THE MARQUIS EGMONT OF THE HOLY ANGELS
The Marquis, known familiarly as Egmont, was at the music hall the next
night, not in his splendid dragoon uniform, nor yet in evening dress,
but in ordinary clothes which suggested the notion of a disguise on
Egmont’s part, to François.
Evidently, the company as a whole, and Diane in particular, had
made a great hit, for the former furniture shop was packed with
persons. François went through his juggling and his tricks with
the Grandins without the slightest nervousness. Not so, Diane.
She began to give signs of what is dangerous and even fatal to an
actress--self-consciousness. No one noticed it except Jean, who saw
everything with the sharp-sightedness of love.
When the performance was over, and the hall closing for the night, the
old woman who took in the money at the door handed a note to Diane,
who slipped it into her breast. When she got home and was alone in
her little white room, she took the note out and read it. Many notes
of the kind had Diane received in her short theatrical career, chiefly
from young shopmen and susceptible lawyers’ clerks and the like, but
this was from a marquis, and written upon beautiful paper. It was very
respectful in tone, and asked Diane why she had been so cruel the night
before, and what evening would she honor Captain, the Marquis Egmont de
St. Angel with her company at supper. The foolish Diane kissed the note
and slept with it under her pillow.
The next morning about ten o’clock, Diane went out on a shopping
expedition in the streets of Bienville. She was one of those women who
have an instinctive knowledge of how to make the best of herself. She
adopted a demure style of dress, a trim little black gown and large
black hat and a thin black veil, all of which gave her a nun-like
appearance. When she raised her eyes, however, there was nothing of the
nun about Diane.
She walked rapidly along the bustling streets of the town, and looked
like a pretty governess somewhat alarmed at being out alone. In truth,
Diane had been out in the world alone since her seventeenth year, and
knew perfectly well how to take care of herself. She went into a paper
shop to buy some writing paper elegant enough to reply to the Marquis’s
note. As she walked out of the shop, she came face to face with the
Marquis swinging along in his dashing uniform, and carrying his sabre
in his arm. He smiled brilliantly at Diane and took off his glittering
helmet with its red plumes, and bowed profoundly to her, but Diane,
whose face became scarlet as the dragoon’s plumes, turned and ran as
fast as she could, and was lost to sight, diving into a narrow and
devious street. She heard footsteps behind her and kept her head down,
thinking it was the Marquis, but the voice in her ear was that of Jean.
“That man means mischief as certainly as you live, Diane,” said Jean,
who had a brusqueness and common sense sometimes most painful and
uncompromising.
Diane stopped under an archway, dark even in the bright autumn morning.
“I don’t know what he means,” she said, “but neither he nor any other
man can do me any harm. In the first place, I am by nature a modest
girl, you know that, Jean. Then, you laugh at my ambitions. Very well;
when the time comes that the newspaper reporters are digging into my
past, they won’t find anything disgraceful, upon that I am determined.
If the Marquis wants to marry me, I shall marry him. But the only way
he can reach me is through the church door.”
Jean laughed a hearty, mirthful laugh.
“I believe you,” he said, “and as you always were the most persevering
and most determined creature that ever lived, I think that you will
stick to what you say. But neither this marquis nor any other marquis
will ever want to marry you. As for this fellow, he is a scoundrel. I
have heard it in the last twenty-four hours, and I see it for myself.”
“You are so prejudiced, Jean,” complained Diane. “However, I will show
you the note that I shall write him, so that you can point out any
mistakes in spelling I may make.”
“François is the man for spelling,” answered Jean.
Diane thought so too, so after writing her little note first on a
piece of wrapping paper--Diane was nothing if not economical--she
showed it to François, who corrected two mistakes. It was very short,
simply saying that Mademoiselle Dorian thanked the Marquis for his
compliment, but that she did not accept invitations to supper.
“But I wish, Skinny,” said François, “you would go with him. He will
be certain to say or do something impudent, and that will disgust you,
and there will be an end of it. But you are acting, my dear, like a
finished coquette.”
This Diane violently denied, as it was the truth and she did not wish
it known.
The Marquis continued to haunt the little hall every night, and the
effect upon Diane’s acting was not good, especially in a little love
scene she had with Jean.
After a week of this, one night when the performance was over and they
were all preparing to go home, Jean spoke to Diane in her little canvas
den of a dressing-room.
“Something is the matter. Your acting isn’t improved, Diane,” said
Jean, “by your eyes wandering over the audience, and shrinking away
from me when you ought to throw yourself in my arms. If you go on like
this, you will never get to Paris even as a music hall artist. Your
acting won’t be worth your railway fare, third class.”
“I know it,” answered Diane with pale lips. “But while I am dressing I
am asking myself all the time, ‘Will the Marquis be in front?’ If he
isn’t there, there doesn’t seem to me as if there were anyone in the
hall; then as soon as he comes in he seems to fill the hall and to be
on the stage with me. Pity me, Jean!”
“I do,” answered Jean, “from the bottom of my heart, and I have a
little pity for myself, too. But, Diane, where is your courage, your
resolution, of which you are always boasting?”
“It is here,” answered Diane, laying her hand upon her heart. “It is
that which keeps me away from him, which drags me to my room when I
want to go with the Marquis. It is that which makes me a victor every
hour, for I am forever struggling to keep away from him, and I _have_
kept away from him. But when he comes where I am--oh, Jean!”
Diane sat down on the rough box which held her stage wardrobe,
consisting of two costumes, and wept plentifully. Jean kneeled by her.
“But you won’t be a coward, Diane,” he cried desperately. “Keep on
struggling and fighting. The fellow is a scoundrel, that I assure you.
I know the kind of a fight you are making. I have had the same kind
ever since I knew you. Think what it is to me to take you in my arms
and then to throw you off as we do on the stage every night. Think what
it is to act when one feels it.”
Jean stopped. The love of one man matters little to a woman who is
desperately in love with another, but Diane, out of the depths of
her own agony, looked into Jean’s eyes and realized that some one
else could suffer besides herself. They both forgot that François was
changing his clothes on the other side of the piece of canvas and could
hear every word. Suddenly François’ head appeared above the canvas
partition which was only about six feet high, and with a convenient
upturned bucket François, who was a short man, could mount and see over
into the next canvas den.
“That’s the way it is,” cried François, laughing. “You know the
Spanish proverb, ‘I am dying for you and you are dying for him who is
dying for someone else.’ I haven’t even the privilege of taking you in
my arms, Diane, on the stage, like Jean. This is a cursed world!”
There can be no secrets in a travelling company of five persons between
whom there is seldom more than a canvas partition.
Diane did not stop crying, and Jean still knelt on the ground looking
at her. Presently he glanced up at François’ grinning face, and cried:
“François, because you never loved a woman, you don’t know what it
means, to see her wretched and foolish and crying her eyes out for a
worthless dog, as Diane is doing now.”
“True, true, true!” laughed François, “I have done many foolish things
in my life, but I never intend to love any woman, especially Diane. Ha,
ha! Here, take this stage dagger and kill yourselves like a couple of
lovers in grand opera. It is not much of a weapon, but it will do the
job. It is the only way out of a three-cornered love affair.”
“François, you are so unfeeling,” said Diane, angrily, and drying her
eyes.
As the stage dagger came clattering over the canvas, François got down
off his bucket on the other side.
“Never loved a woman!” muttered François to himself. He had a habit
common to imaginative persons, of talking to himself when he was under
a great stress. “There they go off together. I wonder if they have
taken the dagger with them.”
He sat motionless, gazing into the dingy little unframed mirror hung
against the canvas, apparently fascinated by the glare in his own eyes.
“Don’t stand on that bucket again, François, my man,” he said to
himself between his clenched teeth. “If the dagger is on the floor-- It
is a clumsy thing, a blunt and horrid weapon to use on one’s self.”
In vain he tried to hold himself by his own glance into the mirror, as
one man tries to cow another by his gaze. He backed away until his foot
struck the overturned bucket; then he jumped up and glanced over into
Diane’s dressing-room. No, there was no dagger on the floor; there was
nothing but the box, which was locked, and a bit of a mirror, a towel
and soap, and a comb and brush. As François looked, his eyes lost their
wild expression. He breathed freely like a man released from the grip
of a wild beast. He even laughed, and in his excess of relief, turned
a double somersault on the floor, and putting on his shabby coat and
shabbier hat, went off whistling gaily. As he came out of the narrow,
black alley entrance which did duty for a stage entrance, he saw the
Marquis Egmont de St. Angel stepping across the street toward the Hotel
Metropole. He had gone through his usual performance of watching Diane
go home.
“Halloo! my dear Egmont of the Holy Angels,” cried François, “I will
take supper with you to-night if you will ask me, or if you will pay
for the supper, I won’t even stand on the asking.”
“Come along, then,” answered the Marquis. He was willing to pay for
François’ supper in order to talk about Diane.
The Marquis got a table in an alcove of the pavilion so he could talk
freely. The contrast between the two men was extreme--the Marquis, in
his splendid dragoon uniform, for he had just come from a reception
at the house of the general commanding, and François in his shabby
clothes. The waiters, who knew that François was a juggler at a cheap
place, nevertheless treated him with an odd kind of respect due to a
note of command which his voice had never wholly lost.
“I had to go to a dull reception at the house of the general,” said the
Marquis when he and François were seated at a little table, “and got
away as soon as I could. What a bore are those pink and white girls,
clinging to their mothers’ skirts and as ignorant as children! They are
quite colorless after Mademoiselle Diane.”
“Diane isn’t ignorant. She could not well be,” replied François,
sipping his wine. “But in mind she has an eternal innocence. There is a
great difference between the two things--ignorance and innocence.”
“I don’t know about that,” replied the Marquis, whose mind was low,
and who was not so intelligent as François. “That capricious little
music hall devil has given me more trouble to bring around to my way
of thinking than half the girls I have met to-night. But she keeps me
dancing after her, damn her, the little darling!”
François laughed at this, and laughed still more when the Marquis
inquired anxiously:
“I think it is that great, hulking fellow who sings and dances with her
that frightens her. Perhaps she is in love with him; women are such
crazy creatures!”
“Oh, no,” cried François, beginning to attack the supper which the
waiter had brought, “Diane is not in love with Jean, nor with me
either, strange to say, although I was born both handsome and rich.”
The Marquis pushed his chair back a little, and the waiter being out of
hearing, brought his fist down on the table.
“The infernal, proud, presumptuous little devil probably thinks she can
marry me! Very well, let us see who will beat at that game. Just look
at this impudent note she wrote me.”
The Marquis tore from his breast Diane’s cool little note, the only one
he had ever had from her.
“She doesn’t go out to supper after the performance. She remains with
Monsieur and Madame Grandin, her friends.”
The Marquis howled with laughter at this, and then kept on.
“And she a singer and dancer in the cheapest music hall in this dull
old town of Bienville! Oh, she has got it into her silly head that by
holding off she can become a marquise, but she won’t.”
“But you are carrying around her note in your breast pocket,” suggested
François.
“Oh, yes, I am fool enough for that,” calmly admitted the Marquis,
putting the note back in his breast pocket and drawing his chair up to
the table. “I can feel it, I can feel it there, although it is only a
bit of paper. Who was her father, François?”
“The village hatter,” replied François, “like the father of Adrienne
Lecouvreur. That was her prosperous period, when she enjoyed the
advantages of a polite education at the village school. Then her
parents died, and she was taken to the house of an uncle who owned
three acres of ground, and Diane worked in the cabbage garden and
tended geese.”
“And where did she learn to sing, and all those devlish, captivating
little ways of hers on the stage?”
“From Nature, the mighty mother of us all. She took some singing
lessons from the village teacher, and used to sing at country fairs
after she was sixteen. Then, a couple of years ago, we found her and
took her into our company. Singing on the stage was taught her by Jean
Leroux, her partner, and I taught her something of acting and little
stage tricks, but I must say she was a very apt pupil. She has got it
into her head to go to Paris and study for the grand opera, but she
has no grand opera voice, and has two hundred and sixty-six francs to
pay her expenses.” For Diane had palmed off the grand opera story on
François as well as on Jean, when really her mind was set upon a big
music hall.
“Everything that you tell me,” said the Marquis, “shows how admirably
unfitted this wide mouthed, skinny girl is to become the Marquise
Egmont de St. Angel.”
“You have hit upon her name,” cried François, laughing, “for we call
her Skinny. Our little Skinny a marquise! And your title is worth at
least two million francs in the open market. As for yourself, I may,
with the frankness of a relative, say you would be dear at two hundred
francs.”
“Has anybody ever told you that you were extremely impudent, M. le
Bourgeois, as you call yourself?”
“Occasionally,” replied François. “Here, waiter.” The waiter came from
a distance. “Take this chicken away,” said François,--“it was hatched
during the First Empire, I think,--and bring us one that isn’t old
enough for military service.”
The Marquis rambled on, admiring and cursing Diane all through the
supper.
When François got home an hour later and passed Diane’s door, he saw a
thread of light under it, and the door opened gently, showing Diane’s
pale, dispirited face. She knew well enough where François had been;
nobody except the Marquis had so far asked him to supper.
“Yes,” said François in a whisper, answering the question in poor
Diane’s eyes, “I have been to supper with him. It always raises me
in my own esteem, for I see that I, François le Bourgeois, born in a
chateau, and now juggler and acrobat when I am sober enough, am a far
more respectable character than the Marquis Egmont de St. Angel; he has
no more brains than my shoe, and is the handsomest young officer I ever
saw. I am ashamed of him as a relative.”
Diane slammed the door angrily in François’ face.
The days and the weeks crept on, and the performances in the
ex-furniture shop maintained and even increased their popularity.
Diane could have had supper every evening with an officer or with a
young advocate or any of the gay dogs who are found in every town, but
Diane, being a shrewd little person, concluded that it was worth more
as an advertisement to decline these offers than to accept them. Soon
it became the subject of numerous wagers among the gilded youth of
Bienville as to who should first have the triumph of entertaining Diane
at supper. Presently the wagers were changed; it was a question whether
any of them could succeed in this commendable project.
This sudden popularity of Diane by no means weakened the devotion of
the Marquis de St. Angel. She still turned an unseeing eye and a deaf
ear toward him, although her heart beat wildly and her pulses were
racing. One person profited by this--François. He could get supper
at any time out of the Marquis by merely telling about Diane, and
especially of the notes and letters she received, and even the presents
which she haughtily returned. The Marquis continued to pursue her and
to damn her for an affected prude and subtle advertiser, and not half
as handsome as a plenty of other ladies in her profession who were not
so obdurate.
Grandin at first bitterly reproached Diane for not encouraging the
Marquis and the other young bloods, but in the course of time he came
around to her opinion.
“It’s much better advertising,” said Diane. “If I should go out to
supper with one of these young gentlemen, the box office receipts would
fall off fifty francs at least. And think, Grandin, how nice it is for
you to have all these people following us and looking at you because
you are my manager.”
“True,” replied Grandin. “I have been photographed, actually
photographed when I appeared upon the street.”
One day in midwinter two great honors were paid the Grandin company of
jugglers, acrobats, and singers. A card was brought up to the little
sitting room where Diane and Madame Grandin were making a suit of
stage clothes for Grandin, who was not only without his coat, but also
_sans-culotte_. It was a beautiful card inscribed Captain, the Marquis
Egmont de St. Angel, Twenty-fifth Regiment of Chasseurs. The two
Grandins and Diane were immediately beside themselves. Diane, who had
on a large white apron, took it off and put it on again, frantically,
and rushed to the little mirror to tidy her hair when it all came
tumbling down her back in a glorious mass. Grandin tore the pinned-up
jacket and short trousers off and made a dash for his clothes which
Madame Grandin seized and withheld violently, mistaking them in her
agitation for the stage clothes. In the midst of the commotion, while
the Marquis was cooling his heels in the narrow passage below, François
passed him and walked upstairs to the little sitting room.
“He is downstairs!” shrieked Diane incoherently, trying with trembling
fingers to put up her rich hair. “He is downstairs, and Jean didn’t
want us to take this sitting room! He said we didn’t need it, and now
Madame Grandin won’t give Grandin his trousers, and I don’t know what I
shall do!”
François, however, with his usual coolness, knew exactly what to do.
He thrust Grandin into his own room, threw the scissors and the work
things and scraps into Diane’s apron, which he gathered up and flung
after Grandin, and going to the top of the stairs called out, laughing:
“Come up, my Marquis Egmont of the Holy Angels.”
The Marquis walked in smiling, having heard all of the commotion.
Madame Grandin greeted him with deep agitation, having never received a
marquis before, as indeed, neither had Diane.
Diane’s usually pale face was scarlet, and she sat as demurely as a
nun on the edge of her chair, with downcast eyes, responding “Yes,
m’sieu,” and “No, m’sieu” to the Marquis’ chaste remarks. François
remained so as to keep Madame Grandin and Diane from a total collapse.
As he looked at the Marquis it occurred to François that any girl might
fall in love with so splendid an exterior. He was certainly the most
highbred-looking man François had ever seen, not excepting himself.
The Marquis’ undress uniform fitted him to perfection, and showed the
supple beauty of his straight and sinewy figure. Then his voice was
peculiarly sweet, not big and sonorous like Grandin’s, but rather low
with a crispness in it like a man accustomed to giving orders.
They talked about nothings, as people do when the ladies of a party are
not quite at ease. The Marquis was perfectly at ease, however, and had
a laughing devil in his eye which responded promptly to the laughing
devil in the eyes of François. Diane’s voice was ever peculiarly
sweet, and it occurred to François that the talk between her and the
Marquis was like a duet of birds in spring, or the rich notes of the
’cello blending with the sharp sweetness of the violin. And they were
just the right height, and Diane was dark-eyed and black-haired and
white-skinned, while the Marquis was chestnut-haired and blond and
bronzed.
The Marquis complained gently to Diane that she would never accept his
invitations to supper, and asked her if she would do him the honor to
sup with him that night, when he hoped also to have the company of
Monsieur and Madame Grandin and Monsieur le Bourgeois.
“I thank you, no,” replied Diane sweetly. “I made a resolution before
we came to Bienville not to accept any invitations to supper.”
“Oh, Diane!” burst out the excellent and too truthful Madame Grandin,
“you did no such thing. You only took the notion after you got here,
and besides, you were never asked to supper before by a marquis.”
“I made the resolution in my own mind,” replied Diane suavely, who had
never dreamed of such a thing in her life. “It is most kind of the
Marquis, but I can make no exception.”
The Marquis protested, backed up not only by Madame Grandin, but by
Grandin himself, who was listening attentively at the door behind the
Marquis, and put out his head, grimacing and gesticulating wildly in
protest to Diane. The Marquis saw it all in the little mirror, and
burst out laughing, at which Grandin’s head suddenly disappeared. But
Diane was relentless, and the Marquis had to leave, asking permission,
however, to call again.
“You may call every day,” replied Madame Grandin. “My husband thinks
it would be a very good thing for the show to have a marquis attentive
to Diane. She is a perfectly good girl, I assure you. We made inquiries
about her character before we engaged her.”
When the Marquis and François were out in the street and laughing
together, François said:
“Beware of Diane! She is the most determined creature I ever saw in my
life. If she makes up her mind to marry you, you are lost.”
François then walked off, taking his way past the Bishop’s palace, a
shabby old stone house with wide iron gates before it. The Bishop was
just coming out for his daily walk, and François, who was as bold with
a bishop as with a rat-catcher, went up and said:
“I perceive your Grace does not recognise me. I am--or I was--François
d’Artignac of the Chateau d’Artignac on the upper Loire.”
The Bishop, a gentle, unsophisticated man, overflowing with
benevolence, shook hands cordially with François, saying:
“Ah, it is a great pleasure to me to meet one of your family, for I and
my brother, General Bion, were both born and reared upon that estate
where our father and our grandfather and our great-grandfathers for
many generations back were laborers. We do not seek to disguise our
humble origin, my brother and I. We were always well treated by the
family of d’Artignac as far back as we can remember, and I am happy and
proud to meet a representative of that family.”
The Bishop was now out of the gate, and François and himself were
promenading together along the street, one of the best in the little
town.
“I remember you and your brother well,” answered François. “You were
always reading and improving yourselves, and taking all the prizes in
the village school.”
“We did our best,” replied the Bishop modestly. “But I recollect you,
the little François, the beautiful boy in dainty clothes, that used to
walk in the meadows with a footman behind you, while my brother and I
kept the cows. Oh, they were happy days!”
François, by design, led the Bishop directly past the lodgings of the
Grandin company, and looking up at the window, saw the noses of Grandin
and his wife and Diane glued to the window-pane. They also passed
Jean, who bowed respectfully to the Bishop and then thrust his tongue
in his cheek on the sly to François.
Meanwhile François had told a pretty story of his downfall in the
world, and his resolute determination to earn a living when he had lost
all his property and had been repudiated by his family. He did not
mention various little episodes with regard to raising money through
means prohibited by the law, drunkenness, and a few other shortcomings.
He gave as a reason for his change of name the desire to spare the
noble house of d’Artignac the mortification of such a fall.
Directly opposite the Hotel Metropole they met General Bion, a stiff,
discerning person, who had a low opinion of his brother the Bishop’s
insight into human nature.
“Brother,” said the Bishop, “here is an old acquaintance of ours in
our boyhood. We could not call him a friend, because he was so far
above us in position, being of the house of d’Artignac. He has had many
misfortunes which give him only greater claim upon us.”
General Bion looked suspiciously at François, with a dim recollection
of having heard that François’ family had never been proud of him. His
greeting, therefore, was rather cool, although being a man of sense he
promptly referred to the fact that his father had been a laborer upon
the estate of François’ father.
“He calls himself Le Bourgeois now, for his stage name,” said the good
Bishop. “I think he shows a true spirit of Christian humility.”
The General made no response to this, which caused the Bishop to
show François the greater kindness, asking him to breakfast the next
morning, which François promptly accepted.
When François returned to his lodgings, the story of his grandeur had
already preceded him, and all his fellow-players, except Jean, were
overcome with the magnificence which was being showered upon them. Jean
said good-humoredly:
“Now, François, don’t play any tricks on the good old Bishop. He is as
innocent as a lamb, and it would be a sin to trick him.”
François took no offence at this, whatever.
But François was not the only one of them who walked that day with a
distinguished person. In the late afternoon, although the day had
grown dark and a brown fog was creeping up from the river and the
low-lying meadows, Diane went for the walk which she religiously
consecrated to her complexion. She took her way past the Bishop’s
palace through the best quarter of the town, indulging herself in
dreams of the time when she would be the mistress of a mansion like the
big stone houses, with gardens in front, in which the aristocracy of
Bienville resided. Presently she came to the gates of the park, which
she entered. It was so quiet and so deserted by the nursemaids and
the children, because of the damp and the fog, that Diane could think
uninterruptedly of the Marquis. The great clumps of evergreen shrubbery
loomed large in the dimness of the fog, and the bare trees were lost in
the mist. Diane entered a little heart-shaped maze of cedars, cut flat,
and towering high over her head on each side. Here indeed was solitude;
not a sound from the near-by town broke the silence, and the darkness,
which was not the darkness of night, was like that of another world.
She threaded the winding paths quickly and presently found herself in
the heart of the maze, and sat down on an iron bench. Then, to shut out
the world more completely, that she might think only of the Marquis,
she put up her muff to her eyes.
As she sat lost in a delicious reverie, she felt two strong hands
taking her own two hands and removing them gently from her face. It was
the Marquis, who was so close to her that even in the pearly mist she
could distinguish his face. Never had he looked so handsome to Diane.
His military cap was set jauntily over his laughing eyes, and his trim,
soldierly figure, with his cavalry cloak hanging over one shoulder, was
grace itself.
Poor Diane!
Having taken her hands from her face, the Marquis laid his mustache on
Diane’s red lips in a long and clinging kiss, and then sat down beside
her, drawing her trembling and palpitating close to him. It was like a
bird in the snare of the fowler.
“I saw you and followed you,” he said after a while. “You cannot escape
me; but why are you so cruel to me?”
“Because I must be,” answered poor Diane, trembling more and more.
“Everybody’s past is known some time or other, and when the time comes
that the newspaper reporters begin to ask about me, I don’t want to
have anything ugly in my past.”
At this, the Marquis, who knew much about women, laughed.
“That is always the way,” he said. “You women think much more of your
reputation than you do of your virtue. No woman kills herself because
she has yielded to her lover. It is only one of three things that
drives her to suicide afterward. The first is the dread of being found
out; the second is to be deserted; and the third is starvation. But
there is no record of any woman killing herself for the mere loss of
her virtue, which shows that modesty is more highly valued than virtue
by women themselves. Is that not true?”
Diane looked at him bewildered. Was it true?
“All I know is,” she said obstinately, “that I don’t intend there
shall be anything in my past that anybody can twit me about. I would
rather die. You may call it either modesty or virtue, but it is
stronger with me than life or death.”
The Marquis looked at her curiously, and saw in her eyes that
peculiar, deadly obstinacy and resolution which was Diane’s strongest
characteristic.
“I once read in a book,” kept on Diane, holding off a little from
Egmont, “that the first time a certain royal prince saw Rachel Felix
act, he wrote something on a card--I am ashamed to tell you what it
was--and sent it to her back of the stage, and she laughed, and invited
him to come to see her. If I had been in her place, I would have killed
him!”
“Killing is rather difficult for a woman,” replied the Marquis,
laughing a little uncomfortably.
Diane rose and stood before him, and seemed to grow taller as she spoke.
“God would have shown me the way,” she said. “Jael had only a nail,
but she killed the enemy of her people, and Judith cut off the head of
Holofernes, in his camp, surrounded by his guards.”
The light in Diane’s eyes startled the Marquis. But it melted into a
dovelike softness, when Egmont drew her once more to his side.
“I suppose,” he said, “you adorable little devil, that you want to
bully me into marrying you?”
“No,” answered Diane, “I am so much in love with you that I don’t want
to bully you into anything; only it is marriage or nothing. I don’t
know why I say this, or feel this, but I tell you it is as fixed as the
stars. You have a power over me so far and no farther.”
Diane, as she said this, laid her head contentedly on the Marquis’
shoulder, and his lips sought hers.
And so half an hour passed in the reproaches and confessions of the
woman who loves and the man who pretends he loves. The mist was growing
colder and more dense. It was as if they were alone in a white,
mysterious, soundless world inhabited only by themselves.
Presently, as Diane lay on the Marquis’ breast, there sounded afar off
the faint echo of a church bell from the other world which they had
forgotten. At the sound, Diane suddenly and violently wrenched herself
from the Marquis’ arms and stood upon her feet. Two thoughts raced
through her mind, one equally as important as the other. The first was
the reproach of the church bell that she had allowed the Marquis to
kiss her lips and put his arm about her. And the second was the iron
discipline of the stage which drags men and women apart when it seems
like the tearing of a heart in two; which calls them from death-beds;
which makes them report at the theatre when they are more dead than
alive.
“There is the cathedral bell,” cried Diane in a choking voice, “and it
tells me that I have been a wicked girl, and that I may be late for the
performance.”
The Marquis stood up too, laughing at the jumble of ideas in Diane’s
mind, but the next moment she was gone, speeding in and out of the
maze. In her agitation and the white gloom of the mist she lost her
way, and the Marquis, following her, though unable to find her, could
hear her sobbing on the other side of the hedge as she ran wildly about
trying to find the outlet. At last, however, she escaped and was in the
open path running toward the park gates.
The Marquis took his way leisurely after her, not smiling like a
successful lover, but grinding his teeth and cursing both her and
himself. Was it possible that this presumptuous, impudent little
creature meant to force him to marry her?
Diane got back to her lodging in time for supper with the Grandins,
Jean, and François. François amused and delighted them all, telling
them of his interview with the Bishop.
“To-morrow,” François said, “I shall be breakfasting in distinguished
company, with the Bishop. He asked me, and I accepted, you may depend
upon it.”
“What an advertisement!” cried Grandin, with an eye to business. “If
only you could manage to get it into the newspapers!”
“Then he wouldn’t be asked to the palace any more,” responded the
practical Jean. “There is a limit to advertising, Grandin, which you
never know.”
“We could say,” said Grandin, meditating, “that François was passing
the Bishop’s palace and fell down and hurt himself, and was taken
within by the Bishop’s servants. Anything will do, just to have it
known that François has been at the palace.”
“Oh, Grandin!” cried Madame Grandin, “how can you invent such lies?”
They were all so interested in the story of François and his grand
acquaintances, that no one except Jean noticed how silent Diane
was, and that she ate no supper, although her appetite was usually
remarkably good. Jean saw that something had happened, but mindful of
that extraordinary loyalty to art of which the theatrical profession is
the great model, forebore to ask, lest he should agitate her more.
As Diane and Jean were always partners, they invariably had a love
scene in whatever they played together. To-night Diane played the love
scene very badly, so badly that the audience noticed it, and she got
very little applause. That waked her up, and she picked up her part, as
it were, and played it with a renewed spirit that put the audience once
more into a good humor with her.
When the performance was over, Diane was a long time in dressing to
go home, and the Grandins and François had already gone. Jean, in his
shabby, every-day clothes, was waiting for her at the stage entrance.
“I am glad you took yourself by the throat,” he said to her grimly, as
they picked their way through the mist which still hung over the town,
in which the gas lamps made only a little yellow ring. “I thought the
scene was gone at one moment, and expected you to be hissed.”
“Never!” cried Diane, for once thoroughly frightened. “But Jean, I
hate love scenes on the stage.”