Chapter Fourteen.
Life’s Fever.
It was with a novel feeling of anxiety that Dale waited for the coming of his model. A peculiar feverish desire to know more of her position had come over him, and he made up his mind to question her about her father and the cause of his exile. Jaggs had said that he had had to flee for life and liberty, and if he questioned her about these she would, foreigner-like, become communicative.
It was nothing to him, of course. This woman—lady perhaps, for her words bespoke refinement—would answer his purpose till the picture was finished. She was paid for her services, and when she was no longer required, there was an end of the visits to his studio.
He told himself all this as he sat before his great canvas, working patiently, filling up portions, and preparing for his model’s coming. And as he worked on, with the figure as strongly marked as the model, the softly rounded contour of the graceful form began to glow in imagination with life, and at last Dale sprang from his seat, threw down palette and brushes, and shook his head as if to clear it from some strange confusion of intellect.
“How absurd!” he said aloud, and trying to turn the current of his thoughts, they drifted back at once to his model, and he gazed at his work, wondering which of his ideas was correct about her persistently keeping her face covered.
“She cannot be disfigured,” he muttered. “It must be for reasons of her own.—She is, as I thought, forced to undertake a task that must be hateful to her.—I wonder whether her face is beautiful too?”
“Bah! what is it to me?” he muttered angrily. “I do not want to paint her face, and yet she must be very beautiful.”
He sat down again before his canvas, thoughtful and dreamy, picturing to himself what her face might be, and the next minute he had seized a drawing-board upon which grey paper was already stretched, picked up a crayon, and with great rapidity sketched in memories of dark aquiline faces that he had studied in Home and Paris, with one of later time—one of the women of the Italian colony which lives by the patronage of artists.
These soon covered the paper, and he sat gazing at them, wondering which would be suited to the figure he was painting.
Then, throwing the board aside, he began to pace the studio impatiently.
“What nonsense!” he muttered. “What craze is this! Her face is nothing to me. I’m overwrought. Worry and work are having their effect. I have had no exercise either lately. Yes: that’s it: I’m overdone.”
He stood hesitating for a few moments, and then thrust his hand into his pocket, and drew out five shillings.
“I’ll rout out Pacey and Leronde, and we’ll go up the river for a row.”
He rang the bell and waited, giving one more glance at his picture, and then turning it face to the wall, with the curtain drawn.
He had hardly finished when Keren-Happuch’s step was heard at the door, and she knocked and entered.
“You ring, please, sir?”
“Yes. Take this money. No—no—stop a moment. She would be hurt,” he muttered, and, hastily wrapping it in a sheet of note-paper at the side table, he thrust the packet into an envelope, fastened it down, and directed it to La Signora Azacci.
“There, Keren-Happuch,” he said.
“Don’t call me that now, please, Mr Dale, sir. I likes the other best, ’cause you don’t do it to tease me, like Mr Pacey.”
“Well then, Miranda, my little child of toil,” he said merrily, “I have wrapped up this money because the young lady might not like it given to her loose. It isn’t that I don’t trust you.”
The girl laughed.
“Zif I didn’t know that, sir. Why, you give me a fi’ pun’ note to get changed once.”
“So I did, Miranda, and will again.”
“And sovrins lots o’ times. I don’t mind.”
“Give this to the Italian lady.”
“Is she a lady, sir? I think she is sometimes, and sometimes I don’t, ’cause she’s so shabby. Why, some o’ them models as comes could buy her up out and out.”
“Yes, Miranda; but don’t be so loquacious.”
“No, sir, I won’t,” said Keren-Happuch, wondering the while what the word meant.
“Tell her that I’m not well this morning, and have gone into the country for a day, but I hope to see her at the same time to-morrow morning.”
“There, I knowed you wasn’t well, sir,” cried the girl eagerly.
“Pooh! only a little seedy.”
“But was she to come at the reg’lar time this morning, sir?”
“Yes, of course.”
“Then she ain’t comin’, sir, for it’s nearly an hour behind by the kitchen clock.”
Dale glanced at his watch in astonishment, then at the clock on the mantelpiece.
Keren-Happuch was quite correct in every respect, for the model did not come, and Dale felt so startled by this that he did not leave the studio all day, but spent it with a growing feeling of trouble.
That night, to get rid of the anxiety which kept his brain working, he sought out his two friends and dined with them at one of the cafés, eating little, drinking a good deal, and sitting at last smoking, morose and silent, listening to Leronde’s excited disquisitions on art, and Pacey’s bantering of the Frenchman, till it was time to return to his studio, which he entered with a shudder, to cross to his room.
Keren-Happuch had been up and lit the gas, leaving one jet burning with a ghastly blue flame, and when this was turned up, the place seemed to be full of shadows, out of which the various casts and busts looked at him weirdly.
“Phew! how hot and stuffy the place is,” he muttered. “Am I going to be ill—sickening for a fever? Bah! Rubbish! I drank too much of that Chianti.”
The Italian name of the wine of which he had freely partaken suggested the Conte, but only for a moment, and then he was brooding again over the failure of the model to keep her appointment.
“Surely she is not ill,” he said excitedly; then, with an angry gesticulation, “well, if she is, what is it to me? Poor woman! she will get better, and I must wait.”
He hurried into his room, and turned up the gas there, but he could not rest without going back into the studio and turning the gas on full before dragging round the great easel, and throwing back the curtains to unveil the picture, with its graceful white figure standing right out from the group like sunlit ivory. But a shadow was cast upon the upper part by a portion of the curtain whose rings had caught upon the rod, and a strange shudder ran through him, for the paper he had used to hide the face looked dark, and, to his excited vision, took the form of the close black veil, through which a pair of brilliant eyes appeared to flash.
Snatching back the curtain, he wheeled the easel into its place, with its face to the wall, turned down the gas after fastening the door, and threw himself upon his bed to lie tossing hour after hour, never once going right off to sleep, but thinking incessantly of the beautiful model, and the masked face whose eyes burned into his brain.