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.--Thoreau: _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 passion; 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 assured, 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
passed, he went out for a long walk in the twilight.
He walked along the Quai D'Orsay, beside which the crowded little
passenger-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 Passy 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 Parnasse, 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 class, 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 title. He
knew that his friends, if they were in funds, would soon be gathered
at the Cafe Des Deux Colombes.
When he passed the rue St. Andre Des Arts, he remembered Fourget.
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 godsend!"
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 glasses: 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 class.
This time he not only knocked: he tried, in his haste, the knob 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.
"When did they go?"
"Early this morning."
"Didn't they leave any address?"
"None. Why should they? Mademoiselle never received letters."
Cartaret could bear no more. Even the man that hauled away the
furniture had only taken it to the shop from which it had been leased.
Refrogne had seen the two women get into a cab with their scanty
luggage and had heard them order themselves driven to the Gare
d'Orsay. That was the end of the trail....
* * * * *
Cartaret climbed to his own room. Thrust under the door, where he had
missed it in the rush of his hopeful exit that morning, was an
envelope. It did not hold the expected note of explanation. It held
only a pressed rose, yellow now, and dry and odorless.