A LADY BLUSHES
As the winter wore on Ewing fell into doubt and dread. Vague enough they
were, but they rested on a sickening effect of emptiness, a time blank
of achievement. He still regarded Teevan as quite all of the seven
pillars of the house of wisdom. Yet instinct was rebelling. There were
tired afternoons when he hungered to eat of the fruit of his own way.
This feeling could not but show in his occasional letters to Mrs.
Laithe. She read through all his protestations of cheerfulness to the
real dejection beneath them, and was both troubled and mystified, raging
at his secretiveness.
When she returned to New York on a day in April and found a note from
Mrs. Lowndes asking her to dine that evening, she accepted with a plan
in mind. Before she saw Ewing she would try to learn something about him
from Sydenham, for Sydenham would also dine with Mrs. Lowndes, and she
knew that Ewing had been painting with the old man.
She found Birley the other guest, and that, too, was customary. Birley
and Sydenham preserved for their hostess a certain aroma of her youth.
Both had wooed her in the long ago; Sydenham in a day when Long Branch
was. On its sands in the light of a July moon she had prettily hoped
they might always be friends. Birley had heard her intone the same
becoming sentiment at Saratoga later in the season. And both rejected
ones had been present at St. Paul's on a day in the following June when
Kitty Folsom and Jack Lowndes had consented together in holy wedlock.
The girl's hope, perfunctory enough at the time, one may fear, had seen
long years of fruition. She liked to have them at her table now. Only,
when the three were alone, they remembered too vividly and became, in
the silences, too fantastically unlike their aged selves to the misty
eyes of one another. The one-time belle found a little of that
forgetting and remembering to be salutary, so little as ensued when a
fourth guest was present. And Eleanor Laithe had often been that fourth,
a saving reminder of the present, to recall them when they had loitered
far enough back into the old marrying years.
But she came this night with a reason beyond her wish to please. So
eager was she to ask Sydenham about Ewing that she gave scant attention
to the searching looks and queries of Birley when she entered the
drawing room. The big man rallied her on her pallor and frailness, but
with a poor spirit that hardly concealed his real misgiving. She
silenced him with impatient denials of illness, but his eyes lingered
anxiously on her face.
She sat at table with but half an ear for their old-time gossip, the
bantering gallantries of the aged swains, and the outworn coquetries of
the one-time beauty. And when they fell silent--oftener now than was
their wont, for each was thinking of that other Kitty Lowndes, who had
taken matters into her own hands--she forgot to make talk, silent
herself for thinking on the son of that Kitty. The dinner lacked the
sparkle she had been expected to give it.
As they were about to rise, after coffee, she playfully petitioned for a
chat with Sydenham.
"Herbert wants to smoke, and I want to sit here with him. We need a
little talk together," she explained. And the other two left them, the
old lady leaning on the arm of Birley.
Sydenham lighted a cigar, pushed his chair back, and faced the woman who
looked eagerly at him across the disordered table, her arms along its
edge, her head tilted to a questionable angle. She flew to her point.
"What about Gilbert Ewing--what trouble is he having?"
Sydenham stared vacantly. He seemed to find it necessary to translate
the question into some language of his own.
"Trouble? Oh, all sorts--chrome and indigo, yellow ocher, burnt umber,
rose madder, Chinese white--composition, light and shade, vanishing
points. You'd have to be one of us to understand."
"Other trouble," she insisted sharply--"personal--not about his
painting."
Sydenham stared again, clutching his beard in a dazed search for
inspiration. He did not consider people apart from painting. It was
impossible that anyone should wish to discuss Ewing except in relation
to colors and canvas.
"Well, he has trouble with everything--composition, tone-values,
everything."
"But something _not_ painting."
He looked up at the ceiling helplessly.
"Well, I fancy Randy Teevan worries him."
"Randall Teevan!" She was amazed and alarmed at once.
"Sometimes I get the idea that Randy badgers him, though they're thick
as thieves. The boy wouldn't breathe if Randy said it was bad for the
lungs."
"How long have they been friends?"
By quick, nervous, point-blank queries she drew from him all that he
knew of this intimacy. She puzzled over it.
"Can he know?" She had not meant him to hear this, but he caught the
words, and betrayed something like human interest.
"Trust Randy for that! I found it out myself. He had Kitty's
portrait--Kitty to the life--stunning brush work. Randy has begged the
picture of him for a while. I fancy he didn't want it hanging there for
others to see. And he found the fellow here one afternoon. Kitty told
me. She was nearly taken off her feet by his story but Randy happened in
and cooled things down. It's queer, Randy's setting himself to win over
the chap. It's a puzzle-mix. I wonder about it sometimes when the light
goes."
She had listened in consternation, a rage for battle rising in her. She
was sure Teevan must have some end in view hurtful to Ewing. Yet this
was cunningly hidden. She was still puzzling over this when Sydenham
recalled her. He had forgotten Ewing, and studied the red light that
fell across the table through a shade of silk.
"What fools we are to think of painting shadows! If heaven's the place
it's said to be they'll have real shadows put in up tubes, and
then--well, _think_ of it!"
She laughed at him, her brief laugh, with a sigh to follow.
"We must go to the others. But, Herbert, you'll watch him as well as
you can, won't you? I feel responsible for him in a way."
He hesitated, but the light came. "Oh, you mean Ewing? Of course I'll
watch him. I dare say he'll paint some day, after a fashion." He fumbled
for the knob and awkwardly opened the door for her.
When the men went Mrs. Laithe asked if she might not linger a moment.
"Dear Aunt Kitty!" she said, going to the other's chair. "_Old_ Kitty!"
she repeated meaningly. The elder woman glanced quickly at her in faint
alarm, half questioning, half defiant.
"Oh, Aunt Kitty! I know--I _know_! and I must talk of him. I suspected
something almost from the first, and then I made sure. But I thought
that perhaps no one else would find it out. And he was worth it--he is
worth it. I couldn't have left him there, even if I'd been sure that
everyone would know. He was a man--he had the right to live."
"My child, my child! Oh, you didn't know what you were doing! It was a
monstrous thing, an impossible thing!"
"He's Kitty's son. You must feel for him."
"Feel? What haven't I felt since that day he came here?" There had been
a break in her voice, but she went quietly on. "I can't make you know,
dear. You've torn me--it will hurt to the end. Can you understand that
in a terrible, an unspeakable way, my Kitty is still alive, is near me,
and yet is not to be known? But you can't understand it. You've never
had a child."
"Ah! but I've been one. I know what he would feel."
"Please, dear!" She put up a hand in protest. "As if I don't feel his
hurt and Kitty's as well as mine. I shall be ground between the two
every day of my life. Do you think my old arms didn't cry out to be
around the mother in him? But think if I had yielded! Picture his own
suffering--his own shame. Can you see us meeting, our eyes falling? Even
for his own sake, he must never know."
"Isn't there a way, Aunt Kitty? Some way? He's worth finding a way for."
She leaned over to stroke the other's hand.
"No way, my girl. Be the world a moment, be cool. He's a nameless thing.
You might know him, but nothing more. Could he make a life? Could a
woman--come, face it without prejudice--could you see your own sister
marry him?" Mrs. Laithe looked blank.
"You see how impossible it is. You, yourself, could _you_ stand before
the world with him? Could you face the shame?"
The younger woman dropped the hand she held and turned away. The elder
regarded her shrewdly.
"There--you see how impossible----"
But the other faced her suddenly, clear-eyed and defiant, her head back.
"Eleanor!" It was a cry of consternation that was yet softened by
tenderness, an amazed but comprehending tenderness, for the face of the
younger woman was incarnadined, flagrantly, splendidly.
A moment they held each other. But there was no mistaking the thing,
for, though the blush had quickly faded, an after glow lingered.
The older woman rose quickly to throw her arms about the other.
"My mad, mad child!" She stood off to search her face incredulously.
"He's alone, Aunt Kitty, and he's so defenseless. He believes in
everyone more than in himself. He'll be cured of that some time, but
just now I'm his only defender. Others are against him or stand neutral
with talk of the 'world.' I can't blame you, dear, I think you must be
right for yourself. But when he does awaken"--she narrowed her eyes on
the other a moment in calculation--"then I shan't be ashamed to have him
know it was always safe to believe in me--whether he was boy or man or
no one at all--or less than no one. I'd never bother about names,
dear--I'd never bother about names."
She smiled and drew the other close with little reassuring caresses.
"You see names aren't much--the directory is full of them, and dreary
enough reading they'd make. No, I'd not care for that. I'd only ask that
he believe in himself as much as I believe in him, and care as little
for names. And I warn you I mean to help him to that if I can."
The eyes of the other sparkled now. There was in her glance the excited
admiration of a timid child who watches a reckless playmate dare some
dark passage of evil repute for goblins.
"You mad--dear mad girl!" she said.