“Yes, of course.”
“Then she ain’t comin’, sir, for it’s nearly an hour behind by the kitchen clock.”
Dale glanced at his watch in astonishment, then at the clock on the mantelpiece.
Keren-Happuch was quite correct in every respect, for the model did not come, and Dale felt so startled by this that he did not leave the studio all day, but spent it with a growing feeling of trouble.
That night, to get rid of the anxiety which kept his brain working, he sought out his two friends and dined with them at one of the cafés, eating little, drinking a good deal, and sitting at last smoking, morose and silent, listening to Leronde’s excited disquisitions on art, and Pacey’s bantering of the Frenchman, till it was time to return to his studio, which he entered with a shudder, to cross to his room.
Keren-Happuch had been up and lit the gas, leaving one jet burning with a ghastly blue flame, and when this was turned up, the place seemed to be full of shadows, out of which the various casts and busts looked at him weirdly.
“Phew! how hot and stuffy the place is,” he muttered. “Am I going to be ill—sickening for a fever? Bah! Rubbish! I drank too much of that Chianti.”
The Italian name of the wine of which he had freely partaken suggested the Conte, but only for a moment, and then he was brooding again over the failure of the model to keep her appointment.
“Surely she is not ill,” he said excitedly; then, with an angry gesticulation, “well, if she is, what is it to me? Poor woman! she will get better, and I must wait.”
He hurried into his room, and turned up the gas there, but he could not rest without going back into the studio and turning the gas on full before dragging round the great easel, and throwing back the curtains to unveil the picture, with its graceful white figure standing right out from the group like sunlit ivory. But a shadow was cast upon the upper part by a portion of the curtain whose rings had caught upon the rod, and a strange shudder ran through him, for the paper he had used to hide the face looked dark, and, to his excited vision, took the form of the close black veil, through which a pair of brilliant eyes appeared to flash.