"Step-father," returned the other briefly. "She knows nothing about it – my mother, I mean. I've been living on her money here for two years and over and it's gone; but before I take a penny from him …"

"I understand," said Fairfax, going back to the mirror and beginning to brush his hair.

"Did you ever have a mother?" asked the red-haired young man with a queer look on his face, and added, "I see you have. Well, let's drop the subject, then, but you may discuss step-fathers all you choose."

Fairfax, for he was not Rainsford, yet, took a fancy to his visitor, a fancy to his rough, deep voice; he liked the eyes that were clearing fast, liked the kindly spirited face and the ready, boy-like confidence.

"What are you up to in Paris?" he asked Dearborn, regarding him with interest.

"I'm a playwright," said the other simply.

CHAPTER V

"A playwright," Fairfax repeated softly. If Dearborn had said "Ali Baba," Fairfax would scarcely have been more surprised.

"You must know the Bohemian life here?" he asked, "even possibly know some artists?"

"Well, rather," drawled his companion; "I live among them. I don't know a single chap who isn't doing something, burning the midnight oil or using the daylight in a studio."

As Dearborn spoke, Fairfax, looking at him more observantly, saw something in his countenance that responded to his own feelings.

"What are you over here for, Rainsford?" asked the Westerner.

"I am a sculptor."

"Delightful!" exclaimed his companion. "Where are you going to work? With Carrier-Belleuse or Rude?"

"Ah, I don't know – I don't know where I can go or what I can do."

His companion, with an understanding nod, said, "Didn't bring over a gold-mine with you, perhaps?"

As he said this he laughed, extended both his hands and jumped up from his seat.

"I like you exceedingly," he exclaimed heartily. "The governor had telegraphed me to go to the devil and I thought I'd take his advice. The little supper I was giving last night was to say good-bye to a hundred-franc note, some money that I won at poker. I might have paid some of this hotel bill, but I didn't. I wish you had been there, Rainsford! But, never mind, you had the afterglow anyway! No," he laughed, "let us surprise them at home. I don't quite know how, but let's surprise them."

Fairfax shook his head as though he didn't quite understand.

"Is there no one who thinks you an insane fool for going in for art? Nobody that your success will be gall to?"

"No, I'm all alone."

"Come," urged the other, too excited to see the sadness on his companion's face. "Come, isn't there some one who will cringe when your statues are unveiled?"

"Stop!" cried Fairfax eagerly.

"Come on then," cried the boy; "whoever it may be, your enemy or my stepfather – we will surprise them yet!"

CHAPTER VI

In January of the following year he leaned out of the window and smelled Paris, drank it in, penetrated by its fragrance and perfume. He saw the river milkily flowing between the shores, the stones of the quay parapet, the arches of the bridges, the wide domain of roofs and towers.

The Sacré-Coeur on Montmartre had not yet begun to rise, though they were laying its foundation stones, and his eyes travelled, as they always did, through the fog to the towers of Notre-Dame with its black, mellow front and its melancholy beauty. The bourdon of the bells smote sympathetically through him. No matter what his state of mind might be, Paris took him out of himself, and he adored it.

He was looking upon the first of the winter mists. The first grey mystery had obscured the form of the city. Paris had a new seduction. He could not believe now that he had not been born in France and been always part of the country he had adopted by temperament and spirit. Like all artists, his country was where he worked the best. For him now, unless the place were a workshop, it could never be a hearthstone, and he took satisfaction in recalling his ancestry on his mother's side – Debaillet, or, as they called it in New Orleans, Ballet. As Arabella Ballet his mother had been beautiful; as Mrs. Fairfax she had given him Irish and French blood.

"Atavism," he said to Dearborn, "you cannot love this place as I do, Bob. My grandfather escaped in the disguise of a French cook to save his head in 1793. I seem to see his figure walking before me when I cross the Place de la Concorde, and the shadow of the guillotine falls across his path."

From his corner of the room Dearborn drawled, "If the substance of the guillotine had fallen across his neck, Tony, where would you be in our mutual history?"

Antony had asked his companion to call him Tony. He had not been able to disassociate himself with everything that recalled the past.

Fairfax's figure as he turned was dark against the light of the window and the room was full of the shadows of the early January twilight. He wore a pair of velveteen breeches whose original colour might have been a dark, rich blue. His flannel shirt (no longer red) was fastened loosely at the neck by a soft black cravat under a rolling collar. It was Sunday and he was working, the clay white upon his fingers and nails. He wore an old pair of slippers, and Dearborn on a couch in a corner watched him, a Turkish drapery wound around his shoulders, for the big room was chilly and it smelled of clay and tobacco smoke. The studio was an enormous attic, running the length of an hotel once of some magnificence, now a tumble-down bit of still beautiful architecture. The room was portioned off for the use of two people. Two couches served in the night-time as their beds, there was a small stove guiltless of fire, a few pieces of studio property, a skylight, a desk covered with papers and books and manuscripts, and in the part of the room near the window and under the skylight, Tony Fairfax, now Thomas Rainsford, worked among his casts and drawings, amidst the barrels of clay and plaster. To him, in spite of being almost always hungry, in spite of the discomfort, of the constant presence and companionship of another when he often longed for solitude, in spite of this, his domain was a heaven. He had come into the place in June with Dearborn.

Tony had paid a year's rent in advance. He was working as a common journeyman in the studio of Barye, and early in the morning, late at night, and on Sundays, worked for himself eagerly, hungrily, like the slave of old in Albany, and yet, with what a difference! He had no one but himself to consider, but had the interest of the atelier where he studied, even as he sold his skill that it might be lost in the creations of more advanced artists, and there, during the days of his apprenticeship, his visions came to him, and what conceptions he then had he tried to work out and to mature, when he had the chance, in his own room.

Dearborn, who never left the studio except to eat, smoked and worked and read all day.

The two men were sufficiently of a size to wear each other's clothes. They had thought it out carefully and had preserved from the holocaust, of the different financial crises, one complete out-of-door outfit, from hat to boots – and those boots!

It was "déplorable" the bookseller, whose little shelf of books lay on the stone wall of the quay, said, it was "déplorable" that such a fine pair of men should be lame and in exactly the same fashion. Fairfax could not walk at all in the other man's shoes, so his normal friend made the sacrifice and the proper shoes were pawned, and Robert Dearborn and Tony Fairfax had shared alternately the big boot and the small one, the light and the heavy step. And they were directed by such different individuals, the boots went through Paris in such diverse ways!

"By Jove!" exclaimed Dearborn, examining the boots carefully, "it isn't fair. You're walking these boots of ours to death! Who the deuce will take them out in his bare feet to be repaired?"

They were just as absurdly poor as this. Nobody whose soul is not absorbed in art can ever understand what it is to be so stupidly poor.

Dearborn, when he could be forced out of the house, put on the shoes with reluctance; he was greatly annoyed by the clatter of the big boot. The shoes didn't fit him in the least. He would shuffle into the nearest café, if his credit was good enough to permit it, and there, under the small table on which he wrote page after page over his cigarette and cup of black coffee, he hid the big awkward shoe for as long as he could endure exile from the studio. Then he came home.

Fairfax swung the boot down the stairs, he swung it along the pavements of Paris! What distance he took it! It seemed to have a wing at the heel. It tramped through the quarters of the city from the quays to fine old streets, to forgotten alleys, to the Cité on the Ile, then again by the fresh gay avenues of the Champs Elysées to the Bois, again to the quays, and, when well up the river, he would sometimes board the boat and come back down the Seine, dreaming, musing, creating, and, floating home, would take the big boot upstairs.

"By Jove, Tony!" Dearborn remarked, examining the boots closely, "it's not fair! One of us will have to drive if you don't let up, old man!"

Dearborn, when he did not haunt his café and when inspiration failed, would haunt the Bibliothèque Nationale, and amongst the "Rats de littérature" – savant, actor, poet, amongst the cold and weary who lounge in the chairs of the library to dream, to get warm, and to imagine real firesides with one's own books and one's own walls around them – Dearborn would sit for hours poring over old manuscripts from which he had hoped to extract inspiration, listening, as do his sort, for "the voices."

CHAPTER VII

It was a year of privation, but there were moments spent on the threshold of Paradise.

His materials, barrels of clay and plaster, were costly. Dearborn said that he thanked God he had a "métier" requiring no further expenditure than a pot of ink and a lot of paper.

"The ideas," he told Fairfax, "are expensive, and I think, old man, that I shall have to buy some. I find that they will not come unless I invite them to dinner!"

Neither of the young men had made a hearty meal for an unconsciously long time. The weather grew colder and they lived as they could on Fairfax's day wage.

At this time, when during the hours of his freedom he was housed with his companion, Fairfax was overwhelmed by the rush of his ideas and his desire to create. He would not let himself long for solitude, for he was devoted to his friend and grateful for his companionship and affection, but a certain piece of work had haunted him since his first Sunday afternoon at the Louvre, and he was eager to finish the statue he had begun and to send it to the Salon.

The Visions no longer eluded him – ever present, sometimes they overpowered him by their obsession. They flattered the young man, seeming to embrace him, called to him, uplifted him until heights levelled before his eyes and became roads upon which he walked lightly, and his pride in his own power grew. Antony forgot to be humble. He was his own master – he had scorned the Academies. For several weeks, when he first came to Paris, he had posed as a model. Sitting there before the students, glowing with shame and pride, his heart was defiant, and not one of the students, who modelled the fine bust and head, imagined how ardent his heart was or what an artist posed for them. Often he longed to seize a tool from inefficient hands and say, "Here, my children, like this, don't you see?"

He learned much from the rare visits of the Master and his cursory, hasty criticism, but he welcomed the impersonal labour in the atelier of Barye, where he was not a student but a worker, mechanical supposedly, yet creative to his fingertips. And as he watched Barye work, admiring him profoundly, eager for the man's praise, crushing down his own individuality, careful to do nothing but the technical, mechanical things he was given to do there – before his hand grew tired, while his brain was fresh, he would plan and dream of what he would do in his own attic, and he went back as a thirsty man to a source.

There came the dead season. Barye shut his atelier and went to Spain. There was nothing to do for Antony Fairfax and he was without any means of making his bread. After a few days of idleness, when his hands and feet were chilblained and he could hardly pass the cafés and restaurants, where the meals were cooking, without a tightening of the chest, he thought to himself, "Now is the time for the competition money to fall among us like a shower of gold"; but he had not heard one word from America or from Falutini, to whom the result was to have been written and who had Fairfax's address.

Dearborn, in a pair of old tennis trousers, a shabby black velvet jacket, sat Turkish fashion on his divan, his writing tablet on his knees. For weeks past he had been writing a five-act play —

"Too hungry, Tony, by Jove, to go on. Every time I start to write, the lines of some old-time menu run across the page – Canards à la presse, Potage à la Reine. Just now it was only pie and yellow cheese, such as we have out in Cincinnati."

Fairfax was breaking a mould. By common consent a fire had been built in the stove. Tony had taken advantage of the warm water to mix his plaster. Dearborn came over from his sofa.

"I wouldn't care to have a barrel of plaster roll on those chilblains of mine, Tony. It's a toss up with us now, isn't it, which of us can wear the boots?"

Pinched and haggard, his hands in his pockets, the young fellow watched the sculptor. Fairfax skilfully released his statue from the mould. He had been working on this, with other things, for a month. He unprisoned the little figurine, a little nude dancer, her arms above her head, the face and smile faun-like.

"Pleine de malice," said Dearborn, "extrêmement fine, my dear Tony. As an object of 'luxe' I find it as exquisite as an article of food, if not as satisfying. It's not good enough to eat, Tony, and those are the only standards I judge by now."

Fairfax turned the figure between his fingers lovingly – lily-white, freshly cold, bits of the mould clinging to it, small and fine, it lay in the palm of his shapely hand.

"If you don't want the boots, Bob," he said, "I think I'll go out in them."

The legal owner of the boots went out in them into the damp, bitter cold. His big figure cut along through the mist and he limped over the Pont des Arts towards the Louvre. All Paris seemed to him blue with cold. The river flowed between its banks with suppressed intent and powerful westward rush, and its mighty flow expressed indifference to the life and passion of existence along its shores.

He leaned a moment on the bridge. Paris was personal to him and the river was like its soul. He was faint from lack of food and overstrain.

In the Louvre, other men of conglomerate costumes as well as he sought the warm rooms. Tramps, vagrants in pitiful rags, affected interest in the works of art, resting their worn figures on the benches, exulting in the public welcome of the museum. Fairfax was more presentable, if as poor. He wore a soft black hat of good make and quality, bought in a sporting moment by Dearborn early in his career. Tony wore his own clothes, retained because they were the newest and a soft black scarf, the vogue in the quarter, was tied under his collar in rather an extravagant bow. He wandered aimlessly through the rooms, glanced at the visitors and saw that they were many, and when he had become thoroughly warm, screwed his courage to the sticking point and went out of the front entrance. A little way from the guides he took his place, and from his pocket his figurine. It showed quite as a lily in the foggy light, pale and ashamed. Its nudity appealed more to the sculptor because of this wanton exposure to the vulgar herd. He trembled, began to regret, but offered it, holding it out for sale.

Some dozen people passed him, glanced at him and his small statue, but he would have passed unnoticed had a lady not come slowly down the steps and seen him, stopped and looked at him, though he did not see her until she had approached. He flamed scarlet, covered his statuette and wished that the cobbles of the pavement would open and swallow him.

She was – he thought of it afterward a hundred times – a woman of singular tact and an illumined sympathy, as well as a woman of exquisite comprehension.

"Mr. Rainsford!" she exclaimed. "You have something to sell?" she added, and simply, as though she spoke to an ordinary vendor, yet he saw that as she spoke a lovely colour rose in her cheek under her veil, and he found that he was not ashamed any more.

She put out her hand. It came from a mantle of velvet and a cuff of costly fur – he couldn't have dreamt then how costly. He lifted his hat, bareheaded in the cold, and laid the little figure in her hand.

"How perfectly charming!" she murmured, holding it. And the dryad-like figure, with its slender arms above its head and the faun-like, brilliant little face, seemed perfection to her. She said so. "What a perfect thing! Of course, you have the clay original?"

Fairfax could not speak. The sight of this woman so worldly, elegant, sumptuous, at the first praise of his little statue, he realized that he was selling it, and it struck him as a crime – his creation, his vision, hawking it as a fish-wife might hawk crabs in the public street!

He felt a great humiliation and could have wept – indeed, tears did spring to his eyes and the cold dried them.

Two "sergents de ville" came up to them.

"Pardon, Monsieur," asked one of them, "have you a license?"

Fairfax started, but the lady holding the little statue turned quickly to the officials —

"A license? Pourquoi faire, mes amis?"

"It is against the rules to sell anything in the streets of Paris without a license," said the policeman.

"Well," she exclaimed, "my friend has just made me a gift. This gentleman is a friend of mine for whom I am waiting to take me to my carriage. Allez vous en," she smiled at them, "I will excuse you, and so will Monsieur."

She was so perfectly mistress of the situation that he had nothing to do but leave himself in her hands.

"You will let me take you home," she said, "in whatever direction you are going," and he followed her to her little carriage, waiting before the curb.

She got in, gave the address of his studio to her coachman, and the next thing he knew was that he was rolling over the pavement he had so painfully traversed a few hours before.

She talked to him of the master, Cedersholm, and Antony listened. She talked enthusiastically, admiringly, and he parried her questions as to when and where he had worked with the Swedish sculptor. The statuette lay on her lap.

At the studio door, when Fairfax left her, she said, taking up the self-same gold purse that he had restored to her in the Louvre seven months ago —

"I hope that I have enough money to pay for this treasure, Mr. Rainsford. It's so beautiful that it must be very dear. What is the price?"

And Fairfax, hot all over, warm indeed for the first time in long, stammered —

"Don't speak of price – of course, I don't know you well enough, but if you really like it, please take it."

"Take it!" Mrs. Faversham had cried, "but I mean to – I adore it. Mr. Cedersholm will tell you how valuable it is, but I must pay you for it, my dear Mr. Rainsford."

Holding the carriage door open, his fine face on fire and his blue eyes illumined, he had insisted, and Antony's voice, his personality, his outstretched hand bare, cold, shapely, charmed her and impressed her, and he saw her slowly, unwillingly accept his sudden gift. He had seen her embarrassed suddenly, as he was. Then she had driven away in her carriage, to be lost in the mists with other people who did not matter to him, and poor as he had started out, poorer, for he had not the statuette, he limped down the stairs again and into the street to forage for them both.

He thought whimsically: "I must feed up the whole dramatis personæ of old Bob's play, for he can't get on until he's fed up the cast!"

He limped along the Rue du Bac, his cold hands in his pockets, his head a little bent. But no battle with life now, be it what it would, could compare with his battle in New York. Now, indeed, though he was cold and hungry and tired, he was the inhabitant of a city that he loved, he was working alone for the art he adored. He believed in himself – not once had he yet come to the period of artistic despair.

During these seven months the little personal work he had been able to do had only whetted his desire; he was young, possessed of great talent and of brilliant imagination, and he was happy and hopeful and determined; the physical wants did not weigh on his spirit nor did the long period of labour injure his power of production. He chafed, indeed, but he felt his strength even as he pulled against the material things from which he had to free himself.

And as Fairfax, part of the throng, walked aimlessly up the Rue du Bac with his problems, he walked less alone that night than ever in his life, for he was absorbed in the thought of the woman.

He realized now how keenly he had observed her, that she was very charming and very beautiful. He could have drawn those dear features, the contour of her neck and chin, the poise of her head, the curve of her shoulder, and, imperceptible, but no less real and strong, her grace and charm made her an entity to him, so much so that she actually seemed to have remained by his side, and he almost fancied, as he breathed the misty air, that he breathed again the odour of the scent that she used, sweet and delicate, and that he felt the touch of her velvet sleeve against his coat.

He still had in his possession one object, which, if pawned, might furnish enough money to pay for a meal. It was a little seal, belonging to his mother, set in old gold.

This afternoon, before leaving the studio, he had thrust it in his waistcoat pocket, in case the little statuette did not sell.

They gave him five francs for it, and he laid in a stock of provisions, and with his little parcel once more he limped up the studio stairs to Dearborn, who, wrapped in the coverlet, waited by the stove.

He told his story, and Dearborn listened delightedly, his literary and dramatic sense pleased by the adventure.

They were talking of the lady when the concierge, toward nine o'clock, tapped at the door and handed Antony a thick blue envelope, inscribed "Mr. Thomas Rainsford" by a woman's hand.

"Tony, old man," said the playwright, as Antony's fingers trembled turning the page, "the romance of a poor young man has begun."

The letter ran as follows: —

"My dear Mr. Rainsford,

"I am anxious to have a small bas-relief of me, to give to Mr. Cedersholm when he shall come over. Would you have time to undertake this work? I can pose when you like.

"I know how many claims a man of talent has upon his time, and I want to secure some of yours and make it mine. I venture to send this sum in advance. I hope you will not refuse it. Perhaps you will dine with me to-morrow and we will talk things over.

"Yours faithfully,
"Mary Faversham."

Fairfax read this letter twice – the second time the words were not quite clear. He handed it across the table to his companion silently. The five-hundred-franc bill lay between the plate where the veal had been and the empty coffee cup.

Dearborn, when he had eagerly read the note, glanced up to speak to Fairfax and saw that he had turned away from him. In his figure, as he bowed over, leaning his head upon his hands, there were the first marks of weariness that Dearborn had ever seen. There had been weariness in the step that limped up the stairs and crossed the room when Fairfax had entered with the meagre bundle of food. Dearborn leaned over and saw his friend's fine profile, and there was unmistakably the mark of fatigue on the face, flushed by fire and lamp-light. Dearborn knew of his companion very little. The two had housed together, come together, bits of driftwood on the river of life, drawn by sympathy in the current, and few questions had been asked. He knew that Rainsford was from New Orleans, that he had studied in New York. Of Antony's life he knew nothing, although he had wondered much.

He said now, lightly, as he handed the letter back, "You haven't been playing perfectly square with me, Tony. I'm afraid you have been wearing the boots under false pretences, but, nevertheless, I guess you will have to wear them to-morrow night, old man."

As Fairfax did not move, Dearborn finished more gravely —

"I would be glad to hear anything you are willing to tell me about it."

Fairfax turned slowly and put the letter back in his pocket. Then leaning across the table, in an undertone, he told Dearborn everything – everything. He spoke quietly and did not linger, sketching for him rapidly his life as far as it had gone. Twice Dearborn rose and fed the stove recklessly with fuel. Once he stood up, took a coverlet and wrapped it around him, and sat blinking like a resurrected mummy. And Fairfax talked till Bella flashed like a red bird across the shadows, lifted her lips to his and was gone. Molly shone from the shadows and passed like light through the open door. And, last of all, Mrs. Faversham came and brought a magic wand and she lingered, for Fairfax stopped here.

He had talked until morning. The dawn was grey across the frosty pane when he rose to throw himself down on his bed to sleep. The five-hundred-franc note lay where he had left it on the table between the empty plate and the empty cup. The fire was dead in the stove and the room was cold.

Dearborn, excited and interested, watched with the visions of Antony's past and the visions of his own creations for a long time. And Fairfax, exhausted by the eventful day, troubled by it, touched by it, watched the vision of a woman coming toward him, coming fatally toward him, wonderfully toward him – but he was tired, and, before she had reached him, he fell asleep.