第55章 PART SECOND(21)

X

Beaton lit his pipe when he found himself in his room,and sat down before the dull fire in his grate to think.It struck him there was a dull fire in his heart a great deal like it;and he worked out a fanciful analogy with the coals,still alive,and the ashes creeping over them,and the dead clay and cinders.He felt sick of himself,sick of his life and of all his works.He was angry with Fulkerson for having got him into that art department of his,for having bought him up;and he was bitter at fate because he had been obliged to use the money to pay some pressing debts,and had not been able to return the check his father had sent him.He pitied his poor old father;he ached with compassion for him;and he set his teeth and snarled with contempt through them for his own baseness.This was the kind of world it was;but he washed his hands of it.The fault was in human nature,and he reflected with pride that he had at least not invented human nature;he had not sunk so low as that yet.The notion amused him;he thought he might get a Satanic epigram out of it some way.But in the mean time that girl,that wild animal,she kept visibly,tangibly before him;if he put out his hand he might touch hers,he might pass his arm round her waist.In Paris,in a set he knew there,what an effect she would be with that look of hers,and that beauty,all out of drawing!They would recognize the flame quality in her.He imagined a joke about her being a fiery spirit,or nymph,naiad,whatever,from one of her native gas-wells.He began to sketch on a bit of paper from the table at his elbow vague lines that veiled and revealed a level,dismal landscape,and a vast flame against an empty sky,and a shape out of the flame that took on a likeness and floated detached from it.The sketch ran up the left side of the sheet and stretched across it.Beaton laughed out.Pretty good to let Fulkerson have that for the cover of his first number!In black and red it would be effective;it would catch the eye from the news-stands.He made a motion to throw it on the fire,but held it back and slid it into the table-drawer,and smoked on.He saw the dummy with the other sketch in the open drawer which he had brought away from Fulkerson's in the morning and slipped in there,and he took it out and looked at it.He made some criticisms in line with his pencil on it,correcting the drawing here and there,and then he respected it a little more,though he still smiled at the feminine quality--a young lady quality.

In spite of his experience the night he called upon the Leightons,Beaton could not believe that Alma no longer cared for him.She played at having forgotten him admirably,but he knew that a few months before she had been very mindful of him.He knew he had neglected them since they came to New York,where he had led them to expect interest,if not attention;but he was used to neglecting people,and he was somewhat less used to being punished for it--punished and forgiven.He felt that Alma had punished him so thoroughly that she ought to have been satisfied with her work and to have forgiven him in her heart afterward.He bore no resentment after the first tingling moments were-past;he rather admired her for it;and he would have been ready to go back half an hour later and accept pardon and be on the footing of last summer again.Even now he debated with himself whether it was too late to call;but,decidedly,a quarter to ten seemed late.The next day he determined never to call upon the Leightons again;but he had no reason for this;it merely came into a transitory scheme of conduct,of retirement from the society of women altogether;and after dinner he went round to see them.

He asked for the ladies,and they all three received him,Alma not without a surprise that intimated itself to him,and her mother with no appreciable relenting;Miss Woodburn,with the needlework which she found easier to be voluble over than a book,expressed in her welcome a neutrality both cordial to Beaton and loyal to Alma.

"Is it snowing outdo's?"she asked,briskly,after the greetings were transacted."Mah goodness!"she said,in answer to his apparent surprise at the question."Ah mahght as well have stayed in the Soath,for all the winter Ah have seen in New York yet.""We don't often have snow much before New-Year's,"said Beaton.

"Miss Woodburn is wild for a real Northern winter,"Mrs.Leighton explained.

"The othah naght Ah woke up and looked oat of the window and saw all the roofs covered with snow,and it turned oat to be nothing but moonlaght.

Ah was never so disappointed in mah lahfe,"said Miss Woodburn.

"If you'll come to St.Barnaby next summer,you shall have all the winter you want,"said Alma.

"I can't let you slander St.Barnaby in that way,"said Beaton,with the air of wishing to be understood as meaning more than he said.

"Yes?"returned Alma,coolly."I didn't know you were so fond of the climate.""I never think of it as a climate.It's a landscape.It doesn't matter whether it's hot or cold.""With the thermometer twenty below,you'd find that it mattered,"Alma persisted.

"Is that the way you feel about St.Barnaby,too,Mrs.Leighton?"Beaton asked,with affected desolation.

"I shall be glad enough to go back in the summer,"Mrs.Leighton conceded.

"And I should be glad to go now,"said Beaton,looking at Alma.He had the dummy of 'Every Other Week'in his hand,and he saw Alma's eyes wandering toward it whenever he glanced at her."I should be glad to go anywhere to get out of a job I've undertaken,"he continued,to Mrs.

Leighton."They're going to start some sort of a new illustrated magazine,and they've got me in for their art department.I'm not fit for it;I'd like to run away.Don't you want to advise me a little,Mrs.

Leighton?You know how much I value your taste,and I'd like to have you look at the design for the cover of the first number:they're going to have a different one for every number.I don't know whether you'll agree with me,but I think this is rather nice."He faced the dummy round,and then laid it on the table before Mrs.