For two weeks the child came almost every day and each time the picture advanced further. Carlos had been right—it was the best thing he had ever done, incomparably the best. To Eloise, who in the months in Paris had gained a good critical knowledge of pictures, it was evident that it was a masterpiece. The feeling of greatness was in it; in the perfection of the body, in the grace of the pose, and most of all in the face. There was something so compelling about the personality of that face, that Eloise would often sit and look at it alone when Carlos had gone out. It was the only time she was ever alone with it, for if he were in the apartment, he spent all his time in the studio.
Then one late afternoon after Rosalie had left, Carlos said:
“One more day, Eloise. Just one more day and it will be done. To-morrow night I’ll be satisfied with it—I’ll even be a little proud of it, because it is good, isn’t it?”
And Eloise nodded happily. For the past two weeks she had been happier than she had ever been before, and now she was too overcome to speak.
The next day Rosalie did not come, although they waited impatiently all afternoon. Carlos tried to go on with the picture from memory, but gave up in disgust. Without the child he was unable to go any further. When she did not appear the next day, Carlos became desperate. The picture was so tantalizingly near completion, yet there was something to be added, something indefinite which he could not name and the lack of which left him dissatisfied and uneasy. He went to the house where she had said she lived, but even the aunt had gone, and no one knew anything about either of them. For a week, two weeks, Carlos alternately waited in the studio and made fruitless attempts to locate the child. When Eloise, fearing he would go mad with impatience, tried to make him work on other pictures, he seemed unable to concentrate for long on anything. The old indolence had returned with a new force which he was unable and half-unwilling to overcome; for the child was the only thing that could fill him with that burning desire to paint that had driven him on, often in spite of himself.
Carlos refused to give up the hope that she might yet return. For hours in the afternoon he would go up to the studio, and, putting on his painting jacket, sit gazing hopelessly at the picture, or make sudden attempts that were over almost as soon as begun to complete the portrait. Fall passed—the fall that had so nearly brought realization—and winter came. The studio became dark early in the afternoons, and no childish laugh returned to lighten the dusk.
STANLEY MILLER COOPER.
The Dreamer
Pine tree, pine tree,
Pointing to the sky,