“Madame,” he answered aloud, “Paris herself will give him that the first day his first canvas hangs in my galleries. Meanwhile, I must in honesty be permitted to add something more. For each of those little canvases, the girl on the roof and the boy at the gate, I will give you now two thousand francs, and two thousand more when they shall be completed. Provided—”
He paused and glanced musingly at René.
Lili had turned away, and was sobbing for very joy at this undreamed-of deliverance.
René stood quite still, with his hands crossed on the easel and his head bent on his chest. The room, I think, swam around him.
The old man sauntered again a little about the place, looking here and looking there, murmuring certain artistic disquisitions technical and scientific, leaving them time to recover from the intensity of their emotion.
What a noble thing old age was, I thought, living only to give hope to the young in their sorrow, and to release captive talents from the prison of obscurity! We should leave the little room in the roof, and dwell in some bright quarter where it was all leaves and flowers; and René would be great, and go to dine with princes and drive a team of belled horses, like a famous painter who had dashed once with his splendid equipage through our narrow passage; and we should see the sky always—as much of it as ever we chose; and Lili would have a garden of her own, all grass and foliage and falling waters, in which I should live in the open air all the day long, and make believe that I was in Provence.
My dreams and my fancies were broken by the sound of the old man’s voice taking up the thread of his discourse once more in front of René.
“I will give you four thousand francs each for those two little canvases,” he repeated. “It is a mere pinch of dust to what you will make in six months’ time if—if—you hear me?—your name is brought before the public of Paris in my galleries and under my auspices. I suppose you have heard something of what I can do, eh? Well, all I can do I will do for you; for you have a great talent, and without introduction, my friend, you may as well roll up your pictures and burn them in your stove to save charcoal. You know that?”
René indeed knew—none better. Lili turned on the old man her sweet, frank Breton eyes, smiling their radiant gratitude through tenderest tears.
“The saints will reward you, monsieur, in a better world than this,” she murmured softly.