The incident left Undine with the baffled feeling of not being able to
count on any of her old weapons of aggression. In all her struggles for
authority her sense of the rightfulness of her cause had been measured
by her power of making people do as she pleased. Raymond's firmness
shook her faith in her own claims, and a blind desire to wound and
destroy replaced her usual business-like intentness on gaining her
end. But her ironies were as ineffectual as her arguments, and his
imperviousness was the more exasperating because she divined that some
of the things she said would have hurt him if any one else had said
them: it was the fact of their coming from her that made them innocuous.
Even when, at the close of their talk, she had burst out: "If you grudge
me everything I care about we'd better separate," he had merely answered
with a shrug: "It's one of the things we don't do--" and the answer had
been like the slamming of an iron door in her face.
An interval of silent brooding had resulted in a reaction of rebellion.
She dared not carry out her threat of joining her compatriots at the
Nouveau Luxe: she had too clear a memory of the results of her former
revolt. But neither could she submit to her present fate without
attempting to make Raymond understand his selfish folly. She had failed
to prove it by argument, but she had an inherited faith in the value of
practical demonstration. If he could be made to see how easily he could
give her what she wanted perhaps he might come round to her view.
With this idea in mind, she had gone up to Paris for twenty-four hours,
on the pretext of finding a new nurse for Paul; and the steps then taken
had enabled her, on the first occasion, to set her plan in motion. The
occasion was furnished by Raymond's next trip to Beaune. He went off
early one morning, leaving word that he should not be back till night;
and on the afternoon of the same day she stood at her usual post in the
gallery, scanning the long perspective of the poplar avenue.
She had not stood there long before a black speck at the end of the
avenue expanded into a motor that was presently throbbing at the
entrance. Undine, at its approach, turned from the window, and as she
moved down the gallery her glance rested on the great tapestries, with
their ineffable minglings of blue and rose, as complacently as though
they had been mirrors reflecting her own image.
She was still looking at them when the door opened and a servant ushered
in a small swarthy man who, in spite of his conspicuously London-made
clothes, had an odd exotic air, as if he had worn rings in his ears or
left a bale of spices at the door.
He bowed to Undine, cast a rapid eye up and down the room, and then,
with his back to the windows, stood intensely contemplating the wall
that faced them.
Undine's heart was beating excitedly. She knew the old Marquise was
taking her afternoon nap in her room, yet each sound in the silent house
seemed to be that of her heels on the stairs.
"Ah--" said the visitor.
He had begun to pace slowly down the gallery, keeping his face to the
tapestries, like an actor playing to the footlights.
"AH--" he said again.
To ease the tension of her nerves Undine began: "They were given by
Louis the Fifteenth to the Marquis de Chelles who--"
"Their history has been published," the visitor briefly interposed; and
she coloured at her blunder.
The swarthy stranger, fitting a pair of eye-glasses to a nose that was
like an instrument of precision, had begun a closer and more detailed
inspection of the tapestries. He seemed totally unmindful of her
presence, and his air of lofty indifference was beginning to make
her wish she had not sent for him. His manner in Paris had been so
different!
Suddenly he turned and took off the glasses, which sprang back into a
fold of his clothing like retracted feelers.
"Yes." He stood and looked at her without seeing her. "Very well. I have
brought down a gentleman."
"A gentleman--?"
"The greatest American collector--he buys only the best. He will not be
long in Paris, and it was his only chance of coming down."
Undine drew herself up. "I don't understand--I never said the tapestries
were for sale."
"Precisely. But this gentleman buys only this that are not for sale."
It sounded dazzling and she wavered. "I don't know--you were only to put
a price on them--"
"Let me see him look at them first; then I'll put a price on them," he
chuckled; and without waiting for her answer he went to the door and
opened it. The gesture revealed the fur-coated back of a gentleman
who stood at the opposite end of the hall examining the bust of a
seventeenth century field-marshal.