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Reginald Wright Kauffman

Je ne connais point la nature des anges, parce que je ne suis qu’homme; il n’y a que les théologiens qui la connaissent.—Voltaire: Dictionnaire Philosophique.
 
He did not know why he headed toward his own room—it could hold nothing that he guessed of to welcome him, except further tokens of the dejection and misery he carried in his heart—but thither he went, and, as he drew nearer, his step quickened. By the time that he entered the rue du Val de Grâce, he was moving at something close upon a run.

He hurried up the rising stairs and into the dark hall, and, as he did so, was possessed by the sense that somebody had as hurriedly ascended [14] just ahead of him. The door to his room was never locked, and now he flung it wide.

The last of the afterglow had all but faded from the sky, and only the faintest twilight, a rose-pink twilight, came into the studio. Rose-pink: he thought of that at once and thought, too, that these sky-roses had a sweeter scent than the roses of earth, for there was about this once-familiar place an odor more delicate and tender than any he had ever known before. It was dim, illusive; it was like a musical poem in an unknown tongue, and yet, unlike French scents and hot-house flowers, it subtly suggested open spaces and mountain-peaks. Cartaret had a quick vision of sunlight upon snow-crests. He wondered how such a perfume could find its way through the narrow, dirty streets of the Latin Quarter and into his poor room.

And then, in the dim light, he saw a figure standing there.

Cartaret stopped short.

An hour ago he had left the place empty. Now, when he so wanted solitude, it had been [15] invaded. There was an intruder. It was—— yes, the Lord have mercy on him, it was a girl!

“Who’s there?” demanded Cartaret.

He was so startled that he asked the question in English and with his native American accent. The next moment, he was more startled when the strange girl answered him in English, though an English oddly precise.

“It is I,” she said.

“It is I,” was what she said first, and, as she said it, Cartaret noted that her voice was a wonderfully soft contralto. What she next said was uttered as he further discovered himself to her by an involuntary movement that brought him within the rear window’s shaft of afterglow. It was:

“What are you doing here?”

She spoke with patent amazement, and there were, between the words, four perceptible pauses.

What was he doing there? What was she? What light there was came from behind her: he could not at all make out her features; he had [16] only her voice to go by—only her voice and her manner of regal possession—and with neither was he acquainted. Good Heavens, hadn’t he a right to come unannounced into the one place in Paris that he might still call his own? It surely was his own. He looked distractedly about him.

“I thought,” said Cartaret, “that this was my room.”

His glance, bewildered as it was, nevertheless assured him that he had not been mistaken. His accustomed eye detected everything that the twilight might hide from the eye of a stranger.

Here was all his student-litter. Here were the good photographs of good pictures, bought second-hand; the bad copies of good pictures, made by Cartaret himself during long mornings in the Louvre, where impudent tourists, staring at his work, jolted his elbow and craned their necks beside his cheek; there were the plaster-casts on brackets—casts of antiques more mutilated than the antiques themselves; and here, too, were the rows of lost endeavors in the shape of discarded canvases banked on the floor along the walls and [17] sometimes jutting far out into the room. Two or three chairs were scattered about, one with a broken leg—he remembered the party at which it was broken; across from the fire-place was Cartaret’s bed that a tarnished Oriental cover (made in Lyons) converted by day into a divan; and close beside the rear window, flanked by the table on which he mixed his colors, stood, almost at the elbow of this imperious intruder, Cartaret’s own easel with a virgin canvas in position, waiting to receive the successor to that picture which he had sold for a song a few hours ago.

What was he doing here, indeed! He liked that.

And she was still at it:

“How dare you think so?” she persisted.

The slight pauses between her words lent them more weight than, even in his ears, they otherwise would have possessed. She came a step nearer, and Cartaret saw that she was breathing quickly and that the bit of lace above her heart rose and fell irregularly.

“How dare you?” she repeated.

[18] She was close enough now for him to decide that she was quite the most striking girl he had ever seen. Her figure, without a touch of exaggeration, was full and yet lithe: it moved with the grace of the athlete. Her skin was rosy and white—the rose of health and the clear cream of sane living.

It was, however, her manner that had led Cartaret first to doubt his own senses, and then to doubt hers. This girl spoke like a queen resenting a next-to-impossible familiarity. He had half a mind to leave the place and allow her to discover her own mistake, the nature of which—his room ran the length of the old house and half its width, being separated from a similar room by only a dark and draughty hallway—now suddenly revealed itself to him. He seriously considered leaving her alone to the advent of her humiliation.

Then he looked at her again. Her hair, in sharp contrast to the tint of her face, was a shining blue-black; though her features were almost classical in their regularity, her mouth was [19] generous and sensitive, and, under even black brows and through long, curling lashes, her eyes shone frank and blue. Cartaret decided to remain.

“You are an artist?” he inquired.

“Leave this room!” She stamped a little foot. “Leave this room instantly!”

Cartaret stooped to one of the canvases that were piled against the wall nearest him. He turned its face to her.

“And this is some of your work?” he asked.

He had meant to be only light and amusing, but when he saw the effect of his action, he cursed himself for a heavy-witted fool: the girl glanced first at the picture and then wildly about her. She had at last realized her mistake.

“Oh!” she cried. Her delicate hands went to her face. “I had just come in and I thought—I thought it was my room!”

He registered a memorandum to kick himself as soon as she had gone. He moved awkwardly forward, still between her and the door.

“It’s all right,” he said. “Everybody drops in [20] here at one time or another, and I never lock my door.”

“But you do not understand!” She was still speaking through her unjeweled fingers: “Sir, we moved into this house only this morning. I went out for the first time ten minutes since. My maid did not want me to go, but I would do it. Our room—I understand now that our room is the other one: the one across the hallway. But I came back hurriedly, a little frightened by the streets, and I turned—Oh-h!” she ended, “I must go—I must go immediately!”

She dropped her hands and darted forward, turning to her right. Cartaret lost his head: he turned to his right. Each saw the mistake and sought the left; then darted to the right again.

"The Azure Rose"