believe. You know ‘adopted’ with a peculiar accent on the word—and it was plausible enough. I have been told that at that time she looked extremely youthful by his side, I mean extremely youthful in expression, in the eyes, in the smile. She must have been . . .”
Blunt pulled himself up short, but not so short as not to let the confused murmur of the word “adorable” reach our attentive ears.
The heavy Mills made a slight movement in his chair. The effect on me was more inward, a strange emotion which left me perfectly still; and for the moment of silence Blunt looked more fatal than ever.
“I understand it didn’t last very long,” he addressed us politely again. “And no wonder! The sort of talk she would have heard during that first springtime in Paris would have put an impress on a much less receptive personality; for of course Allegre didn’t close his doors to his friends and this new apparition was not of the sort to make them keep away. After that first morning she always had somebody to ride at her bridle hand. Old Doyen, the sculptor, was the first to approach them. At that age a man may venture on anything. He rides a strange animal like a circus horse. Rita had spotted him out of the corner of her eye as he passed them, putting up his enormous paw in a still more enormous glove, airily, you know, like this” (Blunt waved his hand above his head), “to Allegre. He passes on. All at once he wheels his fantastic animal round and comes trotting after them. With the merest casual ‘
He put his hat on very much on one side. ‘I am a great sculptor of women,’ he declared. ‘I gave up my life to them, poor unfortunate creatures, the most beautiful, the wealthiest, the most loved. . . Two generations of them. . . Just look at me full in the eyes,
“They stared at each other. Dona Rita confessed to me that the old fellow made her heart beat with such force that she couldn’t manage to smile at him. And she saw his eyes run full of tears. He wiped them simply with the back of his hand and went on booming faintly. ‘Thought so. You are enough to make one cry. I thought my artist’s life was finished, and here you come along from devil knows where with this young friend of mine, who isn’t a bad smearer of canvases—but it’s marble and bronze that you want. . . I shall finish my artist’s life with your face; but I shall want a bit of those shoulders, too. . . You hear, Allegre, I must have a bit of her shoulders, too. I can see through the cloth that they are divine. If they aren’t divine I will eat my hat. Yes, I will do your head and then—
“These were the first words with which the world greeted her, or should I say civilization did; already both her native mountains and the cavern of oranges belonged to a prehistoric age. ‘Why don’t you ask him to come this afternoon?’ Allegre’s voice suggested gently. ‘He knows the way to the house.’
“The old man said with extraordinary fervour, ‘Oh, yes I will,’ pulled up his horse and they went on. She told me that she could feel her heart-beats for a long time. The remote power of that voice, those old eyes full of tears, that noble and ruined face, had affected her extraordinarily she said. But perhaps what affected her was the shadow, the still living shadow of a great passion in the man’s heart.
“Allegre remarked to her calmly: ‘He has been a little mad all his life.’”
CHAPTER III
Mills lowered the hands holding the extinct and even cold pipe before his big face.
“H’m, shoot an arrow into that old man’s heart like this? But was there anything done?”
“A terra-cotta bust, I believe. Good? I don’t know. I rather think it’s in this house. A lot of things have been sent down from Paris here, when she gave up the Pavilion. When she goes up now she stays in hotels, you know. I imagine it is locked up in one of these things,” went on Blunt, pointing towards the end of the studio where amongst the monumental presses of dark oak lurked the shy dummy which had worn the stiff robes of the Byzantine Empress and the amazing hat of the “Girl,” rakishly. I wondered whether that dummy had travelled from Paris, too, and whether with or without its head. Perhaps that head had been left behind, having rolled into a corner of some empty room in the dismantled Pavilion. I represented it to myself very lonely, without features, like a turnip, with a mere peg sticking out where the neck should have been. And Mr. Blunt was talking on.
“There are treasures behind these locked doors, brocades, old jewels, unframed pictures, bronzes, chinoiseries, Japoneries.”
He growled as much as a man of his accomplished manner and voice could growl. “I don’t suppose she gave away all that to her sister, but I shouldn’t be surprised if that timid rustic didn’t lay a claim to the lot for the love of God and the good of the Church. . .
“And held on with her teeth, too,” he added graphically.
Mills’ face remained grave. Very grave. I was amused at those little venomous outbreaks of the fatal Mr. Blunt. Again I knew myself utterly forgotten. But I didn’t feel dull and I didn’t even feel sleepy. That last strikes me as strange at this distance of time, in regard of my tender years and of the depressing hour which precedes the dawn. We had been drinking that straw-coloured wine, too, I won’t say like water (nobody would have drunk water like that) but, well . . . and the haze of tobacco smoke was like the blue mist of great distances seen in dreams.
Yes, that old sculptor was the first who joined them in the sight of all Paris. It was that old glory that opened the series of companions of those morning rides; a series which extended through three successive Parisian spring- times and comprised a famous physiologist, a fellow who seemed to hint that mankind could be made immortal or at least everlastingly old; a fashionable philosopher and psychologist who used to lecture to enormous audiences of women with his tongue in his cheek (but never permitted himself anything of the kind when talking to Rita); that surly dandy Cabanel (but he only once, from mere vanity), and everybody else at all distinguished including also a celebrated person who turned out later to be a swindler. But he was really a genius. . . All this according to Mr. Blunt, who gave us all those details with a sort of languid zest covering a secret irritation.
“Apart from that, you know,” went on Mr. Blunt, “all she knew of the world of men and women (I mean till Allegre’s death) was what she had seen of it from the saddle two hours every morning during four months of the year or so. Absolutely all, with Allegre self-denyingly on her right hand, with that impenetrable air of guardianship. Don’t touch! He didn’t like his treasures to be touched unless he actually put some unique object into your hands with a sort of triumphant murmur, ‘Look close at that.’ Of course I only have heard all this. I am much too small a person, you understand, to even . . .”
He flashed his white teeth at us most agreeably, but the upper part of his face, the shadowed setting of his eyes, and the slight drawing in of his eyebrows gave a fatal suggestion. I thought suddenly of the definition he applied to himself: “
