Читать книгу Different Girls - Various - Страница 9

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Jerome Wilmer sat in the garden, painting in a background, with the carelessness of ease. He seemed to be dabbing little touches at the canvas, as a spontaneous kind of fun not likely to result in anything serious, save, perhaps, the necessity of scrubbing them off afterwards, like a too adventurous child. Mary Brinsley, in her lilac print, stood a few paces away, the sun on her hair, and watched him.

"Paris is very becoming to you," she said at last.

"What do you mean?" asked Wilmer, glancing up, and then beginning to consider her so particularly that she stepped aside, her brows knitted, with an admonishing,

"Look out! you'll get me into the landscape."

"You're always in the landscape. What do you mean about Paris?"

"You look so—so travelled, so equal to any place, and Paris in particular because it's the finest."

Other people also had said that, in their various ways. He had the distinction set by nature upon a muscular body and a rather small head, well poised. His hair, now turning gray, grew delightfully about the temples, and though it was brushed back in the style of a man who never looks at himself twice when once will do, it had a way of seeming entirely right. His brows were firm, his mouth determined, and the close pointed beard brought his face to a delicate finish. Even his clothes, of the kind that never look new, had fallen into lines of easy use.

"You needn't guy me," he said, and went on painting. But he flashed his sudden smile at her. "Isn't New England becoming to me, too?"

"Yes, for the summer. It's over-powered. In the winter Aunt Celia calls you 'Jerry Wilmer.' She's quite topping then. But the minute you appear with European labels on your trunks and that air of speaking foreign lingo, she gives out completely. Every time she sees your name in the paper she forgets you went to school at the Academy and built the fires. She calls you 'our boarder' then, for as much as a week and a half."

"Quit it, Mary," said he, smiling at her again.

"Well," said Mary, yet without turning, "I must go and weed a while."

"No," put in Wilmer, innocently; "he won't be over yet. He had a big mail. I brought it to him."

Mary blushed, and made as if to go. She was a woman of thirty-five, well poised, and sweet through wholesomeness. Her face had been cut on a regular pattern, and then some natural influence had touched it up beguilingly with contradictions. She swung back, after her one tentative step, and sobered.

"How do you think he is looking?" she asked.

"Prime."

"Not so—"

"Not so morbid as when I was here last summer," he helped her out. "Not by any means. Are you going to marry him, Mary?" The question had only a civil emphasis, but a warmer tone informed it. Mary grew pink under the morning light, and Jerome went on: "Yes, I have a perfect right to talk about it, I don't travel three thousand miles every summer to ask you to marry me without earning some claim to frankness. I mentioned that to Marshby himself. We met at the station, you remember, the day I came. We walked down together. He spoke about my sketching, and I told him I had come on my annual pilgrimage, to ask Mary Brinsley to marry me."

"Jerome!"

"Yes, I did. This is my tenth pilgrimage. Mary, will you marry me?"

"No," said Mary, softly, but as if she liked him very much. "No, Jerome."

Wilmer squeezed a tube on his palette and regarded the color frowningly. "Might as well, Mary," said he. "You'd have an awfully good time in Paris."

She was perfectly still, watching him, and he went on:

"Now you're thinking if Marshby gets the consulate you'll be across the water anyway, and you could run down to Paris and see the sights. But it wouldn't be the same thing. It's Marshby you like, but you'd have a better time with me."

"It's a foregone conclusion that the consulship will be offered him," said Mary. Her eyes were now on the path leading through the garden and over the wall to the neighboring house where Marshby lived.

"Then you will marry and go with him. Ah, well, that's finished. I needn't come another summer. When you are in Paris, I can show you the boulevards and cafés."

"It is more than probable he won't accept the consulship."

"Why?" He held his palette arrested in mid-air and stared at her.

"He is doubtful of himself—doubtful whether he is equal to so responsible a place."

"Bah! it's not an embassy."

"No; but he fancies he has not the address, the social gifts—in fact, he shrinks from it." Her face had taken on a soft distress; her eyes appealed to him. She seemed to be confessing, for the other man, something that might well be misunderstood. Jerome, ignoring the flag of her discomfort, went on painting, to give her room for confidence.

"Is it that old plague-spot?" he asked. "Just what aspect does it bear to him? Why not talk freely about it?"

"It is the old remorse. He misunderstood his brother when they two were left alone in the world. He forced the boy out of evil associations when he ought to have led him. You know the rest of it. The boy was desperate. He killed himself."

"When he was drunk. Marshby wasn't responsible."

"No, not directly. But you know that kind of mind. It follows hidden causes. That's why his essays are so good. Anyway, it has crippled him. It came when he was too young, and it marked him for life. He has an inveterate self-distrust."

"Ah, well," said Winner, including the summer landscape in a wave of his brush, "give up the consulship. Let him give it up. It isn't as if he hadn't a roof. Settle down in his house there, you two, and let him write his essays, and you—just be happy."

She ignored her own part in the prophecy completely and finally. "It isn't the consulship as the consulship," she responded. "It is the life abroad I want for him. It would give him—well, it would give him what it has given you. His work would show it." She spoke hotly, and at once Jerome saw himself envied for his brilliant cosmopolitan life, the bounty of his success fairly coveted for the other man. It gave him a curious pang. He felt, somehow, impoverished, and drew his breath more meagrely. But the actual thought in his mind grew too big to be suppressed, and he stayed his hand to look at her.

"That's not all," he said.

"All what?"

"That's not the main reason why you want him to go. You think if he really asserted himself, really knocked down the spectre of his old distrust and stamped on it, he would be a different man. If he had once proved himself, as we say of younger chaps, he could go on proving."

"No," she declared, in nervous loyalty. She was like a bird fluttering to save her nest. "No! You are wrong. I ought not to have talked about him at all. I shouldn't to anybody else. Only, you are so kind."

"It's easy to be kind," said Jerome, gently, "when there's nothing else left us."

She stood wilfully swaying a branch of the tendrilled arbor, and, he subtly felt, so dissatisfied with herself for her temporary disloyalty that she felt alien to them both: Marshby because she had wronged him by admitting another man to this intimate knowledge of him, and the other man for being her accomplice.

"Don't be sorry," he said, softly. "You haven't been naughty."

But she had swung round to some comprehension of what he had a right to feel.

"It makes one selfish," she said, "to want—to want things to come out right."

"I know. Well, can't we make them come out right? He is sure of the consulship?"

"Practically."

"You want to be assured of his taking it."

She did not answer; but her face lighted, as if to a new appeal. Jerome followed her look along the path. Marshby himself was coming. He was no weakling. He swung along easily with the stride of a man accustomed to using his body well. He had not, perhaps, the urban air, and yet there was nothing about him which would not have responded at once to a more exacting civilization. Jerome knew his face—knew it from their college days together and through these annual visits of his own; but now, as Marshby approached, the artist rated him not so much by the friendly as the professional eye. He saw a man who looked the scholar and the gentleman, keen though not imperious of glance. His visage, mature even for its years, had suffered more from emotion than from deeds or the assaults of fortune. Marshby had lived the life of thought, and, exaggerating action, had failed to fit himself to any form of it. Wilmer glanced at his hands, too, as they swung with his walk, and then remembered that the professional eye had already noted them and laid their lines away for some suggestive use. As he looked, Marshby stopped in his approach, caught by the singularity of a gnarled tree limb. It awoke in him a cognizance of nature's processes, and his face lighted with the pleasure of it.

"So you won't marry me?" asked Wilmer, softly, in that pause.

"Don't!" said Mary.

"Why not, when you won't tell whether you're engaged to him or not? Why not, anyway? If I were sure you'd be happier with me, I'd snatch you out of his very maw. Yes, I would. Are you sure you like him, Mary?"

The girl did not answer, for Marshby had started again. Jerome got the look in her face, and smiled a little, sadly.

"Yes," he said, "you're sure."

Mary immediately felt unable to encounter them together. She gave Marshby a good-morning, and, to his bewilderment, made some excuse about her weeding and flitted past him on the path. His eyes followed her, and when they came back to Wilmer the artist nodded brightly.

"I've just asked her," he said.

"Asked her?" Marshby was about to pass him, pulling out his glasses and at the same time peering at the picture with the impatience of his near-sighted look.

"There, don't you do that!" cried Jerome, stopping, with his brush in air. "Don't you come round and stare over my shoulder. It makes me nervous ad the devil. Step back there—there by that mullein. So! I've got to face my protagonist. Yes, I've been asking her to marry me."

Marshby stiffened. His head went up, his jaw tightened. He looked the jealous ire of the male.

"What do you want me to stand here for?" he asked, irritably.

"But she refused me," said Wilmer, cheerfully. "Stand still, that's a good fellow. I'm using you."

Marshby had by an effort pulled himself together. He dismissed Mary from his mind, as he wished to drive her from the other man's speech.

"I've been reading the morning paper on your exhibition," he said, bringing out the journal from his pocket. "They can't say enough about you."

"Oh, can't they! Well, the better for me. What are they pleased to discover?"

"They say you see round corners and through deal boards. Listen." He struck open the paper and read: "'A man with a hidden crime upon his soul will do well to elude this greatest of modern magicians. The man with a secret tells it the instant he sits down before Jerome Wilmer. Wilmer does not paint faces, brows, hands. He paints hopes, fears, and longings. If we could, in our turn, get to the heart of his mystery! If we could learn whether he says to himself: "I see hate in that face, hypocrisy, greed. I will paint them. That man is not man, but cur. He shall fawn on my canvas." Or does he paint through a kind of inspired carelessness, and as the line obeys the eye and hand, so does the emotion live in the line?'"

"Oh, gammon!" snapped Wilmer.

"Well, do you?" said Marshby, tossing the paper to the little table where Mary's work-box stood.

"Do I what? Spy and then paint, or paint and find I've spied? Oh, I guess I plug along like any other decent workman. When it comes to that, how do you write your essays?"

"I! Oh! That's another pair of sleeves. Your work is colossal. I'm still on cherry-stones."

"Well," said Wilmer, with slow incisiveness, "you've accomplished one thing I'd sell my name for. You've got Mary Brinsley bound to you so fast that neither lure nor lash can stir her. I've tried it—tried Paris even, the crudest bribe there is. No good! She won't have me."

At her name, Marshby straightened again, and there was fire in his eye. Wilmer, sketching him in, seemed to gain distinct impulse from the pose, and worked the faster.

"Don't move," he ordered. "There, that's right. So, you see, you're the successful chap. I'm the failure. She won't have me." There was such feeling in his tone that Marshby's expression softened comprehendingly. He understood a pain that prompted even such a man to rash avowal.

"I don't believe we'd better speak of her," he said, in awkward kindliness.

"I want to," returned Wilmer. "I want to tell you how lucky you are."

Again that shade of introspective bitterness clouded Marshby's face. "Yes," said he, involuntarily. "But how about her? Is she lucky?"

"Yes," replied Jerome, steadily. "She's got what she wants. She won't worship you any the less because you don't worship yourself. That's the mad way they have—women. It's an awful challenge. You've got a fight before you, if you don't refuse it.".

"God!" groaned Marshby to himself, "it is a fight. I can't refuse it."

Wilmer put his question without mercy. "Do you want to?"

"I want her to be happy," said Marshby, with a simple humility afar from cowardice. "I want her to be safe. I don't see how anybody could be safe—with me."

"Well," pursued Wilmer, recklessly, "would she be safe with me?"

"I think so," said Marshby, keeping an unblemished dignity. "I have thought that for a good many years."

"But not happy?"

"No, not happy. She would—We have been together so long."

"Yes, she'd miss you. She'd die of homesickness. Well!" He sat contemplating Marshby with his professional stare; but really his mind was opened for the first time to the full reason for Mary's unchanging love. Marshby stood there so quiet, so oblivious of himself in comparison with unseen things, so much a man from head to foot, that he justified the woman's loyal passion as nothing had before. "Shall you accept the consulate?" Wilmer asked, abruptly.

Brought face to face with fact, Marshby's pose slackened. He drooped perceptibly. "Probably not," he said. "No, decidedly not."

Wilmer swore under his breath, and sat, brows bent, marvelling at the change in him. The man's infirmity of will had blighted him. He was so truly another creature that not even a woman's unreasoning championship could pull him into shape again.

Mary Brinsley came swiftly down the path, trowel in one hand and her basket of weeds in the other. Wilmer wondered if she had been glancing up from some flowery screen and read the story of that altered posture. She looked sharply anxious, like a mother whose child is threatened. Jerome shrewdly knew that Marshby's telltale attitude was no unfamiliar one.

"What have you been saying?" she asked, in laughing challenge, yet with a note of anxiety underneath.

"I'm painting him in," said Wilmer; but as she came toward him he turned the canvas dexterously. "No," said he, "no. I've got my idea from this. To-morrow Marshby's going to sit."

That was all he would say, and Mary put it aside as one of his pleasantries made to fit the hour. But next day he set up a big canvas in the barn that served him as workroom, and summoned Marshby from his books. He came dressed exactly right, in his every-day clothes that had comfortable wrinkles in them, and easily took his pose. For all his concern over the inefficiency of his life, as a life, he was entirely without self-consciousness in his personal habit. Jerome liked that, and began to like him better as he knew him more. A strange illuminative process went on in his mind toward the man as Mary saw him, and more and more he nursed a fretful sympathy with her desire to see Marshby tuned up to some pitch that should make him livable to himself. It seemed a cruelty of nature that any man should so scorn his own company and yet be forced to keep it through an allotted span. In that sitting Marshby was at first serious and absent-minded. Though his body was obediently there, the spirit seemed to be busy somewhere else.