SYLVESTER HUDSON COMES FOR HIS PICTURE
Back of his sallow, lantern-jawed face, Sylvester Hudson hid
successfully, though without intention, all that was in him whether of
good or ill. Certainly he did not look his history. He was
stoop-shouldered, pensive-eyed, with long hands on which he was always
turning and twisting a big emerald. He dressed quietly, almost correctly,
but there was always something a little wrong in the color or pattern of
his tie, and he was too fond of brown and green mixtures which did not
become his sallowness. He smiled very rarely, and when he did smile, his
long upper lip unfastened itself with an effort and showed a horizontal
wrinkle halfway between the pointed end of his nose and the irregular,
nicked row of his teeth.
Altogether, he was a gentle, bilious-looking sort of man, who might have
been anything from a country gentleman to a moderately prosperous clerk.
As a matter of fact, he was the owner of a dozen small, not too
respectable, hotels through the West, and had an income of nearly half a
million dollars. He lived in Millings, a town in a certain Far-Western
State, where flourished the most pretentious and respectable of his
hotels. It had a famous bar, to which rode the sheep-herders, the
cowboys, the ranchers, the dry-farmers of the surrounding country--yes,
and sometimes, thirstiest of all, the workmen from more distant
oil-fields, a dangerous crew. Millings at that time had not yielded to
the generally increasing "dryness" of the West. It was "wet,"
notwithstanding its choking alkali dust; and the deep pool of its
wetness lay in Hudson's bar, The Aura. It was named for a woman who had
become his wife.
When Hudson came to New York he looked up his Eastern patrons, and it was
one of these who, knowing Arundel's need, encouraged the hotel-keeper in
his desire to secure a "jim-dandy picture" for the lobby of The Aura and
took him for the purpose to Marcus's studio. On that morning, hardly a
fortnight before the artist's death, Sheila was not at home.
Marcus, in spite of himself, was managed into a sale. It was of an
enormous canvas, covered weakly enough by a thin reproduction of a range
of the Rockies and a sagebrush flat. Mr. Hudson in his hollow voice
pronounced it "classy." "Say," he said, "put a little life into the
foreground and that would please _me_. It's what I'm seekin'. Put in an
automobile meetin' one of these old-time prairie schooners--the old West
sayin' howdy to the noo. That will tickle the trade." Mark, who was
feeling weak and ill, consented wearily. He sketched in the proposed
amendment and Hudson approved with one of his wrinkled smiles. He offered
a small price, at which Arundel leapt like a famished hound.
When his visitors had gone, the painter went feverishly to work. The day
before his death, Sheila, under his whispered directions, put the last
touches to the body of the "auto_m_obile."
"It's ghastly," sighed the sick man, "but it will do--for Millings." He
turned his back sadly enough to the canvas, which stood for him like a
monument to fallen hope. Sheila praised it with a faltering voice, but he
did not turn nor speak. So she carried the huge picture out of his sight.
The next day, at about eleven o'clock in the morning, Hudson called. He
came with stiff, angular motions of his long, thin legs, up the four
steep, shabby flights and stopped at the top to get his breath.
"The picture ain't worth the climb," he thought; and then, struck by the
peculiar stillness of the garret floor, he frowned. "Damned if the feller
ain't out!" He took a stride forward and knocked at Arundel's door. There
was no answer. He turned the knob and stepped into the studio.
A screen stood between him and one half of the room. The other half was
empty. The place was very cold and still. It was deplorably bare and
shabby in the wintry morning light. Some one had eaten a meager breakfast
from a tray on the little table near the stove. Hudson's canvas stood
against the wall facing him, and its presence gave him a feeling of
ownership, of a right to be there. He put his long, stiff hands into his
pockets and strolled forward. He came round the corner of the screen and
found himself looking at the dead body of his host.
The nurse, that morning, had come and gone. With Sheila's help she had
prepared Arundel for his burial. He lay in all the formal detachment of
death, his eyelids drawn decently down over his eyes, his lips put
carefully together, his hands, below their white cuffs and black sleeves,
laid carefully upon the clean smooth sheet.
Hudson drew in a hissing breath, and at the sound Sheila, crumpled up in
exhausted slumber on the floor beside the bed, awoke and lifted her face.
It was a heart-shaped face, a thin, white heart, the peak of her hair
cutting into the center of her forehead. The mouth struck a note of life
with its dull, soft red. There was not lacking in this young face the
slight exaggerations necessary to romantic beauty. Sheila had a strange,
arresting sort of jaw, a trifle over-accentuated and out of drawing. Her
eyes were long, flattened, narrow, the color of bubbles filled with
smoke, of a surface brilliance and an inner mistiness--indescribable
eyes, clear, very melting, wistful and beautiful under sooty lashes and
slender, arched black brows.
Sheila lifted this strange, romantic face on its long, romantic throat
and looked at Hudson. Then she got to her feet. She was soft and silken,
smooth and tender, gleaming white of skin. She had put on an old black
dress, just a scrap of a flimsy, little worn-out gown. A certain slim,
crushable quality of her body was accentuated by this flimsiness of
covering. She looked as though she could be drawn through a ring--as
though, between your hands, you could fold her to nothing. A thin little
kitten of silky fur and small bones might have the same feel as Sheila.
She stood up now and looked tragically and helplessly at Hudson and
tried to speak.
He backed away from the bed, beckoned to her, and met her in the other
half of the room so that the leather screen stood between them and the
dead man. They spoke in hushed voices.
"I had no notion, Miss Arundel, that--that--of--this," Hudson began in a
dry, jerky whisper. "Believe _me_, I wouldn't 'a' thought of intrudin'. I
ordered the picture there from your father a fortnight ago, and this was
the day I was to come and give it a last looking-over before I came
through with the cash, see? I hadn't heard he was sick even, much
less"--he cleared his throat--"gone beyond," he ended, quoting from the
"Millings Gazette" obituary column. "You get me?"
"Yes," said Sheila, in her voice that in some mysterious way was another
expression of the clear mistiness of her eyes and the suppleness of her
body. "You are Mr. Hudson." She twisted her hands together behind her
back. She was shivering with cold and nervousness. "It's done, you see.
Father finished it."
Hudson gave the canvas an absent glance and motioned Sheila to a chair
with a stiff gesture of his arm.
"You set down," he said.
She obeyed, and he walked to and fro before her.
"Say, now," he said, "I'll take the picture all right. But I'd like to
know, Miss Arundel, if you'll excuse me, how you're fixed?"
"Fixed?" Sheila faltered.
"Why, yes, ma'am--as to finances, I mean. You've got some funds, or some
relations or some friends to call upon--?"
Sheila drew up her head a trifle, lowered her eyes, and began to plait
her thin skirt across her knee with small, delicate fingers. Hudson
stopped in his walk to watch this mechanical occupation. She struggled
dumbly with her emotion and managed to answer him at last.
"No, Mr. Hudson. Father is very poor. I haven't any relations. We have no
friends here nor anywhere near. We lived in Europe till quite lately--a
fishing village in Normandy. I--I shall have to get some work."
"Say!" It was an ejaculation of pity, but there was a note of triumph in
it, too; perhaps the joy of the gratified philanthropist.
"Now, look-a-here, little girl, the price of that picture will just about
cover your expenses, eh?--board and--er--funeral?"
Sheila nodded, her throat working, her lids pressing down tears.
"Well, now, look-a-here. I've got a missus at home."
Sheila looked up and the tears fell. She brushed them from her cheeks.
"A missus?"
"Yes'm--my wife. And a couple of gels about your age. Well, say, we've
got a job for you."
Sheila put her hand to her head as though she would stop a whirling
sensation there.
"You mean you have some work for me in your home?"
"You've got it first time. Yes, _ma'am_. Sure thing. At Millings, finest
city in the world. After you're through here, you pack up your duds and
you come West with me. Make a fresh start, eh? Why, it'll make me plumb
cheerful to have a gel with me on that journey ... seem like I'd Girlie
or Babe along. They just cried to come, but, say, Noo York's no place for
the young."
"But, Mr. Hudson, my ticket? I'm sure I won't have the money--?"
"Advance it to you on your pay, Miss Arundel."
"But what is the work?" Sheila still held her hand against her forehead.
Hudson laughed his short, cracked cackle. "Jest old-fashioned house-work,
dish-washing and such. 'Help' can't be had in Millings, and Girlie and
Babe kick like steers when Momma leads 'em to the dish-pan. Not that
you'd have to do it all, you know, just lend a hand to Momma. Maybe
you're too fine for that?"
"Oh, no. I have done all the work here. I'd be glad. Only--"
He came closer to her and held up a long, threatening forefinger. It was
a playful gesture, but Sheila had a distinct little tremor of fear. She
looked up into his small, brown, pensive eyes, and her own were held as
though their look had been fastened to his with rivets.
"Now, look-a-here, Miss Arundel, don't you say 'only' to me. Nor 'but.'
Nor 'if.' Nary one of those words, if you please. Say, I've got daughters
of my own and I can manage gels. I know _how_. Do you know my nickname?
Well--say--it's 'Pap.' Pap Hudson. I'm the adopting kind. Sort of
paternal, I guess. Kids and dogs follow me in the streets. You want a
recommend? Just call up Mr. Hazeldean on the telephone. He's the man that
fetched me here to buy that picture off Poppa."
"Oh," said Sheila, daughter of Mark who looked at stars, "of course
I shouldn't think of asking for a recommendation. You've been only
too kind--"
He put his hand on her shoulder in its thin covering and patted it,
wondering at the silken, cool feeling against his palm.
"Kind, Miss Arundel? Pshaw! My middle name's 'Kind' and that's the truth.
Why, how does the song go--''T is love, 't is love that makes the world
go round'--love's just another word for kindness, ain't it? And it's not
such a bad old world either, eh?"
Without knowing it, with the sort of good luck that often attends the
enterprises of such men, Hudson had used a spell. He had quoted, almost
literally, her father's last words and she felt that it was a message
from the other side of death.
She twisted about in her chair, took his hand from her shoulder, and drew
it, stiff and sallow, to her young lips.
"Oh," she sobbed, "you're kind! It _is_ a good world if there are such
men as you!"
When Sylvester Hudson went down the stairs a minute or two after Sheila's
impetuous outbreak, his sallow face was deeply flushed. He stopped to
tell the Irishwoman who rented the garret floor to the Arundels, that
Sheila's future was in his care. During this colloquy, pure business on
his side and mixed business and sentiment on Mrs. Halligan's, Sylvester
did not once look the landlady in the eye. His own eyes skipped hers, now
across, now under, now over. There are some philanthropists who are
overcome with such bashfulness in the face of their own good deeds. But,
sitting back alone in his taxicab on his way to the station to buy
Sheila's ticket to Millings, Sylvester turned his emerald rapidly about
on his finger and whistled to himself. And cryptically he expressed his
glow of gratified fatherliness.
"As smooth as silk," said Sylvester aloud.