Read Ebook: Rosaleen among the artists by Holding Elisabeth Sanxay

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Ebook has 1161 lines and 44150 words, and 24 pages

d." He had consented; he didn't feel under obligations; he thought it was nice of her, but her duty. He would have been glad, in her place, to help a young Landry to get on his feet.

A respectful Negro butler opened the door, and he entered and went up to his own room--a handsome and well-furnished room, with bureaus and wardrobe and chest of drawers all lamentably empty. In the huge closet hung only a decent suit of evening clothes and some white flannel trousers, and in two of the bureau drawers lay piles of shirts and underwear which his aunt herself mended and mended. She wouldn't have so much as suggested replenishing his stock; he would have felt himself grossly insulted.

He had left his beloved mother and sister in Charleston, where they were living with difficulty on a very small pension, and he took from them only an incredibly small sum, enough for carfares and that sort of thing, until he could be earning something. But though waiting was hard for them and hard for him, he would not be hurried. Until he could find a place which seemed to him advantageous, he would take nothing. He knew what he was about. Now was his chance, and perhaps his only chance, to look about him. He intended to make a good start, to go into a business in which he could stop. Let him only see an opportunity; he asked no more.

This evening his plan for the future was changed and enlarged. It contained, as always, lavish provision for his mother and sister, but it included Rosaleen. In the course of the next few years he was going to marry her.

He had, however, too much sense to mention anything of this, to hint at the existence of a Rosaleen, in that household. It wouldn't be gallant. He was supposed to admire his cousin Caroline; not to the point of compromising himself; everyone knew he wasn't in love with her. But while living there and seeing her every day, it wouldn't, he felt, be polite to fall openly in love with someone else.

His aunt was a woman whom he thoroughly admired. Possessed of a gracious and charming worldliness, she had nevertheless the most severe morals, the most rigid code. She didn't like New York or its people; she was shocked at almost everything; she said the women weren't ladies and the men weren't chivalrous; that the people altogether were vulgar and "fast." But, she said, she was obliged to live there for the sake of Caroline's studies. It wasn't really quite that; however, her intention was natural and praiseworthy, and she did her best to accomplish her unspoken ambition for her child.

Nick Landry enjoyed living there. It was a well-appointed and well-managed home, with an air of perpetual festivity. There were always young men about, and theatre parties and dinner parties and little dances--all the charmed atmosphere of a home with a young girl in it. Mrs. Allanby had known how to make the place agreeable, even fascinating for young men. That was her part; to provide Caroline with a matchless setting. To see Caroline sitting at the piano, under a lamp with a shade of artfully selected tint, charmingly dressed, and singing in a voice a bit colourless but so well bred; to know that there would be punch--not too much of it, for Mrs. Allanby was vigilant,--sandwiches and cakes such as no one else ever had; and an air of flattering attention, an enveloping hospitality--wasn't that a deadly snare? And Nick was the privileged guest, the man of the house. Of course he liked it!

So that evening while he sat there listening to Caroline sing, and thinking all the time of Rosaleen, he felt almost treacherous. And just a little proud of his well-concealed secret. He felt that his dark face was inscrutable....

Perhaps, he thought, at that very instant, Rosaleen too was sitting at the piano in her home.

It was one of Nick's old-fashioned ideas--that a man must always be the first to appear at a tryst, must unfailingly be found waiting by the beloved woman when she arrived. He had made a point of being at least fifteen minutes in advance of the appointed time, so that Rosaleen should see him there, in chivalrous if somewhat irritable patience. He was always ready to wait for a woman, to defer to her, to serve her; he believed it to be his duty as a gentleman; and yet so fierce and haughty was his spirit that he was never without an inward resentment.

He was waiting for her now in the corridor of the Fifth Avenue library. It was a wet October afternoon; he sat on a stone bench with his coat collar still turned up, the brim of his hat still turned down, just as he had come in from the street. He hadn't even taken off his tan gloves, soaked black by the rain; he didn't care how he looked, and he knew Rosaleen wouldn't care either. He had certainly not the look of an expectant lover, this lean and shabby young man with his haughty glance, his ready-made overcoat too large for him, his big rubber overshoes over old and shapeless boots. And yet more than one girl stole a glance at him.

Quarter of an hour late! He only wished that he could smoke. He was beginning to feel chilly, too, and terribly depressed. Wet people going past him and past him, some alone, some in couples, treading and talking quietly. He regarded them with morose interest. All of them after books!... Hadn't he too tried to live that way, vicariously, through books? All very well as a substitute; but there came back to him now, very vividly, the bitter restlessness, the torment that would seize him when he read of some enchanting foreign land, of fierce and desperate adventures. Of course he knew that his life wouldn't be, and couldn't be, at all like any other life ever lived in this world; and yet, in spite of his faith in his own destiny, he fretted so, he chafed so at these slow years, these hours so wasted. What was the matter? Why didn't life begin?

He stirred uneasily. Twenty minutes late! This was abusing her feminine privilege! Doubly unfortunate, too, because he had come prepared to remonstrate with Rosaleen, and the longer she kept him waiting, the chillier and damper he grew, the more severe would the remonstrance be.

At last he saw her coming, and her sweetness almost disarmed him. And then made him even more severe. A girl like that, to be meeting a man about in public places! A girl so pretty, so charming, that people stared at her.... The damp air and her haste had given her a lovely colour, and as she hurried toward him, he found for her a pitifully time-worn simile which nevertheless struck him as startlingly novel and true--she was like a wild rose.

She had very little "style"; her clothes were rather cheap, he observed. But she was superlatively ladylike, refined, modest. He wouldn't have had anything changed, from her sturdy little boots to her plain dark hat.

He rose and came toward her, hat in hand, and for a moment they looked at each other, speechlessly.

"Suppose we have tea?" he said, at last. "There's a nice place near here where they have very good waffles."

"I'm not a bit hungry," said Rosaleen.

Nick was. He had gone without lunch in order to have enough money for tea.

"You ought to be, at your age," he said.

"It isn't age that makes you hungry," said Rosaleen. "It's what you've had for lunch."

Nick said no more, but took her by the arm. And was surprised and shocked to feel how fragile an arm it was. He determined that she should eat a great deal.

He stopped near the door to reclaim their umbrellas, and they went out together into the chilly and misty twilight. The crowds on Fifth Avenue jostled them, but Nick, tall and grim, held his umbrella high over Rosaleen's head, and led her to the quiet little tea room he had selected.

"Now, then!" he said, when they were seated opposite each other at a small table, and tea and waffles and honey had been ordered. And he began.

He told her first of all what was expected of a young girl:

He told her how easy it was to be misjudged.

And how serious.

Once more he was horribly disturbed at seeing her eyes fill with tears. He leaned across the table.

He didn't know how to proceed. He stopped a moment, frowning, to arrange his ideas.

It was the first time he had used her name.

"Please let me!" he entreated.

She gave up. She told him yes, to-morrow evening; for Miss Amy would not be home then.

It was a nice, respectable house in a quiet street below Morningside Park. He was agreeably surprised at its respectability, for he had scented a mystery in Rosaleen's reluctance to have him come--great poverty, perhaps, or a disreputable relative. He went into the vestibule, and looked for the bell. There it was--Humbert--; he rang; the door clicked, and he entered. An old-fashioned house, the carpeted halls were dark and stuffy; he climbed up and up, and on the fourth landing there stood Rosaleen.

"Excuse me just a moment!" she said. "I'll tell--my uncle--you're here."

And vanished, leaving him alone. He looked about him with interest, because it was Rosaleen's home. And he was sorry that it was such a stuffy and unlovely one. He was used to large rooms and fine old furniture, to a sort of dignity and fineness in living. This dining room, with its swarm of decorations, the crowded pictures, the scrawny plants, the flimsy and ugly varnished furniture, the sewing machine, the dark red paper on the walls, distressed him. He sat down on one of the straight chairs against the wall to wait, trying to imagine his fair Rosaleen in this setting.

In the meantime Rosaleen had hurried to knock at the door of Mr. Humbert's room.

"Mr. Morton!" she murmured. "Here's a young man--a--a friend of Miss Waters.... Would you like to come out and see him?"

"Presently," the dignified voice replied, and Rosaleen hastened back.

"He'll be in presently," she repeated to Nick, as she returned. He had risen when she entered, and once more he took her hand. Her nervousness, her distress, filled him with pity.

"Isn't there anyone else? Do you live all alone with your uncle?"

"Oh, no! There's ... there's--a--cousin.... But she's out.... Won't you sit down?"

When he had done so, she fetched him a book from a little table.

"Would you like to look at some views?" she asked.

"No," said Nick, smiling. "I wouldn't."

"Would you like to play cards?"

"No! I'd rather talk to you!"

Now Nick unconsciously expected a girl to do the talking, and the pleasing and the entertaining. Gallant responses were his part. So he waited, but quite in vain, for Rosaleen had no tradition of entertaining, and no experience. Never before had she sat in that room with a young man.

"Have you any of your work here?" he asked, at last, in despair.

"Just those!" she answered, pointing to the transparencies. "There isn't any place for me to draw here."

"Very pretty!" said Nick. "Are you going to be a professional artist?"

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