‘Now, my dear M. Paul,’ she said, ‘you are really and truly admirable. That is quite perfect, and if you will promise me, upon your sacred word of honour as a man, not to betray me by a word or a look, I will tell you something I never told you before. I have never admired you so much, or loved you so dearly, as I do at this hour. You must believe me,’ she continued, pushing her plate away and beckoning the maid with a slight backward gesture of the head, ‘I hate this tone of persiflage, but what is there left for us if we would be blamelessly alone, and yet speak our hearts to each other?’
‘Madame,’ said Paul, ‘I find it a masterstroke of genius.’ Their tones were ice on both sides, but their words were fire. The maid most probably thought her mistress bored, and the guest a dullard. She had seemed at first interested in the new arrival, but she lapsed now into an attitude of indifference, and the dangerous pretence went on. In this intoxicating whirl of passion, when interchange of vows was offered under the necessity of constant watchfulness and self-guardianship, the meal was not an important matter.
‘But,’ said Gertrude, ‘my dear Paul, you must really do justice to my table; the pretence must be absolute.’
‘I will try to make it so,’ he answered; but the luxurious meal had no more relish for him than if it had been desert sand. He struggled with it manfully, however, and contrived to keep astride his end of the see-saw of pretence.
Who are the best and who the worst of women? Did any man ever venture to impugn the fair fame of Madame la Baronne de Wyeth? Yet, had the devil a better ally anywhere than this delicate little purring white-breasted epicure in the varying flavours of the ruined soul? Oh, the devil is, of course, a symbol! Let the phrase pass.
But the Paul Armstrong of ten years later, perched in his fog-bound eyrie, staring along the unseen gorge? He tells himself that had she been what he believed her, he might have been elsewhere than where he finds himself. There had been but a surface ash upon the seeming ruin of a life. There was something still to build upon, but she must needs destroy what was left. There was wholesome blood in the veins of the man who aspired to rebuild, and it was she who poisoned its fount.
‘“Queen bee of the honey asps,”’ quoth Paul of the eyrie: and he was back in Paris.
He was back at Gertrude’s table, the worshipped, the immaculate Gertrude of those days.
They had reached the end of the repast, and coffee was served in little cups of eggshell china encased in filigree gold.
‘A gift from the Khedive,’ she said, indicating these. ‘Sardou was with me when I was in Alexandria.’ She laughed, and what with her eyes, to which a single glass of the rare hock had given an added sparkle, and what with her faultless teeth, she fairly dazzled on her companion. ‘Yes, that is the creature’s absurd name. Sardou is the solemn personage who has been waiting upon us all the morning, and his godfathers and godmothers had the impertinence to baptize him in the name of Victor. I was telling you that Sardou was with me in Alexandria when the Khedive was so gracious as to offer me this little souvenir, and I implored his Highness that he might be permitted to make a study in coffee in the palace kitchen. He made it, and the result is adorable. Inter alia,’ she said in the same tone, ‘you, too, are adorable this morning, and now I think I may snatch a longed-for moment and tell you so in earnest. Juliette, bring me a letter you will find upon my toilet-table, and call Sardou.’