Antony waited in the drawing-room of her hotel in the Avenue du Bois de Boulogne some quarter of an hour before she came downstairs. He thought later that she had purposely given him this time to look about and grow accustomed to the atmosphere, to the room in which he afterward more or less lived for several months.
There was not a false note to disturb his beauty-loving sense. He stood waiting, on one side a long window giving on a rose garden, as he afterward discovered, on the other a group in marble by Cedersholm. He was studying this with interest when he heard Mrs. Faversham enter the room. She had foreseen that he would not be likely to wear an evening dress and she herself had put on the simplest of her frocks. But he thought her quite dazzling, and the grace of her hands, and her welcome as she greeted him, were divine to the young man.
"I'm so glad to see you, Mr. Rainsford."
Instantly he bent and kissed her hand. She saw him flush to his fair hair. He felt a gratitude to her, a thankfulness, which awakened in him immediately the strongest of emotions.
She seemed to consider him a distinguished guest. She told him that she was going to Rome when Mr. Cedersholm came over—there would be a little party going down to Italy.
Fairfax's eyes kindled, and in the few moments he stood with her there, in her fragrant drawing-room, where the fire in the logs sang and whispered and the lamp-light threw its long, fair shadows on the crimson floors and melted in the crimson hangings, he felt that he stood with an old friend, with some one he had known his life long and known well, even before he had known—andthere was a poignancy in his treason—even before he had known his mother.
When the doors were thrown open and another visitor was announced, he was jealous and regretful and glanced at Mrs. Faversham as though he thought she had done him a wrong.
"My vife, oui," said the gentleman who came in and who was of a nationality whose type was not yet familiar to Fairfax. "My wife is horsed to-night, chère Madame; she cannot come to the dinner—a thousand pardons."
"I am sorry the Countess is ill."
Potowski, who had been told by his hostess not to dress, had made up for the sacrifice as brilliantly as he could. His waistcoat was of embroidered satin, his cravat a flaming scarlet, and in his button-hole an exotic flower which went well with his dark, exotic face. He was a little ridiculous: short and fat, with a fashion of gesticulating with his hands as though he were swimming into society, but his expression was agreeable and candid. His near-sighted eyes were naïve, his voice sweet and caressing. Rainsford saw that his hostess liked Potowski. She was too sweet a lady to be annoyed by peculiarities.
In a few moments, the lame sculptor on one side and the flashy Slav on the other, she led them to the little dining-room, to an exquisite table, served by two men in livery.
There was an intimacy in the apartment shut in by the panelling from floor to ceiling of the walls. The windows were covered with yellow damask curtains and the footfalls made no sound on the thick carpet.
"Mr. Rainsford is a sculptor," his hostess told Potowski. "He has studied with Cedersholm, but we shall soon forget whose pupil he is when he is a master himself."
"Ah," murmured the young man, who was nevertheless thrilled.
"He is going to do a bas-relief of me, Potowski—that is, I hope he will not refuse to make my portrait."
"Ah, no," exclaimed Potowski, clasping his soft hands, "not a bas-relief, chère Madame, but a statuary, all of it. The figure, is not it, Mr. Rainsford? You hear people say of the face it is beautiful, or the hand, or thehead of a woman. I think it is all of her. It should be the entirety always, I think. I think it is monstrous to dissect the parts of the human body even in art. When I go to theMuseoand see a hand here, a foot there, a torso somewhere else—you will laugh, I am ridiculous, but it makes me think I look at ahaccident.
"Therefore," exclaimed Potowski, gaily swimming toward the fruit and flowers with his soft hand, "begin, cher Monsieur, by making a whole woman! I never, never sing part of ahopera. I sing a lyric, a little complete song, but in its entirety."
"But, my dear Potowski," Mrs. Faversham laughed, "a bas-relief or a bust is complete."
"But why," cried the Pole, "why behead a lady? As for a profile, it is destruction to the human face." He turned to Fairfax. "You think I am a pagan. In France they have an impolite proverb, 'Stupid as a musician,' but don't think it is true. We see harmony and melody in everything."
Apparently Potowski's lunacy had suggested something to Fairfax, for he said seriously—
"Perhaps Mrs. Faversham will let me make a figure of her some day"—he hesitated—"in the entirety," he quoted; and the words sounded madness, tremendously personal, tremendously daring. "A figure of her standing in a long cloak edged with fur, holding a little statuette in her hand."
"Charming," gurgled Potowski—he had a grape in his mouth which he had culled unceremoniously from the fruit dish. "That is a very modern idea, Rainsford, but I don't understand why she should hold a statuette in her hand."
"For my part," said the hostess, "I only understand what I have been taught. I am a common-place public, and I prefer a classic bas-relief, a profile, just a little delicate study. Will you make it for me, Mr. Rainsford?"
The new name he had chosen, and which was never real to him, sounded pleasantly on her lips, and it gave him, for the first time, a personality. His past was slipping from him; he glanced around the oval room with its soft lights and its warm colouring. It glowed like a beautiful setting for the pearl which was the lady. Thedinner before him was delicious. It ceased to be food—it was a delicate refreshment. The perfume of the flowers and wines and the cooking was intoxicating.
"You eat and drink nothing," Mrs. Faversham said to him.
"No," exclaimed Potowski, sympathetically, peering across the table at Rainsford. "You are suffering perhaps—you diet?"
Antony drank the champagne in his glass and said he was thinking of his bas-relief.
Potowski, adjusting a single eye-glass in his eye, stared through it at Rainsford.
"You should do everything in its entirety, Mr. Rainsford. Eat, drink, sculpt and sing," and he swam out again gently toward Rainsford and Mrs. Faversham, "and love."
Antony smiled on them both his radiant smile. "Ah, sir," he said, "is not that just the thing it is hard for us all not to do? We mutilate the rest, our art and our endeavours, but a young man usually once in his life loves in entirety."
"I don't know," said the Pole thoughtfully, "I think perhaps not. Sometimes it's the head, or the hands, or the figure, something we call perfect or beautiful as long as it lasts, Mr. Rainsford, but if we loved the entirety there would be no broken marriages."
Mrs. Faversham, whom the musician entertained and amused, laughed softly and rose, and, a man on each side of her, went into the drawing-room, to the fire burning across the andirons. Coffee and liqueurs were brought and put on a small table.
"Potowski is a philosopher, is he not, Mr. Rainsford? When you hear him sing, though, you will find that his best argument."
Potowski stirred six lumps of sugar into his small coffee cup, drank the syrup, drank a glass of liqueur with a sort of cheerful eagerness, and stood without speaking, dangling his eyeglass and looking into the fire. Mrs. Faversham took a deep chair and her dark, slim figure was lost in it, and Antony, who had lit his cigarette, leaned on the chimney-piece near her.
She glanced at him, at the deformed shoe, at his shabbyclothes. He had made his toilet as carefully as he could; his linen was spotless, his cravat new and fashioned in a big bow. His fine, thoughtful face, lit now by the pleasure of the evening, where spirit and courage were never absent if other marks were there; his fine brow with the slightly curling blond hair bright upon it, and the profound blue of his eyes—he was different from any man she had seen, and she had known many men and been a great favourite with them. It pleased her to think that she knew and understood them fairly well. She was thinking what she could do for this man. She had wondered this suddenly, the day Fairfax had met her and left her in the Louvre; she had wondered more sincerely the evening she left him at his door. She had asked him to her house in a spirit of real kindness, although she had already felt his charm. Looking at him now, she thought that no woman could see him and hear him speak, watch him for an hour, and not be conscious of that charm. She wondered what she could do for Mr. Rainsford.
"Sit there, won't you?"—she indicated the sofa near her—"you will find that a comfortable place in which to listen. Count Potowski is the one unmaterial musician I ever knew. Time and place, food or feast, make no difference to him."
Potowski, without replying, turned abruptly and went toward the next room, separated from the salon by glass doors. In another moment they heard the prelude of Bohm's "Still as the Night," and then Potowski began to sing.
The studio underwent something of a transformation. Dearborn devoted himself to its decoration. The crisp banknote was divided between the two companions.
Fairfax ordered a suit of clothes on trust, a new pair of boots on trust, and bought outright sundry necessaries for his appearance in the world.
And Dearborn spent too much in making the studio decent, and bought an outfit of writing materials, a wadded dressing-gown with fur collar and deep pockets, the cast-off garment of some elegant rastaquouère, in a second-hand clothing shop on the boulevard. He had no plans for enjoying Paris. He philosophically looked at the cast-off shoes that had gallantly limped with the two of them up and down the stairs and here and there in the streets on such devious missions. If he should be inclined to go out he would wear them. His slippers were his real comfort. He devoted himself to the interior life and to his play. He had the place to himself, and after a long day's work he would read or plan, looking out on the quays and the Louvre, biting his fingers and weaving new plots and making youthful reflections upon life.
In the evenings Fairfax would limp home. Five days of the week he went to Barye's studio and worked for the master. Twice a week he went to the Avenue du Bois de Boulogne. Just how his friend spent his time when he was not in the studio Dearborn wondered vainly. The sculptor grew less and less communicative, almost morose. Tony took to smoking countless cigarettes and sitting in the corner of the big divan, his arms folded across his chest, his eyes fixed on some object which Dearborn could not see. He would listen, or appear to, whilst Dearborn read his play; or draw for him the scenariofor a new play; or the young man would read aloud bits of verse or prose that he loved and found inspiring. And Antony, more than once, could hear his own voice as he had declaimed aloud to the little cousins on a winter's afternoon, "St. Agnes' Eve, how bitter chill it was," or some other favourite repeated to shining eyes and flushed attention. Very often what Dearborn read was neither familiar nor distinguishable, for Fairfax was thinking about other things. They were not always alone in the workroom. Dearborn had friends, and those of them who had not gone away on other quests or been starved out or pushed out, would come noisily in of an evening, bringing with them perhaps a man with a fiddle and a man with a flute, and they would dance and there would be beer and "madeleines" and gay amusement of a very inoffensive kind, of a youthful kind. There would be dancing and singing, and sometimes Fairfax would take part in it all and sing with them in his pleasant baritone and smile upon them; but he liked it best when they were alone, and Dearborn did too; and in Fairfax's silence and the other man's absorption they nevertheless daily grew firmer and faster friends.
"Bob," Fairfax said—and as he spoke he abruptly interrupted Dearborn in the most vital scene of his act—"I can't take a penny from her for this portrait."
Dearborn dropped his manuscript on his knee. His expression was that of a slightly hurt egotism, for he had sat up all night working over this scene and burned all day to read it to Fairfax.
"Well, anyhow, don't ask me to cough up the two hundred and fifty francs. That's all I ask," he said a little curtly.
"I shall give her some study, one of these other statuettes," Fairfax said moodily, "some kind of return for the five hundred francs."
"She wouldn't care for anything I have got, would she, Tony?" Dearborn put his hands in the ample pockets and displayed his voluminous wrapper. "I'm crazy about this dressing-gown," he said affectionately. "It has warmed and sheltered my best thoughts. It has wrapped around and comforted my fainting heart. It's hatched ideas for me; it's been a plaidie to the angryairs. Tony, she wouldn't take the dressing-gown, would she?"
"Rot!" exclaimed his friend fiercely. "Don't be an ass. Don't you see how I feel?"
"No, I don't," said the other simply. "I am not a mind reader. I'm an imaginator. I can make up a lot of stuff about your feeling. I daresay I do invent. You will see this in my play some day. You are really an inspiration, old man, but as for having an accurate idea of your feelings...! For three weeks, ever since that banknote fluttered amongst the crumbs of our table, you have scarcely said a word to me, not a whole paragraph." He shook his finger emphatically. "If I were not absorbed myself, no doubt I should be beastly, diabolically lonesome."
Antony seemed entirely unmoved by this picture. "I think I shall go to Rome, Bob," he began, then cried: "No, I mean to St. Petersburg."
"It will be less expensive," Dearborn suggested dryly, "and considerably less travel, not to go to the Bois de Boulogne."
"I shall finish this portrait this week," Fairfax went on. "Now I can't scrape it out and begin again. I have done it twice. It would be desecration, for it's mightily like her, and my reason for my going there is over."
"Well, how about that full-length figure of her in furs and velvets, holding a little statuette in her hands, that you used to rave about doing? If at first you make a bas-relief, begin and begin again! There are busts and statues, as there are odes and sonnets and curtain-raisers and five-act tragedies."
"Yes," returned Fairfax, "there are tragedies, no doubt about it."
Fairfax, smoking, struggled with the emotions rising in him and which he had no notion of betraying to his friend. In the corner where Dearborn had rolled it, for he made the whole studio pretty much his own now, was the statue Fairfax was making of his mother. It was covered with a white cloth which took the lines and form of the head and shoulders. It stood ghostly amongst the shadows of the room and near it, on a stool, were Antony'ssculpting tools, his broad wooden knives and a barrel of plaster. His gaze wandered to these inanimate objects, nothing in themselves, but which suggested and made possible and real his art—the reason for his existence. Now, when he stopped modelling Mrs. Faversham, he would go on with the bust of his mother. He turned his eyes to Dearborn.
"I have been up there for five weeks; I have been entertained there like a friend; I have eaten and drunk; I have accepted her hospitality; I have gone with her to the plays and opera. I have pretty well lived on her money."
"All men of the world do that," Dearborn said reasonably. "It's an awfully nice thing for a woman to have a handsome young man whom she can call on when she likes."
Fairfax ignored this and went on. "I have met her friends, delightful and distinguished people, who have invited me to their houses. I have never gone, not once, not even to see Potowski. Now I shall go up next Sunday and finish my work, and then I'm going away."
Dearborn crossed his thin legs, his beloved knit slippers, a remnant of his mother's affection, dangling on the toe of his foot. He made a telescope of his manuscript and peered through it as though he saw some illumination at the other end.
"You are not serious, Tony?"
Antony left the sofa and came over to his friend. Five weeks of comparative comfort and comparative release from the anxiety of existence—that is, of material existence—had changed him wonderfully. His contact with worldly people, the entertainments of Paris, the stimulant to his mind and senses, his pleasures, had done him good. His face was something fuller. He had come home early from dining with Mrs. Faversham, and in his evening dress there was an elegance about him that added to his natural distinction. In the lapel of his coat drooped a few violets from theboutonnièrethat had been placed by his plate.
"Cedersholm is coming next week." He lit a fresh cigarette.
"Well," returned Dearborn, coolly, "he is neither thedeluge nor the earthquake, but he may be the plague. What has he got to do with you, old man?"
"She is going to marry him."
"That," said Dearborn with spirit, "is rotten. Now, I will grant you that, Tony. It's rotten for her. Things have got so mixed up in your scenario that you cannot frankly go and tell her what a hog he is. That is what ought to be done, though. She ought to know what kind of a cheat and poor sort she is going to marry. In real life or drama the simple thing never happens." Dearborn smiled finely. "She ought to know, but you can't tell her."
"No," said his friend slowly, "nor would I. But neither can I meet him in her house or anywhere else. I think I should strike him."
"You didn't strike him, though," said Dearborn, meaningly, "when you had a good impersonal chance."
"I wish I had."
"I thought you told me they were all going to Rome?"
"Mrs. Faversham doesn't want to go."
"Ah," murmured Dearborn, nodding, "she doesn't."
"No." Fairfax did not seem to observe his friend's tone. "She is mightily set on having me meet Cedersholm. She wants to have him patronize me, help me!" He laughed dryly and walked up and down the studio into the cold, away from the fire, and then back to Dearborn in his dressing-gown and slippers. "Patronize me, encourage me, pat me on the back—put me in the way of meeting men of the world of art and letters, possibly work with him. She has all sorts of kindly patronizing schemes. But she doesn't know that I have been hungry and cold, and have been housed and fed by her money. Perhaps she does, though," he cried furiously to Dearborn. "No doubt she does. Do you think she does, Bob?"
"No, no—don't be an ass, Tony, old man."
"You see, now don't you, that I can't stay in Paris, that I can't meet that man and knock him down—not tell her that I am not the poor insignificant creature that she thinks, that without me Cedersholm could not have whipped up his old brain and his tired imagination to have done the work that brought him so marked a success.I would have to tell her what I did, and that, crude and unschooled as I was, she would have to see that he was afraid of me, afraid of my future and my talent. Oh, Dearborn!" he cried, throwing up his arms.
Dearborn left his chair and went to Fairfax and put his hand on his shoulder.
"That's right," he said heartily, "blurt it all out, old man. Some day, when the right time comes, you will let it out to him."
Fairfax leaned on Dearborn's arm. "There were eight of us at dinner to-night," he said, "and Cedersholm was the general topic. He is much admired. He is to have the Legion of Honour. Much of what they said about him was just, of course, perfectly just and fair, but it sickened me. They were enthusiastic about his character, his generosity to his pupils, his sympathy with struggling artists, and one man, who had been at the unveiling of the Sphinx, spoke of my Beasts."
Dearborn felt Antony's hand trembling on his arm.
"The gall rose up in my throat, Bob. I saw myself working in a sacred frenzy in his studio, sweating blood, and my joy over my creations. I saw myself eager, hopeful, ardent, devoted, with a happy, cheerful belief in everybody. I had it then, I did indeed. Then I saw my ruined life, my wasted years as an engineer in Albany, my miserable, my cruel marriage, the things I stooped to and the degradation I might have known. My mother, whom I never saw again, called me—my wife, my child, passed before me like ghosts. If I could have had a little encouragement from him then, only just my due, well.... I was thinking of all those things whilst they spoke of him, and then I looked over to her...." As he spoke Mrs. Faversham's name, Antony's voice softened. "... And she was looking at me so strangely, strangely, as though she felt something, knew something, and my silence seemed ungracious and proof of my jealousy; but I could not have said a warm word in praise of him to save my character in her eyes. When we were alone after dinner she asked me, in a voice different to any tone I have heard from her, 'Don't you like Mr. Cedersholm? You don't seem to admire him. I have never heard youspeak his name, or say a friendly word about him,' and I couldn't answer her properly, and she seemed troubled."
Fairfax stopped speaking. The two friends stood mutely side by side. Then Antony said more naturally—
"You see a little of how I feel, Bob."
And the other replied, "Yes, I see a little of how you feel"; but he continued with something of his old drollery: "I would like to know a little of howshefeels."
"What do you mean?"
Antony's voice was so curt, and his words were so short, that Dearborn was quick to understand that it would not be wise to touch on the subject of the woman.
"Why, I mean, Tony, that it is a valuable study for a playwright. I should like to understand the psychology of all characters."
Fairfax shrugged impatiently. "Confound you, you are a brute. All artists are, I reckon. You drive your chariot over human hearts in order to get a dramatic point."
Here the post came and with it a blue letter whose colour was familiar to Dearborn now, and he busied himself with his own mail under the lamp. Fairfax opened his note. It had no beginning.
"If it does not rain to-morrow, will you take me to Versailles? Unless you send me word that you cannot go, I will call for you at ten o'clock. We will drive through the Bois and lunch at the Reservoirs."
For a moment it seemed as though Antony would hand over his note to Dearborn, as he had handed Mrs. Faversham's first letter the night it came. But he replaced it in its envelope and put it in his pocket.
He wrote her that he should not be able to go to Versailles. He deserted his day's work at Barye's and remained at home modelling. And Dearborn, seeing Fairfax's distraction, went out early and did not return until dark. Fairfax found himself alone again, alone with his visions, alone with his pride, alone with powerful and new emotions.
Sometimes in January, in the middle of the month, days come that surprise the Parisians with their inconstancy and their softness. The sun shone out suddenly and the sky was as blue as in Italy.
Fairfax could see the people strolling along the quays, with coats open, and the little booksellers did a thriving business and the "bateaux mouche" shot off into the sunlight bound toward the suburbs which Fairfax had learned in the summer time to know and love. Versailles would be divine on such a day.
His hours spent at the Avenue du Bois de Boulogne must have been impersonal. His first essay he destroyed and began again. He did not want to bring these intimate visits suddenly to an end. But when his sitter very courteously began to question him, he was uncommunicative. He could not tell her the truth. He did not wish to romance or to lie to her. Mrs. Faversham, both sensitive and "fine," respected his reticence. But she found out about him. They talked of art and letters and life in general, circling around life in particular, and Fairfax revealed himself more than he knew, although of his actual existence he told nothing. He enjoyed the charm of the society of a worldly woman, of a clever woman. He fed his mind and cultivated his taste, delighted his eyes with the graceful picture she made, sitting, her head on her hand, posing for her portrait.Her features were not perfect, but the ensemble was lovely and he modelled with tenderness and pleasure until the little bas-relief was magically like her. He was forced to remember that the study was intended as a present for Cedersholm. He was very silent and very often wondered why she asked him so constantly to her house, why she should be so interested in so ungracious a companion. This morning, in his studio on the Quai, he unwrapped his statue of his mother. It was a figure sitting in her chair, a book in her hand, as he had seen her countless times on the veranda of the New Orleans house, dreaming, her face lifted, her eyes looking into the distance. He went back to his work with complicated feelings and a heart at which there was a new ache. He had hardly expected that this statue, left when he had gone to take up the study of another woman, would charm him as it did. He began to model. As he worked, he thought the face was singularly like Bella's—a touch to the head, to the lips, and it was still more like the young girl. Another year was gone. Bella was a woman now. Everything, as he modelled, came back to him vividly—all the American life, with its rush and struggle. So closely did it come, so near to him, that he threw down his tools to walk up and down in the sunlight pouring through the big window. He took up his tools and began modelling again. The statuette was tenderly like his mother. He smoothed the folds at her waist—and saw under the clay the colour of the violet lawn with its sprinkling flowers of darker violet. He touched the frills he had indicated around the throat—and felt the stirring of the Southern breeze across his hand and smelled the jasmine. He paused after working for two hours, standing back, resting his lame limb and musing on the little figure. It grew to suggest all womanhood: Molly, as he had seen her under the lamp-light—Mrs. Faversham, as he had watched her leaning on her hand—not Bella. He looked and thought. Bella was a child, a little girl. There was nothing reposeful or meditative about Bella, yet he had seen her pore over a book, her hair about her face. Would she ever sit like this, tranquil, reposeful, reading, dreaming? The face was like her, but the resemblance passed.
Mrs. Faversham's dresses and jewels, her luxuries, her carriages and her horses, the extravagance of her life, had not dazzled Antony; his eyes had been pleased, but her possessions were a distinct envelope surrounding her and separating them. After watching Potowski's natatorial gestures, Fairfax had longed to swim out of the elegance into a freer sea.
He had told her nothing of his companion or of his life. He often longed to stuff some of the dainties of the table into his pockets for Dearborn, to carry away some of the fire in his hands, to bring something of the comfort back, but he would not have spoken for the world. Once she had broached the subject of further payment, and had seen by his tightening lips that she had made a mistake. In spite of the fact of his reserve and that he was proud to coldness and sometimes not quite kind, intimacy grew between them. Mrs. Faversham was engaged to be married, but Fairfax did not believe that she loved Cedersholm. What her feelings were, or why she wanted to marry him, he could not guess. The intimacy between them was caused by what they knew of each other as human beings, unknown, unexplained, unformulated. There was a tremendous sympathy, and neither the man nor the woman knew how real it was. And although there was her life—she was five years his senior—and his life with its tragedies, its depths and its ascensions, although there was all this unread and unspoken between them, neither of them, when they were together, was conscious of any past. A word, a touch, a look, a hazard chance would have revealed to them how near they stood.
As he went on modelling, he found that he was beginningto think of her as he had not let himself do during the weeks when she had sat for him. He found that he could not go on with his work now and think of her. He had voluntarily denied himself this day at Versailles where he might have enjoyed her for hours. When she had told him that she had written to Cedersholm about him he had smiled.
"He will not recall my name. I was an obscure pupil with others. He will not remember Tom Rainsford."
Evidently Cedersholm had not remembered him. The subject was never mentioned between them again. Except as he heard it in general conversation, Cedersholm's name was no longer frequently on Mrs. Faversham's lips. He stopped working, wrapped his plaster carefully and pushed the stool back into the corner. Near it was a pile of books which he had carefully done up to return to Mrs. Faversham. She had obtained orders for him from her friends, none of which he had accepted. Why should he be so churlish? Why should he refuse to take advantage of her kindness and generosity? Why should not her influence help him on his stony way? What part did his pride play in it? Was it on account of Cedersholm, or was it something else?
At noon he went out to eat his luncheon in a little café where he was known and popular. The little room was across a court-yard filled with potted plants on which the winter had laid icy fingers, but which to-day in the sunshine seemed to have garbed themselves with something like spring. The little restaurant was low, noisy, filled with the clatter and bustle of the noon meal served to hungry students and artists. The walls were painted by the brush of different skilful craftsmen, young artists who could not pay their accounts and had settled their scores by leaving paintings on the walls, and one could read distinguished names. When Fairfax came here, as he sometimes did, he always took a little table in the second and darker room by another window which gave on a quiet court on whose stones were heaped up the statues and remains of an old Louis XV palace. This room was reserved for the older and quieter clients, and here, at another table in the corner, a pretty girl with ashock of curly hair under a soft hat and an old cape and an old portfolio, always ate, and she sometimes smiled at him. He would catch her eye, and she was, as Fairfax, always alone.
Girl-students and grisettes, and others less respectable, had eyed him and elbowed him, but not one had tempted him. There was no merit in his celibacy, but to-day, as he glanced over at the English girl-student, something about her caught his attention as never before. She was half turned to him; her portfolio lay on the table at her side with the remains of a scanty lunch. Her head was bowed on her hands. She looked dejected, forlorn, bringing her little unhappiness to the small restaurant where so many strugglers and aspirants brought their hopes and their inspirations. This little bit of humanity seemed on this day uninspired, cast down, and he had remarked her generally before because of her gaiety, her eagerness, and he had avoided her because he knew that she would be sympathetic with him.
In a sort of revenge possible on himself, and feeling his own loneliness, he permitted himself to look long at her and saw how miserably poor her dress was, how rusty and dusty her cape, how trodden down were her little shoes. She was all in brown, from the old beaver hat to her boots, in a soft, old-faded note of colour, and her hair was gloriously golden like a chrysanthemum. As Antony looked at her she took out her handkerchief and wiped something off her cheek and from her eyes. His luncheon of steak and potatoes had been served him. He took up his napkin and his dinner and limped over to the table where the English girl sat bowed over.
"Would you like a comrade for luncheon? Say so, if you don't want me." He saw her start, wipe her eyes and look up with a sob on her lips.
"Oh, yes, I don't mind." Her voice was stifled. "Sit down, it is good of you."
The girl covered her face with her hands for a second and then wiped her eyes determinedly, as if she fetched herself out of stony depths. She smiled tremulously and her lips were as red and full and sweet as a rose.
"Garcon," he ordered, "fetch two bocks. Yes, mademoiselle, it will do you good."
"I say," she fluttered, "were you lonely over there in your corner?"
Fairfax nodded. She put out her little hand, stained with paint and oil, and it was cold and delicate as it touched his. It seemed to need the strength of the man's big, warm grasp.
"I have always liked your face, do you know—always," she said. "I knew that you could be a real pal if you wanted. You are not like the others. I expect you are a great swell at something. Writing?"
"No, I am a workman in Barye's studio—a sculptor."
"Oh," she said incredulously. "You look 'arrivé,' awfully distinguished. I expect you reallyaresomething splendid."
The beer came foaming. The girl lifted her glass with a hand which trembled. Tears hung on her lashes still, ready to fall, but she was a little sport and full of character and life. She nodded at Fairfax and murmured—
"Here's to our being friends."
Her voice was sweet and musical. They drank the draught to friendship.
Fairfax asked cruelly: "What made you cry?"
She touched her portfolio. "There," she said, "that is the reason. My last fortnight's work. I draw at Julian's, and I had a fearful criticism this morning, most discouraging. I am here on my own." She stopped and said rather faintly: "Why should I tell you?"
"We drank just now to the reason why you should."
"That's true," she laughed. "Well, then, this is my last week in Paris. I will have to go back to England and drop painting, unless they tell me that I am sure to have a career and that it is worth while."
A career! She was a soft, sweet, tender little creature in spite of her good comradeship and the brave little tilt to her hat, and she was fit for a home nest, and no more fit to battle with the storm of a career than a young bird with a tempest.
"Let me see your portfolio, will you?"
"First," she said practically, "eat your steak and your potatoes." Touching her eyes, she added: "I thought of what Goethe said as I cried here—'Wer nie sein Brotmit Thraenen ass'—only it's not the first bread and tears that have gone together in this room, I expect."
"No," returned Fairfax, "I reckon not, and you are lucky to have the bread, Mademoiselle. Some have only tears."
"I know," she returned softly, "and I have been most awfully lucky so far."
When they had finished he made the man clear away the things, and she spread out the contents of her portfolio before him, watching his face, as he felt, for every expression. He handled thoughtfully the bits of cardboard and paper, seeing on them only the evidence of a mediocre talent, a great deal of feeling, and the indications of a sensitive nature. One by one he looked at them and turned them over, and put them back and tied up the green portfolio by its black tapes. Then he looked at her, saw how white her little face had grown, how big and blue her eyes were, how childlike and inadequate she seemed to life.
"You need not speak," she faltered. "You were going to say I'm no good. I don't want to hear you say it."
Impulsively, he put out his strong hands and took hers that fluttered at her coat.
"Why should you care for what I say? You have your masters and your chiefs."
"Yes," she nodded, "and they have been awfully encouraging, all of them, until to-day."
Fairfax looked at her earnestly. "You must not mind if you feel that you have got it in you. Don't seek to hear others' opinions, just go boldly, courageously on. What I say has no meaning."
He dropped her hands and the colour came back somewhat into her face.
"What you say has importance, though," she answered. "I have the feeling that you are somebody. Anyhow, I have watched you every time you came. I think you know things. I believe you must be a great artist. I should believe you—I do believe you. I see you don't think I'm any good. Besnard didn't think so when he came to-day. I don't want to go on being a fool."
As she spoke, from the other restaurant came thenotes of a fiddle and a flute, for two wandering musicians, habitués of these smaller cafés, had wandered in to earn the price of their luncheon. They were playing, not very well, but very plaintively, an old French song, one in vogue in the Latin Quarter. The sun, still magnificently brilliant, had found its way around to the back of the place, and over the court with the ruined marbles the light streamed through the window and fell on Fairfax and the little girl.
"What do you say," he suggested abruptly, "to coming with me for the afternoon? Let's go on the top of a tram and ride off somewhere."
He rose, paid the man who came for his luncheon (the girl's score had already been settled), and stood waiting. She fingered the tapes of her closed portfolio, her lips still trembled. The sunlight was full on her, shining on her hair, on her old worn cape, on the worn felt hat, on the little figure which had been so full of courage and of dreams. Then she looked up at Antony and rose.
"I will go," she said, and he picked up the portfolio, tucked it under his arm, and they walked out together, through the smoky larger room where part of the lunchers were joining in the chorus of the song the musicians played. And this little handful of the Latin Quarter saw the two pass out together, as two pass together often from those Bohemian refuges. Some one, as the door opened and shut on Antony and the girl, cried: "Vive l'amour!"
On the way out to Versailles from the top of the tram, lifted high above Paris and the river, alongside of the vulgar head, alongside of the strange little English girl, Fairfax listened to the outpouring of her heart. She took his interest for granted. With an appreciative understanding of human nature, and as though she had been bearing a burden for years which she had never let slip, she rested it now, and her blue eyes on his, her hands in the old woollen gloves, which she had slipped on before they started, clasped in her lap, she talked to Fairfax. By the time the tram stopped before the Palace of Versailles, he had heard her story. She was the daughter of an Irish clergyman. Nora Scarlet was her name.
Nora and Molly!
But they were very different. This girl was as gay as a lark. She laughed frankly aloud, musically, and put her hand on his with a free "camaraderie." She made sparkling little faces at him and called him softly, "Ami."
"My name is Nora, Nora Scarlet, but I don't want you to tell me your name until the end of the day, please. It is just a silly idea, but I will call you 'Ami.' I daresay it is a great name you have got, and I would rather feel that I don't want to know it too soon."
She had shown talent in the school where she had started in Ireland, and had taken a scholarship and had come to Paris to study, to venture unprepared and quite wildly into the student life, to struggle on small means and insufficient food uphill toward art. She displayed in talking a touching confidence in herself and worship of beauty, as well as a simple and loyal attitude toward lifein general. She occupied a furnished room near the studio and, as she expressed it, "fished for herself." She was the oldest of seven children, with a weight of responsibility on herself. Her father's salary was ridiculous, she told him, not enough to bring up one hungry child well, much less half a dozen.
"I thought that I could support myself with my art," she told Fairfax, "and that I should soon bearrivée, lancée, but to-day, when the criticism discouraged me and I knew that I should have to write home for money soon, well ... I'd not like to tell you what strange fancies came." She lifted up her finger and pointed at the river as it lay between its shores. "And now," she glanced at him, "when you tell me, too, that I am no good at painting!"
"I haven't said that," remonstrated Fairfax; "but don't let's talk about work now, what do you say? Let's have a holiday."
They walked up the Palace over the cobbles of the courtyard and paused to look back at the Route de Paris, that Miss Nora Scarlet might thoroughly picture the procession of the fish-wives and the march of the Paris populace up to Versailles, where the people swept its violent sea over the royal courts and the foam rose to the windows where royal faces whitened against the panes. Nora Scarlet and Fairfax wandered through the great rooms, part of the tourist crowd. The handsome man limped, a student's stoop across his shoulders, by the side of the small blond girl with her student cape and her soft hat, her hair like chrysanthemum petals. Fairfax took occasion in the portrait room to tell her that she looked like a Greuze. Nora Scarlet was an appreciative sightseer.
"Oh, if I could only paint," she murmured, "if I could only paint!" and she clasped her woollen gloves prayerfully before the portraits of the Filles de France. But the Nattiers and the Fragonards mocked her, and the green portfolio under Fairfax's arm mocked her still more. Side by side, they penetrated into the little rooms where a Queen lived, intrigued, loved, and played her part. And Fairfax had his envies before Houdon's head of Marie Antoinette.
The wide, sweet, leaf-strewn alleys were very nearly deserted where they stood, for the day had grown colder and the winter sunlight left early to give place to a long still winter evening. Their footsteps made no sound on the brown carpet of the park. Antony had not stopped to ask what kind of a woman the girl student was when he spontaneously left his lonely seat in the restaurant to take his place at her side, but everything she said to him revealed a frank, innocent mind. He saw that she had come with him without thinking twice, and he should have been touched by it. He drew her arm within his as they passed the great fountain. The basin was empty and its curve as round and smooth as human lips.
"Now," he said, "the time has come to talk of you and what you want to do and can do, and how you can do it."
"That's awfully kind."
"No, those are just the questions that I have to ask myself every day and find on some days that I haven't got the answer. It's a riddle, you know. We don't every day quite find the answer to it. I reckon we would never go on if we did, but it's good sport to ask and try to find out, and, believe me, Miss Nora Scarlet, two are better than one at a riddle, aren't they?"
"Oh, very much." They went along leisurely and after a second she continued: "It's lonely in Paris for a girl who doesn't want to go in for lots of things, and I have been getting muddled. But the worst muddle is pounds, shillings and pence"—she laughed musically—"it's reduced to pence at last, but I don't find the muddle reduced a bit."
"You want to do portraits?" he asked.
"Yes, I haven't an idea about anything else."
The trees above their heads made leafy bowers in summer, but now between the fine bare branches, they saw the delicate wintry sky, pale with the fading light of what had been a rare January day.
"Suppose I get an order for you to paint a portrait and you are paid in advance."
She stopped, holding him back by the arm, and exclaimed, joyously—
"Oh, but you could not!"
"Suppose that I can. If I do succeed and you paint the portrait, will you do something for me?"
She looked up at him quickly. He was much above her. Nora Scarlet had seen Fairfax several times a week for many months. She knew him as well as any person can know another by sight—she knew his clothes, the way he wore them. It had been easy to study his face attentively, for he was so absorbed in general that he was unconscious of scrutiny. She had learned every one of his features pretty well by heart. Solitary as she was, without companions or friends except for her studio mates, she had grown to think as women do of a man they choose, to surround him with fancies and images. She had idealized this unknown artist, and her thoughts kept her company, and he had become almost part of her life already. She looked up at him now and blushed. He put his hand down over hers lightly.
"I mean that when the portrait is finished, we will have it criticized by the subject first, then by some one in whom you have great confidence, and if you are certain then that you have a vocation, we will see what can be done—some way will open up. There is always sure to be a path toward the thing that is to be. But if the criticism is unfavourable, I want you to promise me to go back to England and to your people, and to give up art as bravely as you can—I mean, courageously, like a good soldier who has fought well and lost the battle. Perhaps," Fairfax said, smiling, "if I were not an artist my advice would be worth less, but the place is too full of half-successes. If you can't be at the top, don't fill up the ranks. Get down as soon as you can and be another kind of success."
The advice was sound and practical. She listened to his agreeable voice, softened by the Southern accent. She watched him as he talked, but his face was not that of an adviser. It was charmingly personal and his smile the sweetest she had ever seen. She murmured—
"You are awfully kind. I promise."
"Good," he exclaimed heartily, "you are a first-rate sort; however it turns out, you are plucky."
The most delicious odours of moist earth, blessed with the day's unexpected warmth, rose on the winter air. Their footfalls were lost in the leaves. Far down at the end of the alley they could see other strollers, but where they stood they were quite alone. The excitement of the unusual outing, the pleasure of companionship, brought the colour to their cheeks, a light to their eyes. The girl's helplessness, the human struggle so like to his own, her admiration and her frankness, appealed to him greatly. His late agitation, useless, hopeless, perilous moreover, and which he felt he must overcome because it could have neither issue nor satisfaction, made Fairfax turn here for satisfaction and repose. They wandered slowly down the alley, her hand within his arm, and he said, looking down at her—
"Meanwhile, you belong to me."
The words passed his lips before he realized what they meant, or their importance. He did so as soon as he spoke. He felt her start. She withdrew the hand from his arm. He stopped and said—
"Did I frighten you?" He took her little hand.
"A little," Nora Scarlet said. Her eyes were round and wide.
Antony held her hand, looking at her, trying to see a deeper beauty in her face than was there, greater depths in her eyes than they could contain, more of the woman to fill his need and his loneliness. He realized how great that loneliness was and how demanding. She seemed like a child or a bird that he had caught ruthlessly.
"Didn't you drink just now to our friendship?"
She nodded, bit her lips, smiled, and her humour returned.
"Yes, I drank to our friendship."
"Well," he said, and hesitated, "well...." He drew her a little toward him; she resisted faintly, and Fairfax stopped and quickly kissed her, a feeling of shame in his soul. He kissed her again, murmured something to her, and she kissed him. Then she pushed him gently away, her face crimson, her eyes full of tears.
"No, no," she murmured, "you shouldn't have done it. It is too awful. It's unworthy. Ami," she gasped, "do you know you are the first man I ever let do that?Do you believe me?" She was clinging to his hands, half laughing, half sobbing, and the kiss was sweet, sweet, and the moment was sweet. To one of them it was eternal, and could never come in all her lifetime like that again.
He stifled his self-reproach. He would have taken her in his arms again, but she ran from him, swiftly, like the bird set free.
"Wait," he called; "Nora Scarlet, I promise." He hurried to her. "You forget I am a lame jackdaw."
Then she stood still. They were walking together, his arm around her waist, when they came out at the alley's end. Standing by a marble bust on its pedestal, quite alone and meditative, as if she had just looked up, seen something and nevertheless decided to wait, Fairfax saw Mrs. Faversham.
His first sensation, as he saw her, was as if a sudden light had broken upon a soul's darkness which until this moment had blinded him, oppressed him, condemned him; then there came a great revulsion against himself. Mrs. Faversham was very pale, as white as the bust by whose side she stood. She held out her hand, in its delicate glove, and tried to greet him naturally.
"How do you do, Mr. Rainsford?"
He was conscious of how kind she was, how womanly. He had refused her invitation and flaunted in her sight a vulgar pastoral. His cheeks were hot, his lips hardly formed a greeting. This was the work he had offered as an excuse to her when he had said that he could not go to Versailles. "Then what is it to her?" he thought; "she is engaged to be married to Cedersholm. What am I or my vulgarities to her?" There was a fresh revulsion.
"Will you let me present Miss Scarlet," he said quietly, "Mrs. Faversham?"
Mrs. Faversham, who had recovered herself, gave her hand into the woollen glove of Nora Scarlet, and, looking at the young girl, said that perhaps they had been sketching.
"Not in January," replied Nora with perfect self-possession. From the crown of Mrs. Faversham's fur hat to the lady's shoes, the girl's honest eyes had taken in her elegance and her grace. "We have been walking a bit after Paris."
Fairfax felt as though he had been separated from this lady for a long time, as though he had just come back, after a voyage whose details were tiresome. She seemed too divine to him and at once cruelly near and cruelly removed, in her dark dress, her small walking hat with aspray of mistletoe shining against the fur, her faultless shoes, her face so sweet and high-bred under her veil, her aloofness from everything with which he came in contact, her freedom from care and struggle, from temptation, from the sordidness of which he had long been a part. He suffered horribly; short as the moment was, the acuteness of its sensations comprised for him a miserable eternity.
"I have my carriage here, Mr. Rainsford. Will you not let me drive you both back to Paris?"
He wanted nothing but to go with her then, any way, the farther the better, and for ever. It came upon him suddenly, and he knew it. He refused, of course, angry to be obliged to do so, angrier still at what he was sure she would think was the reason for his doing so. She bade them both good-bye, now thoroughly mistress of herself, and reminded him that she would expect him the next day at three. She asked Miss Scarlet many questions about her work and the schools, as they walked along a little together, before Mrs. Faversham took the path that led to the gate where her carriage waited.
When they were together again alone, Fairfax and his companion, in the tram, he felt as though he had cut himself off once again, by his folly, from everything desirable in the world. The night was cold. He did not realize how silent he was or how silent she was. When they had nearly reached Paris, Miss Scarlet said—
"Is it her portrait you thought I might get to paint?"
The question startled him, the voice as well. It was like being spoken to suddenly by a perfect stranger.
"Yes," he answered, "she is wonderfully generous and open-hearted. I am sure that she would give you an order."
"Please don't bother," said the girl proudly. "I would not take the order."
Her tone was so curt and short that it brought Fairfax back to realities.
"Why, pray, don't you find her paintable?" he asked.
The girl's voice was contemptuous. "I don't know. I didn't look at her with that idea."
Fairfax had nothing left him but his self-reproach, his humiliation, his sense of degradation, though God knows the outing was innocent enough! The Thing had happened. The Event had transpired. The veil had been drawn away from his heart when he saw her there in the park and spoke to her. The idea that she must think him light and vulgar-minded, an ordinary Bohemian, amusing himself as is the fashion in the Latin Quarter, was unbearable to him. He would have given his right hand to have been alone in the park and to have met her alone. Under the spell of his suffering, he said cruelly to the girl whom he had so wantonly captured—
"If you won't let me help you in my way, I'm afraid I can't help you at all."
And she returned, controlling her voice: "No, I am afraid you cannot help me."
He was unconscious of her until they reached the centre of Paris and he found himself in the street by her side, and they were crossing the Pond des Arts on foot. The lamps were lit. The tumult and stir of the city was around them, the odour of fires and the perfume of the city pungent to their nostrils. They walked along silently, and Fairfax asked her suddenly—
"Where shall I take you? Where do you live?" and realized as he spoke how little he knew of her, how unknown they were to each other, and yet what a factor she had been in his emotional life. He had held her in his arms and kissed her not three hours ago.
She put her hand out to him. "We will say good-bye here," she said evenly. "I can go home alone."
"Oh no," he objected, but he saw by her face that in her, too, a revulsion had taken place, perhaps stronger than his own. He was ashamed and annoyed. He put out his hand and hers just touched it.
"Thank you," she said, "for the excursion, and would you please give me my portfolio?"
He handed it to her. Then quite impulsively: "I don't want to part from you like this. Why should I? Let me take you home, won't you?"
He wanted to say, "Forgive me," but she had possessed herself of her little sketches, the poor, inadequate work of fruitless months. She turned and was gonealmost running up the quays, as she had run before him down the alley of Versailles. He saw her go with great relief, and, when the little brown figure was lost in the Paris multitude, he turned and limped home to the studio in the Quais.
He did not go to the Avenue du Bois de Boulogne at the appointed hour, and was so ungracious as not to send her any word. He took the time for his own work, and from thence on devoted himself to finishing the portrait of his mother. Meanwhile, Dearborn, enveloped in smoke, dug into the mine of his imagination and brought up treasures and nearly completed his play. He recited from it copiously, read it aloud, wept at certain scenes which he assured Tony would never be as sad to any spectator as they were to him.
"I wrote them on an empty stomach," he said.
Fairfax, meanwhile, finished his statuette and decided to send it to an exhibition of sculpture to be opened in the Rue de Sèvres. He had bitterly renounced his worldly life, and was shortly obliged to pawn his dress suit, and, indeed, anything else that the young men could gather together went to the Mont de Piété, and once more the comrades were nearly destitute and were really clad and fed by their visions and their dreams.
"You see," he said one day, shortly, to Dearborn, when the silence between the quays and the Avenue du Bois de Boulogne had grown intolerable to him, "you see how indifferent she is. She doesn't know what has become of me. For all she knows I may be drowned in the Seine."
"Or imprisoned for debt," said Dearborn, cheerfully, "that's more likely. The tailor doesn't believe you have gone to London, Fairfax. Try a more congenial place, Tony. Let it be Monte Carlo next time—every one goes there sooner or later."
When he came back from Versailles he told Dearborn nothing about his escapade in detail, simply mentioningthe fact that he had taken out a little girl to spend the day in the woods and that she had bored him in the end, and that he had had the misfortune to meet Mrs. Faversham unexpectedly.
Dearborn was one of those subtle spirits who do not need to be told everything. He rated Antony for playing what he called an ungallant part to the little Bohemian.
"You say her hair was like chrysanthemums and that she had violet eyes? Why, she is a priceless treasure, Tony! How could you desert her?"
And several times Dearborn tried to extract something more about the deserted little girl from his friend, but it was in vain.
"I am sorry," Dearborn said. "We need women, Tony—we need to see the flutter of their dresses, to watch them come and go in this little room. By Jove, I often want to open the door and invite up the concierge, the concierge's wife, his aunt 'and children three' or any, or all of Paris who would come and infuse new life into us. Anything that is real flesh and blood, to chase for a moment visions and dreams away and let us touch real hands."
"You don't go out enough, old man."
"And you went out too much, Fairfax. It's not going out—I want some one to come in. I want to see the studio peopled. You have grown so morose and I have become such a navvy that our points of view will be false the first thing we know."
The snow had been falling lightly. There was a little fringe of it along the sill, and toward sunset it had turned cold, and under the winter fog the sun hung like an orange ball behind a veil. The Seine flowed tawny and yellow under their eyes, as they stood together talking in the window.
Fairfax was in his painting clothes, the playwright in his beloved dressing-gown that Fairfax had not the heart to pawn for coffee and coal. There was a sound of footsteps on the stairs without.
"It's the fellows coming to take my statuette," said Fairfax.
"It's the tailor, the bootmaker and the shirtmaker,"said Dearborn. "Go behind the screen, Tony—run to Monte Carlo."
There was a tap at the door and a cheerful voice called—
"Mr. Rainsford,c'est moi."
"It is Potowski. I will have to let him in, Bob. Here's all Paris for you. You wanted it."
He opened the door for Count Potowski.
The Polish singer came quickly in, his silk hat and his cane in his hand. He looked around brightly.
"You don't hide from me," he said. "I have a fatal grasp when I take hold. You never call on me, Monsieur—so I call on you. Guerrea!—which means in Polish what 'altro' means in Italian, 'Doch' in German, 'Voilà' in French, and in unenthusiastic English, nothing at all."
Fairfax presented the Count to Dearborn, who beamed on him, amused, and Potowski glanced at the cold, cheerless Bohemia. It was meagre. It was cold. Privation was apparent. The place was not without a charm, and it had distinction. There were the evidences of intense work, of devotion to the ideal. There were the evidences of good taste and good breeding. The few bits of furniture were old and had been bought for a song, but selected with judgment. Fairfax's statuette waited on its pedestal to be carried away—in the winter light, softened and subdued by mist, Mrs. Fairfax read in her chair. Dearborn's table, strewn with his papers and books, told of hours spent at a beloved labour. There was nothing material to attract—no studio properties or decorations to speak of. Two long divans were placed against a wall of agreeable colour. There was nothing but the spirit of art and work, and the spirit of youth as well, but Potowski was delighted. He pointed to the statuette.
"This," he said, "is the lovely lady with whom you have been shut up all these days. It is charming, Monsieur."
"It is a study of my mother as I remember her."
"I salute it," said Potowski, making a little inclination. "I saluteyou. It is beautiful." He put his hand on Fairfax's arm. "You do my wife. You do theContessa," said Potowski, "the same. I adore it. It looks my wife. It might be her, Monsieur. But all beauty is alike, is not it? One lovely woman is all women. Are you not of my opinion?"
He swam toward Dearborn who was fascinated by Potowski's overcoat lined with fur, and with the huge fur collar, with his patent shoes with their white tops, with his bright waistcoat, his single eyeglass, his shining silk hat and, above all, by the gay foreign face, its waxed moustache and its sparkling dark eyes.
Dearborn wrapped his dressing-gown modestly around him to conceal his shirtless, collarless condition. Running his hands through dishevelled red hair, he responded—
"No, I don't agree with you. I guess your feminine psychology is at fault there, Count."
"Rreallynot," murmured the Count, looking at him eagerly.
"Mr. Dearborn is a playwright," said Antony. "He is a great student of character."
Potowski waved his hand in its light glove. "You write plays, Monsieur? You shall write me a libretto. I have been looking for ever for some one to write the words for ahoperaI am making."
Dearborn nodded. "Far from being all alike, I don't think that there have been two women alike since Eve."
"Rreally!"
Potowski looked at the red-headed man as if he wondered whether he had met and known all women.
"You find it so, Monsieur? Now I have been married three times. Every one of them were lovely women. I find them all the same."
"You must have a very adaptable, assimilating and modifying nature," said Dearborn, smiling.
"Modifying? What is that?" asked the Pole sweetly.
Neither of the young men made excuses for the icy cold room. They were too proud. They had nothing to offer Potowski, not even a cigarette, but the Pole forced his cigar-case upon them, telling them that he made his cigarettes with a machine by the thousand.
"My wife, Contessa Potowski, makes them, I mean.I do myself the pleasure to send you a box. They're contraband. You will be arrested if the police knows so."
"That," said Dearborn, "would really disappoint the tailor. I think he would like to get in his own score first. But I would rather go to prison as a contrabander than as a debtor."
They sat on the sofa together and smoked, their breath white in the cold room. But the amiable Potowski beamed on them, and Antony saw Dearborn's delight at the outside element. And Dearborn sketched his scenario, the colour hot in his thin cheeks, and Potowski, rubbing his hands to warm them, hummed airs from his own opera in a heavenly voice, and the voice and the enthusiasm magnetized poor Dearborn, carried out of his rut, and before he knew it he had promised to write a libretto for "Fiametta."
Whilst they talked the porters came and took away the statuette of Mrs. Fairfax, and Potowski said—
"It was like seeingtheycarry away my wife." And, when they had gone, Antony lighted the candles and Potowski rose and cried, as though the idea had just come to him: "Guerrea! My friends, I am alone to-night. My wife has gone to sing in Brussels. I implore you to come out to dinner with me—I know not where." He glanced at the sculptor and playwright, as they stood in the candle light. He had only seen Fairfax a well-dressed visitor at Mrs. Faversham's entertainments. On him now a different light fell. In his working clothes, there was nothing poverty-stricken about him, but the marks of need were unmistakably in the environment. He spoke to Dearborn, but he looked at Fairfax. "I have grown very fond of him. I love to speak my thoughts at him. We don't always agree, but we are always good for each other. I have not seen him for some time. I thought he go away."
Dearborn smiled. "Hewasjust going to Monte Carlo," he murmured.
Potowski, who did not hear, went on: "We will go and eat in some restaurant on this side of the river. I am tired of the Café de Paris. We will see a play afterwards. There is 'La Dame aux Camélias' with the divine Sarah. We laugh at dinner and we shall go and sob at La Dameaux Camélias. I like a happy weeping now and then." He swam toward them affably and appealingly. "I don't dress. I go as I am."
Dearborn grasped one of the yellow-gloved hands and shook it.
"Hang it all! I'm going, Tony. There are two pair of boots, anyhow. I haven't been to a play," he laughed excitedly, "since I was a child. Hustle, Tony, we will toss up for the best suit of clothes."
The drama of Dumas gave Antony a beautiful escape from reality. La Dame aux Camélias disenchanted him from his own problems for the time. In the Count's box he sat in the background and fed his eyes and his ears with the romantic and ardent art of the Second Empire. He found the piece great, mobile, and palpitating, and he was not ashamed. The divine Sarah and Marguerite Gautier died before his eyes, and out of the ashes womanhood arose and called to him, as the Venus de Milo had called to him down the long gallery, and distractions he had known seemed soulless and unreal shapes. He worshipped Dumas in his creation.