This little domestic comedy only engaged Count Victor for a moment; he felt vexed for a woman in a position for which there seemed no remedy, and he sought distraction from his uneasy feeling by passing every man in the room under review, and guessing which of them, if any, could be the Drim-darroch who had brought him there from France. It was a baffling task. For many were there with faces wholly inscrutable who might very well have among them the secret he cherished, and yet nothing about them to advertise the scamp who had figured so effectively in other scenes than these. The Duke, their chief, moved now among them—suave, graceful, affectionate, his lady on his arm, sometimes squeezing her hand, a very boy in love!
“That's a grand picture of matrimonial felicity, Count,” said a voice at Count Victor's ear, and he turned to find the Chamberlain beside him.
“Positively it makes me half envious, monsieur,” said Count Victor. “A following influenced by the old feudal affections and wellnigh worshipping; health and wealth, ambitions gratified, a name that has sounded in camp and Court, yet a heart that has stayed at home; the fever of youth abated, and wedded to a beautiful woman who does not weary one, pardieu! his Grace has nothing more in this world to wish for.”
“Ay! he has most that's needed to make it a very comfortable world. Providence is good—”
“But sometimes grudging—”
“But sometimes grudging, as you say; yet MacCailen has got everything. When I see him and her there so content I'm wondering at my own wasted years of bachelordom. As sure as you're there, I think the sooner I draw in at a fire and play my flageolet to the guidwife the better for me.”
“It is a gift, this domesticity,” said Count Victor, not without an inward twinge at the picture. “Some of us have it, some of us have not, and no trying hard for content with one's own wife and early suppers will avail unless one is born to it like the trick of the Sonnet. I have been watching our good friend, your lawyer's wife, distracted over the—over the—balourdise of her husband as a dancer: he dances like a bootmaker's sign, if you can imagine that, and I dare not approach them till her very natural indignation has simmered down.”
The Chamberlain looked across, the hall distastefully and found Mrs. Petullo's eyes on him. She shrugged, for his perception alone, a white shoulder in a manner that was eloquent of many things.
“To the devil!” he muttered, yet essayed at the smile of good friendship which was now to be their currency, and a poor exchange for the old gold.
“Surely Monsieur MacTaggart dances?” said the Count; “I see a score of ladies here who would give their garters for the privilege.”