“Count, you have never yet honoured one of the sex with your hand?”
“Alas! it has lacked cleanness.”
He held it out. It was obvious he spoke the truth.
“I have been a sad rogue,” he said. “It would be useless for me to deny it.”
The Chevalier put the confession by rather hastily. It would appear that his conscience may have resented its intrusion. It is such an advantage, after having realised a personal ambition, to be able to say, “I knew nothing of any moral objection until too late.” But that is just what some queer providence or fatality will never give one the opportunity of asserting. He flushed a little and said, with a stiff air of demand,—
“Monsignore, what attracts you in my daughter?”
The powerful old roué’s face became a mere leering slop of roguery. There was the picture, for anyone who cared to consider it, of concupiscence in its dotage. He had come, in the very exhaustion of his faculties, upon an unheard-of stimulant of loveliness; but sacred, and the more appetising for being so. Any sacrifice was worth to gain this ante-room to heaven. He felt once more the poignant ecstasies of hunger and thirst, he whose sense of surfeit had seemed confirmed to everlastingness. There is no need to enlarge upon his state.
“Ah, monsieur!” he said, “can you, who live in daily contemplation of such perfection, ask? Believe me, the question alone is the riddle; the answer possesses a thousand tongues of rapture and adoration. Would I could speak in them all, that I might ease my breast of this load of undelivered homage which stifles it. I swear, on my honour, there is no interpreter between earth and paradise but Yolande. You will bestow her on me—conditionally?”
M. de France didn’t see, or wouldn’t see, that he was being bribed. There is a point of magnificence, perhaps, above which corruption is elevated to sublimity. What earthly sacrifices can approach the gifts with which the gods reward them? He actually smiled, wintrily but condescendingly, on the other’s enthusiasm.
“Well, well, monsignore,” he protested; “what would your ardour say to a compromise?”