And she staggered to a chair with the reassuring smile frozen on her face.
Then the portrait was passed from hand to hand in silence. It was a miniature of Marie Antoinette, painted on ivory, which had turned yellow. The colours were almost lost, but the face stood clearly enough. It was the face of a young girl, long and narrow, with the hair drawn straight up and dressed high and simply on the head without ornament.
“It is she,” said one and another. “C’est bien elle.”
“It was painted when she was newly a queen,” commented the Vicomte de Castel Aunet. “I have seen others like it, but not that one before.”
Barebone stood apart and no one offered to approach him. Dormer Colville had gone toward the great fireplace, and was standing by himself there with his back toward the room. He was surreptitiously wiping from his face the perspiration which had suddenly run down it, as one may see the rain running down the face of a statue.
Things had taken an unexpected turn. The Marquis de Gemosac, himself always on the surface, had stirred others more deeply than he had anticipated or could now understand. France has always been the victim of her own emotions; aroused in the first instance half in idleness, allowed to swell with a semi-restraining laugh, and then suddenly sweeping and overwhelming. History tells of a hundred such crises in the pilgrimage of the French people. A few more—and historians shall write “Ichabod” across the most favoured land in Europe.
It is customary to relate that, after a crisis, those most concerned in it know not how they faced it or what events succeeded it. “He never knew,” we are informed, “how he got through the rest of the evening.”
Loo Barebone knew and remembered every incident, every glance. He was in full possession of every faculty, and never had each been so keenly alive to the necessity of the moment. Never had his quick brain been so alert as it was during the rest of the evening. And those who had come to the Hotel Gemosac to confirm their adoption of a figure-head went away with the startling knowledge in their hearts that they had never in the course of an artificial life met a man less suited to play that undignified part.
And all the while, in the back of his mind, there lingered with a deadly patience the desire for the moment which must inevitably come when he should at last find himself alone, face to face, with Dormer Colville.
It was nearly midnight before this moment came. At last the latest guest had taken his leave, quitting the house by the garden door and making his way across that forlorn and weedy desert by the dim light reflected from the clouds above. At last the Marquis de Gemosac had bidden them good night, and they were left alone in the vast bedroom which a dozen candles, in candelabras of silver blackened by damp and neglect, only served to render more gloomy and mysterious.