“There is no answer,” he said to the boy, tipped him, and went back to the window. What did he care where the countess would be at eleven! He had not forgotten that moment of revelation the night before when she had looked at Myra Davis like a beast of prey sure of its quarry. There had been in her face a kind of gloating, as though she were revenging herself in some way upon the girl. But that was nonsense. Yet why had she seemed so triumphant? Could the quarry be some one else—Jeneski, Madame Ghita?
The name was uttered at last; he had not been able to keep it back. Yes, there was the sore spot; it was for her he was uneasy, it was she for whom his heart reproached him, it was she whom he wished to protect....
He suddenly made up his mind that he would see the countess. If she really had a secret, he would drag it out of her.
So he arrayed himself rapidly, glad to have something definite to do, and sallied forth into the bright, cool morning.
He had not noticed the time, but as he left the hotel, the big clock over the casino entrance told him that he was early, so he strolled about the camembert, as the little round park just in front of the casino is derisively called, and looked at the people and tried to arrange his thoughts.
The crowd here is astonishingly different from that on the terrace, for these are the people who haunt the public rooms—derelicts, for the most part, poised as it were before the mouth of the dragon, searching for an inspiration before plunging in to stake their last louis; or perhaps with their last louis lost and nothing to do but watch the feverish procession which continually ascends and descends the casino steps, and wonder where another louis could be borrowed or begged or stolen.
It is a motley and sordid crowd, lolling on the benches or loitering uncertainly about: ridiculous old women, wonderfully arrayed in the fabrics of 1860, fondly misinterpreting the astonished glances cast at them; frizzled old men struggling to conceal a bankrupt interior behind a pompous front; cocottes endeavouring to pretend they are not for everybody and at the same time to appear not too difficult; impecunious gamblers trying to pose as men of affairs, but always betrayed by a loose end somewhere; dowdy old couples to whom the tables have become a habit more devastating than any drug—a new Comédie Humaine waiting for another Balzac.
Selden, regarding these people for the hundredth time with an appreciative eye, wished that he were the Balzac, and sighing a little because he was not, he turned away to the gayer life of the terrace—gayer at least on the surface, fascinating as a whirlpool is fascinating, tempting the onlooker to jump in and be swallowed up, and seductive, as things dangerous and forbidden have been seductive since the days of Eve.
The Countess Rémond possessed those qualities of fascination and intrigue, too—superlatively. He realized it anew as he saw her coming toward him down the steps, her lithe uncorseted body faultlessly clad in a grey tailleur, which, conventional and subdued as it was, seemed somehow exotic as she wore it. Selden thanked his stars that he had gained immunity the night before by that glimpse he had had of her soul; it was very pleasant to know himself out of danger.
“How good of you to come,” she said, as he took her hand. And then she looked at him more closely, for her instinct felt the change in him. “Are you annoyed at something? Did it disarrange you to meet me here?”