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Papa Musard in his bed, with his comforts mostly in bottles arranged within his reach, found it rather shocking that a distinguished artist should enter the presence of a dying man like as he remarked during his convalescence a dog going into a pond. He sat up in astonishment. "Musard," demanded Rufin abruptly, "who is the artist who lives in the room below this?"
"I know no such persons," retorted Don Manuel, "as General Merino or King Charles V. But I know you well, Rufin, and the advice I give you is to begone, yourself and your companions. We shall have troops here to-day or to-morrow, and you will find the country too hot to hold you." The officer laughed. "Troops are here already," he said; "you may have seen our column march by not half an hour ago.
Somebody near Rufin spoke a brief order and the three were still. He saw Giaconi's intent face across their shoulders, his open hand reaching forward between them. He clasped it silently. The priest had set the girl on her knees before the improvised altar and stood beside her in silence. The three, with no word spoken, proceeded with their business.
"He is a very old man, you see," said Rufin. "Old men have much to suffer. Well, tell him I will come this afternoon to visit him. And this" producing a coin from his pocket "this is for you." The gamin managed, in some fashion of his own, to combine, in a single movement, a snatch at the money with a gesture of polite deprecation.
"Peter the Lucky?" he queried. She nodded dejectedly. The little official made a grimace. "It was he," he said, "who did the throat-cutting. Tiens! this begins to be a drama." The girl, with drooping head, made a faint moan of protest and misery. Rufin signed the little man to be silent. The truth, if he had but given it entertainment, had offered itself to him from the first.
"Who is the artist in the room below?" repeated Rufin urgently. "Do you know him?" "No," replied Papa Musard, with emphasis. "Know him an Italian, a ruffian, an apache, a man with hair on his arms like a baboon! I do not know him. There!" He was offended; a dying man has his privileges, at least.
He sank his voice so that the mute, abstracted girl should not overhear. "The hair above the neck, you know they always shave that off. It might be better that mademoiselle should not see." "Possibly," agreed Rufin, looking absently at his comely, insignificant face, which the lamps illuminated mercilessly.
He strove with himself fiercely and looked up again to see that three men had entered the room and were going toward the prisoner. The priest had come forward and was raising the kneeling girl. "A moment," cried the prisoner, as the three laid hands upon him. "Just a moment." They took no notice. "Monsieur Rufin," he cried, "it is my hand I offer you only that."
He saw that the condemned man's eyes lightened, a flush rose in his face; he smiled as if in triumph. Then they passed out, and Rufin, after standing for a moment in uncertainty, crossed the room and knelt beside the girl, with his hands pressed to his ears. "At least," said the Comtesse, still staring at the brisk fire in the steel grate "at least he saw them with his own eyes."
It was set on the canvas with a skill that made Rufin smile with frank pleasure; but the skill, the artifice of the thing, were the least part of it. What was wonderful was the imagination, the living insight, that represented not only the shaped product of a harsh existence, but the womanhood at the root of it. It was miraculous; it was convincing as life is convincing; it was great.
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