Fairfax and His Pride Part 47

Antony held her hand, looking at her, trying to see a deeper beauty in her face than was there, greater depths in her eyes than they could contain, more of the woman to fill his need and his loneliness. He realized how great that loneliness was and how demanding. She seemed like a child or a bird that he had caught ruthlessly.

"Didn't you drink just now to our friendship?"

She nodded, bit her lips, smiled, and her humour returned.

"Yes, I drank to our friendship."

"Well," he said, and hesitated, "well...." He drew her a little toward him; she resisted faintly, and Fairfax stopped and quickly kissed her, a feeling of shame in his soul. He kissed her again, murmured something to her, and she kissed him. Then she pushed him gently away, her face crimson, her eyes full of tears.

"No, no," she murmured, "you shouldn't have done it. It is too awful.

It's unworthy. Ami," she gasped, "do you know you are the first man I ever let do that? Do you believe me?" She was clinging to his hands, half laughing, half sobbing, and the kiss was sweet, sweet, and the moment was sweet. To one of them it was eternal, and could never come in all her lifetime like that again.

He stifled his self-reproach. He would have taken her in his arms again, but she ran from him, swiftly, like the bird set free.

"Wait," he called; "Nora Scarlet, I promise." He hurried to her. "You forget I am a lame jackdaw."

Then she stood still. They were walking together, his arm around her waist, when they came out at the alley's end. Standing by a marble bust on its pedestal, quite alone and meditative, as if she had just looked up, seen something and nevertheless decided to wait, Fairfax saw Mrs.

Faversham.

CHAPTER XIII

His first sensation, as he saw her, was as if a sudden light had broken upon a soul's darkness which until this moment had blinded him, oppressed him, condemned him; then there came a great revulsion against himself. Mrs. Faversham was very pale, as white as the bust by whose side she stood. She held out her hand, in its delicate glove, and tried to greet him naturally.

"How do you do, Mr. Rainsford?"

He was conscious of how kind she was, how womanly. He had refused her invitation and flaunted in her sight a vulgar pastoral. His cheeks were hot, his lips hardly formed a greeting. This was the work he had offered as an excuse to her when he had said that he could not go to Versailles.

"Then what is it to her?" he thought; "she is engaged to be married to Cedersholm. What am I or my vulgarities to her?" There was a fresh revulsion.

"Will you let me present Miss Scarlet," he said quietly, "Mrs.

Faversham?"

Mrs. Faversham, who had recovered herself, gave her hand into the woollen glove of Nora Scarlet, and, looking at the young girl, said that perhaps they had been sketching.

"Not in January," replied Nora with perfect self-possession. From the crown of Mrs. Faversham's fur hat to the lady's shoes, the girl's honest eyes had taken in her elegance and her grace. "We have been walking a bit after Paris."

Fairfax felt as though he had been separated from this lady for a long time, as though he had just come back, after a voyage whose details were tiresome. She seemed too divine to him and at once cruelly near and cruelly removed, in her dark dress, her small walking hat with a spray of mistletoe shining against the fur, her faultless shoes, her face so sweet and high-bred under her veil, her aloofness from everything with which he came in contact, her freedom from care and struggle, from temptation, from the sordidness of which he had long been a part. He suffered horribly; short as the moment was, the acuteness of its sensations comprised for him a miserable eternity.

"I have my carriage here, Mr. Rainsford. Will you not let me drive you both back to Paris?"

He wanted nothing but to go with her then, any way, the farther the better, and for ever. It came upon him suddenly, and he knew it. He refused, of course, angry to be obliged to do so, angrier still at what he was sure she would think was the reason for his doing so. She bade them both good-bye, now thoroughly mistress of herself, and reminded him that she would expect him the next day at three. She asked Miss Scarlet many questions about her work and the schools, as they walked along a little together, before Mrs. Faversham took the path that led to the gate where her carriage waited.

When they were together again alone, Fairfax and his companion, in the tram, he felt as though he had cut himself off once again, by his folly, from everything desirable in the world. The night was cold. He did not realize how silent he was or how silent she was. When they had nearly reached Paris, Miss Scarlet said--

"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 fashion 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 finishing 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."