Copyright, 1910, by
D. APPLETON AND COMPANY
Copyright, 1909, 1910, by The Curtis Publishing Company
Published March, 1910
CONTENTS
| CHAPTER | PAGE | |
| I. | —A Taste for Candy | [ 1] |
| II. | —The Painter Gets a Model | [ 20] |
| III. | —A Lesson in Woman | [ 51] |
| IV. | —An Upset Canoe | [ 68] |
| V. | —An Attempt to Dazzle | [ 97] |
| VI. | —The Guile of Innocence | [ 127] |
| VII. | —Mr. Richmond Calls | [ 144] |
| VIII. | —An Infuriate Father | [ 161] |
| IX. | —Family Behind-the-Scenes | [ 175] |
| X. | —Beatrice in Chains | [ 192] |
| XI. | —Peter Visits the Prison | [ 209] |
| XII. | —Under Cover of Night | [ 225] |
| XIII. | —Peter’s Bad Quarter Hour | [ 246] |
| XIV. | —The Second Flight | [ 274] |
| XV. | —Wade’s Lost Fortune | [ 280] |
| XVI. | —Peter Calls on Roger | [ 294] |
| XVII. | —Richmond Tries to Make Peace | [ 315] |
| XVIII. | —Mrs. Richmond Rebels | [ 334] |
| XIX. | —Roger Sore Beset | [ 351] |
| XX. | —Beatrice Loses | [ 367] |
| XXI. | —Roger Wins | [ 388] |
WHITE MAGIC
I
A TASTE FOR CANDY
When Roger Wade’s Aunt Bella died she left him forty thousand dollars in five-per-cent railway bonds and six hundred and ninety acres of wilderness extending from the outskirts of Deer Spring village to the eastern shore of Lake Wauchong, in northern New Jersey. She had contrived to quarrel and break with all her other relations. This was no easy undertaking, and in its success was a signal tribute to her force of character; for, each and everyone of those relatives knew of her possessions and longed and hoped for them and stood ready to endure, even to welcome, any outrage she might see fit to perpetrate. Roger she had not seen in fourteen years—not since he, a youth of eighteen, a painter born, long and lean, with a shock of black-brown hair and dreamy, gray-brown eyes, left his native Deer Spring to study in Paris. He and she had not communicated, either directly or indirectly—a fortunate circumstance for him, as several of Arabella Wade’s bitterest quarrels had begun and had progressed to the irreparable breach altogether by mail. Besides not knowing him she had but one other reason for choosing him as her heir: a year before her death and a week before her last will she happened to read on the cable page of a New York newspaper an enthusiastic note about his pictures and his success in Paris. So the bonds and the land went to him instead of to a missionary society.
Much American newspaper puffery of Americans abroad is sheer invention, designed to give us at home the pleasing notion that we are capturing the earth. But this notice of Roger Wade’s career had truth in it. He was doing extraordinarily well for so young a man. His sense of color and form was lifted toward genius by imagination and originality. His ability had no handicap of cheap and petty—and glaring—eccentricity, such as so often enters into the composition of an original and boldly imaginative temperament to mar its achievement and to retard the recognition of its merit. Thus he speedily made a notable place for himself. He could count on disposing of enough pictures to bring him in fifteen to twenty thousand francs a year; and that sum was about as much as he, simple of tastes, single-hearted in devotion to his work and indifferent to pose and pretense, could find time and opportunity to spend. He knew that in a few years far more money than he needed would be forced upon him—a prospect which he had the good sense to view with distrust when he thought of it at all. About the only thing that had stood in his way was his personal appearance. As one of his friends—Berthier, whose panels will be admired so long as the pale, mysterious glories of their elusive colors persist—said in a confidential moment: “Roger, you look so much like a man of genius that it’s hard to believe you are the real thing.”
Big is the word most nearly expressing that unusual appearance of his. He was tall and broad and powerful. His features were large, bold, handsome. The dark coloring of skin and hair and eyes added to the impression of bigness. It was in part a matter of real size, but only in part. Not the most casual glance could have reported a judgment of mere bulk. He seemed big because his countenance, his whole body, seemed an effort of Nature adequately to express a big nature. Herbert Spencer uttered about the most superb compliment one human being ever paid another when he said of George Eliot that she suggested “a large intelligence moving freely.” There was in Roger Wade this quality of the great bird high in the blue ether above the grime and littleness of conventional life. His looks had caused him more than a little trouble—of which he was not in the least aware. For a large part of his charm lay in his childlike unconsciousness of himself—a trait less rare in painters and sculptors than in any other class of men of genius, probably because their work compels them to concentrate constantly upon persons and things external and in no way related to their own ego. Had Roger been physically vain, beyond doubt his good looks would have ruined him. The envy of men and the infatuation of women would have made escape impossible. As it was, he did his work, ignored his enemies, and neither enslaved nor was enslaved by such women as drifted into his life—and out again. It is fortunate for men—especially for men who are striving for careers—that women are bred to feebleness of purpose and much prefer being loved to loving, being admired to admiring.
His long stay abroad and his success there had touched his Americanism only to idealize it. The dream of his life continued to be building a career at home. He was too able to be given to the fatuities of optimism. He had no delusions on the subject of the difficulties that would confront and assail him. He had observed that those Americans who had the money to buy pictures usually lacked the breadth to appreciate their own country, considered it “crude and commercial,” whatever that might mean, and preferred foreign painters and foreign subjects. But, like many another American artist of ability, he longed to have a personal share in bringing about the change toward national pride and confidence that must come sooner or later. So, when his aunt left him a competence, he felt free to engage in the hazardous American adventure. Two months after he inherited his little fortune he landed in New York with his Paris career a closed incident; a few days later he was installed in the old farmhouse on the edge of his wilderness estate and within a mile of the post office and railway station at Deer Spring. On a hill near the Lake Wauchong end of his estate—a hill that seemed a knoll in comparison with the steeps encompassing it on all sides—he got the village carpenter hastily to build for him a house of one large and lofty room, admitting light freely by way of big windows in the walls and an enormous skylight in the roof. Such small impression as his return made was wholly confined to his native Deer Spring. There the gossip went that, having failed to make art pay, he had come back home to “laze round” and live off his aunt’s money. As he had the doing sort of man’s aversion to discussing his plans, such of the villagers as succeeded in drawing him into lengthier parley than polite exchange of greetings heard nothing that contradicted the gossip.