In the early nineties, when Quinny, Steingall, Herkimer, little Bennett,
who afterward roamed down into the Transvaal and fell in with the
Foreign Legion, Jacobus and Chatterton, the architects, were living
through that fine, rebellious state of overweening youth, Rantoul was
the undisputed leader, the arch-rebel, the master-demolisher of the
group.
Every afternoon at five his Gargantuan figure came thrashing through the
crowds of the boulevard, as an omnibus on its way scatters the fragile
fiacres. He arrived, radiating electricity, tirades on his tongue, to
his chair among the table-pounders of the Café des Lilacs, and his first
words were like the fanfare of trumpets. He had been christened, in the
felicitous language of the Quarter, Don Furioso Barebones Rantoul, and
for cause. He shared a garret with his chum, Britt Herkimer, in the Rue
de l'Ombre, a sort of manhole lit by the stars,--when there were any
stars, and he never failed to come springing up the six rickety flights
with a song on his lips.
An old woman who kept a fruit store gave him implicit credit; a much
younger member of the sex at the corner creamery trusted him for eggs
and fresh milk, and leaned toward him over the counter, laughing into
his eyes as he exclaimed:
"Ma belle, when I am famous, I will buy you a silk gown, and a pair of
earrings that will reach to your shoulders, and it won't be long. You'll
see."
He adored being poor. When his canvas gave out, he painted his ankles to
caricature the violent creations that were the pride of Chatterton, who
was a nabob. When his credit at one restaurant expired, he strode
confidently up to another proprietor, and announced with the air of one
bestowing a favor:
"I am Rantoul, the portrait-painter. In five years my portraits will
sell for five thousand francs, in ten for twenty thousand. I will eat
one meal a day at your distinguished establishment, and paint your
portrait to make your walls famous. At the end of the month I will
immortalize your wife; on the same terms, your sister, your father, your
mother, and all the little children. Besides, every Saturday night I
will bring here a band of my comrades who pay in good hard silver.
Remember that if you had bought a Corot for twenty francs in 1870, you
could have sold it for five thousand francs in 1880, fifty thousand in
1890. Does the idea appeal to you?"
But as most keepers of restaurants are practical and unimaginative, and
withal close bargainers, at the end of a week Rantoul generally was
forced to seek a new sitter.
"What a privilege it is to be poor!" he would then exclaim
enthusiastically to Herkimer. "It awakens all the perceptions; hunger
makes the eye keener. I can see colors to-day that I never saw before.
And to think that if Sherman had never gotten it in his head to march to
the sea I should never have experienced this inspiration! But, old
fellow, we have so short a time to be poor. We must exhibit nothing yet.
We are lucky. We are poor. We can feel."
On the subject of traditions he was at his best.
"Shakspere is the curse of the English drama," he would declare, with a
descending gesture which caused all the little glasses to rattle their
alarm. "Nothing will ever come out of England until his influence is
discounted. He was a primitive, a Preraphælite. He understood nothing of
form, of composition. He was a poet who wandered into the drama as a
sheep strays into the pasture of the bulls, a colorist who imagines he
can be a sculptor. The influence of Victoria sentimentalized the whole
artistic movement in England, made it bourgeois, and flavored it with
mint sauce. Modern portraiture has turned the galleries into an
exhibition of wax works. What is wrong with painting to-day--do you
know?"
"_Allons_, tell us!" cried two or three, while others, availing
themselves of the breathing space, filled the air with their orders:
"Paul, another bock."
"Two hard-boiled eggs."
"And pretzels; don't forget the pretzels."
"The trouble with painting to-day is that it has no point of view,"
cried Rantoul, swallowing an egg in the anaconda fashion. "We are
interpreting life in the manner of the Middle Ages. We forget art should
be historical. We forget that we are now in our century. Ugliness, not
beauty, is the note of our century; turbulence, strife, materialism, the
mob, machinery, masses, not units. Why paint a captain of industry
against a François I tapestry? Paint him at his desk. The desk is a
throne; interpret it. We are ruled by mobs. Who paints mobs? What is
wrong is this, that art is in the bondage of literature--sentimentality.
We must record what we experience. Ugliness has its utility, its
magnetism; the ugliness of abject misery moves you to think, to readjust
ideas. We must be rebels, we young men. Ah, if we could only burn the
galleries, we should be forced to return to life."
"Bravo, Rantoul!"
"Right, old chap."
"Smash the statues!"
"Burn the galleries!"
"Down with tradition!"
"Eggs and more bock!"
But where Rantoul differed from the revolutionary regiment was that he
was not simply a painter who delivered orations; he could paint. His
tirades were not a furore of denunciation so much as they were the
impulsive chafing of the creative energy within him. In the school he
was already a marked man to set the prophets prophesying. He had a style
of his own, biting, incisive, overloaded and excessive, but with
something to say. He was after something. He was original.
"Rebel! Let us rebel!" he would cry to Herkimer from his agitated
bedquilt in the last hour of discussion. "The artist must always
rebel--accept nothing, question everything, denounce conventions and
traditions."
"Above all, work," said Herkimer in his laconic way.
"What? Don't I work?"
"Work more."
Rantoul, however, was not vulnerable on that score. He was not, it is
true, the drag-horse that Herkimer was, who lived like a recluse,
shunning the cafes and the dance-halls, eating up the last gray hours of
the day over his statues and his clays. But Rantoul, while living life
to its fullest, haunting the wharves and the markets with avid eyes,
roaming the woods and trudging the banks of the Seine, mingling in the
crowds that flashed under the flare of arc-lights, with a thousand
mysteries of mass and movement, never relaxed a moment the savage attack
his leaping nature made upon the drudgeries and routine of technic.
With the coveted admittance into the Salon, recognition came speedily
to the two chums. They made a triumphal entry into a real studio in the
Montparnasse Quarter, clients came, and the room became a station of
honor among the young and enthusiastic of the Quarter.
Rantoul began to appear in society, besieged with the invitations that
his Southern aristocracy and the romance of his success procured him.
"You go out too much," said Herkimer to him, with a fearful growl. "What
the deuce do you want with society, anyhow? Keep away from it. You've
nothing to do with it."
"What do I do? I go out once a week," said Rantoul, whistling
pleasantly.
"Once is too often. What do you want to become, a parlor celebrity?
Society _c'est l'ennemie_. You ought to hate it."
"I do."
"Humph!" said Herkimer, eying him across his sputtering clay pipe. "Get
this idea of people out of your head. Shut yourself up in a hole, work.
What's society, anyhow? A lot of bored people who want you to amuse
them. I don't approve. Better marry that pretty girl in the creamery.
She'll worship you as a god, make you comfortable. That's all you need
from the world."
"Marry her yourself; she'll sew and cook for you," said Rantoul, with
perfect good humor.
"I'm in no danger," said Herkimer, curtly; "you are."
"What!"
"You'll see."
"Listen, you old grumbler," said Rantoul, seriously. "If I go into
society, it is to see the hollowness of it all--"
"Yes, yes."
"To know what I rebel against--"
"Of course."
"To appreciate the freedom of the life I have--"
"Faker!"
"To have the benefit of contrasts, light and shade. You think I am not a
rebel. My dear boy, I am ten times as big a rebel as I was. Do you know
what I'd do with society?"
He began a tirade in the famous muscular Rantoul style, overturning
creeds and castes, reorganizing republics and empires, while Herkimer,
grumbling to himself, began to scold the model, who sleepily received
the brunt of his ill humor.
In the second year of his success Rantoul, quite by accident, met a girl
in her teens named Tina Glover, only daughter of Cyrus Glover, a man of
millions, self-made. The first time their eyes met and lingered, by the
mysterious chemistry of the passions Rantoul fell desperately in love
with this little slip of a girl, who scarcely reached to his shoulder;
who, on her part, instantly made up her mind that she had found the
husband she intended to have. Two weeks later they were engaged.
She was seventeen, scarcely more than a child, with clear, blue eyes
that seemed too large for her body, very timid and appealing. It is true
she seldom expressed an opinion, but she listened to every one with a
flattering smile, and the reputations of brilliant talkers have been
built on less. She had a way of passing her two arms about Rantoul's
great one and clinging to him in a weak, dependent way that was quite
charming.
When Cyrus Glover was informed that his daughter intended to marry a
dauber in paints, he started for Paris on ten hours' notice. But Mrs.
Glover who was just as resolved on social conquests as Glover was in
controlling the plate-glass field, went down to meet him at the boat,
and by the time the train entered the St. Lazare Station, he had been
completely disciplined and brought to understand that a painter was one
thing and that a Rantoul, who happened to paint, was quite another. When
he had known Rantoul a week; and listened open-mouthed to his eloquent
schemes for reordering the universe, and the arts in particular, he was
willing to swear that he was one of the geniuses of the world.
The wedding took place shortly, and Cyrus Glover gave the bridegroom a
check for $100,000, "so that he wouldn't have to be bothering his wife
for pocketmoney." Herkimer was the best man, and the Quarter attended
in force, with much outward enthusiasm. The bride and groom departed for
a two-year's trip around the world, that Rantoul might inspire himself
with the treasures of Italy, Greece, India, and Japan.
Every one, even Herkimer, agreed that Rantoul was the luckiest man in
Paris; that he had found just the wife who was suited to him, whose
fortune would open every opportunity for his genius to develop.
"In the first place," said Bennett, when the group had returned to
Herkimer's studio to continue the celebration, "let me remark that in
general I don't approve of marriage for an artist."
"Nor I," cried Chatterton, and the chorus answered, "Nor I."
"I shall never marry," continued Bennett.
"Never," cried Chatterton, who beat a tattoo on the piano with his heel
to accompany the chorus of assent.
"But--I add but--in this case my opinion is that Rantoul has found a
pure diamond."
"True!"
"In the first place, she knows nothing at all about art, which is an
enormous advantage."
"Bravo!"
"In the second place, she knows nothing about anything else, which is
better still."
"Cynic! You hate clever women," cried Jacobus.
"There's a reason."
"All the same, Bennett's right. The wife of an artist should be a
creature of impulses and not ideas."
"True."
"In the third place," continued Bennett, "she believes Rantoul is a
demigod. Everything he will do will be the most wonderful thing in the
world, and to have a little person you are madly in love with think that
is enormous."
"All of which is not very complimentary to the bride," said Herkimer.
"Find me one like her," cried Bennett.
"Ditto," said Chatterton and Jacobus with enthusiasm.
"There is only one thing that worries me," said Bennett, seriously.
"Isn't there too much money?"
"Not for Rantoul."
"He's a rebel."
"You'll see; he'll stir up the world with it."
Herkimer himself had approved of the marriage in a whole-hearted way.
The childlike ways of Tina Glover had convinced him, and as he was
concerned only with the future of his friend, he agreed with the rest
that nothing luckier could have happened.
Three years passed, during which he received occasional letters from
his old chum, not quite so spontaneous as he had expected, but filled
with the wonder of the ancient worlds. Then the intervals became longer,
and longer, and finally no letters came.
He learned in a vague way that the Rantouls had settled in the East
somewhere near New York, but he waited in vain for the news of the stir
in the world of art that Rantoul's first exhibitions should produce.
His friends who visited in America returned without news of Rantoul;
there was a rumor that he had gone with his father-in-law into the
organization of some new railroad or trust. But even this report was
vague, and as he could not understand what could have happened, it
remained for a long time to him a mystery. Then he forgot it.
Ten years after Rantoul's marriage to little Tina Glover, Herkimer
returned to America. The last years had placed him in the foreground of
the sculptors of the world. He had that strangely excited consciousness
that he was a figure in the public eye. Reporters rushed to meet him on
his arrival, societies organized dinners to him, magazines sought the
details of his life's struggle. Withal, however, he felt a strange
loneliness, and an aloofness from the clamoring world about him. He
remembered the old friendship in the starlit garret of the Rue de
l'Ombre, and, learning Rantoul's address, wrote him. Three days later he
received the following answer:
_Dear Old Boy:_
I'm delighted to find that you have remembered me in your fame. Run
up this Saturday for a week at least. I'll show you some fine
scenery, and we'll recall the days of the Café des Lilacs together.
My wife sends her greetings also.
Clyde.
This letter made Herkimer wonder. There was nothing on which he could
lay his finger, and yet there was something that was not there. With
some misgivings he packed his bag and took the train, calling up again
to his mind the picture of Rantoul, with his shabby trousers pulled up,
decorating his ankles with lavender and black, roaring all the while
with his rumbling laughter.
At the station only the chauffeur was down to meet him. A correct
footman, moving on springs, took his bag, placed him in the back seat,
and spread a duster for him. They turned through a pillared gateway,
Renaissance style, passed a gardener's lodge, with hothouses flashing in
the reclining sun, and fled noiselessly along the macadam road that
twined through a formal grove. All at once they were before the house,
red brick and marble, with wide-flung porte-cochère and verandas, beyond
which could be seen immaculate lawns, and in the middle distances the
sluggish gray of a river that crawled down from the turbulent hills on
the horizon. Another creature in livery tripped down the steps and held
the door for him. He passed perplexed into the hall, which was fresh
with the breeze that swept through open French windows.
[Illustration: Rantoul, ... decorating his ankles with lavender and
black]
"Mr. Herkimer, isn't it?"
He turned to find a woman of mannered assurance holding out her hand
correctly to him, and under the panama that topped the pleasant effect
of her white polo-coat he looked into the eyes of that Tina Glover, who
once had caught his rough hand in her little ones and said timidly:
"You'll always be my friend, my best, just as you are Clyde's, won't
you? And I may call you Britt or Old Boy or Old Top, just as Clyde
does?"
He looked at her amazed. She was prettier, undeniably so. She had
learned the art of being a woman, and she gave him her hand as though
she had granted a favor.
"Yes," he said shortly, freezing all at once. "Where's Clyde?"
"He had to play in a polo-match. He's just home taking a tub," she said
easily. "Will you go to your room first? I didn't ask any one in for
dinner. I supposed you would rather chat together of old times. You have
become a tremendous celebrity, haven't you? Clyde is so proud of you."
"I'll go to my room now," he said shortly.
The valet had preceded him, opening his valise and smoothing out his
evening clothes on the lace bedspread.
"I'll attend to that," he said curtly. "You may go."
He stood at the window, in the long evening hour of the June day,
frowning to himself. "By George! I've a mind to clear out," he said,
thoroughly angry.
At this moment there came a vigorous rap, and Rantoul in slippers and
lilac dressing-gown broke in, with hair still wet from his shower.
"The same as ever, bless the Old Top!" he cried, catching him up in one
of the old-time bear-hugs. "I say, don't think me inhospitable. Had to
play a confounded match. We beat 'em, too; lost six pounds doing it,
though. Jove! but you look natural! I say, that was a stunning thing you
did for Philadelphia--the audacity of it. How do you like my place? I've
got four children, too. What do you think of that? Nothing finer. Well,
tell me what you're doing."
Herkimer relented before the familiar rush of enthusiasm and questions,
and the conversation began on a natural footing. He looked at Rantoul,
aware of the social change that had taken place in him. The old
aggressiveness, the look of the wolf, had gone; about him was an
enthusiastic urbanity. He seemed clean cut, virile, overflowing with
vitality, only it was a different vitality, the snap and decision of a
man-of-affairs, not the untamed outrush of the artist.
They had spoken scarcely a short five minutes when a knock came on the
door and a footman's voice said:
"Mrs. Rantoul wishes you not to be late for dinner, sir."
"Very well, very well," said Rantoul, with a little impatience. "I
always forget the time. Jove! it's good to see you again; you'll give us
a week at least. Meet you downstairs."
When Herkimer had dressed and descended, his host and hostess were still
up-stairs. He moved through the rooms, curiously noting the contents of
the walls. There were several paintings of value, a series of drawings
by Boucher, a replica or two of his own work; but he sought without
success for something from the brush of Clyde Rantoul. At dinner he was
aware of a sudden uneasiness. Mrs. Rantoul, with the flattering smile
that recalled Tina Glover, pressed him with innumerable questions, which
he answered with constraint, always aware of the dull simulation of
interest in her eyes.
Twice during the meal Rantoul was called to the telephone for a
conversation at long distance.
"Clyde is becoming quite a power in Wall Street," said Mrs. Rantoul,
with an approving smile. "Father says he's the strength of the younger
men. He has really a genius for organization."
"It's a wonderful time, Britt," said Rantoul, resuming his place.
"There's nothing like it anywhere on the face of the globe--the
possibilities of concentration and simplification here in business. It's
a great game, too, matching your wits against another's. We're building
empires of trade, order out of chaos. I'm making an awful lot of money."
Herkimer remained obstinately silent during the rest of the dinner.
Everything seemed to fetter him--the constraint of dining before the
silent, flitting butler, servants who whisked his plate away before he
knew it, the succession of unrecognizable dishes, the constant jargon of
social eavesdroppings that Mrs. Rantoul pressed into action the moment
her husband's recollections exiled her from the conversation; but above
all, the indefinable enmity that seemed to well out from his hostess,
and which he seemed to divine occasionally when the ready smile left her
lips and she was forced to listen to things she did not understand.
When they rose from the table, Rantoul passed his arm about his wife and
said something in her ear, at which she smiled and patted his hand.
"I am very proud of my husband, Mr. Herkimer," she said with a little
bob of her head in which was a sense of proprietorship. "You'll see."
"Suppose we stroll out for a little smoke in the garden," said Rantoul.
"What, you're going to leave me?" she said instantly, with a shade of
vague uneasiness, that Herkimer perceived.
"We sha'n't be long, dear," said Rantoul, pinching her ear. "Our chatter
won't interest you. Send the coffee out into the rose cupola."
They passed out into the open porch, but Herkimer was aware of the
little woman standing irresolutely tapping with her thin finger on the
table, and he said to himself: "She's a little ogress of jealousy. What
the deuce is she afraid I'll say to him?"
They rambled through sweet-scented paths, under the high-flung network
of stars, hearing only the crunching of little pebbles under foot.
"You've given up painting?" said Herkimer all at once.
"Yes, though that doesn't count," said Rantoul, abruptly; but there was
in his voice a different note, something of the restlessness of the old
Don Furioso. "Talk to me of the Quarter. Who's at the Café des Lilacs
now? They tell me that little Ragin we used to torment so has made some
great decorations. What became of that pretty girl in the creamery of
the Rue de l'Ombre who used to help us over the lean days?"
"Whom you christened Our Lady of the Sparrows?" "Yes, yes. You know I
sent her the silk dress and the earrings I promised her."
Herkimer began to speak of one thing and another, of Bennett, who had
gone dramatically to the Transvaal; of Le Gage, who was now in the
forefront of the younger group of landscapists; of the old types that
still came faithfully to the Café des Lilacs,--the old chess-players,
the fat proprietor, with his fat wife and three fat children who dined
there regularly every Sunday,--of the new revolutionary ideas among the
younger men that were beginning to assert themselves.
"Let's sit down," said Rantoul, as though suffocating.
They placed themselves in wicker easy-chairs, under the heavy-scented
rose cupola, disdaining the coffee that waited on a table. From where
they were a red-tiled walk, with flower beds nodding in enchanted sleep,
ran to the veranda. The porch windows were open, and in the golden
lamplight Herkimer saw the figure of Tina Glover bent intently over an
embroidery, drawing her needle with uneven stitches, her head seeming
inclined to catch the faintest sound. The waiting, nervous pose, the
slender figure on guard, brought to him a strange, almost uncanny
sensation of mystery, and feeling the sudden change in the mood of the
man at his side, he gazed at the figure of the wife and said to himself:
[Illustration: Our Lady of the Sparrows]
"I'd give a good deal to know what's passing through that little head.
What is she afraid of?"
"You're surprised to find me as I am," said Rantoul, abruptly breaking
the silence.
"Yes."
"You can't understand it?"
"When did you give up painting?" said Herkimer, shortly, with a sure
feeling that the hour of confidences had come.
"Seven years ago."
"Why in God's name did you do it?" said Herkimer, flinging away his
cigar angrily. "You weren't just any one--Tom, Dick, or Harry. You had
something to say, man. Listen. I know what I'm talking about,--I've seen
the whole procession in the last ten years,--you were one in a thousand.
You were a creator. You had ideas; you were meant to be a leader, to
head a movement. You had more downright savage power, undeveloped, but
tugging at the chain, than any man I've known. Why did you do it?"
"I had almost forgotten," said Rantoul, slowly. "Are you sure?"
"Am I sure?" said Herkimer, furiously. "I say what I mean; you know it."
"Yes, that's true," said Rantoul. He stretched out his hand and drank
his coffee, but without knowing what he did. "Well, that's all of the
past--what might have been."
"But why?"
"Britt, old fellow," said Rantoul at last, speaking as though to
himself, "did you ever have a moment when you suddenly got out of
yourself, looked at yourself and at your life as a spectator?--saw the
strange strings that had pulled you this way and that, and realized what
might have been had you turned one corner at a certain day of your life
instead of another?"
"No, I've gone where I wanted to go," said Herkimer, obstinately.
"You think so. Well, to-night I can see myself for the first time," said
Rantoul. Then he added meditatively, "I have done not one single thing I
wanted to."
"But why--why?"
"You have brought it all back to me," said Rantoul, ignoring this
question. "It hurts. I suppose to-morrow I shall resent it, but to-night
I feel too deeply. There is nothing free about us in this world, Britt.
I profoundly believe that. Everything we do from morning to night is
dictated by the direction of those about us. An enemy, some one in the
open, we can combat and resist; but it is those that are nearest to us
who disarm us because they love us, that change us most, that thwart our
desires, and make over our lives. Nothing in this world is so
inexorable, so terribly, terribly irresistible as a woman without
strength, without logic, without vision, who only loves."
"He is going to say things he will regret," thought Herkimer, and yet
he did not object. Instead, he glanced down the dimly flushed path to
the house where Mrs. Rantoul was sitting, her embroidery on her lap, her
head raised as though listening. Suddenly he said:
"Look here, Clyde, do you want to tell me this?"
"Yes, I do; it's life. Why not? We are at the age when we've got to face
things."
"Still--"
"Let me go on," said Rantoul, stopping him. He reached out
absent-mindedly, and drank the second cup. "Let me say now, Britt, for
fear you'll misunderstand, there has never been the slightest quarrel
between my wife and me. She loves me absolutely; nothing else in this
world exists for her. It has always been so; she cannot bear even to
have me out of her sight. I am very happy. Only there is in such a love
something of the tiger--a fierce animal jealousy of every one and
everything which could even for a moment take my thoughts away. At this
moment she is probably suffering untold pangs because she thinks I am
regretting the days in which she was not in my life."
"And because she could not understand your art, she hated it," said
Herkimer, with a growing anger.
"No, it wasn't that. It was something more subtle, more instinctive,
more impossible to combat," said Rantoul, shaking his head. "Do you know
what is the great essential to the artist--to whoever creates? The
sense of privacy, the power to isolate his own genius from everything in
the world, to be absolutely concentrated. To create we must be alone,
have strange, unuttered thoughts, just as in the realms of the soul
every human being must have moments of complete isolation--thoughts,
reveries, moods, that cannot be shared with even those we love best. You
don't understand that."
"Yes, I do."
"At the bottom we human beings come and depart absolutely alone.
Friendship, love, all that we instinctively seek to rid ourselves of,
this awful solitude of the soul, avail nothing. Well, what others shrink
from, the artist must seek."
"But you could not make her understand that?"
"I was dealing with a child," said Rantoul. "I loved that child, and I
could not bear even to see a frown of unhappiness cloud her face. Then
she adored me. What can be answered to that?"
"That's true."
"At first it was not so difficult. We passed around the world--Greece,
India, Japan. She came and sat by my side when I took my easel; every
stroke of my brush seemed like a miracle. A hundred times she would cry
out her delight. Naturally that amused me. From time to time I would
suspend the sittings and reward my patient little audience--"
"And the sketches?"
"They were not what I wanted," said Rantoul with a little laugh; "but
they were not bad. When I returned here and opened my studio, it began
to be difficult. She could not understand that I wanted to work eighteen
hours a day. She begged for my afternoons. I gave in. She embraced me
frantically and said; 'Oh, how good you are! Now I won't be jealous any
more, and every morning I will come with you and inspire you.'"
"Every morning," said Herkimer, softly.
"Yes," said Rantoul, with a little hesitation, "every morning. She
fluttered about the studio like a pink-and-white butterfly, sending me a
kiss from her dainty fingers whenever I looked her way. She watched over
my shoulder every stroke, and when I did something that pleased her, I
felt her lips on my neck, behind my ear, and heard her say, 'That is
your reward.'"
"Every day?" said Herkimer.
"Every day."
"And when you had a model?"
"Oh, then it was worse. She treated the models as though they were
convicts, watching them out of the corners of her eyes. Her
demonstration of affection redoubled, her caresses never stopped, as
though she wished to impress upon them her proprietorship. Those days
she was really jealous."
"God--how could you stand it?" said Herkimer, violently.
"To be frank, the more she outraged me as an artist, the more she
pleased me as a man. To be loved so absolutely, especially if you are
sensitive to such things, has an intoxication of its own, yes, she
fascinated me more and more."
"Extraordinary."
"One day I tried to make her understand that I had need to be alone. She
listened to me solemnly, with only a little quiver of her lips, and let
me go. When I returned, I found her eyes swollen with weeping and her
heart bursting."
"And you took her in your arms and promised never to send her away
again."
"Naturally. Then I began to go out into society to please her. Next
something very interesting came up, and I neglected my studio for a
morning. The same thing happened again and again. I had a period of wild
revolt, of bitter anger, in which I resolved to be firm, to insist on my
privacy, to make the fight."
"And you never did?"
"When her arms were about me, when I saw her eyes, full of adoration and
passion, raised to my own, I forgot all my irritation in my happiness as
a man. I said to myself, 'Life is short; it is better to be loved than
to wait for glory.' One afternoon, under the pretext of examining the
grove, I stole away to the studio, and pulled out some of the old
things that I had done in Paris--and sat and gazed at them. My throat
began to fill, and I felt the tears coming to my eyes, when I looked
around and saw her standing wide-eyed at the door.
"'What are you doing?' she said.
"'Looking at some of the old things.'
"'You regret those days?'
"'Of course not.'
"'Then why do you steal away from me, make a pretext to come here? Isn't
my love great enough for you? Do you want to put me out of your life
altogether? You used to tell me that I inspired you. If you want, we'll
give up the afternoons. I'll come here, I'll be your model, I'll sit for
you by the hour--only don't shut the door on me!'
"She began to cry. I took her in my arms, said everything that she
wished me to say, heedlessly, brutally, not caring what I said.
"That night I ran off, resolved to end it all--to save what I longed
for. I remained five hours trudging in the night--pulled back and forth.
I remembered my children. I came back,--told a lie. The next day I shut
the door of the studio not on her, but on myself.
"For months I did nothing. I was miserable. She saw it at last, and said
to me:
"'You ought to work. You aren't happy doing nothing. I've arranged
something for you.'
"I raised my head in amazement, as she continued,
clapping her hands with delight:
"'I've talked it all over with papa. You'll go into his office. You'll
do big things. He's quite enthusiastic, and I promised for you.'
"I went. I became interested. I stayed. Now I am like any other man,
domesticated, conservative, living my life, and she has not the
slightest idea of what she has killed."
"Let us go in," said Herkimer, rising.
"And you say I could have left a name?" said Rantoul, bitterly.
"You were wrong to tell me all this," said Herkimer.
"I owed you the explanation. What could I do?"
"Lie."
"Why?"
"Because, after such a confidence, it is impossible for you ever to see
me again. You know it."
"Nonsense. I--"
"Let's go back."
Full of dull anger and revolt, Herkimer led the way. Rantoul, after a
few steps, caught him by the sleeve.
"Don't take it too seriously, Britt. I don't revolt any more. I'm no
longer the Rantoul you knew."
"That's just the trouble," said Herkimer, cruelly.
When their steps sounded near, Mrs. Rantoul rose hastily, spilling her
silk and needles on the floor. She gave her husband a swift, searching
look, and said with her flattering smile:
"Mr. Herkimer, you must be a very interesting talker. I am quite
jealous."
"I am rather tired," he answered, bowing. "If you'll excuse me, I'll go
off to bed."
"Really?" she said, raising her eyes. She extended her hand, and he took
it with almost the physical repulsion with which one would touch the
hand of a criminal. The next morning he left.