The Silver Poppy Part 13

While these thoughts were running tumultuously through his mind Mrs.

Spaulding, the embodiment, he felt, of the spirit of his newer existence, looked wonderingly out over her pearl-gray boa at him and waited for him to speak. He had taken it all very quietly. She did not know whether to be pleased or annoyed; Cordelia had accustomed her to grat.i.tude in its more demonstrative form. She had expected, perhaps, a little more effusion on the part of her new _protege_. He, on his part, did not see that more remained to be said.

Mrs. Spaulding continued to look at him with musing eyes. He had always seemed to her to have the manners of another century. There were times when his stiffness irritated her.

"Are all Englishmen alike?" she asked.

"Why?"

"Because sometimes I feel that I'd like to give you a good shaking, just to joggle you out of your sh.e.l.l for a few minutes."

He laughed. "I only wish you would."

"Really? Then why do you let so many good times crawl under your Juggernaut of solemnity?"

"Because the Vishnu of the land of the gla.s.sy stare demands it, I suppose. I'm not altogether Americanized yet." And again he laughed.

"Does that mean you're saying anything against my country?" demanded Mrs. Spaulding.

"On the contrary, that I am looking to your country for my reformation.

I'd really like to be shaken out of that sh.e.l.l you speak of."

"Well, New York ought to do that for you."

"I think it is doing it."

"But it's like your accent; it goes slowly." Mrs. Spaulding had seated herself, and was looking at him with her elbows on the table and a meditative chin buried in her thick boa.

"I think you ought to fall in love."

She repeated it, with conviction, and then suddenly, asked him: "Haven't you ever been that way?"

He looked at her with a face both serious and, she thought, unnecessarily chilling.

"There, I told you--the sh.e.l.l!" she cried warningly. "Tell me, now, weren't you ever in love?"

A barrier, impregnable as steel, a barrier beaten out by all the years of an existence uncomprehended and a secrecy unrespected, fell between them. A sense of his isolation, a touch of the sorrow of the alien, crept over him. And as he looked at the woman who thus questioned him it seemed very long ago, and very far away, that old life, and those old days amid the soft Oxfords.h.i.+re hills.

Mrs. Spaulding put out her hand to him, unexpectedly.

"I'm afraid you're going to be very lonely here at first," she said.

"I have my work," he answered wearily--though the thought of it came almost with joy.

"But you can't live by work alone. And if you'll let us, I thought we might give you a little house-warming. Won't you let Cordelia and me join you in your first dinner here?"

Mrs. Spaulding had made a discovery. She had found that her scholar responded only to sincerity, but then, inevitably; and here she had been a.s.sailing him with her levity. She mentioned the many little details of how they should have their dinner prepared. Then she turned to him, and added, as an after-thought:

"Cordelia is a beautiful character, isn't she?" Whereupon, as though fearing his reply, she suddenly looked at her little jeweled watch, and cried with horror: "Good heavens, I'm late for my sitting!" and rustled out to her waiting carriage, not altogether unhappy to get away.

CHAPTER XIV

THE FIRE IN THE CLEARING

She in twined gold all helmeted, Cuira.s.sed in yielding rose, Let fall from lips of wanton red Three little words, like blows;

And laughed where swayed his spear aloft, For she no arms did wear, And her slim body white and soft Of steel and mail was bare!

JOHN HARTLEY, "The Broken Knight."

We prefer our pessimists young and tender, like asparagus; ten years older and what a bore even Hamlet might have been!--"The Silver Poppy."

Repellier had been prevailed upon to attempt a portrait of Mrs. Alfred Spaulding, and three times a week he came to her house to drink a cup of tea and to work, relaxingly, it is true, on a canvas which was progressing neither fast nor altogether favorably. He had undertaken the task only under gentle protest, for, since that day of mingled alarm and disgust when he beheld two pages of an ill.u.s.trated weekly given over to what its editor had dared to call The Repellier Girl, the old artist had gone back to his _genre_ work, declaring that he was tired of the American gigantic miniature. So, profitable as he might have found the painting of beautiful gowns and faces in Bishop's whole lengths, he preferred thereafter to regard all labor like that which he was now performing for Mrs. Spaulding as the avocation of a busy life, and not the vocation of an idle one. And in this instance, too, his fair sitter had confided to him that she would like the portrait to be done in secret. It was to be a Christmas present for her husband, and, as she added with an ambiguity that somewhat ruffled the usual equanimity of Repellier, "Alfred is such a jealous-minded creature, besides."

It was Cordelia who had finally persuaded him to undertake the picture, laughing all seriousness out of its rigid secrecy and holding it up to him as merely the pa.s.sing whim of a very wealthy and very idle woman. It was she, too, who suggested a plan which he ultimately carried out--that the check he received in payment for his work be handed over to the chronically depleted funds of that East Side Convalescent Home of which he was a trustee.

Mrs. Spaulding, in turn, was not ungrateful for what she considered Cordelia's good offices in this case. She even confessed to her young ward the timid fear that a great artist like Repellier, reproducing on his canvas feature by feature the very face in which a vast but heroically hidden pa.s.sion burned, might some day read the soul of the picture, where the soul of the woman had pa.s.sed unnoticed. Cordelia agreed that such cases were not unknown, but honorably kept her own counsel in the matter and even bravely fought down within herself the last inner voice of flippancy.

When Repellier called that afternoon he found Cordelia down in the Spauldings' commodious kitchen, a cook and two busy maids about her.

"I had to call you down, it smells so fine," she cried happily, thrusting before his astonished nose a pan of sizzling English pheasant, which, after a long and tiring hunt throughout the city, she confided to him, she had found somewhere in cold storage.

"How domestic we are, and how charming we look!" said Repellier in reply, noting her bright eyes and flushed face.

"Yes, isn't it fine?"

"But," he asked, "what does it all mean?"

She told him of Hartley's change of apartments--it was the thought of relating these circ.u.mstances to Repellier more than to any one else that had troubled her for days--and how Mrs. Spaulding and she had promised to give him a little house-warming.

"And so we're going to give him a dinner, a most wonderful dinner!" she cried. "And I'm doing it all by myself!"

Repellier glanced interrogatively at the three busy servants.

"Of course I have to have a little help, but that's a secret. Our women at home--in the South--aren't taught to do this sort of thing, you know.

Help, with us, is so easy to get, most of us never learn things. When I was a girl in Kentucky, I don't believe I ever went into a kitchen more than once a month. And now I've just discovered the fascination of the fryingpan."

Cordelia had what Repellier called "the dangerous gift of familiarity."

As he looked at her he remembered how apt Miss Short's description of her had been: "the girl with the semaph.o.r.e eyes." She could be as open and ingenuous as a child at times, and when caring to, could guilelessly brush aside all the restraining conventionalities with one airy sweep of the hand.

"I suppose you realize it's the oldest weapon you have in that eternal warfare of the elemental woman against the elemental man," half laughed Repellier.

"Feed the brutes," she laughed. Then she looked up quickly. "But I'm not arming for any particular engagement with the enemy." He had a way of giving generalities a specific application which she did not like.

"I suppose a few thousand years ago some shock-headed, hairy-bodied creature with a stone hatchet crawled on all fours into a cave and beheld a rat-browed, matted-haired she-thing stooping over a gory piece of toasting bear meat, and his heart went out to her at once."