The dew stood on René’s forehead, his hands clenched on the easel.
“You wish me—to—paint—forgeries of the Petitot enamels?”
The old man smiled unmoved: “Chut, chut! Will you paint me little bonbonnières on enamel instead of on cardboard? That is all the question. I have said where they go, how they are set: what they are called shall be my affair. You know nothing. The only works of yours which you will be concerned to acknowledge will be your own canvas pictures. What harm can it do any creature? You will gratify a connoisseur or two innocently, and you will meanwhile be at leisure to follow the bent of your own genius, which otherwise—”
He paused: I heard the loud throbs of René’s heart under that cruel temptation.
Lili gazed at his tempter with the same startled terror and bewilderment still dilating her candid eyes with a woful pain.
“Otherwise,” pursued the old man with merciless tranquillity, “you will never see me any more, my friends. If you try to repeat any story to my hindrance, no one will credit you. I am rich, you are poor. You have a great talent: I shall regret to see it lost, but I shall let it die—so.”
And he trod very gently on a little gnat that crawled near his foot, and killed it.
A terrible agony gathered in the artist’s face.
“O God!” he cried in his torture, and his eyes went to the canvases against the wall, and then to the face of his wife, with an unutterable, yearning desire.
For them, for them, this sin which tempted him looked virtue.