The Penalty | Page 5

Gouverneur Morris
a pawn upon a chess-board. It pleased his sense of
fitness to know she was beautiful; and to be told that she was like
sunshine in her father's house.
"What has become of her?" he said.
"Of Miss Ferris?" Wilmot did not care to discuss her with a stranger.
But unfortunately there were fifteen thousand dollars of the stranger's
money in his inside pocket. "She became a great favorite in society," he
said, "and then dropped out to study art."
"Painting?" The legless man knew perfectly well, but it suited him to
make inquiries. "Music?"
"Sculpture," said Wilmot shortly.
"Is she succeeding?"
"She works very hard, and she has talent."
"That is not enthusiastic."
"You mustn't ask me; I'm not an art critic."
"What a pity."
"A pity that I'm not an art critic?"
"No. A pity for a beautiful girl to do anything but exist."
Wilmot's eyebrows went up a little. The beggar's speech surprised him,
and pleased him, since it expressed a favorite thought of his own.

"Is any of her work on exhibition? Having seen her once, one takes an
interest, you know."
"I think there is nothing that can be seen," said Wilmot coolly, "except
upon special invitation. And I think she is very shy of showing
anything that she has done."
"True artists," said Blizzard, who criminally was an artist himself and
knew what he was talking about, "live in the future."
Again Wilmot's eyebrows went up a little. Why should a legless beggar
be able to make loans of fifteen thousand dollars, and why should he be
able to talk like a gentleman?
"I am interested in art," continued Blizzard; "sometimes I have earned a
few dollars by sitting for my portrait."
He did not add that he continually put himself in the way of artists in
the hope that his fame as a model would reach Barbara, and touch her
imagination. He did not add that he haunted Washington Square and
McBurney Place, where her studio was, in the hope that his face, which
he knew to be different and more terrible than other faces, might kindle
a fire of inspiration in her. He believed rightly that if a woman once
looked him in the eyes she would never forget him. But hitherto
Barbara had not so much as glanced at him, since she carried her lovely
head very high, and looked straight before her as she went. While, as
for him, he stood upon the stumps of his legs, a gigantic sort of dwarf,
beneath the notice of the proud-eyed and the tall.
Wilmot passed out of the place in deep thought; not even the pretty
girls plaiting straw won a glance from him. Coupled with the relief of
being out of present difficulties was a disagreeable sense of foreboding.
Suppose the legless man were to ask favors of him before the money
could be repaid? Suppose they were favors which a gentleman could
not grant? And he determined to find out, from the police if necessary,
just what sort of a man it was with whom he had had dealings.

III
It seemed to Wilmot that he had not seen Barbara for an age. And
indeed a week had passed without their meeting. Therefore, although
he had often been forbidden to call during working hours, he had
himself driven to 17 McBurney Place and climbed the two flights of
stairs to her studio.
It was a disconsolate Barbara who received him. She had on her
work-apron, but she was not working. She sat in a deep chair, and
presented the soles of her small shoes to an open fire. Wilmot,
expecting to be scolded for disobeying orders, was relieved at being
received with visible signs of pleasure.
"You're just the person I wanted to see," she said, "just the one and only
Wilmot in the world."
"Are you dying?" he asked.
She laughed. "I'm discouraged. I've come to one of those times when
you just want to chuck everything. And there's a man at the bottom of
it."
"Tell me," said Wilmot, "in words of two syllables."
"Well," said Barbara, "I woke up in the middle of the night out of a
dream. I dreamed I'd made a statue of Satan after the fall from heaven,
and that everybody said: 'Well done, Barbs, bully for you,' 'Got Rodin
skinned a mile'--it was you said that--and so forth and so on. I rose,
swollen with conceit, and made a sketch of the head I'd dreamed about,
so's not to forget the pose, and then I went to sleep again. Next day,
early, a man stopped me in Washington Square and begged for a dime.
I looked at him, and he had just the expression of the fallen Satan I'd
dreamed about--a beast of a
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