“Happy? Does it make a woman happy, then, to see a man destroyed by love?”
“It is more comfortable, your Grace, to be loved than to love. But I know nothing of my mistress’s heart. I came to her service only the other day. Yes, she is asleep. And the room is dark.”
The Duke said: “Good! This is indeed my lucky day.”
“I leave you, your Grace. And if I am dismissed?”
“I count you as my friend. I do not forget my friends. Leave me now.”
But a few minutes before he had left that room in a storm of rage. Now, a great peace was on him. He let the minutes pass by, standing there in the soft darkness, a man condemned to death. His life behind him lay like a soiled wilderness through which smirked and pirouetted an unclean travesty of himself. The gates of death looked to him clean and beautiful. He did not wish his life had been otherwise: he regretted not a minute of waste, not one inconstancy, not one folly: he regretted not a strand that had gone to the making of the mad silly tapestry of his life, he was glad that all had been as it had been so that he could now be as he was, a man who understood himself and could die with a heart cleansed of folly and sacred to love.
To the windows of the quiet dark room rose the chatter of the lounging traffic of the Place Vendôme. The Duke listened, and smiled. Brown eyes and scarlet lips, blue eyes and scarlet lips, black hair and golden hair and tawny hair, lazy smile and merry smile and greedy smile and bored smile, little breathless laughs, little meaningless laughs and sharp cries of pleasure, dresses of Chanel, Patou, Vionnet, Molyneux—round and round the Place Vendôme they went, like automata on a bejewelled merry-go-round. And the Duke saw himself sitting in motor-cars first beside one and then beside another, talking, talking, whispering, sighing, yawning....
As the minutes passed his sight began to distinguish the objects in the room. On a table some roses were fainting in a bowl. He made obeisance and kissed a rose, for kissing a rose will clean a man’s lips. Then he knelt beside the still figure on the couch and he kissed her mouth.
“Oh!” she cried, and she cried: “You thief!”
He said: “Your voice is so cold that ice would seem like fire beside it. But I don’t care.” And again he kissed her mouth. Then he said: “Your lips are burning. That is very odd. Your voice is very cold, but your lips are burning. Now why is that?”