The Fate of Felix Brand. Kelly Florence Finch
“Good morning.”
“Only one this morning, Miss Marne,” he said, smiling back at her, and then added, as he saw her face brighten, “but it’s the one you want, I guess!”
“Yes,” she gaily replied, “you’re always very welcome when you bring me a letter like this!”
She was keenly conscious of the caress in her hand as she held the letter in close clasp. Once inside the door again, she pressed the missive softly to her cheek as she whispered, “Dear Warren! You dear boy! I just knew you were writing to me yesterday, and you didn’t disappoint me!”
CHAPTER III
The Mask of His Countenance
It was a curious mixture of people whom Felix Brand had bidden to the theatre party and house-warming with which he celebrated the setting up of his bachelor household gods in a studio apartment house. But the varied contents of that mixture were not so much indicative of catholic tastes in human nature as of an underlying trait of his own character, a trait which led him to look first, in whatever he did, for his own advantage. But whatever their differing attitudes toward life there were few of his guests who did not follow his movements with admiring eyes and think of him as one of Fortune’s favorites.
For in this artistically decorated and luxuriously furnished apartment there was nothing to hint that until recent years he had lived as yoke-fellow with severest economy. The son of a school-teacher in a Pennsylvania town, the family purse had had all that it could do to provide for him a course in college and the training for his profession. But at the beginning of his career he had won a rich prize in an architectural competition, and afterwards commissions and rewards and honors had flowed in upon him in constantly increasing measure. While he did not yet quite merit the adjective which Isabella Marne had applied to him, there was every promise that he would soon be, in truth, a “famous architect.”
Although he had barely entered his third decade, certain characteristic features of his work had already won attention, and these had been praised so much, and had begun to exercise so evident an influence, that many looked upon him as destined to be and as, indeed, already becoming, the leader of a new and fruitful movement in American architecture. A Felix Brand design, whether for a dwelling, a church, a business building, or a civic monument, was sure to be marked by simplicity of conception, exquisite sense of proportion and rhythmic harmony of line.
“What a perfectly charming manner he has!” said Miss Ardeen Andrews to Henrietta Marne, who knew of her as a rising young actress. “And such wonderful eyes! Why, there is a caress in them if he only looks at you!”
“Yes,” replied Henrietta in a matter-of-fact way, “it’s a very pleasant expression, isn’t it? But it doesn’t mean anything in particular. It’s just their natural expression.”
“And he’s not only handsome,” Miss Andrews went on with enthusiasm, “but he’s the most sensitive and refined-looking man I’ve met in a long time.” And she flashed a glance of covert admiration across the room at their host, who was talking with two men of such different type as to make his own courtly manner and intellectual features noticeable by contrast.
A little later Henrietta, passing the two men, heard them speculating, in tones touched with an Irish brogue, as to whether or not the young architect was already making money enough out of his profession to pay for such surroundings as these in which he was settling himself.
“There’s money enough in it when you get to the top,” one of them was saying. Henrietta remembered him as a certain district political leader, Flaherty by name, with whom her employer had lately held several conferences. “Money enough to buy old masters to paper your walls with and velvet chairs to sit in for a year, and never the same one twice. But Brand’s not up to the top yet. He must have some other jug to go to, and I’d like to know just what it is and how big it is!”
Henrietta could have told them what it was, and she was presently reminded of it when two men were presented to her and she recognized their names as that of the firm of brokers through which Felix Brand had for some time been carrying on what she knew to be very profitable operations in stocks.
“The doctor won’t forget us entirely, will he, Mrs. Annister?” the host was saying to the tall and handsome woman with iron-gray hair and warm-colored cheeks who sat beside him at the supper table.
“I hope not; but you know I never vouch for him. Mildred impressed it upon him that he must be here in time for supper,” and she glanced at the young replica of herself at Brand’s other hand.
“Yes,” confirmed the girl, “he promised very faithfully that he’d come as soon as he could. But he was to see a case tonight in which he’s very much interested, and if he gets to thinking and reading about that, you know, Mr. Brand, that he is just as likely as not to forget all about us.”
“Oh, yes, that case!” said her mother. “It’s most curious and interesting – one of the sort that makes you feel creepy.”
“Do tell us about it then,” exclaimed Ardeen Andrews, farther down the table.
“It’s a man possessed by the illusion that his dreams are the real thing and his waking hours are imaginary. Just think what a topsy-turvy state that must keep his family in!”
Felix Brand looked up with sudden interest, but before he could speak a man’s voice called out from the other end of the table, “The doctor doesn’t consider faith in one’s dreams evidence of a pathological state, does he, Mrs. Annister?” It was Robert Moreton, a young author, whose name was of frequent occurrence in magazine tables of contents.
“If he does,” Mrs. Moreton broke in, “how crazy he would think you, Rob! You see, when he is writing a story,” and she glanced up and down the table, “Robert imagines it’s being acted out around him, and I have to be the heroine and the villainess and the parlor maid and the cook and answer to all their names.”
“That must give some variety to existence, Mrs. Moreton,” said Brand. “And variety is the best spice for life that I know of.”
“Do you know that story of Colonel Higginson’s,” Moreton went on, “called ‘A Monarch of Dreams,’ about a man who developed the power of controlling his dreams and became so delighted and absorbed in them that he gave himself up to the life he lived while asleep and allowed his real existence to wither away until it was of no consequence at all to him or any one else? It has always seemed to me a wonderful bit of eerie imagination. And there are such alluring suggestions for experiment in it!”
Felix Brand’s brown eyes were fixed in a speculative stare upon the mass of roses that glowed at the center of the table. Miss Marne, glancing at him, knew that, whether or not he was thinking of them, he was conscious of their beauty in every fibre of his being. “I wonder,” he said slowly, and she saw Mildred Annister’s gaze turn quickly upon him as the girl bent forward with parted lips. “I wonder very, very much,” he repeated, “just how much one could do toward making one’s dream-people come alive. I mean, toward making the different kind of person one sometimes is in a dream the real person when one is awake. You know how different you seem sometimes when you are asleep, not at all the same kind of person you are when you are awake. Now, wouldn’t it be interesting if you could make yourself be that person sometimes after you wake up? It seems to me it would be a delightful change from being the same person all the time. This being tied fast to yourself year in and year out gets very monotonous.”
Miss Annister gave a little gasp and leaned nearer to him, distress in her eyes.
“Don’t say that!” she begged, hardly above a whisper. “Don’t even think such things! You are you, and I wouldn’t have you different for worlds and worlds!”
Her disturbed little appeal was shielded from observation by a vivacious feminine voice which called out simultaneously: “Please finish my house before you turn yourself into anybody else, Mr. Brand! You know we’ve only settled on the back porch and one dormer window, so far, and I’ll leave it to these good people if that’s enough for a family of six to live in!”
Henrietta smiled