The course of public events carried Beaton's private affairs beyond the
reach of his simple first intention to renounce his connection with
'Every Other Week.' In fact, this was not perhaps so simple as it seemed,
and long before it could be put in effect it appeared still simpler to do
nothing about the matter--to remain passive and leave the initiative to
Dryfoos, to maintain the dignity of unconsciousness and let recognition
of any change in the situation come from those who had caused the change.
After all, it was rather absurd to propose making a purely personal
question the pivot on which his relations with 'Every Other Week' turned.
He took a hint from March's position and decided that he did not know
Dryfoos in these relations; he knew only Fulkerson, who had certainly had
nothing to do with Mrs. Mandel's asking his intentions. As he reflected
upon this he became less eager to look Fulkerson up and make the magazine
a partner of his own sufferings. This was the soberer mood to which
Beaton trusted that night even before he slept, and he awoke fully
confirmed in it. As he examined the offence done him in the cold light of
day, he perceived that it had not come either from Mrs. Mandel, who was
visibly the faltering and unwilling instrument of it, or from Christine,
who was altogether ignorant of it, but from Dryfoos, whom he could not
hurt by giving up his place. He could only punish Fulkerson by that, and
Fulkerson was innocent. Justice and interest alike dictated the passive
course to which Beaton inclined; and he reflected that he might safely
leave the punishment of Dryfoos to Christine, who would find out what had
happened, and would be able to take care of herself in any encounter of
tempers with her father.
Beaton did not go to the office during the week that followed upon this
conclusion; but they were used there to these sudden absences of his,
and, as his work for the time was in train, nothing was made of his
staying away, except the sarcastic comment which the thought of him was
apt to excite in the literary department. He no longer came so much to
the Leightons, and Fulkerson was in no state of mind to miss any one
there except Miss Woodburn, whom he never missed. Beaton was left, then,
unmolestedly awaiting the course of destiny, when he read in the morning
paper, over his coffee at Maroni's, the deeply scare-headed story of
Conrad's death and the clubbing of Lindau. He probably cared as little
for either of them as any man that ever saw them; but he felt a shock, if
not a pang, at Conrad's fate, so out of keeping with his life and
character. He did not know what to do; and he did nothing. He was not
asked to the funeral, but he had not expected that, and, when Fulkerson
brought him notice that Lindau was also to be buried from Dryfoos's
house, it was without his usual sullen vindictiveness that he kept away.
In his sort, and as much as a man could who was necessarily so much taken
up with himself, he was sorry for Conrad's father; Beaton had a peculiar
tenderness for his own father, and he imagined how his father would feel
if it were he who had been killed in Conrad's place, as it might very
well have been; he sympathized with himself in view of the possibility;
and for once they were mistaken who thought him indifferent and merely
brutal in his failure to appear at Lindau's obsequies.
He would really have gone if he had known how to reconcile his presence
in that house with the terms of his effective banishment from it; and he
was rather forgivingly finding himself wronged in the situation, when
Dryfoos knocked at the studio door the morning after Lindau's funeral.
Beaton roared out, "Come in!" as he always did to a knock if he had not a
model; if he had a model he set the door slightly ajar, and with his
palette on his thumb frowned at his visitor and told him he could not
come in. Dryfoos fumbled about for the knob in the dim passageway
outside, and Beaton, who had experience of people's difficulties with it,
suddenly jerked the door open. The two men stood confronted, and at first
sight of each other their quiescent dislike revived. Each would have been
willing to turn away from the other, but that was not possible. Beaton
snorted some sort of inarticulate salutation, which Dryfoos did not try
to return; he asked if he could see him alone for a minute or two, and
Beaton bade him come in, and swept some paint-blotched rags from the
chair which he told him to take. He noticed, as the old man sank
tremulously into it, that his movement was like that of his own father,
and also that he looked very much like Christine. Dryfoos folded his
hands tremulously on the top of his horn-handled stick, and he was rather
finely haggard, with the dark hollows round his black eyes and the fall
of the muscles on either side of his chin. He had forgotten to take his
soft, wide-brimmed hat off; and Beaton felt a desire to sketch him just
as he sat.
Dryfoos suddenly pulled himself together from the dreary absence into
which he fell at first. "Young man," he began, "maybe I've come here on a
fool's errand," and Beaton rather fancied that beginning.
But it embarrassed him a little, and he said, with a shy glance aside, "I
don't know what you mean." "I reckon," Dryfoos answered, quietly, "you
got your notion, though. I set that woman on to speak to you the way she
done. But if there was anything wrong in the way she spoke, or if you
didn't feel like she had any right to question you up as if we suspected
you of anything mean, I want you to say so."
Beaton said nothing, and the old man went on.
"I ain't very well up in the ways of the world, and I don't pretend to
be. All I want is to be fair and square with everybody. I've made
mistakes, though, in my time--" He stopped, and Beaton was not proof
against the misery of his face, which was twisted as with some strong
physical ache. "I don't know as I want to make any more, if I can help
it. I don't know but what you had a right to keep on comin', and if you
had I want you to say so. Don't you be afraid but what I'll take it in
the right way. I don't want to take advantage of anybody, and I don't ask
you to say any more than that."
Beaton did not find the humiliation of the man who had humiliated him so
sweet as he could have fancied it might be. He knew how it had come
about, and that it was an effect of love for his child; it did not matter
by what ungracious means she had brought him to know that he loved her
better than his own will, that his wish for her happiness was stronger
than his pride; it was enough that he was now somehow brought to give
proof of it. Beaton could not be aware of all that dark coil of
circumstance through which Dryfoos's present action evolved itself; the
worst of this was buried in the secret of the old man's heart, a worm of
perpetual torment. What was apparent to another was that he was broken by
the sorrow that had fallen upon him, and it was this that Beaton
respected and pitied in his impulse to be frank and kind in his answer.
"No, I had no right to keep coming to your house in the way I did,
unless--unless I meant more than I ever said." Beaton added: "I don't say
that what you did was usual--in this country, at any rate; but I can't
say you were wrong. Since you speak to me about the matter, it's only
fair to myself to say that a good deal goes on in life without much
thinking of consequences. That's the way I excuse myself."
"And you say Mrs. Mandel done right?" asked Dryfoos, as if he wished
simply to be assured of a point of etiquette.
"Yes, she did right. I've nothing to complain of."
"That's all I wanted to know," said Dryfoos; but apparently he had not
finished, and he did not go, though the silence that Beaton now kept gave
him a chance to do so. He began a series of questions which had no
relation to the matter in hand, though they were strictly personal to
Beaton. "What countryman are you?" he asked, after a moment.
"What countryman?" Beaton frowned back at him.
"Yes, are you an American by birth?"
"Yes; I was born in Syracuse."
"Protestant?"
"My father is a Scotch Seceder."
"What business is your father in?"
Beaton faltered and blushed; then he answered:
"He's in the monument business, as he calls it. He's a tombstone cutter."
Now that he was launched, Beaton saw no reason for not declaring, "My
father's always been a poor man, and worked with his own hands for his
living." He had too slight esteem socially for Dryfoos to conceal a fact
from him that he might have wished to blink with others.
"Well, that's right," said Dryfoos. "I used to farm it myself. I've got a
good pile of money together, now. At first it didn't come easy; but now
it's got started it pours in and pours in; it seems like there was no end
to it. I've got well on to three million; but it couldn't keep me from
losin' my son. It can't buy me back a minute of his life; not all the
money in the world can do it!"
He grieved this out as if to himself rather than to Beaton, who, scarcely
ventured to say, "I know--I am very sorry--"
"How did you come," Dryfoos interrupted, "to take up paintin'?"
"Well, I don't know," said Beaton, a little scornfully. "You don't take
a thing of that kind up, I fancy. I always wanted to paint."
"Father try to stop you?"
"No. It wouldn't have been of any use. Why--"
"My son, he wanted to be a preacher, and I did stop him or I thought I
did. But I reckon he was a preacher, all the same, every minute of his
life. As you say, it ain't any use to try to stop a thing like that. I
reckon if a child has got any particular bent, it was given to it; and
it's goin' against the grain, it's goin' against the law, to try to bend
it some other way. There's lots of good business men, Mr. Beaton, twenty
of 'em to every good preacher?"
"I imagine more than twenty," said Beaton, amused and touched through his
curiosity as to what the old man was driving at by the quaint simplicity
of his speculations.
"Father ever come to the city?"
"No; he never has the time; and my mother's an invalid."
"Oh! Brothers and sisters?"
"Yes; we're a large family."
"I lost two little fellers--twins," said Dryfoos, sadly. "But we hain't
ever had but just the five. Ever take portraits?"
"Yes," said Beaton, meeting this zigzag in the queries as seriously as
the rest. "I don't think I am good at it."
Dryfoos got to his feet. "I wish you'd paint a likeness of my son. You've
seen him plenty of times. We won't fight about the price, don't you be
afraid of that."
Beaton was astonished, and in a mistaken way he was disgusted. He saw
that Dryfoos was trying to undo Mrs. Mandel's work practically, and get
him to come again to his house; that he now conceived of the offence
given him as condoned, and wished to restore the former situation. He
knew that he was attempting this for Christine's sake, but he was not the
man to imagine that Dryfoos was trying not only to tolerate him, but to
like him; and, in fact, Dryfoos was not wholly conscious himself of this
end. What they both understood was that Dryfoos was endeavoring to get at
Beaton through Conrad's memory; but with one this was its dedication to a
purpose of self sacrifice, and with the other a vulgar and shameless use
of it.
"I couldn't do it," said Beaton. "I couldn't think of attempting it."
"Why not?" Dryfoos persisted. "We got some photographs of him; he didn't
like to sit very well; but his mother got him to; and you know how he
looked."
"I couldn't do it--I couldn't. I can't even consider it. I'm very sorry.
I would, if it were possible. But it isn't possible."
"I reckon if you see the photographs once--"
"It isn't that, Mr. Dryfoos. But I'm not in the way of that kind of thing
any more."
"I'd give any price you've a mind to name--"
"Oh, it isn't the money!" cried Beaton, beginning to lose control of
himself.
The old man did not notice him. He sat with his head fallen forward, and
his chin resting on his folded hands. Thinking of the portrait, he saw
Conrad's face before him, reproachful, astonished, but all gentle as it
looked when Conrad caught his hand that day after he struck him; he heard
him say, "Father!" and the sweat gathered on his forehead. "Oh, my God!"
he groaned. "No; there ain't anything I can do now."
Beaton did not know whether Dryfoos was speaking to him or not. He
started toward him. "Are you ill?"
"No, there ain't anything the matter," said the old man. "But I guess
I'll lay down on your settee a minute." He tottered with Beaton's help to
the aesthetic couch covered with a tiger-skin, on which Beaton had once
thought of painting a Cleopatra; but he could never get the right model.
As the old man stretched himself out on it, pale and suffering, he did
not look much like a Cleopatra, but Beaton was struck with his
effectiveness, and the likeness between him and his daughter; she would
make a very good Cleopatra in some ways. All the time, while these
thoughts passed through his mind, he was afraid Dryfoos would die. The
old man fetched his breath in gasps, which presently smoothed and
lengthened into his normal breathing. Beaton got him a glass of wine, and
after tasting it he sat up.
"You've got to excuse me," he said, getting back to his characteristic
grimness with surprising suddenness, when once he began to recover
himself. "I've been through a good deal lately; and sometimes it ketches
me round the heart like a pain."
In his life of selfish immunity from grief, Beaton could not understand
this experience that poignant sorrow brings; he said to himself that
Dryfoos was going the way of angina pectoris; as he began shuffling off
the tiger-skin he said: "Had you better get up? Wouldn't you like me to
call a doctor?"
"I'm all right, young man." Dryfoos took his hat and stick from him, but
he made for the door so uncertainly that Beaton put his hand under his
elbow and helped him out, and down the stairs, to his coupe.
"Hadn't you better let me drive home with you?" he asked.
"What?" said Dryfoos, suspiciously.
Beaton repeated his question.
"I guess I'm able to go home alone," said Dryfoos, in a surly tone, and
he put his head out of the window and called up "Home!" to the driver,
who immediately started off and left Beaton standing beside the
curbstone.