Part 75 (2/2)

”Where did you learn this?” she asked.

I handed her the journal.

”Come in, fellow-student,” said she, and held the door wide for me to enter.

For the second time I found myself in her little _salon_, and found everything in the self-same order.

”Well,” I said, ”are you not happy?”

She shook her head.

”Success is not happiness,” she replied, smiling mournfully. ”That Beranger should have advocated my poem is an honor beyond price; but--but I need more than this to make me happy.”

And her eyes wandered, with a strange, yearning look, to the sword over the chimney-piece.

Seeing that look, my heart sank, and the tears sprang unbidden to my eyes. Whose was the sword? For whose sake was her life so lonely and secluded? For whom was she waiting? Surely here, if one could but read it aright, lay the secret of her strange and sudden journeys--here I touched unawares upon the mystery of her life!

I did not speak. I shaded my face with my hand, and sat looking on the ground. Then, the silence remaining unbroken, I rose, and examined the drawings on the walls.

They were water-colors for the most part, and treated in a masterly but quite peculiar style. The skies were sombre, the foregrounds singularly elaborate, the color stern and forcible. Angry sunsets barred by lines of purple cirrus stratus; sweeps of desolate heath bounded by jagged peaks; steep mountain pa.s.ses crimson with faded ferns and half-obscured by rain-clouds; strange studies of weeds, and rivers, and lonely reaches of desolate sea-sh.o.r.e ... these were some of the subjects, and all were evidently by the same hand.

”Ah,” said Hortense, ”you are criticizing my sketches!”

”Your sketches!” I exclaimed. ”Are these your work?”

”Certainly,” she replied, smiling. ”Why not? What do you think of them?”

”What do I think of them! Well, I think that if you had not been a poet you ought to have been a painter. How fortunate you are in being able to express yourself so variously! Are these compositions, or studies from Nature?”

”All studies from Nature--mere records of fact. I do not presume to create--I am content humbly and from a distance to copy the changing moods of Nature.”

”Pray be your own catalogue, then, and tell me where these places are.”

”Willingly. This coast-line with the run of breaking surf was taken on the sh.o.r.es of Normandy, some few miles from Dieppe. This sunset is a recollection of a glorious evening near Frankfort, and those purple mountains in the distance are part of the Taunus range. Here is an old mediaeval gateway at Solothurn, in Switzerland. This wild heath near the sea is in the neighborhood of Biscay. This quaint knot of ruinous houses in a weed-grown Court was sketched at Bruges. Do you see that milk-girl with her scarlet petticoat and Flemish _faille?_ She supplied us with milk, and her dairy was up that dark archway. She stood for me several times, when I wanted a foreground figure.”

”You have travelled a great deal,” I said. ”Were you long in Belgium?”

”Yes; I lived there for some years. I was first pupil, then teacher, in a large school in Brussels. I was afterwards governess in a private family in Bruges. Of late, however, I have preferred to live in Paris, and give morning lessons. I have more liberty thus, and more leisure.”

”And these two little quaint bronze figures?”

”Hans Sachs and Peter Vischer. I brought them from Nuremberg. Hans Sachs, you see, wears a furred robe, and presses a book to his breast.

He does not look in the least like a cobbler. Peter Vischer, on the contrary, wears his leather ap.r.o.n and carries his mallet in his hand.

Artist and iron-smith, he glories in his trade, and looks as st.u.r.dy a little burgher as one would wish to see.”

”And this statuette in green marble?”

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