CHAPTER XXXI
WAYNE SEES JEAN AGAIN
RICHARDSON, the distinguished editor of that admirable magazine, the Hemisphere, was a guest of the Allequippa Club, and Wingfield exercised the right of an old friend to demand the reason for his descent upon Pittsburg. The editor led the way to his room and produced a portfolio of pen and ink and water-colour sketches of children. These he disposed about his room and invited Wingfield’s admiration. There was undoubtedly genius in the things; the key of pathos and humour was struck with a true, firm touch. Most interesting of all, there were babies—a group of them—types of half a dozen races.
“We cried over that bunch at the office. We don’t find the real thing every day and when it comes it’s always out of the dark. It’s a woman and she lives here. I suppose you never by any chance heard of her.”
Wingfield had already taken off his glasses to read the name scrawled at the bottom of one of the drawings—a newsboy with an infectious grin on his face.
“Jean Morley,” Wingfield read aloud. “Oh, certainly I know her. It’s really most remarkable that you should have recognized her talent. I suppose you have come here to offer her a dollar apiece for her sketches—I advise you not to lay yourself open to the humiliation of her scornful rejection of your offer. The girl is wonderful—wonderful! Anything less than a thousand dollars for what you have here would be preposterous; I would give her more myself and hold the drawings as an investment. And I happen to know that This Busy World has already offered to make a contract with her covering a term of years,” he added carelessly, readjusting his glasses.
Wingfield would not have lied to a stranger, but he had known Richardson all his life; and besides, Jean was a pretty girl and Dick Wingfield’s soul was not brass. The situation was much to his liking. Richardson was a man of distinction, a poet and essayist of high attainments, and as such Wingfield would take good care of him for the honour of Pittsburg. He was already wondering whether his mother would undertake a dinner in Richardson’s honour, with two or three girls he knew, and with Jean present—the surprise of the occasion. It was not an opportunity to miss. He had planned the dinner before Richardson had ceased praising the drawings.
“I would appreciate it if you would help me find the girl. I’m in a hurry; we want her to illustrate a series of articles we’ve got in type—‘The Child as a Wage-earner.’ These drawings strayed into the office just as we were discussing illustrators and she’s first choice. The matter is urgent. I must find out if she will undertake it and get out of here to-morrow.”
The larger prospect faded; but Wingfield called Mrs. Blair by telephone and the Lady of Difficult Occasions rose as he knew she would. The editor of the Hemisphere was a celebrity, Jean was her own protégée; there was every reason why Mrs. Blair should bring them together at her own board, and Wingfield was to be of the party—he did not have to suggest it. Whether Wayne should be included was a question Wingfield left to Mrs. Blair and she deemed it best that Wayne and Jean should not meet. For while Wayne was wrestling with his spirit in the hills, Mrs. Blair and Jean had seen much of each other and Jean had told her friend the whole story of her acquaintance with Wayne, and her belief that she was still bound to Joe. Here was a complication that gave even Fanny Blair pause!
She hurried Jean to a shop to find a ready-made gown for the occasion and otherwise exercised the right of guardianship. As Fanny Blair’s last girl fiddler had eloped with a cornetist who already had a wife or two, her faith in budding genius needed this restoration.
“But Lord bless you, I don’t know Mrs. Blair,” cried the editor when Wingfield told him that they were to meet the artist at the Blair house.
“That’s nothing. You are ignorant by so much, that’s all, and Mrs. John McCandless Blair is a liberal education—a post-graduate course, in fact. It would be impossible for Miss Morley to negotiate with you without her. And I myself have taken the deepest interest in the girl from the beginning. The prettiest girl in Pennsylvania—and I am not ignorant of the processions of beauty you can see in Philadelphia on Saturdays at high noon, if you have an excuse for being in Chestnut Street as the divinities seek lobster and ice cream at Vertini’s.”
Mrs. Blair wept—it was her way—when Jean’s drawings were displayed in her library; those sketches did have heart in them! The editor of the Hemisphere was less emotional, but his praise of Jean’s work was ample. He explained the character and scope of the text to be illustrated. Jean would have to visit the South and West to find the types needed, and it would be necessary to begin at once. After dinner the editor and Jean discussed details, with proof sheets of the articles before them. They were bound to make an impression; they were the work of specialists, and comprised a careful economic and social study of child labour and were to be embodied in a book following their use in the periodical; the commission was important to the artist and all concerned. The editor had prepared a schedule of the drawings he thought most desirable, with a memorandum of the times at which they must be delivered. The amount named for the work was generous; Wingfield, graceful liar that he could be, had helped here, and after Jean had taken counsel of Mrs. Blair in a corner, a contract was signed—Jean’s hand a little wobbly for one who could draw so well.
Mrs. Blair’s instructions that no one should be admitted that evening were conclusive enough as against the world in general; but her door was never shut in her brother’s face. Wayne, having missed Walsh, had dined alone at the Club and afterward sought Wingfield vainly by telephone. He was restless and unhappy and set out for his sister’s merely to have something to do. That he and Jean should be in the same town and not see each other struck him as the bitterest irony. He missed the peace of the mountains and the daily discipline of his wood-chopping.
It was in this humour that he came upon the animated scene at his sister’s that had Jean for its central figure—a new Jean, with the happiness of renewed youth bright in her countenance. She had seen him before he made her out from the doorway, and she prepared herself for the meeting while he was making the editor’s acquaintance. She had wondered all these long days since she had watched him from the window of the boarding-house parlour how it would be if they ever met again; but she had not expected anything like this. The most her imagination had conjured had been a chance meeting in the street.
Wayne was taken into the great secret by Mrs. Blair and ran his eyes over the drawings before he spoke to Jean.
“It’s splendid, perfectly splendid!” he cried, but Mrs. Blair got him away for the time being. Her father’s business affairs had given her great concern and she seized the moment to attack Wayne in regard to them. But Wayne was not to be disposed of so easily; his eyes followed Jean, and when she laughed at some of Wingfield’s banter he stopped abruptly in his answer to one of Mrs. Blair’s questions and the look in his eyes told the story, and would have told it to a less observing woman than Fanny Blair. She sighed as he rose and moved across the room to where Jean sat turning in her hands her copy of the editor’s contract. It would hurt nothing this once—so Mrs. Blair suffered him to talk to her.
“I’ve been away,” he began, “and a great deal seems to be happening; here you are at the point of being famous. I always felt that it would come—that you would make good, and you have rung the bell at the first shot.”
“But it wasn’t the first. I had sent portfolios of drawings to a lot of publishers and editors who didn’t care for them at all. And of course, Mr. Richardson was only interested because he happened to be looking for that kind of thing.”
“There are other artists doing that sort of work—good ones—of established reputation—and the Hemisphere prefers you. You can’t get away from that.”
“Well, it’s nice, anyhow. And now I must do the work; it will keep me very busy, if I finish in time.”
“You will do it and it will be a success; there is no doubt of that. And we shall all be proud of you. It’s something to know a genius these days.”
This success would, he knew, raise higher the barriers between them, and he was jealous of her art as he had not been of Joe. Her work meant more to her than Joe had meant or could mean. It was preposterous that this woman should bear the burden of an obligation to a man like Joe Denny. Her new gown clothed her in a fresh vesture of youth. She was no longer the obscure, forlorn and shabby art student, but a young woman whose name would go far and whose eyes were bright with the elixir of success—that most potent of cordials. He wondered whether he should see again the gray mist of the sea steal across the lovely violet of her eyes; and upon the thought the soft shadow fell and the sweet gravity that became her so well came into her face. The change seemed to bring her back to him; and he grasped at the fleeting mood eagerly.
“I have seen things differently since I saw you last,” he began, and all unconsciously her head bowed as though under the weight of remembrance. “I let go of myself again—it was hideous; you heard of it?”
“Yes, I knew. I was sorry.”
“But Paddock took me away to the house of some friends of his; they were good to me. I sent you a telegram Christmas—I wonder if you got it?”
“Yes; and I was glad you remembered me.”
She did not tell him that she had cried over it in her dingy room or that at Paddock’s settlement house, where she had gone to help in the children’s entertainment, she had learned from the minister where he was, or that the knowledge that he was in a place of safety had been the real peace of her Christmas.
“It was a lonely place up there in the mountains and the first night——”
He had felt that he must tell her everything, but he could not do it; he could not confess how narrowly he had escaped taking himself out of life by the back door. Her own fine courage, the success now crowning her endeavour—these things taunted him; he could not tell her how near he had been to throwing down his sword in the face of the enemy. With courage, sincerity and industry she was storming the citadels of a world that had heaped favours upon him only to magnify the humiliation of his failures. He must speak with confidence of his to-morrows to this woman if he would hold her respect.
“I’m going to try harder. I guess I’ve never tried at all. I’ve got a job: Walsh is going to take me into his office; you’ve seen him, he’s a grand old fellow. While you are off making your drawings I shall be trying to learn how to sell groceries. Isn’t that most uninteresting?”
She bent toward him eagerly.
“Oh, no, it is fine! It is just the right thing. I am glad—so glad!”
His heart bounded as he saw how pleased she was—no cloud now on those violet seas; and she smiled that quick rare smile of hers.
“Please don’t grow too famous to remember a poor struggling jobber in canned goods and such. You see, you’ve rather put it up to me to do something. I shan’t get very high—I couldn’t—but I’m going to do the best I can. A man I met up there in the hills—a minister—a priest, he would call himself, made me feel my lack of importance in the world in a new way. He said he thought the devil wouldn’t care for my soul—that I was a clumsy piece of Satan’s practice-work, not worth putting on exhibition in the hall of fame down below. That took the conceit out of me; I had imagined myself a superior article.”
“Well, when you’re at work you won’t have time to think of such things,” she answered, not sanctioning his way of joking about it.
“But I shall think of you every day, and I shall wonder where you are and how your work prospers; and sometimes I shall see you——”
“We shall always be good friends, of course.”
But he would not take warning of her words or her manner; this new career was drawing her away from him and the thought of losing her was intolerable.
“If you haven’t taken that step, if you are still free, won’t you give me my chance?”
“No, no! Please don’t spoil this evening for me; I know you don’t mean to be unkind—but you are!”
“But why should you throw away your freedom; you owe something to yourself!” he pleaded. “See what has come to you; think of what you would lose if you let this imagined duty to Joe interfere with your success.”
“I made up my mind that night when I told you my story; and I shall not change it. Poor Joe! I had hurt him so that he doesn’t want to take me back—but the tie exists. Nothing you could say would ever change my feeling about it.”
The lines of his face hardened and his jaw set. Having, like a child, resolved to be “good,” he saw no reason why he should not at once pluck the stars for his reward. The penitent is never so humble but that he demands immediate share in paradisiacal joys.
“You will be leaving at once. I suppose I shall not see you again,” he remarked, the dejection showing in his face.
“Yes; I shall be going in a day or two, but I shan’t forget you. You are one of my friends; we mustn’t let anything spoil that.”
Mrs. Blair’s eyes were upon her and she rose. Richardson and Wingfield were leaving, and the editor had some last words for Jean. Mr. Blair was to take the men down in his car and Jean left with them, wrapped—for the good woman would not be denied—in Mrs. Blair’s ermine opera cloak.
Wayne was pacing the floor, smoking, when Mrs. Blair came back from seeing Jean off. She threw her arms about her brother impulsively.
“Oh, Wayne; there are not many women like that! I always wondered if you would ever really care, and what she would be like; and now this—this——!”
He was not surprised that she knew it all; Fanny always knew everything.
“And to think that when she offered to go back to that vagabond Joe, he wouldn’t have it that way—wouldn’t listen to it! And here she is left high and dry with her preposterous conscience; it’s that wretched Jimmy Paddock that’s responsible. I didn’t suppose I could ever feel that divorce is right in any case; but here were two silly young children eloping. And a girl with this beautiful genius in her, seeing the awfulness of what she had done, fled from it. If Joe hadn’t nearly died of pneumonia and if Jimmy Paddock hadn’t convinced her that marriages are made in heaven and that the courts of Pennsylvania haven’t any jurisdiction over them—well?” she concluded irrelevantly.
“Nothing, Fanny; only the spectacle of the Pennsylvania courts assuming jurisdiction of the heavenly kingdom tickles me. I’m sorry that I can’t talk about Jean—not now. It’s great that she’s struck it, and that must be enough for me, I guess. Good night; I’m going to walk home.”