Chapter 19

Selby was there alone at his disorderly desk by the window, fussing feebly among the chaos of his tumbled papers, and making a noise of desperation with his lips like a singing kettle.

"Ah, Selby, my friend!" Mr. Baruch went smilingly forward. "You work always too much. And now come I with a little other thing for you. It is too bad yes?"

"Hallo, Baruch!" returned Selby. "You're right about the working. Here I keep a girl to keep my papers in some kind of a sort of order and I been hunting and digging for an hour to find one of 'em. It gets me what she thinks I pay her for! Hoboes an' that kind o' trash, that's her style."

Mr. Baruch had still his agreeable, mild smile, which was as much a part of his daily wear as his trousers. He could not have steered the talk to better purpose.

"Hoboes?" he said vaguely. "Trash?"

Selby exploded in weak, sputtering fury, and, as always, his glasses canted on the high, thin bridge of his nose and waggled in time to each jerk of words.

"It's that hobo, you saw him, Baruch, that pranced in here and threw a fit and a lot of old carpets all over my floor. Armenian or some such thing! Well, they took him to the hospital and this afternoon he hadn't got more sense than to send a message over here."

Mr. Baruch nodded.

"Ah, to Miss Pilgrim, yes? because of her very kind treatment."

Selby caught his glasses as they fell.

"Huh!" he sneered malevolently. "You'd have to be a hobo before you'd get kindness from her. Hard-luck stories is the only kind she believes. 'I'll have to go, Mr. Selby,' she says. And she goes--and here's me hunting and pawing around--"

"Yes," agreed Mr. Baruch; "it is inconvenient. So I will come back tomorrow with my matter, when you shall have more time. Then the poor man, he is worse or better?"

"You don't suppose I been inquiring after him, do you?" squealed Selby.

"No," replied Mr. Baruch equably, "I do not suppose that, Selby, my friend."

The street in which Miss Pilgrim had her rooms was one of the long gullies of high-fronted architecture running at right angles to the river, and thither portly, handsomely overcoated, with the deliberateness of a balanced and ordered mind in every tread of his measured gait went Mr. Baruch. He had no plan; his resource and personality would not fail him in an emergency, and it was time he brought them to bear. One thing he was sure of he would take the carpet home that night.

At the head of two flights of iron-railed stone stairs, he reached the door of the flat which he sought. Two or three attempts upon the bell-push brought no response, and he could hear no sound of life through the door. He waited composedly. It did not enter his head that all the occupants might be out; and he was right, for presently, after he had thumped on the door with his gloved fist, there was a slip-slap of feet within and a sloven of a woman opened to him.

Mr. Baruch gave her his smile.

"The American lady is in? I wish to speak to her." The woman stood aside hastily to let him enter. "Say Gaspodin Baruch is here," he directed blandly.

It was a narrow corridor, flanked with doors, in which he stood. The woman knocked at the nearest of these, opened it, and spoke his name. Immediately from within he heard the glad, gentle voice of the consul's clerk.

"Surely!" it answered the servant in Russian; then called in English, "Come in, Mr. Baruch, please!"

He removed his hat and entered. An unshaded electric-light bulb filled the room with crude light, stripping its poverty and tawdriness naked to the eye its bamboo furniture, its imitation parquet, and the cheap distemper of its walls. But of these Mr. Baruch was only faintly aware, for in the middle of the floor, with brown paper and string beside her, Miss Pilgrim knelt amid a kaleidoscope of tumbled rugs, and in her hand, half folded already, was the rug.

She was smiling up at him with her mild, serene face, while under her thin, pale hands lay the treasure.

"Now this is nice of you, Mr. Baruch," she was saying. "I suppose Mr. Selby told you I'd had to go out."

Mr. Baruch nodded. He had let his eyes rest on the rug for a space of seconds, and then averted them.

"Yes," he said. "He said it was some message about the poor man who was ill, and I think he was angry."

"Angry?" Miss Pilgrim's smile faded. "I'm, I'm sorry for that."

"So," continued Mr. Baruch, "as I have to go by this way, I think I will call to see if I can help. It was some paper Mr. Selby cannot find, I think."

"Some paper?" Miss Pilgrim pondered. "You don't know which it was?"

Mr. Baruch shook his head regretfully. Between them the rug lay and glowed up at him.

"You see," continued Miss Pilgrim, "it's this way, Mr. Baruch. That poor man in the hospital doesn't seem to be getting any better yet, and he's evidently fretting about his rugs. They're probably all he's got in the world. So this afternoon they telephoned up from the hospital to say he wanted me to send down one in particular, the thinnest one of them all. That's this one!"

She showed it to him, her fingers feeling its edge. There was wonder in his mind that the mere contact of it did not tell her of its worth.

"I'm afraid it's the one you wanted to buy," she said. "The one you said was worth thirty rubles. Well, of course, it's his, and since he wanted it I had to get it for him. I couldn't do anything else, could I, Mr. Baruch?"

Mr. Baruch agreed.

"It is very kind treatment," he approved. "So now you pack it in a parcel and take it to the hospital before you go back to find Mr. Selby's paper yes? Mr. Selby will be glad."

A pucker of worry appeared between the girl's frank brows and she fell swiftly to folding and packing the rug.

"If if only he hasn't left the office before I got there!" she doubted.

Mr. Baruch picked up the string and prepared to assist with the packing.

"Perhaps he will not be gone," he said consolingly. "He was so angry I think the paper would be important, and he would stay to find it yes?" Miss Pilgrim did not seem cheered by this supposition. "Well," said Mr. Baruch then, "if it should be a help to you and the poor man, I can take this parcel for you and leave it in the gate of the hospital when I go past this evening."

He had a momentary tremor as he made the proposal, but it was not doubt that it would be accepted or fear lest his purpose should show through it. He felt neither of these; it was the thrill of victory that he had to keep out of his tone and his smile.

For it was victory. Miss Pilgrim beamed at him thankfully.

"Oh, Mr. Baruch, you are kind!" she cried. "I didn't like to ask you, but you must be a thought reader. If you'd just hand it in for Doctor Semianoff, he'll know all about it, and I can get back to Mr. Selby at once. And thank you ever so much, Mr. Baruch!"

"But," protested Mr. Baruch, "it is a little thing--it is nothing. And it is much pleasure to me to do this for you and the poor man. Tonight he will have it, and tomorrow perhaps he will be better."

They went down the stairs together and bade each other a friendly good night in the gateway.

"And I'm ever so much obliged to you, Mr. Baruch," said Miss Pilgrim again, her pale face shining in the dusk.

Mr. Baruch put a fatherly hand on her sleeve.

"Hush! You must not say it," he said. "It is I that am happy."

Half an hour later, he found what he sought in a large furniture store on the Pushkinskaia, an imitation Persian rug, manufactured at Frankfurt, and priced seventeen rubles. With a little bargaining the salesman was no match for Mr. Baruch, at that he got it for fifteen and a half. He himself directed the packing of it, to see that no store-label was included in the parcel; and a quarter of an hour later he delivered it by cab to the dvornik at the hospital gate for Doctor Semianoff. Then he drove homeward; he could not spare the time to walk while the bundle he held in his arms was yet unopened nor its treasure housed in his home.

His stratagem was perfect. Even if the Armenian were to make an outcry, who would lend him an ear?

It would appear it could easily be made to appear that he was endeavoring to extort money from Miss Pilgrim upon a flimsy pretext that a worthless rug had been substituted for a valuable one, and the police would know how to deal with him. Mr. Baruch put the matter behind him contentedly.

The majestic woman in his home watched him impassively as he unpacked his parcel and spread the rug loosely across a couple of chairs in the salon. In actual words he said only: "This is the carpet, Adina, for your bed. Look at it well!" She looked obediently, glancing from it to his face, her own still with its unchanging calm, and wondered dully in her sex-specialized brain at the light of rapture in his countenance. He pored upon it, devouring its rareness of beauty, the sum and the detail of its perfection, with a joy as pure, an appreciation as generous, as if he had not stolen it from under the hands of a sick pauper and a Good Samaritan.

That night he stood at the door of his wife's room. "Blessings upon you!" he said, and smiled at her in acknowledgment of the blessings she returned. A brass-and-glass lantern contained the electric light in the chamber; it shone softly on all the apparatus of toilet and slumber, and upon the picture that was Mr. Baruch's chief work of art the marble-white face thrown into high relief by the unbound black hair and the colors, like a tangle of softened and subdued rainbows, that flowed from her bosom to the foot of the bed. He crossed the floor and bent and kissed her where she lay.

"Wonderful!" he said to her. "You are a question, an eternal question. And here" his hand moved on the surface of the rug like a caress "is the answer to you. Two perfect things two perfect things!"

"Blessings!" she murmured.

"I have them," he said; "two of them," and he laughed and left her.

He did not see Miss Pilgrim the following day or the next; that was easy for him to contrive, for much of his business was done outside his office. It was not that he had any fear of meeting her; but it was more agreeable to his feelings not to be reminded of her part in the acquisition of the carpet. Upon the third day, he was late in arriving, for his wife had complained at breakfast of headache and sickness, and he had stayed to comfort her and see her back to bed for a twenty-four hours' holiday from life. On his way he had stopped at a florist's to send her back some flowers.'

He was barely seated at his desk when there was a knock upon his door and Miss Pilgrim entered.

He smiled his usual pleasant welcome at her.

"Ah, Miss Pilgrim, good morning, I am glad to see you. You will sit down yes?"

He was rising to give her a chair he was not in the least afraid of her when something about her arrested him, a trouble, a note of sorrow.

"Mr. Baruch" she began.

He knew the value of the deft interruption that breaks the thread of thought.

"There is something not right?" he suggested. "I hope not." With a manner of sudden concern, he added: "The poor man, he is worse no?"

Miss Pilgrim showed him a stricken face and eyes brimming with tears.

"He's, he's dead!" she quavered.

"See, now!" said Mr. Baruch, shocked. "What a sad thing and after all your kind treatment! I am sorry, Miss Pilgrim; but it is to remember that the poor man has come here through much hardship yes? And at the least, you have given him back his rug to comfort him."

"But" Miss Pilgrim stayed his drift of easy, grave speech with a sort of cry "that's the cause of all the trouble and danger and you only did it to help me. You must come with me to the town clinic at once. Mr. Selby's gone already. There'll be no danger if you come at once."

"Danger?" repeated Mr. Baruch. "I have not understood." But though in all truth he did not understand, a foreboding of knowledge was chill upon him. He cleared his throat. "What did he die of?"

Miss Pilgrim's tears had overflowed. She had a difficulty in speaking. But her stammered words came as clearly to his ears as though they were being shouted.

"Smallpox!"

He sat down heavily in the chair whence he had risen to receive her, and Miss Pilgrim through her tears saw him shrivel in a gust of utter terror. All his mask of complacency, of kindly power, of reticence of spirit fell from him; he gulped, and his mouth sagged slack. She moved a pace nearer to him.

"But it'll be all right, Mr. Baruch, if you'll just come to the clinic at once and be vaccinated. It's only because we touched him and the rugs. There isn't any need to be so frightened."

She could not divine the vision that stood before his strained eyes the white face of a woman, weary with her ailment, and the beautiful thing that blanketed her, beautiful and venomous like a snake. His senses swam. But from his shaking lips two words formed themselves:

"My wife!"

"Oh, come along, Mr. Baruch!" cried Miss Pilgrim. "Your wife hasn't touched the rugs. She'll be perfectly all right!"

He gave her a look that began abjectly but strengthened as it continued to something like a strange sneer. For he was a connoisseur; he knew. And he was certain that Fate would never leave a drama unfinished like that.

XII

THE DAY OF OMENS

The velvet-footed, rat-faced valet moved noiselessly in the bedroom, placing matters in order for his master's toilet. He had drawn the curtains to admit the day and closed the window to bar out its morning freshness, and it was while he was clearing the pockets of the dress clothes that he became aware that from the alcove at his back, in which the bed stood, eyes were watching him. Without hurry, he deposited a little pile of coins on the edge of the dressing-table and laid the trousers aside; then, with his long thief's hands hanging open in obvious innocence, he turned and saw that his master had waked in his usual uncanny fashion, returning from slumber to full consciousness with no interval of drowsiness and half-wakefulness. It was as if he would take the fortunes of the day by surprise. His wonderful white hair, which made him noticeable without ever making him venerable, was tumbled on his head; he looked from his pillow with the immobility and inexpressiveness of a wax figure.

To his valet's murmured "good morning," he frowned slightly, as if in some preoccupation of his thoughts.

"What sort of day is it?" he asked, without replying to the greeting.

"It is fine, M'sieur le Prince," answered the valet; "a beautiful day."

"H'm!" The Prince de Monpavon lifted himself on one silk-sleeved elbow to see for himself. The window was on the west side of the building, so that from the bed one looked as through a tunnel of shadow to a sunlight that hung aloof and distant. He surveyed it for a space of minutes with a face of discontent, then fell back on his pillows.

"Thought it was raining," he remarked. "Something feels wrong about it. What time is it?"

"It is twenty minutes past eleven, M'sieur le Prince," replied the servant. "I will fetch M'sieur le Prince's letters. And M. Dupontel has telephoned."

"Eh?" The Prince's hard eyes came round to him swiftly, but not soon enough to see that movement of his right hand that gave him the appearance of deftly pocketing some small object concealed in the palm of it. "What does he say?"

"He will be here at noon, and hopes that M'sieur le Prince will go to take lunch with him."

The Prince nodded slowly, and the valet, treading always as if noise were a sacrilege, passed out of the room to fetch the letters. The Prince lifted his head to pack the pillow under it more conveniently, and waited in an appearance of deep thought. Under the bedclothes the contour of his body showed long, and slender, and his face, upturned to the canopy of the bed, was one upon which the years of his age had found slight foothold. It had the smooth pallor of a man whose chief activities are indoors: it was wary, nervous, and faintly sinister, with strong, dark eyebrows standing in picturesque contrast to the white hair. The figure he was accustomed to present was that of a man established in life as in a stronghold.

He was neither youthful nor elderly, but mature. Without fortune or rich connections, he had contrived during nearly thirty years to live as a man of wealth; he had seen the game ecarte go out and bridge come in; and had so devised the effect he made that he was still more eminent as a personality than as a gambler. Though he played in many places, he was careful not to win too much in any of them, and rather than press for a debt he would forgive it.

The rat-faced valet reappeared, carrying a salver on which were some half dozen envelopes. The Prince took them, and proceeded to examine them before opening them, while the valet, still with his uncanny noiselessness, continued his interrupted preparations. Two of the letters the Prince tossed to the floor forthwith; he knew them for trifling bills. Of the others, there was one with the name of a Paris hotel printed on the flap which appeared to interest him. He had that common weakness for guessing at a letter before opening it which princes share with scullions; and in the case of this one there was something vaguely familiar in the handwriting to which he could not put a name. He stared at it thoughtfully, and felt again a momentary stirring within him of that ill ease with which he had waked from sleep, which had made him doubt that the day was bright. Like all gamblers, he found significance in things themselves insignificant. Impatiently he abandoned his speculations and tore the envelope open; then turned upon his elbow to look at the signature.

"Parbleu!" he exclaimed.

The valet turned at the sound, but his master had forgotten his existence. The man, his hands still busy inserting studs in a shirt, watched with sidelong glances how the Prince had thrown off his languor and leaned above his letter, startled and absorbed.

"MY DEAR MONPAVON [read the Prince]: For the first time since our parting, nearly a generation ago, I am once more in Paris, of which the very speech has become strange in my mouth. I return as a citizen of the United States, a foreigner; you will perhaps recognize me with difficulty; and I would hardly give you that trouble were it not for the engagement which is outstanding between us an engagement which you will not fail to recall. It was concluded upon that evening on which we saw each other last, when, having lost to you all that remained to me to lose, you offered me my revenge whenever I should choose to come for it. Well, I have come for it. I will call upon you as soon as possible. I hope such visits are still as welcome to you as once they were."

And at the tail of the letter there sprawled the signature, bold and black: "JULES CARIGNY."

"Tiens!" exclaimed the Prince.

The valet moved. "M'sieur le Prince spoke?" he queried.

"No!" said the Prince impatiently. He glanced up from his letter at the man's sly, secret face. "But by the way have you ever heard of a Monsieur Carigny?"

It was with something like the empty shell of a smile that the man answered. "Everybody who knows M'sieur le Prince has heard of him," he said suavely.

"H'm!" the Prince grunted doubtfully, but he knew it was true. Everybody had heard of Carigny and the revenge that was due to him; impossible to refuse it to him now.

There are incidents in every man's life concerning which one can never be sure that they are closed; in such a life as that of the Prince de Monpavon there are many. The affair of Carigny, nearly thirty years before, was one of them. While he stared again at the letter, there rose before the Prince's eyes a vision of the evening upon which they had parted in a great; over-ornate room with card-tables in it, and a hanging chandelier of glass lusters that shivered and made a tinkling bell-music whenever the door opened. It had been a short game. It was a season of high stakes, and Carigny, as a loser, had doubled and doubled till the last quick hand that finished him. He was a slim youth, with a face smooth and pale. He sat back in his chair, with his head hanging, staring with a look of stupefaction at the cards that spelled his ruin, his finish, and his exile. About him, some of the onlookers began to talk loudly to cover his confusion, and their voices seemed to restore him. He blinked and closed his mouth, and sat up. "Well," he said, then, "there's an end of that!"

The Prince had answered with some conventional remark, the insincere regrets of a winner for the loser's ill fortune, and had added something about giving Carigny his revenge.

The other smiled a little and shook his head. "You are very good," he had answered; "but at present that is impossible. Some day, perhaps."

He paused. He had risen from his chair, and, though the evening was yet young, he had the look of a man wearied utterly. All the room was watching him; it was known that he had lost all.

"Whenever you like," the Prince had replied.

Carigny nodded slowly. "It may be a long time," he said. "I can see that it may be years. But, since you are so good, some day we will play once more. It is agreed?"

"Certainly; it is agreed," said the Prince.

Carigny smiled once more. He had a queer, ironic little smile that seemed to mock its own mirth. Then, nodding a good night here and there, he had gone toward the door, tall and a little drooping, between the men who stood aside to give him passage, strangely significant and notable at that final moment. At the door he had turned and looked toward the Prince.

"Au revoir!" he had said.

And the Prince, concerned not to fail in his attitude, not to make the wrong impression upon those who watched, had matched his tone carefully to Carigny's as he replied: "Au revoir!"

The thing had touched men's imaginations. The drama of that promised return, years ahead, had made a story; it had threatened the Prince with notoriety. He had had to live dexterously to escape it to play little and with restraint for many months afterward. It had had to be suffered to exhaust itself, to die lingeringly. It had lain in its grave for nearly thirty years; and now, like a hand reaching out from a tomb, came this letter. The incident was not closed.

"No wonder," said the Prince to himself, as he knotted his necktie before the mirror "no wonder the day felt wrong! There is bad luck in the very air. I must be very careful today."

M. Dupontel, waiting for him in the salon, saw him enter between the folding doors with a face upon which his distaste of the day had cast a shadow. Dupontel was no more than twenty-five, and the Prince was one of his admirations and his most expensive hobby. He rose from his seat, smiling, surveying, the other's effect of immaculate clothing, fine bearing, and striking looks, and marking the set of his countenance.

"You look very correct today," he remarked pleasantly.

The Prince nodded without humor. "It is one of my days for being correct," he answered. "I feel it in the air it is a day to be on my guard. I have these sensations sometimes not often, mercifully! and I have learned to pay attention to them."

Dupontel smiled again. "To me it seems a cheerful day," he said. "And you begin it well, at any rate."

"How, then?" The Prince, coaxing on his grey gloves, turned narrowed eyes upon him. "In what way do I begin it well?"

Dupontel produced a pocket-book from the breast of his coat. "I have to settle with you over last evening," he said. "Two thousand, wasn't it? I call that beginning any day well."

He dropped the notes upon the little table where the Prince's hat and cane lay.

The Prince picked up the notes.

"Thanks!" he said. He looked at the young man almost with curiosity. "Sure it's convenient?"

For answer, Dupontel showed him his pocketbook, with still half a dozen thousand-franc notes in it.

"I see," said the Prince.