CHAPTER XXVI
THE CONSUL'S COMMISSION
"Hope tells a flattering tale,
Delusive, vain, and hollow.
Ah! let not Hope prevail,
Lest disappointment follow."
Not many hours later saw me seeking admittance to the stately but dilapidated hôtel of the Comtesse de Baloit in the Faubourg St. Germain. I was determined to see Pelagie, and if possible alone, so I sent up word that a messenger from the First Consul desired to see Mademoiselle la Comtesse on business of importance. I feared, should I send up my own name, that the duchesse would not permit her to see me, but, had I known it, I could have sent no message less likely to win Pelagie's consent to an interview. It was only through a lurking suspicion of whom the messenger might be that she consented to see me.
I was ushered into a room very luxuriously furnished, but in which everything had an air of faded grandeur—as if belonging to another age. The tapestries were not only faded but rapidly growing thread-bare, and the gold of the buhl furniture was peeling off in strips, and in tables inlaid with fine mosaics many of the stones were wanting. All this lack of care or evidence of poverty rather surprised me, remembering the magnificent coach and gorgeously liveried servants I had twice seen on the avenue. Then I recalled what I had often heard since coming to Paris, that the nobility of the old régime would starve and go cold at home to make the display in public they considered befitting their dignity. It seemed very sad to me, and I wondered if it could be because mademoiselle did not have enough to eat that she had seemed of late to be growing thin and pale. To me, who am both somewhat of an epicure and a valiant trencherman (and remembering the abundance she had been used to in America), nothing could seem more pitiful than to think of my little Pelagie as going hungry.
Yet when, in a few minutes, she came in, radiantly beautiful in some Frenchy flowing gown of pale rose-color and much soft lace and ribbons, no one could think of her as hungry or poverty-pinched in any way, but only as some wonderful fairy queen who dined on peacocks' tongues and supped on nectar and ambrosia.
She was greatly surprised to see me; I think she thought of me as a kind of Daniel venturing into the lion's den. But the old lioness, the duchesse, was not with her, only the same companion I had seen in the carriage on the Champs-Élysées, and I felt once more that fate smiled on me. It meant much to me, for I knew not whether I should ever see her again, and I longed greatly to have a few minutes' untrammeled conversation with her, such as I had often had in St. Louis in those days that seemed so far away.
Perhaps my eyes dwelt too eagerly upon her. I never could quite remember how beautiful she was when I was away from her, and so every time I saw her I was dazzled afresh. This time, too, I was trying to fasten every lovely curve of cheek and throat, and glowing scarlet of lips, and shadowy glory of dark eyes and waving hair, and witching little curls about white brow and neck, yes, and every knot of lace and ribbon, so firmly in my mind that I might always have the beautiful picture to look on when there was no longer any hope of seeing again the bright reality.
So absorbed was I in fixing fast in memory every little detail of the bright picture that I think I must have forgot my manners: it was only seeing the long lashes on the rose-tinted cheek that brought me to myself. I bent low over her hand and then put into it the packet the First Consul had intrusted me to give to her.
"For me? From the First Consul?" she said, in slow surprise.