For the rest, Madame de Varigny was undeniably a beautiful woman, her blue-black, rather coarse hair framing an oval face, extraordinarily attractive in contour, with somewhat high cheek bones and a clever, flexible mouth.
Jean’s first instinctive feeling was one of distaste. In spite of her knowledge that Varigny was one of the oldest names in France, the Countess struck her as partaking a little of the adventuress—of the type of woman of no particular birth who has climbed by her wits—and she wondered what position she had occupied prior to her marriage.
She was sharply recalled from her thoughts to find that Madame de Varigny was introducing the little middle-aged Frenchman to her as her husband, and immediately she spoke Jean felt her suspicions melting away beneath the warm, caressing cadences of an unusually beautiful voice. Such a voice was a straight passport to the heart. It seemed to clothe even the prosaic little Count in an almost romantic atmosphere of tender charm, an effect which he speedily dispelled by giving Jean a full, true, and particular account of the various pulmonary symptoms which annually induced him to seek the high, dry air of Montavan.
“It is as an insurance of good health that I come,” he informed Jean gravely.
“Oh, yes, we are not here merely for pleasure—comme ces autres”—-Madame de Varigny gestured smilingly towards a merry party of men and girls who had just come in from luging and were stamping the snow from off their feet amid gay little outbursts of chaff and laughter. “We are here just as last year, when we first made the acquaintance of Monsieur Peterson”—the suddenly muted quality of her voice implied just the right amount of sympathetic recollection—“so that mon pauvre mari may assure himself of yet another year of health.”
The faintly ironical gleam in her eyes convinced Jean that, as she had shrewdly begun to suspect, the little Count was a malade imaginaire, and once she found herself wondering what could be the circumstances responsible for the union of two such dissimilar personalities as the high-bred, hypochondriacal little Count and the rather splendid-looking but almost certainly plebeian-born woman who was his wife.
She intended, later on, to ask her father if he could supply the key to the riddle, but he had contrived to drift off during the course of her conversation with the Varignys, and, when at last she found herself free to join him, he had disappeared altogether.
She thought it very probable that he had gone out to watch the progress of a ski-ing match to which he had referred with some enthusiasm earlier in the day, and she smiled a little at the characteristic way in which he had extricated himself, at her expense, from the inconvenience of his unexpected recontre with the Varignys.
But, two hours later, she realised that once again his superficial air of animation had deceived her. From her window she saw him coming along the frozen track that led from the hillside cemetery, and for a moment she hardly recognised her father in that suddenly shrank, huddled figure of a man, stumbling down the path, his head thrust forward and sunken on his breast.
Her first imperative instinct was to go and meet him. Her whole being ached with the longing to let him feel the warm rush of her sympathy, to assure him that he was not utterly alone. But she checked the impulse, recognising that he had no use for any sympathy or love which she could give.