“Oh—” French stammered; and saw the other faintly redden.
“I don’t mean, of course, that an artist, a great creative artist, isn’t always different ... on the contrary....” Paul hesitated again. “I understand all that.... I’ve experienced it....” His handsome face softened, and French, mollified, murmured to himself: “He was awfully kind to Emily Morland—I’m sure he was.”
“Only,” Mrs. Paul’s husband continued with a deepening earnestness, as if he were trying to explain to French something not quite clear to himself, “only, if you’re not a great creative artist yourself, it is hard sometimes, sitting by and looking on and feeling that if you were just allowed to say a word—. Of course,” he added abruptly, “he was very good to her in other ways; very grateful. She was his Inspiration.”
“It’s something to have been that,” French said; and at the words his companion’s colour deepened to a flush which took in his neck and ears, and spread up to his white forehead.
“It’s everything,” he agreed, almost solemnly.
French had wandered up to a book-shelf in what had apparently been Fingall’s dressing-room. He had seen no other books about, and was curious to learn what these had to tell him. They were chiefly old Tauchnitz novels—mild mid-Victorian fiction rubbing elbows with a few odd volumes of Dumas, Maupassant and Zola. But under a loose pile the critic, with beating heart, had detected a shabby sketch-book. His hand shook as he opened it; but its pages were blank, and he reflected ironically that had they not been the dealers would never have left it there.
“They’ve been over the place with a fine-toothcomb,” he muttered to himself.
“What have you got hold of?” Donald Paul asked, coming up.
French continued mechanically to flutter the blank pages; then his hand paused at one which was scribbled over with dots and diagrams, and marginal notes in Fingall’s small cramped writing.
“Tea-party,” it was cryptically entitled, with a date beneath; and on the next page, under the heading: “For tea-party,” a single figure stood out—the figure of a dowdily-dressed woman seated in a low chair, a cup in her hand, and looking up as if to speak to some one who was not yet sketched in. The drawing, in three chalks on a gray ground, was rapidly but carefully executed: one of those light and perfect things which used to fall from Fingall like stray petals from a great tree in bloom. The woman’s attitude was full of an ardent interest; from the forward thrust of her clumsily-shod foot to the tilt of her head and the high light on her eye-glasses, everything about her seemed electrified by some eager shock of ideas.