“Now you must make up for all you have not known, Monsieur,” said Liane, with her enchanting smile, “and I myself will teach you.”
It was a little difficult for Liane to talk to Jean, still for another quarter of an hour she tried. She really made an effort, because she was grateful to him for the passionate adoration in his eyes. It renewed her youth and gave her a feeling of ease and comfort. It was the sensation of a tired swimmer when the breeze drives back the salt water from his mouth, and nerves him afresh for the struggle. Liane was thirty-five, and lately the salt waters of life had risen threateningly close to those still perfect lips. In the end she knew she must yield to age, and she liked Jean because he made the end seem further off.
She asked him about his uncle, whom everybody knew and who was so charming; she asked him about his aunt, who of course was charming too, but whom unfortunately Liane had not happened to meet.
She was interested, to the point of stifling a yawn, in the Banque de Paris et des Pays-Bas; and where Jean lived and what he thought of Paris. It was rather like talking in letters of the alphabet to him instead of using civilized words.
But behind the talk she was busily thinking. Who was it Jean reminded her of so much? Someone she had known very well, whose little habits and tricks of talking were familiar to her; she must remember, and yet the name would not come back to her mind. Then her eyes fell on Jean’s hands and she started, they were narrow, well-shaped hands with long fingers and a wide gap between the thumb and the hand, and they were exactly like the hands of a musician—a musician whom Liane would never forget—the only real figure in her life, perhaps. Certainly the only man for whom she had really cared, and oh! how he had cared for Liane! It was long before she was famous, or it would never have done at all. He was poor and struggling and the most unpractical person on earth; he had no idea of what was due to a woman, but he loved fiercely, with the wild, unappeasable hunger of the soul which Liane never attempted to satisfy. Still he had made her laugh and cry, and in the end he had made her famous; because he killed himself for her. It was all a mistake really—it came of his taking things so seriously. He never had any souplesse about him, and men who will not bend, break. She had only made an appointment to meet a friend; it was certainly unfortunate that he should happen to hear of it, and then he had promptly and publicly shot himself in her presence, and Liane became the talk of Paris. Through it she was offered the engagement which gave her her great opportunity. Certainly he was not a man to forget. Liane smiled a little as she thought of him, not cruelly at all, but with a feeling of grateful security, and amusement at her own power. She had many rivals on the stage, but she did not think that any woman had ever made men feel so much. She was a queen of the emotions. She leaned forward and laid her soft, perilous fingers on Jean’s.
“You have a musician’s hands,” she said. Jean did not attempt to return the pressure of her hand; it would, he felt, have been taking advantage of her heavenly kindness.
“I am not yet a musician,” he said, “but it is true that is what I want to be. It is the thing I love best and understand most in life.”
Had he already forgotten his new vocation? It would have astounded Jean to know that he had.
Liane considered; she could not talk to him any more, and he was obviously unfitted at present for any other form of amusement; perhaps he could play, she was really fond of music.
“Play to me then,” she said very gently. Jean drew in his breath. Play to her! Oh, if he could! He who was so little accustomed to play to anybody, how dared he play to her—to the exquisite and angelic human being whom merely to look at and speak to was a delicious and mysterious fever?