He clenches his teeth to suppress the oath that rises to his lips.
“Marguerite! listen to me! Tell me, I implore of you, what spirit possesses you to-night? Is it your vanity, your love of fresh victories, that induces you to treat me like this? Marguerite, for the love of Heaven!—for the sake of what we have been to each other—do not make me suffer like this.”
But he might as well plead to a marble pillar.
“I wish you would go and smoke, and not talk nonsense,” she says, almost in a whisper, with a flush of annoyance on her cheek. “I only wish I could smoke.”
“If that is your only ambition, do it; most things end in smoke,” he replies meaningly and savagely; and while all this is going on, Lord Delaval watches her covertly, and it is dear incense to his vanity when he marks that De Belcour moves away from the evident contest, foiled and angry. “After all, perhaps Shropshire and Silverlake wronged her,” he thinks, and rather than the Frenchman shall monopolise her, he throws away his half-smoked cigar and saunters towards her.
Her eyes flash with pleasure as he approaches—her cheeks glow—and she listens enraptured to his voice.
Yes! It is evidently love at first sight with her, and to this man she is certainly not acting a part. As her sweet warm breath sweeps past him, he feels the sensuous delirium of a dream, he is intoxicated by the power of her beauty; and she, hard and cold as she really is, deadly in her revenge, cruel in her greed of love, relentless in her hate, her heart yearns to him with quite a real feeling, a feeling which, though wicked and worthless in itself, yet ennobles her to a certain extent, for it makes her feel her own utter unworthiness.
“Stay a few minutes,” she whispers, as he rises among the other guests for his adieux.
And so he stays, but in his mind’s eye he sees his wife’s face, and—man of the world as he is, flirt, vaurien, lax to the last degree—his deep blue eyes actually glisten with generous remorse.
“Poor little woman!” he thinks. “By Jove! what an awful fool I was to come here.”