The Omaha Sunday Bee
AMUSEMENTS
EDITORIAL
TEN CENTS
1 D
VOL. 51 NO. 0.
PART FOUR
OMAHA, SUNDAY MORNING, AUGUST 14, 1921.
A DAUGHTER OF PAN
A
8 sole executor to Marshall Gaunt, I was un
expectedly summoned to England in mid
winter by a telegram from his solicitors
saying he had died from bronchial pneumonia.
His fame as a portrait painter was not so firmly
established that the public took any interest in
his health, and I had received no warning of his
illness from the English papers which came ir
regularly, five, six, or seven days after publica
tion, to Campitello; moreover, as he only wrote
letters when business urged him, I had been
compelled for a twelvemonth to content myself
with his general advice: "As long as you don't
hear from me you may assume that I'm alive;
the solicitors will let you know soon enough
when I'm dead."
Even If, for once, he had not spoken iron
ically I felt confident that the announcement
would not have to be made for another 20 years.
Gaunt was a man of my own age a few months,
more or less, but certainly not a day older than
45; and, though I thought and more than once
In the last year had told him that ho was begin
ning to eat too little and drink too much, his
resilient constitution and his wiry frame, which
had come unscathed through the war, were
more than a match for the excesses to which he
subjected them; and, though I may have
thought, too, that he shut himself up unduly in
liis studio, working and smoking with equal fury,
I was not Justified in criticizing his habit of life
unless I could suggest a practicul alternative.
Six months before I had at least saved him
from the cutting of his throat and had persuad
ed him that he was an artist with a future: it
he chose to work himself to death his suicide
was at leant delayed and might yet be averted
by the deliberate march of time and the steal
ing, slow steps of forgetfulness.
The solicitors, in a consolatory postscript,
suggested that I should not have to endure many
days of the English winter, as the estate was
small and the will simple and precise: to his
sister. Mrs. Mountjoy, Marshall was bequeathing
his exiguous savings, the lease of his Malda Vale
house, and an almost worthless accumulation of
tattered books and ramshackle furniture; as I
had almost convinced him that he was a genius
not yet come Into his own and that we must
nurse his reputation, the pictures unfinished or
unsold were confided to me with instructions to
hold or sell, according to the state of the mar
ket: and. though he did not cite me by name, I
could think of no rival claimant under the clause
which empowered the executor, in his discretion,
to give tokens of remembrance to any friends
who cared to ask for them.
I reflected, as I settled into the train at
Florence, that if the whole of my duties were
likely to be this discreet balancing of claims
between Mrs. Mountjoy and her dead brother's
friends I might well have continued to sun my
self in the villa at Campitello. In his most nor
mal period, which I should call the years from
the Slado school to the outbreak of war, Mar
shall Gaunt had lacked friends because, with his
ironical detachment, he did not need friends and
even frightened them away; if the propinquities
of a mess and of joint service urged him into
ephemeral Intimacies, he made no attempt to
preserve them when the war was over and he
could escape to Maida Vale or to Campitello;
women, he gravely assured me, he would gladly
have admitted to his life had he had leisure for
them.
The funeral took place on the day after my
arrival, but the, coiiin was already sealed and I
could take no farewell of the white-cheeked
face with the Ueepset, smoldering eyes which
used to turn in certain lights and moods from
brown to golden red, flashing with disconcerting
mischief under their Mcphistophelian brows.
Mrs. Mountjoy told me that he had allowed his
beard, which he had shaved on joining the army,
to grow again and that this, with the prominent,
narrow cheelt bones, restored to his face that un
balanced length without breadth which made
all my amateur sketches of him seem out of
drawing. She added that he had grown old and
careworn in the year before his death, with
threads of silver in the thick, black hair on his
temples and new wrinkles, no longer the puck
erings of a quick smile, round his eyes. He was
restless in manner, she said, and unconcentratcd
in expression; I would not have been surprised
if she had substituted "wandering" and
"haunted."
"The truth is, Mr. Bandon," she concluded,
"he never got over the war. To a man of his
temperament, sensitive and emotional, it must
have been a greater strain than to anyone else.
I'm sure you know what I mean. . . . And it's
not as though ho was a boy: Marshall was al
most 40 when he joined the army, and at that
Kgo there's not the same recuperative power."
As I had come to bury Marshall, not to
praise him and still less to argue" about him, I
saw no purpose in reminding Mrs. Mountjoy that
he had declared his age as 31 for the purpose
of obtaining a commission and that he had ap
plied for a commission because this temperament
of his forbade him ever to hesitate on the out
skirts of an adventure. Maybe his older sister
had seen so much of him in the last weeks that
the latest impression obliterated all that he had
left in earlier years, maybe she was an unthink
ing woman Incapable of giving a period Its date
and place; if at any time Marshall Gaunt
showed himself emotional and sensitive H was
in the 12 months between his demobilization
and his death; if the quality was there before
it was so uncompromisingly repressed that it
played Its part only by night attacks and secret
raids from his unconscious mind.
"Did death come very suddenly?" I asked,
as we returned from the cemetery.
"He was taken 111 on Tuesday and died on
Friday," Mrs. Mountjoy told me.
"It was peaceful, I hope?"
"Very. I'tn thankful to say. I don't think he
even knew he was dying; it was all so unexpect
ed that ho didn't have time to resist."
Again I saw , no purpose in asking myself
or her whether, granted the time and the warn
ing, he would have shown any wish to resist.
"Was he unconscious?" I inquired.
"Not until the very end."
"And I suppose, if he didn't know he was
dying, he couldn't have left any message or in
structions?" "Xo. I asked him if he didn't like you to be
sent for, but ho didn't want TTyone."
As she, who had attended the deathbed, did
not hint that even in the last moments of de
lirium he had let fall any phrases that Invited
an, explanation, I did not chooso to put the idea
Into her head.
"The will, I gather, is with the solicitors," I
raid, as we entered the house. "He sent me a
copy when It was drawn; it only remains for us
to see If there are any codicils or later instruc
tions." "I don't think so," said Mrs. Mountjoy.
For at least seven years I had not stirred
the ubiquitous dust of the siudio; and in a
friendship of four times that duration I had been
admitted only to the dining room, to a "study"
an once, at a season of sickness to Mar
shall's own, old, shabby bedroom.
His sister led me round quickly and without
visible emotion, though in her very speed I
seemed to detect a woman's distaste for the
squalid setting of an unfastidious bachelor, a
distaste mitigated perhaps by wonder that he
had remained a bachelor and by resentment
born of loyalty, that I should be the witness of
these threadbare intimacies.
In the matter-of-fact disposal of Marshall
" Gaunfs useless effects I copied her own impa
tience and detachment: hurriedly we set aside
the books that were to be forwarded to her own
bouse in Surrey, unsentlmentaliy we sorted th
neglected wardrobo and packed the clothes in
shapeless bundles for his old schools mission
in Rotherhithe. I. too, was anxious enough to
escape from the gray llfelessness and the chill
mists of Muidu-Valc in winter.
"He wanted you to choose, something for
yourself," said Mrs. Mountjoy, pausing, Hushed
over the last unfinished part-el of books. "It's
in the wili. And even if it weren't. ..."
"I hoped that perhaps there might be some
sketch," I said. "Anything he has left in the
studio. ..."
What I was seeking had so far eluded me,
even in the sanctity of Marshall's bedroom;
perhaps it was destroyed, perhaps left beliind
unfinished in some unexplored corner of my
own illa. I believed, nevertheless, that the
faculty of self-torture which came to life when
Marshall revealed himself as "sensitive" and
"emotional" would have preserved, for future
mortification, the iron spike which he had bound
into his flesh a year before.
And it was in the studio that
I lighted upon the object of
my quest; an unfinished
drawing of an Italian peasant
girl's head and shoulders, not
turned to the wall, not hid
den, yet equally not thrust
into prominence, but left as a
cripple might leave exposed
the boots and spurs of his
hard-riding youth.
wa, fortunate in reaching the divan in
and had already pricked
I was careful not to show that it wakened
any interest in 'me; cautiously and reverently
I perambulated the studio, half choosing and
wholly rejecting, twice paying little Bianca the
insufficient tribute of a, transitory cold glance,
before I felt dispassionate enough to ask
whether I might carry away, as a memento of
my friend and of his art, the wistful, surien
portrait of this little Muritlo face with the
prominent cheek bones and drooping mouth,
the rather broad nose and staring eyes.
"I don't think I know that," said Mrs.
Mountjoy, delicately wrapping her hand in a
duster before venturing to draw the grimy can-,
vas into a better light. "I suppose that's one of
the studies he did when he stayed with you last
year."
"For a wonder, he doesn't seem to have
dated it," I said; and this -lapse from candor
was the last sacrifice of truth to friendship that
I was compelled to make.' "If you don't want
to keep It "
"You're most welcome to it." said Mrs.
Mountjoy, stepping past me to lift the picture
down from the ledge on which it was standing.
As she drew it away from the. wall there was a
metallic clatter, followed by the sound of some
thing round and light rolling over bare boards.
Before I could see what had fallen, she had
stooped and picked up a long, slender knife set
in a rough wooden handle. "What a dangerous
thing to leave about'." she exclaimed.
This time I had no opportunity of walking
indifferently round the studio to impress her
with my lack of interest, but in calling the knife
dangerous she had given me my cue.
"He must have brought that back, too" I
said. "It's an dtdinary gardening knife; you
see them by the thousands in Italy. I believe
they're used, amfcig other things, for pruning
the vines. ... It you're afraid that some
one will cut his fingers with it. . . ."
Of utility the knife showed little promise;
of beauty or worth none at all. Before I left
the house that afternoon it had been given t.
me; and when I returned to Italy a week later,
it accompanied me with a stout cork over its
dagger point and a wad of felt round its mur
derous blade in the trunk that already con
tained the mediocre portrait behind which it
had so apppropriatcly sheltered itself for the
best part of a year.
Though Marshall Gaunt was my guest dur
ing the whole time that he was painting Bianca,
I never saw him at work on this portrait. One
morning, I remember, he told me In high jubila
tion that he had discovered an incomparable
model; but an important collection was being
dispersed in Florence, and, when I returned
making a wholly undesigned entry' it was in
time to see him painting his signature with free
and grandiose sweeps of the brush.
Bianca I never heard her other name had
crept down from the dais to inspect and criti
cize, and was standing at hh elbow, munching,
with a box of chocolates pressed jealously to her
waist. In the studio, face to face with the can
vas and looking from the one to the other with
ftfe 'VSaSW Bsfe.-sffls'lH CM " BOS. Ul
an aesthetic judgment, I felt that Marshall had
painted an indifferent picture of a girl who was
unprepossessing by almost every artistic stand
ard. In the framework of her bones, in the
moulding of her flesh and in the coloring of her
hair and eyes, poor Bianca was innocent of all
beauty; a great artist, seeing her curiosity and
gratification in staring at her own portrait, see
ing, too. the tenacity w ith 'which she gripped
the chocolate box, and guessing, no doubt, the
acquisitiveness with Which she had seized it,
might have painted he symbolically as a wolf
in the early stages of domestication by food;
but Marshall Gaunt would have been the first to
admit that he was not a great symbolic artist.
"Hullo! I say, you've missed the time of
your life!" he cried as he caught sight of me.
"This picture Don't try to think of polite
things to say about it, because I know as well
as you do that it's bad. But I've had great fun
with this young lady. It's all right; she doesn't
time to grip and dra, back the brown, powerful little hand that Wa. graeping long knife,
Gaunt' chat. Then 1 tried to make her drop it without cutting my Hnger, off.
understand English. First of all luring her
here from a mother who entertained the un
wortliiest suspicions of my moral character;
then persuading her that I didn't in the least
want a study of the nude. Her mind is that of '
a maiden aunt. . . . Then the daily duel with
Antonio; I don't know if that's his name, but'
he's the young man who comes here every eve
ning to fetch her away and, incidentally, to
murder me if he thinks I've been poaching on
his preserves.
"I couldn't very well explain to either of
them that it's the child's ugliness that attracts
me. The moment I saw her. . . . Half starved
and cunning, ignorant and credulous with an
astounding shrewdness, a sublime common sense
running through it all avaricious, but so hon
est that you could leave her alone and famished,
she wouldn't go off with a penny-piece. Virtu
ous. . . . When I tilted her chin in posing
her. she slapped my face for me; and yet I'vs
never seen more animal greed and passion on a
human face. Fascinating! ... I must be get
ting very old or decadent or something when I
find ugliness so attractive, but I confess that her
variety of it bowls me over. I'm going to paint
her again. And again and again until I get that
transcendent beauty of ugliness. . . . Now I
suppose she wants some food. You might sug
gest it to her; I'm getting rather tired of dumb
show."
As I had myself eaten no food for 10 hours
I welcomed the excuse for at least a glass of
wine and crust of bread. Gaunt also had fasted
since early morning, and the three of us sat
down on the divan to refresn ourselves until
Bianca's cavalier came to fetch her away. Sup
ported by an interpreter, Gaunt projected a
series of seemingly disconnected inquiries about
her life and upbringing, to which the girl replied
with a brevity conditioned half by reserve and
half by Inability to grasp his abstract questions.
I cannot pretend that the conversation
amused me, as the only interest lay in Gaunt's
intellectual infatuation for the girl or for the
mental image of her which he had created, and
this- I considered certainly foolish and perhaps
undesirable. That it even hold seeds of danger
became apparent when Bianca, relieved of shy
ness and suspicion by . the presence of a third
party, began to respond gently to the warming
flattery of Gaunt's whimsical attention. I no
ticed that the sullen eyes from time to time
raised themselves for a fleeting glance at him;
stray, attractive words of English were repeated
under her breath with a caressing wonder; and,
w-hen her sweetheart knocked defiantly at the
studio door, we had charmed one husky laugh
from her and more than one smile.
"Tell her I want her to come again tomor
row," said Gaunt, as we surrendered Bianca to
an aggressive youth whose naturally unamiable
face had been twisted into a permanent scowl
by a shrapnel wound that had displaced the
muscles of one cheek. "And mind you here,"
he added when we were alone. "I want to find
out more about her; she interests mc."
V ncfluo
Then he went back to his easel, and I saw
his narrow, white face lighting to a smile as he
painted in "A Daughter of Tan."
That was our first meeting, my own first
warning; and, looking back on it all, I do not
think that. If 1 had my time over again. I should
act differently. Had Gaunt been a dissolute boy
of 20 I might have counseled him not to lay up
trouble for himself or others; but insofar as
I knew him, he was a detached and rather cold
blooded man of more than 40, with a certain
sense of responsibility and even stronger instinct
for general fitness of conduct. That he had
any designs on Bianca was improbable; that he
would try to carry out any designs on her in
the intermittent presence of her scowling sweet
heart and through the medium of an interpreter
was inconceivable. By day, so far as I could
gather, he subordinated all personal interest to
the exigencies of the sitting; and it was only
in the evening, when I joined them in their crust
and glass of wine, that they dropped
the relation of artist and model for
that one of one human being to
another.
Had I enjoyed greater oppor
tunities of observation I could not
kok back on those days so compla
cently, for I can see now that there
were danger signals which I ought
to have regarded. Little by little,
in voice and manner, Gaunt showed
pnyone who cared to see that he was
tailing in love with Bianca; little by
little, in the new concern for her
meager little person, in her efforts to learn Eng
lish, and most of all in her trick of follow
ing him with devoted eyes as he moved about
the studio, Bianca began timidly to return his
love; and the best excuse that I can make for
my own blindness is that the idea of love be
tween two such people was so fantastic that I
refused to contemplate it.
I might be refusing to this day if I had not
had the proof forced upon my notice. The first
picture had been followed by a second, the sec
ond by a third that indifferent, unfinished por
trait which I had carried back to Campitello
from the studio in Maida Vale. One afternoon,
as it neared completion, I observed a change in
Marshall Gaunt's demeanor; a new elation was
making him restless, and the restlessness re
acted on Bianca until she, a patient sitter made
perfect by her loving desire to please him, moved
and fidgeted about beyond the limit of the most
indulgent artist's toleration.
In my room next vo the studio T heard him
first ask and then tell her to sit still; her mur
mured reply was peevish in tone, and when next
Gaunt spoke there was an unpleasing snap in
his voice. As Bianca's English was on the
primitive level of Gaunt's Italian, I felt they
were getting at cross purposes and was about to
volunteer my services as peacemaker or at least
as interpreter when the fast crumbling endur
ance of the artist was blown away by an explo
sion of Irrational and disproportionate anger.
"Damnation!" I heard. "For the love of
God, sit still, can't you?" Whatever the words
conveyed, there was no mistaking the tone, and
I caught a pathetic whimper of surprise and
fear. It was followed by a quick softening of
Gaunt's voice. "Here, it's all right! Don't cry.
Bianca. I didn't mean it. It'3 absolutely all
right! I'm not angry with you, but I expect
we're both a bit tired. Let's have a breather."
When I came into the studio he was stand
ing on the dais with one arm round the girl's
heaving shoulders, patting her head with his
other hand, drying her eyes, and, at the end,
kissing her cheeks and then her lips. At the
scrape of my boots on the tiled floor she shook
him off and turned away until she felt com
posed enough to face us, while I took Gaunt's
arm and made him help me lay out the simple
Ingredients of our evening meal. It was my
turn now to become conscious of atmospheric
disturbance, and I cannot define the sensation
any better than by saying that I seemed to have
interrupted a private emotional scene which the
actors independently decided to suspend as long
ns I was present. From a distance I should
have judged that It was a scene of anger or,
less gloriously, of petulance, but, at close quar
ters, I appeared to have Interrupted a love pas
sage, and for the first time I felt that they had
reached an understanding from which I was
excluded.
Bianca, I felt very sure as I looked at her
passionate eyes and hungry mouth, wanted to
be kissed no less than Marshall Gaunt wanted
to kiss her: it was unsatisfied longing more than
fatigue or artistic impatience that made thcin so
By STEPHEN McKENNA
querulous and brought that golden red lljrht
into Gaunt's restless eyes; and the fact that 1
had Interrupted their scene filled me with mis
givings for its end. Gaunt, at a little over 40,
and Bianca at, I suppose, 17, had this In com
mon, that sex had played little part in their con
scious life. Gaunt, I believe, had experienced
a romance In boyhood and had lived faithful to
Its memory for 20 years; Bianca, I dare swear,
had never before been kissed. If they had been
overwrought all day, that broken moment of
embrace had maddened them.
I'ntil I could see some hope of avoiding
disaster it was impossible to banish the misgiv
ings. Even if Gaunt recovered his senses in
time to pack up for England before any more
harm done he still could not undo the harm
of having unsettled the foundations of this little
savage's mind;' it was likely enough that he had
given her a distaste for the simpler appeal of
her scowling sweetheart; it was eyn possible
that, by lighting a fire in, her and not feeding
it, j he would compel the flames to lick their
way, in tentative exploration, until they found
something else to consume.
If, on the other hand, Gaunt allowed him
self to be swept away, blind und mad, realizing
his madness and rushing on indifferent to it,
there'would be bodily disaster and sordid trage
dy for Bianca's portion, spiritual disaster and
remorse for his own; that he could protect him
self from the vengeance of the girl's family by
carrying her to distant security, I was ready to
assume, though any general survey of his risks
could not overlook the hundredth chance that
he might be followed across- Europe and left
with a knife between his ribs.
If ever it were worth a man's while to break
head or heart against such obstacles, it was not
worth while with poor little Bianca as sole
prize. As I grew to know her better I did
realize that beauty of ugliness which had first
excited.Gaunt's artistic interest; I am prepared
to go further and to say that I discovered in it
a sinister attraction.
In the portrait and it is the sole merit of
that unsatisfactory work Gaunt contrived to
bring out what I thought then and believe more
strongly now to have been the essence of Bian
ca; the pure animal in the guise of woman which
led him to christen her a daughter of Pan.
Religion and some rudimentary education' af- ,
fected, indeed, to bind her at least with ropes
of sand; but I always felt that these conven
tions, in which at heart she did not believe, ob
scured the essential Bianca as her conventional
clothes blurred the outline of her animal body.
When first I saw her, voraciously gobbling
chocolates and suspiciously clutching the box,
I likened her to a wolf in the early stages of
domestication by food; but, as I observed her
day after day for a month, she seemed, in every
movement that revealed her nature, to shed
domestication, like a half-tamed dog that from
afar hears the forgotten, ancestral pack in cry
until in the tense, thunderous atmosphere of
the day and moment when Marshall Gaunt's
lips met hers, she stood forth bare and unin
cumbered by the animal spirit.
It was only by a flash of lightning, as it were,
that I saw her. By. the time that I had set the
table with a flask of wine and glasses she had
reverted to the guarded friendliness which she
reserved for these repasts at the end of the day's
work, and it was in Gaunt that the change" of
manner lingered. Excited and boisterous from
the beginning, with glittering eyes and a flush
on his long, white face, he seemed to be atoning
for his moment of harshness by extravagant
, Affection. When he was not filling Bianca's glass
or pressing her favorite sweetmeats upon her
he was patting her cheek, stroking her hand,
or playing with her hair. Both were drinking
more w-ine than usual, drinking it, too, without
water.
I had stood up to fetch another flask, and,
while my back was turned and my head half
inside the cupboard I heard a scuffle. Gaunt
had been sitting with his arm round Bianca'
shoulders; when I came back he had drawn hei
on to his knees. In a moment he was bending
to kiss her again, and I was fortunate in reach
ing the divan in time to grasp the brown, power
ful little hand that was grasping a long knife
and had already pricked Gaunt's chest till his
shirt showed a widening circle of blood.
I remember wondering before all else, to the
exclusion of all else, " where she had concealed
so ungainly a weapon and how she could move
so supplely with 10 inches of steel and four
inches of wooden haft disposed among her
clothing. Then I tried to make her drop it with
out cutting my fingers off; and, when it had
clattered to the floor and I had my foot on it,
I could attend to Gaunt, who was looking from
the stain of blood to his would-be murderess
with such amazement as would have moved me
to laughter at a moment less grave.
"The little devil! . . . You see that, Ban
don? . . . She actually tried to stab me!" The
prick of the knife had sobered him and de
stroyed all desire to continue his caresses.
"What's she jabbering about?"
"She says her body is sacred," -I translated.
At a secure distance Gaunt, dabbed at his
chest with a reddening handkerchief and kept
his eyes averted from me.
"Well, I know that," he muttered. "I wasn't
going to harm her. . . . She didn't mind the
time before when I kissed her, . . . You saw."
"Perhaps she didn't realize w-hat was hap
pening then or now. You may be thankfdl it's
no worse." Brightly, through all the confu
sion of shocked excitement, I seemed to see an
unexpected escape for Gaunt from this entan
glement. "Y'ou'd better pay what you owe her
and get rid of her. And I'll put the fear of
God into her so that she doesn't go about tell
ing Antonio and the rest that you insulted her."
I was just turning to impress Bianca with
the enormity of trying to stab overdemonstra
tive Englishmen when I was astonished to see
her crumple up and fall to her knees, burying
her face in her hands and then stretching them
in entreaty to Gaunt.
"She says she's mad. She's asking you to
kill her now," I interpreted.
He stared at her and then broke Into a
laugh.
"WUat a bloodthirsty little ruffian it is," he
commented. "Look here, explain to her that
my intentions are strictly honorable and say
that, if she feels I took any liberties with her,
I apologize from the bottom of my heart. I
don't want to kill her, and she mustn't try to
kill me. By the same token, I think we'll put
this little toy out of harm's way."
Drawing the knife from under my foot, he
drove the point of it into the woodwork of the
wall a yard above Bianca's reach. The girl
looked from the quivering haft to the stain on
Gaunt's shirt, then drew herself upright and
' plunged into his arms as though to staunch the
bleeding with the touch of her bosom.
As Gaunt's arm slipped, readily protecting,
round her waist. I touched his shoulder.
"You're playing with fire, both of you," I
warned him, but he only laughed and held the
pliant, swaying body tighter as he bent to kiss
the upturned Hps. "Well, even if you pay no
attention to me, remember that there are
other people to consider," I added, as a familiar
knock fell upon the studio door.
The sound caused Gaunt at least to master
his new intoxication; but Bianca, none too
gently disengaged from his arms, looked at him
with reproach and perplexity, as though he had
repulsed her. When the door opened and she
saw the author of the interruption, she strode
with swinging hips and shoulders icross 'the
echoing floor and screamed defiance into the
scowling face .of Antonio, who at once replied
with mingled Invective, threats and eiilreaties.
Above their tumult it was dilncult for us to
make our voices heard.
"What are they shouting about?" demanded
Gaunt.
"She's explaining that she's tired of him and
hates him and always has hated hlni and always
will," I answered; "and he's threatening to mur
der you and her if you lay a linger on her. He's
also reminding her of the vows they've ex
changed and of his undying love for her. The
rest can only be described as vulgar abuse on
both sides."
"Well, I think he's loosed off quite enough,"
said Gaunt with decision, as he inarched to th
door and joined eagerly and unintelligibly in
the altercation.
For Ave minutes three angry voices held
forth in two languages to the limit of lung
capacity and with a rich accompaniment cf
pantomime. At the end, Gaunt turned on his
heel and led Hianca back Into the studio; the
rejected lover vowed vengeance In an operatic
speech, but at length, when he could find no
one to answer him or even to listen, was com
pelled to go" away.
"And it's time for you to be going, too," I
told Bianca.
Whatever life she and Gaunt chose to make
for themselves, I was determined that they
should not embark upon it until he at least had
thought over it for 12 hours in cold blood.
"My knife," she murmured, without looking:
at me.
"What's she talking about?" asked Gaunt.
"She wants her knife," I translated. "She
says the other man will kill her at sight."
"O, will he?" drawled Gaunt. "Then I think
1 11 see her safe home." After one glance at
the knife, he decided to leave it where it was.
"Here, my child, I'm not going to rob you, but I
think that's rather an unsafe thing to carry
about; you'd better have something that shuts
up even if it's not so useful as a weapon of de
fense. Explain to her, Bandon, that I want to
effect an exchange."
My services as interpreter were hardly
needed when once Gaunt had exhibited to her
delighted eyes a knife with two blades and a
corkscrew, a spike, and saw, a file and the long
steel hook traditionally designed for removing
stones from a horse's hoof. She was turning it
over with eager fingers and inspecting the inset
silver name plate as they left the studio; I saw
Bianca look up with a smile of rapture; and her
ugliness was burnt away by the radiance of her
eyes, revealing a new beauty underneath. Never
theless, though I too realized this new beauty
in her, it was a sinister beauty; and I was op
pressed with what I must call panic fear because
I was afraid without a reason.
When Gaunt returned an hour later, I could
see that he would have preferred to be left in
peace; but I felt that, for all the disorder of
his wound and his excited emotions, I must force
him to look ahead before he committed him
self irrevocably.
"We'd better be quite frank about this," I
suggested. "I see how things stand at present..
What are you going to do next?"
"That's just what I can't tell you just yet,"
he answered; then, with an attempted bolt,
"She's made a deuce of a hole in my chest. I
went into a chemist's for some antiseptic "
"Don't run away from my question, Mar
shall," I interrupted. "Are you going to carry
her off?" xf
"I really don't know what I'm going to do."
he answered evasively. "That's the wofst"'
your unpractical artist."
"Then let's think here and now the two of
us. Are you going to carry her off, make her
your mistress, get rid of her when you're tired
of her, send her back spoiled and unfitted for
any kind of life that she's used to with per
haps a child in the bargain?"1
"Strange as it may seem, I am not,"'said
Gaunt with an effort to shelter himself behind
his usual irony. "I'm given to understand that
it's a most praiseworthy and delightful thing to
do, but I've no experience, my technique would
break down. Besides what was her phrase?
'My body Is sacred'? She wouldn't let me carry
her off, even if I wanted to; and, as it happens,
I don't want to."
"Then you mustn't see her again," I told
him. "And, as you will see her if you stay here,
you must clear out. You realize that?"
The irony in Gaunt's smile and tone were
evidence to me that he was affecting to jest for
fear of bursting his frail bands of self-control.
"Strange as it may seem, I don't," he an
swered. "Then, once again, what are you going to
do?"
"You've surely not exhausted all the pos
sible solutions? What would you say if I sug
gested marrying Bianca?"
"I shouldn't readily think you capable of
being such a fool. You're middle aged, and
.she's a child; you're an angular, moody bach
elor, and she's a young savage; you've been
brought up in a certain way, and she's a peasant.
Good God, you'd have to hire me as interpreter
before you proposed to her!"
"I don't think that'll be necessary. After
all, we're naturally intelligent, though our
education has been neglected; she can learn
English, and I can learn Italian. I know half
a dozen words already. I've proposed already.
That celebrated but unreadable romance I
Promessi Sposi. . . . Mark you, I won't swear
that she quite understood what I was driving
at, but I hammered away; and she's coming to
morrow to give me her answer."
While he was In this mood I knew It would
be fruitless to argue with him.
"Let's talk It over in' the Biornlng," I said,
"when you're cool. And now come out for a
walk."
"I'll come for a walk with pleasure, but I
don't know what there is to talk over.. I shall
be grateful, all the same, if you can spare time
to he present . . ."
Our interview next day was the strangest
that I have ever attended, the strangest that
any man, surely, could be required to attend.
My duty was to convey to one helpless crea
ture an offer of marriage from another crea
ture so helpless that he said to me, in trem-
bling apprehension:
"You're going to play the game, aren't yout
Swear you won't try to set her against me!"
I employed the shortest, simplest formula
that I could devise; and Bianca, hanging her
head, answered:
"I understood. He told me yesterday."
. "Well, he wants to know what you say to
it?"
Her answer reminded me of a phrase that
Gaunt had once used in praise of her "sublime
common sense."
"It's impossible, absurd."
I Sometimes wonder whether. t the hour
of his death, Marshall Gaunt believed that I was
keeping my word and arguing, not in his in
terests. Heaven knows, hut loyally and honor
ably on his behalf, in the terms of my brief.
Bianca talked for 10 minutes, I should say, let
ting trickle the short phrases and broken sen
tences of one who had never been trained to
think comprehensively or to express herself co
herently. ' A dozen times, from a dozen different
starting places, she came back to her uncom
promising statement that it was impossible, ab
surd for a man to marry such a girl as she was:
they would be miserable, they had nothing in
common buf their loe: luxury of dress and liv
ing had no power to tempt her into forgetting
this inseparable bar: the urgency of Gaunt,
vehement in 'unintelligible English and passlon
(Tura to re Kifht, Column Tnrr.)
f
