The Azure Rose Part 20

"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 a.s.sent.

"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 G.o.ds 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 p.r.o.noun. "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, pet.i.tioning.

"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."