The Azure Rose Part 12

"The turpentine!" All suspicion of amus.e.m.e.nt 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 a.s.sist 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 cla.s.s, 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 ident.i.ty. 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 cla.s.s, 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 _Ada_.

"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 a.s.sist you."

"Perhaps," said Cartaret. He doubted it, but he hoped that something would a.s.sist 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 n.o.ble, 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 pa.s.sed 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 t.i.tle. 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."