The girl hesitated. She had just been expressing the opinion, possibly absorbed from Saxon, that the personality of the artist was extremely disagreeable. As she glanced at M. Hervé, the thought flashed through her mind that this might possibly be Marston himself. She knew that master’s fondness for the incognito. But she dismissed the idea as highly fanciful, and even ventured frankly to repeat her criticism.
At last, Hervé replied, with great gravity:
“Mademoiselle, I had the honor to know the great Frederick Marston once. It was some years ago. He keeps himself much as a hermit might in these days, but I am sure that the portion of the story I know is not that of the vain man or of the poseur. Possibly,” he hesitated modestly, “it might interest mademoiselle?”
“I’m sure of it,” declared the girl.
“Marston,” he began, “drifted into the Paris ateliers from your country, callow, morbid, painfully young and totally inexperienced. He was a tall, gaunt boy with a beard that grew hardly as fast as his career, though finally it covered his face. Books and pictures he knew with passionate love. With life, he was unacquainted; at men, he looked distantly over the deep chasm of his bashfulness. Women he feared, and of them he knew no more than he knew of dragons.
“He was eighteen then. He was in the Salon at twenty-two, and at the height of fame at twenty-six. He is now only thirty-three. What he will be at forty, one can not surmise.”
The Frenchman gazed for a moment at the spiraling smoke from his cigarette, and halted with the uncertainty of a bard who doubts his ability to do justice to his lay.
“I find the story difficult.” He smiled with some diffidence, then continued: “Had I the art to tell it, it would be pathos. Marston was a generous fellow, beloved by those who knew him, but quarantined by his morbid reserve from wide acquaintanceship. Temperament—ah, that is a wonderful thing! It is to a man what clouds and mists are to a land! Without them, there is only arid desert—with too many, there are storm and endless rain and dreary winds. He had the storms and rain and winds in his life—but over all he had the genius! The masters knew that before they had criticized him six months. In a year, they stood abashed before him.”
“Go on, please!” prompted Duska, in a soft voice of sympathetic interest.
“He dreaded notoriety, he feared fame. He never had a photograph taken, and, when it was his turn to pose in the sketch classes, where the students alternate as models for their fellows, his nervousness was actual suffering. To be looked at meant, for him, to drop his eyes and find his hands in his way—the hands that could paint the finest pictures in Europe!”