A DANGEROUS MODEL
Time passed too quickly to please Jacqueline. Her portrait was finished
at last, notwithstanding the willingness Marien had shown--or so it
seemed to her--to retouch it unnecessarily that she might again and again
come back to his atelier. But it was done at last. She glided into that
dear atelier for the last time, her heart big with regret, with no hope
that she would ever again put on the fairy robe which had, she thought,
transfigured her till she was no longer little Jacqueline.
"I want you only for one moment, and I need only your face," said Marien.
"I want to change--a line--I hardly know what to call it, at the corner
of your mouth. Your father is right; your mouth is too grave. Think of
something amusing--of the Bal Blanc at Madame d'Etaples, or merely, if
you like, of the satisfaction it will give you to be done with these
everlasting sittings--to be no longer obliged to bear the burden of a
secret, in short to get rid of your portrait-painter."
She made him no answer, not daring to trust her voice.
"Come! now, on the contrary you are tightening your lips," said Marien,
continuing to play with her as a cat plays with a mouse--provided there
ever was a cat who, while playing with its mouse, had no intention of
crunching it. "You are not merry, you are sad. That is not at all
becoming to you."
"Why do you attribute to me your own thoughts? It is you who will be
glad to get rid of all this trouble."
Fraulein Schult, who, while patiently adding stitch after stitch to the
long strip of her crochet-work, was often much amused by the dialogues
between sitter and painter, pricked up her ears to hear what a Frenchman
would say to what was evidently intended to provoke a compliment.
"On the contrary, I shall miss you very much," said Marien, quite simply;
"I have grown accustomed to see you here. You have become one of the
familiar objects of my studio. Your absence will create a void."
"About as much as if this or that were gone," said Jacqueline, in a hurt
tone, pointing first to a Japanese bronze and then to an Etruscan vase;
"with only this difference, that you care least for the living object."
"You are bitter, Mademoiselle."
"Because you make me such provoking answers, Monsieur. My feeling is
different," she went on impetuously, "I could pass my whole life watching
you paint."
"You would get tired of it probably in the long run."
"Never!" she cried, blushing a deep red.
"And you would have to put up with my pipe--that big pipe yonder--
a horror."
"I should like it," she cried, with conviction.
"But you would not like my bad temper. If you knew how ill I can behave
sometimes! I can scold, I can become unbearable, when this, for
example," here he pointed with his mahlstick to the Savonarola, "does not
please me."
"But it is beautiful--so beautiful!"
"It is detestable. I shall have to go back some day and renew my
impressions of Florence--see once more the Piazze of the Signora and San
Marco--and then I shall begin my picture all over again. Let us go
together--will you?"
"Oh!" she cried, fervently, "think of seeing Italy! --and with you!"
"It might not be so great a pleasure as you think. Nothing is such a
bore as to travel with people who are pervaded by one idea, and my 'idee
fixe' is my picture--my great Dominican. He has taken complete
possession of me--he overshadows me. I can think of nothing but him."
"Oh! but you think of me sometimes, I suppose," said Jacqueline, softly,
"for I share your time with him."
"I think of you to blame you for taking me away from the fifteenth
century," replied Hubert Marien, half seriously. "Ouf!--There! it is
done at last. That dimple I never could manage I have got in for better
or for worse. Now you may fly off. I set you at liberty--you poor
little thing!"
She seemed in no hurry to profit by his permission. She stood perfectly
still in the middle of the studio.
"Do you think I have posed well, faithfully, and with docility all these
weeks?" she asked at last.
"I will give you a certificate to that effect, if you like. No one could
have done better."
"And if the certificate is not all I want, will you give me some other
present?"
"A beautiful portrait--what can you want more?"
"The picture is for mamma. I ask a favor on my own account."
"I refuse it beforehand. But you can tell me what it is, all the same."
"Well, then--the only part of your house that I have ever been in is this
atelier. You can imagine I have a curiosity to see the rest."
"I see! you threaten me with a domiciliary visit without warning. Well!
certainly, if that would give you any amusement. But my house contains
nothing wonderful. I tell you that beforehand."
"One likes to know how one's friends look at home--in their own setting,
and I have only seen you here at work in your atelier."
"The best point of view, believe me. But I am ready to do your bidding.
Do you wish to see where I eat my dinner?" asked Marien, as he took her
down the staircase leading to his dining-room.
Fraulein Schult would have liked to go with them--it was, besides, her
duty. But she had not been asked to fulfil it. She hesitated a moment,
and in that moment Jacqueline had disappeared. After consideration, the
'promeneuse' went on with her crochet, with a shrug of her shoulders
which meant: "She can't come to much harm."
Seated in the studio, she heard the sound of their voices on the floor
below. Jacqueline was lingering in the fencing-room where Marien was in
the habit of counteracting by athletic exercises the effects of a too
sedentary life. She was amusing herself by fingering the dumb-bells and
the foils; she lingered long before some precious suits of armor. Then
she was taken up into a small room, communicating with the atelier, where
there was a fine collection of drawings by the old masters. "My only
luxury," said Marien.
Mademoiselle Schult, getting impatient, began to roll up yards and yards
of crochet, and coughed, by way of a signal, but remembering how
disagreeable it would have been to herself to be interrupted in a tete-a-
tete with her apothecary, she thought it not worth while to disturb them
in these last moments. M. de Nailles's orders had been that she was to
sit in the atelier. So she continued to sit there, doing what she had
been told to do without any qualms of conscience.
When Marien had shown Jacqueline all his drawings he asked her: "Are you
satisfied?"
But Jacqueline's hand was already on the portiere which separated the
little room from Marien's bedchamber.
"Oh! I beg pardon," she exclaimed, pausing on the threshold.
"One would think you would like to see me asleep," said Marien with some
little embarrassment.
"I never should have thought your bedroom would have been so pretty.
Why, it is as elegant as a lady's chamber," said Jacqueline, slipping
into it as she spoke, with an exciting consciousness of doing something
she ought not to do.
"What an insult, when I thought all my tastes were simple and severe,"
he replied; but he had not followed her into the chamber, withheld by an
impulse of modesty men sometimes feel, when innocence is led into
audacity through ignorance.
"What lovely flowers you have!" said Jacqueline, from within. "Don't
they make your head ache?"
"I take them out at night."
"I did not know that men liked, as we do, to be surrounded by flowers.
Won't you give me one?"
"All, if you like."
"Oh! one pink will be enough for me."
"Then take it," said Marien; her curiosity alarmed him, and he was
anxious to get her away.
"Would it not be nicer if you gave it me yourself?" she replied, with
reproach in her tones.
"Here is one, Mademoiselle. And now I must tell you that I want to
dress. I have to go out immediately."
She pinned the pink into her bodice so high that she could inhale its
perfume.
"I beg your pardon. Thank you, and good-by," she said, extending her
hand to him with a sigh.
"Au revoir."
"Yes--'au revoir' at home--but that will not be like here."
As she stood there before him there came into her eyes a strange
expression, to which, without exactly knowing why, he replied by pressing
his lips fervently on the little hand he was still holding in his own.
Very often since her infancy he had kissed her before witnesses, but this
time she gave a little cry, and turned as white as the flower whose
petals were touching her cheek.
Marien started back alarmed.
"Good-by," he said in a tone that he endeavored to make careless--but in
vain.
Though she was much agitated herself she failed not to remark his
emotion, and on the threshold of the atelier, she blew a kiss back to him
from the tips of her gloved fingers, without speaking or smiling. Then
she went back to Fraulein Schult, who was still sitting in the place
where she had left her, and said: "Let us go."
The next time Madame de Nailles saw her stepdaughter she was dazzled by a
radiant look in her young face.
"What has happened to you?" she asked, "you look triumphant."
"Yes--I have good reason to triumph," said Jacqueline. "I think that I
have won a victory."
"How so? Over yourself?"
"No, indeed--victories over one's self give us the comfort of a good
conscience, but they do not make us gay--as I am."
"Then tell me--"
"No-no! I can not tell you yet. I must be silent two days more," said
Jacqueline, throwing herself into her mother's arms.
Madame de Nailles asked no more questions, but she looked at her
stepdaughter with an air of great surprise. For some weeks past she had
had no pleasure in looking at Jacqueline. She began to be aware that
near her, at her side, an exquisite butterfly was about for the first
time to spread its wings--wings of a radiant loveliness, which, when they
fluttered in the air, would turn all eyes away from other butterflies,
which had lost some of their freshness during the summer.
A difficult task was before her. How could she keep this too precocious
insect in its chrysalis state? How could she shut it up in its dark
cocoon and retard its transformation?
"Jacqueline," she said, and the tones of her voice were less soft than
those in which she usually addressed her, "it seems to me that you are
wasting your time a great deal. You hardly practise at all; you do
almost nothing at the 'cours'. I don't know what can be distracting your
attention from your lessons, but I have received complaints which should
make a great girl like you ashamed of herself. Do you know what I am
beginning to think?--That Madame de Monredon's system of education has
done better than mine."
"Oh! mamma, you can't be thinking of sending me to a convent!" cried
Jacqueline, in tones of comic despair.
"I did not say that--but I really think it might be good for you to make
a retreat where your cousin Giselle is, instead of plunging into follies
which interrupt your progress."
"Do you call Madame d'Etaples's 'bal blanc' a folly?"
"You certainly will not go to it--that is settled," said the young
stepmother, dryly.