"Downstairs in the hold are thirty cases of my work, the labour of the last six years. Go to my exposition, and you will see my ideals."
As the other took his leave Antony saw himself again, poor, unknown, as he had set foot in New York. There was a deputation on the wharf to meet him from the Academy of Design, and he walked down the gang-plank alone, leaving no one behind him in France who stood to him for family, and he would find no one in America who should mean to him hearth and home.
They had taken rooms for him in the old Hotel Plaza overlooking 59th Street; there, toward the afternoon of the first day, he found himself at three o'clock, alone in his parlour overlooking Central Park.
The trees were still in leaf. November was mild and golden. The air of America, of the city which had once been unfriendly to him, and which now opened its doors, blew in upon him through the open window like a caress. He looked musingly at the little park where he had wandered with Gardiner and Bella, on the Sunday holiday, when Bella had told him "all things she wanted to do were wicked."
Amongst his statues he had brought over was one
lately bought by France and presented to the Metropolitan Museum. It was the marble of a little girl mourning over a dead blackbird. Everything in the city was connected now with Bella Carew.
There was a sheaf of invitations on the table from well-known New Yorkers, invitations to dinners, invitations to lecture, and he knew that he would be taken into the kindliest heart of New York. Well, if work can give a man what he wants, he had worked enough for it; there was no doubt about that. It had been nearly a year since his interview with Cedersholm. He brought with him casts and statues for the triumphal arch in Boston, and he intended taking a studio here and continuing his work in America, but he had no plans. In spite of his success and the prices he could command, his thoughts and his mind were all at sea. His personality had not yet developed to the point where he was at peace. He knew that such peace could only come to him through the companionship of a woman.
No commonplace woman would satisfy Fairfax now.
Money and position meant absolutely nothing to him. If Bella Carew were a rich and brilliant heiress it would probably alienate him from her. His need called for a woman who could work at his side with a kindred interest, a woman who knew beauty, who loved art, whose appreciation and criticism could not leave him cold.
What would Bella Carew, when he found her—as he should—prove herself to be? Spoiled she was, no doubt, mistress for several years of a large fortune, coquette, flirt; of these things he was partly sure, because she had not married. Children with her great promise develop sometimes into nonentities, but Bella, at sixteen, had surpassed his wildest prophecies for her. Bella, as he had seen her on the outskirts of the crowd, had driven him mad. He knew that it had been she; there was no doubt about it in his mind. Now to find her, to see what she had become.