"You've got to excuse me,"he said,getting back to his characteristic grimness with surprising suddenness,when once he began to recover himself."I've been through a good deal lately;and sometimes it ketches me round the heart like a pain."In his life of selfish immunity from grief,Beaton could not understand this experience that poignant sorrow brings;he said to himself that Dryfoos was going the way of angina pectoris;as he began shuffling off the tiger-skin he said:"Had you better get up?Wouldn't you like me to call a doctor?""I'm all right,young man."Dryfoos took his hat and stick from him,but he made for the door so uncertainly that Beaton put his hand under his elbow and helped him out,and down the stairs,to his coupe.
"Hadn't you better let me drive home with you?"he asked.
"What?"said Dryfoos,suspiciously.
Beaton repeated his question.
"I guess I'm able to go home alone,"said Dryfoos,in a surly tone,and he put his head out of the window and called up "Home!"to the driver,who immediately started off and left Beaton standing beside the curbstone.
XIV.
Beaton wasted the rest of the day in the emotions and speculations which Dryfoos's call inspired.It was not that they continuously occupied him,but they broke up the train of other thoughts,and spoiled him for work;a very little spoiled Beaton for work;he required just the right mood for work.He comprehended perfectly well that Dryfoos had made him that extraordinary embassy because he wished him to renew his visits,and he easily imagined the means that had brought him to this pass.From what he knew of that girl he did not envy her father his meeting with her when he must tell her his mission had failed.But had it failed?When Beaton came to ask himself this question,he could only perceive that he and Dryfoos had failed to find any ground of sympathy,and had parted in the same dislike with which they had met.But as to any other failure,it was certainly tacit,and it still rested with him to give it effect.
He could go back to Dryfoos's house,as freely as before,and it was clear that he was very much desired to come back.But if he went back it was also clear that he must go back with intentions more explicit than before,and now he had to ask himself just how much or how little he had meant by going there.His liking for Christine had certainly not increased,but the charm,on the other hand,of holding a leopardess in leash had not yet palled upon him.In his life of inconstancies,it was a pleasure to rest upon something fixed,and the man who had no control over himself liked logically enough to feel his control of some one else.
The fact cannot other wise be put in terms,and the attraction which Christine Dryfoos had for him,apart from this,escapes from all terms,as anything purely and merely passional must.He had seen from the first that she was a cat,and so far as youth forecasts such things,he felt that she would be a shrew.But he had a perverse sense of her beauty,and he knew a sort of life in which her power to molest him with her temper could be reduced to the smallest proportions,and even broken to pieces.Then the consciousness of her money entered.It was evident that the old man had mentioned his millions in the way of a hint to him of what he might reasonably expect if he would turn and be his son-in-law.Beaton did not put it to himself in those words;and in fact his cogitations were not in words at all.It was the play of cognitions,of sensations,formlessly tending to the effect which can only be very clumsily interpreted in language.But when he got to this point in them,Beaton rose to magnanimity and in a flash of dramatic reverie disposed of a part of Dryfoos's riches in placing his father and mother,and his brothers and sisters,beyond all pecuniary anxiety forever.He had no shame,no scruple in this,for he had been a pensioner upon others ever since a Syracusan amateur of the arts had detected his talent and given him the money to go and study abroad.Beaton had always considered the money a loan,to be repaid out of his future success;but he now never dreamt of repaying it;as the man was rich,he had even a contempt for the notion of repaying him;but this did not prevent him from feeling very keenly the hardships he put his father to in borrowing money from him,though he never repaid his father,either.In this reverie he saw himself sacrificed in marriage with Christine Dryfoos,in a kind of admiring self-pity,and he was melted by the spectacle of the dignity with which he suffered all the lifelong trials ensuing from his unselfishness.The fancy that Alma Leighton came bitterly to regret him,contributed to soothe and flatter him,and he was not sure that Margaret.
Vance did not suffer a like loss in him.
There had been times when,as he believed,that beautiful girl's high thoughts had tended toward him;there had been looks,gestures,even words,that had this effect to him,or that seemed to have had it;and Beaton saw that he might easily construe Mrs.Horn's confidential appeal to him to get Margaret interested in art again as something by no means necessarily offensive,even though it had been made to him as to a master of illusion.If Mrs.Horn had to choose between him and the life of good works to which her niece was visibly abandoning herself,Beaton could not doubt which she would choose;the only question was how real the danger of a life of good works was.
