“That ring with the three diamonds in it,” Florian had said, “is deplorably old-fashioned—”
“Yes, I suppose it is, sweetheart: but it was given me by a dear friend, and you know the sort of things they pick out, and, besides, I like to have it keeping me in mind of how ridiculously the best-meaning people may be sometimes,” his Melior had answered,—very happily, and nuzzling a very wonderfully soft cheek against his cheek.
So he had let the matter stand....
It was a nuisance, too, this news which Florian had received as to the great Cardinal Dubois, whom Florian had promised—as he regretted now to remember, in carelessly loose terms,—to offer as a Christmas present to Janicot. It appeared that during Florian’s stay at Brunbelois the over-gallant cardinal had been compelled to submit to an operation which deprived him of two cherished possessions and shortly afterward of his life. His death was a real grief to Florian, not as in itself any loss, but because, with Dubois interred at St. Roch, the greatest man living in France when Christmas came would be the Duc d’Orléans.
Florian had long been fond of Philippe d’Orléans, and Florian loathed the thought of making a present of his friend’s life to a comparatively slight and ambiguous acquaintance like Janicot. There seemed no way out of it, however, for Florian had in this matter given his word. But he regretted deeply that he had thus recklessly promised the greatest man in the kingdom instead of specifically confining himself to that selfish Dubois, who could without real self-denial have lived until December, and who could so easily have furthered everybody’s well-being by restricting his amours to ladies of such known piety and wholesomeness and social position as made them appropriate playfellows for a high prince of the Church.
But all this was spilt milk. What it came to in the upshot was that Florian, through his infatuation for Melior, was already in a fair way to lose his most intimate and powerful friend and his only legitimate brother. It was a nuisance, for Florian disliked annoying either one of them, and thus to be burdened with the need of bereaving yourself of both appeared a positive imposition. But we cannot have all things as we desire them in this world, his common-sense assured him: and, in the main, as has been said, the incidental disappointments, now that he had attained his life’s desire, were tepid and not really very deep.
For Melior was beautiful; after months of intimacy and fond research he could find no flaw in her beauty: and in other respects she proved to be as acceptable a wife as any of his own marrying that he had ever had. If she was not always reasonable, if sometimes indeed she seemed obtuse, and if she nagged a little now and then, it was, after all, what past experience had led him to expect alike in marriage and in liaisons. The rapture which he had known at first sight of her, the rapture of the mountain-top, was not, he assured himself, a delusion of which he had ever expected permanence....
“But this remarkably carved staff, my darling—?”
“Oh, it was one of my sister Mélusine’s old things. I would not be in the least surprised if it were magical—And while we are speaking about sisters, Florian, I do wish that black-faced one of yours would not look at me so hard and then shrug, because she has done it twice, in quite a personal way—”
“Marie-Claire is a strange woman, my pet.”