At this point Doctor Lombard entered. He glanced sharply at Wyant. “The servant is a fool; she didn’t tell me you were here.” His eye turned to his wife. “Well, my dear, what have you been telling Mr. Wyant? About the aunts at Bonchurch, I’ll be bound!”
Mrs. Lombard looked triumphantly at Wyant, and her husband rubbed his hooked fingers, with a smile.
“Mrs. Lombard’s aunts are very superior women. They subscribe to the circulating library, and borrow Good Words and the Monthly Packet from the curate’s wife across the way. They have the rector to tea twice a year, and keep a page-boy, and are visited by two baronets’ wives. They devoted themselves to the education of their orphan niece, and I think I may say without boasting that Mrs. Lombard’s conversation shows marked traces of the advantages she enjoyed.”
Mrs. Lombard colored with pleasure.
“I was telling Mr. Wyant that my aunts were very particular.”
“Quite so, my dear; and did you mention that they never sleep in anything but linen, and that Miss Sophia puts away the furs and blankets every spring with her own hands? Both those facts are interesting to the student of human nature.” Doctor Lombard glanced at his watch. “But we are missing an incomparable moment; the light is perfect at this hour.”
Wyant rose, and the doctor led him through the tapestried door and down the passageway.
The light was, in fact, perfect, and the picture shone with an inner radiancy, as though a lamp burned behind the soft screen of the lady’s flesh. Every detail of the foreground detached itself with jewel-like precision. Wyant noticed a dozen accessories which had escaped him on the previous day.
He drew out his notebook, and the doctor, who had dropped his sardonic grin for a look of devout contemplation, pushed a chair forward, and seated himself on a carved settle against the wall.
“Now, then,” he said, “tell Clyde what you can; but the letter killeth.”
He sank down, his hands hanging on the arm of the settle like the claws of a dead bird, his eyes fixed on Wyant’s notebook with the obvious intention of detecting any attempt at a surreptitious sketch.
Wyant, nettled at this surveillance, and disturbed by the speculations which Doctor Lombard’s strange household excited, sat motionless for a few minutes, staring first at the picture and then at the blank pages of the notebook. The thought that Doctor Lombard was enjoying his discomfiture at length roused him, and he began to write.
He was interrupted by a knock on the iron door. Doctor Lombard rose to unlock it, and his daughter entered.
She bowed hurriedly to Wyant, without looking at him.
“Father, had you forgotten that the man from Monte Amiato was to come back this morning with an answer about the bas-relief? He is here now; he says he can’t wait.”
“The devil!” cried her father impatiently. “Didn’t you tell him—”
“Yes; but he says he can’t come back. If you want to see him you must come now.”
“Then you think there’s a chance?—”
She nodded.
He turned and looked at Wyant, who was writing assiduously.
“You will stay here, Sybilla; I shall be back in a moment.”
He hurried out, locking the door behind him.
Wyant had looked up, wondering if Miss Lombard would show any surprise at being locked in with him; but it was his turn to be surprised, for hardly had they heard the key withdrawn when she moved close to him, her small face pale and tumultuous.
“I arranged it—I must speak to you,” she gasped. “He’ll be back in five minutes.”
Her courage seemed to fail, and she looked at him helplessly.
Wyant had a sense of stepping among explosives. He glanced about him at the dusky vaulted room, at the haunting smile of the strange picture overhead, and at the pink-and-white girl whispering of conspiracies in a voice meant to exchange platitudes with a curate.
“How can I help you?” he said with a rush of compassion.
“Oh, if you would! I never have a chance to speak to any one; it’s so difficult—he watches me—he’ll be back immediately.”
“Try to tell me what I can do.”
“I don’t dare; I feel as if he were behind me.” She turned away, fixing her eyes on the picture. A sound startled her. “There he comes, and I haven’t spoken! It was my only chance; but it bewilders me so to be hurried.”
“I don’t hear any one,” said Wyant, listening. “Try to tell me.”
“How can I make you understand? It would take so long to explain.” She drew a deep breath, and then with a plunge—“Will you come here again this afternoon—at about five?” she whispered.
“Come here again?”
“Yes—you can ask to see the picture,—make some excuse. He will come with you, of course; I will open the door for you—and—and lock you both in”—she gasped.
“Lock us in?”
“You see? You understand? It’s the only way for me to leave the house—if I am ever to do it”—She drew another difficult breath. “The key will be returned—by a safe person—in half an hour,—perhaps sooner—”
She trembled so much that she was obliged to lean against the settle for support.
“Wyant looked at her steadily; he was very sorry for her.
“I can’t, Miss Lombard,” he said at length.
“You can’t?”
“I’m sorry; I must seem cruel; but consider—”
He was stopped by the futility of the word: as well ask a hunted rabbit to pause in its dash for a hole!
Wyant took her hand; it was cold and nerveless.
“I will serve you in any way I can; but you must see that this way is impossible. Can’t I talk to you again? Perhaps—”
“Oh,” she cried, starting up, “there he comes!”
Doctor Lombard’s step sounded in the passage.
Wyant held her fast. “Tell me one thing: he won’t let you sell the picture?”
“No—hush!”
“Make no pledges for the future, then; promise me that.”
“The future?”
“In case he should die: your father is an old man. You haven’t promised?”
She shook her head.
“Don’t, then; remember that.”
She made no answer, and the key turned in the lock.
As he passed out of the house, its scowling cornice and facade of ravaged brick looked down on him with the startlingness of a strange face, seen momentarily in a crowd, and impressing itself on the brain as part of an inevitable future. Above the doorway, the marble hand reached out like the cry of an imprisoned anguish.
Wyant turned away impatiently.
“Rubbish!” he said to himself. “SHE isn’t walled in; she can get out if she wants to.”
IV
Wyant had any number of plans for coming to Miss Lombard’s aid: he was elaborating the twentieth when, on the same afternoon, he stepped into the express train for Florence. By the time the train reached Certaldo he was convinced that, in thus hastening his departure, he had followed the only reasonable course; at Empoli, he began to reflect that the priest and the Levite had probably justified themselves in much the same manner.
A month later, after his return to England, he was unexpectedly relieved from these alternatives of extenuation and approval. A paragraph in the morning paper announced the sudden death of Doctor Lombard, the distinguished English dilettante who had long resided in Siena. Wyant’s justification was complete. Our blindest impulses become evidence of perspicacity when they fall in with the course of events.
Wyant could now comfortably speculate on the particular complications from which his foresight had probably saved him. The climax was unexpectedly dramatic. Miss Lombard, on the brink of a step which, whatever its issue, would have burdened her with retrospective compunction, had been set free before her suitor’s ardor could have had time to cool, and was now doubtless planning a life of domestic felicity on the proceeds of the Leonardo. One thing, however, struck Wyant as odd—he saw no mention of the sale of the picture. He had scanned the papers for an immediate announcement of its transfer to one of the great museums; but presently concluding that Miss Lombard, out of filial piety, had wished to avoid an appearance of unseemly haste in the disposal of her treasure, he dismissed the matter from his mind. Other affairs happened to engage him; the months slipped by, and gradually the lady and the picture dwelt less vividly in his mind.