It was the morning after the reunion--the morning after the catastrophe,
and Blake was breakfasting alone in his rooms.
Typically Parisian rooms they were, rooms that stood closed and silent
for more than half the year and woke to offer him a welcome when his
wandering footsteps turned periodically toward Paris; typically
Parisian, with their long windows and stiffly draped curtains, their
marble mantelpieces and gilt-framed mirrors, their furniture arranged
with a suggestion of ancient formality that by its very rigidity soothed
the eye.
At the moment, evidences of Blake's unusually long occupancy broke this
stiffness in many directions; intimate trifles that speak a man's
presence were strewn here and there--objects of utility, objects of
value and interest gathered upon his last long journey. Eminently
pleasant the _salon_ appeared in the sunshine of the May morning--full
of air and light, its gray carpet and gray-panelled walls making an
agreeably neutral setting to the household gods of a gentleman of
leisure. But the gentleman in question, so agreeably situated, seemed to
find his state less gratifying than it might appear; a sense of
dissatisfaction possessed him, as he sat at his solitary meal, a sense
of dulness and loss most tenacious of hold.
More than once he roundly called himself a fool; more than once he shook
out the thin sheets of his morning paper and buried himself in their
contents, but unavailingly. The feeling of flatness, the sense of
dissatisfaction with the world as it stood, grew instead of diminishing.
At last, throwing down the paper, he gave up the unequal struggle and
yielded to the pessimistic pleasure of self-analysis. He recalled last
night and its vexatious trend of events, and with something akin to
shame, he remembered his anger against Max; but although he admitted its
possible exaggeration, the admission brought no palliation of Max's
offence. He, possibly, had behaved like a brute; but Max had behaved
like an imbecile!
At this point, he fell to staring fixedly in front of him, and through
the meshes of his day-dream floated a face--not the face of the boy he
was condemning, but that of the mysterious cause of last night's
calamity.
He conjured it with quite astonishing vividness--the face of the
portrait--the face so like, so unlike, the boy's. Every detail of the
picture assailed him; the subtle illusion of the mirror--the strange,
reflected eyes propounding their riddle.
Looking in imagination into those eyes, he lost himself delightfully.
Sensations, periods of time passed and repassed in his
brain--speculation, desire, and memory danced an enchanting, tangled
measure.
He recalled the hundred fancies that had held, or failed to hold him in
his thirty-eight years; he recalled the women who had loved too little,
the women who had loved too much; and, quick upon the recollection, came
the consciousness of the disillusion that had inevitably followed upon
adventure.
He did not ask himself why these dreams should stir, why these ghosts
should materialize and kiss light hands to him in the blue brilliance of
this May morning; he realized nothing but that behind them all--a
reality in a world of shadows--he saw the eyes of the picture
insistently propounding their riddle--the riddle, the question that from
youth upward had rankled, inarticulate, in his own soul.
It arose now, renewed, with his acknowledgment of it--the troubling,
insistent question that cries in every human brain, sometimes softly,
like a child sobbing outside a closed door, sometimes loudly and
terribly, like a man in agony. The eternal question ringing through the
ages.
He recognized it, clear as the spoken word, in this unknown woman's
gaze; and for the first time in all his life the desire to make answer
quickened within him. He, who had invariably sought, invariably
questioned, suddenly craved to make reply!
An incurable dreamer, the fancy took him and he yielded to its glamour.
How delightful to know and study that exquisite face! How fascinating
beyond all words to catch the fleeting semblance of his charming Max--to
lose it in the woman's seriousness--to touch it again in some gleam of
boyish humor! It was a quaint conceit, apart from, untouched by any
previous experience. Its subtlety possessed him; existence suddenly took
on form and purpose; the depression, the sense of loss dispersed as
morning clouds before the sun.
He rose, forgetful of his unfinished meal, his vitality stirring, his
curiosity kindling as it had not kindled for years.
What, all things reckoned, stood between him and this alluring study? A
boy! A mere boy!
No thought came to him of the boy himself--the instrument of the desire.
No thought came; for every human creature is a pure egoist in the first
stirring of a passion, and stalks his quarry with blind haste, fearful
that at any turn he may be balked by time or circumstance. Later, when
grief has chastened, or joy cleansed him, the altruist may peep forth,
but never in the primary moment.
With no thought of the clinging hands and beseeching voice of last
night--with no knowledge of a mournful figure that had dragged itself up
the stairway of the house in the rue Müller and sobbed itself to sleep
in a lonely bed, he walked across the room to his writing-table and
calmly picked up a pen.
He dipped the pen into the ink and selected a sheet of note-paper; then,
as he bent to write, impatience seized him, he tore the paper across and
took up a telegraph form.
On this he wrote the simple message:
Will you allow me to meet your sister?--NED.
It was brief, it was informal, it was entirely unjustifiable. But what
circumstance in his relation to the boy had lent itself either to
formality or justification?
He rang the bell, dispatched his message, and then sat down to wait.
His attitude in that matter of waiting was entirely characteristic. He
did not arrange his action in the event of defeat; he did not speculate
upon probable triumph. The affair had passed out of his hands; the
future was upon the knees of the gods!
He did not finish his breakfast in that time of probation; he did not
again take up the paper he had thrown aside. He made no effort to occupy
or to amuse himself; he merely waited, and in due time the gods gave him
a sign--a telegraphic message, brief and concise as his own:
Come to-night at ten. She will be here.--MAX.