Page:Littell's Living Age - Volume 131.djvu/478

472 tried with disappointment or sorrow or failure.

As to the environment in which Florimel found him, it was to her a region of confused and broken color and form — a kind of chaos out of which beauty was ever ready to start. Pictures stood on easels, leaned against chair-backs, glowed from the wall, each contributing to the atmosphere of solved rainbow that seemed to fill the space. Lenorme was seated — not at his easel, but at a grand piano, which stood away, half hidden in a corner, as if it knew itself there on sufferance, with pictures all about the legs of it. For they had walked straight in without giving his servant time to announce them. A bar of a song, in a fine tenor voice, broke as they opened the door; and the painter came to meet them from the farther end of the study. He shook hands with Florimel's friend, and turned with a bow to her. At the first glance the eyes of both fell. Raised the same instant, they encountered each other point-blank, and then the eloquent blood had its turn at betrayal. What the moment meant Florimel did not know, but it seemed as if Raoul and she had met somewhere long ago — were presumed not to know it, but could not help remembering it, and agreeing to recognize it as a fact. A strange pleasure filled her heart. While Mrs. Barnardiston sat she flitted about the room like a butterfly, looking at one thing after another, and asking now the most ignorant, now the most penetrative question, disturbing not a little the work, but sweetening the temper of the painter as he went on with his study of the mask and helmet into which the gorgon stare of the unideal had petrified the face and head of his sitter. He found the situation trying, nevertheless. It was as if Cupid had been set by Jupiter to take a portrait of Io in her stall, while evermore he heard his Psyche fluttering about among the peacocks in the yard. For the girl had bewitched him at first sight. He thought it was only as an artist, though, to be sure, a certain throb, almost a pain, in the region of the heart, when first his eyes fell before hers, might have warned, and perhaps did in vain warn, him otherwise. Sooner than usual he professed himself content with the sitting, and then proceeded to show the ladies some of his sketches and pictures. As he did so, Florimel happened to ask to see one standing as in disgrace with its front to the wall. He put it, half reluctantly, on an easel, and said it was meant for the unveiling of Isis, as presented in a mahrchen of Novalis, called "Die Lehrlinge zu Sais" in which the goddess of nature reveals to the eager and anxious gaze of the beholder the person of his Rosenblüthchen, whom he had left behind him when he set out to visit the temple of the divinity. But on the great pedestal where should have sat the goddess there was no gracious form visible. That part of the picture was a blank. The youth stood below, gazing enraptured, with parted lips and outstretched arms, as if he had already begun to suspect what had begun to dawn through the slowly-thinning veil; but to the eye of the beholder he gazed as yet only on vacancy, and the picture had not reached an attempt at self-explanation. Florimel asked why he had left it so long unfinished, for the dust was thick on the back of the canvas.

"Because I have never seen the face or figure." the painter answered, "either in eye of mind or of body, that claimed the position."

As he spoke his eyes seemed to Florimel to lighten strangely, and as if by common consent they turned away and looked at something else. Presently, Mrs. Barnardiston, who cared more for sound than form or color, because she could herself sing a little, began to glance over some music on the piano, curious to find what the young man had been singing; whereupon Lenorme said to Florimel hurriedly, and almost in a whisper, with a sort of hesitating assurance, "If you would give me a sitting or two — I know I am presumptuous, but if you would — I — I — should send the picture to the Academy in a week."

"I will," replied Florimel, flushing like a wild poppy, and as she said it she looked up in his face and smiled. "It would have been selfish," she said to herself as they drove away, "to refuse him."

This first interview, and all the interviews that had followed, now passed through her mind as she lay awake in the darkness preceding the dawn, and she reviewed them not without self-reproach. But for some of my readers it will be hard to believe that one of the feelings that now tormented the girl was a sense of lowered dignity because of the relation in which she stood to the painter, seeing there was little or no ground for moral compunction, and the feeling had its root merely in the fact that he was a painter-fellow and she a marchioness. Her rank had already grown to seem to her so identified with herself that she was hardly any longer capable of the analysis that should 