Phil Watching Helia and Socrate
All this preoccupied Phil, as he put the finishing touches to his landscape. The place inclined to reverie. While he was there, scarcely two or three persons had passed along the road below. They could not see him; it would be necessary to climb up the slope and break through the hawthorn hedge. For two hours Phil had been working. He had reached the time, so dangerous for the artist, when a few strokes too much spoil the picture. He resolved to leave it as it was, without any working up, in all its freshness of first inspiration. He was preparing to close his box and fold his easel before going back to Camp Rosemont; but two persons appeared in the lane below. He gave them no more attention than he had given to others. It seemed to him that a man was speaking, and a woman replying. He did not see them; but when they came near him he recognized their voices.
He stopped motionless and listened again, thinking he must have been mistaken. He leaned over and looked through the branches of the hedge. It was indeed they—Helia and Socrate.
Phil felt a chill at his heart. He would like to have had Poufaille there for a moment—only for a moment—yet no! he would be the only witness! He would see falling away before him, dropping to the dust, petal by petal, the flower of his childish love. He was going to hear Helia talking sweetly, arm in arm, with the painter-thinker. His little Saint John of other days, so pure and simple, he would hear her; but, ah, how he wished that he was not there, that he could not hear!
But he heard everything. Bits of conversation mounted up to him as if torn asunder by the thorns of the hedge.
“Listen to me!” Socrate was saying.
“I know what you are going to say,” answered Helia. “Begone!—I have told you—no!”
“Yet you were so good to me,” continued the tearful voice of Socrate, using the familiar “thou.”
“Socrate, I tell you once again, you are to say ‘you’ when you speak to me,” Helia interrupted firmly. “Any one listening to you might think you had rights over me!”
“But no one is listening!”