Cartaret got up and, for all his weakness, gripped the Frenchman’s hand until Dieudonné nearly screamed.
“I’m a beast, Seraphin!” said Cartaret. “I’m a beast to treat a friendly offer this way. Forgive me. It’s just that I feel a bit rocky this morning. I drank too much champagne last night. I do thank you, Seraphin. You’re a good fellow, the best of the lot, and a sight better than I am. But I’m not hard up; really I’m not. I’m poor, but I’m not a sou poorer than I was this time last year.”
It was a magnificent lie. Seraphin could only shrug, pretend to believe it, and go away.
Cartaret scarcely heeded the departure. He had relapsed into his day-dream. He took from against the wall the two portraits that he had painted of the Lady of the Rose and hung them, now here, now there, trying them in various lights. There were at least ten more sketches of her by this time, and these, too, he hung in first one light and then another. He studied them and tried to be critical, and forgot to be.
His thoughts of her never took the shape of conscious words—he loved her too much to attempt to praise her—but, as he looked at his endeavors to portray her, his mind was busy with his memories of all that loveliness—and passed from memories to day-dreams. He saw her as something that might fade before his touch. He saw her as a Princess, incognito, learning his plight, buying his pictures secretly, and, when she came to her throne, letting him serve her and worship from afar. And then he saw her even as a Galatea possible of miraculous awakening. Why not? Her eyes were the clear eyes of a woman that has never yet loved, but they were also, he felt, the eyes of one of those rare women who, when they love once, love forever. Cartaret dared, in his thoughts, to lift the heavy plaits of her blue-black hair and, with trembling fingers, again to touch that hand at the recollection of touching which his own hand tingled.
Why not, indeed? Already a stranger thing had happened in his meeting her. Until that year he had not guessed at her existence; oceans divided them; the barriers of alien race and alien speech were raised high between them, and all of these things had been in vain. The existence was revealed, the ocean was crossed, the bar of sundering speech was down. He was here, close beside her, as if every event of his life had been intended to bring him. Through blind ways and up ascents misunderstood, unattracted by the many and lonely among the crowd, he had, somehow, always been making his way toward—Her.
Thus Cartaret dreamed while Seraphin made a hurried journey to the rue St. André des Arts and the shop of M. Fourget.
“But no, but no, but no!” Fourget’s bushy brows met in a frown. “It is out of the question. Something has happened to the boy. He can no longer paint.”
Oh, well, at least monsieur could go to the boy’s rooms and see what he had there.
“No. Am I then a silly philanthropist?”