"Peste!" laughed Richelieu. "This cast-off lover seems a strange fellow! Does he not know that absent people have never the presumption to dream of keeping their places, but learn to give them graciously up!—shall I teach him the lesson? If he have his sixteen quarterings, a prick of my sword will soon punish his impudence!"
The jeer fell unheeded on Léon de Tallemont's ear; had he heard it, the flippant sneer would have had no power to sting him then. Regardless of the men around the supper-table, he grasped Thargélie Dumarsais's hands in his:
"This is how we meet!"
She shrank away from his glance, terrified, she scarce knew why, at the mute anguish upon his face.
Perhaps for a moment she realized how utterly she had abused the love and wrecked the life of this man; perhaps with his voice came back to her thronging thoughts of guileless days, memories ringing through the haze of years, as distant chimes ring over the water from lands we have quitted, reaching us when we have floated far away out to sea—memories of an innocent and untroubled life, when she had watched the woodland flowers open to the morning sun, and listened to the song of the brooks murmuring over the violet roots, and heard the sweet evening song of the birds rise to heaven under the deep vine shadows of Lorraine.
One moment she was silent, her eyes falling, troubled and guilty, beneath his gaze; then she looked up, laughing gayly, and flashing on him her languid lustrous glance.
"You look like a somnambulist, mon ami! Did nobody ever tell you, then, how Mme. de la Vrillière carried me off from Lorraine, and brought me in her train to Paris, till, when Favette Fontanie was tired of being petted like the spaniel, the monkey, and the parrot, she broke away from Madame la Marquise, and made, after a little probation at the Foire St. Laurent, her appearance at the Français as Thargélie Dumarsais? Allons donc! have I lost my beauty, that you look at me thus? You should be reminding me of the proverb, 'On revient toujours à ses premiers amours!' Surely, Thargélie Dumarsais will be as attractive to teach such a lesson as that little peasant girl, Favette, used to be? Bah, Léon! Can I not love you as well again in Paris as I once loved you at Grande Charmille? And—who knows?—perhaps I will!"
She leaned towards him; her breath fanning his cheek, her scented hair brushing his lips, her lustrous eyes meeting his with eloquent meaning, her lips parted with the resistless witchery of that melting and seductive sourire d'amour to which they were so admirably trained. He gazed down on her, breathless, silence-stricken—gazed down on the sorceress beauty to which the innocent loveliness of his Lorraine flower had changed. Was this woman, with the rouge upon her cheeks, the crimson roses in her hair, the mocking light in her eyes, the wicked laugh on her lips, the diamond glittering like a serpent's eye in her bosom—was she the guileless child he had left weeping, on the broken steps of the fountain, tears as pure as the dew in the violet-bells, with the summer sunlight streaming round her, and no shade on her young brow darker than the fleeting shadow flung from above by the vine-leaves? A cry broke once more from his lips:
"Would to God I had died before to-night!"
Then he lifted his head, with a smile upon his face—a smile that touched and vaguely terrified all those who saw it—the smile of a breaking heart.