GERTRUDE ENGLISH, with her hands clasped behind her, stood looking over
Allestree’s shoulder and watching him as he worked, in a desultory
way, at some details of Margaret’s now nearly finished portrait. It
was good work, but it lacked the inspiration of his picture of Rose;
it had been, indeed, well nigh impossible to convey the mockery, the
uninterpreted mystery of Margaret’s glance.
“You haven’t made the face half sad enough,” was Gerty’s candid
criticism, “and her eyes--do you suppose any one else ever had quite
such eyes?”
Allestree smiled. “I was going to say that I hoped not, but I suppose
you would construe that as a want of appreciation.”
Miss English opened her own eyes. “Of course I should,” she said
promptly, “and I can’t see what you mean; her eyes are lovely!”
“Admitted!” he said teasingly; “you can’t understand me, Gerty; I have
vagaries.”
“Oh, I suppose that’s genius, isn’t it?”
“Precisely, genius is a form, a mild one, of adolescent insanity.”
“Well, don’t get violent while I’m here, Robert,” she retorted; “I have
enough of whirlwind and tornado just now with Margaret. Heavens, how
glad I’d be if I didn’t have to go to Omaha with her!”
“Poor child, must you?” Allestree stopped painting and looked around
with open sympathy.
“Oh, yes, I must,” Gerty replied with resignation; “I’m homely and
poor, Robert, and they will take me along labelled--‘Propriety, reduced
gentlewoman as secretary and chaperon, age near thirty, conduct
exemplary, travelling expenses paid!’”
“I’d take to the woods, Gerty!” he laughed, not without sympathy; he
dimly imagined the sting under the words.
“Or do something outrageous and get sent home--I wish I could, but I’d
starve,” Gerty said calmly; “nothing else keeps me in the straight and
narrow way but the fact that meat is twenty cents a pound and bread
five. Isn’t it sordid? But I’m really dreadfully sorry for Margaret!”
“I was beginning to lose sight of that fact,” remarked Allestree dryly.
“I’m not sorry for Fox though,” she added, laughing maliciously.
Allestree frowned, concentrating his attention on the picture again.
“It’s a wretched business,” he observed.
Gerty walked to the window and looked out; when she came back her face
was flushed. “Robert, do you know I’m afraid that I did something wrong
the other day,” she broke out; “I’m nearly sure I did!”
He looked at her smiling grimly. “You forgot about the scale of
domestic necessities then, Gerty?” he said.
But she ignored him. “I went to see Rose some time ago, just after
Margaret told me, and I talked--I talked too much.”
“The unruly member, alas!” he mocked, laughing now.
“I did,” she replied. “I told her about Fox and Margaret--and Robert,”
Gerty paused and dropped into a convenient chair, “Robert, she turned
as white as a ghost! Is it possible, do you think it’s possible that
she loves Fox? I never thought of it until Lily Osborne told me so last
week.”
“Mrs. Osborne--why do you listen to Mrs. Osborne?” Allestree broke out,
with a fury which astounded Miss English; “she has no right to speak
of Rose Temple, it’s--it’s an outrage!”
Gerty stared at him a moment in silence, her face reddening still more
with the horrified recognition of another blunder; of course she knew
that he had always loved Rose, in fact she had discounted his devotion
as too stale an affair to be really vital. “I know Lily Osborne is a
cat, _of_ course,” she said slowly, “but then one can’t be rude without
any given reason. She didn’t say a word against Rose, and I suppose
it’s natural enough if Fox has admired her; everybody does.”
But Allestree was not appeased. “Mrs. Osborne!” he broke out again, “of
all women--Mrs. Osborne! Gerty, don’t you let her say a word to you
again.”
“Good heavens, Robert, I shan’t dare squeak after this!” Miss English
retorted plaintively; “and, of course, Mrs. Osborne will marry White
and, they say, he’s going to lose his place in the Cabinet. What on
earth has she been doing about the Russian and German ambassadors?”
“I don’t know,” said Allestree sharply, “and I don’t care!”
Gerty rose abruptly and picked up her parasol. “Robert,” she said with
feeling, “you’re like a bear with a sore head, and I always said you
had such a nice disposition; I should have fallen in love with you
myself if I hadn’t had a snub nose and freckles.”
In spite of himself Robert laughed. “Was that an insurmountable
barrier, Gerty?”
“Certainly; snub nosed girls never fall in love with artists, it isn’t
profitable!” and Gerty moved toward the door.
As she did so she glanced out of the open window. “There’s Rose now,”
she said and beckoned gayly; “she’ll come up and make amends for my
blunders!” she laughed.
Allestree colored hotly, aware that he had betrayed himself; the
amazing indelicacy of Gerty’s raillery was not inconsistent with her
usual careless freedom of speech which gave much unwitting pain and had
cost her correspondingly dear more than once, yet it made him wince
to encounter it, to feel her thoughtless probe sink into the dearest
recesses of his heart and be powerless to resent it. Frankness, after
all, is frequently a doubtful virtue; like a two-edged sword it cleaves
both ways and leaves no healing balsam in its train. It was Margaret
White who always said that an expert and comfortable liar was an
absolute blessing to society.
Meanwhile, Rose had dismounted at the door and come up stairs with
no other motive than a desire to escape her own society. The sight
of Gerty at the window furnished her with an excuse, and she came in
still pale, in spite of her swift gallop by the river, and with a look
in her eyes which shocked Allestree; he had never seen pain in her
look before. Miss English greeted her affectionately; at heart she was
really penitent.
“I came up here to see Lily Osborne’s picture,” she declared, “and
Robert has sent it off already! Isn’t it a shame? I hadn’t seen it.”
“It was excellent,” Rose replied soberly, taking the chair Allestree
pushed forward for her; “she really is a beauty, Gerty; I like to say
that to show myself just and broad-minded!”
“That makes two pictures Robert has finished this winter;--yours and
the serpent’s, as I call Lily Osborne, and now he is nearly done with
Margaret.”
“Not many, if I’m to make a living by it, Gerty,” Allestree retorted
smiling.
“A living? Goodness, if I could only get your prices!” Gerty raised her
eyes and hands to heaven; “I’m a poor thing worth a dollar an hour and
expenses.”
“Raise your rates, Gerty, you’re indispensable,” said Rose.
“Indeed I’m not, there are lots of others waiting for my shoes.
Good-bye, dear children; I’m going now to write two dozen notes, pay
fifty bills and interview a caterer and a florist,” and she kissed her
hand to them as she withdrew, mischievously aware that she had coaxed
Rose into an interview with Allestree; like Judge Temple, Gerty thought
happiness lay in this direction and in no other.
As she disappeared Rose left her chair and went to look at Margaret’s
portrait with dreamy eyes. “I must go, too,” she said, “I only stopped
for a moment on my way. I’ve been riding by the river and through
the White Lot. I kept thinking of those lines, do you remember them,
Robert?--
“‘Hast thou seen by daisied leas,
And by rivers flowing
Lilac-ringlets which the breeze
Loosens, lightly blowing!’”
“I’ve been longing to be out all day myself,” he said soberly enough,
“to see the ‘lilac-ringlets,’ but I must finish this; in some way
I have grown to believe that Margaret will never again be quite
the Margaret we have known so long. I wanted to be sure of this
expression.”
Rose looked again at the picture, and her lip quivered a little in
spite of herself. “Yes,” she replied simply, “I understand you; I
don’t believe you will see that old look again. I feel--” she paused,
choosing her words, her eyes darkening with an emotion which she was
controlling with an effort--“I feel as if Margaret had died, that some
one else would come back to us, some one we do not know!”
It was a striking fact that at the very moment when Margaret believed
that she was about to achieve happiness, her friends regarded her
as approaching its final eclipse. One moment of detachment, of the
external view-point, would open an appalling vista to many a human
soul, for it is true that those whom the gods desire to destroy they
first make blind.
As Rose voiced this thought Allestree averted his eyes; he felt the
keenest regret for his thoughtless words; Gertrude English’s unmerciful
tongue had torn away the veil from Rose’s emotions. He would have been
more than human had not his heart burned with a sudden fierce anger.
What right had Fox, who had so much, to step in between him and the
girl he loved,--to wound a heart so delicate, so sensitive, so tender
as hers?
“I pity Margaret!” he said sharply, with some bitterness, “but he who
sows the tares--”
“I don’t want to judge,” Rose rejoined quietly; “father is very bitter
against divorce; he thinks it a menace to the national existence, and I
know I think always as he does and--perhaps I’m hard, Robert;” as she
spoke she looked at him appealingly, resting her slender, ungloved hand
on the easel beside Margaret’s portrait; her whole attitude was one of
regret, of reluctance.
“I shouldn’t like to speak of it too often,” he said in a low voice,
“as it stands--in the bare aspect that we see it--Margaret’s plain
justification is lost in what we know to be her wild determination to
be happy at any price.”
Rose sighed. His words revealed her own thought, she knew that Margaret
sought divorce to marry Fox; it was hideous to her, unpardonable, and
Fox? She was silent, looking at the pictured face, seeing its mystical
beauty, that weird suggestion of an unhappy fate which seemed to
shadow its wild loveliness. Allestree had only dimly conveyed it, but
Rose’s memory supplied the details. No wonder that men fell under her
spell; there was a charm as subtle as it was absolute in her whole
personality.
“Ah, well,” Rose said at last, “it is natural--she is wonderful.”
She had almost forgotten Allestree, so absorbed was she in her own
thoughts; and he saw her emotion and raged again at the thought of it.
With a sudden impulse he bent and kissed the hand upon the easel. Rose
started violently and blushed with painful emotion.
“Robert!” she exclaimed reproachfully.
“Can I say nothing?” he replied with passion; “must I stand by like a
mute and let my happiness, my love, my life slip away from me? Rose,
you ask too much!”
“I’m so sorry!” she said simply, “now I must go and--and I hate to seem
unkind, Robert!”
Their eyes met with the shock of natural feeling and his face blanched.
“Of course I know it’s useless, Rose, I’ve always known it, but--well,
I had to speak, and you’ll have to forgive me for it!”
She smiled faintly. “There’s nothing to forgive,” she said gently, “and
I must go home to meet father anyway. Won’t you come with me, Robert?”
Without a word he laid down his brushes and the two went down the
old stairs together, each miserable enough in different ways; the
man bitterly rebellious, the girl resolutely enduring with a self
repression that suggested her father in her.