And Dan plodded on with his Messonier-like paintings and missed Barnabas a good deal, in spite of the fact that he had been gone barely three days. And Michael did wonderful line work, and wrote little cynical essays for a small magazine that scoffed at love as sentimental.
But Paul was absorbed in his portrait of the Duchessa, and in the wonderful music his heart heard, the meaning of which was beginning to dawn on his soul.
The Duchessa had given him her own ideas regarding the portrait the first morning she had come to the studio. She had told him about the Casa di Corleone, and the courtyard with the golden oranges and marble fauns and nymphs, and the gallery where her portrait was to hang.
“I want it,” she had said, “to be a wee bit—just the weest bit in the world—flaunting. The women of the House of Corleone are haughty and disdainful. They are too proud to show their feelings. If they ever loved the courtyard and the sunshine, they would have scorned to show it. They have scorned me often for loving it. I have seen—you may laugh at me if you like—their lips curl when my heart has danced for joy as I have stood in the gallery and watched the sunlight stream through the big hall door. I can’t hang there meekly accepting their scorn. I want to defy them. They may think the place theirs, and be calmly satisfied in their possession of it, and they may look upon me as an alien. But it is mine, mine, mine. I want them to know it—not aggressively, you realize—but with just the tiniest bit of assurance that there’s no mistake at all.”
And Paul had responded to her mood as a violin responds to the master-hand that draws the bow across its strings. He had sketched her in on the canvas almost as she had spoken the words, standing there with her head just a trifle thrown back, a little gleam of fascinating devilry in her eyes.
They had nearly come to loggerheads regarding her dress, however. She wished it to be scarlet, in contrast to the black dresses and sombre colours of the haughty ladies already in the gallery. Paul wished it to be blue. In the end she had had her will. It was not often that Sara, Duchessa di Corleone, failed in accomplishing it.
Perhaps the most noticeable characteristic of Sara was her vivid magnetism. Every separate burnished hair of her head seemed to possess it. Her eyes possessed it, her smile possessed it, her voice—a low contralto—possessed it. Her presence dominated a room the moment she entered it, even if she did not speak a word, and Sara possessed a curious gift for silences. They were sudden and unaccountable silences, more disconcerting and full of magnetism than speech. She lapsed into them often with Paul. They came as a sudden and odd interruption to her flow of sparkling talk. She had a trick of making the most ordinary words sparkle. Water, after all, is only water, but it can look very different in sunshine from beneath a grey sky.
And perhaps for the first time Paul found himself at a loss to read the character she presented to him. Probably because he could not appreciate it sufficiently calmly. The music in his heart distracted him, and the tune was clearer and sweeter when she was near. He knew its meaning now, and it filled him with happiness and pain—happiness because it is the most beautiful music in the world to those who hear it, and pain because it somehow seemed to emphasize his own loneliness. And because he had always been lonely a certain feeling had come to him of being not wanted. It was not exactly diffidence, not the outcome of shyness, but merely a certainty that he made no difference to the scheme of happiness in others; in fact, that it probably worked more easily without him. He could not imagine himself as essential to anyone, and never in his wildest dreams could he have imagined himself as essential to the woman who had suddenly become the centre of his universe.
One evening Barnabas returned and walked into Miss Mason’s studio. He came right over to the fire and sat down.