The three stood looking at each other for an interval deeply momentous to French, obviously less stirring to his hosts; then Donald Paul said, in a fresh voice a good deal younger than his ingenuous middle-aged face: “We’ve met somewhere before, surely. Wasn’t it the other day at Brighton—at the Metropole?”
His wife looked at him and smiled, wrinkling her perfect brows a little in the effort to help his memory. “We go to so many hotels! I think it was at the Regina at Harrogate.” She appealed to their visitor for corroboration.
“Wasn’t it simply yesterday, on the Channel?” French suggested, the words buzzing a little in his own ears; and Mrs. Paul instantly remembered.
“Of course! How stupid of me!” Her random sweetness grew more concentrated. “You were talking to a dark man with a beard—André Jolyesse, wasn’t it? I told my husband it was Jolyesse. How awfully interesting that you should know him! Do sit down and let me give you some tea while you tell us all about him.”
French, as he took the cup from her hand, remembered that, a few hours earlier, he had been wondering what he and she would first say to each other.
It was dark when he walked away from the blazing front of the Nouveau Luxe. Mrs. Donald Paul had given him two generous hours, and had filled them with talk of her first husband; yet as French turned from the hotel he had the feeling that what he brought away with him had hardly added a grain to his previous knowledge of Horace Fingall. It was perhaps because he was still too blankly bewildered—or because he had not yet found the link between what had been and what was—that he had been able to sift only so infinitesimal a residue out of Mrs. Paul’s abundance. And his first duty, plainly, if he were ever to thread a way through the tangle, was to readjust himself and try to see things from a different point of view.
His one definite impression was that Mrs. Paul was very much pleased that he should have come to Paris to see her, and acutely, though artlessly, aware of the importance of his mission. Artlessness, in fact, seemed her salient quality: there looked out of her great Sphinx-eyes a consciousness as cloudless as a child’s. But one thing he speedily discovered: she was keenly alive to her first husband’s greatness. On that point French saw that she needed no enlightenment. He was even surprised, sitting opposite to her in all the blatancy of hotel mirrors and gilding, to catch on her lips the echoes of so different a setting. But he gradually perceived that the words she used had no meaning for her save, as it were, a symbolic one: they were like the mysterious price-marks with which dealers label their treasures. She knew that her husband had been proud and isolated, that he had “painted only for himself” and had “simply despised popularity”; but she rejoiced that he was now at last receiving “the kind of recognition even he would have cared for”; and when French, at this point, interposed, with an impulse of self-vindication: “I didn’t know that, as yet, much had been written about him that he would have liked,” she opened her fathomless eyes a little wider, and answered: “Oh, but the dealers are simply fighting for his things.”
The shock was severe; but presently French rallied enough to understand that she was not moved by a spirit of cupidity, but was simply applying the only measure of greatness she knew. In Fingall’s lifetime she had learned her lesson, and no doubt repeated it correctly—her conscientious desire for correctness was disarming—but now that he was gone his teaching had got mixed with other formulas, and she was serenely persuaded that, in any art, the proof and corollary of greatness was to become a best seller. “Of course he was his own worst enemy,” she sighed. “Even when people came to buy he managed to send them away discouraged. Whereas now—!”
In the first chill of his disillusionment French thought for a moment of flight. Mrs. Paul had promised him all the documentation he required: she had met him more than halfway in her lavish fixing of hours and offering of material. But everything in him shrank from repeating the experience he had just been subjected to. What was the use of seeing her again, even though her plans included a visit to Fingall’s former studio? She had told him nothing whatever about Fingall, and she had told him only too much about herself. To do that, she had not even had to open her beautiful lips. On his way to her hotel he had stopped in at the Luxembourg, and filled his eyes again with her famous image. Everything she was said to have done for Fingall’s genius seemed to burn in the depths of that quiet face. It was like an inexhaustible reservoir of beauty, a still pool into which the imagination could perpetually dip and draw up new treasure. And now, side by side with the painter’s vision of her, hung French’s own: the vision of the too-smiling beauty set in glasses and glitter, preoccupied with dressmakers and theatre-stalls, and affirming her husband’s genius in terms of the auction room and the stock exchange!
“Oh, hang it—what can she give me? I’ll go straight back to New York,” the young man suddenly resolved. The resolve even carried him precipitately back to his hotel; but on its threshold another thought arrested him. Horace Fingall had not been the only object of his pilgrimage: he had come to Paris to learn what he could of Emily Morland too. That purpose he had naturally not avowed at the Nouveau Luxe: it was hardly the moment to confess his double quest. But the manifest friendliness of Donald Paul convinced him that there would be no difficulty in obtaining whatever enlightenment it was in the young man’s power to give. Donald Paul, at first sight, seemed hardly more expressive than his wife; but though his last avatar was one so remote from literature, at least he had once touched its borders and even worn its livery. His great romance had originated in the accident of his having written an article about its heroine; and transient and unproductive as that phase of his experience had probably been, it must have given him a sense of values more applicable than Mrs. Paul’s to French’s purpose.