Page:The Strange Case of Miss Annie Spragg (1928).djvu/36

 shadow. She was shy too and frightened like a bird. Mr. Winnery felt a sudden wave of pity for her.

"What an awful life!" he thought.

While they had been talking a workman appeared coming down one of the long light-flecked corridors of the garden, carrying in each hand a pail of water. In his wide belt of black elastic was thrust a scrubbing-brush. He was a young man, dark and black-eyed, who wore blue trousers stained with the red clay and a checkered shirt open to expose his dark sunburned chest. Winnery, who through years of boredom had come to amuse himself at desperate moments by watching the sly, half-concealed actions of people, saw Princess d'Orobelli's eye rove over the masculine young figure. Herodias, he thought. The workman knelt down and with the scrubbing-brush began to remove the patches of red clay from the freshly disinterred statue.

They stood about watching while the statue, slightly pitted here and there by the action of acids hidden in the sour ground of the dark garden, emerged in all the beauty of its time-worn creamy white marble. Princess d'Orobelli whispered something to Father d'Astier. One of the maidservants giggled and was silenced at once by a glance of venom from Mrs. Weatherby, who had clearly determined to regard this as a sacred moment.

Priapus himself had risen from the mouldering soil of the ancient garden.

Whatever hand carved the figure had moved with understanding and passion. The statue carried in every line a kind of quivering voluptuousness. The