Upon Blizzard, who had been looking forward to many mornings during
which he should unobtrusively advance his cause, this quiet statement
fell with disturbing force. It meant that his opportunities for intimate
talks had come to a sudden and most unprepared-for end. He knew that
Barbara was tired out with the steady grind of creation, and that she
had been going through an equally steady grind of discouragement and
uncertainty. He believed that she would make no delay in carrying her
triumph and her trouble out of the heat-ridden city, to cool places, to
her own people. He believed, not that she would forget him, but that,
free from his influence, she would see with equal vision how wide the
gulf between them really was.
He had made a slip in his calculation. He had been spreading his arts
thinly, you may say, to cover what he supposed was to have been a much
longer period of time. And he should have come sooner and with all his
strength to the point. There had been moments of supreme discouragement,
when, if there was to be a miracle in his life, he should have spoken.
There were to be no more of those golden moments. She would close the
studio, go away, and return by way of exercise and fresh air to a sane
and normal state of mind--a state of mind in which such a physical and
moral cripple as himself could have no place except among the
curiosities.
She stood looking steadily at the head which had come to life under her
hands. Her eyelids drooped heavily. She looked almost as if she was
falling asleep.
Blizzard watched her as a cat watches a mouse, not knowing what was best
for him to dare. Now he was for pleading his cause with all the passion
that inspired it; now for boldly claiming her as the expiation for her
father's fault; and now he was for passing over all preliminaries and
felling her with a blow of his fist.
And then she suddenly turned to him, and smiled like a very happy and
very tired child. "You've been very good to me," she said, "and so
patient! I don't know quite how to thank you. I owe you such a lot."
"Do you?" he said, his hard eyes softening and seeking hers.
She nodded slowly. "Such a lot. And there's no way of paying, or making
things up to you, is there?"
"Only one," he said.
There was quite a long silence; his eyes, flames in them, held hers,
which were troubled and childlike, and imbued the two words that he had
spoken with an unmistakable intelligence.
"Don't let me go utterly," he said, "and slip back into the pit. You
have finished the bust. If you wished you could finish the man: put him
back among the good angels.... If your father died owing money, you
couldn't rest until you had paid his debts.... I could be anything you
wished. And I could give you anything that you wanted in this world.
There is nothing I couldn't put over--with you at my side, wishing the
good deed done, the great deed--or--"
He began to tremble with the passion that was in his voice, slipped from
his chair, and began to move slowly toward her with outstretched arms,
upon his stumps of legs.
It was no mirth or any sense of the ridiculous that moved Barbara, but
fear, disgust, and horror. She backed away from him, laughing
hysterically. But he, whose self-consciousness in her sight bordered
upon mania, mistook the cause of her laughter, so that a kind of
hell-born fury shook him, and he rushed at her, his mouth giving out
horrible and inarticulate sounds. And in those lightning moments she
could move neither hand nor foot; nor could she cry for help. And yet
she realized, as in some nightmare, that if once those horrible hairy
hands closed upon her she was lost utterly. And in that same clear flash
of reason she realized that for whatever might befall she had herself
alone to blame. She had touched pitch, and played with fire--and all
that men might some day call her great.
[Illustration: In that instant the legless man overreached himself and
fell heavily]
The speed for which the fury of the legless man called was more than the
stumps of his legs could furnish. He was like a man, thigh-deep in
water, who attempts to run at top speed. Yet his hands were within
inches of her dress, when daring and nerve at last thrilled through
Barbara, and returned her muscles into the keeping of her mind. She
darted backward and to one side. In that instant the legless man
overreached himself and fell heavily. Here seemed an inestimable
advantage for Barbara, and yet the great body, shaken with curses and
already rising to its stumps, was between her and the door.