The Azure Rose Part 21

"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 G.o.d, 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, trespa.s.sed 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 att.i.tude 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 a.s.sented. "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.--Th.o.r.eau: _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 pa.s.sion; 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 a.s.sured, 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 pa.s.sed, he went out for a long walk in the twilight.

He walked along the Quai D'Orsay, beside which the crowded little pa.s.senger-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 Pa.s.sy 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 Parna.s.se, 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 cla.s.s, 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 t.i.tle. He knew that his friends, if they were in funds, would soon be gathered at the Cafe Des Deux Colombes.

When he pa.s.sed the rue St. Andre Des Arts, he remembered Fourget.