The Vicomte de Portenduere and his wife, formerly Mademoiselle Mirouet, had become of late very intimate with the du Guenics, so intimate that they shared their box at the Opera by equal payments. The two young women, Ursula and Sabine, had been won to this friendship by the delightful interchange of counsels, cares, and confidences apropos of their first infants.
While Calyste, a novice in falsehood, was saying to himself, “I must warn Savinien,” Sabine was thinking, “I am sure that paper bore a coronet.” This reflection passed through her mind like a flash, and Sabine scolded herself for having made it. Nevertheless, she resolved to find the paper, which in the midst of her terrors of the night before she had flung into her letter-box.
After breakfast Calyste went out, saying to his wife that he should soon return. Then he jumped into one of those little low carriages with one horse which were just beginning to supersede the inconvenient cabriolet of our ancestors. He drove in a few minutes to the vicomte’s house and begged him to do him the service, with rights of return, of fibbing in case Sabine should question the vicomtesse. Thence Calyste, urging his coachman to speed, rushed to the rue de Chartres in order to know how Beatrix had passed the rest of the night. He found that unfortunate just from her bath, fresh, embellished, and breakfasting with a very good appetite. He admired the grace with which his angel ate her boiled eggs, and he marvelled at the beauty of the gold service, a present from a monomaniac lord, for whom Conti had composed a few ballads on ideas of the lord, who afterwards published them as his own!
Calyste listened entranced to the witty speeches of his idol, whose great object was to amuse him, until she grew angry and wept when he rose to leave her. He thought he had been there only half an hour, but it was past three before he reached home. His handsome English horse, a present from the Vicomtesse de Grandlieu, was so bathed in sweat that it looked as though it had been driven through the sea. By one of those chances which all jealous women prepare for themselves, Sabine was at a window which looked on the court-yard, impatient at Calyste’s non-return, uneasy without knowing why. The condition of the horse with its foaming mouth surprised her.
“Where can he have come from?”
The question was whispered in her ear by that power which is not exactly consciousness, nor devil, nor angel; which sees, forebodes, shows us the unseen, and creates belief in mental beings, creatures born of our brains, going and coming and living in the world invisible of ideas.
“Where do you come from, dear angel?” Sabine said to Calyste, meeting him on the first landing of the staircase. “Abd-el-Kader is nearly foundered. You told me you would be gone but a moment, and I have been waiting for you these three hours.”
“Well, well,” thought Calyste, who was making progress in dissimulation, “I must get out of it by a present—Dear little mother,” he said aloud, taking her round the waist with more cajolery than he would have used if he had not been conscious of guilt, “I see that it is quite impossible to keep a secret, however innocent, from the woman who loves us—”
“Well, don’t tell secrets on the staircase,” she said, laughing. “Come in.”
In the middle of a salon which adjoined their bedroom, she caught sight in a mirror of Calyste’s face, on which, not aware that it could be seen, he allowed his real feelings and his weariness to appear.