The History of David Grieve Part 55

Her eye followed him with excitement, taking in every detail of the action--the masculine breadth of chest, the beauty of the dark head and short upper lip.

'Very good--very good!' she said, clapping her small hands. 'You did that admirably--you improve--_n'est-ce pas, Mademoiselle?_'

But Louie only stared blankly and somewhat haughtily in return. She was beginning to be tired of her silent _role_, and of the sort of subordination it implied. The French girl seemed to divine it, and her.

'She does not like me,' she said, with a kind of wonder under her breath, so that David did not catch the words. 'The other is quite different.'

Then, springing up, she searched in the pockets of her jacket for something--lips pursed, brows knitted, as though the quest were important.

'Where are my cigarettes?' she demanded sharply. 'Ah! here they are.

Mademoiselle--Monsieur.'

Louie laughed rudely, pus.h.i.+ng them back without a word. Then she got up, and began boldly to look about her. The shoes attracted her, and some Algerian scarves and burnouses that were lying on a distant chair. She went to turn them over.

Mademoiselle Delaunay looked after her for a moment--with the same critical attention as before--then with a shrug she threw herself into a corner of the divan, drawing about her a bit of old embroidered stuff which lay there. It was so flung, however, as to leave one dainty foot in an embroidered silk stocking visible beyond it. The tone of the stocking was repeated in the bunch of violets at her neck, and the purples of the flowers told with charming effect against her white skin and the pale fawn colour of her dress and hair. David watched her with intoxication. She could hardly be taller than most children of fourteen, but her proportions were so small and delicate that her height, whatever it was, seemed to him the perfect height for a woman. She handled her cigarette with mannish airs; unless it were some old harridan in a collier's cottage, he had never seen a woman smoke before, and certainly he had never guessed it could become her so well. Not pretty! He was in no mood to dissect the pale irregular face with its subtleties of line and expression; but, as she sat there smoking and chatting, she was to him the realisation--the climax of his dream of Paris. All the lightness and grace of that dream, the strangeness, the thrill of it seemed to have pa.s.sed into her.

'Will you stay in those rooms?' she inquired, slowly blowing away the curls of smoke in front of her.

David replied that he could not yet decide. He looked as he felt--in a difficulty.

'Oh! _you_ will do well enough there. But your sister--_Tenez_! There is a family on the floor below--an artist and his wife. I have known them take _pensionnaires_.

They are not the most distinguished persons in the world--_mais enfin_!--it is not for long. Your sister might do worse than board with them.'

David thanked her eagerly. He would make all inquiries. He had in his pocket a note of introduction from Dubois to Madame Cervin, and another, he believed, to the gentleman on the ground floor--to M.

Montjoie, the sculptor.

'Ah! M. Montjoie!'

Her brows went up, her grey eyes flashed. As for her tone it was half amused, half contemptuous. She began to speak, moved restlessly, then apparently thought better of it.

'After all,' she said, in a rapid undertone, '_qu'est-ce que cela me fait? Allons._ Why did you come here at all, instead of to an hotel, for so short a time?'

He explained as well as he was able.

'You wanted to see something of French life, and French artists or writers?' she repeated slowly, 'and you come with introductions from Xavier Dubois! _C'est drole, ca._ Have you studied art?'

He laughed.

'No--except in books.'

'What books?'

'Novels--George Sand's.'

It was her turn to laugh now.

'You are really too amusing! No, Monsieur, no; you interest me.

I have the best will in the world towards you; but I cannot ask Consuelos and Teverinos to meet you. _Pas possible._ I regret--'

She fell into silence a moment, studying him with a merry look.

Then she broke out again.

'Are you a connoisseur in pictures, Monsieur?'

He had reddened already under her _persiflage._ At this he grew redder still.

'I have never seen any, Mademoiselle,' he said, almost piteously; 'except once a little exhibition in Manchester.'

'Nor sculpture?'

'No,' he said honestly; 'nor sculpture.'

It seemed to him he was being held under a microscope, so keen and pitiless were her laughing eyes. But she left him no time to resent it.

'So you are a blank page, Monsieur--virgin soil--and you confess it. You interest me extremely. I should even like to teach you a little. I am the most ignorant person in the world. I know nothing about artists in books. _Mais je suis artiste, moi! fille d'artiste._ I could tell you tales--'

She threw her graceful head back against the cus.h.i.+on behind her, and smiled again broadly, as though her sense of humour were irresistibly tickled by the situation.

Then a whim seized her, and she sat up, grave and eager.

'I have drawn since I was eight years old,' she said; 'would you like to hear about it? It is not romantic--not the least in the world--but it is true.'

And with what seemed to his foreign ear a marvellous swiftness and fertility of phrase, she poured out her story. After her mother died she had been sent at eight years old to board at a farm near Rouen by her father, who seemed to have regarded his daughter now as plaything and model, now as an intolerable drag on the freedom of a vicious career. And at the farm the child's gift declared itself. She began with copying the ill.u.s.trations, the saints and holy families in a breviary belonging to one of the farm servants; she went on to draw the lambs, the carts, the horses, the farm buildings, on any piece of white wood she could find littered about the yard, or any bit of paper saved from a parcel, till at last the old cure took pity upon her and gave her some chalks and a drawing-book. At fourteen her father, for a caprice, reclaimed her, and she found herself alone with him in Paris. To judge from the hints she threw out, her life during thee next few years had been of the roughest and wildest, protected only by her indomitable resolve to learn, to make herself an artist, come what would. 'I meant to be _famous_, and I mean it still!' she said, with a pa.s.sionate emphasis which made David open his eyes. Her father refused to believe in her gift, and was far too self-indulgent and brutal to teach her. But some of his artist friends were kind to her, and taught her intermittently; by the help of some of them she got permission, although under age, to copy in the Louvre, and with hardly any technical knowledge worked there feverishly from morning to night; and at last Taranne--the great Taranne, from whose _atelier_ so many considerable artists had gone out to the conquest of the public--Taranne had seen some of her drawings, heard her story, and generously taken her as a pupil.

Then emulation took hold of her--the fierce desire to be first in all the compet.i.tions of the _atelier_. David had the greatest difficulty in following her rapid speech, with its slang, its technical idioms, its extravagance and variety; but he made out that she had been for a long time deficient in sound training, and that her rivals at the _atelier_ had again and again beaten her easily in spite of her gift, because of her weakness in the grammar of her art.

'And whenever they beat me I could have killed my conquerors; and whenever I beat them, I despised my judges and wanted to give the prize away. It is not my fault. _Je suis faite comme ca--voila!

_ I am as vain as a peac.o.c.k; yet when people admire anything I do, I think them fools--_fools!_ I am jealous and proud and absurd--so they all say; yet a word, a look from a real artist--from one of the great men who _know_--can break me, make me cry. _Demelez ca, Monsieur, si vous pouvez!_'

She stopped, out of breath. Their eyes were on each other. The fascination, the absorption expressed in the Englishman's look startled her. She hurriedly turned away, took up her cigarette again, and nestled into the cus.h.i.+on. He vainly tried to clothe some of the quick comments running through his mind in adequate French, could find nothing but the most commonplace phrases, stammered out a few, and then blushed afresh. In her pity for him she took up her story again.

After her father's sudden death, the shelter, such as it was, of his name and companions.h.i.+p was withdrawn. What was she to do? It turned out that she possessed a small _rente_ which had belonged to her mother, and which her father had never been able to squander.

Two relations from her mother's country near Bordeaux turned up to claim her, a country doctor and his sister--middle-aged, devout--to her wild eyes at least, altogether forbidding.

'They made too much of their self-sacrifice in taking me to live with them,' she said with her little ringing laugh. 'I said to them--"My good uncle and aunt, it is too much--no one could have the right to lay such a burden upon you. Go home and forget me. I am incorrigible. I am an artist. I mean to live by myself, and work for myself. I am sure to go to the bad--good morning." They went home and told the rest of my mother's people that I was insane. But they could not keep my money from me. It is just enough for me.

Besides, I shall be selling soon,--certainly I shall be selling! I have had two or three inquiries already about one of the exhibits in the Salon. Now then--_talk_, Monsieur David!' and she emphasised the words by a little frown; 'it is your turn.'

And gradually by skill and patience she made him talk, made him give her back some of her confidences. It seemed to amuse her greatly that he should be a bookseller. She knew no booksellers in Paris; she could a.s.sure him they were all pure _bourgeois_, and there was not one of them that could be likened to Donatello's David. Manchester she had scarcely heard of; she shook her fair head over it. But when he told her of his French reading, when he waxed eloquent about Rousseau and George Sand, then her mirth became uncontrollable.

'You came to France to talk of Rousseau and George Sand?' she asked him with dancing eyes--'_Mon Dieu! mon Dieu!_ what do you take us for?'

This time his vanity was hurt. He asked her to tell him what she meant--why she laughed at him.

'I will do better than that,' she said; 'I will get some friend of mine to take you to-morrow to "Les Trois Rats."'

'What is "Les Trois Rats"?' he asked, half wounded and half mystified.

'"Les Trois Rats," Monsieur, is an artist's cafe. It is famous, it is characteristic; if you are in search of local colour you must certainly go there. When you come back you will have some fresh ideas, I promise you.'