Fairfax and His Pride Part 43

He said now, lightly, as he handed the letter back, "You haven't been playing perfectly square with me, Tony. I'm afraid you have been wearing the boots under false pretences, but, nevertheless, I guess you will have to wear them to-morrow night, old man."

As Fairfax did not move, Dearborn finished more gravely--

"I would be glad to hear anything you are willing to tell me about it."

Fairfax turned slowly and put the letter back in his pocket. Then leaning across the table, in an undertone, he told Dearborn everything--everything. He spoke quietly and did not linger, sketching for him rapidly his life as far as it had gone. Twice Dearborn rose and fed the stove recklessly with fuel. Once he stood up, took a coverlet and wrapped it around him, and sat blinking like a resurrected mummy.

And Fairfax talked till Bella flashed like a red bird across the shadows, lifted her lips to his and was gone. Molly shone from the shadows and pa.s.sed like light through the open door. And, last of all, Mrs. Faversham came and brought a magic wand and she lingered, for Fairfax stopped here.

He had talked until morning. The dawn was grey across the frosty pane when he rose to throw himself down on his bed to sleep. The five-hundred-franc note lay where he had left it on the table between the empty plate and the empty cup. The fire was dead in the stove and the room was cold.

Dearborn, excited and interested, watched with the visions of Antony's past and the visions of his own creations for a long time. And Fairfax, exhausted by the eventful day, troubled by it, touched by it, watched the vision of a woman coming toward him, coming fatally toward him, wonderfully toward him--but he was tired, and, before she had reached him, he fell asleep.

CHAPTER VIII

Antony waited in the drawing-room of her hotel in the Avenue du Bois de Boulogne some quarter of an hour before she came downstairs. He thought later that she had purposely given him this time to look about and grow accustomed to the atmosphere, to the room in which he afterward more or less lived for several months.

There was not a false note to disturb his beauty-loving sense. He stood waiting, on one side a long window giving on a rose garden, as he afterward discovered, on the other a group in marble by Cedersholm. He was studying this with interest when he heard Mrs. Faversham enter the room. She had foreseen that he would not be likely to wear an evening dress and she herself had put on the simplest of her frocks. But he thought her quite dazzling, and the grace of her hands, and her welcome as she greeted him, were divine to the young man.

"I'm so glad to see you, Mr. Rainsford."

Instantly he bent and kissed her hand. She saw him flush to his fair hair. He felt a grat.i.tude to her, a thankfulness, which awakened in him immediately the strongest of emotions.

She seemed to consider him a distinguished guest. She told him that she was going to Rome when Mr. Cedersholm came over--there would be a little party going down to Italy.

Fairfax's eyes kindled, and in the few moments he stood with her there, in her fragrant drawing-room, where the fire in the logs sang and whispered and the lamp-light threw its long, fair shadows on the crimson floors and melted in the crimson hangings, he felt that he stood with an old friend, with some one he had known his life long and known well, even before he had known--and there was a poignancy in his treason--even before he had known his mother.

When the doors were thrown open and another visitor was announced, he was jealous and regretful and glanced at Mrs. Faversham as though he thought she had done him a wrong.

"My vife, oui," said the gentleman who came in and who was of a nationality whose type was not yet familiar to Fairfax. "My wife is horsed to-night, chere Madame; she cannot come to the dinner--a thousand pardons."

"I am sorry the Countess is ill."

Potowski, who had been told by his hostess not to dress, had made up for the sacrifice as brilliantly as he could. His waistcoat was of embroidered satin, his cravat a flaming scarlet, and in his b.u.t.ton-hole an exotic flower which went well with his dark, exotic face. He was a little ridiculous: short and fat, with a fashion of gesticulating with his hands as though he were swimming into society, but his expression was agreeable and candid. His near-sighted eyes were nave, his voice sweet and caressing. Rainsford saw that his hostess liked Potowski. She was too sweet a lady to be annoyed by peculiarities.

In a few moments, the lame sculptor on one side and the flashy Slav on the other, she led them to the little dining-room, to an exquisite table, served by two men in livery.

There was an intimacy in the apartment shut in by the panelling from floor to ceiling of the walls. The windows were covered with yellow damask curtains and the footfalls made no sound on the thick carpet.

"Mr. Rainsford is a sculptor," his hostess told Potowski. "He has studied with Cedersholm, but we shall soon forget whose pupil he is when he is a master himself."

"Ah," murmured the young man, who was nevertheless thrilled.

"He is going to do a bas-relief of me, Potowski--that is, I hope he will not refuse to make my portrait."

"Ah, no," exclaimed Potowski, clasping his soft hands, "not a bas-relief, chere Madame, but a statuary, all of it. The figure, is not it, Mr. Rainsford? You hear people say of the face it is beautiful, or the hand, or the head of a woman. I think it is all of her. It should be the entirety always, I think. I think it is monstrous to dissect the parts of the human body even in art. When I go to the _Museo_ and see a hand here, a foot there, a torso somewhere else--you will laugh, I am ridiculous, but it makes me think I look at a _haccident_.

"_Therefore_," exclaimed Potowski, gaily swimming toward the fruit and flowers with his soft hand, "begin, cher Monsieur, by making a whole woman! I never, never sing part of a _hopera_. I sing a lyric, a little complete song, but in its entirety."

"But, my dear Potowski," Mrs. Faversham laughed, "a bas-relief or a bust is complete."

"But why," cried the Pole, "why behead a lady? As for a profile, it is destruction to the human face." He turned to Fairfax. "You think I am a pagan. In France they have an impolite proverb, 'Stupid as a musician,'

but don't think it is true. We see harmony and melody in everything."

Apparently Potowski's lunacy had suggested something to Fairfax, for he said seriously----

"Perhaps Mrs. Faversham will let me make a figure of her some day"--he hesitated--"in the entirety," he quoted; and the words sounded madness, tremendously personal, tremendously daring. "A figure of her standing in a long cloak edged with fur, holding a little statuette in her hand."

"Charming," gurgled Potowski--he had a grape in his mouth which he had culled unceremoniously from the fruit dish. "That is a very modern idea, Rainsford, but I don't understand why she should hold a statuette in her hand."

"For my part," said the hostess, "I only understand what I have been taught. I am a common-place public, and I prefer a cla.s.sic bas-relief, a profile, just a little delicate study. Will you make it for me, Mr.

Rainsford?"

The new name he had chosen, and which was never real to him, sounded pleasantly on her lips, and it gave him, for the first time, a personality. His past was slipping from him; he glanced around the oval room with its soft lights and its warm colouring. It glowed like a beautiful setting for the pearl which was the lady. The dinner before him was delicious. It ceased to be food--it was a delicate refreshment.

The perfume of the flowers and wines and the cooking was intoxicating.

"You eat and drink nothing," Mrs. Faversham said to him.

"No," exclaimed Potowski, sympathetically, peering across the table at Rainsford. "You are suffering perhaps--you diet?"

Antony drank the champagne in his gla.s.s and said he was thinking of his bas-relief.

Potowski, adjusting a single eye-gla.s.s in his eye, stared through it at Rainsford.

"You should do everything in its entirety, Mr. Rainsford. Eat, drink, sculpt and sing," and he swam out again gently toward Rainsford and Mrs.

Faversham, "and love."

Antony smiled on them both his radiant smile. "Ah, sir," he said, "is not that just the thing it is hard for us all not to do? We mutilate the rest, our art and our endeavours, but a young man usually once in his life loves in entirety."

"I don't know," said the Pole thoughtfully, "I think perhaps not.

Sometimes it's the head, or the hands, or the figure, something we call perfect or beautiful as long as it lasts, Mr. Rainsford, but if we loved the entirety there would be no broken marriages."

Mrs. Faversham, whom the musician entertained and amused, laughed softly and rose, and, a man on each side of her, went into the drawing-room, to the fire burning across the andirons. Coffee and liqueurs were brought and put on a small table.

"Potowski is a philosopher, is he not, Mr. Rainsford? When you hear him sing, though, you will find that his best argument."

Potowski stirred six lumps of sugar into his small coffee cup, drank the syrup, drank a gla.s.s of liqueur with a sort of cheerful eagerness, and stood without speaking, dangling his eyegla.s.s and looking into the fire.

Mrs. Faversham took a deep chair and her dark, slim figure was lost in it, and Antony, who had lit his cigarette, leaned on the chimney-piece near her.

She glanced at him, at the deformed shoe, at his shabby clothes. He had made his toilet as carefully as he could; his linen was spotless, his cravat new and fashioned in a big bow. His fine, thoughtful face, lit now by the pleasure of the evening, where spirit and courage were never absent if other marks were there; his fine brow with the slightly curling blond hair bright upon it, and the profound blue of his eyes--he was different from any man she had seen, and she had known many men and been a great favourite with them. It pleased her to think that she knew and understood them fairly well. She was thinking what she could do for this man. She had wondered this suddenly, the day Fairfax had met her and left her in the Louvre; she had wondered more sincerely the evening she left him at his door. She had asked him to her house in a spirit of real kindness, although she had already felt his charm. Looking at him now, she thought that no woman could see him and hear him speak, watch him for an hour, and not be conscious of that charm. She wondered what she could do for Mr. Rainsford.

"Sit there, won't you?"--she indicated the sofa near her--"you will find that a comfortable place in which to listen. Count Potowski is the one unmaterial musician I ever knew. Time and place, food or feast, make no difference to him."

Potowski, without replying, turned abruptly and went toward the next room, separated from the salon by gla.s.s doors. In another moment they heard the prelude of Bohm's "Still as the Night," and then Potowski began to sing.