His Excellency the Minister Part 41

"In speaking of your household? Say then with knife-thrusts."

"Why did you mention my wife before Monsieur de Rosas?"

"Why," said Marianne, "you do not understand anything. It was for your sake, for you alone, in order to explain the presence in Marianne's house, of a minister who is considered to lead a puritan life. Nothing could be more simple!--Would you have me tell him that you neglect your wife and that you are my lover? Perhaps you would have liked that better!"

"Yes, perhaps," said Vaudrey pa.s.sionately.

"Vain fellow!" the pretty girl said as she placed upon his mouth her little hand which he kept upon his lips. "Then you would like me to parade our secrets everywhere and to publicly announce our happiness?"

"I should like," he said, as he removed his lips from the soft palm of her hand, "that all the world should know that you are mine, mine only--only mine, are you not?--That man?"

His eyes entreated her and lost their fire.

Marianne shrugged her shoulders.

"Let Monsieur de Rosas alone in tranquillity and let us return to my house, _our house_," she said, with a tender expression in her eyes.

"You do not love him?"

"No."

"And you love me?"

"I have told you so."

"You love me? You love me?"

"I love you!--Ah!" she said, "how unhappy you would be, nevertheless, if I told you aloud some day in one of the lobbies of the a.s.sembly what you ask me to repeat here in a whisper."

"I should prefer that to losing you and to knowing that you did not love me."

"He is telling the truth, however, the great fool!" cried Marianne, laughing.

"The real, sincere, profound truth!"

He drew her to him, seated on the vulgar divan where Simon Kayser was wont to display his paradoxes, and encircling her waist with both arms he felt her yielding form beneath her satin gown, and wished her to bend her fair face to his lips that were craving a kiss.

Marianne took his face between her soft hands, and looking at him with an odd smile, tender and ironical at once, at this big simpleton who was completely dominated by her mocking tenderness, she said:

"You are just the same Sulpice!"--as she spoke, she bent over him engagingly, and laughed merrily while he kissed her.

IV

Jose de Rosas thought himself much more the master of himself than he actually was.

This energetic man, firm as a very fine steel blade, had hoped to find that in living at a distance from Marianne, he might forget her or at least strengthen himself against her influence. He found on his return that he was, however, more seduced by her than before, his heart was wholly filled and gnawed by the distracting image of the pretty girl. He had borne away with him to London, as everywhere in fact, the puzzling smile, the sparkling glance of this woman's gray eyes that ceaselessly appeared to him at his bedside, and beside him, like some phantom.

The phantom of a living creature whose kiss still burned his lips like a live coal. A phantom that he could clasp in his arms, carry away and possess. All the virgin sentiments of this man whose life had been the half-savage one of a trapper, a savant or a wanderer, turned toward Marianne as to an incarnated hope, a living, palpitating chimera.

Jose felt certain that if he returned to Paris it was all over with him, and that he was giving his life to that woman. But he returned. His fight against himself over, the first visit he made, once again, was to the den where he knew well that he could discover Marianne's whereabouts. He went to her as he might walk to a gulf. Under his cold demeanor of a Castilian of former days, he was intensely pa.s.sionate and would neither reflect nor resist. He had experienced that delightful sensation of impulse when, upon the rapids at the other end of the globe, the river carried into a whirlpool his almost engulfed boat. He would doubtless have been stupefied had he found Marianne installed in a fas.h.i.+onable little mansion. She promised herself to explain that to him when she next saw him while informing him, there and then, that she had taken up her abode there. A mere whim: Mademoiselle Vanda having gone away, the idea had attracted her of sleeping within a courtesan's curtains. "I will tell him that this transient luxury recalls my former follies when I made him believe that I was spending an inheritance from my grandmother."

She had, indeed, already lied to him, for the money she had formerly squandered had been provided by De Lissac, but even then it was necessary--for the duke was in expectancy--to conceal its source from Rosas, hence the story of the inheritance that never existed. But she at once thoroughly realized that the surroundings which were favorable to the progress of the duke's love were not the bedroom and the dressing-room of Mademoiselle Vanda. What difference would Rosas have found between her and the fas.h.i.+onable courtesans whom he had loved, or rather, enriched, in pa.s.sing? He would not believe this new lie this time.

All that luxury might seduce Sulpice Vaudrey; it would have disgusted Jose. What satisfied the appet.i.te of the little, successful bourgeois would nauseate the gentleman.

As soon as Rosas returned to her, happy and stupefied at the same time, extravagantly happy in his joy, her plan of campaign was at once arranged. She did not wish to receive him in the vulgar hotel, where the clubmen had wiped their feet upon the carpets. She entreated him, since he wished to see her again, to see her at her "own house," yes, really, at her own house, in that little, unknown room, in Rue Cuvier, far from the noise of Paris and near the Botanical Garden, a kind of hidden cell into which no one entered.

"No one but me," she said.

The order had been given to Uncle Kayser in advance: in case Rosas should reappear, Simon was to at once inform his niece and prevent the duke from discovering Marianne's new address. And this had been done.

The duke was then going to see Mademoiselle Kayser only at Rue Cuvier, after having rediscovered her at Uncle Simon's.

He felt in advance a kind of grat.i.tude to this woman who thus abandoned the secret of her soul to him; giving him to understand that it was there that she pa.s.sed her days, buried in her recollections, dreaming of her departed years, of that which had been, of that which might be, a living death.

Marianne had shrewdly divined the case. For this great soul, mystery added a new sentiment to the feelings that Rosas experienced. The first time that he found himself in that little abode where Simon Kayser's niece awaited him, he was deeply moved, as if he had penetrated into the pure chamber of a young girl. There, yonder, in that distant quarter, he found a peaceful retreat for one wounded by life, thirsting for solitude and pa.s.sing there secret hours in the midst of loved books; in fact, the discreet dwelling of a poor teacher who had collected some choice _bibelots_ that she had found by chance. Rosas there felt himself surrounded by perfect virtue, amid the salvage of a happier past.

Marianne thus became what he imagined her to be, superior to her lot, living an intellectual life, consoling herself for the mortification of existence and the hideous experiences of life by poet's dreams, in building for herself in Paris itself a sort of Thebais, where she was finally free and mistress of herself and where, when she was sad, she was not compelled to wear a mask or a false smile, and was free from all pretended gaiety. And she was so often sad!

She had occasionally mentioned to Rosas the a.s.sumed name under which she lived at that place.

"Mademoiselle Robert!"

He had manifested surprise thereat.

"Yes, I do not wish them to know anything of me, not even my name. You should understand the necessity that certain minds have for repose and forgetfulness. Did not one of your sovereigns take his repose lying in his coffin? Well! I envy him and when I have pushed the bolt of my little room in Rue Cuvier, I tremble with delight, just as if I felt my heart beating in a coffin. Do not tell any one. They would desire to know and see. People are so curious and so stupid!"

Marianne now seemed to be still more strange and seductive to Rosas. All this romantic conduct, commonplace as it was, with which she surrounded herself, exalted her in the estimation of the duke. She became in that little chamber where she was simply Mademoiselle Robert, a hundred times more charming and attractive to him than any problem: a veritable Parisian sphinx.

She was not his mistress. He loved her too deeply, with a holy, respectful pa.s.sion, to take her hastily, as by chance, and Marianne was too skilful to risk any imprudent act, well-knowing that if she yielded too quickly, it would not be a woman who would fall into the duke's arms, but an idol that descended from its pedestal.

In the silence of the old house in the deserted quarter, they held conversations in the course of which Rosas freely abandoned himself, and through which she gained every day a more intimate knowledge of the character of that man who was so different from those who hitherto had sought her for pleasure.

Thus, the very respect that he instinctively felt for her, impelled her to love him.

She had not been accustomed to such treatment. Every masculine look that since her p.u.b.erty she had felt riveted upon her, clearly expressed even before the lips spoke: "You are beautiful. You please me. Will you?"

Rosas, at least, said: "I love you," before: "I desire you."

Tainted in the body which she had given, offered, abandoned, sold, she felt that she was respected by him even in that body, and although she considered him silly, she thought him superior to all others, or at least different, and that was a sufficient motive for loving him.

One day she said to him in a peculiar tone and with her distracting smile:

"Do you know, my dear Jose, there is one thing I should not have believed? You are bashful!"

He turned slightly pale.