The next morning Campton said to himself: “I can catch that goodbye look if I get it down at once——” and pulled out a canvas before Mme. Lebel came in with his coffee.
As sometimes happened to him, the violent emotions of the last twenty-four hours had almost immediately been clarified and transmuted into vision. He felt that he could think contentedly of George if he could sit down at once and paint him.
The picture grew under his feverish fingers—feverish, yet how firm! He always wondered anew at the way in which, at such hours, the inner flame and smoke issued in a clear guiding radiance. He saw—he saw; and the mere act of his seeing seemed to hold George safe in some pure impenetrable medium. His boy was there, sitting to him, the old George he knew and understood, essentially, vividly face to face with him.
He was interrupted by a ring. Mme. Lebel, tray in hand, opened the door, and a swathed and voluminous figure, sweeping in on a wave of musk, blotted her out. Campton, exasperated at the interruption, turned to face Mme. Olida.
So remote were his thoughts that he would hardly have recognized her had she not breathed, on the old familiar guttural: “Juanito!”
He was less surprised at her intrusion than annoyed at being torn from his picture. “Didn’t you see a sign on the door? ‘No admission before twelve’——” he growled.
“Oh, yes,” she said; “that’s how I knew you were in.”
“But I’m not in; I’m working. I can’t allow——”
Her large bosom rose. “I know, my heart! I remember how stern you always were. ‘Work—work—my work!’ It was always that, even in the first days. But I come to you on my knees: Juanito, imagine me there!” She sketched a plunging motion of her vast body, arrested it in time by supporting herself on the table, and threw back her head entreatingly, so that Campton caught a glint of the pearls in a crevasse of her quaking throat. He saw that her eyes were red with weeping.
“What can I do? You’re in trouble?”