Samson heard him out with a face enigmatically set, and his voice was
soft, as he said simply at the end: "I'm obliged to you."
Farbish had hoped for more stress of feeling, but, as he walked home,
he told himself that the sphinx-like features had been a mask, and
that, when these two met, their coming together held potentially for a
clash. He was judge enough of character to know that Samson's morbid
pride would seal his lips as to the interview--until he met Horton.
In point of fact, Samson was at first only deeply wounded. That
through her kindness to him Adrienne was having to fight his battles
with a close friend he had never suspected. Then, slowly, a bitterness
began to rankle, quite distinct from the hurt to his sensitiveness. His
birthright of suspicion and tendency to foster hatreds had gradually
been falling asleep under the disarming kindness of these persons. Now,
they began to stir in him again vaguely, but forcibly, and to trouble
him.
Samson did not appear at the Lescott house for two weeks after that.
He had begun to think that, if his going there gave embarrassment to
the girl who had been kind to him, it were better to remain away.
"I don't belong here," he told himself, bitterly. "I reckon everybody
that knows me in New York, except the Lescotts, is laughing at me
behind my back."
He worked fiercely, and threw into his work such fire and energy that
it came out again converted into a boldness of stroke and an almost
savage vigor of drawing. The instructor nodded his head over the easel,
and passed on to the next student without having left the defacing mark
of his relentless crayon. To the next pupil, he said: "Watch the way that man South draws. He's not clever. He's elementally
sincere, and, if he goes on, the first thing you know he will be a
portrait painter. He won't merely draw eyes and lips and noses, but
character and virtues and vices showing out through them."
And Samson met every gaze with smoldering savagery, searching for some
one who might be laughing at him openly, or even covertly; instead of
behind his back. The long-suffering fighting lust in him craved
opportunity to break out and relieve the pressure on his soul. But no
one laughed.
One afternoon late in November, a hint of blizzards swept snarling
down the Atlantic seaboard from the polar floes, with wet flurries of
snow and rain. Off on the marshes where the Kenmore Club had its lodge,
the live decoys stretched their clipped wings, and raised their green
necks restively into the salt wind, and listened. With dawn, they had
heard, faint and far away, the first notes of that wild chorus with
which the skies would ring until the southerly migrations ended--the
horizon-distant honking of high-flying water fowl.