But he never loved any other woman. And unconsciously to herself she was so used to consider that implicit and exclusive devotion to her as one of her rights, that she would have been astonished, even perhaps annoyed, had she seen that he took his worship elsewhere. Her remembrance had spoiled twelve years of the promise of his manhood, but if anyone had reproached her with that, she would have said sincerely enough, 'I cannot help his adoring me.' She would have even taken credit to herself for the unusual kindliness with which she had endeavoured to turn the sirocco of love into the mild and harmless breeze of friendly sympathy.
The Duc de Béthune was one of those conquests which flattered even her sated and fastidious vanity; and she had been touched to unwonted feeling by the delicate, chivalrous, and lofty character of the loyalty he gave her so long.
She jested at him often, but she respected him always; occasionally she irritated Othmar by saying to him, half in joke and half in earnest:
'Sometimes I almost wish that I had married Béthune!'
That he remained unmarried for her sake was always agreeable to her.
Loris Loswa was, on the contrary, one of the gayest of her many servitors. By birth noble and poor, he had been early compromised in a students' revolt at Kieff, and through family influence had been allowed self-exile instead of deportation to Tobolsk. He had turned his steps to Paris, and, possessing great facility for art, had pursued the study seriously and so successfully, that before he was thirty he had become one of the most noted artists in France.
He had a wonderful talent for the portraiture of women. No one rendered with so much grace, so much charm, so much delicate flattery, running deftly in the lines of truth, the peculiar beauties of the mondaine, in which, however much nude nature may have done, art always does still more. All that subtle, indescribable loveliness of the woman of society, which is made up of so many details of tint and costume, and manner and style, and a thousand other subtle indescribable things, was caught and fixed by the brush or by the crayon of Loris Loswa with a power all his own, and a fidelity which became the most charming of compliments. Ruder artists, truer perhaps to art than he, grumbled at his method and despised his renown. 'Faiseur de chiffons' some students wrote once upon his door; and there were many of his brethren who pretended that his creations were nothing more than audacious, and unreally brilliant, trickeries.
But detraction did not lock the wheels of his triumphal chariot; it glided along with inconceivable rapidity through the pleasant avenues of popular admiration. And his art pleased too many connoisseurs of elegant taste and cultured sight not to have in it some higher and finer qualities than his enemies allowed to it. He had magical colouring, and as magical a touch; a woman's portrait, under his treatment, became gorgeous as a sunbird, delicate as an orchid, ethereal as a butterfly floating down a sunbeam. Then he was at times arrogant in his pretensions, fastidious in his selections of sitters; he was given to call himself an amateur, which at once disarmed his critics and increased his vogue; he was an aristocrat, and very good-looking, which did not diminish his popularity with any class of women; and what increased it still more was, that he refused many more sitters than he accepted. Not to have been painted in water colours, or drawn in pastel by Count Loris Loswa, was to any élégante to be a step behindhand in fashion; to have a pearl missing from her crown of distinction.
'If anyone could paint dew on a cobweb it would be Loswa,' a great critic had said one day. 'Have you never seen dew on a cobweb? It is the most beautiful thing in the world, especially when a sunbeam trembles through it.'
His present hostess had a high opinion of his powers, mingled with a certain depreciation of them. 'Perhaps it is only a trick,' she admitted; 'but it is a divine trick—a trick of Hermes.'