For a surprising while--even in the face of Vigné's radiance--Arnaud
was as still and shadowed as the inert surface of a dammed stream. Then
slowly, the slenderest trickle at first, his wit revived his spirit; and
he opened an unending mock-solemn attack on Bailey Sandby's eminently
serious acceptance of the responsibilities of his allowed love.
The boy had left the university, and his father--a striking replica of
Arnaud's prejudices, impatience and fundamental kindness--exchanged with
Vigné's male parent the most dismal prophecies together with concrete
plans for their children's future security. This, inevitably, resulted
in Vigné's marriage; a ceremony unattended by Pleydon except by the
presence of a very liberal check.
The life-size version of his Simon Downige was again under way--it had
been torn down, Linda knew, more than once--and he was in a fever of
composition. Nor was this, she decided with Arnaud, his only oppression:
the Asiatic fever clung to him with disquieting persistence. Pleydon
himself admitted he had a degree or two in the evening.
Linda was seated in his studio near Central Park West, perhaps a year
later, and she observed aloud that so much wet clay around was bad for
him. He laughed: nothing now could happen to him, he was forever beyond
accident, sickness, death--his statue for the monument in Hesperia was
finished. It stood revealed before them, practically as Linda had first
seen it, but enlarged, towering, as if the vision it portrayed had
grown, would continue to grow eternally, because of the dignity of its
hope, the necessity of its realization.
“Now,” she said, “it will go to the foundry and be cast.” He corrected
her. “You will go to the foundry and be cast ... in bronze.” A distinct
graceful happiness possessed her at the knowledge that his love for her
was as constant as though it, too, were metal. Not flesh but bronze,
spirit, he insisted.
The multiplying years made that no more comprehensible than when, a
child, she had thrilled in a waking dream. Love, spirit, death. Three
mysteries. But only one, she thought, was inevitably hers, the last. To
be loved was not love itself, but only the edge of its cloak;
response was an indivisible part of realization. No, sterility was the
measure--of its absence. And she was, Linda felt, in spite of Vigné and
Lowrie, the latter a specially vigorous contradiction, the most sterile
woman alive. There were always Dodge's assurances, but clay, stone,
metal, were cold for a belief to embrace. And she was, she knew,
lovelier now than she had ever been before, than she would ever be
again.