Chapter XI

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.