Part 25 (1/2)

The steel-blue-gray of a gull's wing swooping above the water is gross as compared with its texture. The violet and the lady-fern are not so delicate as the substance of its palaces. It might be dream; it might be mirage; it might be the city which came down from G.o.d as a bride adorned for her husband. Beginning too far away for the eye to reach, and ending where the gaze can no longer follow, it is immense and yet aerial, a towered, battlemented, mighty thing, yet spun of the ether between the worlds.

Though Jennie and her father had looked at this mystic wraith of a city so often that they hardly noticed it any more, they were never free from its ecstatic influence. That is, it moved them to aspirations without suggesting the objective to which they should aspire. Caught in the web of daily circ.u.mstance, entangled, enmeshed, helplessly captive amid hand-to-mouth necessities, their thoughts were rarely at liberty to wander from the definite calculation as to how to live. They didn't so wander even now. Even now, lifted up as they were among spiritual splendors, food, clothes, gas, taxes, and the mortgage were the things most heavily on their minds; but something else stirred in them with a sluggish will to live.

”Jennie, do you believe in G.o.d?”

For a minute Jennie gazed sidewise at the celestial city in the air and made no answer. Josiah himself hardly knew why he had asked the question unless it was because of vague new fears as to Jennie's a.s.sociations. Of these he knew almost as little as the parent bird of its offspring's doings when the young have taken flight. This was the custom of the family, the custom of the country. But he had never been free from misgivings that Jennie's calling of artist's model was ”not respectable,” and now this mention of a hundred dollars, even though it were but in jest, roused some little-used sense of paternal responsibility.

”I don't know that I do,” Jennie said, at last. She added, after another minute's thought, ”What's the good of G.o.d, anyhow?”

”People say he can take you to heaven when you die, or send you to the other place.”

”I'm not worrying about what will happen when I die; I've got all I can attend to here. Can G.o.d help me about that?”

It was the test question of Josiah's inner life. His faith stood or fell by it. He would have been glad to tell his child that she could be aided in her earthly problems, but, unlike Job, hadn't he himself served G.o.d for naught?

”He don't seem able to do that, my dear,” he sighed, as if the confession of unbelief forced its way out in spite of himself.

”Well, then”-Jennie rose, wearily-”what's the use? If G.o.d can put me off till I die, I suppose I can put him off in the same way, can't I? Do you believe in him, yourself, daddy?”

”I used to.”

And that was all he could say.

As the sun sank farther into the west, the celestial city which had hitherto been of a luminous white was shot with rose and saffron. Within its heart lay Broadway, Fifth Avenue, Wall Street, and the Bowery, shops, churches, brothels, and banks, all pa.s.sions, hungers, yearnings, and ambitions, all national tendencies worthy and detestable, all human instincts holy and unclean, all loveliness, all l.u.s.t, all charity, all cupidity, all secret and suppressed desire, all shameless exposure on the housetops, all sorrow, all sin, all that the soul of man conceives of evil and good-and yet, with no more than these few miles of perspective and this easy play of light translated into beauty, uplifting, unearthly, and ineffable.

For a minute longer Jennie and her father looking on the vision as it melted from glory to glory in this pageantry of sky. Then, with arms linked as before, they turned their backs on it.

CHAPTER XIV

For the next twenty-four hours Jennie did her best to suspend the operation of thought. Thought got her nowhere. It led her into so many blind alleys that it made her head ache. She had once heard a returned traveler describe his efforts to get out of the labyrinth at Hampton Court, and felt herself now in the same situation. Each way seemed easy till she followed it and found herself balked by a hedge.

But the fact that her head ached gave her an excuse for going to her room and locking herself in. She could thus pull her books from beneath the bed without fear of detection. The points as to which she needed enlightenment being spires and Lady Hamilton, she went at her task with the avidity of a starving person at sight of food.

As to spires, she was quickly appeased, for her volume on the old churches of Paris had the Sainte-Chapelle as its frontispiece. Now that she had seen the name in print, she was sure of it. Because of being so little taxed, her memory was the more retentive. Every sound that had fallen from Mrs. Collingham's lips was stamped on her mind like a footprint hardened into rock on a bit of untracked soil. Within half an hour, she had learned the outlines of the history of the Sainte-Chapelle, and, with some fluttering of timid vanity, had grasped the comparison of its strong and exquisite grace with her own personality.

But, after all, the Sainte-Chapelle was a thing of stone, whereas Lady Hamilton-she loved, the name-must have been of flesh and blood. Here, too, there was a frontispiece, the very Dian of the Frick Gallery to which Mrs. Collingham had referred. Unfortunately, the ill.u.s.trations were in black and white, so that she could get no adequate idea as to the complexion or the color of the hair. The face, however, with its bewitching softness, its heavenly archnesses, bore some resemblance to her own.

It was a shock to learn that the possessor of so much beauty, the bearer of so melodious a t.i.tle, had begun life as Emma Lyon, a servant girl, but, after all, she reflected, the circ.u.mstance only created a.n.a.logies with herself. There were more a.n.a.logies still. Emma Lyon had been an artist's model. In an artist's studio she had made the acquaintance of men of lofty station, just as she herself had met Bob. She had loved and been loved. Romney was perhaps her Hubert Wray. Her career had been exciting and dramatic-the friend of a queen, the more-than-wife of one of the great men of the age. The tragic, miserable death didn't frighten Jennie, since misery and tragedy always stalked on the edge of her experience. She fell asleep amid vast, vague concepts of queens and heroes beset with loves and problems not unlike Jennie Follett's.

All through the next day she stilled the working of thought by application to _The Egoist_. She took to it as to a drug. In the intervals of her household duties, or whenever her mind became active over her affairs, she ran to her room to begin again, ”Comedy is a game played to throw reflections upon social life, and it deals with human nature in the drawing-room of civilized men and women, where we have no dust of the struggling outer world, no mire, no violent clashes, to make the correctness of the representation convincing.” She got little farther, since, for her purpose, this was far enough. She was drugged already, as by dentist's gas. The more she read the more she felt herself wandering sleepily through realms of dream, where words, as she understood them, had ceased to have significance.

So, by sheer force of will, she brought herself to that moment in the afternoon when she stood at the studio door. She hadn't thought; she hadn't, in her own phrase, _imagined_. She had allowed herself no instant in which to count the cost or to shrink from paying it. Hubert, love, and the family deliverance from poverty would be hers before nightfall, and she meant not to look beyond. She opened the door softly.

Before showing herself, she stopped and listened. There was not a sound.

It was often so if Hubert was painting, and the silence only a.s.sured her that if he was there, as he probably was, he was waiting for her alone.

He was waiting for her alone with that look in his eyes, that maddened animal look which she had seen yesterday, so b.e.s.t.i.a.l and yet so compelling! Still more softly she moved forward among the studio odds and ends.

Then she saw-and stopped.