Still Lady Blessington fought on, and faced the footlights without outward faltering; she played her part in the comedy and received the applause of her friends, few of whom realised that the comedy was a tragedy. “Passion! Possession! Indifference!” she writes, “what a history is comprised in these three words! What hopes and fears succeeded by a felicity as brief as intoxicating—followed in its turn by the old consequence of possession—indifference! What burning tears, what bitter pangs, rending the very heartstrings—what sleepless nights and watchful days form part of this everyday story of life, whose termination leaves the actors to search again for new illusions to finish like the last.” But what new illusions can be looked for by a tried, sad woman of sixty?
D’Orsay was locked up in Gore House during these last two years of sunset for six days out of each seven; debt hung like a millstone round his neck also. These two, who had sailed over happy seas with favourable winds, were now together drifting on the rocks.
One day in April a sheriff’s officer, effectually disguised, managed to enter the house, and then the end of this second act of our play came rapidly. Lady Blessington informed of the mishap, realising that once it was known that an execution was laid upon her property there would no more be any safety for the Count’s person, sent to D’Orsay’s room to warn him of his danger.
“Bah!” exclaimed D’Orsay, unable or unwilling to believe that the hour for flight had at last come upon him; and again and again “Bah!” Not until Lady Blessington herself added her personal persuasion did he grasp the situation.
De Contades gives a somewhat different account. Just before the dinner hour, a pastry-cook’s boy presented himself at Gore House with a dish, sent in, so he said, by the confectioner. Having left this in the kitchen, he deliberately walked upstairs to the Count’s dressing-room.
“Well, who’s that?” asked D’Orsay.
It was a sheriff’s officer!
“Really!” exclaimed D’Orsay, and demanded that he should be permitted to complete the tying of his tie—salon or prison—his tie must be perfect.
“But, Count—”
“Bah, bah! All in good time.”