CHAPTER II.

FÊTE CHAMPÊTRE.

He passed almost at a run down the Rue St. Honoré. A friend tried to stop him.

“I am busy,” cried Gaillard; “do not detain me! _Mon Dieu!_ I will pay you to-night! Meet me at eight at the Café de la Paix.” Then, at a run, round the corner of the Rue Royale and into a large café just waking up: “Du Pont! Du Pont! Where is M. Du Pont?”

The proprietor, a large black-whiskered man in shirt-sleeves, appeared from the back premises, wiping his mouth with a serviette. This was Églantine.

“My dear Du Pont,” cried Gaillard, “here am I nearly mad! M. le Prince has arranged a little picnic, and Sarony has forgotten to send the luncheon basket.”

Du Pont flung up his hands as if the world had fallen in.

“Can you arrange a basket for three—cold fowl, tongue, and some _pâté de foie gras_, also champagne?”

“How many for—three?” cried M. du Pont, holding up three fingers. “_Tenez!_” and away he rushed.

In ten minutes the basket arrived, borne by a waiter; it was a capable-looking basket, and seemed heavy.

“At least, we shall not starve,” murmured Gaillard. “Charge it to M. le Prince, Du Pont. Adieu!” And he drove away in an open fly with the basket beside him, remembering, when it was too late, that he ought also to have ordered a box of cigars.

He met his companions in the Rue Mont Thabor; they had left the _crémerie_, and were walking up and down in the sun.

Then the trio, with the luncheon basket in their midst, drove off, and were deposited at the Gare du Nord, that dreary station with its multitudinous platforms and engines that do not whistle healthily, but toot mournfully with a suggestion of phantom horns.

Here in the hurry and hubbub the poet could express his ideas on the third-class tickets which Toto insisted on buying, without fear of Célestin overhearing his plaints.

“My dear Toto, do not do this disgraceful thing. Consider my position in the world, if you forget your own. Should anyone see me, _mon Dieu!_ it will be all over Paris, and they will say my books are not selling. Already they are saying that the editions are being faked. I will go back, I will commit suicide——”

“Oh, rubbish! I’m going third. Stay behind if you like. _Ma foi!_ see over there standing beside that woman with the plum-colored face! It’s old De Nani, and he has seen us. Wait—wait for me, Célestin; I wish to speak to a friend. My dear Marquis,” cried Toto, dragging the old man aside, “I am going on a little private business into the country. In fact, I am going with a lady and my friend Gaillard, but I do not want her to know my identity—you understand.”

“_Parfaitement_,” replied the old beast, grinning under his paint and glancing at Célestin, and vowing in his own mind to do Toto an evil turn, if such a thing were possible.

For by a strange chance Struve’s enemy, to whose house he had been driven drunk on the previous morning, was also his most deadly enemy. The Comte de la Fosse was this gentleman’s name, and on descending in a flowered dressing gown on the previous morning to see what the hubbub was about, he had found M. le Marquis de Nani seated without his wig in the middle of the hall and singing ribald songs as he attempted to remove his boots. The Comte de la Fosse had ordered his enemy to be put to bed, and later in the day read him a pious lecture on the evils of drink and the disgrace he had brought on the old nobility. Toto was indirectly the cause of all this—directly, for all that old De Nani knew. Needless to say, he felt very bitter.

“And above all things,” said Toto, “I don’t want my mother to know.”

“I understand,” said De Nani. “I, too, am going into the country—to Chantilly.”

“Good-by.”

“_Au revoir._ But stay. Where shall I meet you again? Could I see you to-night?”

“Be at the Café de la Paix,” said Gaillard, who had come up to see what was going on, and what this old blood-sucker was saying to his Toto, “and ask for M. Théodore Wolf. Anyone will show you him. He is a journalist with a black beard. I have made a rendezvous for eight with him. We will be there.”

“Yes,” said Toto, “be there at eight.”

And De Nani left them, not for Chantilly, indeed, but to take a cab and drive to the Boulevard Haussmann and say to the Princesse de Cammora:

“Madame, something very strange is going on. Alas! it is not the fact of the young lady that alarms me, but, madame, he desired me not to mention her existence to you. Young men will be young men, but why this excessive secrecy? I have an intimate knowledge of the world, and I fear——I do not like this M. Gaillard, either; he indulges most intemperately.”

“Oh, Gaillard the poet,” said the Princesse; “there is not much harm in him.”

Still, she felt uneasy, and determined in her own mind to have an interview with Gaillard, and implore him to protect her precious Toto from the machinations of strange girls, and lead him into the right path—the path that led to Helen Powers.

“Why did you give that old fool a rendezvous at the Café de la Paix?” asked the Prince as the train whirled them along past green fields, on which Célestin’s eyes were fixed with pathetic rapture.

“I did not give him a rendezvous,” replied the poet, who had obtained Célestin’s assent to his smoking one of Toto’s cigarettes. “I shall not be there. Wolf will be there, and they will bore each other. Wolf is a dun, M. de Nani is a bore. I always appoint my duns and bores to meet each other at the Café de la Paix, the Café Américain, or the Grand Café. They dine together and speak ill of me whilst I am dining at Foyot’s, or the Café Anglais, or the Maison Dorée. I have made the fortune of three cafés by the people I have sent there to wait for me. They all ask for each other, and sit at the same table and wait for me; then they dine, and as a rule drink too much champagne to assuage themselves——”

“_Mon Dieu_, Célestin!” cried Toto, seizing both her hands; “what is this? You are crying!”

“I have just remembered Dodor,” sobbed Célestin. “I have left him shut up in my room, and, oh! should anyone open the door and leave it so, Mme. Liard’s cat may kill him. _What_ shall I do?”

“Why, the girl has a baby!” thought Gaillard in astonishment.

“Well, this is a nuisance!” said Toto in a voice of tribulation.

“How old is Dodor, mademoiselle?” asked the poet.

“He is two years and a little bit,” wept Célestin.

“Ah, then be assured, mademoiselle, he is safe; cats never attack children of that age.”

Toto made horrible faces at his companion.

“He is not a child, monsieur,” murmured Dodor’s mistress—“I often wish that he were; he is my lark, and Mme. Liard’s cat may kill him.”

Gaillard’s eyes became filled with tears; a moment more, and he might have allowed himself the pleasure of weeping.

“Did you lock your door?” asked Toto.

“Why, yes, I did!” cried Célestin, brightening through her tears and putting her hand into the back pocket of her dress; “and the key—I have it. Oh, how relieved I feel! Still, I ought not to have forgotten him; he was a treasure given me by the good God to keep. Ah, monsieur,” she said, turning to Gaillard, “you do not know how I love Dodor.”

Gaillard’s lachrymal works again began to threaten.

“Here we are,” said Toto, and the train drew up at Montmorency, with the trees waving in the wind.

They came along the white road leading to the little town, a boy hired for half a franc carrying the basket, Gaillard threatening him with untold terrors if he dropped it and herding him with his crook-handled stick.

The blue sky was dotted here and there with little white clouds, like a sparse flock of white lambs tended by some invisible shepherd who had gone to sleep in the azure fields and left them to graze at their own sweet will. Beneath the sky and far away stretched the country, green as only April makes it, spread with apple blossom, the air filled with a sound one never hears in Paris—the hum of the wind in a million trees.

Célestin seemed tipsy. One can fancy a newly arrived angel in the fields of Paradise drunk with color and light. She dashed into hedgerows after wild flowers, and clapped her hands at butterflies, and cried out with happiness when she saw a lamb just like one of the lambs one sees in the Magazin du Louvre at Christmas time, but this one dancing round its mother in the middle of a field pied with daisies.

“She has gone mad,” said Toto, delighted with the delight of his _protégée_.

“’Tis the primitive woman breaking out,” said Gaillard. “Proceed, Alphonse, and if you drop that basket I will flay you! Believe me, Désiré, every woman is a nymph at heart. I know several women who are devotees when in Paris, but in the country they become hamadryadic; ’tis the influence of the trees—they remember Pan. Have you read my little brochure ‘Pan in Paris’? It appeared as a feuilleton in _Lucifer_, the journal of the Satanists. I am not a Satanist; I despise the sect. I went to their church once; Satan in person was to appear. He did; the lights were lowered, but he did not frighten me, for I had heard him bleating in the vestry before he was brought on—it was a goat. Besides it was very dull; I left in the middle of the sermon, and Satan smelt dreadfully. I had to burn pastilles in my room for three days to help me to forget him.”

They skirted the happy little town, and made for a part of the chestnut forest declared by Alphonse to be suitable for picnics. Here, beneath the trees on the edge of the sunlight, the basket was deposited on the greensward, and Gaillard flung himself down to rest.

“I will leave you here,” said Toto, “to get the things ready, and I will take Célestin to the hill-top to see the view.”

“Leave me, then, your cigarette case,” murmured Gaillard, his hat over his eyes, and his arms flung out on either side; “and do not be long, Désiré, for I am famished.”

From the hill of Montmorency the whole world of April lay before them, in its midst Paris, the city of light, sixteen miles away, cream-colored and drab; Paris the noisy, silent amidst all that silent country stretching away in billows of tender green to the sky of pale and wonderful blue.

“Oh, _ciel_!” sighed Célestin, removing her gloves as she sat by Toto, and folding them carefully inside out and putting them in her pocket. “Can that be Paris, that little place? my thumb covers it when I hold it so. And, oh, the sky!—it seems to stretch to heaven. How happy the world is!”

“Do you find it happy?” asked Toto, tearing up wild violets and flinging them away to keep his hands employed.

“Yes,” said Célestin, breathing the word out in a manner that made it a prayer of praise.

“But you are not rich—you are like me; and they say the rich see more of the pleasure of the world than we do. Tell me, would you like to be a great lady, one of those one sees in the Bois?”

“Oh, no!” said Célestin; “I would much rather be myself.”

“But!” said Toto, tearing a daisy’s head off, “imagine having money to spend, as much as one wanted.”

“I have.”

“Imagine having a carriage and horses.”

“That would be nice; at least, I would sooner, I think, go in omnibuses—one would be very desolate all alone in a carriage. It is the people who make omnibuses so delightful; one wonders where they are going to and what they have in their baskets; and some read books, and one tries to imagine what they read of. And then the hats one sees! they make one want to laugh and weep. Sometimes they are not so bad, but sometimes they are frightful; often have I wished to say, ‘Madame, let me retrim your hat; I will do it for love, and use my own thread,’ but I have never dared.”

“Well, imagine being able to ride in omnibuses all day long.”

Célestin smiled, and looked away into the blue distance, as if she were watching an ethereal omnibus filled with her familiar angels.

“Well, you could do that all day if you were rich.”

“I could not take Dodor.”

Toto, the tempter, felt that she had him there, but he was not tempting her in the ordinary acceptation of the word.

“You love Dodor very much?” Her eyes swept round to him, and rested full upon his. “Tell me, Célestin: could you not love me a little too?”

When they got back to the picnic they found the cloth spread, the places laid, and the Perigord pie eaten; they had, in fact, been away over two hours, and the poet had not waited.

There was cold tongue, and part of a fowl and rolls and butter left, all of which Gaillard offered with effusion; he had expected a scolding for beginning without them, but he did not get it. Toto did not care, Célestin did not know; cold tongue or Perigord pie, it did not matter—they were in love. The poet smiled upon them like a father, and piled their plates, and gave them what was left of the champagne.

“Here’s to Églantine!” said Toto, toasting the provider of the feast in a glass of Mumm, from which Célestin had taken a sip. “Has she brown eyes or blue?”

“Blue,” said Gaillard. “Blue as the skies above Pentelicus.”

“Well, tell her what I say, and give me a cigarette.”

“There is only one left,” replied the poet, as he hastily lit it.