Crucial Instances

At the door he called a cab and put her in it; then, drawing out his watch again, he said abruptly:  “I believe I’ll let you go alone.  I’ll join you at the hotel in time for luncheon.”  She wondered for a moment if he meant to return to the gallery; but, looking back as she drove off, she saw him walk rapidly away in the opposite direction.

The cabman had carried her half-way to the Hotel Cluny before she realized where she was going, and cried out to him to turn home.  There was an acute irony in this mechanical prolongation of the quest of beauty.  She had had enough of it, too much of it; her one longing was to escape, to hide herself away from its all-suffusing implacable light.

At the hotel, alone in her room, a few tears came to soften her seared vision; but her mood was too tense to be eased by weeping.  Her whole being was centred in the longing to know what her husband thought.  Their short exchange of words had, after all, told her nothing.  She had guessed a faint resentment at her unexpected appearance; but that might merely imply a dawning sense, on his part, of being furtively watched and criticised.  She had sometimes wondered if he was never conscious of her observation; there were moments when it seemed to radiate from her in visible waves.  Perhaps, after all, he was aware of it, on his guard against it, as a lurking knife behind the thick curtain of his complacency; and to-day he must have caught the gleam of the blade.

Claudia had not reached the age when pity is the first chord to vibrate in contact with any revelation of failure.  Her one hope had been that Keniston should be clear-eyed enough to face the truth.  Whatever it turned out to be, she wanted him to measure himself with it.  But as his image rose before her she felt a sudden half-maternal longing to thrust herself between him and disaster.  Her eagerness to see him tested by circumstances seemed now like a cruel scientific curiosity.  She saw in a flash of sympathy that he would need her most if he fell beneath his fate.

He did not, after all, return for luncheon; and when she came up-stairs from her solitary meal their salon was still untenanted.  She permitted herself no sensational fears; for she could not, at the height of apprehension, figure Keniston as yielding to any tragic impulse; but the lengthening hours brought an uneasiness that was fuel to her pity.  Suddenly she heard the clock strike five.  It was the hour at which they had promised to meet Mrs. Davant at the gallery—­the hour of the “ovation.”  Claudia rose and went to the window, straining for a glimpse of her husband in the crowded street.  Could it be that he had forgotten her, had gone to the gallery without her?  Or had something happened—­that veiled “something” which, for the last hour, had grimly hovered on the outskirts of her mind?

She heard a hand on the door and Keniston entered.  As she turned to meet him her whole being was swept forward on a great wave of pity:  she was so sure, now, that he must know.

But he confronted her with a glance of preoccupied brightness; her first impression was that she had never seen him so vividly, so expressively pleased.  If he needed her, it was not to bind up his wounds.

He gave her a smile which was clearly the lingering reflection of some inner light.  “I didn’t mean to be so late,” he said, tossing aside his hat and the little red volume that served as a clue to his explorations.  “I turned in to the Louvre for a minute after I left you this morning, and the place fairly swallowed me up—­I couldn’t get away from it.  I’ve been there ever since.”  He threw himself into a chair and glanced about for his pipe.

“It takes time,” he continued musingly, “to get at them, to make out what they’re saying—­the big fellows, I mean.  They’re not a communicative lot.  At first I couldn’t make much out of their lingo—­it was too different from mine!  But gradually, by picking up a hint here and there, and piecing them together, I’ve begun to understand; and to-day, by Jove, I got one or two of the old chaps by the throat and fairly turned them inside out—­made them deliver up their last drop.”  He lifted a brilliant eye to her.  “Lord, it was tremendous!” he declared.

He had found his pipe and was musingly filling it.  Claudia waited in silence.

“At first,” he began again, “I was afraid their language was too hard for me—­that I should never quite know what they were driving at; they seemed to cold-shoulder me, to be bent on shutting me out.  But I was bound I wouldn’t be beaten, and now, to-day”—­he paused a moment to strike a match—­“when I went to look at those things of mine it all came over me in a flash.  By Jove! it was as if I’d made them all into a big bonfire to light me on my road!”

His wife was trembling with a kind of sacred terror.  She had been afraid to pray for light for him, and here he was joyfully casting his whole past upon the pyre!

“Is there nothing left?” she faltered.

“Nothing left?  There’s everything!” he exulted.  “Why, here I am, not much over forty, and I’ve found out already—­already!” He stood up and began to move excitedly about the room.  “My God!  Suppose I’d never known!  Suppose I’d gone on painting things like that forever!  Why, I feel like those chaps at revivalist meetings when they get up and say they’re saved!  Won’t somebody please start a hymn?”

Claudia, with a tremulous joy, was letting herself go on the strong current of his emotion; but it had not yet carried her beyond her depth, and suddenly she felt hard ground underfoot.

“Mrs. Davant—­” she exclaimed.

He stared, as though suddenly recalled from a long distance.  “Mrs. Davant?”

“We were to have met her—­this afternoon—­now—­”

“At the gallery?  Oh, that’s all right.  I put a stop to that; I went to see her after I left you; I explained it all to her.”

“All?”

“I told her I was going to begin all over again.”

Claudia’s heart gave a forward bound and then sank back hopelessly.

“But the panels—?”

“That’s all right too.  I told her about the panels,” he reassured her.

“You told her—?”

“That I can’t paint them now.  She doesn’t understand, of course; but she’s the best little woman and she trusts me.”

She could have wept for joy at his exquisite obtuseness.  “But that isn’t all,” she wailed.  “It doesn’t matter how much you’ve explained to her.  It doesn’t do away with the fact that we’re living on those panels!”

“Living on them?”

“On the money that she paid you to paint them.  Isn’t that what brought us here?  And—­if you mean to do as you say—­to begin all over again—­how in the world are we ever to pay her back?”

Her husband turned on her an inspired eye.  “There’s only one way that I know of,” he imperturbably declared, “and that’s to stay out here till I learn how to paint them.”

“COPY”