“Won’t you allow her to accept my box at the opera?” said the Countess, without exchanging even a look with her sister, in her terror lest their secret understanding should be betrayed.
“Thank you, she has her own,” said du Tillet, offended.
“Very well, then, I shall see her there,” replied the Countess.
“It will be the first time you have done us that honor,” said du Tillet.
The Countess felt the reproach and began to laugh.
“Keep your mind easy, you shan’t be asked to pay this time,” she said.—“Goodbye, darling.”
“The jade!” cried du Tillet, picking up the flowers which had fallen from the Countess’ hair. “You would do well,” he said to his wife, “to take a lesson from Mme. de Vandenesse. I should like to see you as saucy in society as she was here just now. Your want of style and spirit are enough to drive a man wild.”
For all reply, Eugénie raised her eyes to heaven.
“Well, madame, what have you two been about here?” said the banker after a pause, pointing to the flowers. “What has happened to bring your sister to your box tomorrow?”
In order to get away to her bedroom, and escape the cross-questioning she dreaded, the poor thrall made an excuse of being sleepy. But du Tillet took his wife’s arm and, dragging her back, planted her before him beneath the full blaze of the candles, flaming in their silver-gilt branches between two beautiful bunches of flowers. Fixing her eyes with his keen glance, he began with cold deliberation.
“Your sister came to borrow forty thousand francs to pay the debts of a man in whom she is interested, and who, within three days, will be under lock and key in the Rue de Clichy. He’s too precious to be left loose.”
The miserable woman tried to repress the nervous shiver which ran through her.
“You gave me a fright,” she said. “But you know that my sister has too much principle and too much affection for her husband to take that sort of interest in any man.”
“On the contrary,” he replied drily. “Girls brought up as you were, in a very straitlaced and puritan fashion, always pant for liberty and happiness, and the happiness they have never comes up to what they imagined. Those are the girls that make bad wives.”
“Speak for me if you like,” said poor Eugénie, in a tone of bitter irony, “but respect my sister. The Comtesse de Vandenesse is too happy, too completely trusted by her husband, not to be attached to him. Besides, supposing what you say were true, she would not have told me.”
“It is as I said,” persisted du Tillet, “and I forbid you to have anything to do with the matter. It is to my interest that the man go to prison. Let that suffice.”
Mme. du Tillet left the room.
“She is sure to disobey me,” said du Tillet to himself, left alone in the boudoir, “and if I keep my eye on them I may be able to find out what they are up to. Poor fools, to pit themselves against us!”
He shrugged his shoulders and went to rejoin his wife, or, more properly speaking, his slave.
III
The Story of a Happy Woman
The confession which Mme. Félix de Vandenesse had poured into her sister’s ear was so intimately connected with her history during the six preceding years that a brief narrative of the chief incidents of her married life is necessary to its understanding.
Félix de Vandenesse was one of the band of distinguished men who owed their fortune to the Restoration, till a shortsighted policy excluded them, as followers of Martignac, from the inner circle of Government. In the last days of Charles X he was banished with some others to the Upper Chamber; and this disgrace, though in his eyes only temporary, led him to think of marriage. He was the more inclined to it from a sort of nausea of intrigue and gallantry not uncommon with men when the hour of youth’s gay frenzy is past. There comes then a critical moment when the serious side of social ties makes itself felt. Félix de Vandenesse had had his bright and his dark hours, but the latter predominated, as is apt to be the case with a man who has quite early in life become acquainted with passion in its noblest form. The initiated become fastidious. A long experience of life and study of character reconciles them at last to the second-best, when they take refuge in a universal tolerance. Having lost all illusions, they are proof against guile, yet they wear their cynicism with a grace, and, being prepared for the worst, are saved the pangs of disappointment.
In spite of this, Félix still passed for one of the handsomest and most agreeable men in Paris. With women his reputation was largely due to one of the noblest of their contemporaries, who was said to have died of a broken heart for him; but it was the beautiful Lady Dudley who had the chief hand in forming him. In the eyes of many Paris ladies Félix was a hero of romance, owing not a few of his conquests to his evil repute. Madame de Manerville had closed the chapter of his intrigues. Although not a Don Juan, he retired from the world of love, as from that of politics, a disillusioned man. That ideal type of woman and of love which, for his misfortune, had brightened and dominated his youth, he despaired of finding again. At the age of thirty, Count Félix resolved to cut short by marriage pleasures which had begun to pall. On one point he was determined: he would have none but a girl trained in the strictest dogmas of Catholicism. No sooner did he hear how the Comtesse de Granville brought up her daughters than he asked for the hand of the elder. His own
