As Daymond penned the closing words of the sentence, the last rays of the smoky-red London sunset were withdrawn. Only a little while ago he had replenished the fire with fresh logs; but they were damp, and charred slowly, giving forth no pleasant flame. He struck a match and lighted a taper that stood upon his writing table. It created a feeble oasis of yellow radiance upon the darkness of the great studio, and the shadow of Daymond’s head and shoulders bending above it, was cast upward in gigantesque caricature upon the skylight, reduced to frosty white opacity by a burden of March snow.
Daymond poised the drying pen in white, well-kept fingers, and read over what he had written. Underlying all the elegance of well-modeled phrases was the sheer brutality of rejection, definitely expressed. His finely strung mental organization revolted painfully at the imperative necessity of being cruel.
“She asks for bread,� he cried aloud, “and I am giving her a stone!� The lofty walls and domed roof of his workshop gave back the words to him, and his sensitive ear noted the theatrical twang of the echo. Yet the pang of remorse that had moved him to speech was quite genuine.
“You have heard my story,� he wrote on.
A great many people had heard it, and had been bored by it; but, sensitive as Daymond’s perceptions were, he was not alive to this fact.
“Seventeen years ago, while I was still a student dreaming of fame in a draughty Paris studio, I met the woman who was destined—I felt it then as I know it now—to be the one love of my life. She was an American, a little older than myself. She was divinely beautiful to me—I hardly know whether she was really so or not. We gave up all, each for each. She left husband, home, friends, to devote her life to me. I——�
He paused, trying to sum up the list of his own sacrifices, and ultimately left the break, as potent to express much, and went on:
“Guilty as I suppose we were, we were happy together—how happy I dare not even recall. Twenty-four months our life together lasted, and then came the end. It was the cholera year in Paris; the year which brought me my first foretaste of success in Art, robbed me of all joy in life.... She died. Horribly! suddenly! And the best of me lies buried in her grave!�
The muscles of his throat tightened with the rigor that accompanies emotion; his eyelids smarted. He threw back his still handsome head, and a tear fell shining on the delicately scented paper underneath his hand. He looked at the drop as it spread and soaked into a damp little circle, and made no use of the blotting paper to remove the stain. If any crudely candid observer had told Daymond that he dandled this desolation of his—took an æsthetic delight in his devotion to the coffined handful of dust that had once lived and palpitated at his touch, he would have been honestly outraged and surprised. Yet the thing was true. He had made his sorrow into a hobby-horse during the last fifteen years of honest regret, of absolute faithfulness to the memory of his dead mistress. It gratified him to see the well-trained creature dance and perform the tricks of the haute école. He was aware that the romance of that past, which he regretted with such real sincerity, added something to the glamour of his achieved reputation, his established fame, in the eyes of the world. The halo which it cast about him had increased his desirability in the eyes of the great lady who, after affording him numberless unutilized opportunities for the declaration of a sentiment which her large handsome person and her large handsome property had inspired in many other men, had written him a frank, womanly letter, placing these unreservedly at his disposal.... And Daymond, in his conscious fidelity and unconscious vanity, must perforce reply wintrily, nipping with the east wind of non-reciprocity the mature passion tendrils which sought to twine themselves about him. It was a painful task, though the obligation of it tickled him agreeably—another proof of the inconsistency of the man, who may be regarded as a type of humanity; for we are all veritable Daymonds, in that the medium which gives us back to our own gloating eyes day by day is never the crystal mirror of Truth, but such a lying glass as the charlatans of centuries agone were wont to make for ancient Kings and withered Queens to mop and mow in.
Daymond pushed back his chair, and got up, and began to pace from end to end of the studio. The costly Moorish carpets muffled the falling of his footsteps, which intermittently sounded on the polished interspaces of the parqueted floor, and then were lost again in velvet silence. In the same way, his tall figure, with its thoughtfully bending head and hands clasped behind it, would be swallowed up among the looming shadows of tall easels or faintly glimmering suggestions of sculptured figures which here and there thrust portions of limbs, or angles of faces, out of the dusk—to appear again with the twilit north window for its background, or emerge once more upon the borders of the little island of tapershine. So he moved amid the works of his genius restlessly and wearily to and fro; and the incoherent mutterings which broke from him showed that his thoughts were running in the beaten track of years.