The Empty Sack Part 27

"What's the good of seeing how it's done when-when you've got some one else?"

"But, good Lord! Jennie, this is not the only picture of the kind I shall ever paint! Even if I go on using Emma for this, I shall want you for another one-and I'm not sure that I shall go on using Emma. Do you see?"

She was so perturbed that she launched on a question without knowing what she meant to ask.

"Isn't she-"

"Oh, she's all right as far as the figure goes. Features coa.r.s.e. Not a bit what I'm trying to get. Have to keep toning down and modifying to give her the spiritual look that you've got, Jennie, to throw away. I keep thinking of you all the time I'm doing it. Look here, if you'll come to-morrow, I'll pay Bra.s.shead off and you shall have the job."

By the time they reached Palisade Walk the business was settled on a business basis. Not once did he depart from the professional side of the affair, and not once did she allude to the scene in her dressing-room.

But what was understood was understood, not less certainly for its being by pa.s.sionate mental vibration, without a word, or a glance, or a pressure of the hand.

But the next day, as Jennie was leaving the house to keep her appointment, Josiah, who had gone out as usual to look for work, had dragged himself home and fainted at the door.

"I'm all in," he mumbled, on his return to consciousness. "I don't suppose I shall ever get a chance to do a day's work again."

Jennie was so much alarmed that she forgot to telephone her inability to go to the studio till after her father had been put to bed and the doctor had come and gone.

"Oh, it's all right," Hubert had said, listlessly. "I didn't expect you.

I knew that if it wasn't one excuse, it would be another-"

"But I _will_ come," Jennie had interrupted, tearfully.

"Do just as you like about that. Emma's here, and, as you're so uncertain, I've decided to go on and finish the picture without making a change."

He put up the receiver on saying this, so that Jennie was left all in the air with her love and her distress.

When Teddy appeared that evening, it was she who told him of their father's breakdown.

"The doctor says it's worry," she explained, "and lack of nutrition. He says he must stay in bed a week, and we've got to feed him up and not let him worry again."

Teddy's face grew longer and longer.

"Then we'll have to have more money."

"You poor Ted, yes; but then you're making money on the side, aren't you?"

Reminding himself, as he did a hundred times a day, that Nicholson had had five years in which to get away with it, Teddy pa.s.sed on upstairs to his father's bedside.

"It's all right, dad," he tried to smile. "Don't you worry. I'm here.

I'll take care of ma and the girls. You just make your mind easy and give yourself up to getting well."

Jennie's attendance at the studio was thus put out of the question for many days, and in the meantime she had a letter posted at Havana.

Fearing that it would come and attract attention in the family, she watched the postman, getting it one morning before breakfast. Bob wrote:

There is a love so big and strong and sure that separations mean nothing to it, because it fills the world. That's my kind of love, Jennie darling. You can't get out of it-I can't get out of it-even if we would. At this very minute I'm sailing and sailing; but I'm not being carried farther away from you. The love in which you and I are now leading our lives is wider than the great big circle made by the horizon. Don't forget that, dear. I'm always with you. Love doesn't recognize distance. Love isn't physical or geographical. It's force, power, influence. I love you so much that I know I can keep you safe even though I'm on the other side of the world. I can't fend troubles away from you, worse luck, but I can carry you through them. I know that till I come back you'll be having a hard time; but my love will hang round you like an enchanted cloak, and nothing will really get at you. You're always wearing that cloak, Jennie; you always walk with it about you.

While Jennie was reading this, Edith Collingham, at breakfast at Marillo Park, was springing a question on her father. She sprang it at breakfast because it was the only time she was sure of seeing him alone.

"Father, how far are children obliged to marry or not to marry in deference to their parents' wishes, and how far have fathers and mothers the right to interfere?"

Dauphin, who was on his haunches near his master's knee, removed himself to a midway position between the two ends of the table, as if he felt that in the struggle he perceived to be coming he couldn't throw his influence with either side. Through the open window Max could be seen in perpetual motion on the lawn, yet pausing every two minutes to look wistfully down the avenue in the hope of some loved approach.

Without answering at once, Collingham tapped an egg with a spoon. The broaching of so personal a question between one of his children and himself was something new. It had been an established rule in the household that, however free the intercourse between the boy and the girl and their mother, the approach to their father was always indirect.

Junia had made it her lifelong part to explain the children to their father and the father to his children, but rarely to give them a chance of explaining themselves to each other. Collingham had acquiesced in this for the reason that the duties of a parent were not those for which he felt himself, in his own phrase, specially "cut out."

The duties for which he did feel himself cut out were those that had to do with the investment of money. On this ground, he spoke with authority; he was original, intuitive, inspired. When it came to a flair for the stock which was selling to-day at fifty and which to-morrow would be worth five hundred, he belonged to the _illuminati_. This being the highest use of intelligence known to man, he felt it his duty to specialize in it to the exclusion of everything else.

As already hinted, there were two Collinghams. There was the natural man, a kindly, generous fellow who would never have made a big position in the world; and there was the other Collingham, standardized to the accepted, forceful, American-business-man pattern, and who, now that he was sixty-odd, was the Collingham who mainly had the upper hand.

Mainly, but not completely. The natural Collingham often made timid attempts to speak and had to be stifled. He was being stifled while the standardized Collingham tapped his egg. It was the pupil of Junia, Bickley, and the business world who finally sought to gain time by asking a counter-question.

"What do you want to know for?"

Edith was prepared for this.

"Because I may make a marriage that you and mother wouldn't like; and I think it possible that Bob may do the same."

Whatever the natural Collingham might have said to this, the man who had been evolved from him could have but one response.

"People who act on their own responsibility should be prepared to go the whole hog."

Edith sipped her coffee while she worked out the significance of this.

"Does that mean that you wouldn't give us any money?"

"Rather that, being so extremely independent, you wouldn't ask for it."

"Oh, ask for it-no; and yet-"

"And yet you think I ought to hand it out."

"I was thinking rather of a kind of _n.o.blesse oblige_-"

"In which all the _n.o.blesse_ must be mine."

"Not exactly that. In which perhaps the _n.o.blesse_ should be _ours_.

Even if I should marry a poor man, I can't help being a Collingham, a member of a family with large ideas and a large way of living."

"Yes; but, you see, you'd be giving them up."

"You can't give up what's been bred into you. And in my case I should be bringing the man-you must let me say it, dad-I should be bringing the man I-I _love_-so little-"

"He's probably counting on a great deal. Poor men who marry rich men's daughters generally do."

"I was going to say that while he'd be giving me so much, all I could offer him would be money; and if I didn't bring that-"

"Well? Go on."