Their parting from the recluse at his garden gate was friendly and natural. Mr. Quincunx reverted to his politest manner, and the artist’s good temper seemed quite restored.
In retrospect, after the passing of a couple of days, spent by Dangelis in preparing the accessories of his Ariadne picture, and by Gladys in unpacking certain mysterious parcels telegraphed for to London, the American found himself recalling his visit to Dead Man’s Cottage with none but amiable feelings. The third morning which followed this visit, dawned upon Nevilton with peculiar propitiousness. The air was windless and full of delicious fragrance. The bright clear sunshine seemed to penetrate every portion of the spacious Elizabethan mansion and to turn its corridors and halls, filled with freshly plucked flowers, into a sort of colossal garden house.
Dangelis rose that morning with a more than normal desire to plunge into his work. He was considerably annoyed, however, to find that Gladys had actually arranged to have Mr. Clavering invited to lunch and had gone so far as to add a pencilled scrawl of her own—she herself laughingly confessed as much—to her mother’s formal note, begging him to appear in the middle of the forenoon, as she had a “surprise” in store for him.
The American’s anxiety to begin work as soon as possible with his attractive model, made him suffer miseries of impatience, while Gladys amused herself with her Ariadne draperies, making Lacrima dress and undress her twenty times, behind the screens of the studio.
She appeared at last, however, and the artist, looking up at her from his canvas, was for the moment staggered by her beauty. The instinctive taste of her cousin’s Latin fingers was shown in the exquisite skill with which the classical folds of the dress she wore accentuated the natural charm of her young form.
The stuff of which her chief garment was made was of a deep gentian blue and the contrast between this color and the dazzling whiteness of her neck and arms was enough to ravish not only the æsthetic soul in the man but his more human senses also. Her bare feet were encased in white sandals, bound by slender leathern straps, which were twisted round her legs almost as high as the knee. A thin metal band, of burnished bronze, was clasped about her head and over and under this, her magnificent sun-coloured hair flowed, in easy and natural waves, to where it was caught up, in a Grecian knot, above the nape of her neck. Save for this band round her head she wore no clasps or jewelry of any kind, and the softness of her flesh was made more emphatic by the somewhat rough and coarse texture of her loosely folded drapery. Dangelis was so lost in admiration of this delicious apparition, that he hardly noticed Lacrima’s timid farewell, as the Italian slipped away into the garden and left them together. It was indeed not till Gladys had descended from the little wooden platform and coyly approached the side of his easel, that the artist recovered himself.
“Upon my soul, but you look perfectly wonderful!” he cried enthusiastically. “Quick! Let’s to business. I want to get well started, before we have any interruption.”
He led her back to the platform, and made her lean in a semi-recumbent position upon a cushioned bench which he had prepared for the purpose. He took a long time to satisfy himself as to her precise pose, but at last, with a lucky flash of inspiration, and not without assistance from Gladys herself, whose want of æsthetic feeling was compensated for in this case by the profoundest of all feminine instincts, he found for her the inevitable, the supremely effective, position. It was with a thrill of exquisite sweetness, pervading both soul and senses, that he began painting her. He felt as though this were one of the few flawless and unalloyed moments of his life. Everything in him and about him seemed to vibrate and quiver in response to the breath of beauty and youth. Penetrated by the delicate glow of a passion which was free, at present, from the sting of sensual craving, he felt as though all the accumulative impressions, of a long procession of harmonious days, were summed up and focussed in this fortunate hour. The loveliness of the young girl, as he transferred it, curve by curve, shadow by shadow, to his canvas, seemed expressive of a reserved secret of enchantment, until this moment withheld and concealed from him. The ravishing contours of her lithe figure seemed to open up, to his magnetized imagination, vistas and corridors of emotion, such as he had never even dreamed of experiencing. She was more than a supremely lovely girl. She was the very epitome and incarnation of all those sunward striving forces and impulses, which, rising from the creative heart of the universe, struggle upwards through the resisting darkness. She was a Sun-child, a creature of air and earth and fire, a daughter of Circe and Dionysus; and as he drained the so frankly offered philtre of her intoxicating beauty, and flung his whole soul’s response to it in glowing color upon the canvas, he felt that he would never again thus catch the fates asleep, or thus plunge his hands into the nectar of the supreme gods.
The world presented itself to him at that moment, while he swept his brush with fierce passionate energy across the canvas, as bathed in translucent and unclouded ether. Everything it contained, of weakness and decadence, of gloom and misgiving, seemed to be transfigured, illuminated, swallowed up. He felt as though, in thus touching the very secret of divine joy, held in the lap of the abysmal mothers, nothing but energy and beauty and creative force would ever concern or occupy him again. All else,—all scruples, all questions, all problems, all renunciations—seemed but irrelevant and negligible vapour, compared with this glorious and sunlit stream of life. He worked on feverishly at his task. By degrees, and in so incredibly a short time that Gladys herself was astonished when he told her she could rest and stretch herself a little, the figure of the Ariadne he had seen in his imagination limned itself against the expectant background. He was preparing to resume his labour, and Gladys, after a boyish scramble into the neighbouring conservatory, and an eager return to the artist’s side with a handful of early strawberries, was just re-mounting the platform, when the door of the studio opened and Hugh Clavering entered.
He had been almost inclined,—in so morbid a condition were his nerves—to knock at the door before coming in, but a lucky after-thought had reminded him that such an action would have been scandalously inappropriate.