Sir John, by instinct and training, was an unimaginative person. He was a business man, pure and simple, his eyes were fastened always upon the practical side of life. Such ambitions as he had were stereotyped and material. Yet in some hidden corner was a vein of sentiment, of which for the first time in his later life he was now unexpectedly aware. He was conscious of a peculiar pleasure in sitting there and thinking of those few hours which already were becoming to a.s.sume a definite importance in his mind--a place curiously apart from those dry-as-dust images which had become the G.o.ds of his prosaic life. Somehow or other his reputation as a hardened and una.s.sailable bachelor had won for him during the last few years a comparative immunity from attentions on the part of those women with whom he had been brought into contact. It was a reputation by no means deserved. A wife formed part of his scheme of life, for several years he had been secretly but a.s.siduously looking for her. In his way he was critical.

The young ladies in the somewhat mixed society amongst which he moved neither satisfied his taste nor appealed in any way to his affections.

This girl whom he had met by chance and befriended had done both. She possessed what he affected to despise, but secretly worshipped--the innate charm of breeding. The Pellissiers had been an old family in Hampshire, while his grandfather had driven a van.

As in all things, so his thoughts came to him deliberately. He pictured himself visiting the girl in this shabby little home of her aunt's--she had told him that it was shabby--and he recalled that delicious little smile with which she would surely greet him, a smile which seemed to be a matter of the eyes as well as the lips. She was poor. He was heartily thankful for it. He thought of his wealth for once from a different point of view. How much he would be able to do for her. Flowers, theatre boxes, carriages, the "open sesame" to the whole world of pleasure. He himself, middle-aged, steeped in traditions of the City and money-making, very ill-skilled in all the lighter graces of life, as he himself well knew, could yet come to her invested with something of the halo of romance by the almost magical powers of an unlimited banking account. She should be lifted out of her narrow little life, and it should be all owing to him. And afterwards! Sir John drew his cigar from his lips, and looked upwards where the white-lights flashed strangely amongst the deep cool green of the lime-trees. His lips parted in a rare smile. Afterwards was the most delightful part of all!...

If only there had not been this single torturing thought--a mere pin-p.r.i.c.k, but still curiously persistent. Suddenly he stopped short.

He was in front of one of the more imposing of the _cafes chantants_--opposite, illuminated with a whole row of lights, was the wonderful poster which had helped to make "Alcide" famous. He had looked at it before without comprehension. To-night the subtle suggestiveness of those few daring lines, fascinating in their very simplicity, the head thrown back, the half-closed eyes--the inner meaning of the great artist seemed to come to him with a rush. He stood still, almost breathless. A slow anger burned in the man. It was debauching, this--a devilish art which drew such strange allurements from a face and figure almost Madonna-like in their simplicity.

Unwillingly he drew a little nearer, and became one of the group of loiterers about the entrance. A woman touched him lightly on the arm, and smiled into his face.

"Monsieur admires the poster?"

As a rule Sir John treated such advances with cold silence. This woman, contrary to his custom, he answered.

"It is hateful--diabolical!" he exclaimed.

The woman shrugged her shoulders.

"It is a great art," she said in broken English. "The little English girl is very fortunate. For what indeed does she do? A simple song, no gesture, no acting, nothing. And they pay her. Monsieur is going inside perhaps?"

But Sir John's eyes were still riveted upon the poster, and his heart was beating with unaccustomed force. For just as though a vague likeness is sometimes borne swiftly in upon one, so a vague dissimilarity between the face on the poster and the heroine of his thoughts had slowly crept into his consciousness. He drew a little breath and stepped back. After all, he had the means of setting this tormenting doubt at rest. She had mentioned the address where she and her sister had lived. He would go there. He would see this sister. He would know the truth then once and for all. He walked hastily to the side of the broad pavement and summoned a _fiacre_.

_Chapter IV_

THE TEMPERAMENT OF AN ARTIST

"You may sit there and smoke, and look out upon your wonderful Paris,"

Anna said lightly. "You may talk--if you can talk cheerfully, not unless."

"And you?" asked David Courtlaw.

"Well, if I find your conversation interesting I shall listen. If not, I have plenty to think about," she answered, leaning back in her chair, and watching the smoke from her own cigarette curl upwards.

"For instance?"

She smiled.

"How I am to earn enough _sous_ for my dinner to-morrow--or failing that, what I can sell."

His face darkened.

"And yet," he said, "you bid me talk cheerfully, or not at all."

"Why not? Your spirits at least should be good. It is not you who runs the risk of going dinnerless to-morrow."

He turned upon her almost fiercely.

"You know," he muttered, "you know quite well that your troubles are far more likely to weigh upon me than my own. Do you think that I am utterly selfish?"

She raised her eyebrows.

"Troubles, my friend," she exclaimed lightly. "But I have no troubles."

He stared at her incredulously, and she laughed very softly.

"What a gloomy person you are!" she murmured. "You call yourself an artist--but you have no temperament. The material cares of life hang about your neck like a millstone. A doubt as to your dinner to-morrow would make you miserable to-night. You know I call that positively wicked. It is not at all what I expected either. On the whole, I think that I have been disappointed with the life here. There is so little _abandon_, so little real joyousness."

"And yet," he murmured, "one of the greatest of our writers has declared that the true spirit of Bohemianism is denied to your s.e.x."

"He was probably right," she declared. "Bohemianism is the least understood word ever coined. I do not think that I have the Bohemian spirit at all."

He looked at her thoughtfully. She wore a plain black dress, reaching almost to her throat--her small oval face, with the large brown eyes, was colourless, delicately expressive, yet with something mysterious in its Sphinx-like immobility. A woman hard to read, who seemed to delight in keeping locked up behind that fascinating rigidity of feature the intense sensibility which had been revealed to him, her master, only in occasional and rare moments of enthusiasm. She reminded him sometimes of the one holy and ineffable Madonna, at others of Berode, the great courtezan of her day, who had sent kings away from her doors, and had just announced her intention of ending her life in a convent.

"I believe that you are right," he said softly. "It is the worst of including in our vocabulary words which have no definite meaning, perhaps I should say of which the meaning varies according to one's personal point of view. You, for instance, you live, you are not afraid to live. Yet you make our Bohemianism seem like a vulgar thing."

She stirred gently in her chair.

"My friend," she said, "I have been your pupil for two years. You have watched all the uncouth creations of my brain come sprawling out upon the canvas, and besides, we have been companions. Yet the fact remains that you do not understand me at all. No, not one little bit. It is extraordinary."

"It is," he replied, "the one humiliation of my life. My opportunities have been immense, and my failure utter. If I had been your companion only, and not your master, I might very well have been content to accept you for what you seem. But there have been times, Anna, when your work has startled me. Ill-drawn, without method or sense of proportion, you have put wonderful things on to canvas, have drawn them out of yourself, notwithstanding your mechanical inefficiency.

G.o.d knows how you did it. You are utterly baffling."

She laughed at him easily and mirthfully.

"Dear friend," she said, "do not magnify me into a physiological problem. I should only disappoint you terribly some day. I think I know where I am puzzling you now----"

"Then for Heaven's sake be merciful," he exclaimed. "Lift up one corner of the curtain for me."

"Very well. You shall tell me if I am wrong. You see me here, an admitted failure in the object to which I have devoted two years of my life. You know that I am practically dest.i.tute, without means or any certain knowledge of where my next meal is coming from. I speak frankly, because you also know that no possible extremity would induce me to accept help from any living person. You notice that I have recently spent ten francs on a box of the best Russian cigarettes, and that there are roses upon my table. You observe that I am, as usual, fairly cheerful, and moderately amiable. It surprises you. You do not understand, and you would like to. Very well! I will try to help you."

Her hand hung over the side of her chair nearest to him. He looked at it eagerly, but made no movement to take it. During all their long comradeship he had never so much as ventured to hold her fingers. This was David Courtlaw, whose ways, too, had never been very different from the ways of other men as regards her s.e.x.

"You see, it comes after all," she continued, "from certain original convictions which have become my religion. Rather a magniloquent term, perhaps, but what else am I to say? One of these is that the most absolutely selfish thing in the world is to give way to depression, to think of one's troubles at all except of how to overcome them. I spend many delightful hours thinking of the pleasant and beautiful things of life. I decline to waste a single second even in considering the ugly ones. Do you know that this becomes a habit?"

"If you would only teach us all," he murmured, "how to acquire it."

"I suppose people would say that it is a matter of temperament," she continued. "With me I believe that it is more. It has become a part of the order of my life. Whatever may happen to-morrow I shall be none the better for antic.i.p.ating its miseries to-day."

"I wonder," he said, a trifle irrelevantly, "what the future has in store for you."

She shrugged her shoulders.

"Is that not rather a profitless speculation, my friend?"

He seemed deaf to her interruption. His grey eyes burned under his s.h.a.ggy eyebrows. He leaned towards her as though anxious to see more of her face than that faint delicate profile gleaming like marble in the uncertain light.