The Furnace Part 3

Mrs. Venables drew back; her surprise startled Betty. It was, surely, a very usual and natural request.

'Of course,' Mrs. Venables said gently, after a moment. 'I will give it to you now.... I am so sorry....'

'Thank you tremendously.'

Betty put the notes in her purse. Mrs. Venables became aware that the Crevequer smile, with the single dimple, was rather engaging. Then Tommy came up with Venables, and said it was time to go away.

Miss Varley, as she said good-bye, referred to Betty's statement that she sometimes posed.

'Will you for me? I am painting a picture, and I should be very grateful if you would.'

The unsmiling directness of the tone made the request very much a matter of business. Betty said she would.

'Warren and Prudence are always painting,' Miranda explained mournfully.

'Their pictures are rotten, I think; I hate them.'

The Crevequers went.

'Very picturesque; very striking; very sad,' Mrs. Venables observed.

'Very obvious,' Warren commented. 'I would have betted a guinea that Crevequer would borrow from me; he did. I call that so obvious as to be tiresome.'

To his cousin, a little later, he remarked:

'You're standing on a quite false pedestal of superiority, you know.

Because you're going to paint her yourself. Where's the difference?'

'Ah, well, there is some. To me she's frankly copy, you see; I shall pretend nothing else; I shan't call it making friends--don't you see?

There's where it comes in.'

'All the same, you'll be doing what you repudiate; you'll be making use for your own ends of what you wouldn't otherwise have anything to do with. You're in a false position; you can't escape that by sophistries.'

'If I am, I shall have to be more than ever careful not to make it falser by throwing veils over it,' said Prudence Varley consideringly.

She had the air of a person of a very delicate sense of justice--delicate almost to exaggeration. One detected it in her farsighted grey eyes, with the twinkle that lurked just within call.

Warren chuckled.

'Poor model! You needn't make it so hard as all that for her; let her have a veil or two--it's so much more comfortable.'

Prudence shook her head with decision.

'It wouldn't be fair; it would be ugly.'

Warren smiled again--at her characteristic habit of arriving, with great deliberation, at her own position in a matter, and remaining in it unshaken. If to her perception an immense difference stretched between the frankness of taking copy as such, and ending there, and the course of tact and sympathy and 'achievement of intimacy' which his mother pursued, no accusations of sophistry or overniceness would bridge that gulf to her.

'Well,' Venables said, half defensively, 'Mother really is interested, you know--very much so.'

Prudence frowned over it, half abstractedly.

'As I see it, you either like people or you don't. If you don't, and yet make use of them, they've got to know how the thing stands and all about it.'

'The Crevequers, you know,' Venables said, 'are quite clever enough to know "all about it," even if you do use a veil or two.'

'Are they?' Prudence's eyes mused. 'Oh, I dare say they're clever enough to know. But, Warren, I have a feeling about them--it came to me in the middle of lunch, quite suddenly--that they _don't_ know; that, somehow, either because they are made so, or because they've missed their chances, they know--well, really very little indeed about themselves and how they stand. And that--if that's so--makes it worse; because, do you see, if we accepted them, they would take it naturally, and be content to be accepted; and all the time there would be all kinds of things between us, that we knew of and that they didn't. That would be ugly.

Don't you see? But if we don't accept them, the things between don't matter; it's all right and fair.'

'Well, it may be. Anyhow, if that's what mother would call your "mental standpoint," I'm a little sorry for Miss Crevequer. It will be an embarra.s.sing sitting--except that I can't quite imagine either of you embarra.s.sed.... Personally, you know, they amuse me quite a lot.'

'Oh, well, as to that----' The twinkle came to the front of the grey eyes.

The Crevequers, lounging about Santa Lucia that evening, had their own comments to make. They were a little puzzled.

'Why _not_ be a Catholic?' Tommy pondered, with knitted forehead. 'What else should a man be? Why is it funnier than to be a heretic, or a Jew, or a Buddhist? Perhaps those things _are_ interesting, though, if once one begins thinking about them. We aren't interested in enough things, Betty. Let's study agnostics, and begin with Mrs. Venables. We'll ask her how she feels in church, and say "this is most impressive," as she does. Do agnostics go to church, at least?'

'She does. She watches the devout worshippers. We must think of some nice striking things to tell her, Tommy. She likes that, and we ought to do it, as they've been so kind to us--about how the contadini round Baja still pray to Pan, and things of that sort, that foreigners always like to hear. Would she take that, do you think? No, not quite, perhaps--rather risky. It was very nice of them to lend us both money; and they won't be in a hurry, I should think. I shall rather like to sit to Miss Varley; she's nice to look at, don't you think? She doesn't say very much, but then I can do that.'

'Well, I call them all rather decent,' Tommy said.

They stood for a little and listened to the soft sound of the little night waves sc.r.a.ping the shingle, and looked over the still, dark bay, cut across by the golden road of the three-quarter moon, to where the pine-shaped column above Vesuvius hung and blazed intermittently.

'Something ominous in that sign that the sleeping monster still lives,'

murmured Betty. Then, in answer to a questioning stare, 'Not my own--Mrs. Venables. Tommy, I'm sleepy; let's go to bed.'

'No,' said Tommy--'supper at Brunati's. We'll find some one to have it with us.'

Betty looked dubious.

'To-morrow, don't you think? We really did have such a splendid lunch....'

'To-night,' said Tommy recklessly. 'They must have had tea just after we left them, and dinner after that, and I expect they eat more at it than they did at lunch. We're as good as they are, I should think.'

CHAPTER IV

BLIND WALLS

'The internal nature of each being is surrounded by a circle, not to be surmounted by his fellows; and it is this repulsion which const.i.tutes the misfortune of the condition of life.'--Sh.e.l.lEY.

'Our eyes are hidden that we cannot see things that stare us in the face, until the hour arrives when the mind is ripened.'--EMERSON.

'Forty-six--ninety-eight--fifteen--sixty-three--twenty-seven,' little Silvio Sardi announced at the door of the Trattoria Buonaventura, at the top of his strident young voice.

When he had repeated it three times, every one understood. The expectant stir gave place, in general, to flat disappointment. It is unfortunate to be so sanguine that the weekly disappointment loses none of its force with repet.i.tion.