Money Magic: A Novel

"I don't believe I can stay to-day. The Captain is below."

"Please do sit down for a moment. I'll be hurt if you don't."

The studio was a big bare barn of a place with a few broad canvases upon the walls – not a bit like Humiston; and he explained that his stay in America being short, he could not afford to have a studio of his own. "I'm glad you came. You must let me take you to see my 'show' next week. Your fresh, young, Western eyes are just what I need." This was false, for he was impatient of all criticism. "I need comfort," he added, wearily smiling. "I didn't sell enough in the West to pay my railway fare."

He seemed ill as well as sad, and Bertha felt sorry for him. "Won't you come with us for a ride?"

"I'd rather have you stay and talk with me."

"Oh, I can't do that! The Captain is waiting for me. He said to bring you."

"But I don't want to go. I hate automobiles. I hate seeing sights. I despise this town. I've a grouch against everything in America – except you. Let me go down and tell the Captain to take his spin alone."

"No, no," she sharply said. "I keep my word. I said I'd be back in a few minutes, and I'm going."

He sighed resignedly. "Very well; but you'll let me come to see you?"

"Why, cert! Come to dinner any day. We don't browse around much outside the hotel. We're mostly always feeding at six."

"I'll come, and you must not fail to let me show you my pictures."

"Sure thing! I want to buy one to take home with me."

He assumed great candor. "I won't say that your ability to buy one of my pictures is not of interest to me, for it is; but quite aside from that, there is something in you that appeals to me. You make me think better of the West – of America. I feel that you will find something in my pictures which the critics miss." Then, with mournful abruptness, he added: "No doubt Joe told you of my unhappy marriage – "

"No, he didn't."

"My wife cares nothing for my work. She takes no interest in anything but the frippery side of life. That's what appeals to me in you – you are so aspiring. I feel that you have such wonderful possibilities. You would spur a man to big things."

They were both standing as if he had forgotten where he was, and she, embarrassed but fascinated by his words, and especially held by his voice, dared not make a motion till he released her. He looked round him. "I don't wonder you dislike this room; it's horribly cold and depressing to me. I can't work here. I wish you could see my den in Paris. Perhaps you will let me show it to you some day. All my happiest days have been spent in France. I am more French than American now."

He took her hand again, and with a return to his studiedly cheerful manner called her to witness that she had promised to come to see his paintings. "And please remember that I am going to take you at your word and dine with you – perhaps this very night."

"All right, come along," she replied, and went away filled with wonder at the familiar, almost humble attitude he had assumed towards her.

He did indeed dine with them that night, and quite won the Captain to a belief in him. "Come again," he heartily said. And the great artist feelingly answered: "I mean to, for, strange to say, I am almost as lonesome in this big town as anybody could be." This was a lie, but Haney's sympathy was roused. "There'll always be an empty chair for you," he repeated, with a feeling that he, too, was encouraging art.

Humiston pursued this game with singular and joyous skill. He talked of the West and of politics with the Captain, and of love and art and his essentially lonely life to Bertha. He returned often to the wish that they might meet in Paris. "A trip abroad would do you infinite good," he insisted. "What you need is three years of life in Paris. With your beauty and money, and, above all, with your personal magnetism, you could reign like a queen. I wonder that you don't go. It would be worth more to you than any other possible schooling. I don't know of anything in this world that would give me greater pleasure than to show you Paris."

Bertha's silence in face of these approaches deceived him. The throbbing of her bosom, the fall of her eyelashes, were due to instinctive distrust of him. That he was more dangerous than the rough miners and cowboys of the West she could not believe, and yet she drew back in growing fear of one who openly claimed the right to plow athwart all the barriers of law and custom. His mind's flight was like that of the eagle – now rising to the sun in exultation, now falling to the gray sea to slay. At times she felt a kind of gratitude that he should be willing to sit beside her and talk – he, so skilled, so learned, so famous.

The Chicago papers were still filled with criticism of his work and his theories, and this discussion, as well as the appearance of his portrait in the magazines, had made of him a very exalted person in little Mrs. Haney's eyes, and the interest he took in her was too subtly flattering not to affect her. He seemed fond of the Captain, too, and often joined them in their trips about the city, and the fellows who had known Humiston in Paris and who did not know Bertha nodded knowingly. "Jerry's amusing himself, as usual. I wonder who she is?"

He explained his poverty one day as he sat with her in the little gallery where his paintings were hung. "The fact is, while other men have been painting to order and doing 'stunts' for the Salon, I've gone on refining, seeking new shades, new allurements, subordinating line to color, story to harmony, till my work is sublimated beyond my public. The people that bought my things once can't follow me; it is only now and then that a man, or a woman feels what I'm after – and so I live. I hold all things beautiful to paint, America does not."

He liked her all the better because she did not try to say what she thought of his pictures, and when she insisted on taking one of them home he quickly stopped her. "I'm not asking you to take pity on me," he sharply said. And in this lay the subtlest touch of flattery he had yet used: the idea that she, an ignorant mountain girl, could be accused of patronizing a man so distinguished, so gifted as he, moved her in spite of all warnings. Why should she not use her money to help this wonderful artist?

She insisted on a picture, and asked him to select one for her. "I've got a big house out in the Springs, and I'd like something of yours."

"Not out of this collection," he declared. "These are not the ones on which my fame rests. The ones that represent me are in the cellar."

Her eyes were wide in question. "What do you mean by that?"

"American dealers won't include my best things in the exhibit – they are too 'direct.' They are stored over here in a warehouse. I'd like to show them to you. Will you come?" he asked, with eager eyes.

And she, with a sense of being distinguished above the great public, consented. Humiston rose animatedly. "Let's go over and see them now."

His gentle camaraderie, his eagerness, touched Bertha, and when he took her arm to help her into the elevator or to make sure she did not stumble at the crossing she was stirred – not as Ben's hand had moved her, but her blood nevertheless palpably quickened. Was it not wonderful that she, so lately from the mountains, should be walking here in the midst of the thronging multitudes of a great city street in the company of one of the chief artists of the world?

Humiston, crafty, cruel, unscrupulous, returned to his abuse of the city, and explained to her that American dealers had no real appreciation of art. "They sell anything that will sell, any cheap daub, and yet they dared to refuse to exhibit my best things! It was the same in Pittsburg and Buffalo; they're all alike. But what can you expect of these densely material towns? Beauty means only prettiness to them."

The salesman of the shop, accustomed to seeing Humiston pass in and out with friends, paid no special heed to the painter as he led Bertha into the farther room, where a few of his pictures hung among a dozen others. No one was in the gallery, and just as she was wondering where the other paintings could be, he opened a door (which was cut out of the wall and partly concealed by paintings), and smilingly said: "Here is the inner temple. Enter."

She obeyed with a little hesitation, for the storeroom was not well lighted, and she had a wild bird's distrust of dark, enclosing walls.

Humiston shut the door behind him and followed her, plaintively saying: "Isn't it hard lines to have to bring my friends into this hole to show my masterpieces?" And by this she inferred that there was nothing unusual in the experience.

It was a long, bare hall, filled with boxes and littered with bits of excelsior, and Bertha looked about her uneasily while Humiston bent over some canvases stacked on the floor. He seemed to be selecting one with care. An electric lamp was swinging from the ceiling, and under it stood a large easel, and on this he placed a canvas, and, stepping back with eyes fixed on her, said with spirit: "This is one of my best. It was in the new Salon – here is the number. And yet it may not be exhibited in this rotten town."

Bertha inwardly recoiled from the canvas, for it was a painting of a nude figure of a girl at the bath. The critics had said, "It is naked, rather than nude," and the dealers objected to it on this ground, and to the Western girl it was both shocking and ugly. Before she had caught her breath he continued, in a tone that was at once a seduction and a defence: "There is nothing more beautiful in the world than the female form; it is the flower of flowers. Why should it not be painted?" And then, while still he argued for the return of the Greek's love of beauty, covering his moral depravity with the mantle of the philosopher, he placed another canvas before her – something so unrefined, so animal, so destructive of womanly modesty and of all reserve, that any one looking upon it would instantly know that the man who had painted it was a degenerate demon – an associate of dissolute models, an anarchist in the world of women. It was fit only for the banquet-halls of the damned.

Bertha stared at it – fascinated by the sense of the tempter's nearness. It was as if a satyr had suddenly revealed his lawless soul to her. Her thinking for an instant chained her feet, and her silence emboldened him.

Even as she turned to flee she felt his arm about her waist, his breath upon her cheek. "Don't go!" he pleaded, and in his eyes was the same look she had seen in the face of Charles Haney. At last he stood revealed. His artist soul could stoop as low in purpose as a drunken tramp. Beating him off with her strong hands, she ran down the hall and burst into the brilliantly lighted exhibition room such a picture of affrighted, outraged girlhood that the salesman stared upon her in wonder. His look of surprise warned Bertha of her danger. Composing herself by tremendous effort of the will, she closed the door and walked slowly out into the street, her brain in a tumult of anger and shame.

It seemed at the moment as if every man she had ever known was a brute-demon seeking to destroy her. She understood now the reason for the great painter's flattering deference to her opinion. From the first he had sought to blind her. His ways were subtler than those of Charles Haney and his like, but his soul was no higher; it was indeed more ignoble, for he was of those who claim to dispense learning and light. Pretending to add beauty to the world, he was ready to feed himself at the cost of a woman's soul. She recalled Mrs. Moss' hints about his life in Paris, and understood at last that he had wilfully misread her homage and trust. A realization of this perfidy filled her with a fury of hate and disgust. Was Ben Fordyce like all the rest? Did his candor, his sweetness of smile, but veil another mode of approach? Was his kiss as vile in its disloyalty, his embrace as remorseless in its design?

She walked back along the shining avenue to her hotel with drooping head. She knew the worst of Humiston now. She burned with helpless wrath as she dwelt upon his assumptions of superiority. She hated the whole glittering, unresting, lavish city at the moment, and her soul longed for the silence of the peaks to the west. She turned to her husband as one who seeks a tower of refuge in time of war.

CHAPTER XXIII

BERTHA'S FLIGHT

Before she had fairly recovered her poise next day Lucius brought to her a letter from Humiston – a suave, impudent note wherein he expressed the hope that she was well, and went on to plead in veiled phrase: "I'm sorry you did not stay to see the rest of my pictures. I meant it all as a compliment to your innate good taste and purity of thought. I expected you to see them as I painted them – in pure artistic delight. You misunderstood me. I hope you will let me see you again. You must remember you promised to let me make a portrait sketch of you."

Although not skilled in polite duplicity, Bertha was able to read beneath the serene insolence of these lines something so diabolically relentless that she turned cold with fear and repulsion. She had no experience which fitted her to deal with such a pursuer, and she shuddered at the rustling of the paper in her hand as she had once quivered in breathless terror of a rattlesnake stirring in the leaves near the door of her tent. Her first impulse was to lay the whole affair before the Captain, but the knowledge of his deadly temper when roused decided her to slip out at the other side of this fearsome thicket and leave the serpent in possession. She longed to return to the West. The little group of people in the Springs allured her; they were to be trusted. Congdon and Crego and Ben – these men she knew and respected. Her joy of the big outside Eastern world had begun to pass, and she dreaded to encounter again the bold eyes and coarse compliments of the men who loaf about the hotels and clubs.

She turned to Haney as he came into her room, and said: "Mart, I want to go home – to-day."

"All right, Bertie, I'm ready – or will be, as soon as I pick up the old father. But don't you want to see that show we've got tickets for?"

"No, I've had enough of this old town. I'm crazy to go home."

"Home it is, then." He called sharply; "Lucius!" The man appeared, impassive, noiseless, unhurried. The Captain issued his orders: "Thrun me garbage into a thrunk, and call some one to help the missus; we're goin' to hit the sunset trail to-night. 'Phone me old dad besides, and have him come over at wanst. Here we emigrate westward by the next express."

The man quietly took control of the situation, and in a few moments the Captain's commands were being carried out with the precision of a military camp.

Bertha, alarmed by Humiston's letter, refused to go down to the public dining-room. A fear that she might encounter the painter possessed her, and the thought of him was at once a shame and torment; therefore, she had her luncheon sent up, and Lucius himself found time to wait upon them.

As they were in the midst of their meal, Haney remarked rather than asked: "Of course, you're going back with us, Lucius."

"I have thought of it, sir, but it isn't in our contract."

"We can put it in," said Bertha.

"We can't do without you now," added Mart.

Lucius seemed pleased. "Thank you for that, Captain. I don't particularly care for the West, but I find service with you agreeable."

Haney chuckled. "Service, do ye call it? Sure, man, 'tis you are in command. I'm but a high private in the rear rank."

Lucius's yellow face flushed and his eyes wavered. "I hope I haven't assumed – "

"Assumed! No, 'tis we who are obligated. We need you as bad as a plainsman needs a guide in the green timber; and if you don't mind a steady job of looking after us social tenderfeet, I'm willing to make it right with you – and Mrs. Haney feels just the way I do."

"Sure, Mart – only trouble with Lucius is, he leaves so little for me to do. He's too handy – if anything."

"That'll wear off," replied Haney. "Well, then, it's all settled but the price, and I reckon we can fix that. If I can't pay cash, I'll let you in on the mine."

Lucius smiled. "Thank you, Captain; it's not entirely a question of pay with me; my wants are few."

Bertha seized the moment to put a question she had been minded many times to ask. "Lucius, what's your plan? You can't intend to do this all your life? Tell us your ambition – maybe we can help you."

He looked away, and a deeper shadow fell over his face. "I had ambitions once, Mrs. Haney, but my color was against me. Yes, I think I'll stay as I am. There is a certain security in being valet. You white people know exactly where to find me, and I know just how to meet you. In my profession it was different – I was always being cursed for presumption."

"What was your profession?" asked Haney.

"I studied law – and practised for a year or two in Washington; but I didn't like my position; I was neither white nor colored, so when I got a good chance I went out to service with a senator as body-servant." He stopped abruptly as though that were all of his tale.

Haney said: "Well, if you can put up with an ignorant old hill-climber like meself, I'll be grateful, and I'll try not rub your fur the wrong way."

Lucius became very earnest for the first time. "There, sir, is one point upon which I must insist. If I go with you, you are to treat me just as you have been doing – as a trusted servant. I'm sorry I told you anything about myself. My service thus far has been very pleasant, very satisfactory, and unless we can go on in the same way, I must leave."

"Very well," replied Haney. "It's all settled – you're adjutant-general of the Haneys' forces."

After Lucius went away Bertha said, thoughtfully: "I wish he hadn't told us that; I can't order him around the way I've been doing."

Haney smiled. "Did ye order him around? I niver chanced to hear ye do anything but ask him questions. 'Lucius, will ye do this?' 'Lucius, won't ye do that?'"

Bertha was troubled, and found herself embarrassed by the mulatto's services. She now perceived sadness beneath the quiet lines of his face and hard-won culture in the tones of his voice. The essential tragedy of his defeat grew more poignant to her as she watched him getting the trunks strapped, surrounded by maids and porters. How could she have misread his manner? He was performing his duties, not with quiet gusto, but in the spirit of the trained nurse.

This mountain girl had always regarded Illinois as "the East," but after a few weeks in New York City she now looked away to Chicago as a Western town. She was glad to face the sunset sky again, and yet as she wheeled away to the train she acknowledged a regret. Under the skilful guidance of Lucius she had seen a great deal of the splendid and furious Manhattan. She had gazed with unenvious admiration on the palaces of upper Fifth Avenue and the Park. Together with Haney she had spun up Riverside Drive, past Grant's Tomb, and on through Washington Heights, with joy of the far-spreading panorama. She had visited the Battery and sailed the shining way to Staten Island in silent awe of the ship-filled bay. She had heard the sunset-guns thunder at Fort Hamilton, and had threaded the mazes of the Brooklyn Navy-Yard, and each day the mast-hemmed island widened in grandeur and thickened with threads of human purpose, making the America she knew very simple, very quiet, and very remote.

Night by night she had gone to the music-halls and theatres, and her mind had been powerfully wrought upon by what she had seen and heard. In all these trips Haney had heroically accompanied his wife, though he frequently dropped asleep in his seat; and he, too, left the city with regret, though he said, "Thank God, I'm out of it," as they settled into their seats in the ferry. "'Tis not the night traffic that wears me down – I'm used to being on the night shift; 'tis the wild pace Lucius sets by day. Faith, 'twas the aquarium in the morning and the circus in the afternoon. Me dreams have been wan long procession of misbegotten fish, ballet-dancers, dirty monkeys, and big elephants the nights. 'Tis a great city, but I am ready to return to me peaceful perch above the faro-board; I think 'twould rest me soul to see a game of craps."

"Why didn't you order Lucius to let up on the sight-seeing business?" Bertha said.

"And expose me weak knees to me nigger? No, no, Mike."

"I wanted you to let me rummage about alone."

"You did. But I could not allow that, neyther. So long as I can sit the road-cart or run me arms into a biled shirt I'll stay by, darlin'. 'Tis not safe for you to go about alone in the hell-broth of these Eastern streets. Besides, while I'm losin' weight I'm lighter on me feet than when I came. I've enjoyed me trip, but it does seem sinful to think of our big house standing empty and the horses 'stockin'' in their stalls, and I'm glad we're edgin' along homeward."

"So am I," Bertha heartily agreed, even as she looked lovingly back upon the mighty walls and towers which filled the sky behind her. It was a gloriously exciting place to live in, after all. "Some day I may come back," she promised herself, but the thought of Humiston lurking like a wolf in the shadow came to make her going more and more like an escape.

The elder Haney amused her by his frank comment on everything that was strange to him. His new teeth, which did not fit him very securely, troubled him greatly, and he spoke with one hand held alertly, ready to catch them if they fell, but his smile was a radiant grin, and his shrewd old face was good to look at as he faced the splendors of the limited express.

"'Tis foine as a bar-room," said he. "To be whisked about over the world like this is no hairdship. Bedad, if I'd known how aisy it was I'd a visited McArdle befoore." He pretended to believe that everybody travelled this way, and that Mart was merely doing the ordinary in the matter of meals and state-room; and as he wandered from end to end of the train and found only luxurious coaches, and people taking their ease, he had all the best of the argument. Lucius he regarded as a man of his own level, and they held long confabulations together – the colored man accepting this comradeship in the spirit of democracy in which it was given. Mart, for his part, sat looking out of the window, dreaming of the past.

As she neared Chicago next day Bertha thought with pleasure of seeing the Mosses again. Now that Humiston was eliminated, she had only the pleasantest memories of the people she had met in the smoky city. It was as if in a dark forest of lofty trees she had found a pleasant mead on which the warm sunlight fell. The mellow charm of the studios was made all the more appealing by reason of the drab and desolate waste through which she was forced to pass to attain the light and laughter of those high places.

Chicago had grown more gloomily impressive, and at the same time – by reason of her knowledge of the larger plans and mightier enterprises of New York – it seemed simpler, and Bertha re-entered the hotel which had once dazzled her in confidence, finding it cheerful and familiar. She liked it all the better because it was less pretentious. It gave her a pleasant sense of getting back home to have the men in buttons smile and say, "Glad to see you, Mrs. Haney." The head clerk was very cordial; he even found time to come out and shake hands. "I can't give you precisely your old quarters," he said, "but I can fix you out on the next floor. I'm sure you'll be very comfortable." Thereupon she took up her quietly luxurious life at the point where she had dropped it some weeks before.

There lay in this Western girl a strongly marked tendency towards the culture and refinement of the East; and, though she had grown up far from anything æsthetic in home-life, she instinctively knew and loved the beautiful in nature, the right thing in art; and now that she was about to leave the East for the West – perhaps to abandon the town for the village – she found herself aching with a hunger which had hitherto been unconscious. She was torn with desire to go and a longing to stay. New York, Paris, the world, was open before her if only she were content to take Marshall Haney's money and use it to these ends.

That night as she lay in her bed hearing the rumble and jar of the city's traffic, her mind recalled and dwelt upon the wonderful scenes, especially the beautiful pictures which her eyes had gleaned from the East. The magical, glittering spread of Manhattan harbor, the silver sweep of the Hudson at West Point, the mighty panorama from Grant's Tomb, the silken sheen of Fifth Avenue on a rainy night, the crash and glitter of upper Broadway, the splendid halls of art, literature, and especially of music and the drama – all these came back one by one to claim a place beside her peaks and cañons, sharing the glory of the purple deeps and the snowy heights of the mountains she had hitherto loved so single-heartedly and so well.