“Good-bye, little one,” he continued, “for ever. You would forgive me if you knew all, for I am drifting—drifting, and my strength has gone.”
Two days passed—a week, and hour by hour he had waited, fully expecting that Valentina would come. He shrank from the meeting, but felt that it must be, for her influence seemed to be over him sleeping or waking, her eyes always gazing into his.
But she did not come. Only another note, and this he read in its brevity, for it contained but these words—
“You will drive me to my death.”
“Or me to mine,” he muttered, as he burned the letter; and then, in a raging desire to crush down the thoughts which troubled him, he turned to his work.
“Never!” he cried fiercely. “I will not go. If she comes here—well, if she does. That mockery of a man will track her some day, and then, in spite of English law, there will be a meeting, and he will kill me. I hope so. Then there would be rest.”
The picture which he had now stubbornly set himself to finish, as if he were urged by some unseen power, progressed but slowly. “The Emperor” came to sit, and tried to mould his features into the desired aspect with more or less success; but, in spite of inquiries, and interview after interview with different models recommended by brother artists as suitable to stand for the figure, Dale’s taste was too fastidious to be satisfied, and Juno’s face alone looked scornfully from the canvas.
Pacey had been again and again, but only in a friendly way, to chat as of old, sometimes bringing with him Leronde to gossip and fence with, at other times alone. No reference was made to the picture or the past.
“I shall never finish it,” said Dale, as he sat alone one day gazing at his canvas. “What shall I do—go abroad? Joe would come with me, and all this horrible dream might slowly die away.”
“No,” he muttered, after a pause; “it would not die. Better seek the true forgetfulness. Do all men at some time in their lives suffer from such a madness as mine?”