"You shall have it within two hours; but you must not dine at the club to-day. I have a note from Duplessis to invite you to dine with him to-day!"
"Duplessis! I know so little of him!"
"You should know him better. He is the only man who can give you sound advice as to this difficulty with Louvier; and he will give it the more carefully and zealously because he has that enmity to Louvier which one rival financier has to another. I dine with him too. We shall find an occasion to consult him quietly; he speaks of you most kindly. What a lovely girl his daughter is!"
"I dare say. Ah! I wish I had been less absurdly fastidious. I wish I had entered the army as a private soldier six months ago; I should have been a corporal by this time! Still it is not too late. When Rochebriant is gone, I can yet say with the Mouszquetaire in the melodrame: "I am rich--I have my honour and my sword!""
"Nonsense! Rochebriant shall be saved; meanwhile I hasten to Rameau. Au revoir, at the Hotel Duplessis--seven o"clock."
Lemercier went, and in less than two hours sent the Marquis bank-notes for 600 louis, requesting an order for the delivery of the horses and carriage.
That order written and signed, Alain hastened to acquit himself of his debt of honour, and contemplating his probable ruin with a lighter heart presented himself at the Hotel Duplessis.
Duplessis made no pretensions to vie with the magnificent existence of Louvier. His house, though agreeably situated and flatteringly styled the Hotel Duplessis, was of moderate size, very unostentatiously furnished; nor was it accustomed to receive the brilliant motley crowds which a.s.sembled in the salons of the elder financier.
Before that year, indeed, Duplessis had confined such entertainments as he gave to quiet men of business, or a few of the more devoted and loyal partisans of the Imperial dynasty; but since Valerie came to live with him he had extended his hospitalities to wider and livelier circles, including some celebrities in the world of art and letters as well as of fashion. Of the party a.s.sembled that evening at dinner were Isaura, with the Signora Venosta, one of the Imperial Ministers, the Colonel whom Alain had already met at Lemercier"s supper, Deputes (ardent Imperialists), and the d.u.c.h.esse de Tarascon; these, with Alain and Frederic, made up the party. The conversation was not particularly gay.
Duplessis himself, though an exceedingly well-read and able man, had not the genial accomplishments of a brilliant host. Const.i.tutionally grave and habitually taciturn--though there were moments in which he was roused out of his wonted self into eloquence or wit--he seemed to-day absorbed in some engrossing train of thought. The Minister, the Deputes and the d.u.c.h.esse de Tarascon talked politics, and ridiculed the trumpery emeute of the 14th; exulted in the success of the plebiscite; and admitting, with indignation, the growing strength of Prussia, and--with scarcely less indignation, but more contempt, censuring the selfish egotism of England in disregarding the due equilibrium of the European balance of power,--hinted at the necessity of annexing Belgium as a set-off against the results of Sadowa.
Alain found himself seated next to Isaura--to the woman who had so captivated his eye and fancy on his first arrival in Paris.
Remembering his last conversation with Graham nearly a year ago, he felt some curiosity to ascertain whether the rich Englishman had proposed to her, and if so, been refused or accepted.
The first words that pa.s.sed between them were trite enough, but after a little pause in the talk, Alain said:
"I think Mademoiselle and myself have an acquaintance in common-Monsieur Vane, a distinguished Englishman. Do you know if he be in Paris at present? I have not seen him for many months."
"I believe he is in London; at least, Colonel Morley met the other day a friend of his who said so."
Though Isaura strove to speak in a tone of indifference, Alain"s ear detected a ring of pain in her voice; and watching her countenance, he was impressed with a saddened change in its expression. He was touched, and his curiosity was mingled with a gentler interest as he said "When I last saw M. Vane I should have judged him to be too much under the spell of an enchantress to remain long without the pale of the circle she draws around her."
Isaura turned her face quickly towards the speaker, and her lips moved, but she said nothing audibly.
"Can there have been quarrel or misunderstanding?" thought Alain; and after that question his heart asked itself, "Supposing Isaura were free, her affections disengaged, could he wish to woo and to win her?" and his heart answered--"Eighteen months ago thou wert nearer to her than now.
Thou wert removed from her for ever when thou didst accept the world as a barrier between you; then, poor as thou wert, thou wouldst have preferred her to riches. Thou went then sensible only of the ingenuous impulses of youth, but the moment thou saidst, "I am Rochebriant, and having once owned the claims of birth and station, I cannot renounce them for love, Isaura became but a dream. Now that ruin stares thee in the face--now that thou must grapple with the sternest difficulties of adverse fate--thou hast lost the poetry of sentiment which could alone give to that dream the colours and the form of human life." He could not again think of that fair creature as a prize that he might even dare to covet. And as he met her inquiring eyes, and saw her quivering lip, he felt instinctively that Graham was dear to her, and that the tender interest with which she inspired himself was untroubled by one pang of jealousy. He resumed:
"Yes, the last time I saw the Englishman he spoke with such respectful homage of one lady, whose hand he would deem it the highest reward of ambition to secure, that I cannot but feel deep compa.s.sion for him if that ambition has been foiled; and thus only do I account for his absence from Paris."
"You are an intimate friend of Mr. Vane"s?"
"No, indeed, I have not that honour; our acquaintance is but slight, but it impressed me with the idea of a man of vigorous intellect, frank temper, and perfect honour."
Isaura"s face brightened with the joy we feel when we hear the praise of those we love.
At this moment, Duplessis, who had been observing the Italian and the young Marquis, for the first time during dinner, broke silence.
"Mademoiselle," he said, addressing Isaura across the table, "I hope I have not been correctly informed that your literary triumph has induced you to forego the career in which all the best judges concur that your successes would be not less brilliant; surely one art does not exclude another."
Elated by Alain"s report of Graham"s words, by the conviction that these words applied to herself, and by the thought that her renunciation of the stage removed a barrier between them, Isaura answered, with a sort of enthusiasm:
"I know not, M. Duplessis, if one art excludes another; if there be desire to excel in each. But I have long lost all desire to excel in the art you refer to, and resigned all idea of the career in which it opens."
"So M. Vane told me," said Alain, in a whisper.
"When?"
"Last year--on the day that he spoke in terms of admiration so merited of the lady whom M. Duplessis has just had the honour to address."
All this while, Valerie, who was seated at the further end of the table beside the Minister, who had taken her in to dinner, had been watching, with eyes, the anxious tearful sorrow of which none but her father had noticed, the low-voiced confidence between Alain and the friend, whom till that day she had so enthusiastically loved. Hitherto she had been answering in monosyllables all attempts of the great man to draw her into conversation; but now, observing how Isaura blushed and looked down, that strange faculty in women, which we men call dissimulation, and which in them is truthfulness to their own nature, enabled her to carry off the sharpest anguish she had ever experienced, by a sudden burst of levity of spirit. She caught up some commonplace the Minister had adapted to what he considered the poverty of her understanding, with a quickness of satire which startled that grave man, and he gazed at her astonished. Up to that moment he had secretly admired her as a girl well brought up--as girls fresh from a French convent are supposed to be; now, hearing her brilliant rejoinder to his stupid observation, he said inly: "Dame! the low birth of a financier"s daughter shows itself."
But, being a clever man himself, her retort put him on his mettle, and he became, to his own amazement, brilliant himself. With that matchless quickness which belongs to Parisians, the guests around him seized the new esprit de conversation which had been evoked between the statesman and the childlike girl beside him; and as they caught up the ball, lightly flung among them, they thought within themselves how much more sparkling the financier"s pretty, lively daughter was than that dark-eyed young muse, of whom all the journalists of Paris were writing in a chorus of welcome and applause, and who seemed not to have a word to say worth listening to, except to the handsome young Marquis, whom, no doubt, she wished to fascinate.
Valerie fairly outshone Isaura in intellect and in wit; and neither Valerie nor Isaura cared, to the value of a bean-straw, about that distinction. Each was thinking only of the prize which the humblest peasant women have in common with the most brilliantly accomplished of their s.e.x--the heart of a man beloved.
CHAPTER IV.
On the Continent generally, as we all know, men do not sit drinking wine together after the ladies retire. So when the signal was given all the guests adjourned to the salon; and Alain quitted Isaura to gain the ear of the d.u.c.h.esse de Tarascon.
"It is long--at, least long for Paris life," said the Marquis--"since my first visit to you, in company with Enguerrand de Vandemar. Much that you then said rested on my mind, disturbing the prejudices I took from Bretagne."
"I am proud to hear it, my kinsman."
"You know that I would have taken military service under the Emperor, but for the regulation which would have compelled me to enter the ranks as a private soldier."
"I sympathise with that scruple; but you are aware that the Emperor himself could not have ventured to make any exception even in your favour."
"Certainly not. I repent me of my pride; perhaps I may enlist still in some regiment sent to Algiers."
"No; there are other ways in which a Rochebriant can serve a throne.
There will be an office at Court vacant soon, which would not misbecome your birth."
"Pardon me; a soldier serves his country--a courtier owns a master; and I cannot take the livery of the Emperor, though I could wear the uniform of France."
"Your distinction is childish, my kinsman," said the d.u.c.h.esse, impetuously. "You talk as if the Emperor had an interest apart from the nation. I tell you that he has not a corner of his heart--not even one reserved for his son and his dynasty--in which the thought of France does not predominate."
"I do not presume, Madame la d.u.c.h.esse, to question the truth of what you say; but I have no reason to suppose that the same thought does not predominate in the heart of the Bourbon. The Bourbon would be the first to say to me: "If France needs your sword against her foes, let it not rest in the scabbard." But would the Bourbon say, "The place of a Rochebriant is among the valetaille of the Corsican"s successor"?"
"Alas for poor France!" said the d.u.c.h.esse; "and alas for men like you, my proud cousin, if the Corsican"s successors or successor be--"
"Henry V." interrupted Alain, with a brightening eye. "Dreamer! No; some descendant of the mob-kings who gave Bourbons and n.o.bles to the guillotine."
While the d.u.c.h.esse and Alain were thus conversing, Isaura had seated herself by Valerie, and, unconscious of the offence she had given, addressed her in those pretty caressing terms with which young-lady friends are wont to compliment each other; but Valerie answered curtly or sarcastically, and turned aside to converse with the Minister. A few minutes more, and the party began to break up. Lemercier, however, detained Alain, whispering, "Duplessis will see us on your business so soon as the other guests have gone."
CHAPTER V.