[CHAPTER XI]
COUNT DE GORBIO
Count Stanislas de Gorbio was a handsome man, and quite young, for he was still in the thirties.
There are certain women who cannot endure his particular style of beauty: velvet black eyes, black moustache, black beard, black hair, a pale, delicate almost feminine complexion, and dazzling white teeth displayed in an everlasting smile. Such men are too good looking; they are insipid, these women declare. They prefer, if we may believe them, a man who is frankly ugly.
In so saying some of them scarcely speak the truth, for they change their tune if one of those insipid persons pays court to them. It was thus, for instance, that Mlle. de la Boulays, who had repeatedly declared, without attaching any importance to it, that the airs and graces of Count Stanislas de Gorbio only "made her smile," in other words, that she ridiculed them, began that evening to lend the most assiduous and smiling attention to the Count's amiable chatter.
She had discarded the Red Cross uniform which, admirably suiting her clear-cut beauty, seemed to emphasize the real and somewhat serious side of an expression belonging less to a young girl than to a young woman already conversant with the sorrows of life. Françoise's childhood had not been happy. When she was ten years of age she suffered the great loss of her mother to whom she was tenderly attached. Her father married again, but the marriage was unhappy for both of them. A divorce, however, which had been obtained not long before, set both father and daughter free. And now Françoise and her father lived for each other, never separating, traveling together and finding consolation for the cares and sorrows of the past in their perfect affection.
M. de la Boulays had plunged into considerable business affairs, anxious to increase the fortune of his daughter, who was destined to make a brilliant marriage. She had already refused several suitors. She argued that there was no hurry, though she had passed her twenty-fifth birthday.
Mlle. de la Boulays was fair-haired—so fair-haired that everyone who came near her was bathed in sunshine. Count Stanislas de Gorbio seemed as though he were illuminated. Never, indeed, had that handsome head with its crown of gold bent towards him with so much sweetness to listen to words which he could not regard as more eloquent that day than on the day before. Never had those eyes, those great grey-green eyes, with their variable shadows, like waves affected by the least caprice of the wind, never had those eyes looked at him with such persistence. In truth they fixed themselves only on him. That evening the Count had some grounds for feeling sure that the victory was won.
Didier followed their movements, and his feelings may be imagined. During dinner he seemed greatly dejected, answering in an abstracted manner the few questions which were put to him by M. de la Boulays, who did not fail to notice his guest's gloomy demeanor.
When they retired to the drawing-room Françoise's father asked Didier if he were not somewhat indisposed, to which he made answer that on the contrary he was quite well, and if he had shown some depression during this last meal, it was because he was compelled, as the result of certain news which he had received from Paris, to leave them that very night by the late express.