Gilbert bowed again slightly, but remained standing. “I have come, Madame,” he said, with great directness, “to know if you can give me any news of my unfortunate cousin, the Vicomte de Saint-Ermay.”
Madame d’Espaze’s delicate eyebrows went up. “Mon Dieu! Monsieur le Marquis, you take away my breath,” she said. “Is M. de Saint-Ermay lost, then?”
“He has been arrested,” replied Château-Foix shortly. Little versed as he was in the ways of women, he saw that she was going to play with him, and the prospect was not alluring.
“Ah, he has been arrested, the poor Saint-Ermay?” queried the Comtesse. “I am desolated, but what would you have? Politics is a dangerous game.” She breathed out a light little sigh, and sank down on the sofa. “You should have kept him out of it, Monsieur le Marquis.”
To this remark, delivered with an indescribable airy malice, Gilbert made no answer for the moment. But he took the chair which his hostess had previously indicated to him, and, once seated, he observed coldly: “You will pardon me for saying, Madame, that this is not a case for levity.”
“But, Monsieur,” retorted the lady, “I am all seriousness. Though I do not quite see,” she added, pursing her lips, “why it should be demanded of me.”
“You did not know then, Madame, that M. de Saint-Ermay was in prison?” asked Gilbert, looking at her steadily.
Madame d’Espaze shrugged her shoulders. “How should I?”
“Then I must tell you about it,” replied Château-Foix. “I found, a short time ago, that my cousin was becoming entangled in a scheme which did not commend itself to me—a scheme which I need not particularise to you, Madame, and one in which, to be frank, I suspected a trap. I therefore came to Paris; I endeavoured to dissuade him from further compromising himself, and especially from continuing his visits to the chief meeting-place of the two parties—your house. I failed; and the Vicomte attended your salon last Saturday night, as he had intended. This morning he was arrested, and I am ignorant even of the place of his imprisonment.”
Madame d’Espaze had listened quite gravely to this recital, and now said, without any particular expression in her lazy voice: “I do not know, Monsieur le Marquis, why you are telling me all this.”