“By Jove! of course, we never thought of it!” said Ashton. “You’re growing quite pale from standing so long. You must have some punch. Do let me take you to the banquet hall; it’s jolly nice there—all small tables and souvenir menus in silver frames. I planned them, too, though Tiffany’s name is on them. There’s Cousin Lucy, and the Bagby girls are waving to you now.” (“Yes, we’re under way, hold a table,” he signalled.) “We can cook up the concert while we feed,” and offering his arm, upon which Brooke laid her hand gratefully, for she felt a sudden weariness, he led her through the maze of skirts and furniture as skilfully and rapidly as if he had been her partner in the cotillon, and seated her at one of the little tables amid a bevy of her friends, who were discussing the house, the hostess, the flowers, the menus, and the fallen fortunes of poor Julia Garth in a most impartial way, and at the top of their voices.
“Of course it’s awful to suddenly drop from having your gowns from Paris, a maid, a private turnout, and keeping open house—or rather houses—and all that, to a flat somewhere in Brooklyn, with a sick mother, and trying to work off your music for a living,” said one shrill voice; “but then it is an awful bore, too, for us to have her on our minds. This concert is only the beginning, I suppose.”
“Julia plays delightfully, and we all have more or less chamber music during the winter, and one of us might take her to Lenox or Newport this summer,” said another, in a reproving tone; “and then among us all there are plenty of children for her to teach.”
“If she plays and sings for us all winter, that is sufficient reason why we shall be sick of her next summer,” said the first voice. “You know how it was with Mrs. Darcey Binks and her Creole songs. We thought we could not get enough of her. She thought she was settled here for life, and biff! the Spanish mandolin players knocked her out the second season. As for lessons, if you take up some one half out of charity, and then go South in the middle of a term, they will always whine about it, and you feel mean; a professional can take care of herself and always gets even, but doesn’t let you know it.”
“I wish we could think of something newer than a concert, that would make a hit and a pot of money,” said Lucy Dean, not bragging of the fact that she had already asked Julia Garth to come and live with her, and been refused kindly but firmly. “What can you suggest, Brooke? you are always overflowing with ideas, even if some of them are too good for this world.”
Brooke, thus challenged, half rose in her chair so that she faced both tables, and said: “I do not believe in offering Julia what she would accept as work and you consider as charity; it is false pretence on both sides! We can easily make up a Christmas purse for her among ourselves, without giving her the pain of the advertising of a benefit concert, and all the talk of it. Then when she has a chance to know where she stands,—her father only died a month ago, poor child,—I will get my father or yours” (motioning to Lucy) “to give her real work for real pay, and with no charitable tag hanging to it. She has kept household accounts and sometimes been her father’s private secretary. I saw her last week, and what she wants and is able to do is real work and plenty of it to make her forget, not charity coddling to make her remember.”
“Mercy on me! don’t cut us up like cheese sandwiches, with your sarcasm!” ejaculated Lucy, “and clutch that chair so, as if you had claws. Your eyes remind me of a hawk that perches in a cage over in the park opposite my window, and glares all day long at the silly sparrows outside!”
Brooke laughed, and the dangerous flash in her eyes dying out again, she turned to her plate of salad and the general gossip of the day, but a red spot still glowed in the middle of each cheek. A few minutes later she might have been seen driving down the avenue in her mother’s brougham, trying to decipher, by the light of the electric street lamps, some printing in the silk-covered catalogue.
This is what she read: “Marte Lorenz, born at his uncle’s tulip farm near Haarlem, in 1872. Educated in England, where his father had been a merchant. Studied at the Amsterdam Art School, going afterward to Paris, where his countryman, Israels, befriended him. A hard student, but the picture ‘Eucharistia’ is his first important work, while European critics and his masters believe it is the beginning of a great career. At present he is living in seclusion in Normandy, following his art.”
Ashton, the useful, had patched up the biographies in the little book, helter-skelter, but Brooke did not know it, and tucking the catalogue carefully into her great muff, she leaned back and closed her eyes.