The Lords of High Decision

by Meredith Nicholson

The larger prospect faded; but Wingfield called Mrs. Blair by telephone and the Lady of Difficult Occasions rose as he knew she would. The editor of the Hemisphere was a celebrity, Jean was her own protégée; there was every reason why Mrs. Blair should bring them together at her own board, and Wingfield was to be of the party—he did not have to suggest it. Whether Wayne should be included was a question Wingfield left to Mrs. Blair and she deemed it best that Wayne and Jean should not meet. For while Wayne was wrestling with his spirit in the hills, Mrs. Blair and Jean had seen much of each other and Jean had told her friend the whole story of her acquaintance with Wayne, and her belief that she was still bound to Joe. Here was a complication that gave even Fanny Blair pause!

She hurried Jean to a shop to find a ready-made gown for the occasion and otherwise exercised the right of guardianship. As Fanny Blair’s last girl fiddler had eloped with a cornetist who already had a wife or two, her faith in budding genius needed this restoration.

“But Lord bless you, I don’t know Mrs. Blair,” cried the editor when Wingfield told him that they were to meet the artist at the Blair house.

“That’s nothing. You are ignorant by so much, that’s all, and Mrs. John McCandless Blair is a liberal education—a post-graduate course, in fact. It would be impossible for Miss Morley to negotiate with you without her. And I myself have taken the deepest interest in the girl from the beginning. The prettiest girl in Pennsylvania—and I am not ignorant of the processions of beauty you can see in Philadelphia on Saturdays at high noon, if you have an excuse for being in Chestnut Street as the divinities seek lobster and ice cream at Vertini’s.”

Mrs. Blair wept—it was her way—when Jean’s drawings were displayed in her library; those sketches did have heart in them! The editor of the Hemisphere was less emotional, but his praise of Jean’s work was ample. He explained the character and scope of the text to be illustrated. Jean would have to visit the South and West to find the types needed, and it would be necessary to begin at once. After dinner the editor and Jean discussed details, with proof sheets of the articles before them. They were bound to make an impression; they were the work of specialists, and comprised a careful economic and social study of child labour and were to be embodied in a book following their use in the periodical; the commission was important to the artist and all concerned. The editor had prepared a schedule of the drawings he thought most desirable, with a memorandum of the times at which they must be delivered. The amount named for the work was generous; Wingfield, graceful liar that he could be, had helped here, and after Jean had taken counsel of Mrs. Blair in a corner, a contract was signed—Jean’s hand a little wobbly for one who could draw so well.

Mrs. Blair’s instructions that no one should be admitted that evening were conclusive enough as against the world in general; but her door was never shut in her brother’s face. Wayne, having missed Walsh, had dined alone at the Club and afterward sought Wingfield vainly by telephone. He was restless and unhappy and set out for his sister’s merely to have something to do. That he and Jean should be in the same town and not see each other struck him as the bitterest irony. He missed the peace of the mountains and the daily discipline of his wood-chopping.

It was in this humour that he came upon the animated scene at his sister’s that had Jean for its central figure—a new Jean, with the happiness of renewed youth bright in her countenance. She had seen him before he made her out from the doorway, and she prepared herself for the meeting while he was making the editor’s acquaintance. She had wondered all these long days since she had watched him from the window of the boarding-house parlour how it would be if they ever met again; but she had not expected anything like this. The most her imagination had conjured had been a chance meeting in the street.

Wayne was taken into the great secret by Mrs. Blair and ran his eyes over the drawings before he spoke to Jean.

“It’s splendid, perfectly splendid!” he cried, but Mrs. Blair got him away for the time being. Her father’s business affairs had given her great concern and she seized the moment to attack Wayne in regard to them. But Wayne was not to be disposed of so easily; his eyes followed Jean, and when she laughed at some of Wingfield’s banter he stopped abruptly in his answer to one of Mrs. Blair’s questions and the look in his eyes told the story, and would have told it to a less observing woman than Fanny Blair. She sighed as he rose and moved across the room to where Jean sat turning in her hands her copy of the editor’s contract. It would hurt nothing this once—so Mrs. Blair suffered him to talk to her.

“I’ve been away,” he began, “and a great deal seems to be happening; here you are at the point of being famous. I always felt that it would come—that you would make good, and you have rung the bell at the first shot.”