Stories by American Authors Volume III Part 4

She turned upon him.

"Monsieur!" she cried, pa.s.sionately. "You mock me! It is a bad picture."

He fell back a pace, staring at her and suddenly trembling with the shock.

"A bad picture!" he echoed. "_I_ mock you--_I?_"

"It is my face," she said, pointing to it, "but you have made it what _I_ am not! It is the face of a good woman--of a woman who might be a saint! Does not _that_ mock me?"

He turned to it with a troubled, dreamy look.

"It is what I have seen in your face," he said in a soft, absent voice. "It is a truth to me. It is what _I_ have seen."

"It is what no other has seen," she said. "I tell you it mocks me."

"It need not mock you," he answered. "I could not have painted it if I had not felt it. It is yourself--yourself."

"Myself?" she said. "Do you think, Monsieur, that the men who have painted me before would know it?"

She gave it another glance and a shrill laugh burst from her, but the next instant it broke off and ended in another sound. She fell upon her knees by the empty chair, her open hands flung outward, her sobs strangling her.

He stood quite near her, looking down.

"I have not thought of anything but my work," he said. "Why should I?"

The following Sunday night the artist Ma.s.son met in going down-stairs a closely veiled figure coming up. He knew it and spoke.

"What, Natalie?" he said. "You? One might fancy you had been to church."

"I have been," she returned in a cold voice,--"to the church of the Americans in the Rue de Berri."

He shrugged his shoulders.

"Has it done you good?" he asked.

"No," she answered, and walked past him, leaving him to look after her and think the matter over.

She went to her own apartment and locked herself in. Having done so, she lighted every candle and lamp--flooding the place with a garish mockery of brightness. She sang as she did it--a gay, shrill air from some _opera bouffe_. She tore off her dark veil and wrappings. Her eyes and cheeks flamed as if touched by some unholy fire. She moved with feverish rapidity here and there--dragging a rich dress from a trunk, and jewels and laces from their places of safe keeping, and began to attire herself in them. The simple black robe she had worn to the chapel lay on the floor. As she moved to and fro she set her feet upon it again and again, and as she felt it beneath her tread a harsh smile touched her lips.

"I shall not wear you again," she stopped her song once to say.

In half an hour she had made her toilette. She stood before her gla.s.s, a blaze of color and jewels. For a moment she sang no more. From one of the rooms below there floated up to her sounds of riotous merriment.

"_This_ is myself," she said; "_this_ is no other."

She opened her door and ran down the staircase swiftly and lightly.

The founder of the feast whose sounds she had heard was a foolish young fellow who adored her madly. He was rich, and wicked, and simple. Because he had heard of her return he had taken an apartment in the house. She heard his voice above the voices of the rest.

In a moment she had flung open the door of the _salon_ and stood upon the threshold.

At sight of her there arose a rapturous shout of delight.

"Natalie! Natalie! Welcome!"

But instantaneously it died away. One second she stood there, brilliant, smiling, defiant. The next, they saw that a mysterious change had seized upon her. She had become deathly white, and was waving them from her with a wild gesture.

"I am not coming," she cried, breathlessly. "No! No! No!"

And the next instant they could only gaze at each others'

terror-stricken faces, at the place she had left vacant,--for she was gone.

She went up the stairs blindly and uncertainly. When she reached the turn of the fourth floor where the staircase was bare and unlighted, she staggered and sank against the bal.u.s.trades, her face upturned.

"I cannot go back," she whispered to the darkness and silence above.

"Do you hear? I cannot! And it is you--you who restrain me!"

But there were no traces of her pa.s.sion in her face when she went to the little studio the next day as usual. When the artist opened the door for her, it struck him that she was calm even to coldness.

Instead of sitting down, she went to the easel and stood before it.

"Monsieur," she said, "I have discovered where your mistake lies. You have tried to paint what you fancied must once have existed, though it exists no longer. That is your mistake. It has never existed at all. I remember no youth, no childhood. Life began for me as it will end. It was my fate that it should. I was born in the lowest quarter of Paris.

I knew only poverty, brutality, and crime. My beauty simply raised me beyond their power. Where should I gain what you have insisted in bestowing upon me?"

He simply stood still and looked at her.

"G.o.d knows!" he answered at length. "I do not."

"G.o.d!" she returned with her bitter little laugh. "Yes--G.o.d!"

Then she went to her place, and said no more.

But the next Sunday she was at the American chapel again, and the next, and the next. She could scarcely have told why herself. She did not believe the doctrines she heard preached, and she did not expect to be converted to belief in them. Often, as the service proceeded, a faint smile of derision curved her lips; but from her seat in the obscure corner she had chosen she could see a thin, dark face and a stooping figure, and could lean back against the wall with a sense of repose.

"It is quiet here," was her thought. "One can be quiet, and that is much."

"What is the matter with her?" the men who knew her began to ask one another. But it was not easy for them to discover how the subtle change they saw had been wrought. They were used to her caprices and to occasional fits of sullenness, but they had never seen her in just such a mood as she was now. She would bear no jests from them, she would not join in their gayeties. Sometimes for days together she shut herself up in her room, and they did not see her at all.

The picture progressed but slowly. Sometimes the artist's hand so trembled with weakness that he could not proceed with his work. More than once Natalie saw the brush suddenly fall from his nerveless fingers. He was very weak in these days, and the spot of hectic red glowed brightly on his cheek.

"I am a poor fellow at best," he would say to her, "and now I am at my worst. I am afraid I shall be obliged to rest sooner than I fancied. I wish first I could have finished my work. I must not leave it unfinished."

One morning when he had been obliged to give up painting, through a sudden fit of prostration, on following her to the door, he took her hand and held it a moment.

"I was awake all last night," he said. "Yesterday I saw a poor fellow who had fallen ill on the street, carried into the Hotel Dieu, and the memory clung to me. I began to imagine how it would be if such a thing happened to me--what I should say when they asked for my friends,--how there would be none to send for. And at last, suddenly I thought of you. I said to myself, 'I would send for her, and I think she would come.'"

"Yes, Monsieur," she answered. "You might depend upon my coming."