Reginald Wright Kauffman

It must be a very dear and intimate reality for which people will be content to give up a dream.—Hawthorne: The Marble Faun.

Summer held Paris in his arms when Cartaret returned there—held her, wearied from the dance with Spring, in his warm arms, and was rocking her to sleep. Romance had crowded commerce from the boulevards; poets wrote their verses at the marble-topped tables along the awninged pavements; the lesser streets were lovers’ lanes.

For Cartaret had not hurried. Once the Pyrenees were behind him, he felt growing upon him a dread of any return to the city in which he had first met and loved the Lady of the Rose; and only the necessity of settling his affairs there—of collecting his few possessions, paying two or three remaining bills and bidding a last good-by to his friends—drew him forward. He lingered at one town after the other, caring nothing for what he saw, but hating the thought of even a week in a Paris without her. Vaguely he had decided to return to America, though what of interest life could hold there, or anywhere, for him he could not imagine: some dull business routine, most likely—for he would never paint again—and the duller the better. Thus he wasted a fortnight along the Loire and among the chateaux of Touraine and found himself at last leaving his train in the Gare D’Orsay at the end of a Summer afternoon.

He made for his own room with the objectless hurry of a native American, his feet keeping time to a remembered stanza of Andrew Lang:

Taciturn RefrognÉ seemed no more surprised to see him than if he had gone out but an hour since: the trade of the Parisian concierge slays surprise early.

“A letter for monsieur,” said RefrognÉ.

Cartaret took it from the grimy paw that was extended out of the concierge’s cave. He went on up the stairs.

The door of the magic Room Opposite—in all probability commonplace enough now—stood slightly ajar, and Cartaret felt a new pang as he glanced at it. He passed on to his own room.

His own room! It was precisely as he had seen it last—a little dustier, and far more dreary, but with no other change. The table at which she had leaned, the easel on which he had painted those portraits of her, were just as when he had left them. He went to the window at which he used to store the provisions that Chitta looted, and there he opened the envelope RefrognÉ had given him. It contained only one piece of paper: A Spanish draft on the Comptoir GÉnÉral for a hundred and twenty francs, and on the back, in a labored English script, was written:

A limb of wisteria had climbed to the window and hung a cluster of its purple flowers on the sill. Below, RefrognÉ’s lilacs were in full bloom, and the laughter of RefrognÉ’s children rose from among them as piercing sweet as the scent of the flowers. Cartaret took a match from his pocket, struck it and set the bit of paper aflame. He held it until the flame burnt his fingers, crushed it in his palm and watched the ashes circle slowly downward toward the lilac-trees.

The sun had set and, as Cartaret walked aimlessly toward the front windows, the long shadows of the twilight were deepening from wall to wall. Summer was in all the air.

So much the same! He leaned forward and looked down into the silent rue du Val-de-GrÂce. He was thinking how she had once stood where he was leaning now; thinking how he had leaned there so often, looking for her return up that narrow thoroughfare, waiting for the sound of her light footfall on the stair. So much the same, indeed: the unchanged street outside, the unchanged room within; the room in which he had found her on that February night. Here she had admitted that she loved him, and here she had said the good-by that he would not understand—a few short weeks ago. And now he was back—back after having heard her repudiate him, back after losing her forever.

Fate works everywhere, but her favorite workshop is Paris. Something was moving in the deepest shadow in the room—the shadow about the doorway. Blue-black hair and long-lashed eyes of violet, lips of red and cheeks of white and pink; the incredible was realized, the miracle had happened: Vitoria was here.

He was beside her in a single bound. He thought that he cried her name aloud; in reality, his lips moved without speech.

“Wait,” she said. She drew away from him; but the statues of the Greek gods in the Luxembourg gardens must have felt the thrill in the evening air as she faced him. She was looking at him bravely with only the least tremor of her lips. “Do you—do you still love me?” she asked.

Her voice was like a violin; her words dazed him.

“Love you? I—I can’t tell you how much—I—haven’t the words to say——”

He seized the hand with which she had checked him and kissed its unjeweled fingers.

“What is it?... Why did you say you hated me?... What has brought you back?... Is is true? Is it true?”

From RefrognÉ’s garden came the last good-night-song of the birds.

“Love you? Why, from the day I left you—no, from that night I found you here, I’ve thought nothing but Vitoria, dreamed nothing but Vitoria——”

Now incoherent and afraid, then with hectic eloquence and finally with a complete abandon, he poured out his soul in libation to her. With the first word of it, she saw that she was forgiven.

“I came,” she said, “to—to tell you this: You know now that I ran away from Paris because I loved you and knew that I could not marry you; but you do not know why I said that terrible thing which I said in the tower-room. I was afraid of what my brother might do to you. That is why I would not take your kisses. To try to make you leave before he found you, I said what first came to my mind as likely to drive you away. I said it at what fearful cost! I blasphemed against my love for you.”

Cartaret was recovering himself. Love gives all, but it demands everything.

“Your brother said that I had offered you some insult. He said you’d told him so. I thought you’d told him that in order to make him all the angrier against me.”

“Ever since Chitta and I returned to our home, he had been suspecting,” she said. “He would not forgive me for going away. Chitta he tortured, but she told him nothing. Me, he kept almost a prisoner. When you came, I knew that he would soon guess what was true, so I sent for you that morning to send you away, and when that failed and he found us together, I told him that we loved each other, because I hoped that he would spare the man I loved, even though he would never let me—let me marry that man. I should have known him too well to think that, but I was too afraid to reason—too afraid for your sake. He was so proud that he would not repeat it to you as I said it to him: he repeated it in the way least hateful to him—and after you had gone, I found that all I had done served only to make him try to kill you. Of this I knew nothing until hours later. Then—then——”

The birds had ceased their song, but the scent of the lilacs still rose from the garden.

“Don’t you understand now?” she asked, her cheeks crimson in the fading light. “I guessed you did not understand then; but don’t you understand now?”

He stood bewildered. She had to go through with it.

“My brother had to live—you made him live. To kill himself is the worst disgrace that a Basque can put upon his family. Besides, the thing was done; you had fired into the air; nothing that he might do would undo that. At the bridge he tried to tell you so, but you rode by. You know—my brother told it you—that one reason which allows a foreigner to marry a Basque. We Eskurolas pay our debts; to let you go a creditor for that was to put a stain upon our house indelibly. I would have accepted the disgrace and made my brother continue to accept it, had you not now said that you still loved me; but you have said it. Oh, do—do, please, understand!” She stamped her foot. “My brother is the last man of our name. In saving him, you saved the house of Eskurola.”

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 manuscripts. 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 cafÉ-tables, the procession of carriages and motors along the Champs ÉlysÉes, the very cries and hurry of the rue St. HonorÉ 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 FranÇois 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 gods 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-GrÂce.

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 glass, 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 PrÉs.”

“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.