Miss Verney, when she presently appeared, in the wake of the impersonal and exclamatory young married woman who served as a background to her vivid outline, seemed competent to impart at short notice any information required of her. She had never struck Mrs. Peyton as more alert and efficient. A melting grace of line and colour tempered her edges with the charming haze of youth; but it occurred to her critic that she might emerge from this morning mist as a dry and metallic old woman.
If Miss Verney suspected a personal application in Dick's hospitality, it did not call forth in her the usual tokens of self-consciousness. Her manner may have been a shade more vivid than usual, but she preserved all her bright composure of glance and speech, so that one guessed, under the rapid dispersal of words, an undisturbed steadiness of perception. She was lavishly but not indiscriminately interested in the evidences of her host's industry, and as the other guests a**embled, straying with vague ejaculations through the labyrinth of scale drawings and blue prints, Mrs. Peyton noted that Miss Verney alone knew what these symbols stood for.
To his visitors' requests to be shown his plans for the competition, Peyton had opposed a laughing refusal, enforced by the presence of two fellow-architects, young men with lingering traces of the Beaux Arts in their costume and vocabulary, who stood about in Gavarni attitudes and dazzled the ladies by allusions to fenestration and entasis. The party had already drifted back to the tea-table when a hesitating knock announced Darrow's approach. He entered with his usual air of having blundered in by mistake, embarra**ed by his hat and great-coat, and thrown into deeper confusion by the necessity of being introduced to the ladies grouped about the urn. To the men he threw a gruff nod of fellowship, and Dick having relieved him of his encumbrances, he retreated behind the shelter of Mrs. Peyton's welcome. The latter judiciously gave him time to recover, and when she turned to him he was engaged in a surreptitious inspection of Miss Verney, whose dusky slenderness, relieved against the bare walls of the office, made her look like a young St. John of Donatello's. The girl returned his look with one of her clear glances, and the group having presently broken up again, Mrs. Peyton saw that she had drifted to Darrow's side. The visitors at length wandered back to the work-room to see a portfolio of Dick's water-colours; but Mrs. Peyton remained seated behind the urn, listening to the interchange of talk through the open door while she tried to coordinate her impressions.
She saw that Miss Verney was sincerely interested in Dick's work: it was the nature of her interest that remained in doubt. As if to solve this doubt, the girl presently reappeared alone on the threshold, and discovering Mrs. Peyton, advanced toward her with a smile.
“Are you tired of hearing us praise Mr. Peyton's things?” she asked, dropping into a low chair beside her hostess. “Unintelligent admiration must be a bore to people who know, and Mr. Darrow tells me you are almost as learned as your son.”
Mrs. Peyton returned the smile, but evaded the question. “I should be sorry to think your admiration unintelligent,” she said. “I like to feel that my boy's work is appreciated by people who understand it.”
“Oh, I have the usual smattering,” said Miss Verney carelessly. “I think I know why I admire his work; but then I am sure I see more in it when some one like Mr. Darrow tells me how remarkable it is.”
“Does Mr. Darrow say that?” the mother exclaimed, losing sight of her object in the rush of maternal pleasure.
“He has said nothing else: it seems to be the only subject which loosens his tongue. I believe he is more anxious to have your son win the competition than to win it himself.”
“He is a very good friend,” Mrs. Peyton a**ented. She was struck by the way in which the girl led the topic back to the special application of it which interested her. She had none of the artifices of prudery.
“He feels sure that Mr. Peyton will win,” Miss Verney continued. “It was very interesting to hear his reasons. He is an extraordinarily interesting man. It must be a tremendous incentive to have such a friend.”
Mrs. Peyton hesitated. “The friendship is delightful; but I don't know that my son needs the incentive. He is almost too ambitious.”
Miss Verney looked up brightly. “Can one be?” she said. “Ambition is so splendid! It must be so glorious to be a man and go crashing through obstacles, straight up to the thing one is after. I'm afraid I don't care for people who are superior to success. I like marriage by capture!” She rose with her wandering laugh, and stood flushed and sparkling above Mrs. Peyton, who continued to gaze at her gravely.
“What do you call success?” the latter asked. “It means so many different things.”
“Oh, yes, I know—the inward approval, and all that. Well, I'm afraid I like the other kind: the drums and wreaths and acclamations. If I were Mr. Peyton, for instance, I'd much rather win the competition than—than be as disinterested as Mr. Darrow.”
Mrs. Peyton smiled. “I hope you won't tell him so,” she said half seriously. “He is over-stimulated already; and he is so easily influenced by any one who—whose opinion he values.”
She stopped abruptly, hearing herself, with a strange inward shock, re-echo the words which another man's mother had once spoken to her. Miss Verney did not seem to take the allusion to herself, for she continued to fix on Mrs. Peyton a gaze of impartial sympathy.
“But we can't help being interested!” she declared.
“It's very kind of you; but I wish you would all help him to feel that his competition is after all of very little account compared with other things—his health and his peace of mind, for instance. He is looking horribly used up.”
The girl glanced over her shoulder at Dick, who was just reentering the room at Darrow's side.
“Oh, do you think so?” she said. “I should have thought it was his friend who was used up.”
Mrs. Peyton followed the glance with surprise. She had been too preoccupied to notice Darrow, whose crudely modelled face was always of a dull pallour, to which his slow-moving grey eye lent no relief except in rare moments of expansion. Now the face had the fallen lines of a d**h-mask, in which only the smile he turned on Dick remained alive; and the sight smote her with compunction. Poor Darrow! He did look horribly f*gged out: as if he needed care and petting and good food. No one knew exactly how he lived. His rooms, according to Dick's report, were fireless and ill kept, but he stuck to them because his landlady, whom he had fished out of some financial plight, had difficulty in obtaining other lodgers. He belonged to no clubs, and wandered out alone for his meals, mysteriously refusing the hospitality which his friends pressed on him. It was plain that he was very poor, and Dick conjectured that he sent what he earned to an aunt in his native village; but he was so silent about such matters that, outside of his profession, he seemed to have no personal life.
Miss Verney's companion having presently advised her of the lapse of time, there ensued a general leave-taking, at the close of which Dick accompanied the ladies to their carriage. Darrow was meanwhile blundering into his greatcoat, a process which always threw him into a state of perspiring embarra**ment; but Mrs. Peyton, surprising him in the act, suggested that he should defer it and give her a few moments' talk.
“Let me make you some fresh tea,” she said, as Darrow blushingly shed the garment, “and when Dick comes back we'll all walk home together. I've not had a chance to say two words to you this winter.”
Darrow sank into a chair at her side and nervously contemplated his boots. “I've been tremendously hard at work,” he said.
“I know: too hard at work, I'm afraid. Dick tells me you have been wearing yourself out over your competition plans.”
“Oh, well, I shall have time to rest now,” he returned. “I put the last stroke to them this morning.”
Mrs. Peyton gave him a quick look. “You're ahead of Dick, then.”
“In point of time only,” he said smiling.
“That is in itself an advantage,” she answered with a tinge of asperity. In spite of an honest effort for impartiality she could not, at the moment, help regarding Darrow as an obstacle in her son's path.
“I wish the competition were over!” she exclaimed, conscious that her voice had betrayed her. “I hate to see you both looking so f*gged.”
Darrow smiled again, perhaps at her studied inclusion of himself.
“Oh, Dick's all right,” he said. “He'll pull himself together in no time.”
He spoke with an emphasis which might have struck her, if her sympathies had not again been deflected by the allusion to her son.
“Not if he doesn't win,” she exclaimed.
Darrow took the tea she had poured for him, knocking the spoon to the floor in his eagerness to perform the feat gracefully. In bending to recover the spoon he struck the tea-table with his shoulder, and set the cups dancing. Having regained a measure of composure, he took a swallow of the hot tea and set it down with a gasp, precariously near the edge of the tea-table. Mrs. Peyton rescued the cup, and Darrow, apparently forgetting its existence, rose and began to pace the room. It was always hard for him to sit still when he talked.
“You mean he's so tremendously set on it?” he broke out.
Mrs. Peyton hesitated. “You know him almost as well as I do,” she said. “He's capable of anything where there is a possibility of success; but I'm always afraid of the reaction.”
“Oh, well, Dick's a man,” said Darrow bluntly. “Besides, he's going to succeed.”
“I wish he didn't feel so sure of it. You mustn't think I'm afraid for him. He's a man, and I want him to take his chances with other men; but I wish he didn't care so much about what people think.”
“People?”
“Miss Verney, then: I suppose you know.”
Darrow paused in front of her. “Yes: he's talked a good deal about her. You think she wants him to succeed?”
“At any price!”
He drew his brows together. “What do you call any price?”
“Well—herself, in this case, I believe.”
Darrow bent a puzzled stare on her. “You mean she attached that amount of importance to this competition?”
“She seems to regard it as symbolical: that's what I gather. And I'm afraid she's given him the same impression.”
Darrow's sunken face was suffused by his rare smile. “Oh, well, he'll pull it off then!” he said.
Mrs. Peyton rose with a distracted sigh. “I half hope he won't, for such a motive,” she exclaimed.
“The motive won't show in his work,” said Darrow. He added, after a pause probably devoted to the search for the right word: “He seems to think a great deal of her.”
Mrs. Peyton fixed him thoughtfully. “I wish I knew what you think of her.”
“Why, I never saw her before.”
“No; but you talked with her to-day. You've formed an opinion: I think you came here on purpose.”
He chuckled joyously at her discernment: she had always seemed to him gifted with supernatural insight. “Well, I did want to see her,” he owned.
“And what do you think?”
He took a few vague steps and then halted before Mrs. Peyton. “I think,” he said, smiling, “that she likes to be helped first, and to have everything on her plate at once.”