“Ah!” Brooke exclaimed, half aloud. She remembered her first visit to the Salon, of standing before this same picture with Marte Lorenz, “the big hybrid English-Dutch-French artist,” Lucy Dean called him, and laughing at the solemn, stupid geese, while he had told her in his perfect, slow English that he had often driven flocks of geese to pasture in his boyhood, also that sometimes he had found them to be no laughing matter,—a trifling incident at the time, but now a sort of landmark in the receding journey.
She had met this Lorenz (Marte his intimates called him) often that winter and spring on the easy impersonal footing that prevails between the well-bred American woman and the art students of all countries. He had been presented to her mother most regularly at a fête in Ridgeway’s garden the autumn of their arrival, and from that moment until their parting, a year later, one thing had set him apart from all the score of men with whom she had come in close contact, men who blindly flattered, evaded, or temporized. He had always told her the truth about her work. If she had not realized it at the time, the conviction had always come to her sooner or later.
As to Lorenz himself, once a pupil of the Beaux Arts, his nationality prevented his striving for the Prix-de-Rome, and he had turned his work toward less classic lines; landscapes were his forte, the figure coming second, and yet he oftenest worked at figure-painting and conventional portraiture also, for he must have money for the pot-boiling, much as he disliked the necessity.
Farther away slipt the Whirlpool city and its surroundings. Once more was Brooke sketching in oils, with some friends who often went to the Carlo Rossi garden to pose for each other. Her subject was a girl of the Boulevards, nominally a flower seller. Successful in the drawing and colour, try as she might Brooke could not give the touch that should bring the lifelike expression to the face. With knit brows she looked up to see whose was the shadow cast on the grass before her. It was Lorenz, big, honest fellow, his hands clasped upon the back of the garden seat, his thatch of dark hair sticking out over his deep-set blue eyes, while a questioning expression involved in its uncertainty his straight nose, his deeply cleft chin, and the sensitive yet strong mouth that separated them. Even his short-cut mustache, which accentuated rather than concealed his lips, expressed doubt.
“What is it, M. Lorenz?” Brooke had asked, smiling at his serious air; “no one ever tells me anything definite but you. The master says, ‘Good! keep on!’ One friend only grunts; some one else says ‘Pas mal.’ I know that I must work, work, work, but what do I most lack?”
Lowering his eyes almost to the grass itself, he spoke rapidly, as if the telling was a pain to him: “You have not yet had the awakening; for it you must wait; it is the same with me, but I may not dry my brushes to wait for the day, only work, and destroy, and work again, come good, come ill. It is not enough to block the form and lay on the colours truly. Unless you can interpret your vision and see its shadow on the canvas, watch it draw breath, move, and speak to you, you can never create. But first of all you must know and feel, even if you suffer. How can you interpret this woman before you? Never could you paint for what she stands. Try children, animals, anything else—or better, dry your brush and wait!”
Brooke had flushed angrily and answered curtly; even now the memory brought colour to her cheeks. Only once again had she seen Lorenz before leaving, and now two years had passed. What had become of him? There were depths in this woman’s nature that her parents, all devotion in their different ways, had never fathomed, of which her friends of every day had never dreamed; and in one of these secret places, all unconscious to herself, this man had gained sufficient place at least to bar all others.
While she was thus dreaming away the afternoon, the concert being ended, the throng pressed toward the gallery, and the confusion of voices, high in key and surging on, brought Brooke quickly to herself. Rising, she turned over the pages of the catalogue, reading the artists’ names, and sauntered down the line to where the numbers began, nodding occasionally, or saying a few words to friends that came up; some of whom were stopping to see the pictures, others merely noting the scenic effect of the whole. Suddenly she halted so abruptly, her fingers gripping the page between them with noticeable tension, that a man behind nearly fell over her, while her eyes fastened on the letters that said, “24: Eucharistia. M. Lorenz. 1901.” Before she could read the details opposite, the man whom she had stopped, Charlie Ashton (now Carolus, cousin to Lucy Dean and a courtesy artist possessed of a popular studio for concerts) looked over her shoulder and said:—
“Ah, Miss Lawton, looking for the picture the Senator’s gone daft about, because he thinks the woman in it looks like his wife when he first saw her as a girl out in the California wine country? It’s over this way, that one with the long palm over the frame. I’ve just come from there; everybody’s crowding round, guessing what the name means. I suggested making up a guessing pool on it at five a head, and letting the winner choose the charity; the Bishop is having a shy at it now.”
Brooke steadied herself, and crossing the room joined the group, catching at first but a partial glimpse of the picture.