Prochnow spent the whole day working for Preciosa, oblivious of
Virgilia's snares or of the debut of Robin Morrell. He heaved history,
tradition, legend, mythology into the furnace, worked the bellows with
indefatigable hand, blew his brains to a white heat and kept them there,
and dropped down at dusk with his project complete. He had outlined two
or three of his cartoons as well, and had even dashed out, on a small
scale, the colour-scheme of the one that made the most immediate appeal.
Little O'Grady, who had had all the trouble he anticipated with the
chariot of Progress--and a good deal more--came in for a cup of
Prochnow's potent, bewitching coffee.
"Ignace!" he cried, wiping his clay-encrusted hands on the blue blouse,
"you beat us all! You'll run away ahead of any one of us! Only, you'll
kill yourself doing it!"
"My first great chance," replied Prochnow. "I mustn't let it slip by."
Within a few days this third scheme was brought into intelligible shape
and sent off in pursuit of the scattered sons of finance. "It's a dead
go!" cried Little O'Grady; "this time we get 'em sure!" His confidence
was the light from the blazing furnace, just as Prochnow's intensity was
its heat. When each believed so fully in himself and in the other how
could the thought of failure intrude?
"Ignace," said Little O'Grady, "this time they'll treat us right. You
must take a better room than you have here. You must move downstairs,
where people can find you, and where you will be able to let them in when
they do. Ladies, now--how could you possibly receive them in such
quarters as these?"
Prochnow easily allowed himself to be persuaded. He was already beginning
to see about how the cat jumped and to understand how much depended upon
the gentle patronage of the luminaries of society. There was one little
star, surely, whose light he should be glad to focus on himself once
more--nor be indebted to another's kindness for the privilege. He had
indeed ventured to call on Preciosa once or twice at her own home--in
particular there was the evening on which, defying niggardly Fortune, he
had invited her to the theatre, her passion; but Euphrosyne McNulty had
not seemed fully able to understand him. She appeared to view him as a
sort of unclassifiable young artisan and to find slight justification for
his presence. She had other ideas for her daughter.
"Come, make a stagger," said Little O'Grady encouragingly. "Take that
other big room down there next to Gowan's. I'll cough up a few for you,
and I'll let you have all the traps of mine you need. Take the Aztec jars
and both the priceless Navajos that I have clung to through all my days
of misery and privation."
Prochnow made the move. Preciosa was among his first callers. His studio
came to little compared with Dill's, and to little more compared with
Gowan's; but the jars and the blankets did their part, the mandolin and
the coffee-pot theirs; the portfolios were broken open to decorate the
walls, and,----
"You'll do," said Little O'Grady.
Preciosa's back missed the tall mahogany chair with the brass rosettes.
"We've loaned it to Gowan," explained Little O'Grady; "we're helping him
out on a portrait."
Preciosa's feet missed the thick-piled Persian rug. "It was getting full
of moths and dust," said Little O'Grady. "We've given it to some poor
chaps upstairs for a coverlet."
"Are they very destitute?" asked Preciosa tenderly.
"Turrible," replied Little O'Grady. "There's one sufferer up there who's
just about cleaned out--nothing left but his bed and one chair. He's
eating his mattress. It'll last a week longer."
Preciosa leaned back luxuriously on the wood-box, which was covered by
one of the blankets, and tapped her delicate little foot on the other,
spread over the floor. How fortunate that Ignace was spared all these
privations!
Prochnow himself could not feel that he was poor. _She_ was here; his
drawings were with the bank; his Odalisque was at the club; and his Fall
of Madame Lucifer, in a bright new frame, adorned the chaste walls of
Roscoe Orlando Gibbons. The future was bright with promise. He dared to
speak now. He would. He did.
As soon as Little O'Grady had the grace to make a move toward departure,
Prochnow hastened it on. O'Grady went upstairs to banish one or two more
obstacles from the way of the Car of Progress, and Prochnow took Preciosa
over to the Academy to see the Winter Exhibition.
Preciosa, as has already been said, was not a girl of many ideas; yet a
single one, detached, isolated, and presented to her with some ardour and
directness, was easily within her grasp. The idea was now presented, and
Preciosa forgot all about the pictures. For surely he who offered it was
a most complete and admirable mechanism; the pulse of his heart, the beat
of his brain, the flash of his eye, the tremor of his masterful
hands--all these now worked in fullest harmony and told her here was a
man. Preciosa, never inclined to make too much of worldly considerations,
now set them aside altogether. Any idea of mere lucre slipped from her
mind, and if she thought at all of a mother's strained social ambitions
for a favourite child, it was but to feel with a wilful joy that she was
extricating herself from the selfish grasp of Virgilia Jeffreys. Her own
humble and obscure origin stirred within her,--her, the granddaughter of
peasants who had trotted their bogs,--and she gave no heed to her lover's
gentility or lack of it, in her unconscious tendency, even her active
willingness, to "revert."
Prochnow felt the utmost confidence in his own powers, in his future, in
the great scheme now under the scrutiny of the Grindstone. He glanced
round the walls of the gallery, and here and there a canvas due to one
hand or another that had co-operated in the rival scheme came to his
view. He made silent, acidulous comments on certain manifestations of
mediocrity placed there by men so much better quartered, better known,
better circumstanced than himself. "Never mind," he said; "next year _I_
shall be here, and then the difference will be seen by everybody." Well
might the director welcome work from one who had distanced all others in
a fair race and who unaided had brought to a triumphal issue the greatest
piece of monumental decoration the town had ever known. And this little
thing close by his side, panting, palpitating, flushing divinely, had
helped him to conquer his success.
"It will be your triumph, too!" he told her.
"Mine?" she asked, in self-depreciation. "Why, I have not made you a
single suggestion." Too truly she was no Virgilia Jeffreys.
"You have had a hand in every drawing," he insisted warmly. "You have
moved the crayon over every sheet. The whole work is full of you--it is
You yourself."
Preciosa accepted this full, round declaration with easy passivity; she
was not clever, only happy. If he thought thus, and felt thus--why, that
was enough. He was a strong young man--let him have his way. It all fell
in with his "handling" of the whole situation. Little enough had he
depended upon soft seduction, upon gallantry, upon flattery; still less
had he tried to wheedle, to propitiate. He had grasped her with an
intent, smileless severity, and he was not to be opposed. His words, like
his works, were full of sweep and decision, and empty of all light
humours, and they lifted her up and carried her away.
"Yes," she said, "it will be my triumph too." And she seemed to have said
the words he wished to hear.