TWENTIETH CHAPTER CHARTER'S MIND BECOMES THE ARENA OF CONFLICT BETWEEN THE WYNDAM WOMAN AND SKYLARK MEMORIES In the _Rue Rivoli_ there was a little stone wine-shop. The street was short, narrow, crooked, and ill-paved--a cleft in Saint Pierre's terrace-work. Just across from the vault-like entrance to the shop, the white, scarred cliff arose to another flight of the city. Between the shop and the living-rooms behind there was a little court, shaded by mango-trees. Dwarfed banana-shrubs flourished in the shade of the mangoes, and singing-birds were caged in the lower foliage. Since the sun could find no entrance, the wine-shop was dark as a cave, and as cool. One window, if an aperture like the clean wound of a thirteen-inch gun could be called a window, opened to the north; and from it, by the grace of a crook in the _Rue Rivoli_, might be seen the mighty-calibred cone of Pelée. Pere Rabeaut's wine was very good, and some of it was very cheap. The service was much as you made it, for if you were known you were permitted to help yourself. In this world there was no one of station too lofty to go to Pere Rabeaut's; and since those of no station whatsoever drank rum, instead of wine, you would meet no one there to whom it was not a privilege to say "_Bon jour_." "Come and see my birds," the crafty Rabeaut would say if he approved of you. "Where do you live?" you might ask, being a stranger. "In the coolest hovel of Saint Pierre," was his invariable answer. And presently, if you were truly alive, you would find yourself in the little stone wine-shop, listening to the birds and looking over the stalled casks, demijohns, and bottles, filled with more or less concentrated soil and sun. In due course, Soronia would appear in the shadowy doorway (it would seem that the bird-songs were hushed as she crossed the court), and she would show you a vintage of especially long ago. After that, though you became a missionary in Shantung, or a remittance-man in Tahiti, you would never forget the bouquet of the Rabeaut wines, the cantatas of the canaries, nor the witchery of Soronia's eyes.... If the little stone wine-shop were transplanted in New York, artists would find it, and you would be forced to fetch your own goblet and have difficulty in getting in and out for the crowd o' nights. Thither Charter went the next morning and sat down in the cherished coolness. Peter Stock had reminded him of their former talks there, over a particular wine of Epernay, and had arranged to meet him this morning.... In the foreground of Charter's mind a gritty depression had settled, but throughout the finer, farther consciousness, where realities abide, there hung a mystic constellation, which every little while (and with a shock of ecstasy, so wonderful that his _mere_ brain was alarmed and called it scandalous), fused together into a great, glowing ardent Star of Bethlehem....