V
At the door he called a cab and put her in it; then, drawing out his watch
again, he said abruptly: "I believe I'll let you go alone. I'll join you at
the hotel in time for luncheon." She wondered for a moment if he meant to
return to the gallery; but, looking back as she drove off, she saw him walk
rapidly away in the opposite direction.
The cabman had carried her half-way to the Hotel Cluny before she realized
where she was going, and cried out to him to turn home. There was an acute
irony in this mechanical prolongation of the quest of beauty. She had
had enough of it, too much of it; her one longing was to escape, to hide
herself away from its all-suffusing implacable light.
At the hotel, alone in her room, a few tears came to soften her seared
vision; but her mood was too tense to be eased by weeping. Her whole being
was centred in the longing to know what her husband thought. Their short
exchange of words had, after all, told her nothing. She had guessed a faint
resentment at her unexpected appearance; but that might merely imply a
dawning sense, on his part, of being furtively watched and criticised. She
had sometimes wondered if he was never conscious of her observation; there
were moments when it seemed to radiate from her in visible waves. Perhaps,
after all, he was aware of it, on his guard against it, as a lurking knife
behind the thick curtain of his complacency; and to-day he must have caught
the gleam of the blade.
Claudia had not reached the age when pity is the first chord to vibrate in
contact with any revelation of failure. Her one hope had been that Keniston
should be clear-eyed enough to face the truth. Whatever it turned out to
be, she wanted him to measure himself with it. But as his image rose before
her she felt a sudden half-maternal longing to thrust herself between him
and disaster. Her eagerness to see him tested by circumstances seemed now
like a cruel scientific curiosity. She saw in a flash of sympathy that he
would need her most if he fell beneath his fate.
He did not, after all, return for luncheon; and when she came up-stairs
from her solitary meal their _salon_ was still untenanted. She
permitted herself no sensational fears; for she could not, at the height of
apprehension, figure Keniston as yielding to any tragic impulse; but the
lengthening hours brought an uneasiness that was fuel to her pity. Suddenly
she heard the clock strike five. It was the hour at which they had promised
to meet Mrs. Davant at the gallery--the hour of the "ovation." Claudia
rose and went to the window, straining for a glimpse of her husband in the
crowded street. Could it be that he had forgotten her, had gone to the
gallery without her? Or had something happened--that veiled "something"
which, for the last hour, had grimly hovered on the outskirts of her mind?
She heard a hand on the door and Keniston entered. As she turned to meet
him her whole being was swept forward on a great wave of pity: she was so
sure, now, that he must know.
But he confronted her with a glance of preoccupied brightness; her first
impression was that she had never seen him so vividly, so expressively
pleased. If he needed her, it was not to bind up his wounds.
He gave her a smile which was clearly the lingering reflection of some
inner light. "I didn't mean to be so late," he said, tossing aside his hat
and the little red volume that served as a clue to his explorations. "I
turned in to the Louvre for a minute after I left you this morning, and the
place fairly swallowed me up--I couldn't get away from it. I've been there
ever since." He threw himself into a chair and glanced about for his pipe.
"It takes time," he continued musingly, "to get at them, to make out what
they're saying--the big fellows, I mean. They're not a communicative lot.
At first I couldn't make much out of their lingo--it was too different from
mine! But gradually, by picking up a hint here and there, and piecing them
together, I've begun to understand; and to-day, by Jove, I got one or two
of the old chaps by the throat and fairly turned them inside out--made them
deliver up their last drop." He lifted a brilliant eye to her. "Lord, it
was tremendous!" he declared.
He had found his pipe and was musingly filling it. Claudia waited in
silence.
"At first," he began again, "I was afraid their language was too hard for
me--that I should never quite know what they were driving at; they seemed
to cold-shoulder me, to be bent on shutting me out. But I was bound I
wouldn't be beaten, and now, to-day"--he paused a moment to strike a
match--"when I went to look at those things of mine it all came over me
in a flash. By Jove! it was as if I'd made them all into a big bonfire to
light me on my road!"
His wife was trembling with a kind of sacred terror. She had been afraid
to pray for light for him, and here he was joyfully casting his whole past
upon the pyre!
"Is there nothing left?" she faltered.
"Nothing left? There's everything!" he exulted. "Why, here I am, not much
over forty, and I've found out already--already!" He stood up and began to
move excitedly about the room. "My God! Suppose I'd never known! Suppose
I'd gone on painting things like that forever! Why, I feel like those
chaps at revivalist meetings when they get up and say they're saved! Won't
somebody please start a hymn?"
Claudia, with a tremulous joy, was letting herself go on the strong
current of his emotion; but it had not yet carried her beyond her depth,
and suddenly she felt hard ground underfoot.
"Mrs. Davant--" she exclaimed.
He stared, as though suddenly recalled from a long distance. "Mrs. Davant?"
"We were to have met her--this afternoon--now--"
"At the gallery? Oh, that's all right. I put a stop to that; I went to see
her after I left you; I explained it all to her."
"All?"
"I told her I was going to begin all over again."
Claudia's heart gave a forward bound and then sank back hopelessly.
"But the panels--?"
"That's all right too. I told her about the panels," he reassured her.
"You told her--?"
"That I can't paint them now. She doesn't understand, of course; but she's
the best little woman and she trusts me."
She could have wept for joy at his exquisite obtuseness. "But that isn't
all," she wailed. "It doesn't matter how much you've explained to her. It
doesn't do away with the fact that we're living on those panels!"
"Living on them?"
"On the money that she paid you to paint them. Isn't that what brought us
here? And--if you mean to do as you say--to begin all over again--how in
the world are we ever to pay her back?"
Her husband turned on her an inspired eye. "There's only one way that I
know of," he imperturbably declared, "and that's to stay out here till I
learn how to paint them."
