Chapter III: Part 3

"Do you think it is always funny?" inquired the child, her deep, grey eyes on his face.

He smiled:

"Yes, I do; but sometimes the joke in on one's self. And then, although it is still a funny world, from the world's point of view, you, of course, fail to see the humour of it.... I don't suppose you understand."

"I do," nodded the child, with the ghost of a smile.

"Really? Well, I was afraid I'd been talking nonsense, but if you understand, it's all right."

They both laughed.

"Do you want to look at some books?" he suggested.

"I'd rather listen to you."

He smiled:

"All right. I'll begin at this corner of the room and tell you about the things in it." And for a while he rambled lazily on about old French chairs and Spanish chests, and the panels of Mille Fleur tapestry which hung behind them; the two lovely pre-Raphael panels in their exquisite ancient frames; the old Venetian velvet covering triple choir-stalls in the corner; the ivory-toned marble figure on its wood and compos pedestal, where tendrils and delicate foliations of water gilt had become slightly irridescent, harmonising with the patine on the ancient Chinese garniture flanking a mantel clock of dullest gold.

About these things, their workmanship, the histories of their times, he told her in his easy, unaccented voice, glancing sideways at her from time to time to note how she stood it.

But she listened, fascinated, her gaze moving from the object discussed to the man who discussed it; her slim limbs curled under her, her hands clasped around a silken cushion made from the robe of some Chinese princess.

Lounging there beside her, amused, humorously flattered by her attention, and perhaps a little touched, he held forth a little longer.

"Is it a nice party, so far, Dulcie?" he concluded with a smile.

She flushed, found no words, nodded, and sat with lowered head as though pondering.

"What would you rather do if you could do what you want to in the world, Dulcie?"

"I don't know."

"Think a minute."

She thought for a while.

"Live with you," she said seriously.

"Oh, Dulcie! That is no sort of ambition for a growing girl!" he laughed; and she laughed, too, watching his every expression out of grey eyes that were her chiefest beauty.

"You're a little too young to know what you want yet," he concluded, still smiling. "By the time that bobbed mop of red hair grows to a proper length, you'll know more about yourself."

"Do you like it up?" she enquired naively.

"It makes you look older."

"I want it to."

"I suppose so," he nodded, noticing the snowy neck which the new coiffure revealed. It was becoming evident to him that Dulcie had her own vanities--little pathetic vanities which touched him as he glanced at the reconstructed first communion dress and the drooping hyacinth pinned at the waist, and the cheap white slippers on a foot as slenderly constructed as her long and narrow hands.

"Did your mother die long ago, Dulcie?"

"Yes."

"In America?"

"In Ireland."

"You look like her, I fancy--" thinking of Soane.

"I don't know."

Barres had heard Soane hold forth in his cups on one or two occasions--nothing more than the vague garrulousness of a Celt made more loquacious by the whiskey of one Grogan--something about his having been a gamekeeper in his youth, and that his wife--"God rest her!"--might have held up her head with "anny wan o' thim in th' Big House."

Recollecting this, he idly wondered what the story might have been--a young girl's perverse infatuation for her father's gamekeeper, perhaps--a handsome, common, ignorant youth, reckless and irresponsible enough to take advantage of her--probably some such story--resembling similar histories of chauffeurs, riding-masters, grooms, and coachmen at home.

The Prophet came noiselessly into the studio, stopped at sight of his little mistress, twitched his tail reflectively, then leaped onto a carved table and calmly began his ablutions.

Barres got up and wound up the Victrola. Then he kicked aside a rug or two.

"This is to be a real party, you know," he remarked. "You don't dance, do you?"

"Yes," she said diffidently, "a little."

"Oh! That's fine!" he exclaimed.

Dulcie got off the sofa, shook out her reconstructed gown. When he came over to where she stood, she laid her hand in his almost solemnly, so overpowering had become the heavenly sequence of events. For the rite of his hospitality had indeed become a rite to her. Never before had she stood in awe, enthralled before such an altar as this man's hearthstone. Never had she dreamed that he who so wondrously served it could look at such an offering as hers--herself.

But the miracle had happened; altar and priest were accepting her; she laid her hand, which trembled, in his; gave herself to his guidance and to the celestial music, scarcely seeing, scarcely hearing his voice.

"You dance delightfully," he was saying; "you're a born dancer, Dulcie. I do it fairly well myself, and I ought to know."

He was really very much surprised. He was enjoying it immensely. When the Victrola gave up the ghost he wound it again and came back to resume. Under his suggestions and tutelage, they tried more intricate steps, devious and ambitious, and Dulcie, unterrified by terpsichorean complications, surmounted every one with his whispered coaching and expert aid.

Now it came to a point where time was not for him. He was too interested, enjoying it too genuinely.

Sometimes, when they paused to enable him to resurrect the defunct music in the Victrola, they laughed at the Prophet, who sat upon the ancient carved table, gravely surveying them. Sometimes they rested because he thought she ought to--himself a trifle pumped--only to find, to his amazement, that he need not be solicitous concerning her.

* * * * *

A tall and ancient clock ringing midnight from clear, uncompromising bells, brought Barres to himself.

"Good Lord!" he exclaimed, "this won't do! Dear child, I'm having a wonderful time, but I've got to deliver you to your father!"

He drew her arm through his, laughingly pretending horror and haste; she fled lightly along beside him as he whisked her through the hall and down the stairs.

A candle burned on the desk. Soane sat there, asleep, and odorous of alcohol, his flushed face buried in his arms.

But Soane was what is known as a "sob-souse"; never ugly in his cups, merely inclined to weep over the immemorial wrongs of Ireland.

He woke up when Barres touched his shoulder, rubbed his swollen eyes and black, curly head, gazed tragically at his daughter:

"G'wan to bed, ye little scut!" he said, getting to his feet with a terrific yawn.

Barres took her hand:

"We've had a wonderful party, haven't we, Sweetness?"

"Yes," whispered the child.

The next instant she was gone like a ghost, through the dusky, whitewashed corridor where distorted shadows trembled in the candlelight.

"Soane," said Barres, "this won't do, you know. They'll sack you if you keep on drinking."

The man, not yet forty, a battered, middle-aged by-product of hale and reckless vigour, passed his hands over his temples with the dignity of a Hibernian Hamlet:

"The harp that wanst through Tara's halls--" he began; but memory failed; and two tears--by-products, also, of Grogan's whiskey--sparkled in his reproachful eyes.

"I'm merely telling you," remarked Barres. "We all like you, Soane, but the landlord won't stand for it."

"May God forgive him," muttered Soane. "Was there ever a landlord but he was a tyrant, too?"

Barres blew out the candle; a faint light above the Fu-dog outside, over the street door, illuminated the stone hall.

"You ought to keep sober for your little daughter's sake," insisted Barres in a low voice. "You love her, don't you?"

"I do that!" said Soane--"God bless her and her poor mother, who could hould up her pretty head with anny wan till she tuk up with th' like o' me!"

His brogue always increased in his cups; devotion to Ireland and a lofty scorn of landlords grew with both.

"You'd better keep away from Grogan's," remarked Barres.

"I had a bite an' a sup at Grogan's. Is there anny harrm in that, sorr?"

"Cut out the 'sup,' Larry. Cut out that gang of bums at Grogan's, too. There are too many Germans hanging out around Grogan's these days. You Sinn Feiners or Clan-na-Gael, or whatever you are, had better manage your own affairs, anyway. The old-time Feinans stood on their own sturdy legs, not on German beer-skids."

"Wisha then, sorr, d'ye mind th' ould song they sang in thim days:

"_Then up steps Bonyparty
An' takes me by the hand,
And how is ould Ireland,
And how does she shtand?
It's a poor, disthressed country
As ever yet was seen,
And they're hangin' men and women
For the wearing of the green!_

_Oh, the wearing of the_----"

"That'll do," said Barres drily. "Do you want to wake the house? Don't go to Grogan's and talk about Ireland to any Germans. I'll tell you why: we'll probably be at war with Germany ourselves within a year, and that's a pretty good reason for you Irish to keep clear of all Germans. Go to bed!"

VI

DULCIE

One warm afternoon late in spring, Dulcie Soane, returning from school to Dragon Court, found her father behind the desk, as usual, awaiting his daughter's advent, to release him from duty.

A tall, bony man with hectic and sunken cheeks and only a single eye was standing by the desk, earnestly engaged in whispered conversation with her father.

He drew aside instantly as Dulcie came up and laid her school books on the desk. Soane, already redolent of Grogan's whiskey, pushed back his chair and got to his feet.

"G'wan in f'r a bite an' a sup," he said to his daughter, "while I talk to the gintleman."

So Dulcie went slowly into the superintendent's dingy quarters for her mid-day meal, which was dinner; and between her and a sloppy scrub-woman who cooked for them, she managed to warm up and eat what Soane had left for her from his own meal.

When she returned to the desk in the hall, the one-eyed man had gone. Soane sat on the chair behind the desk, his face over-red and shiny, his heels drumming the devil's tattoo on the tessellated pavement.

"I'll be at Grogan's," he said, as Dulcie seated herself in the ancient leather chair behind the desk telephone, and began to sort the pile of mail which the postman evidently had just delivered.

"Very well," she murmured absently, turning around and beginning to distribute the letters and parcels in the various numbered compartments behind her. Soane slid off his chair to his feet and straightened up, stretching and yawning.

"Av anny wan tilliphones to Misther Barres," he said, "listen in."

"What!"

"Listen in, I'm tellin' you. And if it's a lady, ask her name first, and then listen in. And if she says her name is Quellen or Dunois, mind what she says to Misther Barres."

"Why?" enquired Dulcie, astonished.

"Becuz I'm tellin' ye!"

"I shall not do that," said the girl, flushing up.

"Ah, bother! Sure, there's no harm in it, Dulcie! Would I be askin' ye to do wrong, asthore? Me who is your own blood and kin? Listen then: 'Tis a woman what do be botherin' the poor young gentleman, an' I'll not have him f'r to be put upon. Listen, m'acushla, and if airy a lady tilliphones, or if she comes futtherin' an' muttherin' around here, call me at Grogan's and I'll be soon dishposen' av the likes av her."

"Has she ever been here--this lady?" asked the girl, uncertain and painfully perplexed.

"Sure has she! Manny's the time I've chased her out," replied Soane glibly.

"Oh. What does she look like?"

"God knows--annything ye don't wish f'r to look like yourself! Sure, I disremember what make of woman she might be--her name's enough for you. Call me up if she comes or rings. She may be a dangerous woman, at that," he added, "so speak fair to her and listen in to what she says."

Dulcie slowly nodded, looking at him hard.

Soane put on his faded brown hat at an angle, fished a cigar with a red and gold band from his fancy but soiled waistcoat, scratched a match on the seat of his greasy pants, and sauntered out through the big, whitewashed hallway into the street, with a touch of the swagger which always characterised him.

* * * * *

Dulcie, both hands buried in her ruddy hair and both thin elbows on the desk, sat poring over her school books.

Graduation day was approaching; there was much for her to absorb, much to memorise before then.

As she studied she hummed to herself the air of the quaint song which she was to sing at her graduation exercises. That did not interfere with her concentration; but as she finished one lesson, cast aside the book, and opened another to prepare the next lesson, vaguely happy memories of her evening party with Barres came into her mind to disturb her thoughts, tempting her to reverie and the delicious idleness she knew only when alone and absorbed in thoughts of him.

But she resolutely put him out of her mind and opened her book.

The hall clock ticked loudly through the silence; slanting sun rays fell through the street grille, across the tessellated floor where flies crawled and buzzed.

The Prophet sat full in a bar of sunlight and gravely followed the movements of the flies as though specialising on the study of those amazing insects.

Tenants of Dragon Court passed out or entered at intervals, pausing to glance at their letter-boxes or requesting their keys.

Westmore came down the eastern staircase, like an avalanche, with a cheery:

"Hello, Dulcie! Any letters? All right, old dear! If you see Mr. Mandel, tell him I'll be at the club!"

Corot Mandel came in presently, and she gave him Westmore's message.

"Thanks," he said, not even glancing at the thin figure in the shabby dress too small for her. And, after peering into his letter-box, he went away with the indolent swing of a large and powerful plantigrade, gazing fixedly ahead of him out of heavy, oriental eyes, and twisting up his jet black, waxed moustache.

A tall, handsome girl called and enquired for Mr. Trenor. Dulcie returned her amiable smile, unhooked the receiver, and telephoned up. But nobody answered from Esme Trenor's apartment, and the girl, whose name was Damaris Souval, and whose profession varied between the stage and desultory sitting for artists, smiled once more on Dulcie and sauntered out in her very charming summer gown.

The shabby child looked after her through the sunny hallway, the smile still curving her lips--a sensitive, winning smile, untainted by envy. Then she resumed her book, serenely clearing her youthful mind of vanity and desire for earthly things.

Half an hour later Esme Trenor sauntered in. His was a sensitive nature and fastidious, too. Dinginess, obscurity--everything that was shabby, tarnished, humble in life, he consistently ignored. He had ignored Dulcie Soane for three years: he ignored her now.

He glanced indifferently into his letter-box as he passed the desk. Dulcie said, with the effort it always required for her to speak to him:

"Miss Souval called, but left no message."

Trenor's supercilious glance rested on her for the fraction of a second, then, with a bored nod, he continued on his way and up the stairs. And Dulcie returned to her book.

The desk telephone rang: a Mrs. Helmund desired to speak to Mr. Trenor. Dulcie switched her on, rested her chin on her hand, and continued her reading.

Some time afterward the telephone rang again.

"Dragon Court," said Dulcie, mechanically.

"I wish to speak to Mr. Barres, please."

"Mr. Barres has not come in from luncheon."

"Are you sure?" said the pretty, feminine voice.

"Quite sure," replied Dulcie. "Wait a minute----"

She called Barres's apartment; Aristocrates answered and confirmed his master's absence with courtly effusion.

"No, he is not in," repeated Dulcie. "Who shall I say called him?"

"Say that Miss Dunois called him up. If he comes in, say that Miss Thessalie Dunois will come at five to take tea with him. Thank you. Good-bye."

Startled to hear the very name against which her father had warned her, Dulcie found it difficult to reconcile the sweet voice that came to her over the wire with the voice of any such person her father had described.

Still a trifle startled, she laid aside the receiver with a disturbed glance toward the wrought-iron door at the further end of the hall.

She had no desire at all to call up her father at Grogan's and inform him of what had occurred. The mere thought of surreptitious listening in, of eavesdropping, of informing, reddened her face. Also, she had long since lost confidence in the somewhat battered but jaunty man who had always neglected her, although never otherwise unkind, even when intoxicated.

No, she would neither listen in nor inform on anybody at the behest of a father for whom, alas, she had no respect, merely those shreds of conventional feeling which might once have been filial affection, but had become merely an habitual solicitude.

No, her character, her nature refused such obedience. If there was trouble between the owner of the unusually sweet voice and Mr. Barres, it was their affair, not hers, not her father's.

This settled in her mind, she opened another book and turned the pages slowly until she came to the lesson to be learned.

It was hard to concentrate; her thoughts were straying, now, to Barres.

And, as she leaned there, musing above her dingy school book, through the grilled door at the further end of the hall stepped a young girl in a light summer gown--a beautiful girl, lithe, graceful, exquisitely groomed--who came swiftly up to the desk, a trifle pale and breathless:

"Mr. Barres? He lives here?"

"Yes."

"Please announce Miss Dunois."

Dulcie flushed deeply under the shock:

"Mr.--Mr. Barres is still out----"

"Oh. Was it you I talked to over the telephone?" asked Thessalie Dunois.

"Yes."

"Mr. Barres has not returned?"

"No."

Thessalie bit her lip, hesitated, turned to go. And at the same instant Dulcie saw the one-eyed man at the street door, peering through the iron grille.

Thessalie saw him, too, stiffened to marble, stood staring straight at him.

He turned and went away up the street. But Dulcie, to whom the incident signified nothing in particular except the impudence of a one-eyed man, was not prepared for the face which Thessalie Dunois turned toward her. Not a vestige of colour remained in it, and her dark eyes seemed feverish and too large.

"You need not give Mr. Barres any message from me," she said in an altered voice, which sounded strained and unsteady. "Please do not even say that I came or mention my name.... May I ask it of you?"

Dulcie, very silent in her surprise, made no reply.

"Please may I ask it of you?" whispered Thessalie. "Do you mind not telling anybody that I was here?"

"If--you wish it."

"I do. May I trust you?"

"Y-yes."

"Thank you--" A bank bill was in her gloved fingers; intuition warned her; she took another swift look at Dulcie. The child's face was flaming scarlet.

"Forgive me," whispered Thessalie.... "And thank you, dear--" She bent over quickly, took Dulcie's hand, pressed it, looking her in the eyes.

"It's all right," she whispered. "I am not asking you to do anything you shouldn't. Mr. Barres will understand it all when I write to him.... Did you see that man at the street door, looking through the grating?"

"Yes."

"Do you know who he is?" whispered Thessalie.

"No."

"Have you never before seen him?"

"Yes. He was here at two o'clock talking to my father."

"Your father?"

"My father's name is Lawrence Soane. He is superintendent of Dragon Court."

"What is your name?"

"Dulcie Soane."

Thessalie still held her hand tightly. Then with a quick but forced smile, she pressed it, thanking the girl for her consideration, turned and walked swiftly through the hall out into the street.

* * * * *

Dulcie, dreaming over her closed books in the fading light, vaguely uneasy lest her silence might embrace the faintest shadow of disloyalty to Barres, looked up quickly at the sound of his familiar footsteps on the pavement.

"Hello, little comrade," he called to her on his way to the stairs. "Didn't we have a jolly party the other evening? I'm going out to another party this evening, but I bet it won't be as jolly as ours!"

The girl smiled happily.

"Any letters, Sweetness?"

"None, Mr. Barres."

"All the better. I have too many letters, too many visitors. It leaves me no time to have another party with you. But we shall have another, Dulcie--never fear. That is," he added, pretending to doubt her receptiveness of his invitation, "if you would care to have another with me."

She merely looked at him, smiling deliciously.

"Be a good child and we'll have another!" he called back to her, running on up the western staircase.

* * * * *

Around seven o'clock her father came in, steady enough of foot but shiny-red in the face and maudlin drunk.

"That woman was here," he whined, "an' ye never called me up! I am b-bethrayed be me childer--wurra the day----"

"Please, father! If any one sees you----"

"An' phwy not! Am I ashamed o' the tears I shed? No, I am not. No Irishman need take shame along av the tears he sheds for Ireland--God bless her where she shtands!--wid the hob-nails av the crool tyrant foreninst her bleeding neck an'----"

"Father, please----"

"That woman I warned ye of! She was here! 'Twas the wan-eyed lad who seen her----"

Dulcie rose and took him by his arm. He made no resistance; but he wept while she conducted him bedward, as the immemorial wrongs of Ireland tore his soul.

VII

OPPORTUNITY KNOCKS

The tremendous tragedy in Europe, now nearing the end of the second act, had been slowly shaking the drowsy Western World out of its snug slumber of complacency. Young America was already sitting up in bed, awake, alert, listening. Older America, more difficult to convince, rolled solemn and interrogative eyes toward Washington, where the wooden gods still sat nodding in a row, smiling vacuously at destiny out of carved and painted features. Eyes had they but they saw not, ears but they heard not; neither spake they through their mouths.

Yet, they that made them were no longer like unto them, for many an anxious idolater no longer trusted in them. For their old God's voice was sounding in their ears.

The voice of a great ex-president, too, had been thundering from the wilderness; lesser prophets, endowed, however, with intellect and vision, had been warning the young West that the second advent of Attila was at hand; an officer of the army, inspired of God, had preached preparedness from the market places and had established for its few disciples an habitation; and a great Admiral had died of a broken heart because his lips had been officially sealed--the wisest lips that ever told of those who go down to the sea in ships.

Plainer and plainer in American ears sounded the mounting surf of that blood-red sea thundering against the frontiers of Democracy; clearer and clearer came the discordant clamour of the barbaric hordes; louder and more menacing the half-crazed blasphemies of their chief, who had given the very name of the Scourge of God to one among the degenerate litter he had sired.

* * * * *

Garret Barres had been educated like any American of modern New York type. Harvard, then five years abroad, and a return to his native city revealed him as an ambitious, receptive, intelligent young man, deeply interested in himself and his own affairs, theoretically patriotic, a good citizen by intention, an affectionate son and brother, and already a pretty good painter of the saner species.

A modest income of his own enabled him to bide his time and decline pot-boilers. A comparatively young father and an even more youthful mother, both of sporting proclivities, together with a sister of the same tastes, were his preferred companions when he had time to go home to the family rooftree in northern New York. His lines, indeed, were cast in pleasant places. Beside still waters in green pastures, he could always restore his city-tarnished soul when he desired to retire for a while from the battleground of endeavour.

The city, after all, offered him a world-wide battlefield; for Garret Barres was by choice a painter of thoroughbred women, of cosmopolitan men--a younger warrior of the brush imbued with the old traditions of those great English captains of portraiture, who recorded for us the more brilliant human truths of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

From their stately canvases aglow, the eyes of the lovely dead look out at us; the eyes of ambition, of pride, of fatuous complacency; the haunted eyes of sorrow; the clear eyes of faith. Out of the past they gaze--those who once lived--deathlessly recorded by Van Dyck, Lely, Kneller; by Gainsborough, Reynolds, Hoppner, Lawrence, Raeburn; or consigned to a dignified destiny by Stuart, Sully, Inman, and Vanderlyn.

* * * * *

When Barres returned to New York after many years, he found that the aspect of the city had not altered very greatly. The usual dirt, disorder, and municipal confusion still reigned; subways were being dug, but since the memory of man runneth, the streets of the metropolis have been dug up, and its market places and byways have been an abomination.

The only visible excitement, however, was in the war columns of the newspapers, and, sometimes, around bulletin boards where wrangling groups were no uncommon sight, citizens and aliens often coming into verbal collision--sometimes physical--promptly suppressed by bored policemen.

There was a "preparedness" parade; thousands of worthy citizens marched in it, nervously aware, now, that the Great Republic's only mobile military division was on the Mexican border, where also certain Guard regiments were likely to be directed to reinforce the regulars--pet regiments from the city, among whose corps of officers and enlisted men everybody had some friend or relative.

But these regiments had not yet entrained. There were few soldiers to be seen on the streets. Khaki began to be noticeable in New York only when the Plattsburg camps opened. After that there was an interim of the usual dull, unaccented civilian monotony, mitigated at rare intervals by this dun-coloured ebb and flow from Plattsburg.

Like the first vague premonitions of a nightmare the first ominous symptoms of depression were slowly possessing hearts already uneasy under two years' burden of rumours unprintable, horrors incredible to those aloof and pursuing the peaceful tenor of their ways.

A growing restlessness, unbelief, the incapacity to understand--selfishness, rapacity, self-righteousness, complacency, cowardice, even stupidity itself were being jolted and shocked into something resembling a glimmer of comprehension as the hunnish U-boats, made ravenous by the taste of blood, steered into western shipping lanes like a vast shoal of sharks.

And always thicker and thicker came the damning tales of rape and murder, of cowardly savagery, brutal vileness, degenerate bestiality--clearer, nearer, distinctly audible, the sigh of a ravaged and expiring civilisation trampled to obliteration by the slavering, ferocious swine of the north.

* * * * *

Fires among shipping, fires amid great stores of cotton and grain destined for France or England, explosions of munitions of war ordered by nations of the Entente, the clumsy propaganda or impudent sneers of German and pro-German newspapers; reports of German meddling in Mexico, in South America, in Japan; more sinister news concerning the insolent activities of certain embassies--all these were beginning to have their logical effect among a fat and prosperous people which simply could not bear to be aroused from pleasant dreams of brotherhood to face the raw and hellish truth.

* * * * *

"For fifty years," remarked Barres to his neighbour, Esme Trenor, also a painter of somewhat eccentric portraits, "our national characteristic has been a capacity for absorbing bunk and a fixed determination to kid ourselves. There really is a war, Trenor, old top, and we're going to get into it before very long."

Trenor, a tall, tired, exquisitely groomed young man, who once had painted a superficially attractive portrait of a popular debutante, and had been overwhelmed with fashionable orders ever since, was the adored of women. He dropped one attenuated knee over the other and lighted an attenuated cigarette.

"Fancy anybody bothering enough about anything to fight over it!" he said languidly.

"We're going to _war_, Trenor," repeated Barres, jamming his brushes into a bowl of black soap. "That's my positive conviction."

"Yours is so disturbingly positive a nature," remonstrated the other. "Why ever raise a row? Nothing positive is of any real importance--not even opinions."

Barres, vigorously cleaning his brushes in turpentine and black soap, glanced around at Trenor, and in his quick smile there glimmered a hint of good-natured malice. For Esme Trenor was notoriously anything except positive in his painting, always enveloping a lack of technical knowledge with a veil of camouflage. Behind this pretty veil hid many defects, perhaps even deformities--protected by vague, indefinite shadows and the effrontery of an adroit exploiter of the restless sex.

But Esme Trenor was both clever and alert. He had not even missed that slight and momentary glimmer of good-humoured malice in the pleasant glance of Barres. But, like his more intelligent prototype, Whistler, it was impossible to know whether or not discovery ever made any particular difference to him. He tucked a lilac-bordered handkerchief a little deeper into his cuff, glanced at his jewelled wrist-watch, shook the long ash from his cigarette.

"To be positive in anything," he drawled, "is an effort; effort entails exertion; exertion is merely a degree of violence; violence engenders toxins; toxins dull the intellect. Quod erat, dear friend. You see?"

"Oh, yes, I see," nodded Barres, always frankly amused at Trenor and his ways.

"Well, then, if you see----" Trenor waved a long, bony, over-manicured hand, expelled a ring or two of smoke, meditatively; then, in his characteristically languid voice: "To be positive closes the door to further observation and pulls down the window shades. Nothing remains except to go to bed. Is there anything more uninteresting than to go to bed? Is there anything more depressing than to know all about something?"

"You do converse like an ass sometimes," remarked Barres.

"Yes--sometimes. Not now, Barres. I don't desire to know all about anybody or anything. Fancy my knowing all about art, for example!"

"Yes, fancy!" repeated Barres, laughing.

"Or about anything specific--a woman, for example!" He shrugged wearily.

"If you meet a woman and like her, don't you want to know all there is to know about her?" inquired Barres.

"I should say not!" returned the other with languid contempt. "I don't wish to know anything at all about her."

"Well, we differ about that, old top."

"Religiously. A woman can be only an incidental amusement in one's career. You don't go to a musical comedy twice, do you? And any woman will reveal herself sufficiently in one evening."

"Nice, kindly domestic instincts you have, Trenor."

"I'm merely fastidious," returned the other, dropping his cigarette out of the open window. He rose, yawned, took his hat, stick and gloves.

"Bye," he said languidly. "I'm painting Elsena Helmund this morning."

Barres said, with good-humoured envy:

"I've neither commission nor sitter. If I had, you bet I'd not stand there yawning at my luck."

"It is you who have the luck, not I," drawled Trenor. "I give a portion of my spiritual and material self with every brush stroke, while you remain at liberty to flourish and grow fat in idleness. I perish as I create; my life exhausts itself to feed my art. What you call my good luck is my martyrdom. You see, dear friend, how fortunate you are?"

"I see," grinned Barres. "But will your spiritual nature stand such a cruel drain? Aren't you afraid your morality may totter?"

"Morality," mused Esme, going; "that is one of those early Gothic terms now obsolete, I believe----"

He sauntered out with his hat and gloves and stick, still murmuring:

"Morality? Gothic--very Gothic--"

Barres, still amused, sorted his wet brushes, dried them carefully one by one on a handful of cotton waste, and laid them in a neat row across the soapstone top of his palette-table.

"Hang it!" he muttered cheerfully. "I could paint like a streak this morning if I had the chance--"

He threw himself back in his chair and sat there smoking for a while, his narrowing eyes fixed on a great window which opened above the court. Soft spring breezes stirred the curtains; sparrows were noisy out there; a strip of cobalt sky smiled at him over the opposite chimneys; an April cloud floated across it.

He rose, walked over to the window and glanced down into the court. Several more hyacinths were now in blossom. The Prophet dozed majestically, curled up on an Italian garden seat. Beside him sprawled the snow white Houri, stretched out full length in the sun, her wonderful blue eyes following the irrational gambols of the tortoise-shell cat, Strindberg, who had gone loco, as usual, and was tearing up and down trees, prancing sideways with flattened ears and crooked tail, in terror at things invisible, or digging furiously toward China amid the hyacinths.

Dulcie Soane came out into the court presently and expostulated with Strindberg, who suffered herself to be removed from the hyacinth bed, only to make a hysterical charge on her mistress's ankles.

"Stop it, you crazy thing!" insisted Dulcie, administering a gentle slap which sent the cat bucketing and corvetting across the lawn, where the eccentric course of a dead leaf, blown by the April wind, instantly occupied its entire intellectual vacuum.

Barres, leaning on the window-sill, said, without raising his voice:

"Hello, Dulcie! How are you, after our party?"

The child looked up, smiled shyly her response through the pale glory of the April sunshine.

"What are you doing to-day?" he inquired, with casual but friendly interest.

"Nothing."

"Isn't there any school?"

"It's Saturday."

"That's so. Well, if you're doing nothing you're just as busy as I am," he remarked, smiling down at her where she stood below his window.

"Why don't you paint pictures?" ventured the girl diffidently.

"Because I haven't any orders. Isn't that sad?"

"Yes.... But you could paint a picture just to please yourself, couldn't you?"

"I haven't anybody to paint from," he explained with amiable indifference, lazily watching the effect of alternate shadow and sunlight on her upturned face.

"Couldn't you find--somebody?" Her heart had suddenly begun to beat very fast.

Barres laughed:

"Would you like to have your portrait painted?"

She could scarcely find voice to reply:

"Will you--let me?"

The slim young figure down there in the April sunshine had now arrested his professional attention. With detached interest he inspected her for a few moments; then:

"You'd make an interesting study, Dulcie. What do you say?"

"Do--do you mean that you _want_ me?"

"Why--yes! Would you like to pose for me? It's pin-money, anyway. Would you like to try it?"

"Y-yes."

"Are you quite sure? It's hard work."

"Quite--sure----" she stammered. The little flushed face was lifted very earnestly to his now, almost beseechingly. "I am quite sure," she repeated breathlessly.

"So you'd really like to pose for me?" he insisted in smiling surprise at the girl's visible excitement. Then he added abruptly: "I've half a mind to give you a job as my private model!"

Through the rosy confusion of her face her grey eyes were fixed on him with a wistful intensity, almost painful. For into her empty heart and starved mind had suddenly flashed a dazzling revelation. Opportunity was knocking at her door. Her chance had come! Perhaps it had been inherited from her mother--God knows!--this deep, deep hunger for things beautiful--this passionate longing for light and knowledge.

Mere contact with such a man as Barres had already made endurable a solitary servitude which had been subtly destroying her child's spirit, and slowly dulling the hunger in her famished mind. And now to aid him--to feel that he was using her--was to arise from her rags of ignorance and emerge upright into the light which filled that wonder-house wherein he dwelt, and on the dark threshold of which her lonely little soul had crouched so long in silence.

* * * * *

She looked up almost blindly at the man who, in careless friendliness, had already opened his door to her, had permitted her to read his wonder-books, had allowed her to sit unreproved and silent from sheer happiness, and gaze unsatiated upon the wondrous things within the magic mansion where he dwelt.

And now to serve this man; to aid him, to creep into the light in which he stood and strive to learn and see!--the thought already had produced a delicate intoxication in the child, and she gazed up at Barres from the sunny garden with her naked soul in her eyes. Which confused, perplexed, and embarrassed him.

"Come on up," he said briefly. "I'll tell your father over the 'phone."

* * * * *

She entered without a sound, closed the door which he had left open for her, advanced across the thick-meshed rug. She still wore her blue gingham apron; her bobbed hair, full of ruddy lights, intensified the whiteness of her throat. In her arms she cradled the Prophet, who stared solemnly at Barres out of depthless green eyes.

"Upon my word," thought Barres to himself, "I believe I have found a model and an uncommon one!"

Dulcie, watching his expression, smiled slightly and stroked the Prophet.

"I'll paint you that way! Don't stir," said the young fellow pleasantly. "Just stand where you are, Dulcie. You're quite all right as you are----" He lifted a half-length canvas, placed it on his heavy easel and clamped it.

"I feel exactly like painting," he continued, busy with his brushes and colours. "I'm full of it to-day. It's in me. It's got to come out.... And you certainly are an interesting subject--with your big grey eyes and bobbed red hair--oh, quite interesting constructively, too--as well as from the colour point."

He finished setting his palette, gathered up a handful of brushes:

"I won't bother to draw you except with a brush----"

He looked across at her, remained looking, the pleasantly detached expression of his features gradually changing to curiosity, to the severity of increasing interest, to concentrated and silent absorption.

"Dulcie," he presently concluded, "you are so unusually interesting and paintable that you make me think very seriously.... And I'm hanged if I'm going to waste you by slapping a technically adequate sketch of you onto this nice new canvas ... which might give me pleasure while I'm doing it ... and might even tickle my vanity for a week ... and then be laid away to gather dust ... and be covered over next year and used for another sketch.... No.... _No_!... You're worth more than that!"

He began to pace the place to and fro, thinking very hard, glancing around at her from moment to moment, where she stood, obediently immovable on the blue meshed rug, clasping the Prophet to her breast.

"Do you want to become my private model?" he demanded abruptly. "I mean seriously. Do you?"

"Yes."

"I mean a real model, from whom I can ask anything?"

"Oh, yes, please," pleaded the girl, trembling a little.

"Do you understand what it means?"

"Yes."

"Sometimes you'll be required to wear few clothes. Sometimes none. Did you know that?"

"Yes. Mr. Westmore asked me once."

"You didn't care to?"

"Not for him."

"You don't mind doing it for me?"

"I'll do anything you ask me," she said, trying to smile and shivering with excitement.

"All right. It's a bargain. You're my model, Dulcie. When do you graduate from school?"

"In June."

"Two months! Well--all right. Until then it will be a half day through the week, and all day Saturdays and Sundays, if I require you. You'll have a weekly salary----" He smiled and mentioned the figure, and the girl blushed vividly. She had, it appeared, expected nothing.

"Why, Dulcie!" he exclaimed, immensely amused. "You didn't intend to come here and give me all your time for nothing, did you?"

"Yes."

"But why on earth should you do such a thing for me?"

She found no words to explain why.

"Nonsense," he continued; "you're a business woman now. Your father will have to find somebody to cook for him and take the desk when he's out at Grogan's. Don't worry; I'll fix it with him.... By the way, Dulcie, supposing you sit down."

She found a chair and took the Prophet onto her lap.

"Now, this will be very convenient for me," he went on, inspecting her with increasing satisfaction. "If I ever have any orders--any sitters--you can have a vacation, of course. Otherwise, I'll always have an interesting model at hand--I've got chests full of wonderful costumes--genuine ones----" He fell silent, his eyes studying her. Already he was planning half a dozen pictures, for he was just beginning to perceive how adaptable the girl might be. And there was about her that indefinable something which, when a painter discovers it, interests him and arouses his intense artistic curiosity.

"You know," he said musingly, "you are something more than pretty, Dulcie.... I could put you in eighteenth century clothes and you'd look logical. Yes, and in seventeenth century clothes, too.... I could do some amusing things with you in oriental garments.... A young Herodiade ... Calypso ... Theodora.... She was a child, too, you know. There's a portrait with bobbed hair--a young girl by Van Dyck.... You know you are quite stimulating to me, Dulcie. You excite a painter's imagination. It's rather odd," he added naively, "that I never discovered you before; and I've known you over two years."

He had seated himself on the sofa while discoursing. Now he got up, touched a bell twice. The Finnish maid, Selinda, with her high cheek-bones, frosty blue eyes and colourless hair, appeared in cap and apron.

"Selinda," he said, "take Miss Dulcie into my room. In a long, leather Turkish box on the third shelf of my clothes closet is a silk and gold costume and a lot of jade jewelry. Please put her into it."

So Dulcie Soane went away with her cat in her arms, beside the neat and frosty-eyed Selinda; and Barres opened a portfolio of engravings, where were gathered the lovely aristocrats of Van Dyck and Rubens and Gainsborough and his contemporaries--a charmingly mixed company, separated by centuries and frontiers, yet all characterised by a common _something_--some inexplicable similarity which Barres recognised without defining.

"It's rather amusing," he murmured, "but that kid, Dulcie, seems to remind me of these people--somehow or other.... One scarcely looks for qualities in the child of an Irish janitor.... I wonder who her mother was...."

* * * * *

When he looked up again Dulcie was standing there on the thick rug. On her naked feet were jade bracelets, jade-set rings on her little toes; a cascade of jade and gold falling over her breasts to the straight, narrow breadth of peacock hue which fell to her ankles. And on her childish head, clasping the ruddy bobbed hair, glittered the jade-incrusted diadem of a fairy princess of Cathay.

The Prophet, gathered close to her breast, stared back at Barres with eyes that dimmed the splendid jade about him.

"That settles it," he said, the tint of excitement rising in his cheeks. "I _have_ discovered a model and a wonder! And right here is where I paint my winter Academy--right here and right now!... And I call it 'The Prophets.' Climb up on that model stand and squat there cross-legged, and stare at me--straight at me--the way your cat stares!... There you are. That's right! Don't move. Stay put or I'll come over and bow-string you!--you little miracle!"

"Do--you mean me?" faltered Dulcie.

"You bet, Sweetness! Do you know how beautiful you are? Well, never mind----" He had begun already to draw with a wet brush, and now he relapsed into absorbed silence.

The Prophet watched him steadily. The studio became intensely still.

VIII

DULCIE ANSWERS

The studio door bell rang while Barres was at breakfast one morning late in June. Aristocrates leisurely answered the door, but shut it again immediately and walked out into the kitchenette without any explanation.

Selinda removed the breakfast cover and fetched the newspaper. Later, Aristocrates, having washed his master's brushes, brought them into the studio mincingly, upon a silver service-salver.

"No letters?" inquired Barres, glancing up over the morning paper and laying aside his cigarette.

"No letters, suh. No co'espondence in any shape, fo'm or manner, suh."

"Anybody to see me?" inquired Barres, always amused at Aristocrates' flights of verbiage.

"Nobody, suh, excusin' a persistless 'viduality inquihin' fo' you, suh."

"What persistless individuality was that?" asked Barres.

"A ve'y or-nary human objec', suh, pahshially afflicted with one bad eye."

"That one-eyed man? He's been here several times, hasn't he? Why does he come?"

"Fo' commercial puhposes, suh."

"Oh, a pedlar?"

"He mentions a desiah, suh, to dispose, commercially, of vahious impo'ted materials requiahed by ahtists."

"Didn't you show him the sign in the hall, 'No pedlars allowed'?"

"Yaas, suh."

"What did he say?"

"I would not demean myse'f to repeat what this human objec' said, suh."

"And what did you do then?"

"Mistuh Barres, suh, I totally igno'hed that man," replied Aristocrates languidly.

"Quite right. But you tell Soane to enforce the rule against pedlars. Every day there are two or three of them ringing at the studio, trying to sell colours, laces, or fake oriental rugs. It annoys me. Selinda can't hear the bell and I have to leave my work and open the door. Tell that persistless one-eyed man to keep away. Tell Soane to bounce him next time he enters Dragon Court. Do you understand?"

"Yaas, suh. But Soane, suh, he's a might friendly Irish. He's spo'tin' 'round Grogan's nights, 'longa this here one-eyed 'viduality. Yaas, suh. I done seen 'em co-gatherin' on vahious occasionalities."

"Oho!" commented Barres. "It's graft, is it? This one-eyed pedlar meets Soane at Grogan's and bribes him with a few drinks to let him peddle colours in Dragon Court! That's the Irish of it, Aristocrates. I began to suspect something like that. All right. I'll speak to Soane myself.... Leave the studio door open; it's warm in here."

* * * * *

The month of May was now turning somewhat sultry as it melted into June. Every pivot-pane in the big studio window had been swung wide open. The sun had already clothed every courtyard tree with dense and tender foliage; hyacinth and tulip were gone and Soane's subscription geraniums blazed in their place like beds of coals heaped up on the grass plot of Dragon Court.

But blue sky, sunshine of approaching summer, gentle winds and freshening rains brought only restlessness to New Yorkers that month of May.

Like the first two years of the war, the present year seemed strange, unreal; its vernal breezes brought no balm, its blue skies no content. The early summer sunlight seemed almost uncanny in a world where, beyond the sea, millions of men at arms swayed ceaselessly under sun and moon alike, interlocked in one gigantic death grip!--a horrible and blood-drenched human chain of butchery stretching half around the earth.

Into every Western human eye had come strange and subtle shadows which did not depart with moments of forgetful mirth, intervals of self-absorption, hours filled with familiar interests--the passions, hopes, perplexities of those years which were now no more.

Those years of yesterdays! A vast and depthless cleft already divided them from to-day. They seemed as remote as dusty centuries--those days of an ordered and tranquil world--those days of little obvious faiths unshattered--even those days of little wars, of petty local strifes, of an almost universal calm and peace and trust in brotherhood and in the obligations of civilisation.

Familiar yesterday had vanished, its creeds forgotten. It was already decades away, and fading like a legend in the ever-increasing glare of the red and present moment.

And the month of May seemed strange, and its soft skies and sun seemed out of place in a world full of dying--a world heavy with death--a western world aloof from the raging hell beyond the seas, yet already tense under the distant threat of three continents in flames--and all aquiver before the deathly menace of that horde of blood-crazed demons still at large, still unsubdued, still ranging the ruins of the planet which they had so insanely set on fire.

Entire nations were still burning beyond the ocean; other nations had sunk into cinders. Over the Eastern seas the furnace breath began to be felt along the out-thrust coast lines of the Western World. Inland, not yet; but every seaward city became now conscious of that first faint warning wave of heat from hell. Millions of ears strained to catch the first hushed whisper of the tumult. Silent in its suspense the Great Republic listened. Only the priesthood of the deaf and wooden gods continued voluble. But Israel had already begun to lift up its million eyes; and its ancient faith began to glow again; and its trust was becoming once more a living thing--the half-forgotten trust of Israel in that half-forgotten Lord, who, in the beginning, had been their helper and their shield.

* * * * *

Through the open studio door came Dulcie Soane. The Prophet followed at her slender heels, gently waving an urbane tail.

* * * * *

After his first smiling greeting--he always rose, advanced, and took her hand with that pleasant appearance of formality so adored by femininity, youthful or mature--he resumed his seat and continued to write his letters.

These finished, he stamped them, rang for Aristocrates, picked up his palette and brushes, and pulled out the easel upon which was the canvas for the morning.

Dulcie, still in the hands of Selinda, had not yet emerged. The Prophet sat upright on the carved table, motionless as a cat of ebony with green-jewelled eyes.

"Well, old sport," said Barres, stepping across the rug to caress the cat, "you and your pretty mistress begin to look very interesting on my canvas."

The Prophet received the blandishments with dignified gratitude. A discreet and feathery purring filled the room as Barres stroked the jet black, silky fur.

"Fine cat, you are," commented the young man, turning as Dulcie entered.

She laid one hand on his extended arm and sprang lightly to the model stand. And the next moment she was seated--a slim, gemmed thing glimmering with imperial jade from top to toe.

Barres laid the Prophet in her arms, stepped back while Dulcie arranged the docile cat, then retreated to his canvas.

"All right, Sweetness?"

"All right," replied the child happily. And the morning seance was on.

Barres was usually inclined to ramble along conversationally in his pleasant, detached way while at work, particularly if work went well.

"Where were we yesterday, Dulcie? Oh, yes; we were talking about the Victorian era and its art; and we decided that it was not the barren desert that the ultra-moderns would have us believe. That's what we decided, wasn't it?"

"_You_ decided," she said.

"So did you, Dulcie. It was a unanimous decision. Because we both concluded that some among the Victorians were full of that sweet, clean sanity which alone endures. You recollect how our decision started?"

"Yes. It was about my new pleasure in Tennyson, Browning, Morris, Arnold, and Swinburne."

"Exactly. Victorian poets, if sometimes a trifle stilted and self-conscious, wrote nobly; makers of Victorian prose displayed qualities of breadth, imagination and vision and a technical cultivation unsurpassed. The musical compositions of that epoch were melodious and sometimes truly inspired; never brutal, never vulgar, never degenerate. And the Victorian sculptors and painters--at first perhaps austerely pedantic--became, as they should be, recorders of the times and customs of thought, bringing the end of the reign of a great Queen to an admirable renaissance."

Dulcie's grey eyes never left his. And if she did not quite understand every word, already the dawning familiarity with his vocabulary and a general comprehension of his modes of self-expansion permitted her to follow him.

"A great Queen, a great reign, a great people," he rambled on, painting away all the while. "And if in that era architecture declined toward its lowest level of stupidity, and if taste in furniture and in the plastic, decorative, and textile arts was steadily sinking toward its lowest ebb, and if Mrs. Grundy trudged the Empire, paramount, dull and smugly ferocious, while all snobbery saluted her and the humble grovelled before her dusty brogans, yet, Dulcie, it was a great era.

"It was great because its faith had not been radically impaired; it was sane because Germany had not yet inoculated the human race with its porcine political vulgarities, its bestial degeneracy in art.... And if, perhaps, the sentimental in British art and literature predominated, thank God it had not yet been tainted with the stark ugliness, the swinish nakedness, the ferocious leer of things Teutonic!"