"Once, then--?" The Duc de Puysange seated himself beside his wife, and
took her hand.
"I--it was nothing." Her lashes fell, and dull color flushed through her
countenance.
"Between friends," the Duke suggested, "there should be no reservations."
"But it is such a pitiably inartistic little history!" the Duchess
protested. "Eh bien, if you must have it! For I was a girl once,--an
innocent girl, as given as are most girls to long reveries and bright,
callow day-dreams. And there was a man--"
"There always is," said the Duke, darkly.
"Why, he never even knew, mon ami!" cried his wife, and laughed, and
clapped her hands. "He was much older than I; there were stories about
him--oh, a great many stories,--and one hears even in a convent--" She
paused with a reminiscent smile. "And I used to wonder shyly what this
very fearful reprobate might be like. I thought of him with de Lauzun,
and Dom Juan, and with the Duc de Grammont, and all those other scented,
shimmering, magnificent libertines over whom les ingénues--wonder; only, I
thought of him, more often than of the others, I made little prayers for
him to the Virgin. And I procured a tiny miniature of him. And, when I came
out of the convent, I met him at my father's house. [Footnote: She was of
the Aigullon family, and sister to d'Agenois, the first and very politic
lover of Madame de la Tournelle, afterward mistress to Louis Quinze under
the title of Duchesse de Châteauroux. The later relations between the
d'Aigullons and Madame du Barry are well-known.] And that was all."
"All?" The Duc de Puysange had raised his swart eyebrows, and he slightly
smiled.
"All," she re-echoed, firmly. "Oh, I assure you he was still too youthful
to have any time to devote to young girls. He was courteous--no more. But I
kept the picture,--ah, girls are so foolish, Gaston!" The Duchess, with a
light laugh, drew upward the thin chain about her neck. At its end was a
little heart-shaped locket of dull gold, with a diamond sunk deep in each
side. She regarded the locket with a quaint sadness. "It is a long while
since I have seen that miniature, for it has been sealed in here," said
she, "ever since--since some one gave me the locket"
Now the Duc de Puysange took this trinket, still tepid and perfumed from
contact with her flesh. He turned it awkwardly in his hand, his eyes
flashing volumes of wonderment and inquiry. Yet he did not appear jealous,
nor excessively unhappy. "And never," he demanded, some vital emotion
catching at his voice--"never since then--?"
"I never, of course, approved of him," she answered; and at this point de
Puysange noted--so near as he could remember for the first time in his
existence,--the curve of her trailing lashes. Why but his wife had lovely
eyelashes, lashes so unusual that he drew nearer to observe them more at
his ease. "Still,--I hardly know how to tell you--still, without him the
world was more quiet, less colorful; it held, appreciably, less to catch
the eye and ear. Eh, he had an air, Gaston; he was never an admirable man,
but, somehow, he was invariably the centre of the picture."
"And you have always--always you have cared for him?" said the Duke,
drawing nearer and yet more near to her.
"Other men," she murmured, "seem futile and of minor importance, after
him." The lashes lifted. They fell, promptly. "So, I have always kept the
heart, mon ami. And, yes, I have always loved him, I suppose."
The chain had moved and quivered in his hand. Was it man or woman who
trembled? wondered the Duc de Puysange. For a moment he stood immovable,
every nerve in his body tense. Surely, it was she who trembled? It seemed
to him that this woman, whose cold perfection had galled him so long, now
stood with downcast eyes, and blushed and trembled, too, like any rustic
maiden come shamefaced to her first tryst.
"Hélène--!" he cried.
"But no, my story is too dull," she protested, and shrugged her shoulders,
and disengaged herself--half-fearfully, it seemed to her husband. "Even
more insipid than your comedy," she added, with a not unkindly smile. "Do
we drive this afternoon?"
"In effect, yes!" cried the Duke. He paused and laughed--a low and gentle
laugh, pulsing with unutterable content. "Since this afternoon, madame--"
"Is cloudless?" she queried.
"Nay, far more than that," de Puysange amended; "it is refulgent."
V
What time the Duchess prepared her person for the drive the Duke walked
in the garden of the Hôtel de Puysange. Up and down a shady avenue of
lime-trees he paced, and chuckled to himself, and smiled benignantly upon
the moss-incrusted statues,--a proceeding that was, beyond any reasonable
doubt, prompted by his happiness rather than by the artistic merits of
the postured images, since they constituted a formidable and broken-nosed
collection of the most cumbrous, the most incredible, and the most hideous
instances of sculpture the family of Puysange had been able to accumulate
for, as the phrase is, love or money. Amid these mute, gray travesties of
antiquity and the tastes of his ancestors, the Duc de Puysange exulted.
"Ma foi, will life never learn to improve upon the extravagancies of
romance? Why, it is the old story,--the hackneyed story of the husband and
wife who fall in love with each other! Life is a very gross plagiarist. And
she--did she think I had forgotten how I gave her that little locket so
long ago? Eh, ma femme, so 'some one'--'some one' who cannot be alluded to
without a pause and an adorable flush--presented you with your locket! Nay,
love is not always blind!"
The Duke paused before a puff-jawed Triton, who wallowed in an arid basin
and uplifted toward heaven what an indulgent observer might construe as a
broken conch-shell. "Love! Mon Dieu, how are the superior fallen! I have
not the decency to conceal even from myself that I love my wife! I am
shameless, I had as lief proclaim it from the house-tops. And a month
ago--tarare, the ignorant beast I was! Moreover, at that time I had not
passed a month in her company,--eh bien, I defy Diogenes and Timon to come
through such a testing with unscratched hearts. I love her. And she loves
me!"
He drew a deep breath, and he lifted his comely hands toward the pale
spring sky, where the west wind was shepherding a sluggish flock of clouds.
"O sun, moon, and stars!" de Puysange said, aloud: "I call you to witness
that she loves me! Always she has loved me! O kindly little universe! O
little kings, tricked out with garish crowns and sceptres, you are masters
of your petty kingdoms, but I am master of her heart!
"I do not deserve it," he conceded, to a dilapidated faun, who, though his
flute and the hands that held it had been missing for over a quarter of
a century, piped, on with unimpaired and fatuous mirth. "Ah, heart of
gold--demented trinket that you are, I have not merited that you should
retain my likeness all these years! If I had my deserts--parbleu! let us
accept such benefits as the gods provide, and not question the wisdom
of their dispensations. What man of forty-three may dare to ask for his
deserts? No, we prefer instead the dealings of blind chance and all the
gross injustices by which so many of us escape hanging"....