I
“Does it look nice, mother?”
Dick Peyton met her with the question on the threshold, drawing her gaily
into the little square room, and adding, with a laugh with a blush in it:
“You know she’s an uncommonly noticing person, and little things tell with
her.”
He swung round on his heel to follow his mother’s smiling inspection of the
apartment.
“She seems to have _all_ the qualities,” Mrs. Denis Peyton remarked,
as her circuit finally brought her to the prettily appointed tea-table.
“_All_,” he declared, taking the sting from her emphasis by his prompt
adoption of it. Dick had always had a wholesome way of thus appropriating
to his own use such small shafts of maternal irony as were now and then
aimed at him.
Kate Peyton laughed and loosened her furs. “It looks charmingly,” she
pronounced, ending her survey by an approach to the window, which gave,
far below, the oblique perspective of a long side-street leading to Fifth
Avenue.
The high-perched room was Dick Peyton’s private office, a retreat
partitioned off from the larger enclosure in which, under a north light
and on a range of deal tables, three or four young draughtsmen were busily
engaged in elaborating his architectural projects. The outer door of the
office bore the sign: _Peyton and Gill, Architects_; but Gill was
an utilitarian person, as unobtrusive as his name, who contented himself
with a desk in the workroom, and left Dick to lord it alone in the small
apartment to which clients were introduced, and where the social part of
the business was carried on.
It was to serve, on this occasion, as the scene of a tea designed, as Kate
Peyton was vividly aware, to introduce a certain young lady to the scene of
her son’s labours. Mrs. Peyton had been hearing a great deal lately about
Clemence Verney. Dick was naturally expansive, and his close intimacy with
his mother--an intimacy fostered by his father’s early death--if it had
suffered some natural impairment in his school and college days, had of
late been revived by four years of comradeship in Paris, where Mrs. Peyton,
in a tiny apartment of the Rue de Varennes, had kept house for him during
his course of studies at the Beaux Arts. There were indeed not lacking
critics of her own sex who accused Kate Peyton of having figured too
largely in her son’s life; of having failed to efface herself at a period
when it is agreed that young men are best left free to try conclusions with
the world. Mrs. Peyton, had she cared to defend herself, might have said
that Dick, if communicative, was not impressionable, and that the closeness
of texture which enabled him to throw off her sarcasms preserved him also
from the infiltration of her prejudices. He was certainly no knight of the
apron-string, but a seemingly resolute and self-sufficient young man, whose
romantic friendship with his mother had merely served to throw a veil of
suavity over the hard angles of youth.
But Mrs. Peyton’s real excuse was after all one which she would never have
given. It was because her intimacy with her son was the one need of her
life that she had, with infinite tact and discretion, but with equal
persistency, clung to every step of his growth, dissembling herself,
adapting herself, rejuvenating herself in the passionate effort to be
always within reach, but never in the way.
Denis Peyton had died after seven years of marriage, when his boy was
barely six. During those seven years he had managed to squander the best
part of the fortune he had inherited from his step-brother; so that, at his
death, his widow and son were left with a scant competence. Mrs. Peyton,
during her husband’s life, had apparently made no effort to restrain his
expenditure. She had even been accused by those judicious persons who are
always ready with an estimate of their neighbours’ motives, of having
encouraged poor Denis’s improvidence for the gratification of her own
ambition. She had in fact, in the early days of their marriage, tried to
launch him in politics, and had perhaps drawn somewhat heavily on his funds
in the first heat of the contest; but the experiment ending in failure, as
Denis Peyton’s experiments were apt to end, she had made no farther demands
on his exchequer. Her personal tastes were in fact unusually simple, but
her outspoken indifference to money was not, in the opinion of her critics,
designed to act as a check upon her husband; and it resulted in leaving
her, at his death, in straits from which it was impossible not to deduce a
moral.
Her small means, and the care of the boy’s education, served the widow as
a pretext for secluding herself in a socially remote suburb, where it was
inferred that she was expiating, on queer food and in ready-made boots, her
rash defiance of fortune. Whether or not Mrs. Peyton’s penance took this
form, she hoarded her substance to such good purpose that she was not only
able to give Dick the best of schooling, but to propose, on his leaving
Harvard, that he should prolong his studies by another four years at the
Beaux Arts. It had been the joy of her life that her boy had early shown
a marked bent for a special line of work. She could not have borne to see
him reduced to a mere money-getter, yet she was not sorry that their small
means forbade the cultivation of an ornamental leisure. In his college days
Dick had troubled her by a superabundance of tastes, a restless flitting
from one form of artistic expression to another. Whatever art he enjoyed
he wished to practise, and he passed from music to painting, from painting
to architecture, with an ease which seemed to his mother to indicate lack
of purpose rather than excess of talent. She had observed that these
changes were usually due, not to self-criticism, but to some external
discouragement. Any depreciation of his work was enough to convince him
of the uselessness of pursuing that special form of art, and the reaction
produced the immediate conviction that he was really destined to shine in
some other line of work. He had thus swung from one calling to another
till, at the end of his college career, his mother took the decisive step
of transplanting him to the Beaux Arts, in the hope that a definite course
of study, combined with the stimulus of competition, might fix his wavering
aptitudes. The result justified her expectation, and their four years in
the Rue de Varennes yielded the happiest confirmation of her belief in
him. Dick’s ability was recognized not only by his mother, but by his
professors. He was engrossed in his work, and his first successes developed
his capacity for application. His mother’s only fear was that praise was
still too necessary to him. She was uncertain how long his ambition would
sustain him in the face of failure. He gave lavishly where he was sure
of a return; but it remained to be seen if he were capable of production
without recognition. She had brought him up in a wholesome scorn of
material rewards, and nature seemed, in this direction, to have seconded
her training. He was genuinely indifferent to money, and his enjoyment
of beauty was of that happy sort which does not generate the wish for
possession. As long as the inner eye had food for contemplation, he cared
very little for the deficiencies in his surroundings; or, it might rather
be said, he felt, in the sum-total of beauty about him, an ownership of
appreciation that left him free from the fret of personal desire. Mrs.
Peyton had cultivated to excess this disregard of material conditions; but
she now began to ask herself whether, in so doing, she had not laid too
great a strain on a temperament naturally exalted. In guarding against
other tendencies she had perhaps fostered in him too exclusively those
qualities which circumstances had brought to an unusual development in
herself. His enthusiasms and his disdains were alike too unqualified
for that happy mean of character which is the best defence against the
surprises of fortune. If she had taught him to set an exaggerated value on
ideal rewards, was not that but a shifting of the danger-point on which her
fears had always hung? She trembled sometimes to think how little love and
a lifelong vigilance had availed in the deflecting of inherited tendencies.
Her fears were in a measure confirmed by the first two years of their life
in New York, and the opening of his career as a professional architect.
Close on the easy triumphs of his studentships there came the chilling
reaction of public indifference. Dick, on his return from Paris, had formed
a partnership with an architect who had had several years of practical
training in a New York office; but the quiet and industrious Gill, though
he attracted to the new firm a few small jobs which overflowed from the
business of his former employer, was not able to infect the public with
his own faith in Peyton’s talents, and it was trying to a genius who felt
himself capable of creating palaces to have to restrict his efforts to
the building of suburban cottages or the planning of cheap alterations in
private houses.
Mrs. Peyton expended all the ingenuities of tenderness in keeping up
her son’s courage; and she was seconded in the task by a friend whose
acquaintance Dick had made at the Beaux Arts, and who, two years before
the Peytons, had returned to New York to start on his own career as an
architect. Paul Darrow was a young man full of crude seriousness, who,
after a youth of struggling work and study in his native northwestern
state, had won a scholarship which sent him abroad for a course at the
Beaux Arts. His two years there coincided with the first part of Dick’s
residence, and Darrow’s gifts had at once attracted the younger student.
Dick was unstinted in his admiration of rival talent, and Mrs. Peyton,
who was romantically given to the cultivation of such generosities, had
seconded his enthusiasm by the kindest offers of hospitality to the young
student. Darrow thus became the grateful frequenter of their little
_salon_; and after their return to New York the intimacy between
the young men was renewed, though Mrs. Peyton found it more difficult
to coax Dick’s friend to her New York drawing-room than to the informal
surroundings of the Rue de Varennes. There, no doubt, secluded and absorbed
in her son’s work, she had seemed to Darrow almost a fellow-student; but
seen among her own associates she became once more the woman of fashion,
divided from him by the whole breadth of her ease and his awkwardness.
Mrs. Peyton, whose tact had divined the cause of his estrangement, would
not for an instant let it affect the friendship of the two young men. She
encouraged Dick to frequent Darrow, in whom she divined a persistency of
effort, an artistic self-confidence, in curious contrast to his social
hesitancies. The example of his obstinate capacity for work was just the
influence her son needed, and if Darrow would not come to them she insisted
that Dick must seek him out, must never let him think that any social
discrepancy could affect a friendship based on deeper things. Dick, who had
all the loyalties, and who took an honest pride in his friend’s growing
success, needed no urging to maintain the intimacy; and his copious reports
of midnight colloquies in Darrow’s lodgings showed Mrs. Peyton that she had
a strong ally in her invisible friend.
It had been, therefore, somewhat of a shock to learn in the course of time
that Darrow’s influence was being shared, if not counteracted, by that of a
young lady in whose honour Dick was now giving his first professional tea.
Mrs. Peyton had heard a great deal about Miss Clemence Verney, first from
the usual purveyors of such information, and more recently from her son,
who, probably divining that rumour had been before him, adopted his usual
method of disarming his mother by taking her into his confidence. But,
ample as her information was, it remained perplexing and contradictory, and
even her own few meetings with the girl had not helped her to a definite
opinion. Miss Verney, in conduct and ideas, was patently of the “new
school”: a young woman of feverish activities and broad-cast judgments,
whose very versatility made her hard to define. Mrs. Peyton was shrewd
enough to allow for the accidents of environment; what she wished to get
at was the residuum of character beneath Miss Verney’s shifting surface.
“It looks charmingly,” Mrs. Peyton repeated, giving a loosening touch to
the chrysanthemums in a tall vase on her son’s desk.
Dick laughed, and glanced at his watch.
“They won’t be here for another quarter of an hour. I think I’ll tell Gill
to clean out the work-room before they come.”
“Are we to see the drawings for the competition?” his mother asked.
He shook his head smilingly. “Can’t--I’ve asked one or two of the Beaux
Arts fellows, you know; and besides, old Darrow’s actually coming.”
“Impossible!” Mrs. Peyton exclaimed.
“He swore he would last night.” Dick laughed again, with a tinge of
self-satisfaction. “I’ve an idea he wants to see Miss Verney.”
“Ah,” his mother murmured. There was a pause before she added: “Has Darrow
really gone in for this competition?”
“Rather! I should say so! He’s simply working himself to the bone.”
Mrs. Peyton sat revolving her muff on a meditative hand; at length she
said: “I’m not sure I think it quite nice of him.”
Her son halted before her with an incredulous stare. “_Mother_!” he
exclaimed.
The rebuke sent a blush to her forehead. “Well--considering your
friendship--and everything.”
“Everything? What do you mean by everything? The fact that he had more
ability than I have and is therefore more likely to succeed? The fact that
he needs the money and the success a deuced sight more than any of us? Is
that the reason you think he oughtn’t to have entered? Mother! I never
heard you say an ungenerous thing before.”
The blush deepened to crimson, and she rose with a nervous laugh. “It
_was_ ungenerous,” she conceded. “I suppose I’m jealous for you. I
hate these competitions!”
Her son smiled reassuringly. “You needn’t. I’m not afraid: I think I shall
pull it off this time. In fact, Paul’s the only man I’m afraid of--I’m
always afraid of Paul--but the mere fact that he’s in the thing is a
tremendous stimulus.”
His mother continued to study him with an anxious tenderness. “Have you
worked out the whole scheme? Do you _see_ it yet?”
“Oh, broadly, yes. There’s a gap here and there--a hazy bit, rather--it’s
the hardest problem I’ve ever had to tackle; but then it’s my biggest
opportunity, and I’ve simply _got_ to pull it off!”
Mrs. Peyton sat silent, considering his flushed face and illumined eye,
which were rather those of the victor nearing the goal than of the runner
just beginning the race. She remembered something that Darrow had once said
of him: “Dick always sees the end too soon.”
“You haven’t too much time left,” she murmured.
“Just a week. But I shan’t go anywhere after this. I shall renounce the
world.” He glanced smilingly at the festal tea-table and the embowered
desk. “When I next appear, it will either be with my heel on Paul’s
neck--poor old Paul--or else--or else--being dragged lifeless from the
arena!”
His mother nervously took up the laugh with which he ended. “Oh, not
lifeless,” she said.
His face clouded. “Well, maimed for life, then,” he muttered.
Mrs. Peyton made no answer. She knew how much hung on the possibility of
his winning the competition which for weeks past had engrossed him. It was
a design for the new museum of sculpture, for which the city had recently
voted half a million. Dick’s taste ran naturally to the grandiose, and the
erection of public buildings had always been the object of his ambition.
Here was an unmatched opportunity, and he knew that, in a competition of
the kind, the newest man had as much chance of success as the firm of most
established reputation, since every competitor entered on his own merits,
the designs being submitted to a jury of architects who voted on them
without knowing the names of the contestants. Dick, characteristically,
was not afraid of the older firms; indeed, as he had told his mother, Paul
Darrow was the only rival he feared. Mrs. Peyton knew that, to a certain
point, self-confidence was a good sign; but somehow her son’s did not
strike her as being of the right substance--it seemed to have no dimension
but extent. Her fears were complicated by a suspicion that, under his
professional eagerness for success, lay the knowledge that Miss Verney’s
favour hung on the victory. It was that, perhaps, which gave a feverish
touch to his ambition; and Mrs. Peyton, surveying the future from the
height of her material apprehensions, divined that the situation depended
mainly on the girl’s view of it. She would have given a great deal to know
Clemence Verney’s conception of success.