Outside Inn Part 15

Then she added seriously, "It's. .h.i.tty, you know, that will have all the real care of Sheila. I'm pretty busy down here, and I--" she hesitated, half expecting him to threaten to remove his child at once from the prospective guardianship of a creature who reverted so readily to the barbarism of ham and eggs.

"Well, if it's. .h.i.tty that is to have the care of Sheila," Collier Pratt said, and Nancy was not longer puzzled as to which element of her parentage Sheila owed her Irish complexion, "why, more power to her!"

Nancy dreamed that night that she was married to d.i.c.k, and that Hitty made and served them _pate de foies gras_ dumplings, while Collier Pratt in freckles and overalls sat in a high chair, and had his dinner with the family. Later it was discovered that Betty had poisoned his bread and milk, and he died in Nancy's arms in dreadful agony, swearing in a beautiful Irish brogue that in all his life he had never looked at another woman,--which even in her dream seemed to Nancy a somewhat irreconcilable statement.

CHAPTER X

THE PORTRAIT

To Nancy's surprise Hitty welcomed the little girl warmly, when she was introduced into the family circle. She liked to be busy all day, and her duties in taking care of Nancy were not onerous enough to keep her full energy employed. She liked children and family life, and she seemed to have the feeling that if Nancy continued to a.s.semble the various parts that go to make up a family, she would end by adding to it the essential masculine element, though it was d.i.c.k and not Collier Pratt that she visualized at the head of the table cutting up Sheila's meat for her. Collier Pratt was to her a necessary but insignificant detail in Nancy's scheme of things, a poor artist who had "frittered away so much time in furrin parts" that he was incapable of supporting his only child--"poor little motherless lamb!"--in anything like a befitting and adequate manner. Whenever he came to see Sheila she treated him with the condescension of a poor relation, and served his tea in the second best china with the kitchen silver and linen, unless Nancy caught her at it in time to demand the best.

Nancy had expected that Collier Pratt would try to make some business arrangement with her when she took Sheila in charge,--that he would insist on paying her at least a nominal sum a week for the child's board. She had lain awake nights planning the conversations with him in which she would overcome his delicate but natural scruples in the matter and persuade him to her own way of thinking. She had even fixed on the smallest sum--two dollars and a half a week--at which she thought she might induce him to compromise, if all her eloquence failed. She knew that he considered her the hard working, paid manager of Outside Inn, and took it for granted that she had no other source of income. She was a little disconcerted that he made no effort, beyond thanking her sincerely and simply for her kindness, to put the matter on a more concrete basis, but when he told her presently that he was going to do a portrait of her, she scourged herself for her New England perspective on an affair that he handled with so much delicacy.

Her friends were, on the whole, pleased with her experiment in vicarious motherhood. d.i.c.k instinctively resented the fact that Nancy had taken Collier Pratt's daughter into her home and heart, but the child herself was a delight to him, and he spent hours romping with her and telling her stories, loading her with toys and sweetmeats, and taking her off for enchanting holiday excursions "over the Palisades and far away." Billy was hardly less diverted with her, and Betty regarded her advent as a provision on the part of Providence against things becoming too commonplace. Caroline, as was her wont, took the child very seriously, and tried to interest Nancy in all the latest educational theories for her development, including posture dancing, and potato raising.

Nancy herself had loved the child from the moment the big l.u.s.trous gray eyes opened, on the day of her sudden illness at Outside Inn, and looked confidingly up into hers. For the first time in her life her maternal ardor--the instinct which made her yearn to nourish and minister to a race--had concentrated on a single human being. Sheila, hungry for mothering, had turned to her with the simplicity of the people among whom she had been brought up, taking her sympathetic response as a matter of course; and the two were soon on the closest, most affectionate terms.

Sheila and Outside Inn divided Nancy's time to the practical exclusion of all other interests. She had, without realizing her processes, taken into her life artificial responsibilities in almost exact proportion to the normal ones of any woman who makes the choice of marriage rather than that of a career. She was doing housekeeping on a large scale,--she had a child to care for, and she felt that she had entirely disproved any lingering feeling in the mind of any one a.s.sociated with her that she ought to marry,--at least that she ought to marry d.i.c.k.

No woman ought to marry for the sake of marrying, but she was growing to understand now that the experiences of love and marriage might be necessary to the true development of a woman like herself; that there might even be some tragedy in missing them. She was twenty-five, practically alone in the world, and the growing pa.s.sion of her life was for a child that she had borrowed, and might be constrained to relinquish at any moment.

She was tired. The unaccustomed confinement of the long hours at the Inn, the strain of enduring the thick, almost unalleviated heat of an exceptionally humid New York summer, and the tension engendered by her various executive responsibilities, all told on her physically, and her physical condition in its turn reacted on her mind, till she was conscious of a nostalgia,--a yearning and a hunger for something that she could not understand or name, but that was none the less irresistible. She fell into strange moods of brooding and la.s.situde; but there were two connections in which her spirit and ambition never failed her. She never failed of interest in the distribution of food values to her unconscious patrons, and incidentally to Collier Pratt, or in directing the activities and diversions of Sheila.

She bathed and dressed the child with her own hands every morning, combed out the cloudy black hair, fine spun and wavy, that framed the delicate face, and accentuated the dazzling white and pink of her coloring. She had bought her a complete new wardrobe--she was spending money freely now on every one but herself--venturing on one dress at a time in fear and trepidation lest Collier Pratt should suddenly call her to account for her interference with his rights as a parent, but he seemed entirely oblivious of the fact that Sheila had changed her shabby studio black for the most cobwebby of muslins and linens, frocks that by virtue of their exquisite fineness cost Nancy considerably more than her own.

"I say to my father, 'See the pretty new gown that Miss Dear bought for me,' and my father says to me, 'Comb your hair straight back from your brow, and don't let your arms dangle from your shoulders.'"

Sheila complained, "He sees so hard the little things that n.o.body sees--and big things like a dress or a hat he does not notice."

"Men are like that," Nancy said. "Last night when I put on my new rose-colored gown for the first time, your friend Monsieur d.i.c.k told me he had always liked that dress best of all."

"_Comme il est drole_, Monsieur d.i.c.k," Sheila said; "he asked me to grow up and marry him some day. He said I should sit on a cushion and sew a fine seam, and feast upon strawberries, sugar and cream--like the poetry."

"And what did you say?" Nancy asked.

"I said that I thought I should like to marry him if I ever got to be big enough,--but I was afraid I should not be bigger for a long time.

Miss Betty said she would marry him if I was _trop pet.i.te_."

"What did d.i.c.k say to that?" Nancy could not forbear asking.

"He said she was very kind, and maybe the time might come when he would think seriously of her offer."

There was a feeling in Nancy's breast as if her heart had suddenly got up and sat down again. Betty bore no remotest resemblance to the pale kind girl, practically devoid of feminine allure, that Nancy had visualized as the mate for d.i.c.k, and frequently exhorted him to go in search of.

"Miss Betty was only making a joke," she told Sheila sharply.

"We were all making jokes, Miss Dear," Sheila explained.

"I have never loved any one in the world quite so much as I love you, Sheila," Nancy cried in sudden pa.s.sion as the little girl turned her face up to be kissed, as she always did when the conversation puzzled her.

"I like being loved," Sheila said, sighing happily. "My father loves me,--when he is not painting or eating. He is very good to me, I think."

"Your father is a very wise man, Sheila," Nancy said, "he understands beautiful things that other people don't know anything about. He looks at a flower and knows all about it, and--and what it needs to make it flourish. He looks at people that way, too."

"But he doesn't always have time to get the flower what it wants,"

Sheila said; "my jessamine died in Paris because he forgot to water them."

"Your father needs taking care of himself, Sheila. We must plan ways of trying to make him more comfortable. Don't you think of something that he needs that we could get for him?"

"More socks--he would like," Sheila said unexpectedly. "When his socks get holes in them he will not wear them. He stops whatever he is doing to mend them, and the mends hurt him. He mends my stockings, too, sometimes, but I like better the holes especially when he mends them on my feet."

Sheila could have presented no more appealing picture of her father to Nancy's vivid imagination. Collier Pratt with the incongruous sewing equipment of the unaccustomed male, using, more than likely, black darning cotton on a white sock--Nancy's mental pictures were always full of the most realistic detail--bent tediously over a child's stocking, while the precious sunlight was streaming unheeded upon the waiting canvas. She darned very badly herself, but the desire was not less strong in her to take from him all these preposterous and unbefitting tasks, and execute them with her own hands. She stared at the child fixedly.

"You buy him some socks out of your allowance," she said at last. Then she added an anxious and inadequate "Oh, dear!"

"Aren't you happy?" Sheila asked in unconscious imitation of d.i.c.k, with whom she had been spending most of her time for days, while Nancy superintended the additions and improvements she was making in the up-stairs quarters of her Inn, preparatory to moving in for the winter.

"Yes, I'm happy," Nancy said, "but I'm sort of--stirred, too. I wish you were my own little girl, Sheila. I think I'll take you with me to the Inn to-day. You might melt and trickle away if I left you alone here with Hitty."

"_Quelle joie!_ I mean, how nice that will be! Then I can talk about Paris to Gaspard, and he will give me some baba, with a _soupcon of maraschine_ in the sauce, if you will tell him that I may, Miss Dear."

"I'll think about it." It was Nancy's dearest privilege to be asked and grant permission for such indulgences. "Put on that floppy white hat with the yellow ribbon, and take your white coat."

"When I had only one dress to wear I suppose I got just as dirty,"

Sheila reflected, "only it didn't show on black satin. Now I can tell just how dirty I am by looking. I make lots of washing, Miss Dear."

"Yes, thank heaven," Nancy said, unaccountably tearful of a sudden.

The first part of the day at the Inn went much like other days.

Gaspard, eager to retrieve the record of the week when Hitty and a Viennese pastry cook had divided the honors of preparing the daily menus between them--for Nancy had never again attempted the feat--never let a day go by without making a new _plat de jour_ or inventing a sauce; was in the throes of composing a new ca.s.serole, and it was a pleasure to watch him deftly sifting and sorting his ingredients, his artist's eyes aglow with the inward fire of inspiration. Nancy called all the waitresses together and offered them certain prizes and rewards for all the b.u.t.termilk, and prunes and other health dishes that they were able to distribute among ailing patrons,--with the result they were over a.s.siduous at the luncheon hour, and a red-headed young man with gold teeth made a disturbance that it took both Hilda and Michael, who appeared suddenly in his overalls from the upper regions where he was constructing window-boxes, to quell. But these incidents were not sufficiently significant to make the day in any way a memorable one to Nancy. It took a telephone message from Collier Pratt, requesting, nay demanding, her presence in his studio for the first sitting on her portrait, to make the day stand out upon her calendar.

"Sheila is with me. Shall I bring her?" Nancy asked.

"No," Collier Pratt said uncompromisingly, "I am not a parent at this hour. She would disturb me."

"What shall I wear?"

"What have you got on?"

"That blue crepe, made surplice,--the one you liked the other night."

"That's just what I want--Madonna blue. Can you get down here in fifteen minutes?"

"Yes, I'll send Michael up-town with Sheila."

The bare, ramshackle studio on Washington Square shocked her,--it was so comfortless, so dingy; but the canvases on the walls, set up against the wainscoting, stacked on every available chair, gave her a new and almost appalling impression of his personality, and the peculiar poignant power of him. She could not appraise them, or get any real sense of their quality apart from the astounding revelation of the man behind the work.