The Azure Rose Part 16

"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?"

"n.o.body."

"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 n.o.body. 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 pa.s.sing by. He made suave enquiries.

"But not Refrogne," he a.s.sured 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 pa.s.sed 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 appet.i.te 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 pa.s.sed: "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 pa.s.sions. 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 pa.s.sed 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 a.s.sume a mildly Pre-Raphaelite bearing.

Something else that his gla.s.s 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 _pet.i.t 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.