“If I were a rich man, as rich as Ford or Carnegie, I’d buy that picture of old Jim’s and send it to them in Berlin. Some day it might help them to ask themselves just what it was that brought the man who painted it, a man who simply lived for beauty, to die like a dog, half mad, in a poisoned muckyard in Flanders.”
Suddenly he stopped and the light seemed to die in his face. Then he turned round on the piano stool and broke delicately into the opening bars of the haunted, wild and terrible Fifth Symphony. For the moment he had forgotten that Sally was there.
She got up from her chair and came to him as a child to a wounded and suffering animal. Putting an arm round his clean but frayed collar she kissed his forehead.
“I shall come and see you again ... if I may.”
His sightless flesh seemed to contract as he lifted his thin hands from the keyboard. “Don’t!” he gasped. “Better not ... better not ... for both of us.”
She knew he was right and something in her voice told him so. “... If I may,” she repeated weakly.
He didn’t answer. She pressed her lips again upon his forehead, then took up her coat and went hastily from the room.
The old woman was in the act of turning the latchkey in the front door. She had got her coupons and was returning in triumph with a full basket.
“Not going, Miss Sally, are you? I should like you to have seen his decorations—D.S.O. with two Bars and such a wonderful letter from the General.”
“I’m afraid I simply must go, Mrs. Nixey. Off to France to-morrow, and I’ve got to pack.”