Chapter 10

She had resumed her place on the divan, but Vaudrey had already forgiven her tête-à-tête with Rosas--and in truth, what had he to forgive?--This burning glance had effaced everything. He bore it away like a bright ray and still shuddered at the sensation he experienced.

He was in a hurry to leave. He now felt a sudden attack of nervousness. He was at the same moment charmed and bored. Again he resumed--amid the throng that made way for him, humbly performing its duty as a crowd--his rôle of minister, raising his head, and greeting with his official smile, but, at the bottom of his heart, really consumed by an entirely different thought. His brain was full of blue, of floating clouds, and he still heard Marianne's voice ringing in his ears with an insinuating tone, whispering: "We have many tastes in common," together with all kinds of mutual understandings which, as it were, burned like a fire in his heart.

He saw Adrienne still seated in the same place and smiling sweetly at him,--a smile of ardent devotion, but which seemed to him to be lukewarm. He leaned toward her, reached his hands out and said to De Lissac, hurriedly, as he grasped his hand: "We meet later, do we not, Guy?" Then he disappeared in the antechamber, while the servants hurried toward Madame Vaudrey, bearing her cloak, and as Vaudrey put on his overcoat, a voice called out:

"His Excellency's carriage."

"I am exhausted," said Adrienne, when she had taken her place in the carriage. "What about yourself?"

"I? not at all! I am not at all tired. It was very entertaining! One must show one's self now--"

"I know that very well," the young wife replied.

Like a child who is anxious to go to sleep, she gently rested her hood-covered head on Sulpice's shoulder. Her tiny hands sought her husband's hand, to press it beneath her cloak, as warm as a nest; and after she had closed her eyes, overcome as she was by weariness, her breathing seemed to become gradually almost as regular as in slumber, and Sulpice Vaudrey recalled once more, beneath the light of the chandeliers, that pretty blonde, with her half-bare arms and shoulders, and strange eyes, who moistened her dry lips and smiled as she swallowed her sherbet.

VI

In the pretty little Japanese salon, with its panels of sky-blue satin, framed with gilded bamboo, Marianne was seated on the divan, half-facing the duke as if to penetrate his inward thoughts, and she seemed to the Castilian as she did to Vaudrey, to be a most charming creature amid all those surroundings that might have been made expressly to match her fair beauty. Moreover, with Rosas, her freedom of manner was entirely different from that which she manifested to Sulpice, and she embraced the young man with a passionate, fervent glance.

José felt himself grow pale in the presence of this exquisite creature whose image, treasured in the depths of his heart, he had borne with him wherever his fancy had led him to travel. He gazed at her as a man looks at a woman whom he has long desired, but whom some urgent necessity has kept out of his way, and who by chance is suddenly brought near him, fate putting within our reach the dream--

She was prettier than ever, graceful and blooming, "more matured," like a fruit whose color is more tempting to the appetite. Sabine had just before very naturally brought these two together and instinctively, as if they had to exchange many confidences, they had immediately sought a retired spot away from that crowd and were seated there in that salon where Vaudrey, already half-jealous, guessed that Marianne would be.

Yes, indeed, she had many confidences to impart to that man who had suddenly entered the sphere of her life and had suddenly disappeared, remaining during several years as if dead to her. It seemed to her as they sat face to face that this flight of wasted time had made her still younger, and Rosas, notwithstanding his cold demeanor, allowed his former passion to be divined: the women one loves unmask one's secret before a man can himself explain what he feels.

She felt a profound, sincere joy. She recalled a similar conversation with José in his studio, that Oriental corner hidden in the Rue de Laval. The Japanese satin enhanced the illusion.

"Do you know that it seems to me," she said, "that I have been dreaming, and that I am not a whit older?"

"You are not altered, in fact," said Rosas. "I am mistaken--"

"Yes, I know. I have grown lovelier. That is a compliment that I am used to--Lissac has told me that already, only the other morning."

She bit her lips almost imperceptibly, as if to blame herself for her imprudence, but had she mentioned Guy's name designedly, she could not have been better satisfied with the result. Monsieur de Rosas, usually very pale, became pallid, and a slight curl of his lip, although immediately suppressed, gave an upward turn to his reddish moustache.

"Ah!" he said, "You still see Guy."

"I!--I had not spoken a single word to him until I asked him to have an invitation sent me for this soirée, and then it was merely because I knew you would be here."

"Ah!" said José again, without adding a word.

Marianne was satisfied. She knew now that the duke still loved her, since the mention of Lissac's name had made him tremble. Well! she had shrewdly understood her Rosas.

"And what have you been doing, my dear duke, for such an age?" she said.

She looked at him as she had looked at Vaudrey, with her sweet and shrewd smile, which moved him profoundly, and her glance penetrated to the inmost depths of his being.

"You know the old saying: 'I have lived.' It is great folly, perhaps, but it is the truth."

"And I wager," boldly said Marianne, "that you have never thought of me."

"Of you?"

"Of me. Of that mad Marianne, who is the maddest creature of all those you have met in your travels from the North Pole to Cambodia, but who has by no means a wicked heart, although a sufficiently unhappy one, and that has never ceased to beat a little too rapidly at certain reminiscences which you do not recall, perhaps--who knows?"

"I remember everything," replied the duke in a grave voice.

Marianne looked at him and commenced to laugh.

"Oh! how you say that, _mon Dieu!_ Do you remember I used to call you Don Carlos? Well, you have just reminded me of Philip II. 'I remember everything!' B-r-r! what a funereal tone. Our reminiscences are not, however, very dramatic."

"That depends on the good or ill effects that they cause," said Rosas very seriously.

"Ah! God forgive me if I have ever willingly done you the least harm, my dear Rosas. Give me your hand. I have always loved you dearly, my friend."

She drew him gently toward her, half bending her face under the cold glance of the young man:

"Look at me closely and see if I lie."

The duke actually endeavored to read the gray-blue eyes of Marianne; but so strange a flash darted from them, that he recoiled, withdrawing his hands from the pressure of those fingers.

"Come, come!" she said, "I see that my cat-like eyes still make you afraid. Are they, then, very dreadful?"

She changed their expression to one of sweetness, humility, timidity and winsomeness.

"After all, that is something to be proud of, my dear duke. It is very flattering to make a man tremble who has killed tigers as our sportsmen kill partridges."

"You know very well why I am still sufficiently a child to tremble before you, Marianne," murmured José. "At my age, it is folly; but I am as superstitious as gamblers--or sailors, those other gamblers, who stake their lives, and I have never met you without feeling that I was about to suffer."

"To suffer from what?"

"To suffer through you," said the duke. "Do you know that if I had never met you, it is probable that I should never have seen all those countries of which I spoke just now, and that I should have been married long ago, at Madrid or at Toledo?"

"And I prevented you?--"

Rosas interrupted Marianne, saying abruptly, and smiling almost sadly:

"Ah! my dear one, if you only knew--you have prevented many things."

"If I have prevented you from being unhappy, I am delighted. Besides, it is evident that you have never had a very determined inclination for marriage, seeing that you have preferred to trot around the world."

"Like Don Quixote, eh? Do you know, moreover, since we are talking of all these things, that you have saved me from dying in the corner like an abandoned dog?"

"I?" said Marianne.

"You or your songs, as you please. Yes, in Egypt I suffered from fever something like typhus. They left me for dead, as after a battle, in the most wretched and frightful of native villages. No doctors, who might, perhaps, have cured me, not a bed, not even a mattress. My servants, believing me past hope, abandoned me--or rather, for I prefer your Parisian word--cast me adrift--there is no other expression. There I was, stretched out on a heap of damp straw--in short, on a dunghill--"

"You, Rosas?"

"In all conscience, I correctly portrayed Job there; lean, with a three months' old beard, and with the death-rattle in my throat; in the open air--don't alarm yourself, the nights were warm. In the evening the fellah-women gathered round me, while I watched the sun that tinted their cheeks with bronze--there were some pretty ones among them, I have painted them in water-colors from memory--they poured out their insults upon me in guttural tones, which I unfortunately understood, as I am an Orientalist,"--he smiled--"and in addition to those insults they threw mud at me, a fetid mass of filth. The women were charming, although they took part in it. These people did not like the _roumi_, the shivering Christian. Besides, women do not like men who have fallen. They do not like feeble creatures.--"

"Bah!--and where were the hospitals, the Sisters of Charity?"

"Are you quite sure that the Sisters of Charity are women, my dear Marianne?--In a word, I swear that I asked only one thing, as I lay on that devilish, poisonous dunghill, and that was, to end the matter in the quickest possible way, that I might be no longer thought of, when--don't know why, or, rather, I know very well--in my fever, a certain voice reached me--whence?--from far away it commenced humming,--I should proclaim it yours among a thousand--a ridiculously absurd refrain that we heard together one evening at the Variétés, at an anniversary celebration. And this Boulevard chant recurred to me there in the heart of that desert, and transported me at a single bound to Paris, and I saw you again and these fair locks that I now look at, I saw them, too, casting upon your forehead the light shadow that they do now. I heard your laugh. I actually felt that I had you beside me in one of the stage-boxes at the theatre, listening to the now forgotten singer humming the refrain that had so highly amused you, Guy and myself--"

It seemed to Marianne that the duke hesitated for a moment before pronouncing Guy's name. It was an almost imperceptible hesitation, rather felt than seen.

Rosas quickly recovered:

"On my word, you will see directly that the Boulevard lounger was hidden under your gloomy Castilian,--that refrain took such a hold on my poor wandering brain, such an entire possession, that I clung to it when the fever was at its height--I hummed it again and again, and on my honor, it banished the fever, perhaps by some homeopathic process, for at any other time, this deuced refrain would have aroused a fever in me."

"Why?--Because it was I who formerly hummed it?"

"Yes," said Rosas in a lowered tone. "Well! yes, just for that reason!--"

He drew closer to her on the divan, and she said to him, laughingly:

"How fortunate it is that Faure is singing yonder! He attracts everybody and so leaves us quite alone in this salon. It is very pleasant. Would you like to go and applaud Faure? It is some years since I heard him."

"You are very malicious, Marianne," said the duke. "Let me steal this happy, fleeting hour. I am very happy."

"You are happy?"

"Profoundly happy, and simply because I am near you, listening to you and looking at you--"

"My poor Job," she said, still laughing, "would you like me to sing you the refrain that we heard at the Variétés?"

De Rosas did not reply, but simply looked at her.

He felt as if he were surrounded with all the perfume of youth. On a console beside Marianne, stood a vase of inlaid enamel containing sprigs of white lilacs which as she leaned forward, surrounded her fair head as with an aureole of spring. Her locks were encircled with milk-white flowers and bright green leaves, transparent and clear, like the limpid green of water; and at times these sprigs were gently shaken, dropping a white bud on Marianne's hair, that looked like a drop of milk amid a heap of ruddy gold.

Ah! how at this moment, all the poetry, all the past with its unacknowledged love swelled Rosas's heart and rushed to his lips. In this brilliantly-lighted salon, under the blaze of the lights, amid the shimmering reflections of the satin draperies, he forgot everything in his rapture at the presence of this woman, lovely to adoration, whose glance penetrated his very veins and filled him with restless thoughts.

The distant music, gentle, penetrating and languishing, some soothing air from Gounod, reached them like a gentle breeze wafted into the room.

José believed himself to be in a dream.

"Ah! if you only knew, madame," he said, becoming more passionate with each word that he spoke, as if he had been gulping down some liqueur, "if you only knew how you have travelled with me everywhere, in thought, there, carried with me like a scapular--"

"My portrait?" said Marianne. "I remember it. I was very slender then, prettier, a young girl, in fact."

"No! no! not your portrait. I tore that up in a fit of frenzy."

"Tore it up?"

"Yes, as I thought that those eyes, those lips and that brow belonged to another."

Marianne's cheeks became pallid.

"But I have taken with me something better than that portrait: I preserved you, you were always present, and pretty, so pretty--as you are now, Marianne--Look at yourself! No one could be lovelier!"

"And why," she said slowly, speaking in a deep, endearing tone, "why did you not speak to me thus, of old?"

"Ah! of old!" said the duke angrily.

She allowed her head to fall on the back of the divan; looking at this man as she well knew how, and insensibly creeping closer to him, she breathed in his ears these burning words:

"Formerly, one who was your friend was beside me, is that not so?"

"Do not speak to me of him," José said abruptly.

"On the contrary, I am determined to tell you that even if I had loved him, I should not have hesitated for a moment to leave him and follow you. But I did not love him."

"Marianne!"

"You won't believe me? I never loved him. I have never been his mistress."

"I do not ask your secret. I do not speak of him," said the duke, who had now become deadly pale.

"And I am determined to speak to you of him. Never, you understand, never was Guy de Lissac my lover. No, in spite of appearances; he has never even kissed my lips. I thought I loved him, but before yielding, I had time to discover that I did not love him! And I waited, I swear to you, expecting that you would say to me: 'I love you!'"

"I?"

"You," said Marianne, in a feeble tone. "You never guessed then?"

And she crept with an exquisitely undulating movement still closer to Rosas, who, as if drawn by some magnetic fluid, surrendered his face to this woman with the wandering eyes, half-open lips, from which a gentle sigh escaped and died away in the duke's hair.

He said nothing, but hastily seizing Marianne's hand, he drew her face close to his lips, her pink nostrils dilated as if the better to breathe the incense of love; and wild, distracted, intoxicated, he pressed his feverish, burning lips upon that fresh mouth that he felt exhaled the perfume of a flower that opens to the morning dew.

"I love you now, I loved you then!--" Marianne said to him, after that kiss that paled his cheeks.

Rosas had risen: a thunder of applause greeted the termination of a song in the other salon and the throng was pouring into the smaller salon. Marianne saw Uncle Kayser, who was arguing with Ramel, whose kindly, lean face wore an expression of weariness. She also rose, grasped the duke's hands with a nervous pressure and said as she still gazed at him:

"There is my uncle. We shall see each other again, shall we not?"

She crushed Rosas with her electric glance.

Preceding the duke, she went straight to Kayser and took his arm, leaning on it as if to show that she was not alone, that she had a natural protector, and was not, as Rosas might have supposed, a girl without any position.

Kayser was almost astonished at the eagerness of his niece.

"Let us go!" she said to him.

"What! leave? Why, there is to be a supper."

"Well! we will sup at the studio," she replied nervously. "We will discuss the morality of art."

She had now attained her end. She realized that anything she might add would cool the impression already made on the duke. She wished to leave him under the intoxication of that kiss.

"Let us go!" said Kayser, drawing himself up in an ill-humored way. "Since you wish it--what a funny idea!--Ramel," he said, extending his hand to the old journalist, "if your feelings prompt you, I should like to show you some canvases."

"I go out so rarely," said Ramel.

"Huron!" said the painter.

"Puritan!" said Marianne, also offering her hand to Denis Ramel.

Rosas looked after her and saw her disappear amongst the guests in the other salon, under the bright flood of light shed by the chandeliers; and when she was gone, it seemed to him that the little Japanese salon was positively empty and that night had fallen on it. Profound ennui at once overcame him, while Marianne, in a happy frame of mind, on returning to Kayser's studio, reviewed the incidents of that evening, recalling Vaudrey's restless smile, and seeming again to hear Rosas's confidences, while she thought: "He spoke to me of the past almost in the same terms as Lissac. Is human nature at the bottom merely commonplace, that two men of entirely different characters make almost identical confessions?" While she was recalling that passionate moment, the duke was experiencing a feeling of disappointment because of their interrupted conversation, and he reproached himself for not having followed Marianne, for having allowed her to escape without telling her--

But what had he to tell her?

He had said everything. He had entirely surrendered, had opened his soul, as transparent as crystal. And this notwithstanding that he had vowed in past days that he would keep his secret locked within him. He had smothered his love under his frigid Castilian demeanor. And now, suddenly, like a child, on the first chance meeting with that woman, he had allowed himself to be drawn into a confession that he had been rigidly withholding!

Ah! it was because he loved her, and had always loved her. There was only one woman in the whole world for him,--this one. He did not lie. Marianne's smile haunted him, wherever he was. In her glance was a poison that he had drunk, which set his blood on fire. He was hers. Except for the image of Lissac, he would most certainly have returned long since to Paris to seek Mademoiselle Kayser.

But Lissac was there. He recalled how much Guy had loved her. He had more than once made the third in their company. He had often accompanied Lissac to Marianne's door. How then had she dared to say just now that she had never been his mistress?

But how was he to believe her?

And why, after all, should she have lied? What interest had she?--

In proportion as Rosas considered the matter, he grew more angry with himself, and in the very midst of the crowd, he was seized with a violent attack of frenzy, such as at times suddenly determined him to seek absolute solitude. He was eager to escape.

In order to avoid Madame Marsy, who was perhaps seeking him, he slipped through the groups of people and reached the door without being seen, leaving without formal salutation, as the English do.

He was in the hall, putting on his overcoat, while a servant turned up its otter-fur collar, when he heard Guy say:

"You are going, my dear duke? Shall we bear each other company?"

The idea was not distasteful to Rosas. Involuntarily, perhaps, he thought that a conversation with Lissac was, in some way, a _chat_ with Marianne. These two beings were coupled in his recollections and preoccupations; besides, he really liked Guy. The Parisian was the complement of the Castilian. They had so many reminiscences in common: fêtes, suppers, sorrows, Parisian sadnesses, girls who sobbed to the measure of a waltz. Then they had not seen each other for so long.

Rosas experienced a certain degree of pleasure in finding himself once more on the boulevard with Guy. It made him feel young again. Every whiff of smoke that ascended from his cigar in the fresh air, seemed to breathe so many exhalations of youth. They had formerly ground out so many paradoxes as they strolled thus arm in arm, taking their recreation through Paris.

In a very little time, and after the exchange of a few words, they had bridged the long gap of years, of travel and separation. They expressed so much in so few words. Rosas, as if invincibly attracted by the name of Marianne, was the first to pronounce it, while Guy listened with an impassive air to the duke's interrogations.

In this way they went toward the boulevard, along which the rows of gas-jets flamed like some grand illumination.

"Paris!" said Rosas, "has a singular effect on one. It resumes its dominion over one at once on seeing it again, and it seems as if one had never left it. I have hardly unpacked my trunks, and here I am again transformed into a Parisian."

"Paris is like absinthe!" said Guy. "As soon as one uncorks the bottle, one commences to drink it again."

"Absinthe! there you are indeed, you Frenchmen, who everlastingly calumniate your country. What an idea, comparing Paris with absinthe!"

"A Parisian's idea, _parbleu!_ You have not been here two days and you are already intoxicated with _Parisine_, you said so yourself. The hasheesh of the boulevard."

"Perhaps it is not _Parisine_ only that has, in fact, affected my brain," said Rosas.

"No doubt, it is also the _Parisienne_. Madame Marsy is very pretty."

"Charming," said Rosas coldly.

"Less charming than Mademoiselle Kayser!"

Guy sent a whiff of smoke from his cigar floating on the night breeze, while awaiting the duke's reply; but José pursued his way beside his friend, without uttering a word, as if he were suddenly absorbed, and Lissac, who had allowed the conversation to lapse, sought to reopen it: "Then," he said suddenly,--dropping the name of Mademoiselle Kayser:--"You will be in Paris for some time, Rosas?"

"I do not in the least know."

"You will not, I hope, set out again for the East?"

"Oh! you know what a strange fellow I am. It won't do to challenge me to!"

Lissac laughed.

"I don't challenge you at all, I only ask you not to leave the fortifications hereafter. We shall gain everything. You are not a Spaniard, you are a born Parisian, as I have already told you a hundred times. If I were in your place, I would set myself up here and stick to Paris. Since it is the best place in the world, why look for another?"

"My dear Guy," interrupted the duke, who had not listened, "will you promise to answer me, with all frankness, a delicate, an absurd question, if you will, one of those questions that is not generally put, but which I am going to ask you, nevertheless, without preface, point-blank?"

"To it and to any others that you put me, my dear duke, I will answer as an honest man and a friend should."

"Have you been much in love with Mademoiselle Kayser?"

"Very much."