XXVIII
Three days after the despatch of his letter to Ile Bourbon, Raymon had entirely forgotten both the letter and its purpose. He had felt decidedly better and had ventured to make a visit in the neighborhood. The estate of Lagny, which Monsieur Delmare had left to be sold for the benefit of his creditors, had been purchased by a wealthy manufacturer, Monsieur Hubert, a shrewd and estimable man, not like all wealthy manufacturers, but like a small number of the newly-rich. Raymon found the new owner comfortably settled in that house which recalled so many memories. He took pleasure in giving a free rein to his emotion as he wandered through the garden where Noun's light footprints seemed to be still visible on the gravel, and through those great rooms which seemed still to retain the echoes of Indiana's soft words; but soon the presence of a new hostess changed the current of his thoughts.
In the main salon, on the spot where Madame Delmare was accustomed to sit and work, a tall, slender young woman, with a glance that was at once pleasant and mischievous, caressing and mocking, sat before an easel, amusing herself by copying in water-colors the odd hangings on the walls. The copy was a fascinating thing, a delicate satire instinct with the bantering yet refined nature of the artist. She had amused herself by exaggerating the pretentious finicalness of the old frescoes; she had grasped the false and shifting character of the age of Louis XIV. on those stilted figures. While refreshing the colors that time had faded, she had restored their affected graces, their perfume of courtiership, their costumes of the boudoir and the shepherd's hut, so curiously identical. Beside that work of historical raillery she had written the word copy.
She raised her long eyes, instinct with merriment of a caustic, treacherous, yet attractive sort, slowly to Raymon's face. For some reason she reminded him of Shakespeare's Anne Page. There was in her manner neither timidity nor boldness, nor affectation, nor self-distrust. Their conversation turned upon the influence of fashion in the arts.
"Is it not true, monsieur, that the moral coloring of the period was in that brush?" she said, pointing to the wainscoting, covered with rustic cupids after the style of Boucher. "Isn't it true that those sheep do not walk or sleep or browse like sheep of to-day? And that pretty landscape, so false and so orderly, those clumps of many-petalled roses in the middle of the forest where naught but a bit of eglantine grows in our days, those tame birds of a species that has apparently disappeared, and those pink satin gowns which the sun never faded—is there not in all these a deal of poesy, ideas of luxury and pleasure, of a whole useless, harmless, joyous life? Doubtless these absurd fictions were quite as valuable as our gloomy political deliverances! If only I had been born in those days!" she added with a smile; "frivolous and narrow-minded creature that I am, I should have been much better fitted to paint fans and produce masterpieces of thread-work than to read the newspapers and understand the debates in the Chambers!"
Monsieur Hubert left the young people together; and their conversation drifted from one subject to another, until it fell at last upon Madame Delmare.
"You were very intimate with our predecessors in this house," said the young woman, "and it is generous on your part to come and see new faces here. Madame Delmare," she added, with a penetrating glance at him, "was a remarkable woman, so they say; she must have left memories here which place us at a disadvantage, so far as you are concerned."
"She was an excellent woman," Raymon replied, unconcernedly, "and her husband was a worthy man."
"But," rejoined the reckless girl, "she was something more than an excellent woman, I should judge. If I remember rightly there was a charm about her personality which calls for a more enthusiastic and more poetic description. I saw her two years ago, at a ball at the Spanish ambassador's. She was fascinating that night; do you remember?"
Raymon started at this reminder of the evening that he spoke to Indiana for the first time. He remembered at the same moment that he had noticed at that ball the distingué features and clever eyes of the young woman with whom he was now talking; but he did not then ask who she was.