But La Boulaye paid no heed to her. The flush deepened on his face, then faded again, and he grew oddly pale. His official's inventory of her characteristics fitted Mademoiselle de Bellecour in every detail.
'Admit her, Brutus,' he commanded, and his voice had a husky sound. Then, turning to Cecile, 'You will give me leave?' he said, cloaking rude dismissal in its politest form.
'Assuredly,' she answered bitterly, making shift to go. 'Your visitor is no doubt political?' she half-asked half-asserted.
But he made no answer as he held the door for her, and bowed low as she passed out. With a white face and lips tightly compressed she went, and half-way on the stairs she met a handsome woman, tall and of queenly bearing, who ascended. Her toilette lacked the elaborateness of Cecile's, but she carried it with an air which not all the modistes of France could have succeeded in imparting to the Citoyenne Deshaix.
So dead was Robespierre's niece to every sense of fitness that, having drawn aside to let the woman pass, she stood gazing after her until she disappeared round the angle of the landing. Then, in a fury, she swept from the house and into her waiting coach, and as she drove back to Duplay's in the Rue St. Honore she was weeping bitterly in her jealous rage.
CHAPTER XVII. LA BOULAYE'S PROMISE
La Boulaye remained a moment by the door after Cecile's departure; then he moved away towards his desk, striving to master the tumultuous throbbing of his pulses. His eye alighted on Cecile's roses, and, scarce knowing why he did it, he picked them up and flung them behind a bookcase. It was but done when again the door opened, and his official ushered in Mademoiselle de Bellecour.
Oddly enough, at sight of her, La Boulaye grew master of himself. He received her with a polite and very formal bow—a trifle over-graceful for a patriot.
'So, Citoyenne,' said he, and so cold was his voice that it seemed even tinged with mockery, 'you are come at last.'
'I could not come before, Monsieur,' she answered, trembling. 'They would not let me.' Then, after a second's pause: 'Am I too late, Monsieur?' she asked.
'No,' he answered her. 'The ci-devant Vicomte d'Ombreval still lies awaiting trial. Will you not be seated?'
'I do not look to remain long.'
'As you please, Citoyenne. I have delayed Ombreval's trial thinking that if not my letter why then his might bring you, sooner or later, to his rescue. It may interest you to hear,' he continued with an unmistakable note of irony, 'that that brave but hapless gentleman is much fretted at his incarceration.'
A shadow crossed her face, which remained otherwise calm and composed —the beautiful, intrepid face that had more than once been La Boulaye's undoing.
'I am glad that you have waited, Monsieur. In so doing you need have no doubts concerning me. M. d'Ombreval is my betrothed, and the troth I plighted him binds me in honour to succour him now.'
La Boulaye looked steadily at her for a moment.
'Upon my soul,' he said at last, a note of ineffable sarcasm vibrating in his voice, 'I shall never cease to admire the effrontery of your class, and the coolness with which, in despite of dishonourable action, you make high-sounding talk of honour and the things to which it binds you. I have a dim recollection, Citoyenne, of something uncommonly like your troth which you plighted me one night at Boisvert. But so little did that promise bind you that when I sought to enforce your fulfilment of it you broke my head and left me to die in the road.'
His words shook her out of her calm. Her bosom rose and fell, her eyes seemed to grow haggard and her hands were clasped convulsively.
'Monsieur,' she answered, 'when I gave you my promise that night I had every intention of keeping it. I swear it, as Heaven is my witness.'
'Your actions more than proved it,' he said dryly.
'Be generous, Monsieur,' she begged. 'It was my mother prevailed upon me to alter my determination. She urged that I should be dishonoured if I did not.'
'That word again!' he cried. 'What part it plays in the life of the noblesse. All that it suits you to do, you do because honour bids you, all to which you have bound yourselves, but which is distasteful, you discover that honour forbids, and that you would be dishonoured did you persist. But I am interrupting you, Citoyenne. Did your mother advance any arguments?'
'The strongest argument of all lay here, in my heart, Monsieur,' she answered him, roused and hardened by his scorn. 'You must see that it had become with me a matter of choosing the lesser of two evils. Upon reflection I discovered that I was bound to two men, and it behoved me to keep the more binding of my pledges.'
'Which you discovered to be your word to Ombreval,' he said, and his voice grew unconsciously softer, for he began to realise the quandary in which she had found herself.
She inclined her head assentingly.
'To him I had given the earlier promise, and then, again, he was of my own class whilst you—'
'Spare me, Citoyenne,' he cried. 'I know what you would say. I am of the rabble, and of little more account in a matter of honour than a beast of the field. It is thus that you reason, and yet, mon Dieu! I had thought that ere now such notions had died out with you, and that, stupid enough though your class has proved itself, it would at least have displayed the intelligence to perceive that its day is ended, its sun set.' He turned and paced the apartment as he spoke. 'The Lilies of France have been shorn from their stems, they have withered by the roadside, and they have been trampled into the dust by the men of the new regime, and yet it seems that you others of the noblesse have not learnt your lesson. You have not yet discovered that here in France the man who was born a tiller of the soil is still a man, and, by his manhood, the equal of a king, who, after all, can be no more than a man, and is sometimes less. Enfin!' he ended brusquely. 'This is not the National Assembly, and I talk to ears untutored in such things. Let us deal rather with the business upon which you are come.'
She eyed him out of a pale face, with eyes that seemed fascinated. That short burst of the fiery eloquence that had made him famous revealed him to her in a new light: the light of a strength and capacity above and beyond that which, already, she had perceived was his.
'Will you believe, Monsieur, that it cost me many tears to use you as I did? If you but knew—' And there she paused abruptly. She had all but told him of the kiss that she had left upon his unconscious lips that evening on the road to Liege. 'Mon Dieu how I hated myself!' And she shuddered as she spoke.
He observed all this, and with a brusqueness that was partly assumed he hastened to her rescue.
'What is done is done, Citoyenne. Come, let us leave reminiscences. You are here to atone, I take it.'
At that she started. His words reminded her of those of his letter.
'Monsieur La Boulaye—'
'If it is all one to you, Citoyenne, I should prefer that you call me citizen.'
'Citizen, then,' she amended. 'I have brought with me the gems which I told you would constitute my dowry. In his letter to me the Vicomte suggested that—' She paused.
'That some Republican blackguard might be bribed,' he concluded, very gently.
His gentleness deceived her. She imagined that it meant that he might not be unwilling to accept such a bribe, and thereupon she set herself to plead with him. He listened dispassionately, his hands behind his back, his eyes bent upon her, yet betraying nothing of his thoughts. At last she brought her prayer for Ombreval's life to an end, and produced a small leather bag which she set upon the table, beseeching him to satisfy himself as to the value of the contents.
Now at last he stirred. His face grew crimson to the roots of his hair, and his eyes seemed of a sudden to take fire. He seized that little bag and held it in his hand.
'And so, Mademoiselle de Bellecour,' said he, in a concentrated voice, 'you have learnt so little of me that you bring me a bribe of gems. Am I a helot, that you should offer to buy my very soul? Do you think my honour is so cheap a thing that you can have it for the matter of some bits of glass? Or do you imagine that we of the new regime, because we do not mouth the word at every turn, have no such thing as honour? For shame!' He paused,
