Chapter VII (1)
Horatia drove with the Marquise next afternoon. The Champs Elysées were very gay, and her spirits always went up when the sun shone. There was the indefinable romance of spring, the eternal romance of Paris—and Armand was coming back to-night. She was inclined to wonder at her restlessness of yesterday.
“Dear me,” observed Madame de Beaulieu suddenly, “I smell essence de mousseline. When have you been to Houbigant’s?” And without waiting for an answer she went on, “You are improving, ma chère. As a rule you English have organs for which no odour is too strong, and no colour is too striking. Lavender is the basis of all your perfumes, and the rainbow of all your colours.”
As she spoke a very pretty woman, elaborately dressed in violet drap d’Algers and swansdown, and extravagantly painted, passed them for the third or fourth time in her carriage. She was alone, and was driving very slowly; many glances, of which she seemed pleasurably conscious, were cast at her from other carriages and by the male loungers under the trees. Chiefly to avoid the subject of Houbigant’s, Horatia asked who she was.
The Marquise put up her lorgnettes. “That?” she said carelessly—“oh, Mademoiselle Blanchette Delmar of the Opera of course. Yes, she is pretty, isn’t she? Armand thought so once, too, but they apparently got tired of each other very soon. I forget who is the favoured swain at present.”
A curious sick coldness came over Horatia; yet the red mounted to her cheeks. The Marquise observed it.
“Ma chère,” she said with a laugh, “surely you have not been placing your husband on a pinnacle apart from other men! Armand as an anchorite! Mon Dieu!”
“No, of course not,” said Horatia, battling for composure, “but...”
“But!” repeated Madame de Beaulieu, “But what? The young person is very well, in her way. And it is quite a year ago. Then you are shocked at me for knowing about it? Well, I grant you that we are not supposed to know these things, for it is not good taste for a gentleman to parade his love-affairs. But pardon, for perhaps in England (though I had not guessed it such an Eden of purity) these things do not exist, and I have soiled your innocence unnecessarily. Forgive me!”
All the distaste of Horatia’s soul for the Marquise blossomed at this moment into a sudden flower of hatred. She wanted to stop the carriage and get out. What need to have told her! Her brain went on working furiously as they continued to drive up and down and the Marquise continued to talk. Horatia had heard a good many things since she came to Paris, but they had never seemed to touch her—she had never imagined that they could touch her.... It hurt; it burned like poison....
When she got back to the Hôtel de la Roche-Guyon she was told, to her surprise, that M. le Comte had already returned, and that he was waiting for her in her boudoir.
She had not expected him till night, and she went up the stairs very slowly. Part of her was crying out for joy that he was back, would have liked to run to him, to throw her arms round his neck and say to him, “Darling, I don’t think of it, now that you are here: it is past, it is untrue.” And part of her did not feel thus.
If she had had any intention of referring to the subject she had not, in the event, much chance of doing so. It was to be a day of shocks. Armand was standing with his back to her, looking out of the window giving on to the courtyard; evidently he had been watching her arrival. He turned at her entrance, came forward and kissed her hand, her cheek, and then said gravely, “Horatia, I am sorry to have to scold you.”
“What is it?” she asked, genuinely amazed.
“You went yesterday to the English Embassy.”
“O, that!” she exclaimed, moved by the ludicrous disparity between this enormity and what she had been hearing of him. And she began to walk across the room, pulling off her gloves.
“And is ’that’ so small a thing to you?” demanded Armand angrily. “You know that for nothing in the world would one of us be seen setting foot in a house which is on intimate terms with the Palais Royal, which receives the Orléans princes. Yet you choose a day when I am away, when my cousin cannot accompany you...”
Horatia turned round. “Please be careful what you are saying to me, Armand! I think you cannot realise that you are accusing me—me—of duplicity.”
“Eh bien, what is it then?” asked her husband.
“Ignorance, stupidity, what you like, but not that,” she said, “How was I to know of these... these petty restrictions? I am English, and Lady Granville is English, and knew my father.”
“Pardon me, you are French now,” retorted Armand. “Permit me to remind you that you have duties towards the name which you honoured me by accepting.”
His tone a little suggested that the honour was the other way round. The caged feeling came over her for a moment. “I am the prisoner of the tribe,” she thought to herself. “Armand will never liberate me.” She said coldly, “Lady Granville enlightened me. I am sorry, very sorry, if I have injured your prestige, but it was done in ignorance.” With that she turned her back on him once more, and went and sat down by the window. Her husband followed her, biting his lip.
“I beg your pardon for supposing that you knew what you were doing,” he said, still rather stiffly. “You see, Horatia, do you not—”
“I see a great many things,” she said. “I see that I am to have no friends, no will, no identity of my own. I may not go out when I wish; I may not see you when I wish...”
Suddenly she heard her own voice; it sounded shrill. The ache, the disgust of the afternoon swung back on her. Was she driving him to that? She stopped; and, more electric than a lightning flash, it came to her how most triumphantly she could end this situation. So, rising, she laid her hand on his breast and, looking up at him, said very gently and deliberately,
“Are you really angry with me, Armand?”
Her victory was instantaneous.
(2)
Martha, pulling back her lamb’s curtains next morning, was, all unsuspecting, like the gaoler who rouses the captive. As the daylight flooded the room Horatia woke more fully to the realisation of an extraordinary weight on her spirits. While she lay there waiting for her coffee the whole of yesterday’s scene in the Champs Elysées played itself through again. That woman with her laughing, reddened lips.... There was time to taste shock, and yet she did not taste it fully; the soreness at her heart had in it much more of the most primitive of all passions—jealousy.
Her coffee and rolls came; she could scarcely touch them. She wanted Armand to enter; but he had been out late last night at the bal de l’Opéra. He might not come for a long time. Tears began to well out under her lashes; and presently Horatia de la Roche-Guyon, her head half buried in the pillow, was sobbing like a child that cries for it knows not what.
“Bon jour, chère amie!”
She had not heard his knock, nor his entrance. Hastily and stealthily she dabbed at her eyes.
“You are late this morning,” observed the Comte cheerfully. “Look at me, not home till three this morning, but already risen.... My darling, what is the matter?”
Horatia, her face nearly concealed by the pillow and the tumbled masses of her hair, murmured something unintelligible.
Armand sat down on the bed. “My angel, what is it? Is it because I scolded you yesterday? But you forgave me.... Look at me, Horatia, and tell me what is the matter.” He had gently to draw away the hand which held the handkerchief to her eyes. “Come, my darling—Bon Dieu, what hair you have!” He took up a lock.
“Madame de Beaulieu says it is hideous,” sighed Horatia between two little sobs.
“That is because she cannot succeed in buying any like it, I expect,” retorted her husband. “Is that why you were crying, my child? Listen then, and I will tell you a secret. The Duchesse is having a wig made as nearly as possible the colour of your hair; she is going to wear it on her fête or on the next saint’s day. There’s a compliment for you! Do not mind, therefore, what my cousin says. All women are jealous of one another.... Come now, take away that handkerchief and let me kiss you!”
She let him do so, and even clung to him. “Promise me, promise me, that you will always love me, Armand!”
“The good old phrase again!” whispered a little imp in the young man’s ear. “Foolish, foolish child,” he said, smiling his delightful smile. “What do you think I am made of then?”
“You do really forgive me for yesterday?” she murmured, hiding her tear-stained face in his breast. “It must never happen again. I could not bear that anything should come between us.... As long as you are with me, Armand, nothing can.”
“My darling,” he said, and kissed the top of her head.
“I am very, very sorry about Lady Granville,” she went on after a moment, and with a heavy sigh. “Is the Duchesse exceedingly angry with me?”
“Perhaps the slaughter she made of me yesterday will content her,” suggested her husband cheerfully.
Horatia clasped him closer, “O poor Armand! I will never, never see Lady Granville again! I will write to her to-day and say so.”
When, a few minutes later, Armand had gone, after assuring her again that he would love her as long as the Seine ran through Paris, that she was probably the one woman in the world who could look beautiful after tears, and that he had found the bal de l’Opéra last night very dull because he could not hope to come on a lock of her hair peeping out from the hood of a domino, Horatia slipped out of bed and went to her mirror. Was she beautiful, pale and heavy-eyed as she was? She propped her face on her hands, her hair falling about her shoulders in a cloud of sunset, and stared into the glass. As long as the Seine ran through Paris! Would he love her just as much when her colour was not as clear and fresh as now it was, when there were lines on her white forehead, when her bright hair began to lose its lustre... when, in short, she was no longer young, and, as he called her now, beautiful? Would he?
And would he love her just as much... or more... if, if—
She was still gazing, with a dream in her half-smiling eyes, when Martha came to dress her.