CHAPTER I
From the Western world he heard nothing for four years. Meanwhile he brought his new skill, his maturer knowledge, the result of seven years' study and creation in the workshops of masters and in his own studio, to the sculpturing of the second tomb—the Open Door.
There were crowds around his marble in the Salon, and he mingled with them, watching them muse, discuss, criticize, grow sad and thoughtful before his conception of Life and Death. Some of them looked as poor Tom Rainsford had looked, yearningly toward the door of the tomb. Others hurried past the inscrutable beauty of the Open Door. Purely white, stainless, slender, luminous and yet cold, Molly stood immortalized by Antony. His conception made him famous.
He had exhibited each year with increasing success at private exhibitions, but never at the Salon, and had been called "poseur" because of his reluctance to expose his work in national academies. His bas-reliefs had made him favourably known, but nothing equalled the solemn marble that came now from his studio. Antony's work occupied some twenty feet in the Champ de Mars.
His lame foot touched a pile of newspapers on the floor, in which the critics spoke of him in terms he thought fulsome and ridiculous, and they pained him while they dazzled him. He thought of Bella. He had thought of
Bella constantly of late, and there were no answers to his questions. She would be twenty-three, a woman, married, no doubt, always enchanting. How she had stood before his bas-relief in Albany, musing, and her eyes had been wet when she had turned to him and asked, "Who is it, Cousin Antony? It is perfectly beautiful, beautiful!" He would have liked to have led Bella to his work in the Salon, and, hand-in-hand with her, until the crowd around them should have melted away, have stood there with her alone. From the night her inspiring little hand had stolen into his, Bella's hand had seemed a mate for his.
"Who is it, Cousin Antony?"
Indeed, who was the woman going through the Open Door? What woman's face and form constantly inspired him, haunting him, promising to haunt him until the end? He was always seeking to unveil the face of his visions and find the one woman, the supplement, the mate, the companion.
Who would inspire him now? His memories, his dead, his past, had done their work. What fresh inspiration would urge him now to create?