Part 16 (1/2)
”Tell me!” insisted Cartaret.
”How should I know?” the concierge countered.
”It's your business to know. You're responsible. Who's come in and gone out since I went out?”
”n.o.body.”
”There must have been somebody! Somebody has been to my room and stolen something.”
Thefts are not so far removed from the sphere of a concierge's natural activities as unduly to excite him.
”To rob it is not necessary that one come in from without,” said he.
”You charge a tenant?”
”I charge n.o.body. It is you that charge, monsieur. I did not know that you possessed to be stolen. A thief of a tenant? But certainly. One cannot inquire the business of one's tenants. What house is without a little thief?”
”I believe you did it!” said Cartaret.
Refrogne whistled, in the darkness, a bar of ”Margarita.”
Houdon was pa.s.sing by. He made suave enquiries.
”But not Refrogne,” he a.s.sured Cartaret. ”You do an injustice to a worthy man, my dear friend. Besides, what is a box of strawberries to you?”
Cartaret felt that he was in danger of making a mountain of a molehill; he had the morbid fear, common to his countrymen, of appearing ridiculous. It occurred to him that it would not have been beyond Houdon to appropriate the berries, if he had happened into the room and found its master absent; but to bother further was to be once more absurd.
”I don't suppose it does matter,” he said; ”but my supplies have been going pretty fast lately, and if I was to catch the thief, I'd hammer the life out of him.”
”Magnificent!” gurgled Houdon as he pa.s.sed gesturing into the street.
Cartaret returned toward his room. The dusk had fallen and, if he had not known the way so well, he would have had trouble in finding it. He was tired, too, and so he went slowly. That he also went softly he did not realize until he gently pushed open the door to his quarters.
A shadowy figure was silhouetted against the window out of which Cartaret kept his supplies, and the figure seemed to have some of them in its hands.
Cartaret's anger was still hot. Now it flamed to a sudden fury. He did not pause to consider the personality, or even the garb, of the thief.
He saw nothing, thought nothing, save that he was being robbed. He charged the dim figure; tackled it as he once tackled runners on the football-field; fell with it much as he had fallen with those runners in the days of old--except that he fell among a hail of food-stuffs--and then found himself tragically holding to the floor the duenna Chitta.
It was a terrible thing, this battle with a frightened woman. Cartaret tried to rise, but she gripped him fast. His amazement first, and next his mortification, would have left him nerveless, but Chitta was fighting like a tigress. His face was scratched and one finger bitten, before he could hold her quiet enough to say, in slow French:
”I did not know that it was you. You are welcome to what you want. I am going to let you go. Don't struggle. I shan't hurt you. Get up.”
He thanked Heaven that she understood at least a little of the language. Shaken, he got to his own feet; but Chitta, instead of rising, surprisingly knelt at his.
She spouted a long speech of infinite emotion. She wept. She clasped and unclasped her hands. She pointed to the room of her mistress; then to her mouth, and then rubbed that portion of her figure over the spot where the appet.i.te is appeased.
”Do you mean,” gasped Cartaret--”do you mean that you and your mistress”--this was terrible!--”have been poor?”
Chitta had come to the room without her head-dress, and the subsequent battle had sent her hair in dank coils about her shoulders. She nodded; the shaken coils were like so many serpents.