"Thank you, Floyd," said he in his cool way. "I am better for having seen you. But let us talk of something besides my troubles to-night. It is a sweet evening."
He took my arm, and we walked out along the avenue into the street. It was a beautiful night, calm and warm, with a full moon shining down upon the deserted squares. We went up the hill and stood on the steps of the academy, then sat down upon a bench on the playground beneath the poplars, and found our initials there where we had cut them years before. Missing Dart in these old familiar places, it was natural for us to talk of him, for, well as Jack loved me, Harry was his dearest friend. A peculiar tenderness had always knit their hearts together, and it had been another sorrow to Holt that in all his trouble his cousin was too far away to give him a glance of his eyes, a grip of his strong hand.
I told him all I knew of Harry. We had not been mistaken in our estimate of his genius: he had not been in Rome three months before the famous Z——had become interested in him and allowed him to study in his atelier. Every one predicted success for the young artist, and dealers were already beginning to buy up his pictures, paying a mere song for studies to-day which years hence they expected to sell for a big sum on the strength of the reputation he would have gained. Harry's strong points were his unequalled distinctness of vision and his intensity of feeling for art. He put a passionate throb into every movement of his brush. When once an idea occurred to him as desirable to work out, it defined itself to his imagination with a reality, a power, an amplitude of detail, which blinded him for the time being to everything else, and he worked so faithfully that he stamped his conception and his meaning upon not only every figure, but every accessory of his picture; so that the most commonplace observer gazed at his canvas with some of the same feeling with which he gazed at an experience of life. But Z—— was not yet satisfied to have him attempt compositions, and he was spending much time over the curious processes by which the perfection of skill in art is attained—productive analyses of coloring, light, shadow and the mellowed harmonies of time-worn pictures.
"We shall be proud of Harry by and by," said Holt as I paused. "I hope he won't stay too long abroad. I have missed you so, Floyd!" And we fell to telling stories of our boyhood, and again and again Jack's laugh broke the silence of the night, for there were droll tales to tell. We heard the chimes of midnight before we stirred from our seat, and then we moved with some reluctance, for the moonlight was rare, and the light upon the water where the sea-line showed through the interstices of the trees was a silvery radiance too blessed to lose. But at last we rose and moved carelessly homeward. We did not take the nearest way, but turned as with one intention through another street than that by which we came. Our feet knew the way to a little Gothic cottage on the hill, and we stood outside silently for a time. No sight or sound of any creature stirring in the world but ourselves met eyes or ears. No light was in the windows, and the blinds of a casement beneath the gable were close drawn. I wondered if a white hand had closed them a few hours before, and if a fair sleep-flushed face and bright disordered hair lay on the pillow inside. Just then some bird, brooding over her three eggs in her nest, stirred drowsily and cooed softly at some delicious dream of love or maternity. It broke the spell, and we turned to go away.
"Don't fancy," said Jack, "that this is a habit of mine. I have not been here before since December."
"Is she here?"
"I have no idea. I never hear her name, and when I am in church I never turn to look."
I left Belfield early the next morning, and pursued my way to The Headlands. I had many thoughts of Jack as I went on, wondering if this cruel and irremediable wrong which Fate had inflicted was to shadow all his life. Indeed, I felt disheartened, for I had warm sympathies; and besides, the cruel prose of his experience broke upon the easy, pleasure-loving harmony of my life like the sudden crash of kettledrums in the midst of moribund flute melody. I had always possessed too much leisure not to have become saddened and perplexed at times with doubts before the eternal problem of life; and they all returned now, and not until I reached The Headlands in the late afternoon did I rouse myself into an anticipation of the pleasant life I was to meet.