The Azure Rose Part 22

Cartaret was ashamed that his memory had been so tardy. Fourget had helped him in his heavy need; Fourget should be the first to know of his affluence....

The old dealer, his bushy brows drawn tight together, his spectacles gleaming, was trying to say "No" to a lad with a picture under his arm--a crestfallen lad that was a stranger to Cartaret.

"Let me see the picture," said Cartaret, without further preface. He put out a ready hand.

The boy blushed. Cartaret had been abrupt and did not present the appearance of a possible purchaser.

"If you please," urged Cartaret. "I may care to buy."

Fourget gaped. The boy turned up his canvas--an execrable daub.

"I'll buy that," said Cartaret.

"Are you mad?" asked Fourget.

"Bring back that picture to M. Fourget in half an hour," pursued the heedless American, "and he will give you for it two hundred francs that he will have lent me and that I shall have left with him."

He pushed the stammering lad out of the shop and turned to Fourget.

"Are you drunk?" asked the dealer, changing the form of his suspicions.

"Fourget," cried Cartaret, clapping his friend on the back, "I shall never be hungry again--never--never--never! Look at that." He produced the precious cable-message. "That piece of paper will feed me all my life long. It will buy me houses, horses, motors, steamship-tickets. It looks like paper, Fourget." He spread it under Fourget's nose. "But it isn't; it's a dozen suits of clothes a year; it's a watch-and-chain, a diamond scarf-pin (if I'd wear one!); it's a yacht. It's an oil-well, Fourget--and a G.o.dsend!"

Fourget took it in his blue-veined hands. His hands trembled.

"Oh, I forgot," said Cartaret. "It is in English. Let me translate."

He translated.

When Charlie looked up from his reading, he found Fourget busily engaged in polishing his spectacles. Perhaps the old man's eyes were weak and could not bear to be without their gla.s.ses: they certainly were moist.

"I do not see so well as I once saw," the dealer was explaining: his voice was very gruff indeed. "You are wholly certain that this is no trick which one plays upon you?"

Cartaret was wholly certain.

Fourget made a valiant attempt at expressing his congratulations in a mere Anglo-Saxon handshake. He found it quite inadequate, and this annoyed him.

"The world," he growled, "loses a possibly fair artist and gets an idle millionaire."

"You get a new shop," vowed Cartaret. "Don't shake your head! I'll make it a business proposition: I've had enough trouble by being suspected of charity. I'm going to buy an interest, and I shan't want my money sunk in anything dark and unsanitary."

Fourget shook his gray head again.

"Thank you with all my heart, my friend," he said; "but no. This little shop meets my little needs and will last out my little remaining days. I would not leave it for the largest establishment on the boulevards."

They talked until Cartaret again bethought him of the cafe in the rue Jacob.

"But you will lend me the two hundred francs," he asked, "and give it to that boy for his picture?" How much a boy that boy seemed now: he was just the boy that Cartaret had been in the long ago time that was yesterday!

"Since you insist; but truly, my dear monsieur, myself I was about to weaken and purchase the terrible thing when you interrupted and saved me." ...

The money from Seraphin's latest _magnum opus_ not being yet exhausted, Seraphin's friends were lunching at the Cafe Des Deux Colombes, with little Pasbeaucoup fluttering between them and the kitchen, and Madame, expressionless under her mountain of hair, stuffed into the wire cage and bulging out of it. The company rose when they espied Cartaret, the cadaverous poet Garnier picking up his plate of roast chicken so as not to lose, in his welcoming, time that might be given to eating.

Cartaret felt at first somewhat ashamed before them. He felt the contrast between his changed fortunes and their fortunes unchanged. At last, however, the truth escaped him, and then he felt more ashamed than ever, so unenvious were the congratulations that they poured upon him.

Devignes' round belly shook with delight. Garnier even stopped eating.

"Now you may have the leisure for serious work, which," squeaked Varachon through his broken nose, "your art has so badly needed."

Seraphin said nothing, but put his hand on Cartaret's shoulder and gripped it hard.

Houdon embraced the fortunate one.

"Did I not always tell you?" he demanded of Seraphin. "Did I not say he was a disguised millionaire?"

"But he has but now got his money," Seraphin protested.

"Poof!" said Houdon, dismissing the argument with a trill upon his invisible piano. "La-la-la!"

"Without doubt to mark the event you will give a dinner?" suggested Garnier.

"Without doubt," said Houdon.

Cartaret said that he would give a dinner that very evening if Pasbeaucoup would strain the Median laws of the establishment so far as to trust him for a few days, and Pasbeaucoup, receiving the necessary nod from Madame, said that they would be but too happy to trust M. Cartarette for any sum and for any length of time that he might choose to name.

So Cartaret left them for a few hours and went back to his room at the earliest possible moment for finding Vitoria returned from her cla.s.s.

This time he not only knocked: he tried, in his haste, the k.n.o.b of the door, and the door, swinging open, revealed an empty room, stripped of even its furniture.

He nearly fell downstairs to the cave of Refrogne.

"Where are they?" he demanded.

Had monsieur again been missing strawberries? Where were what?

"Where is Mlle. Urola--where are the occupants of the room across from mine?" Cartaret's frenzied tones implied that he would hold the concierge personally responsible for whatever might have happened to his neighbors.

"Likely they are occupying some other room by this time," growled Refrogne. "I was unaware that they were such great friends of monsieur."

"They are. Where are they?"

"In that case, they must have told monsieur of their contemplated departure."

"Do you mean they've moved to another room in this house?"

"But no."

"Then where have they gone?"

They had gone away. They had paid their bill honestly, even the rent for the unconsumed portion of the month, and gone away. That was all it was an honest concierge's business to know.