1 files changed, 7416 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/38436.txt b/38436.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..681a195
--- /dev/null
+++ b/38436.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,7416 @@
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Azure Rose, by Reginald Wright Kauffman
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Azure Rose
+       A Novel
+
+Author: Reginald Wright Kauffman
+
+Release Date: December 29, 2011 [EBook #38436]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE AZURE ROSE ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Suzanne Shell, Sam W. and the Online Distributed
+Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was
+produced from images generously made available by The
+Internet Archive/American Libraries.)
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+                 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.
+
+
+
+
+  [Illustration: "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
+
+
+    CHAPTER                                                   PAGE
+
+       I. In Which, if not Love, at Least Anger, Laughs
+            at Locksmiths                                       13
+
+      II. Providing the Gentle Reader with a Card of
+            Admission to the Nest of the Two Doves              36
+
+     III. In Which a Fool and His Money Are Soon Parted         49
+
+      IV. A Damsel in Distress                                  64
+
+       V. Which Tells How Cartaret Returned to the Rue du
+            Val-de-Grace, and What He Found There               84
+
+      VI. Cartaret Sets Up Housekeeping                        102
+
+     VII. Of Domestic Economy, of Day-Dreams, and of a Far
+            Country and Its Sovereign Lady                     118
+
+    VIII. Chiefly Concerning Strawberries                      144
+
+      IX. Being the True Report of a Chaperoned Dejeuner       154
+
+       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                           169
+
+      XI. Tells How Cartaret's Fortune Turned Twice in a
+            Few Hours and How He Found One Thing and Lost
+            Another                                            192
+
+     XII. Narrating How Cartaret Began His Quest of the
+            Rose                                               206
+
+    XIII. Further Adventures of an Amateur Botanist            222
+
+     XIV. Something or Other About Traditions                  253
+
+      XV. In Which Cartaret Takes Part in the Revival of
+            an Ancient Custom                                  273
+
+     XVI. And Last                                             300
+
+
+
+
+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.
+
+
+
+
+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 theologiens 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 Grace, 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 credit, il faut toujours frapper
+    l'imagination. L'idee de genie, 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 Cite 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 Cafe 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 Cafe was
+named--and a man that was trying to look like a customer.
+
+Gaston Francois 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-Rhone
+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
+_dejeuner_.
+
+"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 cafe 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 Dieudonne 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 ca_," 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. Andre 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 cafe, 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 Dieudonne, 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 Dieudonne; "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 Dieudonne 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-Grace, 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 Dieudonne.
+
+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-Grace 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
+Odeon, and so, by the steep descent of the rue de Tournon and the rue
+de Seine, came to the rue Jacob and the Cafe 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 vertebrae. 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 cafe.
+
+"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 Dieudonne, 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 Dieudonne 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 Cafe 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. Refrogne," 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 Cafe 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 Cafe 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?"
+
+Refrogne understood but truly.
+
+"Well--in short, who are they, monsieur?"
+
+"Who knows?" asked Refrogne 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. Refrogne, it said, neither knew nor
+cared. In the rue du Val de Grace 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 Refrogne'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 Refrogne 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
+Refrogne 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 Cafe 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 Cartar_ette_. 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 Dieudonne 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 cafe
+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 cafe, when, crying barbarous
+threats incomprehensible, this she-bandit, this--this _anarchiste
+infame_, 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 Refrogne 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
+Cartar_ette_."
+
+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-GRACE, AND WHAT
+HE FOUND THERE
+
+    La timidite est un grand peche contre l'amour.--Anatole
+    France: _La Rotisserie de la Reine Pedauque_.
+
+
+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 Cafe 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 Refrogne--that's the concierge--that I was dining with some
+friends at the Deux Colombes--that's a cafe--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 Grace, 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 _Aida_.
+
+"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. Andre 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 Musee 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. Andre 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 Cafe 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 cafe 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
+_patisseries_ 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 Pere la Chaise and putting violets on the tomb
+of Heloise 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'indiscretion d'un de ces amis officieux qui ne sauraient
+    garder inedite la nouvelle susceptible de vous causer un
+    chagrin.--Murger: _Scenes de la Vie de Boheme_.
+
+
+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
+regime 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 "senor."
+
+Cartaret leaned from a window. The air was still keen, but the night
+was clear. The rue du Val de Grace 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. Refrogne 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 Grace, 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 Dieudonne 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. Andre 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 betise_. 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 Dieudonne 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 Besancon, 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 Cimetiere 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 _dejeuner_ 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 _dejeuner_ 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.
+
+Refrogne 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.
+
+Refrogne whistled, in the darkness, a bar of "Margarita."
+
+Houdon was passing by. He made suave enquiries.
+
+"But not Refrogne," 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. Refrogne," 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 Refrogne. 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 Kleber 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 regime 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 DEJEUNER
+
+    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
+_dejeuner_ 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 dejeuner_. 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 etat bizarre de folie tendre qui fait que nous n'avons
+    plus de pensee que pour des actes d'adoration. On devient
+    veritablement un possede que hante une femme, et rien
+    n'existe plus pour nous a cote 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
+Piete--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 Inferieur. 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 Grace: 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 Pres:
+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 Opera, 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."
+
+"None of my family has ever taken charity of any man!"
+
+"Charity?" He did not dare to look at her, but he knew just how high
+she was holding her head and just how her eyes were flashing. "It
+wasn't that. Believe me--please believe me when I say it wasn't that.
+It never struck me in that way." He was on the point of telling her
+how he had caught Chitta red-handed in a theft, and how this had led
+to his enlightenment; but he realized in time that such an explanation
+would only deepen the wound that he had inflicted on the Lady's pride.
+"I merely thought," he concluded, "that it was one comrade--one
+neighbor--helping another."
+
+"How much have you given that wretched woman?"
+
+"I haven't the least idea."
+
+"You must know!" She stamped her foot. "Or are you, after all, one of
+those rich Americans that do not have to count their money, and that
+are proud of insulting the people of older and poorer countries by
+flinging it at them?"
+
+It was a bitter thing to say. He received it with head still bent, and
+his answer was scarcely a whisper:
+
+"I am not quite rich."
+
+"Then count. Recollect yourself, sir, and count. Tell me, and you
+shall be repaid. Within three days you shall be repaid."
+
+It never occurred to him further to humiliate her by seeking sympathy
+through a reference to his own poverty. He looked up. In her clenched
+hands and parted lips, in her hot eyes and face, he saw the tokens of
+the blow that he had dealt her. He came toward her with outstretched
+hands, petitioning.
+
+"Can't you guess why I did this?" he asked her. His amazement, even
+his sorrow, left him. In their place was only the sublimation of a
+worthy tenderness, the masterfulness of a firm resolve. His face was
+tense. "Listen," he said: "I don't want you to answer me; I wouldn't
+say this if I were going to allow you to make any reply. I don't want
+pity; I don't deserve it. Anything else I wouldn't ask, because I
+don't deserve anything else, either, and don't hope for it. I just
+want to make my action clear to you. Perhaps I should have done for
+any neighbor what I did for--what little I have been doing; I trust
+so; I don't know. But the reason I did it in this case was a reason
+that I've never had in all my life before. Remember, I'm hopeless and
+I shan't let you reply to me: I did this because"--his unswerving
+glance was on hers now--"because I love you."
+
+But she did reply. At first she seemed unable to credit him, but then
+her face became scarlet and her eyes blazed.
+
+"Love me! And you do this? Yes, sir, insult me by contributing--and
+through my servant--to my support! If I had not come back
+unexpectedly but now and found her counting more silver than I knew
+she could by right possess--if I had not frightened her into a
+confession--it might have gone on for months." The Lady stopped
+abruptly. "How long _has_ it been going on?"
+
+"I tell you that I have no idea."
+
+"But once, sir, was enough! You insult me with your money, and when I
+ask you why you do it, you answer that you love me. Love!"
+
+She uttered the concluding word with an intensity of scorn that lashed
+him. She turned to go, but, as on the occasion of their first meeting,
+he stepped forward and barred the way.
+
+"You have no right to put that construction on what I say. Our points
+of view are different."
+
+"Yes--thank the Holy Saints they _are_ different!"
+
+"I shall try to understand yours; I beg you to try to understand
+mine."
+
+Their eyes met again. In his it was impossible for her not to read the
+truth. Slowly she lowered hers.
+
+"In my country," she said, more softly now, but still proudly, "love
+is another sort of thing. In my country I should have said: 'If you
+respect me, sir, you perhaps love me; if you do not respect me, it is
+out of the question that you should love me.'"
+
+"Respect you?" This was a challenge to his love that he could not
+leave unanswered. His voice rose fresh and clear. He was no longer
+under the necessity of seeking words: they leaped, living, to his
+lips. "Respect you? Good God, I've been worshiping the very thought of
+you from the first glimpse of you I ever had. This miserable room has
+been a holy place to me because you have twice been in it. It's been a
+holy place, because, from the moment I first found you here, it has
+been a place where I dreamed of you. Night and day I've dreamed of
+you; and yet have I ever once knowingly done you any harm, trespassed
+or presumed on your kindness? I've seen no pure morning without
+thinking of you, no beautiful sunset without remembering you; you've
+been the harmony of every bar of music, of every bird-song, that I've
+heard. When you were gone, the world was empty for me; when I was with
+you, all the rest of the world was nothing, and less than nothing.
+Respect you? Why, I should have cut off my right hand before I let you
+even guess what you've discovered to-day!"
+
+As he spoke, her whole attitude altered. Her hands were still clenched
+at her sides, but clenched now in another emotion.
+
+"Is--is this true?" she asked. Her voice was very low.
+
+"It is true," he answered.
+
+"And yet"--she seemed to be not so much addressing him as trying to
+quiet an accuser in her own heart--"I never spoke one word that could
+give you any hope."
+
+"Not one," he gravely assented. "I never asked for hope; I don't
+expect it now."
+
+"And it is--it is really true?" she murmured.
+
+Again he spoke in answer to what she seemed rather to address to her
+own heart:
+
+"Because you found out what I'd done, I wanted you to know why I'd
+done it--and no more. If you hadn't found out about Chitta, I would
+never have told you--this."
+
+She tried to smile, but something caught the smile and broke it. With
+a sudden movement, she raised her white hands to her burning face.
+
+"Oh," she whispered, "why did you tell me? Why?"
+
+"Because you accused me, because----" He could not stand there and see
+her suffer. "I've been a brute," he said; "I've been a bungling
+brute."
+
+"No, no!" She refused to hear him.
+
+He drew her hands from before her face and revealed it, the underlip
+indrawn, the blue eyes swimming in hushed tears, all humbled in a
+wistful appeal.
+
+"A brute!" he repeated.
+
+"No, you are not!" Her fingers closed on his. "You are splendid; you
+are fine; you are all that I--that I ever----"
+
+"Vitoria!"
+
+Out in the rue du Val de Grace that rattletrap French hurdy-gurdy
+struck up "Annie Laurie." It played badly; its time was uncertain and
+its conception of the tune was questionable; yet Cartaret thought
+that, save for her voice, he had never heard diviner melody. She was
+looking up at him, her hands clasped in his over his pounding heart,
+her eyes like altar-fires, her lips sacrosanct, and, wreathing her
+upturned face, seeming to float upon the twilight, hovered, fresh from
+sunlit mountain-crests of virgin snow, the subtle and haunting perfume
+that was like a poem in a tongue unknown: the perfume of the Azure
+Rose.
+
+"Vitoria!" he began again. "You don't mean that you--that you----"
+
+She interrupted him with a sharp cry. She freed her hands. She went by
+him to the door.
+
+Her voice, as she paused there, was broken, but brave:
+
+"You do not understand. How could you? And I cannot tell you.
+Only--only it must be 'Good-by.' Often I have wondered how Love would
+come to me, and whether he would come singing, as he comes to most, or
+with a sword, as he comes to some." She opened the door and stepped
+across the threshold. She was closing it upon herself when she spoke,
+but she held it open and kept her eyes on Cartaret until she ended. "I
+know now, my beloved: he has come with a sword."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+TELLS HOW CARTARET'S FORTUNE TURNED TWICE IN A FEW HOURS AND HOW HE
+FOUND ONE THING AND LOST ANOTHER
+
+    A man is rich in proportion to the things he can afford to
+    let alone.--Thoreau: _Walden_.
+
+
+A great deal has been said, to not much purpose, about the vagaries of
+the feminine heart; but its masculine counterpart is equally
+mysterious. The seat of Charlie Cartaret's emotions furnishes a case
+in point.
+
+Cartaret had resolved never to tell Vitoria that he loved her, and he
+told her. Similarly, when he told her, he sought to make it clear to
+her, quite sincerely, that he nursed no hope of winning her for his
+wife, and, now that she was gone, hope took possession of his breast
+and brought with it determination. Why not? Had she not amazingly
+confessed her love for him? That left him, as he saw it, no reason
+for abnegation; it made sacrifice wrong for them both. The secret
+difficulty at which she hinted became something that it was now as
+much his duty, as it was his highest desire, to remove. For the rest,
+though he could now no more than previously consider offering her a
+union with a man condemned to a lifelong poverty, there remained for
+him no task save the simple one of acquiring affluence. What could
+seem easier--for a young man in love?
+
+The more he thought about it, the more obvious his course became.
+During all his boyhood, art had been his single passion; during all
+his residence in Paris he had flung the best that was in him upon the
+altar of his artistic ambition; but now, without a single pang of
+regret, he resolved to give up art forever. He would see Vitoria on
+the morrow and come to a practical understanding with her: was he not
+always a practical man? Then he would reopen negotiation with his
+uncle and ask for a place in the elder Cartaret's business. Perhaps it
+would not even be necessary for him to return to America: he had the
+brilliant idea that his uncle's business--which was to say, the great
+monopoly of which his uncle's holdings were a small part--had never
+been properly "pushed" in France, and that Charles Cartaret was the
+man of all men to push it. The mystery that dear Vitoria made of some
+private obstacle? That, of course, was but the exaggeration of a
+sensitive girl; it was the long effect of some parental command or
+childish vow. He had only to wrest from her the statement of it in
+order to prove it so. It was some unpractical fancy wholly beneath the
+regard of a practical, and now wholly assured, man of affairs.
+
+By way of beginning a conservative business-career, Charlie went to
+the front window and, as he had done one day not long since, emptied
+his pockets for the delight of the hurdy-gurdy grinder. Then, singing
+under his breath, and inwardly blessing every pair of lovers that he
+passed, he went out for a long walk in the twilight.
+
+He walked along the Quai D'Orsay, beside which the crowded little
+passenger-steamers were tearing the silver waters of the Seine;
+crossed the white Pont de l'Alma; struck through the Trocadero
+gardens, and so, by the rue de Passy and the shaded Avenue Ingrez,
+came to the railway bridge, crossed it and strolled along the Allee
+des Fortifications. He walked until the night overtook him, and only
+then turned back through Auteuil and over the Pont Grenelle toward
+home.
+
+Alike in the perfumed shadows beneath the trees and under the yellow
+lamps of the Boulevard de Mont Parnasse, he walked upon the clouds of
+resolution. The city that has in her tender keeping the dust of many
+lovers, cradled him and drew him forward. Her soft breath fanned his
+cheek, her sweet voice whispered in his ears:
+
+"Trust me and obey me! Did I not know and shelter Gabrielle d'Estrees
+and her royal suitor? Have I not had a care for De Musset and for
+Heine? In that walled garden over there, Balzac dreamed of Mme.
+Hanska. Along this street Chopin wandered with George Sand."
+
+That whisper followed him to his room, still thrilling with Vitoria's
+visit. It charmed him into a wonderful sense of her nearness, into a
+belief that he was keeping ward over her as long as he sat by his
+windows and watched the stars go down and the pink dawn climb the
+eastern sky. It lulled him at last to sleep with his head upon his
+arms and his arms upon the mottled table.
+
+He overslept. It must have been nearly noon when he woke, and then he
+was wakened only by a pounding at the door of his room. Fat Mme.
+Refrogne had brought him a cable-message. When she had gone, he opened
+it, surprised at once by its extravagant length. It was from Cora; a
+modern miracle had happened: there was oil in the black keeping of the
+plot of ground that only sentiment had so long bade them retain in the
+little Ohio town. Cartaret was rich....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+When the first force of the shock was over, when he could realize, in
+some small measure, what that message meant to him, Cartaret's
+earliest thought was of the Lady of the Rose. Holding the bit of paper
+as tightly as if it were itself his riches and wanted to fly away on
+the wings that had brought it, he staggered, like a drunken man, to
+the door of the Room Opposite.
+
+He knocked, but received no answer. A clock struck mid-day. Vitoria
+had probably gone to her class, and Chitta to her marketing.
+
+A mad impulse to spread the good news possessed him. It was as if
+telling the news were recording a deed that there was only a brief
+time to record: he must do it at once in order to secure title. He
+knew that his friends, if they were in funds, would soon be gathered
+at the Cafe Des Deux Colombes.
+
+When he passed the rue St. Andre Des Arts, he remembered Fourget.
+Cartaret was ashamed that his memory had been so tardy. Fourget had
+helped him in his heavy need; Fourget should be the first to know of
+his affluence....
+
+The old dealer, his bushy brows drawn tight together, his spectacles
+gleaming, was trying to say "No" to a lad with a picture under his
+arm--a crestfallen lad that was a stranger to Cartaret.
+
+"Let me see the picture," said Cartaret, without further preface. He
+put out a ready hand.
+
+The boy blushed. Cartaret had been abrupt and did not present the
+appearance of a possible purchaser.
+
+"If you please," urged Cartaret. "I may care to buy."
+
+Fourget gaped. The boy turned up his canvas--an execrable daub.
+
+"I'll buy that," said Cartaret.
+
+"Are you mad?" asked Fourget.
+
+"Bring back that picture to M. Fourget in half an hour," pursued the
+heedless American, "and he will give you for it two hundred francs
+that he will have lent me and that I shall have left with him."
+
+He pushed the stammering lad out of the shop and turned to Fourget.
+
+"Are you drunk?" asked the dealer, changing the form of his
+suspicions.
+
+"Fourget," cried Cartaret, clapping his friend on the back, "I shall
+never be hungry again--never--never--never! Look at that." He
+produced the precious cable-message. "That piece of paper will feed
+me all my life long. It will buy me houses, horses, motors,
+steamship-tickets. It looks like paper, Fourget." He spread it under
+Fourget's nose. "But it isn't; it's a dozen suits of clothes a year;
+it's a watch-and-chain, a diamond scarf-pin (if I'd wear one!); it's
+a yacht. It's an oil-well, Fourget--and a godsend!"
+
+Fourget took it in his blue-veined hands. His hands trembled.
+
+"Oh, I forgot," said Cartaret. "It is in English. Let me translate."
+He translated.
+
+When Charlie looked up from his reading, he found Fourget busily
+engaged in polishing his spectacles. Perhaps the old man's eyes were
+weak and could not bear to be without their glasses: they certainly
+were moist.
+
+"I do not see so well as I once saw," the dealer was explaining: his
+voice was very gruff indeed. "You are wholly certain that this is no
+trick which one plays upon you?"
+
+Cartaret was wholly certain.
+
+Fourget made a valiant attempt at expressing his congratulations in a
+mere Anglo-Saxon handshake. He found it quite inadequate, and this
+annoyed him.
+
+"The world," he growled, "loses a possibly fair artist and gets an
+idle millionaire."
+
+"You get a new shop," vowed Cartaret. "Don't shake your head! I'll
+make it a business proposition: I've had enough trouble by being
+suspected of charity. I'm going to buy an interest, and I shan't want
+my money sunk in anything dark and unsanitary."
+
+Fourget shook his gray head again.
+
+"Thank you with all my heart, my friend," he said; "but no. This
+little shop meets my little needs and will last out my little
+remaining days. I would not leave it for the largest establishment on
+the boulevards."
+
+They talked until Cartaret again bethought him of the cafe in the rue
+Jacob.
+
+"But you will lend me the two hundred francs," he asked, "and give it
+to that boy for his picture?" How much a boy that boy seemed now: he
+was just the boy that Cartaret had been in the long ago time that was
+yesterday!
+
+"Since you insist; but truly, my dear monsieur, myself I was about to
+weaken and purchase the terrible thing when you interrupted and saved
+me." ...
+
+The money from Seraphin's latest _magnum opus_ not being yet
+exhausted, Seraphin's friends were lunching at the Cafe Des Deux
+Colombes, with little Pasbeaucoup fluttering between them and the
+kitchen, and Madame, expressionless under her mountain of hair,
+stuffed into the wire cage and bulging out of it. The company rose
+when they espied Cartaret, the cadaverous poet Garnier picking up his
+plate of roast chicken so as not to lose, in his welcoming, time that
+might be given to eating.
+
+Cartaret felt at first somewhat ashamed before them. He felt the
+contrast between his changed fortunes and their fortunes unchanged. At
+last, however, the truth escaped him, and then he felt more ashamed
+than ever, so unenvious were the congratulations that they poured upon
+him.
+
+Devignes' round belly shook with delight. Garnier even stopped eating.
+
+"Now you may have the leisure for serious work, which," squeaked
+Varachon through his broken nose, "your art has so badly needed."
+
+Seraphin said nothing, but put his hand on Cartaret's shoulder and
+gripped it hard.
+
+Houdon embraced the fortunate one.
+
+"Did I not always tell you?" he demanded of Seraphin. "Did I not say
+he was a disguised millionaire?"
+
+"But he has but now got his money," Seraphin protested.
+
+"Poof!" said Houdon, dismissing the argument with a trill upon his
+invisible piano. "La-la-la!"
+
+"Without doubt to mark the event you will give a dinner?" suggested
+Garnier.
+
+"Without doubt," said Houdon.
+
+Cartaret said that he would give a dinner that very evening if
+Pasbeaucoup would strain the Median laws of the establishment so far
+as to trust him for a few days, and Pasbeaucoup, receiving the
+necessary nod from Madame, said that they would be but too happy to
+trust M. Cartarette for any sum and for any length of time that he
+might choose to name.
+
+So Cartaret left them for a few hours and went back to his room at the
+earliest possible moment for finding Vitoria returned from her class.
+This time he not only knocked: he tried, in his haste, the knob of the
+door, and the door, swinging open, revealed an empty room, stripped of
+even its furniture.
+
+He nearly fell downstairs to the cave of Refrogne.
+
+"Where are they?" he demanded.
+
+Had monsieur again been missing strawberries? Where were what?
+
+"Where is Mlle. Urola--where are the occupants of the room across from
+mine?" Cartaret's frenzied tones implied that he would hold the
+concierge personally responsible for whatever might have happened to
+his neighbors.
+
+"Likely they are occupying some other room by this time," growled
+Refrogne. "I was unaware that they were such great friends of
+monsieur."
+
+"They are. Where are they?"
+
+"In that case, they must have told monsieur of their contemplated
+departure."
+
+"Do you mean they've moved to another room in this house?"
+
+"But no."
+
+"Then where have they gone?"
+
+They had gone away. They had paid their bill honestly, even the rent
+for the unconsumed portion of the month, and gone away. That was all
+it was an honest concierge's business to know.
+
+"When did they go?"
+
+"Early this morning."
+
+"Didn't they leave any address?"
+
+"None. Why should they? Mademoiselle never received letters."
+
+Cartaret could bear no more. Even the man that hauled away the
+furniture had only taken it to the shop from which it had been leased.
+Refrogne had seen the two women get into a cab with their scanty
+luggage and had heard them order themselves driven to the Gare
+d'Orsay. That was the end of the trail....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Cartaret climbed to his own room. Thrust under the door, where he had
+missed it in the rush of his hopeful exit that morning, was an
+envelope. It did not hold the expected note of explanation. It held
+only a pressed rose, yellow now, and dry and odorless.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+NARRATING HOW CARTARET BEGAN HIS QUEST OF THE ROSE
+
+    The power of herbs can other harms remove,
+    And find a cure for every ill, but love.
+                    --Gray: _Elegy I_.
+
+
+For a great while Cartaret remained as a man stunned. It was only very
+slowly that there came to him the full realization of his loss, and
+then it came with all the agony with which a return to life is said to
+come to one narrowly saved from death by drowning.
+
+Blindly his brain bashed itself against the mysterious wall of
+Vitoria's flight. Why had she gone? Where had she gone? Why had she
+left no word? A thousand times that day these unanswerable questions
+whirled through his dizzy consciousness. Had he offended her? He had
+explained his one offense, and she had given no sign of having taken
+any other hurt. Was she indeed a revolutionist from some strange
+country, summoned away, without a moment's warning, by the inner
+council of her party? Revolutionist conspirators did not go to
+art-classes and do not walk only under the chaperonage of an ancient
+duenna. Was she, then, that claimant to power that he had once
+imagined her, now gone to seize her rights? Things of that sort did
+not, Cartaret knew, occur in these prosy days. Then why had she gone,
+and where, and why had she left no word for him? Again these dreary
+questions began their circle.
+
+Less than twenty-four hours ago, he had thought that money would
+resolve all his troubles. Money! Fervently he wished himself poor
+again--poor again, as yesterday, with Her across the landing in the
+Room Opposite.
+
+Somehow, he did not forget his friends and the dinner he had promised
+them. He went to the Deux Colombes and ordered the dinner.
+
+"Say to them, Pasbeaucoup," he gave instructions, "that I am
+indisposed and shall not be able to dine with them. Say that we shall
+all dine together some other night--very soon I hope. Say that I am
+sorry."
+
+He was bitter now against all the world. "What will they care, as long
+as they have the dinner?" he reflected.
+
+Pasbeaucoup cared. He expressed great concern for monsieur's health.
+
+"That," thought Cartaret, "is because I'm rich. A month or two ago and
+they wouldn't trust me: they'd have let me starve."
+
+He went back to his desolate room and to his dreary questioning. He
+was there, with his head in his hands, when Seraphin found him.
+
+Seraphin's suit was still new, and it was evident that he had dressed
+carefully his twin wisps of whisker in honor of Cartaret's
+celebration. The Frenchman's face was grave.
+
+"Why aren't you dining?" sneered Cartaret.
+
+Seraphin passed by the sneer.
+
+"They told me that you were ill," he said, simply.
+
+"And you came to see if it was true?"
+
+"I came to see if I could be of any assistance."
+
+("Ah," ran Cartaret's unjust thoughts, "it's very evident you're rich
+now, Charlie!")
+
+"Nobody else came with you," he said.
+
+Seraphin hesitated. He twirled his soft hat in his hands.
+
+"They thought--all but Houdon, who still persists that you have been
+rich always--they thought that, now that you were rich, you might
+prefer other society."
+
+"_You_ didn't think it?"
+
+"I did not."
+
+It was said so frankly that even Cartaret's present mood could not
+resist its sincerity. Charlie frowned and put both his hands on
+Seraphin's shoulders.
+
+"Dieudonne," he said, "I'm in trouble."
+
+"I feared it."
+
+"Not money-trouble."
+
+"I feared that it was not money-trouble."
+
+"You understood?"
+
+"I guessed. You have been so happy of late, while you were so poor,
+that to absent yourself from this gayety when you were rich----" An
+expressive gesture finished the sentence. "Besides," added Seraphin,
+"one cannot be happy long, and when you told me that you had money, I
+feared that you would lose something else."
+
+Cartaret wrung the hand of his friend.
+
+"Go back," he said. "Go back and tell them that it's not pride. Tell
+them it's illness. I _am_ ill. It was good of you to come here, but
+there's nothing you can do just now. To-morrow, or next day, perhaps I
+can talk to you about it. Perhaps. But not now. I couldn't talk to any
+one now. Good-night."
+
+He sat down again--sat silent for many hours after he had heard
+Seraphin's footsteps die away down the stairs. He heard the
+hurdy-gurdy and thought that he could not bear it. He heard the other
+lodgers return. He heard the strange sounds--the creaking boards, the
+complaining stairway, the whispering of curtains--which are the
+night-sounds of every house. In the ear of his mind, he heard the
+voices of his distant guests:
+
+    "What woman's lips compare to this:
+    This sturdy seidel's frothy kiss?----"
+
+Because he grew afraid of the ghosts of doubt that haunt the darkness,
+he lighted his lamp; but for a long time the ghosts remained.
+
+This was the very room in which he had told her that he loved her;
+this desert place was once the garden in which he had said that little
+of what was so much. She had stood by that table (so shabby now!) and
+made it a wonderful thing. She had touched that curtain; her fingers,
+at parting, had held that rattling handle of the shattered door. He
+half thought that the door might open and reveal her, even now. Memory
+joined hands with love to make her poignantly present. Her lightest
+word, her least action: his mind retained them and rehearsed them
+every one. The music of her laughter, the melody of her grace, wove
+spells in the lamplit room; but they ceased as she had ceased; they
+left the song unfinished, they stopped in the middle of a bar.
+
+He wondered whether it must always remain unfinished, this allegro of
+love in what, without it, would be the dull biographic symphony of
+his life; whether he would grow to be an old man with no memories but
+broken memories to warm his heart; and whether even this memory would
+become as the mere memory of a beautiful portrait seen in youth, a
+Ghirlandaio's or a Guido Reni's work, some other man's vision, a part
+of the whole world's rich heritage, a portion of the eternal riddle of
+existence.
+
+"So short a time ago," crooned the ghosts--"and doubtless she has
+already forgotten you. You have but touched her hands: how could you
+hope that you had touched her heart? She will be happy, though she
+knows that you are unhappy; glad, though you are desolate. You gave
+her your dreams to keep, your hopes, your faith in love and womankind:
+and this is what she did with them! They are withered like that rose."
+
+He had put the yellow thing against his heart, where once he had put
+it when it was fresh and pure. He drew it out now and looked at it.
+What did it mean--that message of the rose? That, as she had once
+treasured the flower, so now she would treasure in its place her
+memory of him?
+
+"It means," chanted the ghosts, "that her friendship is as dead as
+this dry flower!"
+
+Did it? He would make one trial more.
+
+Vivid as was her face in his mind, he brought to the lamp his pictures
+of her. She had liked those pictures; in spite of herself, she had
+shown him that she liked them----
+
+(The ghosts were crooning:
+
+"Though you had the brush of Diego Velasquez, she would not heed you
+now!")
+
+Had he painted her--he had tried to--as she should have been? Or had
+he painted her as she really was?
+
+He searched the pictures. Her eyes seemed to look at him with a long
+farewell in their blue-black depths, the parted lips to tremble on a
+sob. A light was born in the canvas--the reflected light of his own
+high faith revived. Whatever separated them, it was by no will of
+hers. No, there was no ghost in all the fields of night that he would
+listen to again: in that pictured face there was as much of pride as
+there was of beauty, but there was nothing of either cruelty or
+deceit. Yes, he had only touched her hand, but certainly hand had
+never yet touched hand as his touched hers. He was sure of it and sure
+of her. A short acquaintance--it had been long enough to prove her. A
+few broken words in the twilight--they were volumes. The merest breath
+of feeling--it would last them to their graves.
+
+He would move earth and Heaven to find Vitoria: the wine of that
+resolution rang in his ears and fired his heart. The sun, coming up
+over the Pantheon in a glory of red and gold, sent into Cartaret's
+room a shining messenger of royal encouragement before whose sword the
+ghosts forever fled. The lover was almost gay again: here was new
+service for her; here, for him, was work, the best surcease of sorrow.
+He felt like an athlete trained to the minute and crouching for the
+starter's pistol-shot. He believed in Vitoria! He believed in her, and
+so he could not doubt his own ability to discover her in the face of
+all hardships and to win her against all odds; he believed in her and
+in himself, and so he could not doubt God.
+
+He understood something of the difficulties that presented themselves.
+He knew scarcely anything of the woman whom he sought; his only clews
+were her name and the name of the rose; he must first find to what
+country those names belonged, and to find that country he might have
+to seek through all the world. He could not ask help of the police; he
+would not summon to his assistance those vile rats who call themselves
+private-detectives. It was a task for himself alone; it was a task
+that must occupy his every working-hour; but it was a task that he
+would accomplish.
+
+A second cable-message interrupted him at his ablutions. It was from
+his uncle, and it read:
+
+    "Cora wires me received no reply from you. Do you accept
+    trust's offer stated in her cable? Advise you say yes. Better
+    come home and attend to business."
+
+This brought Cartaret to the realization that he was in a paradoxical
+position: he was a penniless millionaire. He went to Fourget's and
+borrowed some money. Thence he went to the cable-office in the Avenue
+de l'Opera. There had been, he now recalled, an offer--a really
+dazzling offer--mentioned in his sister's message; but more practical
+matters had driven it from his mind. He therefore sent his uncle this:
+
+    "I accept trust's offer. Advise Cora to agree. Don't worry:
+    New York's not the only place for business. There's business
+    in Paris--lots of it."
+
+His uncle had been very annoying: Charlie should have been at work at
+the Bibliotheque Nationale a full half-hour ago. He had resolved to
+begin with the floral clew.
+
+He went there immediately and asked what books they had about flowers;
+they told him that they had many thousand. Cartaret narrowed his
+field; he said what he wanted was a book on roses, and he was told
+that he might choose any of hundreds that were at hand. In despair, he
+ordered brought to him any one that began with an "A"; he would work
+through the alphabet.
+
+By closing-time he had reached "Ac." He hurried out into the fresh
+breeze that blew down through the public square and the narrow rue
+Colbert, and so cut across to the cable-office.
+
+He wanted to send a message mentioning a little matter he had
+forgotten that morning. As it happened, the operator had just received
+a message for Charlie. It was again from his uncle, and said that the
+sale would be consummated early next day. There was about it a brevity
+more severe than even cables require: the elder Cartaret patently
+disapproved of the communication that his nephew had sent him. Still,
+the sale seemed to be assured, and that was the main thing, so Charlie
+put the word "Five" in place of the word "One" in the message he was
+drafting, and sent it off:
+
+    "Cable me five thousand."
+
+He interrupted his library-researches the next day to make a sporadic
+raid upon florist-shops along the boulevards, but found no florist
+that had ever heard of the Azure Rose.
+
+The answer to his latest cable-message came the next day at noon. He
+had resumed his search at the Bibliotheque and instructed the
+cable-clerk to hold all messages until he should call for them. He
+called for this at lunch-time:
+
+    "Sale completed, thanks to power-of-attorney you left me when
+    sailing. Do you mean dollars?"
+
+Cartaret groaned at this procrastination.
+
+"And my uncle brags of his American hustle!" he cried.
+
+He filed his reply:
+
+    "Of course I meant dollars. What did you suppose I meant?
+    Francs? Pounds sterling? I mean dollars. Hurry!"
+
+"Be sure to put in the punctuation marks," he admonished the pretty
+clerk.
+
+He dashed back to the library. During the next hundred and twenty
+hours, he divided his time between botanical researches and one side
+of the following cable-conversation:
+
+"Come home."
+
+"Can't."
+
+"Why?"
+
+"Busy."
+
+"How?"
+
+"Botanizing. But if you don't send me immediately that little bit of
+all that belongs to me, I'll knock off work to find out the reason
+why."
+
+The money arrived just as his credit in short-credit Paris was
+everywhere close to the breaking-point, and just as he gave up hope of
+ever finding what he wanted at the great library, where he had driven
+every sub and deputy librarian to the brink of insanity. Money,
+however, brings resourcefulness: Cartaret then remembered the Jardin
+des Plantes, where he had once been with Vitoria.
+
+No official knew anything about the Azure Rose, but an old gardener
+(Cartaret was trying them all) gave him hope. He was a little Gascon,
+that gardener, with white hair and blue eyes, and his long labor had
+bent him forward, as if the earth in which he worked had one day laid
+hold of his shoulders and never since let go.
+
+"I had a brother once who was a _faineant_ and so a great traveler.
+He spoke of such a rose," the Gascon nodded; "but I cannot remember
+what it was that he told me."
+
+"Here are five francs to help you remember," said Cartaret.
+
+The old man took the money and thanked him.
+
+"But I cannot remember what my brother told me," he said, "except that
+the rose was found nowhere but in the Basque provinces of Spain." ...
+
+A half-hour later Cartaret had bought his traveling-kit, which
+included a forty-five caliber automatic revolver. Forty minutes later
+he had paid Refrogne ten months' rent in advance, together with a
+twenty-five franc tip, and directed that his room be held against his
+return. An hour later he was sheepishly handing Seraphin a bulky
+package, evidently containing certain canvases, and saying to him:
+
+"These are something I wouldn't leave about and couldn't bring myself
+to store, and you're--well, I think you'll understand."
+
+At twelve o'clock that night, from an opened window in his compartment
+of a sleeping-car on a southward-speeding _train de luxe_, Cartaret
+was looking up at the yellow stars somewhere about Tours.
+
+"Good-night, Vitoria!" he was whispering. "Good-night, and--God keep
+you!"
+
+He was a very practical man.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+FURTHER ADVENTURES OF AN AMATEUR BOTANIST
+
+    The happiness of the good old times is a mere dream in every
+    age; but to keep on the laws of the old times, in preserving
+    to reform, in reforming to preserve, is the true life of a
+    free people.--Freeman: _The Norman Conquest_.
+
+
+"Vitoria," explained the guard, whom Cartaret inveigled into
+conversation next morning, "is the capital of the province of Alava."
+
+"Eh?" said Cartaret. "Then there's more than one Vitoria, my friend.
+If I'd only studied geography when I was at school, it might have
+saved me a week now."
+
+He tried to make talk with a hatless Englishman in tweeds, who was
+smoking a briar-pipe in the corridor.
+
+"Vitoria," said the Englishman, "is one of the places where Wellington
+beat the French under Joseph Buonaparte and Jourdan, in the
+Peninsular War."
+
+"Didn't the Spanish help?" asked Cartaret.
+
+"They thought they did," said the Englishman.
+
+Cartaret had had small time in Paris to learn anything about the
+strange people and the strange country for which he was bound; but,
+had he had weeks for study, he would have learned little more.
+Centuries had availed almost nothing to the scholars that sought to
+explain them. The origin of their race and language still unknown, the
+Basques, proud and wild, free and self-sufficient, have held to
+themselves their sea and mountain-fortresses from the dawn of recorded
+history. The successive tides of the Suavi, the Franks and the Goths
+have swept through those rugged valleys, and left the Basque unmixed
+and untainted. From the days of the Roman legions to those of the
+Napoleonic armies, he has withstood the onslaughts of every conqueror
+of Western Europe, unconquered and unchanged. The rivers of his
+legends draw direct from the source of all legends; the boundary of
+his customs is as unalterable as the foundation of his Pyrenees. The
+engines of imperial slaughter, the steady blows of progress, the
+erosion of time itself, have left him as they found him: the serene
+despair of the philologist, the Sphynx of ethnology, the riddle of the
+races of mankind.
+
+Cartaret picked up the scanty threads of the Basques' known chronicle.
+He learned that these Celtiberi had preserved an independence which
+outlasted the Western Empire, gave no more than a nominal allegiance
+to Leovigild, to Wamba and to Charlemagne, cast their fortunes with
+the Moors at Roncesvalles and, in the eleventh century, formed a free
+confederation of three separate republics under a ruler of their own
+blood and choice, whose tenure was dependent upon constitutional
+guarantees and whose power was wholly executive. Even the yoke of
+Spain, hated as it was, had failed materially to affect this form of
+government and could be justly regarded as little save a name. The
+three provinces--the Vascongadas as they were called: the sea-coast
+Viscaza and Guipuzcoa and the inland Alava--retained their ancient
+identity. Somewhere among their swift rivers and well-nigh
+inaccessible mountains must be the house of her whom he sought.
+Because of the name that she had given him, Cartaret headed now for
+Vitoria.
+
+Twice he had to change his train, each time for a worse. From Bayonne
+he crossed the Spanish border at Hendaya, whence the railway, after
+running west along the rocky coast of the Bay of Biscay, turned
+southward toward the heights about Tolosa. All afternoon the scenery
+was varied and romantic. The hard-clay soil, cultivated with painful
+care by young giants and graceful amazons, gave place to pine-forests,
+to tree-cloaked hills, to mountains dark with mystery.
+
+Twilight fell, then night. Cartaret could now see nothing of the
+landscape through which he was jolted, but, from the puffing of the
+engine, the slow advance, the frightful swinging about curves, it was
+clear to him that he was being hauled, in a series of half-circles,
+up long and steep ascents.
+
+"What station is this?" he asked a French-speaking guard that passed
+his window at a stop where the air was cool and sweet with the odor of
+pine. The lantern showed only a good-natured face in a world of
+darkness.
+
+"Ormaiztegua, monsieur," said the guard.
+
+"What?" said Cartaret. "Say it slow, please, and say it plainly: I am
+a stranger and of tender years."
+
+The guard repeated that outlandish name.
+
+"And now which way do we go?" Cartaret inquired.
+
+"North again to Zumarraga."
+
+"North again?" repeated Cartaret. "Look here: I'm in a hurry. Isn't
+there any more direct route to Vitoria?"
+
+"Evidently monsieur does not know the Pyrenees."
+
+From Zumarraga, the train bent yet again southward, out of Guipuzcoa
+across the Navarra line.
+
+"Aren't we late?" asked Cartaret.
+
+"But a little," the guard reassured him: "scarcely two hours."
+
+At last, when they had climbed that precipitous spur of the Pyrenees
+which forms the northern wall of Alava; after they had stopped once to
+harness an extra locomotive, and stopped again to unharness it; after
+they had descended again, ascended again and once more descended--this
+last time for what seemed but a little way--the train came to the end
+of this stage of Cartaret's journey. He alighted on a smoky platform
+only partially illuminated by more smoky lamps and had himself driven
+to the hotel that the first accessible cabby recommended.
+
+Vitoria is a curious city of nearly 150,000 inhabitants, situated on a
+hill overlooking the Plain of Alava. Cartaret, waking with the sun,
+could see from his window the Campillo, the oldest portion of the
+town, crowning the hill-crest, an almost deserted jumble of ruined
+walls and ancient towers, surrounded by public-gardens and topped by
+the twelfth-century Cathedral of St. Mary, the effect of its Gothic
+arches sadly lessened by ugly modern additions to the pile. Below,
+the Vitoria Antigua clung to the hillside, a maze of narrow, twisting
+streets; and still lower lay the new town, a place of wide
+thoroughfares and shady walks, among which was Cartaret's hotel.
+
+He breakfasted early and, having no leisure for sight-seeing, asked
+his way to the city's administrative-offices. He passed rows of
+hardware-factories, wine and wool warehouses, paper-mills and
+tanneries, wide yards in which rows of earthenware lay drying, and
+plazas where the horse and mule trade flourished, and so came at last
+to the arcaded market-place opposite which was the building that he
+was in search of; the offices were not yet open for the day.
+
+He sat down to wait at a table under an awning and before a cafe that
+faced the market. The market was full of country-folk, men and women,
+all of great height and splendid physique, and Cartaret saw at once
+that the latter wore the same sort of peculiar head-dress that, in
+Paris, had distinguished Chitta.
+
+A loquacious waiter, wholly unintelligible, was accosting him.
+Cartaret, guessing that he was expected to pay for his chair with an
+order for drink, made signs to fit that conjecture, and the waiter
+brought him a flask of the native _chacoli_. It was a poor wine, and
+Cartaret did not care for it, but he sat on, pretending to, watching
+the white municipal building and looking, from time to time, at the
+farmers from the market who passed into the cafe and out of it.
+
+He half expected to see Chitta among their womenfolk: Chitta, of whom
+he would so lately have said that he never wanted to see her again!
+The farmers all gravely bowed to him, and Cartaret, of course, bowed
+in return. Finally it occurred to him that he might get news from one
+of them and so, one by one, he would stop them with an inquiry as to
+whether they spoke French. A dozen failures were convincing him of his
+folly, when their result was ruined by the appearance of a
+rosy-cheeked young man in a wide hat and swathed legs, who appeared to
+be more prosperous than his neighbors and who replied to Cartaret in
+a French that the American could understand.
+
+"Then do sit down and have a drink with me," urged Cartaret. "I'm a
+stranger here and I'd be greatly obliged to you if you would."
+
+The young man agreed. He explained complacently that the folk of
+Alava, though invariably hospitable, generally distrusted strangers,
+but that he had had advantages, having been sent to the Jesuit school
+in St. Jean Pied-de-Port. He was the one chance in a thousand: he knew
+something of what Cartaret wanted to learn.
+
+Had he ever heard of a rose, a white rose, called the Azure Rose?
+
+Had he not heard! It was one of the foolish superstitions of the folk
+of Northern Alava, that rose. His own mother, being from the
+North--God rest her soul--had not been exempt: when he was sent into
+France to school, she had pinned an Azure Rose against his heart in
+order to insure his return home.
+
+"Then it grows in the North?"
+
+"For the most part, yes, monsieur, and even there it is something
+rare: that, without doubt, is why it is esteemed so dearly by the
+common folk. It grows only near the snows, the high snows. There are
+but few white peaks there, and on them a few such roses. The country
+beyond Alegria is the place of all places for them. If monsieur wants
+to find the Azure Rose, he should go to the wild country beyond
+Alegria."
+
+"Do you know that country?" asked Cartaret.
+
+The young man shrugged. He ought to know it: he had been brought up
+there. But it was no place for strangers; it was very wild.
+
+"I wonder," said Cartaret, hope shining in his brown eyes--"I wonder
+if you ever heard of a family there by the name of Urola?"
+
+The farmer shook his head. Urola? No, he had never heard of Urola. But
+stay: there was the great family, the Ethenard-Eskurola d'Alegria.
+Eskurola was somewhat like Urola; indeed, Urola was part of Eskurola.
+Perhaps, monsieur----
+
+Cartaret was leaning far over the table.
+
+"Is there," he asked, "a young lady in that family named Vitoria?"
+
+The farmer reflected.
+
+"There was one daughter," he said; "a little girl when I was a lad.
+She was the Lady Dolorez. She had, however, many names: people of
+great houses among us have many names, monsieur, and Vitoria is not
+uncommonly among them. Vitoria? Yes, I think she was also called
+Vitoria."
+
+"Did she speak English?"
+
+"It was likely, monsieur." Nearly all of the Ethenard-Eskurolas spoke
+English, because one of their so numerous ancestors was the great Don
+Miguel Ricardo d'Alava, general under the Duke of Wellington, who
+valued him above all his generals in that Spanish campaign. Since then
+there had always been English teachers for the children of the house.
+So much was common knowledge.
+
+It was enough for Cartaret. Within the hour he was summoning the
+proprietor of his hotel to his assistance in arranging for an
+expedition to Alegria.
+
+The hotel proprietor stroked a beard so bristling as to threaten his
+caressing fingers.
+
+"It is a wild country," he remarked.
+
+"That's what they all say," returned Cartaret. "When does the next
+train leave for it?"
+
+"There is no train. Alegria is a little town in the high Cantabrian
+Mountains, far from any train."
+
+"Then come along downtown and help me buy a horse," said Cartaret. "I
+saw a lot of likely-looking ones this morning."
+
+"But, monsieur," expostulated the hotel proprietor, "nobody between
+here and Alegria speaks French. Nobody in Alegria speaks French--and
+you do not speak _Eskura_."
+
+"What's that?"
+
+"It is how we Basques name our own tongue."
+
+"Well, I don't care. Get me a guide."
+
+"I fear I cannot, monsieur. The country people do not want Alava to
+become the prey of tourists, and they will be slow to allow a
+stranger."
+
+"Have you got a road-map?"
+
+Yes, the proprietor had a road-map--of sorts. It looked faulty, and
+Cartaret found later that it was more faulty than it looked; but he
+resolved to make it do, and that afternoon found him in the saddle of
+a lean and hardy mare, ten miles on his way. He had brought with him a
+pair of English riding-breeches and leggings--purchased in Paris for
+no other reason than that he had the money and used to love to
+ride--his reduced equipment was in saddle-bags, and the road-map in
+his handiest pocket.
+
+He put up at a little inn that night and rode hard, east by south, all
+the next day. He rode through fertile valleys where the fields were
+already yellow with wheat and barley. He came upon patches of Indian
+corn that made him think of the country about his own Ohio home, and
+upon flax-fields and fields of hemp. His way lay steadily upward, and
+in the hills he met with iron-banks and some lead and copper mines.
+Queerly costumed peasants herded sheep and goats along the roadside;
+but nobody that Cartaret addressed could understand a word of his
+speech. The road-map was bad, indeed: twice he lost his way by
+consulting it and once, he thought, by failing to consult it. A road
+that the map informed him would lead straight to Alegria ended in a
+marble-quarry.
+
+Cartaret accosted the only workman in sight.
+
+"Alegria?" he asked.
+
+The man pointed back the way that Cartaret had come.
+
+He followed the direction thus indicated and took a turning that he
+had missed before. He passed through a countryside of small plains.
+Then he began to climb again and left these for stretches of bare
+heath and hills covered with furze. From one hilltop he looked ahead
+to a vast pile of mountains crowned by two white peaks that shone in
+the sun like the lances of a celestial guard. The farms were less and
+less in size and farther and farther apart--tiny farms cultivated with
+antique implements. Apple-orchards appeared and disappeared, and then,
+quite suddenly, the hills became mountains, their bases covered by
+great forests of straight chestnut-trees, gigantic oaks and stately
+bushes whose limbs met in a dark canopy above the rider's head. At
+his approach, rabbits scurried, white tails erect, across the road;
+from one rare clearing a flock of partridges whirred skyward, and
+once, in the distance, he saw a grazing herd of wild deer.
+
+Late in the afternoon, he came to a wide plateau, surrounded on three
+sides with mountain-peaks. There was a lake in the center, with a few
+cottages scattered along its shores, and at one end of the lake a
+high-gabled, wide-eaved inn, in front of which a short man, dark and
+wiry and unlike the people of that country, lounged in the sun. He
+proved to be the innkeeper, a native of Navarre, and, to Cartaret's
+delight, spoke French.
+
+"Yes," he nodded, "I learned it years ago from a French servant that
+they used to have at the castle in the old lord's time."
+
+"I've come from Vitoria," Cartaret explained. "Can you tell me how far
+it is to Alegria?"
+
+"If you have come from Vitoria," was the suspicious answer, "you must
+have taken the wrong road and come around Alegria. Alegria is a score
+of miles behind you."
+
+Cartaret swore softly at that road-map. He was tired and stiff,
+however, and so he dismounted and let the landlord attend to his mare
+and bring him, at the inn-porch, some black bread and cheese and a
+small pitcher of _zaragua_, the native cider.
+
+"These are a strange people here," he said as the landlord took a
+chair opposite.
+
+The landlord shook his swarthy head.
+
+"I do not speak ill of them," said he. His tone implied that such a
+course would be unwise. "They call themselves," he went on after a
+ruminative pause, "the direct descendants of those Celtiberi whom the
+old Romans could never conquer, and I can well believe it of them.
+However, I know nothing: the lord at the castle knows."
+
+"They don't like the Spaniards?" asked Cartaret.
+
+"They hate us," said the innkeeper.
+
+"Why?"
+
+"I do not know. Perhaps because Spain rules them--so much as any
+power could. But I know nothing: the lord at the castle knows."
+
+"What's his name?"
+
+The question fell thoughtlessly from the lips of the American, but he
+had no sooner uttered it than he surmised its answer:
+
+"The Don Ricardo Ethenard-Eskurola d'Alegria."
+
+Cartaret produced a gold-piece and spun it on the rude table before
+him.
+
+"An important man, isn't he?"
+
+The innkeeper was eyeing the money, but his reply was cautious:
+
+"How--'important'?"
+
+"Rich?"
+
+"The old lord lost much when there was the great rising for Don
+Carlos. But an Ethenard-Eskurola does not need riches."
+
+"Then he's lucky. How does that happen?"
+
+"Because his family is the most ancient and powerful in all the
+Vascongadas. There is no family older in Spain, nor any prouder." It
+was plainly one subject of which this alien was permitted to know
+something. "They have been lords of this land since before the time
+that men made chronicles. The papers in the castle go back to the
+Fifteenth Century--to the time when _Eskura_ was first turned into an
+alphabet. They were at Roncesvalles; they made pilgrimages to
+Jerusalem and fought in the crusades. One of them was Lord-Lieutenant
+of Jerusalem when Godfrey de Bouillon was its King. There was an
+Ethenard-Eskurola at La Isla de los Faisanes when the French Louis XI
+arranged there with our Henry the marriage of the Duc de Guienne.
+Always they have been lords and over-lords--always."
+
+"I see," said Cartaret. "And the present lord lives near here at the
+castle?"
+
+"As all his fathers lived before him. At their place and in their
+manner. What they did, he does; what they believed, he believes.
+Monsieur, even the ancient Basque traditions of hospitality are there
+a law infringeable. Were you his bitterest blood-enemy and knocked at
+the castle-gate for a night's shelter, he himself, Ricardo d'Alegria,
+would greet you and wait upon you, and keep you safe until morning."
+
+"And then shoot my head off?" suggested Cartaret.
+
+The innkeeper smiled: "I know nothing; but the lord at the castle
+knows."
+
+"I suppose he hasn't a drop of any blood but Basque blood in him?"
+
+"Monsieur, there is but one way in which a foreigner may marry even
+the humblest Basque, and that is by some act that saves the Basque's
+entire line. Thus even the humblest. As for the grandee at the castle,
+if I so much as asked him that question, so proud is he of his
+nationality and family that likely he would kill me."
+
+"He must be a pleasant neighbor," said the American. "He lives alone?"
+
+"With his servants. He has, of course, many servants."
+
+"He is not married?"
+
+Still eyeing the gold-piece, the landlord answered:
+
+"No. There was something, once, long ago, that men say--but I know
+nothing. The Don Ricardo is the last of his house. Unless he marries,
+the Eskurolas will cease. However, he will marry."
+
+"You seem certain of it."
+
+"Naturally, monsieur. He will marry in order that the Eskurolas do not
+cease."
+
+"Yes-s-s." Cartaret hesitated before his next question. "So he's alone
+up there? I mean--I mean there's no other member of his family with
+him now?"
+
+Instantly the innkeeper's face became blank.
+
+"I know nothing----" he began.
+
+"But the lord at the castle knows!" interrupted Cartaret. "I said it
+first that time. The lord at the castle must know everything."
+
+"He does," said the landlord simply.
+
+Cartaret rose. He pushed the gold-piece across the table.
+
+"That sentiment earns it," said he. "Bring my mare, please. And you
+might point out the way to this castle. I've a mind to run up there."
+
+The innkeeper looked at him oddly, but, when the mare had been
+brought around, pointed a lean brown finger across the lake toward the
+mountains that ended in twin white peaks: the peaks that Cartaret had
+seen a few hours since and that now seemed to him to be the crests of
+which he had dreamed when first he saw the Azure Rose.
+
+"The road leads from the head of the lake, monsieur," said the
+innkeeper: "you cannot lose your way."
+
+Cartaret followed the instructions thus conveyed. After three miles'
+riding, a curved ascent had shut the lake and the cottages from view,
+had shut from view every trace of human habitation. He rode among
+scenery that, save for the grassy bridle-path, was as wild as if it
+had never before been known of man.
+
+It was a ravishing country, a fairy-country of blue skies and fleecy
+clouds; of acicular summits and sharp-edged crags; of mist-hung
+valleys shimmering in the sun; of black chasms dizzily bridged by
+scarlet-flowered vines. The road ran along the edges of precipices
+and wreathed the gray outcropping rock; thick ropes of honeysuckle
+festooned the limbs of ancient trees and perfumed all the air. Here a
+blue cliff hid its distant face behind a bridal-veil of descending
+spray, broken by a dozen rainbows; there, down the terrifying depths
+of a vertical wall, roared a white and mighty cataract. The traveler's
+ears began to listen for the song of the hamadryad from the branches
+of the oak; his eyes to seek the flashing limbs of a frightened nymph;
+here if anywhere the gods of the elder-revelation still held sway.
+
+Evening, which comes so suddenly in the Cantabrians, was falling
+before the luxuriant verdure lessened and he came to a break in the
+forest. Below him, billow upon billow, the foothills fell away in
+rolling waves of green. Above, the jagged circle of the horizon was a
+line of salient summits and tapering spires of every tint of
+blue--turquoise, indigo, mauve--mounting up and up like the seats in a
+Titanic amphitheater, to the royal purple of the sky.
+
+Cartaret had turned in his saddle to look at the magnificent
+panorama. Now, turning forward, he saw, rising ahead of him--ten miles
+or more ahead, but so gigantic as to seem bending directly above him
+and tottering to crush him and the world at his feet--one of the peaks
+that the innkeeper had indicated. It was a mountain piled upon the
+mountains, a sheer mountain of naked chalcedonous rock, rising to a
+snow-topped pinnacle; and, at its foot, almost at the extreme edge of
+the timber-line, a broad, muricated natural gallery, stood a vast
+Gothic pile, a somber, rambling mass of wall and tower: the castle of
+the Eskurolas.
+
+Almost as Cartaret looked, the sun went down behind that peak and
+wrapped the way in utter darkness. The traveler regarded with
+something like dismay the last faint glow that vanished from the west.
+
+"So sorry you had to go," he said, addressing the departed lord of
+day. He tried to look about him. "A nice fix I'm in," he added.
+
+He attempted to ride on in the dark, but, remembering the precipices,
+dared not touch rein. He thought of trusting to the instinct of the
+mare, but that soon failed him: the animal came to a full stop. The
+stillness grew profound, the night impenetrable.
+
+Then, suddenly, there was a wild cacophony from the forest on his
+left. It shook the air and set the echoes clanging from cliff to
+cavern. The mare reared and snorted. Lights danced among the trees;
+the lights became leaping flames; the noise was identifiable as the
+clatter of dogs and the shouts of men. Cartaret subdued his mare just
+as a torch-bearing party of picturesquely-garbed hunters plunged into
+the road directly in front of him and came, at sight of him, to a
+stand.
+
+In the flickering light from a trio of burning pine-knots, the sight
+was enough strange. There were six men in all: three of them, in
+peasant costume, bearing aloft the torches, and two more, similarly
+dressed, holding leashes at which huge boar-hounds tugged. A pair of
+torch-bearers carried a large bough from the shoulder of one to the
+shoulder of the other, and suspended feet upward from this
+bough--bending with the weight--was a great, gray-black boar, its
+woolly hair red with blood, the coarse bristles standing erect like a
+comb along its spine, its two enormous tusks prism-shaped and shining
+like prisms in the light from the pine-knots.
+
+A deep bass voice issued a challenge in _Eskura_. It came from the
+sixth member of the party, unmistakably in command.
+
+He was one of the biggest men Cartaret had ever seen. He must have
+stood six-feet-six in his boots and was proportionately broad,
+deep-chested and long-armed. In one hand he held an old-fashioned
+boar-spear--its blade was red--as a sportsman that scorns the safety
+of a boar-hunt with a modern rifle.
+
+The torchlight, flickering over his tanned and bearded face, showed
+features handsome and aquiline, fashioned with a severe nobility.
+Instead of a hat, a scarf of red silk was wrapped about his black
+curls and knotted at one side. His eyes, under eagle-brows, were
+fierce and gray. Cartaret instinctively recalled his early ideas of a
+dark Wotan in the _Nibelungen-Lied_.
+
+The American dismounted. He said, in English:
+
+"You are the Don Ricardo Ethenard-Eskurola?"
+
+He had guessed rightly: the big man bowed assent.
+
+"I'm an American," explained Cartaret. "The innkeeper down in the
+valley told me your castle was near here, so I thought that this was
+you. I'm rather caught here by the darkness. I wonder if----" He noted
+Eskurola's eye and did not like it. "I wonder if there's another
+inn--one somewhere near here."
+
+The Basque frowned. For a moment he said nothing. When he did speak it
+was in the slow, but precise, English that Cartaret had first heard
+from the lips of the Lady of the Rose.
+
+"You, sir, are upon my land----"
+
+"I'm very sorry," said Cartaret.
+
+"And," continued Don Ricardo, "I could not permit to go to a mere inn
+any gentleman whom darkness has overtaken upon the land of the
+Eskurolas. It is true: on my land merely, you are not my guest;
+according to our customs, I am permitted to fight a duel, if need
+arises, with a gentleman that is on my land." He smiled: he had, in
+the torchlight, a fearsome smile. "But on my land, you are in the way
+of becoming my guest. Will you be so good as to accompany me to my
+poor house and accept such entertainment as my best can give you?"
+
+Cartaret accepted, and, in the act, thought the acceptance too ready.
+
+"Pray remount," urged Eskurola.
+
+But Cartaret said that he would walk with his host, and so the still
+trembling mare was given to an unencumbered torch-bearer to lead, and,
+by the light of the pine-knots, the party began its ten-mile climb.
+
+The night air, at that altitude, was keen even in Summer, and the way
+was dark. The American had an uneasy sense that he was often toiling
+along the edges of invisible abysses, and once or twice, from the
+forest, he heard the scurry of a fox and saw the green eyes of a lynx.
+He tried to make conversation and, to his surprise, found himself
+courteously met more than half way.
+
+"I know very little of this part of Spain," he said: "nothing, in
+fact, except what I've learned in the past few days and what the
+innkeeper down there told me."
+
+"We Basques do not call this a part of Spain," Eskurola corrected him
+in a voice patently striving to be gentle; "and the innkeeper knows
+little. He is but a poor thing from Navarre."
+
+"Yes," Cartaret agreed; "the staple of his talk was the statement that
+he knew nothing at all."
+
+Eskurola smiled.
+
+"That is the truth," said he.
+
+He went on to speak freely enough of his own people. He explained
+something of their almost Mongolian language: its genderless nouns;
+its countless diminutives; its endless compounds formed by mere
+juxtaposition and elision; its staggering array of affixes to supply
+all ordinary grammatical distinctions, doing away with our need of
+periphrasis and making the ending of a word determine its number and
+person and mood, the case and number of the object, and even the
+rank, sex and number of the persons addressed.
+
+He talked with a modesty so formed as really to show his high pride in
+everything that was Basque. When Cartaret pressed him, he told, with
+only a pretense of doubt in his voice, how the Celtiberi considered
+themselves descendants of the ocean-engulfed Atalantes, and former
+owners of all the Spanish peninsula. Even now, he insisted, they were
+the sole power over themselves from the bold coast-line of Vizcaya to
+the borders of Navarre and had so been long before Sancho the Wise was
+forced to grant them a _fuero_. They had always named their own
+governors and fixed their own taxes by republican methods. The sign of
+the Vascongadas, the three interlaced hands with the motto
+_Iruracacabat_, signified three-in-one, because delegates from their
+three parliaments met each year to care for the common interests of
+all; but there was no written pact between them: the Basques were
+people of honor.
+
+Spain? Don Ricardo disliked its mention. St. Mary of Salvaterra! The
+Basque parliaments named a deputation that negotiated with
+representatives of the Escorial and preserved Basque liberties and
+law. If Madrid called that sovereignty, it was welcome to the term.
+
+"We remain untouched by Spain," he said, "and untouched by the world.
+Our legends are still Grecian, our customs are what the English call
+'iron-clad.' Basque blood is Basque and so remains. It never mixes. It
+could mix in only one contingency."
+
+Cartaret was glad that the darkness hid his flushed cheek as he
+answered:
+
+"I have recently heard of that contingency."
+
+"It never occurs," said Eskurola quickly, "because the Basque always
+chooses not to permit himself to be saved. It is a traditional law
+among us as strong as that against the disgrace of suicide."
+
+Their feet were sounding over a bridge: the bridge, as Cartaret
+reflected, to the castle's moat. Through the light of the torches, the
+great gray walls of the pile climbed above him and disappeared into
+the night. A studded door, with mighty heaving of bolts, swung open
+before them, and they passed through into a vaulted gateway. The
+pine-knots cast dancing shadows on the stones.
+
+Into what medieval world was he being admitted? Did Vitoria indeed
+inhabit it? And if she did, what difficulties and dangers must he
+overcome before ever he could take her thence?
+
+Don Ricardo was speaking.
+
+"I welcome you to my poor home," he said.
+
+Cartaret's heart beat high. He was ready for any difficulty, for any
+danger....
+
+With a solemn boom the great gate swung shut behind him. He felt that
+it had shut out the Twentieth Century.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV
+
+SOMETHING OR OTHER ABOUT TRADITIONS
+
+    ... Since we must part, down right
+    With happy day; burdens well borne are light.
+                    --Donne: _Eleg. XIII_.
+
+
+Cartaret was lighted by his host himself to a bedroom high up in the
+castle and deep within it--a bedroom big enough and dreary enough to
+hold all the ghosts of Spain. An old man-servant brought him a supper
+calculated to stay the hunger of a shipwrecked merchant-crew. He lay
+down in a great four-poster bed both canopied and curtained, and, in
+spite of his weariness, he tossed for hours, wondering whether Vitoria
+was also somewhere within those grim walls and what course he was to
+pursue in regard to her.
+
+The same uncertainty gripped him when breakfast was brought to his
+bedside in the early morning. Was this, after all, Vitoria's home; and
+if it was, had she returned to it? Supposing an affirmative answer to
+these questions, what was he to say to her brother? So far, thank
+Heaven, Don Ricardo, though he had once or twice looked queerly at the
+American, had been too polite to make awkward inquiries, but such
+inquiries were so natural that they were bound soon to be made; and
+Cartaret could not remain forever an unexplained and self-invited
+guest in the castle of his almost involuntary host. The guest recalled
+all that he had heard of the national and family pride and traditions
+of the Eskurolas, and only his native hopefulness sustained him.
+
+He found his own way down twisting stairs and into a vast court-yard
+across which servants were passing. The great gate was open, and he
+stepped through it toward the battlemented terrace that he saw beyond.
+
+His first shock was there. The bridge that he had crossed the night
+before was indeed a drawbridge and did indeed span the castle-moat,
+but the bridge was unrailed and that moat was a terrible thing. It was
+no pit of twenty or thirty feet dug by the hand of man. The terrace
+to which the castle clung was separated from that to which climbed the
+steep approach by a natural chasm of at least twelve yards across,
+with sheer sides, like those of a glacial crevasse, shooting downwards
+into black invisibility and echoing upward the thunderous rush of
+unseen waters.
+
+Leaning on the weather-worn wall that climbed along the edge of this
+precipice and guarded a broad promenade between it and the castle,
+Cartaret looked with a new sensation at the marvelous scene about him.
+Behind rose the frowning castle, a maze of parapets and towers, built
+against that naked, snow-capped, chalcedonous peak. In front, falling
+away through a hundred gradations of green, a riot of luxuriant
+vegetation, lay the now apparently uninhabited country through which
+he had ridden, and beyond this, circling it like the teeth of the
+celestial dragon that the Chinese believe is to swallow the sun, rose
+row on row of bare mountains, ridges and pinnacles blue and gray.
+
+A hand fell on Cartaret's shoulder. He turned to find Don Ricardo
+standing beside him. The giant gave every appearance of having been up
+and about for hours, and, despite his bulk, he had approached his
+guest unheard.
+
+"I trust that you, sir, have slept well in my poor house."
+
+Cartaret replied that he had slept like a top.
+
+"And that you could eat of the little breakfast which my servants
+provided?"
+
+"I made a wonderful breakfast," said Cartaret.
+
+"It is good, sir. If you can bear with my house, it is yours for so
+long as you care to honor it with your presence."
+
+Cartaret knew that this must be only an exaggerated fashion of speech,
+but he chose to take it literally.
+
+"That's very good of you," he said. "I haven't ridden for years and
+I'm rather done up. If you really don't mind, I think I will rest here
+over another night."
+
+Don Ricardo seemed unprepared for this, but he checked a frown and
+bowed gravely.
+
+"A year would be too short for me," he vowed.
+
+They fell to talking, the host now trying to turn the conversation
+into the valley, the guest holding it fast to the castle-heights.
+
+"It is a beautiful place," said Cartaret; "I don't know when I've seen
+anything to compare with it; and yet I should think you'd find it
+rather lonely."
+
+"Not lonely, sir," said the Basque. "The hunting in the valley is a
+compensation. For example, where you see those oaks about the curve of
+that river, I hunted, not ten days ago, a wolf as large as those for
+which my ancestors paid the wolf-money."
+
+"Still," Cartaret persisted, "you do live here quite alone, don't
+you?"
+
+He knew that he was impudent, and he felt that only his host's
+reverence for the laws of hospitality prevented an open resentment.
+Nevertheless, Cartaret was bound to find out what he could, and this
+time he was rewarded.
+
+"There is good enough to live with me," said Don Ricardo stiffly, "my
+lady sister, the Dona Dolorez Eulalia Vitoria." He looked out across
+the chasm.
+
+Cartaret caught his breath. There was an awkward pause. Then, glancing
+up, he saw, coming toward them along the terrace, the figure of a
+woman-servant that seemed startlingly familiar.
+
+It was Chitta. She was bent, no doubt, on some household errand to her
+master, whose face was luckily turned away--luckily because, when she
+caught sight of Cartaret, her jaw dropped and her knees gave under
+her.
+
+Cartaret had just time to knit his brows with the most forbidding
+scowl he could assume. The old woman clasped her hands in what was
+plainly a prayer to him to be silent concerning all knowledge of her
+and her mistress. A moment more, and Don Ricardo was giving her orders
+in the Basque tongue.
+
+"Our servants," he said apologetically when she had gone, "are
+faithful, but stupid." His gray eyes peered at Cartaret searchingly.
+"Very stupid, sir," he added. "For instance, you, sir, know something
+of our customs; you know that centuries-old tradition--the best of
+laws--makes it the worst of social crimes for a Basque to marry any
+save a Basque----"
+
+He stopped short, holding Cartaret with his eyes. Cartaret nodded.
+
+"Very well, sir," Ricardo continued: "one time a lady of our house--it
+was years upon years ago, when Wellington and the English were
+here--fell in love, or thought that she did, with a British officer.
+For an Englishman, his degree was high, but had he been the English
+King it would have served him nothing among us. Knowing of course that
+the head of our house would never consent to such a marriage, this
+lady commanded her most loyal servant to assist in an elopement. Now,
+the Basque servant must obey her mistress, but also the Basque servant
+must protect the honor of the house that she has the privilege to
+serve. This one sought to do both things. She assisted in the
+elopement and brought the lady to the English camp. Then, thus having
+been faithful to one duty, she was faithful to the other: before the
+wedding, she killed both her mistress and herself." He turned
+quickly. "Sir, I have pressing duties in the valley, and you are too
+weary to ride with me: my poor house is at your disposal."
+
+Cartaret leaned against the parapet and, when his host was out of
+earshot, whistled softly.
+
+"What a delightful _raconteur_," he mused. "I wonder if he meant me to
+draw any special moral from that bit of family-history."
+
+He waited until, a quarter of an hour later, he saw Don Ricardo and
+two servants ride across the drawbridge and wind their way toward the
+valley. He waited until the green forest engulfed them. What he was
+going to do might be questionable conduct in a guest, but there was no
+time to waste over nice points of etiquette. He was going to find
+Vitoria.
+
+He started for the court-yard. His plan was to accost the first
+servant that he encountered and mention Chitta's name, but this
+trouble was saved him. In the shadowy gateway, he found Chitta
+crouching.
+
+She glanced to right and left, saw that they were unobserved, passed
+beyond a narrow door that opened into the gate, and led Cartaret up a
+spiral stone staircase to the entrance of a circular room in one of
+the twin gate-towers. There she turned and left him alone with
+Vitoria.
+
+In the center of that bare room, standing beside one of the bowmen's
+windows that commanded the approach to the castle, the Lady of the
+Rose awaited him. For an instant, he scarcely recognized her. She was
+gowned in a single-piece Basque dress of embroidered silk, closely
+fitted about her full lithe figure to below the hips, the skirt
+widening and hanging loosely about her slim ankles. A black silk
+scarf, in sharp contrast to the embroidery, was sewn to the dress and
+drawn tightly over the right shoulder, across the bust, and then
+draped beneath the left hip. But the glory of her blue-black hair was
+as he had first seen it in the twilight of his far-off studio; the
+creamy whiteness of her cheeks was just touched with pink, and her
+blue eyes, under curling lashes, seemed at first the frank eyes that
+he loved.
+
+"Vitoria!" he cried.
+
+She drew back. She raised one hand, its pink palm toward him.
+
+"You should not have done this," she said in a rapid whisper. "How did
+you find me? How did you come here?" Her voice was kind, but steady.
+
+Cartaret stood still. This he had not looked for. His cheeks were
+flushed, and the lines about his mouth deepened, as they always did at
+moments of crisis, and made his face very firm.
+
+"Does it matter how?" he asked. "Not all the width of the world could
+have kept me away. There's something I've got to know and know
+instantly."
+
+"But you should not have come, and you must go immediately!
+Listen--no, listen to me now! I am not Vitoria Urola in these
+mountains; whether I want it or not, I have to be the Dona Dolorez
+Ethenard-Eskurola. That would perhaps sound amusing in the rue du Val
+de Grace; here it is a serious matter: the most serious matter in this
+little mountain-world. You will have to listen to me."
+
+Cartaret folded his arms.
+
+"Go on," he said.
+
+"Last Winter," she continued, her face challenging his, "I had a time
+of rebellion against all these things amongst which I had been brought
+up. I had never been farther away from this place than Alegria, but I
+had had French and English governesses, and I read books and dreamed
+dreams. I loved to paint; I thought that I could learn to be a real
+artist, but I knew that my brother would think that a shame in an
+Eskurola and would never permit his unmarried sister to go to a
+foreign city to study. Nevertheless, I was hungry for the great world
+outside--for the real world--and so I took poor Chitta, gathered what
+jewels were my own and not family-jewels, and ran away."
+
+She looked from the window to the road that led into the valley; but
+the road was still deserted.
+
+"Chitta sold the jewels," she presently went on. "They brought very
+little; but to me, who had never used money, it seemed much. We went
+to Paris: I and Chitta, who, because she had often been so far as
+Vitoria before, became as much my guardian as she was my servant--and
+I was long afraid to go but a little distance in the streets without
+her: the streets terrified me, and, after one fright, she made me
+promise to go nowhere without her. So we took the room that you know
+of. We were used to regarding my brother as all-powerful; we feared
+that he would find us. Therefore, we would let no one know who we were
+or whence we came. Now that is over." Her voice trembled a little. She
+made a hopeless gesture. "It is all over, and we have come back to our
+own people." She raised her head proudly; she had regained her
+self-control: to Cartaret, she seemed to have regained an ancient
+pride. "I have learned that I must be what I was born to be."
+
+He squared his jaw.
+
+"A slave to your brother's will," he said.
+
+"A creature," she answered with steady gaze--"a creature of the will
+of God."
+
+"But this is nonsense!" He came forward. "This sort of thing may have
+been all very well in the Fourteenth Century; but we're living in the
+Twentieth, and it doesn't go now. Oh,"--he flung out a hand--"I know
+all about your old laws and traditions! I dare say they're extremely
+quaint and all that, and I dare say there was a time when they had
+some reason in them; but that time isn't this time, and I refuse to
+hear any more about them. I won't let them interfere with me."
+
+She flashed crimson.
+
+"You speak for yourself, sir: permit me to speak for myself."
+
+His answer was to seize her hands.
+
+"Let me go!" she ordered.
+
+"I'll never let you go," said he.
+
+"Let me go. You are a brave man to restrain a woman! Shall I call a
+servant?"
+
+She struggled fiercely, panting.
+
+"I've got to make you understand me," he protested, holding fast her
+hands. "I didn't mean any harm to your traditions or your customs.
+Whatever you love I'll try to love too--just so long as it doesn't
+hurt you. But _this_ does hurt you. Tell me one thing: Why did you
+leave Paris? What was it made you change your mind?" He saw in her
+face the signs of an effort to disregard the demand. "Tell me why you
+left Paris," he repeated.
+
+Her eyes wavered. The lids fluttered.
+
+"That night," she began in an uneven tone, "I gave you to understand,
+that night----"
+
+"You gave me to understand that you loved me."
+
+He said it fearlessly, and, on the edge of a sob, she fearlessly
+answered him. She had ceased to struggle. Her hands lay still and cold
+in his.
+
+"I told you that love had brought me a sword."
+
+"You've changed. What has changed you?"
+
+"I have not changed. I have only come back to these unchangeable
+mountains, to this unchanging castle, to the ancient laws and customs
+of my people--their ancient and unalterable laws. I had to come back
+to them," she said, "because I realized that it was not in me to be
+false to all that my fathers have for centuries been true to."
+
+Cartaret leaned forward. He could not believe that this was her only
+reason; he could not understand that the sway of any custom can be so
+powerful. He held her hands tighter. His eyes searched her quailing
+eyes.
+
+"Do you love me? That's all I want to know, and I'll attend to
+everything else. I've no time for sparring. I've got to know if you
+love me. I've got to know that, right here and now."
+
+She shook her head.
+
+"Don't!" she whispered.
+
+"Do you love me?" he relentlessly persisted.
+
+"To love in Paris is one thing: here I may not love."
+
+"You may not--but _do_ you?"
+
+"Don't. Please don't. Oh!"--her red lips parted, her breath came
+fast--"if love were all----"
+
+"It _is_ all!" he declared. He slipped both her cold hands into his
+right hand and put his freed arm about her waist. "Vitoria," he
+whispered, drawing her to him, "it _is_ all. It's all that matters,
+all that counts. It can mock all custom and defy all law. I love you,
+Vitoria." Slowly her eyes closed; slowly she sank against his arm;
+slowly her head drooped backward, and slowly he bent toward its
+parted, unresisting lips---- "And love's the one thing in the world
+worth living and dying for."
+
+At that word, she came to sudden life. With one wrench, she had darted
+from his arms. Instantly she had recovered self-control.
+
+"No, no, no!" she cried. "Go away! There is danger here. Oh, go away!"
+
+The suddenness of her action shattered his delirium. He read in her
+words only her reply to the question that he had put to her.
+
+Impossible as it would have seemed a moment since, that negative meant
+a catastrophic denial of any love for him. He glanced at the old walls
+that surrounded them--at all the expressions of a remorseless self in
+which he could have no part. He felt, with a sudden certainty, that
+these things were of her, and she of them--that what she meant by her
+distinction between herself in Paris and this other self here was the
+vast difference between a Byzantine empress breaking plebeian hearts
+in the alleys of her capital and that same woman on her throne,
+passionless and raised above the reach of men's desires.
+
+The most modest of young fellows is always a little vain, and his
+vanity is always wounded; it is ever seeking hurts, anxious to suffer:
+Cartaret was no exception to human rules. He told his heart that
+Vitoria's words meant but one thing: She had entertained herself with
+him during an incognito escapade and, now that the escapade was
+finished, wanted no reminders. A Byzantine empress? This was worse:
+the empress gave, if only to take away. What Vitoria must mean was
+that even her momentary softening toward him on this spot was no more
+than momentary. She was saying that, having had her amusement by
+making him love her, she was now returned to her proper station, where
+to love her was to insult her. He had been her plaything, and now she
+was tired of it.
+
+"Very well," he said, "if you think my love is worth so little. If you
+can't brave one miserable medieval superstition for it, then I've got
+the answer to what I asked you, and you're right: I'd better go." He
+turned to the narrow door at the head of the spiral stairs. "I know,"
+he said, as if to the stone walls about them, "that I'm not worth much
+sacrifice; but my love has been worth a sacrifice. Some day you'll
+understand what my love might have meant. Some day, when you're old,
+you'll look from one of these windows out over these valleys and
+mountains and think of what could have happened--what there was once,
+just this one time, one chance for." He half faced her. "Other men
+will love you, many of them. They'll love your happiness and grace and
+beauty as well, I dare say, as I do and always will. But you'll
+remember one man that loved your soul; you'll remember me----"
+
+Vitoria was swaying dizzily. Her recaptured self-command visibly
+wavered. She leaned against the rough wall. He leaped toward her, but
+she had the strength left to warn him away.
+
+"No, no, no!" she repeated. "I do not----" She raised her hands to the
+vaulted roof. By a tremendous effort she became again mistress of
+herself--and of him. "Why will you not understand? I do not love you.
+Go!"
+
+At that moment a cry rang out. It was a cry from the gateway. It was
+the cry of Chitta, who came bounding into the narrow room and hurled
+herself at her mistress's feet.
+
+Before any one of the trio could speak, there was the clatter of a
+galloping horse on the road, the thunder of hoofs over the drawbridge
+above that frightful chasm.
+
+"Go!" shrieked Vitoria. "Will you never go? Do you not understand what
+this means? Do you not know who is coming here?"
+
+Chitta set up a loud wail.
+
+"I don't care who's coming here," said Cartaret. "If there's any
+danger----"
+
+Vitoria leaped over the prostrate servant and began pushing Cartaret
+away.
+
+"I hate you!" she cried. "Do you hear that? _I hate you!_ Now will you
+go?"
+
+He looked at her, and his face hardened.
+
+"I'll go," he said.
+
+He turned away.
+
+"My brother!" gasped Vitoria.
+
+Don Ricardo came in at the door of the tower-room.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV
+
+IN WHICH CARTARET TAKES PART IN THE REVIVAL OF AN ANCIENT CUSTOM
+
+    La vieille humanite porte encore dans ses entrailles la
+    brutalite primitive; un anthropoide feroce survit en chacun
+    de nous.--Opinions a Repandre.
+
+
+For a moment none moved. There was Chitta, groveling on the stone
+floor of the circular room, her face hidden in her hands; there was
+Vitoria, her arms outstretched, struck rigid in the act of repulsing
+Cartaret; and there were the two men--the American white, but
+determined and unafraid; the Basque with a dull red spreading on his
+tanned cheeks--facing each other as pugilists, entering the ring, face
+each other at pause during the fleeting instant before they begin to
+circle for an opening. Cartaret, with the eye that, in times of high
+emotion, takes account of even trivial detail, noted how Don Ricardo,
+who had been forced to stoop in order to pass the doorway, gradually
+straightened himself with a slow, unconscious expansion of the muscles
+such as a tiger might employ.
+
+Vitoria was the first to speak: she lowered her arms and turned upon
+her brother a glance of which the pride proved that her
+self-possession was regained. She spoke in English, though whether for
+Cartaret's comprehension, for the servant's mystification, or as an
+added gibe at Ricardo, the American was unable to determine.
+
+"You came unannounced, brother," she said. "I am not accustomed to
+such entrances."
+
+The red deepened over Don Ricardo's high cheek-bones, but he bit his
+lip and seemed to bite down his rage.
+
+"These are not your apartments, Dona Dolorez," he said, adopting, with
+visible repugnance, the language she employed. "And I am the head of
+your house." He bent his gray eyes on Cartaret. "Be so good as to come
+with me, sir," he said. He stood aside from the door. "I follow after
+my guest."
+
+Cartaret's heart had place only for the last words that Vitoria had
+said to him. He would not look at her again, and he cared little what
+might happen to himself, so long as he could draw this irate brother
+after him and away from the endangered women. Vitoria had said that
+she hated him: well, he would do what he could to save her, and then
+leave Alava forever. He passed through the door....
+
+"He is my guest," he heard Don Ricardo saying. "An Eskurola remembers
+the laws of hospitality."
+
+Cartaret went on to the court-yard. There his host followed him.
+
+"Will you come to my offices?" he asked.
+
+He walked across to the north wing of the castle and into a large room
+that looked upon the terrace. The ceiling was a mass of blackened
+rafters; the walls, wainscoted in oak, were hung with ancient arms and
+armor, with the antlers of deer and the stuffed heads of tusked boar,
+and with some rags of long-faded tapestry. There was a yawning
+fire-place at one end, between high bookshelves filled with
+leather-bound folios, and, near one of the windows, stood an open
+Seventeenth Century desk massed with dusty papers.
+
+Eskurola waved his guest to a stiff-backed chair. Cartaret, seeing
+that Don Ricardo intended to remain standing, merely stood beside it.
+
+"Sir," began the Basque, "you have said that you are a stranger to our
+country and its ways. It is my duty to enlighten you in regard to some
+details."
+
+He towered nearly half a foot above Cartaret. The nostrils of his
+beaked nose quivered above his bristling beard, but he kept his voice
+rigorously to the conversational pitch.
+
+Cartaret, however, was in no mood to hear any more exposition of
+Vascongada manners and customs. He had had enough of them.
+
+"There's no need of that," he said. "If I've done anything I shouldn't
+have done, I'm sorry. But I want you to understand that I'm to blame:
+_I'm_ to blame--and nobody else."
+
+Eskurola went on as if Cartaret had not spoken:
+
+"It is not our custom to present to our ladies such casual strangers
+as happen to ask shelter of us; nor is it the custom of our ladies to
+permit such presentations, still less to seek them. Of that last fact,
+I say but one word more: the Dona Dolorez has been lately from home,
+and I fear that her contact with the outer world has temporarily
+dulled the edge of her native sensitiveness."
+
+"Look here," said Cartaret, his hands clenched, "if you mean to
+imply----"
+
+"Sir!" The Basque's eyes snapped. "I speak of my sister."
+
+"All right then. But you'd better be told a few facts, too. Paris
+isn't Alava. I met the Dona Dolorez in Paris. We were neighbors. What
+could be more natural, then, than that, when I came here----"
+
+"Ah-h-h!" Eskurola softly interrupted. In the meshes of his beard, his
+red lips were smiling unpleasantly. "So that was it! How stupid of me
+not to have guessed before, sir. I was sure that there had been in
+Paris something beside Art."
+
+Cartaret's impulse was to fly at the man's throat. His reason,
+determined to protect the woman that cared no more for him, dictated
+another course.
+
+"I wanted," he said quietly, "to make your sister my wife."
+
+The effect of this statement was twofold. At first a violent anger
+shook the Basque, and the veins stood out in ridges along his neck and
+at his temples, below the red cloth bound about his head. Then, as
+quickly, the anger passed and was succeeded by a look reminiscent,
+almost tender.
+
+"You know that no alien can marry one of our people," he said. "You
+know that now."
+
+Cartaret thought again of Vitoria's parting word to him.
+
+"I know it _now_," he said.
+
+"You are my guest," Eskurola pursued. "I shall tell you something. You
+have seen me only as what must seem to you a strange and hard
+man--perhaps a fierce and cruel man. I am the head of my ancient
+house; on me there depends not only its honor, but also its
+continuance. Sir, I exact of my relatives no less than I have already
+exacted of myself."
+
+Cartaret looked at him in amazement. Could it be possible that there
+had ever been in this medieval mind anything but ruthless pride of
+race?
+
+"Years ago--but not so many years ago as you, sir, might
+suppose--there came to this house a young lady. She came here as a
+governess for my sister, but she was a lady, a person of birth. Also,
+she spoke your language." He paused, and then went on in a still
+gentler voice. "Sir, because of her, your language, barbarous as it
+is, has always been dear to me, and yet, still because of her, I have
+ever since wanted not to speak it."
+
+Cartaret looked at the floor. Even though this confession of a past
+weakness was voluntary, it seemed somehow unfair to watch, during it,
+the man whose pride was so strong.
+
+"And you sent her away?" he found himself asking.
+
+"She went when her work was finished. She went without knowing."
+
+Cartaret raised his eyes. There was no false assumption in the man
+upon whom they rested: it was impossible to believe that, seeing him
+thus, a woman would not love him.
+
+"I'll go," said Cartaret. Eskurola's words had assured him of
+Vitoria's safety. "I'll go now."
+
+"I would not drive you away. You have said that you would be my guest
+for another night; you may remain as long as you care to remain."
+
+"I'll go," Cartaret repeated. "It isn't you that's driving me. Will
+you please send up to my room for my saddle-bags, and have my mare
+brought around?"
+
+Don Ricardo bowed. He went out.
+
+Cartaret stood for some time on the spot where he had been standing
+throughout the talk with his host. He was thinking of his ruined hopes
+and of the woman that had ruined them. Once he asked himself what had
+so changed her; but, when he could find no answer to that question, he
+asked what the cause could matter, since the effect was so apparent.
+He walked to a window. He could see that part of the terrace which lay
+between the gate and the drawbridge, but he saw no sign of his mare.
+What could Eskurola be doing? He seemed, whatever it was, to be a
+long time about it.
+
+The oaken door of the room opened and closed with a bang. Don Ricardo
+stood before it. The dull red had returned to his cheeks.
+
+"Sir," said he, "I have just been having another word with the Dona
+Dolorez: she informs me that you have had the impertinence to tell her
+that you love her."
+
+Cartaret laughed bitterly. "In _my_ country," he said, "when a man
+wants to marry a woman it is customary to say something of that kind."
+
+"You are in Alava, sir, and you speak of a member of my family."
+
+"I was in Paris then."
+
+"But this morning--just now?" Eskurola came a step forward.
+
+"I won't talk any more about it," said Cartaret. "Please have my mare
+brought around at once."
+
+"No," Eskurola replied: "you shall talk no more about it. Mr.
+Cartaret, you must fight me."
+
+The American could not believe his ears. He recollected that when the
+Continental speaks of fighting he does not refer to mere pugilism.
+
+"You're crazy," said Cartaret. "I don't want to fight you."
+
+"So soon as you have passed that gate, you will be my guest no longer.
+What, sir, you may then want will not matter. You will have to fight
+me."
+
+Cartaret sat down. He crossed his legs and looked up at his host.
+
+"Is this your little way of persuading me to stay awhile?" he asked.
+
+"You cannot go too soon to please me."
+
+"Then perhaps you'll be good enough to tell me what it's all about."
+
+Eskurola's giant figure bent forward. His eyes blazed down in
+Cartaret's face.
+
+"You came into this place, the place of my people, under false
+pretenses. I made you welcome; you were my guest, sir. Yet you used
+your opportunities to insult my sister."
+
+Cartaret got slowly to his feet. He knew the probable consequences of
+what he was about to say, but, never shifting his gaze from the
+Basque's, he said it quietly:
+
+"That's a lie."
+
+Don Ricardo leaped backward. It was doubtless the first time in his
+life that such a phrase had been addressed to him, and he received it
+as he might have received a blow. Both in mind and body, he staggered.
+
+"My sister has told me----" he began.
+
+"I don't want to hear any more, senor. I've said all that I have to
+say." Cartaret thrust his hands into the pockets of his riding-breeches
+and, turning his back on Eskurola, looked out of the window.
+
+"Now," the Basque was saying, as his mental balance reasserted
+itself--"now we must indeed fight."
+
+Cartaret himself was thinking rapidly and by no means clearly. To say
+that dueling was not an American custom would avail him nothing--would
+be interpreted as cowardice; to fight with a man bred as Don Ricardo
+was evidently bred would be to walk out to death. Cartaret looked at
+the panorama of the mountains. Well, why not death? Less than an hour
+ago his whole life had been mined, had been sent crashing about his
+head. The only thing that he cared for in life was taken from him:
+Vitoria had herself declared that she hated him. Nor that alone--the
+thought burned in his brain: she had told this wild brother of hers
+that he, Cartaret, had insulted her; she had incited Eskurola to
+battle--perhaps to save herself, perhaps to salve some strange Basque
+conception of honor or pride. So be it; Cartaret could render her one
+more service--the last: if he allowed himself to be killed by this
+half-savage who so serenely thought that he was better than all the
+rest of the world, Don Ricardo's wounded honor would be healed, and
+Vitoria--now evidently herself in danger or revengeful--would be
+either safe or pacified. The Twentieth Century had never entered these
+mountains, and Cartaret, entering them, had left his own modernity
+behind.
+
+"All right," said he, "since you're so confounded hungry for it, I'll
+fight you. Anything to oblige."
+
+He looked about to find Eskurola bowing gratefully: the man's eyes
+seemed to be selecting the spot on their enemy's body at which to
+inflict the fatal wound.
+
+"I am glad, sir, that you see reason," said Don Ricardo.
+
+"I'm not sure that I see reason," said Cartaret, "but I'm going to
+fight you."
+
+"I do not suppose that you can use a rapier, Mr. Cartaret?"
+
+It was clear that not to understand the rapier was to be not quite a
+gentleman; but Cartaret made the confession. "Not that it matters," he
+reflected.
+
+"But you can shoot?"
+
+Cartaret remembered the boyish days when he had taken prizes for his
+marksmanship with a revolver. It was the one folly of his youth that
+he had continued, and he found a certain satisfaction (so much did
+Eskurola's pride impress him) in admitting this, albeit he did not
+mean to use the accomplishment now.
+
+"I carry this with me," said he, producing his automatic revolver.
+
+Don Ricardo scarcely glanced at it.
+
+"That is not the weapon for a marksman," he said. "Nevertheless, let
+me see what you can do. None will be disturbed; these walls are
+sound-proof." He took a gold coin, an alfonso, from his pocket and
+flung it into the air. "Shoot!" he commanded.
+
+Cartaret had expected nothing of the sort. He fired and missed. The
+report roared through the room; the acrid taste of the powder filled
+the air. Eskurola caught the descending coin in his hand. Cartaret saw
+that his failure had annoyed Don Ricardo, and this in its turn annoyed
+the American.
+
+"I didn't know you were going to try me," he said, "and I'm not used
+to marking up the ceilings of my friends' houses. Try again."
+
+The Basque, without comment, flung up the alfonso a second time, and a
+second time Cartaret fired. Eskurola reached for the coin as before,
+but this time it flew off at an angle and struck the farther wall.
+When they picked it up, they found that it had been hit close to the
+edge of the disk.
+
+"Not the center," said Don Ricardo.
+
+"Indeed?" said Cartaret. What sort of shot would please the man?
+"Suppose you try."
+
+Eskurola explained that he was not accustomed to such a revolver, but
+he would not shirk the challenge; and there was no need for him to
+shirk it: when Cartaret recovered the alfonso after Don Ricardo had
+shot, there was a mark full in its middle.
+
+"So much for His Spanish Majesty," said the Basque, as he glanced at
+the mark made by his bullet in the face upon the coin. "We shall use
+dueling-pistols. I have them here." He went to the desk.
+
+Cartaret had no doubt that Eskurola had them there: he probably had a
+rack and thumbscrews handy below-stairs.
+
+"We shall have to dispense with the formality of a surgeon," Don
+Ricardo was saying.
+
+"It doesn't look as if one would be needed," Cartaret smiled; "and it
+doesn't look as if we were to have seconds, either."
+
+The Basque turned sharply. "We are the only gentlemen within miles,
+and we cannot have servants for witnesses. Moreover, an Eskurola needs
+no seconds, either of his choosing to watch his safety, or of his
+enemy's to suspect his honor."
+
+He pressed a spring, released a secret drawer in the desk and found
+what he was seeking: a box of polished mahogany. Opening the lid, he
+beckoned to Cartaret. There, on a purple velvet lining, lay a
+beautifully kept pair of dueling-pistols, muzzle-loaders of the
+Eighteenth Century pattern and of about .32 caliber, their long
+octagonal barrels of shining dark blue steel, their curved butts of
+ivory handsomely inlaid with a Moorish design in gold.
+
+"Listen," said Eskurola, "as we are to have no seconds, I shall write
+a line to exculpate you in case you survive me. Then"--his gray eyes
+shone; he seemed to take a satisfaction that was close to delight in
+arranging these lethal details--"also as we are to have no seconds to
+give a signal, we shall have but one true shot between us. Certainly.
+Are we not men, we two? And we have proved ourselves marksmen. You
+cannot doubt me, but I have a man that speaks French, so that you
+shall see that I do not trick you, sir."
+
+He went to the door and called into the court-yard. Presently there
+answered him a man whom Cartaret recognized as one of those who, the
+night before, held the dogs in leash.
+
+"Murillo Gomez," said Eskurola, in a French more labored than his
+English, "in five minutes this gentleman and I shall want the terrace
+to ourselves. You will close the gate when we go out. You will remain
+on this side of it, and you will permit none to pass. Answer me in
+French."
+
+The servant's face showed no surprise.
+
+"_Oui, senor_," he said.
+
+"Now you will take these pistols and bring them back without delay. In
+the armory you will load one with powder and shot, the other with
+powder only. Neither this gentleman nor I must know which is which.
+You understand?"
+
+The servant's face was still impassive.
+
+"_Oui, senor._"
+
+"Go then. Also see that the Dona Dolorez remains in her own
+apartments. And hurry."
+
+The servant disappeared with the pistols. Eskurola, apologizing
+gravely, went to the desk and wrote--apparently the lines of which he
+had spoken. He sanded them, folded the paper, lit a candle and sealed
+the missive with an engraved jade ring that he wore on the little
+finger of his left hand.
+
+"This is your first duel, sir?" he said to Cartaret. He said it much
+as an Englishman at luncheon might ask an American guest whether he
+had ever eaten turbot.
+
+"Yes," said Cartaret.
+
+"Well, you may have what the gamblers of London call 'beginner's
+luck.'"
+
+The servant knocked at the door.
+
+"Will you be so good as to take the pistols?" asked Don Ricardo in
+English of Cartaret. "It appears better if I do not speak with him.
+Thank you. And please to tell him in French that he may have your mare
+and saddle-bags ready in the gateway within five minutes, in case you
+should want them."
+
+Cartaret obeyed.
+
+Eskurola again held the door for his guest to pass.
+
+"After you, sir," he said.
+
+They crossed the court-yard leisurely and shoulder to shoulder, for
+all the world as if they were two friends going out to enjoy the view.
+Any one observing them from the windows, had there been any one, would
+have said that Don Ricardo was pointing out to Cartaret the beauties
+of the scene. In reality he was saying:
+
+"With your agreement, we shall fix the distance at ten paces, and I
+shall step it. There is no choice for light, and the wind is at rest.
+Therefore, there being no person to count for us, I shall ask you to
+toss a coin again, this time that I may call it: if I fail to do so,
+you fire first; if I succeed, I fire first. Permit me to advise you,
+sir, that, if you are unaccustomed to the hair-trigger, it is as well
+that you be careful lest you lose your shot."
+
+Eskurola's manners were apparently never so polished as when he was
+about to kill or be killed. He measured off the ground and marked the
+stand for each, always asking Cartaret's opinion. He stood while
+Cartaret again tossed a glittering gold-piece in the air.
+
+"Tails!" cried Don Ricardo. "I always prefer," he explained, "to see
+this king with his face in the dust. Let us look at him together, so
+that there will be no mistake."
+
+The piece lay with its face to the terrace.
+
+"I win," said Eskurola. "I shoot first. It is bad to begin well."
+
+Cartaret smiled. With such a marksman as this Basque to shoot at one,
+the speech became the merest pleasantry. There was only the question
+of the choice of the pistol, and as to that----
+
+"If you will open the box, I shall choose," Eskurola was saying.
+Evidently the choice was also to go to the winner of the toss.
+Cartaret was certain this would not have been the case if the toss
+had gone otherwise. "I must touch neither until I have chosen,
+although the additional powder in the blank pistol tends toward making
+their weight equal."
+
+Mechanically Cartaret opened the mahogany box. Don Ricardo scarcely
+glanced at the pair of beautiful and deadly weapons lying on the
+purple velvet: he took the one farther from him.
+
+"Pray remember the hair-trigger," he continued: "you might easily
+wound yourself. Now, if you please: to our places."
+
+Each man took off his hat and coat and stood at his post in his white
+shirt, his feet together, his right side fronting his enemy, his
+pistol pointing downwards from the hand against his right thigh.
+
+"Are you ready, sir?" asked Eskurola.
+
+For a flashing instant Cartaret wanted to scream with hysterical
+laughter: the whole proceeding seemed so archaic, so grotesque, so
+useless. Then he thought of how little he had to lose and of whom he
+might serve in losing that little....
+
+"Ready, senor," he said.
+
+If only she could, for only that last moment, love him! That last
+moment, for he made no doubt of the end of this adventure. The Basque
+had been too punctilious in all his arrangements: from the first
+Cartaret had been sure that Don Ricardo and the French-speaking
+servant had played this tragic farce before, and that the master so
+arranged matters as easily to choose the one pistol that held death in
+its mouth. To convict him was impossible, and, were it possible, would
+be but to strike a fatal blow at the honor of that family which
+Vitoria held so dear. How false his vanity had played him! What was he
+that a goddess should not cease to love him when she chose? Enough and
+more that she had loved him once; an ultimate blessing could she love
+him a moment more. But once again, then: but that one instant! To see
+her pitiful eyes upon him, to hear her pure lips whisper the last
+good-by like music in his dying ears!
+
+He saw the arm of his enemy slowly--slowly--rising, without speed and
+without hesitation, as the paw of a great cat rises to strike, but
+with a claw of shining steel.
+
+Cartaret would look his last on the scene that her eyes had known when
+she was a child, that her eyes would know long after his--so soon
+now!--were closed forever. It was mid-morning; the golden sun was
+half-way to the zenith. At Cartaret's left, above the walls, the
+turrets and towers of the Gothic castle, rose the sheer front of that
+sheer chalcedonous peak. Its top was crowned with the dazzling and
+eternal snow; its face was waxen, almost translucent; its outcroppings
+of crypto-crystalline quartz, multi-toned by the wind and rain of
+centuries, caught the sunlight and flamed in every gradation of blue
+and yellow, of onyx, carnelian and sard. To the right lay the wide and
+peaceful valley, mass after mass of foliage, silver-green and emerald,
+and, above that, the ridges of the vast, scabrous amphitheater:
+beetling peaks of gray, dark pectinated cones, fusiform apexes,
+dancing lancets and swords' points, a hundred beetling crags and
+darting spires under a turquoise sky.
+
+(Eskurola's arm was rising ... rising....)
+
+Her face came before his eyes; not the face of the woman that sent him
+from the tower-room, but the face of The Girl that had parted from him
+in his shabby studio: the frame of blue-black hair, the clear cheek
+touched with healthy pink, the red lips and white teeth, the level
+brows, the curling lashes and the frank violet eyes.... Into his own
+eyes came a mist; it blotted out the landscape.
+
+He dragged his glance back to his executioner. He must meet death face
+forward. A horrid fear beset him that he had been tardy in this--had
+seemed ever so little to waver.
+
+But Eskurola had observed no faltering, and had not faltered: his arm
+still crept upward. It must all have happened in the twinkling of an
+eye, then: that impulse toward mad laughter, that thought of what he
+had suffered, that realization of the landscape, even the memory of
+her face--the Lady of the Rose.
+
+Don Ricardo's arm had just risen a trifle above his shoulder and then
+come back to its level.... It would come now--the flash, the quick
+pang that would outstrip and shut out the very sound of the
+explosion--come now and be over.
+
+The man was taking an aim, careful, deadly....
+
+But if everything else had been quick, this was an eternity. Cartaret
+could feel the Basque's eye, he could see that the leveled
+pistol-barrel covered his throat directly below the ear. He wanted to
+shout out to Eskurola to shoot; to say, "You've got me!" He ground his
+teeth to enforce his tongue to silence. And still he waited. Good God,
+would the man never fire?
+
+Don Ricardo was lowering his pistol, and his pistol was smoking. He
+had fired. Moreover, he had aimed truly. But he had chosen his weapon
+honorably--it was the one that did not hold a bullet.
+
+Cartaret was dazed, but knew instantly what to do. As if it was the
+performance of an act long since subconsciously decided upon, he
+raised his own pistol slowly--the death-laden pistol--and shot
+straight up into the air....
+
+The smoke was still circling about the American's head when he saw
+Eskurola striding toward him. The Basque's face was a study of
+humiliation and dismay.
+
+"What is this?" he demanded. "After I have tried to kill you, you do
+not kill me? You refuse to kill me? You inflict the greatest insult
+and the only one that I cannot resent?"
+
+Cartaret threw down his pistol: it frightened him now. "I don't know
+whether it's an insult to let you live or not," he said, "and I don't
+care a damn. Where's my mare?"
+
+He went to the gate. It was opened by the French-speaking servant,
+wide-eyed now, but with his curiosity inarticulate. Cartaret mounted.
+His hand trembled as he gathered up the reins. He was angry at this
+and at the comedy that Fate had made of his attempted heroism. Was
+there ever before, he reflected, a duel the two principals of which
+were angry because they survived?
+
+Eskurola was standing at the edge of the unrailed drawbridge that
+crossed the precipitous abyss. It was evident even to Cartaret that
+the Basque was still too amazed to think, much less speak,
+coherently; that something beyond his comprehension had occurred; that
+a phenomenon hitherto unknown had wrecked his cosmos.
+
+"Sir," he began, "will you not return first into the castle and
+there----"
+
+"If you don't get out of my way," said Cartaret, "I'll ride you into
+this chasm!"
+
+Don Ricardo drew dumbly aside, and Cartaret rode on. With Vitoria
+relentless and unattainable, abjured by the woman he had loved, robbed
+even of the chance to give his life for her, he was riding anywhere to
+get away from Alava, was fleeing from his sense of loss and failure.
+He rode as fast as the steep descent permitted, and only once, at a
+sharp twist of the way, a full mile down the mountain, did he allow
+himself to turn in his saddle and look back.
+
+There was Eskurola, a silhouette against the gray walls. Behind him
+rose the castle of his fathers, and back of it the great peak towered,
+through a hundred flashing colors, to its shining crown of eternal
+snow.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI
+
+AND LAST
+
+    It must be a very dear and intimate reality for which people
+    will be content to give up a dream.--Hawthorne: _The Marble
+    Faun_.
+
+
+Summer held Paris in his arms when Cartaret returned there--held her,
+wearied from the dance with Spring, in his warm arms, and was rocking
+her to sleep. Romance had crowded commerce from the boulevards; poets
+wrote their verses at the marble-topped tables along the awninged
+pavements; the lesser streets were lovers' lanes.
+
+For Cartaret had not hurried. Once the Pyrenees were behind him, he
+felt growing upon him a dread of any return to the city in which he
+had first met and loved the Lady of the Rose; and only the necessity
+of settling his affairs there--of collecting his few possessions,
+paying two or three remaining bills and bidding a last good-by to his
+friends--drew him forward. He lingered at one town after the other,
+caring nothing for what he saw, but hating the thought of even a week
+in a Paris without her. Vaguely he had decided to return to America,
+though what of interest life could hold there, or anywhere, for him he
+could not imagine: some dull business routine, most likely--for he
+would never paint again--and the duller the better. Thus he wasted a
+fortnight along the Loire and among the chateaux of Touraine and found
+himself at last leaving his train in the Gare D'Orsay at the end of a
+Summer afternoon.
+
+He made for his own room with the objectless hurry of a native
+American, his feet keeping time to a remembered stanza of Andrew Lang:
+
+    "In dreams she grows not older
+      The lands of Dream among,
+    Though all the world wax colder,
+      Though all the songs be sung;
+    In dreams doth he behold her
+      Still fair and kind and young."
+
+Taciturn Refrogne seemed no more surprised to see him than if he had
+gone out but an hour since: the trade of the Parisian concierge slays
+surprise early.
+
+"A letter for monsieur," said Refrogne.
+
+Cartaret took it from the grimy paw that was extended out of the
+concierge's cave. He went on up the stairs.
+
+The door of the magic Room Opposite--in all probability commonplace
+enough now--stood slightly ajar, and Cartaret felt a new pang as he
+glanced at it. He passed on to his own room.
+
+His own room! It was precisely as he had seen it last--a little
+dustier, and far more dreary, but with no other change. The table at
+which she had leaned, the easel on which he had painted those
+portraits of her, were just as when he had left them. He went to the
+window at which he used to store the provisions that Chitta looted,
+and there he opened the envelope Refrogne had given him. It contained
+only one piece of paper: A Spanish draft on the Comptoir General for a
+hundred and twenty francs, and on the back, in a labored English
+script, was written:
+
+    "For repayment of the sum advanced to my servant, Chitta
+    Grekekora.
+
+        "Ricardo B. F. R. Ethenard-Eskurola (d'Alegria)."
+
+A limb of wisteria had climbed to the window and hung a cluster of its
+purple flowers on the sill. Below, Refrogne's lilacs were in full
+bloom, and the laughter of Refrogne's children rose from among them as
+piercing sweet as the scent of the flowers. Cartaret took a match from
+his pocket, struck it and set the bit of paper aflame. He held it
+until the flame burnt his fingers, crushed it in his palm and watched
+the ashes circle slowly downward toward the lilac-trees.
+
+The sun had set and, as Cartaret walked aimlessly toward the front
+windows, the long shadows of the twilight were deepening from wall to
+wall. Summer was in all the air.
+
+So much the same! He leaned forward and looked down into the silent
+rue du Val-de-Grace. He was thinking how she had once stood where he
+was leaning now; thinking how he had leaned there so often, looking
+for her return up that narrow thoroughfare, waiting for the sound of
+her light footfall on the stair. So much the same, indeed: the
+unchanged street outside, the unchanged room within; the room in which
+he had found her on that February night. Here she had admitted that
+she loved him, and here she had said the good-by that he would not
+understand--a few short weeks ago. And now he was back--back after
+having heard her repudiate him, back after losing her forever.
+
+Fate works everywhere, but her favorite workshop is Paris. Something
+was moving in the deepest shadow in the room--the shadow about the
+doorway. Blue-black hair and long-lashed eyes of violet, lips of red
+and cheeks of white and pink; the incredible was realized, the miracle
+had happened: Vitoria was here.
+
+He was beside her in a single bound. He thought that he cried her name
+aloud; in reality, his lips moved without speech.
+
+"Wait," she said. She drew away from him; but the statues of the Greek
+gods in the Luxembourg gardens must have felt the thrill in the
+evening air as she faced him. She was looking at him bravely with
+only the least tremor of her lips. "Do you--do you still love me?" she
+asked.
+
+Her voice was like a violin; her words dazed him.
+
+"Love you? I--I can't tell you how much--I--haven't the words to
+say----"
+
+He seized the hand with which she had checked him and kissed its
+unjeweled fingers.
+
+"What is it?... Why did you say you hated me?... What has brought you
+back?... Is is true? Is it _true_?"
+
+From Refrogne's garden came the last good-night-song of the birds.
+
+"Love you? Why, from the day I left you--no, from that night I found
+you here, I've thought nothing but Vitoria, dreamed nothing but
+Vitoria----"
+
+Now incoherent and afraid, then with hectic eloquence and finally with
+a complete abandon, he poured out his soul in libation to her. With
+the first word of it, she saw that she was forgiven.
+
+"I came," she said, "to--to tell you this: You know now that I ran
+away from Paris because I loved you and knew that I could not marry
+you; but you do not know why I said that terrible thing which I said
+in the tower-room. I was afraid of what my brother might do to you.
+That is why I would not take your kisses. To try to make you leave
+before he found you, I said what first came to my mind as likely to
+drive you away. I said it at what fearful cost! I blasphemed against
+my love for you."
+
+Cartaret was recovering himself. Love gives all, but it demands
+everything.
+
+"Your brother said that I had offered you some insult. He said you'd
+told him so. I thought you'd told him that in order to make him all
+the angrier against me."
+
+"Ever since Chitta and I returned to our home, he had been
+suspecting," she said. "He would not forgive me for going away. Chitta
+he tortured, but she told him nothing. Me, he kept almost a prisoner.
+When you came, I knew that he would soon guess what was true, so I
+sent for you that morning to send you away, and when that failed and
+he found us together, I told him that we loved each other, because I
+hoped that he would spare the man I loved, even though he would never
+let me--let me marry that man. I should have known him too well to
+think that, but I was too afraid to reason--too afraid for your sake.
+He was so proud that he would not repeat it to you as I said it to
+him: he repeated it in the way least hateful to him--and after you had
+gone, I found that all I had done served only to make him try to kill
+you. Of this I knew nothing until hours later. Then--then----"
+
+The birds had ceased their song, but the scent of the lilacs still
+rose from the garden.
+
+"Don't you understand now?" she asked, her cheeks crimson in the
+fading light. "I guessed you did not understand then; but don't you
+understand now?"
+
+He stood bewildered. She had to go through with it.
+
+"My brother had to live--you made him live. To kill himself is the
+worst disgrace that a Basque can put upon his family. Besides, the
+thing was done; you had fired into the air; nothing that he might do
+would undo that. At the bridge he tried to tell you so, but you rode
+by. You know--my brother told it you--that one reason which allows a
+foreigner to marry a Basque. We Eskurolas pay our debts; to let you go
+a creditor for that was to put a stain upon our house indelibly. I
+would have accepted the disgrace and made my brother continue to
+accept it, had you not now said that you still loved me; but you have
+said it. Oh, do--do, please, understand!" She stamped her foot. "My
+brother is the last man of our name. In saving him, you saved the
+house of Eskurola."
+
+Cartaret was seized by the same impulse toward hysteria that had
+seized him when he first faced Don Ricardo's pistol.
+
+"Was _that_ what he tried to say at the bridge? What a fool I was not
+to listen! If I had all the world to give, I'd give it to you!"
+
+He tried to seize her hand again, but she drew it away.
+
+"And so," she said, with a crooked smile and a flaming face, "since
+you say that you love me, I--I have to pay the just debt of my house
+and save its honor--I must marry you whether I love you or not."
+
+He looked at her with fear renewed.
+
+"Then you _have_ changed?" he asked.
+
+Suddenly she put her own right hand to her lips and kissed the fingers
+on which his lips had rested.
+
+"You have all the world," she said.... "Give it me."
+
+He found both of her hands this time, but still she kept him from her.
+The scent of the lilacs mingled with another scent--a scent that made
+him see again the tall Cantabrians.... Suddenly he realized that she
+was wearing her student-blouse.
+
+"You've been here--When did you come back to Paris?"
+
+"A week ago."
+
+"To this house?"
+
+"Of _course_ I am living in this house as before, and with your friend
+Chitta. You know that I could not have lived anywhere else in Paris.
+I _couldn't_. So I took the old room--the dear little old
+room--again."
+
+"_Before_ you knew that I still loved you!" She hung her head. "But
+I'll surely never let you go this time." He held her hands fast as if
+fearing that she might escape him. "No custom--no law--no force could
+take you now. Tell me: would you have wanted to go back?"
+
+She freed herself. That newer perfume filled the purple twilight: the
+pure perfume of the Azure Rose that the wandering Basque carries with
+him abroad to bring him safely home. She drew the rose from beneath
+her blouse and held it out to him. Cartaret kissed it. She took it
+back, kissed it too, went to the nearest window and, tearing the
+flower petal from petal, dropped it into the Paris street.
+
+"No," she said softly when she had turned to him again, "do not kiss
+me yet. I want you first to understand me. I do love my own country,
+but I cannot stay in it forever. I was being smothered there by all
+the dust of those dead centuries; I was being slowly crushed by the
+iron weight of their old customs and their old laws--all horribly
+alive when they should have been long ago in their graves. There was
+nothing around me that was not old: old walls and towers, ancient
+tapestries and arms, musty rooms, yellowed manuscripts. The age of the
+place, it seemed to become a soul-in-itself. It seemed to get a
+consciousness and to hate me because I was not as it was. There was
+nothing that was not old--and I was young." As she remembered it, her
+face grew almost sulky. "Even if it had not been for you, I believe I
+should have come away again. I was so angry at it all that I could
+even have put on a Paquin gown--if I had had a Paquin gown!--and worn
+it at dinner in the big dining-hall of my ancestors."
+
+He understood. He realized--none better--the hunger and thirst for
+Paris: for the lights of the boulevards, the clatter of the dominoes
+on the cafe-tables, the procession of carriages and motors along the
+Champs Elysees, the very cries and hurry of the rue St. Honore by day
+or the Boul' Miche' by night. Nevertheless, he had lately been an
+American headed for America, and so he said:
+
+"Just wait till you see Broadway!"
+
+Vitoria smiled, but she remained serious.
+
+"I wanted you to know that--first," she said: "to know that I came
+away this second time in large part because of you, but not wholly."
+
+"I think," said Cartaret, "that I can manage to forgive that."
+
+"And then--there is something else. You saw my brother in a great
+castle and on a great estate, but he is not rich, and I am very poor."
+
+Cartaret laughed.
+
+"Was that what was on your mind? My dear, _I'm_ rich--I'm frightfully
+rich!"
+
+"Rich?" Her tone was all incredulity.
+
+"It happened the day you left Paris. Oh, I know I ought to have told
+you at the castle, but I forgot it. You see, there was so little time
+to talk to you and so many more important things to say."
+
+He told her all about it while the dusk slowly deepened. Chitta should
+have a salary for remaining in a cottage that he would give her in
+Alava and never leaving it. He would give his friends that dinner
+now--Houdon and Devignes, Varachon and Garnier--a dinner of
+celebration at which the host would be present and to which even
+Gaston Francois Louis Pasbeaucoup and the elephantine Madame would sit
+down. There would be bushels of strawberries. Seraphin would be
+pensioned for life, so that he might paint only the pictures that his
+heart demanded, and Fourget--yes, Cartaret would embrace dear old
+Fourget like a true Gaul. In the Luxembourg Gardens the statues of the
+old gods smiled and held their peace.
+
+"You--you can study too," said Cartaret. "You can have the best
+art-masters in the world, and you shall have them."
+
+But Vitoria shook her head.
+
+"There," she said, "is another confession and the last. I was the more
+ready to leave Paris when I ran away from you, because I was
+disheartened: the master had told me that I could never learn, and so
+I was afraid to face you."
+
+"Then _I'll_ never paint again," vowed Cartaret. "Pictures? I was
+successful only when I painted pictures of you, and why should I paint
+them when I have you?"
+
+She looked at him gravely.
+
+"I am glad," she said, "that you are rich, but I am also glad that we
+have both been poor--together. Oh,"--she looked about the familiar
+room,--"it needs but one thing more: if only the street-organ were
+playing that Scotch song that it used to play!"
+
+"If it only were!" he agreed. "However, we can't have everything, can
+we?"
+
+But lovers, if they only want it enough, can have everything, and,
+somehow, the hurdy-gurdy did, just at that moment, begin to play
+"Annie Laurie" as it used to do, out in the rue du Val-de-Grace.
+
+Cartaret led her toward the darkened window, but stopped half-way
+across the room.
+
+"I will try to deserve you," he said. "I _will_ make myself what you
+want me to be."
+
+"You _are_ that," she answered, her face raised toward his. "All that
+I ask is to have you with me always as you are now." The clear
+contralto of her voice ran like a refrain to the simple air of the
+ballad. "I want you with me when you are unhappy, so that I may
+comfort you; when you are ill, so that I may nurse you; when you are
+glad, so that I may be glad because you are. I want to know you in
+every mood: I want to belong to you."
+
+High over the gleaming roofs, the moon, a disk of yellow glass, swung
+out upon the indigo sky and peeped in at that window. One silver beam
+enveloped her. It bathed her lithe, firm figure; it touched her pure
+face, her scarlet lips; it made a refulgent glory of her hair, and,
+out of it, the splendor of her wonderful eyes was for him.
+
+"Soon," he whispered, "in the chapel of Ste. Jeanne D'Arc at the
+church of St. Germain des Pres."
+
+"Good-night," she said.... "Good-night, my love."
+
+She raised her white hands to him and drew one step nearer. Then she
+yielded herself to his arms and, as they closed, strong and tight,
+about her, her own arms circled his neck.
+
+The scent of the Azure Rose returned with her lips: a vision of
+mountain-peaks and sunlight upon crests of snow, a perfume sweeter
+than the scent of any rose in any garden, a poem in a language that
+Cartaret at last could understand.
+
+Her lips met his....
+
+"Oh," he whispered, "sweetheart, is it really, really you?"
+
+"Yes," said the lady of the Rose, "it--is _me_!"
+
+
+THE END.
+
+
+
+
+_ENVOI: THE SON OF JOEL._
+
+
+    The poet is a beggar blind
+      That sits beside a city gate,
+    The while the busy people wind
+      Their daily way, less fortunate.
+
+    The many pass with slavish speed;
+      The few remember this or that;
+    Some hear and jeer, some stop to heed--
+      And some drop pennies in his hat....
+
+    O, you that pause and understand,
+      Though I may never see your face,
+    Across the years I touch your hand:
+      I kiss you through the leagues of space!
+                    R. W. K.
+
+
+
+
+_Famous Books at Popular Prices_
+
+STORIES OF WESTERN LIFE
+
+
+TREASURE AND TROUBLE, by Geraldine Bonner.
+
+The wild and glowing golden West; a hold-up; a buried treasure;
+outlaws of the excitingly adventurous type, and something new, too, in
+the outlaw line in the shape of a Social Pirate; real dyed-in-the-wool
+bandits; miners who delve for the riches of the Earth; dazzlingly
+beautiful women; youth--and Love, vivid and beautiful.
+
+
+THE SHERIFF OF BADGER, by George E. Pattullo.
+
+Lafe Johnson--strong, brave, big-hearted cowboy of the higher
+type--through his courage in routing a gun-fighter, is hailed as a
+hero and made Sheriff of Badger, a ranch town in the Southwest. The
+story is more than interesting; it is exciting, and the vein of
+romance running through it adds to its strength as a first class
+breezy Western ranch yarn.
+
+
+WOLFVILLE FOLKS, by Alfred Henry Lewis.
+
+Here is another "Wolfville" book. The characters are of the
+picturesque cowboy type. "Doc" Seely, "Cherokee Bill," "Faro Nell,"
+"The Rose of Wolfville," etc. The novel is full of Western philosophy,
+pistol play, gambling duel, and a remarkable series of romance and
+adventures. A lively cowboy novel.
+
+
+BILLY FORTUNE, by William R. Lighton.
+
+Billy Fortune, able cow-puncher of Wyoming, is a chap for whom things
+are always happening. Billy is a lover of life in all its heights and
+depths, with a special fondness for the frail sex. There is plenty of
+swift comedy action in this story and not a line of melancholy. And
+incidentally it gives one a splendid picture of the jocund cow country
+of Wyoming.
+
+
+THE COAST OF OPPORTUNITY, by Page Philips.
+
+Author of "The Trail of the Waving Palm."
+
+Unmistakably a work struck hot from the forge of human experience,
+this rapid-action story yields a wealth of intrigue and adventure to
+all lovers of stirring romance.
+
+
+THE TRAIL OF THE WAVING PALM, by Page Philips.
+
+"A story of the open that is highly captivating
+throughout."--Cincinnati Times-Star.
+
+
+THE MACAULAY COMPANY, 15-17 W. 38th St., New York
+
+Send for Illustrated Catalogue
+
+
+_Famous Books at Popular Prices_
+
+ADVENTURE, ROMANCE AND LOVE
+
+
+THE RED LANTERN, by Edith Wherry.
+
+A novel of deep undercurrents, with a theme that wakes the pulses of
+the heart and fills the imagination with the irresistible lure of
+secret Asia.
+
+
+THE SIGN OF FREEDOM, by Arthur Goodrich.
+
+The pinnacle of real old-fashioned, bred-in-the-bone patriotism, made
+militant by love, tender and true, and steadfast, is the theme of this
+story--and the hero, David Warburton, like the David of old, is a
+"Corker." You will love his absorbing tale.
+
+
+THE AZURE ROSE, by Reginald Wright Kauffman.
+
+A delightful love romance of a young American: handsome, witty and
+daring--and a beautiful girl: attractive, mysterious and coming nobody
+knows whence. Set against the picturesque background of the Latin
+Quarter of Paris.
+
+
+UNEASY MONEY, by Pelham Grenville Wodehouse.
+
+Clean, clever, packed full of wit and humor, like all of Wodehouse's
+tales, in this one he outdoes himself. Imagine yourself trying to give
+away a fortune, and, finding the one girl to give it to--who won't
+have it at any price--a bully good yarn.
+
+
+WOLF-LURE, by Agnes and Egerton Castle.
+
+Love, Adventure Political Intrigue, Mystery Rivalry, Vaulting
+Ambition. Pride which goeth before a fall, and the light pride of
+personal honor and of conquest--all are here in this amazingly
+absorbing tale of the "Greatest Thing in the World"--Love.
+
+
+UP THE ROAD WITH SALLIE, by Frances R. Sterrett.
+
+This tale of a most astounding abduction told by the author of "The
+Jam Girl!" will thrill you with the most surprising adventures you
+have ever encountered. Sallie Waters' plot for the winning of a
+fortune--and her sweetheart, too, is compelling and fascinating.
+
+
+HIS DEAR UNINTENDED, by J. B. Ellis.
+
+A delightful story with thrills aplenty when a bewitching girl appears
+mysteriously out of the night and exerts a strange influence over
+several people.
+
+
+THE DIARY OF MY HONEYMOON, Anonymous.
+
+A work of intense and throbbing humanity, appearing in the cloak of
+fiction, in which the moral is sound throughout and plain to see.
+
+
+THE MACAULAY COMPANY, 15-17 W. 38th St., New York
+
+Send for Illustrated Catalogue
+
+
+_And Paul Verdayne--what of him?_
+
+_Of course you want to know._
+
+_Read the sequel_
+
+_HIGH NOON_
+
+A powerful, stirring love-story of twenty years after. Abounding in
+beautiful descriptions and delicate pathos, this charming love idyl
+will instantly appeal to the million and a quarter people who have
+read and enjoyed "Three Weeks." You can get
+
+_HIGH NOON_
+
+from your bookseller, or for $1.10, carriage paid, from the publishers
+
+The Macaulay Company
+
+Publishers 15 West 38th St. New York
+
+
+
+
+Transcriber's Note
+
+Variations in spelling are preserved as printed.
+
+This book uses forms of both enquire and inquire; these are preserved
+as printed.
+
+Minor punctuation errors have been repaired.
+
+Both rue du Val-de-Grace and rue du Val de Grace are used; these are
+preserved as printed. Hyphenation usage has otherwise been made
+consistent. There are also some inconsistencies in capitalisation of
+French street and place names, and these are preserved as printed.
+
+The following typographic errors have been repaired:
+
+    Page 71--Carteret amended to Cartaret--"... whose nose always
+    reminded Cartaret of an antique and long lost bit of
+    statuary, ..."
+
+    Page 84--Deaux amended to Deux--"He left the Cafe des Deux
+    Colombes, ..."
+
+    Page 87--drawn amended to dawn--""Oh"--it began to dawn on
+    Cartaret ..."
+
+    Page 99--Good-bye amended to Good-by--"... this time she had
+    not said "Good-by.""
+
+    Page 118--saraient amended to sauraient--"L'indiscretion d'un
+    de ces amis officieux qui ne sauraient ..."
+
+    Page 129--peeked amended to peaked--"... turning upon his
+    friend a face that was peaked and drawn."
+
+    Page 165--unprejudicd amended to unprejudiced--"An
+    unprejudiced critic would have said ..."
+
+    Page 177--Eifel amended to Eiffel--"... and the pointing
+    finger of the Tour Eiffel ..."
+
+    Page 195--DeMusset amended to De Musset--"Have I not had a
+    care for De Musset and for Heine?"
+
+    Page 197--Cataret amended to Cartaret--"... a crestfallen lad
+    that was a stranger to Cartaret."
+
+    Page 268--elf amended to self--"... at all the expressions of
+    a remorseless self ..."
+
+    Page 311--Mich' amended to Miche'--"... of the rue St. Honore
+    by day or the Boul' Miche' by night."
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's The Azure Rose, by Reginald Wright Kauffman
+
+*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE AZURE ROSE ***
+
+***** This file should be named 38436.txt or 38436.zip *****
+This and all associated files of various formats will be found in:
+        http://www.gutenberg.org/3/8/4/3/38436/
+
+Produced by Suzanne Shell, Sam W. and the Online Distributed
+Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was
+produced from images generously made available by The
+Internet Archive/American Libraries.)
+
+
+Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions
+will be renamed.
+
+Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no
+one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation
+(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without
+permission and without paying copyright royalties.  Special rules,
+set forth in the General Terms of Use part of this license, apply to
+copying and distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works to
+protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm concept and trademark.  Project
+Gutenberg is a registered trademark, and may not be used if you
+charge for the eBooks, unless you receive specific permission.  If you
+do not charge anything for copies of this eBook, complying with the
+rules is very easy.  You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose
+such as creation of derivative works, reports, performances and
+research.  They may be modified and printed and given away--you may do
+practically ANYTHING with public domain eBooks.  Redistribution is
+subject to the trademark license, especially commercial
+redistribution.
+
+
+
+*** START: FULL LICENSE ***
+
+THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE
+PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK
+
+To protect the Project Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting the free
+distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work
+(or any other work associated in any way with the phrase "Project
+Gutenberg"), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full Project
+Gutenberg-tm License (available with this file or online at
+http://gutenberg.org/license).
+
+
+Section 1.  General Terms of Use and Redistributing Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic works
+
+1.A.  By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree to
+and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property
+(trademark/copyright) agreement.  If you do not agree to abide by all
+the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or destroy
+all copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in your possession.
+If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work and you do not agree to be bound by the
+terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the person or
+entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph 1.E.8.
+
+1.B.  "Project Gutenberg" is a registered trademark.  It may only be
+used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people who
+agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement.  There are a few
+things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works
+even without complying with the full terms of this agreement.  See
+paragraph 1.C below.  There are a lot of things you can do with Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works if you follow the terms of this agreement
+and help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works.  See paragraph 1.E below.
+
+1.C.  The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation ("the Foundation"
+or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the collection of Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works.  Nearly all the individual works in the
+collection are in the public domain in the United States.  If an
+individual work is in the public domain in the United States and you are
+located in the United States, we do not claim a right to prevent you from
+copying, distributing, performing, displaying or creating derivative
+works based on the work as long as all references to Project Gutenberg
+are removed.  Of course, we hope that you will support the Project
+Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting free access to electronic works by
+freely sharing Project Gutenberg-tm works in compliance with the terms of
+this agreement for keeping the Project Gutenberg-tm name associated with
+the work.  You can easily comply with the terms of this agreement by
+keeping this work in the same format with its attached full Project
+Gutenberg-tm License when you share it without charge with others.
+
+1.D.  The copyright laws of the place where you are located also govern
+what you can do with this work.  Copyright laws in most countries are in
+a constant state of change.  If you are outside the United States, check
+the laws of your country in addition to the terms of this agreement
+before downloading, copying, displaying, performing, distributing or
+creating derivative works based on this work or any other Project
+Gutenberg-tm work.  The Foundation makes no representations concerning
+the copyright status of any work in any country outside the United
+States.
+
+1.E.  Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg:
+
+1.E.1.  The following sentence, with active links to, or other immediate
+access to, the full Project Gutenberg-tm License must appear prominently
+whenever any copy of a Project Gutenberg-tm work (any work on which the
+phrase "Project Gutenberg" appears, or with which the phrase "Project
+Gutenberg" is associated) is accessed, displayed, performed, viewed,
+copied or distributed:
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+1.E.2.  If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is derived
+from the public domain (does not contain a notice indicating that it is
+posted with permission of the copyright holder), the work can be copied
+and distributed to anyone in the United States without paying any fees
+or charges.  If you are redistributing or providing access to a work
+with the phrase "Project Gutenberg" associated with or appearing on the
+work, you must comply either with the requirements of paragraphs 1.E.1
+through 1.E.7 or obtain permission for the use of the work and the
+Project Gutenberg-tm trademark as set forth in paragraphs 1.E.8 or
+1.E.9.
+
+1.E.3.  If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is posted
+with the permission of the copyright holder, your use and distribution
+must comply with both paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 and any additional
+terms imposed by the copyright holder.  Additional terms will be linked
+to the Project Gutenberg-tm License for all works posted with the
+permission of the copyright holder found at the beginning of this work.
+
+1.E.4.  Do not unlink or detach or remove the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+License terms from this work, or any files containing a part of this
+work or any other work associated with Project Gutenberg-tm.
+
+1.E.5.  Do not copy, display, perform, distribute or redistribute this
+electronic work, or any part of this electronic work, without
+prominently displaying the sentence set forth in paragraph 1.E.1 with
+active links or immediate access to the full terms of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm License.
+
+1.E.6.  You may convert to and distribute this work in any binary,
+compressed, marked up, nonproprietary or proprietary form, including any
+word processing or hypertext form.  However, if you provide access to or
+distribute copies of a Project Gutenberg-tm work in a format other than
+"Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other format used in the official version
+posted on the official Project Gutenberg-tm web site (www.gutenberg.org),
+you must, at no additional cost, fee or expense to the user, provide a
+copy, a means of exporting a copy, or a means of obtaining a copy upon
+request, of the work in its original "Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other
+form.  Any alternate format must include the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+License as specified in paragraph 1.E.1.
+
+1.E.7.  Do not charge a fee for access to, viewing, displaying,
+performing, copying or distributing any Project Gutenberg-tm works
+unless you comply with paragraph 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
+
+1.E.8.  You may charge a reasonable fee for copies of or providing
+access to or distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works provided
+that
+
+- You pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you derive from
+     the use of Project Gutenberg-tm works calculated using the method
+     you already use to calculate your applicable taxes.  The fee is
+     owed to the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark, but he
+     has agreed to donate royalties under this paragraph to the
+     Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation.  Royalty payments
+     must be paid within 60 days following each date on which you
+     prepare (or are legally required to prepare) your periodic tax
+     returns.  Royalty payments should be clearly marked as such and
+     sent to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation at the
+     address specified in Section 4, "Information about donations to
+     the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation."
+
+- You provide a full refund of any money paid by a user who notifies
+     you in writing (or by e-mail) within 30 days of receipt that s/he
+     does not agree to the terms of the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+     License.  You must require such a user to return or
+     destroy all copies of the works possessed in a physical medium
+     and discontinue all use of and all access to other copies of
+     Project Gutenberg-tm works.
+
+- You provide, in accordance with paragraph 1.F.3, a full refund of any
+     money paid for a work or a replacement copy, if a defect in the
+     electronic work is discovered and reported to you within 90 days
+     of receipt of the work.
+
+- You comply with all other terms of this agreement for free
+     distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm works.
+
+1.E.9.  If you wish to charge a fee or distribute a Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic work or group of works on different terms than are set
+forth in this agreement, you must obtain permission in writing from
+both the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation and Michael
+Hart, the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark.  Contact the
+Foundation as set forth in Section 3 below.
+
+1.F.
+
+1.F.1.  Project Gutenberg volunteers and employees expend considerable
+effort to identify, do copyright research on, transcribe and proofread
+public domain works in creating the Project Gutenberg-tm
+collection.  Despite these efforts, Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works, and the medium on which they may be stored, may contain
+"Defects," such as, but not limited to, incomplete, inaccurate or
+corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other intellectual
+property infringement, a defective or damaged disk or other medium, a
+computer virus, or computer codes that damage or cannot be read by
+your equipment.
+
+1.F.2.  LIMITED WARRANTY, DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES - Except for the "Right
+of Replacement or Refund" described in paragraph 1.F.3, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the owner of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm trademark, and any other party distributing a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work under this agreement, disclaim all
+liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including legal
+fees.  YOU AGREE THAT YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE, STRICT
+LIABILITY, BREACH OF WARRANTY OR BREACH OF CONTRACT EXCEPT THOSE
+PROVIDED IN PARAGRAPH F3.  YOU AGREE THAT THE FOUNDATION, THE
+TRADEMARK OWNER, AND ANY DISTRIBUTOR UNDER THIS AGREEMENT WILL NOT BE
+LIABLE TO YOU FOR ACTUAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE OR
+INCIDENTAL DAMAGES EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH
+DAMAGE.
+
+1.F.3.  LIMITED RIGHT OF REPLACEMENT OR REFUND - If you discover a
+defect in this electronic work within 90 days of receiving it, you can
+receive a refund of the money (if any) you paid for it by sending a
+written explanation to the person you received the work from.  If you
+received the work on a physical medium, you must return the medium with
+your written explanation.  The person or entity that provided you with
+the defective work may elect to provide a replacement copy in lieu of a
+refund.  If you received the work electronically, the person or entity
+providing it to you may choose to give you a second opportunity to
+receive the work electronically in lieu of a refund.  If the second copy
+is also defective, you may demand a refund in writing without further
+opportunities to fix the problem.
+
+1.F.4.  Except for the limited right of replacement or refund set forth
+in paragraph 1.F.3, this work is provided to you 'AS-IS' WITH NO OTHER
+WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO
+WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTIBILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PURPOSE.
+
+1.F.5.  Some states do not allow disclaimers of certain implied
+warranties or the exclusion or limitation of certain types of damages.
+If any disclaimer or limitation set forth in this agreement violates the
+law of the state applicable to this agreement, the agreement shall be
+interpreted to make the maximum disclaimer or limitation permitted by
+the applicable state law.  The invalidity or unenforceability of any
+provision of this agreement shall not void the remaining provisions.
+
+1.F.6.  INDEMNITY - You agree to indemnify and hold the Foundation, the
+trademark owner, any agent or employee of the Foundation, anyone
+providing copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in accordance
+with this agreement, and any volunteers associated with the production,
+promotion and distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works,
+harmless from all liability, costs and expenses, including legal fees,
+that arise directly or indirectly from any of the following which you do
+or cause to occur: (a) distribution of this or any Project Gutenberg-tm
+work, (b) alteration, modification, or additions or deletions to any
+Project Gutenberg-tm work, and (c) any Defect you cause.
+
+
+Section  2.  Information about the Mission of Project Gutenberg-tm
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm is synonymous with the free distribution of
+electronic works in formats readable by the widest variety of computers
+including obsolete, old, middle-aged and new computers.  It exists
+because of the efforts of hundreds of volunteers and donations from
+people in all walks of life.
+
+Volunteers and financial support to provide volunteers with the
+assistance they need, are critical to reaching Project Gutenberg-tm's
+goals and ensuring that the Project Gutenberg-tm collection will
+remain freely available for generations to come.  In 2001, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation was created to provide a secure
+and permanent future for Project Gutenberg-tm and future generations.
+To learn more about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
+and how your efforts and donations can help, see Sections 3 and 4
+and the Foundation web page at http://www.pglaf.org.
+
+
+Section 3.  Information about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive
+Foundation
+
+The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a non profit
+501(c)(3) educational corporation organized under the laws of the
+state of Mississippi and granted tax exempt status by the Internal
+Revenue Service.  The Foundation's EIN or federal tax identification
+number is 64-6221541.  Its 501(c)(3) letter is posted at
+http://pglaf.org/fundraising.  Contributions to the Project Gutenberg
+Literary Archive Foundation are tax deductible to the full extent
+permitted by U.S. federal laws and your state's laws.
+
+The Foundation's principal office is located at 4557 Melan Dr. S.
+Fairbanks, AK, 99712., but its volunteers and employees are scattered
+throughout numerous locations.  Its business office is located at
+809 North 1500 West, Salt Lake City, UT 84116, (801) 596-1887, email
+business@pglaf.org.  Email contact links and up to date contact
+information can be found at the Foundation's web site and official
+page at http://pglaf.org
+
+For additional contact information:
+     Dr. Gregory B. Newby
+     Chief Executive and Director
+     gbnewby@pglaf.org
+
+
+Section 4.  Information about Donations to the Project Gutenberg
+Literary Archive Foundation
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm depends upon and cannot survive without wide
+spread public support and donations to carry out its mission of
+increasing the number of public domain and licensed works that can be
+freely distributed in machine readable form accessible by the widest
+array of equipment including outdated equipment.  Many small donations
+($1 to $5,000) are particularly important to maintaining tax exempt
+status with the IRS.
+
+The Foundation is committed to complying with the laws regulating
+charities and charitable donations in all 50 states of the United
+States.  Compliance requirements are not uniform and it takes a
+considerable effort, much paperwork and many fees to meet and keep up
+with these requirements.  We do not solicit donations in locations
+where we have not received written confirmation of compliance.  To
+SEND DONATIONS or determine the status of compliance for any
+particular state visit http://pglaf.org
+
+While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states where we
+have not met the solicitation requirements, we know of no prohibition
+against accepting unsolicited donations from donors in such states who
+approach us with offers to donate.
+
+International donations are gratefully accepted, but we cannot make
+any statements concerning tax treatment of donations received from
+outside the United States.  U.S. laws alone swamp our small staff.
+
+Please check the Project Gutenberg Web pages for current donation
+methods and addresses.  Donations are accepted in a number of other
+ways including checks, online payments and credit card donations.
+To donate, please visit: http://pglaf.org/donate
+
+
+Section 5.  General Information About Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works.
+
+Professor Michael S. Hart is the originator of the Project Gutenberg-tm
+concept of a library of electronic works that could be freely shared
+with anyone.  For thirty years, he produced and distributed Project
+Gutenberg-tm eBooks with only a loose network of volunteer support.
+
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm eBooks are often created from several printed
+editions, all of which are confirmed as Public Domain in the U.S.
+unless a copyright notice is included.  Thus, we do not necessarily
+keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper edition.
+
+
+Most people start at our Web site which has the main PG search facility:
+
+     http://www.gutenberg.org
+
+This Web site includes information about Project Gutenberg-tm,
+including how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary
+Archive Foundation, how to help produce our new eBooks, and how to
+subscribe to our email newsletter to hear about new eBooks.