Once again Maurice laughed aloud as he recalled how earnestly he had explained to his students his method in painting pearls, telling them of the many slow and careful studies he had made of pearls before he had really mastered the mystery of pearls, and much else, after the manner of enthusiastic and self-giving teachers the world over. In general, the youngsters had listened and profited; otherwise, they would have been donkeys. Also, they had jeered and jested; otherwise, Maurice thought, they would have been prigs. And that nickname, “the Price-of-Great-Pearls,” had clung to him, in a heart-warming way. He felt that if his students had given him no title at all, he would have suffered some vague loneliness of spirit when among them.
Astonishing how Pietro, in one piece of brilliant painting, had succeeded in poking fun at two Frenchmen and two Americans! Certainly, Anthony’s well-studied devil-may-care composition showed doubly riotous after that boy had wreaked his genius on it; and the pearls, as Maurice saw with a twinge of gratification, were exquisitely painted, if you considered them as giant opalescent lamps filched from some moonlit fairyland, and not as gems discreetly adorning a woman. And then the Gauguin coloring, the Matisse arabesques! As a final flourish, like the “I thank you” after a four-minute speech, Pietro had signed the work “the Price-of-Great-Pearls.” Maurice found, on looking for that signature, that some later jester had obliterated from it all but the one word, “Price.” Price, indeed!
Maurice’s smile faded away into mere pensiveness as he recalled both Pietro and Amouretta. The boy, in all his vivid brightness of youth, had died suddenly from the epidemic in which Maurice himself had suffered, while Amouretta—
Her real name was not Amouretta. No one’s is. She was just Anna McGowan, golden and rosy, with hair and complexion that would have been beyond belief if she had not insisted on showing every artist (and more especially his wife) just how far her hair fell below her knees and just how it grew around her temples; because, as she said, it was where the hair started and where it left off that all that nasty peroxide business gave those others away, poor things! Also, she would press her finger on her cheek and lips, so that their roses would vanish and return, as if an electric button had been touched. She loved to have the wives see that, too. There was nothing false about Amouretta. From her golden topknot to her pink toes, she was as good a girl, all in all, as ever hopped high-heeled from a painter’s studio to a picture-studio (two quite different arenas), in the effort to make both ends meet, and then cross over. “It’s the cross-over that counts,” Amouretta used to say; “there’s where the joy in life appears.” The name Amouretta was a business concession to the picture industry and to the small vaudeville shows in which she worked when posing was slack.
A singularly vivid personality, that child; her adventures, like her hair and her complexion, sometimes seemed fabulous, at first glance, but always gained new lustre after investigation. For instance, there was on her shoulder a tiny red mark, which she said was due to a bite she had received at the Kilkenny Ball, from a mad and anonymous devotee of beauty. Could any one altogether believe that? Nevertheless, young Cavendish (whom she had never known or even seen), on coming to himself the day after, had confessed himself publicly, in an agony of shame. He had taken a bite of a peach in passing; he didn’t know why, Lord help him; and from that hour he was nevermore the strayed reveller we once had known, but settled down into blameless and uninteresting eclipse. Then again, there came a morning when Amouretta, posing in a green satin bodice as an understudy for an overworked “bud,” whose portrait Maurice Price was painting, had yielded to that self-revealing mood to which all models are at times given; she confided to our painter that she was engaged to be married to a middle-aged admirer, a man of great wealth, whose name she would not tell until the engagement was publicly announced. Could not Mr. Price guess? She meant to give up both stage and model-stand, of course; why, she had given up cigarettes already for that man, because he had said that the men of his family didn’t like them for ladies. “And he was so dear, when he said it.”
Amouretta’s brilliant blush came and went so often during her story, and finally stayed so long, that it played the very deuce with Maurice’s entire morning; you know how difficult it is to paint emerald satin when the wearer is blushing; the green and the red come to blows. And Maurice, who had two daughters of his own, howbeit small, was really worried, until one afternoon at the Century, Mr. William Saltonstall, long of limb, lineage, and purse,—a man of undoubted probity, and a collector, too!—had touched him on the shoulder, and poured out the whole story of his love for Amouretta. The wedding was to be at Saint Barnaby’s, in June. There could be no doubt as to Mr. Saltonstall’s self-surrender; love at first sight it was, that day in the studio when Maurice had introduced a patron of beauty to beauty herself. Naturally the painter was delighted with this idyl—its delicate fragrance, its perfect flowering; all unconsciously, he himself had sown the seed, his wife and Amouretta smiling wisely thereafter at his blindness. He had always liked William Saltonstall, and none the less because that gentleman was not one whom every one called Bill.
After the engagement, Amouretta continued to work, because, valiant little soul, she meant to earn her own trousseau. No man not a relative should be able to say he had done that for her; and I’m thinking it would be a long day before either her father or her brother, in their good-natured shiftlessness, could provide the outfit she had in mind! But there was no June wedding at Saint Barnaby’s, after all; for Amouretta caught a fatal chill one raw night at the Revelries, while posing as Innocence, insufficiently clad in white paint and a scrap of georgette, in one of those pure-white sculpture groups which occasionally reappear in refined vaudeville.
And there was nothing more that could ever happen now to Pietro and Amouretta, thought Maurice. For one as for the other, their story of bright youth was ended. For Pietro, no daring assault upon the Roman Prize; for Amouretta, no adventure of any color at all, not even that climax of white satin train and flower-girls at Saint Barnaby’s. Maurice sighed as he took up a large flat brush and charged it with gray paint to obliterate the caricature. A few vigorous strokes would suffice. But he could not bring himself to do what he intended. He started back as if he had hurt himself. Or had young hands pushed him back? Surely there was something in that quaint, brilliant, impudent creature smiling on him—some hint or vestige of that which was once Amouretta—Amouretta who threw a kiss to the world, and was gone. And what was he, successful Maurice Price, that he should go about with brutal paint to hush up forever young Pietro’s jest? No, no, he could not do that. It was not fair, not sportsmanlike. Live and let live!
He examined all the other panels, but their shapes and sizes were not right. “Oh, well, I don’t give a damn,” lied Maurice to himself. He lit a cigarette, but the landscape came between him and his smoke. He picked up a frayed copy of “La Reine Margot,” but the landscape shut out Saint Bartholomew. He sat a moment in Anthony’s Venetian chair, and covered his eyes with his hands, but between his eyes and his hands he saw only the miracle landscape. So he rose resolutely, took up the panel of his choice, the Amouretta panel, and began to paint on its untouched side. A beautifully primed surface lent itself at once to the artist’s will.