The Azure Rose Part 3

Again her eyes widened. Then she tossed her head and laughed a little silvery laugh.

He fancied the laugh disdainful, and thought so the more when she seemed to detect his suspicion and tried to allay it by an alteration of tone.

"I mean exactly that," he said.

She bit her red lip, and Cartaret noted that her teeth were even and white.

"Forgive me," she begged.

She put out her hand so frankly that he would have forgiven her anything. He took the hand and, as it nestled softer than any satin in his, he felt his heart hammer in his breast.

"Forgive me," she was repeating.

"I hope _you'll_ forgive _me_," he muttered. "At any rate, you can't forget me: you'll have to remember me as the greatest boor you ever met."

She shook her head.

"It was I that was foolish."

"Oh, but it wasn't! I----"

He stopped, for her eyes had fallen from his and rested on their clasped hands. He released her instantly.

"Good-by," she said again.

"Good---- But surely I'm to see you once in a while!"

"I do not know."

"Why, we're neighbors! You can't mean that you won't let me----"

"I do not know," she said. "Good-by."

She went out, drawing-to the shattered door behind her.

Cartaret leaned against the panel and listened shamelessly.

He heard her cross the hall and open the door to the opposite room; he heard her suspiciously greeted by another voice--a voice that he gladly recognized as feminine--and in a language that was wholly unfamiliar to him: a language that sounded somehow Oriental. Then he heard the other door shut, and he turned to the comfortless gloom of his own quarters.

He sat down on the bed. He had forgotten a riotous dinner that was to have been his final Parisian folly, forgotten his poverty, forgotten his day of disappointment and his desire to go back to Ohio and the law. He remembered only the events of the last quarter-hour and the girl that had made them what they were.

As he sat there, there seemed to come again into the silent room the perfume he had noticed when he returned. It seemed to float in on the twilight, still dimly pink behind the roofs of the gray houses along the Boul' Miche': subtle, haunting, an odor more delicate and tender than any he had ever known before.

He raised his head. He saw something white lying on the floor--lying where, a few moments since, he had stood. He went forward and picked it up.

It was a flower like a rose--a white rose--but unlike any rose of which Cartaret had any knowledge. It was small, but perfect, its pure petals gathered tight against its heart, and from its heart came the perfume that had seemed to him like a musical poem in an unknown tongue.

For a second time Cartaret had that quick vision of the sunlight upon snow-crests and the virgin sheen of unattainable mountain tops....

CHAPTER II

PROVIDING THE GENTLE READER WITH A CARD OF ADMISSION TO THE NEST OF THE TWO DOVES

Dans ces questions de credit, il faut toujours frapper l'imagination. L'idee de genie, c'est de prendre dans la poche des gens l'argent qui n'y est pas encore.--Zola: _L'Argent_.

Until just before the appearance of Charlie Cartaret's rosy vision, this had been a day of darkness and wet. Rain--a dull, hopeless, February rain--fell with implacable monotony. It descended in fine spray, as if too lazy to hurry, yet too spiteful to stop. It made all Paris miserable; but, as is the way with Parisian rains, it was a great deal wetter on the Left Bank of the Seine than on the Right.

No rain--not even in those happy times before the great war--ever washed the Left Bank clean, and this one only made it a marsh. A curtain of fog fell sheer between the Isle de la Cite and the Quai des Augustins; the twin towers of St. Sulpice staggered up into a pall of fog and were lost in it. The gray houses hunched their shoulders, lowered their heads, drew their mansard hats and gabled caps over their noses and stood like rows of patient horses at a cabstand under the gray downpour. Now and again a real cab scuttled along the streets, its skinny beast clop-clopping over the wooden paving, or slipping among the cobbled ways, its driver hidden under a mountainous pile of woolen great-coat and rubber cape. Even the taxis lacked the proud air with which they habitually splash pedestrians, and such pedestrians as business forced upon the early afternoon thoroughfares went with heads bowed like the houses' and umbrellas leveled like flying-jibs.

In front of the little Cafe Des Deux Colombes, the two marble-topped tables which occupied its scant frontage on the rue Jacob were deserted by all save their four iron-backed chairs with wet seats and their twin water-bottles into which, with mathematical precision, water dropped from a pair of holes in the sagging canvas overhead.

Inside, however, there were lighted gas-jets, the proprietor and the proprietor's wife--presumably the pair of doves for whom the Cafe was named--and a man that was trying to look like a customer.

Gaston Francois Louis Pasbeaucoup had an ap.r.o.n tied about his middle, and, standing before the intended patron's table, leaned what weight he had--it was not much--upon his finger-tips. His mustache was fierce enough to grace the upper lip of a deputy from the Bouches-du-Rhone and generous enough to spare many a contribution to the _plat-du-jour_; but his mustache was the only large thing about him--always excepting Madame his wife, who was ever somewhere about him and who was just now, two hundred and twenty pounds of evidence to the good food of the Deux Colombes, stuffed into a wire cage at one end of the bar, and bulging out of it, her eyebrows meeting over her pug-nose and the heap of hair leaping from her head nearly to the ceiling, while her lips and fingers were busy adding the bills from _dejeuner_.

"It would greatly pleasure me to accommodate monsieur," Pasbeaucoup was whispering, "but monsieur must know that already----"

The sentence ended in a deprecating glance over the speaker's shoulder in the general direction of mighty Madame.

"Already? Already what then?" demanded the intending customer.

He was lounging on the wall-seat behind his table, and he had an aristocratic air surprisingly at variance with his garments. His black jacket shone too highly at the elbows, and its short sleeves betrayed an unnecessary length of red wrist. His black boots gasped for repair; a soft black hat, pushed to the back of his black hair, still dripped from an unprotected voyage along the rainy street, and his neckcloth, which was also long and soft and black, showed a spot or two not put there by its makers. These were patently matters beyond their owner's command and beneath the dignity of his attention. Against them one was compelled to set a manner truly lofty, which was enhanced by a pair of burning, deep-placed eyes, a thin white face and, sprouting from either side of his lower jaw, near the chin, two wisps of ebon whisker. He frowned majestically, and he smoked a caporal cigarette as if it were a Havana cigar.

"Already what?" he loudly repeated. "If it is possible! I patronize your cabbage of a cafe for five years, and now you put me off with your alreadys!"

Pasbeaucoup, his fingers still resting on the table, danced in embarra.s.sment and rolled his eyes in a manner that plainly enough warned monsieur not to let his voice reach the caged lady.

"I was but about to say that monsieur already owes us the trifling sum of----"

"_Sixty francs, twenty-five!_"

The tone that announced these fateful numerals was so tremendous a contralto as to be really ba.s.s. It came from the wire cage and belonged to Madame.

Pasbeaucoup sank into the nearest chair. He spread out his hands in a gesture that eloquently said:

"Now you've done it! I can't s.h.i.+eld you any longer!"

The debtor, albeit he was still a young man, did not appear unduly impressed. The table was across his knees, but he rose as far as it would permit and removed his hat with a flourish that sent a spray of water directly over Madame's monument of hair. Disregarding the blatant fact that she was quite the most remarkable feature of the room, he vowed that he had not observed her upon entering, was desolated because of his oversight and ravished now to have the pleasure of once more beholding her in all her accustomed grace and charm.

Madame shrugged her shoulders higher than the walls of the cage.

"Sixty francs, twenty-five," she said, without looking up from her task.

Ah, yes: his little account. Monsieur recalled that: there was a little account; but, so truly as his name was Seraphin and his pa.s.sion Art, what a marvelous head Madame had for figures. It was of an exact.i.tude magnificent!