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?