"I hope, Count," said the Duke, who would not understand the allusion of the young man to his marriage, "that the climate of Paris suits you better than that of Naples. Besides, the Duc d'Harcourt, your father, that most influential nobleman, will prevent you henceforth from endangering an existence you held too cheaply in Italy."
"Luckily," said D'Harcourt, with a smile, "your Excellency watched over me, and it is no slight honor to have as a physician the minister of police of a kingdom. Excuse me, however," added he to the Duke, "I hear the prelude of Collinet's orchestra, and I have a family duty to fulfil: my sister Mary has promised to dance this contradance with me, and I must humor the whim of a spoiled child."
The wild young man hurried to take his sister's arm, and to get into place with her. Marie d'Harcourt, René's sister, was a charming girl, with blonde hair and a rosy complexion, fair and lithe as a northern elf. The blue veins were visible beneath her transparent skin, so fair that one might often have fancied the blood was about to come gushing through it. The Duke d'Harcourt had lost two of his sons of that terrible pulmonary disease against which medicine, alas, is powerless. The distress of the father was intense, for two of the scions of this family had been cut off by death; and of the five offshoots from the family tree, but two remained. All his love was therefore centred in René, now his only son, and in Marie, the young girl of whom we have just spoken. From a sentiment of tender respect, the Duke had not permitted his last son to assume the title of those he had lost, and René continued to be called the Vicompte d'Harcourt. There were already apparent sad indications that René would become a prey to the monster which had devoured his two brothers: Marie, a few years younger, gave her father great uneasiness, on account of the excessive delicacy of her constitution and organization. All Paris had participated in the grief of the Duke d'Harcourt; for all Paris respected him. Rich, kind, and benevolent, in an enlightened manner, and within the bounds of reason, rejecting all social Utopias, popular as they might make all who sustained them, the Duke d'Harcourt was a Christian philanthropist, that is to say, a charitable man. Charity is the holiest and purest of earthly virtues, and that in which this patriarch indulged shunned noise and renown. He did not wait until misfortune came to him to soothe it, but sought it out. When this second providence was known to those whom he aided, the Duke imposed secrecy on them as a reward for all he had done. He was, so to say, an impersonation of French honor, and the arbiter of all the differences which arose between the members of the great aristocratic families of France. His word was law, and his decisions sovereign.
The Prince de Maulear had determined to marry his son to the daughter of this noble old man, and had been forced by the Marquis's marriage to abandon the plan. The Duke still remained the friend of the Prince, though he had not unfrequently blamed his somewhat lax principles. Whenever he discovered the Prince in any peccadillo, he used to say, "Well, we must be lenient to youth." Now, the Prince de Maulear was a young man of seventy. The beauty of Aminta, her extreme paleness alone, would have sufficed to fix attention, and created a very revolution in the saloons of the Embassy. The Duchess of Palma did not produce her ordinary effect. The animation she experienced in the beginning of the evening gradually left her, and the sadness under which she had previously suffered, but which she had thrown off during the early hours of the entertainment, began again to take possession of her features and person. One man alone remarked the Duchess, for he had never lost sight of her. Leaning against the door of the boudoir, his eye followed her wherever she went, and appeared to sympathize with all the constraint inflicted on her as mistress of the house. When, however, the Duchess thought she had paid sufficient personal attention, and was satisfied that the pleasures of the evening would be sustained without her, the man who examined her with such care, saw her come towards the boudoir where he was. He went in without being seen by her, and yielding to one of those promptings which a man in his cooler moments would resist, went behind a drapery which covered a door leading into a gallery of pictures, and waited motionless. The Duchess of Palma entered the boudoir, and assuring herself by a glance that she was alone, fell rather than sat on a divan, and suffered two streams of tears to flow from her eyes. "I was strangling," said she. "I would die a thousand deaths. My cruel experiment has succeeded. He loves her yet—I am sure of it. For her sake he came to this entertainment, to which he would not have come for mine. He would have made an excuse of his old difficulties with the Duke, of his political position. I would have believed him, and have sacrificed my wish to see him to propriety and his honor. He never ceases to look at her. He thinks of her alone. He is busied with her alone, yet he has no look, no thought for me." The Duchess began to weep again. Steps were heard in the gallery—the drapery at the door was agitated. "Oh, my God!" said the Duchess, "if met with here, and in this condition, what shall I do and say!" The steps approached. Hurrying then to one of the outlets of the boudoir, she opened it hastily, and went into the garden. The steps the Duchess had heard were those of two persons, who, after having been the rounds of the room, were about to go into the picture-gallery. The two persons were René d'Harcourt and Count Monte-Leone.
"Ah ha!" said the Count, "what the devil is Taddeo doing there against the drapery, there like a jealous Spaniard at a corner of Seville, listening to a serenade given by his rival?"
"True! true!" replied d'Harcourt, "but I think the serenade has been given, for his features express the most malevolent expression."
The emotion of Taddeo was so violent when he heard the words of the Duchess, that he had not strength to leave. He, however, restrained himself, and listened to the raillery of his friends.
"Like yourselves," said he, with a quivering voice, "I was in search of fresh air, for it is fearfully warm."
"Do not get sick here," said d'Harcourt, "for Doctor Matheus is not here to cure you."
"Silence," said Taddeo, changing his expression at once, "how imprudent you are to pronounce his name."