Part 47 (2/2)

”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 G.o.d 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 fas.h.i.+on 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 gone almost 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 mult.i.tude, he turned and limped home to the studio in the Quais.

CHAPTER XIV

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 finis.h.i.+ng 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 a.s.sured 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 Sevres. He had bitterly renounced his worldly life, and was shortly obliged to p.a.w.n his dress suit, and, indeed, anything else that the young men could gather together went to the Mont de Piete, and once more the comrades were nearly dest.i.tute 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.”

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