The Return of the Prodigal Part 48

As ill-luck would have it Sat.u.r.day was a wet day, and Durant, instead of riding the mare, was wandering aimlessly about the house.

He had finished all the books in his bedroom and was badly in want of more. He knocked up against Frida Tancred in a dark pa.s.sage, apologized, and confided in her. As usual she was sorry for him.

"I'm afraid we haven't many books; but you'll find some of mine in here." She opened a door as she spoke, and pa.s.sed on.

Durant found himself in a room which he had not yet investigated.

It was somewhat bare as to furniture; it struck strange to his senses as if he had stumbled into another world; in some occult way it preserved a tradition of travel and adventure. The bookcase he came to inspect was flanked by a small cabinet of coins and curios--Italian, Grecian, Egyptian, and j.a.panese; the walls were hung with bad landscapes interspersed with maps.

One of these, an uncolored map of Europe, attracted his attention.

It was drawn by hand in Indian ink, a red line and accompanying arrow heads followed the coast and strung together such inland places as were marked upon the blank. The line started from Southampton and reached the Mediterranean by the Bay of Biscay; it shot inland to the great cities of Italy, returning always to the sea. It skirted Greece, wound in and out of the Ionian islands, touched at Constantinople, ringed the Bosporus and the Black Sea, wheeled to Moscow and St. Petersburg, and then swept wildly up the north of Russia to Archangel and the Arctic Ocean; thence it followed the Scandinavian coast-line, darted to Iceland, and dipped southward again to Britain by way of the Hebrides. Off Queenstown the arrowheads pointed west, winged for the Atlantic. He found the same red line again on a blank map of Asia heading for India by China and j.a.pan. An adventurous, erratic line, whose stages were now the capitals of the world, and now some unknown halting-place in the immeasurable waste. And what on earth did it mean? Was it the record of an actual journey, or some yet untraveled visionary route?

But it was not these things alone that gave the room its fantastic and alien air. What dominated the place was the portrait of a woman, a woman who had Frida's queer accented eyebrows and Frida's eyes, with some more fiery and penetrating quality of her own, something more inimitably fine and foreign. The portrait (which struck Durant as decidedly clever) was signed by some unknown Russian artist, and he recognized it as that of Frida's mother, the lady of the landscapes. He wondered if it was the demon of _ennui_ that had driven poor Mrs. Tancred to the practice of her terrible art, if she had had a spite against Coton Manor, which she vented by covering its walls with bad pictures.

He turned to the bookcase. Frida's library offered him an amazing choice of polyglot fiction. It contained nearly all Balzac and the elder Dumas, Tolstoi and Turgenieff, Bjornsen and Ibsen, besides a great deal of miscellaneous literature, chiefly Russian and Norwegian. Here and there he came across some odd volumes of modern Greek. A whole shelf was devoted to books of travel; grammars and dictionaries made up the rest. Miss Tancred's taste in books was a little outlandish, but it was singularly virile and robust. He had been prepared to suspect her of a morbid pedantry, having known more than one lady in her desperate case who found consolation in the dead languages. But Miss Tancred betrayed no ghoulish appet.i.tes; if she had a weakness for tongues, she had also the good taste to prefer them living.

Durant was so much absorbed in these observations that he did not hear her come into the room.

"Have you found anything you can read?" she asked.

"I've found a great deal that I can't read. You _do_ go in strong for languages."

"That's nothing; my mother was a Russian, and Russians know every language better than their own. I don't know more than seven besides mine. And I can only read and write them. They will never be any use to me."

"How can you tell what may be of use to you? Even Mrs. Fazakerly, or I?" Durant was anxious to give a playful turn to that remarkable discussion they once had; he thus hoped to set the tone for all future conversations with Miss Tancred. "I admit that you can't live on languages, they are not exactly safety-valves for the emotions; n.o.body can swear in more than three of them at a time. I think music's better. Instead of playing whist you ought to play Chopin."

"It's better to play whist well than Chopin badly."

"Better to rule in Hades than fool in the other place, you think?

Miss Tancred, you are as proud as Lucifer."

"I don't see that any good is got by murdering the masters."

"It saves some women from worse crimes, I believe. Why didn't you take to sketching, then? _That_ only kills time."

Miss Tancred was splendid in her scorn. "Kill time with painting bad pictures? I'd rather time killed me."

Ah, that was what he liked about her. She had not revenged herself on Nature by making hideous caricatures of Nature's face; she did not draw in milk-and-water colors, and she did not strum. She had none of the exasperating talents, the ludicrous ambitions of the amateur; she was altogether innocent of intellectual vanity.

"That reminds me," said she, "that I've seen nothing of those wonderful sketches you said you'd show me."

He had clean forgotten the things. Well, he could hardly do better than exhibit them; it would keep her quiet, and save him from perilous personalities.

At first he thought the exhibition was going to give her more pain than pleasure. He sat beside her, and she took the sketches from him gingerly, one by one, and looked at them without a word. A visible nervousness possessed her; her pulses clamored, she seemed to struggle with her own unsteady breathing. Once, when in the transfer of a drawing her hand brushed against his, she drew it back again as if it had dashed against a flame. Durant had noticed once or twice before that she avoided his touch.

Suddenly she awoke out of the agony of her consciousness. One picture had held her longer than the rest.

"It's beautiful--beautiful," she murmured.

"I'm glad you like it," said Durant, pleased at her first sign of admiration.

"Oh, I don't mean your picture--I mean the place."

"It's not a very good picture perhaps----"

"I don't know whether it's good or bad; it seems to me rather bad, though I can't say what's wrong with it. It looks unfinished."

"It _is_ unfinished, but that's not what's wrong with it. These are better--better painting."

His hand brushed hers in vain this time. She remained absorbed. "I don't care two straws about the painting; they may be masterpieces for all I know; it's _that_--that stretch of sand licked by the sea, and the gra.s.s trodden down by the wind--the agony and beauty and desolation of it----" She laid it down unwillingly, and took the others from his hand.

"Oh, what's this?"

"A wall in Suza."

"I've never seen anything like that. The light seems to be moving--soaking into it and streaming out again. It looks as if it would burn if you touched it."

The artist in him laughed for pure pleasure. "It's all very well, you know, but they must be infernally good if they make you feel like that."

"They may be. Have you seen all these things, or have you done any of them out of your head?"

"Seen them, of course. I never paint 'out of my head'; I haven't enough imagination."

"Show me more places where you've been. Tell me about them. You might have done that before."

He obeyed, giving her his experience, his richest and his best; he drew for her scenes and things, not in their crude and temporary form, but as they lived for him and for his art, idealized, eternalized by the imagination that sees them as parts of the immortal whole; and yet vivid, individual, drenched with the peculiar color that made them equally and forever one with the soul of Maurice Durant. She hardly seemed to heed, hardly seemed to listen or to follow. She looked as if hearing were already absorbed in sight.

Durant put a small oil painting into her hand. He had kept his finest to the last. "If you're fond of the sea that may please you."

Mid-ocean, the slope and trough of a luminous sea; in the foreground one smooth, high-bosomed, unbroken wave, the light flung off from its crest like foam, to slide down its shoulder like oil on rounded gla.s.s. On the sky-line the white peak of a sail; the whole a heaving waste of wind and water, light and air. It was a consummate bit of painting, as n.o.body knew better than Maurice Durant.

She looked at it as though she would never be tired of looking. A sudden impulse seized him, a blind instinct to give pleasure at any cost, to make amends for pain.

"If you honestly like it, I wish you'd keep it."

"Keep it? Keep it? Do you really mean it?"

"It would give me pleasure if you would."

"But isn't--might it not be valuable?"

It was valuable, as Durant reflected somewhat regretfully, but he answered well. "Valuable chiefly to me, I fancy. Which is all the more reason, if you like it----"

"Like it? I should lo----" She drew back her breath. "No; I think I'd better not. Thank you very much, all the same." She laid the canvas down with a gesture of renunciation.

"Now that's foolish. Why ever won't you?"

"I daren't. I daren't live with it. It would remind me of all the things I want to forget."

"What things?" He felt that the question was cruel, it was probing the very heart of pain. But his curiosity was too strong. The fountains of the deep were breaking up; he knew that he had only to give the word to witness an astounding transformation of the woman.

He had given the word. Her face was changing; it had taken on the likeness of her foreign mother, intensified in its subtlety and fire.