fine! … I am ashamed and sorry for myself both at once.”
I begged her in vain: she would not tell me what she did; then I rose to go:
“Already?” she cried.
And when I announced that I must dine in Monte Carlo, she asked me diffidently:
“You wouldn’t care to dine with me? I should be so glad if you would.”
I accepted at once. She was delighted, and rang the bell; then, when she had given some orders to the little maid, she took me round the house.
The dining room opened on to a kind of glass veranda filled with shrubs, and through it I could see from one end to the other of the long alley of orange-trees that stretched away back to the mountain. A low seat, hidden under the plants, indicated that the old actress often sat there.
Then we went into the garden to look at the flowers. The evening stole down, one of those warm quiet evenings that release all the scents of earth.
It was almost dark when we sat down to the table. The dinner was a long and excellent one, and we became intimate friends, she and I, when she realised what profound sympathy for her filled my heart. She had drunk two fingers of wine, as they used to say, and was becoming more confidential and expansive.
“Let us go and look at the moon,” she said. “I adore the kind moon. She has witnessed all my dearest joys. I think sometimes that all the things I remember are in her, and that I have only to look at her to have them come back to me at once. And even … sometimes, in the dusk … I allow myself a pretty sight … pretty … pretty … do you know? But no, you’d laugh too much at me. … I can’t. … I daren’t … no … no … indeed I daren’t.”
I implored her.
“Let me see it … what is it? Tell me; I promise you I won’t laugh. … I promise … let me see it.”
She hesitated. I took her hands, her poor little hands, so thin and cold, and I kissed them one after the other, several times, as her lovers had done in the old days. She was touched. She hesitated.
“You promise you won’t laugh?”
“Yes, I promise.”
“Then come.”
She rose. And as the little servant, awkward in his green livery, drew away her chair, she spoke a few low quick words in his ear.
“Yes, madame,” he answered, “at once.”
She took my arm and led me on to the veranda.
The orange-grove was truly a marvellous sight. The risen moon, a full moon, flung down it a thin silver path, a long line of light that fell across the yellow sand between the thick round tops of the sombre trees.
The trees were in blossom and their sweet heady scent filled the night. In their dark green shadows flitted a cloud of gleaming fireflies like star dust.
I cried:
“Oh, what a setting for a love scene!”
She smiled:
“Isn’t it? Isn’t it? Wait and see.”
She made me sit beside her.
“This is what makes me regret my spent life. But you hardly think of these things, you modern men. You are all stockbrokers, tradesmen, men of affairs. You are hardly able to talk to us. When I say ‘us’ I mean the young. Love affairs have become intrigues that often begin with an unpaid dressmaker’s bill. If you think the bill is dearer than the lady, you withdraw; but if you think more of the lady than of the bill, you pay. Charming ways … charming loves.”
She took my hand.
“Look!”
I sat there in an ecstasy of surprise and delight. From the far end of the alley, down the path of moonlight, came two young people with arms round each other’s waists. They came towards us, locked together, charming, walking with tiny steps, stepping through pools of light that flung a sudden glory round them before they were lost in the shadows again. He was dressed in the white satin coat of a past century and a hat covered with an ostrich feather. She wore a panniered gown, and the high powdered hair of the lovely ladies of the Regency.
A hundred paces from us they paused, standing in the middle of the alley, and embraced with a pretty ceremony.
And all at once I recognised the two little servants. Then one of those dreadful spasms of mirth that grip your very bowels bent me double in my chair. I did not laugh out, however. Sick and convulsed, I fought it down as a man whose leg is being cut off fights down the cry that forces open his throat and his jaw.
But the children were turning back towards the end of the alley; and once more they were enchanting. They went slowly farther and farther away and at last vanished, like the vanishing of a dream. Now they were out of sight. The empty alley wore an air of sadness.
And I went away too, I went away so that I shouldn’t see it again; for I realised that it would go on for a very long time, this spectacle that recalled all the past years, the past years of love and playacting, the mannered deceitful seductive past, with all its false and all its real charms, this spectacle that could still stir the pulses of the old woman who had been an actress and a great lover.
The Sign
The little Marquise de Rennedon was still asleep, in the warm scented room, in her soft low wide bed, between her sheets of fine lawn, as fragile as love, as caressing as a kiss; she slept alone, peacefully, the deep happy sleep of the divorced.
She was awakened by the sound of sharp voices in the little blue drawing room. She recognised her dearest friend, the little Baroness de Grangerie, arguing her right to come in with the maid who was guarding her mistress’s door.
Then the little Marquise rose, drew the bolts, turned the key, lifted the curtain and thrust out her head, only her fair
