Part 24 (2/2)
”Of course I meant dollars. What did you suppose I meant?
Francs? Pounds sterling? I mean dollars. Hurry!”
”Be sure to put in the punctuation marks,” he admonished the pretty clerk.
He dashed back to the library. During the next hundred and twenty hours, he divided his time between botanical researches and one side of the following cable-conversation:
”Come home.”
”Can't.”
”Why?”
”Busy.”
”How?”
”Botanizing. But if you don't send me immediately that little bit of all that belongs to me, I'll knock off work to find out the reason why.”
The money arrived just as his credit in short-credit Paris was everywhere close to the breaking-point, and just as he gave up hope of ever finding what he wanted at the great library, where he had driven every sub and deputy librarian to the brink of insanity. Money, however, brings resourcefulness: Cartaret then remembered the Jardin des Plantes, where he had once been with Vitoria.
No official knew anything about the Azure Rose, but an old gardener (Cartaret was trying them all) gave him hope. He was a little Gascon, that gardener, with white hair and blue eyes, and his long labor had bent him forward, as if the earth in which he worked had one day laid hold of his shoulders and never since let go.
”I had a brother once who was a _faineant_ and so a great traveler.
He spoke of such a rose,” the Gascon nodded; ”but I cannot remember what it was that he told me.”
”Here are five francs to help you remember,” said Cartaret.
The old man took the money and thanked him.
”But I cannot remember what my brother told me,” he said, ”except that the rose was found nowhere but in the Basque provinces of Spain.” ...
A half-hour later Cartaret had bought his traveling-kit, which included a forty-five caliber automatic revolver. Forty minutes later he had paid Refrogne ten months' rent in advance, together with a twenty-five franc tip, and directed that his room be held against his return. An hour later he was sheepishly handing Seraphin a bulky package, evidently containing certain canvases, and saying to him:
”These are something I wouldn't leave about and couldn't bring myself to store, and you're--well, I think you'll understand.”
At twelve o'clock that night, from an opened window in his compartment of a sleeping-car on a southward-speeding _train de luxe_, Cartaret was looking up at the yellow stars somewhere about Tours.
”Good-night, Vitoria!” he was whispering. ”Good-night, and--G.o.d keep you!”
He was a very practical man.
CHAPTER XIII
FURTHER ADVENTURES OF AN AMATEUR BOTANIST
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