In the courtyard the fat concierge was awake, in a torpid fashion, and knitting. She lifted her greedy and tyrannical eyes at the tall figure of Rufin, with its suggestion of splendors and dignities. But she was not much more informative than Papa Musard had been.
"Oh, the painter!" she exclaimed, when she understood who was in question. "Ah, M'sieur, it is two days since I have seen him. He is not of a punctual habit—no! How often have I waked in the blackness of night, upon a frightful uproar of the bell, to admit him, and he making observations at the top of his voice that would cause a fish to blush! An Italian, M'sieur—yes! But all the same it astonishes no one when he is away for two days."
"The Italians are like that," generalized Rufin unscrupulously. "His door is unlocked, Madame, and there is a picture in his room which is—well, valuable."
"He sold the key," lamented Madame, "and the catches of the window, and the bell-push, and a bucket of mine which I had neglected to watch. And he called me a she-camel when I remonstrated."
"In Italian it is a mere jest," Rufin assured her. "See, Madame, this is my card, which I beg you to give him. I am obliged to leave Paris to-morrow, but on my return I shall have the honor to call on him. And this is a five-franc piece!"
The big coin seemed to work on the concierge like a powerful drug.
She choked noisily and was for the while almost enthusiastic.
"He shall have the card," she promised. "I swear it! After all, artists must have their experiences. Doubtless the monsieur who resides above is a great painter?"
"A very great painter," replied Rufin.
His work, during the next three weeks, exiled him to a green solitude of flat land whose horizons were ridged by poplars growing beside roads laid down as though with a ruler, so straight they were as they sliced across the rich levels. It was there he effected the vital work on his great picture, "Promesse," a revelation of earth gravid with life, of the opulent promise and purpose of spring. It is the greater for what lodged in his mind of the picture he had seen in the Montmartre tenement. It was constant in his thought, the while he noted on his canvas the very texture of the year's early light; it aided his brush. In honesty and humbleness of heart, as he worked, he acknowledged a debt to the unknown Italian who stole the key of the room to sell, and called his concierge a she-camel.
It was a debt he knew he could pay. He, Rufin, whose work was in the Luxembourg, in galleries in America, in Russia, in the palaces of kings, could assure the painter of Montmartre of fame. He went to seek him on the evening of his return to the city.