"The price," said Antony, leaning fully forward, his blue eyes, whose sight was unimpeded, fixed on Cedersholm, "must be great enough to buy me back my lost youth."
His companion laughed gently and said indulgently, "My dear Mr. Rainsford."
"To buy me back my loss of faith in men's honour, in human kindness, in justice, in woman's love."
"He is a true genius," Cedersholm thought to himself, "just a bit over the line of mental balance." And he almost envied Antony this frenzy, for he had always judged himself too sane to be a great artist.
"It must buy me back three years of bitter struggle, of degrading manual toil."
"My dear man," said the sculptor indulgently. "I think I understand you, but no material price could ever do what you ask. Money, unfortunately, has nothing to do with the past; it can take care of the future more or less, but the past is beyond repurchase, you know."
It was growing constantly darker. The corners of the
studio were deep in shadows, and the forms of Antony's casts shone like spectres in their white clothes; the scaffoldings looked ghostly and spirit-like. Cedersholm sighed.
"Why have you come to me?" he heard Fairfax ask in his cutting tone, and he understood that for some reason or other this stranger was purposely impolite and unfriendly to him. He had not even found Fairfax's face familiar. There he sat before Antony, small, insignificant. How often he had crossed Tony's mind in some ugly dream when he had longed to crush him like a reptile. Now that he stood before him in flesh and blood it was astonishing to Fairfax to see how little real he was.
"I have been absent from France for six years," continued the Swede, and paused.... And Antony knew he was going back in his mind over the past six years of his married life with Mary. "I returned to Paris this week, and wandered into the Salon and stood with a crowd before your bas-relief. I stood for quite half an hour there, I should think, and at least one hundred men and women passed and paused as I had paused. I listened to their comments. I saw your popularity and your power, and saw how you touched the mass by the real beauty of real emotion, by your expression of feeling in plastic art. This is not often achieved nowadays, Mr. Rainsford. Sculpture is the least emotional of all the arts; literature, painting, and music stir the emotions and bring our tears, but that calm, sublime marble, that cold stone awes us by its harmonious perfection. Before sculpture we are content to marvel and worship, and in the 'Open Door' you have made us do all this and made us weep. I do not doubt that amongst those people many had lost their own by death." He paused. It was so dark now that the two men saw each other's face indistinctly. In the shadows Cedersholm's form had softened; the shadows blurred him before Fairfax's eyes; his voice was intensely melancholy. "To every man and woman who has lost your bas-relief is profoundly appealing. Every one of us must go through that door. Your conception, Mr. Rainsford, and your execution are sublime."