XXVI
THE PORTRAIT OF A LADY
How thankful he was that the old brick corner mansion in Madison Avenue,with age alone to recommend its architecture of the seventies--let itstand for what it was--had not been replaced by one of stone freshlypolished each year! The butler who opened the door was new and stifferthan the one of the old days; but he saw that the broad hall, with thestairs running across the rear in their second flight, was little morechanged than the exterior.
Five years since he had left that hall! He was in the thrall ofanticipation incident to seeing old associations with the eyes ofmanhood. The butler made to take his hat, but Jack, oblivious of theattention, went on to the doorway of the drawing-room, his look centeringon a portrait that faced the door. In this place of honor he saw aGainsborough. He uttered a note of pained surprise.
"There used to be another portrait here. Where is it?" he demanded.
The butler, who had heard that the son of the house was an invalid, hadnot recovered from his astonishment at the appearance of health of thereturned prodigal.
"Upstairs, sir," he answered. "When Mr. Wingfield got this prize lastyear, sir--"
Though the butler had spoken hardly a dozen words, he became consciousof something atmospheric that made him stop in the confusion of onewho finds that he has been garrulous with an explanation that doesnot explain.
"Please take this upstairs and bring back the other," said Jack.
"Yes, sir. You will be going to your room, sir, and while--" The butlerhad a feeling of a troublesome future between two masters.
"Now, please!" said Jack, settling into a chair to wait.
The Gainsborough countess, with her sweeping plumes, her rich, fleshy,soft tones, her charming affectation, which gave you, after the artinterest, no more human interest in her than in a draped model, wascarried upstairs and back came the picture that it had displaced. Theframe still bore at the bottom the title "Portrait of a Lady," underwhich it had been exhibited at the Salon many years ago. It was by ayoung artist, young then, named Sargent. He had the courage of hismethod, this youngster, no less than Hals, who also worked his wonderswith little paint when this suited his genius best. The gauze of the gownwhere it blended with the background at the edge of the line of arm wasso thin, seemingly made by a single brush-stroke, that it almost showedthe canvas.
A purpose in that gauze: The thinness of transparency of character! Theeyes of the portrait alone seemed deep. They were lambent and dark,looking straight ahead inquiringly, yet in the knowledge that no answerto the Great Riddle could change the course of her steps in the blindalley of a life whose tenement walls were lighted with her radiance. Youcould see through the gown, through the flesh of that frail figure, solacking in sensuousness yet so glowing with a quiet fire, to the soulitself. She seemed of such a delicate, chaste fragility that she could beshattered by a single harsh touch. There would be no outcry except thetinkle of the fragments. The feelings of anyone who witnessed thebreaking and heard the tinkle would be a criterion of his place in thewide margin between nerveless barbarism and sensitive gentility.
"I give! I give! I give!" was her message.
For a long time, he had no measure of it, Jack sat studying the portrait,set clear in many scenes of memory in review. It had been a face aschangeful as the travels, ever full of quick lights and quick shadows. Hehad had flashes of it as it was in the portrait in its very triumph ofresignation. He had known it laughing with stories of fancy which shetold him; sympathetic in tutorial illumination as she gave him lessonsand brought out the meaning of a line of poetry or a painting; beset bythe restlessness which meant another period of travel; intense as fireitself, gripping his hands in hers in a defiance of possession; in moodswhen both its sadness and its playfulness said, "I don't care!" andagain, fleeing from his presence to hide her tears.
It was with the new sight of man's maturity and soberness that he now sawhis mother, feeling the intangible and indestructible feminine majesty ofher; feeling her fragility which had brought forth her living soul in itsbeauty and impressionableness as a link with the cause of his Odyssey;believing that she was rejoicing in his strength and understandinggloriously that it had only brought him nearer to her.
After he had been to his room to dress he returned to the same chair andsettled into the same reverie that was sounding depths of his being thathe had never suspected. He was mutely asking her help, asking the supportof her frail, feminine courage for his masculine courage in the battlebefore him; and little tremors of nervous determination were runningthrough him, when he heard his father's footstep and became conscious ofhis father's presence in the doorway.
There was a moment, not of hesitation but of completing a thought, beforehe looked up and rose to his feet. In that moment, John Wingfield, Sr.had his own shock over the change in the room. The muscles of his facetwitched in irritation, as if his wife's very frailty were bafflinginvulnerability. Straightening his features into a mask, his eyes stillspoke his emotion in a kind of stare of resentment at the picture.
Then he saw his son's shoulders rising above his own and looked intohis son's eyes to see them smiling. Long isolated by his power fromclashes of will under the roof of his store or his house, the fatherhad a sense of the rippling flash of steel blades. A word might start ahavoc of whirling, burning sentences, confusing and stifling as adesert sandstorm; or it might bring a single killing flash out ofgathering clouds.
Thus the two were facing each other in a silence oppressive to both,which neither knew how to break, when relief came in the butler'sannouncement of dinner. Indeed, by such small, objective interruptions dodynamic inner impulses hang that this little thing may have suppressedthe lightnings.
The father was the first to speak. He hoped that a first day in New Yorkhad brought Jack a good appetite; certainly, he could see that the storehad given him a wonderful fit for a rush order.
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