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Updated: June 25, 2025
Of course she had often known men about whom she knew really very little. But she could not remember ever having known a man about whose character, position, education and former life she was so ignorant as she was about Arabian's. He was still a vague sort of Cosmopolitan to her, a floating foreign man whom she could not place. He was still the magnificent mongrel belonging to no known breed.
"You are going to paint Sir Seymour?" "I am! Think I can do him?" She looked at him for a moment, and her violet eyes searched him as if to see whether he were worthy. Then she said soberly: "Yes, Dick." "Then let's turn the damned epitaph with its hole to the wall!" And he lifted what remained of Arabian's portrait from the easel and threw it into a dark corner of the studio.
All this time his small eyes were fixed upon her, and the fierce little lights in them seemed to touch her like the points of two pins. "You talk about fear! Does it never occur to you that Arabian's a man you picked up at the Cafe Royal, that we neither of us know anything about him, that he may be " "Anyhow, he's far more presentable that I am." "Of course he's presentable, as you call it.
Then, as the silence continued, she raised her eyes to Arabian's. She did not know what she expected to see, but she was surprised at what she did see. Standing quite still immediately in front of the picture, with his large eyes fixed upon it, Arabian was looking very calm. There was, indeed, scarcely any expression in his face. He had thrust both hands into the pockets of his overcoat.
She thought of the evening when she had cried aloud that she would give her soul to know the Wanderer safe, of the quick answer that had followed, and of Keyork Arabian's face. Was he a devil, indeed, as she sometimes fancied, and had there been a reality and a binding meaning in that contract? Keyork Arabian! He, indeed, possessed the key to all evil. What would he have done with Beatrice?
"Yes, a damned sight too late! But come up!" They went in, and Garstin, without any more words, took them up to the studio. "There you are!" he said, still in the harsh and unnatural voice. He flung out his arm towards the easel which stood in the middle of the room. Sir Seymour and the inspector went up to it. Part of the canvas on which Arabian's portrait had been painted was still there.
And how he had waited for her, how he had known how to wait! It was frightful that deliberation of his! Garstin had been right about him. Garstin's instinct for people had not betrayed him. Although later Arabian's craft had puzzled even him he had summed up Arabian at a first glance. Garstin was diabolically clever.
But when he was putting the latchkey into the door the almost solemn words of Dick Garstin came back to her: "Beryl, believe it or not, as you can, that is Arabian!" And she hesitated. An intense disinclination to go into the flat struggled with the intense desire to yield herself to Arabian's will.
"What has happened?" he asked, bending down to examine the couple. "My friend has fainted," said Unorna calmly. "He is subject to it. You must help me to get him home." "Is it far?" asked the man. "To the House of the Black Mother of God." The principal room of Keyork Arabian's dwelling was in every way characteristic of the man.
Arabian's portrait stood on its easel in the middle of the room. Garstin glanced at it as he went toward the stairs. Since the day when he had shown it for the first time to Beryl Van Tuyn and Arabian he had not seen either of them. Nor had he had a word from them. This had not troubled him.
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