Fairfax and His Pride: A Novel

"Flow gently, sweet Afton."

He indistinctly heard Dearborn open the door. A woman slipped in and went over and sat down by her lover. The two sat together holding hands, and "Sweet Afton" flowed on, and nobody's dream was disturbed. Little Gardiner slept his peaceful sleep in his child's grave; his mother slept her sleep in a Southern cemetery; the Angel of Resurrection raised his spotless wings over the city of the silent dead, and Antony's heart swelled in his breast.

When the Comtesse Potowski stopped singing no one said a word. Her husband played a few bars of Werther and she sang the "Love Letters." Then, before she ceased, Antony was conscious that Nora Scarlet had recognized him. Before any embarrassment could be between them, he went over to her and took her hand, saying warmly —

"I am so glad, Miss Scarlet. Dearborn has told me of his good fortune. He is the best fellow in the world, and I know how lucky he is," and Nora Scarlet murmured something, with her eyes turned away from him.

Tony turned to Madame Potowski and said ardently, "You must let me come to see you to-morrow. I want to thank you for this wonderful treat."

And when Potowski and his Aunt Caroline had gone, and when Dearborn had taken Nora Scarlet home, Antony stood in the studio, which still vibrated with the tones of the lovely voice. He had lived once again a part of his old life. This was his mother's sister, and she had made havoc of her home. He thought of little Bella's visit to him in Albany.

"Mother has done something perfectly terrible, Cousin Antony – something a daughter is not supposed to know."

Well, the something perfectly terrible was, she had set herself free from a man she did not love; that she was making Potowski happy; that she had found her sphere and soared into it.

Fairfax tried in vain to think of himself now and Mary Faversham, but he could not. The past rushed on him with its palpitating wings. He groaned and stretched out his arms into the shadows of the room.

"There is something that chains me, holds me prisoner. I am wedded to something – is it death and a tomb?"

CHAPTER XVIII

During the following weeks it seemed to him he was chasing his soul and her own. In their daily intercourse – sweet, of course, tender, of course – there was a constant sense of limitation. He wanted her to share with him his love of the beautiful, but Mary Faversham was conventional. He would have spent hours with her in the Louvre, hanging over treasures, musing before pictures whose art he felt he could never sufficiently make his own. Mrs. Faversham followed him closely, but after a time watched the people. Whilst her lover – in love with all beauty – remained transfixed over the contemplation of a petrified rose found in the ruins of Pompeii, or intoxicated himself with the beauty of an urn, she would interrupt his meditation by speaking to him of unimportant things. She found resemblances in the little Grecian statues to her friends in society. Tony sighed and relinquished seeing museums with Mary. She patronized art with largesse and generosity but he discovered it was one way to her of spending money, an agreeable, satisfying way to a woman of breeding and refinement.

The bewitching charm of her clothes, her great expenditures on herself, made him open his blue eyes. Once he held her exquisitely shod foot in his hand, admiring its beauty and its slenderness. On the polished leather was the sparkle of her paste buckles; he admired the ephemeral web of her silk stocking, and was ashamed that the thought should cross his mind as to what this lovely foot represented of extravagance. But he had been with her when she bought the buckles on the Rue de la Paix; he knew the price they cost. Was the money making him sordid – hypercritical, unkind?

Life for six months whirled round him. Mary Faversham dazzled and bewitched him, charmed and flattered him. Their engagement had not been made public. He ceased to work; he was at her beck and call; he went with her everywhere. At her house, in her box at the opera, he met all Paris. She was hardly ever alone with him; he made one of a group. Nevertheless, they were talked about. Several orders for busts were the outcome of his meeting fashionable Paris; but he did not work. Toward March he received word from America that his bas-relief under the name of Thomas Rainsford had won the ten thousand dollar prize. He felt like a prince. For some singular reason he told no one, not even Dearborn. In writing to him the committee had told him that according to the contracts the money would not be forthcoming until July. He had gone through so many bitter disappointments in his life that he did not want in the minds of his friends to anticipate this payment and be disappointed anew.

Among his fellow-workers in the Barye studio was the son of a millionaire pork-packer from Chicago. The young man took a tremendous liking to Antony. With a certain perspicacity, the rich young fellow divined much of his new friend's needs. He came to the studio, to their different reunions, and chummed heartily with Dearborn and Fairfax. Peterson was singularly lacking in talent and tremendously over-furnished with heart. One day, as they worked side by side in the studio of the big man, Peterson watched Antony's handling of a tiger's head.

"By Jove!" cried the Chicagoan, "you are simply great – you are simply great! I wonder if you would be furious with me if I said something to you that is on my mind?"

The something on the simple young man's mind was that he wanted to lend Fairfax a sum of money, to be paid back when the sculptor saw fit. After a moment's hesitation Antony accepted the loan, making it one-third as much as the big-hearted chap had suggested. Fairfax set July as the date of payment, when his competitive money should come in. He borrowed just enough to keep him in food and clothes for the following months.

There were no motors in Paris then. In the mornings he drove with Mrs. Faversham to the Bois and limped by her side in the allées, whilst the worldly people stared at the distinguished, conspicuous couple. One day Barye himself stopped them, and to the big man Antony presented Mrs. Faversham who did not happen to know her fiancé's chief.

Fairfax looked at her critically as she laughed and was sweet and gracious. Carriages filed past them; shining equipages, the froth and wine of life flowed around them under the trees, whose chestnut torches were lit with spring.

Barye said to Antony, "Not working, are you, Rainsford? C'est dommage", and turning to Mrs. Faversham he added, nodding, "C'est dommage."

Antony heard the words throughout the day, and they haunted him —c'est dommage. Barye's voice had been light, but the sculptor knew the underlying ring in it. There is, indeed, no greater pity than for a man of talent not to work. That day he lunched with her on the terrace of her hotel overlooking the rose garden. Fairfax ate scarcely anything. Below his eyes spread a parterre of perfect purple heliotropes. The roses were beginning to bloom on their high trees, and the moist earth odours from the garden he had thought so exquisite came to him delicately on the warm breeze. But this day the place seemed oppressive, shut in by its high iron walls. In the corner of the garden, the gardener, an old man in blue overalls, bent industriously over his potting, and to Antony he seemed the single worthy figure. At the table he was surrounded by idlers and millionaires. He judged them bitterly to-day, brutally and unreasonably, and hastily looked toward Mrs. Faversham, his future life's companion, hoping that something in her expression or in her would disenchant him from the growing horror that was threatening to destroy his peace of mind. Mary Faversham was all in white; from her ears hung the pearls given her by her husband, whom she had never loved; around her neck hung a creamy rope of pearls; she was discussing with her neighbour the rising value of different jewels. It seemed to them both a vital and interesting subject.

It was the end of luncheon; the fragrance of the strawberries, the fragrance of the roses came heavily to Antony's nostrils.

His aunt, the Comtesse Potowski, sat at his right. She was saying —

"My dear boy, when are you going to be married? There is nothing like a happy marriage, Tony. A woman may have children, you know, and be miserable; she has not found the right man. I hope you will be very happy, Tony."

Some one asked her to sing, and Madame Potowski, languid, slim, with unmistakable distinction, rose to play. She suggested his mother to Antony. She sang selections from the opera then in vogue. Tony stood near the piano and listened. Her voice always affected him deeply, and as he had responded to it in the old days in New York he responded now, and there was a sense of misery at his heart as he listened to her singing the music of old times when he had been unable to carry out his ideals because of his suffering and poverty.

There was now a sense of soul discontent, of pitiless remorse. As if again to disenchant himself, he glanced at Mary as she, too, listened. Back of her in the vases were high branches of lilac, white and delicate, with the first beauty of spring; she sat gracefully indolent, smoking a cigarette, evidently dreaming of pleasant things. To Antony there was a blank wall now between him and his visions. How unreal everything but money seemed, and his soul stifled and his senses numbed. In this atmosphere of riches and luxury what place had he? Penniless, unknown, his stature stunted – for it had been dwarfed by his idleness. Again he heard Barye say, "C'est dommage."

His aunt's voice, bright as silver, filled the room. He believed she was singing for him expressly, for she had chosen an English ballad – "Roll on, silvery moon." Again, with a sadness which all imaginative and poetic natures understand, his present slipped away. He was back in Albany in the cab of his engine; the air bellied in his sleeve, the air of home whipped in his veins – he saw the fields as the engine flashed by them, whitening under the moonlight as the silvery moon rolled on! How he had sweated to keep himself a man, how he had toiled to keep his hope up and to live his life well, what a fight he had made in order that his visions might declare themselves to him!

When his aunt ceased to sing and people gathered around her, Tony rose and limped over to Mrs. Faversham. He put out his hand.

"I must go, Mary," he said. "I have some work to do this afternoon."

She smiled at him. "Don't be ridiculous, Tony."

The others had moved away to speak to the Comtesse Potowski, and they were alone.

"I am becoming ridiculous," said Antony, "that is true, but it is not because I am going to work."

She did not seem to notice anything in his gravity. "Don't forget we are dining and driving out to Versailles; don't forget, Tony."

Fairfax made no response. On his face was a pitiless look, but Mrs. Faversham, happy in her successful breakfast and enchanted with the music, did not read his expression.

"I will come in to-morrow, Mary."

Mrs. Faversham, turning to a man who had come up to her, still understood nothing.

"Don't forget, Tony," – she nodded at him – "this afternoon."

Antony bade her good-bye. He looked back at her across the room, and she seemed to him then the greatest stranger of them all.

CHAPTER XIX

He went upstairs to his atelier with a strange eager hammering at his heart. For several weeks the studio had been, for him, little more than an ante-chamber – a dressing-room where he had made careful toilettes before going to Mrs. Faversham. His constant attendance upon a beautiful woman had turned him into something of a dandy, and the purchase of fine clothes and linen had eaten well into his borrowed money, which had been frankly used by Dearborn when in need.

"Dearborn, wear any of my things you like, only don't get ink spots on them, for God's sake!"

And Dearborn had responded, "I don't need to go courting in four-hundred-franc suits, Tony; Nora is my kind, you know."

And when Antony had flashed out, "What the devil do you mean?" Dearborn explained —

"Only that Nora and I are poor together. I didn't intend to be rude, old man."

Dearborn had gone to London third-class with his play under his arm and hope in his heart. Antony had not been sorry to find himself alone. When he was not with Mary he paced the floor, his idle hands in his pockets. At night he was restless, and he did not disturb any one when at two o'clock he would rise to smoke, and, leaning out of the window, watch the dawn come up over the Louvre, over the river and the quays. His easels, his tools, his covered busts mocked him as the dust settled down upon them. His part of the big room had fallen into disuse. In the salons of Mary Faversham nothing seemed important but the possession of riches; they talked of art there, but they discussed it easily, and no one ever spoke of work. They talked of books there, but the makers of them seemed men of another sphere. His aunt and the Comte Potowski sang there indeed, but to Antony their voices were only echoes. He had grown accustomed to objects whose possession meant small fortunes. His own few belongings seemed pitiful and sordid. Poverty at Albany had appalled him, but as yet his soul had been untarnished. Life seemed then a beautiful struggle. Here in Paris, too, as he worked with Dearborn in his studio, the lack of money had been unimportant, and privation only a step on which men of talent poised before going on. Lessons had been precious to him, and in his meagre existence all his untrammelled senses had been keen. Now his lack of material resource was terrible, degrading, sickening.

He threw open wide the window and let in the May sunlight, and the noise of the streets came with it. Below his window paused the "goat's milkman," calling sweetly on his little pipe; a girl cried lilies of the valley; there was a cracking of whips, the clattering of horses' feet, and the rattling of the little cabs. The peculiar impersonality of the few of the big city, the passing of the anonymous throng, had a soothing effect upon him. The river flowed quietly, swiftly past the Louvre, on which great white clouds massed themselves like snow. Fairfax drew a long breath and turned to the studio, put on his old corduroy clothes, filled himself a pipe, and uncovered one of his statues in the corner, and with his tools in his hand took his position before his discarded work.

This study had not struck him as being successful when he had thrown the cloth over it in February, when he had gone up to the Avenue du Bois de Boulogne. Since that time he had not touched his clay. Now the piece of work struck his critical sense with its several qualities of merit. He was too real an artist not to see its value and to judge it. Was it possible that he had created that charming thing – had there been in him sufficient talent to form those plastic lines? It was impossible for Antony to put himself in the frame of mind in which he had been before he left his work; in vain he tried to bring back the old inspiration of feeling. The work was strange to him, and almost beautiful too. He was jealous of it, angry at it. Had he become in so short a time a useless man? He should have been gaining in experience. A man is all the richer for being in love and being loved. The image of Mary would not come to him to soothe his irritation. He seemed to see her surrounded by people and things. Evidently his love had not inspired him, nor did luxury and the intercourse with worldly people. He had been the day before with Mary to see the crowning exhibition of a celebrated painter's work, the fruits of four years of labour. The artist himself, frightfully obese, smiling and self-satisfied, stood surrounded by his canvases. None of the paintings had the spontaneity and beauty of his early works – not one. Fairfax had heard a Latin Quarter student say, "B – used to paint with his soul before he was rich, now he paints with his stomach." The marks of the beast had stamped out the divine seal.

As Fairfax mixed his clay in the silent room where he and Dearborn had half starved together, he said, "I have never yet become so frightfully rich as to imperil my soul."

In the declining spring light he began to model. He did not look like a happy man, like a happy lover, like a man destined to marry a beautiful woman with several millions of dollars. "Damn money," he muttered as he worked, and, after a little, "Damn poverty," he murmured. What was it, then, he could bless? In his present point of view nothing seemed blessed. He was working savagely and heavily, but hungrily too, as though he besought his hands to find again for him the sacred touch that should electrify him again, or as though he prayed his brain to send its enlightened message to his hand, or as though he called on his emotion to warm his hardened heart – a combination which he believed was needful to work and art. Fairfax was so working when the porter brought him a letter.

It was from Dearborn, and Antony read it eagerly, holding it up to the fading light. As he saw Dearborn's handwriting he realized that he missed his companion, and also realized the strong link between them which is so defined between those who work at a kindred art.

"Dear old man," – the letter was dated London – "I am sky-high in a room for which I pay a shilling a night. A thing in the roof is called a window. Through it I see a field of pots – not flower-pots, but chimney-pots – and the smoke from them is hyacinthine. The smoke of endless winters and innumerable fogs has grimed every blessed thing in this filthy room. My bed-spread is grey cloth, once meant to be white. Other lodgers have left burnt matches on the faded carpet, whose flowers have long since been put out by the soot. Out of this hole in the roof I see London, the sky-line of London in a spring sky. There is a singular sort of beauty in this sky, as if it had trailed its cerulean mantle over fields of English bluebells. For another shilling I dine; for another I lunch. I skip breakfast. I calculate I can stay here ten days, then the shillings will be all gone, Tony. In these ten days, old man, I shall sell my play. I am writing you this on the window-sill; without is the mutter of soft thunder of London – the very word London thrills me to the marrow. Such great things have come out of London – such prose – such verse – such immortality!

"To-day I passed 'Jo,' Dickens's street-sweeper, in Dickens's 'Bleak House.' I felt like saying to him, 'I am as poor as you are, Jo, to-day,' but I remembered there were a few shillings between us.

"Well, old man, as I sit here I seem to have risen high above the roof-tops and to look down on the struggle in this great vortex of life, and here and there a man goes amongst them all, carrying a wreath of laurel. Tony, my eyes are upon him! Call me a fool if you will, call me mad; at any rate I have faith. I know I will succeed. Something tells me I will stand before the curtain when they call my name. It is growing late. I must go out and forage for food … Tony. I kiss the hand of the beautiful Mrs. Faversham."

Antony turned the pages between his fingers. The reading of the letter had smoothed the creases from his brow. He sighed as he lifted his head to say "Come in," for some one had knocked timidly at the door.

"Hello!" Fairfax said, and now that they were alone he called her "Aunt Caroline."

Madame Potowski came forward and kissed him.

He drew a big chair into the window. He was always solicitous of her and a little pitiful.

Madame Potowski's hair had been soft brown once; it was golden, frankly so, now, and her fine lips were a little rouged. In her dress of changeable silk, her cape of tulle, her hat with a bunch of roses, her tiny gloved hands, she was a very elegant little lady. She rested her hands on her parasol and had suggested his mother to Antony. Then, as that resemblance passed, came the fleeting suggestion which he never cared to hold – of Bella.

"I have come, my dear Tony, to see you. I wanted to see you alone."

Tony lit a cigar and sat by her side. The Comtesse Potowski had a little diamond watch with a chain on her breast. Outside the clock struck five.

"I have only a second to stay – my husband misses me if I am five minutes out of his sight."

"I do not wonder, Aunt Caroline."

"Isn't it all strange, Tony," she asked, "how very far up we have come?"

He shook the ashes off his cigar. "Well, I don't feel myself very far up, Aunt Caroline."

"My dear Tony, aren't you going to marry an immense fortune?"

"Is that what people say, Aunt Caroline?"

"You are going to do a very brilliant thing, Tony."

"Is that what you call going very far up?"

His aunt shook her pretty head. "Money is the greatest power in the world, dear boy. Art is very well, but there is nothing in the wide world like an income, dear."

Her nephew stirred in his chair. Caroline Potowski looked down at her little diamond watch, her dress shining like a bunch of many-hued roses. Antony knew that her husband was rich; he also made a good income from his singing and she must have made not an inconsiderable fortune.

"What are you thinking about?" said his aunt later, her hand on his own. "You have shown great wisdom, great worldly wisdom."

"My God!" exclaimed her nephew between his teeth.

If Madame Potowski heard this exclamation, it was not tragic to her. She lowered her tone, although there was no one to hear them.

"Tony, I am very anxious about money."

Her nephew laughed aloud. In spite of himself there came over him in a flash the memory of the day nearly ten years ago when she sat on the side of his miserable little bed in his miserable little room in New York and took from him as a loan – which she never meant to pay back – all the money he had in the world. He put his hands in his pockets.

"Has your husband any financial difficulties?"

"My husband knows nothing about it," she said serenely. "You don't suppose I could tell him, do you? I must have five thousand francs, dear Tony, before to-morrow."

Tony said lightly, "I am afraid economy is not your strong point."

"Tony," she exclaimed reproachfully, "I am a wonderful manager; I can make a franc go further than my husband can a louis, and I have a real gift for bargains. Think of it! I only had one hundred dollars a month to dress myself and Bella and poor little Gardiner, and for all my little expenses." The children's names on her lips seemed sacrilege to him. He did not wish her to speak those sacred names, or destroy his sacred past, whose charm and tenderness persisted over all the suffering and which nothing could destroy. "I have been buying a quantity of old Chinese paintings – a great bargain; in ten years they will be worth double the money. You must come and see them. The dealer will deliver them to-morrow."

"History," Antony thought, "how it repeats itself!"

Caroline Potowski leaned toward her nephew persuasively, and even in the softened twilight he saw the weakness and the caprices of her pretty face, and he pitied Potowski.

"I must have five thousand francs before to-morrow," said his aunt, "otherwise these dealers will make me trouble."

Fairfax laughed again. With a touch of bitterness he said —

"And I must have an income of five times as much as that a year – ten times as much as that a year – unless I wish to feel degraded because I am a poor labourer."

The comtesse did not reply to this. As she did not, Fairfax saw the humour of it.

"You do not really think I could give you five thousand francs, auntie?"

"I know you haven't a great deal of money, dear boy – "

"Not a great deal, auntie."

"But you seem to have such a lot of time to spend to amuse yourself."

He nodded. "So I seem to have."

The comtesse looked at him a little askance. "You are going to make such a brilliant marriage. Mrs. Faversham is so fearfully rich."

Fairfax exclaimed, but shut down on the words that came to his lips. He realized that his aunt was a toy woman, utterly irresponsible, a pretty fool. He said simply —

"You had better frankly tell your husband."

She swung her parasol to and fro. "You think so, Tony?"

"Decidedly."

"And you couldn't possibly manage, Tony?"