The Azure Rose Part 8

Cartaret raised his hand to silence these contentions.

"Do you understand me?" he urged.

The wide head-dress flapped a vehement a.s.sent.

"But you can't answer?"

The head-dress fluttered a negative, and the mouth mumbled a negative in a French so thick, hesitant and broken as to be infinitely less expressive than the shake of the head.

Cartaret remembered what the concierge Refrogne had told him. To the circle of curious people he explained:

"She can understand a little French, but she cannot speak it."

Madame snorted. "Why then does she come to this place so respectable if she cannot talk like a Christian?"

"Because," said Cartaret, "she evidently thought she would be intelligently treated."

It was clear to him that she would not have come had her need not been desperate. He made another effort to discover her nationality.

"Who of you speaks something besides French?" he asked of the company.

Not Madame; not Seraphin or Houdon: they were ardent Parisians and of course knew no language but their own. As for Garnier, as a French poet and a native of the pure-tongued Tours, he would not have soiled his lips with any other speech had he known another. Varachon, it turned out, was from the Jura, and had picked up a little Swiss-German during a youthful _liaison_ at Pontarlier. He tried it now, but the stranger only shook her head-dress at him.

"She knows no German," said Varachon.

"Such German!" sniffed Houdon.

"Chut! This proves rather that she knows it too well," grumbled Madame. "She but wishes to conceal it; probably she is a German spy."

Devignes said he knew Italian, and he did seem to know a sort of Opera-Italian, but it, too, was useless.

Cartaret had an inspiration.

"Spanish!" he suggested. "Does any one know any Spanish?"

Pasbeaucoup did; he knew two or three phrases--chiefly relating to prices on the menu of the Deux Colombes--but to him also the awful woman only shook her head in ignorance.

Cartaret took up the French again.

"Can you not tell me what you want here?" he pleaded.

"Kar-kar-tay," said the stranger.

"Ah!" cried Seraphin, clapping his hands. "Does not Houdon say that she makes her abode in the same house that you make yours? She seeks you, monsieur. 'Kar-kar-tay,' it is her manner of endeavoring to say Cartar_ette_."

At the sound of that name, the stranger nodded hard.

"_Oui, oui!_" she cried.

She understood that her chief inquisitor was Cartaret, and it was indeed Cartaret that she sought. She flung herself on her knees to him. When he hurriedly raised her, she caught at the skirt of his coat and nearly pulled it from him in an attempt to drag him to the stairs.

Cartaret looked sharply at Houdon. The musician having been so recently saved from the wrath of his host, was momentarily discreet: he hid his smile behind one of the thin bands that contrasted so sharply with his plump cheeks.

"Messieurs," said Cartaret, "I am going with this lady."

They all edged forward.

"And I am going alone," added the American. "I wish you good-night."

"You will be knifed in the street," said Madame. Her tone implied: "And it will serve you right."

None of the others seemed to mind his going; the wrangle over, they were ready for their coffee and liqueurs. Houdon was frankly relieved.

Only Seraphin protested.

"And you will leave your dinner unfinished?" he cried.

Cartaret was taking his hat and rain-coat from the row of pegs on the wall where, among the other guests', he had hung them when he entered.

He nodded his answer to Seraphin's query.

"Leave your dinner?" said Seraphin. "But my G.o.d, it is paid for!"

"Good-night," said Cartaret, and was plunged down the stairs by the strangely-garbed woman tugging at his hand.

CHAPTER V

WHICH TELLS HOW CARTARET RETURNED TO THE RUE DU VAL-DE-GRaCE, AND WHAT HE FOUND THERE

La timidite est un grand peche contre l'amour.--Anatole France: _La Rotisserie de la Reine Pedauque_.

If that strange old woman in the rakish head-dress was in a hurry, Cartaret, you may be sure, was in no mood for tarrying by the way. He left the Cafe des Deux Colombes, picturing The Girl of the Rose desperately ill, and he was resolved not only to be the first to come to her aid, but to have none of the restaurant's suspicious company for a companion. Then, no sooner had he pa.s.sed through the empty room on the ground-floor of Mme. Pasbeaucoup's establishment and gone a few steps toward the rue de Seine, than he began to fear that perhaps the house to which he was apparently being conducted--The Girl's house and his own--had taken fire; or that the cause of the duenna's mission was some like misfortune which would be better remedied, so far as The Girl's interests were concerned, if there were more rescuers than one.

"What is the matter?" he begged his guide to inform him, as they hurried through the darkened streets.

His guide lifted both hands to her face.

"Is mademoiselle ill?"

The duenna shook her head in an emphatic negative.

"The place isn't on fire?" His tone was one of pet.i.tion, as if, should he pray hard enough, she might avert the catastrophe he now dreaded; or as if, by touching her sympathies, he could release some hidden spring of intelligible speech.

The old woman, however, only shook her head again and hurried on.

Cartaret was glad to find that she possessed an agility impossible for a city-bred woman of her apparent age, and he was still more relieved when they reached their lodging-house and discovered it in apparently the same condition as that in which he had left it.

Their ascent of the stairs was like a race--a race ending in a dead-heat. At the landing, Cartaret turned, of course, toward his neighbor's door; to his amazement, the old woman pulled him to his own.