“To understand his half-mad conduct, one must understand his half-mad genius. To most men who can command fame, the plaudits of clapping hands are as the incense of triumph. To him, there was but the art itself—the praise meant only embarrassment. His ideal was that of the English poet—a land where
‘—only the Master shall praise us, and only the Master shall blame:
And no one shall work for money and no one shall work for fame.’
That was what he wished, and could not have in Paris.
“It was in painting only that he forgot himself, and became a disembodied magic behind a brush. When a picture called down unusual comment from critics and press, he would disappear—remain out of sight for months. No one knew where he went. Once, I remember, in my time, he stayed away almost a year.
“He knew one woman in Paris, besides the models, who were to him impersonal things. Of that one woman alone, he was not afraid. She was a pathetic sort of a girl. Her large eyes followed him with adoring hero-worship. She was the daughter of an English painter who could not paint, one Alfred St. John, who lodged in the rear of the floor above. She herself was a poet who could not write verse. To her, he talked without bashfulness, and for her he felt vast sorrow. Love! Mon dieu, no! If he had loved her, he would have fled from her in terror!
“But she loved him. Then, he fell ill. Typhoid it was, and for weeks he was in his bed, with the papers crying out each day what a disaster threatened France and the world, if he should die. And she nursed him, denying herself rest. Typhoid may be helped by a physician, but the patient owes his life to the nurse. When he recovered, his one obsessing thought was that his life really belonged to her rather than to himself. I have already said he was morbid half to the point of madness. Genius is sometimes so!
“By no means a constant absintheur, in his moods he liked to watch the opalescent gleams that flash in a glass of Pernod. One night, when he had taken more perhaps than was his custom, he returned to his lodgings, resolved to pay the debt, with an offer of marriage.
“I do not know how much was the morbidness of his own temperament, and how much was the absinthe. I know that after that it was all wormwood for them both.
“She was proud. She soon divined that he had asked her solely out of sympathy, and perhaps it was at her urging that he left Paris alone. Perhaps, it was because his fame was becoming too great to allow his remaining there longer a recluse. At all events, he went away without warning—fled precipitantly. No one was astonished. His friends only laughed. For a year they laughed, then they became a trifle uneasy. Finally, however, these fears abated. St. John, his father-in-law, admitted that he was in constant correspondence with the master, and knew where he was in hiding. He refused to divulge his secret of place. He said that Marston exacted this promise—that he wanted to hide. Then came new pictures, which St. John handled as his son-in-law’s agent. Paris delighted in them. Marston travels about now, and paints. Whether he is mildly mad, or only as mad as his exaggerated genius makes him, I have often wondered.”
“What became of the poor girl?” Duska’s voice put the question, very tenderly.