The Moonlit Way: A Novel

“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 94 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 95 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 97 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 98 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?”