The Maker of Opportunities Part 13

"Don't boast, worse vagabonds than you have been tamed--come now, what shall she be--blonde or brunette?"

Burnett shrugged his shoulders. "I'm quite indifferent--pigment is cheap nowadays."

"Now you're scoffing."

Ross Burnett leaned back in his chair and smiled at the chandelier.

Women had long ago been omitted from his list of possibilities. But Patricia was not to be denied.

"Married you shall be," she said with the air of an oracle, "and before the year is out. I swear it."

"But why do you want me to----"

"Revenge!" she said tragically. "You helped marry me to Mort."

And the young matron was as good as her word, though her method may have been unusual.

It came about in the following manner, and Burnett's brother and Miss Millicent Darrow were her unconscious agents. Miss Darrow had gone to the Academy Exhibit. The rooms were comfortably crowded. She entered conscious of a certain dignity and repose in the character of her surroundings. She brought forth her catalogue, resolutely opened it to the first page and in a moment was oblivious to the people about her.

She did not belong to the great army "who know what they like." She had an instinctive perception of the good, and found herself not a little amazed at the amount of masterly work by younger men whose names she had never heard. It was an unpleasant commentary upon the mentality and taste of the set in which she moved, and she was conscious of a sense of guilt; for was she not a reflection of the shortcomings of those she was so ready to condemn? "The Plain--Evening--William Hazelton"--a direct rendering of an upland field at dusk, between portraits by well-known men; "Sylvia--Henry Marlow"--a girl in a green bodice painted with knowledge and a.s.surance.

In another room were the things in a higher key--she knew them at a glance; and on the opposite wall a full-length portrait that looked like a Sargent. She was puzzled at the color, which was different from that of any man she remembered. The Sargents she knew were grouped in another room--and yet there was here the force and breadth of the master. She experienced the same perplexity--"Agatha--Philip Burnett,"

said the catalogue. She sank upon a bench before it and gave herself up to quiet rapture.

"If I were a man," she said at last, "that is how I should wish to paint, the drawing of Sargent, the poetry of Whistler, the grace of Alexander, the color of Benson. Philip Burnett," she apostrophized, "I'm a Philistine. Forgive me."

CHAPTER XII

It was very pleasant under the subdued lights from above. She followed the sweep of the drapery with delighted eye, taking an almost sensuous pleasure in the relation of color and the grace of the arms and throat--the simplicity of the modeling and the admirable characterization.

She found herself repeating:

"'And those that were good shall be happy, They shall sit in a golden chair; They shall splash at a ten-league canvas With brushes of comet's hair.'

"Philip Burnett, I wonder if you're good? You ought to be. I'd be good if I could paint like that. I'd work for an age at a sitting, too. How could one ever be tired making adagios in color? Oh!" she sighed, "how good it must be to amount to something!"

A procession of agreeable, vacuous faces pa.s.sed before the canvas, creatures of a common fate, garbed in the uniform of convention, carrying the polite weapons of Vanity Fair, each like the others and as uninteresting. The few who wore the bright chevrons of distinction had marched with the throng for a time, but had gone back to their own. She wondered if it would really matter if she never saw them again; of course, the women--but the men. Would she care?

Was there not another life? It beckoned to her. What was Philip Burnett like? Could he be young and handsome as well as gifted? The vacuous faces vanished and in their place she could see this young genius--Antinous and Hercules combined--standing before this canvas living for the mere joy of work. Here was her answer. Was she to flit through enchanted gardens other people had planted, sipping only at the perfumed petals while the honey to be garnered was in plain sight?

A voice broke in just beside her:

"It's convincing, but I tell you, Burnett, the arm's too long."

"Perhaps. Not bad, though, for a new man. You know we Burnetts are an exceptional race."

The men moved away and the other's reply was lost in the murmur of the crowd. Miss Darrow turned to follow them with her eyes--what a big fellow he was! with an admirable profile, a straight nose, a waxed mustache, and a chin like the one on the mask of Brutus. Conceited, of course! All artists were conceited. And who was that with him--Mortimer Crabb? Yes, and there was the bride talking to the Pendergasts.

"Why, Milly, dear!" Mrs. Pendergast pa.s.sed an incurious but observant eye over her acquaintance. "I thought you were in Aiken. What a lovely hat! Are you going to the Inghams? What will you wear? Isn't it restful here?"

Miss Darrow politely acquiesced and attempted replies, but her eyes strayed toward the Burnett portrait.

"Stunning," continued Mrs. Pendergast. "A new man just over. Quite too clever. Wonderful color, isn't it? Like a ripe pomegranate."

"Have you met him?"

"No. He belongs to the Westchester Burnetts, though. Mrs. Hopkinson. So glad. Is Frederick here?"

The agreeable lady had made of the portion of the galleries in the neighborhood of the Burnett portrait a semblance of her own busy drawing-room. Other acquaintances came up and Miss Darrow was soon lost in the maze of small talk. A broad pair of shoulders were thrust forward into her group, and Miss Darrow found herself looking into a pair of quizzical gray eyes which were beaming a rather frank admiration into hers. "Miss Darrow--Mr. Burnett," Patricia Crabb was saying; and Millicent Darrow was conscious that in a moment the new arrival had quietly and cleverly appropriated her and was taking her to the opposite side of the room where he found for her a Winslow Homer of rocks and stormy splendor.

"Why is it," she asked, after her first enthusiasm, "that the work of the artist so seldom suggests its creator's personality?"

"The perversity of the human animal," he laughed. "That's the system of justice of the great Republic of Art, Miss Darrow. If we lose a characteristic here, we gain it somewhere else. Rather a nice balance, don't you think?"

"You hardly look the poet, Mr. Burnett--you don't mind my saying so?"

she laughed. "And if you do dream, you do it with your eyes very wide open."

Mr. Burnett's brows were tangled in bewilderment. "I'm really not much given to dreaming. I'm rather busy, you know."

"It's splendid of you. You've worked long?"

"Er--yes--since I left college," he said, the tangle in his brows suddenly unraveling. A smile now illuminated his rather whimsical eyes.

Miss Darrow found herself laughing frankly into them.

"Art is long--you must be at least--thirty."

"Less," he corrected. "Youth is my compensation for not being a lawyer--or a broker."

She was conscious of the personal note in their conversation, but she made no effort to avoid it. This genius of less than thirty gave every token of sanity and good fellowship.

"Who is Agatha?" she asked suddenly.

"A--er--a friend of mine in Paris."

"Oh!" she said, in confusion.

And then:

"The face is of the East--the Slav--did you choose her for that character?"

"Not at all. She was--er--just--just a sitter--a commission, you know."

"How interesting!"

They had made the rounds of the room and were now facing the portrait again.

"It was lucky to have so good a model," he continued. "One doesn't always. Have you ever posed, Miss Darrow?"