The noise that he made in entering caused the two personages instantly to resume their respective positions, and, in the strong light which dazzled his prying eyes, he saw the young girl standing before him, indignant, stupefied.
"Who is that? Who has taken the liberty?" and the Nabob, on his platform, with his collar turned down, petrified, monumental.
Jenkins, a little abashed, frightened by his own audacity, murmured some excuses. He had something very urgent to say to M. Jansoulet, a piece of news which was most important and would suffer no delay. "He knew upon the best authority that certain decorations were to be bestowed on the 16th of March."
Immediately the face of the Nabob, that for a moment had been frowning, relaxed.
"Ah! can it be true?"
He abandoned his pose. The thing was worth the trouble, _que diable!_ M. de la Perriere, a secretary of the department involved had been commissioned by the Empress to visit the Bethlehem Refuge. Jenkins had come in search of the Nabob to take him to see the secretary at the Tuileries and to appoint a day. This visit to Bethlehem, it meant the cross for him.
"Quick, let us start, my dear doctor. I follow you."
He was no longer angry with Jenkins for having disturbed him, and he knotted his cravat feverishly, forgetting in his new emotions how he had been upset a moment earlier, for ambition with him came before all else.
While the two men were talking in a half-whisper, Felicia, standing motionless before them, with quivering nostrils and her lip curled in contempt, watched them with an air of saying, "Well, I am waiting."
Jansoulet apologized for being obliged to interrupt the sitting; but a visit of the most extreme importance--She smiled in pity.
"Don"t mention it, don"t mention it. At the point which we have reached I can work without you."
"Oh, yes," said the doctor, "the work is almost completed."
He added with the air of a connoisseur:
"It is a fine piece of work."
And, counting upon covering his retreat with this compliment, he made for the door with shoulders drooped; but Felicia detained him abruptly.
"Stay, you. I have something to say to you."
He saw clearly from her look that he would have to yield, on pain of an explosion.
"You will excuse me, _cher ami_? Mademoiselle has a word for me. My brougham is at the door. Get in. I will be with you immediately."
As soon as the door of the studio had closed on that heavy, retreating foot, each of them looked at the other full in the face.
"You must be either drunk or mad to have allowed yourself to behave in this way. What! you dare to enter my house when I am not at home? What does this violence mean? By what right--"
"By the right of a despairing and incurable pa.s.sion."
"Be silent, Jenkins, you are saying words that I will not hear. I allow you to come here out of pity, from habit, because my father was fond of you. But never speak to me again of your--love"--she uttered the word in a very low voice, as though it were shameful--"or you shall never see me again, even though I should have to kill myself in order to escape you once and for all."
A child caught in mischief could not bend its head more humbly than did Jenkins, as he replied:
"It is true. I was in the wrong. A moment of madness, of blindness--But why do you amuse yourself by torturing my heart as you do?"
"I think of you often, however."
"Whether you think of me or not, I am there, I see what goes on, and your coquetry hurts me terribly."
A touch of red mounted to her cheeks at this reproach.
"A coquette, I? And with whom?"
"With that," said the Irishman, indicating the ape-like and powerful bust.
She tried to laugh.
"The Nabob? What folly!"
"Don"t tell an untruth about it now. Do you think I am blind, that I do not notice all your little manoeuvres? You remain alone with him for very long at a time. Just now, I was there. I saw you." He dropped his voice as though breath had failed him. "What do you want, strange and cruel child? I have seen you repulse the most handsome, the most n.o.ble, the greatest. That little de Gery devours you with his eyes; you take no notice. The Duc de Mora himself has not been able to reach your heart.
And it is that man there who is ugly, vulgar, who had no thought of you, whose head is full of quite other matters than love. You saw how he went off just now. What can you mean? What do you expect from him?"
"I want--I want him to marry me. There!"
Coldly, in a softened tone, as though this avowal had brought her nearer the level of the man whom she so much despised, she explained her motives. The life which she led was pushing her into a situation from which there was no way out. She had luxurious and expensive tastes, habits of disorder which nothing could conquer and which would bring her inevitably to poverty, both her and that good Crenmitz, who was allowing herself to be ruined without saying a word. In three years, four years at the outside, all would be over with them. And then the wretched expedients, the debts, the tatters and old shoes of poor artists"
households. Or, indeed, the lover, the man who keeps a mistress--that is to say, slavery and infamy.
"Come, come," said Jenkins. "And what of me, am I not here?"
"Anything rather than you," she exclaimed, stiffening. "No, what I require, what I want, is a husband who will protect me from others and from myself, who will save me from many terrible things of which I am afraid in my moments of ennui, from the gulfs in which I feel that I may perish, some one who will love me while I am at work and relieve my poor old wearied fairy of her sentry duty. This man here suits my purpose, and I thought of him from the first time I met him. He is ugly, but he has a kind manner; then, too, he is ridiculously rich, and wealth, upon that scale, must be amusing. Oh, I know well enough. No doubt there is in his life some blemish that has brought him luck. All that money cannot be made honestly. But come, truly now, Jenkins, with your hand on that heart you so often invoke, do you think me a wife who should be very attractive to an honest man? See: among all these young men who ask permission as a favour to be allowed to come here, which one has dreamed of offering me marriage? Never a single one. De Gery no more than the rest. I am attractive, but I make men afraid. It is intelligible enough.
What can one imagine of a girl brought up as I have been, without a mother, among my father"s models and mistresses? What mistresses, _mon Dieu_! And Jenkins for sole guardian. Oh, when I think, when I think!"
And from that far-off memory things surged up that stirred her to a deeper wrath.
"Ah, yes, _parbleu_! I am a daughter of adventure, and this adventurer is, of a truth, the fit husband for me."
"You must wait at least till he is a widower," replied Jenkins calmly.
"And, in that case, you run the risk of having a long time to wait, for his Levantine seems to enjoy excellent health."
Felicia Ruys turned pale.
"He is married?"
"Married? certainly, and father of a bevy of children. The whole camp of them landed a couple of days ago."
For a minute she remained overwhelmed, looking into s.p.a.ce, her cheeks quivering. Opposite her, the Nabob"s large face, with its flattened nose, its sensual and weak mouth, spoke insistently of life and reality in the gloss of its clay. She looked at it for an instant, then made a step forward and, with a gesture of disgust, overturned, with the high wooden stool on which it stood, the glistening and greasy block, which fell on the floor shattered to a heap of mud.
JANSOULET AT HOME
Married he was and had been so for twelve years, but he had mentioned the fact to no one among his Parisian acquaintances, through Eastern habit, that silence which the people of those countries preserve upon affairs of the harem. Suddenly it was reported that madame was coming, that apartments were to be prepared for herself, her children, and her female attendants. The Nabob took the whole second floor of the house on the Place Vendome, the tenant of which was turned out at an expense worthy of a Nabob. The stables also were extended, the staff doubled; then, one day, coachmen and carriages went to the Gare de Lyon to meet madame, who arrived by train heated expressly for her during the journey from Ma.r.s.eilles and filled by a suite of negresses, serving-maids, and little negro boys.
She arrived in a condition of frightful exhaustion, utterly worn out and bewildered by her long railway journey, the first of her life, for, after being taken to Tunis while still quite a child, she had never left it. From her carriage, two negroes carried her into her apartments on an easy chair which, subsequently, always remained downstairs beneath the entrance porch, in readiness for these difficult removals. Mme.
Jansoulet could not mount the staircase, which made her dizzy; she would not have lifts, which creaked under her weight; besides, she never walked. Of enormous size, bloated to such a degree that it was impossible to a.s.sign to her any particular age between twenty-five and forty, with a rather pretty face but grown shapeless in its features, dull eyes beneath lids that drooped, vulgarly dressed in foreign clothes, laden with diamonds and jewels after the fashion of a Hindu idol, she was as fine a sample as could be found of those transplanted European women called Levantines--a curious race of obese creoles whom speech and costume alone attach to our world, but whom the East wraps round with its stupefying atmosphere, with the subtle poisons of its drugged air in which everything, from the tissues of the skin to the waists of garments, even to the soul, is enervated and relaxed.