glanced toward his aunt, unconsciously looking to her for comfort on this trying day.
Mrs. Carew was truly embarrassed at the sight of her creditor, but she continued to play lightly among the hymns, and gave him up to the children. But Fairfax was too desperate to be set aside. If there was any comfort anywhere he was going to have it. He said to his aunt in a voice deepened by feeling —
"Aunt Caroline, I'm a little down on my luck."
The lady turned her doe-like eyes on her nephew. "My dear Tony…"
He clenched his vigorous hands to keep down his emotion.
"Yes. Cedersholm has turned his back on me, as far as I can see."
With a short laugh he threw off his intense mood, thoroughly ashamed of his weakness.
"Our branch of the family, Aunt Caroline, are unlucky all round, I reckon."
There was one thought uppermost in his aunt's mind. She had no money with which to pay her debt to him. When there weren't lamps to buy there were rugs and figures of biscuit Venuses bending over biscuit streams. She had confessed her vice; she "adored bric-à-brac." The jumble in her mind made her eyes more vague than ever.
"Will you go back South?" she wondered.
He started, spread out his empty hands. "Go back to mother like this? Auntie!"
As ineffectual as she had been on the night of his arrival, so now Mrs. Carew sat ineffectual before his crisis. She breathed, "My poor boy!" and her fingers strayed amongst the keys and found the melody of the song he loved so much.
The young traveller at her side was too much of a man, even in his state of despair, to have expected a woman to lift his burden. If she did, he did not think of the money she owed him. What he wanted was a soothing touch to be laid on his heart, and the song in which, not six weeks before, he had nearly loved his aunt, did what she did not.
The children had gone upstairs. Mrs. Carew sang through the first verse of the song. As far as she was concerned nothing could have been a greater relief. The sympathy she did not know how to give, the debt she had never discharged, the affection she had for Antony, and her own self-pity, Mrs. Carew threw into her voice, and it shook its tremulo through him.
He breathed devotedly: "Thank you, dear," and raised one of his aunt's hands to his lips.
Mr. Carew had let himself in with his latchkey, and was within a few feet of them as his wife finished her song.
CHAPTER XXI
Neither Antony nor Mrs. Carew had the presence of mind to stir. Mrs. Fairfax said of her brother-in-law that he was a "vain creature whose pomposity stood in place of dignity." Carew, at all events, came upon a scene which he had never supposed would confront his eyes. Before him in his own drawing-room, a whipper-snapper from the South was kissing his wife's hands. To Carew the South was the heart of sedition, bad morals, lackadaisical indolence. What the South could not do for him in arousing his distaste, the word "artist" completed. He said to his wife —
"Is this the way you pass your Sabbath afternoons, Mrs. Carew?"
And before she could murmur, "My dear Henry – " he turned on Fairfax.
"Can't you find anything better to do in New York, sir?" He could not finish.
Fairfax rose. "Don't say anything you will regret, sir. I kissed my aunt's hand as I would have kissed my mother's. Not that I need to make excuse."
Mr. Carew's idea of his own importance, of the importance of everything that belonged to him, was colossal, and it would have taken more than this spectacle, unpleasant as it was, to make him fancy his wife harboured a sentiment for her jackanapes of a nephew. If the tableau he had had time to observe on his way across the dining-room floor had aroused his jealousy, that sentiment was less strong that was his anger and his dislike. Young Fairfax had been a thorn in his side for several weeks.
"You are wise to make no excuses," he said coldly. "I could not understand your sentiments. I have my own ideas of how a young man should employ his time and carve out his existence. Your romantic ideas are as unsympathetic to me as was this exhibition."
Mrs. Carew, who had never been so terrified in her life, thought she should faint, but had presence of mind sufficient to realize that unconsciousness would be prejudicial to her, and by bending over the keys she kept her balance.
She murmured, "My dear, you are very hard on Antony."
Carew paid no attention to her. "Your career, sir, your manner of life, are no affair of mine. I am concerned in you as you fetch your point of view" (Carew was celebrated for his extempore speaking), "your customs and your morals into my house."
"Believe me," said Mrs. Fairfax's son, in a choked voice, "I shall take them out of it for ever."
Carew bowed. "You are at liberty to do so, Fairfax. You have not asked my advice nor my opinions. You have ingratiated yourself with my friends, to my regret and theirs."
Antony exclaimed violently, "Now, what do you mean by that, sir?"
"I am in no way obliged to explain myself to you, Fairfax."
"But you are!" fairly shouted the young man. "With whom have I ingratiated myself to your regret?"
"I speak of Cedersholm, the sculptor."
"Well, what does he say of me?" pursued the poor young man.
"It seems you have had the liberty of his workshop for months – "
"Yes," – Antony calmed his voice by great effort, – "I have, and I have slaved in it like a nigger – like a slave in the sugar-cane. What of that?"
The fact of the matter was that Cedersholm in the Century Club had spoken to Carew lightly of Fairfax, and slightingly. He had given the young sculptor scant praise, and had wounded and cut Carew's pride in a possession even so remote as an undesirable nephew by marriage. He could not remember what Cedersholm had really said, but it had been unfortunate.
"I don't know what Cedersholm has said to you," cried Antony Fairfax, "nor do I care. He has sapped my life's blood. He has taken the talent of me for three long months. He is keeping my drawings and my designs, and, by God – "
"Stop!" said Mr. Carew, sharply. "How dare you use such language in my house, before my wife?"
Antony laughed shortly. He fixed his ardent blue eyes on the older man, and as he did so the sense of his own youth came to him. He was twenty years this man's junior. Youth was his, if he was poor and unlucky. The desire to say to the banker, "If I should tell you what I thought of you as a husband and a father," he checked, and instead cried hotly —
"God's here, at all events, sir, and perhaps my way of calling on Him is as good as another."
He extended his hand. It did not tremble. "Good-bye, Aunt Caroline."
Hers, cold as ice, just touched his. "Henry," she gasped, "he's Arabella's son."
Again the scarlet Antony had seen, touched the banker's face. Fairfax limped out of the room. His clothes were so shabby (as he had said a few moments before, he had worked in them like a nigger), that, warm as it was, he wore his overcoat to cover his suit. The
