第151章 PART FIFTH(26)

Beaton did not go to the office during the week that followed upon this conclusion;but they were used there to these sudden absences of his,and,as his work for the time was in train,nothing was made of his staying away,except the sarcastic comment which the thought of him was apt to excite in the literary department.He no longer came so much to the Leightons,and Fulkerson was in no state of mind to miss any one there except Miss Woodburn,whom he never missed.Beaton was left,then,unmolestedly awaiting the course of destiny,when he read in the morning paper,over his coffee at Maroni's,the deeply scare-headed story of Conrad's death and the clubbing of Lindau.He probably cared as little for either of them as any man that ever saw them;but he felt a shock,if not a pang,at Conrad's fate,so out of keeping with his life and character.He did not know what to do;and he did nothing.He was not asked to the funeral,but he had not expected that,and,when Fulkerson brought him notice that Lindau was also to be buried from Dryfoos's house,it was without his usual sullen vindictiveness that he kept away.

In his sort,and as much as a man could who was necessarily so much taken up with himself,he was sorry for Conrad's father;Beaton had a peculiar tenderness for his own father,and he imagined how his father would feel if it were he who had been killed in Conrad's place,as it might very well have been;he sympathized with himself in view of the possibility;and for once they were mistaken who thought him indifferent and merely brutal in his failure to appear at Lindau's obsequies.

He would really have gone if he had known how to reconcile his presence in that house with the terms of his effective banishment from it;and he was rather forgivingly finding himself wronged in the situation,when Dryfoos knocked at the studio door the morning after Lindau's funeral.

Beaton roared out,"Come in!"as he always did to a knock if he had not a model;if he had a model he set the door slightly ajar,and with his palette on his thumb frowned at his visitor and told him he could not come in.Dryfoos fumbled about for the knob in the dim passageway outside,and Beaton,who had experience of people's difficulties with it,suddenly jerked the door open.The two men stood confronted,and at first sight of each other their quiescent dislike revived.Each would have been willing to turn away from the other,but that was not possible.

Beaton snorted some sort of inarticulate salutation,which Dryfoos did not try to return;he asked if he could see him alone for a minute or two,and Beaton bade him come in,and swept some paint-blotched rags from the chair which he told him to take.He noticed,as the old man sank tremulously into it,that his movement was like that of his own father,and also that he looked very much like Christine.Dryfoos folded his hands tremulously on the top of his horn-handled stick,and he was rather finely haggard,with the dark hollows round his black eyes and the fall of the muscles on either side of his chin.He had forgotten to take his soft,wide-brimmed hat off;and Beaton felt a desire to sketch him just as he sat.

Dryfoos suddenly pulled himself together from the dreary absence into which he fell at first."Young man,"he began,"maybe I've come here on a fool's errand,"and Beaton rather fancied that beginning.

But it embarrassed him a little,and he said,with a shy glance aside,"Idon't know what you mean."

"I reckon,"Dryfoos answered,quietly,"you got your notion,though.

I set that woman on to speak to you the way she done.But if there was anything wrong in the way she spoke,or if you didn't feel like she had any right to question you up as if we suspected you of anything mean,Iwant you to say so."

Beaton said nothing,and the old man went on.

"I ain't very well up in the ways of the world,and I don't pretend to be.All I want is to be fair and square with everybody.I've made mistakes,though,in my time--"He stopped,and Beaton was not proof against the misery of his face,which was twisted as with some strong physical ache."I don't know as I want to make any more,if I can help it.I don't know but what you had a right to keep on comin',and if you had I want you to say so.Don't you be afraid but what I'll take it in the right way.I don't want to take advantage of anybody,and I don't ask you to say any more than that."Beaton did not find the humiliation of the man who had humiliated him so sweet as he could have fancied it might be.He knew how it had come about,and that it was an effect of love for his child;it did not matter by what ungracious means she had brought him to know that he loved her better than his own will,that his wish for her happiness was stronger than his pride;it was enough that he was now somehow brought to give proof of it.Beaton could not be aware of all that dark coil of circumstance through which Dryfoos's present action evolved itself;the worst of this was buried in the secret of the old man's heart,a worm of perpetual torment.What was apparent to another was that he was broken by the sorrow that had fallen upon him,and it was this that Beaton respected and pitied in his impulse to be frank and kind in his answer.

"No,I had no right to keep coming to your house in the way I did,unless--unless I meant more than I ever said."Beaton added:"I don't say that what you did was usual--in this country,at any rate;but Ican't say you were wrong.Since you speak to me about the matter,it's only fair to myself to say that a good deal goes on in life without much thinking of consequences.That's the way I excuse myself.""And you say Mrs.Mandel done right?"asked Dryfoos,as if he wished simply to be assured of a point of etiquette.