“That I have sinned against your ideals of character and principle is my punishment. Tell me—Miss Merling—if I had been the kind of man you thought me—if I had come back to Cavendish Street and sought your friendship—would it have been denied?”
“No!” she said, looking in his face with beautiful candor. “For I saw much to admire and to respect in you—as you were in days gone by.”
“The world dubbed me, very plainly—a fool for being what I was in those days,” returned Dunoisse, with a slight deprecatory lift of shoulders and eyebrows. “And frankly, Mademoiselle, I had not the courage requisite to go against the world.”
“If you were a fool, you were God’s fool,” she answered him, “and such folly is superior to the wisdom of the sages. Now, good-by, Colonel Dunoisse.”
And, with a slight inclination of the head, she withdrew her hand and moved away, as the farther door of the library opened, admitting Madame Walewski, her homeliness painfully accentuated by her dazzling dress of gold brocade and famous parure of Brazilian emeralds; and another lady, dark-haired, sweet-faced, and of middle height, dressed in half-mourning, towards whom Ada Merling hurried, saying in a tremulous whisper as she caught the outstretched hand:
“Oh, Mary, come!....”
And then the three ladies were gone, retreating by that farther door into unknown, conjectural regions; and the velvet curtain lifted and dropped behind Dunoisse, and he turned, instinctively drawing the Prince’s letter from his breast, to meet the radiant blue eyes and graceful, cordial greeting of Count Walewski, and to be presented to the Ambassador’s companion, Lord Walmerston....
You saw the all-powerful Foreign Minister as a hale, vigorous, elderly gentleman, displaying a star, and the broad red ribbon and oval gold badge of a Civil G.C.B., and the befrogged and gold-laced swallow-tail of official ceremony rather awkwardly, upon a heavy-shouldered, somewhat clumsy figure, though the black silk stockings showed well-made legs, and gold-buckled, patent-leather shoes set off the small, neat feet.
Little enough remained at this period of the dandified elegance that had won repute at Almack’s in 1820, and the grace that had made him famous in the waltz. The weather-beaten face, surrounded by pepper-and-salt hair and whiskers, the square-ended, sagacious nose and flexible, curving lips, might have belonged to a shrewd, humorous, Northern farmer rather than a brilliant statesman; while the jerky manner, the odd gesticulations that accompanied the hesitating, drawling speech, made the stranger to whom it was addressed ask himself in wonder whether this could really be the great orator, the dazzling politician, the famous diplomat who had steered England’s ship of State through so many troubled foreign seas? until the keen, dark, glittering eyes met and held his own; and under the merciless, piercing scrutiny of their regard the querist ceased to question, and the critic found himself appraised, weighed, judged, and valued by a mind without its parallel in the science of reading men.
One phrase employed by him was to linger in Dunoisse’s memory. He said, as Walewski handed him the letter from the Élysée, and he wiped his tortoiseshell-rimmed eyeglasses to read: