CHAPTER XVI
ANNA'S SECRET
I saw very little of Anna during the first few days of my stay at the Pater's. Cleon had drawn a bad number and was therefore drafted on a detachment of workmen engaged in mending roads—a work all disliked, and as no one volunteered for it, it had to be apportioned by lot. Anna of Ann felt the absence of Cleon because, although he was young, he had attached himself to her and she had learned somewhat to depend on his companionship. In the absence of Cleon, therefore, I often joined Anna in her walks and became more and more charmed by her singleness of purpose. She seemed indifferent to everything except her art, cared nothing for Chairo and his principles, had little conviction as regards the Demetrian cult, and absorbed herself altogether in the joy to be derived from beauty, whether in nature or in man. The idea that there was something in man different from nature had become so familiar to this century that the confusion between them from which the philosophy of our time was only just emerging seemed to her altogether impossible, and it was a hope of hers one day to compose a group or monument in which man with his faculty of subjugating the forces of nature to his use would be contrasted with these forces, typified either by animals or undeveloped human races. She had shown me several models upon which she was at work to typify these forces; among them I remember one of a negro kneeling, with wonder on his thick lips and a superb strength about his loins; she had modelled also a lion crouching at the bidding of an unseen hand; but I had seen no model of Conquering Man. In an abandoned sugar house which she had arranged as a studio, however, were many unfinished busts hidden away which she did not show to me or to others, and there was a good deal of curiosity and some little chaff as to the secret so carefully thus concealed by her.
One morning, however, that I had risen early, tempted by the bright sun of an Indian summer, I started for a short stroll, and passing Anna's studio was surprised to find a window open. Looking inside the window, I saw Anna so absorbed on a clay bust that she had not heard my approach. I watched her work in silence without appreciating that I had surprised a secret, until moving a little I saw clearly that the bust on which she was working was a portrait of Ariston. Even then I was not clear that Anna had been hiding this portrait from us; it seemed perfectly natural that she should be engaged upon it. But when she at last perceived me she blushed scarlet and threw a cloth over it.
"You have seen it," she said reproachfully.
"Why not?" asked I. "It was only a portrait of Ariston."
"Was it so like him that you saw it at once?"
"Did you not mean it to be so?"
"No!" she exclaimed, almost with temper, "and I did not mean you to see it."
I apologized to her and suggested that she should join me in my walk; but she did not answer me at once; she moved about the studio as though agitated by my discovery, moving things aimlessly, taking things up and putting them down again. I stood at the window waiting for an answer, for I did not wish to leave her in this disturbed condition. At last she looked me full in the face and her mobile lips twitched with ill-suppressed emotion. Had she known how little I suspected the cause of her trouble she need not have been so moved; but she had been so long fighting against her love for Ariston that she imagined the discovery by me of the portrait had betrayed her secret.