Ainslee's magazine, Volume 16, No. 3, October, 1905

Ainslee's magazine, Volume 16, No. 3, October, 1905

YOUNG CARRINGTON’S CAREER

BY Beatrice Hanscom

CHAPTER I

THE studio in Numero – rue Boissonade had on its holiday togs: model stand covered with rugs, tea table much in evidence, framed picture on the easel, and lilacs enough in the great brass bowl in the corner to serve as sweetly affirmative witnesses that the heart of Paris and the heart of spring had renewed their yearly alliance.

To judge from the blitheness of Carrington, he, too, had spring in his heart and a festal day in prospect.

Life, already lavish in good gifts, was on the point of giving him the one he most desired to grasp.

At twenty-one he had health, plenty of money, and a talent to which he considered health and money merely subservient – a talent which lured him to work indefatigably.

The portrait on which he had lavished himself hung on the line in the spring salon; and Velantour, the master for whom he had toiled tirelessly for the last three years – Velantour, the sternest critic in France, most sparing in praise – Velantour, whose painting expeditions in the far East were always solitary save for his trusted courier —Velantour had invited Carrington to go with him to the Vale of Cashmere and the Himalayas! To paint with him and by his side for three long, delicious months.

“It is not enough to put people’s souls on canvas, mon cher, if you can’t put nature’s heart back of them,” he had told him, hand on his shoulder. Velantour, whose caustic criticisms usually confined themselves to technique, and took small account of souls!

Carrington tingled to his finger tips in the desire to be off. Life was good – was “bully,” as Carrington phrased it. And he whistled softly, rapturous as a thrush, as he crossed the studio to lift a corner of the rug which covered a trunk masquerading as a seat, a trunk locked and strapped; packed with an infinite forethought for any possible contingency that might arise during the trip; with enough paint tubes and brushes to set up a small dealer; packed, too, with hopes and aspiration, which luckily take up no room, and do not increase the excess baggage rate. Had they weighed the smallest fraction of an ounce apiece, modern hydraulics could not have lifted that trunk a single inch.

“And we start to-night! Jove, it’s unbelievable!” he said, exultantly, as he dropped the rug corner and stood up, straight and slender and tall, a handsome boy with his black hair a trifle long, his blue eyes aglow, his delicate features alight with enthusiasm as he drew in a long breath of satisfaction.

There was a touch of the romantic in his attire – in the loosely hanging, dark gray velveteen suit that was almost black, and the soft cravat that had the color of pigeon’s blood.

He was young enough to like that sort of thing, dandy enough to order those dull gray suits by the half dozen, with long, crimson lined cloaks and marvelous soft felt hats; and handsome enough to make Velantour vow he would immortalize him in them. “Le nouveau Van Dyck,” he whispered to himself, for he loved the boy as much as he believed in his future, and he believed in that with the intensity and concentrated fervor of a man who permits himself few beliefs.

“To have a son like that!” he would murmur – little, squat, short-legged, gray-headed, lonely old, famous Velantour; and the words wrenched his lips into the dry twist of an old grief.

For Velantour’s scapegrace son had rested many years in Père-la-Chaise.

* * * * *

Velantour was coming this afternoon to the informal little reunion of the half dozen friends whom Carrington had summoned to wish him God-speed.

With the warning swish of the curtains Carrington turned to see if it was he even now. But he saw instead a young fellow of his own age, a youth whose brown hair curled obstinately, whose mouth was wide and mobile, and who had the kind of snub nose one inevitably associates with jollity.

“My dear Ned, you’re most disappointing,” the newcomer stated, with burlesque complaint and a gesture that sent his hands far apart. “You ought to be putting the last touch to a tuft of grass in the foreground. It’s a poor foreground that won’t stand a few extra tufts here and there, and it’s an immensely effective proceeding. Or else you ought to be on your knees to the gods. You’re neither posing piously to please Providence, nor patently to please Paris. I’m afraid we’ve overrated your genius. You’ll never make a Whistler.”

He laughed good-humoredly as he grasped Carrington’s outstretched hand. Robert Parker, yclept Bobbins, took life easily.

“I’m so happy, Bobbins,” Carrington confided in him, “that I can’t even think. Isn’t it ripping – going east with Velantour?”

“It is for you, Rising Genius,” Bobbins assured him, “but so far as I am concerned, though I might manage to sit under a Kashmirian cedar with a fan, standing on an icy peak with a pot of paint strapped to my waistband, and a fault-finding old gentleman to tell me how badly I was using it, isn’t my ideal of bliss. No Himalayas for me.”

“Bless you, Bobbins, we’re not contracting to paint them by the yard, the way you do a fence,” expostulated Carrington, laughingly. “We’re going to make pictures, not advertise breakfast foods.”

“What is your sister going to do?” queried Bobbins.

“Elenore is going to Brittany to-morrow with the Waldens,” Carrington told him promptly.

“And Hastings, I presume, has always wanted to go to Brittany,” Bobbins laughed.

“Well, Hastings has certainly developed a sudden enthusiasm in that direction,” Carrington acknowledged.

“Do you suppose Elenore – ” Bobbins began mysteriously.

“I know enough to know that I don’t know anything about girls,” Elenore’s brother announced, promptly. “Do you suppose Hastings – ”

“I certainly do,” said Bobbins, fervently. “And he has a bad case of it. Wouldn’t go to the Bal Bullier the other night; thinks cafés chantants are vulgar; doesn’t hear what you are saying half the time, and has taken to humming ‘Home-keeping hearts are happiest.’ You don’t have to take him to the hospital to see what’s the matter with him.”

“I told him distinctly by the hour,” a high-pitched, patrician voice floated in from the hall, “and if he doesn’t stop swearing he’ll have to put his pourboire in troches.” Coincident with the remark a fluent outburst of Parisian profanity came wafting in the open windows.

“My dear Ned,” said Mrs. Van Velt, the owner of the patrician voice, appearing in the doorway; “would you mind sending some one to chloroform my cabby? The more Carol argues with him, the more vocal he becomes. He seems to think that they also swear who only sit and wait.”

Mrs. Van Velt was a dowager unmistakably American.

She appeared to have been poured into her black satin gown at some abnormally high temperature and at a calculation perilously close. Her gray pompadour strained back from her high forehead in an apparent endeavor to oust her bonnet as an insolent trespasser on its private domain, but the bonnet, a black octopus with an intelligent jetty eye, wound two narrow black velvet tentacles firmly beneath Mrs. Van Velt’s double chin, and triumphed calmly.

“You go, Bobbins,” said Carrington, gayly. “Mrs. Van Velt, may I present Mr. Parker? Chloroforming cabbies is one of his specialties. You may be sure that it will be painless and thorough.”

“And bring back my daughter, Mr. Parker,” said Mrs. Van Velt, as placidly as though she had said spectacles or handkerchief. The obliging young knight was already half way to the door. “Carol thought she ought to argue it out with him; and as she couldn’t understand his French, and he couldn’t understand hers, it seemed perfectly safe.”

She laughed good-humoredly.

“That’s a nice-looking boy, Ned,” she said, as the subject of her remark disappeared. “Who is he, and how did he get such a remarkable name?”

“Bobbins?” said Carrington. “Oh, he’s a trump. His father is the inventor – no, his grandfather – of Parker’s Peerless Sewing Machine. You know all the advertisements say: ‘Observe the bobbin. So simple, a child can work it.’ And Robert the Third is such a generous chap, he’s an awfully easy mark. So – Bobbins.”

His hands turned palms upward in an explanatory gesture.

Mrs. Van Velt laughed again. Then she put a hand on Carrington’s shoulder with a touch that was almost motherly.

“Ned,” she said, affectionately, “I wish your father could be here to-day to see you before you go east. He’d be so proud of you. How long is it since he has seen you and Elenore?”

“Six years,” said Carrington. “Dear old dad! Not since he sent us over here in Aunt Sarah’s care, six years ago, when mother died. He’s intended to come every year, but there’s always been something at the mine to prevent it. Dad loves the struggle of business, you know.”

“He loves his children, too,” said Mrs. Van Velt, seriously. “It must be lonely for him. And the mine is in such a forlorn little, out-of-the-way place, ’way up there in northern Michigan.”

“The mines situated right in the heart of Manhattan are pretty well worked out,” Ned expostulated, humorously.

“Yellow Dog! Did you ever hear such a ghastly name?” Mrs. Van Velt went on. “Half the people thought your mother was crazy when she married him and went out there to live. They said he was harnessing Psyche to his mine machinery for motive power. And the other half said that when he was tired and wanted sympathy she’d write him a sonnet. Everybody agreed that they would be unhappy. And they were the happiest people I ever knew.”

“They certainly were,” said Carrington, emphatically. “How do you account for it?”

“Modern prophets have a horror of the country,” said Mrs. Van Velt, sententiously, “unless it’s in easy motoring distance of Sherry’s. And they overlooked the vital fact that when you’re making two human beings one, duplicate good qualities are quite as useless as duplicate wedding presents.

“It’s curious,” she continued, “about you twins: that Elenore has all her father’s love of adventure and his executive ability, for all her girlishness; and you have your mother’s talent and her tastes. You couldn’t be more different, and yet you look as much alike as you did when you were tots. I remember the first time your mother brought you east. Your Uncle Dick – well, your Uncle Dick thought rock-and-rye a splendid tonic for other people, but personally he took it without the rock, which he thought might be indigestible – and he looked at you both as you stood there side by side. And he said: ‘Bring on your blue ribbons. I can see two of them.’”

“Why, Mrs. Van Velt, and so early in the day, too!” said a gay voice behind her, a voice so like Carrington’s that it seemed his echo; and Elenore Carrington came forward to kiss the dowager on both cheeks.

As Mrs. Van Velt had said, the resemblance between the twins was remarkable.

They had the same height, the same coloring, the same blue eyes that had a trick of turning violet under emotion; the same delicate arch to the eyebrows; the same wavy line of hair upon the forehead; the same buoyant poise of body. Even a certain quick suppleness of motion belonged to them both; and, stranger still, their hands were wonderfully like.

The artistic impulse that gave to Ned’s a certain femininity in slenderness and taper fingers was curiously balanced by a strain of resourcefulness which lent to Elenore’s well-shaped white palms so strong a resemblance to her twin’s that it was only by putting them side by side and noting that hers were a bit smaller, a shade more femininely modeled, a trifle more delicately cushioned, that they were distinguishable.

The black locks that Carrington permitted to wave back just enough for picturesqueness, with no trace of the bizarre or of unkemptness, gave to his face a boyishness that carried a suggestion of eternal youth.

But Elenore’s dark hair was coiled low in the nape of her neck, and her manner was as feminine as was her distinctly smart and frilly pale blue chiffon frock.

“I’m glad,” Elenore went on, chaffingly, “that Aunt Sarah is safely on her way to the North Cape and cannot hear you describe your shocking condition.”

“Bless you, child,” said Mrs. Van Velt, promptly. “You’re altogether too good-looking. You ought to wear a veil. That’s what young Hastings thinks, I hear. He’s confided in Carol. And anyone who would confide in Carol must be laboring under strong mental excitement. And so your Aunt Sarah has really started for the North Cape! Women as plain as Sarah Moore are always pretending to be absorbed in the beauties of nature, but they are really trying to get their own minds and yours away from such sensitive subjects as snub noses.”

“Where is Carol?” demanded Elenore, laughingly. “Isn’t she coming to say good-by to Ned and me?”

“Carol seems to be putting in a stitch in time with that young sewing machine,” said Mrs. Van Velt, unperturbed. “She’s like her father. He never could bear to see machinery idle.”

Elenore looked up at her smilingly from the place she had taken at the tea table. The samovar was steaming gayly, and the girl’s white hands moved with housewifely deftness as she prepared to make tea. They were firm, capable hands, that it was a pleasure to watch.

The portières swung back with a decided flourish to admit a short, bright-eyed, gray-headed, animated old gentleman, who came forward with the buoyancy of a boy.

“Here I am, cher Edouard,” cried Velantour, gayly. “Mademoiselle, mes hommages, I come exprès to assure you that I shall take the bes’ of care of this brother of yours.”

“Mrs. Van Velt,” said Carrington, putting his hand affectionately on old Velantour’s arm, “I present to you Monsieur Velantour, the master of painting in France.”

“Madame,” said Velantour, courtly in turn, “I presen’ to you Monsieur Edouard Carrington, a nouveau maître of whom America will one day be very proud.

“You have a daughter, madame?” he added, gravely.

“Somewhere,” said Mrs. Van Velt, calmly.

“C’est ça!” said Velantour. “I fall over two young peopl’ in the hall as I enter – young Monsieur Parker and a young lady – and the young lady say: ‘Oh, Monsieur Velantour, will you tell mother I’ll be in in a minute?’ And Monsieur Parker say: ‘So soon as she have finish’ winding the bobbin.’”

“It’s all right, Mrs. Van Velt,” said Carrington, amusedly. “Bobbins is decidedly an eligible.”

“What is that, an eligible?” demanded Velantour, puzzled to know what could justify such calm.

“Well, in America, Monsieur Velantour,” Mrs. Van Velt informed him, “an eligible is an attractive man entirely surrounded by daughters – other people’s daughters.”

“When mother begins to talk about other people’s daughters it’s always time for me to appear,” announced Miss Carol Van Velt, entering gayly.

Bobbins, radiant, was just back of her; and a tall, serious, thoroughbred young fellow followed them.

Carol Van Velt was a remarkably pretty blonde, who looked delightfully ingénue, but was entirely capable of managing most masculinity. She accepted admiration as nonchalantly as she did bonbons, and considered that the sources of supply of both were unlimited. Experience seemed to prove that this theory was correct.

“We saw, anyway, that we were just being used as stepping-stones to higher things,” she went on; “so we thought we might as well come in with Mr. Hastings.”

She sank gracefully down on one end of a large divan, and drew her skirts aside with a gesture that assumed matter-of-factly that Bobbins would occupy the other half of the seat. He justified the conclusion with a promptness which left no doubt that he regarded it as a heaven-sent opportunity.

“Not that we minded being an angels’ ladder,” he asserted, cheerfully, “but I thought from Hastings’ cast of countenance that he might be going to give you a few scenes from ‘Hamlet,’ and I didn’t think it was safe to be sitting behind a curtain when he got to that part about Polonius.”

Velantour regarded them with that awe which a Frenchman must feel for the rollicking frivolity of the American young and the placid inefficiency of the American parent.

Meantime Hastings had made his way to Elenore and slipped into a vacant chair by the tea table, as a matter of course.

She smiled at him very charmingly.

“You’re late,” she said, “and you were coming early, you know. Do you think you deserve caravan tea with a dash of burgundy in it?”

“I think I deserve all the good things I can get to-day,” he said, and though his tone was light, there was an undertone that suggested that he meant it.

“It tastes to me more like burgundy with a dash of caravan tea,” said Mrs. Van Velt. “After a while they will forget to put in the tea at all.”

“And then, Monsieur Velantour?” said Carrington, amusedly; for the old Frenchman was sipping the mixture cautiously.

“Then it will not need mademoiselle’s hands to make it perfection,” said Velantour, with a humorous twist of his keen old lips.

His gray eyes gleamed as they applauded him laughingly. Age had intensified in him the love of appreciation which is innate in the Gallic heart.

“While we have tea, let us have toast,” said Bobbins, promptly. “I propose a toast to Monsieur Velantour. Turn it into rhyme, Ned. You’re a crack improvisatore.”

Carrington stood up, with the easy grace of an Italian. He had the temperament of a troubadour, and he loved in turn a compliment.

“To Monsieur Velantour” (he began) “whose nameIs but a synonym for fame – ”

He had the improvisatore’s trick of lingering on the final syllable until it brought its own suggestion.

“Bravo!” they applauded him; while Velantour enjoyed the adulation with the frankness of a child.

“So irresistible that Art” (he glanced with gay raillery at Velantour)“Quite womanlike, has lost her heart.Yet knows it in his keeping, sure.A health to Monsieur Velantour!”

They drank it in hilarious mood.

Velantour was on his feet the next instant.

“If I could but make one littl’ Americain verse,” he implored, expansively. “But I speak so poorly. You mus’ help me a littl’.”

“Well,” said Mrs. Van Velt, practically, “you have to begin with the street he lives on, or something like that. Rue Boissonade– ” she began, and halted.

“Shall have its Claude,” suggested Bobbins.

“Bon!” cried Velantour. “Now I have it.

“Rue BoissonadeShall have its Claude,And l’AmeriqueThe new Van Dyck.”

His naïf delight was contagious.

He patted Carrington’s arm affectionately.

“But we shall paint, cher Edouard!” he said, fondly. “And you are quite ready?”

“More than ready,” laughed Carrington.

He glanced at the little clock on the mantel.

“And our train goes in just two hours,” he whispered, triumphantly.

“Till then,” said Velantour, gayly. Then he crossed over to Elenore. “Mademoiselle, I will guard your brother as though he was – what is mos’ perishable in English – a bubbl’, is it not? Madame” – he bowed to Mrs. Van Velt. “Mademoiselle” – he inclined to Carol. “In two littl’ hours,” he called to Carrington from the doorway, and was gone.

“Isn’t he the dearest thing?” Carol demanded, frankly, of Bobbins.

“He’s an old brick, but not my idea of the dearest thing,” that discriminating individual replied, promptly. “I don’t suppose you could guess what my idea would be,” he insinuated.

“Oh, that’s too much of an antique,” said Miss Van Velt, with crushing promptness.

“Antique! I bought it this year,” said Bobbins, tacking, unharmed.

“Then some one is selling you back numbers,” Miss Van Velt assured him. “Try to get your money back. It’s been taking candy from children, and it ought to be stopped.”

“The police won’t give it back,” said Bobbins, mysteriously.

“The police!” said Miss Van Velt, startled. “What have they to do – ”

“With my Mercedes?” said Bobbins, cheerfully. “That’s just the attitude I’ve tried to take with them. But it has cost me five hundred francs this week, and this is only Wednesday. The dearest thing on earth to me is Mercedes, my Mercedes,” he hummed, pathetically.

“You naturally would lavish your young affection on machines,” Miss Van Velt remarked, cruelly, but she gave him a look of decided favor.

“So long as you think I am in the running,” said Bobbins, placidly.

The maid had brought in a letter with an American postmark. Carrington held it in his hand as he crossed over to join the group around the tea table.

Mrs. Van Velt was enjoying her usual volubility, and Hastings was paying her the flattery of an apparent attention and a comprehendingly amused smile, while his eyes gave the deeper homage of frequent and involuntary glances to Elenore.

For him, at least, Elenore was the central figure. Nor was it only for him. Things were quite apt to gravitate around Elenore. Ned himself did not overshadow his twin. If there is any truth in theosophic theories, she had an unusually powerful aura; if we discard the esoteric for the exoteric, beauty and wit and reserve force, cast in the mold of an alluring femininity, are quite as attractive as the same buoyant youth, plus tremendous talent, in masculine fiber.

Elenore had, too, a certain firm, keen grasp on the realities of life which Carrington, with all his localized talent, lacked. One felt that she would not fail in any qualm, that she would not be daunted by any obstacle, that in crises she would think not of surrender or sacrifice, but of resource and expedient.

Mrs. Van Velt was concluding her story of a recent tea given for a famous woman novelist.

“Did she talk about her work?” she exclaimed. “She never got away from her books, and she drenched us with her successes until our ardor was more than dampened. It was soaked. She gave us to understand that she had Browning beaten on obscurity, Ibsen on subtlety, and Maeterlinck on imagination. And when she left there was a heavy silence for a minute, and then Alec Carter said: ‘Now let’s talk nursery rhymes for a while. We might begin on “Little bas bleu, come blow your horn.”’”

She made her adieux on the strength of that, collecting her purse, her feather boa and her daughter from different parts of the room, with surprising promptitude.

It was her practice to save her best rocket for the last, and disappear in the glory of its swish.

Bobbins accompanied the Van Velts to their carriage, and, to misquote long-suffering Omar, once departed, he returned no more.

Carrington turned to Hastings the moment they were out of the door.

“You’ll excuse me if I read dad’s letter, won’t you? My time is getting so short,” he said, apologetically; and went over to one of the long windows to get the benefit of its light.

Elenore turned to Hastings with the question that had been hovering on her lips for the last half-hour.

“Tell me why you are so serious,” she said. “Has anything gone wrong? It doesn’t mean that you are not coming to Brittany to see the Waldens and – me – this summer, does it?”

“It means a great deal more than that,” said Hastings, soberly. “Yesterday I thought I was on my way to being a rising architect. To-day I am simply cast into outer darkness. The shears of fate have clipped this piece of my life short, and I can’t see what the next is going to be like.”

“Tell me,” said Elenore, quietly.

“It’s grotesquely simple,” said Hastings, and there was an involuntary tinge of bitterness in the tone he tried to keep even. “My uncle, who has given me my start in life – the only relative I have – has written me to come back to New York at once. I’m to give up being an architect. When it’s the only thing I am fitted for! He has something else for me. He doesn’t explain what. He does vouchsafe the information that the place is quite impossible, but, he says, what are a few years out of a young man’s life?” His voice was a trifle unsteady. Years seemed eternity to him just then.

“I must go, of course, unquestioningly,” he went on, holding himself in check. “Considering that I owe him everything, it’s a military command. And I have no right to say anything but good-by to – to any woman. I’m out of things, that’s all.”