His mind had grown strangely clear. He lay upon the wide divan in the centre of the room, and his eye roving from object to object, unusual recognition in its glance. A Godin stove glowed in one corner of the great room; the fire in it had never been allowed to die out since the first occupation of the studio. It filled the room with a summery warmth that drew out to the last drop the fragrance of a jar of Sicilian lilac that stood in the open window; and brought lovely memories of the veldt from an enormous bunch of mimosa stuck in a blue pot on the piano. So warm was the climate of the room that a balcony door stood perpetually open, even on a night such as this, when the outside air sliced against the warmth of the body with the keenness of a scimitar. Shaded lights threw faintly-tinted shadows in far corners. The only objects that showed clear in the dimness of the big shadowy room were the busts and figures of dead white clay--a gigantic head of Tolstoi, bearded, rugged; a perfect reproduction of Houdon's bust of Napoleon as First Consul; some little Donatello angels.
"It 'll be cold lying here in a Paris cemetery, Val!" said Valdana musingly.
His eye rested reflectively on the face of L'Inconnue, hung on a nail against a pale green-and-rose Persian rug--that lovely mask taken from the dead face of a young unknown girl, fished out one morning from the river's muddy waters. She had cast her secret into the bosom of the Seine, and that kind, wicked, cruel, voluptuous, motherly old river had kept it for ever, so that to this day the world still wonders and longs to know who the girl was, and why with youth and beauty and all the gifts of life stamped upon her she chose to go out into the dark with that little radiant smile on her lips, as if in the last instant she had thought on some wondrous hour into which all the beauty of life had been compressed--and was glad to die because that hour could never come again.
Val, who had often studied the quietly smiling tragic face, said once:
"It was some man's eyes she was thinking of just before she sprang! That little smile was meant for just one man in the world."
"Yes: it'll be cold lying here in Paris," repeated Valdana thoughtfully. "I wish now I 'd stayed with those fellows at Platkop. They have the sunshine, and they 're all together."
Val smoothed the bright rug that lay over him with her thin nervous hands.
"Don't bother now, Dan."
It was many a long year since she had called him by that name which pity now wrung from her.
"I wonder why I should have been the only one not wounded?" He looked at her critically. "All the others had got it somewhere, but I had n't a thing, not a spot! And there was n't a bullet left among those blasted Boers: it was easy enough to slink off as the evening came on ... but some of the fellows looked at me as I undid that door. No one said anything, but they looked at me, Val."