Marie Van Vorst - Fairfax and His Pride - A Novel

Fairfax listened, amused; the problems of his life were vital, she could not distract him. He took the rubber, erasing her careless work, sat down by her and began to give her real instruction. Little Gardiner, excused from all study, amused himself after his own fashion in a corner of the sofa, and after a few moments of silence, Fairfax's pupil whispered to him in a low tone —

"I can't draw anything, Cousin Antony, when you've got that look on."

Fairfax continued his work.

"It's no use, you've got the heavy look like the heavy step. Are you angry with me?"

Not her words, but her voice made her cousin stop his drawing. In it was a hint of the tears she hated to shed. Bella leant her elbow on the table, rested her head in her hand and searched Fairfax's face with her eloquent eyes. They were not like her mother's, doe-like and patient; Bella's were dark eyes, superb and shadowy. They held something of the Spanish mystery, caught from the strain that ran through the Carew family from the Middle Ages, when the Carez were nobles in Andalusia.

"I am angry with myself, Bella; I am a fool."

"Oh no, you're not ," she breathed devotedly, "you're a genius."

The tension of Fairfax's heart relaxed. The highest praise that any woman could have found, this child, in her naïveté, gave him.

"Why don't you make some figures and sell them, Cousin Antony? Are you worried about money troubles?" She had heard these terms often.

"Yes," he said shortly, "just that."

He had gone on to sketch a head on the drawing-board, touching it absently, and over his shoulder Bella murmured —

"Cousin Antony, it's just like me. You just draw wonderfully."

He deepened the shadows in the hair and rounded the ear, held it some way off and looked at it.

"I wish I had some clay," he murmured.

He had brought the cast of the foot back to show it to his aunt when an occasion should offer. It stood now in the little cabinet where Bella and Gardiner kept their treasures.

"I went to see Mr. Cedersholm to-day," Fairfax continued, for lack of other confidant taking the dark-eyed child; "now, if Cedersholm would only take me up, and give me the chance to work under him, I'd soon show him."

Bella agreed warmly. "Yes, indeed, you soon would."

The odours of strange meats and sauces were wafted throughout the house. Little troublesome feet pattered up and down the dingy back stairs, and whenever Bella and Gardiner were laid hold upon they were banished. They were inoculated with excitement and their nostrils pricked with the delicious smells of flowers and smilax and feast meats.

Mr. Carew annually gave a banquet to some twenty New Yorkers, who he was so generous as to think were nearly as great as himself. The household was not constructed or run on a hospitable basis and nothing was in tune for entertaining. Sympathetic Bella, thrilling with liveliest interest, assisted at the preparations, and to her bright cheeks and eyes her mother bewailed —

"Only twenty glasses, Bella, of the fine engraved deer and pheasant pattern, and we shall be twenty-four."

"Mother, give me one in a paper and I'll take it down town and match it."

Her mother laughed. "Match it, why they were made by hand years ago, and are worth ten dollars apiece."

"Oh, dear," breathed the little girl, and multiplied: "Two hundred dollars for twenty. Mother! "

The child stole silently out from the glistening array. Ten dollars apiece. And she and Gardiner at their last nursery tea-party… Through the door, as she slipped away, she looked back at her mother, standing thoughtful over the rows of crystal. In the great mahogany cage which, like a small dark château, surmounted the pedestal of carved wood, the blackbird Jetty huddled on his perch. He was a superb specimen, black as jet, whence his name, a free woodland spirit, with a yellow bill like a crocus flower, and piercing eyes. Bella passed under the cage and called up to him, "Sing, Jetty, sing."

The child crooned to the bird her schoolroom poem. In return, Jetty sang a short, brilliant little roulade, his one trained tune, which Bella had vainly tried to pick out on the piano. She never heard half so sweet a song from any bird.

"Jetty is my favourite singer," she had said to Antony. But as she lingered now under his cage in order to lengthen out the time, which, because of her aching conscience, was hanging heavy, Jetty blinked down at her as she stood with her hands behind her back, her face uplifted; he peered at her like a weird familiar spirit. "Listen, Jetty. Gardiner and I took those perfectly beautiful, expensive glasses for our tea party. He smashed all three of them. There was a glass for Gardiner, a glass for me and one for the uninvited guest – no, I mean the unexpected guest. Gardiner sat down on the glasses where I had put them out to wash them. He would have been awfully cut only he had father's overcoat on (one of father's old coats, we got it out of the camphor chest)." She ceased, for Jetty, in the midst of the confession, hopped down to take a valetudinarian peck at his yellow seeds.

"Now," murmured Bella, "the question is, shall I tell mother on an exciting day like this when she is worried and nervous, and, if I do tell her, wouldn't it be carrying tales on poor little Gardiner?"

Jetty, by his food cup, disheartened and discouraged and apparently in a profound melancholy, depressed Bella; she left him, turned and fled.

Bella picked a forbidden way up the freshly oiled stairs and joined her little brother. There she listened to tales, danced on tiptoe to peer through the stair rails, and hung with Gardiner over the balustrade and watched and listened. The children flew to the window to see the cabs and carriages drive up, fascinated by the clicking of the doors, finding magic in the awning and the carpeting that stretched down the stoop to the curb; found music in the voices below in the hallway as the guests arrived. Bella could hardly eat the flat and unpalatable supper prepared for her on the tray, and, finally, she seized her little brother.

"Come, let's go down and see the party, Gardiner."

She dragged him after her, half-reluctant and wholly timid. On the middle of the stairway she paused. The house below was transformed, hot and perfumed with flowers, the very atmosphere was strange. Along the balustrade, their hands touched smilax garlands. The blaze of light dazzled them, the sweet odours, the gaiety and the spirit of cheer and life and good-fellowship came up on fragrant wings. The little brother and sister stood entranced. The sound of laughter and men's agreeable voices came soaring in, the gaiety of guests at a feast, and, over all rose a sound most heavenly, a low, thrilling, thrilling sound.

Jetty was singing.

The children knew the blackbird's idyl well, but it was different this night. They heard the first notes rise softly, half stifled in his throat, where Jetty caressed his tune, soothed it, crooned with it, and then, preluded by a burst all his own of a few adorable silver notes, the trained melody came forth.

"Oh, Gardiner ," breathed the little girl, "hear Jetty. Isn't it perfectly beautiful?"

They stepped softly on downstairs, hand in hand, into the lower rooms, over to the dining-room where the thick red curtains hung before the doorway. Gardiner wore his play apron and his worsted bed slippers. Bella – neither the little brother nor the old nurse had observed that Bella had made herself a toilette. The dark hair carefully brushed and combed, was tied back with a crimson ribbon, and below her short dress shone out her dancing school blue stockings and her tight blue shoes. Peering through the curtains, the children could see the dinner company to their hearts' content. Bella viewed the great New Yorkers, murmuring under her breath the names and wondering to whom they belonged. Judge Noah Davis, famous for the breaking of the Tweed ring – him, Bella knew, he was a frequent caller. There was a prelate of the Church and there was some one whom Bella wanted especially to see – Cedersholm, Mr. Cedersholm – which could he be? Which might he be? Little Gardiner's hand was hot in hers. He whispered beseechingly —