XXXIII
It seemed to Dunoisse that he had always known her, always waited for her to reveal herself just in this manner, as she rose up amidst the crisping rustle of innumerable little flounces, outstretched the white arm partly veiled by the scarf of black flowered lace—shed the brilliance of her look upon him, and smiled like a naughty angel or a sweet mischievous child, saying in a soft voice that was strange to his ears and yet divinely familiar:
“So we meet at last?”
He found no better reply than:
“You were not at home, Madame, when I paid my visit of ceremony.”
“I detest visits of ceremony,” she said, and her tone robbed the words of harshness.
“Do you then turn all unknown visitors from your doors?” Dunoisse queried. Her smile almost dazzled him as she returned:
“No, Monsieur ... I turn them into friends.” Adding, as he stood confounded at the vast possibilities her words suggested: “And I have wished to know you.... My husband has told me much.... But in these times of disturbance, how is it possible to be social? One can only remain quiescent, and look on while History is made.”
“I have been quiescent enough, Heaven knows!—for nearly a week past,” said Dunoisse, “without even the consolation of looking on.”
Her shadowy glance was full of kindness.
“I know!... Poor boy!” She added quickly: “Do not be offended at my calling you a boy. I am twenty-five—nearly!... Old enough to be your elder sister, Monsieur.... Have you sisters? If so, I should like to call them friends.”
“I had one sister,” said Dunoisse, his eyes upon a night-black curl that lay upon an ivory shoulder. “She died very young—a mere infant.”
“Poor little angel!”
Henriette de Roux rather objected to children—thought them anything but little angels. But her white bosom heaved and fell, and a glittering tear trembled an instant on a sable eyelash. And so infectious is sentiment, that Hector, who dedicated a regret to the memory of the departed cherub on an average once a year, echoed her sigh.
The silver-coated roach, contemplating the dangling bait of the angler, is quite aware that for innumerable generations the members of his family have succumbed to the attraction of the pill of paste that conceals the barbed hook. Yet he deliberately sucks it in, and is borne swiftly upwards, leaving in the round-eyed family circle a gap that is soon refilled.
That tear of Henriette’s was the bait. When her sigh was echoed, it was to the feminine fisher of men significant as the slow, deliberate curtsey of the float is to the angler for the slimy children of the river. Variable as a fay in a rainbow, she smiled dazzlingly upon the young man; and said, touching him lightly upon the arm with her Spanish fan and leaning indolently back in the fauteuil that wasalmost completely hidden beneath the rippling wavelets of her purplish-gray flounces:
“Look round. Tell me what flower is most in evidence to-night?”
Thus bidden, Dunoisse turned his glance questingly about. A moment gave the answer. The corsage of every lady present, no matter of what costly hothouse blooms her bouquet and wreath might be composed, had its bunch of violets; the coat of every second man displayed the Napoleonic emblem. His eyes went back to meet an intent look from Henriette. She said:
“You do not wear that flower, Monsieur!”
He returned her look with the answer:
“My military oath was of allegiance to a King. And though the King be discrowned and the Republic claims my services, I know nothing of an Empire—at least, not yet.”
The irony stung. She bit her scarlet lip, and said, with a bright glance that triumphed and challenged:
“Unless the winds and tides have conspired against us, the Emperor will be in Paris to-night.”
“Indeed!” The reports bandied, the bets made at the Club, came back upon Dunoisse’s memory. He said:
“Then Prince Louis-Napoleon has determined to risk the step?”
She answered with energy:
“He is of a race that think little of risking. The son of Marshal Dunoisse should know that.... Ah! how it must grieve your father to know you indifferent to the great traditions of that noble family!”
Hector answered her with a darkening forehead:
“My father congratulated me upon good service rendered to the cause of Imperialism—only yesterday.” He added as Madame de Roux opened her beautiful eyes inquiringly: “He is of the comprehensive majority who hold me guilty of that deed of bloodshed at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. He——”
Dunoisse broke off. She had become so pale that he knew a shock of terror. Deep shadows filled the caves whence stared a pair of haunted eyes. There were hollows in her cheeks—lines about her mouth that he had never dreamed of.... A broken whisper came from the stiff white lips that said:
“Do not seem to notice.... It is the ... heat!...”
Hector, exquisitely distressed, forced his gaze elsewhere. Long seconds passed, during which he could hear her breathing; then the voice said:
“Thanks!... You may look at me now!”
He found her still pale, but without that bleak look of horror that had appalled him. She tried to smile with lips that had partly regained their hue. She asked, averting her gaze from him:
“Your father.... What did you answer to him when he—said that—that you had rendered good service to the Imperial cause?”
“I told him,” Dunoisse answered her, “that I could testify to my innocence of that guilty deed before Heaven. And that I should assert it before the tribunals of men.”
She murmured in a tone that gave the impression of breathlessness:
“There will be an official inquiry?”
Hector returned:
“This evening, when I returned to my quarters to change my dress, I received a summons to appear before a Court-Martial of Investigation, to be held at the Barracks in three days’ time. Perhaps with this cloud hanging over me I should not have accepted your invitation? But I thought ... I imagined ... you could not fail to know!”
She said, with a transient gleam of mockery in her glance, though her eyebrows were knitted as though in troubled reflection:
“Husbands do not tell their wives everything. And I am an Imperialist, like your father.... How should I blame you for an act that counts to us? But we will speak of this later.... Here is Colonel de Roux....”
Dunoisse’s eyes involuntarily sought and found de Roux. The Comtesse made a signal with her Spanish fan. And as if a wire had been jerked, the purple-haired, blood-shot-eyed, elderly, rouged dandy, the center of a knot of ladies to whom he was playing the gallant, excused himself and crossed to his wife’s side. He had been all cordiality and civility that morning in his office at the Barracks in the Rue de l’Assyrie; he was cordial and civil now, as he insinuated his arm through Dunoisse’s and led him thisway and that amongst his guests, presenting him to ladies, introducing men.
Limited as his opportunities had been of moving in those social circles to which his mother’s rank, no less than the Marshal’s wealth, would have given Dunoisse admission, he displayed no awkwardness—was not handicapped by the shyness that is the young man’s bane. His perfect muscular development lent easiness and grace to his movements; the open candor and simplicity that characterized his regard and address might have been subtlety, they disarmed criticism so completely and won upon prejudice so well.
The gathering in the de Roux’ drawing-room represented all ranks and classes of Society, severely excepting the exclusive circle of the Faubourg Saint Germain. There were Dukes of Empire creation with their Duchesses, there were Peers of the Monarchy now defunct. Politicians, financiers, editors, and dandies rubbed shoulders with stars of the stage, and comets of the concert-room; painters great and small, and fashionable men of letters. You saw the youngest of all famous poets with his radiant blue eyes, slim upright figure, auburn locks and beard, and unquenchable air of youth. And Chopin, animated, and glowing with the joy of life, illuminated with the fire of genius, hectic with the pulmonary disease that was to kill him a year later; and Liszt, iron gray, fantastically thin, at the height of his infatuation for Madame Daniel Stern. You saw Delacroix in the first bloom of success, and Ingrés, long established on his throne of fame, gray-haired and stout, robust and plain, commonplace until he opened his mouth to speak—lifted his hands in gesture. And above all towered the massive figure and leonine head of the man who had been speaking when Dunoisse had been announced.
But the majority of the male guests belonged to what Louis Napoleon was afterwards to dub the “cream of fast and embarrassed Colonels,” and many of the women were of the dashing, dazzling, voluptuous type that de Musset had immortalized by a single word. Thelionneof 1848 was ere long to be transformed into thecocodetteof the Second Empire, and in the process was to lose the gracethat is woman’s womanliest attribute, and shed the last feather of the angel’s wing.
Free from self-consciousness as he was, Dunoisse, with the taint of the blood shed upon the Boulevard des Capucines hot upon his memory, was not slow in awakening to the fact that the majority of the women present regarded him with peculiar interest; and that many of their male companions turned eyeglasses his way. Questions, answers, comments, dealing with the abhorrent subject came to his ears as he moved forwards, bruised like pelting hailstones, stabbed with hornet-stings.... Several of the ladies curtseyed ... some of the gentlemen bowed low; more than one feathered dowager styled him “Serene Highness” and “Monseigneur.”... And with a rush of angry blood to his temples and forehead, darkening still further his tawny-reddish skin, and adding to the brilliance of his black-diamond eyes, the young man realized that the fact of Paris being in the throes of Red Revolution had not deprived, in such eyes as these, the newspaper-mooted question of the Widinitz Succession of its vulgar charm. And that, on the strength of the hateful episode at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, in combination with the intrigues of the Marshal, Sub-Adjutant Hector Dunoisse had become a personage to fawn upon and flatter, to invite and entertain.
The band of crape about his sleeve began to burn him. The now overcrowded drawing-rooms seemed suffocatingly hot. Madame de Roux had become the invisible, attractive nucleus of a crowd of civilian coats and blazing uniforms.... Dunoisse, alternately tempted by the thought of escape, teased by the desire to join that magic circle, was enduring the civilities of a group of ogling ladies and grinning exquisites with what outward patience he could muster, when he encountered, through a gap in the wall of heads and shoulders, the gaze of a pair of golden-bronze eagle eyes, glowing beneath a vast white forehead crowned with pale flowing locks of auburn hair.
For an instant he forgot his boredom, his desire to regain the side of Madame de Roux, or to escape from the perfumed, overheated rooms to the space and freedom of the Club, or the familiar loneliness of his rooms in theRue de la Chaussée d’Antin. He was grateful when a surge of the ever-thickening crowd of guests brought him within touch of the plainly-dressed, perfectly-mannered gentleman who was the elected chief and generalissimo of the Free Lances of Romance. But, as Dunoisse gained the Master’s side, the tall rounded shape of Madame de Roux swept by, leaning on the arm of a white-haired general officer in a brilliant Staff uniform ablaze with decorations. She never turned her face.... The night of her luxuriant tresses, the pale oval of her cheek, the dusky sweep of her eyelashes stamped themselves anew upon the young man’s consciousness, as her draperies, shimmering purplish gray as Oriental pearl through their veiling of black Spanish laces, swept across his feet. He felt once more that heavy knocking in the breast as though the curtain were going up upon the play.... And the scent of violets came to him with the breeze of her passing, strongly as though he stooped above the wet, dark, fragrant clusters in some woodland glade.... A knot of the purple blossoms had fallen from amongst her laces as she went by. They lay close to his foot. He stooped and picked them up with a hand that was not quite steady. And as he mechanically lifted the violets to his face, still looking after the swaying, smoothly-gliding figure, dwelling upon the beauty of a creamy nape upon which rested great coils of night-black hair, pierced with a diamond arrow, one heavy curl escaping, hiding in the delicate hollow between the rounded ivory shoulders, vanishing in thebertheof lace that framed their loveliness, he started, for Hugo spoke. The deep melodious voice said: