Don Orsino | Page 9

dwelling are his only estate, his only capital, his only wealth, and he does not take the trouble to conceal the fact. The very idea of a fixed income is as distasteful to him as the possibility of possessing it is distant and visionary. There is always money in abundance, money for Faustina's horses and carriages, money for Gouache's select dinners, money for the expensive fancies of both. The paint pot is the mine, the brush is the miner's pick, and the vein has never failed, nor the hand trembled in working it. A golden youth, a golden river flowing softly to the red gold sunset of the end--that is life as it seems to Anastase and Faustina.
On the morning which opens this chronicle, Anastase was standing before his canvas, palette and brushes in hand, considering the nature of the human face in general and of young Orsino's face in particular.
"I have known your father and mother for centuries," observed the painter with a fine disregard of human limitations. "Your father is the brown type of a dark man, and your mother is the olive type of a dark woman. They are no more alike than a Red Indian and an Arab, but you are like both. Are you brown or are you olive, my friend? That is the question. I would like to see you angry, or in love, or losing at play. Those things bring out the real complexion."
Orsino laughed and showed a remarkably solid set of teeth. But he did not find anything to say.
"I would like to know the truth about your complexion," said Anastase, meditatively.
"I have no particular reason for being angry," answered Orsino, "and I am not in love--"
"At your age! Is it possible!"
"Quite. But I will play cards with you if you like," concluded the young man.
"No," returned the other. "It would be of no use. You would win, and if you happened to win much, I should be in a diabolical scrape. But I wish you would fall in love. You should see how I would handle the green shadows under your eyes."
"It is rather short notice."
"The shorter the better. I used to think that the only real happiness in life lay in getting into trouble, and the only real interest in getting out."
"And have you changed your mind?"
"I? No. My mind has changed me. It is astonishing how a man may love his wife under favourable circumstances."
Anastase laid down his brushes and lit a cigarette. Reubens would have sipped a few drops of Rhenish from a Venetian glass. Teniers would have lit a clay pipe. D��rer would perhaps have swallowed a pint of N��remberg beer, and Greuse or Mignard would have resorted to their snuff-boxes. We do not know what Michelangelo or Perugino did under the circumstances, but it is tolerably evident that the man of the nineteenth century cannot think without talking and cannot talk without cigarettes. Therefore Anastase began to smoke and Orsino, being young and imitative, followed his example.
"You have been an exceptionally fortunate man," remarked the latter, who was not old enough to be anything but cynical in his views of life.
"Do you think so? Yes--I have been fortunate. But I do not like to think that my happiness has been so very exceptional. The world is a good place, full of happy people. It must be--otherwise purgatory and hell would be useless institutions."
"You do not suppose all people to be good as well as happy then," said Orsino with a laugh.
"Good? What is goodness, my friend? One half of the theologians tell us that we shall be happy if we are good and the other half assure us that the only way to be good is to abjure earthly happiness. If you will believe me, you will never commit the supreme error of choosing between the two methods. Take the world as it is, and do not ask too many questions of the fates. If you are willing to be happy, happiness will come in its own shape."
Orsino's young face expressed rather contemptuous amusement. At twenty, happiness is a dull word, and satisfaction spells excitement.
"That is the way people talk," he said. "You have got everything by fighting for it, and you advise me to sit still till the fruit drops into my mouth."
"I was obliged to fight. Everything comes to you naturally--fortune, rank--everything, including marriage. Why should you lift a hand?"
"A man cannot possibly be happy who marries before he is thirty years old," answered Orsino with conviction. "How do you expect me to occupy myself during the next ten years?"
"That is true," Gouache replied, somewhat thoughtfully, as though the consideration had not struck him.
"If I were an artist, it would be different."
"Oh, very different. I agree with you." Anastase smiled good-humouredly.
"Because I should have