His eyes were travelling slowly and greedily about the vast cold room. He had instantly noted that, in Lady Brankhurst’s description of the place, nothing was exact but the blackness of the stairs that led there. The rest she must have got up from muddled memories of other studios—that of Jolyesse, no doubt, among the number. French could see Jolyesse, in a setting of bibelots, dispensing Turkish coffee to fashionable sitters. But the nakedness of Fingall’s studio had assuredly never been draped: as they beheld it now, so it must have been when the great man painted there—save, indeed, for the pictures once so closely covering the walls (as French saw from the number of empty nails) that to enter it must have been like walking into the heart of a sunset.
None were left. Paul had moved away and stood looking out of the window, and timidly, tentatively, French turned around, one after another, the canvases against the wall. All were as bare as the room, though already prepared for future splendours by the hand from which the brush had dropped so abruptly. On one only a few charcoal strokes hinted at a head—unless indeed it were a landscape? The more French looked the less intelligible it became—the mere first stammer of an unuttered message. The young man put it back with a sigh. He would have liked, beyond almost everything, here under Fingall’s roof to discover just one of his pictures.
“If you’d care to see the other rooms? You know he and Bessy lived here,” he heard his companion suggest.
“Oh, immensely!”
Donald Paul opened a door, struck a match in a dark passage, and preceded him.
“Nothing’s changed.”
The rooms, which were few and small, were still furnished; and this gave French the measure of their humbleness—for they were almost as devoid of comfort as the studio. Fingall must have lived so intensely and constantly in his own inner vision that nothing external mattered. He must have been almost as detached from the visible world as a great musician or a great ascetic; at least till one sat him down before a face or a landscape—and then what he looked at became the whole of the visible world to him.
“Rather doleful diggings for a young woman,” Donald Paul commented with a half-apologetic smile, as if to say: “Can you wonder that she likes the Nouveau Luxe?”
French acquiesced. “I suppose, like all the very greatest of them, he was indifferent to lots of things we think important.”
“Yes—and then....” Paul hesitated. “Then they were so frightfully poor. He didn’t know how to manage—how to get on with people, either sitters or dealers. For years he sold nothing, literally nothing. It was hard on her. She saw so well what he ought to have done; but he wouldn’t listen to her!”