He took one of the canvases in Coventry and placed it upon an easel.
“Oh, my God, how beautiful!” said the old Marquis de Nani, putting on his pince-nez as the electric light fell full upon the indifferent-looking daub exposed so ruthlessly to view.
“Everyone says that,” said Toto, so innocently and so frankly that the tears almost rose to Helen Powers’ eyes.
“I have never seen a picture quite like that,” continued the Marquis. “There is an air about it, a something indefinable about it. Those bulrushes”—it was a naked nymph trying to screen herself behind bulrushes—“those bulrushes seem to quiver in the wind.”
“Otto Struve said Ingres might have painted it,” said Toto, with a smile that made him look like an angel by Raphael. He had several smiles at his command, and most of them made him look like a good-humored devil. “But they turned it away from the Salon, though I’d had half of the hanging committee to dinner the night before and made them jolly. Otto said the other half were jealous. I’ll have the whole lot next time if I can get them. Here’s a John the Baptist. What do you think of that?”
John the Baptist was brought forth, and a Sisera and Jael, all treated in the old original manner, with a difference due to want of skill. A lamentable Holofernes appeared and vanished.
“Those are all classical,” said the author after De Nani had almost bleated himself hoarse in their praise, revolving in his own mind the while a project which had for aim the borrowing of five hundred francs from this illustrious artist. “But this is original, or, at least, I think so.”
He exposed a blind beggar and his daughter, filled with a mawkish sentimentality strangely at variance with the known character of the Prince.
Helen Powers looked on. Her liking for Toto had rapidly altered. This art show had supplied the crystallizing thread for her feelings to seize upon. She was now mournfully in love with him. It was as if he had suddenly become maimed and needful of her pity. Her mind became filled with anger against Otto Struve and old De Nani and all the other sycophants or sneerers who had belauded this poor boy and his works. She felt a kindness for cock-fighting as she gazed upon the blind beggar and his whining yellow-ocher daughter, a strange emotion in the breast of a delicately nurtured girl, and, so to speak, one of the minor miracles wrought by art.