The Greater Inclination Part 26

Vard looked at the tip of his cigarette.

"A carriage in Thirteenth Street? My good fellow, my own brougham is at the door."

"I know, I know--but _they_'re there too, sir; or they will be, inside of a minute. For G.o.d's sake, Mr. Vard, don't trifle!--There's a way out by Thirteenth Street, I tell you"--

"Bardwell's myrmidons, eh?" said Vard. "Help me on with my overcoat, Cornley, will you?"

Cornley's teeth chattered.

"Mr. Vard, your best friends ... Miss Vard, won't you speak to your father?" He turned to me haggardly;--"We can get out by the back way?"

I nodded.

Vard stood towering--in some infernal way he seemed literally to rise to the situation--one hand in the bosom of his coat, in the att.i.tude of patriotism in bronze. I glanced at his daughter: she hung on him with a drowning look. Suddenly she straightened herself; there was something of Vard in the way she faced her fears--a kind of primitive calm we drawing-room folk don't have. She stepped to him and laid her hand on his arm. The pause hadn't lasted ten seconds.

"Father--" she said.

Vard threw back his head and swept the studio with a sovereign eye.

"The back way, Mr. Vard, the back way," Cornley whimpered. "For G.o.d's sake, sir, don't lose a minute."

Vard transfixed his abject henchman.

"I have never yet taken the back way," he enunciated; and, with a gesture matching the words, he turned to me and bowed.

"I regret the disturbance"--and he walked to the door. His daughter was at his side, alert, transfigured.

"Stay here, my dear."

"Never!"

They measured each other an instant; then he drew her arm in his. She flung back one look at me--a paean of victory--and they pa.s.sed out with Cornley at their heels.

I wish I'd finished the face then; I believe I could have caught something of the look she had tried to make me see in him. Unluckily I was too excited to work that day or the next, and within the week the whole business came out. If the indictment wasn't a put-up job--and on that I believe there were two opinions--all that followed was. You remember the farcical trial, the packed jury, the compliant judge, the triumphant acquittal?... It's a spectacle that always carries conviction to the voter: Vard was never more popular than after his "exoneration"...

I didn't see Miss Vard for weeks. It was she who came to me at length; came to the studio alone, one afternoon at dusk. She had--what shall I say?--a veiled manner; as though she had dropped a fine gauze between us. I waited for her to speak.

She glanced about the room, admiring a hawthorn vase I had picked up at auction. Then, after a pause, she said:

"You haven't finished the picture?"

"Not quite," I said.

She asked to see it, and I wheeled out the easel and threw the drapery back.

"Oh," she murmured, "you haven't gone on with the face?"

I shook my head.

She looked down on her clasped hands and up at the picture; not once at me.

"You--you're going to finish it?"

"Of course," I cried, throwing the revived purpose into my voice. By G.o.d, I would finish it!

The merest tinge of relief stole over her face, faint as the first thin chirp before daylight.

"Is it so very difficult?" she asked tentatively.

"Not insuperably, I hope."

She sat silent, her eyes on the picture. At length, with an effort, she brought out: "Shall you want more sittings?"

For a second I blundered between two conflicting conjectures; then the truth came to me with a leap, and I cried out, "No, no more sittings!"

She looked up at me then for the first time; looked too soon, poor child; for in the spreading light of rea.s.surance that made her eyes like a rainy dawn, I saw, with terrible distinctness, the rout of her disbanded hopes. I knew that she knew ...

I finished the picture and sent it home within a week. I tried to make it--what you see.--Too late, you say? Yes--for her; but not for me or for the public. If she could be made to feel, for a day longer, for an hour even, that her miserable secret _was_ a secret--why, she'd made it seem worth while to me to chuck my own ambitions for that ...

Lillo rose, and taking down the sketch stood looking at it in silence.

After a while I ventured, "And Miss Vard--?"

He opened the portfolio and put the sketch back, tying the strings with deliberation. Then, turning to relight his cigar at the lamp, he said: "She died last year, thank G.o.d."