Miss Fleming arrived that evening while Jane was on the water. She was in
the habit of coming out to the Hemlock Farm for a day's holiday, and went
directly to her own room as though she were at home. When she stepped
presently out on the porch, where the gentlemen had gone to smoke, a soft
black silk showing every line of her supple figure, glimpses of the rounded
arms revealed with every movement of the loose sleeves, one or two thick
green leaves in her light hair--ugly, quiet, friendly--they all felt more
at home than they had done before. There was a pitcher of punch by the
captain's elbow: she tasted it, threw in a dash of liquor, poured him out a
glass and sat down beside him, and he felt that a gap was comfortably
filled.
"You have turned your back on Philadelphia, they tell me, Miss Fleming,"
complained Judge Rhodes. "New York sucks in all the young blood of the
country--the talent and energy."
"Oh, I came simply to sell my wares. New York is my market, but
Philadelphia will always be home to me," in her peculiar pathetic voice. "I
left good friends there," with one of her bewildering glances straight into
the judge's beady eyes, at which his flabby face was suffused with heat.
"You do not forget your friends, that's certain," he said, lowering his
voice. "That was a delicate compliment, sending my portrait back to the
Exhibition. I felt it very much, I assure you."
Cornelia bowed silently. Neither she nor the judge said anything about the
round-numbered cheque which he had sent her for it. In the moonlight they
preferred to let the affair stand on a sentimental basis.
Mr. Van Ness meanwhile eyed Miss Fleming's pose and rounded figure with a
watery gleam of complacency.
"An exceptional woman," was his verdict. He turned the conversation to art,
and asked innumerable questions with a profound humility. Cornelia replied
eagerly, until the fact crept out from the judge that there was not an
æsthetic dogma nor a gallery in the world with which he was not familiar.
Then to pottery, in which field his modesty was as profound, until the
judge pushed him, as it were, to a corner, when he acknowledged himself the
possessor of a few "nice bits."
"I have some old Etruscan pieces which I should like you to see, Miss
Fleming," with his mild, deprecating cough, "and a bit of Capo di Monte,
and the only real specimen of Henri Deux in the country."
"I must see them," emphatically. "Where are your cabinets?"
"Oh, nowhere," with a shrug. "My poor little specimens have never been
unpacked since I returned to this country. They are boxed up in a friend's
cellar."
"God bless me, Cornelia!" cried the captain in a muffled tone, "how could
Mr. Van Ness spend his time koo-tooing to cracked pots? He has, as I may
say, the future of Pennsylvania in his hand. When I think what he is doing
for the friendless children--thousands of'em--" The punch had heated the
captain's zeal to the point where words failed him.
After that the friendless children swept lighter subjects out of sight. Mr.
Van Ness, whose humility in this light rose to saintly heights, had all the
statistics of the Bureaux of Charity at his tongue's end. He had studied
the Dangerous Classes in every obscure corner of the world. He could give
you the _status quo_ of any given tribe in India just as easily as the
time-table on the new railway in Egypt. No wonder that he could tell you in
a breath the percentage of orphans, deserted minors, children of vicious
parents, in his own State, and the amount _per capita_ required to civilize
and Christianize them. As he talked of this matter his eyes became
suffused with tears. The great Home for these helpless wards of the State
he described at length, from its situation on a high table-land of the
Alleghanies and the dimensions of the immense buildings down to the
employments of the children and the capacity of the laundry--a perfect
Arcadia with all the modern improvements, where Crime was to be transformed
wholesale into Virtue.
"Where is this institution?" asked Miss Fleming. "It is strange I never
heard of it."
"Oh, it is not built as yet: we have not raised the funds," Mr. Van Ness
replied with a smothered sigh.
The judge patted one foot and looked at him compassionately. It was a
devilishly queer ambition to be the savior of those dirty little wretches
in the back alleys. But if a man had given himself up, body and soul, to
such a pursuit, it was hard measure that he must be thwarted in it.
Miss Fleming also bent soft sympathetic eyes on her new friend. The Home
was not built, eh? Not a brick laid? She wondered whether that box with the
priceless treasures existed in his friend's cellar or in his brain: she
wondered whether he had not seen those pictures of the old masters in
photographs, or whether he had travelled in Japan and the obscure corners
of the earth in the flesh or in books. There was more than the wonted
necessity upon her to establish sympathetic relations with this new man:
she had never seen a finer presence: the beard and brow quite lifted his
masculinity into æsthetic regions; she caught glimpses, too, of an
unfamiliar mongrel species of intellect with which she would relish
Platonic relations. Yet with this glow upon her she regarded the reformer's
noble face and benignant blond beard doubtfully, thinking how she used to
stick pins in brilliant bubbles when she was a child, and nothing would be
left but a patch of dirty water.
"Jane is out on the river, as usual?" she asked presently.
"Yes," said her father: "Mr. Neckart is with her. Neither of them will ever
stay under a roof if they can help it. They ought to have a dash of Indian
blood in their veins to account for such vagabondizing."
"Is Bruce Neckart here?" with a change in her tone which made the captain
look up at her involuntarily.
"Yes."
"I thought he was in Washington: I did not expect to meet him."
The judge puffed uneasily at his cigar. He was a family man, with a stout
wife and married son. He did not meet Miss Fleming once a year, but he felt
a vague jealousy of Neckart.
"By the way, you must be old acquaintances?" he said abruptly. "Both from
Delaware? Kent county?"
"Oh yes," with a shrill womanish laugh, very different from her usual sweet
boyish ha! ha! "Many's the day we rowed on the bay or dredged for oysters
together, dirty and ragged and happy. There is not very much difference in
our ages," seeing his look of surprise. "I look younger than I am, and
Bruce has grown old fast. At least, so I hear. I have not seen him for
years."
She was silent after that, and preoccupied as her admirers had never seen
her, and presently, hearing Jane's and Neckart's steps on the path, she
rose hastily and bade them good-night. They each shook hands with her, that
being one of the sacred rites in the Platonic friendships so much in vogue
now-a-days among clever men and women. Mr. Van Ness offered his hand last,
and Cornelia smiled cordially as she took it. But it was clammy and soft.
She rubbed her fingers with a shudder of disgust as she hurried up to her
own room. There she walked straight to her glass and turned up the lamp
beside it, looking long and fixedly at her face. She knew with exactness
the extent of its ugliness and its power.
"It is too late now even if it ever could have been," she said quietly, and
put out the light. Then she went to the window. Mr. Neckart had left Jane
inside, and, not joining the other men, turned back to the garden. She saw
the bulky dark figure as it passed under her window.
She stretched out her hands as if for a caress, with the palms pressed
close. "Oh, Bruce!" she said under her breath. "Bruce!"
After he had passed out of sight she stood thinking over all the men who
had made a comrade of her since she saw him last--how they had handled her
fingers and looked into her eyes; how her every thought and fancy had grown
common and unclean through much usage; how she had dragged out whatever
maidenly feeling she had in the old times, and made capital of it to bring
these companions to her who were neither lovers nor friends.
"When I could not have the food which I wanted. I took the husks which the
swine did eat," she said, leaving the window, with a short laugh. "Well, I
could not die of starvation."