“You hear music, anyhow,” said the artist. That was his gentle way of intimating that Claude was not invited to be a looker-on.
On the next day, Claude, in his nook above, with the studio below shut from view by the curtain of his inner window, heard the ladies come. He knows they are these two, for one voice, the elder, blooms out at once in a gay abundance of words, and the other speaks in soft, low tones that, before they reach his ear, run indistinguishably together.
Soon there comes the sound of tuning the violin, while the older voice is still heard praising one thing and another, and asking careless questions.
“I suppose that cotton cloth covers something that is to have a public unveiling some day, doesn’t it?”
Claude cannot hear the answer; the painter drops his voice even below its usual quiet tone. But Claude knows what he must be saying; that the cloth covers merely a portrait he is finishing of a young man who has sat for it to please a wifeless, and, but for him, childless, and fondly devoted father. And now he can tell by the masculine step, and the lady’s one or two lively words, that the artist has drawn away the covering from his (Claude’s) own portrait. But the lady’s young companion goes on tuning her instrument—“tink, tink, tink;” and now the bow is drawn.
“Why, how singular!” exclaims the elder lady. “Why, my dear, come here and see! Somebody has got your eyes! Why, he’s got your whole state of mind, a reduplication of it. And—I declare, he looks almost as good as you do! If—I”—
The voice stops short. There is a moment’s silence in which the unseen hearer doubts not the artist is making signs that yonder window and curtain are all that hide the picture’s original, and the voice says again,—
“I wish you’d paint my picture,” and the violin sounds once more its experimental notes.
But there are other things which Claude can neither hear, nor see, nor guess. He cannot see that the elder lady is already wondering at, and guardedly watching, an agitation betrayed by the younger in a tremor of the hand that fumbles with her music-sheets and music-stand, in the foot that trembles on the floor, in the reddened cheek, and in the bitten lip. He may guess that the painter sits at his easel with kindling eye; but he cannot guess that just as the elder lady is about to say,—
“My dear, if you don’t feel”—the tremor vanishes, the lips gently set, and only the color remains. But he hears the first soft moan of the tense string under the bow, and a second, and another; and then, as he rests his elbows upon the table before him, and covers his face in his trembling hands, it seems to him as if his own lost heart had entered into that vibrant medium, and is pouring thence to heaven and her ear its prayer of love.