“You’ll ruin yourself,” he gasped, between tears and bullying. “If you ruin me, you come down too—don’t forget that.”
“O, in a noble cause!” I said mockingly: “to open the eyes of my mistress and my friend.”
He stamped about in a little impotent frenzy, then came and almost prostrated himself before me.
“I—I thought you’d forsaken me,” he cried; “I swear I did, Di; and—and I was as miserable as a dog, and wanted sympathy, I did, in this cursed strait-laced nunnery. Don’t tell on me—don’t; and I’ll go on with your picture here and now.”
In a fever of trepidation, he hurried from me, calling on me not to go, and fetched the canvas from the press and brought it to me.
“See,” he said, “you little injured innocent—yes, you was quite right to be hurt; but—but it’s you I love, Di—it really is—and”—
The canvas fell from his hand. He stood, gaping, as if in the first shock of a stroke. And I turned; and there was madam standing in our midst, every atom of colour gone from her face.
There are some situations, my Alcide, that can only be ended brutally. I don’t know what deadly instinct drove me to the portrait; but to it I ran, and turned it with the easel about. Then, I declare, I felt as if I had committed murder. The wretch, with what fatal purpose I could not tell, had done nothing less than mutilate his own inspiration. In place of the lovely roses of yesterday was the worn, haggard woman of to-day, and the harp in her lap was a tangle of broken strings.
I felt for her. Looking in her face, I almost repented my part. There was a dreadful smile on it, as she went very quiet and breathless, and lifted the “Una” from the ground.
“It is very pretty,” she said, “but hardly proper to a child of the Good Shepherd.”