Cleo The Magnificent Part 28

"I'm just doing a little group of greyhounds. I'm going to exhibit them at the Academy. It's such a bother and such fun, too! I've got over the worst part now. The big mother and two little ones playing at the side of her make twelve legs and three tails--quite a forest of them. I had no end of trouble to get a good composition. But the chief bother was with the models. The dog would never keep still, and I had to keep on moving my wax figure just as it moved. Sometimes it would turn upside down, and then I had to turn my work upside down as well.

Do you know what I should like to do, Morgan?"

"I don't, but I should like to."

"I wonder if you'd let me make a bust of you! I want to very much."

"Why?" he asked, without meaning that exactly, but only by way of surprised exclamation.

"Well," she smiled, "I just want to. I could have an old bench brought up here and a lot of clay. If you sat to me, say, for a couple of hours every Sunday morning, you'd begin to recognise yourself after a time."

He was powerless to refuse. With her speaking to him, he became as pa.s.sive as the clay she moulded. He knew her power; perhaps that was why his instinct had led him to elude it.

"That is really good of you, dear Morgan," she exclaimed, while her eyes sparkled with honest delight.

Time was, perhaps, when seeing her thus he might have taken her hand.

"But don't look as if you already regretted making the promise," she went on to protest. "I a.s.sure you it won't hurt a bit; not any more than having your hair cut. By the way, why do you wear your hair so short? Oughtn't a poet to have long, n.o.ble locks? They come out very effectively in clay, those long, n.o.ble locks. I hope I'm not making your bed too hard. Come now, Morgan, are you still so heavy-hearted?

What can I do to make you merry?"

"Take supper with me," he responded quickly, with an atoning flash of briskness, the while he upbraided himself for oppressing her with his dejection. "It will be a real Bohemian supper."

"How nice! I'm dying with hunger."

"In here, I mean," he explained. "I make my own supper."

"I know. We heard all about the inside of that cupboard."

"You won't mind sitting on the hard chair?"

"No. What's the menu?"

"Bread and cheese and----"

"Not beer, I hope," she interrupted hastily.

"And cocoa," he finished. "Do you mind keeping house here for two minutes whilst I run down to get the milk. We have a dairy two doors away."

He returned in a moment and she helped him to set out the table, for which there was no cloth.

"This chair _is_ hard," she said again later, when she had been seated on it some little time. "I must send you a soft chair, Morgan. I haven't given you a birthday present this year."

"Indeed, you must not. Such luxuries are out of place here, and you ought not to try to spoil me."

"But, dear Morgan, you've a lovely rug, and I'm sure you ought to have a nice chair to keep it company. You've your guests to think of now. I must have something to sit on when I come and so must your papa. I'm willing to admit my suggestion was not quite a disinterested one; in fact, I'm prepared to be perfectly unscrupulous so long as I carry my point."

"I'd better yield before you get so far as that. Only, of course, the chair shall be used exclusively for my visitors."

"Oh, you must sit on it sometimes, as well."

"Well, let us not quarrel about it."

"Of course we're not going to quarrel about it. We're going to be the best of friends now, aren't we?"

"I never dared dream----" he began.

"Dreaming hasn't anything to do with it. It really isn't at all necessary, so the omission need not count. All along I've had the feeling as if you were thrusting me back away from your life, and I have always wanted to count for something in it, if ever so little.

Won't you let me now be of some help to you? It is wicked of you to continue in this terrible solitude. I feel that you've promised to let me come here and model you really against your will; don't deny it, Morgan--your face spoke only too plainly. I should be standing here and talking to you, but you would be as solitary as if I had never come. I want to break down that stupid barrier between us; I want you to believe in me, to trust me and to show me you trust me."

"It is myself I dare not trust. Such a friends.h.i.+p needs strength, and I am not strong enough, Margaret."

"Then you must find the strength, Morgan. Weakness is an unmanly excuse, and you are a man."

"You talk like that because you still do not realise what it means for me to--to----"

He hesitated.

"Go on," she said. "I am strong enough to listen."

There was a silence, but she knew he was collecting his scattered forces.

"To be friends with you," he went on determinedly. "You say that I kept you at arm's length. That is true. But then you don't know what my life has been--you never did really know even when we were close together."

"Tell me then, Morgan. Make me understand why you kept me at arm's length. I do not know how you came to marry so suddenly, what woman you married, or why she left you. I want to know all about her. Tell me, if it doesn't hurt you too much. Perhaps it will hurt you less after you have told me."

"I have kept you at arm's length, Margaret, because I loved you. I am struggling now to keep you at arm's length because I still love you.

Dare you stay here and listen to me after that?"

She looked him straight in the face.

"I dare, Morgan. I want you to know me as well as to love me. If you had understood me, you would neither have thrust me back nor would you be struggling to do so now. You no doubt always considered me just a pretty girl, who thought and acted always as becomes what it called a young lady; a colourless, conventional creature, without any judgment or emotions of her own; just a white sheet of paper with a name written across in beautiful lettering; a simpering thing in petticoats who must smile and blush just at the right moments and be perfectly proper at all times; who must never act unless she has a fixed rule to guide her; who is supposed to understand nothing at all of real life; for whom human beings are reduced to a strange uniformity, the men in their evening dress so simple, so nice, so attentive, so easy to understand, the women--but then such a young person is not supposed to concern herself with the women. That, I'm sure, is the sort of girl I appeared to you, Morgan. I am sorry that, so far, I cannot take your love for me as a compliment. You saw me as a painter might see a model, and perhaps you enshrined my image as a sort of poetic fancy.

You loved me as an unreal spirit. But I am not what you thought me; I am a real person. I can think and judge for myself, and I can be myself. That is why I have had the courage to come here to you, and had I known earlier where you were I should have forced this interview on you long ago. And this despite the fact that you are married, that you love me and that I--love you. I have the courage to face the occasion, to outrage convention where convention makes no provision for the needs of the particular occasion. I know that, despite all, we can be very dear friends. Only trust me a little, Morgan, learn to know me better, and I am sure you will trust me altogether. Make an effort to be strong and perhaps I may help you."

And so Morgan poured himself out to her, told her all; and, if at times he faltered, she bade him go on, she would not blush.

The recital was a long one. Interruptions and discussions were frequent; they were also making pretence to sup. Neither remembered the flight of time.

"Of course, I have known the bare facts for a long time," said Margaret, "but only in a very vague way and in a very puzzling one.

There was so much left to my imagination, and it bothered me so much to fill up the blanks. And so you are working to pay off her debts. I know it feels awfully nice to earn money for one's self. Do you know that I'm quite rich. Guess how much I made last year by my modelling?"

"How much?" he asked.

"Eighty-seven pounds, after paying all my expenses," she exclaimed. "I wanted to pay for my own frocks, but papa wouldn't let me. And so I've got it all and I don't know what to do with it; at least I know what I should like to do with it."

"But surely papa wouldn't disapprove of your doing what you liked with it?"

"Oh, papa wouldn't disapprove," she said, colouring a little, "but I'm afraid you would."

"I? You're not intending to buy me a silver chair with jewels set in it, are you?"