Hearing the music no longer, the chamberlain ventured at last into the room, as cautiously as a lion-tamer going into a cage of lions.
“Yes, yes, I am coming,” said Roumestan, and addressing the little actress with his best “Excellency air” in order to make her feel the difference in position between him and his secretary:
“I am very much pleased with your singing, Mademoiselle; you have a great deal of talent, a great deal! And if you care to sing for us on Sunday next, I gladly grant you that favor.”
She gave a joyful, childlike cry: “Really? O, how lovely of you!”—and in an instant flung her arms about his neck.
“Alice! Alice! Well, I declare!” cried her mother.
But she was gone; she had taken flight through the great rooms where she looked so tiny in the long perspective—a child! O, such a perfect child!
Much agitated by her caress, Roumestan paused a few moments before he went upstairs. Outside in the wintry garden one pale sun-ray shone on the withered lawn and seemed to warm and revive the winter. He felt penetrated to the heart by a similar warmth as if the contact with this supple youthful form communicated some of its spring-like vitality to him. “Ah! how charming is youth!”
Instinctively he glanced at himself in the mirror; a mournfulness came over him that he had not felt for years. How changed things were, boun Diou! He had grown very stout from want of exercise, much sitting at his desk and the too constant use of his carriage; his complexion was injured by staying up late at night, his hair thin and grizzled at the temples; he was even more horrified at the fatness of his cheeks and the vast flat expanse between his nose and his ears. “I have a mind to grow a beard to cover that.” But then the beard would be white—and yet he was only forty-five. Alas, politics age one so!
He was suffering there, in those few moments, the frightful anguish a woman feels when she realizes that all is over—her power of inspiring love is gone, while her own power to love still remains. His reddened lids swelled with tears; there in the midst of his masterful place this sorrow profoundly human, in which ambition had no part, seemed to him bitter almost beyond endurance. But with his usual versatility of feeling he consoled himself quickly by thinking of his talents, his fame and his high position. Were they not just as strong as beauty or as youth in order to make him loved?
“Come, come!”