Motion Picture Magazine (Aug 1914-Jan 1915)

68 MOTION PICTURE MAGAZINE One day the picture was done — one warm, June day. The mocking, lovely face smiled up at its twin from the canvas on the easel; the mocking, lovely model stood beside it. Stephen sat on a low stool looking up at them. "So you are done with me, eh?" Caprice laughed down at him. She knew it was June, and she knew the man, and she knew the call o' the pipes. She had not learnt these things in woodland glades, but she had learnt them passing well. "Are you ready to go?" The man whitened under the query, and his hurt eyes sought hers. She held them an instant — one dangerous, glamorous instant. Stephen rose, with something unsaid in his throat. "Devil-woman," he half -sobbed, as he caught her close, "or are you truly woman? You frighten me. Strange, beautiful creature, are you human or daughter of a god ? ' ' "Human enough." "Human enough?" he repeated after her. "Well, then, human enough to love me, suppose we say; human enough to love me, Caprice." "To love you," she whispered back — ah, mon cher!" Downstairs in the library, Marion was pouring tea for Arthur Darrell. It was a scene far removed from the dream Stephen was living with his mad Caprice : the dream of forest glades and pagan fauns and laughing, luring nymphs. And yet Are we all fauns and nymphs under our more or less well-adjusted masks ? Do we hear still, in our innermost hearts, the shrill, sweet Pipes o ' Pan ! Marion was looking into Arthur Darrell's eyes. And, lo, the modern setting falls away! A nymph and faun are in a forest glade ; the look is the brand of the soulless love they live; over there stands the Daughter of Great Pan, and the notes of her melody, savagely sweet, woo and win the freighted air. An instant only; then Marion lifted the sugar-tongs, laughingly. ' ' We were lost for an instant," she said; "were you very far away?" "Not very, after all," he said softly. ' ' I was listening to the wild love-notes of Pan, and I do hot think he is very far distant, since we have met." Marion dropped the lumps in the amber tea, with a little sigh. She was fearful for this new love; distressed for the old. Only that morning she had gone to her husband's studio and had found him gazing, tense and rapt, at a charcoal sketch he had been doing. The face was the lovely, provocative face of the figure in oils. The look in his eyes was not the artist-look; not the master's pride in a masterly work; but the hungerlook in the eyes of a man when he craves the woman he loves. And she had turned away, unseen and strangely sad. She turned to Darrell suddenly. "Do you believe," she demanded, "in the gods of old — -in dryads and fauns and Pan, and all that? Do you believe we humdrum mortals can come under that enchanted spell at this late date so that — so that we become changed?" Arthur Darrell took the hand that still held the tongs gently in his own. "Lovely lady," he told her, "I do not know whether the gods of old have cast their witchery over me, nor whether I'm really hearing the maddening Pipes o' Pan. I do know that your witchery is on me ; I know that I'm hearing your silent call. I am pagan enough to believe in the strength of my own desires; I am pagan enough to dare to claim you, even tho you are another 's first. ' ' He stretched out his arms. And once again it sounded thru the room, that flute-like, reed-sweet note; the walls became forest trees; a murmur soughed the tree-tops. A faun and a nymph were loving again — the faun enticing; the nymph half -ready to go. "I will go," she found herself whispering, when her lover's arms released her; "I will go with you, for you have taught me things I never glimpsed before : strange dreams ; odd imaginings; a new music in my ears. But listen" — she leaned toward him