Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  Beaton did not find the humiliation of the man who had humiliated him so sweet as he could have fancied it might be. He knew how it had come about, and that it was an effect of love for his child; it did not matter by what ungracious means she had brought him to know that he loved her better than his own will, that his wish for her happiness was stronger than his pride; it was enough that he was now somehow brought to give proof of it. Beaton could not be aware of all that dark coil of circumstance through which Dryfoos’s present action evolved itself; the worst of this was buried in the secret of the old man’s heart, a worm of perpetual torment. What was apparent to another was that he was broken by the sorrow that had fallen upon him, and it was this that Beaton respected and pitied in his impulse to be frank and kind in his answer.

  “No, I had no right to keep coming to your house in the way I did, unless — unless I meant more than I ever said.” Beaton added: “I don’t say that what you did was usual — in this country, at any rate; but I can’t say you were wrong. Since you speak to me about the matter, it’s only fair to myself to say that a good deal goes on in life without much thinking of consequences. That’s the way I excuse myself.”

  “And you say Mrs. Mandel done right?” asked Dryfoos, as if he wished simply to be assured of a point of etiquette.

  “Yes, she did right. I’ve nothing to complain of.”

  “That’s all I wanted to know,” said Dryfoos; but apparently he had not finished, and he did not go, though the silence that Beaton now kept gave him a chance to do so. He began a series of questions which had no relation to the matter in hand, though they were strictly personal to Beaton. “What countryman are you?” he asked, after a moment.

  “What countryman?” Beaton frowned back at him.

  “Yes, are you an American by birth?”

  “Yes; I was born in Syracuse.”

  “Protestant?”

  “My father is a Scotch Seceder.”

  “What business is your father in?”

  Beaton faltered and blushed; then he answered:

  “He’s in the monument business, as he calls it. He’s a tombstone cutter.” Now that he was launched, Beaton saw no reason for not declaring, “My father’s always been a poor man, and worked with his own hands for his living.” He had too slight esteem socially for Dryfoos to conceal a fact from him that he might have wished to blink with others.

  “Well, that’s right,” said Dryfoos. “I used to farm it myself. I’ve got a good pile of money together, now. At first it didn’t come easy; but now it’s got started it pours in and pours in; it seems like there was no end to it. I’ve got well on to three million; but it couldn’t keep me from losin’ my son. It can’t buy me back a minute of his life; not all the money in the world can do it!”

  He grieved this out as if to himself rather than to Beaton, who, scarcely ventured to say, “I know — I am very sorry—”

  “How did you come,” Dryfoos interrupted, “to take up paintin’?”

  “Well, I don’t know,” said Beaton, a little scornfully. “You don’t take a thing of that kind up, I fancy. I always wanted to paint.”

  “Father try to stop you?”

  “No. It wouldn’t have been of any use. Why—”

  “My son, he wanted to be a preacher, and I did stop him or I thought I did. But I reckon he was a preacher, all the same, every minute of his life. As you say, it ain’t any use to try to stop a thing like that. I reckon if a child has got any particular bent, it was given to it; and it’s goin’ against the grain, it’s goin’ against the law, to try to bend it some other way. There’s lots of good business men, Mr. Beaton, twenty of ’em to every good preacher?”

  “I imagine more than twenty,” said Beaton, amused and touched through his curiosity as to what the old man was driving at by the quaint simplicity of his speculations.

  “Father ever come to the city?”

  “No; he never has the time; and my mother’s an invalid.”

  “Oh! Brothers and sisters?”

  “Yes; we’re a large family.”

  “I lost two little fellers — twins,” said Dryfoos, sadly. “But we hain’t ever had but just the five. Ever take portraits?”

  “Yes,” said Beaton, meeting this zigzag in the queries as seriously as the rest. “I don’t think I am good at it.”

  Dryfoos got to his feet. “I wish you’d paint a likeness of my son. You’ve seen him plenty of times. We won’t fight about the price, don’t you be afraid of that.”

  Beaton was astonished, and in a mistaken way he was disgusted. He saw that Dryfoos was trying to undo Mrs. Mandel’s work practically, and get him to come again to his house; that he now conceived of the offence given him as condoned, and wished to restore the former situation. He knew that he was attempting this for Christine’s sake, but he was not the man to imagine that Dryfoos was trying not only to tolerate him, but to like him; and, in fact, Dryfoos was not wholly conscious himself of this end. What they both understood was that Dryfoos was endeavoring to get at Beaton through Conrad’s memory; but with one this was its dedication to a purpose of self sacrifice, and with the other a vulgar and shameless use of it.

  “I couldn’t do it,” said Beaton. “I couldn’t think of attempting it.”

  “Why not?” Dryfoos persisted. “We got some photographs of him; he didn’t like to sit very well; but his mother got him to; and you know how he looked.”

  “I couldn’t do it — I couldn’t. I can’t even consider it. I’m very sorry.

  I would, if it were possible. But it isn’t possible.”

  “I reckon if you see the photographs once”

  “It isn’t that, Mr. Dryfoos. But I’m not in the way of that kind of thing any more.”

  “I’d give any price you’ve a mind to name—”

  “Oh, it isn’t the money!” cried Beaton, beginning to lose control of himself.

  The old man did not notice him. He sat with his head fallen forward, and his chin resting on his folded hands. Thinking of the portrait, he saw Conrad’s face before him, reproachful, astonished, but all gentle as it looked when Conrad caught his hand that day after he struck him; he heard him say, “Father!” and the sweat gathered on his forehead. “Oh, my God!” he groaned. “No; there ain’t anything I can do now.”

  Beaton did not know whether Dryfoos was speaking to him or not. He started toward him. “Are you ill?”

  “No, there ain’t anything the matter,” said the old man. “But I guess I’ll lay down on your settee a minute.” He tottered with Beaton’s help to the aesthetic couch covered with a tiger-skin, on which Beaton had once thought of painting a Cleopatra; but he could never get the right model. As the old man stretched himself out on it, pale and suffering, he did not look much like a Cleopatra, but Beaton was struck with his effectiveness, and the likeness between him and his daughter; she would make a very good Cleopatra in some ways. All the time, while these thoughts passed through his mind, he was afraid Dryfoos would die. The old man fetched his breath in gasps, which presently smoothed and lengthened into his normal breathing. Beaton got him a glass of wine, and after tasting it he sat up.

  “You’ve got to excuse me,” he said, getting back to his characteristic grimness with surprising suddenness, when once he began to recover himself. “I’ve been through a good deal lately; and sometimes it ketches me round the heart like a pain.”

  In his life of selfish immunity from grief, Beaton could not understand this experience that poignant sorrow brings; he said to himself that Dryfoos was going the way of angina pectoris; as he began shuffling off the tiger-skin he said: “Had you better get up? Wouldn’t you like me to call a doctor?”

  “I’m all right, young man.” Dryfoos took his hat and stick from him, but he made for the door so uncertainly that Beaton put his hand under his elbow and helped him out, and down the stairs, to his coupe.

  “Hadn’t you better let me drive home with you?” he asked.

  “What?” said Dr
yfoos, suspiciously.

  Beaton repeated his question.

  “I guess I’m able to go home alone,” said Dryfoos, in a surly tone, and he put his head out of the window and called up “Home!” to the driver, who immediately started off and left Beaton standing beside the curbstone.

  XIV.

  Beaton wasted the rest of the day in the emotions and speculations which Dryfoos’s call inspired. It was not that they continuously occupied him, but they broke up the train of other thoughts, and spoiled him for work; a very little spoiled Beaton for work; he required just the right mood for work. He comprehended perfectly well that Dryfoos had made him that extraordinary embassy because he wished him to renew his visits, and he easily imagined the means that had brought him to this pass. From what he knew of that girl he did not envy her father his meeting with her when he must tell her his mission had failed. But had it failed? When Beaton came to ask himself this question, he could only perceive that he and Dryfoos had failed to find any ground of sympathy, and had parted in the same dislike with which they had met. But as to any other failure, it was certainly tacit, and it still rested with him to give it effect. He could go back to Dryfoos’s house, as freely as before, and it was clear that he was very much desired to come back. But if he went back it was also clear that he must go back with intentions more explicit than before, and now he had to ask himself just how much or how little he had meant by going there. His liking for Christine had certainly not increased, but the charm, on the other hand, of holding a leopardess in leash had not yet palled upon him. In his life of inconstancies, it was a pleasure to rest upon something fixed, and the man who had no control over himself liked logically enough to feel his control of some one else. The fact cannot other wise be put in terms, and the attraction which Christine Dryfoos had for him, apart from this, escapes from all terms, as anything purely and merely passional must. He had seen from the first that she was a cat, and so far as youth forecasts such things, he felt that she would be a shrew. But he had a perverse sense of her beauty, and he knew a sort of life in which her power to molest him with her temper could be reduced to the smallest proportions, and even broken to pieces. Then the consciousness of her money entered. It was evident that the old man had mentioned his millions in the way of a hint to him of what he might reasonably expect if he would turn and be his son-in-law. Beaton did not put it to himself in those words; and in fact his cogitations were not in words at all. It was the play of cognitions, of sensations, formlessly tending to the effect which can only be very clumsily interpreted in language. But when he got to this point in them, Beaton rose to magnanimity and in a flash of dramatic reverie disposed of a part of Dryfoos’s riches in placing his father and mother, and his brothers and sisters, beyond all pecuniary anxiety forever. He had no shame, no scruple in this, for he had been a pensioner upon others ever since a Syracusan amateur of the arts had detected his talent and given him the money to go and study abroad. Beaton had always considered the money a loan, to be repaid out of his future success; but he now never dreamt of repaying it; as the man was rich, he had even a contempt for the notion of repaying him; but this did not prevent him from feeling very keenly the hardships he put his father to in borrowing money from him, though he never repaid his father, either. In this reverie he saw himself sacrificed in marriage with Christine Dryfoos, in a kind of admiring self-pity, and he was melted by the spectacle of the dignity with which he suffered all the lifelong trials ensuing from his unselfishness. The fancy that Alma Leighton came bitterly to regret him, contributed to soothe and flatter him, and he was not sure that Margaret. Vance did not suffer a like loss in him.

  There had been times when, as he believed, that beautiful girl’s high thoughts had tended toward him; there had been looks, gestures, even words, that had this effect to him, or that seemed to have had it; and Beaton saw that he might easily construe Mrs. Horn’s confidential appeal to him to get Margaret interested in art again as something by no means necessarily offensive, even though it had been made to him as to a master of illusion. If Mrs. Horn had to choose between him and the life of good works to which her niece was visibly abandoning herself, Beaton could not doubt which she would choose; the only question was how real the danger of a life of good works was.

  As he thought of these two girls, one so charming and the other so divine, it became indefinitely difficult to renounce them for Christine Dryfoos, with her sultry temper and her earthbound ideals. Life had been so flattering to Beaton hitherto that he could not believe them both finally indifferent; and if they were not indifferent, perhaps he did not wish either of them to be very definite. What he really longed for was their sympathy; for a man who is able to walk round quite ruthlessly on the feelings of others often has very tender feelings of his own, easily lacerated, and eagerly responsive to the caresses of compassion. In this frame Beaton determined to go that afternoon, though it was not Mrs. Horn’s day, and call upon her in the hope of possibly seeing Miss Vance alone. As he continued in it, he took this for a sign and actually went. It did not fall out at once as he wished, but he got Mrs. Horn to talking again about her niece, and Mrs. Horn again regretted that nothing could be done by the fine arts to reclaim Margaret from good works.

  “Is she at home? Will you let me see her?” asked Beacon, with something of the scientific interest of a physician inquiring for a patient whose symptoms have been rehearsed to him. He had not asked for her before.

  “Yes, certainly,” said Mrs. Horn, and she went herself to call Margaret, and she did not return with her. The girl entered with the gentle grace peculiar to her; and Beaton, bent as he was on his own consolation, could not help being struck with the spiritual exaltation of her look. At sight of her, the vague hope he had never quite relinquished, that they might be something more than aesthetic friends, died in his heart. She wore black, as she often did; but in spite of its fashion her dress received a nun-like effect from the pensive absence of her face. “Decidedly,” thought Beaton, “she is far gone in good works.”

  But he rose, all the same, to meet her on the old level, and he began at once to talk to her of the subject he had been discussing with her aunt. He said frankly that they both felt she had unjustifiably turned her back upon possibilities which she ought not to neglect.

  “You know very well,” she answered, “that I couldn’t do anything in that way worth the time I should waste on it. Don’t talk of it, please. I suppose my aunt has been asking you to say this, but it’s no use. I’m sorry it’s no use, she wishes it so much; but I’m not sorry otherwise. You can find the pleasure at least of doing good work in it; but I couldn’t find anything in it but a barren amusement. Mr. Wetmore is right; for me, it’s like enjoying an opera, or a ball.”

  “That’s one of Wetmore’s phrases. He’d sacrifice anything to them.”

  She put aside the whole subject with a look. “You were not at Mr.

  Dryfoos’s the other day. Have you seen them, any of them, lately?”

  “I haven’t been there for some time, no,” said Beaton, evasively. But he thought if he was to get on to anything, he had better be candid. “Mr. Dryfoos was at my studio this morning. He’s got a queer notion. He wants me to paint his son’s portrait.”

  She started. “And will you—”

  “No, I couldn’t do such a thing. It isn’t in my way. I told him so. His son had a beautiful face an antique profile; a sort of early Christian type; but I’m too much of a pagan for that sort of thing.”

  “Yes.”

  “Yes,” Beaton continued, not quite liking her assent after he had invited it. He had his pride in being a pagan, a Greek, but it failed him in her presence, now; and he wished that she had protested he was none. “He was a singular creature; a kind of survival; an exile in our time and place. I don’t know: we don’t quite expect a saint to be rustic; but with all his goodness Conrad Dryfoos was a country person. If he were not dying for a cause you could imagine him milking.” Beaton intended a contempt tha
t came from the bitterness of having himself once milked the family cow.

  His contempt did not reach Miss Vance. “He died for a cause,” she said.

  “The holiest.”

  “Of labor?”

  “Of peace. He was there to persuade the strikers to be quiet and go home.”

  “I haven’t been quite sure,” said Beaton. “But in any case he had no business there. The police were on hand to do the persuading.”

  “I can’t let you talk so!” cried the girl. “It’s shocking! Oh, I know it’s the way people talk, and the worst is that in the sight of the world it’s the right way. But the blessing on the peacemakers is not for the policemen with their clubs.”

  Beaton saw that she was nervous; he made his reflection that she was altogether too far gone in good works for the fine arts to reach her; he began to think how he could turn her primitive Christianity to the account of his modern heathenism. He had no deeper design than to get flattered back into his own favor far enough to find courage for some sort of decisive step. In his heart he was trying to will whether he should or should not go back to Dryfoos’s house. It could not be from the caprice that had formerly taken him; it must be from a definite purpose; again he realized this. “Of course; you are right,” he said. “I wish I could have answered that old man differently. I fancy he was bound up in his son, though he quarrelled with him, and crossed him. But I couldn’t do it; it wasn’t possible.” He said to himself that if she said “No,” now, he would be ruled by her agreement with him; and if she disagreed with him, he would be ruled still by the chance, and would go no more to the Dryfooses’. He found himself embarrassed to the point of blushing when she said nothing, and left him, as it were, on his own hands. “I should like to have given him that comfort; I fancy he hasn’t much comfort in life; but there seems no comfort in me.”

  He dropped his head in a fit attitude for compassion; but she poured no pity upon it.