"And your father?"
The room suddenly filled with her fateful words.
"My father?" he repeated. "He was never with my mother. I did not understand until long afterward, but she meant me to understand--that she was not married. She impressed it upon my consciousness _for_ me to understand--when I was older."
Beth could have knelt in her humility that moment.
"Please forgive me for asking," she faltered.
"It was right. I intended to tell you."
Some strange, sustaining atmosphere came from him. His words lifted her. Beth saw upon his brow and face the poise and fineness of a love-child.... With all the mother"s giving there had been no name for him; and he had told her with all the ease and grace of one who knows in his heart--a mother"s purity of soul.... It was hard for Beth to realize, with Bedient sitting there, that the world makes tragic secrets of these things he had told her; that lives of lesser men have been ruined with the fear of such discoveries.... Nothing of so intense and intimate appeal had ever come to her studio, as the heroism of this mother, impressing upon her tortured and desperate child, that though taken from him, she would be near always.... The sensitive Vina had seemed to see the mother _near_ him, her hand upon his head, saying with a laugh, "This is my Art--and he _lives_!"
Beth spoke at last: "You honor me, Mr. Bedient, in telling me these deep things."
"This seemed the place," he said, leaning forward. "It"s extraordinary when I recall I have only been here an hour or so. It would seem absurd to some women, but the story knew where it belonged.... In fact, it is hard for me to remember that this is our first talk alone.... Perhaps you should know, that I"ve never spoken of my mother to anyone else....
I never could find the port where she died."
They learned that they could be silent together.... Beth knew that she would have extended conference with the Shadowy Sister when alone. Big things were enacting in the depths. There was another thing that Vina had said regarding the appeal of Bedient personally to her, which required much understanding.... Beth had found herself thinking (in Bedient"s presence) that she might have been hasty and imperious in sending the Other away. She had been rather proud of her iron courage up to this hour. Of course, it was ridiculous that Bedient should recall the Other, and after months suggest her unreasonableness; yet these things recurred.... Moreover, a moment after Bedient"s entering, there had been no embarra.s.sment between them. Not only had they dared be silent, but they had not tried each other out tentatively by talking about people they knew. Then he had said it was hard for him to remember this was their first talk together alone. Beth realized that here was a subject who would not bore her before his portrait was finished.
"Does David Cairns know Miss Nettleton very well?" Bedient asked, as he was leaving.
She smiled at the question, and was about to reply that they had been right good friends for years, when it occurred that he might have a deeper meaning.
Bedient resumed while she was thinking: "I know that he admires her work and intelligence, but he never spoke to me of any further discoveries. Perhaps he wouldn"t.... He"s a singularly fine chap, finer than I knew.... I noticed a short essay in your stand that contains a sentence I cannot forget. It was about a rare man who "stooped and picked up a fair-coined soul that lay rusting in a pool of tears.""
"Browning," she said excitedly.
"Yes.... Good-by and thank you.... To-morrow?"
"Yes."
He left her in the whirl of this new conception. She was taking dinner with David Cairns that night. David, she felt, had arranged this for further urging in the matter of her seeing his friend. And now she smiled at the surprise in store for him; then for a long time, until the yellows and browns were thickly shadowed about her, Beth sat very still, thinking about the Vina Nettleton of yesterday, and the altered and humble David Cairns of the past fortnight.... In the single saying of Bedient"s, that he had found Cairns finer than he knew, there was a remarkable, winsome quality for her perception. Bedient had started the revolution which was clearing the inner atmospheres of his friend; and yet, he refused any part.
David took her for dinner to a club far down-town--a dining-room on the twentieth floor, overlooking the rivers and the bay, the shipping and the far sh.o.r.es pointed off with lights.... They waited by a window in the main hall for a moment while a smaller room was being arranged.
Forty or more business men were banqueting in a glare of light and gla.s.s and red roses--a commercial dinner with speeches. The talk had to do with earnings, per cents, leakages, markets and such matters. The lower lid of many an eye was updrawn in calculation.
Beth shivered, for she saw avarice, cunning, bluff, campaigning with humor and natural forces. "The starry night and the majestic rivers might just as well be plaster-walls," she whispered. "What terrible occupations are these to make our brothers so dull, bald and stodgy-looking?"
"It"s their art," said Cairns. "They start in merrily enough, but it"s a fight out in the centre of the current. You see them all of one genial dining-countenance, yet this day they fought each other in the streets below, and to-morrow again.... It"s not only the sweep of the current, but each other, they have to fight.... Oh, it"s very easy for an artist to look and feel superior, Beth, but we know very well how much is sordid routine in our own decenter games--and suppose we had been called to money-making instead. It would catch us young, and we"d either harden or fail."
... They were taken to a place of stillness and the night-view was restoring.... Though Cairns had just left Bedient, he had not been told about the portrait nor the first sitting. Beth wondered if Bedient foresaw that she would appreciate this. She was getting so that she could believe anything of the Wanderer. For a long time they talked about him.... Cairns already was emerging from the miseries of reaction; new ways of work had opened; he was fired with fresh growth and delights of service. Beth was charmed with him.... At last she said:
"Nor has Mr. Bedient missed those rare and subtle things which make Vina Nettleton the most important woman of my acquaintance."
The sentence was a studied challenge.
"You mean in her work?" he said, under the first spur.
"Did I say _artist_? I meant woman--"most important woman"----"
"That"s what you said."
"Yes, I thought so----" Beth shaded the interior light from her eyes to regard the night through the open window. "It was misty gray all day, and yet it is clear now as a summer night."
"And so Bedient sees more than a remarkable artist in Vina?" Cairns mused.
"That much is for the world to see.... Why, those dollar-eating gentlemen in the big room could see that, if they interested themselves in her kind of work. But they are not trained to know real women. Their work keeps them from knowing such things. When they marry a real woman, it"s an accident, largely. A diadem of paste would have caught their eyes quite as quickly. Sometimes I think they prefer paste jewels....
Only here and there a man of deep discernment reads the truth--and is held by it. What a fortune is that discernment! A woman may well tremble before that kind of vision, for it is her own, empowered with a man"s understanding----"
"Why, Beth, that"s Bedient"s mind exactly!" Cairns exclaimed. "A woman"s vision of the finest sort, empowered with a man"s understanding----"
"Of the finest sort," Beth finished laughingly. "By the way, that"s a good definition of a prophet, isn"t it?"
"It does work out," he said, thinking hard.
Beth observed with interest at this point, that Bedient had confined his discussion of the visioning feminine principle to Vina. There were several approaches to his elevation.
"How glorious it is to see things, David!" she exclaimed happily. "Even to see things after they are pointed out. And you--I"m really so glad about you! You"re coming along so finely, and putting away boyish things."
She reached across the table and dropped her hand upon his sleeve.
"It"s so tonic and bracing to watch one"s friend burst into bloom!... I needed the stimulus, too. You are helping me."
It was Cairns" turn to shade his eyes for a clearer view of the night.
SIXTEENTH CHAPTER
"THROUGH DESIRE FOR HER"
David Cairns left Beth at her elevator, and walked down the Avenue toward Gramercy. It was still an hour from midnight. As he had hoped, Bedient was at the Club. The library was deserted, and they sat down in the big chairs by the open window. The only lights in the large room were those on the reading table. The quiet was actually interesting for down-town New York.
"I"ve been out hunting up music," Bedient said. "There is a place called the _Columbine_ where you eat and drink; and a little Hungarian violinist there with his daughter--surely they can"t know how great they are! He played the _Kreutzer Sonata_, the daughter accompanying as if it were all in the piano, and she just let it out for fun, and then they played it again for me--"
Cairns laughed at his joy. Bedient suddenly leaned forward and regarded him intently through the vague light. "David," he said, "you"re looking fit and happy, and I"m very glad to see you." This was a way of Bedient"s at unexpected moments.... "Do you know, it"s a marvellous life you live," he went on, "looking inward upon the great universe of ideas constantly, balancing thought against thought, seeking the best vehicle, and weighing the effects--for or against the Ultimate Good----"
"It appears that you had to come up here--to show me----"
"It"s good of you to say so, David, but you had to be Cairns and not New York! A woman would have shown you----"
Cairns had met before, in various ways, Bedient"s unwillingness to identify himself with results of his own bringing about. Beth had long realized his immaturity, yet she had not spoken. Cairns saw this now.
"A woman would have shown me----?" he repeated.