... Adowne
They prayd him sit, and gave him for to feed.
—Spenser: Faerie Queene.
Charlie Cartaret would have told you—indeed, he frequently did tell his friends—that the mere fact of a man being an artist was no proof that he lacked in the uncommon sense commonly known as common. Cartaret was quite insistent upon this and, as evidence in favor of his contention, he was accustomed to point to C. Cartaret, Esq. He, said Cartaret, was at once an artist and a practical man: it was wholly impossible, for instance, to imagine him capable of any silly romance.
Nevertheless, when left alone in his room by the departure of the Lady on that February evening, he sat for a long time with the strange rose between his fingers and a strange look in his eyes. He regarded the rose until the last ray of light had altogether faded from the West. Only then did he recall that he had invited sundry persons to dine with him at the Café Des Deux Colombes, and when he had made ready to go to them, the rose was still in his reluctant hand.
Cartaret looked about him stealthily. He had been in the room for some hours and he should have been thoroughly aware that he was alone in it; but he looked, as all guilty men do, to right and left to make sure. Then, like a naughty child, he turned his back to the street-window.
He stood thus a bare instant, yet in that instant his hand first raised something toward his lips, and then bestowed that same something somewhere inside his waistcoat, a considerable distance from his heart, but directly over the rib beneath which ill-informed people believe the heart to be. This accomplished, he exhibited a rigorously practical face to the room and swaggered out of it, ostentatiously humming a misogynistic drinking-song:
“There’s nothing, friend, ’twixt you and me
Except the best of company.
(There’s just one bock ’twixt you and me,
and I’ll catch up full soon!)
What woman’s lips compare to this:
This sturdy seidel’s frothy kiss——”
Armand Garnier, one of the men that were to dine with Cartaret to-night, had written the words of which this is a free translation, and Houdon had composed the air—he composed it impromptu for Devignes over an absinthe, after laboring upon it in secret for an entire week—but Cartaret, when he reached the note that stood for the last word here given, came to an abrupt stop; he was facing the door of the room opposite his own. He continued facing it for quite a minute, but he heard nothing.
“M. Refrogné,” he said, when he thrust his head into the concierge’s box downstairs, “if—er—if anybody should inquire for me this evening, you will please tell them that I am dining at the Café Des Deux Colombes.”
Nothing could be seen in the concierge’s box, but from it came a grunt that might have been either assent or dissent.
“Yes,” said Cartaret, “in the rue Jacob.”