and we"re going to have a fresh ill.u.s.tration for the cover of each number, and we ain"t agoing to give the public any rest at all.
Sometimes we"re going to have a delicate little landscape like this, and sometimes we"re going to have an indelicate little figure, or as much so as the law will allow."
The young man leaning against the mantelpiece blushed a sort of protest.