Read Ebook: The Arch-Satirist by Williams Frances Fenwick Copeland Charles Illustrator

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Ebook has 1288 lines and 68990 words, and 26 pages

CHAPTER

"Have a little hot Scotch for the cough," he suggested, reluctantly. "What's the use? I may just as well give it to him, here," he added to himself. "The boy's trebly doomed and a drop more or less isn't going to make any difference either way." He busied himself with a spirit lamp and glasses and soon his visitor was gulping down the proffered draught, greedily.

"That's good!" he exclaimed. "That puts life in me. I feel as if I could write something now--something worth while."

"Something unfit for reading, I suppose you mean," returned his host, cheerfully.

The boy laughed easily and settled back among the cushions of his easy chair with panther-like grace.

"Not a bit of it," he answered, gaily. "I only write them after gin. The best thing I ever did was gin--'Sin's Lure.' You read it?"

"I did."

"Strong, wasn't it?"

"Strong, yes. So is a--so are various other things strong. Just the sort of thing a diseased, vice-racked, dissipated young--genius--like you might be expected to produce. What bothers me now is your prose. Anything more uncharacteristic"--

The boy laughed and gazed at the older man, intently and mischievously.

"Nothing morbid about that, is there?"

"Nothing. Bright, dainty, unerringly truthful, delightfully witty--how in thunder do you do it? You must have two souls."

"Two! I've got a dozen."

The boy lit a cigarette and puffed it, meditatively. The man smoked a well-coloured pipe and gazed steadily at his visitor. Seen thus, they were an ill-assorted pair.

Gerald Amherst, the owner of the studio, was an artist, uncursed overmuch by the artistic temperament. His strong, sane face and massive figure suggested the athlete, the pose and substance of his attitude the successful business man. Nor did the omens lie. He was an athlete in his leisure moments, a business man at all times. Art was his occupation, his delight; but he never forgot that she was also his bread-winner. Amherst painted good, sometimes exceptional pictures; and he demanded--and obtained--good, sometimes exceptional prices for them. For the rest he was thirty-four, fine-looking, well-bred, honest--and popular. Friends came to him as flies come in July to ordinary mortals.

So alien was his visitor that he hardly seemed to belong to the same world. Lithe, long-limbed, sinuous, with features of almost feminine delicacy and charm and hands that made the artist soul in Gerald vibrate pleasurably. The eyes--deep-set, hollow, passionate--were the eyes of a lost soul; impenetrable, fathomless, and lurid.

Strange, alluring, repellent personality! where the seeds of a thousand sins--sown centuries before--bore hideous fruit. Madness, vice, disease, and death--and, through them all, the golden fire of genius! This boy's age was nineteen; and no second glance was needed to tell that the fierce, straining spirit must soon leave its wretched tenement behind and fare forth into darkness. In the meantime--Amherst puffed at his pipe and thought. A year ago this boy had been a pet and idol of Montreal society; to-day his open corruptness had closed all doors to him save those of a few, who, like Amherst, forgave the madman in the genius, and the beast in the dying boy.

Then, too, our hero was an artist; and Leo Ricossia was a model such as artist seldom sees. He was graceful as some young wild animal; his delicately nervous body could form no pose that was not pleasing. As for his face--thin-lipped, wide-eyed, luminous--"Ricossia will never write a poem so wonderful as his face," a brother-artist had once remarked; and Amherst fully concurred in the opinion.

Ricossia spoke presently, his dark eyes heavy with thought.

"You think it possible that one may have ten souls?"

"I think it probable that one soul may have twenty outlooks, and all of them vile, when he has soaked in sufficient gin. But how an unhealthy mind can produce healthy stuff--that's beyond me. Your prose is healthy, and what's more, it's fine. It ranks with"--He stopped abruptly, amazed and confounded by the glitter in Ricossia's eye.

"You--you don't think it better than my poetry? You can't!"

"I think--in a sense--it is better!" Amherst spoke slowly and Ricossia leaned forward to catch his words with an avidity which seemed disproportioned to the matter in hand. "In another sense it's not so good, of course. The poems are unhealthy, feverish, abnormal--but, in their way, they're efforts of genius. The stories are simply very unusually clever prose--healthy, witty, and clean. Personally I prefer them."

"You--you miserable Philistine!"

The boy leaned back as though relieved and his scarlet lips parted in a smile of startling sweetness. The eyes had lost their wild gleam now and were simply wells of dusky kindness and fellowship; the eyes of an intelligent, friendly brute with something added. Gerald noted the change with unflagging interest; as a study the boy never palled.

"You think I'm a bad lot, don't you?"

"I think you're as bad as the worst. But a chap like you isn't to be judged by ordinary standards."

"Yet," pursued Ricossia, slowly, "you allow that I can write clean stuff. Perhaps in spite of it all, underneath it all--my soul is clean."

"I hope so; but I don't believe it for a moment. No, I can't account for it that way."

"Possibly," suggested the other, puffing fitfully, "possibly, then, my unclean spirit has gained control of some healthy, human soul which it dominates."

"Possibly you're talking awful rot," returned the other, good-humouredly but a trifle impatiently.

"Possibly I am."

The poet smiled softly and leaned back, making a lovely thing of the corner where he lounged.

"Healthy people often have a liking for me," he observed. "You, for instance--the healthiest man I know. And the healthiest woman--Miss Thayer."

"That'll do."

"What do you mean?"

"That you mustn't speak of her."

"Why?"

"You ought to know."

The boy stared, uncomprehendingly; then threw himself back, chuckling inaudibly.

"You didn't understand me," he said at last, his beautiful eyes bright with amusement. "She has far too much sense to be attracted by me in the ordinary way. I meant only"--

"I don't care what you meant. I don't like to talk to you about her and I won't. If she did bestow a good deal of attention on you at one time it was before she knew your real character; she regarded you just as a sick, inspired boy. None of them ever speak of you, now; you ought to know that."

Ricossia fixed his great eyes on the speaker's face with an impenetrable expression, then shook with silent laughter.

"We'll talk on some less delicate subject," he said at last with a keen, bright glance at the other man, replete with subtle mockery. "Still," he added, softly, "you'll allow--leaving all personalities out of the question--that I have a magnetic attraction for all women, good and bad--even if I am ostracized from polite society."

"I'll allow nothing--I don't want to discuss it, I tell you," said Amherst, irritably. "There are some things and some people one doesn't care to hear you mention, you young-- Can't you understand that?"

"Perfectly!" returned the boy, laughing. His laugh was an uncanny thing, so melodious and bell-like as to be startlingly unmasculine. Amherst liked it no better than the rest of him--and found it equally attractive.

After all, he mused, his momentary irritation subsiding, our ideas of what a man should be were arbitrary. Certainly there was a beauty of disease; a beauty even of corruption, which, while no one cared to imitate, no one, on the other hand, could deny the existence of. Here was a living example; the scapegoat of heredity, laden down with sin, weighted with disease, yet possessed of how many goodly gifts! And all to end in--what? The passion of the hot heart, the sweat of the over-active brain--all, all for nothing. An evil life and an early grave. Retribution, yes; but retribution, really, for the sins of the dead men whose deeds lived, poisoning the life and rotting the blood in the veins of this, their human puppet. And these dead men, what of them? What of their life, endlessly self-renewed, unceasingly sinned against until this, the last representative of a name that had once been great, went to fertilize the waiting earth. "About all he is fit for, too," mused Gerald grimly enough, noting the signs plainly written on the face of the boy. Then his mood changed. How pitiful! This beautiful creature, in nature a cross between a satyr and an elfin, in face, nothing short of a god; this "vessel of a more ungainly make" "leaning all awry"; this marionette of the scornful gods, dancing gaily enough, to every tune the devil chose to play him; this strange, only half human being of the unbridled will, the untempered desires. And only nineteen!

The studio showed bright with candle-light and lamp-light. A fire of wood and coal glowed and chattered on the hearth. It was all very quiet, very restful. The boy still lingered among the rich-hued cushions and his face showed an unwonted sense of peace.

The poetic instincts which an Italian father, an Irish grandmother, had bequeathed to him responded amazingly to this atmosphere of cosy, sinless warmth. He was quite capable of rising to heights of extraordinary mental spirituality at such moments, though quite incapable of applying the first principle of morality to his daily life.

Gerald Amherst thought, as he had thought many times before, of the strange inequalities of life. Here was he, thirty-four, the possessor of a sound body, a clear conscience, a healthy mind and a sufficient income. He reflected on these various advantages with no sense of personal merit, feeling that they had been bequeathed to him as truly as had the old mahogany chest which formed one of the chief ornaments of his room. He had certainly started as well equipped as most to play the great game of life.

What if he, too, had had this boy's heritage? He tried, smiling a little, to imagine himself a Ricossia; a doomed, reckless, light-hearted being who chose to spend his few remaining years in hopeless vice. As he thought, a sudden pity for the boy overtook him as it had very often done before, a sudden curiosity as to what really transpired behind the black veil which we all hang between our inmost selves and the eyes of our fellow-humans. Did the boy ever feel regret or shame or loathing for himself or reluctance to continue in his vile career? Would he confess to it if he did? Amherst, pressed by a sudden desire to know more of his whimsical visitant, questioned him, soberly.

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