Loe raamatut: «Daughters of Belgravia; vol 3 of 3», lehekülg 5

“Ah!” he says, “and did they tell you more about me than my name?” he asks eagerly, for somehow he is very averse to her knowing that he is married.

“No,” she replies. “Nothing. Wait! They did say that you were not married.”

He flushes and is silent a second.

“They told you the truth,” he says calmly, but, lax as he is, his conscience gives a throb of compunction at denying the existence of Zai – Zai, who loves him with every inch of her heart. “But I must go now. I have been here too long already, Marguerite,” he adds rather abruptly.

“You are going?” she asks regretfully, and a tear glistens on her lash. “Do you know I believe I shall never see you again. Is this the only time – tell me the truth, it will be kinder! – that my eyes will look on your face?”

“No. Of course we shall meet again.”

“When?” she asks fervently.

“When? In a very few days, I trust.”

“Will you come here on Wednesday night to supper? Ah, do! Let me have some date to look forward to! Yet, no! Do not come! What use is it for us to meet again? Are you not as far removed from me as heaven from earth? as respectability from unrespectability? Say, is there not an obstacle between us two that we cannot surmount?”

Her lips are quivering. Her heart beats so loudly that he can almost count its throbs. Truly there is no acting in this. Marguerite has fallen in love with him at first sight, as he has done with her.

“There is no obstacle between us,” he whispers, once more denying his wife. “I will come on Wednesday.”

“You will?”

She holds out her hands to him, and as he clasps them closely, he bends his head and his lips nearly rest upon hers.

But it is only a passing madness. He is not quite lost yet. And Marguerite, as she looks up at him hastily, sees no trace of passion in his face.

When she is alone she kisses eagerly the hands he has held in his.

“He will come again, and again!” she says aloud. “He is not a man to stop at anything if inclination leads him. He spoke of my beauty. Oh! how I thank Heaven for it now —now that I know it will give me my heart’s desire yet!”

CHAPTER VII.
DEEPER AND DEEPER STILL

 
“If one should love you with real love —
Such things have been —
Things that your fair face knows nothing of
It seems – Faustine?
....
“Curled lips, long since half kissed away,
Still sweet and keen,
You’d give him poison, shall we say?
Or what – Faustine?”
 

They are much sought after, the little suppers that Mademoiselle Ange gives on Wednesday nights.

Dainty, récherché feasts, where the guests are chosen more for social than moral worth, and the cuisine is irreproachable.

Mademoiselle, with the tact of a hostess to the manner born, and the savoir-faire that she has learned goodness knows how, is careful that these small feasts shall savour rather of gay Bohemianism than the conventional dullness that some people deem inseparable from propriety.

But while she regulates the social element, she does not ignore sympathy between mind and body, and knowing that the nearest way to men’s hearts is through their palates, secures the services of a noted chef, who drives to the Rue Tronchet in his own chic brougham, and disburses himself of a hundred-guinea diamond ring before he commences the momentous operation of trussing an ortolan.

This Wednesday night most of the guests are assembled in the salon.

Lounging on a sofa is a superb brunette, perfectly dressed and bejewelled. She is Leonide Leroux, a dramatic star both in Paris and London. By her side, languidly stroking his moustache, sits Ivan Scoboloff, a Russian baron with more money than brains. Beside these are little Rose Marigny, soubrette at the Theatre des Galléries, Monsieur Chavard, dramatic critic and author, and Louis, Marquis de Belcour, a good-looking giant and as rich as Crœsus.

Mademoiselle Ange is not herself to-night. Lovely, of course, but with the sparkle of her beauty lacking, as she reclines in a red velvet chair, in an artistic pose, and gives small heed to the little tittle-tattle around.

The last Parisian scandal is discussed, the last mot of the coulisses related, but, contrary to her usual habit, Marguerite is evidently distraite, and every now and then she throws anxious glances towards the door.

The full light of the crystal chandelier falls upon the snowy white of her skin, the exquisite rose and opal tints of her lips and cheeks, and her large black eyes full of passion and fire.

The strongest glare can only show up her brilliance, and find no flaw or blemish in the marvellous colouring that looks as if it was Nature’s own handiwork.

All that the best Parisian modiste can do has been done for her, and she is exceptionally well got up this evening; for she has abandoned her usual preference for gorgeous hues and costly heavy materials, and her trailing skirts of purest white fall in cloud-like masses round her as she leans back with the mien of a young empress. Opals and brilliants fasten the laces on her bosom, and a single tropical flower, with blood-red petals, gleams near her slender throat.

Suddenly a radiant light flashes in her restless eyes. The portière is held back, and Lord Delaval enters.

As he approaches, a vivid flush of pleasure surges over her lovely face, and, as he takes her hand, she says, in a low, reproachful voice:

“I feared so much you were not coming, but you have come! Will you take me in?”

He offers her his arm and at this moment catches sight of De Belcour, who is looking at him with ill-concealed jealousy and vexation. He has met this man before, a year or two ago, and nods recognition, then, turning towards his companion, forgets his existence.

The portière is drawn aside, and they enter the supper-room. On the table are antique silver tripods holding rare hothouse flowers and richest fruit, vases of exquisite camellias of every colour are interspersed between, and the whole are lit up by the soft light of waxen tapers. The supper itself is one of those which has made Monsieur Hector a king of chefs. Meats have lost their identity in the elaboration of the flavouring, cunning dishes are ingeniously devised to give zest to appetites already satiated. Rhenish of the rarest bouquet and Comet claret, tribute from the cellar of a youthful Duc, contribute to the hilarious enjoyment of the company.

The talk is animated, bright sallies and sharp repartee and racy anecdotes succeed one another, and amidst it all, pleasant as it is, Lord Delaval’s conscience rather smites him for being where he is, while De Belcour waxes momentarily more wrathful at Mademoiselle Ange’s evident partiality for the comparative stranger – “ce milord Anglais!”

“Are these to-night’s spoils, Mademoiselle,” asks Ivan Scoboloff, taking a lovely red camellia bud from its vase and quietly putting it into his button-hole. “I believe all the conservatories are pillaged for your especial benefit, and you’ll turn Paris into a wilderness.”

“I am afraid my reign will last too short a while for that!” Marguerite laughs, but in a tone rather tinged with regret, as she carelessly plucks an exquisite Sofrano rose to pieces, that lies by her plate. “I am only the rage of an hour, the fashion of a season, you know!”

“If you did lay Paris waste, what matter?” asks De Belcour, “and while a laurel grows, you should have its tribute, for are you not the Queen of – Hearts?”

“I hate laurels, they are so gloomy, and I love flowers! though they are not so lasting! still I prefer them, and as for tributes, of course the praises of the public are for the singer and not for the woman! and I like it so. I love to be applauded when I sing. It is life and soul to me, but as for individual tributes, I don’t want them. I wonder why people pester me with baubles and with billets doux. Heaven knows I would rather be without them!” She speaks contemptuously, her eyes are scornful, and it is easy to see that she is absolutely in earnest.

“How inscrutable is woman!” Delaval remarks, with a little of his old cynicism; “she despises the admiration she does all her best to inspire, and repudiates the passion she has taken an immense trouble to create!”

“Inscrutable you call us?” Marguerite answers, her face sparkling with animation. “And yet you affect to read us so easily! We are not inscrutable, I think, but we are inconsistent perhaps – cold and passionate, selfish and self-denying, tender and heartless, kind and cold, a mixture of the serpent and the dove; gentle as a faithful hound when we love, fierce and relentless as the hawk to the quarry when we hate, or have cause for revenge!”

“A list of contradictions that prove you are inscrutable, ma belle!” observes Chavard, filling up his glass with Roussillion for the fifth time.

“I thought you knew us better; it is your trade,” Marguerite says carelessly, peeling a peach whose bloom is less lovely than her own. “I wonder when men who want to win our love will cease to woo us? The prize beyond a woman’s reach is always the most coveted; it has been so since Paradise; it will be so for all eternity!”

Her voice sinks lower as she says this, and there is quite a wistful look in her eyes as she turns them towards Delaval, that evinces them to be no affectation, but a true echo of her heart.

“Don’t let us talk of love, ma chère,” Leonide Leroux breaks in brightly. “It is the wettest blanket in the world. Love may be a charming companion, but we all know it is an intolerable master. It’s like this absinthe, delicious but dangerous; once let it get hold of you —eh bien!– the rest I know nothing about, but I have heard it is too terrible!”

“I cannot think what the devil people fall in love for,” Ivan Scoboloff murmurs languidly; “it’s an amusement that only suits boys and girls, but after five-and-twenty no sane man would think of such folly.”

“And yet I have seen you go in for it, although I fancy you have arrived at a little beyond twenty-five,” Chavard says quietly, with a meaning glance at Leonide Leroux.

“I am a girl, but I have never gone in for love,” Rose Marigny cries in her bird-like voice.

“That’s well done, Mademoiselle Rose; mind you keep to that. No love is half so sweet as caramels à la vanille or marrons glacés,” Mademoiselle Leroux answers, as she piles the above comestibles on her plate.

Meanwhile De Belcour joins very little in either conversation or laughter, and grows momentarily more ill at ease. Desperately jealous by nature, it irritates him almost beyond endurance to see Marguerite bestow her attention upon any other man.

Hitherto he has hugged to his bosom the notion that she is invariably cold – to him only she has been kind of late, and her kindness has made a great impression on him, simply from its contrast to the capricious manner she has towards others.

Is the love which he had begun to persuade himself she bore him nothing but a passing caprice after all – an amourette of an hour – to be abandoned when it has lost the zest of freshness? Irritation, wounded amour propre, fierce jealousy, all mingle together in his breast and make a formidable whole when the fear creeps on him that the woman he loves to fatuous stupidity sets so little value on his feelings that she is ready to sacrifice it to the gratification of a passing whim, the transient excitement of a new conquest.

For what else, he argues, and not without reason on his side, can prompt her to look and speak to Lord Delaval with eyes and lips that too truly simulate a love she cannot possibly feel for him, stranger as he is?

Every word, every glance she gives, tortures this impassioned, impetuous Frenchman, and he determines to dog her steps and her house to find out the mystery that drives him wild.

“When’s the new play coming out, Chavard?” Scoboloff asks, gloating, gourmet as he is, on the lusciousness of an apricot before him.

Chavard has written a play which his clique declare will take Paris by storm, and, intolerably vain of his brains, he is of their opinion.

“In about a month or two,” he answers.

“Shocking bad time for that sort of thing, isn’t it? No one will be left in Paris.”

“No one at all to speak of – only about a couple of millions!”

“Keep your smartness for your play, mon cher. Of course I meant no one in Society.”

“I don’t mind that. You swells are so phlegmatic, you see. The canaille laugh, and clap, and hoot, and shout at my work, and thoroughly appreciate my pet points, but the golden youth sleep always, snore even, through my best situations.”

“Quite true!” cries Leonide Leroux. “I have often noticed them yawn when I have been dying so beautifully in the Sphinx. What makes swells so sleepy, I wonder?”

“Affectation – a little ennui– and a great deal of dinner,” says Chavard.

“Let us go into the drawing-room and have some music,” Marguerite suggests, feeling possibly that at the supper-table she and Lord Delaval are too much en evidence.

So they all go, and Leonide Leroux sings them Il Bacio deliciously in a lovely soprano, while Marguerite lounges as usual in a large chair, and her eyes glance frequently at a group near the window of smokers, and which is composed of Scoboloff, Delaval and Rose Marigny, who puffs away prettily at a dainty Sultan doux, and evidently is no novice in the accomplishment.

Presently De Belcour draws near his hostess – De Belcour, with half his beauty spoiled by scowling eyes and a frown on his brow.

“Why waste your glances on people who don’t appreciate them?” he asks, in a low voice that has a sullen ring in it.

She laughs, and does not answer, so he pulls viciously at his long moustache to vent his anger on something, since he is afraid to vent it on her.

“You spoke the truth at supper to-night, Marguerite, when you said to woo a woman was a sure way not to win her; and yet, poets rave about the softness and the tenderness of women, and call them the link that unites earth with Heaven. Sapristi! for cold-blooded cruelty, for passionless devilment, a woman is to a man what a hawk is to a dove, a tigress to a tame cat!”

Marguerite elevates her pencilled brows slightly.

“I wish you would try and be less violent and abusive in your talk, Monsieur le Marquis: if you must talk to me, let the talk be endurable, anyway.”

He clenches his teeth to suppress the oath that rises to his lips.

“Marguerite! listen to me! Tell me, I implore of you, what spirit possesses you to-night? Is it your vanity, your love of fresh victories, that induces you to treat me like this? Marguerite, for the love of Heaven! – for the sake of what we have been to each other – do not make me suffer like this.”

But he might as well plead to a marble pillar.

“I wish you would go and smoke, and not talk nonsense,” she says, almost in a whisper, with a flush of annoyance on her cheek. “I only wish I could smoke.”

“If that is your only ambition, do it; most things end in smoke,” he replies meaningly and savagely; and while all this is going on, Lord Delaval watches her covertly, and it is dear incense to his vanity when he marks that De Belcour moves away from the evident contest, foiled and angry. “After all, perhaps Shropshire and Silverlake wronged her,” he thinks, and rather than the Frenchman shall monopolise her, he throws away his half-smoked cigar and saunters towards her.

Her eyes flash with pleasure as he approaches – her cheeks glow – and she listens enraptured to his voice.

Yes! It is evidently love at first sight with her, and to this man she is certainly not acting a part. As her sweet warm breath sweeps past him, he feels the sensuous delirium of a dream, he is intoxicated by the power of her beauty; and she, hard and cold as she really is, deadly in her revenge, cruel in her greed of love, relentless in her hate, her heart yearns to him with quite a real feeling, a feeling which, though wicked and worthless in itself, yet ennobles her to a certain extent, for it makes her feel her own utter unworthiness.

“Stay a few minutes,” she whispers, as he rises among the other guests for his adieux.

And so he stays, but in his mind’s eye he sees his wife’s face, and – man of the world as he is, flirt, vaurien, lax to the last degree – his deep blue eyes actually glisten with generous remorse.

“Poor little woman!” he thinks. “By Jove! what an awful fool I was to come here.”

He calls himself a fool, but fool is a mild term to apply to a man who deliberately seeks temptation, knowing himself to be uncommonly weak in the flesh; nevertheless, he stays a little longer, and yet a little longer.

Marguerite Ange leans back in a pose that would drive a sculptor into a phrensy of delight. The fragrance of her golden hair goes out to him, and her charming red lips tempt dreadfully.

How he anathematises inwardly the convenances so dear to his mother-in-law’s heart!

The conventionalities (he does not dream of calling them by any more serious term) that bid him and her sit apart.

“It is growing very late, I am afraid,” he says, after a little.

“If it is, what matter?”

“I am afraid!”

“Afraid! Afraid of whom?”

“Afraid of myself,” he answers.

“Is that really true?”

“Quite, quite true, so help me Heaven! Marguerite, you don’t really doubt me! Have you lived till now, and never learnt that a man often fears to try and climb to the highest pinnacle of his desire, be it for fame, or fortune, or bliss, lest he fall before he has tasted it. Don’t you know what your face can do to a man?”

She shakes her head, and the bright light glistening on it seems to turn each tress to living gold.

“It can send him into a dream of Heaven! fire his soul with rapture, or drive him mad with disappointment and regret!”

He pauses, a little breathless. Sentiment is not a plant of common or spontaneous growth in our aristocracy, and it is not at all in Lord Delaval’s line.

The age is far too practical for it, more’s the pity.

He is, in fact, a little astonished at his flight of eloquence, mediocre though it be, and a little silence ensues.

Then Marguerite Ange leans forward, puts her white hand, all sparkling with gems, on his arm and looks up in his face.

He is certainly the handsomest man she has ever seen.

“The last would never be your fate,” she says, in a low, thrilling tone; but he hears her, of course. Trust a man, even if he is partially deaf, not to hear any sort of incense to his vanity, if he can hear nothing else; and this man is especially vain, from the top of his blond head to the sole of his well-made boot.

His ultramarine eyes kindle at once into great fires, and the red spots glow on his cheeks to match.

“Do you know what your face has done to me, Marguerite?” he asks slowly.

She does not reply, but somehow this face of hers seems to have come nearer him, and through a bewildered haze he sees nothing but a pair of lips, soft and maddening; a pair of eyes, black as midnight, lustrous as two stars, with a depth of passion in their liquid depths that stirs his pulse and makes his head whirl.

It is a picture that brings oblivion of everything, save of dangerous proximity.

“I told you a falsehood the other day, Marguerite, when I said I was not married. I am married! I have not been married two years, and I married for love. My wife loves me with all her soul, and it would break her heart to lose me, and yet – Heaven forgive me! – I feel to-night as if I hated her! because she seems to rise up between you and me.”

She averts her face, and a little smile passes quickly over her mouth – a smile that has triumph in it, a smile that is absolutely wicked.

“When I entered this house to-night something told me of the end. It seems utter folly for a man to go mad over a woman’s face like this, doesn’t it? But, Marguerite, it is so. I have gone mad, I believe, for, strangers as we were but three short days ago, I love you as I never loved anyone before! I swear it, Marguerite!”

She does not smile now at his rhapsody. She knows he is watching her, and he sees nothing but the sweetest, tenderest light in the wonderful eyes, a softer look on the perfect mouth.

“Strange!” she says simply, “that we should have felt the same to-night – that – ”

“We?” he interrupts. “Say that again, Marguerite!”

“Yes! Did I not tell you the first time we spoke that you were —my fate!” And Marguerite’s head is very close to his shoulder, and her lips seem to seek his. But she starts away hastily as De Belcour, unannounced, strides into the room.

“Pardon, Mademoiselle!” he says through his set teeth, “I forgot my gloves! I am sorry to have interrupted you.”

And Marguerite, forgetting the conventional smile which is one of the tricks of her trade, sits silent and a little uncomfortable.

“We may as well walk a little way together,” Lord Delaval says quietly. “Mademoiselle’s society is so charming, I really forgot the hour!”