The Moonlit Way: A Novel

“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. 99 “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. 100 It’s rather odd,” he added naïvely, “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 101 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!”