Summary
On the eve of vows and molten bronze, sculptor John Drene toasts painter Jack Graylock beneath a sky bruised by Parisian lamplight, swearing a brotherhood that will shatter like terracotta in the kiln. Months later, Jack’s brushstrokes seduce Drene’s bride; the lovers vanish, leaving marble dust and the acrid stink of betrayal. The affair curdles, the wife perishes in a freak conflagration, and Jack crawls back to Montparnasse dragging sunlight in the shape of Cecelie—an urchin who sells violets and smells of rain on cobblestones. Drene, chiseling the ghost of his marriage into an unfinished statue, hires the girl as model, unaware she already carries Jack’s confession in her trembling pupils. When the truth erupts, Drene dooms his former friend to a ritual suicide: pistol at dawn, the Seine as witness, blood for blood. Yet vengeance mutates; Drene’s calculated seduction of Cecelie becomes his own entrapment, for her quiet devotion re-awakens the mercy he thought he’d quarried away. On the fatal morning, the bullet meant for a temple grazes flesh instead of fate, and two bruised men—one cracked like fired porcelain, the other still soft as wet clay—offer themselves to the girl whose forgiveness is harder than stone.
Synopsis
The friends of the story are John Drene, a sculptor, and Jack Graylock, a painter. Both men swear eternal friendship on the night before Drene's marriage. Later on the artist runs away with the sculptor's wife. The couple tire of each other, and the woman becomes an outcast. Then Graylock falls honestly in love with a flower girl, one of those sweetly innocent young women found in romance of the Chambers school Her name is Cecelie, and she follows the painter back to Paris. He installs her with the housekeeper of the studios where he lives, and introduces her to Drene, who is at once inspired to employ her as the model for a half completed statue posed by his wife. Drene, who was present when the runaway woman paid for her folly be being accidentally burned to death, has never suspected his friend, but Cecelie unintentionally betrays him. Drene is filled with a determination to kill Graylock at once. He then concludes that this would not be sufficient punishment, and informs the artist that on a certain day he must shoot himself or be killed. As a further revenge, Drene makes up his mind to wind Cecelie away from Graylock. He starts to put his plan in operation, not knowing that the girl has already fallen in love with him. Her gentleness and devotion soften his heart toward his one time friend, and he tries to prevent Graylock from carrying out the compact. The artist fires the shot as agreed, but only wounds himself, and Drene finds peace and happiness with Cecelie. - Moving Picture World.
