Part 17 (2/2)

'I've been your first audience,' he said. 'Come out now, and I'll buy you flowers; your room shall be so full of flowers that you can hardly move through them. As for Verschoyle, he shall pay. It shall be his privilege to pay for us while we give the world the priceless treasure that is in us.'

His words rather repelled and hurt her, and in her secret mind she protested,--

'But I am a woman. But I am a woman.'

It hurt her cruelly that Charles should be blind to that, blind to the cataclysmic change in her, blind to her new beauty and to her newly gathered force of character. After all, the magic of the stage was only illusion, a trick that, if it were not a flowering of the deeper magic of the heart, was empty, vain, contemptible, a thing of darkness and cajolery.

'Perhaps it was just an accident,' said Clara.

'Do it again!' said Charles, in a tone of command.

'What?'

'Do it again!'

'I can't.'

'Do it again, I tell you. When you do a thing like that you have to find out how you did it. Art isn't a thing of chance. You must do it again now.'

'No.'

To her horror and amazement he pounced on her, seized her roughly by the shoulders, and shook her until her head rolled from side to side and her teeth chattered. He was beside himself with pa.s.sion, ruthless, impersonal in his fury to catch and hold this treasure of art which had so suddenly appeared in the child whom hitherto he had regarded as about as important as his hat or his walking-stick.

'By Jove,' he said, 'I might have known it was not for nothing that I fished you out of Picquart's studio....'

'How dare you speak to me like that?'

She knocked his hands away and stood quivering in an outraged fury, and lashed out at him with her tongue.

'I'm not paint that you can squeeze out of a tube,' she said. 'You treat people as though they were just that and then you complain if they round on you.... I know what you want. You want to squeeze out of me what your own work lacks....'

Charles reeled under this a.s.sault and his arms fell limply by his side.

'Forgive me,' he said, 'I didn't know what I was doing. I was knocked out with my astonishment and delight.... Really, really I forgot the stage was empty. I thought we were working....'

Clara stared at him. Could he really so utterly lose himself in the play as that? Or was he only persuading himself that it was so? ...

With a sudden intuition she knew that in all innocence he was lying to her, and that what had enraged him was the knowledge, which he could never admit, that she was no longer a child living happily in his imagination but a human being and an artist who had entered upon a royal possession of her own. She had outstripped him. She had become an artist without loss of humanity. Henceforth she must deal with realities, leaving him to his painted mummery... She could understand his frenzy, his fury, his despair.

'That will do, Charles,' she said very quietly. 'I will see what can be done about Mr Clott, and whatever happens I will see that you are not harmed.... If you like, you can dine with Verschoyle and me to-night. You can come home with me now, while I dress. I am to meet him at the Carlton and then we are going on to the Opera.'

'Does Verschoyle know?'

'He knows that you are you and that I am I--that is all he cares about... He is a good man. If people must have too much money, he is the right man to have it. He would never let a man down for want of money--if the man was worth it.'

'Ah!' said Charles, rea.s.sured. This was like the old Clara speaking, but with more a.s.surance, a more certain knowledge and less bewildering intuition and guess-work.

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