The shrug of her shoulders sufficiently completed the interjection. But the madness of a woman’s anger may always lead to something, so he drew her on. ‘Yet he was one of our best diplomatists.’
‘It was I who put him up to it. He knows nothing of the business but what I taught him.’
She hid her face, as for shame, in her hands, checking her sobs and gasping with fury. ‘To think, to think, twelve years of my life to a man like that! And now he leaves me; he casts me off! Cast off by him! Cast off by him!’
It is some hours later, and she is still there. The young man is upon his knees and is whispering tenderly: ‘When you know that I love you—when you know that I loved you always. Think, think!’ The striking of a clock is heard in the far distance and wakening sounds go by in the growing light. She flies in dismay from the room, not caring so much as to take with her the brief of her intended revenge.
Revenge herself now? On whom? and what for? There was an end of her hatred now, for had she not her love? From this day she was another woman, such an one as when she is seen with her lover or her husband, supporting her unhasty steps upon the tender cradle of his arm, makes the common people say, ‘Well, she has got what she wants.’ There are not so many of them as people think, particularly in society. Not that the mistress of a great house could be thinking exclusively of her own happiness; there were guests going away and other guests arriving and settling in, a second instalment, more numerous and less intimate, the whole in fact of the Academic set. There were the Duke de Courson-Launay, the Prince and Princess de Fitz-Roy, the De Circourts, the Huchenards, Saint-Avol the diplomatist, Moser and his daughter, Mr. and Mrs. Henry of the American embassy. It was a hard task to provide entertainment and occupation for all these people and to fuse such different elements. No one understood the business better than she, but just now it was a burden and a weariness to her. She would have liked to keep quiet and meditate on her happiness, to think of nothing else: and she could devise no other amusements for her guests than the invariable. visit to the fish preserves, to Ronsard’s castle, and to the Orphanage. Her own pleasure was complete when her hand touched Paul’s, as accident brought them together in the same boat or the same carriage.
In the course of one such pompous expedition on the river, the little fleet from Mousseaux, sailing on a shimmering mirror of silken awnings and ducal pennons, had gone somewhat further than usual. Paul Astier was in the boat in front of his lady’s. He was sitting in the stern beside Laniboire, and was receiving the Academician’s confidences. Having been invited to stay at Mousseaux till his report was finished, the old fool fancied that he was making good progress towards the coveted succession; and as always happens in such cases, he chose Paul as the confidant of his hopes. After telling him what he had said and what she had answered, and one thing and another, he was just saying, ‘Now, young man, what would you do, if you were me?’ when a clear voice of low pitch rang over the water from the boat behind them.
‘Monsieur Astier!’
‘Yes, Duchess.’
‘See yonder, among the reeds. It looks like Védrine.’
Védrine it was, painting away, with his wife and children at his side, on an old flat-bottomed boat moored to a willow branch alongside of a green islet, where the wagtails were chirping themselves hoarse. The boats drew quickly up beside him, any novelty being a break to the everlasting tedium of fashionable society: and while the Duchess greeted with her sweetest smile Madame Védrine, who had once been her guest at Mousseaux, the ladies looked with interest at the artist’s strange home and the beautiful children, born of its light and its love, as they lay in the shelter of their green refuge on the clear, placid stream, which reflected the picture of their happiness. After the first greetings, Védrine, palette in hand, gave Paul an account of the doings at Clos Jallanges, which was visible through the mists of the river, half-way up the hill side—a long low white house with an Italian roof. ‘My dear fellow, they have all gone crazy there! The vacancy has turned their heads. They spend their days ticking votes—your mother, Picheral, and the poor invalid in her wheelchair. She too has caught the Academic fever, and talks of moving to Paris, entertaining and giving parties to help her brother on.’ So Védrine, to escape the general madness, camped out all day and worked in the open air—children and all; and pointing to his old boat he said, with a simple unresentful laugh, ‘My dahabeeah, you see; my trip to the Nile.’