CHAPTER VI.
IN THE MESHES.
“Take hands and part with laughter,
Touch lips and part with tears,
Once more, and no more after,
Whatever comes with years.
We twain shall not remeasure
The ways that left us twain,
Nor crush the lees of pleasure
From sanguine grapes of pain.”
Lord Delaval has never let a desire of his remain ungratified in his life, so now, haunted by the beauty of a woman for the space of twenty-four hours, he resolves to make her acquaintance.
“Her sort are not very particular about the convenances,” he says to himself as he approaches Numèro 17 Rue de Tronchet, but it must be confessed that his courage does not rear its crest much aloft as he rings the bell, and hears from the concierge that “Mademoiselle Ange est chez elle.”
Still, though his mind is perturbed, his pulses throb, and there is a mingling of expectation and trepidation in his breast, if his real feelings were finely analysed, it would be found that Mademoiselle’s beauty repels even while it attracts him to the point of looking on it closer.
Possibly the daylight may dissipate his delusion, he thinks. And he is conscious of a sort of half-hope, half-regret, that it may be so.
The apartment, into which he is ushered by Mademoiselle’s own smart soubrette, disappoints him at once.
The decorations are florid and over-done. The big mirrors gleam too brightly on the sea-green of the walls, the vivid scarlet of the ottomans, the chairs, the velvet cushions, the too heavily perfumed atmosphere, the curious medley of objets d’art, individually costly, but making a strange and heterogeneous whole, all seem to his fastidious eyes as redolent of the Alcazar.
The sunbeams that fall through the rose-tinted blinds are studiously toned down to a pale mystic light, fit for the languor of magnificent, heavy-lidded eyes—a Marie Antoinette fan with a jewelled handle, a flacon of esprit des millefleurs, a tiny handkerchief with a Chantilly border, a volume of De Musset’s poems, lie together, and bric-à-brac, rococo, ormolu, and Sèvres are heaped everywhere in picturesque confusion. If Mademoiselle Ange has ever desired to be grand, she has gained her desire.
While he waits, he wonders if the woman is really content, and whether these things are worth possessing at the price she has to pay for them.