The Second Class Passenger Part 28

Colonel Saval sat up in his chair and uncrossed his legs.

"I saw her no more," he said. "Madame la Comtesse knows how she returned to Algiers and presently died there? Yes."

The Comtesse bowed. "I thank you, Monsieur," she said. "You have done me a great service."

"I am honored," he replied, as he rose. "I wish you a good-night.

Mademoiselle, good-night."

He was gone. The white doors closed behind him. The Comtesse raised her face and kissed the tall, gentle girl.

"Leave me now," she said. "I must read my letter alone."

And Elsie went. The story was finished at last.

IX

LOLA

Rubies ripped from altar cloths Leered a-down her rich attire; Her mad shoes were scarlet moths In a rose of fire.

A. T. Quiller-Couch.

From the briskness of the street, with its lamps aglitter in the lingering May evening, O'Neill entered to the sober gloom and the restless echoes of the great studio. He had come to hate the place of late. The high poise of its walls, like the sides of a well, the pale s.h.i.+ne of the north light in the roof, the lumber of naked marble and formal armor and the rest, peopling its shadows, were like a tainted atmosphere to him; they embarra.s.sed the lungs of his mind. Only the name of friends.h.i.+p exacted these visits from him; Regnault, dying where he had worked, was secure against desertion.

Buscarlet opened the door to him, his eyes wide and bewildered behind his spectacles.

"How is he?" asked O'Neill curtly, entering the great room.

"Ill," answered the other. "Very ill, so that one cannot tell whether he sleeps or wakes. There should be a nun here to nurse him, only--"

O'Neill nodded. The sick man's bed was set in the centre of the great room, s.h.i.+elded from the draughts of the door by a tall screen of gilt leather. From behind this screen, a shaded lamp by the bedside made an island of soft radiance in the darkness.

They went together past the screen and stopped to look at Regnault.

He was lying on his back, with closed eyes, and his keen aquiline face upturned to the pallor of the "light" in the roof. The white hair tumbled on the pillow, and the long, beautiful hands that lay on the coverlet were oddly pathetic in contrast to the potency of the unconscious face. Even in sleep it preserved its cast of high a.s.surance, its note of ideals outworn and discounted. It was the face of a man who had found a bitter answer for most of life's questions.

By the bed sat Truelove, his servant, ex-corporal of dragoons. He rose noiselessly as O'Neill approached.

"No change, sir," he reported. "Talked a bit, an hour ago. Mr.

Buscarlet was then 'ere."

"Any attacks?" asked O'Neill.

"One, sir, but I 'ad the amyl under 'is nose at the first gasp, an'

'e came round all right."

"Good," said O'Neill. "You go and get some supper now, Truelove. I'll attend to everything till you get back."

The corporal bowed and went forthwith. O'Neill set the capsules out on the table to be easily accessible, and joined Buscarlet by the great fireplace at the end of the room, whence he could keep watch on the still profile that showed against the gold of the screen. From without there came the blurred noises of the Paris street, mingled and blended in a single hum, as though life were laying siege to that quiet chamber.

Buscarlet was eager to talk. He was a speciously amiable little man, blonde and plump, a creature of easy emotions, p.r.o.ne to panic and tears.

"Ah, he talked indeed!" he said, as soon as O'Neill was seated. "At first I thought: 'This is delirium. He is returning to the age of his innocence.' But his eyes, as he looked at me, were wise and serious.

My friend, it gave me a shock."

"What did he talk about?" asked O'Neill.

Buscarlet coughed. "Of his wife," he answered. "Fancy it!"

"His wife? Why, is he married?" demanded O'Neill in astonishment.

Buscarlet nodded two or three times. "Yes," he replied; "that is one of the things that has happened to him. One might have guessed it, hein?--a life like that! Ah, my friend, there is one who has put out his hours at usury. What memories he must have!"

O'Neill grunted, with his eyes on the bed. "He's had a beastly life, if that's what you mean," he said, "Who was the woman?'

"One might almost have guessed that, too," said Buscarlet. He rose.

"Come and see," he said.

There was a recess beside the great mantelpiece, and in it hung Regnault's famous picture, "The Dancer," all scarlet frock and white flesh against an amber background.

"That?" exclaimed O'Neill. "Lola?"

Buscarlet nodded; he had forced a good effect.

"That is she," he answered.

The picture was familiar to O'Neill; to him, as to many another young painter of that time, it was an upstanding landmark on the road of art. He looked at it now, in the spa.r.s.e light from the bedside lamp, with a fresh interest in its significance. He saw with new understanding the conventionalism of the pose--hip thrust out, arm akimbo, shoulder c.o.c.ked--contrasted against the dark vivacity of the face and all the pulsing opulence of the flesh. It was an epic, an epic of the savage triumphant against civilization, of the spirit victorious against the forms of art.

He stared at it, Buscarlet smiling mildly at his elbow; then he turned away and went back to his seat. The face on the bed was unchanged.

"So Regnault married Lola!" he said slowly. "When?"

"Ah, who knows?" Buscarlet shrugged graphically. "Many years ago, of course. It is twenty years since she danced."

"And what was he saying about her?" asked O'Neill.

"Nothing to any purpose," replied Buscarlet. "I think he had been dreaming of her. You know the manner he has of waking up--coming back to consciousness with eyes wide open and his mind alert, with no interval of drowsiness and reluctance? Yes? Well, he woke like that before I knew he had ceased to sleep. 'I should like to see her now,'

he said. 'Whom?' I asked, and he smiled. 'Lola,' he answered, and he went on to say that she was the one woman he had never understood.

'That was her advantage,' he said, smiling still; 'for she understood me; yes, she knew me as if she had made me.' After a while, he smiled again, and said, 'Yes, I should like to see her now.'"

O'Neill frowned thoughtfully. "Well, she ought to be here if she's his wife," he said. "Is she in Paris, d'you know? We might send for her."

"I do not know," replied Buscarlet. "n.o.body knows, but I have heard she retired upon religion."

Their talk dwindled a little then. O'Neill found himself dwelling in thought upon that long-ago marriage of the great artist with Lola, the dancer. To him she was but a name; her sun had set in his boyhood, and there remained only the spoken fame of her wonderful dancing and a tale here and there of the fervor with which she had lived. It was an old chronicle of pa.s.sion and undiscipline, of a vehement personality naming through the capitals of Europe, its trail marked by scandals and violences, ending in the quick oblivion which comes to compensate for such lives. On the whole, he thought, such a marriage was what one would have looked for in Regnault; as Buscarlet said, one might almost have guessed. He, with his genius and his restlessness, his great fame and his infamy, the high achievement of his art and the baseness of his relaxations, he was just such another as Lola.

Friends.h.i.+p, or even the mere forms of friends.h.i.+p, are the touchstone of a man. O'Neill was credited in his world with the friends.h.i.+p of Regnault. It had even been to him a matter of some social profit; there were many who deferred willingly to the great man's intimate.

O'Neill saw no reason to set them right, but he knew himself that he had come by a loss in his close acquaintance with the Master. To know him at a distance, to be sure of just enough to interpret his work by the clue of his personality, was a thing to be glad of. But if one went further, incurred a part of his confidence, and ascertained his real flavor, then, as O'Neill once said, it was like visiting one's kitchen; it killed one's appet.i.te.