CHAPTER VIII

A QUEEN FOR KINGS

Poufaille, seated on a high stool, was copying in the Louvre Gallery. Since his share of glory had been stolen from him, he had become as downcast as a caged lion from whom his quarter of meat has been taken. Poor Poufaille! Everything fell to pieces in his hands. His studio had been dispersed at auction; “Liberty” and “Fraternity” had been sold for nothing, not even for enough to pay up the garlic- and potato-seller. And his cows were in the Luxembourg under another name! What reasons for sadness! He did not even listen to Suzanne, babbling near him on a lower seat. He was timidly copying the goat and kids of Paul Potter. The company of such good animals consoled him a little for that of men.

He was a touching sight, with the veins in his forehead swollen by his effort, exhausting himself in the handling of brushes and paint-knives, which were things too delicate for his big hairy hands made for the plow and the wine-press.

Nothing could amuse him. Yet Suzanne lifted toward him her laughing face and told her funniest stories. One was an adventure of the other evening, when she had taken Helia’s hat and cloak to go and sup with the duke. _Mon Dieu!_ how she had laughed. At the thought of it she still held her sides, careless of the stares of the public.

“I wish you had been there, my little Poufaille, when I went up the stairs. They bowed to me as if I were a queen—_ah, mais oui!_ I made myself as fine as I could and I had Helia’s hat and cloak. If Phil had seen me he might have thought it was Helia.

“_Eh bien! quoi!_” Suzanne exclaimed, interrupting herself to look at Poufaille. “What do you mean by grinding your teeth when I speak of Phil? One would say you were going to eat some one up. Phil doesn’t hear us, you know; he is up there with Helia, who is posing for him in what they used to call their oasis—the garden, you know, where you wanted to grow potatoes. Oh, forgive me, my little Poufaille, I didn’t wish to hurt your feelings,” Suzanne added quickly, as she saw Poufaille clenching his fist at the remembrance of the rejected potatoes, as painful to him as the stolen share of glory. Poufaille went back to work with a heavy sigh.

“Besides,” Suzanne went on, “you know I’m not so stuck on Phil myself any more, and I wish he were here, to tell him what I think of his way of acting toward Helia. I wouldn’t hide the truth from him; and I’d like to know if he’d answer as he used to do in his attic—‘I’m not that kind of a man!’ Ah!” Suzanne continued, “you’re all the same, you men! You’re not worth the rope to hang you!”

Poufaille sighed as if his heart were breaking. He kept on painting his goat and kids.

“I wish you had been there when the garçon brought me in,” Suzanne began again, to finish her story. “Imagine a table all spread with fruits and flowers and lights; and whom do I see coming toward me but the duke, in evening clothes, leaning over and kissing my hand. I had my veil down and he did not recognize me—it was Helia he was waiting for; the duke had invited her with a little note, very well expressed, you know, such as dukes know how to write. When Helia had opened the note she asked me to go and present her excuses. You can imagine I took the opportunity—I whom you see before you. I had supped before that with smart people, but with a duke never! What would you have done, Poufaille? That humbug of a Caracal once told me I should have to get down on my knees when I spoke to him. Well, I just took off my veil and said: ‘Cuckoo! It’s me! You’re waiting for Helia, but she begs to be excused!’ Would you think men could be so odd? My little Poufaille, Helia’s stock went up with him at once. I could see it by the way he spoke of her. But never mind that; he was very amiable and kept me to dinner. I didn’t wish to, but he insisted so—and it’s a very chic place, that restaurant. Then all at once there was a squabble at the door and I saw two bears coming in!—I mean two men like bears, bowing to the ground to the duke and calling him monseigneur. They spoke of lots of things—that they had just come from the monseigneur’s house; that they had been told monseigneur was in diplomatic consultation—_et patati et patata_—and then there was Turkey and Morgania and I don’t know what all. The duke had a very embarrassed look—‘my dear Zrnitschka—Bjelopawlitji—my dear minister—’

“Ministers—those two bears! I was bursting! And, on my word, I believe the duke presented me as the diplomatic agent! After that there was dinner and jokes and songs, and the duke brewed a champagne salad, while I tickled the two bears under the chin to make them swallow brandied cherries.”

Suzanne spoke in vain. Poufaille kept the fated look of a man who has been grazed by glory as it passes. He lifted his head sullenly and then let it fall again on his breast, as if crushed.

“Attention!” suddenly cried Suzanne, who was looking down the gallery. “Here are serious customers—Miss Rowrer and Mme. Rowrer, Mr. Will, the duke, and Caracal. I’m sure they’re going to visit Phil up there in his oasis. Helia isn’t expecting such an honor!”

Miss Rowrer and her party came on, a compact group among the scattered visitors. Ethel was listening absently to Caracal. Grandma was examining the crowd. The duke was winking at the pictures, while Will looked at the parquet floor.

Caracal seemed delighted. Besides his opportunity to shine by telling off names and dates, he was also going to show the party one of the hanging gardens of Paris. Presently he would explain the very _modus operandi_ for making such blooming terraces—fine sand, tar, gravel, and earth.

“You know, Miss Rowrer, you go to the Louvre Gardens up a staircase.”

“Awful!” said grandma.

“A winding staircase cut in the thickness of the wall.”

“Really! Oh, how nice that is!” said Ethel, to whom these little details gave the sensation of being abroad. She forgave the lack of an elevator, as long as the staircase was winding and cut in the thickness of the wall—something impossible to find in her own country.

“It’s a kind of Jacob’s ladder that will take us up to Paradise,” Caracal continued. “A real Paradise, where I myself have known an Adam and Eve, known them personally, intimately!”

“Oh, M. Caracal, don’t talk of that now,” Miss Rowrer said, “but tell me what this picture is.”

Caracal explained the picture, regretting that Ethel did not question him about the Adam and Eve he had known in the Paradise.

Poufaille, who had lifted his head, lowered it quickly. The party was just in front of him, all looking at his picture. He had heard Caracal say to Miss Rowrer: “An artist, a great artist, with a brain, but no luck! It is incredible, his lack of luck—I could tell you a story—”

But Caracal was interrupted by grandma, who noticed the frayed cravat and worn shoes of Poufaille, and pointed him out to Will. Caracal presented Poufaille, who nearly fell from his high stool. The duke bowed. Ethel greeted him cordially, as well as Suzanne, at whom the duke did not even look.

“That’s the way of the world!” Suzanne thought within herself.

“Do you really wish me to buy such a daub?” Will said in an aside to grandma, after judging, at a glance, the “Goat and the Kids.”

“Poor devil! he is in rags,” Ethel murmured.

“All right,” Will answered; “it’s frightful, but I’ll send it to my farm in Texas—it will give them a poor idea of grazing in the old country!”

Poufaille felt his legs tremble under him, and thought all the torrents of Pactolus were pouring down upon him when Will, taking his leave, gave him in advance the money for the order.

“Au revoir, Mlle. Suzanne! M. Poufaille, au revoir!” Miss Rowrer said, not a little flattered to know, not a Charley, but a real and genuine bohemian.

With a final bow, Poufaille watched the party going away, in utter amazement at the possession of so much money.

“Vive la joie—and fried potatoes!” Suzanne said, by way of moral.

Soon Ethel and grandma, Will, the duke, and Caracal were lost in the distance.

“You would think Caracal was the chief of the party,” Suzanne remarked to Poufaille; “only look—you see nothing but him!”

Indeed, Caracal, who at first was abashed at not being allowed to tell the story of Adam and Eve, nor that of the false signature of the Luxembourg, became doubly amiable, and fished for compliments because of his courageous behavior toward Vieillecloche, a man with five corpses in his trail. Meanwhile, he went on explaining, endlessly, the pictures of the old masters. He greeted them as friends; he spoke familiarly of the painters, called them by their first names and their nicknames—the old Breughel—the young Teniers—“Van Ryn” for Rembrandt—and so on.

He told over the jokes about the Louvre Museum. It was a national lounge, heated in winter and the place for a siesta in summer. He attacked the curators, who were incompetent, to his thinking; and he cited the forged art objects bought for their weight in gold, crowns and coins and jewels, and the famous Holbein on a mahogany panel—the Louvre’s pride up to the day when, scratching it on the back, the words appeared: “Flor de Habaña—Lawyers’ Club Brand”!

The duke passed along heedlessly. The Louvre for him was, most of all, a place in which you can talk amid sumptuous decoration. His only real interest in painting was in the hall of the Italian primitives, before the St. Morgana of Botticelli.

“St. Morgana, my ancestress,” he said to Miss Rowrer.

He drew himself up as he pointed to the saint, amid the choir of angels, in a sky of gold above a fantastic landscape, where architecture and monuments were piled together. He seemed moved, especially when he explained to Miss Rowrer that he should definitively be obliged to go back to Morgania, that grave events were on the way, and that only the other evening he had had a diplomatic interview with his people’s delegates.

Miss Rowrer liked him better, with this air of one convinced of his own importance and duties, than when he was making fun of himself with the skeptical tone which she abhorred. Just as she was glad to know a real and genuine bohemian, so she was delighted to walk with the scion of a legendary family, whose ancestress figured in the Louvre, painted by Botticelli, surrounded by angels in a golden sky. She found it amusing to take the arm of a man in whose pedigree there was the equal of the White Lady of Potsdam and the Cavalier of Hatfield House. It was all so un-American and exciting.

She was also really at her ease in the Louvre among these old royal personages. She pleased herself in the midst of history and polished courts. Her intelligence revealed to her their grandeur.

“I like sincere men who are faithful to their traditions,” she said. “There is a noble side to it all which I understand.”

She admired the effete generations who had heaped here, to the very ceiling, royal escutcheons and chimeras and victories.

“There is something great in it,” she said; “you feel the conviction of it. Compare it with the frightful style which artists bungle with nowadays! The beautiful has had its time here; it is our turn now, in our great Republic! Faith in traditions—that is what produces masterpieces! Whether royalty, as in the old times, or the Republic, as with us—I recognize only that.”

“But there is a golden mean,” the duke said, conciliatingly.

“Away with the golden mean, with cowardly compromises and satisfied selfishness, with falsehood and insincerity. We must be one thing or another—loyalty before all else!”

Grandma and Will approved this.

“Ah!” the duke thought to himself, struck by Miss Rowrer’s accents of conviction, “it wouldn’t be well to fail in one’s words to this lady!”

“This is a Signorelli,” Caracal explained, pointing out a picture; “this is a Filippo Lippi; this is a Pinturicchio.”

“Say, M. Caracal, if we stop at every picture of the Quattro Cento we shall never reach Paradise. Where is your winding staircase?”

There were halls after halls, marbles and gilding, the Salon Carré, and galleries with resplendent jewels; marble for the pavement, and then parquetry shining like a smooth lake, and pictures, and pictures again. The copyists were up on their ladders in galleries, which heap together civilizations that have disappeared, statues of gods and the mummies of kings, decayed grandeur pell-mell with fragments of columns and open tombs and women’s jewels. And there was the crouching sphinx seeming to take them to witness that all things pass like a dream.

Miss Rowrer and the duke walked together. In front were grandma and Will and Caracal. The duke sought to understand Miss Rowrer’s ideas, which seemed contradictory to him. How was he to reconcile her admiration both for republic and royalty?

“Miss Rowrer,” the duke began, “your theories are contrary to progress. Your extreme loyalty implies a government which is unchangeable.”

“Not at all!” Ethel answered. “Greatness is in the constant effort toward progress; it is the pursuit of the best. A people’s loyalty toward its king is very beautiful.”

“_Eh bien_, then!” the duke replied.

“I told you my way of looking at things the day we visited St. Denis,” Ethel continued. “But you forget one thing—the king’s loyalty to his people!”

They were leaving the gallery and walking ever onward. They saw a monumental staircase under a vault as high as a cathedral apse, and then there were more halls, with marbles and gilding and galleries, never ending.

“But where is your Paradise?” Miss Rowrer asked.

“It is here,” answered Caracal.

He gave a glance at the guardian who was pacing up and down the hall, and Will slipped a heavy _pourboire_ into the man’s hand.

“Is Monsieur Phil up there?”

“The former gardener? Yes. Go up.” Lifting a piece of tapestry at the corner of a wall, a little door appeared—it was the door of the staircase.

“Go ahead, M. Caracal; show us the way!” Ethel said.

Caracal, proud to lead, showed them the way up. They went on, turning round and round in single file, the staircase being wide enough for nothing else.

“This reminds me of going up the Monument in London,” Ethel said.

“And me of the corkscrew in the Mammoth Cave,” said grandma.

“Only a few more steps,” said Caracal, as he opened the door giving on the roof.

The light was dazzling. Great clouds floated high in a sky that was sweet and calm. Across the branches of the garden they looked on Paris, bathed in sun. The great city stretched out from horizon to horizon and, vibrating with the heat, seemed to wave like a sea. Grandma, Ethel, and Will, as well as the duke, stopped short. While the distant view was full of grandeur, the nearer scene was just as charming. There were shaded alleys, and under the oleanders and apple- and pear-trees, currants and strawberries were ripening. Caracal was already beginning his explanations.

“The green spots you see over there are the hanging gardens of the Rue de Valois. If we were a little higher up we could see those of the Automobile Club of the Place de la Concorde. This is the way they make them—first a layer of Norway tar, then fine sand, and then gravel—”

“M. Caracal,” Ethel interrupted, “you are right; this is a real Paradise!”

“And over there you have Adam and Eve,” Caracal said, pointing amid the greenery to where Phil was painting Helia, posed in an old arm-chair half hidden by climbing plants.

“That is what is best in the Louvre,” Ethel said to the group, looking at Helia. “Let us greet her Majesty Beauty!”

Phil had just caught sight of Ethel and her party. He hurriedly laid down his palette and came forward. Helia saw them also, and arose and bowed. Ethel recognized her and spoke with a friendly manner. They looked at each other in that peculiar way which women have of taking each other’s measure,—it was like a mute dialogue between Beauty and Culture. But Beauty—poor Helia—lowered her eyes. She became humble and acknowledged herself vanquished.

For Helia no longer had any hope. She understood, she saw with fright the ever-growing distance between herself and Phil. Ah, no! Phil was no longer the same; he was above her, far above, among the rich and powerful; and he would continue his upward march, while she, Helia, would, little by little, go downwards.

She had agreed to pose for him that day—it was the decisive test. It had cost her much to do it. Phil, after all, ought to know what his conscience told him to do; but she did not wish there should be any fault on her part. She had never had the courage to say to herself it was all over, until this day, which she was passing alone with him. She had come to see if he would remember—if the trees in bloom amid their oasis would recall anything to him. She counted on the complicity of the blue sky and the fragrance of roses. But the day had passed, under the splendid heavens, and they had not, as in other days, gathered fruit from the trees or picked flowers from the parterres. Phil had been good-natured, but he was like a friend and nothing more. Phil—she saw it clearly—Phil would be a stranger for her to-morrow. Who knows? The time might come when he would forget even her name.

Helia acknowledged that it was possible when she looked at Miss Rowrer, who drew near and began chatting with Phil. What charm there was in her words! Helia was never tired of listening to her. She felt no jealousy of Ethel, whose goodness saved her from envy. She admired her in silence. Sometimes, like a lightning flash, she seemed to understand the abyss which separated them, and then everything reëntered the shadow. No—she did not know; everything escaped her grasp in that sphere of life, more inaccessible to her than the white clouds up in the depths of the azure. What had she with which to struggle against this young girl, so brilliant and so playful, before whom Phil and the duke were content to seem little? And then, she was so rich!

But Helia blushed for herself and quickly cast away any thoughts of Miss Rowrer’s wealth. Since she could not help loving Phil, she at least would not cease giving him her esteem. She looked in a sort of fear at Miss Rowrer, of whom so much was said, and who seemed so simple and gay. What could she do against so many advantages—she, Helia, who had only her beauty? And perhaps Phil found her ugly now!

“What are you painting?” Ethel asked Phil. “I suppose I may look.”

“Miss Rowrer, I beg you,” Phil answered, “give me your advice.”

Miss Rowrer squinted with her eye, measured and made a few professional gestures, probably the only thing she retained from her art studies among so many social duties. She remarked a few things, showing refined tastes, and then looked at Helia as a connoisseur.

She admired her noble profile, like that of a marble Venus, her full neck and bare arms, and the sumptuous thickness of her hair over shoulders which would have thrown Phidias into despair.

“What success a young girl like that would have in society—if she belonged to society—” thought Miss Rowrer. “Ought not beauty like that to overcome all social distinctions?”

Helia appeared to Miss Rowrer as the splendid flowering of the Louvre, personifying in herself all the masterpieces heaped up beneath their feet—all that men have loved and made divine in marble or on canvas. At her feet roses and fuchsias breathed forth their fragrance, sweet as the Attic breeze.

“What you are doing there, Monsieur Phil, is very fine—a magnificent study,” Miss Rowrer said. “But it is not up to the model. Is it, Monsieur le Duc?”

The duke assented.

“Tell me, Monsieur Phil,” Miss Rowrer continued, “what is that thing on the ground, with your palette on top of it?”

She pointed to one of the busts which lined the walks.

“Those are busts,” Phil began.

“Yes, but of whom?” Ethel asked.

“Imperial and presidential busts,” Phil explained, “Napoleon III, Charles X, Louis Philippe.”

“Really,” Miss Rowrer said, with amusement; “only think, each bust represents a revolution. They are sovereigns who no longer pleased—let them be an example to you, monseigneur,” she added, laughing. “This is not Paradise, then, but the other place—each of these busts is a paving-stone of good intentions!”

“And that, Phil, that old arm-chair which has lost its gilding? Mademoiselle Helia, who was in it just now, looked, with these busts at her feet, like a sovereign surrounded by the dwarfs of the court. What is that old arm-chair?”

“A throne, Miss Rowrer!”

“Now you are laughing at me!”

“Not at all.”

“The throne of some fairy king?”

“The throne of King Louis Philippe,” answered Phil. In a few words he explained how it happened to be there in the company of the busts.

“It is not a very comfortable seat,” grandma remarked.

“They’d make a better one than that at Grand Rapids,” Will added.

“Will you try it, Miss Rowrer?” Caracal hastened to ask. “Be seated on the throne; you might believe yourself a queen.”

“Ah! that’s all the same to me,” said Miss Rowrer.

“The queen you are worthy to be,” Caracal corrected, by way of compliment. “You would not have ill become Louis Philippe’s throne, I imagine.”

“I hope not, indeed,” Ethel replied. “What! that bourgeois king, that king of the golden mean, who was neither brave nor cowardly, without vice as without virtue, flat, like a pancake; an old wolf turned shepherd? And I could sit on a throne and fancy myself the consort of that imitation goodman, be queen of such a king? Even for his kingdom, I would not!”

Helia looked at Miss Rowrer as she prodded with her parasol the worn velvet of the throne. She thought of her own half hesitation to sit down in it the first time she came to the oasis, and how she had answered Phil: “A king’s throne! You wouldn’t think of it—a poor girl like me!” To her it had seemed a sort of sacrilege, whereas Miss Rowrer, quite the contrary, turned her back on it with disdain and walked away, saying to the duke and Phil:

“Louis Philippe was possibly a king, but at any rate he was not a man! The people did well to cast him out.”

And Helia asked herself in amazement: “Who is this Miss Rowrer that judges kings and would refuse them their kingdoms? Is she, then, more than a queen?”