The Nest Builder Part 8

"You've been a marvel--the whole thing has been Napoleonic--and I simply don't know how to thank you." She appeared at the door of the closet, which was to serve as kitchenette and bathroom, drying her hands.

"My, your face is like a rose! _You_ don't look tired any!" exclaimed the spinster. "As for thanks, why, it's been a treat to me. I've felt like I was a girl again. But we're through now, and I've got to go." She rose. "I guess I'll enjoy my sleep to-night."

"Oh, don't go, Miss Mason, stay for tea and let my husband thank you too."

But the little New Englander again showed her simple tact. "No, no, my dear, it's time I went, and you and Mr. Byrd will want to be alone together your first evening," and she pulled on her cotton gloves.

At the door Mary impulsively put her arms round Miss Mason and kissed her.

"You have been good to me--I shall never forget it," she whispered, almost loath to let this first woman friend of her new life go.

Alone, Mary turned to survey the room.

The floor, of wide uneven planks, was bare, but it carried a dark stain, and this had been waxed until it shone. The walls, painted gray, had yielded a clean surface to the mop. The grate was blackened. On either side of it stood the two large chairs, and Mary had thrown a strip of bright stuff over the cus.h.i.+ons of the Morris. Beside this chair stood the smaller table, polished, and upon it blue and white tea things. Near the large window stood the other table, with Stefan's palette, paint tubes, and brushes in orderly array, and a plain chair beside it, while centered at that end was the model-throne. Opposite the fireplace the divan fronted the wall, obscured by Mary's steamer rug and green deck cus.h.i.+on. At the end of the room the heavy chest of drawers, with its dark walnut paint, faced the window, bearing the gilded mirror and a strip of embroidery. On the mantlepiece stood Mary's traveling clock and the two bra.s.s candlesticks, and above it Stefan's pastoral of the stream and the dancing faun was tacked upon the wall. She could hear the kettle singing from the closet, through the open door of which a shaft of sunlight fell from the tiny window to the floor.

Suddenly Mary opened her arms. "Home," she whispered, "home." Tears started to her eyes. With a caressing movement she leant her face against the wall, as to the cheek of her lover.

But emotion lay deep in Mary--she was ashamed that it should rise to facile tears. "Silly girl," she thought, and drying her eyes proceeded more calmly to her final task, which was to change her dress for one fitted to honor Stefan's homecoming.

Hardly was she ready when she heard his feet upon the stair. Her heart leapt with a double joy, for he was springing up two steps at a time, triumph in every bound. The door burst open; she was enveloped in a whirlwind embrace. "Mary," he gasped between kisses, "I've sold the boy--sold him for a hundred! At the very last place--just as I'd given up. You beloved oracle!"

Then he held her away from him, devouring with his eyes her glowing face, her hair, and her soft blue dress. "Oh, you beauty! The day has been a thousand years long without you!" He caught her to him again.

Mary's heart was almost bursting with happiness as she clung to him.

Here, in the home she had prepared, he had brought her his success, and their love glorified both. Her emotion left her wordless. Another moment, and his eyes swept the room.

"Why, Mary!" It was a shout of joy. "You magician, you miracle-worker!

It's beautiful! Don't tell me how you did it--" hastily--"I couldn't understand. It's enough that you waved your hand and beauty sprang up!

Look at my little faun dancing--we must dance too!" He lilted a swaying air, and whirled her round the room with gipsy glee. His face looked like the faun's, elfin, mischievous, happy as the springtime.

At last he dropped into a chair. Then Mary fetched her teakettle. They quenched their thirst, she shared his cigarette, they prattled like children. It was late before they remembered to go out in search of dinner, hours later before they dropped asleep upon the gilded Ja.n.u.s-faced couch that had become for Mary the altar of a sacrament.

IV

Mary's original furnis.h.i.+ngs had cost her less than a hundred dollars.

In the first days of their housekeeping she made several additions, and Stefan contributed a large second-hand easel, a stool, and a piece of strangely colored drapery for the divan. This he discovered during a walk with Mary, in the window of an old furniture dealer, and instantly fell a victim to. He was so delighted with it that Mary had not the heart to veto its purchase, though it was a sad extravagance, costing them more than a week's living expenses. The stuff was of oriental silk, shot with a changing sheen, of colors like a fire burning over water, which made it seem a living thing in their hands. The night they took it home Stefan lit six candles in its honor.

In spite of these expenses Mary banked four hundred dollars, leaving herself enough in hand for a fortnight to come, for she found that they could live on twenty-five dollars a week. She calculated that they must make, as an absolute minimum, to be safe, one hundred dollars a month, for she was determined, if possible, not to draw further upon their h.o.a.rd. This was destined for a future use, the hope of which trembled constantly in her heart. All her plans centered about this hope, but she still forebore to speak of it to Stefan, even as she had done before their marriage. Perhaps she instinctively feared a possible lack of response in him. Meanwhile, she must safeguard her nest.

In spite of Stefan's initial success, Mary wondered if his art would at first yield the necessary monthly income, and cast about for some means by which she could increase his earnings. She had come to America to attain independence, and there was nothing in her code to make dependence a necessary element of marriage.

"Stefan," she said one morning, as she sat covering a cus.h.i.+on, while he worked at one of the unfinished pastorals, "you know I sold several short stories for children when I was in London. I think I ought to try my luck here, don't you?"

"You don't need to, sweetheart," he replied. "Wait till I've finished this little thing. You see if the man I sold the boy to won't jump at it for another hundred." And he whistled cheerily.

"I'm sure he will," she smiled. "Still, I should like to help."

"Do it if you want to, Beautiful, only I can't a.s.sociate you with pens and typewriters. I'm sure if you were just to open your mouth, and sing, out there in the square--" he waved a brush--"people would come running from all over the city and throw yellow and green bills at you like leaves, till you had to be dug out with long shovels by those funny street-cleaners who go about looking dirty in white clothes. You would be a nymph in a shower of gold--only the gold would be paper! How like America!" He whistled again absently, touching the canvas with delicate strokes.

"You are quite the most ridiculous person in the world," she laughed at him. "You know perfectly well that my voice is much too small to be of practical value."

"But I'm not being practical, and you mustn't be literal, darling--G.o.ddesses never should."

"Be practical just for a moment then," she urged, "and think about my chances of selling stories."

"I couldn't," he said absently, holding his brush suspended. "Wait a minute, I've got an idea! That about the shower of gold--I know--Danae!"

he shouted suddenly, throwing down his palette. "That's how I'll paint you. I've been puzzling over it for days. Darling, it will be my chef d'oeuvre!" He seized her hands. "Think of it! You standing under a great shaft of sun, nude, exalted, your hands and eyes lifted. About you gold, pouring down in cataracts, indistinguishable from the sunlight--a background of prismatic fire--and your hair lifting into it like wings!"

He was irradiated.

She had blushed to the eyes. "You want me to sit to you--like that!" Her voice trembled.

He gazed at her in frank amazement. "Should you mind?" he asked, amazed.

"Why, you rose, you're blus.h.i.+ng. I believe you're shy!" He put his arms around her, smiling into her face. "You wouldn't mind, darling, for me!"

he urged, his cheek to hers. "You are so glorious. I've always wanted to paint your glory since the first day I saw you. You _can't_ mind!"

He saw she still hesitated, and his tone became not only surprised but hurt. He could not conceive of shame in connection with beauty. Seeing this she mastered her shrinking. He was right, she felt--she had given him her beauty, and a denial of it in the service of his art would rebuff the G.o.d in him--the creator. She yielded, but she could not express the deeper reason for her emotion. As he was so oblivious, she could not bring herself to tell him why in particular she shrank from sitting as Danae. He had not thought of the meaning of the myth in connection with her all-absorbing hope.

"Promise me one thing," she pleaded. "Don't make the face too like me--just a little different, dearest, please!"

This a trifle fretted him.

"I don't really see why; your face is just the right type," he puzzled.

"I shan't sell the picture, you know. It will be for us--our marriage present to each other."

"Nevertheless, I ask it, dearest." With that he had to be content.

Stefan obtained that afternoon a full-length canvas, and the sittings began next morning. He was at his most inspiring, laughed away Mary's stage fright, posed her with a delight which, inspired her, too, so that she stood readily as he suggested, and made half a dozen lightning sketches to determine the most perfect position, exclaiming enthusiastically meanwhile.

When absorbed, Stefan was a sure and rapid worker. Mary posed for him every morning, and at the end of a week the picture had advanced to a thing of wonderful promise and beauty. Mary would stand before it almost awed. Was this she, she pondered, this aspiring woman of flame?

It troubled her a little that his ideal of her should rise to such splendor; this apotheosis left no place for the pitying tenderness of love, only for its glory. The color of this picture was like the sound of silver trumpets; the heart-throb of the strings was missing. Mary was neither morbid nor introspective, but at this time her whole being was keyed to more than normal comprehension. Watching the picture, seeing that it was a portrayal not of her but of his love for her, she wondered if any woman could long endure the arduousness of such deification, or if a man who had visioned a G.o.ddess could long content himself with a mortal.

The face, too, vaguely troubled her. True to his promise, Stefan had not made it a portrait, but its unlikeness lay rather in the meaning and expression than in the features. These differed only in detail from her own. A slight lengthening of the corners of the eyes, a fuller and wider mouth were the only changes. But the expression amidst its exaltation held a quality she did not understand. Translated into music, it was the call of the wood-wind, something wild and unhuman flowing across the silver triumph of the horns.

Of these half questionings, however, Mary said nothing, telling Stefan only what she was sure of, that the picture would be a masterpiece.

The days were shortening. Stefan found the light poor in the afternoons, and had to take part of the mornings for work on his pastoral. This he would have neglected in his enthusiasm for the Danae, but for Mary's urgings. He obeyed her mandates on practical issues with the unquestioning acceptance of a child. His att.i.tude suggested that he was willing to be worldly from time to time if his Mary--not too often--told him to.

The weather had turned cool, and Mr. Corriani brought them up their first scuttle of coal. They were glad to drink their morning coffee and eat their lunch before the fire, and Mary's little sable neck-piece, relic of former opulence, appeared in the evenings when they sought their dinner. This they took in restaurants near by--quaint bas.e.m.e.nts, or back parlors of once fine houses, where they were served nutritious meals on bare boards, in china half an inch thick. Autumn, New York's most beautiful season, was in the air with its heart-lightening tang; energy seemed to flow into them as they breathed. They took long walks in the afternoons to the Park, which Stefan voted hopelessly ba.n.a.l; to the Metropolitan Museum, where they paid homage to the Sorollas and the Rodins; to the Battery, the docks, and the whole downtown district. This they found oppressive at first, till they saw it after dark from a ferry boat, when Stefan became fired by the towerlike skysc.r.a.pers sketched in patterns of light against the void.

Immediately he developed a cult for these buildings. "America's one creation," he called them, "monstrous, rooted repellently in the earth's bowels, growing rank like weeds, but art for all that." He made several sketches of them, in which the buildings seemed to sway in a drunken abandonment of power. "Wicked things," he named them, and saw them menacing but fascinating, t.i.tanic engines that would overwhelm their makers. He and Mary had quite an argument about this, for she thought the skysc.r.a.pers beautiful.

"They reach sunward, Stefan, they do not menace, they aspire," she objected.

"The aspiration is yours, G.o.ddess. They are only fit symbols of a super-materialism. Their strength is evil, but it lures."