# The Smart Set/Volume 4/Issue 2/The Rose of Heart's Delight

from The Smart Set, Vol 4 Iss 2, June 1901, pp. 127-135.
THE ROSE OF HEART'S DELIGHT
By Justus Miles Forman
Mr. Gerald Livingston sat on the terrasse of the Café du Panthéon and swore, wickedly and with point. Jimmie Rogers, across the little marble-topped table, screwed about in his chair and looked vaguely apologetic.
"I don't see how I'm to blame," he said, plaintively, "because my sister wants to come over and play. I can't stop Jessica. You know well enough I'd rather go to Concarneau with you than to Scotland with her, but hang it! I'm simply out of the running for the Summer, that's all there is of it."
"When are you leaving Paris?" growled Livingston.
"To-morrow evening, night boat Calais-Dover. I'll run up from London to Liverpool next day and meet the Lucania."
"Sweet mess you leave me in!" said Livingston, resentfully. "What in Gehenna am I going to do? I spent an hour last night down at the club trying to get Simmy Simmons to go to Concarneau with me. I even lowered myself to a compromise on St. Malo or Dinard, but he's making little wax horses up in the Campagne Première stables—they tie a piebald Arab out in the courtyard for him every day—and you couldn't get him away with a rope. I've a jolly good notion to cut up to Scheveningen and get some bathing. It's always interesting there, interestingly indecent."
"Why don't you go somewhere near?" suggested Jimmie. "Your governor may turn up any day, you know. He's in Naples."
"Yes—bless him!" agreed Livingston. "He's pottering about Pompeii under a pith helmet and a green umbrella, squandering the money that he might save and will to me on spurious little statuettes elaborately mutilated as to noses and arms. I could take him to the shop where they're made. As for the places near here, I'm sick of them. I won't go to Barbison and I won't go to Fontainebleau, and I hate Crécy. Crécy and Czerny la Ville are overrun with things in limp skirts and spectacles, who sit under umbrellas and paint sheep and poplar trees. I ran into a drove of these budding geniuses once two years ago at Czerny. They were working under a silly little ass of an American who wore his hair down over his eyes and pretended he was French. He'd once studied under Chase in America, and while he couldn't paint well enough to whitewash a fence, he had all manner of foolish little tricks and mannerisms—stolen from Chase. He painted with brushes about three feet long, and he'd make a little dab at arm's length, then run back about a rod and squint. He had a beautiful, studied pose for that squint. Then he'd spring at the canvas, hit it cruelly with a brush and go back and pose again. It was sickening. But every one of those admiring females tried to imitate him. You'd have died to see a whole line of them on a hill of an afternoon, painting poplar trees and dashing to and fro viciously with brushes like mahlsticks, for all the world like a fencing school. It turned me daffy in a day, and I came away."
Jimmie Rogers laughed. "The fools ye have always with you," he observed. "You might go to Grez."
"What's Grez?" demanded Livingston. "Never heard of it."
"Grez-sur-Loing, other side of the forest. Dead little white plaster town. Three people, a cow and two jackasses. Funny old white plaster hotel. Pretty river, though."
Livingston clinked a franc on the table and rose, yawning. "Doesn't sound exciting, very," he criticised. "Think I'll go to Scheveningen. Give Jessica my love and be good. See you in September."
Then he strolled up the Boul' Miche' and looked in for a half-hour at that very improper resort for the ribald known as Bullier's.
The next day he spent ten minutes over an Indicateur Chaix, after which he put a steamer box and a suit-case into a fiacre, and taking his bicycle over his lap, drove to the Gare de Lyon.
A curious and singularly unsafe looking omnibus rolled and swayed and wobbled over the two kilometers between the country railway station and the village of Grez. Livingston wagered countless louis with an imaginary second self that the ark would seize on the first turning as an Ararat.
Nothing so disastrous happened, however. The ark left the poplar-bordered highroad, dived into a hollow of the plain, and a little wooden sign hanging precariously from the yellowed wall said, "Grez s. L. Nemours 5 kilomètres. "
Livingston perceived at once two of the three people whom Jimmie Rogers had described as constituting the human element of the populace; also the cow, also one of the jackasses. The other could be heard. Though distant he was not lost. Indeed, the town seemed to be growing. A yellow dog with three and a half legs came out and sniffed at the ark. He had a sort of triumphant air. Three of his supports were firm. None of the ark's was.
There stood at the door of the Hôtel Chevillon, smiling cavernously, a sprightly young thing of five-and-sixty, in red head-kerchief and meal-bag waist and skirt tied none too securely.
At dusk he was served his dinner out in the queer little rustic loge built of boughs and gnarled roots, open on all sides, and just large enough to hold the round table. He was waited on by a big-eyed, red-cheeked country maid and two cats. The cats' part was to get under the girl's feet or to reach timid, suppliant paws to the knees of the young American. The girl brought Livingston's coffee and spanked the cat, not very severely.
The man laughed. "Très mignons, les chats, hein?" he suggested. The girl bobbed, and Livingston gave her a louis. It appeared to produce temporary heart failure.
After his coffee he lighted a pipe and lounged out into the street. It was quite dark by now, and Grez was at dinner or going to bed.
Through lighted windows came the clink of dishes and bursts of household chatter, with now and then, by way of the spice of life, a howl from chastised infancy.
Livingston felt, all at once, curiously alien and lonely and out of it. "They're all at home, curse 'em!" he said, morosely. "Sordid beggars, if you like, but it's—it's home." It was a long time since Livingston had known anything like a home. "If I'd stopped in town, now," he growled, "I'd be sitting at the Ambassadeur's or the Jardin de Paris drinking something cold and watching all the pretty American girls with their poppers and their mommers. And if I'd gone to Scheveningen I'd be hearing the band play in the Kursaal and hobnobbing with Altessen. My dear boy, you're an ass! a silly ass!"
An hour later he was nestling his head in the pillows. "If something doesn't turn up to-morrow," he muttered, "back I go to civilization."
He woke in the morning suddenly, and with a sense of disaster. The air shivered with a strange clamor. Then he smiled. Two of the inhabitants of Grez were braying as if their hearts or lungs would burst, and from the hotel garden a peacock screamed uncannily. "Oh, that will do for a rising bell!" said Livingston.
He dressed and wandered down through the lonely garden toward the river on which it bordered. "Grand Jardin bosquet bordant la rivière," said the hotel correspondence paper.
The garden was full of geraniums and mignonette and little spice pinks and single roses. Over in a corner stood a group of tall hollyhocks. Something grew tight in the man's throat, and a little pain came into his heart. His mind went back with a jump to New Haven and his four years under the big white Y on the blue flag, and to Her. In Her garden there were hollyhocks, over by the fence in a comer, as here.
"Damn!" said Livingston, and began to whistle. "I'll go up to Paris this noon," he declared. Then he went down under the little grove of gnarled lindens to the bank of the river, where the bateaux de pêche et de promenade were moored, and his heart stood still again.
"No, I won't," he exclaimed, inwardly, with great decision. "Oh, my Lord! what a beauty! what an unthinkable, unbelievable beauty!" Then added aloud, in a state of confusion bordering on paralysis: "Oh—er—good-morning—er. Beautiful day, isn't it?"
"Comment, monsieur?" asked the girl, looking up. "Bonjour, monsieur," she added, with a little, oh, a very little smile at the corner of her lips.
"You're a rose," said Livingston in his soul, "a deep, deep pink rose, born in a queen's garden. You're all the beautiful, indescribable things that ever came into men's dreams and died on the waking—all of them put together. Oh, the gods must have been happy when you were born!" And then aloud: "Mille pardons, mademoi—er—madame."
The smile at the corners of the maddening lips became a shade less ghostlike, and something flickered in two big cornflower eyes.
"They're too big," complained Livingston to his soul. "It's uncanny to have such big eyes. I'd go clear off my head if I should look at them for ten seconds."
"Alas, this chain!" sighed the vision.
Livingston wondered when he could have heard such a golden voice before, and decided that it must have been in church during the Sanctus. He made a mental vow to attend divine worship more faithfully hereafter.
"This chain! It has made of itself a hopeless tangle." The eyes looked tragic distress.
Livingston forced his legs and tongue from paralysis. "If I might be permitted, mademoiselle," he begged, and knelt by the little post where the boat's painter was made fast.
The chain was not in the least tangled or tied. It was merely wrapped twice about the post. A babe might have freed it. For an instant an unworthy suspicion flickered through the mind of Mr. Livingston. He turned his head. A hand hung at the level of his eyes, long, slim, white, blue veined, pink palmed as a Bouguereau nymph's. His blood rose and sang.
"If I dared kiss that," he said fiercely to his soul, "I would gladly roll off this bank and drown. My life would have been well spent."
The girl sprang into the boat. He was annoyed. He had hoped to assist her.
He fetched oars—such clumsy things for those slim hands! The girl dipped them pensively and looked up. The boat was a yard from shore.
"That chain—" she murmured.
"Heaven bless the chain!" murmured Livingston, with fervor.
"—was most difficult. Monsieur is clever—at chains."
"I hope, mademoiselle, that I shall never meet with anything more difficult. I know that I shall never meet with anything more agreeable."
The girl smiled and rowed away. In the middle of the tiny stream she pulled a water lily and sniffed it. "For a so polite little speech," she said, her face buried in the lily, "monsieur deserves more than—chains." She placed the lily ostentatiously on the stern seat of the boat, and regarding it with care, pulled through the arch of the stone bridge, while Livingston held his breath.
The sprightly creature who had welcomed his advent the day before—inquiry revealed that it was old Madame Chevillon who owned the hotel—came and chattered with him over his breakfast.
Monsieur intended to stay some days? Livingston flourished a croissant and beamed on her largely. Monsieur had every intention of staying for weeks—months—probably forever, he answered her.
Madame Chevillon seemed alarmed and retreated in a speedy waddle to the scullery, where she held excited communion with the red -cheeked maid, and the two stared in turns at the mad Englishman through the little window.
Livingston was meditating. "She went away in one of the hotel boats," he answered. "It is not to be supposed that she will burn or sink that boat for the sake of walking home. Ergo, she will return as she went. That river bank struck me as rather a good place to sit and read. I might even make foolish little sketches."
He found "The Seven Seas" in his bag, and hastened with it to the river. The boat was still absent. "Here I stay," he said, with decision, "if it takes a month," and opened the book. It took about an hour.
At the sound of gentle splashing he raised his head, and was conscious of a strong internal disturbance beneath his left ribs. A syringa bush partially screened him, and he waited behind it while the boat drifted toward the stake, but as the prow touched land he caught and held it. The girl's back had of course been toward him, but as she stood up in the swaying boat and turned, she saw him and gave a little scream; immediately afterward she sat down with some decision.
"I'm sorry," said Livingston, meekly. "I held it as steady as I could."
"I hadn't seen you," said the girl. "You—you frightened me."
Livingston sighed. "I know I'm not handsome," he admitted.
He was rewarded by a momentary vision of very white, even and shining teeth. "Are you trying to make me say that you are beautiful?" she asked. "I shall disappoint you. I shall say that you are a perfect hobgoblin."
"I am crushed," asseverated Livingston. "Do you want to do anything else to me, or will you get out now? I intend holding the boat very still this time."
The girl rose, balancing herself like a rope dancer. Then she looked at the chain. "Perhaps," she suggested, "perhaps you would give me your hand."
Livingston saved himself as by a miracle from falling into the water. Then both of the slim, cool hands were in his for an instant, with the quick pressure of her weight, and she was beside him on the bank.
The face of each was scarlet. Livingston made fast the boat while the girl rescued her bunch of flowers. "Aren't they beautiful?" she murmured.
Livingston looked into her eyes.
"Larkspur, that's it!" he cried triumphantly to his soul. "They're the color of larkspurs! I—I believe they are the most beautiful things I ever saw," he answered.
The crimson spread back to the little ears. "But you aren't looking at them!" she cried.
"I have but one pair of eyes," complained the American.
"It appears," observed the girl, with dignity, "that monsieur is clever at other things than—chains." And she moved toward the little gate in the wall which gave on the neighboring garden.
"Oh, dear!" said she, at the gate, "I have dropped a flower. However," very carelessly, "it is of no consequence whatever."
Livingston fastened the flower in his buttonhole. "Politeness doesn't demand that I agree with all your opinions," he said.
Up at the hotel he maneuvered Madame Chevillon into a corner and demanded information. "Monsieur doubtless speaks of Mademoiselle St. Roques," decided this lady. "Qui est Mademoiselle St. Roques? Personne ne sait pas. What would you? On dit qu'elle chante dans un café à Paris."
"Sings in a café!" cried Livingston. "Never!"
"Comment?" begged Madame Chevillon. "Every Summer, since three, four years, she has lived with the good Mère Piot, next door to the hotel—mademoiselle et sa tante, une vieille dame très gentille. Monsieur has seen the aunt? Yes? Mademoiselle has permission to use the hotel boats. What would you? There is no one else to use them. She commonly makes her promenade en bateau in the morning."
"Sings in a café in Paris!" said Livingston again. "That girl? Nonsense!"
The next morning he was down in the garden before the asses and the peacocks had finished their matins.
A vision in pink muslin sprigged with little roses knelt at the landing stage. "This chain!" it murmured, in distress.
"Heaven bless the chain!" said Livingston, with fervor.
The vision indulged in a faint smile. Livingston's heart sprang to the top of his throat and turned somersaults there.
"It is a beautiful morning," he observed, between somersaults.
"I strained my wrist yesterday," said the vision, irrelevantly, "rowing that boat. The boat is very heavy."
Livingston advanced with the light of decision in his eye. "There is but one thing to be done," he said, firmly. "I cannot permit you to miss your morning promenade. You must be rowed, since you cannot row yourself."
He began to unfasten the painter.
The vision looked at him with big round eyes. "Monsieur is very amiable," innocently, "but I really was—was not thinking of rowing this morning. I only came over to look at the boat."
Then the vision sauntered pensively toward the gate in the wall. A close observer might have detected a glint not altogether childlike in the blue eyes.
Livingston stood with his mouth open. "Well, I'll be—" he began, and failed. "I'll be—the little fiend!"
The next morning he was down as early as before. The vision was there again, in pink muslin sprigged with little flowers, and carrying three deep pink roses still wet with dew.
"This—" began the vision, sweetly.
"Heaven bless it!" declared Livingston, impulsively.
"I was not about to speak of the chain," was the answer, in a sudden access of dignity, but with lips not quite under control.
"May I venture to beg," said the man, very humbly, "that as mademoiselle's wrist is incapacitated, I may have the honor, the unspeakable honor, of rowing mademoiselle along the course of this very attractive stream?"
The vision seemed startled.
"Madame, my aunt, would die of horror," she asserted.
"Madame is in the habit of rising early?" inquired the tempter.
"Oh, no," hurriedly; "madame will not be up for—for an hour yet."
"In that case," declared Livingston, in triumph, "we might row—for an hour—without in the least risking the life of madame, your aunt."
The vision laughed, and protested. "I am certain that your reasoning has a moral flaw somewhere."
"Reason," said Livingston, as he pulled under the low, sounding arch of the stone bridge, "and morals, as you should have been taught earlier in life, have nothing whatever to do with each other. I show you by perfectly sound logic that our taking advantage of a gorgeously beautiful morning can in no way endanger the life of madame, your aunt, who lies sleeping yonder, and you immediately assail my morals. You have no more sense of logic than——"
"Than what?" demanded the girl.
"Than any other woman."
Dew lay on the grass of the stream's bank. Dew lay beaded on the rushes and lily pads. The unutterable freshness and fragrance of a Summer morning, with all nature washed clean overnight, filled the air, and there was the glad sense of running water, of green things growing, of gardens and of mating birds.
Livingston threw out his arms and sniffed with delight. The girl's eyes sparkled. "Isn't it wonderful?" she cried; "isn't it glorious?" His eyes answered her. "Now, if you were alone," she continued with scorn—he made a gesture of abhorrence—"you would spoil it all with tobacco smoke." He looked guilty. "But if you think you are going to be allowed to do so while I am here you are mistaken. It sha'n't be spoiled." A fish leaped near the boat, its fins glistening in the sunlight. "What do you do here in our little Grez, monsieur?" she asked. "So few come here."
"I wait for the early morning to arrive, "he replied, sighing. "Alas, the days are very long."
The girl's lips twitched and he had a moment's glimpse of larkspur eyes. "Mais sérieusement! to sketch, to paint?"
"Well," he admitted, "I had some small thought of sketching when I came. It's out of my line, though—trees and things."
"Your line? But what is your métier, then?"
"Girls," said Livingston.
"Oh," responded the vision, coldly.
"I—that is—oh, you know, I mean—oh, damn!"
The vision appeared much shocked. There was no mistaking the tone of Livingston's last remark.
"How do you know, monsieur," she demanded, "that I do not understand English?"
"Oh, I say!" gasped the man. "Of course you don't, though," he continued, more comfortably. "But about the girls, you know, I want to explain. You see, my line is making drawings of good-looking women in smart clothes; men, too, of course, to some extent; sketchy, unfinished, chic sort of things. The magazines of my native soil demand such libels on art. It is believed that I do them well. I don't, really."
"Oh!" breathed the vision, delightedly. "Will you make a sketch of me? Not that I—I don't mean that I'm—I'm—well, worth drawing, you know, but I want to see you do it. Please!"
Livingston dropped his oars and looked at her with dismay. "Draw you!" he gasped. "You! Merci, non! Jamais de la vie! I've given up trying to gild the gates of heaven or paint fire into an opal. Merci, non!"
The girl wrinkled a small nose. "That is rather pretty," she admitted. "Still, I should have liked to be drawn." She trailed a hand in the water and lifted it, dripping. It flashed a shower of diamonds and pearls. "If you pull to the left of the little point of rushes, monsieur," she said, "we shall come to where I gathered my flowers avant-hier."
The boat brushed through a hedge of rushes that closed again high overhead, and floated lazily in a backwater, a nook shut in on all sides by waving green. The water was covered with strange little waxen blossoms, white petaled, yellow centred The girl pulled an armful. "Are they not beautiful?" she murmured.
Livingston looked into the larkspur eyes, and the blood sang in his veins.
"I—I believe they are the most beautiful things I ever saw," he answered.
The crimson spread back to the little ears. "But you aren't looking at them!" she said.
"I have but one pair of eyes, "complained the American.
The larkspur eyes were under cover. The bosom of the flower-sprigged muslin heaved.
"We must go back," the girl faltered; "it grows late,."
Livingston's hand trembled on the oars. "Oh, you are the rose of heart's delight!" he cried, in a shaking whisper, and the boat broke through the wall of rushes.
The next morning there was no pink muslin at the boat landing, no larkspur eyes to hide themselves behind absurdly long black lashes.
Livingston raged along the river bank. "Suppose she should be ill!" his heart cried, dumbly. And a ready mind conjured visions of his angel stretched, pale and suffering, on her bed. For the first time in his life he counted every hour of the day as it dragged by.
The next day it rained. Livingston stopped drearily indoors and cursed himself—if the Recorder ever takes such things seriously—into a permanent billet in Gehenna.
The morning after, she was coming through the gate in the wall as Livingston reached the river's edge. He turned a reproachful face.
"It is you, monsieur!" she said, with great surprise.
"I," he agreed. "It is good of you to notice. What an eternity!" he sighed, somewhat obscurely.
"Two days?" queried the maid.
"Two months!" said the man, "each of thirty days, and every day of twenty-four hours. What do you know about the passage of time?"
The girl smiled, but she saw Livingston's face, and the smile somehow died.
"I have been reading to madame, my aunt," she said, presently, "the Essays of Monsieur Montaigne. Selected essays," she added, hastily, and turned pink.
Livingston laughed. They pulled up the river swiftly, breathing in the freshness of the morning, exquisite, aromatic, a blended essence of all delightful odors, pungent, almost, as a pain. The tall green rushes parted for them a moment, then swung to place and nodded in the little breeze. The girl pulled an armful of waxen flowers.
"Are they not beautiful?" she murmured.
"I believe they are the most—" began Livingston.
"That will do," interrupted the girl, and the larkspur eyes retreated behind the long lashes.
"You're not polite," complained the American.
The girl sniffed. Then she extracted a flower from the great cluster. "Would monsieur like one of—of the most beautiful things in the world?" she inquired. There was a slight suggestion of malice in the tone.
He looked at the black lashes. There was the swiftest flash of blue. "Monsieur would like two," he said.
The girl made a little exclamation of impatience. "Now you are becoming very tiresome," she declared; "and if you don't reform we shall have to go back at once." But she did not look wholly offended.
"These flowers," she said, presently, "must be arranged in a grand bouquet for madame my aunt. Monsieur shall see how clever I am comme fleuriste."
Then she set to work with the cluster of flowers, and as she worked she sang. She sang the great air out of "Samson et Dalila"—
"Réponds—réponds à ma tendresse!
Verse-moi—verse-moi l'ivresse!"
She sang in a little, low, hushed voice, just over her breath—a contralto voice, rich unspeakably, golden clear, with that strange, thrilling vibrato that every great voice has when its power is held in check. Livingston crooked his feet under the thwart and strained his hands on the gunwales. "For God's sake, don't make an ass of yourself now!" he cried savagely to his soul. "Look away somewhere. Say the multiplication table over backward. Count the cows in that meadow. Don't make an ass of yourself!"
The voice thrilled and quivered like the C string of a violin, like a 'cello dreaming of its German forests when the world was young.
"Do you suppose she realizes what she's singing?" said Livingston to his soul. "Do you suppose she does?" In truth, it wasn't a fortunate selection.
The girl threw overboard a handful of dead leaves, sighed pensively and sang:
"Bonjour, Suzon, ma fleur des bois.
"Why don't you applaud my little concert?" she demanded, mockingly.
Livingston raised a sober face. "You make the very soul of a chap grow weak," he said, half-laughing. "You would make an angel forget himself!"
Quick tears sprang to the blue eyes. "Ah, non, non, non, mon ami!" she cried, and a little flush spread over her cheeks. "I—I'd trust you," she added, softly.
He gave a low, inarticulate exclamation and leaned toward her pleadingly. In a flash the larkspur eyes read his face and hid behind the "grand bouquet" of water flowers.
"Stop it!" cried Livingston's good angel. "Do you want to spoil everything?"
"It grows late," the girl faltered; "we must go back."
As they pulled homeward Livingston said, to break the silence that was becoming intolerable: "You have the most wonderful voice I have heard. You must have sung a great deal."
The girl gave him a glance of alarm. "What do you mean?" she said, swiftly. Then, after a moment, "Yes; I sing a great deal to madame, my aunt, and—to my friends."
She bent over the flowers, but her eyes were still troubled when the landing was made at the hotel garden. At the gate in the wall she paused an instant. "The other day," she began, critically regarding the flowers, "I called you a—hobgoblin." She opened the gate and passed through it. "You aren't a hobgoblin," she added, from the other side; "you're very good-looking." And she banged the gate.
The next morning she met him with a wholly irresponsible and apparently causeless giggle. Indeed, the hour of the morning's promenade en bateau might safely be described as a prolonged giggle.
When the gate in the wall had finally closed, the American stood regarding it in a sort of trance. "Well, I'll be—" he began, and failed. "They say God is especially kind to fools. What an overwhelming, elemental tenderness He must feel toward the chap who thinks he knows anything about women!"
The morning after, he came down in a mask of tragedy. The Rose of Heart's Delight was there before him, all sweetness, all dainty seriousness, with a half-humorous deprecation of the mood of yesterday in her eyes.
"Monsieur is not well?" she demanded, regarding him anxiously. "It is a migraine? mal aux dents? Monsieur is ennuyé of Grez?"
"I didn't sleep," said Livingston, and pulled upstream. The tall reeds bent and nodded as they passed. He pulled a crumpled telegram from his pocket and threw it into the bottom of the boat. "I must go to Paris to-day," he said, looking over the fields. "My father is there. This came last night."
The girl drew a little sharp breath and caught her clasped hands to her breast swiftly. There was a long silence while the man stared out miserably over the green and yellow fields and the girl sat with round, wide eyes and paling cheeks.
A little fish sprang into the sunlight and landed most unexpectedly on a lily pad, where it flopped in panic, ludicrous in the face of heaven. A scent of thyme and rose gardens came down on a vagrant breeze, fragrant as memories of lost childhood, and overhead the tall, plumed reeds nodded always, swishing their green leaves and whispering together.
"Why, then—" said the girl, softly, and stopped, because her voice was not yet safe; "why, then—it's over, monsieur—our little promenades en bateau? our little matinées? I'm sorry, monsieur, but doubtless monsieur is quite ready to go back to Paris—déjà ennuyé," The voice quivered and ceased, and she tried to laugh, but it was a pitiful little unsuccessful laugh.
Livingston raised a white, drawn face. "God ha' mercy," said he, "for I love you better than I love life or my worthless soul. There isn't an inch of me, body or spirit, that doesn't thrill and ache for you. I've loved you from the first moment I saw you by the river bank. When I die, and they ask me what I've done as an excuse for living, I shall boast that I've known you and worshipped you, and they'll say my life was well spent. Oh, you beauty—you unthinkable, unbelievable beauty! You're a rose," he whispered, "the Rose of Heart's Delight. You're all the beautiful, indescribable things that ever came into men's dreams and died on the waking—all of them put together! Oh, the gods must have been happy when you were born!"
Then for a long time there was silence. The girl sat in the stern with her hands over her face and sobbed shiveringly.
After a time he spoke again, gently.
"Ah, Heart's Delight, try not to think it madness," he said; "I beg you, by the greatest, tenderest, fiercest love in all God's world, to marry me."
The girl's hands dropped. "Marry you?" she breathed. The wide blue eyes searched him. Fear was in them—agony. Love was in them, and the birth of an awful joy. "Marry you?" she breathed. Then the sobs came again. "Ah, non, non, non, mon cœur!" she cried, brokenly. "Ah, non! you—you don't know what you ask! You don't know what I am!" She faced him defiantly, the blue eyes full of a hopeless pain. "I am a singer in a café in Paris!" she went on, wildly. "I sing in a café every evening—a little café—a common café, for fifteen francs the day, to keep body and soul together. Do you hear—do you understand? My father was a nobleman, a marquis. He died, and there was no one to care for me. Don't you hear me? I sing in a café!"
Then the man looked up with a great smile that seemed to carry balm for all tears and troubles. "And if you ground a barrel-organ in front of the Moulin Rouge," he scoffed, "I should still say that I love you better than life or my hopes of heaven. Heart of my soul, will you marry me?"
The girl stared at him again, wide-eyed. "Oh!" she breathed. "Are there such men? You'd marry me—me, une chanteuse des cafés? But I mustn't let you—ah, I mustn't let you!"
"Then," said Livingston, "you'll drive me to crime. I shall be compelled to abduct you and make you marry me."
The girl threw up her head with a little laugh that was a half-sob. "And to-day you must go to Paris?" she asked, after a little.
"I must," said the man, gloomily. "My governor'll be there a fortnight."
"Come back!" whispered the Rose of Heart's Delight.
He threw himself at her feet with a glad, confused cry. "Ah, non; ah, non!" she gasped, in panic; "Ne touche pas!" Then presently divining the pain that was in his eyes, she turned with a wonderful little smile and took his face between slim pink palms and kissed his lips. "Ah, roi de mon cœur!" sobbed the Rose of Heart's Delight.
"This chain—" began the girl, as they disembarked.
"Heaven bless the chain!" said Livingston, with fervor.
"I have a confession to make," she went on, turning very pink. "It—it was, after all, not very difficult to unfasten!"
She looked up with a plaintive, deprecatory smile.
"Heaven bless the chain!" said Livingston, firmly.
This work was published before January 1, 1930, and is in the public domain worldwide because the author died at least 100 years ago.
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