Under the Skylights Part 27

"H'm," said Virgilia; "one of the Morrells."

The newcomer picked up all the men available and invited them to a.s.sist in his libations. Robin Morrell, the second of the Twins, had pa.s.sed an active forenoon in the popularization of those unequalled certificates, and now he was more than willing to spend money freely in the eyes of the right people. Everybody he had approached earlier had met his views as to the value of those doc.u.ments (they were at two-hundred-and-thirty, or some such incredible figure)--including a bank president or so, who had accepted them as collateral on this basis; and all whom he invited, or summoned, now (refusal seemed impossible), must needs show a like unanimity in sharing his pleasures. He was big and red, and took up a great deal of room. By contrast, Daffingdon Dill looked more of a gentleman than ever.

"He's like his brother--just!" said Virgilia to herself. "Imagine!" she added elliptically.

While Morrell collected the men and impressed his very urgent and particular demands upon the intimidated steward, Virgilia, leaving Preciosa, bestowed a few moments' exertions upon Elizabeth Gibbons.

Virgilia gently but decidedly held the girl's father up to reprobation.

Elizabeth professed herself utterly shocked by this disclosure of her parent's divagations and conveyed the impression that he should be brought back into the right path and should turn from Prochnow and all his works.

"What sort of a thing did he make of it?" asked Virgilia, thinking of the portrait.

"Why, really, do you know, it came out very well."

"What kind of a person is he?"

"Clever enough, I should say; but not by any means what you would call a gentleman."

"Um," murmured Virgilia darkly. How could anybody be interested in a painter that was not a gentleman? This was more than she could understand. "Don't let it go any further, dear," she counselled gently.

"Certainly not," said Elizabeth promptly, and put the matter out of her mind for once and for all.

After Morrell had imposed himself upon the men he turned his attention to the women. Virgilia had always impressed him as a trifle meagre and acidulous, and Elizabeth Gibbons had never impressed him at all; but he instantly caught at the flamboyant and high-charged beauty of little Preciosa McNulty. However, she was too chill and lonely once more to be greatly affected by the bl.u.s.terous gallantries of this prosperous swain.

She was very subdued in her acceptance of his heavy attentions;--"more so than I should--well, than I should have expected," as he himself observed. Really, she was too young for so much poise, too "temperamental," by every indication of her physiognomy, for such complete self-control.

"I say, she has a very good tone, do you know," he took occasion to remark to Dill. And he spoke as a man whose authority in such delicate matters was beyond dispute. There is only one way to impress the pusher, and that way Preciosa had unconsciously taken. The more she repulsed him the more worthy he thought her. "I must see her again, somewhere," he decided.

"Millions," whispered Virgilia to Preciosa, behind Robin Morrell's broad back. "Quite one of _us_. And you can see for yourself how immensely he is taken with you."

Yes, here was something more glorious even than the Thursday tea.

On the way home Preciosa was quiet and thoughtful. Her mother, devoured by a hungry curiosity and a sharp solicitude, plied her with questions.

Whom had she met? What had they said and done? How had they dressed and acted? For the love of heaven, names, descriptions, particulars!

Preciosa looked back at her mother and held an unbroken silence.

XIX

Prochnow spent the whole day working for Preciosa, oblivious of Virgilia's snares or of the debut of Robin Morrell. He heaved history, tradition, legend, mythology into the furnace, worked the bellows with indefatigable hand, blew his brains to a white heat and kept them there, and dropped down at dusk with his project complete. He had outlined two or three of his cartoons as well, and had even dashed out, on a small scale, the colour-scheme of the one that made the most immediate appeal.

Little O'Grady, who had had all the trouble he antic.i.p.ated with the chariot of Progress--and a good deal more--came in for a cup of Prochnow's potent, bewitching coffee.

"Ignace!" he cried, wiping his clay-encrusted hands on the blue blouse, "you beat us all! You'll run away ahead of any one of us! Only, you'll kill yourself doing it!"

"My first great chance," replied Prochnow. "I mustn't let it slip by."

Within a few days this third scheme was brought into intelligible shape and sent off in pursuit of the scattered sons of finance. "It's a dead go!" cried Little O'Grady; "this time we get 'em sure!" His confidence was the light from the blazing furnace, just as Prochnow's intensity was its heat. When each believed so fully in himself and in the other how could the thought of failure intrude?

"Ignace," said Little O'Grady, "this time they'll treat us right. You must take a better room than you have here. You must move downstairs, where people can find you, and where you will be able to let them in when they do. Ladies, now--how could you possibly receive them in such quarters as these?"

Prochnow easily allowed himself to be persuaded. He was already beginning to see about how the cat jumped and to understand how much depended upon the gentle patronage of the luminaries of society. There was one little star, surely, whose light he should be glad to focus on himself once more--nor be indebted to another's kindness for the privilege. He had indeed ventured to call on Preciosa once or twice at her own home--in particular there was the evening on which, defying n.i.g.g.ardly Fortune, he had invited her to the theatre, her pa.s.sion; but Euphrosyne McNulty had not seemed fully able to understand him. She appeared to view him as a sort of uncla.s.sifiable young artisan and to find slight justification for his presence. She had other ideas for her daughter.

"Come, make a stagger," said Little O'Grady encouragingly. "Take that other big room down there next to Gowan's. I'll cough up a few for you, and I'll let you have all the traps of mine you need. Take the Aztec jars and both the priceless Navajos that I have clung to through all my days of misery and privation."

Prochnow made the move. Preciosa was among his first callers. His studio came to little compared with Dill's, and to little more compared with Gowan's; but the jars and the blankets did their part, the mandolin and the coffee-pot theirs; the portfolios were broken open to decorate the walls, and,----

"You'll do," said Little O'Grady.

Preciosa's back missed the tall mahogany chair with the bra.s.s rosettes.

"We've loaned it to Gowan," explained Little O'Grady; "we're helping him out on a portrait."

Preciosa's feet missed the thick-piled Persian rug. "It was getting full of moths and dust," said Little O'Grady. "We've given it to some poor chaps upstairs for a coverlet."

"Are they very dest.i.tute?" asked Preciosa tenderly.

"Turrible," replied Little O'Grady. "There's one sufferer up there who's just about cleaned out--nothing left but his bed and one chair. He's eating his mattress. It'll last a week longer."

Preciosa leaned back luxuriously on the wood-box, which was covered by one of the blankets, and tapped her delicate little foot on the other, spread over the floor. How fortunate that Ignace was spared all these privations!

Prochnow himself could not feel that he was poor. _She_ was here; his drawings were with the bank; his Odalisque was at the club; and his Fall of Madame Lucifer, in a bright new frame, adorned the chaste walls of Roscoe Orlando Gibbons. The future was bright with promise. He dared to speak now. He would. He did.

As soon as Little O'Grady had the grace to make a move toward departure, Prochnow hastened it on. O'Grady went upstairs to banish one or two more obstacles from the way of the Car of Progress, and Prochnow took Preciosa over to the Academy to see the Winter Exhibition.

Preciosa, as has already been said, was not a girl of many ideas; yet a single one, detached, isolated, and presented to her with some ardour and directness, was easily within her grasp. The idea was now presented, and Preciosa forgot all about the pictures. For surely he who offered it was a most complete and admirable mechanism; the pulse of his heart, the beat of his brain, the flash of his eye, the tremor of his masterful hands--all these now worked in fullest harmony and told her here was a man. Preciosa, never inclined to make too much of worldly considerations, now set them aside altogether. Any idea of mere lucre slipped from her mind, and if she thought at all of a mother's strained social ambitions for a favourite child, it was but to feel with a wilful joy that she was extricating herself from the selfish grasp of Virgilia Jeffreys. Her own humble and obscure origin stirred within her,--her, the granddaughter of peasants who had trotted their bogs,--and she gave no heed to her lover's gentility or lack of it, in her unconscious tendency, even her active willingness, to "revert."

Prochnow felt the utmost confidence in his own powers, in his future, in the great scheme now under the scrutiny of the Grindstone. He glanced round the walls of the gallery, and here and there a canvas due to one hand or another that had co-operated in the rival scheme came to his view. He made silent, acidulous comments on certain manifestations of mediocrity placed there by men so much better quartered, better known, better circ.u.mstanced than himself. "Never mind," he said; "next year _I_ shall be here, and then the difference will be seen by everybody." Well might the director welcome work from one who had distanced all others in a fair race and who unaided had brought to a triumphal issue the greatest piece of monumental decoration the town had ever known. And this little thing close by his side, panting, palpitating, flus.h.i.+ng divinely, had helped him to conquer his success.

"It will be your triumph, too!" he told her.

"Mine?" she asked, in self-depreciation. "Why, I have not made you a single suggestion." Too truly she was no Virgilia Jeffreys.

"You have had a hand in every drawing," he insisted warmly. "You have moved the crayon over every sheet. The whole work is full of you--it is You yourself."

Preciosa accepted this full, round declaration with easy pa.s.sivity; she was not clever, only happy. If he thought thus, and felt thus--why, that was enough. He was a strong young man--let him have his way. It all fell in with his "handling" of the whole situation. Little enough had he depended upon soft seduction, upon gallantry, upon flattery; still less had he tried to wheedle, to propitiate. He had grasped her with an intent, smileless severity, and he was not to be opposed. His words, like his works, were full of sweep and decision, and empty of all light humours, and they lifted her up and carried her away.

"Yes," she said, "it will be my triumph too." And she seemed to have said the words he wished to hear.

XX

A week or two went by. The paladins of finance found it as hard as ever to get together. Nothing moved ahead save the new building itself. Even the Car of Progress stood stock-still in the roadway, while Little O'Grady gnawed his nails. Only the contractors and their men had any advance to show. They had put on the roof and had begun to plaster the interior. The vagaries and uncertainties of a few struggling, befogged old gentlemen had no terrors for them--_their_ contracts had been signed hard and fast months before, and their receipts of money had kept close and exact step with the progress of the work itself. "I wish I was a bricklayer--or even a hod-carrier!" said Little O'Grady, throwing a despairing eye upon the Car, stuck fast in the mire.

Prochnow was still confident. He saw a bride, a home, a year of satisfying and profitable activity; he even saw more than one new ring on Preciosa's dear, overloaded little fingers. Yes, he had fully justified his summary s.n.a.t.c.hing of this child of luxury from that front parlour full of contorted chairs with gilded arms and with backs of pink brocade.

He even heard Euphrosyne McNulty say to him in a voice tremulous with generous feeling: "Dear Ignace, you are all I hoped to find you--and more. You have made little Preciosa's mother completely content."