Her brother laughed out at the candid cheerfulness, hopefulness almost,
with which this inquiry broke from her. "He's only dead to me. He has
gone away."
"Where has he gone?"
"I haven't the least idea."
"Why, have you quarrelled?"--Biddy shone again.
"Quarrelled? For what do you take us? Docs the nightingale quarrel with
the moon?"
"I needn't ask which of you is the moon," she said.
"Of course I'm the nightingale. But, more literally," Nick continued,
"Nash has melted back into the elements--he's part of the great air of
the world." And then as even with this lucidity he saw the girl still
mystified: "I've a notion he has gone to India and at the present moment
is reclining on a bank of flowers in the vale of Cashmere."
Biddy had a pause, after which she dropped: "Julia will be glad--she
dislikes him so."
"If she dislikes him why should she be glad he's so enviably placed?"
"I mean about his going away. She'll be glad of that."
"My poor incorrigible child," Nick cried, "what has Julia to do with
it?"
"She has more to do with things than you think," Biddy returned with all
her bravery. Yet she had no sooner uttered the words than she
perceptibly blushed. Hereupon, to attenuate the foolishness of her
blush--only it had the opposite effect--she added: "She thinks he has
been a bad element in your life."
Nick emitted a long strange sound. "She thinks perhaps, but she doesn't
think enough; otherwise she'd arrive at this better thought--that she
knows nothing whatever about my life."
"Ah brother," the girl pleaded with solemn eyes, "you don't imagine what
an interest she takes in it. She has told me many times--she has talked
lots to me about it." Biddy paused and then went on, an anxious little
smile shining through her gravity as if from a cautious wonder as to how
much he would take: "She has a conviction it was Mr. Nash who made
trouble between you."
"Best of little sisters," Nick pronounced, "those are thoroughly
second-rate ideas, the result of a perfectly superficial view. Excuse my
possibly priggish tone, but they really attribute to my dear detached
friend a part he's quite incapable of playing. He can neither make
trouble nor take trouble; no trouble could ever either have come out of
him or have got into him. Moreover," our young man continued, "if Julia
has talked to you so much about the matter there's no harm in my talking
to you a little. When she threw me over in an hour it was on a perfectly
definite occasion. That occasion was the presence in my studio of a
dishevelled, an abandoned actress."
"Oh Nick, she has not thrown you over!" Biddy protested. "She has
not--I've proof."
He felt at this direct denial a certain stir of indignation and looked
at the girl with momentary sternness. "Has she sent you here to tell me
this? What do you mean by proof?"
Biddy's eyes, at these questions, met her brother's with a strange
expression, and for a few seconds, while she looked entreatingly into
them, she wavered there with parted lips and vaguely stretched out her
hands. The next minute she had burst into tears--she was sobbing on his
breast. He said "Hallo!" and soothed her; but it was very quickly over.
Then she told him what she meant by her proof and what she had had on
her mind ever since her present arrival. It was a message from Julia,
but not to say--not to say what he had questioned her about just before;
though indeed, more familiar now that he had his arm round her, she
boldly expressed the hope it might in the end come to the same thing.
Julia simply wanted to know--- she had instructed her to sound him
discreetly--if Nick would undertake her portrait; and she wound up this
experiment in "sounding" by the statement that their beautiful kinswoman
was dying to sit.
"Dying to sit?" echoed Nick, whose turn it was this time to feel his
colour rise.
"At any moment you like after Easter, when she comes up. She wants a
full-length and your very best, your most splendid work."