Page:The Strand Magazine (Volume 2).djvu/356

 studio was closed, and Trenoweth had gone away. The man left in charge and who made the arrangements for letting them, told me that a new rule had been made by their landlord. They were never to be let to women artists. That is all my part of the story. This—this sketch is only the figure I remember. She was standing once just like that, looking at the wall of the studio, as if to her it was peopled with life, and form and colour. 'I—I was fancying myself at the Academy,' she said to me, as I asked her at what she was gazing, 'at the Academy, and my picture on the line.' I do not know if she ever attained her ambition," he added. "I have never seen or heard of her since."

He glanced at Jasper Trenoweth, who silently held out his hand for the sketch.

For a moment silence reigned throughout the room. The eyes of all were on the bent head and sad, grave face of the man who sat there before them, his thoughts apparently far away, so far that he seemed to have forgotten his promise to finish the story which Denis O'Hara had begun.

At last he roused himself. "There is not much more to add," he said slowly. "All that Denis has said of Musette Delaporte is true, and more than true. She was one of those women who are bound to leave their mark on a man's life and memory. After Denis left so abruptly I saw very little of her. She seemed restless, troubled, and disturbed. Her mind was absorbed in the completion of her picture. That unrest and dissatisfaction which is ever the penalty of enthusiasm, had now taken the place of previous hopefulness. 'If it should fail,' she said to me. 'Oh, you don't know what that would mean. You don't know what I have staked on it.'

"Still she never offered to show it to me, and I would not presume to ask. I kept away for several days, thinking she was best undisturbed. All artists have gone through that phase of experience which she was undergoing It is scarcely possible to avoid it, if, indeed, one has any appreciation for, or love of, art in one's nature.

"At last, one day I walked down to the studio. I knocked at the door There was no answer. I turned the handle, and entered. In the full light of the sunset, as it streamed through the window, stood the easel, covered no longer, and facing me, as I paused on the threshold, was the picture. I stood there too amazed to speak or move It was magnificent. If I had not known that only a woman's hand had converted that canvas into a living breathing history, I could not have believed it. There was nothing crude or weak or feminine about it. The power and force of genius spoke out like a living voice, and seemed to demand the homage it so grandly challenged. Suddenly I became aware of a sound in the stillness—the low, stifled sobbing of a woman I saw her then, thrown face downwards on the couch at the farthest end of the room, her face buried in the cushions, her whole frame trembling and convulsed with a passion of grief. 'Oh, Maurice!' she sobbed, and then again only that name—'Maurice! Maurice! Maurice!'

"I closed the door softly, and went away. There seemed to me something sacred in this grief I—I could not intrude on it. She was so near to Fame. She held so great a gift and yet she lay weeping her heart out yonder, like the weakest and most foolish of her sex, for—well, what could I think, but that it was for some man's sake? "

He paused, his