The Palace of Darkened Windows Part 20

Nothing continued to happen.

Travelers were few. Occasionally a carriage pa.s.sed; once a couple of young Englishmen on polo ponies galloped by; once a poor native came down the road, moving his harem--a donkey-cart load of black shrouded women, with three half-naked children bouncing on a long tailboard.

Several groups of veiled women on foot proceeded to the cemetery and back again.

The one-eyed man sauntered by in vain.

In the heat of the afternoon the wide door suddenly opened and Captain Kerissen himself appeared on his black horse. He spurred off at a gallop, intending apparently to ride down the artist on the way, but changed his mind at the last and dashed past, showering him with dust from his horse's hoofs. The little donkey-boy, lolling down the road, started to follow him, crying out for alms in the name of Allah.

Billy stared up at the windows. Not a handkerchief there, not a signal, not a note flung into the street! In great derision he squirted half a tube of cerulean blue upon his canvas.

This, he reflected, was zero in detective work. It was also minus in adventure.

But one never knows when events are upon the wing. Almost immediately there came into the flatness of his bored existence a victoria containing those two English ladies he had met--in the unconventional way which characterized his meetings with ladies in Cairo--two days before.

The recognition was mutual. The curiosity appeared upon their side.

To his horror he saw that they had stopped their carriage and were descending.

"How interesting!" said Miss Falconer, with more cordiality than she had shown on the previous occasion. "How very interesting! So you are an artist--I do a little sketching myself, you know."

"You do happen in the most unexpected places," smiled Lady Claire.

The English girl looked very cool and sweet and fresh to the heated painter. His impression of her as a nice girl and a pretty girl was speedily reinforced, and he remembered that dark-haired girls with gray-blue eyes under dusky lashes had been his favorite type not so long ago ... before he had seen Arlee's fairy gold.

"We've just been driving through the old cemetery--such interesting tombs," said the elder lady, and Lady Claire added, "I should think you could get better views there than here."

By this time they had reached the easel and stood back of it in observation.

Blue, intensely blue, and thickly blue was the sky that Billy had lavished. Green and rigid were the palms. Purple was the palace.

Very black lay the shadows like planks across the orange road.

Miss Falconer looked as if she doubted her own eyes. Hurriedly she unfolded her lorgnette.

"It--it's just blocked in," said Billy, speaking with a peculiar diffidence.

"Quite so--quite so," murmured the lady, bending closer, as if fascinated.

Lady Claire said nothing. Stealing a look at her, Billy saw that she was looking it instead.

Miss Falconer tried another angle. The sight of that lorgnette had a stiffening effect upon Billy B. Hill.

"You get it?" he said pleasantly. "You get the--ah--symphonic chord I'm striking?"

"Chord?" said Miss Falconer. "Striking," she murmured in a peculiar voice.

"It's all in thirds, you see," he continued.

"Thirds!" came the echo.

"Perhaps you're of the old school?" he observed.

"Really--I must be!" agreed the lady.

"Ah!" said Billy softly, commiseratingly. He c.o.c.ked his head at an angle opposite from the slant of the lorgnette and stared his own amazing canvas out of countenance.

"Then, of course," he said, "this hardly conveys----"

"What are you?" she demanded. "Is this a--a school?"

"I?" He seemed surprised that there could be any doubt about it. "I am a Post-Cubist."

Miss Falconer turned the lorgnette upon him. "Oh, really," she said vaguely. "I fancy I've heard something of that--you're quite new and radical, aren't you?"

"Oh, we're old," he said gently, "very, very old. We have returned to Nature--but not the nature of mere academicians. We paint, not the world of the camera, but the world of the brain. We paint, not the thing you think you see, but the way you think you see it--its vibrations of your inner mentality. To paint the apple ripening on the bough one should reproduce the gentle swelling of the maturing fruit in your perception.... Now, you see, I am not trying to reproduce the precise carving of that door; I do not fix the wavings of that palm. I give you the cerebellic----"

"Quite so," said Miss Falconer, dropping her lorgnette and giving the canvas the fixity of her un.o.bstructed gaze. "It's most interesting," she said, a little faintly. "Are there many of you?"

"I don't know," said Billy. "We do not communicate with one another.

That always influences, you know, and it is better to work out thought alone."

"I should think it would be." Something in her tone suggested that the inviolated solitude of the asylum suggested itself to her as a fitting spot. "Well, we won't interrupt you any longer. You've been most interesting.... The sun is quite hot, isn't it?" and with one long, lingering look at the picture, a look convinced against its will, she went her way toward the victoria.

But Lady Claire stood still. Billy had fairly forgotten all about her, and now as he turned suddenly from the clowning with her chaperon, he found her gaze being transferred from his picture to himself. It was a very steady gaze, calm-eyed and deliberate.

"I'm afraid you're making game of us!" she said, in her musical, high-bred tones, her clear eyes disconcertingly upon him. "Aren't you?" she gently demanded.

"That's not fair." Billy was uncomfortable and looked away in haste.

He felt a grin coming.

Perhaps he was a shade too late, for Lady Claire laughed suddenly and with a note of curious delight.

"You're _too_ amusing!" she said. "What made you?... How did you think of it all?... Are you just beginning?"

"Oh, I began twenty years ago," he smiled back, "but I haven't done anything in the meantime."

Again she laughed with that ring of mischievous delight. "However you could think of it all! I shan't tell on you--but she'll _never_ be done wondering." She turned away, her pretty face still bright with humor, and then she turned back hesitantly toward him.

"It _is_ hot here in this sun," she said. "It _can't_ be good for you. Shall we drive you back?"

She had lovely eyes, dark, smoky-blue under black lashes, and when they held a gentle, half-shy, half-proud invitation, as they did then, they were very unsettling eyes.... And it was hot on that infernal camp stool. And there was a crick in the back of his neck and his errand was glaringly a fool's errand....

He half rose, and as he did so the door in the palace opened a crack and a veiled face peered furtively out. Billy sat down again.

"No, thank you," he said, "I think I'd better do a little more of this."

In such light ways is the gate of opportunity closed and opened.

Everything that happened afterwards with such appalling startlingness hung on that instant's decision.