Still the suggestion haunted him. It would be a nuance too ridiculous, of
course, to care seriously for one's wife, and yet Hélène de Puysange
was undeniably a handsome woman. As they sat over the remains of their
dinner,--_à deux_, by the Duke's request,--she seemed to her husband quite
incredibly beautiful. She exhaled the effects of a water-color in discreet
and delicate tinctures. Lithe and fine and proud she was to the merest
glance; yet patience, a thought conscious of itself, beaconed in her eyes,
and she appeared, with urbanity, to regard life as, upon the whole, a
countrified performance. De Puysange liked that air; he liked the reticence
of every glance and speech and gesture,--liked, above all, the thinnish
oval of her face and the staid splendor of her hair. Here was no vulgar
yellow, no crass and hackneyed gold ... and yet there was a clarified and
gauzier shade of gold ... the color of the moon by daylight, say.... Then,
as the pleasures of digestion lapsed gently into the initial amenities of
sleep, she spoke.
"Monsieur," said she, "will you be pleased to tell me the meaning of this
comedy?"
"Madame," de Puysange answered, and raised his gloomy eyebrows, "I do not
entirely comprehend."
"Ah," said she, "believe me, I do not undervalue your perception. I have
always esteemed your cleverness, monsieur, however much"--she paused for
a moment, a fluctuating smile upon her lips,--"however much I may have
regretted its manifestations. I am not clever, and to me cleverness has
always seemed to be an infinite incapacity for hard work; its results
are usually a few sonnets, an undesirable wife, and a warning for one's
acquaintances. In your case it is, of course, different; you have your
statesmanship to play with--"
"And statesmen have no need of cleverness, you would imply, madame?"
"I do not say that. In any event, you are the Duc de Puysange, and the
weight of a great name stifles stupidity and cleverness without any
partiality. With you, cleverness has taken the form of a tendency to
intoxication, amours, and--amiability. I have acquiesced in this. But, for
the past month--"
"The happiest period of my life!" breathed the Duke.
"--you have been pleased to present me with flowers, bonbons, jewels, and
what not. You have actually accorded your wife the courtesies you usually
preserve for the ladies of the ballet. You have dogged my footsteps, you
have attempted to intrude into my bedroom, you have talked to me as--well,
very much as--"
"Much as the others do?" de Puysange queried, helpfully. "Pardon me,
madame, but, in one's own husband, I had thought this very routine might
savor of originality."
The Duchess flushed, "All the world knows, monsieur, that in your
estimation what men have said to me, or I to them, has been for fifteen
years a matter of no moment! It is not due to you that I am still--"
"A pearl," finished the Duke, gallantly,--then touched himself upon the
chest,--"cast before swine," he sighed.
She rose to her feet. "Yes, cast before swine!" she cried, with a quick
lift of speech. She seemed very tall as she stood tapping her fingers upon
the table, irresolutely; but after an instant she laughed and spread out
her fine hands in an impotent gesture. "Ah, monsieur," she said, "my father
entrusted to your keeping a clean-minded girl! What have you made of her,
Gaston?"
A strange and profoundly unreasonable happiness swept through the Duke's
soul as she spoke his given name for the first time within his memory.
Surely, the deep contralto voice had lingered over it?--half-tenderly,
half-caressingly, one might think.
The Duke put aside his coffee-cup and, rising, took his wife's soft hands
in his. "What have I made of her? I have made of her, Hélène, the one
object of all my desires."
Her face flushed. "Mountebank!" she cried, and struggled to free herself;
"do you mistake me, then, for a raddle-faced actress in a barn? Ah, les
demoiselles have formed you, monsieur,--they have formed you well!"
"Pardon!" said the Duke. He released her hands, he swept back his hair with
a gesture of impatience. He turned from his wife, and strolled toward a
window, where, for a little, he tapped upon the pane, his murky countenance
twitching oddly, as he stared into the quiet and sunlit street. "Madame,"
he began, in a level voice, "I will tell you the meaning of the comedy. To
me,--always, as you know, a creature of whims,--there came, a month ago, a
new whim which I thought attractive, unconventional, promising. It was to
make love to my own wife rather than to another man's. Ah, I grant you, it
is incredible," he cried, when the Duchess raised her hand as though to
speak,--"incredible, fantastic, and ungentlemanly! So be it; nevertheless,
I have played out my rôle. I have been the model husband; I have put away
wine and--les demoiselles; for it pleased me, in my petty insolence, to
patronize, rather than to defy, the laws of God and man. Your perfection
irritated me, madame; it pleased me to demonstrate how easy is this trick
of treating the world as the antechamber of a future existence. It pleased
me to have in my life one space, however short, over which neither the
Recording Angel nor even you might draw a long countenance. It pleased me,
in effect, to play out the comedy, smug-faced and immaculate,--for the
time. I concede that I have failed in my part. Hiss me from the stage,
madame; add one more insult to the already considerable list of those
affronts which I have put upon you; one more will scarcely matter."
She faced him with set lips. "So, monsieur, your boasted comedy amounts
only to this?"
"I am not sure of its meaning, madame. I think that, perhaps, the swine,
wallowing in the mire which they have neither strength nor will to leave,
may yet, at times, long--and long whole-heartedly--" De Puysange snapped
his fingers. "Peste!" said he, "let us now have done with this dreary
comedy! Beyond doubt de Soyecourt has much to answer for, in those idle
words which were its germ. Let us hiss both collaborators, madame."
"De Soyecourt!" she marveled, with, a little start. "Was it he who prompted
you to make love to me?"
"Without intention," pleaded the Duke. "He twitted me for my inability, as
your husband, to gain your affections; but I do not question his finest
sensibilities would be outraged by our disastrous revival of Philemon and
Baucis."
"Ah--!" said she. She was smiling at some reflection or other.
There was a pause. The Duc de Puysange drummed upon the window-pane; the
Duchess, still faintly smiling, trifled with the thin gold chain that hung
about her neck. Both knew their display of emotion to have been somewhat
unmodern, not entirely _à la mode_.
"Decidedly," spoke de Puysange, and turned toward her with a slight
grimace, "I am no longer fit to play the lover; yet a little while, madame,
and you must stir my gruel-posset, and arrange the pillows more comfortably
about the octogenarian."
"Ah, Gaston," she answered, and in protest raised her slender fingers, "let
us have no more heroics. We are not well fitted for them, you and I."
"So it would appear," the Duc de Puysange conceded, not without sulkiness.
"Let us be friends," she pleaded. "Remember, it was fifteen years ago I
made the grave mistake of marrying a very charming man--"
"Merci!" cried the Duke.
"--and I did not know that I was thereby denying myself the pleasure of his
acquaintance. I have learned too late that marrying a man is only the most
civil way of striking him from one's visiting-list." The Duchess hesitated.
"Frankly, Gaston, I do not regret the past month."
"It has been adorable!" sighed the Duke.
"Yes," she admitted; "except those awkward moments when you would insist on
making love to me."
"But no, madame," cried he, "it was precisely--"
"O my husband, my husband!" she interrupted, with a shrug of the shoulders;
"why, you do it so badly!"
The Duc de Puysange took a short turn about the apartment. "Yet I married
you," said he, "at sixteen--out of a convent!"
"Mon ami," she murmured, in apology, "am I not to be frank with you? Would
you have only the connubial confidences?"
"But I had no idea--" he began.
"Why, Gaston, it bored me to the very verge of yawning in my lover's
countenance. I, too, had no idea but that it would bore you equally--"
"Hein?" said the Duke.
"--to hear what d'Humières--"
"He squints!" cried the Duc de Puysange.
"--or de Créquy--"
"That red-haired ape!" he muttered.
"--or d'Arlanges, or--or any of them, was pleased to say. In fact, it was
my duty to conceal from my husband anything which might involve him in
duels. Now that we are friends, of course it is entirely different."
The Duchess smiled; the Duke walked up and down the room with the contained
ferocity of a caged tiger.
"In duels! in a whole series of duels! So these seducers besiege you
in platoons. Ma foi, friendship is a good oculist! Already my vision
improves."
"Gaston!" she cried. The Duchess rose and laid both hands upon his
shoulders. "Gaston--?" she repeated.
For a heart-beat the Duc de Puysange looked into his wife's eyes; then he
sadly smiled and shook his head. "Madame," said the Duke, "I do not doubt
you. Ah, believe me, I have comprehended, always, that in your keeping my
honor was quite safe--far more safe than in mine, as Heaven and most of the
fiends well know. You have been a true and faithful wife to a worthless
brute who has not deserved it." He lifted her fingers to his lips. De
Puysange stood very erect; his heels clicked together, and his voice was
earnest. "I thank you, madame, and I pray you to believe that I have never
doubted you. You are too perfect to err--Frankly, and between friends."
added the Duke, "it was your cold perfection which frightened me. You are
an icicle, Hélène."