Feeling a slight discomfort under his look, she at length diverted his eyes to the room in which they sat.
"It"s the room I like best in all the house," she said. "That big drawing room you came through is inhuman. It terrified me as a child, and still refuses to make friends with me, but this library--don"t you feel that I"ve humanized it?"
He became aware that he had felt its easing charm of dark-toned wood and dull-red walls. There were low book-shelves, low seats that invited, a broad table with its array of magazines, and a lazy fire in the open grate.
"It"s a fine room to be in," he said, bringing his eyes back to her.
"There"s not a chair in it," she continued, "that wasn"t meant to be sat in--most chairs nowadays are mere spectacles, you know--and no gla.s.s doors before the books. Nothing enrages me like having to open a door to get at books."
"It"s the room you need," he replied. "You draw all the light to yourself. It gives you color, turns your hair to black, and makes your eyes look like----"
"Mr. Piersoll!" announced the man.
His look still engaged her as she floated forward to greet the tall, pleasant-faced, alert young man with tumbled yellow hair who now entered. Not until he heard his own name did he relinquish her to acknowledge the word of introduction.
A moment later the father of Mrs. Laithe strolled in and Ewing was again introduced, this time to a stoutish man with a placid, pink face, scanty hair going from yellow to white--arranged over his brow with scrupulous economy--and a closely cut mustache of the same ambiguous hue. He was a man who gracefully confessed fifty years to all but the better informed.
Ewing felt himself under the scrutiny of a pair of very light gray eyes as Bartell took his hand, tentatively at first, then with a grip of entire cordiality. One may suspect that this gentleman had looked forward with mild apprehension to a dinner meeting with the latest protege of his impulsive daughter. The youth"s demeanor, however, so quickly caused his barbaric past to be forgotten that, by the time they were at table, his host had said to him, prefacing one of his best anecdotes, "Of course you know that corner table on the Cafe de la Paix terrace...."
Ewing floated dreamily on the stream of talk; laughing, chatty talk, spiced with suggestive strange names; blithe gossip of random happenings. He was content to feel its flow beneath him and rather resented the efforts to involve him in it, preferring to listen and to look. But he was courteously groped for by the others and compelled to response as the dinner progressed.
Piersoll mentioned his drawings pleasantly and engaged him for dinner at a club the following evening. "I"ll call for you at the Stuyvesant about six," he said, when Ewing had accepted. "I must have a look at your stuff. Don"t dress; we dine in our working clothes at the Monastery."
The father of Mrs. Laithe warned Ewing to beware of worry in his new surroundings.
"Let life carry you, my boy. That"s my physiology in a nutsh.e.l.l. Don"t try to lug the world about. The people who tell you that life in New York is a strain haven"t learned rational living. Worry kills, but I never worry, and I find town idyllic. Clarence was born to worry: result, dyspepsia and nervous breakdown. My daughter worries. She goes into side streets looking for trouble, and when she finds it she keeps it. That"s wrong. Life is whatever we see it to be. Eleanor sees too much of the black side, poverty, starvation, hard luck--all kinds of deviltry, and it reacts on her. I look only on the cheerful side, and that reacts on me. A good dinner, a gla.s.s of burgundy--there"s an answer to all that socialistic pessimism."
"Suppose one hasn"t the answer at hand?" his daughter broke in.
"Keep smiling, my dear," retorted her father with Spartan grimness.
"Skipping a dinner or two can"t overturn real philosophy. Down on the Chesapeake last fall, duck shooting one day, we lost the luncheon hamper overboard, and hadn"t so much as a biscuit from four in the morning till after nine at night, shooting from a chilly, wet blind all day. _There_ was a test! But I give you my word I never worried. I took it as so much discipline. My dear, if I had fretted over tenement houses the way you have, I should be a broken man. Thank the G.o.ds that be, I"ve had the wit to let my agent do all that!"
His daughter received this with a shrug of despair. "But confess, daddy--you _have_ a worry."
""Oh, that this too, too solid flesh would melt!"" quoted Piersoll, divining her mark.
"I admit, my dear, that legitimate worry has its uses. I only warn against the too common abuse of it. I maintain," he went on, turning to Ewing, "that a man with the feelings of a boy should, if there"s any moral balance in the world, retain the waistline of a boy; yet I"ve not done it. I go to doctors--they all talk the same ballyrot about exercise or they harangue you about diet. Why, I"ve heard them gibber of things one mustn"t eat till I writhed in anguish. Some day I know I shall chuck it all and let Nature take her course." He glared defiantly about the table.
"She"s not waiting for you to let her, dear," observed his daughter maliciously.
"It"s my temperament, I suppose"--he sighed ruefully into his plate of sweet stuff--"just as it"s Randy Teevan"s temperament to keep slender, though I suspect Randy of stays."
Mrs. Laithe had glanced swiftly toward Ewing at the mention of this name. She again looked at him alertly a moment later when the man announced "Mr. Teevan and Mr. Alden Teevan."
"Alden told me this afternoon at the club, my dear, that he and his father might stop for a moment on their way up town, just to say "How-de-do." We can have coffee in the library."
His daughter received this with a meditative under lip. Then she brightened.
"I"m sure you men would rather sit here and smoke while I run in and see them. They"ll stay only a minute."
"Nonsense, child! I can"t lose sight of you so soon again. We can smoke in there as well."
"Coffee in the library, Harris." She gave the order with a submissive shrug and led the way out.
Ewing saw two men come to greet her, alike enough of feature to reveal their relationship at first glance. He detected, however, a curious contrast they presented. The father, slight and short of stature, was a very young-looking old man, while the son was an old-looking young man.
The father was dapper, effusive, sprightly, quick with smiling gestures; the son restrained, deliberate, low-toned with a slow, half-cynical smile of waiting. He gave the effect of subduing what his father almost elfishly expressed.
Father and son greeted the men over the shoulders of Mrs. Laithe, and Ewing was presented. There was an inclination of the son"s head, and a careless glance of his waiting eyes; from the father, a jerky, absent "How-d"you do--How-d"you do!"
They moved by chatting stages to the library. The elder Teevan, carefully pointing the ends of his small, dark mustache, stood with his back to the dying fire, a coffee cup in one hand, a cigarette in the other, twittering gallantly of a town"s desolation wrought by the going away of Mrs. Laithe; and of a town renewed by her great-hearted return.
"A preciously timed relenting," he called it, with a challenging sigh toward the lady, as he gracefully flicked back a ringlet of the l.u.s.trous brown hair that had fallen low on his brow. Ewing thought it wonderful hair on a man whose face, though ruddy in hue, showed signs of age.
There were deep lines at the corners of those gallantly flashing eyes, and their under lids drooped. The skin was shrunk tightly over the high, thin nose, the cheeks were less than plump, and the neck revealed some unhappy wrinkles. Sadly, too, his voice failed at supreme moments. It was tragic, Ewing thought, to listen to a sentence valiantly begun, only to hear the voice crack on a crucial word.
Mrs. Laithe received the little man"s tribute with a practiced indifference, chatting absently, meanwhile, with the son. Presently she led Ewing and the younger Teevan to the drawing room to admire a huge jar of roses for which she thanked Teevan.
Back in the library Piersoll was listening to a salmon-fishing story of Bartell"s. The elder Teevan genially overlooked the scene, humming lightly to himself the catch air from a late musical comedy. He turned to study a bit of j.a.panese bronze on the mantel behind him, s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g a single gla.s.s into an eye. When he had scanned the bronze with a fine little air of appreciation he replaced it, resumed his jaunty humming, and idly picked up a card that had been thrown beside it. Carelessly under the still fixed monocle he brought the words "Mr. Gilbert Denham Ewing." A moment he held it so in fingers that suddenly trembled. His head went sharply back, the gla.s.s dropped from his eye, dangling on its silken ribbon, and his little song died. He glanced about him, observing the two groups to be still inattentive. Placing a supporting hand on the mantel he set the gla.s.s firmly again and studied the card a second time. Another glance through the rooms, and he resumed his song, crumpling the card in his hand. Then, turning, he stood once more before the fire, his hands comfortably at his back. One of them tossed the card into the grate, and his song again ceased.
Bartell looked up, having, after incredible finesse, slain and weighed his giant salmon. Piersoll, recalling that the anecdotist had killed other salmon in his time, made a hasty adieu and went to his hostess, who lingered in the drawing room with the younger men. Teevan, before the fire, breathed in smoke, emitted it from pursed lips, studied the ash at the end of his cigarette from under raised, speculative brows, and flashed search-light eyes upon his host.
"Who"s the young chap, Chris?"
Bartell took up a liqueur gla.s.s and turned to his questioner.
"Name"s Ewing, I believe. Some chap Eleanor picked up in the far West.
Painter, I believe, or means to be."
"Painter, yes, to be sure--quite right; painter...." He waited pointedly.
"Paints cowboys and Indians, I fancy--the usual thing. Seems a decent sort; rather a gentleman. You"re looking a bit off. Randy."
"Am I, though? Queer! Never felt fitter. Walked to Fifty-ninth Street and back to-day. Might have overdone a bit. That chap staying in town long?"
"Have to ask Eleanor. It"s her affair. By Jove, old boy, you _are_ a wonder. I wish I could keep it off around here the way you do."
The little man drew himself up, expanded his chest, and bravely flourished a smile of acknowledgment. This faded into a look of hostile curiosity, discreetly veiled, as Mrs. Laithe and the two young men came in from the drawing room.
"Time to be moving on, Governor," young Teevan remarked.
"I"m not going, my boy," the little man answered in crisp tones, with the hint of a side look at Ewing and Mrs. Laithe. "Run on like a good chap and make my excuses to the dear grandmother. Needn"t lie, you know. Say I chucked her theater party at the last moment because the places are stuffy. Say that I loathe plush and those crumpy little boxes where one sees nothing but the gas fellow in a gingham jumper yawning in the wings. Say I"m whimsical, capricious, fickle as April zephyrs--in all but my love for her. If you"re quite honest she"ll disbelieve you and guess that I"d a reason for stopping away. Run, like a good lad, while I quench a craving for tales of adventure from the most charming of her s.e.x and from our young friend here--will you pardon my oversight--Ewing?--Ah, to be sure, from Mr. Ewing---Ewing. I must remember that. I"m a silly a.s.s about names."
But when his son had gone the little man appeared to forget the craving that had prompted his stay. From his stand on the hearth rug he jauntily usurped the talk, winging his way down the world stream of gossip from capital to capital. Circuitous, indeed, was his approach to art; an anecdote of studio life in Paris; a criticism of Rodin, "Whitman in marble;" the vigor of our native art impulse, only now learning to withdraw a slavish deference from the French schools. "And you--Mr.--Ah, yes--Ewing, to be sure--our amiable and rotund host tells me that you are to be a warrior in this fray of brush and chisel. Bravo! You shall show me work."
Ewing had listened to his recondite discourse chiefly with a morbid expectancy of that recurrent break in the voice, straining until it came and relaxing until it quavered back to the hazardous masculine level.
Finding himself thus noticed he stammered, "Oh, I--I"ve done some work in black and white. I hope--Mrs. Laithe has encouraged me."
"A charming modesty, yours; by no means the besetting sin of your craft, but is Mrs. Laithe an ideal promoter of genius? I fancy you"ll need a sterner guide, one to be harsh as well as kind. Women can"t be that, least of all the charming specimen who has honored you with her patronage. I shall be proud to supplement her deficiencies as critic--her glorious, her fascinating deficiencies. Women, audacious souls, are recklessly kind. They incur perils to chill the blood of brave enough men, meaning monstrously well all the time"--his narrowed eyes sought to read the face of Mrs. Laithe--"but I"ve yet to see one worth a second look who had divined that there exists a certain arbitrary relation between cause and effect. Need I word the inference?... No?..." Relieved by his scrutiny of her face he broke off, his heart leaping to the thought, "She doesn"t know--doesn"t know ...
the _fool_!"
"I"ll be glad to show you what I have," Ewing answered, rejoicing at this solicitude in a critic so obviously eminent. "I"ve been afraid all along that Mrs. Laithe might be too kind."