Dunoisse stared straight before him. Rigid and immovable, he might have been taken for the colored image of an officer of piou-pious. Only his Algerian medals shook a little with the beating of his heart. And the voice came again. It said:
“Think of me what you will!... I must speak to you! Remain after the others have left.... Wait in the gray boudoir at the end of the drawing-room beyond this. Raise those violets to your face if you agree: drop them if you refuse!...”
His hand shook as he lifted the knot of drooping blossoms, pretending to inhale their vanished scent. He heard her whisper:
“Thanks!” and the rustle of her silks and laces—distinguishable to him through the swishing and billowing and crackling of a sea of feminine fripperies—passed on. And footmen with baskets of champagne and silver trays of glasses, light as bubbles, began to circulate through the crowd; and the explosion of corks, the gurgling of the foamy wine, the pledging of loyal toasts and the clinking of glasses heralded the conversion of a festival of sentiment into a lively night.
Amidst the popping, clinking and toasting, Dunoisse passed from the larger drawing-room into the smaller, less crowded salon beyond, and presently found himself in the little boudoir.
It was a charming, cosy nest with purple-gray silken hangings, its ebony furniture upholstered with velvet of the same shade, the black, shining wood inlaid with silver wreaths, fillets and ribbons in the unfashionable Empire style.
Lofty in proportion to its size, it boasted a painted ceiling of nymphs and satyrs dancing in a woodland glade, exquisite enough to have been the work of Boucher. A bright fire burned in the fireplace of steel and bronze; tall double-doors left ajar gave a peep of a bedroom, perfumed and pink as the heart of a moss-rose; the deep chairs and wide divan suggested slumber. A black-and-tan King Charles’s spaniel of English breed, all floss-silk curls and blue ribbon bow, slept in a basket on the chinchilla hearthrug; there were books in ebony book-cases: a volume of the plays of de Musset, bound in white vellum, lay open upon an ottoman; the “Fleurs du Mal” of Baudelaire peeped from a dainty work-basket from which a strip of ecclesiastically-patterned embroidery trailed; and violets in bowls of Sèvres and groups of the white narcissus in tall Venetian vases made the air heavily sweet.
It was a nest for confidences, a place for revelations and confessions. It contained no pictures beyond a few frames of miniatures, all masculine portraits by famous hands, and one fine full-length, life-sized oil-painting, within a massive carved and gilded frame of the period of the Regency; representing a voluptuously-beautiful woman, in the habit of a Cistercian nun, standing upon a daïs covered with blue-and-gold tapestry in a pattern of fleurs-de-lis. Behind her rose a marble altar, its Tabernacle, surmounted with a pointed arch and the Cross, towered overhead, and one white, dimpled hand of the fair woman grasped a Crucifix, and the other was outstretched in the act of taking from the altar a Crown of Thorns.... And at her feet, bare, ivory-white, daintily-small and pink-toed, were scattered kingly crowns and jeweled orbs and scepters. And from her loosened coif streamed golden tresses, and her proud uplifted eyes blazed, not with the heavenly fires of Divine Love, but with the lurid flames of Hell.... And in her Satanic pride and imperial arrogance of beauty she seemed to live; and send out subtle electric influences that dominated and swayed those who dwelt within the reach of them, not for good but for evil and misery, and the wreck of bodies and souls.
And Dunoisse looked at the portrait, and the red lips seemed to smile at him. And while they appeared to whisper “Stay!” unseen hands plucked at him, as though striving to drag him from the place; and a thin voice of warning fluttered like a cobweb at his inner ear, urging him to begone and lose no time about it. Perhaps wan Sister Thérèse de Saint François was praying for him in her cell at the Carmel of Widinitz. But all the champagne he had not tasted seemed boiling in his veins, and he gave back the smile of the proud, voluptuous, painted lips, and was drawing near to decipher an inscription on an ornamental scroll at the bottom of the Regency frame, when there was a rustle and whisper of silken draperies in the doorway, and he turned to meet the eyes of Henriette.