Fairfax and His Pride Part 59

Mary Faversham-Cedersholm. He drew his breath hard, clasped one hand across his forehead, and still back in the far remote past he did not bid this vision of Mary Cedersholm to linger.

"When I came back to Paris, I found you had justified my faith in your work. The question of payment now, in case you undertake this group, for instance, I dare say the matter would be satisfactorily adjusted."

"I doubt it, Mr. Cedersholm."

Cedersholm, already interested in the man as a worker, became now interested in his personality, and found him curious, settled himself comfortably in his chair and swung his monocle, which he still wore, by its string. He saw the face of his host indistinctly, and his eyes wandered around the vast, shadowy studio where the swathed casts stood in the corners. The place gave him a twinge of jealousy and awakened all his longings as an artist.

"It makes me acutely suffer," he said, "to come into the workshop of the sculptor. Four years of enforced idleness----" Then he broke in abruptly and said, "You have apparently settled already in your mind--decided not to accept this work for us. I think you are determined not to meet us, Mr. Rainsford."

"The price," said Antony, leaning fully forward, his blue eyes, whose sight was unimpeded, fixed on Cedersholm, "must be great enough to buy me back my lost youth."

His companion laughed gently and said indulgently, "My dear Mr.

Rainsford."

"To buy me back my loss of faith in men's honour, in human kindness, in justice, in woman's love."

"He is a true genius," Cedersholm thought to himself, "just a bit over the line of mental balance." And he almost envied Antony this frenzy, for he had always judged himself too sane to be a great artist.

"It must buy me back three years of bitter struggle, of degrading manual toil."

"My dear man," said the sculptor indulgently. "I think I understand you, but no material price could ever do what you ask. Money, unfortunately, has nothing to do with the past; it can take care of the future more or less, but the past is beyond repurchase, you know."

It was growing constantly darker. The corners of the studio were deep in shadows, and the forms of Antony's casts shone like spectres in their white clothes; the scaffoldings looked ghostly and spirit-like.

Cedersholm sighed.

"Why have you come to me?" he heard Fairfax ask in his cutting tone, and he understood that for some reason or other this stranger was purposely impolite and unfriendly to him. He had not even found Fairfax's face familiar. There he sat before Antony, small, insignificant. How often he had crossed Tony's mind in some ugly dream when he had longed to crush him like a reptile. Now that he stood before him in flesh and blood it was astonishing to Fairfax to see how little real he was.

"I have been absent from France for six years," continued the Swede, and paused.... And Antony knew he was going back in his mind over the past six years of his married life with Mary. "I returned to Paris this week, and wandered into the Salon and stood with a crowd before your bas-relief. I stood for quite half an hour there, I should think, and at least one hundred men and women pa.s.sed and paused as I had paused. I listened to their comments. I saw your popularity and your power, and saw how you touched the ma.s.s by the real beauty of real emotion, by your expression of feeling in plastic art. This is not often achieved nowadays, Mr. Rainsford. Sculpture is the least emotional of all the arts; literature, painting, and music stir the emotions and bring our tears, but that calm, sublime marble, that cold stone awes us by its harmonious perfection. Before sculpture we are content to marvel and worship, and in the 'Open Door' you have made us do all this and made us weep. I do not doubt that amongst those people many had lost their own by death." He paused. It was so dark now that the two men saw each other's face indistinctly. In the shadows Cedersholm's form had softened; the shadows blurred him before Fairfax's eyes; his voice was intensely melancholy. "To every man and woman who has lost your bas-relief is profoundly appealing. Every one of us must go through that door. Your conception, Mr. Rainsford, and your execution are sublime."

Fairfax murmured something which Cedersholm did not make out. He paused a moment, apparently groping in thought as he groped with his weak eyes, and as Fairfax did not respond, he continued--

"You spoke just now of the price we must pay you, the price which you say must buy you back--what I judge you to mean by your progress, by these years of labour and education, by your apprenticeship to art, and, let me say, to life. My dear man, they have already purchased for you your present achievement, your present power. Everything we have, you know, must be paid for. Some things are paid for in coin, and others in flesh and blood and tears. To judge by what we know of the progress of the world in spiritual things and in art, it is the things that are purchased by this travail of the spirit that render eternal possessions, the eternal impressions. No man who has not suffered as you have apparently suffered, no man who has not walked upon thorns, could have produced the 'Open Door.' Do not degrade the value of your past life and the value of every hour of your agony. Why, it is above price." He paused ... his voice shook. "It is the gift of G.o.d!"

Antony's hands were clasped lightly together; they had been holding each other with a grip of steel; now they relaxed a bit. He bowed his head a little from its proud hauteur, and said--

"You are right; you are right."

"Four years ago," continued the voice--Cedersholm had become to him now only a voice to which he listened in the darkness--"four years ago, if I had seen the 'Open Door,' I would have appreciated its art as I recognized the value of your figure which I bought at the Exposition, but I could not have understood it; its spiritual lesson would have been lost upon me. You do not know me," he continued, "and I can in no way especially interest you. But these six years of my life, especially the last two, have been my Garden of Gethsemane."

He stopped. Antony knew that he had taken out the silk handkerchief again and wiped his eyes. After a second, Cedersholm said--

"You must have lost some one very near you."

"My wife," said Antony Fairfax.

The other man put out his hand, and he touched Antony's closed hands.

"I have lost my wife as well; she died two years ago."

Cedersholm heard Antony's exclamation and felt him start violently.

"Your wife," he cried, "Mary ... dead ... dead?"

"Yes. Why do you exclaim like that?"

"Not Mary Faversham?"

"Mary Faversham-Cedersholm. Did you know her?"

With a supreme effort Antony controlled himself. His voice suffocated him.

Dead! He felt again the touch of her lips; he heard again her voice; he felt her arms around him as she held him in Windsor--"Tony, darling, go!

It is too late."

Oh! the Open Door!

Cedersholm, in the agitation that his own words had produced in himself, and in his grief, did not notice that Fairfax murmured he had known Mrs.

Cedersholm in Paris.

"My wife was very delicate," he said. "We travelled everywhere. She faded and my life stopped when she died. To-day, when I saw the 'Open Door,' it had a message for me that brought me the first solace." Again his hands sought Fairfax's. "Thank you, brother artist," he murmured; "you have suffered as I have. You understand."

From where he sat, Fairfax struck a match and lit the candle. Its pale light flickered up in the big dark room like a lily shining in a tomb.

He said, with a great effort--

"I made a little bas-relief of Mrs. Cedersholm. Did she never speak of me?"

"Never," said Cedersholm thoughtfully. "She met so many people in France; she was so surrounded. She admired greatly the little figure I bought at the Exposition; it was always in our salon. We spoke of you as a coming power, but I do not recall that she ever mentioned having known you."

To Antony this was the greatest proof she could have given him of her love for him. That careful silence, the long silence, not once speaking his name. He had triumphed over Cedersholm. She had loved him.

Cedersholm murmured--

"And you did that bas-relief--a head silhouetted against a lattice? It never left her room, but she never mentioned it to me although I greatly admired it. It Was a perfect likeness." Fairfax saw Cedersholm peer at him through the candle light. "Curious," he continued, "curious."

And Antony knew that Cedersholm would never forget his cry of "Mary--Mary dead!" And her silence regarding his existence and his name, and that silence and that cry would go together in the husband's memory.

The door of the studio was opened by Dearborn, who came in calling--

"Tony, Tony, old man."

Cedersholm rose, and Antony rose as well, putting out his hand, saying--

"I will undertake the work you speak of, if your committee will write me confirming your suggestion. And I leave the price to you, you know; you understand what such work is worth. I place myself in your hands."

Dearborn had come up to them. "Tony," said Dearborn, "what are you plotting in the dark with a single candle?"

Fairfax presented him. "Mr. Cedersholm, Robert Dearborn, the playwright, the author of 'All Roads Meet.'"

Dearborn shook the sculptor's hand lightly. He wondered how this must have been for his friend. He looked curiously from one to the other.