A strange and profoundly unreasonable happiness swept through the Duke's soul as she spoke his given name for the first time within his memory. Surely, the deep contralto voice had lingered over it?—half-tenderly, half-caressingly, one might think.
The Duke put aside his coffee-cup and, rising, took his wife's soft hands in his. 'What have I made of her? I have made of her, Helene, the one object of all my desires.'
Her face flushed. 'Mountebank!' she cried, and struggled to free herself; 'do you mistake me, then, for a raddle-faced actress in a barn? Ah, les demoiselles have formed you, monsieur,—they have formed you well!'
'Pardon!' said the Duke. He released her hands, he swept back his hair with a gesture of impatience. He turned from his wife, and strolled toward a window, where, for a little, he tapped upon the pane, his murky countenance twitching oddly, as he stared into the quiet and sunlit street. 'Madame,' he began, in a level voice, 'I will tell you the meaning of the comedy. To me,—always, as you know, a creature of whims,—there came, a month ago, a new whim which I thought attractive, unconventional, promising. It was to make love to my own wife rather than to another man's. Ah, I grant you, it is incredible,' he cried, when the Duchess raised her hand as though to speak,—'incredible, fantastic, and ungentlemanly! So be it; nevertheless, I have played out my role. I have been the model husband; I have put away wine and—les demoiselles; for it pleased me, in my petty insolence, to patronize, rather than to defy, the laws of God and man. Your perfection irritated me, madame; it pleased me to demonstrate how easy is this trick of treating the world as the antechamber of a future existence. It pleased me to have in my life one space, however short, over which neither the Recording Angel nor even you might draw a long countenance. It pleased me, in effect, to play out the comedy, smug-faced and immaculate,—for the time. I concede that I have failed in my part. Hiss me from the stage, madame; add one more insult to the already considerable list of those affronts which I have put upon you; one more will scarcely matter.'
She faced him with set lips. 'So, monsieur, your boasted comedy amounts only to this?'
'I am not sure of its meaning, madame. I think that, perhaps, the swine, wallowing in the mire which they have neither strength nor will to leave, may yet, at times, long—and long whole-heartedly—' De Puysange snapped his fingers. 'Peste!' said he, 'let us now have done with this dreary comedy! Beyond doubt de Soyecourt has much to answer for, in those idle words which were its germ. Let us hiss both collaborators, madame.'
'De Soyecourt!' she marveled, with, a little start. 'Was it he who prompted you to make love to me?'
'Without intention,' pleaded the Duke. 'He twitted me for my inability, as your husband, to gain your affections; but I do not question his finest sensibilities would be outraged by our disastrous revival of Philemon and Baucis.'
'Ah—!' said she. She was smiling at some reflection or other.
There was a pause. The Duc de Puysange drummed upon the window-pane; the Duchess, still faintly smiling, trifled with the thin gold chain that hung about her neck. Both knew their display of emotion to have been somewhat unmodern, not entirely
'Decidedly,' spoke de Puysange, and turned toward her with a slight grimace, 'I am no longer fit to play the lover; yet a little while, madame, and you must stir my gruel-posset, and arrange the pillows more comfortably about the octogenarian.'
'Ah, Gaston,' she answered, and in protest raised her slender fingers, 'let us have no more heroics. We are not well fitted for them, you and I.'
'So it would appear,' the Duc de Puysange conceded, not without sulkiness.
'Let us be friends,' she pleaded. 'Remember, it was fifteen years ago I made the grave mistake of marrying a very charming man—'
'Merci!' cried the Duke.
'—and I did not know that I was thereby denying myself the pleasure of his acquaintance. I have learned too late that marrying a man is only the most civil way of striking him from one's visiting-list.' The Duchess hesitated. 'Frankly, Gaston, I do not regret the past month.'
'It has been adorable!' sighed the Duke.
'Yes,' she admitted; 'except those awkward moments when you would insist on making love to me.'
'But no, madame,' cried he, 'it was precisely—'
'O my husband, my husband!' she interrupted, with a shrug of the shoulders; 'why, you do it so badly!'
The Duc de Puysange took a short turn about the apartment. 'Yet I married you,' said he, 'at sixteen—out of a convent!'
'Mon ami,' she murmured, in apology, 'am I not to be frank with you? Would you have only the connubial confidences?'
'But I had no idea—' he began.
'Why, Gaston, it bored me to the very verge of yawning in my lover's countenance. I, too, had no idea but that it would bore you equally—'
'Hein?' said the Duke.
'—to hear what d'Humieres—'
'He squints!' cried the Duc de Puysange.
'—or de Crequy—'
'That red-haired ape!' he muttered.
'—or d'Arlanges, or—or any of them, was pleased to say. In fact, it was my duty to conceal from my husband anything which might involve him in duels. Now that we are friends, of course it is entirely different.'
The Duchess smiled; the Duke walked up and down the room with the contained ferocity of a caged tiger.
'In duels! in a whole series of duels! So these seducers besiege you in platoons. Ma foi, friendship is a good oculist! Already my vision improves.'
'Gaston!' she cried. The Duchess rose and laid both hands upon his shoulders. 'Gaston—?' she repeated.
For a heart-beat the Duc de Puysange looked into his wife's eyes; then he sadly smiled and shook his head. 'Madame,' said the Duke, 'I do not doubt you. Ah, believe me, I have comprehended, always, that in your keeping my honor was quite safe—far more safe than in mine, as Heaven and most of the fiends well know. You have been a true and faithful wife to a worthless brute who has not deserved it.' He lifted her fingers to his lips. De Puysange stood very erect; his heels clicked together, and his voice was earnest. 'I thank you, madame, and I pray you to believe that I have never doubted you. You are too perfect to err—Frankly, and between friends.' added the Duke, 'it was your cold perfection which frightened me. You are an icicle, Helene.'
She was silent for a moment. 'Ah!' she said, and sighed; 'you think so?'
'Once, then—?' The Duc de Puysange seated himself beside his wife, and took her hand.
'I—it was nothing.' Her lashes fell, and dull color flushed through her countenance.
'Between friends,' the Duke suggested, 'there should be no reservations.'
'But it is such a pitiably inartistic little history!' the Duchess protested. 'Eh bien, if you must have it! For I was a girl once,—an innocent girl, as given as are most girls to long reveries and bright, callow day-dreams. And there was a man—'
'There always is,' said the Duke, darkly.
'Why, he never even knew, mon ami!' cried his wife, and laughed, and clapped her hands. 'He was much older than I; there were stories about him—oh, a great many stories,—and one hears even in a convent—' She paused with a reminiscent smile. 'And I used to wonder shyly what this very fearful reprobate might be like. I thought of him with de Lauzun, and Dom Juan, and with the Duc de Grammont, and all those other scented, shimmering, magnificent libertines over whom les ingenues—wonder; only, I thought of him, more often than of the others, I made little prayers for him to the Virgin. And I procured a tiny miniature of him. And, when I came out of the convent, I met him at my father's house. [Footnote: She was of the Aigullon family, and sister to d'Agenois, the first and very politic lover of Madame de la Tournelle, afterward mistress to Louis Quinze under the title of Duchesse de Chateauroux. The later relations between the d'Aigullons and Madame du Barry are well-known.] And that was all.'
'All?' The Duc de Puysange had raised his swart eyebrows, and he slightly smiled.
'All,' she re-echoed, firmly. 'Oh, I assure you he was still too youthful to have any time to devote to young girls. He was courteous—no more. But I kept the picture,—ah, girls are so foolish, Gaston!' The Duchess, with a light laugh, drew upward the thin chain about her neck. At its end was a little heart-shaped locket of dull gold, with
