AN ACCOUNT OF AN EMPTY PURSE AND A FULL HEART, IN THE COURSE OF WHICH
THE AUTHOR BARELY ESCAPES TELLING A VERY OLD STORY
C'est etat bizarre de folie tendre qui fait que nous n'avons
plus de pensee que pour des actes d'adoration. On devient
veritablement un possede que hante une femme, et rien
n'existe plus pour nous a cote d'elle.--De Maupassant: _Un
Soir_.
The Lady's "perhaps" meant "yes," it seemed, for, when Cartaret called
for her the next day, he found her ready to go to the Bois, and not
the Lady only: hovering severely in the immediate background, like a
thunder-cloud over a Spring landscape, was Chitta, wrapped in a shawl
of marvelous lace, doubtless from her own country, and crowned with a
brilliant bonnet unmistakably procured at some second-hand shop off
the rue St. Jacques. The Lady noticed his expression of bewilderment
and appeared a little annoyed by it.
"Of course," she said, "Chitta accompanies us."
Cartaret had to submit.
"Certainly," said he.
He proposed a taxi-cab to the Bois--he had visited the Mont de
Piete--but the Lady would not hear of it; she was used to walking; she
was a good walker; she liked to walk.
"But it's miles," Cartaret protested.
"It is nothing," said she.
Her utmost concession was to go by tram to the _Arc_.
It was a beautiful day in the Bois, with half of Paris there:
carriages from the Faubourg St. Germain, motors of the smart set,
hired conveyances full of tourists. The trees were a tender green; the
footways crowded by the Parisian bourgeois, making a day of it with
his family. Slim officers walked, in black jackets and red trousers,
the calves of their legs compressed in patent-leather riding-leggings;
women of the half-world showed brilliant toilettes that had been
copied by ladies of the _haut monde_, who, driven past, wore them not
quite so well. Grotesquely clipped French poodles rode in the
carriages, and Belgian police-dogs in the automobiles; thin-nosed
collies frolicked after their masters; here and there a tailless
English sheep-dog waddled by, or a Russian boar-hound paced sedately;
children played on the grass and dashed across the paths with a
suddenness that threatened the safety of the adult pedestrians.
Cartaret led the way into the less frequented portions of the great
park beyond the Lac Inferieur. The Lady was pleasantly beside him,
Chitta unpleasantly at his heels.
"Don't you admit it's worth coming to see?" he began in English. "When
I was here, under the stars, the other night----"
"You must speak French," the Lady smilingly interrupted. "You must
remember my promise to Chitta."
Cartaret ground his teeth. He spoke thereafter in French, but he
lowered his voice so as to be sure that Chitta could not understand
him.
"I was thinking then that you ought to see it." He took his courage in
both hands. "I was wishing very much that you were with me." His
brown eyes sought hers steadily. "May I tell you all that I was
wishing?"
"Not now," she said.
Her tone was conventional enough, but in her face he read--and he was
sure that she had meant him to read--a something deeper.
He put it to her flatly: "When?"
She was looking now at the fresh green leaves above them. When she
looked down, she was still smiling, but her smile was wistful.
"When dreams come true, perhaps," she said. "Do dreams ever come true
in the American United States, monsieur?"
The spell of the Spring was dangerously upon them both. Cartaret's
breath came quickly.
"I wish--I wish that you were franker with me," he said.
"But am I ever anything except frank?"
"You're--I know I haven't any right to expect your confidence: you
scarcely know me. But why won't you tell me even where you come from
and who you are?"
"You know my name."
"I know a part of it."
"My little name is--it is Vitoria."
"V-i-t-t-o-r-i-a?" he spelled.
"Yes, but with one 't,'" the Lady said.
"Vitoria Urola," he repeated.
She raised her even brows.
"Oh, yes; of course," said she.
Somehow it struck him that its sound was scarcely familiar to her:
"Do I pronounce it badly?"
"No, no: you are quite correct."
"But not quite to be trusted?"
She looked at him doubtfully. She looked at Chitta and gave her a
quick order that sent the duenna reluctantly ahead of them. Then the
Lady put her gloved hand on Cartaret's arm.
"I want you to be my friend," she said.
"I am your friend," he protested: "that is what I want you to believe.
That is why I ask you to be frank with me. I want you to tell me just
enough to let me help--to let me protect you. If you are in danger, I
want----"
"You might be my danger."
"I?"
She bowed assent.
"No, do not ask me why. I shall not tell you. I shall never tell
you--no more," she smiled, "than I shall ever say for you 'it's me.'
It is very kind of you to want to be my friend. I am alone here in
Paris, except for poor Chitta, and I shall be glad if you will be my
friend; but it will not be very easy."
"It would be hard to be anything else."
"Not for you: you are too curious. My friend must let me be just what
I am here. All that I was before I came to Paris, all that I may be
after I leave it, he must ask nothing about."
Cartaret looked long into her eyes.
"All right," he said at last. "I am glad to have that much. And--thank
you."
He stuck to his side of their agreement; not only during that
afternoon in the Bois, but during the days that followed. He worked
hard. He turned out one really good picture, and he turned out many
successful pot-boilers. He would not impose these on Fourget, because
old Fourget had already been too kind to him; but Lepoittevin wanted
such stuff, and Cartaret let him have it.
Cartaret worked gladly now, because he was, however little she might
guess it, working for Vitoria. He had left for himself precisely
enough to keep him alive, but every third or fourth day he would have
the happiness of slipping a little silver into Chitta's horny palm:
Chitta came readily to the habit of waiting for him on the stair. He
grew happier day by day, and looked--as who does not?--the better for
it. He sought out Seraphin and Varachon; he bought brandy for Houdon;
went to hear Devignes sing, and once he had Armand Garnier to
luncheon. He rewarded the hurdy-gurdy so splendidly that it was a
nightly visitor to the rue du Val de Grace: the entire street was
whistling "Annie Laurie."
Seraphin guessed the truth.
"Ah, my friend," he nodded, "that foolish one, Houdon, says that you
have again decided to spend of your income: _I_ know that you are
somehow making largess with your heart."
Cartaret took frequent walks with Vitoria, Chitta always two feet
behind, never closer, but never farther away. Often he saw the Lady to
her classes, more frequently they walked to the Ile Saint Louis, or
between the old houses of the rue des Francs Bourgeois; to the Jardin
des Plantes, or into the Cours de Dragon or St. Germain des Pres:
Chitta's unsophisticated mind should have been improved by a thorough
knowledge of picturesque Paris.
He was guilty of trying to elude the guardian--guilty of some rather
shabby tricks in that direction--and he suffered the more in
conscience because they were almost uniformly unsuccessful. More than
once, however, he reached a state of exaltation in which he forgot
Chitta, cared nothing about Chitta, and then he felt nearer Heaven.
On one such occasion he was actually nearer than the site usually
ascribed to the Celestial City. With Vitoria and her guardian he had
climbed--it was at his own malign suggestion--to Montmartre and, since
Chitta feared the funicular, had toiled up the last steep ascent into
Notre Dame de Sacre Coeur. Chitta's piety--or her exhaustion--kept
her long upon her knees in that Byzantine nave, and the Lady and
Cartaret had a likely flying-start up the stairs to the tower.
Cartaret possessed the wit to say nothing, but he noticed that
Vitoria's blue eyes shone with a light of adventure, which tacitly
approved of the escapade, and that her step was as quick as his own
when Chitta's slower step, heavy breathing and muttered imprecations
became audible below them.
"I'm sure the old girl will have to rest on the way up, for all her
spryness," thought Cartaret. "If we can only hold this pace, we ought
to have five minutes alone on the ramparts."
They had quite five minutes and, no other sight-seers being about,
they were quite alone. Below them, under a faintly blue haze, Paris
lay like an outspread map, with here and there a church steeple rising
above the level of the page. The roof of the Opera, the gilt dome of
Napoleon's tomb and the pointing finger of the Tour Eiffel were
immediately individualized, but all the rest of the city merged into a
common maze about the curving Seine with the red sun setting beyond
the Ile de Puteaux.
Vitoria leaned on the rampart. She was panting a little from her
climb; her cheeks were flushed, and her whole face glowing.
"It is as if we were gods on some star," she said, "looking down upon
a world that is strange to us."
She was speaking in English. Cartaret bent closer. Pledges of mere
friendship ceased, for the moment, to appear of primary importance: he
wanted, suddenly, to make the most of a little time.
"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 assent.
"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 gods 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 pronoun. "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, petitioning.
"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."
"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 God, 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, trespassed
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 attitude 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 assented. "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."