Miss Verney, when she presently appeared, in the wake of the impersonal
and exclamatory young married woman who served as a background to her
vivid outline, seemed competent to impart at short notice any information
required of her. She had never struck Mrs. Peyton as more alert and
efficient. A melting grace of line and colour tempered her edges with the
charming haze of youth; but it occurred to her critic that she might emerge
from this morning mist as a dry and metallic old woman.
If Miss Verney suspected a personal application in Dick’s hospitality, it
did not call forth in her the usual tokens of self-consciousness. Her
manner may have been a shade more vivid than usual, but she preserved all
her bright composure of glance and speech, so that one guessed, under the
rapid dispersal of words, an undisturbed steadiness of perception. She
was lavishly but not indiscriminately interested in the evidences of her
host’s industry, and as the other guests assembled, straying with vague
ejaculations through the labyrinth of scale drawings and blue prints, Mrs.
Peyton noted that Miss Verney alone knew what these symbols stood for.
To his visitors’ requests to be shown his plans for the competition,
Peyton had opposed a laughing refusal, enforced by the presence of two
fellow-architects, young men with lingering traces of the Beaux Arts in
their costume and vocabulary, who stood about in Gavarni attitudes and
dazzled the ladies by allusions to fenestration and entasis. The party had
already drifted back to the tea-table when a hesitating knock announced
Darrow’s approach. He entered with his usual air of having blundered in
by mistake, embarrassed by his hat and great-coat, and thrown into deeper
confusion by the necessity of being introduced to the ladies grouped about
the urn. To the men he threw a gruff nod of fellowship, and Dick having
relieved him of his encumbrances, he retreated behind the shelter of Mrs.
Peyton’s welcome. The latter judiciously gave him time to recover, and when
she turned to him he was engaged in a surreptitious inspection of Miss
Verney, whose dusky slenderness, relieved against the bare walls of the
office, made her look like a young St. John of Donatello’s. The girl
returned his look with one of her clear glances, and the group having
presently broken up again, Mrs. Peyton saw that she had drifted to Darrow’s
side. The visitors at length wandered back to the work-room to see a
portfolio of Dick’s water-colours; but Mrs. Peyton remained seated behind
the urn, listening to the interchange of talk through the open door while
she tried to coordinate her impressions.
She saw that Miss Verney was sincerely interested in Dick’s work: it
was the nature of her interest that remained in doubt. As if to solve
this doubt, the girl presently reappeared alone on the threshold, and
discovering Mrs. Peyton, advanced toward her with a smile.
“Are you tired of hearing us praise Mr. Peyton’s things?” she asked,
dropping into a low chair beside her hostess. “Unintelligent admiration
must be a bore to people who know, and Mr. Darrow tells me you are almost
as learned as your son.”
Mrs. Peyton returned the smile, but evaded the question. “I should be sorry
to think your admiration unintelligent,” she said. “I like to feel that my
boy’s work is appreciated by people who understand it.”
“Oh, I have the usual smattering,” said Miss Verney carelessly. “I
_think_ I know why I admire his work; but then I am sure I see more in
it when some one like Mr. Darrow tells me how remarkable it is.”
“Does Mr. Darrow say that?” the mother exclaimed, losing sight of her
object in the rush of maternal pleasure.
“He has said nothing else: it seems to be the only subject which loosens
his tongue. I believe he is more anxious to have your son win the
competition than to win it himself.”
“He is a very good friend,” Mrs. Peyton assented. She was struck by the way
in which the girl led the topic back to the special application of it which
interested her. She had none of the artifices of prudery.
“He feels sure that Mr. Peyton _will_ win,” Miss Verney continued.
“It was very interesting to hear his reasons. He is an extraordinarily
interesting man. It must be a tremendous incentive to have such a friend.”
Mrs. Peyton hesitated. “The friendship is delightful; but I don’t know that
my son needs the incentive. He is almost too ambitious.”
Miss Verney looked up brightly. “Can one be?” she said. “Ambition is so
splendid! It must be so glorious to be a man and go crashing through
obstacles, straight up to the thing one is after. I’m afraid I don’t care
for people who are superior to success. I like marriage by capture!” She
rose with her wandering laugh, and stood flushed and sparkling above Mrs.
Peyton, who continued to gaze at her gravely.
“What do you call success?” the latter asked. “It means so many different
things.”
“Oh, yes, I know--the inward approval, and all that. Well, I’m afraid I
like the other kind: the drums and wreaths and acclamations. If I were Mr.
Peyton, for instance, I’d much rather win the competition than--than be as
disinterested as Mr. Darrow.”
Mrs. Peyton smiled. “I hope you won’t tell him so,” she said half
seriously. “He is over-stimulated already; and he is so easily influenced
by any one who--whose opinion he values.”
She stopped abruptly, hearing herself, with a strange inward shock, re-echo
the words which another man’s mother had once spoken to her. Miss Verney
did not seem to take the allusion to herself, for she continued to fix on
Mrs. Peyton a gaze of impartial sympathy.
“But we can’t help being interested!” she declared.
“It’s very kind of you; but I wish you would all help him to feel that his
competition is after all of very little account compared with other
things--his health and his peace of mind, for instance. He is looking
horribly used up.”
The girl glanced over her shoulder at Dick, who was just reentering the
room at Darrow’s side.
“Oh, do you think so?” she said. “I should have thought it was his friend
who was used up.”
Mrs. Peyton followed the glance with surprise. She had been too preoccupied
to notice Darrow, whose crudely modelled face was always of a dull pallour,
to which his slow-moving grey eye lent no relief except in rare moments of
expansion. Now the face had the fallen lines of a death-mask, in which only
the smile he turned on Dick remained alive; and the sight smote her with
compunction. Poor Darrow! He did look horribly fagged out: as if he needed
care and petting and good food. No one knew exactly how he lived. His
rooms, according to Dick’s report, were fireless and ill kept, but he stuck
to them because his landlady, whom he had fished out of some financial
plight, had difficulty in obtaining other lodgers. He belonged to no clubs,
and wandered out alone for his meals, mysteriously refusing the hospitality
which his friends pressed on him. It was plain that he was very poor, and
Dick conjectured that he sent what he earned to an aunt in his native
village; but he was so silent about such matters that, outside of his
profession, he seemed to have no personal life.
Miss Verney’s companion having presently advised her of the lapse of time,
there ensued a general leave-taking, at the close of which Dick accompanied
the ladies to their carriage. Darrow was meanwhile blundering into his
greatcoat, a process which always threw him into a state of perspiring
embarrassment; but Mrs. Peyton, surprising him in the act, suggested that
he should defer it and give her a few moments’ talk.
“Let me make you some fresh tea,” she said, as Darrow blushingly shed the
garment, “and when Dick comes back we’ll all walk home together. I’ve not
had a chance to say two words to you this winter.”
Darrow sank into a chair at her side and nervously contemplated his boots.
“I’ve been tremendously hard at work,” he said.
“I know: _too_ hard at work, I’m afraid. Dick tells me you have been
wearing yourself out over your competition plans.”
“Oh, well, I shall have time to rest now,” he returned. “I put the last
stroke to them this morning.”
Mrs. Peyton gave him a quick look. “You’re ahead of Dick, then.”
“In point of time only,” he said smiling.
“That is in itself an advantage,” she answered with a tinge of asperity. In
spite of an honest effort for impartiality she could not, at the moment,
help regarding Darrow as an obstacle in her son’s path.
“I wish the competition were over!” she exclaimed, conscious that her voice
had betrayed her. “I hate to see you both looking so fagged.”
Darrow smiled again, perhaps at her studied inclusion of himself.
“Oh, _Dick_’s all right,” he said. “He’ll pull himself together in no
time.”
He spoke with an emphasis which might have struck her, if her sympathies
had not again been deflected by the allusion to her son.
“Not if he doesn’t win,” she exclaimed.
Darrow took the tea she had poured for him, knocking the spoon to the floor
in his eagerness to perform the feat gracefully. In bending to recover the
spoon he struck the tea-table with his shoulder, and set the cups dancing.
Having regained a measure of composure, he took a swallow of the hot tea
and set it down with a gasp, precariously near the edge of the tea-table.
Mrs. Peyton rescued the cup, and Darrow, apparently forgetting its
existence, rose and began to pace the room. It was always hard for him to
sit still when he talked.
“You mean he’s so tremendously set on it?” he broke out.
Mrs. Peyton hesitated. “You know him almost as well as I do,” she said.
“He’s capable of anything where there is a possibility of success; but I’m
always afraid of the reaction.”
“Oh, well, Dick’s a man,” said Darrow bluntly. “Besides, he’s going to
succeed.”
“I wish he didn’t feel so sure of it. You mustn’t think I’m afraid for him.
He’s a man, and I want him to take his chances with other men; but I wish
he didn’t care so much about what people think.”
“People?”
“Miss Verney, then: I suppose you know.”
Darrow paused in front of her. “Yes: he’s talked a good deal about her. You
think she wants him to succeed?”
“At any price!”
He drew his brows together. “What do you call any price?”
“Well--herself, in this case, I believe.”
Darrow bent a puzzled stare on her. “You mean she attached that amount of
importance to this competition?”
“She seems to regard it as symbolical: that’s what I gather. And I’m afraid
she’s given him the same impression.”
Darrow’s sunken face was suffused by his rare smile. “Oh, well, he’ll pull
it off then!” he said.
Mrs. Peyton rose with a distracted sigh. “I half hope he won’t, for such a
motive,” she exclaimed.
“The motive won’t show in his work,” said Darrow. He added, after a pause
probably devoted to the search for the right word: “He seems to think a
great deal of her.”
Mrs. Peyton fixed him thoughtfully. “I wish I knew what _you_ think of
her.”
“Why, I never saw her before.”
“No; but you talked with her to-day. You’ve formed an opinion: I think you
came here on purpose.”
He chuckled joyously at her discernment: she had always seemed to him
gifted with supernatural insight. “Well, I did want to see her,” he owned.
“And what do you think?”
He took a few vague steps and then halted before Mrs. Peyton. “I think,” he
said, smiling, “that she likes to be helped first, and to have everything
on her plate at once.”