PAGE 14
Lodusky
by
The next instant he started backward. Before he had time for a thought she had uttered a low cry, and flung herself down at his feet.
“I don’t keer,” she panted; “I wont keer fur nothin’,–whether ye’re good or bad,–only don’t leave me here when ye go away.”
*****
A week later Lennox arose one morning and set about the task of getting his belongings together. He had been up late and had slept heavily and long. He felt exhausted and looked so.
The day before, his model had given him his last sitting. The picture stood finished upon the easel. It was a thorough and artistic piece of work, and yet the sight of it was at times unbearable to him. There were times again, however, when it fascinated him anew when he went and stood opposite to it, regarding it with an intense gaze. He scarcely knew how the last week had passed. It seemed to have been spent in alternate feverish struggles and reckless abandonment to impulse. He had let himself drift here and there, he had at last gone so far as to tell himself that the time had arrived when baseness was possible to him.
“I don’t promise you an easy life,” he had said to Dusk the night before. “I tell you I am a bad fellow, and I have lost something through you that I cared for. You may wish yourself back again.”
“If you leave me,” she said, “I’ll kill myself!” and she struck her hands together.
For the moment he was filled, as he often was, with a sense of passionate admiration. It was true he saw her as no other creature had ever seen her before, that so far as such a thing was possible with her, she loved him–loved him with a fierce, unreserved, yet narrow passion.
He had little actual packing to do–merely the collecting of a few masculine odds and ends, and then his artistic accompaniments. Nothing was of consequence but these; the rest were tossed together indifferently, but the picture was to be left until the last moment, that its paint might be dry beyond a doubt.
Having completed his preparations he went out. He had the day before him, and scarcely knew what to do with it, but it must be killed in one way or another. He wandered up the mountain and at last lay down with his cigar among the laurels. He was full of a strange excitement which now thrilled, now annoyed him.
He came back in the middle of the afternoon and laughed a rather half-hearted laugh at the excellent Mandy’s comment upon his jaded appearance.
“Ye look kinder tuckered out,” she said. “Ye’d oughtn’t ter walked so fur when ye was a-gwine off to-night. Ye’d orter rested.”
She stopped the churn-dasher and regarded him with a good-natured air of interest.
“Hev ye seed Dusk to say good-by to her?” she added. “She’s went over the mountain ter help Mirandy Stillins with her soap. She wont be back fur a day or two.”
He went into his room and shut the door. A fierce repulsion sickened him. He had heretofore held himself with a certain degree of inward loftiness; he had so condemned the follies and sins of other men, and here he found himself involved in a low and common villainy, in the deceits which belonged to his crime, and which preyed upon simplicity and ignorant trust.
He went and stood before his easel, hot with a blush of self-scorn.
“Has it come to this?” he muttered through his clinched teeth–“to this!”
He made an excited forward movement; his foot touched the supports of the easel, jarring it roughly; the picture fell upon the floor.
“What?” he cried out. “Beck! You! Great God!”
For before him, revealed by the picture’s fall, the easel held one of the fairest memories he had of the woman he had proved himself too fickle and slight to value rightly.
It was merely a sketch made rapidly one day soon after his arrival and never wholly completed, but it had been touched with fire and feeling, and the face looked out from the canvas with eyes whose soft happiness stung him to the quick with the memories they brought. He had meant to finish it, and had left it upon the easel that he might turn to it at any moment, and it had remained there, covered by a stronger rival–forgotten.