"No! You are trying to escape me--now, don't deny it. Perhaps I know the reason which makes you unfavorable to my request. You have delicate duties that you must regard. If your friend should discover that you had shown the same favor to me as to her--I don't know her, but, for all that, it might be possible, and certainly pardonable, for her to be a little jealous! Am I not right? Isn't it that which makes you hesitate?"
He was silent for a moment. Then, still in an absent way and as if speaking to himself, he said, quietly:
"Jealous? She would certainly have no cause to be."
The unfortunate expression had scarcely passed his lips when a hot and cold shudder passed over him, and he suddenly became conscious what a deadly insult he had uttered. He looked at her in alarm; he saw that all the blood had fled from her cheeks, leaving even her lips a deathly white. But immediately, before he could even recover sufficient self-possession to soften the impression of his words, she forced a pleasant laugh, hastily rose from the sofa and stepped up to him with both her hands extended.
"Thank you, my friend," she said, in her easiest tone; "you are not particularly gallant, but something better and rarer--you are candid. You are right; unless a woman is able to set the whole female sex wild with envy and jealousy, like your beautiful unknown friend, she is not a worthy subject for your art. I really ought to be old enough to see that myself. But, as I said, you are partly to blame for my having hit on such a foolish idea--the portrait of that beautiful woman had turned my head. But now it is in its right place again, and I thank you for your speedy cure. Prenez que je n'aie rien dit. That my tardy wish, which perhaps would have been an impudent one even in earlier days, remains our secret, I expect from your chivalry. So--your hand upon it--and soyons amis! And now, good-night. Though I am in no danger of awakening jealousy, I am not old enough yet to be secure from malicious gossip, and--you have already staid longer than is proper."
In the most painful confusion he attempted to stammer out a few palliating words. But she would not listen to them, and, amid all sorts of pretty speeches and jests, almost hustled him by main force out of the door, which she immediately locked behind him.
No sooner did she find herself alone than her features became transformed; the smile on her lips faded into a grimace, and a threatening scowl appeared on her smooth forehead. She brushed from her eyelashes the tears of angry humiliation which she had held back too long already, and drew a long, deep breath, as if to save her heart from suffocation. Thus she stood, near the threshold, her little hands clinched tight, gazing motionless at the door through which the man who had insulted her had passed out. If a passionate wish possessed the magic power to kill, Jansen would probably have never left her house alive.
She heard steps in the adjoining cabinet. She looked up, passed her hands across her eyes and seized a glass of water, which she emptied at a single draught. She was herself again. An elderly woman entered cautiously, dressed simply and entirely in black, but with a care which betrayed long practice in the arts of the toilet. Moreover, her manner of speaking and carrying herself showed, at the first glance, that she had once been at home behind the foot-lights. She was apparently well on in the forties; but her real face was concealed under a coating of paint, very skillfully laid on, and her soft, regular features made no disagreeable impression.
"You are still here, my dear?" cried the countess, scarcely attempting to conceal a feeling of displeasure. "I thought you had long ago felt bored at your self-chosen part and gone away."
"I have passed an unspeakably pleasurable evening, my dear countess, and wanted to thank you for it. Since I lost my voice and left the stage, I scarcely remember to have heard so much good music in so few hours. Manna in the desert, my dear countess!--manna in the desert! But how lucky it was that I listened to the concert, as I did, in my dark box over there! It is true that he, before whom I particularly wished to avoid appearing, might not have noticed me. Since his new liaison he seems to be blind for everything else, and the many years since we last met have done their best to make it hard for him to recognize me. But imagine, countess, that young painter--the same one who got in my way that night when we discovered the burning picture--strayed by chance into your bedroom! Fortunately, he hastily retired again. But it was a bright moonlight night the first time. Who knows whether he did not recognize me again, especially as the picture in the cabinet there--"