The Azure Rose

A Novel

BY
REGINALD WRIGHT KAUFFMAN
Author of “Jim,” “The House of Bondage,”
“The Mark of The Beast,” “Our Navy at Work,” etc.

NEW YORK
THE MACAULAY COMPANY

Copyright, 1919
By The Macaulay Co.

“Oh!” she cried. “I had just come in and I thought—I thought it was my room.”

For
My Friend and Secretary,
LANCE-CORPORAL ARNOLD ROBSON,
No. 10864, “C” Company, Sixth Battalion,
Yorkshire Regiment—“The Green Howards”—
Who, Leading His Squad, Died for His Country
At Suvla Bay, Gallipoli, 21st August, 1915,
Aged Twenty.

PREFACE

A novel about Paris that is not about the war requires even now, I am told, some word of explanation. Mine is brief:

This story was conceived before the war began. I came to the task of putting it into its final shape after nine months passed between the Western Front and a Paris war-torn and war-darkened, both physically and spiritually. Yet, though I had found the old familiar places, and the ever young and ever familiar people, wounded and sad, I did not long have to seek for the Parisian bravery in pain and the Parisian smile shining, rainbowlike, through the tears. Nothing can conquer France and nothing can lastingly hurt Paris. They are, as a famous wit said of our own so different Boston, a state of mind. Had the German succeeded in the Autumn of 1914 or the Spring of 1918, France would have remained, and Paris. What used to happen in the Land of Love and the City of Lights will happen there again and be always happening, so that my story is at once a retrospect and a prophecy.

Realizing these things, I have found it a pleasure to make this book. A book without problems and without horrors, its sole purpose is to give to the reader some of that pleasure which went to its making. Wars come and go; but for every man the Door Opposite stands open beside the Seine, the hurdy-gurdy plays “Annie Laurie” in the Street of the Valley of Grace and—a Lady of the Rose is waiting.

R. W. K.

Columbia, Penna.,
Christmas Day, 1918.

CONTENTS

OUT OF ASHES

Paris as I knew her
In the days ere this—
Paris, when I threw her
Many a careless kiss—
Paris of my pleasure,
Bright of eye and brow,
Town of squandered treasure—
Where’s that Paris now?

Song had shunned her traces,
Care was on her track:
All my young girls’ faces
Pale in folds of black!
Half the hearts were broken,
All the mirth was fled;
Scarce a vow was spoken,
Save above the dead....

Oh, but there’s a spirit
Sorrow cannot kill!
Even now I hear it
Swear the great “I Will!”
Paris, at your portal
Taps the ancient truth,
Laughing and immortal:
Never-conquered Youth!
R. W. K.

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THE AZURE ROSE

CHAPTER I
IN WHICH, IF NOT LOVE, AT LEAST ANGER, LAUGHS AT LOCKSMITHS

Je ne connais point la nature des anges, parce que je ne suis qu’homme; il n’y a que les théologiens qui la connaissent.—Voltaire: Dictionnaire Philosophique.

He did not know why he headed toward his own room—it could hold nothing that he guessed of to welcome him, except further tokens of the dejection and misery he carried in his heart—but thither he went, and, as he drew nearer, his step quickened. By the time that he entered the rue du Val de Grâce, he was moving at something close upon a run.

He hurried up the rising stairs and into the dark hall, and, as he did so, was possessed by the sense that somebody had as hurriedly ascended just ahead of him. The door to his room was never locked, and now he flung it wide.

The last of the afterglow had all but faded from the sky, and only the faintest twilight, a rose-pink twilight, came into the studio. Rose-pink: he thought of that at once and thought, too, that these sky-roses had a sweeter scent than the roses of earth, for there was about this once-familiar place an odor more delicate and tender than any he had ever known before. It was dim, illusive; it was like a musical poem in an unknown tongue, and yet, unlike French scents and hot-house flowers, it subtly suggested open spaces and mountain-peaks. Cartaret had a quick vision of sunlight upon snow-crests. He wondered how such a perfume could find its way through the narrow, dirty streets of the Latin Quarter and into his poor room.

And then, in the dim light, he saw a figure standing there.

Cartaret stopped short.

An hour ago he had left the place empty. Now, when he so wanted solitude, it had been invaded. There was an intruder. It was—— yes, the Lord have mercy on him, it was a girl!

“Who’s there?” demanded Cartaret.

He was so startled that he asked the question in English and with his native American accent. The next moment, he was more startled when the strange girl answered him in English, though an English oddly precise.

“It is I,” she said.

“It is I,” was what she said first, and, as she said it, Cartaret noted that her voice was a wonderfully soft contralto. What she next said was uttered as he further discovered himself to her by an involuntary movement that brought him within the rear window’s shaft of afterglow. It was:

“What are you doing here?”

She spoke with patent amazement, and there were, between the words, four perceptible pauses.

What was he doing there? What was she? What light there was came from behind her: he could not at all make out her features; he had only her voice to go by—only her voice and her manner of regal possession—and with neither was he acquainted. Good Heavens, hadn’t he a right to come unannounced into the one place in Paris that he might still call his own? It surely was his own. He looked distractedly about him.

“I thought,” said Cartaret, “that this was my room.”

His glance, bewildered as it was, nevertheless assured him that he had not been mistaken. His accustomed eye detected everything that the twilight might hide from the eye of a stranger.

Here was all his student-litter. Here were the good photographs of good pictures, bought second-hand; the bad copies of good pictures, made by Cartaret himself during long mornings in the Louvre, where impudent tourists, staring at his work, jolted his elbow and craned their necks beside his cheek; there were the plaster-casts on brackets—casts of antiques more mutilated than the antiques themselves; and here, too, were the rows of lost endeavors in the shape of discarded canvases banked on the floor along the walls and sometimes jutting far out into the room. Two or three chairs were scattered about, one with a broken leg—he remembered the party at which it was broken; across from the fire-place was Cartaret’s bed that a tarnished Oriental cover (made in Lyons) converted by day into a divan; and close beside the rear window, flanked by the table on which he mixed his colors, stood, almost at the elbow of this imperious intruder, Cartaret’s own easel with a virgin canvas in position, waiting to receive the successor to that picture which he had sold for a song a few hours ago.

What was he doing here, indeed! He liked that.

And she was still at it:

“How dare you think so?” she persisted.

The slight pauses between her words lent them more weight than, even in his ears, they otherwise would have possessed. She came a step nearer, and Cartaret saw that she was breathing quickly and that the bit of lace above her heart rose and fell irregularly.

“How dare you?” she repeated.

She was close enough now for him to decide that she was quite the most striking girl he had ever seen. Her figure, without a touch of exaggeration, was full and yet lithe: it moved with the grace of the athlete. Her skin was rosy and white—the rose of health and the clear cream of sane living.

It was, however, her manner that had led Cartaret first to doubt his own senses, and then to doubt hers. This girl spoke like a queen resenting a next-to-impossible familiarity. He had half a mind to leave the place and allow her to discover her own mistake, the nature of which—his room ran the length of the old house and half its width, being separated from a similar room by only a dark and draughty hallway—now suddenly revealed itself to him. He seriously considered leaving her alone to the advent of her humiliation.

Then he looked at her again. Her hair, in sharp contrast to the tint of her face, was a shining blue-black; though her features were almost classical in their regularity, her mouth was generous and sensitive, and, under even black brows and through long, curling lashes, her eyes shone frank and blue. Cartaret decided to remain.

“You are an artist?” he inquired.

“Leave this room!” She stamped a little foot. “Leave this room instantly!”

Cartaret stooped to one of the canvases that were piled against the wall nearest him. He turned its face to her.

“And this is some of your work?” he asked.

He had meant to be only light and amusing, but when he saw the effect of his action, he cursed himself for a heavy-witted fool: the girl glanced first at the picture and then wildly about her. She had at last realized her mistake.

“Oh!” she cried. Her delicate hands went to her face. “I had just come in and I thought—I thought it was my room!”

He registered a memorandum to kick himself as soon as she had gone. He moved awkwardly forward, still between her and the door.

“It’s all right,” he said. “Everybody drops in here at one time or another, and I never lock my door.”

“But you do not understand!” She was still speaking through her unjeweled fingers: “Sir, we moved into this house only this morning. I went out for the first time ten minutes since. My maid did not want me to go, but I would do it. Our room—I understand now that our room is the other one: the one across the hallway. But I came back hurriedly, a little frightened by the streets, and I turned—Oh-h!” she ended, “I must go—I must go immediately!”

She dropped her hands and darted forward, turning to her right. Cartaret lost his head: he turned to his right. Each saw the mistake and sought the left; then darted to the right again.

“Let me pass!” commanded the girl.

Cartaret, inwardly condemning his stupidity, suddenly backed. He backed into the half open door; it shut behind him with a sharp snap.

“I’m not dancing,” he said. “I know it looks like it, but I’m not—truly.”

“Then stand aside and let me pass.”

He stood aside.

“Certainly,” said he; “that is what I was trying to do.”

With her head high, she walked by him to the door and turned the knob: the door would not open.

Than the scorn that she turned upon him then, he had never seen anything more magnificent—or more beautiful. “What is this?” she asked.

He did not know.

“It’s probably stuck,” he suggested. She was beginning to terrify him. “If you’ll allow me——”

He bent to the knob, his hand just brushing hers, which was quickly withdrawn. He pulled: the door would not give. He took the knob in both hands and raised it: no success. He bore all his weight down upon the knob: the door remained shut.

He looked up at her attempting the smile of apology, but her eyes, as soon as they encountered his, were raised to a calm regard of the panel above his head. Cartaret’s gaze returned to the door and, presently, encountered the old deadlatch that antedated his tenancy and that he had never once used: it was a deadlatch of a type antiquated even in the Latin Quarter, tough and enduring; years ago it had been pushed back and held open by a small catch; the knob whereby it was originally worked from inside the room had been broken off; and now the catch had slipped, the spring-bolt had shot home and, the knob being broken, the girl and Cartaret were as much prisoners in the room as if the lock had been on the other side of the door.

The American broke into a nervous laugh.

“What now?” asked the girl, her eyes hard.

“We’re caught,” said Cartaret.

She could only repeat the word:

“Caught?”

“Yes. I’m sorry. It was my stupidity; I suppose I jolted the door rather hard when I bumped into it, doing that tango just now. Anyhow, this old lock’s sprung into action and we’re fastened in.”

The girl looked at him sharply. A difficult red climbed her cheeks.

“Open that door,” she ordered.

“But I can’t—not right away. I’ll have to try to——”

“Open that door instantly.”

“But I tell you I can’t. Don’t you see?” He pointed to the offending deadlatch. In embarrassed sentences, he explained the situation.

She did not appear to listen. She had the air of one who has prejudged a case.

“You are trying to keep me in this room,” she said.

Her tone was steady, and her eyes were brave; but it was evident that she quite believed her statement.

Cartaret colored in his turn.

“Nonsense,” said he.

“Then open the door.”

“I tell you the lock has slipped.”

“If that is so, use your key.”

“I haven’t any key,” protested Cartaret. “And even if I had——”

“You have no key to your own room?” She raised her eyes scornfully. “I understood you to say very positively that I was trespassing in your room.”

“Great Scott!” cried Cartaret. “Of course it’s my room. You make me wish it wasn’t, but it is. It is my room, but you can see for yourself there’s no keyhole to the confounded lock on this side of the door, and never was. Look here.” Again he pointed to the deadlatch: “If you’ll only come a little nearer and look——”

“Thank you,” she said. “I shall remain where I am.” She had put her hand among the lace over her breast; now the hand, withdrawn, held an unsheathed knife. “And if you come one step nearer to me,” she calmly concluded, “I will kill you.”

It was the sole dream-touch needed to perfect his sense of the entire episode’s unreality. In his poor room, a princess that he had never seen before—that, surely, he was not seeing now!—some royal figure out of a lost Hellenic tragedy; her breast visibly cumbered by the heavy air of modern Paris, her wonderful eyes burning with the cold fire of resolution, she told him that she would kill him if he approached her. And she would do it; she would kill him with less compunction than she would feel in crushing an offending moth!

Cartaret had instinctively jumped at the first flash of the weapon. Now his laughter returned. A vision could not be impeded by a sprung lock.

“But you’re not here,” he said.

She did not shift by so much as a hairbreadth her position of defense, yet, ever so slightly, her eyes widened.

“And I’m not, either,” he persisted. “Don’t you see? Things like this don’t happen. One of us is asleep and dreaming—and I must be that one.”

Plainly she did not follow him, but his laughter had been so boyishly innocent as to make her patently doubtful of her own assumption. He crowded that advantage.

“Honestly,” he said, “I didn’t mean any harm——”

“You at least place yourself in a strange position,” the girl interrupted, though the hand that held the knife was lowered to her side.

“But if you really doubt me,” he continued, “and don’t want to wait until I pick this lock, let me call from the window and get somebody in the street to send up the concierge.”

“The street?” She evidently did not like this idea. “No, not the street. Why do you not ring for him?”

Cartaret’s gesture included the four walls of the room:

“There’s no bell.”

Still a little suspicious of him, her blue eyes scanned the room to confirm his statement.

“Then why not call him from the window in the back?”

“Because his quarters are at the front of the house, and he wouldn’t hear.”

“Would no one hear?”

“There’s nobody in the garden at this time of day. You had really better let me call to the first person that goes along the street. Somebody is always going along, you know.”

He made two strides toward the front window.

“Come back!”

He turned to find her with her face scarlet. She had raised the knife.

“Break the lock,” she said.

“But that will take time.”

“Break the lock.”

“All right; only why don’t you want me to call for help?”

“And humiliate me still further?” One small foot, cased in an absurdly light patent-leather slipper with a flashing buckle, tapped the floor angrily. “I have been foolish, and your folly has made me more foolish, but I will not have it known to all the world how foolish I have been. Break the lock at once—now—immediately.”

Cartaret divined that this was eminently a time for silence: she was alive, she was real, and she was human. He opened a drawer in the table, dived under the divan, plunged behind a curtain in one corner, and at last found a shaky hammer and a nicked chisel with which he returned to the locked door.

“I’m not much of a carpenter,” he said, by way of preparatory apology.

The girl said nothing.

He was angry at himself for having appeared to such heavy disadvantage. Consequently, he was unsteady. His first blow missed. His strength turned to mere violence, and he showered futile blows upon the butt of the chisel. Then a misdirected blow hit the thumb of his left hand. He swore softly and, having sworn, heard her laugh.

He looked up: the knife had disappeared. He was pleased at the change to merriment that her face discovered; but, as he looked, he realized that her mirth was launched against his efforts, and he was pleased no longer. His rage directed itself from him to her.

“I’m sorry you don’t approve,” he said sulkily. “For my part, I am quite willing to stop, I assure you.”

If an imperious person may be said to have tossed her head, then it should here be said that this imperious person now tossed hers.

“Now, shall I go to the window and yell into the street?” he savagely inquired.

Her high-tilted chin, her crimsoned cheeks and the studiously managed lack of expression in her eyes were proofs that she had heard him. Nevertheless, she persisted in her disregard of his suggestion.

Cartaret’s mood became more ugly. He resolved to make her pay attention.

“I’ll do it,” he said, and turned away from the door.

That brought the answer. She looked at him in angry horror.

“And make us the laughing-stock of the neighborhood?” she cried. “Is it not enough that you have shut me in here, that you have insulted me, that——”

“Insulted you?” He stood with the hammer in one hand and the chisel in the other, a rather unromantic figure of protest. “I never did anything of the sort.”

He made a flourish and dropped the hammer. When he picked it up, he saw that she stood there, looking over his bent head, with eyes sternly kept serene; but he saw also that her cheeks remained aglow and that her breath came short.

“I never did anything of the sort,” he went on. “How could I?”

“How could you?” She clenched her hands.

“I don’t mean that.” He could have bitten out his tongue. He floundered in a marsh of confusion. “I mean—I mean—Oh, I don’t know what I mean, except that I beg you to believe I am incapable of the impudence you charge! I came in here and found the most beautiful woman——”

She recoiled.

“You speak so to me?”

It was out: he had to go ahead now. He did not at all recognize himself: this was not American; it was wholly Gallic.

“I can’t help it,” he said, “you are.”

“Go to work,” said the girl.

“But I want you to understand——”

Two tears, twin diamonds of mortification, shone in her blue eyes.

“You have humiliated me, and mortified me, and insulted me!” she persisted. Her white throat swallowed the chagrin, and anger returned to take its place. “If you are what you pretend to be, you will go back to your work of opening that door. If I were the strong man that you are, I should have broken it open long ago.”

She had a handsome ferocity. Cartaret put one broad shoulder to the door and both hands to the knob. There was a tremendous wrenching and splitting: the door swung open. He turned and bowed.

“It’s open,” he said.

To his amazement, her mood had entirely changed. Whether his action had served as proof of his declared sincerity, or whether her brief reflection on his words had itself served him this good turn, he could not guess; but he saw now that her eyes had softened and that her underlip quivered.

“Good afternoon,” said Cartaret.

“Good-by,” said she.

She moved toward the door, then stopped.

“I hope that you will pardon me,” she said, and she spoke as if she were not accustomed to asking pardon. “I have been too quick and very foolish. You must know that I am new to Paris—new to France—new to cities—and that I have heard strange stories of Parisians and of the men of the large towns.”

Cartaret was more than mollified, but he took a grip upon his emotions and resolved to pursue this advantage.

“At least,” he said, “you should have seen that I was your own sort.”

“My own—my own sort?” She did not seem to comprehend.

“Well, of your own class, then.” This girl had an impish faculty for making him say things that sounded priggish: “You should have seen I was of your own class.”

Again her eyes widened. Then she tossed her head and laughed a little silvery laugh.

He fancied the laugh disdainful, and thought so the more when she seemed to detect his suspicion and tried to allay it by an alteration of tone.

“I mean exactly that,” he said.

She bit her red lip, and Cartaret noted that her teeth were even and white.

“Forgive me,” she begged.

She put out her hand so frankly that he would have forgiven her anything. He took the hand and, as it nestled softer than any satin in his, he felt his heart hammer in his breast.

“Forgive me,” she was repeating.

“I hope you’ll forgive me,” he muttered. “At any rate, you can’t forget me: you’ll have to remember me as the greatest boor you ever met.”

She shook her head.

“It was I that was foolish.”

“Oh, but it wasn’t! I——”

He stopped, for her eyes had fallen from his and rested on their clasped hands. He released her instantly.

“Good-by,” she said again.

“Good—— But surely I’m to see you once in a while!”

“I do not know.”

“Why, we’re neighbors! You can’t mean that you won’t let me——”

“I do not know,” she said. “Good-by.”

She went out, drawing-to the shattered door behind her.

Cartaret leaned against the panel and listened shamelessly.

He heard her cross the hall and open the door to the opposite room; he heard her suspiciously greeted by another voice—a voice that he gladly recognized as feminine—and in a language that was wholly unfamiliar to him: a language that sounded somehow Oriental. Then he heard the other door shut, and he turned to the comfortless gloom of his own quarters.

He sat down on the bed. He had forgotten a riotous dinner that was to have been his final Parisian folly, forgotten his poverty, forgotten his day of disappointment and his desire to go back to Ohio and the law. He remembered only the events of the last quarter-hour and the girl that had made them what they were.

As he sat there, there seemed to come again into the silent room the perfume he had noticed when he returned. It seemed to float in on the twilight, still dimly pink behind the roofs of the gray houses along the Boul’ Miche’: subtle, haunting, an odor more delicate and tender than any he had ever known before.

He raised his head. He saw something white lying on the floor—lying where, a few moments since, he had stood. He went forward and picked it up.

It was a flower like a rose—a white rose—but unlike any rose of which Cartaret had any knowledge. It was small, but perfect, its pure petals gathered tight against its heart, and from its heart came the perfume that had seemed to him like a musical poem in an unknown tongue.

For a second time Cartaret had that quick vision of the sunlight upon snow-crests and the virgin sheen of unattainable mountain tops....

CHAPTER II
PROVIDING THE GENTLE READER WITH A CARD OF ADMISSION TO THE NEST OF THE TWO DOVES

Dans ces questions de crédit, il faut toujours frapper l’imagination. L’idée de génie, c’est de prendre dans la poche des gens l’argent qui n’y est pas encore.—Zola: L’Argent.

Until just before the appearance of Charlie Cartaret’s rosy vision, this had been a day of darkness and wet. Rain—a dull, hopeless, February rain—fell with implacable monotony. It descended in fine spray, as if too lazy to hurry, yet too spiteful to stop. It made all Paris miserable; but, as is the way with Parisian rains, it was a great deal wetter on the Left Bank of the Seine than on the Right.

No rain—not even in those happy times before the great war—ever washed the Left Bank clean, and this one only made it a marsh. A curtain of fog fell sheer between the Isle de la Cité and the Quai des Augustins; the twin towers of St. Sulpice staggered up into a pall of fog and were lost in it. The gray houses hunched their shoulders, lowered their heads, drew their mansard hats and gabled caps over their noses and stood like rows of patient horses at a cabstand under the gray downpour. Now and again a real cab scuttled along the streets, its skinny beast clop-clopping over the wooden paving, or slipping among the cobbled ways, its driver hidden under a mountainous pile of woolen great-coat and rubber cape. Even the taxis lacked the proud air with which they habitually splash pedestrians, and such pedestrians as business forced upon the early afternoon thoroughfares went with heads bowed like the houses’ and umbrellas leveled like flying-jibs.

In front of the little Café Des Deux Colombes, the two marble-topped tables which occupied its scant frontage on the rue Jacob were deserted by all save their four iron-backed chairs with wet seats and their twin water-bottles into which, with mathematical precision, water dropped from a pair of holes in the sagging canvas overhead. Inside, however, there were lighted gas-jets, the proprietor and the proprietor’s wife—presumably the pair of doves for whom the Café was named—and a man that was trying to look like a customer.

Gaston François Louis Pasbeaucoup had an apron tied about his middle, and, standing before the intended patron’s table, leaned what weight he had—it was not much—upon his finger-tips. His mustache was fierce enough to grace the upper lip of a deputy from the Bouches-du-Rhône and generous enough to spare many a contribution to the plat-du-jour; but his mustache was the only large thing about him—always excepting Madame his wife, who was ever somewhere about him and who was just now, two hundred and twenty pounds of evidence to the good food of the Deux Colombes, stuffed into a wire cage at one end of the bar, and bulging out of it, her eyebrows meeting over her pug-nose and the heap of hair leaping from her head nearly to the ceiling, while her lips and fingers were busy adding the bills from déjeuner.

“It would greatly pleasure me to accommodate monsieur,” Pasbeaucoup was whispering, “but monsieur must know that already——”

The sentence ended in a deprecating glance over the speaker’s shoulder in the general direction of mighty Madame.

“Already? Already what then?” demanded the intending customer.

He was lounging on the wall-seat behind his table, and he had an aristocratic air surprisingly at variance with his garments. His black jacket shone too highly at the elbows, and its short sleeves betrayed an unnecessary length of red wrist. His black boots gasped for repair; a soft black hat, pushed to the back of his black hair, still dripped from an unprotected voyage along the rainy street, and his neckcloth, which was also long and soft and black, showed a spot or two not put there by its makers. These were patently matters beyond their owner’s command and beneath the dignity of his attention. Against them one was compelled to set a manner truly lofty, which was enhanced by a pair of burning, deep-placed eyes, a thin white face and, sprouting from either side of his lower jaw, near the chin, two wisps of ebon whisker. He frowned majestically, and he smoked a caporal cigarette as if it were a Havana cigar.

“Already what?” he loudly repeated. “If it is possible! I patronize your cabbage of a café for five years, and now you put me off with your alreadys!”

Pasbeaucoup, his fingers still resting on the table, danced in embarrassment and rolled his eyes in a manner that plainly enough warned monsieur not to let his voice reach the caged lady.

“I was but about to say that monsieur already owes us the trifling sum of——”

“Sixty francs, twenty-five!”

The tone that announced these fateful numerals was so tremendous a contralto as to be really bass. It came from the wire cage and belonged to Madame.

Pasbeaucoup sank into the nearest chair. He spread out his hands in a gesture that eloquently said:

“Now you’ve done it! I can’t shield you any longer!”

The debtor, albeit he was still a young man, did not appear unduly impressed. The table was across his knees, but he rose as far as it would permit and removed his hat with a flourish that sent a spray of water directly over Madame’s monument of hair. Disregarding the blatant fact that she was quite the most remarkable feature of the room, he vowed that he had not observed her upon entering, was desolated because of his oversight and ravished now to have the pleasure of once more beholding her in all her accustomed grace and charm.

Madame shrugged her shoulders higher than the walls of the cage.

“Sixty francs, twenty-five,” she said, without looking up from her task.

Ah, yes: his little account. Monsieur recalled that: there was a little account; but, so truly as his name was Seraphin and his passion Art, what a marvelous head Madame had for figures. It was of an exactitude magnificent!

When he paused, Madame said:

“Sixty francs, twenty-five.”

“But surely, Madame——” Seraphin Dieudonné was politely amazed; he did not desire to credit her with an impoliteness, and yet she seemed to imply that, unless he paid this absurdly little sum, there might be some delay in serving him in this so excellent establishment.

“C’est ça,” said Madame. “The delay will be entire.”

“Incomprehensible!” Seraphin put a bony hand to his heart. “Do you not know—all the world of the Quartier knows—that I have, Madame, but three days’ work more upon my magnum opus—a week at the utmost—and that then it can sell for not a sou less than fifteen thousand francs?”

Madame’s face never changed expression when she talked; it always seemed set at the only angle that would balance her monument of hair. She now said:

“What all the world of the Quartier knows is that your last magnum opus you sold to that simpleton Fourget in the rue St. André des Arts; that even from him you could squeeze but a hundred francs for it; and that he has not yet been able to find a customer.”

At first Seraphin seemed slow to credit the scorn that Madame was at such pains to reveal. He made one valiant effort to overlook it, and failed; then he made an effort no less valiant to meet her with the ridiculous majesty in which he habitually draped himself. It was as if, unable to make her believe in him, he at least wanted her to believe that his long struggle with poverty and an indifferent public had served only to increase his confidence in his own genius and to rear between him and the world a wall through which the arrows of the scornful could hardly pass. But this attempt succeeded no more than its predecessor: as he half stood, half bent before this landlady of a fifth-rate café, a tardy pink crept up his white face and painted the skin over his cheek-bones; his eyelids fluttered, and his mouth worked. The man was hungry.

“Madeleine!” whispered Pasbeaucoup, compassion for the debtor almost overcoming fear of the wife.

Seraphin wet his lips.

“Madame——” he began.

“Sixty francs, twenty-five,” said Madame. “Ca y est!”

As she said it, the door of the Deux Colombes opened and another patron, at once evidently a more welcome patron, presented himself. He was a plump little man with hands that were thinly at contrast with the rest of him. He was fairly well dressed, but far better fed, and so contented with his lot as to have no eye for the evident lot of Seraphin. He was Maurice Houdon, who had decided some day to be a great composer and who meanwhile overcharged a few English and American pupils for lessons on the piano and borrowed money from any that would trust him. He stormed Dieudonné, leaned over the intervening table and embraced him.

“My dear friend!” he cried, his arms outflung, his fingers rattling rapid arpeggios upon invisible pianos. “You are indeed well found. I have news—such news!” He thrust back his head and warbled a laugh worthy of the mad-scene in Lucia. “Listen well.” Again he embraced the unresisting Seraphin. “This night we dine here; we make a collation—a symposium: we feed both our bodies and our souls. I shall sit at the head of the table in the little room on the first floor, and you will sit at the foot. Armand Garnier will read his new poem; Devignes will sing my latest song; Philippe Varachon and you will discourse on your arts; and I—perhaps I shall let you persuade me to play the fugue that I go to write for the death of the President: it is all but ready against the day that a president chooses to die.”

But Seraphin’s thoughts were fixed on the food for the body.

“You make no jest with me, Maurice?”

“Jest with you? I jest with you? No, my friend. I do not jest when I invite a guest to dine with me.”

“I comprehend,” said Dieudonné; “but who is to be the host?”

At that question, Pasbeaucoup rose from his chair, and Madame, his wife, tried to thrust her nose, which was too short to reach, through the bars of her cage. The composer struck a chord on his breast and bowed.

“True: the host,” said he. “I had forgotten. I have found a veritable patron of my art. He has had the room above mine for two years, and I did not once before suspect him. He is an American of the United States.”

Madame’s contralto shook her prison bars:

“There is no American that can appreciate art.”

“True, Madame,” admitted Houdon, bowing profoundly; “there is no American that can appreciate art, and there is no American millionaire that can help patronizing it.”

“Eh, he is a millionaire, then, this American?” demanded Madame, audibly mollified.

“He has that honor.”

“And his name?”—Madame wanted to make a memorandum of that name.

Houdon struck another chord. It was as if he were sounding a fanfare for the entrance of his hero.

“Charles Cartaret.” He pronounced the first name in the French fashion and the second name “Cartarette.”

Seraphin’s reply to this announcement rather spoiled its effect. He laughed, and his laughter was high and mocking.

“Cartaret!” he cried. “Charlie Cartaret! But I know him well.”

“Eh?”—The composer was reproachful—“And you never presented him to me?”

“It never happened that you were by.”

“My faith! Why should I be? Am I not Houdon? You should have brought him to me. Is it that you at the same time consider yourself my friend and do not bring to me your millionaire?”

Seraphin’s laughter waxed.

“But he is not my millionaire: he is your millionaire only. I know well that he is as poor as we are.”

The musician’s imaginary melody ceased: one could almost hear it cease. He gazed at Seraphin as he might have gazed at a madman.

“But that room rents for a hundred francs a month!”

“He is in debt for it.”

“And his name is that of a rich American well known.”

“An uncle who does not like him.”

“And he has offered to provide this collation.”

Seraphin shrugged.

“M. Cartaret’s credit,” said he, with a glance at Madame, “seems to be better than mine. I tell you he is only a young art-student, enough genteel, and the relation of a man enough rich, but for himself—poof!—he is one of us.”

CHAPTER III
IN WHICH A FOOL AND HIS MONEY ARE SOON PARTED

Money’s the still sweet-singing nightingale.—Herrick: Hesperides.

Seraphin Dieudonné told the truth: at that moment Charlie Cartaret—for all this, remember, preceded the coming of the Vision—at that moment Cartaret was seated in his room in the rue du Val-de-Grâce, wondering how he was to find his next month’s rent. His trouble was that he had just sold a picture, for the first time in his life, and, having sold it, he had rashly engaged to celebrate that good fortune by a feast which would leave him with only enough to buy meals for the ensuing three weeks.

He was a rather fine-looking, upstanding young fellow of a type essentially American. In the days, not long distant, when the goal at the other end of the gridiron had been the only goal of his ambition, he had put hard muscles on his hardy frame; later he had learned to shoot in Arizona; and he even now would have looked more at home along Broadway or Halsted Street than he did in the rue St. Jacques or the Boulevard St. Michel. He was tow-haired and brown-eyed and clean-shaven; he was generally hopeful, which is another way of saying that he was still upon the flowered slope of twenty-five.

Cartaret had inherited his excellent constitution, but his family all suffered from one disease: the disease of too much money on the wrong side of the house. When oil was found in Ohio, it was found in land belonging to his father’s brother, but Charlie’s father remained a poor lawyer to the end of his days. Uncle Jack had children of his own and a deserved reputation for holding on to his pennies. He sent his niece to a finishing-school, where she could be properly prepared for that state of life to which it had not pleased Heaven to call her, and he sent his nephew to college. When the former child was finished, he found her a place as companion to an ancient widow in Toledo and dismissed her from his thoughts; when Charlie was through with college—which is to say, when the faculty was through with him for endeavoring to plant a fraternity in a plot of academic soil that forbade the seed of Greek-letter societies—he asked him what he intended to do now—and asked it in a tone that plainly meant:

“What further disgrace are you planning to bring upon our name?”

Charlie replied that he wanted to be an artist.

“I might have guessed it,” said his uncle. “How long’ll it take?”

Young Cartaret, knowing something about art, had not the slightest idea.

“Well,” said the by-product of petroleum, “if you’ve got to be an artist, be one as far away from New York as you can. They say Paris is the best place to learn the business.”

“It is one of the best places,” said Charlie.

The elder Cartaret wrote a check.

“Take a boat to-morrow,” he ordered. “I’ll pay your board and tuition for two years: that’s time enough to learn any business. After two years you’ll have to make out for yourself.”

So Charlie had worked hard for two years. That period ended a week ago, and his uncle’s checks ended with it. He had stayed on and hoped. To-day he had carried a picture through the rain to Seraphin’s benefactor, the dealer Fourget; and the soft-hearted Fourget had bought it. Cartaret, on his return, met Houdon in the lower hall and before the American was well aware of it, he was pledged to the feast of which Maurice was bragging to Dieudonné.

Charlie dug into his pocket and fished out all that was in it: a matter of two hundred and ten francs. He counted it twice over.

“No use,” he said. “I can’t make it any larger. I wonder if I ought to take a smaller room.”

Certainly there was more room here than he wanted, but he had grown to love the place: even then, when he had still to see it in the rose-pink twilight of romance, in the afterglow that was a dawn—even then, before the apparition of the strange Lady—he loved it as his sort of man must love the scenes of those struggles which have left him poor. Its front windows opened upon the street full of student-life and gossip, its rear windows looked on a little garden that was pretty with the concierge’s flowers all Summer long and merry with the laughter of the concierge’s children on every fair day the whole year round. The light was good enough, the location excellent; the service was no worse than the service in any similar house in Paris.

“But I have been a fool,” said Cartaret.

He looked again at his money, and then he looked again about the room. The difference between a fool and a mere dilettante in folly is this: that the latter knows his folly as he indulges it, whereas the former recognizes it, if ever, only too late.

“If I’d been able to study for only one year more,” he said.

It was the wail of retrospection that, sooner or later, every man, each in his own way and according to his chances and his character for seizing them, is bound to utter. It was what we all say and what, in saying, we each think unique. Happy he that says it, and means it, in time to profit!

“Yes,” said Cartaret, “I’ve been a fool. But I won’t be a quitter,” he added. “I’ll go and order that dinner.”

Thus Charles Cartaret in the afternoon.

He had put on a battered, broad-brimmed hat of soft black felt, which was picturesquely out of place above his American features, and a still more battered English rain-coat, which did not at all belong with the hat, and, thus fortified against the rain, he hurried into the hall. As he closed the door of his studio behind him, he fancied that he heard a sound from the room across from his own, and so stood listening, his hand upon the knob.

“That’s queer,” he reflected. “I thought that room was still to let.”

He listened a moment longer, but the sound, if sound there had been, was not repeated, so he pulled his hat-brim over his eyes and descended to the street.

The rain had lessened, but the fog held on, and the thoroughfares were wet and dismal. Cartaret cut down the rue du Val-de-Grâce to the Avenue de Luxembourg and through the gardens with their dripping statues and around the museum, whence he crossed to the sheltered way between those bookstalls that cling like ivy to the walls of the Odéon, and so, by the steep descent of the rue de Tournon and the rue de Seine, came to the rue Jacob and the Café Des Deux Colombes.

Seraphin and Maurice were still there. They received him as their separate natures dictated, the former with a restrained dignity, the latter with the dignity of a monarch so secure of his title that he can afford to condescend to an air of democracy. Seraphin bowed; Maurice embraced and, embracing, tapped the diatonic scale along Cartaret’s vertebræ. Pasbeaucoup, in trembling obedience to a cryptic nod from the caged Madame, hovered in the background.

“I have come,” said Cartaret, whose French was the easy and inaccurate French of the American art-student, “to order that dinner.” He half turned to Pasbeaucoup, but Houdon was before him.

“It is done,” announced the musician, as if announcing a favor performed. “I have relieved you of that tedium. We are to begin with an hors-d’oeuvre of anchovies and——”

Madame had again nodded, this time less cryptically and more violently, at her husband, and Pasbeaucoup, between twin terrors, timidly suggested:

“Monsieur Cartaret comprehends that it is only because of the so high cost of necessities that it is necessary for us to request——”

He stopped there, but the voice from the cage boomed courageously:

“The payment in advance!”

“A custom of the establishment,” explained Houdon grandly, but shooting a venomous glance in the direction of Madame.

Seraphin came quietly from behind his table and, slipping a thin arm through Cartaret’s, drew him, to the speechless amazement of the other participants in this scene, toward the farthest corner of the café.

“My friend,” he whispered, “you must not do it.”

“Eh?” said Cartaret. “Why not? It’s a queer thing to be asked, but why shouldn’t I do it?”

Seraphin hesitated. Then, regaining the conquest over self, he put his lips so close to the American’s ear that the Frenchman’s wagging wisps of whisker tickled his auditor’s cheek.

“This Houdon is but a pleasant coquin,” he confided. “He will suck from you the last sou’s worth of your blood.”

Cartaret smiled grimly.

“He won’t get a fortune by it,” he said.

“That is why I do not wish him to do it: I know well that you cannot afford these little dissipations. I do not wish to see my friend swindled by false friendship. Houdon is a good boy, but, Name of a Name, he has the conscience of a pig!”

“All right,” said Cartaret suddenly, for Seraphin was appealing to a sense of economy still fresh enough to be sensitive, “since he’s ordered the dinner, we’ll let him pay for it.”

“Alas,” declared Dieudonné, sadly shaking his long hair, “poor Maurice has not the money.”

“Oh!”—A gleam of gratitude lighted Cartaret’s blue eyes—“Then you are proposing that you do it?”

“My friend,” inquired Seraphin, flinging out his arms as a man flings out his arms to invite a search of his pockets, “you know me: how can I?”

Cartaret blushed at his ineptitude. He knew Dieudonné well enough to have been aware of his poverty and liked him well enough to be tender toward it. “But,” he nevertheless pardonably inquired, “if that’s the way the thing stands, who’s to pay? One of the other guests?”

“We are all of the same financial ability.”

“Then I don’t see——”

“Nor do I. And”—Seraphin’s high resolution clattered suddenly about his ears—“after all, the dinner has been ordered, and I am very hungry. My friend,” he concluded with a happy return of his dignity, “at least I have done you this service: you will buy the dinner, but you will not both buy it and be deceived.”

Cartaret turned, with a smile no longer grim, to the others.

“Seraphin,” he said, “has persuaded me. Madame, l’addition, if you please.”

Pasbeaucoup trotted to the cage, bringing back to Cartaret the long slip of paper that Madame had ready for him. Cartaret glanced at only the total and, though he flushed a little, paid without comment.

“And now,” suggested Houdon, “now let us play a little game of dominoes.”

Seraphin, from the musician’s shoulder, frowned hard at Cartaret, but Cartaret was in no mood to heed the warning. He was angry at himself for his extravagance and decided that, having been such a fool as to fling away a great deal of his money, he might now as well be a greater fool and fling it all away. Besides, he might be able to win from Houdon, and, even if Houdon could not pay, there would be the satisfaction of revenge. So he sat down at one of the marble-topped tables and began, with a great clatter, to shuffle the dominoes that obsequious Pasbeaucoup hurriedly fetched. Within two hours, Seraphin was head over ears in the musician’s debt, and the American was paying into Houdon’s palm all but about ten francs of the money that he had so recently earned. He rose smilingly.

“You do not go?” inquired Houdon.

Cartaret nodded.

“But the dinner?”

“Don’t you worry; I’ll be back for that—I don’t know when I’ll get another.”

“Then permit me,” Houdon condescended, “to order a bock. For the three of us.” He generously included the hungry Seraphin. “Come, we shall drink to your better fortune next time.”

But Cartaret excused himself. He said that he had an engagement with a dealer, which was not true, and which was understood to be false, and he went into the street.

The last of the rain, unnoticed during Cartaret’s fevered play, had passed, and a red February sun was setting across the Seine, behind the higher ground that lies between L’Etoile and the Place du Trocadero. The river was hidden by the point of land that ends in the Quai D’Orsay, but, as Cartaret crossed the broad rue de Vaugirard, he could see the golden afterglow and, silhouetted against it, the high filaments of the Eiffel Tower.

What an ass he had been, he bitterly reflected, as he passed again through the Luxembourg Gardens, where now the statues glistened in the fading light of the dying afternoon. What a mad ass! If a single stroke of almost pathetically small good luck made such a fool of him, it was as well that his uncle and not his father had come into a fortune.

His thought went back with a new tenderness to his father and to his own and his sister Cora’s early life in that small Ohio town. He had hated the dull routine and narrow conventionality of the place. There the most daring romance of youth had been to walk with the daughter of a neighbor along the shaded streets in the Summer evenings, and to hang over the gate to the front yard of the house in which she lived, tremblingly hinting at a delicious tenderness, which one never dared more adequately to express, until a threatening parental voice called the girl to shelter. His life, since those days, had been more stirring, and sometimes more to be regretted; but he had loved it and thought it absurd sentiment on Cora’s part to insist that their tiny income go to keeping up the little property—the three-story brick house and wide front and back-yard along Main Street—which had been their home. Yet now he felt, and was half ashamed of feeling, a strong desire to go back there, a pull at his heartstrings for a return to all that he was once so anxious to quit forever.

He wondered if it could be possible that he was tired of Paris. He even wondered if it were possible that he could not be a successful artist—he had never wanted to be a rich one—whether the sensible course would not be to go home and study law while there was yet time....

And then——

Then, in the rose-pink twilight, the beginning of the Dream Wonderful: that scent of the roses from the sky; that quick memory of sunlight upon snow-crests; that first revelation of the celestial Lady transfiguring the earthly commonplace of his room!

CHAPTER IV
A DAMSEL IN DISTRESS

... 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.”

Again the ambiguous grunt.

“Exactly,” Cartaret agreed; “the Café Des Deux Colombes, in the rue Jacob, close by the rue Bonaparte. You—you’re quite sure you won’t forget?”

The grunt changed to an ugly chuckle, and, after the chuckle, an ugly voice said:

“Monsieur expects something unusual: he expects an evening visitor?”

“Confound it, no!” snapped Cartaret. He had been wildly hoping that perhaps The Girl might need some aid or direction that evening and might seek it of him. “Not at all,” he pursued, “but you see——”

“How then?” inquired the voice.

Cartaret’s hand went to his pocket and drew forth one of the few franc-pieces that remained there.

“Just, please, remember what I’ve said,” he requested.

In the darkness of the box into which it was extended, his hand was grasped by a larger and rougher hand, and the franc was deftly extracted.

“Merci, monsieur.”

A barely appreciable softening of the tone encouraged Cartaret. He balanced himself from foot to foot and asked:

“Those people—the ones, you understand, that have rented the room opposite mine?”

Refrogné understood but truly.

“Well—in short, who are they, monsieur?”

“Who knows?” asked Refrogné in the darkness. Cartaret could feel him shrug.

“I rather thought you might,” he ventured.

The darkness was silent; a good concierge answers questions, not general statements.

“Where—don’t you know where they come from?”

There was speech once more. Refrogné, it said, neither knew nor cared. In the rue du Val de Grâce people continually came and went—all manner of people from all manner of places—so long as they paid their rent, it was no concern of Refrogné’s. For all the information that he possessed, the two people of whom monsieur inquired might be natives of Cochin-China. Mademoiselle evidently wanted to be an artist, as scores of other young women, and Madame, her guardian and sole companion, evidently wanted Mademoiselle to be nothing at all. There were but two of them, thank God! The younger spoke much French with an accent terrible; the elder understood French, but spoke only some pig of a language that no civilized man could comprehend. That was all that Refrogné had to tell.

Cartaret went on toward the scene of his dinner-party. He wished he did not have to go. On the other hand, he was sure he had thrown Refrogné a franc to no purpose: the Lady of the Rose was little likely to seek him! He found the evening cold and his rain-coat inadequate. He began humming the drinking-song again.

They were singing it outright, in a full chorus, when he entered the little room on the first floor of the Café Des Deux Colombes. The table was already spread, the feast already started. The unventilated room was flooded with light and full of the steam of hot viands.

Maurice Houdon, his red cheeks shining, his black mustache stiffly waxed, sat at the head of the table as he had promised to do, performing the honors with a regal grace and playing imaginary themes with every flourish of address to every guest: a different theme for each. On his right was a vacant place, the sole apparent reference to the host of the evening; on his left, Armand Garnier, the poet, very thin and cadaverous, with long dank locks and tangled beard, his skin waxen, his lantern-jaw emitting no words, but working lustily upon the food. Next to Cartaret’s place bobbed the pear-shaped Devignes, leading the chorus, as became the only professional singer in the company. Across from him was Philippe Varachon, the sculptor, whose nose always reminded Cartaret of an antique and long lost bit of statuary, badly damaged in exhumation; and at the foot Seraphin was seated, the first to note Cartaret’s arrival and the only one to apologize for not having delayed the dinner.

He got up immediately, and his whiskers tickled the American’s cheek with the whisper:

“It was ready to serve, and Madame swore that it would perish. My faith, what would you?”

Pasbeaucoup was darting among the guests, wiping fresh plates with a napkin and his dripping forehead with his bare hand. Cartaret felt certain that the little man would soon confuse the functions of the two.

“Ah-h-h!” cried Houdon. He rose from his place and endeavored to restore order by beating with a fork upon an empty tumbler, as an orchestral conductor taps his baton—at the same time nodding fiercely at Pasbeaucoup to refill the tumbler with red wine. He was the sole member of the company not long known to their host, but he said: “Messieurs, I have the happiness to present to you our distinguished American fellow-student, M. Charles Cartarette. Be seated among us, M. Cartarette,” he graciously added; “pray be seated.”

Cartaret sat down in the place kindly reserved for him, and the interruption of his appearance was so politely forgotten that he wished he had not been such a fool as to make it. The song was resumed. It was not until the salad was served and Pasbeaucoup had retired below-stairs to assist in preparing the coffee, that Houdon turned again to Cartaret and executed what was clearly to be the Cartaret theme.

“We had despaired of your arrival, Monsieur,” said he.

Cartaret said he had observed signs of something of the sort.

“Truly,” nodded Houdon. His tongue rolled a ball of salad into his cheek and out of the track of speech. “Doubtless you had the one living excuse, however.”

“I don’t follow you,” said Cartaret.

Houdon leered. His fingers performed on the table-cloth something that might have been the motif of Isolde.

“I have heard,” said he, “your American proverb that there are but two adequate excuses for tardiness at dinner—death and a lady—and I am charmed, monsieur, to observe that you are altogether alive.”

If Cartaret’s glance indicated that he would like to throttle the composer, Cartaret’s glance did not misinterpret.

“We won’t discuss that, if you please,” said he.

But Houdon was incapable of understanding such glances in such a connection. He tapped for the attention of his orchestra and got it.

“Messieurs,” he announced, “our good friend of the America of the North has been having an adventure.”

Everybody looked at Cartaret and everybody smiled.

“Delicious,” squeaked Varachon through his broken nose.

“Superb,” trilled the pear-shaped singer Devignes.

Garnier’s lantern-jaws went on eating. Seraphin Dieudonné caught Cartaret’s glance imploringly and then shifted, in ineffectual warning, to Houdon.

“But that was only what was to be expected, my children,” the musician continued. “What can we poor Frenchmen look for when a blond Hercules of an American comes, rich and handsome, to our dear Paris? Only to-day I observed, renting an abode in the house that Monsieur and I have the honor to share, a young mademoiselle, the most gracious and beautiful, accompanied by a tuteur, the most ferocious; and I noted well that they went to inhabit the room but across the landing from that of M. Cartarette. Behold all! At once I said to myself: ‘Alas, how long will it be before this confiding——’”

He stopped short and looked at Cartaret, for Cartaret had grasped the performing hand of the composer and, in a steady grip, forced it quietly to the table.

“I tell you,” said Cartaret, gently, “that I don’t care to have you talk in this strain.”

“How then?” blustered the amazed musician.

“If you go on,” Cartaret warned him, “you will have to go on from the floor; I’ll knock you there.”

“Maurice!” cried Seraphin, rising from his chair.

“Messieurs!” piped Devignes.

Varachon growled at Houdon, and Garnier reached for a water-bottle as the handiest weapon of defense. Houdon and Cartaret were facing each other, erect, each waiting for the other to make a further move, the former red, the latter white, with anger. There followed that flashing pause of quiet which is the precursor of battle.

The battle, however, was not forthcoming. Instead, through the silence, there came a roar of voices that diverted the attention of even the chief combatants. It was a roar of voices from the café below: a heavy rumble that was unmistakably Madame’s and a clatter of unintelligible shrieks and demands that were feminine but unclassifiable. Now one voice shouted and next the other. Then the two joined in a mighty explosion, and little Pasbeaucoup was shot up the stairs and among the diners as if he were the first rock from the crater of an emptying volcano.

He staggered against the table and jolted the water-bottle out of the poet’s hand.

“Name of a Name!” he gasped. “She is a veritable tigress, that woman there!”

They had no time then to inquire whom he referred to, though they knew that, however justly he might think it, he would never, even in terror like the present, say such a thing of his wife. The words were no sooner free of his lips than a larger rock was vomited from the volcano, and a still larger, the largest rock of the three, came immediately after.

Everybody was afoot now. They saw that Pasbeaucoup cowered against the wall in a fear terrible because it was greater than his fear for Madame; they saw that Madame, who was the third rock, was clinging to the apron-strings of another woman, who was rock number two, and they saw that this other woman was a stocky figure, who carried in her hand a curious, wide head-dress, and who wore a parti-colored apron that began over her ample breasts and ended by brushing against her equally ample boots, and a black skirt of simple stuff and extravagant puffs, surmounted by a short-skirted blouse or basque of the same material. Her face was round and wrinkled like a last winter’s apple on the kitchen-shelf; but her eyes shone red, her hands beat the air vigorously, and from her lips poured a lusty torrent of sounds that might have been protestations, appeals or curses, yet were certainly, considered as words, nothing that any one present had ever heard before.

She ran forward; Madame ran forward. The stranger shouldered Madame; Madame dragged her back. The stranger cried out more of her alien phrases; Madame shouted French denunciations. The Gallic diners formed a grinning circle, eager to lose no detail of the sort of wrangle that a Frenchman loves best to watch: a wrangle between women.

Cartaret made his way through the ring and put his hand on the stranger’s shoulder. She seemed to understand, and relapsed into quiet, attentive but alert.

“Now,” said Cartaret, “one at a time, please. Madame, what is the trouble?”

“Trouble?” roared Madame. Her face did not change expression, but she held her arms akimbo, pug-nose and strong chin poked defiantly at the strange interloper. “You may well say it, trouble!”

She put her position strongly and at length. She had been in the caisse, with no one of the world in the café, when, crying barbarous threats incomprehensible, this she-bandit, this—this anarchiste infâme, had burst in from the street, disrupting the peace of the Deux Colombes and endangering its well-known quiet reputation with the police.

That was the gist of it. When it was delivered, Cartaret faced the stranger.

“And you, Madame?” he asked, in French.

The stranger strode forward as a pugilist steps from his corner for the round that he expects to win the fight for him. She clapped her wide head-dress upon her head, where it settled itself with a rakish tilt.

“Holy pipe!” cried Houdon. “In that I recognize her. It is the ferocious tuteur!”

Cartaret’s interest became tense.

“What did you want here?” he urged, still speaking French.

The stranger said, twice over, something that sounded like “Kar-kar-tay.”

“She is mad,” squeaked Varachon.

“She is worse; she is German,” vowed Madame.

Cartaret raised his hand to silence these contentions.

“Do you understand me?” he urged.

The wide head-dress flapped a vehement assent.

“But you can’t answer?”

The head-dress fluttered a negative, and the mouth mumbled a negative in a French so thick, hesitant and broken as to be infinitely less expressive than the shake of the head.

Cartaret remembered what the concierge Refrogné had told him. To the circle of curious people he explained:

“She can understand a little French, but she cannot speak it.”

Madame snorted. “Why then does she come to this place so respectable if she cannot talk like a Christian?”

“Because,” said Cartaret, “she evidently thought she would be intelligently treated.”

It was clear to him that she would not have come had her need not been desperate. He made another effort to discover her nationality.

“Who of you speaks something besides French?” he asked of the company.

Not Madame; not Seraphin or Houdon: they were ardent Parisians and of course knew no language but their own. As for Garnier, as a French poet and a native of the pure-tongued Tours, he would not have soiled his lips with any other speech had he known another. Varachon, it turned out, was from the Jura, and had picked up a little Swiss-German during a youthful liaison at Pontarlier. He tried it now, but the stranger only shook her head-dress at him.

“She knows no German,” said Varachon.

“Such German!” sniffed Houdon.

“Chut! This proves rather that she knows it too well,” grumbled Madame. “She but wishes to conceal it; probably she is a German spy.”

Devignes said he knew Italian, and he did seem to know a sort of Opera-Italian, but it, too, was useless.

Cartaret had an inspiration.

“Spanish!” he suggested. “Does any one know any Spanish?”

Pasbeaucoup did; he knew two or three phrases—chiefly relating to prices on the menu of the Deux Colombes—but to him also the awful woman only shook her head in ignorance.

Cartaret took up the French again.

“Can you not tell me what you want here?” he pleaded.

“Kar-kar-tay,” said the stranger.

“Ah!” cried Seraphin, clapping his hands. “Does not Houdon say that she makes her abode in the same house that you make yours? She seeks you, monsieur. ‘Kar-kar-tay,’ it is her manner of endeavoring to say Cartarette.”

At the sound of that name, the stranger nodded hard.

“Oui, oui!” she cried.

She understood that her chief inquisitor was Cartaret, and it was indeed Cartaret that she sought. She flung herself on her knees to him. When he hurriedly raised her, she caught at the skirt of his coat and nearly pulled it from him in an attempt to drag him to the stairs.

Cartaret looked sharply at Houdon. The musician having been so recently saved from the wrath of his host, was momentarily discreet: he hid his smile behind one of the thin bands that contrasted so sharply with his plump cheeks.

“Messieurs,” said Cartaret, “I am going with this lady.”

They all edged forward.

“And I am going alone,” added the American. “I wish you good-night.”

“You will be knifed in the street,” said Madame. Her tone implied: “And it will serve you right.”

None of the others seemed to mind his going; the wrangle over, they were ready for their coffee and liqueurs. Houdon was frankly relieved. Only Seraphin protested.

“And you will leave your dinner unfinished?” he cried.

Cartaret was taking his hat and rain-coat from the row of pegs on the wall where, among the other guests’, he had hung them when he entered. He nodded his answer to Seraphin’s query.

“Leave your dinner?” said Seraphin. “But my God, it is paid for!”

“Good-night,” said Cartaret, and was plunged down the stairs by the strangely-garbed woman tugging at his hand.

CHAPTER V
WHICH TELLS HOW CARTARET RETURNED TO THE RUE DU VAL-DE-GRÂCE, AND WHAT HE FOUND THERE

La timidité est un grand péché contre l’amour.—Anatole France: La Rotisserie de la Reine Pédauque.

If that strange old woman in the rakish head-dress was in a hurry, Cartaret, you may be sure, was in no mood for tarrying by the way. He left the Café des Deux Colombes, picturing The Girl of the Rose desperately ill, and he was resolved not only to be the first to come to her aid, but to have none of the restaurant’s suspicious company for a companion. Then, no sooner had he passed through the empty room on the ground-floor of Mme. Pasbeaucoup’s establishment and gone a few steps toward the rue de Seine, than he began to fear that perhaps the house to which he was apparently being conducted—The Girl’s house and his own—had taken fire; or that the cause of the duenna’s mission was some like misfortune which would be better remedied, so far as The Girl’s interests were concerned, if there were more rescuers than one.

“What is the matter?” he begged his guide to inform him, as they hurried through the darkened streets.

His guide lifted both hands to her face.

“Is mademoiselle ill?”

The duenna shook her head in an emphatic negative.

“The place isn’t on fire?” His tone was one of petition, as if, should he pray hard enough, she might avert the catastrophe he now dreaded; or as if, by touching her sympathies, he could release some hidden spring of intelligible speech.

The old woman, however, only shook her head again and hurried on. Cartaret was glad to find that she possessed an agility impossible for a city-bred woman of her apparent age, and he was still more relieved when they reached their lodging-house and discovered it in apparently the same condition as that in which he had left it.

Their ascent of the stairs was like a race—a race ending in a dead-heat. At the landing, Cartaret turned, of course, toward his neighbor’s door; to his amazement, the old woman pulled him to his own.

He opened it and struck a match: the room was empty. He held the match until it burnt his fingers.

The old woman pushed him toward his table, on which stood a battered lamp. She pointed to the lamp.

“But your mistress?” asked Cartaret.

The duenna pointed to the lamp.

“Shall I light it?”

She nodded.

He lit the lamp. The flame grew until it illuminated a small circle about the table.

“Now what?” Cartaret inquired.

Again that odd gesture toward the nose and mouth.

“I don’t understand,” said Cartaret.

She picked up the lamp and made as if to search the floor for something. Then she held out the lamp to him.

“Oh”—it began to dawn on Cartaret—“you’ve lost something?”

“Oui, oui!”

He took the lamp, and they both fell on their knees. Together they began a minute inspection of the dusty floor. Cartaret’s mind was more easy now: at least his Lady suffered no physical distress.

“It’s like a sort of religious ceremony,” muttered the American, as, foot by foot, they crawled and groped over the grimy boards....

“Was it money you lost?” he inquired.

No, it was not money.

The search continued. Cartaret crawled under the divan, while the duenna held the cover high to admit the light. He blackened his hands in the fire-place and transferred a little of the soot to his few extra clothes that hung behind the corner curtain—but only a little; most of the soot preferred his hands.

“I never knew before that the room was so large,” he gasped.

They had covered two-thirds of the floor-space when a new thought struck him. Still crouching on his knees, he once more tried his companion.

“I can’t find it,” he said; “but I’d give a good deal to know what I’m looking for. What were you doing in here when you lost it, anyway?”

She shook her head, with her hand on her breast. Then she pointed to the door and nodded.

“You mean your mistress lost it?”

“Oui.”

“Well, then, let’s get her. She can tell me what I’m after.”

He half rose; but the woman seized his arm. She broke into loud sounds, patently protestations.

“Nonsense,” said Cartaret. “Why not? Come on; I’ll knock at her door.”

The duenna would not have her mistress disturbed. The ancient voice rose to a shriek.

“But I say yes.”

The shriek grew louder. With amazing strength, the old woman forced his unsuspecting body back to its former position; she came near to jolting the lamp from his hand.

It was then that Cartaret heard a lesser noise behind them: a voice, the low sweet voice of The Rose-Lady, asked, in the duenna’s strange tongue, a question from the doorway. Cartaret turned his head.

She was standing there in the dim light, a sort of kimono gathered about her, her sandaled feet peeping from its lower folds, the lovely arm that held the curious dressing-gown in place bare to the elbow. She was smiling at the answer that her guardian had already given her; Cartaret thought her even more beautiful than when he had seen her before.

The duenna had scuttled forward on her knees and, amid a series of cries, was pressing the hem of the kimono to her lips. The Girl’s free hand was raising the petitioner.

“I am sorry that you have been disturbed by Chitta,” she was saying.

Cartaret understood then that he was addressed. Moreover, he became conscious that he was by no means at his best on his knees, with his clothes even more rumpled than usual, his hands black and, probably, his face no better. He scrambled to his feet.

“It’s been no trouble,” he said awkwardly.

“I should say that it had been a good deal,” said the Girl. “Chitta is so very superstitious. Did you find it?”

“No,” said Cartaret. “At least I don’t think so.”

The Girl puckered her pretty brow.

“I mean,” explained Cartaret, coming nearer, but thankful that he had left the lamp on the floor behind him, whence its light would least reveal his soiled hands and face—“I mean that I haven’t the least idea what I was looking for.”

The Girl burst into rippling laughter.

“Not the least,” pursued the emboldened American. “You see, I left word with Refrogné—that’s the concierge—that I was dining with some friends at the Deux Colombes—that’s a café—when I went out; and I suppose she—I mean your—your maid, isn’t it?—made him understand that she—I mean your maid again—wanted me—you know, I don’t generally leave word; but this time I thought that perhaps you—I mean she—or, anyhow, I had an idea——”

He knew that he was making a fool of himself, so he was glad when she came serenely to his assistance and gallantly shifted the difficulty to her own shoulders.

“It was too bad of Chitta to take you away from your dinner.”

Chitta had slunk into the shadows, but Cartaret could descry her glaring at him.

“That was of no consequence,” he said; he had forgotten what the dinner cost him.

“But, sir, for a reason of so great an absurdity!” She put one hand on the table and leaned on it. “I must tell you that there is in my country a superstition——”

She hesitated. Cartaret, his heart leaping, leaned forward.

“What is your country, mademoiselle?” he asked.

She did not seem to hear that. She went on:

“It is really a superstition so much absurd that I am slow to speak to you of it. They believe, our peasants, that it brings good luck when they take it with them across our borders; that only it can ensure their return, and that, if it is lost, they will never come back to their home-land.” Her blue eyes met his gaze. “They, sir, love their home-land.”

Cartaret was certain that the land which could produce this presence, at once so human and so spiritual, was well worth loving. He wanted to say so, but another glance at her serene face checked any impulse that might seem impertinent.

“I, too, love my country, although I am not superstitious,” the Girl pursued, “so I had brought it with me from my country. I brought it with me to Paris, and I lost it. We go early to sleep, the people of my race; I had not missed it when I went to bed; but then Chitta missed it; and I told her that I thought that I had perhaps dropped it here. She ran before I could recall her—and I fell straightway asleep. She tells me that she had seen you go out, sir, and that she went to the concierge, as you supposed, to discover where you had gone, for she thought, she says, that your door was locked.” The corners of the Girl’s mouth quivered in a smile. “I trust that she would not have trespassed when you were gone, even if your door was open. Until I heard her shriek but now, I had no idea that she would pursue you. I regret for your sake that she disturbed you, but I also regret for her sake that it was not found.”

Cartaret had guessed the answer to his question before he asked it. His cheeks burned for the consequences, but he put the query:

“What was lost?” he inquired.

“Ah, I thought that I had said it: a flower.”

“A—a rose?”

The hand that held her kimono pressed a little closer to her breast.

“Then you have found it?”

Mountain-peaks and glaciers in the sun: Cartaret, being a practical man, was distinctly aware of not wanting her to know the present whereabouts of that flower. He fenced for time.

“Was it a rose?” he repeated.

“Yes,” she said, “the Azure Rose.”

“What?” Perhaps, after all, he was wrong. “I’ve never heard of a blue rose.”

“It is not blue,” she said; “we call it the azure rose as you, sir, would say the rose of azure, or the rose of heaven. We call it the azure rose because it grows only in our own land, where the mountains are blue, and only high, high up on those mountains, near to the blue of the sky. It is a white rose.”

“Yes. Of course,” said Cartaret. “A white rose.”

He stood uncertainly before her. For a reason that he would have hesitated long to define, he hated to part with that rose; for a reason concerning which he was quite clear, he did not want to produce it there and then.

“You have it?” asked The Girl.

“Er—do you want it?” countered Cartaret.

A shade of impatience crossed her face. She tried to master it.

“I gather from your speech that you, sir, are American, not English. You are the first American that ever I have met, and I do not seem well to understand the motives of all that you say, although I do understand perfectly the words. You ask do I want this rose. But of course I want it! Have I not asked for it? I want it because Chitta will be distressed if we lose it, but also I want it for myself, to whom it belongs, since it is a souvenir already dear to me.”

Her face was alight. Cartaret looked at it; then his glance fell.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to offend you. I’m forever putting my foot in things.”

“You have trodden on my rose?” Her voice discovered her dismay.

“No, no! I wouldn’t—I couldn’t. I meant that I was always making mistakes. This afternoon, for instance—And now——”

To the rescue of his embarrassment came the thought that indeed he obviously could not tread on the rose, unless he were a contortionist, because the rose was——

Among the smudges of black, his cheeks burned a hot red. He thrust a hand between his shirt and waistcoat and produced the coveted flower: a snow-rose in the center of his grimy palm.

Again the perfume, subtle, haunting. Again the pure mountain-peaks. Again the music of a poem in a tongue unknown....

At first he did not dare to look at her; he kept his gaze lowered. Had he looked, he would have seen her wide eyes startle, then change to amusement, and then to a doubting tenderness. He felt her delicate fingers touch his palm and he thrilled at the touch as she recaptured her rose. He did not see that, in welcome to the returned prodigal, she started to raise to her own lips those petals, gathered so tight against the flower’s heart, which he had lately kissed. When at last he glanced up, she had recovered her poise and was again looking like some sculptured Artemis that had wandered into his lonely room from the gardens of the Luxembourg.

Then he saw a much more prosaic thing. He saw the hand that held the rose and saw it discolored.

“Will you ever forgive me?” he cried. “You’ve been leaning on my table, and I mix my paints on it!”

The speech was not precisely pellucid, but she followed his eyes to the hand and understood.

“The fault was mine,” she said.

Cartaret was searching among the tubes and bottles on the table. He searched so nervously that he knocked some of them to the floor.

“If you’ll just wait a minute.” He found the bottle he wanted. “And if you don’t mind the turpentine.... It smells terribly, but it will evaporate soon, and it cleans you up before you know it.”

He lifted one of the rags that lay about, and then another. He discarded both as much too soiled, hesitated, ran to the curtained corner and returned with a clean towel.

She had hidden the flower. She extended her hand.

“Do you mind?” he asked.

“Do I object? No. You are kind.”

He took the smudged hand—took it with a hand that trembled—and bent his smudged face so close to it that she must have felt his breath beating on it, hot and quick. He made two dabs with the end of the towel.

Chitta, whom they had both sadly neglected, pounced upon them from her lair among the shadows. She seized the hand and, jabbering fifty words in the time for two, pushed Cartaret from his work.

“I’m not going to hurt anybody,” said Cartaret. “Do, please, get away.”

The Girl laughed.

“Chitta trusts no foreigners,” she explained.

She spoke to Chitta, but Chitta, glowering at Cartaret, shook her head and grumbled.

“I do not any more desire to order her about,” said The Girl to Cartaret. “Already this evening I have wounded her feelings, I fear. She says she will allow none but herself to minister to me. You, sir, will forgive her? After all, it is her duty.”

Cartaret inwardly cursed Chitta’s fidelity. What he said was: “Of course.” He knew that just here he might say something gallant, and that he would think of that something an hour hence; but he could not think of it now.

The Girl touched the turpentine bottle.

“And may we take it to our room?”

“Eh? Oh, certainly,” said Cartaret.

She held out her hand, the palm lowered.

“Good-night,” she said.

Cartaret’s heart bounded: this time she had not said “Good-by.” He seized the hand. Chitta growled, and he released it with a conventional handshake.

The Girl smiled.

“Ah, yes,” she said; “this afternoon it puzzled me, but now I recollect: you Americans, sir, shake one’s hand, do you not?”

She was gone, and glowering Chitta with her, before he could answer.

Cartaret stood where she had left him, his brows knitted. He heard Chitta double-lock the door to their rooms. He was thinking thoughts that his brain was not accustomed to. It was some time before they became more familiar. Then he gasped:

“I wonder if my face is dirty!”

He took the lamp and sought the sole mirror that his room boasted. His face was dirty.

“Damn!” said Cartaret.

Down in the narrow street, an uncertain chorus was singing:

“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——”

His guests were coming to seek him. They had remembered him at last.

Cartaret’s mind, however, was busy with other matters. He had not thought of the gallant thing that he might have said to The Girl, but he had thought of something equally surprising.

“Gee whiz!” he cried. “I understand now—it’s probably the custom of her country: she expected me to kiss her hand. Kiss her hand—and I missed the chance!”

CHAPTER VI
CARTARET SETS UP HOUSEKEEPING

Que de femmes il y a dans une femme! Et c’est bien heureux.—Dumas, Fils: La Dame Aux Perles.

Cartaret did not see the Lady of the Rose next day, though his work suffered sadly through the worker’s jumping from before his easel at the slightest sound on the landing, running to his door, and sometimes himself going to the hall and standing there for many minutes, trying, and not succeeding, to look as if he had just come in, or were just going out, on business of the first importance. He concluded, for the hundredth time, that he was a fool; but he persevered in his folly. He asked himself why he should feel such an odd interest in an unknown girl practically alone in Paris; but he found no satisfactory answer. He declared that it was madness in him to suppose that she could want ever to see him again, and madness to suppose that a penniless failure had anything to gain by seeing her; but he continued to try.

On the night following the first day of his watch, Cartaret went to bed disappointed and slept heavily. On the second night he went to bed worried, and dreamed of scaling a terrible mountain in quest of a flower, and of falling into a hideous chasm just as the flower turned into a beautiful woman and smiled at him. On the third night, he surrendered to acute alarm and believed that he did not sleep at all.

The morning of the fourth day found him knocking on the panel of that magic door opposite. Chitta opened the door a crack, growled, and shut it in his face.

“I wonder,” reflected Cartaret, “what would be the best means of killing this old woman. I wonder if the hyena would eat candy sent her by mail.”

He had been watching, all the previous day, for the Lady of the Rose to go out, and she did not leave her room. Now it occurred to him to watch for Chitta’s exit on a forage foray and to renew his attack during her absence. This he accomplished. From a front window, he had no sooner seen the duenna swing into the rue du Val de Grâce, with her head-dress bobbing and a shopping-net on her arm, than he was again knocking at the door across the landing.

He knew now, did Cartaret, that, on whatever landing of life he had lived, there was always that door opposite, the handle of which he had never dared to turn, the key to which he had never yet found. He knew, on this morning—a clear, windy morning, for March had come in like a lion—that, for the door of every heart in the world, or high or low, or cruel or tender, there is a heart opposite with a door not inaccessible.

The pale yellow sun sang of it: Marvelous Door Opposite!—it seemed to sing—how, when they pass that portal, the commonplace becomes the unusual and reality is turned into romance. Lead becomes silver then, and copper—gold. Magical Door Opposite! All the possibilities of life—aye, and what is better, all life’s impossibilities—are behind you, and all life’s fears and hopes before. All our young dreams, our mature ambitions, our old regrets, curl in incense from our brains and struggle to pass that keyhole. Unhappy he for whom the door never opens; more unhappy, often, he for whom it does open; but most unhappy he who never sees that it is there: the Door across the Landing.

Cartaret knocked as if he were knocking at the gate of Paradise, and, perhaps again as if he were knocking at the gate of Paradise, he got no answer. He knocked a second time and heard the rustle of a woman’s skirt.

“Who is there?”—She spoke in French now, but he would have known her voice had she talked the language of Grand Street.

“Cartaret,” he answered.

She opened the door. A ray of light beat its way through a grimy window in the hall to welcome her—Cartaret was sure that no light had passed that window for years and years—and rested on the beauty of her pure face, her calm eyes, her blue-black hair.

“Good morning,” said the Lady of the Rose.

It sounded wonderful to him. When he replied “Good morning”—and could think of nothing else to say—the phrase sounded less remarkable.

She waited a moment. She looked a little doubtful. She said:

“You perhaps wanted Chitta?”

Were her eyes laughing? Her lips were serious, but he was uncertain of her eyes.

“Certainly not,” said he.

“Oh, you wanted me?”

“Yes!” said Cartaret, and blushed at the vehemence of the monosyllable.

“Why?”

For what, indeed, had he come there? He vividly realized that he should have prepared some excuse; but, having prepared none, he could offer only the truth—or so much of it as seemed expedient.

“I wanted to see if you were all right,” he said.

“But certainly,” she smiled. “I thank you, sir; but, yes, I am—all right.”

She said no more; Cartaret felt as if he could never speak again. However, speak he must.

“Well, you know,” he said, “I hadn’t seen you anywhere about, and I was rather worried.”

“Chitta takes of me the best care.”

“Yes, but, you see, I didn’t know and I—Oh, yes: I wanted to see whether that turpentine worked.”

“The turpentine!” All suspicion of amusement fled her eyes: she was contrite. “I comprehend. How careless of Chitta not at once to have returned it to you.”

Turpentine! What a nectar for romance! Cartaret made a face that could not have been worse had he swallowed some of the liquid. He tried to protest, but she did not heed him. Instead, she left him standing there while she went to hunt for that accursed bottle. In five minutes she had found it, returned it, thanked him and sent him back to his own room, no further advanced in her acquaintance than when he knocked at her door.

She had laughed at him. He returned fiercely to his work, convinced that she had been laughing at him all the while. Very well: what did he care? He would forget her.

He concentrated all his thoughts upon the idea of forgetting the Lady of the Rose. In order to assist his purpose, he set a new canvas on his easel and fell to work to make a portrait of her as she should be and was not. The contrast would help him, and the plan was cheap, because it needed no model. By the next afternoon he had completed the portrait of a beautiful woman with a white rose at her throat. It was quite his best piece of work, and an excellent likeness of the girl in the room opposite.

He saw that it was a likeness and thought of painting it out, but it would be a pity to destroy his best work, so he merely put it aside. He decided to paint a purely imaginative figure. He squeezed out some paints, almost at haphazard, and began painting in that mood. After forty-eight hours of this sort of thing, he had produced another picture of the same woman in another pose.

In more ways than one, Cartaret’s position was growing desperate. His money was almost gone. He must paint something that Fourget, or some equally kind-hearted dealer, would buy, and these two portraits he would not offer for sale.

Telling himself that it was only to end his obsession, he tried twice again to see the Lady of the Rose, who was now going out daily to some master’s class, and each time he gained nothing by his attempt. First, she would not answer his knock, though he could hear her moving about and knew that she must have heard him crossing the hall from his own room and be aware of her caller’s identity. On the next occasion, he waited for her at the corner of the Boul’ Miche’ when he knew that she would be returning from the class, and was greeted by nothing save a formal bow. So he had to force himself to pot-boilers by sheer determination, and finally turned out something that then seemed poor enough for Fourget to like.

Houdon came in and found him putting on the finishing touches. The plump musician, frightened by his impudence, had stopped below at his own room on the night of the dinner when the revelers at last came to seek their host. Now it appeared that he was anxious to apologize. He advanced with the dignity befitting a monarch kindly disposed, and his gesturing hands beat the score of the kettle-drums for the march of the priests in Aïda.

“My very dear Cartarette!” cried Houdon. “Ah, but it is good again to see you! I so regretted myself not to ascend with our friends to call upon you the evening of our little collation.” He sought to dismiss the subject with a run on the invisible piano and the words: “But I was slightly indisposed: without doubt our good comrades informed you that I was slightly indisposed. I am very sensitive, and these communions of high thought are too much for my delicate nerves.”

His good comrades had told Cartaret that Houdon was very drunk; but Cartaret decided that to continue his quarrel would be an insult to its cause. After all, he reflected, this was Houdon’s conception of an apology. Cartaret looked at the composer, who was a walking symbol of good feeding and iron nerves, and replied:

“Don’t bother to mention it.”

Houdon seized both of Cartaret’s hands and pressed them fondly.

“My friend,” said Houdon magnanimously, “we shall permit ourselves to say no more about it. What sings your sublime poet, Henri Wadsworth Longchap? ‘I shall allow the decomposed past to bury her dead.’—Or do I mistake: was it Whitman, hein?”

He gestured his way to Cartaret’s easel, much as if the air were water and he were swimming there. He praised extravagantly the picture that Cartaret now knew to be bad. Finally he began to potter about the room with a pretense of admiring the place and looking at its other canvases, but all the while conveying the feeling that he was apprising the financial status of its occupant. Cartaret saw him drawing nearer and nearer to the two canvases that, their faces toward the wall, bore the likeness of the Lady of the Rose.

“I am just going out,” said Cartaret. He hurried to his visitor and took the fellow’s arm. “I must take that picture on the easel to the rue St. André des Arts. Will you come along?”

Houdon seemed suspicious of this sudden friendliness. He cast a curious glance at the canvases he had been about to examine, but his choice was obviously Hobson’s.

“Gladly,” he flourished. “To my cher ami Fourget, is it? But I know him well. Perhaps my influence may assist you.”

“Perhaps,” said Cartaret. He doubted it, but he hoped that something would assist him.

He held the picture, still wet of course, exposed for all the world of the Quarter to see, hurried Houdon past the landing and could have sworn that the composer’s eyes lingered at the sacred door.

“But it is an infamy,” said Houdon, when they had walked as far down the Boul’ Miche’ as the Musée Cluny—“it is an infamy to sell at once such a superb work to such a little cow of a dealer. Why then?”

“Because I must,” said Cartaret.

Houdon laughed and wagged his head.

“No, no,” said he; “you deceive others: not Houdon. I know well the disguised prince. Come”—he looked up and down the Boulevard St. Germain before he ventured to cross it—“trust your friend Houdon, my dear Cartarette.”

“I am quite honest with you.”

“Bah! Have your own way, then. Pursue your fancy of self-support for a time. It is noble, that. But think not that I am deceived. Me, Houdon: I know. Name of an oil-well, you should send this masterpiece to the Salon!”

But just at the corner of the rue St. André des Arts, the great composer thought that he saw ahead of him a friend with whom he had a pressing engagement of five minutes. He excused himself with such a wealth of detail that Cartaret was convinced of the slightness of the Fourget acquaintanceship, which Houdon had not again referred to.

“I shall be finished and waiting at this corner long ere you return,” vowed Houdon. “Go, my friend, and if that little dealer pays you one third of what your picture is worth, my faith, he will bankrupt himself.”

So Cartaret went on alone, and was presently glad that he was unaccompanied.

For Fourget would not buy the picture. It was a silly sketch of a pretty boy pulling to tatters the petals of a rose, and the gray-haired dealer, although he had kindly eyes under his bristling eyebrows, behind his glistening spectacles, shook his head.

“I am sorry,” he said: so many of these hopeful young fellows brought him their loved work, and he had so often, but never untruthfully, to say that he was sorry. “I am very sorry, but this is not the real you, monsieur. The values—you know better than that. The composition—it is unworthy of you, M. Cartarette.”

Cartaret was in no mood to try elsewhere. He wanted to fling the thing into the Seine. He certainly did not want Houdon to see him return with it. Might he leave it with Fourget? Perhaps some customer might see and care for it?

No, Fourget had his reputation to sustain; but there was that rascal Lepoittevin across the street——

Cartaret went to the rascal, a most amiable man, who would buy no more than would Fourget. He was willing, however, to have the picture left there on the bare chance of picking up a sale—and a commission—and there Cartaret left it.

Houdon wormed the truth out of him as easily as if Cartaret had come back carrying the picture under his arm: the young American was too disconsolate to hide his chagrin. Houdon was at first incredulous and then overcome; he asked his dear friend to purchase brandy for the two of them at the Café Pantheon: such treatment of a veritable masterpiece was too much for his sensitive nerves.

With some difficulty, Cartaret got rid of the composer. On a bench in the Luxembourg Gardens, he took account of his resources. They were shockingly slender and, if they were to last him any time at all, he must exercise the most stringent economy. He must buy no more brandy for musical geniuses. Indeed, he must buy no more café dinners for himself....

It struck him, as a happy thought, that he might save a little if he lived on such cold solids as he could buy at the fruit-stand and pâtisseries and such liquids as he might warm in a tin-cup over his lamp. Better men than he was had lived thus in the Quarter, and Cartaret, as the thought took shape, rather enjoyed the prospect: it made him feel as if he were another martyr to Art, or as if—though he was not clear as to the logic of this—he were another martyr to Love. He considered going to Père la Chaise and putting violets on the tomb of Héloise and Abelard; but he decided that he could not afford the tram-fare, and he was already too tired to walk, so he made his scanty purchases instead, and had rather a good time doing it.

He passed Chitta on his way up the stairs to his room, with his arms full of edibles, and he thought that she frowned disapproval. He supposed she would tell her mistress scornfully, and he hoped that her mistress would understand and pity him.

He got a board and nailed it to the sill of one of the rear windows. On that he stored his food and, contemplating it, felt like a successful housekeeper.

CHAPTER VII
OF DOMESTIC ECONOMY, OF DAY-DREAMS, AND OF A FAR COUNTRY AND ITS SOVEREIGN LADY

L’indiscrétion d’un de ces amis officieux qui ne sauraient garder inédite la nouvelle susceptible de vous causer un chagrin.—Murger: Scènes de la Vie de Bohème.

You would have said that it behooved a man in Charlie Cartaret’s situation to devote his evenings to a consideration of its difficulties and his days to hard work; but Cartaret, though he did, as you will see, try to work, devoted the first evening of his new régime to thoughts that, if they affected his situation at all, tended only to complicate it. He thought, as he had so much of late, and as he was to think so much more in the future, of the Lady of the Rose.

Who was she? Whence did she come? What was this native land of hers that she professed to love so well? And, if she did love it so well, why had she left it and come to Paris with a companion that appeared to be some strange compromise between guardian and servant?

He wondered if she were some revolutionary exile: Paris was always full of revolutionary exiles. He wondered if she were a rightful heiress, dispossessed of a foreign title. Perhaps she was the lovely pretender to a throne. In that mysterious home of hers, she must have possessed some exalted position, or the right to it, for Chitta had kneeled to her on the dusty floor of this studio, and the Lady’s manner, he now recalled, was the manner of one accustomed to command. Her beauty was of a type that he had read of as Irish—the beauty of fair skin, hair black and eyes of deepest blue; but the speech was the English of a woman born to another tongue.

What was her native speech? Both her French and her English were innocent of alien accent—he had heard at least a phrase or two of the former—yet both had a precision that betrayed them as not her own and both had a foreign-born construction. Her frequent use of the word “sir” in addressing him was sufficiently peculiar. She employed the word not as one that speaks frequently to a superior, but rather as if she were used to it in a formal language, or a grade of life, in which it was a common courtesy. It was something more usual than the French “monsieur,” even more usual than the Spanish “señor.”

Cartaret leaned from a window. The air was still keen, but the night was clear. The rue du Val de Grâce was deserted, its houses dark and silent. Overhead, in the narrow ribbon of indigo sky, hung a pallid moon: a disk of yellow glass.

What indeed was she, this Lady of the Rose? He pictured as hers a distant country of deep valleys full of clamoring streams and high mountains where white roses grew. He pictured her as that country’s sovereign. Yet the rose which she treasured had not yet faded on the day of her arrival: she could not come from anywhere so far away.

He was cold. He closed the window, shivering. He was ridiculous: why, he had been in danger of falling in love with a woman of whom he knew nothing! He did not even know her name....

The passage of slow-footed time helped him, however, not at all. He would sit for hours, idle before his easel, listening for her light step on the stair and afraid to go to meet her when at last he heard it, for he was desperately poor now, and poverty was making him the coward that it will sooner or later make any man.

He had antagonized the concierge by preparing his own coffee in the morning instead of continuing to pay Mme. Refrogné for it. When he had something to cook, he cooked badly; but there were days when he had nothing, and lived on pastry and bricks of chocolate, and others when it seemed to him that such supplies as he could buy and store on that shelf outside the window were oddly short-lived.

For a while he called daily at the shop of M. Lepoittevin, but that absurd picture of a boy tearing a rose would not sell, and Cartaret soon grew ashamed of calling there; Fourget he would not face. He managed at first to dispose of one or two sketches and so kept barely alive, yet, as the days went by, his luck dwindled and his greatest energy was expended in keeping up a proud pretense of comfort to his friends of the Quarter.

Pear-shaped Devignes was easy to deceive: the opera-singer lived too well to want to believe that anybody in the world could starve. Garnier, the cadaverous poet, saved trouble, indulging his dislike of other people’s poverty by remaining away from it; but Seraphin, who came often and sat about the studio in a silence wholly uncharacteristic, was difficult. Houdon, finally, was frequent and expensive: he always foraged about what he called Cartaret’s “tempting window-buffet,” but he regarded the condition of affairs as the passing foible of a young man temporarily wearied by the pleasures of wealth.

“Ah,” he snorted one day when he had come in with Varachon, “you fail wholly to deceive me, Cartarette. You say you are not well-to-do so that we shall think that you are not, but I know, I! Had you not your own income, you would try to sell more pictures, and your pictures are superb. They would fetch a pretty sum. Believe not that because I have a great musical genius I have no eye for painting. I know good painting. All Arts are one, my brother.”

He jabbed Cartaret’s empty stomach and, whistling a theme and twisting his little mustache, went to the window and took a huge bite of the last apple there.

Cartaret watched the composer toss half the apple into the concierge’s garden.

Varachon, the sculptor, grunted through his broken nose.

“Your work is bad,” he whispered to Cartaret—“very bad. You require a long rest. Go to Nice for a month.”

The weeks passed. Cartaret was underfed and discouraged. He was too discouraged now to attempt to renew his acquaintance with the Lady of the Rose. He was pale and thin, and this from reasons wholly physical.

Meanwhile, through the scented dawns, April was coming up to that city in which April is most beautiful and most seductive. From the spicy Mediterranean coasts, along the Valley of the Rhone, Love was dancing upon Paris with laughing Spring for his partner. Already the trees had blossomed between the Place de La Concorde and the Rond Point, and out in the Bois the birds were singing to their mates.

One morning, when Cartaret, with unsteady hand, drew back his curtain, rouge-gorges were calling from the concierge’s garden, and seemed to be calling to him.

“Seize hold of love!” they chorused in that garden. “Life is short; time flies, and love flies with it. Love will pass you by. Take it, take it, take it, while there still is time! Like us, it is a bird that flies, but, unlike us, it never more returns. It is a rose that withers—a white rose: take it while it blooms. Take it, though it leave you soon; take it, though it scratch your fingers. Take it, take it, take it now!”

On that day the annual siege of Paris ended, the city fell before her invaders, and by the time that Cartaret went into the streets, the army of occupation was in possession. The Luxembourg Gardens, the very benches along the Boul’ Miche’ were full of lovers: he could not stir from the house without encountering them.

From it, however, he had to go: the Spring called him with a sad seductiveness that he could no longer resist. He wandered aimlessly, trying the impossible: trying to keep his eyes from the couples that also wandered, but wandered hand in hand, and trying to keep his thoughts from roses and the Lady of the Rose.

He found himself before one of the riverside bookstalls, fingering an old book, leather-bound. The text, he realized, was English, or what once was so: it was a volume of Maundeville, and Cartaret was reading:

“Betwene the cytee and the chirche of Bethlehem is the felde Floridus; that is to seyne, the field florsched. For als moche as a fayre mayden was blamed with wrong ... for whiche cause sche was demed to the dethe, and to be brent in that place, to the which she was ladd. And, as the fyre began to brenne about hire, she made her preyeres to oure Lord, that als wissely as sche was not gylty ... that he would help hire, and make it to be knowen to alle men of his mercyfulle grace. And, whanne sche had thus seyd, sche entered into the fuyer; and anon was the fuyer quenched and oute, and the brondes that weren brennynge becomen white roseres, full of roses; and theise werein the first roseres and roses, both white and rede, that ever ony man saughe. And thus was this mayden saved by the grace of God.” ...

All that week—while the contents of his window-sideboard dwindled, he was sure, faster than he ate from it—he had tried to forget everything by painting heavily at pot-boilers. He had begun with the aim of earning enough to resume his studies; he had continued with the hope of getting together enough to keep alive—in Paris. And yet, fleeing from that bookstall, he was fool enough to walk all the way to Les Halles, to walk into Les Halles, and to stop, fascinated by a counter laden with boxes of strawberries, odorous and red, the smallest box of which was beyond the limits of his economy.

That was bad enough—it was absurd that his will should voluntarily play the Barmecide for the torture of his unrewarded Shacabac of a stomach—but worse, without fault of his own, was yet to follow this mere aggravation of his baser appetites. Spring and Paris are an irresistible combination on the side of folly, and that evening another sign of them presented itself: there was a burst of music; a hurdy-gurdy was playing in the rue du Val de Grâce, and Cartaret, from his window, listened eagerly. It has been intimated from the best of sources that all love lives on music, and it is the common experience that when any love cannot get the best music, it takes what it can get:

“Her brow is like the snaw-drift;
Her throat is like the swan;
Her face it is the fairest
That e’er the sun shone on—
That e’er the sun shone on—
And dark blue is her e’e——”

That French hurdy-gurdy was playing “Annie Laurie,” and, since the lonely artist’s heart ached to hear the old, familiar melody, when the bearded grinder looked aloft, Cartaret drew a coin from his pocket. Anxious to pay for his pain, as the human kind always is, he tossed his last franc to that vendor of emotions in the twilit street.

He was drunk at last with the wine that his own misery distilled. He abandoned himself to the admission that he was in love: he abandoned himself to his dream of the Lady of the Rose.

Seraphin, in a wonderful new suit of clothes, found him thus the next morning—it was a Friday—and found him accordingly resentful of intrusion. Cartaret was sitting before an empty easel, his hands clasped in his lap, his eyes looking vacantly through the posts of the easel.

“Good-day,” said Seraphin.

Cartaret said “Good-day” as if it were a form of insult.

Seraphin’s hands tugged at his two wisps of whisker.

“You are not well, hein?”

“I was never better in my life,” snapped Cartaret, turning upon his friend a face that was peaked and drawn.

The Frenchman came timidly nearer.

“My friend,” he said, “I have completed my magnum opus. It has not sold quite so well as I hoped, not of course one thousandth of its value. That is this Spanish cow of a world. But I have three hundred francs. If you need——”

“Go away,” said Cartaret, looking at his empty easel. “Can’t you see I’m trying to begin work?”

Seraphin himself had suffered. His dignity was not offended: he kept it for only his creditors and other foes. He guessed that Cartaret was at last penniless, and he guessed rightly.

“Come, my friend,” he began; “none shall know. Will you not be so kind as to let me——”

Cartaret got up and, for all his weakness, gripped the Frenchman’s hand until Dieudonné nearly screamed.

“I’m a beast, Seraphin!” said Cartaret. “I’m a beast to treat a friendly offer this way. Forgive me. It’s just that I feel a bit rocky this morning. I drank too much champagne last night. I do thank you, Seraphin. You’re a good fellow, the best of the lot, and a sight better than I am. But I’m not hard up; really I’m not. I’m poor, but I’m not a sou poorer than I was this time last year.”

It was a magnificent lie. Seraphin could only shrug, pretend to believe it, and go away.

Cartaret scarcely heeded the departure. He had relapsed into his day-dream. He took from against the wall the two portraits that he had painted of the Lady of the Rose and hung them, now here, now there, trying them in various lights. There were at least ten more sketches of her by this time, and these, too, he hung in first one light and then another. He studied them and tried to be critical, and forgot to be.

His thoughts of her never took the shape of conscious words—he loved her too much to attempt to praise her—but, as he looked at his endeavors to portray her, his mind was busy with his memories of all that loveliness—and passed from memories to day-dreams. He saw her as something that might fade before his touch. He saw her as a Princess, incognito, learning his plight, buying his pictures secretly, and, when she came to her throne, letting him serve her and worship from afar. And then he saw her even as a Galatea possible of miraculous awakening. Why not? Her eyes were the clear eyes of a woman that has never yet loved, but they were also, he felt, the eyes of one of those rare women who, when they love once, love forever. Cartaret dared, in his thoughts, to lift the heavy plaits of her blue-black hair and, with trembling fingers, again to touch that hand at the recollection of touching which his own hand tingled.

Why not, indeed? Already a stranger thing had happened in his meeting her. Until that year he had not guessed at her existence; oceans divided them; the barriers of alien race and alien speech were raised high between them, and all of these things had been in vain. The existence was revealed, the ocean was crossed, the bar of sundering speech was down. He was here, close beside her, as if every event of his life had been intended to bring him. Through blind ways and up ascents misunderstood, unattracted by the many and lonely among the crowd, he had, somehow, always been making his way toward—Her.

Thus Cartaret dreamed while Seraphin made a hurried journey to the rue St. André des Arts and the shop of M. Fourget.

“But no, but no, but no!” Fourget’s bushy brows met in a frown. “It is out of the question. Something has happened to the boy. He can no longer paint.”

Oh, well, at least monsieur could go to the boy’s rooms and see what he had there.

“No. Am I then a silly philanthropist?”

Seraphin tried to produce his false dignity. What he brought out was something genuine.

“I ask it from the heart,” he pleaded. “Do not I, my God, know what it is to be hungry?”

“Hungry?” said the dealer. “Hungry! The boy has an uncle famously rich. What is an uncle for? Hungry? You make une bêtise. Hungry.” He called his clerk and took up his hat. “I will not go,” he vowed. “Hungry, par example!”

“Truly you will not,” smiled Seraphin. “And do not tell him that I sent you: he is proud.”

The sound of the door opening interrupted Cartaret’s dream. He turned, a little sheepish, wholly annoyed. Spectacled Fourget stood there, looking very severe.

“I was passing by,” he explained. “I have not come to purchase anything, but I grow old: I was tired and I climbed your stairs to rest.”

It was too late to hide those portraits. Cartaret could only place for Fourget a chair with its back to them.

“What have you been doing?” asked the dealer.

He swung ’round toward the portraits.

“Don’t look at them!” said Cartaret. “They’re merely sketches.”

But Fourget had already looked. He was on his feet. He was bobbing from one to the other, his lean hands adjusting his glasses, his shoulders stooped, his nose thrust out. He was uttering little cries of approval.

“But this is good! It is good, then. This is first-rate. This is of an excellence!”

“They’re not for sale,” said Cartaret.

“Hein?” Fourget wheeled. “If they are not for sale, they are for what, then?”

“They—they are merely sketches, I tell you. I was trying my hand at a new method; but I find there is nothing in it.”

Fourget was unbuttoning his short frock-coat. He was reaching for his wallet.

“I tell you there is everything in it. There is the sure touch in it, the clear vision, the sympathy. There is reputation in it. In fine, there is money.”

He had the wallet out as he concluded.

Cartaret shook his head.

“Oh,” said Fourget, the dealer in him partially overcoming the lover of art, “not much as yet; not a great deal of money. You have still a long way to go; but you have found the road, monsieur, and I want to help you on your journey. Come, now.” He nodded to the first portrait. “What do you ask for that?”

“I don’t want to sell it.”

“Poof! We shall not haggle. Tell Fourget what you had thought of asking. Do not be modest. Tell me—and I will give you half.”

He kept it up as long as he could; he tried at last to buy the least of the preliminary sketches of the Rose-Lady; he offered what, to Cartaret, were dazzling prices; but Cartaret was not to be shaken: these experiments were not for sale.

Fourget was first disappointed, then puzzled. His enthusiasm had been genuine; but could it be possible that Dieudonné was mistaken? Was Cartaret not starving? The old man was beginning to button his coat when a new idea struck him.

“Who was your model?” he asked abruptly.

“I—I had none,” Cartaret stammered.

“Ah!”—Fourget peered hard at him through those glistening spectacles. “You painted them from memory?”

“Yes.” Cartaret felt his face redden. “From imagination, I mean.”

Then Fourget understood. Perhaps he had merely the typical Frenchman’s love of romance, which ceases only with the typical Frenchman’s life; or perhaps he remembered his own youth in Besançon, when he, too, had wanted to be an artist and when, among the vines on the hillside, little Rosalie smiled at him and kissed his ambition away—little Rosalie Poullot, dust and ashes these twenty years in the Cimetière du Mont Parnasse....

He turned to a pile of pot-boilers. He took one almost at random.

“This one,” he said, “I should like to buy it.”

It was the worst pot-boiler of the lot. Before the portraits, it was hopeless.

Cartaret half understood.

“No,” he said; “you don’t really want it.”

Seraphin had been right: the young man was proud. “How then?” demanded Fourget. “This also did you paint not-to-sell?”

“I painted it to sell,” said Cartaret miserably, “but it doesn’t deserve selling—perhaps just because I did paint it to sell.”

To his surprise, Fourget came to him and put an arm on his shoulder, a withered hand patting the American’s back.

“Ah, if but some more-famous artists felt as you do! Come; let me have it. That is very well. I shall sell it to a fool. Many fools are my patrons. How else could I live? There is not enough good art to meet all demands, or there are not enough demands to meet all good art. Who shall say? Suffice it there are demands of sorts. Daily I thank the good God for His fools....”

Cartaret went to Les Halles and bought a large box of strawberries.

He had put them carefully on his window-shelf and covered them with a copy of a last week’s Matin—being an American, he of course read the Matin—for he was resolved that, now he again had a little money, these strawberries should be his final extravagance and should be treasured accordingly—he had just anchored the paper against the gentle Spring breeze when he became aware that he had another visitor.

Standing by his table, much as she had stood there on the night of his second sight of her, was the Lady of the Rose.

Cartaret thought that his eyes were playing him tricks. He rubbed his eyes.

“It is I,” she said.

He thought that again he could detect the perfume of the Azure Rose. He again thought that he could see white mountain-tops in the sun. He could have sworn that, in the street, a hurdy-gurdy was playing:

“Her brow is like the snaw-drift;
Her throat is like the swan——”

“I came in,” she was saying, “to see how you were. I should have sent Chitta, but she was so long coming back from an errand.”

“Thank you,” he said—he was not yet certain of himself—“I’m quite well. But I’m very glad you called.”

“Yet you, sir, look pale, and your friend”—her forehead puckered—“told me that you had been ill.”

“My friend?” He spoke as if he had none in the world, though now he knew better.

“Yes: such a pleasant old gentleman with gray hair and glasses. As I came in half an hour ago, I met him on the stairs.”

“Fourget!”

“Was that his name? He seemed most anxious about you.”

“He is my friend.”

“I like him,” said the Lady of the Rose.

“Then you understand him. I didn’t understand him—till this morning. He is an art-dealer: those that he won’t buy from think him hard; the friends of those that he buys from think him a fool.”

Although he had reassured her of his health, she seemed charmingly willing to linger. Really, she was looking at Cartaret’s haggard cheeks with a wonderful sympathy.

“So he bought from you?”

Cartaret nodded.

“Only I hope you won’t think him a fool,” he said.

“I shall consider,” she laughed. “I must first see some of your work, sir.”

She came farther into the room. She moved with an easy dignity, her advance into the light displaying the lines of her gracile figure, the turn of her head discovering the young curve of her throat; her eyes, as they moved about his studio, were clear and starry.

In the presence of their original, Cartaret had forgotten the portraits. Now she saw them and turned scarlet.

It was a time for no more pride on the part of the painter: already, head high in air, she had turned to go. It was a time for honest dealing. Cartaret barred her way.

“Forgive me!” he cried. “Won’t you please forgive me?”

She tried to pass him without a word.

“But listen. Only listen a minute! You didn’t think—oh, you didn’t think I’d sold him one of those? They were on the wall when he came in, and I couldn’t get them away in time. I’d put them up—Well, I’d put them up there because I—because I couldn’t see you, so I wanted to see them.”

His voice trembled; he looked ill now: she hesitated.

“What right had you, sir, to paint them?”

“I don’t know. I hadn’t any. Of course, I hadn’t any! But I wouldn’t have sold them to the Luxembourg.”

What was it that Fourget had told her when he met her on the stair?—“Mademoiselle, you will pardon an old man: that Young Cartarette cannot paint pot-boilers, and in consequence he starves. For more things than money, mademoiselle. But because he cannot paint pot-boilers and get money, he starves literally.”—Her heart smote her now, but she could not refrain from saying:

“Perhaps the Luxembourg did not offer—in the person of M. Fourget?”

The last vestige of his pride left Cartaret.

“He wanted to buy those portraits,” he said. “I know that my action loses by the telling of it whatever virtue it might have had, but I’d rather have that happen than have you think what you’ve been thinking. He offered me more for them than for all my other pictures together, but I couldn’t sell.”

It was a mood not to be denied: she forgave him.

“But you, sir, must take them all down,” she said, “and you must promise to paint no more of them.”

He would have promised anything: he promised this, and he had an immediate reward.

“To-morrow,” she asked, “perhaps you will eat déjeuner with Chitta and me?”

Would he! He did not know that she invited him because of Fourget’s use of the phrase “starving literally.” He accepted, declaring that he would never more call Friday unlucky.

“At eleven o’clock?” she asked.

“At eleven,” he bowed.

When she was gone, Cartaret went again to the window that looked on the concierge’s garden. The robins were still singing:

“Seize hold of love! It is a rose—a white rose. Take it—take it—take it now!”

CHAPTER VIII
CHIEFLY CONCERNING STRAWBERRIES

Theft in its simplicity—however sharp and rude, yet if frankly done, and bravely—does not corrupt men’s souls; and they can, in a foolish, but quite vital and faithful way, keep the feast of the Virgin Mary in the midst of it.—Ruskin: Fors Clavigera.

It was quite true that he had resolved to be careful of the money that old Fourget had paid him for the pot-boiler. He still meant to be careful of it. But he was to be a guest at déjeuner next morning, and a man must not breakfast with a Princess and wear a costume that is really shockingly shabby. Cartaret therefore set about devising some means of bettering his wardrobe.

His impulse was to buy a new suit of clothes, as Seraphin had done when he sold his picture. Seraphin, however, had received a good deal more money than Cartaret, and Cartaret was really in earnest about his economies: when he had spent half the afternoon in the shops, and found that most of the ready-made suits there exposed for sale would cost him the bulk of his new capital, he decided to sponge his present suit, sew on a few buttons and then sleep with it under his mattress by way of pressing it. A new necktie was, nevertheless, imperative: he had been absent-mindedly wiping his brushes on the old, and it would not do to smell more of turpentine than the exigencies of his suit made necessary; the scent of turpentine is not appetizing.

If you have never been in love, you may suppose that the selection of so small a thing as a necktie is trivial; otherwise, you will know that there are occasions when it is no light matter, and you will then understand why Cartaret found it positively portentous. The first score of neckties that he looked at were impossible; so were the second. In the third he found one that would perhaps just do, and this he had laid aside for him while he went on to another shop. He went to several other shops. Whereas he had at first found too few possibilities, he was now embarrassed by too many. There was a flowing marine-blue affair with white fleur-de-lys that he thought would do well for Seraphin and that he considered for a moment on his own account. He went back to the first shop and so through the lot again. In the end, his American fear of anything bright conquered, and he bought a gray “four-in-hand” that might have been made in Philadelphia.

On his return he went to the window to see how his strawberries were doing. He remembered the anecdote about the good cleric, who said that doubtless God could have made a better berry, but that doubtless God never did. Cartaret wondered if it would be an impertinence to offer his strawberries to the Lady of the Rose.

They were gone.

He went down the stairs in two jumps. He thrust his head into the concierge’s cavern.

“Who’s been to my room?” he shouted. He was still weak, but anger lent him strength.

Refrogné growled.

“Tell me!” insisted Cartaret.

“How should I know?” the concierge countered.

“It’s your business to know. You’re responsible. Who’s come in and gone out since I went out?”

“Nobody.”

“There must have been somebody! Somebody has been to my room and stolen something.”

Thefts are not so far removed from the sphere of a concierge’s natural activities as unduly to excite him.

“To rob it is not necessary that one come in from without,” said he.

“You charge a tenant?”

“I charge nobody. It is you that charge, monsieur. I did not know that you possessed to be stolen. A thief of a tenant? But certainly. One cannot inquire the business of one’s tenants. What house is without a little thief?”

“I believe you did it!” said Cartaret.

Refrogné whistled, in the darkness, a bar of “Margarita.”

Houdon was passing by. He made suave enquiries.

“But not Refrogné,” he assured Cartaret. “You do an injustice to a worthy man, my dear friend. Besides, what is a box of strawberries to you?”

Cartaret felt that he was in danger of making a mountain of a molehill; he had the morbid fear, common to his countrymen, of appearing ridiculous. It occurred to him that it would not have been beyond Houdon to appropriate the berries, if he had happened into the room and found its master absent; but to bother further was to be once more absurd.

“I don’t suppose it does matter,” he said; “but my supplies have been going pretty fast lately, and if I was to catch the thief, I’d hammer the life out of him.”

“Magnificent!” gurgled Houdon as he passed gesturing into the street.

Cartaret returned toward his room. The dusk had fallen and, if he had not known the way so well, he would have had trouble in finding it. He was tired, too, and so he went slowly. That he also went softly he did not realize until he gently pushed open the door to his quarters.

A shadowy figure was silhouetted against the window out of which Cartaret kept his supplies, and the figure seemed to have some of them in its hands.

Cartaret’s anger was still hot. Now it flamed to a sudden fury. He did not pause to consider the personality, or even the garb, of the thief. He saw nothing, thought nothing, save that he was being robbed. He charged the dim figure; tackled it as he once tackled runners on the football-field; fell with it much as he had fallen with those runners in the days of old—except that he fell among a hail of food-stuffs—and then found himself tragically holding to the floor the duenna Chitta.

It was a terrible thing, this battle with a frightened woman. Cartaret tried to rise, but she gripped him fast. His amazement first, and next his mortification, would have left him nerveless, but Chitta was fighting like a tigress. His face was scratched and one finger bitten, before he could hold her quiet enough to say, in slow French:

“I did not know that it was you. You are welcome to what you want. I am going to let you go. Don’t struggle. I shan’t hurt you. Get up.”

He thanked Heaven that she understood at least a little of the language. Shaken, he got to his own feet; but Chitta, instead of rising, surprisingly knelt at his.

She spouted a long speech of infinite emotion. She wept. She clasped and unclasped her hands. She pointed to the room of her mistress; then to her mouth, and then rubbed that portion of her figure over the spot where the appetite is appeased.

“Do you mean,” gasped Cartaret—“do you mean that you and your mistress”—this was terrible!—“have been poor?”

Chitta had come to the room without her head-dress, and the subsequent battle had sent her hair in dank coils about her shoulders. She nodded; the shaken coils were like so many serpents.

“And that she has been hungry?—Hungry?”

A violent negative. Chitta bobbed toward Cartaret’s rifled stores and then toward the street, as if to include other stores in the same circle of depredation. She was also plainly indignant at the idea that she would permit her mistress to be hungry.

“Oh,” said Cartaret, “I see! You are a consistent thief.”

This time Chitta’s nod was a proud one; but she pointed again to the other room and shook her head violently; then to herself and nodded once more. Words could not more plainly have said that, although she had been supplementing her provisions by petty thefts, her employer knew nothing about them.

And she must not be told. Again Chitta began to bob and moan and weep. She pointed across the hallway, put a finger to her lips, shook her old head and finally held out her clasped hands in supplication.

Cartaret emptied his pockets. He wished he had not been so extravagant as to buy that necktie. He handed to Chitta all the money left from the price that Fourget had paid him, to the last five-centime piece.

“Take this,” he said, “and be sure you don’t ever let your mistress know where it came from. I shan’t tell anybody about you. When you want more, come direct to me.” He knew that he could paint marketable pot-boilers now.

She wanted to kiss his hand, but he hurried from the woman and left her groveling behind him....

“M. Refrogné,” he said to the concierge, “I owe you an apology. I am sorry for the way I spoke to you a while ago. I have found those strawberries.”

“Bah!” said Refrogné. He added, when Cartaret had passed: “In his stomach, most likely.”

Slowly the horror of having had to use physical force against a woman left Cartaret. He started for a long walk and thought many things. He thought, as he trudged at last across L’Etoile, how the April starshine was turning the Arc de Triomphe to silver, and how the lovers on the benches at the junction of the rue Lauriston and the avenue Kléber made Napoleon’s arch in praise of war a monument to softer passions. He thought, as he strolled from the avenue d’Eylan and across the Place Victor Hugo, how the heart of that poet, whose statue here represented him as so much the politician, must grow warm when, as now, boys and girls passed arm in arm about the pediment. The night bore jonquils in her hands and wore a spray of wisteria in her hair. Brocaded ghosts of the old régime must be pacing a stately measure at Ranelagh, and all the elves of Spring were dancing in the Bois.

The Princess was poor. That brought her nearer to him: it gave him a chance to help her. Cartaret found it hard to be sorry that she was poor.

CHAPTER IX
BEING THE TRUE REPORT OF A CHAPERONED DÉJEUNER

For she hath breathed celestial air,
And heavenly food hath been her fare,
And heavenly thought and feelings give her face
That heavenly grace.
—Southey: The Curse of Kehama.

Sometimes a mattress is doubtless as efficient a means of pressing one’s clothes as any other means, but doubtless always a good deal depends upon the mattress. By way of general rules, it may be laid down, for instance, that the mattress employed must not be too thin, must not be stuffed with a material so gregarious as to gather together in lumpy communities, and must not sag in the middle. Cartaret’s mattress failed to meet these fundamental requirements, and when he made his careful toilet on the morning that he was to take déjeuner at the Room Across the Landing, he became uneasily aware that his clothes betrayed certain evidences of what had happened to them. He had been up half a dozen times in the night to rearrange the garments, in fear of just such a misfortune; but his activities were badly repaid; the front of the suit bore a series of peculiar wrinkles, rather like the complicated hatchments on an ancient family’s escutcheon; he could not see how, when the coat was on him, its back looked, and he was afraid to speculate. With his mirror now hung high and now standing on the floor, he practiced before it until he happily discovered that the wrinkles could be given a more or less reasonable excuse if he could only remember to adopt and assume a mildly Pre-Raphaelite bearing.

Something else that his glass showed him gave him more anxiety and appeared beyond concealment: Chitta’s claws had left two long scratches across his right cheek. He had no powder and no money to buy any. He did think of trying a touch of his own paint, but he feared that oils were not suited to the purpose and would only make the wound more noticeable. He would simply have to let it go.

He had wakened with the first ray of sunlight that set the birds to singing in the garden, and, Chitta’s fall of the previous evening having spilled his coffee and devastated his supplies, he was forced to go without a petit déjeuner. He found a little tobacco in one of his coat-pockets and smoked that until the bells of St. Sulpice, after an unconscionable delay, rang the glad hour for which he waited.

Chitta opened the door to his knock, and he was at once aware of her mistress standing, in white, behind her; but the old duenna was aware of it too and ordered herself accordingly. Chitta bowed low enough to appease the watchful Lady of the Rose, but Chitta’s eyes, as she lowered them, glowered at him suspiciously. It was clear that she by no means joined in the welcome that the Lady immediately accorded him.

The Lady, in clinging muslin and with a black lace scarf of delicate workmanship draped over her black hair, gave him her hand, and this time Cartaret was not slow to kiss it. The action was one to which he was scarcely accustomed, and he hesitated between the fear of being discourteously brief about it and the fear of being discourteously long. He could be certain only of how cool and firm her hand was and, as he looked up from it, how pink and fresh her cheeks.

It was then that the Lady saw the scratches.

“Oh, but you have had an accident!” she cried.

Cartaret’s hand went to his face. He looked at Chitta: Chitta’s returning glance was something between an appeal and a threat, but a trifle nearer the latter.

“I had a little fall,” said Cartaret, “and I was scratched in falling.”

The room was bare, but clean and pleasant, fresh from the constant application of Chitta’s mop and broom, fresher from the Spring breeze that came in through the front windows, and freshest from the presence of the Lady of the Rose. Two curtained corners seemed to contain beds. At the rear, behind a screen, there must have been a gas-stove where Chitta could soon be heard at work upon the breakfast. What furniture there was bore every evidence of being Parisian, purchased in the Quarter; there was none to indicate the nationality of the tenants; and the bright little table, at which Cartaret was presently seated so comfortably as to forget the necessity of the Pre-Raphaelite pose, was Parisian too.

“You must speak French,” smiled the Lady—how very white her teeth were, and how very red her lips!—as she looked at him across the coffee-urn: “that is the sole condition that, sir, I impose upon you.”

“Willingly,” said Cartaret, in the language thus imposed; “but why, when you speak English so well?”

“Because”—the Lady was half serious about it—“I had to promise Chitta that, under threat of her leaving Paris; and if she left Paris, I should of course have to leave it, too. French she understands a little, as you know, but not English, and”—the Lady’s pink deepened—“she says that English is the one language of which she cannot even guess the meaning when she hears it, because English is the one language that can be spoken with the lips only, and spoken as if the speaker’s face were a mask.”

He said he should have thought that Chitta would pick it up from her. “Why,” he said, “it comes so readily to you: you answered in it instinctively that time when I first saw you. Don’t you remember?”

“I remember. I was very frightened. Perhaps I used it when you did because we had an English governess at my home and speak it much in the family. We speak it when we do not want the servants to understand, and so we have kept it from Chitta.” She was pouring the coffee. “Tell me truly: do I indeed speak it well?”

“Excellently. Of course you are a little precise.”

“How precise?”

“Well, you said, that time, ‘It is I’; we generally say ‘It’s me’—like the French, you understand.”

If Princesses could pout, he would have said that she pouted.

“But I was right.”

“Not entirely. You weren’t colloquial.”

“I was correct,” she insisted. “‘It is I’ is correct. My grammar says that the verb ‘To be’ takes the same case after it as before it. If the Americans say something else, they do not speak good English.”

Cartaret laughed.

“The English say it, too.”

“Then,” said the Lady with an emphatic nod, “the English also.”

It was a simple breakfast, but excellently cooked, and Cartaret had come to it with a healthy hunger. Chitta was present only in the capacity of servant; but managed to be constantly within earshot and generally to have hostess and guest under her supervision. He felt her eyes upon him when she brought in the highly-seasoned omelette, when she replenished the coffee; frequently he even caught her peeping around the screen that hid the stove. It was a marvel that she could cook so well, since she was forever deserting her post. She made Cartaret blush with the memory of his gift to her; she made him feel that his gift had only increased her distrust; when he fell to talking about himself, he made light of his poverty, so that, should Chitta’s evident scruples against him ever lead her to betray what he had done, the Lady might not feel that he had sacrificed too much in giving so little.

Nevertheless, Cartaret was in no mood for complaint: he was sitting opposite his Princess and was happy. He told her of his life in America, of football and of Broadway. It is a rare thing for a lover to speak of his sister, but Cartaret even mentioned Cora.

“Is she afraid of you, monsieur?” asked the Lady.

“I can’t imagine Cora being afraid of any mere man.”

“Ah,” said the Lady; “then the American brothers are different from brothers in my country. I have a brother. I think he is the handsomest and bravest man in the world, and I love him. But I fear him too. I fear him very much.”

“Your own brother?”

The Lady was giving Cartaret some more omelette. Cartaret, holding his ready plate, saw her glance toward the rear of the room and saw her meet the eyes of Chitta, whose face was thrust around the screen.

“Yes,” said the Lady.

It struck Cartaret that she dropped her brother rather quickly. She talked of other things.

“Your name,” she said, “is English: the concierge gave it me. It is English, is it not?”

She had made enquiries about him, then: Cartaret liked that.

“My people were English, long ago,” he answered. He grew bold. He had been a fool not to make enquiries about her, but now he would make them at first hand. “I don’t know your name,” he said.

He saw her glance again toward the rear of the room, but when he looked he saw nobody. The Lady was saying:

“Urola.”

It helped him very little. He said;

“That sounds Spanish.”

Instantly her head went up. There was blue fire in her eyes as she answered:

“I have not one drop of Spanish blood; not one.”

He had meant no offense, yet it was clear that he came dangerously near one. He made haste to apologize.

“You do not understand,” she said, smiling a little. “In my country we hate the Spaniard.”

“What is your country?”

It was the most natural of questions—he had put it once before—yet he had now no sooner uttered it than he felt that he had committed another indiscretion. This time, when she glanced at the rear of the room, he distinctly saw Chitta’s head disappearing behind the screen.

“It is a far country,” said Mlle. Urola. “It is a wild country. We have no opportunities to study art in my country. So I came to Paris.”

After that there was nothing for him to do but to be interested in her studies, and of them she told him willingly enough. She was very ambitious; she worked hard, but she made, she said, little progress.

“The people that have no feeling for any art I pity,” she said; “but, oh, I pity more those who want to be some sort of artist and cannot be! The desire without the talent, that kills.”

Chitta was coming back, bearing aloft a fresh dish. She bore it with an air more haughty than any she had yet assumed. Directing at Cartaret a glance of pride and scorn, she set before her mistress—Cartaret’s strawberries.

The Lady clapped her pretty hands. She laughed with delight.

“This,” she said, “is a surprise! I had not known that we were to have strawberries. It is so like Chitta. She is so kind and thoughtful, monsieur. Always she has for me some surprise like this.”

“It is a surprise,” said Cartaret. “I’m sure I’ll enjoy it.”

She served the berries while Chitta stalked away.

“I find,” confessed the Lady in English, “that they are not so good below as they seemed on the top. You will not object?”

Oh, no: Cartaret wouldn’t object.

“I suppose,” said Mlle. Urola, “that I should reprimand her, for their quality is”—she frowned at the berries—“inferior; but I have not the heart. Not for the whole world could I hurt her feelings. She is both so kind and so proud, and she is such a marvel of economy. You, sir, would not guess how well she makes me fare upon how small an expense.”

After breakfast, she showed him some examples of her work. It had delicacy and feeling. An unprejudiced critic would have said that she had much to learn in the way of technique, but to Cartaret every one of her sketches was a marvel.

“This,” she said, again in English, as she produced a drawing from the bottom of her bundle, “does not compare with what you did, sir, but it is not the work of a flatterer, since it is my own work. It is I.”

It was a rapid sketch of herself and it was, as she had said, the work of no flatterer.

“I like that least of all,” declared Cartaret, in the language to which she had returned; but he wanted her to forget those portraits he had made. He caught, consequently, at trifles. “Why don’t you say ‘It’s me’?” he asked.

She clasped her hands behind her and stood looking up at him with her chin tilted and her unconscious lips close to his.

“I say what is right, sir,” she challenged.

He laughed, but shook his head.

“I know better,” said he.

“No,” she said. She was smiling, but serious. “It is I that am right. And even if I learned that I were wrong, I would now not change. It would be a surrender to you.”

Cartaret found his color high. His mind was putting into her words a meaning he was afraid she might see that he put there.

“Not to me,” he said.

“Yes, yes, to you!”

Surrender! What a troublesome word she was using!

The chin went higher; the lips came nearer.

“A complete surrender, sir.” Quickly she stepped back. If she had read his face rightly, her face gave no hint of it, but she was at once her former self. “And that I will never do,” she said, reverting to French.

It was Cartaret’s turn to want to change the subject. He did it awkwardly.

“Have you been in the Bois?” he asked.

No, she had not been in the Bois. She loved nature too well to care for artificial scenery.

“But the Bois is the sort of art that improves on nature,” he protested; “at least, so the Parisian will tell you; and, really, it is beautiful now. You ought to see it. I was there last night.”

“You go alone into the Bois in the night? Is not that dangerous?”

He could not tell whether she was mocking him. He said:

“It isn’t dangerous in the afternoons, at any rate. Let me take you there.”

She hesitated. Chitta was clattering dishes in the improvised kitchen.

“Perhaps,” said the Lady.

Cartaret’s heart bounded.

“Now?” he asked.

The dishes clattered mightily.

“How prompt you are!” she laughed. “No, not now. I have my lessons.”

“To-morrow, then?”

“Perhaps,” said the Lady of the Rose. “Perhaps——”

Cartaret’s face brightened.

“That is,” explained his hostess, “if you will not try to teach me English, sir.”

CHAPTER X
AN ACCOUNT OF AN EMPTY PURSE AND A FULL HEART, IN THE COURSE OF WHICH THE AUTHOR BARELY ESCAPES TELLING A VERY OLD STORY

C’est état bizarre de folie tendre qui fait que nous n’avons plus de pensée que pour des actes d’adoration. On devient véritablement un possédé que hante une femme, et rien n’existe plus pour nous à côté d’elle.—De Maupassant: Un Soir.

The Lady’s “perhaps” meant “yes,” it seemed, for, when Cartaret called for her the next day, he found her ready to go to the Bois, and not the Lady only: hovering severely in the immediate background, like a thunder-cloud over a Spring landscape, was Chitta, wrapped in a shawl of marvelous lace, doubtless from her own country, and crowned with a brilliant bonnet unmistakably procured at some second-hand shop off the rue St. Jacques. The Lady noticed his expression of bewilderment and appeared a little annoyed by it.

“Of course,” she said, “Chitta accompanies us.”

Cartaret had to submit.

“Certainly,” said he.

He proposed a taxi-cab to the Bois—he had visited the Mont de Piété—but the Lady would not hear of it; she was used to walking; she was a good walker; she liked to walk.

“But it’s miles,” Cartaret protested.

“It is nothing,” said she.

Her utmost concession was to go by tram to the Arc.

It was a beautiful day in the Bois, with half of Paris there: carriages from the Faubourg St. Germain, motors of the smart set, hired conveyances full of tourists. The trees were a tender green; the footways crowded by the Parisian bourgeois, making a day of it with his family. Slim officers walked, in black jackets and red trousers, the calves of their legs compressed in patent-leather riding-leggings; women of the half-world showed brilliant toilettes that had been copied by ladies of the haut monde, who, driven past, wore them not quite so well. Grotesquely clipped French poodles rode in the carriages, and Belgian police-dogs in the automobiles; thin-nosed collies frolicked after their masters; here and there a tailless English sheep-dog waddled by, or a Russian boar-hound paced sedately; children played on the grass and dashed across the paths with a suddenness that threatened the safety of the adult pedestrians.

Cartaret led the way into the less frequented portions of the great park beyond the Lac Inférieur. The Lady was pleasantly beside him, Chitta unpleasantly at his heels.

“Don’t you admit it’s worth coming to see?” he began in English. “When I was here, under the stars, the other night——”

“You must speak French,” the Lady smilingly interrupted. “You must remember my promise to Chitta.”

Cartaret ground his teeth. He spoke thereafter in French, but he lowered his voice so as to be sure that Chitta could not understand him.

“I was thinking then that you ought to see it.” He took his courage in both hands. “I was wishing very much that you were with me.” His brown eyes sought hers steadily. “May I tell you all that I was wishing?”

“Not now,” she said.

Her tone was conventional enough, but in her face he read—and he was sure that she had meant him to read—a something deeper.

He put it to her flatly: “When?”

She was looking now at the fresh green leaves above them. When she looked down, she was still smiling, but her smile was wistful.

“When dreams come true, perhaps,” she said. “Do dreams ever come true in the American United States, monsieur?”

The spell of the Spring was dangerously upon them both. Cartaret’s breath came quickly.

“I wish—I wish that you were franker with me,” he said.

“But am I ever anything except frank?”

“You’re—I know I haven’t any right to expect your confidence: you scarcely know me. But why won’t you tell me even where you come from and who you are?”

“You know my name.”

“I know a part of it.”

“My little name is—it is Vitoria.”

“V-i-t-t-o-r-i-a?” he spelled.

“Yes, but with one ‘t,’” the Lady said.

“Vitoria Urola,” he repeated.

She raised her even brows.

“Oh, yes; of course,” said she.

Somehow it struck him that its sound was scarcely familiar to her:

“Do I pronounce it badly?”

“No, no: you are quite correct.”

“But not quite to be trusted?”

She looked at him doubtfully. She looked at Chitta and gave her a quick order that sent the duenna reluctantly ahead of them. Then the Lady put her gloved hand on Cartaret’s arm.

“I want you to be my friend,” she said.

“I am your friend,” he protested: “that is what I want you to believe. That is why I ask you to be frank with me. I want you to tell me just enough to let me help—to let me protect you. If you are in danger, I want——”

“You might be my danger.”

“I?”

She bowed assent.

“No, do not ask me why. I shall not tell you. I shall never tell you—no more,” she smiled, “than I shall ever say for you ‘it’s me.’ It is very kind of you to want to be my friend. I am alone here in Paris, except for poor Chitta, and I shall be glad if you will be my friend; but it will not be very easy.”

“It would be hard to be anything else.”

“Not for you: you are too curious. My friend must let me be just what I am here. All that I was before I came to Paris, all that I may be after I leave it, he must ask nothing about.”

Cartaret looked long into her eyes.

“All right,” he said at last. “I am glad to have that much. And—thank you.”

He stuck to his side of their agreement; not only during that afternoon in the Bois, but during the days that followed. He worked hard. He turned out one really good picture, and he turned out many successful pot-boilers. He would not impose these on Fourget, because old Fourget had already been too kind to him; but Lepoittevin wanted such stuff, and Cartaret let him have it.

Cartaret worked gladly now, because he was, however little she might guess it, working for Vitoria. He had left for himself precisely enough to keep him alive, but every third or fourth day he would have the happiness of slipping a little silver into Chitta’s horny palm: Chitta came readily to the habit of waiting for him on the stair. He grew happier day by day, and looked—as who does not?—the better for it. He sought out Seraphin and Varachon; he bought brandy for Houdon; went to hear Devignes sing, and once he had Armand Garnier to luncheon. He rewarded the hurdy-gurdy so splendidly that it was a nightly visitor to the rue du Val de Grâce: the entire street was whistling “Annie Laurie.”

Seraphin guessed the truth.

“Ah, my friend,” he nodded, “that foolish one, Houdon, says that you have again decided to spend of your income: I know that you are somehow making largess with your heart.”

Cartaret took frequent walks with Vitoria, Chitta always two feet behind, never closer, but never farther away. Often he saw the Lady to her classes, more frequently they walked to the Ile Saint Louis, or between the old houses of the rue des Francs Bourgeois; to the Jardin des Plantes, or into the Cours de Dragon or St. Germain des Prés: Chitta’s unsophisticated mind should have been improved by a thorough knowledge of picturesque Paris.

He was guilty of trying to elude the guardian—guilty of some rather shabby tricks in that direction—and he suffered the more in conscience because they were almost uniformly unsuccessful. More than once, however, he reached a state of exaltation in which he forgot Chitta, cared nothing about Chitta, and then he felt nearer Heaven.

On one such occasion he was actually nearer than the site usually ascribed to the Celestial City. With Vitoria and her guardian he had climbed—it was at his own malign suggestion—to Montmartre and, since Chitta feared the funicular, had toiled up the last steep ascent into Notre Dame de Sacre Coeur. Chitta’s piety—or her exhaustion—kept her long upon her knees in that Byzantine nave, and the Lady and Cartaret had a likely flying-start up the stairs to the tower. Cartaret possessed the wit to say nothing, but he noticed that Vitoria’s blue eyes shone with a light of adventure, which tacitly approved of the escapade, and that her step was as quick as his own when Chitta’s slower step, heavy breathing and muttered imprecations became audible below them.

“I’m sure the old girl will have to rest on the way up, for all her spryness,” thought Cartaret. “If we can only hold this pace, we ought to have five minutes alone on the ramparts.”

They had quite five minutes and, no other sight-seers being about, they were quite alone. Below them, under a faintly blue haze, Paris lay like an outspread map, with here and there a church steeple rising above the level of the page. The roof of the Opéra, the gilt dome of Napoleon’s tomb and the pointing finger of the Tour Eiffel were immediately individualized, but all the rest of the city merged into a common maze about the curving Seine with the red sun setting beyond the Ile de Puteaux.

Vitoria leaned on the rampart. She was panting a little from her climb; her cheeks were flushed, and her whole face glowing.

“It is as if we were gods on some star,” she said, “looking down upon a world that is strange to us.”

She was speaking in English. Cartaret bent closer. Pledges of mere friendship ceased, for the moment, to appear of primary importance: he wanted, suddenly, to make the most of a little time.

“Am I never to see you alone?” he asked.

She forsook the view of Paris to give him a second’s glance. There was something roguish in it.

“Chitta,” she said, “has not yet arrived.”

He felt himself a poor hand at love-making. Its language was upon his tongue—perhaps the slower now because he so much meant what he wanted to say. His jaw set, the lines at his mouth deepened.

“I’ve never thought much,” he blundered, “about some of the things that most fellows think a lot about. I mean I’ve never—at least not till lately—thought much about love and—” he choked on the word—“and marriage; but——”

She cut him short. Her speech was slow and deliberate. Her eyes were on his, and in them he saw something at once firm and sad.

“Nor I, my friend,” she was saying: “it is a subject that I am forbidden to think about.”

If she conveyed a command, he disobeyed it.

“Then,” he said, “I wish you’d think about it now.”

“I am forbidden to think about it,” she continued, “and I do not think about it because I shall not marry any one—at least not any one that—that I——”

Her voice dropped into silence. She turned from him to the sunset over the gray city.

Cartaret’s exaltation left him more suddenly than it had come.

“Any one that you care for?” he asked in a lowered tone.

Still facing the city, she bowed assent.

“But, in Heaven’s name, whom else should you marry except somebody that you care for?”

She did not answer.

“Look here,” urged Cartaret, “you—you’re not engaged, are you?”

She faced him then, still with that something at once firm and sad in her fine eyes.

“No,” she said; but he must have shown a little of the hope he found in that monosyllable, for she went on: “Yet I shall never marry any one that I care for. That is all that I may tell you—my friend.”

As a hurrying tug puffs up to the liner that it is to tow safely into port, Chitta puffed up to her mistress. She met a Cartaret, could she have guessed it, as hopeless as she wanted him to be.

He did his best to put from him all desire to unravel the mystery, and for some days he was again content to remain Vitoria’s unquestioning friend. She had told him that she could not marry him: nothing could have been plainer. What more could he gain by further enquiry? Did she mean that she loved somebody else whom she could not marry? Or did she mean that she loved, but could not marry—him? Cartaret highly resolved to take what good the gods provided: to remain her friend; to work on, in secret, for her comfort, and to be as happy as he could in so much of her companionship as she permitted him. He would never tell her that he loved her.

And then, very early on an evening in May, Destiny, who had been somnolent under the soft influence of Spring, awoke and once more took a hand in Cartaret’s affairs and those of the Lady of the Rose.

Cartaret had just returned from a mission to Lepoittevin’s shop and, having there disposed of a particularly bad picture, had put money in his purse: Chitta was waiting on the stairs and accepted the bulk of his earnings with her usual bad grace. He went into his studio, leaving the door ajar. The cool breeze of the Spring twilight fluttered the curtains; it bore upward the laughter of the concierge’s children, playing at diavolo in the garden; it brought the fainter notes of the hurdy-gurdy, grinding out its music somewhere farther down the street.

Somebody was tapping at the door.

“Who is it?” he called.

“It’s—I,” came the answer, with the least perceptible pause before the pronoun. “May I come in?”

“Do,” he said, and rose.

Before he could reach the door, Vitoria had entered, closing it carefully behind her. He could see that she was in her student’s blouse; tendrils of her hair, slightly disarrayed, curled about the nape of her white neck; her delicate nostrils were extended and her manner strangely quiet.

“This is good of you,” he gratefully began. “I didn’t expect——”

“What is this that you have been doing?”

Her tone, though low, was hasty. Cartaret bewilderedly realized that she was angry. Before he could reply, she had repeated her question:

“Sir, what is this that you have been doing?”

“I don’t understand.” He had drawn away from her, his face unmistakably expressive of his puzzled pain.

“You have been—— oh, that I should live to say it!—you have been giving money to my maid.”

He drew back farther now. He was detected; he was ashamed.

“Yes,” he confessed; “I thought—You see, she gave me to understand that you were—were poor.”