White Ashes. Sidney R. Kennedy
into the drawing room.
John M. Hurd's drawing room reflected the substance of its master in so far that it appeared to represent lavish resources. In the rather dim light, the deep rose tapestry curtains, the really beautiful rugs on the highly polished floor, the heavy, stately furniture, and the big central crystal chandelier all made for dignity. Even the broad-framed pictures on the wall, although there were two or three old masters among them, looked above suspicion. Miss Hurd was seated near the window, talking to two young men who seemed on terms of informality in the house.
"Shall we have tea?" she asked, when her step-cousin had seated himself.
"By all means—but I hope you don't mean it literally," replied Wilkinson, promptly. "Tea, by all means, if necessary to preserve the conventionalities, but especially anything and everything else you like." He turned to Bennington Cole. "I feel rather proud of my success in this establishment, Benny. A year ago Isabel would have handed you out nothing except a couple of anemic sugar wafers with the cup; now you can get English muffins and all kinds of sandwiches and éclairs—which is at least a little better."
"Congratulate you," said Cole, with a laugh.
"Oh, I haven't finished," Wilkinson went on. "The next step in my missionary movement will be a popular demand for chicken salad. That's a big forward step—you eat it with a fork—and from there it will be an easy gradation up the carte du jour until finally I triumph in the introduction of real food, so that when you ask for tea in this house you will get a full portion of porterhouse steak and French fried potatoes. But don't think me hypercritical, Isabel," he added. "Even now I can usually manage to part from you without reeling, faint with hunger, down your front steps and collapsing at their feet—I should say foot."
"I'm extremely relieved to hear you say so," replied the girl.
The third young man, who alone of the three wore a frock coat, and who retained on his hand his left glove while his right was laid smoothly across his knee, now entered the conversation.
"You talk as though you were really hungry, Charlie," he said.
"Well, I am, rather," the other rejoined. "And I can tell you, Stan, that if you lived in my boarding house, you never could have completed that charming still-life effect of the platter of fish that I recently saw in your studio. You would have eaten your model before you could have finished the picture."
"Why don't you change your boarding house, Charlie, if it's so bad?"
Miss Hurd inquired.
"I did," her cousin replied. "Of boarding houses within my sadly circumscribed means there is a very wide but strictly numerical choice. They are all exactly alike, you understand. I changed once, twice, twenty, forty times. I grew positively dizzy caroming from one inferior boarding house to another. You would have thought I was trying a peripatetic preventative for dyspepsia. Finally the mental strain of remembering where to go home at night became so irksome that I decided to leave bad enough alone and stay where I was—one eleven Mount Vernon Place—at the sign of the three aces. It's no worse, you see, than anywhere else—it's merely a matter of living down to my painfully limited income. But," he added thoughtfully, "I sincerely wish some philanthropist would put me to the trouble of moving again."
The two men laughed at Wilkinson's frank exposition, but his cousin frowned a little.
"I wish father would do something for you," she said. "There are so many things he could do if he chose."
"He was good enough to offer me a job as conductor on one of his street cars, the last time I mentioned the subject," the other responded cheerfully. "But I told him that the company's system of espionage was reputed to be so nearly perfect that I doubted whether I could make the position pay—that is, pay as it ought. And you know, Isabel," he added, "that with all due respect to my esteemed relation, he's exceedingly awkward to get anything out of. Can either of you gentlemen," he turned to the others, "suggest anything along these lines? I would be willing to pay a liberal commission."
"Well," said the painter, "if he wanted to buy a Caneletto cheap, I know where you could pick one up for him. It would rather damage my reputation to recommend him to buy it, but you could do it all right, Charlie. Guaranteed authentic by European experts—they're easily fixed. And if he didn't like the Caneletto, you could get him a very fair Franz Hals—by the same artist."
Miss Hurd, whose feelings had not been in the least lacerated by the reference to her parent's notable eccentricity of retentiveness, but who had been amused at the suggestion, interposed.
"I'm afraid it couldn't be done," she said. "Louis von Glauber passes on every picture that father buys."
"That settles that, then," Pelgram rejoined.
"Well, Benny, anything to suggest?" Wilkinson inquired.
"I don't know," said Cole, slowly. The germ of an idea had flashed on him. "I don't know," he repeated. The impecunious one regarded him attentively.
"My dear Benny, an unconvincing prevarication is of less practical value than—" he began, but he was interrupted by the appearance of a young lady who came through the doorway.
The three men rose quickly, and even the languid face of Stanwood Pelgram took on a look of a little sharper interest than he had so far shown. From the tea table Miss Hurd cordially greeted the newcomer.
"Tea, Helen?" she asked. "You're quite late. What have you been doing?"
"Thank you, Isabel," the other replied. "Quite strong, and with sugar and lemon—both." She sat down and commenced to pull off her long gloves. "I've been helping Cousin Henrietta Lyons select wall papers for her new apartment. I still live, but I've had a very trying time."
"Was it so difficult?" Bennington Cole asked politely. He did not know her very well.
"Well," responded Miss Maitland, "I can think of nothing more difficult than selecting wall papers—excepting, perhaps, Cousin Henrietta Lyons. As I picked out her papers, I think I'm entitled to abuse her," she explained with some feeling. "Wall papers in themselves are bad enough." She paused.
"Well, they ought to be," Wilkinson cheerfully put in, adroitly diverting the attack from Miss Lyons. "I understand that most of them are designed by individuals who have failed to succeed as sign painters on account of color-blindness, or by draughtsmen who have lost their positions because of the paramount influence of epilepsy on their work."
"I should estimate that they have about twenty-eight thousand samples at Heminway and Shipman's," the girl continued. "Cousin Henrietta possesses a fine old spirit of thoroughness which made it necessary for us to see them all. We sat on a red plush sofa while a truly affable young man kept flopping the sheets of samples over the back of an easel. That is, he was truly affable for an hour or two; after that he grew a little reticent. At first some of the samples interested me. There was one design of a row of cockatoos, each one standing on a wreath of lilacs, that was fascinating, and I liked one that looked like a flock of nectarines hiding in the interstices of a steam radiator. The young man made encouraging suggestions at first, but at the last, scarcely—although I was so nearly stupefied that I doubt whether I would have heard him even if he had said what he really thought." She took up her cup. "But the walk here did me a lot of good—I walked fast."
"Where your cousin made her mistake," Wilkinson observed, "was in going in for wall papers at all. She should have abandoned the idea of papering her walls, and retained our talented friend, Stanwood Pelgram, to paint them, instead. A splendid conception! How I should like to have attended the pirate view of Miss Lyons's flat, when the last coat of distemper had dried on the parlor ceiling and Stanwood had put the affectionate finishing touches on the decorative panel portrait of Lucretia Borgia in the oval above the kitchen stove! The whole thing would have been a magnificent and unusual symbol of the triumph of paint over paper—a new and vivid illustration of the practical value of true art."
"Oh, nonsense, Charlie!" said Pelgram, much annoyed at being made the rather vulnerable subject of Wilkinson's humor.
His tormentor