“The duchess of what?” I asked patiently.
“You will have heard of her,” he said, with a proud smile. Evidently he thought that the lady was a trump card. “The Duchess of Saint-Maclou.”
I laid down my cigar, maintaining, however, a calm demeanor.
“Aha!” said Gustave. “You will come, my friend?”
I could not deny that Gustave had a right to his little triumph; for a year ago, when the duchess had visited England with her husband, I had received an invitation to meet her at the Embassy. Unhappily, the death of a relative (whom I had never seen) occurring the day before, I had been obliged to post off to Ireland, and pay proper respect by appearing at the funeral. When I returned the duchess had gone, and Gustave had, half-ironically, consoled my evident annoyance by telling me that he had given such a description of me to his friend that she shared my sorrow, and had left a polite message to that effect. That I was not much consoled needs no saying. That I required consolation will appear not unnatural when I say that the duchess was one of the most brilliant and well-known persons in French society; yes, and outside France also. For she was a cosmopolitan. Her father was French, her mother American; and she had passed two or three years in England before her marriage. She was very pretty, and, report said, as witty as a pretty woman need be. Once she had been rich, but the money was swallowed up by speculation; she and her father (the mother was dead) were threatened with such reduction of means as seemed to them penury; and the marriage with the duke had speedily followed—the precise degree of unwillingness on the part of Mlle. de Beville being a disputed point. Men said she was forced into the marriage, women very much doubted it; the lady herself gave no indication, and her father declared that the match was one of affection. All this I had heard from common friends; only a series of annoying accidents had prevented the more interesting means of knowledge which acquaintance with the duchess herself would have afforded.
“You have always,” said Gustave, “wanted to know her.”
I relit my cigar and puffed thoughtfully. It was true that I had rather wished to know her.
“My belief is,” he continued, “that though she says ‘anybody,’ she means you. She knows what friends we are; she knows you are eager to be among her friends; she would guess that I should ask you first.”
I despise and hate a man who is not open to flattery: he is a hard, morose, distrustful, cynical being, doubting the honesty of his friends and the worth of his own self. I leant an ear to Gustave’s suggestion.
“What she would not guess,” he said, throwing his cigarette into the fireplace and rising to his feet, “is that you would refuse when I did ask you. What shall be the reason? Shocked, are you? Or afraid?”