“Haughty enough, but by no means a Moor, any more than you are. His eyes were blue, and really lighter than yours, my boy. With a queer shine in them, sometimes! I was sorry for him, and so was Anita. But Janvier, with his obsession about equality and justice, sturdily refused to see that there was anything to be sorry about, except our nasty human point of view. He gave a lot of the care of his colored patients to Richmond, who did nobly by them, too. Only, by some mysterious instinct, they always recognized him as one of them. And it hurt him, clean through and through. How that boy suffered! He had real genius, we knew. And I suppose this helped Janvier to put up with Richmond’s occasional frantic outbursts against his fate. We used to call them his cyclones of the soul, not dreaming that a similar expression was to be invented long afterward. These storms of passion always left him crumpled up into nothingness before Janvier, Anita, even myself! I tell you, Gerald, the man’s agonies were atrocious. He had a kind of gallant courage, too, for all his self-abasement; you would be pretty dull, if you couldn’t see the sublimity of it. After every outbreak, and the subsequent surrender, he would painfully pick up the pieces of himself, and put them together again in a dazed sort of way, and next day devote himself to his work, more single-mindedly than ever. Janvier was his chosen pattern and example, in that.”
“But perhaps the poor chap worked too hard,” suggested Gerald.
“Exactly! And there’s where Janvier and I were wrong, not to have known it. Anita, with a far finer vision than we had, often warned us that the bent bow was strung too tight. But we couldn’t see it so; men are blind, sometimes, in the heat and burden of the day. Richmond was six feet tall, and broad in proportion. A magnificent physique! That’s what we went by. We laughed at Anita’s fears—accused her of plantation-coddling. And there was a lot to be done, too, that year after the Janviers were married. It was a horrible winter, disease stalking everywhere, especially among the ‘coloreds.’ Both Janvier and Richmond were overworked. You would have thought that the sort of office Janvier had, with so many colored patients, would have hurt his practice. Not a bit of it. People felt a trust in him. Children always took to him, and he was very successful, as you know, in children’s diseases.
“It happened that in the following spring, Janvier was suddenly called to Toronto to see his mother, who had but a few days to live. He asked me to look after things a little, in his absence. Of course, I said I would, but I told him, half-laughingly, that I hoped to goodness Charles Richmond wouldn’t treat me to a cyclone of the soul; and if he did, I should turn the hose on him. Janvier looked rather troubled, but said he didn’t expect anything of the sort. In fact, a storm had occurred only the day before, and another such tempest wouldn’t be due for a long time. It struck me that if I’d been in Frank’s place, I would have been worried about leaving Anita. Very likely, Frank was worried, for he had tried to persuade her to visit her sister while he was away. But the girl was tremendously interested in some sick little pickaninnies she was helping both doctors to pull out of various croups and itises, and she felt that those children needed her. And, anyway, Frank would be back in a few days.”
A new tone had crept into the sculptor’s voice, and Gerald guessed that his uncle was about to speak of things hitherto untold. “Poor Stevedear,” he thought, with a thrill of loving sympathy, “he’s come to the place where the novels always have a row of asterisks, or something.”
“And,” continued the other steadily, “Franklin Janvier did come back, summoned by a telegram I sent him, telling him that Richmond had committed suicide. He had shot himself at the Tenth Street house. More than that, Anita had seen it all, and was prostrated by the shock. She had often warned us that Richmond’s end might be madness. We had laughed at her, and now—Well, no use dwelling on that part now, this evening of your happiness, Gerald! It’s enough to tell you that Janvier went through the hell of seeing his young wife’s mind give way completely, from the shock. Specialists came, and after a while they held out a distinct hope that a few months might bring a change for the better. She regained something of her former sweetness, but it was evident that most of the time her mind was a blank. Once, in one of her rare outbursts, she cried out that her soul was snared in a web, not of her own weaving. You can imagine what Janvier felt, hearing this truth from her lips.
“The young couple had looked forward happily to the birth of children; but now, in extreme anguish of spirit, Frank Janvier told me that it was not worth the price; nothing could be worth the price his wife was paying. But he didn’t give up hope. The doctors still believed that the coming of the child might end forever the terrible shadow. Anita was naturally an unusually well-balanced person. It was part of her charm, the kind of sweet steadiness she had. I know Janvier counted on it to save her, in the end. So it was with very great eagerness that we all awaited the arrival of the Janvier heir.
“By tacit agreement, I stopped going to the Tenth Street house, but Janvier came often to my studio. He seemed to cling to me in his trouble, and I wanted to help him, of course. He kept himself in hand, pluckily enough; but sometimes, in unguarded moments, the suffering that showed itself in his face was horrible to see. So summer and autumn passed, and winter came.
“One bitter December night as I was reading in this very room, a messenger brought me a note from Janvier, begging me to come to him at once. He had, as I already knew, passed through two days of alternate hope and despair. And now, so the note told me, both wife and child had died. Anita’s face had taken on a look of exquisite beauty, the look of her wedding-day. He wanted me to make the mask that would preserve it. You know how I must have felt.”