Cousin Betty Part 67

"Yes," replied Victorin, "for we must get on. Do you know that by one single phrase that woman has endangered my mother's life and reason? So, I say, get on."

"We have got on!" replied the old woman.

"Well?" cried Victorin, with a gulp.

"Well, you do not cry off the expenses?"

"On the contrary."

"They run up to twenty-three thousand francs already."

Victorin looked helplessly at the woman.

"Well, could we hoodwink you, you, one of the s.h.i.+ning lights of the law?" said she. "For that sum we have secured a maid's conscience and a picture by Raphael.--It is not dear."

Hulot, still bewildered, sat with wide open eyes.

"Well, then," his visitor went on, "we have purchased the honesty of Mademoiselle Reine Tousard, a damsel from whom Madame Marneffe has no secrets--"

"I understand!"

"But if you shy, say so."

"I will play blindfold," he replied. "My mother has told me that that couple deserve the worst torments--"

"The rack is out of date," said the old woman.

"You answer for the result?"

"Leave it all to me," said the woman; "your vengeance is simmering."

She looked at the clock; it was six.

"Your avenger is dressing; the fires are lighted at the _Rocher de Cancale_; the horses are pawing the ground; my irons are getting hot.--Oh, I know your Madame Marneffe by heart!--Everything is ready.

And there are some boluses in the rat-trap; I will tell you to-morrow morning if the mouse is poisoned. I believe she will be; good evening, my son."

"Good-bye, madame."

"Do you know English?"

"Yes."

"Well, my son, thou shalt be King. That is to say, you shall come into your inheritance," said the dreadful old witch, foreseen by Shakespeare, and who seemed to know her Shakespeare.

She left Hulot amazed at the door of his study.

"The consultation is for to-morrow!" said she, with the gracious air of a regular client.

She saw two persons coming, and wished to pa.s.s in their eyes a pinchbeck countess.

"What impudence!" thought Hulot, bowing to his pretended client.

Baron Montes de Montejanos was a _lion_, but a lion not accounted for. Fas.h.i.+onable Paris, Paris of the turf and of the town, admired the ineffable waistcoats of this foreign gentleman, his spotless patent-leather boots, his incomparable sticks, his much-coveted horses, and the negro servants who rode the horses and who were entirely slaves and most consumedly thrashed.

His fortune was well known; he had a credit account up to seven hundred thousand francs in the great banking house of du Tillet; but he was always seen alone. When he went to "first nights," he was in a stall. He frequented no drawing-rooms. He had never given his arm to a girl on the streets. His name would not be coupled with that of any pretty woman of the world. To pa.s.s his time he played whist at the Jockey-Club. The world was reduced to calumny, or, which it thought funnier, to laughing at his peculiarities; he went by the name of Combabus.

Bixiou, Leon de Lora, Lousteau, Florine, Mademoiselle Heloise Brisetout, and Nathan, supping one evening with the notorious Carabine, with a large party of _lions_ and _lionesses_, had invented this name with an excessively burlesque explanation. Ma.s.sol, as being on the Council of State, and Claude Vignon, erewhile Professor of Greek, had related to the ignorant damsels the famous anecdote, preserved in Rollin's _Ancient History_, concerning Combabus, that voluntary Abelard who was placed in charge of the wife of a King of a.s.syria, Persia, Bactria, Mesopotamia, and other geographical divisions peculiar to old Professor du Bocage, who continued the work of d'Anville, the creator of the East of antiquity. This nickname, which gave Carabine's guests laughter for a quarter of an hour, gave rise to a series of over-free jests, to which the Academy could not award the Montyon prize; but among which the name was taken up, to rest thenceforth on the curly mane of the handsome Baron, called by Josepha the splendid Brazilian--as one might say a splendid _Catoxantha_.

Carabine, the loveliest of her tribe, whose delicate beauty and amusing wit had s.n.a.t.c.hed the sceptre of the Thirteenth Arrondiss.e.m.e.nt from the hands of Mademoiselle Turquet, better known by the name of Malaga--Mademoiselle Seraphine Sinet (this was her real name) was to du Tillet the banker what Josepha Mirah was to the Duc d'Herouville.

Now, on the morning of the very day when Madame de Saint-Esteve had prophesied success to Victorin, Carabine had said to du Tillet at about seven o'clock:

"If you want to be very nice, you will give me a dinner at the _Rocher de Cancale_ and bring Combabus. We want to know, once for all, whether he has a mistress.--I bet that he has, and I should like to win."

"He is still at the Hotel des Princes; I will call," replied du Tillet.

"We will have some fun. Ask all the youngsters--the youngster Bixiou, the youngster Lora, in short, all the clan."

At half-past seven that evening, in the handsomest room of the restaurant where all Europe has dined, a splendid silver service was spread, made on purpose for entertainments where vanity pays the bill in bank-notes. A flood of light fell in ripples on the chased rims; waiters, whom a provincial might have taken for diplomatists but for their age, stood solemnly, as knowing themselves to be overpaid.

Five guests had arrived, and were waiting for nine more. These were first and foremost Bixiou, still flouris.h.i.+ng in 1843, the salt of every intellectual dish, always supplied with fresh wit--a phenomenon as rare in Paris as virtue is; Leon de Lora, the greatest living painter of landscape and the sea who has this great advantage over all his rivals, that he has never fallen below his first successes. The courtesans could never dispense with these two kings of ready wit. No supper, no dinner, was possible without them.

Seraphine Sinet, _dite_ Carabine, as the mistress _en t.i.tre_ of the Amphitryon, was one of the first to arrive; and the brilliant lighting showed off her shoulders, unrivaled in Paris, her throat, as round as if turned in a lathe, without a crease, her saucy face, and dress of satin brocade in two shades of blue, trimmed with Honiton lace enough to have fed a whole village for a month.

Pretty Jenny Cadine, not acting that evening, came in a dress of incredible splendor; her portrait is too well known to need any description. A party is always a Longchamps of evening dress for these ladies, each anxious to win the prize for her millionaire by thus announcing to her rivals:

"This is the price I am worth!"

A third woman, evidently at the initial stage of her career, gazed, almost shamefaced, at the luxury of her two established and wealthy companions. Simply dressed in white cashmere trimmed with blue, her head had been dressed with real flowers by a coiffeur of the old-fas.h.i.+oned school, whose awkward hands had unconsciously given the charm of inept.i.tude to her fair hair. Still unaccustomed to any finery, she showed the timidity--to use a hackneyed phrase--inseparable from a first appearance. She had come from Valognes to find in Paris some use for her distracting youthfulness, her innocence that might have stirred the senses of a dying man, and her beauty, worthy to hold its own with any that Normandy has ever supplied to the theatres of the capital. The lines of that unblemished face were the ideal of angelic purity. Her milk-white skin reflected the light like a mirror. The delicate pink in her cheeks might have been laid on with a brush. She was called Cydalise, and, as will be seen, she was an important p.a.w.n in the game played by Ma'ame Nourrisson to defeat Madame Marneffe.

"Your arm is not a match for your name, my child," said Jenny Cadine, to whom Carabine had introduced this masterpiece of sixteen, having brought her with her.

And, in fact, Cydalise displayed to public admiration a fine pair of arms, smooth and satiny, but red with healthy young blood.

"What do you want for her?" said Jenny Cadine, in an undertone to Carabine.

"A fortune."

"What are you going to do with her?"

"Well--Madame Combabus!"

"And what are you to get for such a job?"

"Guess."

"A service of plate?"