Chapter Three.
The Heart’s Desire.
At ten o’clock on the same evening the Baron Henri de Neuville sat smoking a cigar in a small, luxuriously furnished room in the great white mansion in the Avenue Louise.
A broad-shouldered, grey-haired, slightly bald man, whose heavy jaws were fringed by short grey side-whiskers, and whose deep-set eyes were rendered darker by the natural pallor of his complexion. His hair was well brushed to hide his baldness, and in his well-cut evening clothes he looked younger than he really was. He had been commanded to the Palace earlier in the evening, for the King had consulted him in connection with some secret financial transaction affecting the nation, and therefore at his throat he wore the ribbon and cross of the Order of Leopold.
With him sat his friend, Arnaud Rigaux, a dandified thin-faced man, a few years his junior, with black hair plastered down upon his head, a pair of narrow-set beady eyes, a countenance of distinctly Hebrew cast, and a small pointed black moustache, unmistakably dyed. The shrivelled thinness of his hands was certainly not in keeping with the artificial youth of his face, and, on second glance, the most casual observer would have realised that he was one of those men who, by reason of a fast life, have aged prematurely, and who endeavour to remain young, and believe themselves still attractive to the fair sex.
He had, in years past, been a rather handsome man. But the life he had led had left its mark indelibly upon him, for he looked what he was, a roué who had run the whole gamut of the gaieties of Europe, from the Casino at Aix to the Villa Regala at Bucharest, and from the haunts of the demi-monde on the Riviera to the night-cafés of Berlin and the cabarets of the Montmarte.
As he lounged back in the big, soft, saddle-bag chair, the fine diamond glistening in his shirt, he presented a picture of the affluent parvenu, that type of wealthy financier of Hebrew strain, which is so familiar the world over.
The Baron was certainly of a refined and gentlemanly type, though there was in his face that shrewd, hard expression which seems inseparable from the financial mind. Yet his companion was of an entirely different stamp—coarse, unsympathetic, with sensuality stamped upon his loose lips.