XXIX
A MEETING ON THE AVENUE TRAIL
Light sang in the veins and thoughts of a city. Light cleansed thestreets of vapors. Light, the light of the sunshine of late May, made afar different New York from the New York under a blanket of March mist ofthe day of Jack's arrival. The lantern of the Metropolitan tower was allblazing gold; Diana's scarf trailed behind her in the shimmering abandonof her _honi soit qui mal y pense_ chases on Olympus; Admiral Farragutgrew urbane, sailing on a smooth sea with victory won; General Sherman inhis over-brightness, guided by his guardian lady, still gallantly pursuedthe tone of time in the direction of the old City Hall and Trinity; andthe marble facade of the new library seemed no less at home than under anAgean sky. An ecstasy, blinding eyes to blemishes, set critical facultiesto rejoicing over perfections. They graciously overlooked the blotch ofred brick hiding the body of St. Patrick's on the way up town ingratitude for twin spires against the sky.
Enveloping radiance gilded the sharp lines of skyscrapers and swept awaythe shadows in the chasms between them. It pointed the bows of busy tugswith sprays of diamonds falling on the molten surface of rivers and bays.It called up paeans of childish trebles from tenement alleys; slippedinto the sickrooms of private houses, delaying the advent of crape onthe door; and played across the rows of beds in the public wards ofhospitals in the primal democracy of the gift of ozone to the earth.
The milky glass roof of the central court of the Wingfield store acted asa screen to the omnipotent visitor, but he set unfiltered patches ofdelight in the aisles and on the counters near the walls. Mamie Devoreand Burleigh and Peter Mortimer and many other clerks and employees askedif this were like a desert day and Jack said that it was. He longed to befree of all roofs and feel the geniality of the hearth-fire of theplanetary system penetrating through his coat, his skin, his flesh, intohis very being. Why not close the store and make a holiday for everybody?he asked himself; only to be amazed, on second thought, at such apreposterous suggestion from a hundred-dollar-a-week author of createdprofits in the business. He was almost on the point of acting on anotherimpulse, which was that he and his father break away into the country ina touring car, not knowing where they were going to stop until hungerovertook an inn. This, too, he dismissed as a milder form of the samedemoralizing order of heresy, bound to be disturbing to the new filialrelations springing from the night when he had told his desert story overthe coffee, which, contrary to the conventional idea of an exchange ofconfidences clearing the mind of a burden, had only provoked morerestlessness.
At least, he would fare forth for a while on the broad asphalt trail thatbegins under the arch of the little park and runs to the entrance of thegreat park. Even as the desert has its spell of overawing stillness in anuninhabited land, so this trail had its spell of congested humanmovement in the heart of habitations. A broad, luminous blade lay acrossthe west side of the street and left the other in shade; and all theworld that loved sunshine and had no errands on the east side kept to thewest side. There was a communism of inspiration abroad. It was aconqueror's triumph just to be alive and feel the pulse-beat of thethrong. The very over-developed sensitiveness of city nerves becamesomething to be thankful for in providing the capacity for keenerenjoyment as compensation for the capacity for keener pain.
Womankind was in spring plumage. The mere consciousness of the value oflight to their costumes, no less than the elixir in their nostrils, gavevivacity to their features. As usual, Jack was seeing them only to seeMary. The creation of no _couturier_ could bear rivalry with the garb inwhich his imagination clothed her. He found himself suddenly engrossed ina particular exhibit of fashion's parade a little distance ahead andgoing in the same direction as himself, a young woman in a simplicity ofgown to which her carriage gave the final touch of art. Her steps had along-limbed freedom and lightness, with which his own steps ran in arhythm to the music of some past association. The thrall of a likeness,which more and more possessed him, made him hasten to draw near for amore satisfying glimpse.
The young woman turned her head to glance into a shop-window and thenthere could be no mistaking that cheek and chin and the peculiar relationof the long lashes to the brow. It was the profile whose imprint hadbecome indelible on his mind when he had come round an elbow of rock onGaleria. The Jack of wild, tumultuous pleading who had parted from MaryEwold on the pass became a Jack elate with the glad, swimming joy of Maysunshine at seeing and speaking to her again.
"Mary! Mary!" he cried. "My, but you've become a grand swell!" hebreathed delectably, with a fuller vision of her.
"Jack!"
There was a nervous twitching of her lips. He saw her eyes at first in ablaze of surprise and wonder; then change to the baffling sparkle, hidingtheir depths, of the slivers of glass on the old barrier. His smile andhers in unspoken understanding said that two comrades of another trailhad met on the Avenue trail. There had not been any Leddy; there had notbeen any scene on the pass. They were back to the conditions of theprotocol he had established when they started out from the porch of theEwold bungalow in the airiest possible mood to look at a parcel of land.
"And you also have become a grand swell!" she said. "Did you expect thatI should be in a gray riding-habit? Certainly I didn't expect to see youin chaps and spurs."
It was brittle business; but with a common resource in play they managedit well. And there they were walking together, noted by passers-by fortheir youth and beaming oblivion to everything but themselves.
"How long have you been here?" Jack asked.
"Two weeks," she answered.
Two weeks in the same town and this his first glimpse of her! What a mazeNew York was! What a desert waste of two weeks!
"Yes. Our decision to come was rather abrupt," she explained. "A suddencall to travel came to father; came to him like an inspiration that hecould not resist. And how happily he has entered into the spirit of thecity again! It has made him young."
"And it has been quite like martyrdom for you!" Jack put in, teasingly.
"Terrible! Sackcloth and ashes!"
"I see you are wearing the sackcloth."
She laughed outright, with a downward glance at her gown, at once inguilt and appreciation.
"Another whim of father's."
"The Doge a scapegoat for fashion!"
"Not a scapegoat--a partisan! He insisted on going to one of the bestplaces. Could I resist? I wanted to see how I felt, how I appeared."
"The veritable curiosity of a Japanese woman getting her firstforeign gown!"
"Thank you! That is another excuse."
"And it certainly looks very well," Jack declared.
"Do you think so?" Mary flushed slightly. She could not help beingpleased. "After six years, could I drop back into the old chrysalisnaturally, without awkwardness? Did I still know how to wear a finegown?"--and the gift for it, as anyone could see, was born in her assurely as certain gifts were born in Jack. "But," she added, severely, "Ihave only two--just two! And the cost of them! It will take the wholeorange crop!"
Just two, when she ought to have twenty! When he would have liked to putall the Paris models in the store in a wagon and, himself driving,deliver them at her door!
"Having succumbed to temptation, I enjoy it out of sheer respect tothe orange crop," Mary said; "and yes, because I like beautifulgowns; wickedly, truly like them! And I like the Avenue, just as Ilike the desert."
And all that she liked he could give her! And all that he could give shehad stubbornly refused!
The liveliness of her expression, the many shades of meaning that shecould set capering with a glance, were now as the personal reflection ofthe day and the scene. Their gait was a sauntering one. They went as faras the Park and started back, as if all the time of the desert weretheirs. They stopped to look into the windows of shops of every kind,from antiques to millinery. When he saw a hat which he declared, afterdeliberate, critical appraisement, would surely become her, she askedboldly if it were better than the one she w
ore.
"I mean an extra hat; that one more hat would have the good fortune ofbecoming you!"
"Almost a real contribution to the literature of compliments!" sheanswered, unruffled.
He thought, too, that she ought to have a certain necklace in ajeweler's window.
"To wear over my riding-habit or when I am digging in the flower beds?"she inquired.
When they passed a display of luxuries for masculine adornment, she founda further retort in suggesting that he ought to have a certain giddyfancy waistcoat. He complimented her on her taste, bought the waistcoatand, going to the rear of the shop, returned wearing it with amomentarily appreciated show of jaunty swagger.
"Why be on the Avenue and not buy?" he queried, enthusing with a newidea.
Jim Galway should have a cowpuncher hat as a present. The style of bandwas a subject of discussion calling on their discriminative views ofJim's personal tastes. This led to thoughts of others in Little Riverswho would appreciate gifts, and to the purchase of toys for the children,a positive revel. When they were through it was well past noon and theywere in the region of the restaurants. The sun in majestic altitude sweptthe breadth of the Avenue.
"Shall we lunch--yes, and in the Best Swell Place?" he asked, as if itwere a matter-of-course part of the programme, while inwardly he wasstirred with the fear of her refusal. He felt that any minute she mightleave him, with no alternative but another farewell. She hesitated amoment seriously, then accepted blithely and naturally.
"Yes, the Best Swell Place--let's! Who isn't entitled to the Best SwellPlace occasionally?"
After an argument in comparison of famous names, they were convinced thatthey had really chosen the Best Swell Place by the fact of a vacant tableat a window looking out over a box hedge. Jack told the waiter that theassemblage was not an autocracy, but a parliament which, with a fullquorum present, would enjoy in discursive appreciation selections fromthe broad range of a bill of fare.
A luncheon for two narrows a walk on the Avenue, where you are part of acrowd, into restricted intimacy. He was feeling the intoxication of herinscrutability, catching gleams of the wealth that lay beyond it, acrossthe limited breadth of a table-cloth. He forgot about the unspokenconditions in a sally which was like putting his hand on top of thebarrier for an impetuous leap across.
"I wrote you stacks of letters," he said, "and you never sent me onelittle line; not even 'Yours received and contents noted!'"
In a flash all intimacy vanished. She might have been at the other end ofthe dining-room in somebody else's party nodding to him as to anacquaintance. Her answer was delayed about as long as it takes to lift anarrow from a quiver and notch it in a bowstring.
"A novel may be very interesting, but that does not mean that I write tothe author!"
He imagined her going through the meal in polite silence or in measuredcommonplaces, turning the happy parliament into a frigid Gothic ceremony.Why had he not kept in mind that sufficient to the hour is the pleasureof it? Famished for her companionship, a foolhardy impulse of temptationhad risked its loss. The waiter set something before them and softlywithdrew. Jack signaled the unspoken humility of being a disciplinedsoldier at attention on his side of the barrier and Mary signaled atrifle superior but good-natured acceptance of his apology and promise ofbetter conduct.
They were back to the truce of nonsense, apostrophizing the cooking ofthe Best Swell Place, setting exclamations to their glimpses of peoplepassing in the street. For they had never wanted for words when talkingacross the barrier; there was paucity of conversation only when hethreatened an invasion.
While a New Yorker meeting a former New Yorker on the desert might havelittle to tell not already chronicled in the press, a Little Riversitemeeting a former Little Riversite in New York had a family budget ofnews. How high were Jack's hedges? How were the Doge's date-trees? Howwas this and that person coming on? Listening to all the details, Jackfelt homesickness creeping over him, and he clung fondly to every one ofthe swiftly-passing moments. By no reference and by no inference had shesuggested that there was ever any likelihood of his meeting or hearingfrom her again. A thread of old relations had been spun only to besnapped. She was, indeed, as a visitation developed out of the sunshineof the Avenue, into which she would dissolve.
"I was to meet father at a bookstore at three," she said, finally,as she rose.
"Inevitably he would be there or in a gallery," said Jack.
"He has done the galleries. This is the day for buying books--stillmore books! I suppose he is spending the orange crop again. If you keepon spending the same orange crop, just where do you arrive in the mazeof finance?"
"I should not like to say without consulting the head book-keeper or, atleast, Peter Mortimer!"
They were coming out of the door of the Best Swell Place, now. A word andshe would be going in one direction and he in another. How easily shemight speak that word, with an electric and final glance of good-will!
"But I must say howdy do to the Doge!" he urged. "I should like tosee him buying books. What a prodigal debauch of learning! I cannotmiss that!"
"It is not far," she said, prolonging Paradise for him.
A few blocks below Forty-second Street they turned into a cross streetwhich was the same that led to the Wingfield house; and halfway toMadison Avenue they entered a bookstore. The light from low windowsspreading across the counters blended with the light from high windows atthe back, and here, on a platform at the head of the stairs, before a bigtable sat the Doge, in the majesty of a great patron of literature, witha clerk standing by in deftly-urging attentiveness. Mary and Jack pausedat the foot of the stairs watching him. Gently he was fingering an oldoctavo; fingering it as one would who was between the hyperionic desireof possession and a fear that a bank account owed its solvency to keepingthe amounts of deposits somewhere in proportion to the amount ofwithdrawals.
"No, sir! No more, you tempter!" he declared. "No more, you unctuousambassador from the court of Gutenberg! Why, this one would take enoughalfalfa at the present price a ton to bury your store under a haycock ashigh as the Roman Pantheon!"
The Doge rose and picked up his broad-brimmed hat, prepared to fly fromdanger. He would not expose himself a moment longer to the wiles ofthat clerk.
"I'll wait for my daughter down there in the safe and economical environsof the popular novels fresh from the press!" he said.
Turning to descend the stairs he saw the waiting pair. He stopped stockstill and threw up his hand in a gesture of astonishment. His glancehovered back and forth between Jack's face and Mary's, and then metJack's look with something of the same challenge and confidence of hisfarewell on the road out of Little Rivers, and in an outburst of genialraillery he began the conversation where he had left off with the finalcall of his personal good wishes and his salutations to certain landmarksof New York.
"Well, well, Sir Chaps! I saw Sorolla in his new style; very differentfrom the academics of the young Sorolla. He has found his mission and lethimself go. No wonder people flocked to his exhibitions on misty days!The trouble with our artists is that they are afraid to let themselvesgo, afraid to be popular. They think technique is the thing, when it isonly the tool. Why, confound it all! all the great masters were popularin their day--Venetian, Florentine, Flemish! Confound it, yes! And notone Velasquez"--evidently he was talking partly to get his bearings afterhis shock at seeing Jack--"no, not one Velasquez in the Metropolitan! Igo home without seeing a Velasquez. They have the Catherine LorillardWolfe collection, thousands of square yards of it, and yes, cheer up!Thank heaven, they have some great Americans, Inness and Martin and Homerand our exile Whistler, who annexed Japan, and our Sargent, born inFlorence. And I did see the Metropolitan tower. I take off my hat, mybroad-brimmed hat, wishing that it were as big as a carter's umbrella, tothat tower. I hate to think it an accident of chaos like the GrandCanyon. I rather like to think of it as majestic promise."
The Doge had talked so fast that he was almost out of breath.
He wasready to yield the floor to Jack.
"I kissed my hand to Diana for you!" said Jack. "And what do you think?The lady in answer shook out her scarf and something white and smallfluttered down. I picked it up. It was a note."
"Did you open that note?" asked the Doge in haughty suspicion.
"Naturally."
"Wasn't it marked personal for me?"--this in fine simulation ofindignation.
"Without address!"
"I am chagrined and surprised at Diana," said the Doge ruefully. "It'sthe effect of city association. As a matter of course, she ought to havegiven it to Mercury, or at least to one of the Centaurs, considering allthe horseshows that have been held under her skipping toes! Well, whatdid she say? Being a woman of action she was brief. What did she say?"
"It was in the nature of a general personal complaint. Her costume is inneed of repair; it is flaking disgracefully. She said that if you had notforsaken your love of the plastic for love of the graphic arts you wouldlong ago have stolen a little gold off the Eternal Painter's palette,just to clothe her decently for the sake of her own self-respect--thetown having set her so high that its sense of propriety was quite safe."
"I stand convicted of neglect," said the Doge, coming down to the floorof the store. "I will shoot her a bundle of gold leaf from the top of thepass on a ray of evening sunshine."
There, he gave Jack a pat on the shoulder; a hasty, playful, almostaffectionate demonstration, and broke off with a shout of:
"Persiflage, sir, persiflage!"
"It is manna to me!" declared Jack, in the fulness and sweetness of thesensation of the atmosphere of Little Rivers reproduced in New York.
"And not a Velasquez in the Metropolitan!" mused the Doge, bustling alongthe aisle hurriedly. "Well, Mary, we have errands to do. There is no timeto spare."
They were at the door, Jack in wistful insistence, hungry for theircompanionship, and the Doge and Mary in common hesitancy for a phrasebefore parting from him. He was ahead of the phrase.
"But there is a Velasquez, one of the greatest of Velasquezes, just a fewsteps from here! It would take only a minute to see it."
"A Velasquez a few steps from here!" cried the Doge. "Where? Be exact,before I let my hopes rise too high."
"The subject is an ancestor of mine. My father has it."
Jack had looked in the direction of the Wingfield house on the MadisonAvenue corner as he spoke, and the Doge had followed his glance. Theeagerness passed from the Doge's face, but not its intensity. That wastransmuted into something staring and hard.
"A very great Velasquez!" Jack repeated.
"My _amour propre_!" the Doge said, in whispered abstraction, using theFrench which so exactly expresses the rightness of an inner feeling thatwill not let one do a thing however much he may wish to. Then a wave ofconfusion passed over his face, evidently at the echo of his thoughts inthe form of words come unwittingly from his lips. He tried to retrievehis exclamation in an effort at the forensic: "The _amour propre_ of anyAmerican is hurt by the thought that he must go to a private gallery tosee a Velasquez in the greatest city of the land!"
But it was a lame explanation. Clearly, some old antipathy had beenaroused in Jasper Ewold; and it made him hesitate to enter the big redbrick house on the corner.
"And we have a wonderful Sargent, too, a Sargent of my mother!" Jackproceeded.
"Yes, yes!" said the Doge, and eagerness returned; a strange, movingeagerness that seemed to come from the same depths as the exclamationthat had arrested his acceptance of the invitation at the outset. It heldthe monosyllables like drops of water trembling before they fell.
"I should like you to see them both," said Jack.
"Yes," said the Doge, the word an echo rather than consent.
"There is no one at home at this hour; you will have all the time you canspare for the pictures."
In the ascendency of his ardor to retain the joy of their company and inthe perplexity of mystery injected afresh into his relations with Mary,Jack was hardly conscious that his urging was only another way of sayingthat his father was absent. And Mary had not thrown her influence eitherfor or against going. She was watching her father, curiously andpenetratingly, as if trying to understand the source of the emotion thathe was seeking to control.
"Why, in that case," exclaimed the Doge, "why, you see," he went on toexplain, "we desert folk, though we are used to galleries, are a littlediffident about meeting people who live in big mansions. I mean, peoplewho have not had the desert training that you have had, Sir Chaps. If itis only a matter of looking at a picture without any socialresponsibilities, and that picture a Velasquez, why, we must take thetime, mustn't we, Mary?"
"Yes," Mary assented.
With Mary on one side of him and Jack on the other, the Doge was walkingheavily and slowly.
"At what period of Velasquez's career?" he asked, vacantly.
"When he was young and the subject was middle-aged, a Northerner, withfair hair and lean muscles under a skin bronzed by the tropics, and theunquenchable fire of youth in his eyes."
"That ought to be a good Velasquez," said the Doge.
At the bottom step of the flight up to the entrance to the house hehesitated. He appeared to be very old and very tired. His face had gonequite pale. The lids hung heavily over his eyes. Jack dropped back inalarm to assist him; but his color quickly returned and the old challengewas in his glance as it met Jack's.
"Now for your Velasquez!" he exclaimed, with calm vigor.
Once in the hall, Jack stood to one side of the door of the drawing-roomto let the Doge enter first. As the old man crossed the threshold hishands were clasped behind him; his shoulders had fallen together, not inweariness now, but in a kind of dazed, studious expectancy; and he facedthe "Portrait of a Lady."
"This is the Sargent," he said slowly, his lips barely opening inmechanical and absent comment. "A good Sargent!"
He was as still as the picture in his bowed and earnest gaze into hereyes, except for an occasional nervous movement of the fingers. All thesurroundings seemed to melt into a neutral background for the two; therewas nothing else in the room but the scholar in his age and the "Portraitof a Lady" in her youth. Jack saw the Doge's face, its many linesexpressive as through a mist of time, its hills and valleys in the sunand the shadow of emotions as variable as the mother's in life, speakingpersonal resentment and wrong, admiration and tenderness, grievousinquiry and philosophy, while the only answer was the radiant, "I give! Igive!" Finally, the Doge tightened the clasp of his hands, with a quiverof his frame, as he turned toward Jack.
"Yes, a really great Sargent--a Sargent of supreme inspiration!" he said."Now for your Velasquez!"
Before the portrait of the first John Wingfield, Jasper Ewold's head andshoulders recovered their sturdiness of outline and his features lightedwith the veritable touch of the brush of genius itself. He was theconnoisseur who understands, whose joy of possession is in the verytingling depths of born instinct, rich with training and ripened by time.It was superior to any bought title of ownership. In the presence of asupreme standard, every shade of discriminative criticism and appraisalbecame threads woven into a fabric of rapture.
"Mary," he said, his voice having the mellowness of age in its deepappreciation, "Mary, wherever you saw this--skied or put in a corneramong a thousand other pictures, in a warehouse, a Quaker meetinghouse,anywhere, whatever its surroundings--should you feel its compellingpower? Should you pause, incapable of analysis, in a spell of tribute?"
"Yes, I don't think I am quite so insensible as not to realize thegreatness of this portrait, or that of the Sargent, either," sheanswered.
"Good! I am glad, Mary, very glad. You do me credit!"
Now he turned from the artist to the subject. He divined the kind of manthe first John Wingfield was; divined it almost as written in thechronicle which Jack kept in his room in hallowed fraternity. Only hebore hard on the unremitting, callous, impulsive aggressiveness of afierce past age, with its surv
ival of the fittest swordsmen andbuccaneers, which had no heroes for him except the painters, poets, andthinkers it gave to posterity.
"Fire-eating old devil! And the best thing he ever did, the best luck heever had, was attracting the attention of a young artist. It'simmortality just to be painted by Velasquez; the only immortality many afamous man of the time will ever know!"
He looked away from the picture to Jack's face keenly and back at thepicture and back at Jack and back at the picture once more.
"Yes, yes!" he mused, corroboratively; and Jack realized that at the sametime Mary had been making the same comparison.
"Very like!" she said, with that impersonal exactness which to him wasalways the most exasperating of her phases.
Then the Doge returned to the Sargent. He was standing nearer thepicture, but in the same position as before, while Jack and Mary waitedsilently on his pleasure; and all three were as motionless as thefurniture, had it not been for the nervous twitching of the Doge'sfingers. He seemed unconscious of the passing of time; a man in a maze ofabsorption with his thoughts. Jack was strangely affected. His brain wasmarking time at the double-quick of fruitless energy. He felt theatmosphere of the room surcharged with the hostility of the unknown. Hewas gathering a multitude of impressions which only contributed morechaos to chaos. His sensibilities abnormally alive to every sound, heheard the outside door opened with a latch-key; he heard steps in thehall, and saw his father's figure in the doorway of the drawing-room.
John Wingfield, Sr. appeared with a smile that was gone in a flash.His face went stark and gray as stone under a frown from the Doge toJack; and with an exclamation of the half-articulate "Oh!" ofconfusion, he withdrew.
Jack looked around to see the Doge half turned in the direction of thedoor, gripping the back of a chair to steady himself, while Mary wasregarding this sudden change in him in answer to the stricken change inthe intruder with some of Jack's own paralysis of wonder. The Doge wasthe first to speak. He fairly rocked the chair as he jerked his hand freeof its support, while he shook with a palsy which was not that of fear,for there was raging color in his cheeks. The physical power of his greatfigure was revealed. For the first time Jack was able to think of him ascapable of towering militancy. His anger gradually yielded to thepressure of will and the situation. At length he said faintly, with akind of abyssmal courtesy:
"Thank you, Sir Chaps! Now I shall not go back to the desert withouthaving seen a Velasquez. Thank you! And we must be going."
Jack had an impulse, worthy of the tempestuous buccaneer of the picture,to call to his father to come down; and then to bar the front door untilhis burning questions were heard. The still light in Mary's eyes wouldhave checked him, if not his own proper second thought and the fear ofprecipitating an ungovernable crisis. There had been shadows, realshadows, he was thinking wildly; they were not born of desert imaginings;and out of the quandary of his anguish came only the desire not to partfrom the Doge and Mary in this fashion! No, not until in some wayequilibrium of mind was restored.
Though he knew that they did not expect or want his company, he wentout into the street with them. He would go as far as their hotel, heremarked, in the bravery of simulated ease. The three were walking inthe same relative positions that they had before, with the Doge's bulkhiding Mary from Jack's sight. The Doge set a rapid pace, as if underthe impetus of a desire to escape from the neighborhood of theWingfield house.
"Well, Sir Chaps," he said, after a while, "it will be a long time beforethe provincials come to New York again. Why, in this New York you canspend a patrimony in two weeks"--this with an affected amusement at hisown extravagance--"and I've pretty nearly done it. So we fly fromtemptation. Yes, Mary, we will take the morning train."
"The morning train!" Mary exclaimed; and her surprise left no doubt thather father's decision was new to her. Was it due to an exchange ofglances between a stark face and a face crimson with indignation whichJack had already connected with the working out of his own destiny?
"Yes, that is better than spending our orange crop again!" she hastenedto add, with reassuring humor. "I'm fairly homesick for our oasis."
"We've had our fill of the big city," said the Doge, feelingly, "and weare away to our little city of peace where we turned our pasts under withthe first furrows in the virgin soil."
Then silence. The truce of nonsense was dead. Persiflage was dead. Jackwas as a mute stranger keeping at their side unasked, while the onlyglimpse he had of Mary was the edge of her hat and her fingertips on herfather's sleeve. Silence, which he felt was as hard for them as for him,lasted until they were at the entrance to the quiet little hotel on across-town street where the Ewolds were staying; and having the firstglimpse of Mary's eyes since they had started, he found nothingfathomable in them except unmistakable relief that the walk was over.
"Thank you for showing me the Velasquez," said the Doge.
"Thank you, Jack," Mary added.
Both spoke in a manner that signaled to him the end of all things, but anend which he could not accept.
"I--I--oh, there are a thousand questions I--" he broke out, desperately.
The muscles of his face tightened. Unconsciously he had leaned forwardtoward the Doge in his intensity, and his attitude had become that of theWingfield of the portrait. A lower note of command ran through themisery of his tone.
Jasper Ewold stared at him in a second of scrutiny, at once burninglyanalytic and reflective. Then he flushed as he had at sight of the figurein the drawing-room doorway. His look plainly said: "How much longer doyou mean to harass me?" as if Jack's features were now no less the imageof a hard and bitter memory than those of John Wingfield, Sr. Jack drewback hurt and dumb, in face of this anger turned on himself. At length,the Doge mustered his rallying smile, which was that of a man who carriesinto his declining years a burden of disappointments which he fears may,in his bad moments, get the better of his personal system of philosophy.
"Come, Mary!" he said, drawing his arm through hers. He became, in anevident effort, a grand, old-fashioned gentleman, making a bow offarewell. "Come, Mary, it's an early train and we have our packingyet to do."
This time it was, indeed, dismissal; such a dismissal with polite urgencyas a venerable cabinet minister might give an importunate caller who isslow to go. He and Mary started into the hotel. But he halted in thedoorway to say over his shoulder, with something of his old-time cheer,which had the same element of pity as his leave-taking on the trailoutside of Little Rivers:
"Luck, Sir Chaps!"
"Luck!" Mary called in the same strained tone that she had called to Jackwhen he went over the pass on his way to New York, the tone that was likethe click of a key in the lock of a gate.
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