“Of course I don’t see him,” replied Fair defiantly, but she leaned forward, straining her eyes.
“Look farther—look far away; you cannot see the other little boys, many, many, all hurrying while they sing to get home before it is dark? No? Ah, poor Wise Eyes! Perhaps it is because it is years that those little boys hurry down, instead of just an alley of lime trees—they are hurrying home clean across the centuries. Since that first Philippe came singing up from the south, they have loved these gray stones best of all the earth—best, I think, of heaven. And that last little boy, he did not love it least, believe me. Perhaps he is singing louder than them all, because though they have made it, those others, he has saved it.”
“He didn’t save it any more than a good many million other people,” commented Fair ruthlessly.
Philippe le Gai threw back his black head with a ringing peal of laughter. “Truly as you say, not more. But that is another reason why he sings, believe me.”
“But what did you do before you started in to save it?” pursued the remorseless inquisitor, and suddenly she sickened at her task. The radiance flagged in the dark face before her; for a moment Philippe le Gai looked mortally tired.
“Me? I was an artist—and an engineer.” He sat staring ahead of him, tense and straight; and then he relaxed easily, the smile playing again. “Not so good an artist, and not so bad an engineer. I was oh, most young, and oh, most vain, and gray-headed old gentlemen from far away came to beg a little advice as to what to do with their sick mines.”
“Mines?” Fair’s face was alight. “That was what Dad used to do before he went in for cotton. It was copper, you know. D’you know about copper?”
“Every kind of mine that ever was I knew about,” he assured her lightly. “But now I have forgotten.”
“How could you?” she cried. “How could you, when they need you so? Don’t you think that that little boy would be ashamed if he could see you sitting on this terrace—just sitting and sitting like a great enormous lazy black cat? Don’t you?”
“Why, no,” replied Philippe le Gai. “No, I do not think that he would be ashamed.”