“Ah, but that’s the deuce of it! The fact is, we’re off for Biarritz the
day after tomorrow; and St. Moritz later. We shan’t be back here, I
suppose, till the early spring. And of course _you_ have your plans; ah,
going back to America next week? Jove, that is bad.” He frowned over it
with an artless boyish anxiety. “And tomorrow—well, you know what a
woman’s last day in Paris is likely to be, when she’s had only three of
them! Should you mind most awfully—think it hopelessly inadequate, I
mean—if I offered to take you to the studio instead?” He reddened a
little, evidently not so much at the intrusion of his own person into
the setting of his predecessor’s life, as at his conscious inability to
talk about Horace Fingall in any way that could possibly interest Willis
French.
“Of course,” he went on, “I shall be a wretched substitute ... I know so
little ... so little in any sense.... I never met him,” he avowed, as if
excusing an unaccountable negligence. “You know how savagely he kept to
himself.... Poor Bessy—_she_ could tell you something about that!” But
he pulled up sharp at this involuntary lapse into the personal, and let
his smile of interrogation and readiness say the rest for him.
“Go with you? But of course—I shall be delighted,” French responded; and
a light of relief shone in Mr. Paul’s transparent eyes.
“That’s very kind of you; and of course she can tell you all about it
later—add the details. She told me to say that if you didn’t mind
turning up again this afternoon late, she’ll be ready to answer any
questions. Naturally, she’s used to that too!”
This sent a slight shiver through French, with its hint of glib replies
insensibly shaped by repeated questionings. He knew, of course, that
after Fingall’s death there had been an outpouring of articles on him in
the journals and the art-reviews of every country: to correct their
mistakes and fill up their omissions was the particular purpose of his
book. But it took the bloom—another layer of bloom—from his enthusiasm
to feel that Mrs. Paul’s information, meagre as it was, had already been
robbed of its spontaneity, that she had only been reciting to him what
previous interrogators had been capable of suggesting, and had
themselves expected to hear.
Perhaps Mr. Paul read the disappointment in his looks, and
misinterpreted it, for he added: “You can’t think how I feel the
absurdity of trying to talk to _you_ about Fingall!”
His modesty was disarming. French answered with sincerity: “I assure you
I shall like nothing better than going there with you,” and Donald Paul,
who was evidently used to assuming that the sentiments of others were as
genuine as his own, at once brightened into recovered boyishness.
“That’s jolly.—Taxi!” he cried, and they were off.