"And what was he saying about her?" asked O'Neill.
"Nothing to any purpose," replied Buscarlet. "I think he had been dreaming of her. You know the manner he has of waking up—coming back to consciousness with eyes wide open and his mind alert, with no interval of drowsiness and reluctance? Yes? Well, he woke like that before I knew he had ceased to sleep. 'I should like to see her now,' he said. 'Whom?' I asked, and he smiled. 'Lola,' he answered, and he went on to say that she was the one woman he had never understood. 'That was her advantage,' he said, smiling still; 'for she understood me; yes, she knew me as if she had made me.' After a while, he smiled again, and said, 'Yes, I should like to see her now.'"
O'Neill frowned thoughtfully. "Well, she ought to be here if she's his wife," he said. "Is she in Paris, d'you know? We might send for her."
"I do not know," replied Buscarlet. "Nobody knows, but I have heard she retired upon religion."
Their talk dwindled a little then. O'Neill found himself dwelling in thought upon that long-ago marriage of the great artist with Lola, the dancer. To him she was but a name; her sun had set in his boyhood, and there remained only the spoken fame of her wonderful dancing and a tale here and there of the fervor with which she had lived. It was an old chronicle of passion and undiscipline, of a vehement personality naming through the capitals of Europe, its trail marked by scandals and violences, ending in the quick oblivion which comes to compensate for such lives. On the whole, he thought, such a marriage was what one would have looked for in Regnault; as Buscarlet said, one might almost have guessed. He, with his genius and his restlessness, his great fame and his infamy, the high achievement of his art and the baseness of his relaxations, he was just such another as Lola.
Friendship, or even the mere forms of friendship, are the touchstone of a man. O'Neill was credited in his world with the friendship of Regnault. It had even been to him a matter of some social profit; there were many who deferred willingly to the great man's intimate. O'Neill saw no reason to set them right, but he knew himself that he had come by a loss in his close acquaintance with the Master. To know him at a distance, to be sure of just enough to interpret his work by the clue of his personality, was a thing to be glad of. But if one went further, incurred a part of his confidence, and ascertained his real flavor, then, as O'Neill once said, it was like visiting one's kitchen; it killed one's appetite.
While he pondered, he was none the less watchful; he saw the change on the still face as soon as it showed. With a quick exclamation he crossed to the bed. Regnault's jaw had set; his eyes were wide and rigid. On the instant his forehead shone with sweat. Deftly and swiftly O'Neill laid his hands on a capsule, crushed it in his palm, and held it to the sick man's face. The volatile drug performed its due miracle.
The face that had been a livid shell slackened again; the fixed glare sank down; and Regnault shuddered and sighed. Buscarlet, trembling but officious, wiped his brow and babbled commiserations.
"Ah!" said Regnault, putting up a thin hand to stop him. "It takes one by the throat, this affair."
Though he spoke quietly, his voice had yet the conscious fullness, the deliberate inflection, of a man accustomed to speak to an audience.