下载掌阅APP，畅读海量书库
立即打开
"If I drive the nail here, boy, will you be satisfied? Upon my word, it's the last place I'll try!" He spoke with what dignity and distinctness he could command, but the effect was lost upon Max, who, also dusty, also bearing upon his person the evidences of manual labor, was crouching over a wood fire, intent upon the contents of a brass coffee-pot.
"Max! Do you hear me?"
"No, I do not hear. Take the nail from your mouth."
"Take it for me! I haven't a hand."
Max left the coffee-pot with some reluctance, crossed the room, and with the seriousness known only to the enthusiastic amateur in house-furnishing, removed the nail from Blake's mouth.
"It is a shame! You will spoil your nice teeth."
"What is a tooth or two in such a cause! Have you a handkerchief?"
"Yes."
"Then, for the love of God, wipe my forehead for me!"
Still without a smile, Max produced a handkerchief that had obviously played the rôle of duster at an earlier hour and, passing it over Blake's face, removed the dew of heat, leaving in its place a long black streak.
"Thanks! I'm cooler now—though probably dirtier!"
"Dirtier! On the contrary, mon ami ! You have the most artistic scar of dust that makes you as interesting as a German officer! Oh!" His voice rose to a cry of sharp distress, and he ran back to the fire. "Oh, my coffee! My beautiful coffee! Oh, Ned, it has over boiled!"
Blake eyed the havoc from his coign of vantage with a philosophy tinged with triumph.
"Didn't I tell you that coffee-pot was a fraud the very first day old Bluebeard tried to palm it off on us! You will never distinguish between beauty and utility."
"Beauty is utility!" Max, in deep distress, was using the much-taxed handkerchief to wipe the spilt coffee from the hearth.
"Should be, my boy, but isn't! I say, give me that business to see to!" Regardless of the picture still dangling from his hand, he jumped to the ground and strode through a litter of papers, straw, and packing-cases.
"Give me that rag!" He took the sopping handkerchief and flung it into a distant corner. "A wisp of this straw is much more useful—less beautiful, I admit!"
Max glanced up with wide eyes, extremely wistful and youthful in expression. "I do not believe I care about either the use or the beauty," he said, plaintively. "I only care that I am hungry and that my coffee is lost."
"Hungry, boy? Why, bless my soul, you must be starving! What time is it at all?" Blake pulled out his watch. "Eleven! And we've been at this hard since eight! Hungry! I should think you are. Look here! You just sit down!" He pushed aside the many objects that encumbered the floor, and began impatiently to strip the packing from a leather arm-chair.
Max laughed a little.
"But, mon cher , I prefer the ground—this nice warm little corner close to the fire. One day I think I shall have two cushions, like your Bluebeard of the curio shop, and sit all day long with my legs crossed, imagining myself a Turk. Like this!" He drew back against the wall, curling himself up with supple agility, and smiled into his companion's eyes.
Blake looked down, half amused, half concerned.
"Poor little gamin ! Tired and dirty and hungry. Just you wait!" Nodding decisively, he crossed the room, opened the door softly, and disappeared.
Left to himself, Max drew farther back into his warm corner and clasped his hands about his knees. Max was enjoying himself. The fact was patent in the lazy ease of his pose, in the smile that hovered about his lips, in the slow, pleased glance that travelled round and round the bare room and the furniture still standing ghostly in its packing. It was still the joyful beginning of things: the clean white paper upon the walls spoke of first hours as audibly as the bunch of jonquils peeping from a dark corner spoke of spring. It was still the beginning of things—the salt before the sweet, the ineffable, priceless moment when life seems malleable and to be bent to the heart's desire.
One month had passed since his first visit to this fifth floor; one month since he had entered Paris, armored in his hopes; one month since Blake had crossed his path.
The smile upon his lips deepened, then wavered to seriousness, and his gaze turned from the white wall to the fire, where the flames from the logs spurted copper and blue.
One month. A dream—or a lifetime?
Gazing into the fire, questioning his own fancy, he could scarce decide which; a dream in the quick moving of events—the swift viewing of new scenes; a lifetime in alteration of outlook and environment—the severing and knitting of bonds.
The happy seriousness was still enfolding him, his eyes were still intent upon the fire, when Blake entered, triumphant, carrying a coffee-pot, and followed by a demure girl with blonde hair and delicate pale skin.
"Monsieur is served!"
Max, startled out of his reverie, jumped to his feet.
"What is this? Oh, but you should not! You should not!"
"And why not, in the name of God? If you insist upon having antique brass coffee-pots, your neighbors must expect to suffer, eh, Jacqueline?"
The little Jacqueline laughed, shaking her fair head. "Ah, well, monsieur, it is an art—the keeping of an establishment—and must be learned like any other!"
"And you think we ought to go to school?"
"I did not say that!" She laid down the loaf of bread, the butter, and the milk-jug that she was carrying, and took the coffee from Blake's hands with an air of pretty gravity. "And now, monsieur, where are the cups?"
Blake turned to Max. "Cups?" he said in English. "I know we bought something quite unique in the matter of cups, but where the deuce we put them—For the love of God and the honor of the family, boy, tell me where they are!"
Max's eyes were shining. "They are in the chest, mon cher . We put them there for safety as we went out last night."
"Good! Give me the key."
"The key, mon ami , I have left at the Hôtel Railleux!"
Consternation spread over Blake's face, then he burst out laughing and turned to Jacqueline, relapsing into French.
"Monsieur Max would have you to know, mademoiselle, that he possesses an altogether unusual and superior set of Oriental china, which he bought from a certain villanous Jew at the corner of the rue André de Sarte; that for safety he has locked that china into the artistic and musty dower-chest standing against the wall; and that for greater safety he has forgotten the key in an antique hotel near the Gare du Nord!"
He laughed again; Max laughed; the little Jacqueline laughed, and ran to the door.
"Oh, la! la ! What a pair of children!" She flitted out of the room, returning with two cups, which she set beside the coffee and the milk.
"And now, messieurs, it is possible you can arrange for yourselves!" She shot a bright, quizzical look from one to the other. "I know you would wish me to stay and measure out the milk and sugar, and it would flatter me to do so, but, unhappily, I have a dish of some importance upon my own fire, and it is necessary that one is domestic when one is only a woman—is it not so, Monsieur Max?" She wrinkled her pretty face into a grimace of mischief, and nodded as if some idea infinitely amusing, infinitely profound lurked at the back of her blonde head.
"Good-day, Monsieur Edouard. Good-day, Monsieur Max!"
"Strange little creature!" said Blake, as the door closed upon her. "Frail as a butterfly, with one capacity to prevent her taking wing!"
"And that capacity—what is it?" Max had returned to his former position, and was pouring out the coffee as he crouched comfortably by the fire.
"The capacity, boy, for the grande passion . Odd that it should exist in so light a vessel, but these are the secrets of Nature! There are moments, you know, when this little Jacqueline isn't laughing at life—rare, I admit, but still existent—and then you see that the corners of her mouth can droop. She may live to find existence void, but she'll never live to find it shallow. Thanks, boy!" He took his cup of coffee, and, walking to the table, cut a slice of bread, which he carried back to the fire. "Now, don't say a word! I'm going to make you the finest bit of toast you ever saw in your life!"
Max, preserving the required silence, watched him make the toast, carefully balancing the bread on the tip of a knife, carefully browning, carefully buttering it.
"Now! Taste that, and tell me if there wasn't a great chef lost in me!"
He carried the toast back to the fire and watched Max eat the first morsel.
"Nice?"
"Delicious!"
"Ah! Then it's all fair sailing! I'll cut myself a bit of bread and sit down on my heels like you. There's something in that Turkish idea, after all! But, as I was saying"—he buttered his bread and dropped into position beside the boy—"as I was saying awhile ago, that child next door, with all her innocent air and her blue eyes, has climbed the slippery stairs and reached the seventh heaven. And not only reached it herself, mind you, but dragged that ungainly Cartel with her by the tip of her tiny finger! Wonderful! Wonderful! Enviable fate!"
Max's eyes laughed. "M. Cartel's?"
"M. Cartel's. Oh, boy, that seventh heaven! Those slippery steps!"
"And the tip of a tiny finger?" Max was jesting; but Blake, lost in his own musings, did not perceive it.
"For Cartel—yes!" he said. "For me, no! I think I'd like the whole hand."
Here Max picked up a tongs and stirred the logs until they blazed.
"Absurd!" he said. "The tip of a finger or the whole of a hand, it is all the same! It is a mistake, this love! That old story of the Garden and the Serpent is as true as truth. Man and Woman were content to live and adorn the world until one day they espied the stupid red Apple—and straightway they must eat! Look even at this Cartel! He is an artist; he might make the world listen to his music. But, no! He sees a little butterfly, as you call her—all blonde and blue—and down falls his ambition, and up go his eyes to the sky, and henceforth he is content to fiddle to himself and to the stars! Oh, my patience leaves me!" Again he struck the logs, and a golden shower of sparks flew up the chimney.
"I don't know!" said Blake, placidly. "I'm not so sure that he isn't getting the best of it, when all's said and done!"
Max reddened. "You make me angry with this 'I do not know!' and 'I am not so sure!' The matter is like day. You cannot submerge your personality and yet retain it."
"I don't know! I'd submerge mine to-morrow if I could find an alter ego !"
"Then, mon cher , you are a fool!"
Blake drank his coffee meditatively. "Some say the fools are happier than the wise men! I remember a poor fool of a boy at home in Clare who used to say that he danced every night with the fairies on the rath, and I often thought he was happier than the people who listened to him out of pity, and shook their heads and laughed behind his back!"
Max looked up, and as he looked the anger died out of his eyes.
"Ned, mon cher , you are very patient with me!"
Blake turned. "What do you mean?"
"What I say—that you are patient. Why is it?"
"Oh, I don't know. I'm fond of you, I suppose."
"I am, then, a good comrade?"
"The best."
"What is it you find in me?"
"I don't know! You are you."
"I amuse you?"
"You do—and more."
"More! In what way more?" Max drew nearer.
"Oh, I don't know! You're as amusing and spirited and generous as any boy I've known, and yet you're different from any boy. You sometimes fit into my thoughts almost like a woman might!" He hesitated, and laughed at his own conceit.
Max, with an odd little movement of haste, drew away again.
"Do not say that, mon ami ! Do not think it! I am your good comrade, that is all."
"Of course you are! Sorry if I hurt your pride."
"You did not. It was not that." With an inexplicable change of mood Max drew near again, and suddenly slipped his hand through Blake's arm.
They laughed in unison at the return to amity, and then fell silent, looking into the fire, watching the blue spurt of the flames, the feathery curls of ash on the charred logs.
"Ned! Make me one of your stories! Tell me what you are seeing in the fire!"
Blake settled himself more comfortably.
"Well, boy, I was just seeing a castle," he began in the accepted manner of the story-teller, and in his pleasant, soothing voice. "A great big castle on the summit of a mountain, with a golden flag fluttering in the sunset; and I think it must be the 'Castle of Heart's Desire,' because all up the craggy path that leads to it there are knights urging their horses—"
"Good!" Max smiled with pleasure and pressed his arm. "Continue! Continue!"
"Well, they're all sorts of knights, you know," Blake went on in the dreamy, singsong voice—"fair knights and red knights and black knights, every one of them in glittering armor, with long lances, and wonderful devices on their shields—"
"Yes! Yes!"
"—wonderful devices on their shields, and spurs of gold and silver, and waving plumes of many colors; and the flanks of their horses—cream-colored and chestnut and black—shine in the light."
"Continue, mon cher ! Continue! I can see them also!" Max, utterly absorbed, charming as a child, bent forward, staring into the heart of the fire.
"Well, they mount and mount and mount, and sometimes the great horses refuse the craggy path and rear, and sometimes a knight is unseated and the others look back and laugh at his discomfiture and ride on until they themselves are proved unfit; and so, on and on, while the way gets steeper and more perilous, and the company smaller and still smaller, until the sun drops down behind the mountain and the gold flag flutters as gray as a moth, and in all the windows of the castle torches spring up to greet the knight who shall succeed."
"And which is he—the knight who shall succeed?"
"Don't you see him?"
"No! Where is he? Where?"
"Why, there—riding first, on the narrowest verge of the craggy path! A very young knight with dark hair and a proud carriage and gray eyes with flecks of gold in them."
For an instant Max gazed seriously into the flames, then turned, blushing and laughing.
"Ah! But you are laughing at me! What a shame! For a punishment you shall go straight back to work." He jumped up and handed Blake his discarded hammer.
Blake looked reluctantly at the hammer, then looked back at the enticing flame of the logs.
"Oh, very well! Have it your own way!" he said, getting slowly to his feet. "But if I were you, I'd like to have heard what awaited the knight in the tapestried chamber of the castle tower!"