The Purple Heights Part 20

That he should so instantly like his wife's protege raised that charming lady's fine judgment even higher in his estimation. A man always respects his wife's judgment more when it tallies with his own convictions.

The Hemingways insisted that Peter should spend some time in England. Mrs. Hemingway was going over to Paris presently, and he could accompany her. In the meantime she wanted him to meet certain English friends of hers. Peter was perfectly willing to wait. He was enchanted with London, and although he would have preferred to be turned foot-loose to prowl indefinitely, his affection for Mrs.

Hemingway made him amenable to her discipline. At her command he went with Hemingway to the latter's tailor. To please her he duteously obeyed Hemingway's fastidious instructions as to habiliments. He overcame his rooted aversion to meeting strangers, and when bidden appeared in her drawing-room, and there met smart, clever, and noted London.

Hemingway thereafter marked his progress with amus.e.m.e.nt not unmixed with amazement. It came to him that there was a greater difference, a deeper divergence between himself and Peter than between Peter and these Britishers. The earmark of your coast-born South Carolinian is the selfsame, absolute sureness of himself, his place, his people, in the essential scheme of things. Wasn't he born in South Carolina?

Hasn't he relatives in Charleston? Very well, then!

In Peter's case this essential sureness had developed into a courtesy so instinctive, a democracy so unaffectedly sincere, that it flavored his whole personality with a pleasing distinctiveness.

The British do not expect their very young men to be too knowing or too fatally bright; they mark the promise rather than the performance of youth, and s.p.a.ciously allow time for the process of development. And so Peter Champneys found himself curiously at home in democratically oligarchic England.

"I feel as if I were visiting my grandmother's house," he confided to a certain lady next whom he was seated at one of Mrs. Hemingway's small dinners.

"And where is your mother's house?" wondered the lady, who found herself attracted to him.

"Over home in Riverton," said Peter Champneys. And his face went wistful, remembering the little town with the tide-water gurgling in its coves, and its great oaks hung with long gray swaying moss, and the sinuous lines of the marshes against sky and water, and the smell of the sea--all the mellow magic of the coast that was Home.

It didn't occur to him that an English lady mightn't know just where "over home in Riverton" might be. She was so great a lady that she didn't ask. She looked at him and said thoughtfully:

"I wonder if you wouldn't like to see an old place of ours. I'm having the Hemingways down for a week, and I should like you to come with them." And she added, with a charming smile: "As you are an artist, you'll like our gallery. There's a Rembrandt you should see."

Peter's eyes of a sudden went deep and golden, and their dazzling depths had so instant and so sweet a recognition that her heart leaped in answer. It was as if a young archangel had secretly signaled her in pa.s.sing.

When the formal invitation arrived, Mrs. Hemingway was delighted with what she termed Peter's good fortune. The invitations to that house were coveted and prized she explained. Really, Peter Champneys was unusually lucky! She felt deeply gratified.

Peter hadn't known that there existed anywhere on earth anything quite so perfect as the life in a great English country house. He thought that perhaps the vanished plantation life of the old South might have approximated it. His delight in the fine old Tudor pile, in its ordered stateliness, its mellowed beauty, pleased his hostess and won the regard of the rather grumpy gentleman who happened to be her husband and its owner. To her surprise, he took Peter under his wing, and showed himself as much interested in this modest guest as he was ordinarily indifferent to many more important ones. It was his custom to take what he called a stroll before breakfast--a matter of a mere eight or ten miles, maybe--and he found to his hand a young man with walking legs, seeing eyes, and but a modic.u.m of tongue. He showed Peter that country-side with the thoroughness of a boy birds'-nesting, as Peter had once showed the Carolina country-side to Claribel Spring. They went over the venerable house with the same thoroughness, and Peter sensed the owner's impersonally personal delight in the stewards.h.i.+p of a priceless possession. He held it in trust, and he loved it with a quiet pa.s.sion that was as much a part of himself as was his English speech. Every now and then he would pause before some rusty sword, or maybe a tattered and dusty banner; and although he was of a very florid complexion, and his nose was even bigger than Peter's, in such moments there was that in the eye and brow, in the expression of the firm lips, that made him more than handsome in the young man's sight. Through him he glimpsed that something silent and large and fine that is England.

"And we're going," said the n.o.bleman, pausing before the portrait of a gentleman who had fallen at Marston Moor. "Oh, yes, we are vanis.h.i.+ng. After a while the great breed of English gentlemen will be as extinct as the dodo. And this house will be turned into a Dispensary for Dyspeptic Proletarians, or more probably an American named Cohen will buy it and explain to his guests at dinner just how much it cost him."

Peter remembered broken and vine-grown chimneys where stately homes had stood, the extinction of a romantic plantation life, the vanis.h.i.+ng of the gentlemen of the old South, as the Champneys had vanished. They had taken with them something never to be replaced in American life, perhaps; but hadn't that vanished something made room for a something else intrinsically better and sounder, because based on a larger conception of freedom and justice? The American looked at the cavalier's haughty, handsome face; he looked at the Englishman thoughtfully.

"Yes. You will go," he agreed presently. "All things pa.s.s. That is the law. In the end it is a good law."

"I should think it would altogether depend on what replaces us,"

said the other, dryly.

"And that," said Peter, "altogether depends upon you, doesn't it?

It's in your power to shape it, you know. However, if you'll notice, things somehow manage to right themselves in spite of us. Now, over home in Carolina we haven't come out so very badly, all things considered."

"Got jolly well licked, didn't you?" asked the Englishman, whose outstanding idea of American military history centered upon Stonewall Jackson.

"Just about wiped off the slate. Had to begin all over, in a world turned upside down. Yet, you see, here I am! And I a.s.sure you I shouldn't be willing to change places with my grandfather." With a shy friendliness he laid his fingers for a moment on his host's arm.

"Your grandson won't be willing to change, either, because he'll be the right sort. _That's_ what your kind hands down." He spoke diffidently, but with a certain authority. Each man is a sieve through which life sifts experiences, leaving the garnering of grain and the blowing away of chaff to the man himself. Peter had garnered courage to face with a quiet heart things as they are. He had never accepted the general view of things as final, therefore he escaped disillusionment.

"They thought the end of the world had come--my people. So it had--for them. But not for us. There's always a new heaven and a new earth for those who come after," he finished.

The Englishman smiled twistedly. After a while he said unexpectedly:

"I wish you'd have a try at my portrait, Mr. Champneys. I think I'd like that tentative grandson of mine to see the sort of grandfather he really possessed."

"Why, I haven't had any training! But if you'll sit for me I'll do some sketches of you, gladly."

"Why not now?" asked the other, coolly. "I have a fancy to see what you'll make of me." He added casually: "Whistler used the north room over the stables when he stayed here. You've seen his pastels, and the painting of my father."

"Yes," said Peter, reverently. And he stared at his host, round-eyed.

"We've never changed the room since his time. Should you like to look over it now? You'll find all the materials you are likely to need,--my sister has a pretty little talent of her own, and it pleases her to use the place."

"Why, yes, if you like," murmured Peter, dazedly. And like one in a dream he followed his stocky host to the room over the stables. One saw why the artist had selected it; it made an ideal studio. A small canvas, untouched, was already in place on an easel near a window.

One or two ladylike landscapes leaned against the wall.

"She has the talent of a painstaking copyist," said her brother, nodding at his sister's work. "Shall you use oils, or do you prefer chalks, or water-colors?"

"Oils," decided Peter, examining the canvas. "It will be rough work, remember." He made his preparations, turned upon his sitter the painter's knife-like stare, and plunged into work. It was swift work, and perhaps roughly done, as he had said, but by the miracle of genius he managed to catch and fix upon his canvas the tenacious and indomitable soul of the Englishman. You saw it looking out at you from the steady, light blue eyes in the plain face with its craggy nose and obstinate chin; and you saw the kindness and delicacy of the firm mouth. There he stood, flat-footed, easy in his well-worn clothes, one hand in his pocket, the other holding the blackthorn walking-stick he always carried, and looked at you with the quiet sureness of integrity and of power. Peter added a few last touches; and then, instead of signing his name, he painted in a small Red Admiral, this with such exquisite fidelity that you might think that gay small rover had for a moment alighted upon the canvas and would in another moment fly away again.

His lords.h.i.+p studied his painted semblance critically.

"I rather thought you could do it," he said quietly. "I usually manage, as you Americans say, to pick a winner. You'll be a great painter if you really want to be one, Mr. Champneys. Should you say sixty guineas would be a fair price for this?"

"That's something like three hundred dollars, isn't it?" asked Peter, interestedly. "Suppose we call this a preliminary sketch for a portrait I'm to paint later--say when I've had a few years of training."

"You will charge me very much more than sixty guineas for a portrait, two or three years from now," said the other, smiling. He looked at the swiftly done, vivid bit of work. "_This_ is what I want for my grandson; it is his grandfather as nature made him. It is as true and as homely as life itself." And he looked at Peter respectfully, so that that young man blushed to his ears. And that is how and when Peter Champneys painted his first ordered picture, signed with the Red Admiral; and how he won the faithful friends.h.i.+p of a crusty Englishman. It was a very real friends.h.i.+p. His lords.h.i.+p had what he himself called a country heart, and as Peter Champneys had the same sort, and neither man outraged the other by too much talk, they got along astonis.h.i.+ngly well.

"He's deucedly intelligent," his lords.h.i.+p explained, with quiet enthusiasm. "We'll tramp for miles, and I give you my word that for an hour on end he won't say three words!"

Hemingway, to whom this confidence was given, chuckled. It amused him to watch his wife's wild goose putting on native swan feathers.

Yet it pleased him, for he knew the boy appealed to her romantic as well as to her maternal instinct. She handled him skilfully, and it was she who pa.s.sed upon his invitations. She wished him to meet clever and brilliant men and women; and at times she left him in the hands of young girls, pink-and-white visions who troubled as well as interested him. He felt that he was really meeting them under false pretenses. Their youth called to his, but he might not answer.

Between him and youth stood that unloved and unlovely girl in America.

Mrs. Hemingway watched him with the eyes of the woman who has a young man upon her hands. His reactions to his contacts interested her immensely. His worldly education was progressing with entire satisfaction to her.

"I want him to marry an English wife," she confided to her husband.

They were to leave for Paris that night, and she was summing up the results of his stay in London, the balance being altogether in his favor. "A well-bred, normal English girl with good connections, a girl entirely untroubled by temperament, who will love him tenderly, look out for his physical well-being, and fill his house with healthy children, is exactly what Peter Champneys needs. And the sooner it happens to him the better. Peter has a lonely soul. It shouldn't be allowed to become chronic."

Hemingway looked at her apprehensively. "Sounds to me as if you were trying to make Peter pick a peck of pickled peppers," he commented.

And Peter coming in at this opportune moment, he grinned at the boy cheerfully.

"Peter," he smiled, "the sweet chime of merry wedding-bells in the distance falls softly on mine ear; my wife thinks you should be altar-broke. Charming domestic interior, happy fireside clime, flag of our union fluttering from the patent clothes-line! Futurist painting of Young Artist Pus.h.i.+ng a Pram! Don't look at me with such an agonized expression of the ears, Peter!"

But Peter had no answering smile. His face had changed, and there was that in his eyes which gave Hemingway pause.

"Why, old chap, I was merely joking!" he began, with real concern.

"Peter!" said the woman, softly. "You have had--a disappointment?

But, my dear boy, you are so _very_ young. Don't take it too much to heart, Peter. At your age nothing is final, really." And she smiled at him.

A flush suffused the young man's forehead. He felt shamed and miserable. He _couldn't_ flaunt his price-tag before these unbuyable souls whose beautiful and true marriage was based upon love, and sympathy, and mutual ideals! He _couldn't_ rattle his chains, or explain Anne Champneys. He couldn't, indeed, force himself to speak of her at all. The thing was bad enough, but to talk about it--No!

He lifted troubled eyes.

"I am afraid--in my case--it is final," he said, in a low voice.

And after a pause, in a louder tone: "Yes--please understand--it is final."