The old man took snuff a little nervously. “There is one condition I must make,” he said with a trifling hesitation—“one only.”
“Ask of my gratitude what you will,” answered René quickly, while he drew a deep breath of relief and freedom,—the breath of one who casts to the ground the weight of a deadly burden.
“It is, that you will bind yourself only to paint for me.”
“Certainly!” René gave the assent with eagerness. Poor fellow! it was a novelty so exquisite to have any one save the rats to paint for. It had never dawned upon his thoughts that when he stretched his hands out with such passionate desire to touch the hem of the garment of Fortune and catch the gleam of the laurels of Fame, he might be in truth only holding them out to fresh fetters.
“Very well,” said the old man quietly, and he sat down again and looked full in René’s face, and unfolded his views for the artist’s future.
He used many words, and was slow and suave in their utterance, and paused often and long to take out his heavy gold box; but he spoke well. Little by little his meaning gleamed out from the folds of verbiage in which he skilfully enwrapped it.
It was this.
The little valueless drawings on the people’s sweetmeat boxes of gilded cardboard had a grace, a color, and a beauty in them which had caught, at a fair-booth in the village of St. Cloud, the ever-watchful eyes of the great dealer. He had bought half a dozen of the boxes for a couple of francs. He had said, “Here is what I want.” Wanted for what? Briefly, to produce Petitot enamels and Fragonard cabinets—genuine eighteenth-century work. There was a rage for it. René would understand?
René’s dark southern eyes lost a little of their new lustre of happiness, and grew troubled with a sort of cloud of perplexity. He did not seem to understand.
The old man took more snuff, and used phrases clearer still.