The Sacrificial Altar

Poor Louis! Spurred on by his anxious and experienced friend, M. Cesar Dupont, he made a meticulous attempt to adore a little French milliner; but the young artist, who would have been a monk in the Middle Ages and left to his monastery a precious heritage of illuminated manuscripts, returned within the month to his art (with abject apologies), set his teeth, and dissected the whole affair for his next book; presenting Celeste, the pivot of a demoniacal crime, in all the phases, common or uncommon, to a woman of her type. This novel, which he estimated as his worst, achieved to his disgust a certain measure of popularity, and the reporters hammered at his gate. San Francisco, which after its first mild interest, had forgotten him, awoke to a sense of its own importance, and besieged M. Dupont, whose acquaintance extended far beyond the French colony, for introductions. But Louis would have none of them. He went on writing his novels, taking his walks at midnight, never leaving the house otherwise unless to visit a bookstore or sit in the back of a box at the play, and literally knew no one in the city of his birth but old Madame Dupont, her son, and his two old servants, Philippe and Seraphine. It was after his seventh novel, when he felt himself growing stale, taking less pleasure in the mere act of writing, and losing his hold on his good friends, the intellectuals, that he took his trouble, as was his habit, to M. Cesar.

They dined in the old Dupont mansion on Nob Hill, built, like the humbler home of the Bacs, in the city’s youth, and alone, as Madame was in bed with an influenza. M. Cesar as a rule entertained at his club, and had a luxurious suite for bachelor purposes in a select apartment-like house kept by a compatriot, but, like a dutiful son, he made a pretense of sharing his mother’s evening meal at six o’clock, no matter where he might be dining at eight.

For an hour after dinner Louis paced up and down the library and unburdened himself while M. Cesar smoked in the depths of a chair. This confidence, which included rage at his own limitations, disgust with the critics who encouraged such miserable failures as he, and invective against fate for planting the fiction imp in what should have been a purely scientific mind and then withholding the power to electrify his talent with genius, was made about every seven months, and M. Cesar always listened with deep concern and sympathy. He loved Louis, who was sweet of nature and the most inoffensive of egoists, but was beginning to regard him as hopeless. To-night, however, he was admitting a ray of hope.

“Celeste was a failure,” he said, abruptly. “It is no use for you to try that sort of thing again. But live you must. I have given up a dinner at the club to a distinguished guest from abroad to tell you that I insist you give yourself one more chance.”

“What is that?” Louis was alert and suspicious at once.

“Do you remember Berthe?”

“Berthe—your niece at Neuilly?”

“Ah—you do, although you would go to my brother’s house so seldom.”

“He had grown daughters of whom I was afraid, for their cruel instincts were excited by my shyness. But Berthe was a little thing then, very pretty, very sympathetic. I romped with her in the garden sometimes.”

“Just so. Berthe is now twenty, very handsome, very vivacious—a great admirer of M. Louis Bac, celebrated novelist.”

The young Frenchman stared at the elderly Frenchman. “Do you wish that I should marry her?”