“Halloo! So it’s here!” Robert Kater stood by a much-littered table and looked down on a few papers and envelopes which some one had laid there during his absence. All day long he had been wandering about the streets of Paris, waiting––passing the time as he could in his impatience––hoping for the communication contained in one of these very envelopes. Now that it had come he felt himself struck with a singular weakness, and did not seize it and tear it open. Instead, he stood before the table, his hands in his pockets, and whistled softly.
He made the tour of the studio several times, pausing now and then to turn a canvas about, apparently as if he would criticize it, looking at it but not regarding it, only absently turning one and another as if it were a habit with him to do so; then returning to the table he stirred the envelopes apart with one finger and finally separated one from the rest, bearing an official seal, and with it a small package carefully secured and bearing the same seal, but he did not open either. “Yes, it’s here, and that’s the one,” he said, but he spoke to himself, for there was no one else in the room.
He moved wearily away, keeping the packet in his hand, but leaving the envelope on the table, and hung his hat upon a point of an easel and wiped his damp brow. As he did so, he lifted the dark brown hair from his temple, showing a jagged scar. Quickly, as if with an habitual touch, he 388 rearranged the thick, soft lock so that the scar was covered, and mounting a dais, seated himself on a great thronelike chair covered with a royal tiger skin. The head of the tiger, mounted high, with glittering eyes and fangs showing, rested on the floor between his feet, and there, holding the small packet in his hand, with elbows resting on the arms of the throne, he sat with head dropped forward and shoulders lifted and eyes fixed on the tiger’s head.
For a long time he sat thus in the darkening room. At last it grew quite dark. Only the great skylight over his head showed a defined outline. The young man had had no dinner and no supper, for his pockets were empty and his last sou gone. If he had opened the envelopes, he would have found money, and more than money, for he would have learned that the doors of the Salon had opened to him and the highest medal awarded him, and that for which he had toiled and waited and hoped,––for which he had staked his last effort and sacrificed everything, was won. He was recognized, and all Paris would quickly know it, and not Paris only, but all the world. But when he would open the envelope, his hands fell slack, and there it still lay on the table concealed by the darkness.
Down three flights of stairs in the court a strange and motley group were collecting, some bearing candles, all masked, some fantastically dressed and others only concealed by dominoes. The stairs went up on the outer wall of this inner court, past the windows of the basement occupied by the concierge and his wife and pretty daughter, and entered the building on the first floor above. By this arrangement the concierge could always see from his window who mounted them.
“Look, mamma.” The pretty daughter stood peering out, her face framed in the white muslin curtains. “Look. See the students. Ah, but they are droll!”
“Come away, ma fille.”
“But the owl and the ape, there, they seem on very good terms. I wonder if they go to the room of Monsieur Kater! I think so; for one––the ghost in white, he is a little lame like the Englishman who goes always to the room of Monsieur.––Ah, bah! Imbecile! Away with you! Pig!”
The ape had suddenly approached his ugly face close to the face framed in the white muslin curtains on the other side of the window, and made exaggerated motions of an embrace. The wife of the concierge snatched her daughter away and drew the curtains close.