The Sins of the Children Part 8

And then Peter bent again over his letter, and in writing to the little girl whom he adored with all his heart, he was safe.

PART TWO

THE CITY

I

"Mother took the car to Lord & Taylor's," said Belle, looking herself over in the long gla.s.s with a scrutiny that was eventually entirely favorable. "I guess it'll do us good to walk."

"I'd simply love to," said Betty. "But I must just run in and tell father I'm going to have dinner with you. I won't be a minute."

"All right, my dear. Time's cheap. Don't hurry on my account."

Belle went over to the dressing-table. She had only recently powdered her nose from the elaborate apparatus from which she rarely permitted herself to be separated, but a little more would do no harm. She burst into involuntary song as she performed a trick which she might so well have afforded to leave to those ladies of doubtful summers to whose Anno Domini complexions the thick disguise of powder may perhaps be useful.

Tucked into her blouse there was a letter from Kenyon which had come a week ago. It was only a matter of days before she was to see him again.

And Betty ran out of her bedroom and along a pa.s.sage which led to the studio. A stretch of cloudless sky could be seen through a recess window, and the far-below flat roofs of the old buildings on the corner of Gramercy Park. She knocked and waited. There was a grunt, and she went in.

Into the large lofty room--a cross between a barn and an attic--a hard north light was falling with cruel accuracy. It showed up stacks of unframed canva.s.ses with their faces turned to the dark wall and the imperfections of several ma.s.sive pieces of oak, the worn appearance of the stained floor, the age of the Persian rugs and of a florid woman who sat with studied grace and an anxious expression of pleasant thought on the dais, with one indecently beringed hand resting with strained nonchalance on the arm of her chair and the other about an ineffably bored Pekingese.

Ranken Townsend, the successful portrait painter, had backed away from his almost life-size canvas, and with his fine untidy head on one side and irritation in his red-grey beard was glaring at it with savage antagonism.

The lady on the dais had crow's-feet round her made-up eyes, and a chin that could not be made anything but double however high she held it.

Also--as the north light seemed to take a hideous delight in proving--her figure was irreclaimably dumpy and plump. The lady on the canvas, however,--such is Art that runs an expensive studio, good wines and well-preserved Coronas,--was slight and lovely and patrician, and should she stand up, at least six feet tall. No wonder Townsend grunted and glared at the commercial fraud in front of him, at which, in his good, idealistic, hungry Paris days he would have slung wet brushes and the honest curses of the Place Pigalle. He was selling his gift once more for five thousand dollars. His wife dressed at Bendels.

Anger and irritation went out of the painter's eyes when he saw the sweet face that peeked in. "h.e.l.lo, sweetheart!" he sang out. "Come in and bring a touch of sun. Mrs. Vandervelde, I'd like you to meet my little girl."

Without turning her head or breaking a pose that she considered to have become, after many serious attempts, extremely effective, the much-paragraphed lady, whose lizard-covered mansion in Fifth Avenue was always one of the objects touched upon by the megaphone men in rubber-neck wagons, murmured a few words. "How d'you do, child? How well you look."

Betty smothered a laugh. Mrs. Vandervelde had acquired the habit of looking through her ears. "I'm going home with Belle, father, and I shall stay to dinner. But I'll be back before ten."

"Will you? All right." He tilted up her face and kissed it. "I'm dining at the National Arts Club to-night, and I guess I shall be late." He pointed his brush at the canvas and made the grimace of a man who's obliged to swallow a big dose of evil-smelling physic. So Betty, who understood and was sorry, put his hand to her lips, bowed to the indifferent lady and slipped away. The room was perceptibly colder when she left. The picture was already four thousand two hundred dollars toward completion, and Betty was just as much relieved as her father, who returned angrily to work to paint in the diamonds. He was sick of that smile.

While waiting for the elevator, Belle gave a rather self-conscious laugh and lifted her tight skirt quickly. "Seen the latest, Betty?" She showed a tiny square watch edged with diamonds worn as a garter.

"Cunning, isn't it?"

"Why, I should just think it was! Where did you buy it?"

"Buy it? My dear, can you see me paying three hundred dollars for something that doesn't show? Harry Spearman gave it to me last night, and put it on in his car on the way to the Pierrot Club."

"Put it on?"

Belle threw back her beautiful head and burst out laughing. "You said that just like the Quaker girl in the play at the Hudson. Why shouldn't he put it on? It amused him and didn't hurt me. He's a sculptor, and like the bus-conductor, 'legs is no treat to him,' anyway."

They entered the elevator, dropped nine floors to the wide foyer of the palatial apartment house, and went out into the street. It was a typical New York October afternoon--the sky blue and clear, the sun warm and the air alive with that pinch of ozone of which no other city in the world can boast. The girls instinctively made their way towards Fifth Avenue, warily dodging the amazing traffic, the struggling wagons and plunging horses going in and out of buildings in course of ear-splitting construction, and coal-chutes in the middle of the sidewalks.

"But you were not at the opening of the Pierrot Club last night," said Betty. "I heard you tell Mrs. Guthrie that you were dining with the Delanos and going to their theatre party."

"I know. But Harry Spearman sent round a note in the afternoon asking me to have dinner with him at Delmonico's and go on to the Club to dance. I had such a severe headache that I rang up Mrs. Delano and reluctantly begged to be excused. To quote Nicholas, theatre parties with elderly people bore me stiff. As it was, I had a perfectly corking time till one o'clock and danced every dance."

"Did you tell Mrs. Guthrie?"

"For Heaven's sake, Betty, what _do_ you take me for? Mother isn't my school-teacher and I don't have to ask her for permission to live. I have my latch-key and dear little mother is perfectly happy. As she never knows what I do she never has to worry about me; and, as she always says, I can only be young once." A curious little smile played round her very red lips. "It's true that Harry Spearman is rather unmanageable when he gets one alone in a car after several hours of champagne and ragtime, but--oh, well, I guess I can take care of myself.

Do you know, I don't think the Pierrot Club's going to be as good this winter. It's a year old, you see. Everybody's going to the new room at the Plaza--that is, everybody back from the country. It's rather a pity, I think. I like the Club, but the motto of New York is 'Follow the Crowd' and so the Plaza's for me."

Betty's admiration for her school-fellow and closest friend was invincible and her loyalty very true. It made her therefore a little uneasy to notice about her a growing artificiality which was neither attractive nor characteristic. She knew better than anyone that Belle was a remarkable girl. She had a kind heart. She possessed that rarest of gifts, a sense of grat.i.tude, and if her talent for writing had been properly developed she might eventually have made her mark. She had a quick perception--sympathy and imagination not often found in so young a girl--an uncanny ear for the right word--and if she chose to exercise it, quite an unusual power of concentration. It seemed to Betty to be such a pity that, just at the moment when Belle left school with her mind filled with ideals and the ambition to make something of herself and do things, the Doctor found himself a rich man. The incentive to work which the constant need for economy had awakened in her went out like a snuffed candle. From having before been in the habit of saying, with eager enthusiasm, "I'm _going_ to do such and such a thing, whatever the odds," she immediately began to say: "Oh, my dear, what's the use?" Everything for which she had intended to work became now hers for the asking. Her father gave her a free hand in the matter of entertaining her young friends. She could order what books she wished to read from Brentano's, and she had a generous allowance on which to dress. Like a chameleon she quickly changed the rather dull colors of her former surroundings for those bright ones which the sudden accession to wealth made it easy to acquire. Her outlook was no longer that of the daughter of an overworked general pract.i.tioner whose income had to be carefully managed in order to live not too far up-town and educate a family of four, but of a debutante whose parents entertained distinguished men and women in a fashionable street and whose friends were equally well off. Her inherited and cultivated energy was, of course, obliged to find vent in some direction, since it was not employed in the development of her talent; and it was now burnt up in a restless search of enjoyment, a constant series of engagements to lunch and dine, and do the theatre and dance,--especially dance. The ordinary healthy, high-spirited young man, who had not much to say for himself, quickly bored her. Her wits required to be kept sharp, her latent intelligence needed something on which to feed. It was therefore natural that she should throw her smiles at men much older and far more experienced than herself and who, from the fact that they did not intend to give anything for nothing, exercised her ingenuity and native wit to keep them in order. In a word, she found that playing with fire and avoiding being burned kept that side of her in good condition which, in her old circ.u.mstances, would have been devoted to work. And so with a sort of conscious superficiality she had allowed herself to flit from one unmeaning incident to another and entered into a series of artificial flirtations with men who had no scruples and one pa.s.sion simply in order to kill time. Her carelessness led her into episodes, the merest hint of which would have thrown dear little Mrs. Guthrie into a panic, and her coolness permitted her to escape from them with perhaps more ingenuity than dignity. Even upon her return from England with her heart full of Nicholas Kenyon, and with a desire to see him again that kept her awake at night, she frittered away her superfluous energy with this Harry Spearman, whom no woman with any respect for her daughter would willingly allow within a mile of her, even if properly chaperoned.

Betty, being one of those girls who had never been suspected of any talent, but who nevertheless had it in her to perform a far more womanly and beautiful thing than to write books or plays--to be in fact a good wife to the man she loved and a good mother to his children--looked at Belle's way of living with growing anxiety. She was not a prude or a prig. She had not been allowed out in the world with eyes all curious to see the truth of things through a veil of false modesty. Her father, a wise and humane man, had seen to that. She delighted in enjoyment, went to the theatre whenever she had the opportunity and danced herself out of shoes. But, not being ambitious to shine, she was content to apply her energy to the ordinary work that came to her to do,--the practical, everyday, undramatic, domestic things that cropped up hourly in the strange house where the father was an artist and the mother suffered from individualism and was a leader of new movements. Leaving school to find a home in a constant state of chaos, her father rarely out of his studio, her mother always in the throes of committee meetings and speech-making,--she knuckled down to set it in order, to clear out an extravagant cook with an appet.i.te for hysterics, and a sloppy Irish waitress whose hairpins fell everywhere and whose loose hand dropped things of value almost before it touched them. This done she found others and appointed herself housekeeper, and the duties of this position kept her both busy and happy,--the one being hyphenated to the other. But even if her father had been, like Dr. Guthrie, a rich man instead of one who lived up to every penny that he earned and generally several thousand dollars beyond, she had nothing in her character that, however little she was occupied, would have allowed her to look at life from the modern standpoint of Belle and her other friends. She was--and rejoiced in the fact--old-fashioned. Most of her ideas were what is now scoffingly called "early Victorian," because they were not loose and careless, and the many things that Belle and others found "fearfully amusing" were, to her, impossible. She didn't, for instance, leave her petticoat in the cloak-room when she went to dances, so that her partners might find her better fun. She didn't go to tea alone with mere acquaintances in bachelor apartments, or for taxi rides with her partner between dances. She never made herself cheap, and went out of her way to avoid men whose eyes ran calculatingly over her figure. These things and many others merely appealed to her as the perquisite of those girls who did not place a very high value upon self-respect.

The Guthries lived at 55 East Fifty-second Street. It was the house which the man whom Dr. Guthrie called his benefactor had built for himself and left to the doctor whom he was proud to endow. The architect who had been employed had been given a free hand. He had not been required to mix his styles or perform extraordinary architectural gymnastics of any kind. The result of his efforts was good. It was a house such as one sees in one of the numerous old London squares within sound of the mellow clock of St. James's Palace. Addison might have lived in it, or Walpole or Pepys. Its face was scrupulously plain and its doorway was modelled on those of the Adams period. Standing between two very florid examples of modern architecture it made one think of the portrait of a charming early Victorian gentle-woman between the photographs of two present-day chorus ladies in hoopskirts and a cloud of chiffon. The rooms were large and lofty and were all furnished with great simplicity and taste. There was nothing in them except old furniture which had been collected in England by its late owner, piece by piece, and its oak chests, armoires and secretaries, china closets, corner pieces and Chippendale chairs were very good to look at and live with. So also were the pictures,--Cattermoles, Bartalozzi engravings, colored prints and a half-dozen priceless oil paintings by old masters,--which made the small, cunning, unscrupulous, eager mouths of the numerous art collectors of New York water with desire. The library, too, out of which led the Doctor's laboratory, was almost unique, and contained first editions and specimens of rare and beautiful book-binding which filled the Doctor's heart with constant pleasure and delight. It was nearly a year before the man who had struggled so hard to lift himself out of his father's small farm could believe that he wasn't walking in his sleep when he pa.s.sed through these beautiful rooms, and often he was obliged to pinch himself to make sure that he was not dreaming.

There was however one room in this house which would have given its late owner many shudders to enter. This was the little mother's own particular room, the windows of which looked out upon that row of small, red, bandbox-like houses opposite which had managed to remain standing in spite of the rapacious hands of reconstruction companies which are never so happy as when destroying old landmarks and tearing down old buildings. Into this room Mrs. Guthrie had placed all the furniture of her first sitting-room,--cheap, late Victorian stuff of which she had been so inordinately and properly proud when she started housekeeping with the young doctor. From these things Mrs. Guthrie could not be parted. They were all redolent with good and tender memories and were to her mind far more valuable and more beautiful than all the priceless old oak pieces put together.

Curiously enough--or perhaps not curiously at all--this was Peter's favorite room, too, and he never entered it without renewing his vows to climb to the top of his own tree, as his father had done. Belle, Graham and Ethel all laughed at the little mother for clinging to this "rubbish," as they called it, which was so out of keeping with the rest of the house. But Peter sympathized with her and never failed while sitting there in the evening, in close and intimate conversation with the dear little woman who meant so much to him, to get from it a new desire to emulate his father and make his own way in the same brave spirit.

When Belle and Betty arrived at East Fifty-second Street--a little tired after their walk--they found Graham in the hall. "Oh, h.e.l.lo!" said he.

"Been shopping?"

"No," answered Belle, "nothing tempted us. We've walked all the way home from Gramercy Park,--some walk! Everything I've got on is sticking to me. Aren't you home early, Graham?"

Graham nodded. "Nothing doing," he said. "Besides, I'm dining early." He turned to Belle with a rather curious smile. "I thought you were to be with the Delanos last night."

Belle tilted her chin. "I was. I dined there, went to the Winter Garden and then danced at Bustan.o.by's."

"I caught sight of you in Spearman's car somewhere about one o'clock in the morning. Did he drive you home?"

"I guess he did, dear boy," said Belle, blandly, "and by the way, we saw you, going in to supper somewhere with a girl with a Vogue face and an open-air back!"

Graham laughed. "That's different," he said. "Spearman isn't the sort of man I care to see my sister going about with alone. I advise you to be a little more fastidious."

"Thank you, Graham darling," said Belle, quite un-moved, "but I'm old enough to choose my own friends without your b.u.t.ting in. Just for fun, would you tell me what _you_ know about the word fastidious?"

"That's different," said Graham again. And he went up-stairs to his own room with rather heavy feet.

Belle looked at Betty and a little smile curled up the corners of her beautiful red mouth. "I don't see anything wrong with Harry Spearman, and he's an old friend of the Delanos. My word, but isn't Graham a good sport?"

Presently when they went into the drawing-room they found little Mrs.

Guthrie sitting in front of the table with a more than usually happy smile, and Ethel lying on the sofa looking the very epitome of an interesting invalid. With a slightly critical frown on her pretty face she was reading Wells's latest novel,--a full-blooded effort well calculated to improve the condition of a girl of fifteen who had not gone back to school on account of anaemia.

With quick intuition, and one glance at her mother's face, Belle knew she had heard from Peter. "Any news?" she asked eagerly.

"Yes, darling,--the very best of news. A Marconi from my boy," said Mrs.

Guthrie.