Love's Usuries Part 26

"How sad; terrible! Is this a common accident?" I inquired of him.

"Common? Yes, ze coup de fouet; but zis vas vorse. For long I lay in bed, my brain made mad to know zat all vas overe, zat all vas lost. Zey offered me half vage to teach, but no--not vere I had been ze first--ze very first. I left England and my friends, I hoped for evere."

"Was that not foolish?" I asked, viewing the greasy curtains and other surrounding evidences of poverty.

"Voolish? Ah, ve are all vools vhen ve love. I had loved: she vas almost mine, but she vas too young, a child dancer of feefteen summers. So sveet, so beautiful. She learnt from me my art, every jeste, every perfection. She vould have been my vife, my queen--but after zis, I ran.

Vhen my senses came I knew that I could be no more rich--only a poor dead dog in her vay. For zis I fled ze country. I came back after feefteen year, no longer ze great Salvador, but plain M. Dupres--back to hear of Betty----"

"Betty!" I echoed.

"Yes, the first dancer in London--my leetle Betty--you have zeen her?"

And he lifted a hand to a portrait over his pillow.

I recognised with dismay the child face--the merry smile at the corner of the lip.

"This is the very woman I am trying to paint."

"Sapristi!" he exclaimed, and again wiped his brow. "You vill keep my zecret? Ze years of zacrifice, let them not be known to her." His face was wrinkled and livid with anxiety.

"Your confidence is sacred; I am honoured by it," I said, extending a hand, for Laura just then opened the door upon us.

She laughed whimsically at my almost emotional leave-taking of a total stranger, and chaffed me about it when we got outside.

"I have much to be grateful for to him--to you," I said. "My picture is almost achieved. I may be worthy to follow at the heels of Degas yet."

When Betty next came to the studio she thought my painting was completed, and skipped about in front of the canvas with the genuine joy of gratified vanity.

"Why didn't you tell me it was done, and I needn't have got into these,"

she said, lifting the hem of her gauze skirt to her lips--a fascinating trick which, to use her own expression, invariably "brought down the house."

I looked at the laughing row of white teeth and thought of Dupres.

"You still want a touch or two. Just get into position for one moment."

"You'll spoil me," she warned, jumping to her place on the "throne," and shooting out an ankle that would have unhinged Diogenes.

"Nothing could spoil you," I said gallantly, and a paint tube levelled in the direction of my head was the reward of my politeness.

"You don't aim as well as you dance. How did you learn--at a training school, or where?"

"To dance? Bah! training schools can't teach the fine poetry of movement. They knock the prose into you, but--but the poetry I learnt from--O--a man who was great in his day."

"Salvador?" I ventured.

She blushed faintly.

"How did you know?"

"You gave the cue. Salvador was the greatest name I could think of----"

"You know something of dancing, then?"

"Very little. I have heard he had an accident or something that affected his career."

"Yes; it turned his head. He was to have married me, but, like all men, he was ungrateful. He changed--changed quite suddenly."

"How so?"

"I nursed him night and day. He had no mother, no sister, and I thought I could be all the world to him. Little girls are romantic, and he was too ill to know. Before he recovered consciousness I sent an old woman to attend him; but one fine day, when well enough, he bolted."

"Where?"

"Lord knows!" (Betty's language was not Johnsonian.) "Do you think I was going to crawl after him and grovel----?"

"There is no grovelling where love levels."

"But it didn't level," she said, angrily, as though the reproach stung--"it didn't level. I would have chucked my whole future for him: I would now, while he.... O, don't talk of it," she exclaimed huskily, whisking the back of her hand across her eyes: "I tell myself it was all for the best."

The tone implied a query, but I made no answer. There were heart thrills in the air, and my brush, pregnant with their subtle rhythm, was travailling fast.

"Why don't you say it was?" she persisted. "You know that love--real love--is worse than handcuffs."

"'A cloying treacle to the wings of independence'--eh? Keats would have been glad of the treacle nevertheless."

"Perhaps. Wouldn't we just drown in it if we could?... But, after all, I should have been a fat lump of domesticity by now," she laughed, straightening her lithe limbs and resuming her conventional smile.

In a moment she had become the world's Betty again--bewitching, coy, insouciante Betty.

But a tear-drop still clung to her eyelashes.

THE END