A few days later, and his bold step seemed justified. The directors were
an elusive body, and even when got together they found it hard to act
with anything like unanimity and despatch; but one afternoon Stephen
Giles encountered Mr. Holbrook in the office of one of the hotels and was
told that the plan was receiving favourable consideration and was not
unlikely to be accepted. As Mr. Holbrook was the most passive member of
the directorate, drifting quietly along with the general current, it
seemed safe to accept him as representing the feeling of that body.
Giles carried the good news to Adams, at the Academy. Adams hurried home
with it to his wife and little Frankie.
A few days more, and it laboriously transpired that old Jeremiah McNulty
was readjusting himself to the plan as modified and elaborated by Dill
and his associates. Old Jeremiah was particularly taken by the idea of
the First Ferry--suggesting only that the scene be slightly enlarged, so
as to take in the site of his early "yard."
"At last we're gathering them in!" declared Adams to his wife. They began
to figure up their share of the spoils and to study how they would lay
this immense sum out.
First of all they would bring a smile to the wan face of a patient
landlord by paying the back rent in full. As for the rest, Frankie must
have a pair of new shoes; and a thousand dollars at least must be placed
on deposit in some good savings bank.
"For we have never been able to put anything by, and now at last comes
this chance to provide for the rainy day." They looked at each other in
mutual content and admiration--this was prudence, this was thrift.
Next, word came to Dill that the attorney for the bank was actually
engaged in drawing up the contract. "We may even be able to sign it
to-morrow," he said to Virgilia. "We shall have Japan in good season, and
much more in between. Tell me; are we not selfish in keeping our
happiness to ourselves? Shall you not----"
"I am ready to let the whole world know, dear Daff," she responded. "And
oh, to think that I have had my part in bringing your great good fortune
about!"
At the very moment when Daffingdon and Virgilia were taking notes on the
aborigines and planning for Japan, Preciosa McNulty was strolling with
Ignace Prochnow through the galleries of the Art Academy. The portrait
was now finished. The submerged "resemblance" had risen once more to the
surface, as Little O'Grady had foretold, and the canvas had been borne
home in triumph to Preciosa's fond, admiring family.
"Who did it?" asked her grandfather, boundlessly pleased.
"That young man," replied Preciosa.
"What young man?"
"The one who came here that night and threw those big sheets of paper all
over the furniture."
"It's you to the life, my child," he said.
"Grandpa," proceeded Preciosa, "I want him to come here again and throw
some more sheets over the furniture. He's awfully smart, and he's just
bursting with ideas."
Her grandfather scratched his chin. There were so many smart young men
bursting with ideas--the wrong sort of ideas. "Let him go to Mr. Hill."
"They're better than those others were."
Still the old man shook his head. "Let him go to Mr. Hill," he repeated.
"With a letter or something from you?"
"Let him go and talk for himself."
"No. You just sit down and write it now." Then, to herself: "There! I
think Virgilia Jeffreys will find she can't wind me round her finger
quite as easily as she thought she could!"
Preciosa gave Prochnow his letter in front of the Parthenon pediment
(where the current of visitors was thinnest), and counselled him to
advance on the Grindstone. He was as quick and clever as any of them, she
declared, and was entitled to take his share.
Prochnow tossed his head. "I don't know that I care for a 'share,'" he
said.
"Do you want to do it all?" asked Preciosa, awe-struck.
"All or none," replied Prochnow loftily. "I am not one to co-operate. I
could do the whole as easily as a part."
They strolled on through one spacious hall after another; none seemed too
roomy for the manoeuvres of this young genius. The largest studio in the
Burrow, Gowan's own, cramped him--most of all on the days when Mrs. Gowan
came down, set forth the tea-pot, lit up her candles and gave her moving
little imitation of the handsomer functions that took place through the
upper tiers of the Temple of Art. Prochnow had scant patience with the
mild hospitalities that accompanied, obbligato-like, art's onward course;
he could not accommodate himself, he could not fit in. There were days
when the streets and the parks themselves seemed none too spacious, and
Preciosa, who was beginning to accompany him abroad, soon got the widest
notion of his limitless expansiveness. He saw things with an eye that was
new, informed, penetrating, and he spread comments acute, critical,
pungent, with the freest possible tongue. He showed her the tawdry,
restless vulgarity of the architecture along the most splendid of her
favourite thoroughfares, and the ludicrousness of much of the sculpture
that cumbered the public parks; and with the mercilessness of youth for
mediocrity in his seniors, the _arrives,_ he would run through the
canvases of current exhibitions, displaying an abrupt arrogance, a bald,
raw, cursory cruelty that only the Uebermensch of art would have ventured
to employ.
"And what do you think of our front parlour furniture?" asked Preciosa;
"and of all that fancy woodwork on our cupola?"
Prochnow placed his hand over his mouth and turned away. It seemed as if
these things were too awful for characterization, yet he would spare them
for her sake. Let him laugh, though, if he wished; and she would laugh
with him.
Thus her world daily became smaller, more insignificant, less to be
regarded, while Ignace himself grew bigger, more preponderant. How could
she refuse confidence in one who had such boundless confidence in
himself?
In the course of these strolls he told her something about his own early
life. He had been born, she made out, somewhere between the Danube and
the Oder; he spoke familiarly of the frontier of Silesia. He had studied
in Munich and Vienna, and some of his things--sumptuous, highly-charged,
over-luscious--showed clearly enough the influence of Makart and the
lawless vicinity of gipsy Hungary. He had crossed to America with his
family five years before; they were still in New Jersey. "They came
half-way," he declared; "and I have come all the way--an adventurer in a
new land."
Preciosa tried to realize the newness, which she had always taken for
granted, and the remoteness, which had never made itself particularly
plain to her consciousness; all this that she might reach some
appreciation of his venturesomeness,--a gallant, spirited quality not
misplaced in one so youthful, so self-confident, so fitted for success
and mastery.
"Well, you're ready for one adventure, anyway," declared Preciosa,
motioning toward the letter still held in Prochnow's brown, veined hand.
She saw herself helping him into the saddle and passing him up his lance.
"So I am," he acquiesced. He brought his eyes back from the large, pale,
formidable Amazonian figures before him to the warm-hearted,
warm-coloured little creature by his side. Her wealth of chestnut hair
was glowing in its most artful disorder; and there was limitless
enticement in the turn of her long curling eyelashes, just on a level
with his moustache-to-be. Her slim little body was subordinated to her
head and to her spreading hat in precisely the degree imposed by modern
taste and recognised by the canons of modern art; nothing less grandiose,
pallid, remote was to be imagined. Her dress, full of rich, daring
colours and latter-day complications of design, completed the spell;
those very large white women in crinkled draperies might remain where
they were, when such a one as this was here, as close to him as his own
self, as contemporaneous as the last stroke of the clock, as rich and
brilliant in colouring as any of the canvases of his master's master, as
necessary as bread and wine. He must put to its best use the weapon she
had placed in his hand, when there was so much--all the world, in
fact--to gain.
"Do your best," said Preciosa, mindful of the portfolios that Little
O'Grady had lugged downstairs and had opened in Festus Gowan's studio.
"Leave them all behind," she added, feeling as keenly as ever the smart
of her feeble complaisance toward Virgilia Jeffreys.
"Can I fail with such encouragement?" asked Prochnow, in an intonation
unwontedly tender, as he tried to look under those long curling lashes.
Preciosa flushed--a thing those great, over-admired marble women would
have tried in vain to do. Yes, she was no closer to him than she was
necessary to him. He began to look forward to the time when he might take
her by the hand, restraining such modest impulse as she was now showing
to move on to the next room, and reproduce that blush by telling her all
she was to him and must be ever. Only the wills, the whims, the
prejudices of a few unenlightened old men stood in his way; these he must
bend, dissipate, brush aside. He felt himself equal to the task.