Jerome Wilmer sat in the garden, painting in a background, with the
carelessness of ease. He seemed to be dabbing little touches at the
canvas, as a spontaneous kind of fun not likely to result in anything
serious, save, perhaps, the necessity of scrubbing them off afterwards,
like a too adventurous child. Mary Brinsley, in her lilac print, stood a
few paces away, the sun on her hair, and watched him.
"Paris is very becoming to you," she said at last.
"What do you mean?" asked Wilmer, glancing up, and then beginning to
consider her so particularly that she stepped aside, her brows knitted,
with an admonishing,
"Look out! you'll get me into the landscape."
"You're always in the landscape. What do you mean about Paris?"
"You look so--so travelled, so equal to any place, and Paris in
particular because it's the finest."
Other people also had said that, in their various ways. He had the
distinction set by nature upon a muscular body and a rather small head,
well poised. His hair, now turning gray, grew delightfully about the
temples, and though it was brushed back in the style of a man who never
looks at himself twice when once will do, it had a way of seeming
entirely right. His brows were firm, his mouth determined, and the close
pointed beard brought his face to a delicate finish. Even his clothes,
of the kind that never look new, had fallen into lines of easy use.
"You needn't guy me," he said, and went on painting. But he flashed his
sudden smile at her. "Isn't New England becoming to me, too?"
"Yes, for the summer. It's over-powered. In the winter Aunt Celia calls
you 'Jerry Wilmer.' She's quite topping then. But the minute you appear
with European labels on your trunks and that air of speaking foreign
lingo, she gives out completely. Every time she sees your name in the
paper she forgets you went to school at the Academy and built the fires.
She calls you 'our boarder' then, for as much as a week and a half."
"Quit it, Mary," said he, smiling at her again.
"Well," said Mary, yet without turning, "I must go and weed a while."
"No," put in Wilmer, innocently; "he won't be over yet. He had a big
mail. I brought it to him."
Mary blushed, and made as if to go. She was a woman of thirty-five, well
poised, and sweet through wholesomeness. Her face had been cut on a
regular pattern, and then some natural influence had touched it up
beguilingly with contradictions. She swung back, after her one tentative
step, and sobered.
"How do you think he is looking?" she asked.
"Prime."
"Not so--"
"Not so morbid as when I was here last summer," he helped her out. "Not
by any means. Are you going to marry him, Mary?" The question had only a
civil emphasis, but a warmer tone informed it. Mary grew pink under the
morning light, and Jerome went on: "Yes, I have a perfect right to talk
about it, I don't travel three thousand miles every summer to ask you to
marry me without earning some claim to frankness. I mentioned that to
Marshby himself. We met at the station, you remember, the day I came. We
walked down together. He spoke about my sketching, and I told him I had
come on my annual pilgrimage, to ask Mary Brinsley to marry me."
"Jerome!"
"Yes, I did. This is my tenth pilgrimage. Mary, will you marry me?"
"No," said Mary, softly, but as if she liked him very much. "No,
Jerome."
Wilmer squeezed a tube on his palette and regarded the color frowningly.
"Might as well, Mary," said he. "You'd have an awfully good time in
Paris."
She was perfectly still, watching him, and he went on:
"Now you're thinking if Marshby gets the consulate you'll be across the
water anyway, and you could run down to Paris and see the sights. But it
wouldn't be the same thing. It's Marshby you like, but you'd have a
better time with me."
"It's a foregone conclusion that the consulship will be offered him,"
said Mary. Her eyes were now on the path leading through the garden and
over the wall to the neighboring house where Marshby lived.
"Then you will marry and go with him. Ah, well, that's finished. I
needn't come another summer. When you are in Paris, I can show you the
boulevards and cafés."
"It is more than probable he won't accept the consulship."
"Why?" He held his palette arrested in mid-air and stared at her.
"He is doubtful of himself--doubtful whether he is equal to so
responsible a place."
"Bah! it's not an embassy."
"No; but he fancies he has not the address, the social gifts--in fact,
he shrinks from it." Her face had taken on a soft distress; her eyes
appealed to him. She seemed to be confessing, for the other man,
something that might well be misunderstood. Jerome, ignoring the flag of
her discomfort, went on painting, to give her room for confidence.
"Is it that old plague-spot?" he asked. "Just what aspect does it bear
to him? Why not talk freely about it?"
"It is the old remorse. He misunderstood his brother when they two were
left alone in the world. He forced the boy out of evil associations when
he ought to have led him. You know the rest of it. The boy was
desperate. He killed himself."
"When he was drunk. Marshby wasn't responsible."
"No, not directly. But you know that kind of mind. It follows hidden
causes. That's why his essays are so good. Anyway, it has crippled him.
It came when he was too young, and it marked him for life. He has an
inveterate self-distrust."
"Ah, well," said Winner, including the summer landscape in a wave of his
brush, "give up the consulship. Let him give it up. It isn't as if he
hadn't a roof. Settle down in his house there, you two, and let him
write his essays, and you--just be happy."
She ignored her own part in the prophecy completely and finally. "It
isn't the consulship as the consulship," she responded. "It is the life
abroad I want for him. It would give him--well, it would give him what
it has given you. His work would show it." She spoke hotly, and at once
Jerome saw himself envied for his brilliant cosmopolitan life, the
bounty of his success fairly coveted for the other man. It gave him a
curious pang. He felt, somehow, impoverished, and drew his breath more
meagrely. But the actual thought in his mind grew too big to be
suppressed, and he stayed his hand to look at her.
"That's not all," he said.
"All what?"
"That's not the main reason why you want him to go. You think if he
really asserted himself, really knocked down the spectre of his old
distrust and stamped on it, he would be a different man. If he had once
proved himself, as we say of younger chaps, he could go on proving."
"No," she declared, in nervous loyalty. She was like a bird fluttering
to save her nest. "No! You are wrong. I ought not to have talked about
him at all. I shouldn't to anybody else. Only, you are so kind."
"It's easy to be kind," said Jerome, gently, "when there's nothing else
left us."
She stood wilfully swaying a branch of the tendrilled arbor, and, he
subtly felt, so dissatisfied with herself for her temporary disloyalty
that she felt alien to them both: Marshby because she had wronged him by
admitting another man to this intimate knowledge of him, and the other
man for being her accomplice.
"Don't be sorry," he said, softly. "You haven't been naughty."
But she had swung round to some comprehension of what he had a right to
feel.
"It makes one selfish," she said, "to want--to want things to come out
right."
"I know. Well, can't we make them come out right? He is sure of the
consulship?"
"Practically."
"You want to be assured of his taking it."
She did not answer; but her face lighted, as if to a new appeal. Jerome
followed her look along the path. Marshby himself was coming. He was no
weakling. He swung along easily with the stride of a man accustomed to
using his body well. He had not, perhaps, the urban air, and yet there
was nothing about him which would not have responded at once to a more
exacting civilization. Jerome knew his face,--knew it from their college
days together and through these annual visits of his own; but now, as
Marshby approached, the artist rated him not so much by the friendly as
the professional eye. He saw a man who looked the scholar and the
gentleman, keen though not imperious of glance. His visage, mature even
for its years, had suffered more from emotion than from deeds or the
assaults of fortune. Marshby had lived the life of thought, and,
exaggerating action, had failed to fit himself to any form of it. Wilmer
glanced at his hands, too, as they swung with his walk, and then
remembered that the professional eye had already noted them and laid
their lines away for some suggestive use. As he looked, Marshby stopped
in his approach, caught by the singularity of a gnarled tree limb. It
awoke in him a cognizance of nature's processes, and his face lighted
with the pleasure of it.
"So you won't marry me?" asked Wilmer, softly, in that pause.
"Don't!" said Mary.
"Why not, when you won't tell whether you're engaged to him or not? Why
not, anyway? If I were sure you'd be happier with me, I'd snatch you out
of his very maw. Yes, I would. Are you sure you like him, Mary?"
The girl did not answer, for Marshby had started again. Jerome got the
look in her face, and smiled a little, sadly.
"Yes," he said, "you're sure."
Mary immediately felt unable to encounter them together. She gave
Marshby a good-morning, and, to his bewilderment, made some excuse about
her weeding and flitted past him on the path. His eyes followed her, and
when they came back to Wilmer the artist nodded brightly.
"I've just asked her," he said.
"Asked her?" Marshby was about to pass him, pulling out his glasses and
at the same time peering at the picture with the impatience of his
near-sighted look.
"There, don't you do that!" cried Jerome, stopping, with his brush in
air. "Don't you come round and stare over my shoulder. It makes me
nervous ad the devil. Step back there--there by that mullein. So! I've
got to face my protagonist. Yes, I've been asking her to marry me."
Marshby stiffened. His head went up, his jaw tightened. He looked the
jealous ire of the male.
"What do you want me to stand here for?" he asked, irritably.
"But she refused me," said Wilmer, cheerfully. "Stand still, that's a
good fellow. I'm using you."
Marshby had by an effort pulled himself together. He dismissed Mary from
his mind, as he wished to drive her from the other man's speech.
"I've been reading the morning paper on your exhibition," he said,
bringing out the journal from his pocket. "They can't say enough about
you."
"Oh, can't they! Well, the better for me. What are they pleased to
discover?"
"They say you see round corners and through deal boards. Listen." He
struck open the paper and read: "'A man with a hidden crime upon his
soul will do well to elude this greatest of modern magicians. The man
with a secret tells it the instant he sits down before Jerome Wilmer.
Wilmer does not paint faces, brows, hands. He paints hopes, fears, and
longings. If we could, in our turn, get to the heart of his mystery! If
we could learn whether he says to himself: "I see hate in that face,
hypocrisy, greed. I will paint them. That man is not man, but cur. He
shall fawn on my canvas." Or does he paint through a kind of inspired
carelessness, and as the line obeys the eye and hand, so does the
emotion live in the line?'"
"Oh, gammon!" snapped Wilmer.
"Well, do you?" said Marshby, tossing the paper to the little table
where Mary's work-box stood.
"Do I what? Spy and then paint, or paint and find I've spied? Oh, I
guess I plug along like any other decent workman. When it comes to that,
how do you write your essays?"
"I! Oh! That's another pair of sleeves. Your work is colossal. I'm still
on cherry-stones."
"Well," said Wilmer, with slow incisiveness, "you've accomplished one
thing I'd sell my name for. You've got Mary Brinsley bound to you so
fast that neither lure nor lash can stir her. I've tried it--tried Paris
even, the crudest bribe there is. No good! She won't have me."
At her name, Marshby straightened again, and there was fire in his eye.
Wilmer, sketching him in, seemed to gain distinct impulse from the pose,
and worked the faster.
"Don't move," he ordered. "There, that's right. So, you see, you're the
successful chap. I'm the failure. She won't have me." There was such
feeling in his tone that Marshby's expression softened comprehendingly.
He understood a pain that prompted even such a man to rash avowal.
"I don't believe we'd better speak of her," he said, in awkward
kindliness.
"I want to," returned Wilmer. "I want to tell you how lucky you are."
Again that shade of introspective bitterness clouded Marshby's face.
"Yes," said he, involuntarily. "But how about her? Is _she_ lucky?"
"Yes," replied Jerome, steadily. "She's got what she wants. She won't
worship you any the less because you don't worship yourself. That's the
mad way they have--women. It's an awful challenge. You've got a fight
before you, if you don't refuse it.".
"God!" groaned Marshby to himself, "it is a fight. I can't refuse it."