Theft in its simplicity—however sharp and rude, yet if frankly done, and bravely—does not corrupt men’s souls; and they can, in a foolish, but quite vital and faithful way, keep the feast of the Virgin Mary in the midst of it.—Ruskin: Fors Clavigera.
It was quite true that he had resolved to be careful of the money that old Fourget had paid him for the pot-boiler. He still meant to be careful of it. But he was to be a guest at déjeuner next morning, and a man must not breakfast with a Princess and wear a costume that is really shockingly shabby. Cartaret therefore set about devising some means of bettering his wardrobe.
His impulse was to buy a new suit of clothes, as Seraphin had done when he sold his picture. Seraphin, however, had received a good deal more money than Cartaret, and Cartaret was really in earnest about his economies: when he had spent half the afternoon in the shops, and found that most of the ready-made suits there exposed for sale would cost him the bulk of his new capital, he decided to sponge his present suit, sew on a few buttons and then sleep with it under his mattress by way of pressing it. A new necktie was, nevertheless, imperative: he had been absent-mindedly wiping his brushes on the old, and it would not do to smell more of turpentine than the exigencies of his suit made necessary; the scent of turpentine is not appetizing.
If you have never been in love, you may suppose that the selection of so small a thing as a necktie is trivial; otherwise, you will know that there are occasions when it is no light matter, and you will then understand why Cartaret found it positively portentous. The first score of neckties that he looked at were impossible; so were the second. In the third he found one that would perhaps just do, and this he had laid aside for him while he went on to another shop. He went to several other shops. Whereas he had at first found too few possibilities, he was now embarrassed by too many. There was a flowing marine-blue affair with white fleur-de-lys that he thought would do well for Seraphin and that he considered for a moment on his own account. He went back to the first shop and so through the lot again. In the end, his American fear of anything bright conquered, and he bought a gray “four-in-hand” that might have been made in Philadelphia.
On his return he went to the window to see how his strawberries were doing. He remembered the anecdote about the good cleric, who said that doubtless God could have made a better berry, but that doubtless God never did. Cartaret wondered if it would be an impertinence to offer his strawberries to the Lady of the Rose.
They were gone.
He went down the stairs in two jumps. He thrust his head into the concierge’s cavern.
“Who’s been to my room?” he shouted. He was still weak, but anger lent him strength.
“Tell me!” insisted Cartaret.
“How should I know?” the concierge countered.
“It’s your business to know. You’re responsible. Who’s come in and gone out since I went out?”
“Nobody.”
“There must have been somebody! Somebody has been to my room and stolen something.”
Thefts are not so far removed from the sphere of a concierge’s natural activities as unduly to excite him.
“To rob it is not necessary that one come in from without,” said he.
“You charge a tenant?”
“I charge nobody. It is you that charge, monsieur. I did not know that you possessed to be stolen. A thief of a tenant? But certainly. One cannot inquire the business of one’s tenants. What house is without a little thief?”
“I believe you did it!” said Cartaret.
Refrogné whistled, in the darkness, a bar of “Margarita.”
Houdon was passing by. He made suave enquiries.
“But not Refrogné,” he assured Cartaret. “You do an injustice to a worthy man, my dear friend. Besides, what is a box of strawberries to you?”
Cartaret felt that he was in danger of making a mountain of a molehill; he had the morbid fear, common to his countrymen, of appearing ridiculous. It occurred to him that it would not have been beyond Houdon to appropriate the berries, if he had happened into the room and found its master absent; but to bother further was to be once more absurd.
“I don’t suppose it does matter,” he said; “but my supplies have been going pretty fast lately, and if I was to catch the thief, I’d hammer the life out of him.”
“Magnificent!” gurgled Houdon as he passed gesturing into the street.
Cartaret returned toward his room. The dusk had fallen and, if he had not known the way so well, he would have had trouble in finding it. He was tired, too, and so he went slowly. That he also went softly he did not realize until he gently pushed open the door to his quarters.
A shadowy figure was silhouetted against the window out of which Cartaret kept his supplies, and the figure seemed to have some of them in its hands.
Cartaret’s anger was still hot. Now it flamed to a sudden fury. He did not pause to consider the personality, or even the garb, of the thief. He saw nothing, thought nothing, save that he was being robbed. He charged the dim figure; tackled it as he once tackled runners on the football-field; fell with it much as he had fallen with those runners in the days of old—except that he fell among a hail of food-stuffs—and then found himself tragically holding to the floor the duenna Chitta.
It was a terrible thing, this battle with a frightened woman. Cartaret tried to rise, but she gripped him fast. His amazement first, and next his mortification, would have left him nerveless, but Chitta was fighting like a tigress. His face was scratched and one finger bitten, before he could hold her quiet enough to say, in slow French:
“I did not know that it was you. You are welcome to what you want. I am going to let you go. Don’t struggle. I shan’t hurt you. Get up.”
He thanked Heaven that she understood at least a little of the language. Shaken, he got to his own feet; but Chitta, instead of rising, surprisingly knelt at his.
She spouted a long speech of infinite emotion. She wept. She clasped and unclasped her hands. She pointed to the room of her mistress; then to her mouth, and then rubbed that portion of her figure over the spot where the appetite is appeased.
“Do you mean,” gasped Cartaret—“do you mean that you and your mistress”—this was terrible!—“have been poor?”
Chitta had come to the room without her head-dress, and the subsequent battle had sent her hair in dank coils about her shoulders. She nodded; the shaken coils were like so many serpents.
“And that she has been hungry?—Hungry?”
A violent negative. Chitta bobbed toward Cartaret’s rifled stores and then toward the street, as if to include other stores in the same circle of depredation. She was also plainly indignant at the idea that she would permit her mistress to be hungry.
“Oh,” said Cartaret, “I see! You are a consistent thief.”
This time Chitta’s nod was a proud one; but she pointed again to the other room and shook her head violently; then to herself and nodded once more. Words could not more plainly have said that, although she had been supplementing her provisions by petty thefts, her employer knew nothing about them.
And she must not be told. Again Chitta began to bob and moan and weep. She pointed across the hallway, put a finger to her lips, shook her old head and finally held out her clasped hands in supplication.
Cartaret emptied his pockets. He wished he had not been so extravagant as to buy that necktie. He handed to Chitta all the money left from the price that Fourget had paid him, to the last five-centime piece.
“Take this,” he said, “and be sure you don’t ever let your mistress know where it came from. I shan’t tell anybody about you. When you want more, come direct to me.” He knew that he could paint marketable pot-boilers now.
She wanted to kiss his hand, but he hurried from the woman and left her groveling behind him....
“M. Refrogné,” he said to the concierge, “I owe you an apology. I am sorry for the way I spoke to you a while ago. I have found those strawberries.”
“Bah!” said Refrogné. He added, when Cartaret had passed: “In his stomach, most likely.”
Slowly the horror of having had to use physical force against a woman left Cartaret. He started for a long walk and thought many things. He thought, as he trudged at last across L’Etoile, how the April starshine was turning the Arc de Triomphe to silver, and how the lovers on the benches at the junction of the rue Lauriston and the avenue Kléber made Napoleon’s arch in praise of war a monument to softer passions. He thought, as he strolled from the avenue d’Eylan and across the Place Victor Hugo, how the heart of that poet, whose statue here represented him as so much the politician, must grow warm when, as now, boys and girls passed arm in arm about the pediment. The night bore jonquils in her hands and wore a spray of wisteria in her hair. Brocaded ghosts of the old régime must be pacing a stately measure at Ranelagh, and all the elves of Spring were dancing in the Bois.
The Princess was poor. That brought her nearer to him: it gave him a chance to help her. Cartaret found it hard to be sorry that she was poor.
Sometimes a mattress is doubtless as efficient a means of pressing one’s clothes as any other means, but doubtless always a good deal depends upon the mattress. By way of general rules, it may be laid down, for instance, that the mattress employed must not be too thin, must not be stuffed with a material so gregarious as to gather together in lumpy communities, and must not sag in the middle. Cartaret’s mattress failed to meet these fundamental requirements, and when he made his careful toilet on the morning that he was to take déjeuner at the Room Across the Landing, he became uneasily aware that his clothes betrayed certain evidences of what had happened to them. He had been up half a dozen times in the night to rearrange the garments, in fear of just such a misfortune; but his activities were badly repaid; the front of the suit bore a series of peculiar wrinkles, rather like the complicated hatchments on an ancient family’s escutcheon; he could not see how, when the coat was on him, its back looked, and he was afraid to speculate. With his mirror now hung high and now standing on the floor, he practiced before it until he happily discovered that the wrinkles could be given a more or less reasonable excuse if he could only remember to adopt and assume a mildly Pre-Raphaelite bearing.
Something else that his glass showed him gave him more anxiety and appeared beyond concealment: Chitta’s claws had left two long scratches across his right cheek. He had no powder and no money to buy any. He did think of trying a touch of his own paint, but he feared that oils were not suited to the purpose and would only make the wound more noticeable. He would simply have to let it go.
He had wakened with the first ray of sunlight that set the birds to singing in the garden, and, Chitta’s fall of the previous evening having spilled his coffee and devastated his supplies, he was forced to go without a petit déjeuner. He found a little tobacco in one of his coat-pockets and smoked that until the bells of St. Sulpice, after an unconscionable delay, rang the glad hour for which he waited.
Chitta opened the door to his knock, and he was at once aware of her mistress standing, in white, behind her; but the old duenna was aware of it too and ordered herself accordingly. Chitta bowed low enough to appease the watchful Lady of the Rose, but Chitta’s eyes, as she lowered them, glowered at him suspiciously. It was clear that she by no means joined in the welcome that the Lady immediately accorded him.
The Lady, in clinging muslin and with a black lace scarf of delicate workmanship draped over her black hair, gave him her hand, and this time Cartaret was not slow to kiss it. The action was one to which he was scarcely accustomed, and he hesitated between the fear of being discourteously brief about it and the fear of being discourteously long. He could be certain only of how cool and firm her hand was and, as he looked up from it, how pink and fresh her cheeks.
It was then that the Lady saw the scratches.
“Oh, but you have had an accident!” she cried.
Cartaret’s hand went to his face. He looked at Chitta: Chitta’s returning glance was something between an appeal and a threat, but a trifle nearer the latter.
“I had a little fall,” said Cartaret, “and I was scratched in falling.”
The room was bare, but clean and pleasant, fresh from the constant application of Chitta’s mop and broom, fresher from the Spring breeze that came in through the front windows, and freshest from the presence of the Lady of the Rose. Two curtained corners seemed to contain beds. At the rear, behind a screen, there must have been a gas-stove where Chitta could soon be heard at work upon the breakfast. What furniture there was bore every evidence of being Parisian, purchased in the Quarter; there was none to indicate the nationality of the tenants; and the bright little table, at which Cartaret was presently seated so comfortably as to forget the necessity of the Pre-Raphaelite pose, was Parisian too.
“You must speak French,” smiled the Lady—how very white her teeth were, and how very red her lips!—as she looked at him across the coffee-urn: “that is the sole condition that, sir, I impose upon you.”
“Willingly,” said Cartaret, in the language thus imposed; “but why, when you speak English so well?”
“Because”—the Lady was half serious about it—“I had to promise Chitta that, under threat of her leaving Paris; and if she left Paris, I should of course have to leave it, too. French she understands a little, as you know, but not English, and”—the Lady’s pink deepened—“she says that English is the one language of which she cannot even guess the meaning when she hears it, because English is the one language that can be spoken with the lips only, and spoken as if the speaker’s face were a mask.”
He said he should have thought that Chitta would pick it up from her. “Why,” he said, “it comes so readily to you: you answered in it instinctively that time when I first saw you. Don’t you remember?”
“I remember. I was very frightened. Perhaps I used it when you did because we had an English governess at my home and speak it much in the family. We speak it when we do not want the servants to understand, and so we have kept it from Chitta.” She was pouring the coffee. “Tell me truly: do I indeed speak it well?”
“Excellently. Of course you are a little precise.”
“How precise?”
“Well, you said, that time, ‘It is I’; we generally say ‘It’s me’—like the French, you understand.”
If Princesses could pout, he would have said that she pouted.
“But I was right.”
“Not entirely. You weren’t colloquial.”
“I was correct,” she insisted. “‘It is I’ is correct. My grammar says that the verb ‘To be’ takes the same case after it as before it. If the Americans say something else, they do not speak good English.”
Cartaret laughed.
“The English say it, too.”
“Then,” said the Lady with an emphatic nod, “the English also.”
It was a simple breakfast, but excellently cooked, and Cartaret had come to it with a healthy hunger. Chitta was present only in the capacity of servant; but managed to be constantly within earshot and generally to have hostess and guest under her supervision. He felt her eyes upon him when she brought in the highly-seasoned omelette, when she replenished the coffee; frequently he even caught her peeping around the screen that hid the stove. It was a marvel that she could cook so well, since she was forever deserting her post. She made Cartaret blush with the memory of his gift to her; she made him feel that his gift had only increased her distrust; when he fell to talking about himself, he made light of his poverty, so that, should Chitta’s evident scruples against him ever lead her to betray what he had done, the Lady might not feel that he had sacrificed too much in giving so little.
Nevertheless, Cartaret was in no mood for complaint: he was sitting opposite his Princess and was happy. He told her of his life in America, of football and of Broadway. It is a rare thing for a lover to speak of his sister, but Cartaret even mentioned Cora.
“Is she afraid of you, monsieur?” asked the Lady.
“I can’t imagine Cora being afraid of any mere man.”
“Ah,” said the Lady; “then the American brothers are different from brothers in my country. I have a brother. I think he is the handsomest and bravest man in the world, and I love him. But I fear him too. I fear him very much.”
“Your own brother?”
The Lady was giving Cartaret some more omelette. Cartaret, holding his ready plate, saw her glance toward the rear of the room and saw her meet the eyes of Chitta, whose face was thrust around the screen.
“Yes,” said the Lady.
It struck Cartaret that she dropped her brother rather quickly. She talked of other things.
“Your name,” she said, “is English: the concierge gave it me. It is English, is it not?”
She had made enquiries about him, then: Cartaret liked that.
“My people were English, long ago,” he answered. He grew bold. He had been a fool not to make enquiries about her, but now he would make them at first hand. “I don’t know your name,” he said.
He saw her glance again toward the rear of the room, but when he looked he saw nobody. The Lady was saying:
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.
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.”
C’est état bizarre de folie tendre qui fait que nous n’avons plus de pensée que pour des actes d’adoration. On devient véritablement un possédé que hante une femme, et rien n’existe plus pour nous à côté d’elle.—De Maupassant: Un Soir.
The Lady’s “perhaps” meant “yes,” it seemed, for, when Cartaret called for her the next day, he found her ready to go to the Bois, and not the Lady only: hovering severely in the immediate background, like a thunder-cloud over a Spring landscape, was Chitta, wrapped in a shawl of marvelous lace, doubtless from her own country, and crowned with a brilliant bonnet unmistakably procured at some second-hand shop off the rue St. Jacques. The Lady noticed his expression of bewilderment and appeared a little annoyed by it.
“Of course,” she said, “Chitta accompanies us.”
Cartaret had to submit.
“Certainly,” said he.
He proposed a taxi-cab to the Bois—he had visited the Mont de Piété—but the Lady would not hear of it; she was used to walking; she was a good walker; she liked to walk.
“But it’s miles,” Cartaret protested.
“It is nothing,” said she.
Her utmost concession was to go by tram to the Arc.
It was a beautiful day in the Bois, with half of Paris there: carriages from the Faubourg St. Germain, motors of the smart set, hired conveyances full of tourists. The trees were a tender green; the footways crowded by the Parisian bourgeois, making a day of it with his family. Slim officers walked, in black jackets and red trousers, the calves of their legs compressed in patent-leather riding-leggings; women of the half-world showed brilliant toilettes that had been copied by ladies of the haut monde, who, driven past, wore them not quite so well. Grotesquely clipped French poodles rode in the carriages, and Belgian police-dogs in the automobiles; thin-nosed collies frolicked after their masters; here and there a tailless English sheep-dog waddled by, or a Russian boar-hound paced sedately; children played on the grass and dashed across the paths with a suddenness that threatened the safety of the adult pedestrians.
Cartaret led the way into the less frequented portions of the great park beyond the Lac Inférieur. The Lady was pleasantly beside him, Chitta unpleasantly at his heels.
“Don’t you admit it’s worth coming to see?” he began in English. “When I was here, under the stars, the other night——”
“You must speak French,” the Lady smilingly interrupted. “You must remember my promise to Chitta.”
Cartaret ground his teeth. He spoke thereafter in French, but he lowered his voice so as to be sure that Chitta could not understand him.
“I was thinking then that you ought to see it.” He took his courage in both hands. “I was wishing very much that you were with me.” His brown eyes sought hers steadily. “May I tell you all that I was wishing?”
“Not now,” she said.
Her tone was conventional enough, but in her face he read—and he was sure that she had meant him to read—a something deeper.
He put it to her flatly: “When?”
She was looking now at the fresh green leaves above them. When she looked down, she was still smiling, but her smile was wistful.
“When dreams come true, perhaps,” she said. “Do dreams ever come true in the American United States, monsieur?”
The spell of the Spring was dangerously upon them both. Cartaret’s breath came quickly.
“I wish—I wish that you were franker with me,” he said.
“But am I ever anything except frank?”
“You’re—I know I haven’t any right to expect your confidence: you scarcely know me. But why won’t you tell me even where you come from and who you are?”
“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——”
“I?”
She bowed assent.
“No, do not ask me why. I shall not tell you. I shall never tell you—no more,” she smiled, “than I shall ever say for you ‘it’s me.’ It is very kind of you to want to be my friend. I am alone here in Paris, except for poor Chitta, and I shall be glad if you will be my friend; but it will not be very easy.”
“It would be hard to be anything else.”
“Not for you: you are too curious. My friend must let me be just what I am here. All that I was before I came to Paris, all that I may be after I leave it, he must ask nothing about.”
Cartaret looked long into her eyes.
“All right,” he said at last. “I am glad to have that much. And—thank you.”
He stuck to his side of their agreement; not only during that afternoon in the Bois, but during the days that followed. He worked hard. He turned out one really good picture, and he turned out many successful pot-boilers. He would not impose these on Fourget, because old Fourget had already been too kind to him; but Lepoittevin wanted such stuff, and Cartaret let him have it.
Cartaret worked gladly now, because he was, however little she might guess it, working for Vitoria. He had left for himself precisely enough to keep him alive, but every third or fourth day he would have the happiness of slipping a little silver into Chitta’s horny palm: Chitta came readily to the habit of waiting for him on the stair. He grew happier day by day, and looked—as who does not?—the better for it. He sought out Seraphin and Varachon; he bought brandy for Houdon; went to hear Devignes sing, and once he had Armand Garnier to luncheon. He rewarded the hurdy-gurdy so splendidly that it was a nightly visitor to the rue du Val de Grâce: the entire street was whistling “Annie Laurie.”
Seraphin guessed the truth.
“Ah, my friend,” he nodded, “that foolish one, Houdon, says that you have again decided to spend of your income: I know that you are somehow making largess with your heart.”
Cartaret took frequent walks with Vitoria, Chitta always two feet behind, never closer, but never farther away. Often he saw the Lady to her classes, more frequently they walked to the Ile Saint Louis, or between the old houses of the rue des Francs Bourgeois; to the Jardin des Plantes, or into the Cours de Dragon or St. Germain des Prés: Chitta’s unsophisticated mind should have been improved by a thorough knowledge of picturesque Paris.
He was guilty of trying to elude the guardian—guilty of some rather shabby tricks in that direction—and he suffered the more in conscience because they were almost uniformly unsuccessful. More than once, however, he reached a state of exaltation in which he forgot Chitta, cared nothing about Chitta, and then he felt nearer Heaven.
On one such occasion he was actually nearer than the site usually ascribed to the Celestial City. With Vitoria and her guardian he had climbed—it was at his own malign suggestion—to Montmartre and, since Chitta feared the funicular, had toiled up the last steep ascent into Notre Dame de Sacre Coeur. Chitta’s piety—or her exhaustion—kept her long upon her knees in that Byzantine nave, and the Lady and Cartaret had a likely flying-start up the stairs to the tower. Cartaret possessed the wit to say nothing, but he noticed that Vitoria’s blue eyes shone with a light of adventure, which tacitly approved of the escapade, and that her step was as quick as his own when Chitta’s slower step, heavy breathing and muttered imprecations became audible below them.
“I’m sure the old girl will have to rest on the way up, for all her spryness,” thought Cartaret. “If we can only hold this pace, we ought to have five minutes alone on the ramparts.”
They had quite five minutes and, no other sight-seers being about, they were quite alone. Below them, under a faintly blue haze, Paris lay like an outspread map, with here and there a church steeple rising above the level of the page. The roof of the Opéra, the gilt dome of Napoleon’s tomb and the pointing finger of the Tour Eiffel were immediately individualized, but all the rest of the city merged into a common maze about the curving Seine with the red sun setting beyond the Ile de Puteaux.
Vitoria leaned on the rampart. She was panting a little from her climb; her cheeks were flushed, and her whole face glowing.
“It is as if we were gods on some star,” she said, “looking down upon a world that is strange to us.”
She was speaking in English. Cartaret bent closer. Pledges of mere friendship ceased, for the moment, to appear of primary importance: he wanted, suddenly, to make the most of a little time.
“Am I never to see you alone?” he asked.
She forsook the view of Paris to give him a second’s glance. There was something roguish in it.
“Chitta,” she said, “has not yet arrived.”
He felt himself a poor hand at love-making. Its language was upon his tongue—perhaps the slower now because he so much meant what he wanted to say. His jaw set, the lines at his mouth deepened.
“I’ve never thought much,” he blundered, “about some of the things that most fellows think a lot about. I mean I’ve never—at least not till lately—thought much about love and—” he choked on the word—“and marriage; but——”
She cut him short. Her speech was slow and deliberate. Her eyes were on his, and in them he saw something at once firm and sad.
“Nor I, my friend,” she was saying: “it is a subject that I am forbidden to think about.”
If she conveyed a command, he disobeyed it.
“Then,” he said, “I wish you’d think about it now.”
“I am forbidden to think about it,” she continued, “and I do not think about it because I shall not marry any one—at least not any one that—that I——”
Her voice dropped into silence. She turned from him to the sunset over the gray city.
Cartaret’s exaltation left him more suddenly than it had come.
“Any one that you care for?” he asked in a lowered tone.
Still facing the city, she bowed assent.
“But, in Heaven’s name, whom else should you marry except somebody that you care for?”
She did not answer.
“Look here,” urged Cartaret, “you—you’re not engaged, are you?”
She faced him then, still with that something at once firm and sad in her fine eyes.
“No,” she said; but he must have shown a little of the hope he found in that monosyllable, for she went on: “Yet I shall never marry any one that I care for. That is all that I may tell you—my friend.”
As a hurrying tug puffs up to the liner that it is to tow safely into port, Chitta puffed up to her mistress. She met a Cartaret, could she have guessed it, as hopeless as she wanted him to be.
He did his best to put from him all desire to unravel the mystery, and for some days he was again content to remain Vitoria’s unquestioning friend. She had told him that she could not marry him: nothing could have been plainer. What more could he gain by further enquiry? Did she mean that she loved somebody else whom she could not marry? Or did she mean that she loved, but could not marry—him? Cartaret highly resolved to take what good the gods provided: to remain her friend; to work on, in secret, for her comfort, and to be as happy as he could in so much of her companionship as she permitted him. He would never tell her that he loved her.
And then, very early on an evening in May, Destiny, who had been somnolent under the soft influence of Spring, awoke and once more took a hand in Cartaret’s affairs and those of the Lady of the Rose.
Cartaret had just returned from a mission to Lepoittevin’s shop and, having there disposed of a particularly bad picture, had put money in his purse: Chitta was waiting on the stairs and accepted the bulk of his earnings with her usual bad grace. He went into his studio, leaving the door ajar. The cool breeze of the Spring twilight fluttered the curtains; it bore upward the laughter of the concierge’s children, playing at diavolo in the garden; it brought the fainter notes of the hurdy-gurdy, grinding out its music somewhere farther down the street.
Somebody was tapping at the door.
“Who is it?” he called.
“It’s—I,” came the answer, with the least perceptible pause before the pronoun. “May I come in?”
“Do,” he said, and rose.
Before he could reach the door, Vitoria had entered, closing it carefully behind her. He could see that she was in her student’s blouse; tendrils of her hair, slightly disarrayed, curled about the nape of her white neck; her delicate nostrils were extended and her manner strangely quiet.
“This is good of you,” he gratefully began. “I didn’t expect——”
“What is this that you have been doing?”
Her tone, though low, was hasty. Cartaret bewilderedly realized that she was angry. Before he could reply, she had repeated her question:
“Sir, what is this that you have been doing?”
“I don’t understand.” He had drawn away from her, his face unmistakably expressive of his puzzled pain.
“You have been—— oh, that I should live to say it!—you have been giving money to my maid.”
He drew back farther now. He was detected; he was ashamed.
“Yes,” he confessed; “I thought—You see, she gave me to understand that you were—were poor.”
“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 Grâce 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.”