The Azure Rose Part 34

Cartaret was seized by the same impulse toward hysteria that had seized him when he first faced Don Ricardo's pistol.

"Was _that_ what he tried to say at the bridge? What a fool I was not to listen! If I had all the world to give, I'd give it to you!"

He tried to seize her hand again, but she drew it away.

"And so," she said, with a crooked smile and a flaming face, "since you say that you love me, I--I have to pay the just debt of my house and save its honor--I must marry you whether I love you or not."

He looked at her with fear renewed.

"Then you _have_ changed?" he asked.

Suddenly she put her own right hand to her lips and kissed the fingers on which his lips had rested.

"You have all the world," she said.... "Give it me."

He found both of her hands this time, but still she kept him from her.

The scent of the lilacs mingled with another scent--a scent that made him see again the tall Cantabrians.... Suddenly he realized that she was wearing her student-blouse.

"You've been here--When did you come back to Paris?"

"A week ago."

"To this house?"

"Of _course_ I am living in this house as before, and with your friend Chitta. You know that I could not have lived anywhere else in Paris.

I _couldn't_. So I took the old room--the dear little old room--again."

"_Before_ you knew that I still loved you!" She hung her head. "But I'll surely never let you go this time." He held her hands fast as if fearing that she might escape him. "No custom--no law--no force could take you now. Tell me: would you have wanted to go back?"

She freed herself. That newer perfume filled the purple twilight: the pure perfume of the Azure Rose that the wandering Basque carries with him abroad to bring him safely home. She drew the rose from beneath her blouse and held it out to him. Cartaret kissed it. She took it back, kissed it too, went to the nearest window and, tearing the flower petal from petal, dropped it into the Paris street.

"No," she said softly when she had turned to him again, "do not kiss me yet. I want you first to understand me. I do love my own country, but I cannot stay in it forever. I was being smothered there by all the dust of those dead centuries; I was being slowly crushed by the iron weight of their old customs and their old laws--all horribly alive when they should have been long ago in their graves. There was nothing around me that was not old: old walls and towers, ancient tapestries and arms, musty rooms, yellowed ma.n.u.scripts. The age of the place, it seemed to become a soul-in-itself. It seemed to get a consciousness and to hate me because I was not as it was. There was nothing that was not old--and I was young." As she remembered it, her face grew almost sulky. "Even if it had not been for you, I believe I should have come away again. I was so angry at it all that I could even have put on a Paquin gown--if I had had a Paquin gown!--and worn it at dinner in the big dining-hall of my ancestors."

He understood. He realized--none better--the hunger and thirst for Paris: for the lights of the boulevards, the clatter of the dominoes on the cafe-tables, the procession of carriages and motors along the Champs elysees, the very cries and hurry of the rue St. Honore by day or the Boul' Miche' by night. Nevertheless, he had lately been an American headed for America, and so he said:

"Just wait till you see Broadway!"

Vitoria smiled, but she remained serious.

"I wanted you to know that--first," she said: "to know that I came away this second time in large part because of you, but not wholly."

"I think," said Cartaret, "that I can manage to forgive that."

"And then--there is something else. You saw my brother in a great castle and on a great estate, but he is not rich, and I am very poor."

Cartaret laughed.

"Was that what was on your mind? My dear, _I'm_ rich--I'm frightfully rich!"

"Rich?" Her tone was all incredulity.

"It happened the day you left Paris. Oh, I know I ought to have told you at the castle, but I forgot it. You see, there was so little time to talk to you and so many more important things to say."

He told her all about it while the dusk slowly deepened. Chitta should have a salary for remaining in a cottage that he would give her in Alava and never leaving it. He would give his friends that dinner now--Houdon and Devignes, Varachon and Garnier--a dinner of celebration at which the host would be present and to which even Gaston Francois Louis Pasbeaucoup and the elephantine Madame would sit down. There would be bushels of strawberries. Seraphin would be pensioned for life, so that he might paint only the pictures that his heart demanded, and Fourget--yes, Cartaret would embrace dear old Fourget like a true Gaul. In the Luxembourg Gardens the statues of the old G.o.ds smiled and held their peace.

"You--you can study too," said Cartaret. "You can have the best art-masters in the world, and you shall have them."

But Vitoria shook her head.

"There," she said, "is another confession and the last. I was the more ready to leave Paris when I ran away from you, because I was disheartened: the master had told me that I could never learn, and so I was afraid to face you."

"Then _I'll_ never paint again," vowed Cartaret. "Pictures? I was successful only when I painted pictures of you, and why should I paint them when I have you?"

She looked at him gravely.

"I am glad," she said, "that you are rich, but I am also glad that we have both been poor--together. Oh,"--she looked about the familiar room,--"it needs but one thing more: if only the street-organ were playing that Scotch song that it used to play!"

"If it only were!" he agreed. "However, we can't have everything, can we?"

But lovers, if they only want it enough, can have everything, and, somehow, the hurdy-gurdy did, just at that moment, begin to play "Annie Laurie" as it used to do, out in the rue du Val-de-Grace.

Cartaret led her toward the darkened window, but stopped half-way across the room.

"I will try to deserve you," he said. "I _will_ make myself what you want me to be."

"You _are_ that," she answered, her face raised toward his. "All that I ask is to have you with me always as you are now." The clear contralto of her voice ran like a refrain to the simple air of the ballad. "I want you with me when you are unhappy, so that I may comfort you; when you are ill, so that I may nurse you; when you are glad, so that I may be glad because you are. I want to know you in every mood: I want to belong to you."

High over the gleaming roofs, the moon, a disk of yellow gla.s.s, swung out upon the indigo sky and peeped in at that window. One silver beam enveloped her. It bathed her lithe, firm figure; it touched her pure face, her scarlet lips; it made a refulgent glory of her hair, and, out of it, the splendor of her wonderful eyes was for him.

"Soon," he whispered, "in the chapel of Ste. Jeanne D'Arc at the church of St. Germain des Pres."

"Good-night," she said.... "Good-night, my love."

She raised her white hands to him and drew one step nearer. Then she yielded herself to his arms and, as they closed, strong and tight, about her, her own arms circled his neck.

The scent of the Azure Rose returned with her lips: a vision of mountain-peaks and sunlight upon crests of snow, a perfume sweeter than the scent of any rose in any garden, a poem in a language that Cartaret at last could understand.

Her lips met his....

"Oh," he whispered, "sweetheart, is it really, really you?"

"Yes," said the lady of the Rose, "it--is _me_!"

THE END.