Under the Skylights Part 29

To Little O'Grady this profanity was no more than the profanity of anybody else. It did not stop him.

"To advertise your business?" he mocked. "Then why didn't you say so before? It ain't too late to do so yet, is it? I'll do it for you myself.

I'll advertise you and your business and your building fit to make you dizzy. I'll make you celebrated. I'll make you talked about. You won't have to pay twenty-five thousand dollars for it, either. Nor four. Nor one. Just give me a week's time and a scaffolding--I worked on a panorama once--and I'll see that you're advertised. I'll do it with my eyes bandaged and with one hand--either one--tied behind me. I'll see to it that you get the Merry Laugh. I'll see that you get the Broad Grin. I'll see that you get the Unrestrained Cachinnation. I'll get you into the guide-books and the art journals--nit! Why, you poor creatures"--Little O'Grady's liberal glance took in the entire a.s.sembly--"who do you think bestow the sort of celebrity you have presumed to hope for? _Your_ kind?

Not on your life. The cheap twaddlers of cheap daily stuff for cheap people? Never imagine it. Who, then? The few, wherever they may be, who _know_. Good work by good men; and then a single word from the right source, however distant, starts the ball rolling and the stream running.

The city feels proud of your taste and liberality, travelling strangers turn aside to see the fruit of it, and you get praise and celebrity indeed. But nothing of that kind will ever happen to you, whether you think yourselves art patrons or not;"--here O'Grady dealt a deadly look at Roscoe Orlando Gibbons. "Do what you like; people will snicker and guffaw and hold their sides and pant for somebody to fan them and bring them to. As for me, I utterly scorn and loathe the whole pack of you. I curse you; I rue the day when first I----"

Little O'Grady thrust out his angry hands to rend his garment, but found that he had left it behind. Balked here, he was about to let them loose on his hair, when the Morrell Twins, at a sign from Andrew P. Hill, now speechless with anger, sprang up and seized Little O'Grady by both shoulders and hustled him out of the room. Robin Morrell gave him a cuff on the ear to boot--a cuff that was to cost him dearer than any other action of his life. Little O'Grady paused on the other side of the part.i.tion to curse the board again, but the watchman hustled him out into the street. He paused on the curbstone to curse the bank, but a policeman told him to move along. On his way back to the Warren, Little O'Grady went a block out of his road to curse the new building, now almost ready for occupancy. He lifted up his arm against it and anathematized it, and a pa.s.sing patrol-wagon almost paused, as if wondering whether he were not best picked up.

"Don't bother about me," said Little O'Grady to the patrol-wagon. "I'm all right." He looked again at the long row of columns: they were still standing. "There yet?" he said. "Well, you'll be down before long, if I'm any guesser."

XXII

The columns were still standing a week later; and the Pin-and-Needle Combine, too, still managed to hang together. But every moment was precious, and Roscoe Orlando Gibbons lost no time in giving a dinner for Preciosa McNulty.

Robin Morrell's first impression of Preciosa had lost nothing of its intensity--on the contrary. He had taken every possible occasion for seeing more of her. He had invaded a stage-box at the theatre where she happened to be sitting; he had made an invitation to call upon her at home impossible to withhold, and he had called. Elizabeth Gibbons, who was hand and glove with Preciosa (except that, like everybody else, she knew nothing of her engagement), speculated aloud on the probable outcome of all this, and her father himself, overhearing, had laid these considerations before old Jeremiah. Briefly, Preciosa must marry Robin, and Roscoe Orlando himself would help to the extent of bringing them together once more by means of a dinner.

Jeremiah blinked solemnly at Roscoe Orlando's florid side-whiskers and wide sensuous mouth. Both the affairs of the heart and the functions of society life were far removed from the range of Jeremiah's interests and sympathies.

"Save Morrell, and you save the bank," urged Roscoe Orlando.

Jeremiah blinked again. He was fully able to do this, if he chose. He was immensely well off. He drew rentals from every quarter of the city. Those gilded Louis Quinze chairs and sofas in his front parlour were, as everybody knew, stuffed with bonds and mortgages, and coupons and interest-notes were always bursting out and having to be crammed back in place again. Yes, Jeremiah was the richest member of the board; but he was also one of the smallest among the stock-holders. He shook his head.

Why risk so much to save so little?

"Then save your grandchild," pursued Roscoe Orlando.

Jeremiah stopped blinking and opened his eyes to a wide stare. "Aha! this fetches him!" thought Roscoe Orlando.

"Will you have her marry a business-man of means and ability," he went on, "or will you have her tie up to a poor devil of a painter, with no friends, no position, no influence, no future?" Roscoe Orlando's brief period of easy patronage was over; no longer was he the caressing amateur, but the imperilled stockholder (rather a large one, too), and Ignace Prochnow need look for no further support from his quarter. Roscoe told Jeremiah bluntly that his granddaughter was as good as engaged (this was his own daughter's guess) to that obscure young man from nowhere, and asked him if he wanted the thing to end in matrimony.

Jeremiah scratched his chin. Roscoe Orlando saw with disappointment that neither explosion nor panic was to ensue. Yes, Jeremiah remembered Prochnow; he recalled the bold, brainy young fellow, so full of vigour and vitality. He himself had reached an age when such things made their impression, and when he wistfully envied so signally full a repository of youthful hope, energy, persistence.

Gibbons eyed him narrowly; clearly his argument was failing. "However,"

he went on hurriedly, therefore, "this is no affair for us. Speak to the child's mother; she will know how to handle it. Meanwhile, my daughters will arrange for the dinner."

Euphrosyne McNulty jumped at the dinner. As for Preciosa's infatuation for Prochnow (upon which Jeremiah had touched very lightly), she refused to consider any such possibility. At most it was but a pa.s.sing fancy, due to the painting of that portrait; it would quickly dissipate: least said, soonest mended. A girl like Preciosa, brought up so carefully, a girl who had always had everything and who would always need to have everything, would know how to choose between two such men. As for Robin Morrell, Euphrosyne had been greatly taken with him. He blew into her arid parlour the long-awaited whiff from the golden fields of "society." He was big, loud, self-confident, tremendously and immediately at home (in a condescending way, though this she hardly grasped),--a man to open up his own path and trample through the world, Preciosa by his side, and Preciosa's mother not far behind. So, up to the very hour of the Gibbons dinner, she sang his praises in Preciosa's ear.

Preciosa was preparing to revert; she sought the soil, but she was determined it should be the soil of her own choosing. She found Morrell coa.r.s.e, dry, hard, sandy, gritty. What she sought was some dank, rich loam, dark, moist, productive. To be sure, great towering things grew in the sand--pine-trees, for example, with vast trunks and with broad heads that spread out far above the humbler growths below; but on the whole she preferred some l.u.s.trous-leaved shrub full of buds that would soon open into beautiful red flowers. She told her mother that she had no interest in the Gibbons dinner and did not mean to go.

"But I mean that you shall!" retorted Euphrosyne. "After all that's been done to get you into society you turn round now, do you, and cut off your own parents from it? You'll go, make sure of that; and your father and I will go with you."

XXIII

Daffingdon and Virgilia were bidden to the Gibbons dinner, along with the rest.

"It's a sop," declared Virgilia; "it's to propitiate us. It's to make amends--he knows he hasn't treated us fairly. Shall we go?"

"He has treated us no worse than he has treated everybody else," said Dill, bent upon the preservation of his _amour propre_. "Look at that young Prochnow--picked up one day and dropped the next."

"They say he's really clever," replied Virgilia. "If we failed, we failed in good company. Just how good, we might see by going. Mr. Gibbons has something of his at the house, you remember."

"We haven't failed yet," persisted Daffingdon. "The field is clear--just as it was to start with. We may be able to bring them round yet. Anyway, we'll keep up the pretence of good terms. Let's go."

Virgilia and Daffingdon had given over all mention of j.a.pan, and had left off the shy, desultory house-hunting that had occupied the spare hours of their engagement. This great question with the bank must be settled first. Nor was Virgilia sure that Daff was proving to be all she had fancied him. He had shown less head than he might have shown in planning the scheme, and less s.p.u.n.k than he should have shown in pus.h.i.+ng it. As she thought things over she felt that all the ideas and all the efforts had been her own. And now the question of money. Money; it did not come in, and yet it was the prime need. These considerations filled her mind as they bowled along in the cab together, and she was not sure but that their engagement was a mistake. At Roscoe Orlando's carriage-block their cab was close behind the livery brougham of the Joyces--Abner and his wife were going everywhere, now; and she looked after Medora half in envy, as upon a woman whose future, whether small or great, was at least a.s.sured. Nothing consoled her but Daffingdon's seeming determination not to give up. Yes, there was room for more ideas, for further efforts. But whose? His or hers?

Elizabeth Gibbons welcomed her father's guests, and Madame Lucifer backed her up bravely. Dill gave this canvas the closest scrutiny. "It _is_ strong," he said; "it has _chic_ without end." But it had no earthly bearing on the great problem. Another point in his own favour: he was here and Prochnow wasn't.

Yes, he was here, and he tried to take advantage of the fact. Before long he met Gibbons himself in front of the picture--a juncture he had privately hoped to bring about--and was speaking of its merits and of its author and of their common partic.i.p.ation in the great scheme and of the prospects and possibilities of the early future. Roscoe Orlando tried to seem smiling and cordial and encouraging, but clearly his thoughts were somewhere else. And his eyes. And his ears. They were wherever Preciosa McNulty and Robin Morrell happened to be sitting or standing together. It was no longer a question of decorations, nor of the walls that were to give them place, nor of the colonnade through which the public would pa.s.s to view them. It was a question of the very vaults themselves; of the capital, the deposits, the surplus, the undivided profits, of his own five hundred shares; of safety, of credit, of honour--oh, might this painter but eat his dinner in quiet and let the matter of art go hang!

Eudoxia Pence looked at the new picture too, comparing its spirit and quality with a number she had recently added to her own gallery. She also attempted a word with her host about the thwarted pageantry at the Grindstone, but Roscoe Orlando put off her just as he had put off Dill.

"Very well, sir," said Eudoxia firmly, within herself; "if I can't speak here, then I will speak elsewhere. If not to you, then to others. Have eyes and ears if you will for that poor little vulgarian alone; all the same, I shall know how to make my point."

Preciosa was in full feather and in high colour; she seemed like a sumptuous pocket-edition of some work bound more richly, perhaps, than it deserved to be. She was in yellow tulle, and her mother had clapped an immense bunch of red roses upon the child's corsage and had crowded innumerable rings upon her plump little fingers. Her chestnut hair fell in careless affluence round her neck and blew breezily about her temples, and a bright spot in each cheek gave her even more than her wonted colour. Robin Morrell, who was, of course, to take her out to dinner, seized upon her at the very start. It was as if he had wrenched a peach from the tree and had hastily set his greedy teeth in it--one almost saw the juices running down his chin. Yet his satisfaction was not without its drawbacks; the peach seemed a clingstone, after all; and there was a bitter tang to its skin. Preciosa's eyes blazed as well as her cheeks, but not, as some thought, from exhilaration or from gratified vanity; rather from protestant indignation and a full determination not to be moved. Virgilia, from her place, saw how Euphrosyne McNulty constantly watched the child on one side and how Roscoe Orlando Gibbons as constantly watched her on the other; and when Dill asked her, "What does it mean?" she replied: "Leave it to me; this is nothing that a mere man can hope to master. I shall know all about it before I quit this house."

Roscoe Orlando put the men through their liqueurs and cigars in short order--more important concerns were at hand; Joyce, who was now beginning to feel himself an authority in such matters, almost found in his host's unceremonious haste good cause for resentment. James W. McNulty, who saw nothing but the surface, supposed himself here by virtue of his growing importance in the business world, and was fain to acknowledge the attention by the recital of a number of appropriate "stories." During the slight delay thus occasioned, the ladies made s.h.i.+ft, as usual, to entertain one another. Preciosa, relieved temporarily of the pressing attentions of Morrell, sat with Medora Joyce on the drawing-room sofa, proud and flattered to have the undivided regards of the most charming "young matron" present. At the same time, Virgilia, in a shaded corner of the library, was sounding Elizabeth for a clew. Elizabeth had little, consciously, to tell; but, like many persons in that position, she told more than she realized. It was not enough for the purpose, but it dovetailed in with other information that came from other sources the day following. When Morrell led Preciosa into the conservatory, at the earliest possible moment, Virgilia was as keen over their exit as Euphrosyne McNulty or as Roscoe Orlando himself. She knew what was impending and she almost knew why.

And when Robin Morrell issued from the conservatory she knew just what had happened. n.o.body could be so dashed, so dumfounded for nothing. Yes, that incredible child had refused him. Richard had not been good enough for the one, but surely Robin was good enough for the other.

Preciosa's no had been without qualification or addition. Morrell knew as little as her own mother that she considered herself fully pledged to Ignace Prochnow.

Roscoe Orlando came up to Eudoxia. His lips were white.

"A little plan I had set my heart upon," he said, trying to smile lightly, "has received a slight check. May I not rely on you to help it through?"

"A little plan I had set _my_ heart upon," she returned significantly, "has received a slight check. May I not rely on _you_? In other words, I have my problem, just as you have yours. I must insist that justice be done to Mr. Dill."

Roscoe Orlando bowed--only too glad to acquiesce in anything.

"One straggler brought back to camp," said Eudoxia. "To-morrow I shall try to bring back one or two others."

XXIV

Eudoxia Pence immediately got herself into motion. During the watches of the night she evolved plans for such a function as she thought the present situation required. Her picture gallery, re-enforced by those six or eight new masterpieces from Paris, she should throw open to the general public. She would call the thing an afternoon reception, and there would be tea. People were to be invited with some regard to form, but the opportunity would be made rather general--almost anybody might come who was willing to pay a dollar. This crush would supplement her bazar, and would be announced as for the benefit of--oh, well, of any one of the half-dozen charities that looked to her for support. She would throw open the whole house and tea should flow like water. These doings must take place within three days, at the outside. Time was precious and none of her friends would take seriously anything of hers given at so short a notice. No matter, then, who paid; no matter who poured; no matter about anything, if only her net took in all the different people she wanted to catch.

Next morning she rose for a busy day. She had brought back Gibbons, and now she must bring back Hill. Young Prochnow was off the board, but that did not put Daffingdon Dill back upon it; nor would he be there till she should have placed him there. "We _must_ have that commission," said Virgilia. "You shall, if I've got any influence," replied her aunt.

She had long foreseen that, one day or another, she must seize her Grindstone stock in her talons, beat her wings about the head of Andrew P. Hill, raise a threatening beak against his obdurate front, and ask him what he meant by behaving so.

She drove to the bank. The old office stood empty; a last load of ancient ledgers and of shabby furniture was just driving away. She ordered her coupe to go to the new building. Here she found Andrew adjusting himself to his grandiose environment, and delivered her a.s.sault.