IT was spoken—the one word, so brief, so significant; and Jacqueline stood hesitating, pleading, equally ready to rush forward or to fly.
At last Max spoke.
"Why do you call me that?"
The tone in which the question was put was extremely low, the gray eyes were steady almost to coldness, the strong, slight fingers began mechanically to fold up the hair, strand upon strand.
Jacqueline's candle swayed, until a stream of the melted wax guttered to the floor.
"Because—"
"Yes?"
"Because—oh, because—because—I have always known!"
Then indeed a silence fell. Jacqueline, too petrified to embellish her statement, let her voice trail off into silence; Max, folding—mechanically folding—the strands of hair, offered neither disclaimer nor acceptance. With the force of the inevitable the confession had struck home, and deep within him was the strong soul's respect for the inevitable.
"You have always known?" he said, slowly, when the silence had fulfilled itself. "You have always known—that I am a woman?"
It sounded abominably crude, abominably banal—this tardy question, and never had Max felt less feminine than in the uttering of it.
The lips of Jacqueline quivered, her blue eyes brimmed with tears of distress.
"Oh, I could wish myself dead!"
"And why?"
"Because I have made myself an imbecile!"
The humiliation, the self-contempt were so candid, so human, that something changed in Max's face and the icy rigidity of pose relaxed.
"Come here!"
The guilty child to the life, Jacqueline came timidly across the room, the candlestick still drooping unhappily from her right hand, the mysterious mug clutched in her left.
Max's first action was to take possession of both, and to set them side by side upon the dressing-table. The candle Jacqueline delivered up in silence, but as the mug was wrested from her, she cried out in sudden vindictiveness:
"And that—look you—that is the cause of all! It was Lucien's idea! I served a cup ofbouillonto him and to his friend at midnight, for they had talked much; and finding it good, nothing would serve but I must place a cup also for Monsieur Max, to await him on his return. Alas! Alas!"
Max pushed the cup away, as if to remove a side issue.
"Answer the question I put to you! You know that I am a woman?"
"Yes; I know."
"Since when? Since the night at the Bal Tabarin?"
"Oh, but no!"
"Since the morning we met upon this doorstep?"
"No."
"Since the morning you made the coffee for M. Blake and me?"
Jacqueline was twisting the buckle of her belt in nervous perturbation.
"Answer me! It was since that morning?"
"No! Yes! Oh, it was before that morning. Oh, madame—monsieur!" She wrung her hands in a confusion of misery. "Oh, do not torture me! I cannot tell you how it was—or when. I cannot explain. You know how these things come—from here!" She lightly touched the place where she imagined her heart to be.
Max, sitting quiet, made no betrayal of the agony of apprehension at work within.
"And how many others have had this—instinct? M. Cartel? M. Blake?"
So surprising, so grotesque seemed the questions, that self-confidence rushed suddenly in upon Jacqueline. She threw back her head and laughed—laughed until her old inconsequent self was restored to power.
"Lucien! Monsieur Édouard! Oh,la, la! How droll!"
"Then they do not know?"
"Know? Are they not men? And are men not children?"
The vast superiority—the wordly wisdom in the babyish face was at once so comical and so reassuring that irresistibly Max laughed too; and at the laugh, the little Jacqueline dropped to her knees beside the dressing-table and looked up, smiling, radiant.
"I am forgiven?"
"I suppose so!"
"Then grant me a favor—one favor! Permit me to touch the beautiful hair!"
Without waiting for the permission, the eager little hands caught up the coiled strands, and in a moment the candlelight was again chasing the red tints and the bronze through the dark waves.
"My faith, but it is beautiful! Beautiful! And what a pity!"
"A pity—?"
"That no man may see it!" For an instant Jacqueline buried her face in the silky mass; then, like a little bright bird, looked up again. "A man would go mad for this!"
"For a thing like that? Absurd!"
"Yet a thing like that can demolish Monsieur Max, and leave in his place—"
"What?"
"How shall I say? His sister?" She looked up anew, disarming in her naïve candor: and a swift temptation assailed her listener—the temptation that at times assails the strongest—the temptation to unburden the mind.
"Jacqueline," Max cried, impetuously, "you speak a great truth when you say that! We have all of us the two natures—the brother and the sister! Not one of us is quite woman—not one of us is all man!"
The thought sped from him, winged and potent; and Jacqueline, wise in her child's wisdom, offered no comment, put forward no opinion.
"It is a war," Max cried again, "a relentless, eternal war; for one nature must conquer, and one must fail. There cannot be two rulers in the same city."
"No," Jacqueline murmured, discreetly, "that is most true."
"It is. Most true."
"Why, then, was madame adorning herself with her beautiful hair when I had the unhappiness to enter? Has not madame already waged her war—and conquered?"
The eyes were full of innocent question, the soft lips perfectly grave.
Max paused to frame the falsehood that should fit the occasion; but, like a flood-tide, the frankness, the courage of the boy nature rose up, and the truth broke forth.
"I thought until to-night, Jacqueline, that the battle was won; but to-night, while I supped with M. Blake, a little play was played out before me—a little human play, where real people played real parts, where the woman clung to her womanhood, as you cling to yours, and the man to his manhood, as does M. Cartel; where the stage effects were smiles and glances and eyes and hair—"
Jacqueline nodded, but said not a word.
"And as I watched, the thought came to me—the mad thought, that I had, perhaps, lost something—that I had, perhaps, put something from me. Oh, it was a possession! A possession of some evil spirit!"
Max sprang from the chair, and began to pace up and down the shadowed room, while the little Jacqueline, sitting back upon her heels in a stillness almost Oriental, watched, evolving some thought of her own.
"And so madame desired to strangle the evil spirit with her beautiful hair?"
The hurried steps ceased.
"I wished to see the woman in me—and to dismiss her!"
"And was she easily dismissed?"
The new question seemed curiously pregnant. Max heard it, and in swift response came back again to the dressing-table, took the hair from Jacqueline's hands and began again to intertwist it with the boyish locks.
Jacqueline raised herself from her crouching position, the more easily to gratify her curiosity.
"It is extraordinary—the change!" she murmured. "Extraordinary! Madame, let us complete it! Let us remove that ugly coat!" Excitedly, and without permission, she began to free Max of the boy's coat, while Max yielded with a certain passive excitement. "And, now, what can we find to substitute? Ah!" She gave a cry of delight and ran to the bed, over the foot of which was thrown a faded gold scarf—a strip of rich fabric such as artists delight in, for which Max had bargained only the day before in the rue André de Sarte.
"Now the tie! And the ugly collar!" She ran back, the scarf floating from her arm; and Max, still passive, still held mute by conflicting sensations, suffered the light fingers to unloose the wide black tie, to remove the collar, to open a button or two of the shirt.
"And now the hair!" With lightning-like dexterity, Jacqueline drew a handful of hairpins from her own head, reduced her short blonde curls to confusion, and in a moment had brushed the thick waves of Max's clipped hair upward and secured them into a firm foundation.
"Now! Now, madame! Close your eyes! I am the magician!"
Max's eyes closed, and the illusion of dead hours rose again, more vivid, more poignant than before. With the familiar sensation of deft fingers at work upon the business of hairdressing, a thousand recollections of countless nights and mornings—countless preparations and wearinesses—countless anticipations and disgusts, born with the placing of each hairpin, the coiling of the unfamiliar—familiar—weight of hair.
"Now, madame! Is it not a picture?"
With the gesture and pride of an artist, Jacqueline cast the wide scarf round Max's shoulders and stepped back.
Max's eyes opened, gazing straight into the mirror, and once again in that night of contrasts, emotion rose paramount.
It was most truly a picture; not the earlier, puzzling sketch—the anomalous mingling of sex—but the complete semblance of the woman—the slim neck rising from the golden folds, the proud head, seeming smaller under its coiled hair than it had ever appeared in the untidiness of its boy's locks.
"And now, madame, tell me! Is the evil spirit one lightly to be dismissed?"
All the woman in the little Jacqueline—the creature of eternal tradition, eternal intrigue—was glorying in her handiwork, in the consciousness of its potency.
But Max never answered; Max continued to stare into the glass.
"You will dismiss it, madame?"
Max still stared, a peculiar light of thought shining and wavering in the gray eyes.
"Madame, you will dismiss it?"
Max turned slowly.
"I will do more, Jacqueline. I will destroy it utterly."
"Madame!"
"I have a great idea."
"Madame!"
"If a spirit—no matter how evil—could be materialized, it would cease to affect the imagination. I shall materialize mine!"
"Madame!"
"Yes; I have arrived at a conclusion. I shall render my evil spirit powerless by materializing it. But I must first have a promise from you; you must promise me to keep my secret."
"Madame—madame!" Jacqueline stammered.
"You will promise?"
"Yes."
"And how am I to trust you?"
Jacqueline's blue eyes went round and round the room, in search of some overwhelming proof of her fidelity; then swiftly they returned to Max's.
THE COMPLETE SEMBLANCE OF THE WOMAN
THE COMPLETE SEMBLANCE OF THE WOMAN
"Not even to Lucien, madame, shall it be revealed!" And silently Max nodded, realizing the greatness of the pledge.
Many hours later, when all the lights were out in the rue Müller and all the doors wore closed, the slight figure of the boy Max might have been seen by any belated wanderer slipping down the Escalier de Sainte-Marie to post a letter—a letter that had cost much thought, and upon which had been dropped many blots of ink; and had the belated wanderer been possessed of occult powers and wished to probe inside the envelope, the words he would have read were these—scrawled with bold impetuosity:
Mon Ami,—My idea—the true idea—has come to me. It was born in the first hour of this new day, and with it has come the knowledge that, either you were right and some artists need solitude, or I am one of the fools I talked of yesterday!All this means that I am ill of the fever of work, and that for many, many days—many, many weeks—I shall be in my studio—locked away even from you.Think no unkind thing of me! All my friendship is yours—and all my thought. Be not jealous of my work! Understand! Oh, Ned, understand! And know me, for ever and for ever, your boy.MAX.
Mon Ami,—My idea—the true idea—has come to me. It was born in the first hour of this new day, and with it has come the knowledge that, either you were right and some artists need solitude, or I am one of the fools I talked of yesterday!
All this means that I am ill of the fever of work, and that for many, many days—many, many weeks—I shall be in my studio—locked away even from you.
Think no unkind thing of me! All my friendship is yours—and all my thought. Be not jealous of my work! Understand! Oh, Ned, understand! And know me, for ever and for ever, your boy.
MAX.
OF all the ills that circumstance forces upon man, separation from a beloved object is, perhaps, the most salutary. Separation is the crucible wherein love undergoes the test absolute; in the fire of loss, grief softens to indifference or hardens to enduring need.
The pale blue sky of May smiled upon Montmartre. The shrubs in the plantation shimmered forth in green garments, the news-vender by the gate, the little old Basque peasant woman telling her beads in the shade of a holly-tree, even the children screaming at play on the gravelled pathway, were touched with the charm of the hour. Or so it seemed to Max—Max,debonairof carriage—Max, hastening to arendezvouswith fast-beating heart and nerves that throbbed alternately to a wild joy of anticipation and a ridiculous, self-conscious dread.
How he had counted upon the moment! How he had loved and feared it in ardent, varying imagination! And now, that it had at last arrived, how hopelessly his prearranged actions eluded him, how humanly his rehearsed sentences failed to marshal themselves for speech! As he climbed up the plantation, dazzled by the sun, intoxicated by the budding summer, he felt the merest unsophisticated youth—the merest novice, dumb and impotent under his own emotions.
Then, suddenly, all self-distrust—even all self-consciousness—was reft from him and he stood quite still, the blood burning his face, a strange sensation contracting his throat.
"At last! After a hundred thousand years!"
The first impression that fled across his mind was the intense familiarity of Blake's voice—the delightful familiarity of Blake's phrasing; the second, the brimming joy of regained companionship.
"Mon ami! Cher ami!"
His hands went out and were caught in Blake's; and all existence became a mirror to the blue, smiling sky.
No further word was said; Blake took possession of his arm in the old, accustomed fashion, and silently—in that silence which makes speech seem poor—they turned and began to pace up and down the gravelled path.
There was nothing beautiful in the plantation of the Sacré-Coeur; the shrubs, for all their valor of green, were slight things if one thought of forest trees, the grass was a mere pretence of grass. But the human mind is a great magician, weaving glories from within, and neither Blake nor Max had will for anything but the moment set precisely as it was.
For the gift of the universe, Blake could not have told why the mere holding of the boy's arm, the mere regulating of his pace to his, filled him with such satisfaction; nor, for the same magnificent bribe, could Max have explained the glow—the all-sufficing sense of fulfilment, born of the physical contact.
For long they paced up and down, wrapped in their cloak of content; then some look, some movement brought the world back, and Blake paused.
"What a selfish brute I am! What about the work? Tell me, is it done?"
Max looked up, the sun discovering the little flecks of gold in his gray eyes; Max laughed from sheer happiness.
"Mon ami!But absolutely I had forgotten! Figure it to yourself! I came out of the house, hot and cold for my poor picture, and immediately we met—" He laughed again. "Mon ami! What a compliment to you!"
"It is done then—the great work?"
"Yes; it is finished."
"Then I must see it this minute—this minute—this very minute!"
The definiteness of the tone was like the clasp of the arm, and Max glowed anew. By a swift, emotional effort, he conjured up the longings that had preyed upon him in his self-imposed solitude—conjured them for the sheer joy of feeling them evaporate before reality.
"It awaits you,mon ami!" He made a sweeping gesture, as though he laid the world at his friend's feet. And Blake, noting this, noted also with an odd little sense of gratification, that Max's English was a trifle more halting—a trifle more stilted for the break in their companionship.
Still arm in arm, they passed down the sloping pathway to the gate, where the children still played shrilly and the old Basque peasant still drowsed over her rosary beads. As they passed her, Blake put his hand in his pocket and slipped a silver coin into her fingers.
"They're so like my own people—these Basque peasants!" he said, by way of excuse. "They always give me a warm feeling about the heart."
The old woman looked up surprised, and both were attracted by the picture she made against the dark holly-trees—- the brown withered face, the astonishingly bright eyes like the eyes of a bird, the spare, bent figure with its scrupulous cleanliness of dress.
"The blessing of the good God rest upon you, monsieur!" she said, solemnly. "And may He provide you with your heart's desire!"
"And for me,bonne mère?" Max broke in. "What for me?"
The small bright eyes scanned the young face thoughtfully. "The good God, monsieur, will take you where He means that you should go!" Her thin lips closed, and she fell again to the telling of her beads, her inner vision doubtless weaving the scenes of her youth—the grave brown hills and sounding sea of her native country.
"For the moment it would seem that the good God points a way to the studio!" said Max, as they turned away. "Mon ami, I burn and tremble at once! Suppose it is of no use—my picture?" He stopped suddenly by the gate, to gaze with unpremeditated consternation at Blake; and Blake, touched by the happy familiarity of the action, laughed aloud.
"The same Max!" he cried. "The same, same Max! It's like turning back to the first page of my little book. Come along! I have spirit for anything to-day—even to tell you that you've made a failure. Come along, boy! It's a great world, when all's said and done! Come along! I'll race you up the steps!"
Laughing like a couple of children, they ran up the Escalier de Sainte-Marie, smiled upon indulgently by the careless passers-by, and entering the house, the race was continued up the polished stairs.
At the door of theappartementMax came level with Blake, his face glowing with excitement, his laughter broken by quick breaths.
"Oh, Ned, no! No! You must not enter! I am to go first. I have arranged it all. Ned, please!" He pulled Blake back and, opening the door, passed into the little hall and on into the bare, bright studio.
To Blake, following closely, the scene bore a striking resemblance to another scene—to the occasion upon which Max had blocked in, and then destroyed, hiscabaretpicture—save that now the light was no longer the silvery light of spring, but the pale gold radiance of a youthful summer.
The impression came, but the impression was summarily erased, for as he crossed the threshold, Max flew to him, his exuberance suddenly dead, the trepidation of the artist enveloping him again, chasing the blood from his cheeks.
"Oh, Ned! Dear Ned! If it is bad?" He caught and clung to Blake's arm, restraining him forcibly. "Do not look! Wait one moment! Just one little moment!"
Very gently Blake disengaged the clinging hands. "What a child he is, after all! He shuts himself away and works like a galley-slave and then, when the moment of justification comes—! Nonsense, boy! I'm not a critic. Let me see!"
As in a dream, Max saw him walk round the easel and pause full in front of it; in an agony of apprehension, a quaking eagerness, he lived through the moment of silence; then at Blake's first words the blood rushed singing to his ears.
"It's extraordinary! But who is it?"
"Extraordinary? Extraordinary?" In a wild onset of emotion, Max caught but the one word. "Does that mean good—or does it mean bad? Oh,mon cher, all that I have put into that picture! Speak! Speak! Be cruel! It is all wrong? It is all bad?"
"Don't be a fool!" said Blake, harshly. "You know it's good. But who is it? That's what I'm asking you. Who is it?"
Heedless, unstrung—half laughing, half crying—Max ran across the room. "Oh,mon ami, how you terrified me—I thought you had condemned it!"
But Blake's eyes were for the picture; the portrait of a woman seated at a mirror—a portrait in which the delicate reflected face looked out from its shadowing hair with a curious questioning intentness, a fascinating challenge at once elusive and vital.
"Who is it?"
He spoke low and with a deliberate purpose; and at his tone recklessness seized upon Max.
"A woman,mon ami! Just a woman!" He stiffened his shoulders, threw up his head, like a child who would dare the universe.
"Yes, but what woman?" With amazing suddenness Blake swung round and fixed a searching glance upon him. "She's the living image of you—but you with such a difference—"
He stopped as swiftly as he had begun, and in the silence Max quailed under his glance. Out of the unknown, fear assailed him; it seemed that under this mastering scrutiny his mask must drop from him, his very garments be rent. In sudden panic his thought skimmed possibilities like a circling bird and lighted upon the first-found point of safety.
"She is my sister," he said, in a voice that shook a little. "She is my sister—Maxine."
Blake's eyes still held his.
"But you never said you had a sister."
Max seized upon his bravado, flinging it round him as a garment.
"Mon ami," he cried, "we are not all as confiding as you! Besides, it is not given to us all to possess five aunts, seven uncles, and twenty-four first cousins! If I have but one sister, may I not guard her as a secret?"
He spoke fast; his eyes flashed with the old light, half pleading, half impertinent, his chin was lifted with the old defiant tilt. The effect was gained. Blake's severity fell from him, and with a quick gesture of affection he caught him by the shoulder.
"I'm well reproved!" he said. "Well reproved! 'Twas quite the right way of telling me to mind my own affairs. And if she weremysister—" He turned again to the picture, but as his eyes met the mirrored eyes with their profound, inscrutable look, his words broke off unaccountably.
"Yes,mon ami? If she were your sister—?" Max, with eager, stealthy glance, was following his expressions.
But he did not answer; he stood lost in contemplation, speculating, he knew not why, upon the question in the mirrored face.
THE studio was in darkness; the old leathern arm-chair was drawn close to the window, and from its capacious depths Blake looked down upon the lights of Paris, while Max, leaning over the balcony, looked upward at the pale May stars clustering like jewelled flowers in the garden of the sky.
They had finished dinner—a dinner cooked by Blake in the little kitchen beyond the hall, and empty coffee-cups testified to a meal enjoyed to its legitimate end. The sense of solitude—of an intimate hour—lay upon the scene as intangibly and as definitely as did the darkness; but Max, watching the pageant of the stars, resting his light body against the iron railing, was filled with a mental restlessness, the nervous reaction of the day's triumph. More than once he glanced at Blake, a little gleam of uncertainty flashing in his eyes, and more than once his glance returned to the sky, as if seeking counsel of its immensity.
Upon what point was Blake speculating? What were the thoughts at work behind his silence? The questions tormented him like the flicking of a whip, and he marked with an untoward jealousy the profundity of Blake's calm—marked it until, goaded by a sudden loneliness, he cried his fear aloud.
"Ned! You missed me in these weeks?"
Blake started, giving evidence of a broken dream. "Missed you, boy?" he said, quietly. "I didn't know how much I missed you until I saw you again to-day."
"And you have made no new friend?"
"Not a solitary one—man, woman, or child!"
The reply would have satisfied the most suspicious; and Max gave a quick, deep sigh of relief.
"Ah! I thank God!"
In the darkness, Blake smiled, looking indulgently at the youthful figure silhouetted against the sky. "Why are you so absurd, boy?" he asked, gently. "Surely, I have proved myself!"
"Forgive me! I was jealous!" With one of his engaging impulses, the boy straightened himself and came across the balcony. "I am a strange creature, Ned! I want you altogether for myself—I want to know you satisfied to be all mine!"
Blake looked up. "Do you know," he said, irrelevantly and a little dreamily, "do you know that is just the speech I could imagine issuing from the lips of your picture! Tell me something of this mysterious sister of yours; I've been patient until now."
Max drew back into the darkness.
"Of my sister? There is nothing to tell!"
"Nonsense! There's always something to tell. It's the sense of a story behind things that keeps half of us alive. Come! I've spun you many a yarn." With the quiet air of the man who means to have his way, he took out and lighted a cigar.
"Come, boy! I'm listening!"
Max had turned back to the railing, and once more he leaned out into the night; but now his eyes were for the meshed lights of the city and no longer for the stars, his restlessness had heightened to excitement, his heart seemed to beat in his throat. The temptation to make confession, to make confession here, isolated in the midst of the world, with the friend of his soul for confessor, caught him with the urgency of an embracing gale. To lay himself bare, and yet retain his garments! His head swam, as he yielded to the suggestion.
"There is nothing to tell!" he said again.
"That's admitted! All the best stories begin that way."
Max laughed and took a cigarette from his pocket. His nerves were tingling, his blood racing to the thought of the precipice upon which he stood. One false step and the fabric of his existence was imperilled! The adventurer awoke in him alive and alert.
"She intrigues you, then—Maxine?"
"Marvellously—as the Sphinx intrigues me! To begin with, why the name? You Max! She Maxine!"
For an instant Max scanned the dark plantation with knitted brows; then he looked over his shoulder with a peculiar smile.
"We are twins,mon cher!" he said, taking secret joy in the elaboration of his lie. "My mother was a Frenchwoman, by name Maxine, and when she died at our birth, my father in his grief bestowed the name upon us both—the boy and the girl—Max and Maxine!" Very carefully he lighted his cigarette. His whole nature was quivering to the dangers of this masked confession—this dancing upon the edge of the precipice. "My father was a man of ideas!" He carefully threw the match down into the rue Müller.
"Your father, I take it, was a personage of importance?" Blake was momentarily sarcastic.
"A personage, yes," the boy admitted, "but that is not the point. The point is that he was a man of ideas, who understood the body and the soul. A man who trained a child in every outdoor sport until it was one with nature, and then taught it to entrap nature and bend her to the uses of art. He was very great—my father!"
"He is dead?"
"Yes; he is dead. He died the year before Maxine married."
"Ah, she married?" Absurd as it might seem, there was a fleeting shadow of disappointment discernible in Blake's voice.
"Yes, she married. After my father's death she went to my aunt in Petersburg, and there she forgot both nature and art—and me."
"And who was the man she married?"
Max shrugged his shoulders to the ears. "Does it serve any purpose to relate? He was very charming, very accomplished; how was my sister, at eighteen, to know that he was also very callous, very profligate, very cruel? These things happen every day in every country!"
"Did she love him?" Blake was leaning forward in his chair; he had forgotten to keep his cigar alight.
"Love him?" With a vehemence electric as it was unheralded, Max's voice altered; with the passionate changefulness of the Russian, indifference was swept aside, emotion gushed forth. "Love him? Yes, she loved him—she, who was as proud as God! She loved him so that all her pride left her—all the high courage of my father left her—"
"And he—the man, the husband?"
"The man?" Max laughed a short, bitter laugh unsuggestive of himself. "The man did what every man does, my friend, when a woman lies down beneath his feet—he spurned her away."
"But, my God, a creature like that!"
Again Max laughed. "Yes! That is what you all say of the woman who is not beneath your own heel! You wonder why I disapprove of love. That is the reason of my disapproval—the story of my sister Maxine! Maxine who was as fine and free as a young animal, until love snared her and its instrument crushed her."
"But the man—the husband?" said Blake again.
"The man? The man followed the common way, dragging her with him—step by step, step by step—down the sickening road of disillusionment—down that steep, steep road that is bitter as the Way of the Cross!"
"Boy!"
"I shock you? You have not travelled that road! You have not seen the morass at the bottom! You have not seen the creature you loved stripped of every garment that you wove—as has my sister Maxine! You do well to be shocked. You have not been left with a scar upon your heart; you have not viewed the last black picture of all—the picture of your beloved as a dead thing—dead over some affair of passion so sordid that even horror turns to disgust. You do well to be shocked!"
"Dead?" repeated Blake, caught by the sound of the word. "He died, then?"
"He killed himself." Max laughed harshly. "Killed himself when all the wrong was done!"
"And your sister? Your sister? Where did she go—what did she do?"
"What does a woman do when she is thrown up like wreckage after the storm?"
"She does as her temperament directs. I think your sister would go back to nature—to the great and simple things."
With a tense swiftness the boy turned from his fixed contemplation of the sky, his glance flashing upon Blake.
"One must be naked and whole to go back to nature! One fears nature when one is wreckage from the storm!"
"Then she turned to art?"
"No, my friend! No! Art, like nature, exacts—and she had already given! She was too frightened—too hurt to meddle with great things. She dried her tears before they had time to fall; she hardened her heart, and went back to the world that gives nothing and exacts nothing."
"Poor child!" said Blake. "Poor child!"
"She went back to the world—and the world poured oil on her wounds, and soothed her fears and taught her its smiling, shallow ways."
"Poor child!"
The reiterated word had a curious effect upon the boy; his fierceness dropped from him; he turned again to the railing and, looking upward, seemed to drench himself in the coolness of the starlight.
"For years she lived her shallow life. She took lightly the light gifts the world offered; among those gifts was love—"
"Stop!" cried Blake, involuntarily. "You are tarnishing the picture!"
"I am only painting in crude colors! Much love was offered lightly to Maxine, and she took it—lightly; then one day her friend the world brought for her consideration a suitor more powerful, more distinguished, even less exigent than the rest—"
"Stop! Stop!" cried Blake, again. "I can't see her as this hard woman. She frightens me!"
"She has sometimes frightened me," said Max, enigmatically, "but that is outside the picture. She took, as I tell you, with both hands, smiling very wisely to herself, holding her head very high. But when the head is held too high, the feet sometimes fall into a trap. It came suddenly—the trapping of my sister Maxine."
"Yes! Yes! Tell me!"
"I am telling you, my friend! The date of Maxine's marriage was fixed, and she moved through her world content. One night a great court function was held; she was present, herfiancéwas present, the atmosphere was all congratulation—like honey and wine. When it was over, thefiancébegged the privilege of escorting her to her home, and they drove together through the cold Russian night. They spoke little; Maxine's thoughts skimmed lightly over the future, her hands lay lightly in herfiancé's. All was unemotional—all was smooth and undisturbed—until they reached the street where her house stood; then, with the swiftness that belongs to mad moments, the being beside her showed himself. Quick as a flash of lightning, the dignified, distinguished, unexacting lover was effaced, and in his place was a man—an animal—a passionate egoist! He caught her in his arms, and his arms were like iron bands; his lips pressed hers, and they were like a flame. In a flash, the fabric of her illusions was scattered. She saw the truth. The world had cheated her, this second marriage was to be as the first. Terror seized my sister Maxine—terror of life, terror of herself. Her false calm broke up, as the ice breaks under the hand of spring—wells of fear gushed in her heart. She dismissed her lover at the gateway of her house; he guessed nothing—he knew nothing but that her hands were shaking and that her face was white, but when he was gone she rushed to her own room, cast off all her jewels, wrapped herself in a fur cloak and commanded her sledge and her swiftest horses."
"Boy!" cried Blake. "What a situation!"
"She drove, drove for hours, feeling nothing of the biting cold, seeing nothing of the imprisoning white world about her, goaded by one idea—the terror of life—the terror of giving herself again—"
"She fled," cried Blake, with sudden intuition. "She never returned to Petersburg!" He had risen from his chair; he was supremely, profoundly interested.
"She never returned to her own house. Three days after that wild drive she left Russia—left Russia and came—"
"To you!" cried Blake. "What a superb situation! She came back to you—the companion of her youth—to you, adventuring here in your own odd way! Oh, boy, it's great!"
"It is strange—yes!" said Max, suddenly curbing himself.
"Strange? It's stupendous!" Blake caught him by the shoulder, wheeling him round, looking straight into his face. "Boy! You know what I'm going to ask? You know what I'm wanting with all my heart and soul?"
The pressure of his hand was hard; he was the Blake of rare moments—the Blake roused from nonchalant good-nature into urgency of purpose. Max felt a doubt, a thin, wavering fear flutter across his mind.
"Mon cher," he stammered, "I do not know. How could I know?"
"It's this, then! With all my heart and soul I want to know this sister of yours."
IT came sharply, as the crash of a breaking vessel might come to the ear—this ring of reality in Blake's voice! Abruptly, unpleasantly, Max came back to the world and the consequences of his act.
Impressions and instincts spring to the artist mind; in a moment he was armored for self-preservation—so straitly armored that every sentiment, even the vague-stirring jealousy of himself that had been given sudden birth, was overridden and cast into the dark.
With the old hauteur, the old touch of imperiousness, he returned Blake's glance.
"Mon ami," he said, gravely, "what you desire is impossible."
Only a moment had intervened between Blake's declaration and his reply, but it seemed to him that the universe had reeled and steadied again in that brief interval.
"And why impossible?"
Again it was the atmosphere of their first meeting—the boy hedged behind his pride, the man calmly breaking a way through that hedge.
Max shrugged. "The word is final. It explains itself."
With a conciliatory, affectionate movement, Blake's hand slipped from his shoulder to his arm. "Don't be absurd, boy," he said, gently. "Nothing on God's earth is impossible. 'Impossibility' is a word coined by weak people behind which to shelter. Why may I not know your sister?"
Max drew away his arm, not ostentatiously, but with definite purpose.
"Can you not understand without explanation—you, who comprehend so well?"
"Frankly, I cannot."
"My sister is in Paris secretly. She would think it very ill of me to discuss her affairs—"
Blake looked quickly into the cold face. "I wonder if she would, boy?" he said. "I think I'll go and see!" With perfect seriousness he stepped back into the studio, struck a match, lighted a candle and walked deliberately to the easel, while Max, upon the balcony, held his breath in astonishment.
For long he stood before the portrait; then at last he spoke, and his words were as unexpected as his action had been.
"She loves you, boy?" he asked.
"Loves me? Oh, of course!" Max was startled into the reply.
"Then 'twill be all right!" With a touch of finality he blew out his candle and came back to the balcony. "It will be all right, or I'm no judge of human nature! That woman could be as proud as Lucifer where she disliked or despised, but she'd be all toleration, all generosity where her love was touched. Tell her I'm your friend and, believe me, she'll ask no other passport to her favor."
Max, standing in the darkness—eager of glance, quick of thought, acutely attentive to every tone of Blake's voice—suddenly became cognizant of his demon of jealousy, felt its subtle stirring in his heart, its swift spring from heart to throat. A wave of blood surged to his face and receded, leaving him pale and trembling, but with the intense self-possession sometimes born of such moments, he stepped into the studio and relighted the candle Blake had blown out.
"Why are you so anxious to know my sister?" His voice was measured—it gave no suggestion either of pleasure or of pain.
Blake, unsuspicious, eager for his own affairs, followed him into the room.
"I can't define the desire," he said; "I feel that I'd find something wonderful behind that face; I feel that"—he paused and laughed a little—"that somehow I should findyoutransfigured and idealized and grown up."
"It is the suggestion of me that intrigues you?"
"I suppose it is—in a subtle way!" He glanced up, to accentuate his words, but surprise seized him at sight of the boy's white, passionate face. "Why, Max, boy! What's the matter?"
Max made a quick gesture, sweeping the words aside. "I am not sufficient to you?"
Blake stared. "I don't understand."
"Yet I speak your own tongue! I say 'I am not sufficient to you?' I have given you my friendship—my heart and my mind, but I am not sufficient to you? Something more is required—something else—something different!"
"Something more? Something different?"
"Yes! In this world it is always the outward seeming! I may have as much personality as my sister Maxine; I may be as interesting, but you do not inquire. Why? Why? Because I am a boy—she a woman!"
Blake, uncertain how to answer this cataract of words, took refuge in banter.
"Don't be fantastical!" he said. "We are not holding a debate on sex. If we are to be normal, we must declare that man and woman don't compare!"
"Now you are gambling with words! I desire facts. It is a fact that until to-day I was enough—friend enough—companion enough—"
"My child!"
But Max rushed on, lashing himself to rage.
"I was enough; but now you desire more. And why? Why? Not because you discern more in the new personality, but because it appeals to you as the personality of a woman. There is nothing deeper—nothing more in the affair—no other reason, as you yourself would say, upon God's earth!" He ended abruptly; his arms fell to his sides; his voice held in it a sound perilously like a sob.
Blake looked at him in surprise.
"My good boy," he said, "you're forgetting the terms of our friendship; to my knowledge they never included hysterics."
The tonic effect of the words was supreme; the sob was strangled in Max's throat; a swift, pained certainty came to him that Blake would not have spoken these words in the plantation that morning, would not have spoken them as they raced together up the Escalier de Sainte-Marie.
"I understand,mon ami!" he said, tensely. "I understand so perfectly that, were you dying, and were this request your last, I would refuse it! I hope I have explained myself!"
The tone was bitter and contemptuous, it succeeded in stinging Blake. Up to that moment he had played with the affair; now the play became earnest, his own temper was stirred.
"Thanks, boy!" he said; "but when I'm dying I'll hope for an archangel to attend to my wants—not a little cherub. Good-night to you!" Without look or gesture of farewell, he picked up his hat and walked out of the room.
Once before this thing had happened; once before Max had heard the closing of the door, and known the blank isolation following upon it. But then weeks of close companionship, weeks of growing affection had preceded the moment, giving strength for its endurance; now it came hot upon a long abstinence from friendship, an abstinence made doubly poignant by one day's complete reunion.
For a moment he stood—pride upon his right hand, love upon his left; for a moment he stood, waging his secret war, then with amazing suddenness, the issue was decided, he capitulated shamelessly. Pride melted into the night and love caught him in a quick embrace.
Lithe and silent as some creature of the forest, he was across the studio and down the stairs, his mind tense, his desires fixed upon one point.
Blake was crossing the dim hallway as the light feet skimmed the last slippery steps; he paused in answer to a swift, eager call.
"Ned! Ned! Wait! Ned, I want you!"
Blake paused; in the dim light it was not possible to read his face, but something in the outline of his figure, in the rigidity and definiteness of his stopping, chilled the boy with a sense of antagonism.
"Ned! Ned!" He ran to him, caught and clung to his arm, put forth all his wiles.
"Ned, you are angry! Why are you angry?"
"I am not angry; I am disappointed." Some strange wall of coldness, at once intangible and impenetrable, had risen about Blake. In fear the boy beat vain hands against it.
"You are disappointed, Ned—in me?"
"I am."
"And why? Why?"
"Because you have behaved like a little fool."
In themselves, the words were nothing, but Blake's tone was serious.
"And—because of that—you are disappointed?"
Max's voice undeniably shook; and the fates, peering into the dark hallway, smiled as they pushed the little human comedy nearer the tragic verge.
"I am," answered Blake, with cruel deliberateness. "I thought until to-night that you were a reasonable being—a bit elusive, perhaps—a bit wayward and tantalizing—but still a reasonable being. Now—"
"Now?" Suddenly Max had a sensation of being very small, very insignificant; suddenly he had an impression of Blake as a denizen of a wider world, where other emotions than laughter and comradeship held place—and his heart trembled unreasonably.
"Oh,mon cher!" he cried. "Forgive me! Forgive me! Say I am still your boy! Say it! Say it!"
Truth lent passion to his voice—false passion Blake esteemed it, and the cold, imaginary wall became more impregnable.
"That'll do, Max! Heroics are no more attractive to me than hysterics. Good-night to you!" He freed his arm and turned to the door.
In the darkness, Max threw out both hands in despairing appeal.
"Ned! Oh, Ned!" he called. But only the sound of Blake's retreating steps responded. And here was no merciful intervention of gods and mortals, to make good the evil hour; no pretty, tactful Jacqueline, no M. Cartel with his magic fiddle. Only the dim hall, the lonely stairway, the open door with its vision of cold, pale stars and whispering trees.
His misery was a tangible thing. Like a lost child, obsessed by its own fears, he bent under the weight of his sorrow; he sank down upon the lowest step of the stairs and, resting his head against the banister, broke into pitiful, silent tears.