第45章 PART SECOND(11)

Beaton went home feeling sure there would not.He tried to read when he got to his room;but Alma's looks,tones,gestures,whirred through and through the woof of the story like shuttles;he could not keep them out,and he fell asleep at last,not because he forgot them,but because he forgave them.He was able to say to himself that he had been justly cut off from kindness which he knew how to value in losing it.He did not expect ever to right himself in Alma's esteem,but he hoped some day to let her know that he had understood.It seemed to him that it would be a good thing if she should find it out after his death.He imagined her being touched by it under those circumstances.

VI.

In the morning it seemed to Beaton that he had done himself injustice.

When he uncovered his Judas and looked at it,he could not believe that the man who was capable of such work deserved the punishment Miss Leighton had inflicted upon him.He still forgave her,but in the presence of a thing like that he could not help respecting himself;he believed that if she could see it she would be sorry that she had cut herself off from his acquaintance.He carried this strain of conviction all through his syndicate letter,which he now took out of his desk and finished,with an increasing security of his opinions and a mounting severity in his judgments.He retaliated upon the general condition of art among us the pangs of wounded vanity,which Alma had made him feel,and he folded up his manuscript and put it in his pocket,almost healed of his humiliation.He had been able to escape from its sting so entirely while he was writing that the notion of making his life more and more literary commended itself to him.As it was now evident that the future was to be one of renunciation,of self-forgetting,an oblivion tinged with bitterness,he formlessly reasoned in favor of reconsidering his resolution against Fulkerson's offer.One must call it reasoning,but it was rather that swift internal dramatization which constantly goes on in persons of excitable sensibilities,and which now seemed to sweep Beaton physically along toward the 'Every Other Week'office,and carried his mind with lightning celerity on to a time when he should have given that journal such quality and authority in matters of art as had never been enjoyed by any in America before.With the prosperity which he made attend his work he changed the character of the enterprise,and with Fulkerson's enthusiastic support he gave the public an art journal of as high grade as 'Les Lettres et les Arts',and very much that sort of thing.All this involved now the unavailing regret of Alma Leighton,and now his reconciliation with her they were married in Grace Church,because Beaton had once seen a marriage there,and had intended to paint a picture of it some time.

Nothing in these fervid fantasies prevented his responding with due dryness to Fulkerson's cheery "Hello,old man!"when he found himself in the building fitted up for the 'Every Other Week'office.Fulkerson's room was back of the smaller one occupied by the bookkeeper;they had been respectively the reception-room and dining-room of the little place in its dwelling-house days,and they had been simply and tastefully treated in their transformation into business purposes.The narrow old trim of the doors and windows had been kept,and the quaintly ugly marble mantels.The architect had said,Better let them stay they expressed epoch,if not character.

"Well,have you come round to go to work?Just hang up your coat on the floor anywhere,"Fulkerson went on.

"I've come to bring you that letter,"said Beaton,all the more haughtily because he found that Fulkerson was not alone when he welcomed him in these free and easy terms.There was a quiet-looking man,rather stout,and a little above the middle height,with a full,close-cropped iron-gray beard,seated beyond the table where Fulkerson tilted himself back,with his knees set against it;and leaning against the mantel there was a young man with a singularly gentle face,in which the look of goodness qualified and transfigured a certain simplicity.His large blue eyes were somewhat prominent;and his rather narrow face was drawn forward in a nose a little too long perhaps,if it had not been for the full chin deeply cut below the lip,and jutting firmly forward.

"Introduce you to Mr.March,our editor,Mr.Beaton,"Fulkerson said,rolling his head in the direction of the elder man;and then nodding it toward the younger,he said,"Mr.Dryfoos,Mr.Beaton."Beaton shook hands with March,and then with Mr.Dryfoos,and Fulkerson went on,gayly:"We were just talking of you,Beaton--well,you know the old saying.Mr.March,as I told you,is our editor,and Mr.Dryfoos has charge of the publishing department--he's the counting-room incarnate,the source of power,the fountain of corruption,the element that prevents journalism being the high and holy thing that it would be if there were no money in it."Mr.Dryfoos turned his large,mild eyes upon Beaton,and laughed with the uneasy concession which people make to a character when they do not quite approve of the character's language.

"What Mr.March and I are trying to do is to carry on this thing so that there won't be any money in it--or very little;and we're planning to give the public a better article for the price than it's ever had before.

Now here's a dummy we've had made up for 'Every Other Week',and as we've decided to adopt it,we would naturally like your opinion of it,so's to know what opinion to have of you."He reached forward and pushed toward Beaton a volume a little above the size of the ordinary duodecimo book;its ivory-white pebbled paper cover was prettily illustrated with a water -colored design irregularly washed over the greater part of its surface: