Ewing's Lady Part 25

And Ewing began to paint; to paint like Sydenham, if he might--cloud studies, bits of street perspective, stretches of river, a realistic view of the roofs from his window, with their water b.u.t.ts, chimney pots, and clothes lines. Baldwin looked in once, and carried a word below to the men who sold things: the word "Awful!" He also ventured a friendly remonstrance to Ewing. "If you're going to paint, for G.o.d's sake go to some man who knows how!"

Ewing referred to Teevan's conviction that Sydenham was the ideal master for him, and to the attested fact that Teevan knew painting and painters.

"Then I don't understand Teevan," was Baldwin's puzzled response.

"But I'm coming on--Teevan says so."

Baldwin ventured another look at the canvas in hand and fled below.

Teevan was watchful and permitted few chances for meddling of this sort.

He contrived to be with Ewing most of the time when Sydenham was not.

And Ewing never tired of Sydenham. If they walked the streets together the old man would direct his eye to some unnoticed felicity of color on the walls that shut them in, to bits of enchanting perspective, to subtle plays of light and shade in unpromising spots. Or if they sat alone at night the painter told of color in the world beyond the sea; how from the top of Mont Blanc the stars are seen at midday, points of vivid light in a dark blue-violet field; of the purple nights of the desert, the stars but an arrowshot above; of the cold, pale silvers of dawn in the desert, and the heated gold and scarlet of evening; of the impossible blue of the bay of Naples. His face glowed to such youthfulness at these times that Ewing would forget his futile years until the sigh came.

"But I've always seen too much. Only the fountain of Juventius could have given me time enough. I'm like the lad in the school-reader tale who reached into the jar of nuts and tried to withdraw his hand full--and lost them all."

Between Ewing and Teevan there was even a new bond. Ewing discovered that money inevitably left one's pocket in New York, even if it vanished under auspices less violent and less obscure than Ben had so gloomily feared. The steady dribble was quite as effective. When he awoke to this great fiscal truth he saw that some condescension of effort would be required. He must sell enough drawings to sustain him modestly. He broached this regrettable necessity to Teevan, wishing the little man to understand that, in making a few things for money, he was guilty of no treachery to the Teevan ideal. But Teevan, much to his embarra.s.sment, had extended the full hand of bestowal.

He was hurt when Ewing demurred; then annoyed that so petty an obstacle should r.e.t.a.r.d a progress so splendid. He never dared to suspect a decadence in the resolution of his young friend.

Ewing was cut by his distress, stung by his doubt, and persuaded by his logic. He accepted Teevan's money, though not without instinctive misgiving. There were moments when he traitorously wondered if it might not be better for him to lack a friend with ideals so rigid. And more than once he suffered the disquieting suspicion of some unreality in and through it all--his intimacy with Teevan, and his desertion of a trail whose beginnings, at least, he knew. There was sometimes a faint ring of artificiality in the whole situation. Yet Teevan's heartiness and his certainty--the felicitous certainty of a star in its course--always dispelled this vague unquiet, and at last it brought Ewing a new pleasure to remember that an actual, material obligation--one increasing at measured intervals--now existed between them.

He had never spoken openly to Mrs. Laithe of his intimacy with Teevan.

The little man had conveyed his wish of this by indirect speech. He would have liked to tell her of the solace and substantial benefits of their comradeship, to dwell upon the shining merits of this whole-souled but modest benefactor--for Teevan caused his charge to infer that a shame of doing good openly inspired his hints--but he had, perforce, to let the praise die unspoken.

Nor did he speak often of Mrs. Laithe to Teevan, for the little man was not only bitter as to woman's influence on the life artistic, but inclined to hold the s.e.x lightly, it seemed, in a much wider aspect. And he spoke, Ewing was sure, out of a ripe experience. He had no difficulty in detecting, under the little man's self-depreciating talk, that Teevan had ever been a power among women, and was not even yet invincibly averse to gallant adventure; not yet a man to be resisted. He was far from bluntly confessing this, but sometimes, when the brandy was low in the decanter, he would tacitly admit a romantic past; romantic, perhaps, to the point of turbulence. And once, when there was no brandy left, he spoke of specific affairs, particularly of one the breaking off of which was giving him the devil's own worry.

"Gad! She's bent on sacrificing everything for me!"

Ewing innocently murmured words about marriage as an honorable estate.

"Marriage!" said Teevan, and Ewing blushed, noting his tone and the lift of his brows.

"Poor, silly, romantic fools!" sighed Teevan. "One would find it difficult to say what they see in me, I fancy."

Ewing murmured polite protestations. But less than ever did he feel moved to speak of Mrs. Laithe to the little man. It did not seem fitting. "Don Juan" had been among the verse with which the lake cabin was supplied.

Not even when Mrs. Laithe was taken off to Florida by her father did he speak her name, though he was filled with her good-by to him. There had seemed to be so much between them, and yet so little of it that could come to words. But he carried for long the last look of her eyes, and he set to his work with a new resolve. There was incentive enough. Teevan never let him forget that he required signs and miracles, like the doubting ones of old. And she--she knew he would perform them.

CHAPTER XX

A LADY BLUSHES

As the winter wore on Ewing fell into doubt and dread. Vague enough they were, but they rested on a sickening effect of emptiness, a time blank of achievement. He still regarded Teevan as quite all of the seven pillars of the house of wisdom. Yet instinct was rebelling. There were tired afternoons when he hungered to eat of the fruit of his own way.

This feeling could not but show in his occasional letters to Mrs.

Laithe. She read through all his protestations of cheerfulness to the real dejection beneath them, and was both troubled and mystified, raging at his secretiveness.

When she returned to New York on a day in April and found a note from Mrs. Lowndes asking her to dine that evening, she accepted with a plan in mind. Before she saw Ewing she would try to learn something about him from Sydenham, for Sydenham would also dine with Mrs. Lowndes, and she knew that Ewing had been painting with the old man.

She found Birley the other guest, and that, too, was customary. Birley and Sydenham preserved for their hostess a certain aroma of her youth.

Both had wooed her in the long ago; Sydenham in a day when Long Branch was. On its sands in the light of a July moon she had prettily hoped they might always be friends. Birley had heard her intone the same becoming sentiment at Saratoga later in the season. And both rejected ones had been present at St. Paul's on a day in the following June when Kitty Folsom and Jack Lowndes had consented together in holy wedlock.

The girl's hope, perfunctory enough at the time, one may fear, had seen long years of fruition. She liked to have them at her table now. Only, when the three were alone, they remembered too vividly and became, in the silences, too fantastically unlike their aged selves to the misty eyes of one another. The one-time belle found a little of that forgetting and remembering to be salutary, so little as ensued when a fourth guest was present. And Eleanor Laithe had often been that fourth, a saving reminder of the present, to recall them when they had loitered far enough back into the old marrying years.

But she came this night with a reason beyond her wish to please. So eager was she to ask Sydenham about Ewing that she gave scant attention to the searching looks and queries of Birley when she entered the drawing room. The big man rallied her on her pallor and frailness, but with a poor spirit that hardly concealed his real misgiving. She silenced him with impatient denials of illness, but his eyes lingered anxiously on her face.

She sat at table with but half an ear for their old-time gossip, the bantering gallantries of the aged swains, and the outworn coquetries of the one-time beauty. And when they fell silent--oftener now than was their wont, for each was thinking of that other Kitty Lowndes, who had taken matters into her own hands--she forgot to make talk, silent herself for thinking on the son of that Kitty. The dinner lacked the sparkle she had been expected to give it.

As they were about to rise, after coffee, she playfully pet.i.tioned for a chat with Sydenham.

"Herbert wants to smoke, and I want to sit here with him. We need a little talk together," she explained. And the other two left them, the old lady leaning on the arm of Birley.

Sydenham lighted a cigar, pushed his chair back, and faced the woman who looked eagerly at him across the disordered table, her arms along its edge, her head tilted to a questionable angle. She flew to her point.

"What about Gilbert Ewing--what trouble is he having?"

Sydenham stared vacantly. He seemed to find it necessary to translate the question into some language of his own.

"Trouble? Oh, all sorts--chrome and indigo, yellow ocher, burnt umber, rose madder, Chinese white--composition, light and shade, vanishing points. You'd have to be one of us to understand."

"Other trouble," she insisted sharply--"personal--not about his painting."

Sydenham stared again, clutching his beard in a dazed search for inspiration. He did not consider people apart from painting. It was impossible that anyone should wish to discuss Ewing except in relation to colors and canvas.

"Well, he has trouble with everything--composition, tone-values, everything."

"But something _not_ painting."

He looked up at the ceiling helplessly.

"Well, I fancy Randy Teevan worries him."

"Randall Teevan!" She was amazed and alarmed at once.

"Sometimes I get the idea that Randy badgers him, though they're thick as thieves. The boy wouldn't breathe if Randy said it was bad for the lungs."

"How long have they been friends?"

By quick, nervous, point-blank queries she drew from him all that he knew of this intimacy. She puzzled over it.

"Can he know?" She had not meant him to hear this, but he caught the words, and betrayed something like human interest.

"Trust Randy for that! I found it out myself. He had Kitty's portrait--Kitty to the life--stunning brush work. Randy has begged the picture of him for a while. I fancy he didn't want it hanging there for others to see. And he found the fellow here one afternoon. Kitty told me. She was nearly taken off her feet by his story but Randy happened in and cooled things down. It's queer, Randy's setting himself to win over the chap. It's a puzzle-mix. I wonder about it sometimes when the light goes."