Then she turned away and left this favourite of fortune and great ladies to his own reflections. They were irritated and mortified; bitter with that bitterest of all earthly things, wounded vanity.
Good heavens! he thought, with a sharp stinging sense of a woman's base ingratitude, was it for this that he had painted her portrait in such wise that season after season each succeeding one had been the centre of all eyes in the Paris Salon? Was it for this that he had immortalised her face looking out from a cloud of shadow like a narcissus in the mists of March?—that he had drawn her in every attitude and every costume, from the loose white draperies of her hours of langour to the golden tissues and crowding jewels of her court-dress at imperial palaces? Was it for this that he had composed that divinest portrait of them all, in which, with a knot of stephanotis at her breast and a collar of pearls at her throat, she seemed to smile at all who looked on her that slight, amused, disdainful smile which had killed men as surely as any silver-hilted dagger lying in an ivory case, which once was steeped in aqua Tofana for Lucrezia or Bianca? Was it for this!—to be called opprobrious, derisive names, and have Basil Vereschaguin, the painter of death, of carnage, of horror, of brown Hindoos and hideous Tartars, vaunted before him as his master!
He hated Vereschaguin as a Sèvres vase, had it a mind and soul to hate, might hate the bronze statue of a gladiator; and his tormentor, in a moment of mercilessness and candour, had wounded him with a weapon whose use he never forgave.
'He is a coxcomb! Béthune is quite right,' she said of him when Melville hinted that she had been too cruel. 'He has marvellous talent and technique, but he dares to think that these two are genius. If he had not likened himself to Vandyke I might perhaps never have told him what I think of his place in art. He is a pretty painter, a very pretty painter, and his portraits of me are charming; but if they be looked at at all in the twentieth century they will hardly rank higher than we rank now the pastels of Rosalba; certainly not higher than we rank the portraits of Greuze.'
'If I were a painter I would be content to be Greuze,' said Melville with a smile.
'No you would not,' said Nadine; 'you would not be content to be a d'Estrées in your own profession, nor any other mere Court cardinal.'
CHAPTER VII.
The following morning Loris Loswa rose much earlier than his wont, and went out of the gilded gate of the pretty little villa which he had taken for the season at St. Raphael; a coquettish place with large gardens and trellised paths overhung with creepers; and down below, a small cutter ready for use in a nook of the bay where the aloes and the mimosa grew thickest. It all belonged to a friend of his, who was away in distant lands to escape his creditors, and by whose misfortunes Loswa had profited with that easy egotism which had been so advantageous to him throughout his life, and which looked so good-natured that no one resented it. He descended this morning to the shore by the winding cactus-lined path which led down to it, and asked the sailors if they knew of an island called Bonaventure. They knew nothing about it; they, however, consulted the admiralty maps and found it: a tiny dot some leagues to the south-westward.