XV
Earlyin November, Dampierre burst one morning into Fontenelle’s studio. They worked in the same house in the Rue Notre Dame des Champs, René on the top floor, François two flights lower down.
He looked up as his friend came in.
“Yes. I know. She’s coming,” he said, without ceasing to paint. “This background’s the very devil. It’s all wrong in tone.”
“How did you know?”
François nodded towards a side table. “There’s her note.”
Dampierre found it amongst a litter of brushes and palettes.
“Yes,” he said glancing over it, “she says the same thing to me. She feels she wants a change, so she’s shut up the house for a time, and she’ll stay in Paris possibly on her way elsewhere. That’s all she tells me.”
“The old lady must have left her some money,” observed François, still apparently engrossed with his background. “Looks asthough it’s rather more than enough to keep body and soul together, doesn’t it?”
“Oh, do shut up, and leave that damned picture alone, and be sympathetic!” exclaimed René, irritably.
His eyes were bright, and he laughed rather excitedly.
“I know you’re sick she’s coming. But I can’t stand your wisdom any longer. I’m glad, do you hear? Glad. Glad.Glad!And there’s an end of it.”
“Pardon me, but that’s just what it’s not,” returned Fontenelle.
“Very well then, it isn’t. And I don’t care. I only know I want to see her again,—horribly. And she’ll be here to-night, thank goodness, and I’m going to meet her at the station.”
François shrugged his shoulders, and continued to paint.
“Where’s her hotel? Oh, the Impérial. She’s got that out of Baedeker.” He laughed.
“Come now, François. Own that sweet Anne Page in Paris will be rather nice!”
“You’d better ask her to tea here to-morrow. Your place is even more of a pig-sty than mine. We shall see Dacier and Thouret at theLilasthis evening. We can ask them then.”
“All right. But I’m not going to have you about all the time mind!”
“You won’t,” returned his friend briefly. “I can’t stand fools.”
René’s face darkened for a moment, but the retort died on his lips.
“Look here, old man,” he urged. “Don’t be a beast. I’m serious.”
“Tant pis,” was François’ implacable reply.
But when next day Anne was actually in his studio, and he heard her voice, and saw her smile, and listened to the laughing clamour around her, as she sat in the only armchair that was not broken, and drank execrable tea out of a cup which did not match its saucer, it was difficult even for Fontenelle to be anything but gay and pleased.
With an odd mixture of sensations, he noticed how fair her skin looked against her black dress. The fur she wore on her shoulders was also exceedingly becoming. François, who as a painter of many women’s portraits knew something of the cost of feminine apparel, looked at it with a certain surprise. Either the old lady had been fairly generous, or Anne in her one day’s shopping, had been disgracefully extravagant. In either case the result was admirable. He emerged from his reflections to find a furious discussion raging as to which restaurant she should be taken to dine.
“Café de la Régence,” said François authoritatively, “and afterwards we’ll drive back to theLilas.”
It was several days before Anne found herself alone with René.
He came to her hotel one morning, and carried her off to lunch with him at a little restaurant in the neighbourhood of his studio.
“You have such a devoted body-guard, that I never get a word with you,” he complained. “And I want you to see my pictures. We must get in before the light goes. It gets so confoundedly dark in the afternoons now.”
Later on in the great gaunt studio at the top of the pile of buildings in the Rue Notre Dame des Champs, Anne stood before some of the pictures which in after years were to fetch great sums from art collectors, which were to be discussed by connoisseurs, to be execrated, loved, praised, condemned, admired.
She did not see them. For her at the moment, they were non-existent.
One thing only was in her mind; one idea, and that in the form of a question.
How should she accomplish what she had come to do?
This was the first time René had deliberately sought her alone, and in the circumstance,without malice, she divined the influence of François Fontenelle.
He had meant to be careful. He had meant to see her only in the presence of others, but,—she knew him so well that she could have smiled,—to-day he had thrown prudence to the wind.
Tenderness was in his voice, in his eyes, even while he kept tender words from his lips.
It grew dusk while she lingered. The blue of twilight filled the windows, and a ruddy gleam from the stove lay along the floor. Anne sat down on the couch, and René settled cushions at her back.
His hand touched her arm, and for a moment it rested there, before he turned abruptly away.
Earlier in the day, Anne had spoken of returning to Dymfield.
“Youmustn’tgo yet,” he broke out all at once. “You won’t leave Paris yet?”
The words were an appeal, and his voice was not steady.
“I came to see you,” said Anne deliberately.
He turned to her sharply. It was too dark to see his face, but she heard the anxiety in his tone.
“All of us—or me?”
“To see you.”
He threw himself on his knees beside her. “Anne,” he whispered, “stay. I want you. Will you marry me?”
He had taken her hands and was holding them tight against his breast.
“No, René.”
The words were decisive, but she made no effort to release herself, and her hands rested quietly in his.
“Sit here, beside me,” she said, moving a little on the couch. “I want to talk to you.”
Wondering at something in her voice, he obeyed in silence, and she went on speaking, still very quietly.
“I won’t marry you, dear, because I’m too old for you. I will never marry you. But if you want me, I will stay.”
In his amazement, he let her hands drop, and bent forward to see her face.
Quite quietly, Anne got up. “It’s very dark,” she said. “I’ll light the candles. I saw where you put the matches.”
He watched her in a sort of stupor as she went to a side table for the matches, and lighted one after another of the candles in a sconce on the opposite side of the room.
Did she know what she had said? Had he understood her?
He sat staring at her as she reached up tothe sconce, the movement throwing into relief the lines of her beautiful figure.
When the last candle was lighted, she turned to him smiling.
“No. You haven’t misunderstood me,” she said. “Now you can see my face you will know you have not.”
She came swiftly across the room, and sat down beside him.
“Listen, René. I will not marry you, for many reasons. Two months ago I was prepared never to see you again. But things have altered. I haven’t told you yet, but all my circumstances have changed. I’m a rich woman now, and my life is my own, to do what I like with it. And because I love you, I propose to give it to you, for a little while at least. As long as you want me. Until——”
Her voice, quite calm and quiet at first, broke at the last words, and she paused abruptly.
René sprang to his feet, and drew her quickly up from the sofa into his arms.
“Anne!” he cried. “Sweet Anne Page!” the words came brokenly between tremulous laughter. “You don’t know what you’re saying. You will marry me, of course, because we love each other, because——”
She put one hand on his shoulder, and so kept him at arm’s length.
“I will never marry you,” she repeated. “If you won’t consent to let me stay as I suggest, I shall say good-bye to you now, and I will not see you again.”
“Remember René, you’re not talking to a girl. You’re dealing with a woman who knows her own mind, and will have this or nothing. If I stay we both have perfect freedom. I am old enough to do what I please with my life. And I please to do this. René,” for the first time the colour came to her cheeks, and her eyes wavered, “you’ll make me shy if I have to ask you so many times to let me stay.”
She looked suddenly so like a child as she spoke, that in spite of his perplexed amazement, Dampierre smiled.
He kissed her soft hair, and then her lips. “You’re adorable,” he murmured. “But you amazing woman, you’re anenfant terrible! What am I to do with you?”
“Don’t you see how simple it is?” she asked. “I’m rich now, so I can stay as long as you—as long as I please.” She altered the pronoun hurriedly. “And you have plenty of money, too, René, haven’t you? I mean that we are each quite independent. It makes it all so easy.”
He laughed again as the only expression of his otherwise inexpressible emotions.
She was as guileless, as simple as a child. Yet she was proposing——Good God, what was she not proposing? And above all she meant what she proposed; meant it absolutely. He looked into her eyes, and knew that no words of his would move her.
“But Anne, Anne!” he stammered. “You’re saying awful things. Not from my point of view, but as an Englishwoman.Mon Dieu!as an Englishwoman with the fear of Mrs. Grundy if not the fear of God before her eyes!”
She looked at him, and his words, which amazement and uncertainty had made flippant, died before the sadness of her glance.
“You don’t understand,” she said. “Nobody troubles about me. Nobody has ever troubled. I have never been happy all my life. And now when I could have happiness without hurting any one, why must I give it up because of a world in which I have no concern?” She paused a moment, and looked at him uncertainly.
“You think I ought to feel I’m doing wrong? Perhaps I ought. But Idon’tfeel it, René. I should be doing wrong if I married you, because——” She left the sentenceunfinished, forbearing to tell him that he would some day thank her for his freedom.
“Don’t argue about it,” she said, smiling, though her eyes were full of tears. “It’s my last word. If you won’t agree, I shall go back to Dymfield to-morrow.”
“No. Don’t let us waste time now, at any rate,” he exclaimed eagerly. “We shall have plenty of time to talk and argue. Just now I’m too absurdly happy!”
He drew her down beside him on the sofa, and covered her eyes with kisses.
“Anne! do you know what a sweet thing you are? No, of course you don’t know, and that’s what make you so delicious!”
Even while she thrilled from head to foot with an almost unbearable happiness, Anne remembered the price at which it was bought, and told herself that it was not too dear.
“I only know I’m happy,” she whispered. “But I’m afraid of waking up and finding it’s a dream.”
Again and again, through the years as they passed, her own words came back to her.
In the summer evenings at Dymfield, she thought of them. When she travelled, they often came to her as she stood before some picture in church or gallery. She thought ofthem sometimes at night, when on some Italian terrace she sat watching the sunset.
To-day she remembered them, as she walked home through the sunshine, and mounted the stately Spanish steps towards her apartment on the heights.
“Twenty years ago!” She repeated the words to herself in wonder.
“It was a beautiful dream, and thank God, I never waked.”