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Marion, the Story of an Artist's Model

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<h2>XVIII</h2> I HAD finished the work for the Château de Ramezay, but the Count said I could stay on there, and that he would try to help me get outside work. He did get me quite a few orders for work of a kind he himself would not do. One woman gave me an order to paint pink roses on a green plush piano cover. She said her room was all in green and pink. When I had finished the cover, she ordered a picture “of the same colors.” She wished me to copy a scene of meadows and sheep. So I painted the sunset pink, the meadows green and the sheep pink. She was delighted and said it was a perfect match to her carpets. The Count nearly exploded with delight about it. My orders seemed to give him exquisite joy and he sometimes said, to see me at work compensated for much and made life worth while. He used to hover about me, rubbing his hands and chuckling to himself and muttering: “Ya, ya!” I did a lot of decorating of boxes for a manu{103}facturer and painted dozens of sofa pillows. Also I put “real hand-painted” roses on a woman’s ball dress, and she told me it was the envy of every one at the big dance at which she wore it. I did not love these orders, but I made a bit of money, and I needed clothes badly. It was impossible to go around with Reggie in my thin and shabby things. Moreover, an especially cold winter had set in and I did want a new overcoat badly. I hated to have to wear my old blanket overcoat. It looked so dreadfully Canadian, and many a time I have seen Reggie look at it askance, though, to do him justice, he never made any comment about my clothes. In a poor, large family like ours, there was little enough left for clothes. About the middle of winter, the Count began to have bad spells of melancholia. He would frighten me by saying: “Some day ven you come in the morning, you vill find me dead. I am so plue, I vish I vas dead.” I tried to laugh at him and cheer him up, but every morning as I came through those ghostly old halls, I would think of the Count’s words and I would be afraid to open the door. One day, about five in the afternoon, when I was getting ready to go, the Count who was sitting near the fire all hunched up, said: “Please stay mit me a little longer. Come sit{104} by me a little vile. Your radiant youth vill varm me up.” I had an engagement with Reggie and was in a hurry to get away. So I said: “I can’t, Count. I’ve got to run along.” He stood up suddenly and clicked his heels together. “Miss Ascough,” he said, “I think after this, you better vork some other place. You have smiles for all the stupid Canadian poys, but you vould not give to me the leastest.” “Why, Count,” I said, astonished, “don’t be foolish. I’m in a hurry to-night, that’s all. I’ve an engagement.” “Very vell, Miss Ascough? Hurry you out. It is pest you come not pack again.” “Oh, very well!” I said. “Good-bye.” I ran down the stairs, feeling much provoked with the foolish old fellow. Poor old Count! How I wish I had been kinder and more grateful to him; but in my egotistical youth I was incapable of hearing or understanding his pathetic call for sympathy and companionship. I was flying along through life, as we do in youth. I was, indeed, as I had said, “in a hurry.” He died a few years later in our Montreal, a stranger among strangers, who saw only in the really beauty-loving soul of the artist the gro{105}tesque and queer. I wished then that I could have been with him in the end, but I myself was in a strange land, and I was experiencing some of the same appalling loneliness that had so oppressed and crushed my old friend.{106} <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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