The Second Class Passenger Part 21

"You are going?" demanded Musard.

"I must," said Rufin. "To-morrow I go into the country for some weeks, and nothing is packed yet."

"Corot would not have left an old man to die in solitude," remarked Musard thoughtfully.

Rufin smiled regretfully and got away while he could. Papa Musard in an hour could wear down even his patience.

The painter's room was still unlocked and unoccupied as he descended the stairs; he entered it for another look at the picture. He needed to confirm his memory, to be a.s.sured that he had not endowed the work with virtue not its own. The trivial, cheaply pretty face fronted him again, with its little artificial graces only half-masking the sore, tormented femininity behind it. Yes, it was the true art, the poignant vision, a thing belonging to all time.

In the courtyard the fat concierge was awake, in a torpid fashion, and knitting. She lifted her greedy and tyrannical eyes at the tall figure of Rufin, with its suggestion of splendors and dignities. But she was not much more informative than Papa Musard had been.

"Oh, the painter!" she exclaimed, when she understood who was in question. "Ah, M'sieur, it is two days since I have seen him. He is not of a punctual habit--no! How often have I waked in the blackness of night, upon a frightful uproar of the bell, to admit him, and he making observations at the top of his voice that would cause a fish to blush! An Italian, M'sieur--yes! But all the same it astonishes no one when he is away for two days."

"The Italians are like that," generalized Rufin unscrupulously. "His door is unlocked, Madame, and there is a picture in his room which is--well, valuable."

"He sold the key," lamented Madame, "and the catches of the window, and the bell-push, and a bucket of mine which I had neglected to watch. And he called me a she-camel when I remonstrated."

"In Italian it is a mere jest," Rufin a.s.sured her. "See, Madame, this is my card, which I beg you to give him. I am obliged to leave Paris to-morrow, but on my return I shall have the honor to call on him.

And this is a five-franc piece!"

The big coin seemed to work on the concierge like a powerful drug.

She choked noisily and was for the while almost enthusiastic.

"He shall have the card," she promised. "I swear it! After all, artists must have their experiences. Doubtless the monsieur who resides above is a great painter?"

"A very great painter," replied Rufin.

His work, during the next three weeks, exiled him to a green solitude of flat land whose horizons were ridged by poplars growing beside roads laid down as though with a ruler, so straight they were as they sliced across the rich levels. It was there he effected the vital work on his great picture, "Promesse," a revelation of earth gravid with life, of the opulent promise and purpose of spring. It is the greater for what lodged in his mind of the picture he had seen in the Montmartre tenement. It was constant in his thought, the while he noted on his canvas the very texture of the year's early light; it aided his brush. In honesty and humbleness of heart, as he worked, he acknowledged a debt to the unknown Italian who stole the key of the room to sell, and called his concierge a she-camel.

It was a debt he knew he could pay. He, Rufin, whose work was in the Luxembourg, in galleries in America, in Russia, in the palaces of kings, could a.s.sure the painter of Montmartre of fame. He went to seek him on the evening of his return to the city.

The fat concierge preserved still her burst and overripe appearance, and at the sight of him she was so moved that she rose from her chair and stood upright to voice her lamentations.

"Monsieur, what can I say? He is gone! It was a nightmare. It is true that he omitted to pay his rent--a defect of his temperament, without doubt. But the proprietor does not make these distinctions. After three weeks he would expel Michelangelo himself. The monsieur who was driven out--he resisted. He employed blasphemies, maledictions; he smote my poor husband on the nose and in the stomach--all to no purpose, for he is gone. I was overcome with grief, but what could I do?"

"At least you know whither he went?" suggested Rufin.

"But, M'sieur, how should I know? His furniture--it was not much--was impounded for the rent, else one might have followed it. He took away with him only one picture, and that by force of threats and a.s.saults."

"Oh yes, of course he would take that," agreed the artist.

"He retired down the street with it, walking backward in the middle of the road and not ceasing to make outcries at us," said the concierge. "He uttered menaces; he was dangerous. Could I leave my poor husband to imperil myself by following such a one? I ask M'sieur could I?"

"I suppose not," said Rufin, staring at her absently. He was thinking, by an odd momentary turn of fancy, how well he could have spared this gruesome woman for another look at the picture.

"Who are his friends?" he inquired.

But the concierge could tell him nothing useful.

"He had no friends in the house," she said. "Our poor honest people-- he treated them with contumely. I do not know his friends, M'sieur."

"Ah, well," said Rufin, "I shall come across him somehow."

He saluted her perfunctorily and was about to turn away, but the avidity of her face reminded him that he had a standard to live up to. He produced another five-franc piece and was pursued to the gate by the stridency of her grat.i.tude.

A man--even a man of notable attributes and shocking manners--is as easily lost in Paris as anywhere; it is a city of many shadows. At the end of some weeks, during which his work had suffered from his new preoccupation, Rufin saw himself baffled. His man had vanished effectually, carrying with him to his obscurity the great picture. It was the memory of that consummate thing that held Rufin to his task of finding the author; he pictured it to himself, housed in some garret, making the mean place wonderful. He obtained the unofficial aid of the police and of many other people whose business in life is with the underworld. He even caused a guarded paragraph to appear in certain papers, which spoke temperately of a genius in hiding, for whom fame was ripe whenever he should choose to claim it. But Paris at that moment was thrilled by a series of murders by apaches, and the notice pa.s.sed unremarked.

In the end, therefore, Rufin restored himself to his work, richer by a memory, poorer by a failure. Not till then came the last accident in the chain of accidents by which the matter had presented itself to him.

Some detail of quite trivial business took him to see an official at the Palais de Justice, In the great Salle des Pas Perdus there was, as always, a crowd of folk, jostling, fidgeting, making a clamor of mixed voices. He did not visit it often enough to know that the crowd was larger than usual and strongly leavened with an element of furtive shabby men and desperate calm women. He found his official and disposed of his affair, and the official, who was willing enough to be seen in the company of a man of Rufin's position, rose politely to see him forth, and walked with him into the noisy hall.

"You are not often here, Monsieur Rufin?" he suggested. "And yet, as you see, here is much matter for an artist. These faces, eh? All the brigands of Paris are here to-day. In there"--and he pointed to one of the many doors--"the trial is proceeding of those apaches."

"A great occasion, no doubt," said Rufin. He looked casually towards the door which his companion indicated. "Of course I have read of the matter in the newspapers, but----"

He ceased speaking abruptly. A movement in the crowd between him and the door had let him see, for a s.p.a.ce of seconds, a girl who leaned against the wall, strained and pale, as though waiting in a patient agony for news, for tidings of the fates that were being decided within. From the moment his eyes rested on her he was sure; there was no possibility of a mistake; it was the girl whose face, reproduced, interpreted, and immortalized, looked forth from the canvas he had seen in the Montmartre tenement.

"Two of them held the gendarme, while the third cut his throat with his own sword. A grotesque touch, that--vous ne trouvez pas? tres fort!"--the official was remarking when Rufin took him by the arm.

"That girl," he said. "You see her?--against the wall there. I cannot talk with her in this crowd, and I must talk to her at once. Where is there some quiet Place?"

"Eh?" The little babbling official had a moment of doubt. But he reflected that one is not a great artist without being eccentric; and his amiable brow cleared.

"She is certainly a type," he said, peering on tiptoe. "Wonderful!

You cast your eye upon all this crowd and at once, in a single glance, you pluck forth the type--wonderful! As to a place, that is easy. My office is at your service."

The girl lifted hunted and miserable eyes to the tall, grave man who looked down upon her and raised his hat.

"I have something to say to you," he said. "Come with me."

A momentary frantic hope flamed in her thin countenance. It sank, and she hesitated. Girls of her world are practiced in discounting such requests. But Rufin's courteous and fastidious face was above suspicion; without a word she followed him.

The office to which he led her was an arid, neat room, an economical legal factory for making molehills into mountains. A desk and certain chairs stood like chill islands about its floor; it had the forlorn atmosphere of a waiting-room. The little official whose workshop it was held open the door for them, followed them in, and closed it again. "Do not be alarmed, my child," he said to the tragic girl.

"This gentleman is a great artist. You will be honored in serving him."

Rufin stilled him with an upraised hand and fetched a chair for the girl. She rested an arm on the back of it, but did not sit down. She did not understand why she had been brought to this room, and stared with hard, preoccupied eyes at the tall man with the mild, still face.

"I recognized you by a picture I saw some months ago in a room in Montmartre," said Rufin.

"It was a great picture, the work of a great man."

"Ah!" The girl let her breath go in a long sigh. "Monsieur knows him, then? And knows that he is a great man? For he is--he is a great man!"

She spoke with pa.s.sion, with a living fervor of conviction, but her eyes still appealed.

"You and I both know it quite certainly, Mademoiselle," replied Rufin. "Everybody will know it very soon. It is a truth that cannot be hidden. But where is the picture?!"

"I have it," she answered.