The Azure Rose Part 5

Cartaret had inherited his excellent const.i.tution, but his family all suffered from one disease: the disease of too much money on the wrong side of the house. When oil was found in Ohio, it was found in land belonging to his father's brother, but Charlie's father remained a poor lawyer to the end of his days. Uncle Jack had children of his own and a deserved reputation for holding on to his pennies. He sent his niece to a finis.h.i.+ng-school, where she could be properly prepared for that state of life to which it had not pleased Heaven to call her, and he sent his nephew to college. When the former child was finished, he found her a place as companion to an ancient widow in Toledo and dismissed her from his thoughts; when Charlie was through with college--which is to say, when the faculty was through with him for endeavoring to plant a fraternity in a plot of academic soil that forbade the seed of Greek-letter societies--he asked him what he intended to do now--and asked it in a tone that plainly meant:

"What further disgrace are you planning to bring upon our name?"

Charlie replied that he wanted to be an artist.

"I might have guessed it," said his uncle. "How long'll it take?"

Young Cartaret, knowing something about art, had not the slightest idea.

"Well," said the by-product of petroleum, "if you've got to be an artist, be one as far away from New York as you can. They say Paris is the best place to learn the business."

"It is one of the best places," said Charlie.

The elder Cartaret wrote a check.

"Take a boat to-morrow," he ordered. "I'll pay your board and tuition for two years: that's time enough to learn any business. After two years you'll have to make out for yourself."

So Charlie had worked hard for two years. That period ended a week ago, and his uncle's checks ended with it. He had stayed on and hoped.

To-day he had carried a picture through the rain to Seraphin's benefactor, the dealer Fourget; and the soft-hearted Fourget had bought it. Cartaret, on his return, met Houdon in the lower hall and before the American was well aware of it, he was pledged to the feast of which Maurice was bragging to Dieudonne.

Charlie dug into his pocket and fished out all that was in it: a matter of two hundred and ten francs. He counted it twice over.

"No use," he said. "I can't make it any larger. I wonder if I ought to take a smaller room."

Certainly there was more room here than he wanted, but he had grown to love the place: even then, when he had still to see it in the rose-pink twilight of romance, in the afterglow that was a dawn--even then, before the apparition of the strange Lady--he loved it as his sort of man must love the scenes of those struggles which have left him poor. Its front windows opened upon the street full of student-life and gossip, its rear windows looked on a little garden that was pretty with the concierge's flowers all Summer long and merry with the laughter of the concierge's children on every fair day the whole year round. The light was good enough, the location excellent; the service was no worse than the service in any similar house in Paris.

"But I have been a fool," said Cartaret.

He looked again at his money, and then he looked again about the room.

The difference between a fool and a mere dilettante in folly is this: that the latter knows his folly as he indulges it, whereas the former recognizes it, if ever, only too late.

"If I'd been able to study for only one year more," he said.

It was the wail of retrospection that, sooner or later, every man, each in his own way and according to his chances and his character for seizing them, is bound to utter. It was what we all say and what, in saying, we each think unique. Happy he that says it, and means it, in time to profit!

"Yes," said Cartaret, "I've been a fool. But I won't be a quitter," he added. "I'll go and order that dinner."

Thus Charles Cartaret in the afternoon.

He had put on a battered, broad-brimmed hat of soft black felt, which was picturesquely out of place above his American features, and a still more battered English rain-coat, which did not at all belong with the hat, and, thus fortified against the rain, he hurried into the hall. As he closed the door of his studio behind him, he fancied that he heard a sound from the room across from his own, and so stood listening, his hand upon the k.n.o.b.

"That's queer," he reflected. "I thought that room was still to let."

He listened a moment longer, but the sound, if sound there had been, was not repeated, so he pulled his hat-brim over his eyes and descended to the street.

The rain had lessened, but the fog held on, and the thoroughfares were wet and dismal. Cartaret cut down the rue du Val-de-Grace to the Avenue de Luxembourg and through the gardens with their dripping statues and around the museum, whence he crossed to the sheltered way between those bookstalls that cling like ivy to the walls of the Odeon, and so, by the steep descent of the rue de Tournon and the rue de Seine, came to the rue Jacob and the Cafe Des Deux Colombes.

Seraphin and Maurice were still there. They received him as their separate natures dictated, the former with a restrained dignity, the latter with the dignity of a monarch so secure of his t.i.tle that he can afford to condescend to an air of democracy. Seraphin bowed; Maurice embraced and, embracing, tapped the diatonic scale along Cartaret's vertebrae. Pasbeaucoup, in trembling obedience to a cryptic nod from the caged Madame, hovered in the background.

"I have come," said Cartaret, whose French was the easy and inaccurate French of the American art-student, "to order that dinner." He half turned to Pasbeaucoup, but Houdon was before him.

"It is done," announced the musician, as if announcing a favor performed. "I have relieved you of that tedium. We are to begin with an _hors-d'oeuvre_ of anchovies and----"

Madame had again nodded, this time less cryptically and more violently, at her husband, and Pasbeaucoup, between twin terrors, timidly suggested:

"Monsieur Cartaret comprehends that it is only because of the so high cost of necessities that it is necessary for us to request----"

He stopped there, but the voice from the cage boomed courageously:

"The payment in advance!"

"A custom of the establishment," explained Houdon grandly, but shooting a venomous glance in the direction of Madame.

Seraphin came quietly from behind his table and, slipping a thin arm through Cartaret's, drew him, to the speechless amazement of the other partic.i.p.ants in this scene, toward the farthest corner of the cafe.

"My friend," he whispered, "you must not do it."

"Eh?" said Cartaret. "Why not? It's a queer thing to be asked, but why shouldn't I do it?"

Seraphin hesitated. Then, regaining the conquest over self, he put his lips so close to the American's ear that the Frenchman's wagging wisps of whisker tickled his auditor's cheek.

"This Houdon is but a pleasant _coquin_," he confided. "He will suck from you the last sou's worth of your blood."

Cartaret smiled grimly.

"He won't get a fortune by it," he said.

"That is why I do not wish him to do it: I know well that you cannot afford these little dissipations. I do not wish to see my friend swindled by false friends.h.i.+p. Houdon is a good boy, but, Name of a Name, he has the conscience of a pig!"

"All right," said Cartaret suddenly, for Seraphin was appealing to a sense of economy still fresh enough to be sensitive, "since he's ordered the dinner, we'll let him pay for it."

"Alas," declared Dieudonne, sadly shaking his long hair, "poor Maurice has not the money."

"Oh!"--A gleam of grat.i.tude lighted Cartaret's blue eyes--"Then you are proposing that you do it?"

"My friend," inquired Seraphin, flinging out his arms as a man flings out his arms to invite a search of his pockets, "you know me: how can I?"

Cartaret blushed at his inept.i.tude. He knew Dieudonne well enough to have been aware of his poverty and liked him well enough to be tender toward it. "But," he nevertheless pardonably inquired, "if that's the way the thing stands, who's to pay? One of the other guests?"

"We are all of the same financial ability."

"Then I don't see----"

"Nor do I. And"--Seraphin's high resolution clattered suddenly about his ears--"after all, the dinner has been ordered, and I am very hungry. My friend," he concluded with a happy return of his dignity, "at least I have done you this service: you will buy the dinner, but you will not both buy it and be deceived."

Cartaret turned, with a smile no longer grim, to the others.

"Seraphin," he said, "has persuaded me. Madame, _l'addition_, if you please."