Life and Gabriella Part 15

"Oh, Patty has all the furs she'll need for years. We spent every penny we had on Patty before she married," answered Mrs. Fowler, but she was saying to herself: "Yes, the girl is the right wife for him. I am sure she is the right wife for him."

The Park was brilliant with falling leaves, and as they drove beneath a perfect sky beside a lake which sparkled like sapphire, Gabriella, lifting her chin above the white furs, said rapturously, "Oh, I am so happy! Life is so beautiful!"

A shadow stole into the eyes with which Mrs. Fowler was watching the pa.s.sing carriages, and the fixed sweetness about her mouth melted into an expression of yearning. Tears veiled the faces of the women who spoke to her in pa.s.sing, for she was thinking of her first drive in the Park with her husband, and though her marriage had been a happy one, she felt a strange longing as if she wanted to weep.

"I never saw such wonderful horses," said Gabriella. "Cousin Jimmy would be wild about them;" and she added impetuously, "But the hats aren't in the least like the one I am wearing." A misgiving seized her as she realized that her dresses, copied by Miss Polly with ardent fidelity from a Paris fashion book, were all hopelessly wrong. She wondered if her green silk gown with the black velvet sleeves was different in style from the gowns the other women were wearing under their furs? Had sleeves of a different colour from the bodice, which Miss Polly considered the last touch of elegance, really gone out of fashion?

The carriage pa.s.sed out of the Park, and turning into one of the streets on the upper West Side stopped presently before a small dingy apartment house, where a dozen ragged children were playing leapfrog on the pavement.

"Patty has the top floor--there's a studio." Drawing her skirts away from the children, for her generation feared contact with the lower cla.s.ses, Mrs. Fowler walked briskly to the low brown steps, on which an ash can stood waiting for removal. Inside, where the hall smelled uninvitingly of stale cooking, they rang for the elevator under a dim yellow light which revealed a hundred secret lines in their faces.

"I can't imagine how Patty puts up with the place," remarked Patty's mother dejectedly. "You wouldn't believe the trouble we went to to start her well. She was the acknowledged beauty of her winter--everybody was crazy about her looks--and the very week before she ran off with Billy she had a proposal from the Duke of Toxbridge. Of course, if I'd ever dreamed she had a fancy for Billy, I'd have kept him out of her sight instead of allowing him to paint her portrait whenever she had any time she could spare. But who on earth would have suspected it? Billy King, whom she had known all her life, as poor as a church mouse, and the kind of painter whose work will never 'take' if he lives to be a thousand!

His portraits may be good art--I don't pretend to know anything about that--but I do know pictures of pretty women when I see them, and his women are frights, every last one of them. If you're thin, he paints your skeleton, and if you're fat, he makes you as square as a house, and, thin or fat, he always gives you a blue and yellow complexion. He wouldn't even make Patty white, though I implored him to do it--and he made her look exactly ten years older than her age."

"I've never seen any portraits of living people--only of ancestors,"

said Gabriella, "and I am so much interested."

"Well, you mustn't judge them by Billy's, my dear, even if he did get all those prizes in Paris. But I always said the French were queer, and if they hadn't been, they would never have raved so over the things Billy painted. Now, Augustus Featherfield's are really charming. One can tell to look at his portraits that he paints only ladies, and he gives them all the most perfectly lovely hair, whether they have it or not.

Some day I'll take you to his studio and let you see for yourself."

The elevator descended, creaking beneath the weight of a negro youth who seemed half asleep, and a little later, creaking more loudly, it bore them slowly upward to the top of the house.

"I feel as if I were taking my life in my hands whenever I come here,"

observed Mrs. Fowler, in the tone of dispa.s.sionate resignation with which she always discussed Patty and the surroundings amid which Patty lived. Marching resolutely, though disapprovingly, down a long hall, she pressed a small bell at the side of a door, and stood, holding tightly to the bundle of curtains, while her expression of unnatural pleasantness grew almost painful in its determination. Here, also, they waited some time, and when at last the door was opened by an agitated maid, without an ap.r.o.n, and they were led into a long, queerly furnished studio, with a balcony from which they had a distant cloudless view of the river, Gabriella felt for a minute that she must have fallen into a dream. Long afterwards she learned that Billy's studio was charming, with its blurred Italian tapestries, which had faded to an exquisite tone, with its broken torsos of old marble, warming to deep ivory in the sunlight, with its ecstatic haloed saints praying against dim Tuscan landscapes, with its odd and unexpected seats of carved stone on which the cushions made strange splotches and pools of colour. At the time, seen through provincial eyes, it seemed merely "queer" to her; and queerer still appeared the undraped figures of women, all lean lines and violet shadows, which, unframed and unhung, filled the dusty corners.

"The river is lovely, but it is so far away," she said, turning her abashed eyes from the nude figures, and thinking how terribly they would have shocked the innocence of Cousin Jimmy.

"I always look at the river when I come here," responded Mrs. Fowler, and her tone implied that the river at least was perfectly proper. "A month ago the colours were wonderful."

In the drive, which they could see from a corner view, a few old men, forgotten by time, warmed themselves in the sunlight. Far below, the river reflected the changeable blue of the sky, while the autumnal pageantry on the horizon was fading slowly, like a burned-out fire, to the colour of ashes.

"Mother, dear, I'm so glad," said a gay voice in the doorway, and turning quickly, Gabriella stared with wide eyes at the vision of Patty--of Patty in some soft tea-gown, which borrowed its tone from the old tapestries on the wall, with her honey-coloured hair hanging over her shoulders, and her eyes as fresh as blue flowers in the ivory pallor of her face.

"And this is Gabriella," she added, holding out her arms. "What a darling you are to come so soon, Gabriella."

She was a tall girl, so tall that she stooped to kiss Gabriella, whose height measured exactly five feet and seven inches, and she was beautiful with the faultless beauty which is seen only once or twice in a generation, but which, seen once, is never forgotten. For Patty's beauty, as a poet once wrote of a dead woman, was the beauty of destiny, the beauty that changes history and turns men into angels or into beasts. Though Gabriella had seen lovely skins on Southern women--rose-leaf skins, magnolia skins, peach-blossom skins--she had seen nothing that resembled the exquisite colour and texture of Patty's face.

"The curtains were finished, so I brought them," said Mrs. Fowler, pointing to the bundle. "I wanted Gabriella to see the Park. You are coming to-night without fail, aren't you, Patty?"

"Without fail, even if we have to walk," answered Patty. "You can't imagine how much it costs to get about when one lives so far uptown.

That's one reason we are anxious to move. Billy has been looking for a studio for weeks, and, do you know, he has really found one at last.

Harry Allen is moving out of the Rubens Building, and we are going to take his studio on the top floor. We're awfully lucky, too, to get it, for it is the first vacancy there for years."

"But it's over a stable, isn't it?" asked Mrs. Fowler. "How could you possibly live there? And the East Side way down there is just as bad as up here"

"I believe there is a stable, but it won't bother us--we're too high,"

replied Patty.

"Well, we can't stop; Gabriella hasn't unpacked her trunks," returned Mrs. Fowler; "but be sure to come early, Patty. I want your father to see you."

"I wish there wasn't going to be anybody else. I want to talk to my sister. Isn't it lovely to have a sister, and mamma was too selfish to give me one. Do you call her 'mamma,' too, Gabriella?"

"Of course she calls me 'mamma,'" answered Mrs. Fowler before Gabriella could speak, "and she is a much better daughter already than you ever were."

"And a much better son, too, than George ever was?" asked Patty slyly.

"We aren't talking about George. George has settled down," said Mrs.

Fowler quickly, too quickly it occurred to Gabriella, who was eager to hear all that the daring Patty would say. "Don't you think those white furs look well on Gabriella?"

"She looks like the snow queen in them. Does it matter what I wear to-night? Who is coming?"

"n.o.body you will care about--only Judge and Mrs. Crowborough and Colonel Buffington."

"That old bore of a colonel! And why do you have to ask the judge again so soon? He looks like a turkey gobbler, Gabriella, and he has so much money that it is impossible to judge him by the standards of other people, everybody says that--even Billy."

"Hush, Patty. You mustn't corrupt Gabriella."

"If the judge doesn't, I shan't, mamma."

"Well, your father has the greatest respect for him, and as for asking him often to dinner, it isn't by any means so easy to get him as you think. I don't suppose there's another man in New York who is invited out so often and goes out so little."

"Papa is a sweet innocent," observed Patty maliciously, "but if you can stand the judge, mamma, dear, I am sure I can, especially as I shan't have to sit by him. That honour will be reserved for poor Gabriella. I wish you didn't have to go, but you really must, I suppose?"

"Yes, we must go. Come, Gabriella, or you won't have time to get into your trunks before dinner."

On the drive home Mrs. Fowler was grimly silent, while the sweetness about her mouth ebbed slowly away, leaving the faintest quiver of the muscles. For the first time Gabriella saw George's mother look as she must look in her sleep, when the artificial cheerfulness of her expression faded into the profound unconsciousness which drowns not only happiness, but the very pretence of happiness. So here, also, was insincerity, here, also, was the striving, not for realities, but for appearances! In a different form she saw her mother's struggle again--that struggle, without beginning and without end, which moved always in a circle and led nowhere. Was there no sincerity, no reality even in love? Was George, too, only a shadow? And the visible sadness of the November afternoon, with its faint haze like the haze of a dream landscape, seemed a part of this invisible sadness which had sprung from nothing and which would change and pa.s.s away in a breath. "If things would only last," she thought, looking with wistful eyes on the gold and purple around her. "If things would only last, how wonderful life would be!"

"To think that all Patty's beauty should have been thrown away," said Mrs. Fowler suddenly.

Though Gabriella had never seen Billy, she was inclined at the moment, in her mood of dissatisfaction with the universe, to sympathize with Mrs. Fowler's view of the matter. To her frugal mind, trained to economy of material, it seemed that Patty was altogether too much for a poor man--even though he could paint her in lean lines and violet shadows.

Upstairs she found her trunks in her bedroom, and after she had unpacked her wedding-gown of white satin, removed the tissue paper stuffing from the sleeves, and shaken out the creases with gentle hands, she sat down and pondered deeply the problem of dressing for dinner. By removing the lace yoke, she might make the gown sufficiently indecorous for the fashion of the period, and her only evening dress, the white muslin she had worn to dances in Richmond, she reflected gloomily, would appear absurd in New York.

"I wish I didn't look such a fright," she said aloud, as she ripped and sewed. Then, in a flash, her mind wandered from herself, and she thought: "I wonder why George didn't tell his mother that we are going to take an apartment? I wonder why he didn't tell her that mother is coming in June? When he comes I must ask him."

Looking at the clock, she saw that it was after seven, and hurriedly taking the last few st.i.tches, she laid the gown on the bed, bathed her face in cold water, and then, sitting down before her dressing-table, drew the pins from her hair. In some obscure way she felt herself a different person from the bride who had watched George so ecstatically at the station that morning. She could not tell how she had altered, and yet she felt perfectly conscious that an alteration had taken place in her soul--that she was not the same Gabriella--that life could never be again exactly as it had been before. Nothing and yet everything seemed to have happened to her in a day. Her face, gazing gravely back at her from the mirror, looked young and wistful, the face of one who, like a bird flying suddenly out of darkness against a lamp, is bewildered by the first shock of the light.

When her hair was arranged in the simple way she had always worn it, she slipped her dress over her bare shoulders, and fastened it slowly--for Miss Polly had no patience with "back fastenings"--while she told herself again that George would not be satisfied. She knew that her gown was provincial, knew that she lacked the "dash" he admired in women; and from the first she had been mystified by a love which could, while still pa.s.sionately desiring her, wish her different in so many ways. "I'd like him to be proud of me, but I suppose he never will be," she thought dejectedly, "and yet he fell in love with me just as I was, and he did not fall in love with any of the dashing women he knows," she added quickly, consoled by the reflection. "And of course in a few things I wish him different, too. I wish he wasn't so careless. He is so careless that I shall have to be twice as careful, I shall have to look after him all the time. Even to-night he has forgotten about the dinner, and he'll be obliged to dress in a hurry, which he hates."

Glancing at the clock again, she saw that it was a quarter of eight, and still George had not come.

CHAPTER VI

THE OLD SERPENT